decoded_text stringlengths 4.18k 47.6k |
|---|
elements of the Ranger" and is not as closely based on the Ranger's architecture as had been anticipated.
Sources also say the Ford Everest won't be a direct replacement for the Territory from then end of 2016 onwards, saying the Everest "will be a true off-roader". It will compete directly against models such as the Holden Colorado 7 that shares its underpinnings with the Colorado ute.
“This is our vision for a large, seven-seat off-road SUV to allow our customers to take on the world and it was created by our world-class design team here in Australia,” said Mark Fields, Ford's chief operating officer.
“We believe our customers will love the distinctive design, which clearly showcases the Ford Everest Concept’s exceptional off-road capability and toughness.”Historian Victor Davis Hanson recently gave one of the finest and most memorable presentations on the subject of immigration.
America could be on "a path to Armageddon," given the blend of relativism, racial preferences, and nullified immigration laws, warned Hanson in an interview with Mark Levin, [link opens in pop-up, interview begins at 51:00].
Hanson is a military historian who taught the classics and is now a Senior Fellow at Stanford's Hoover Institution. Winner of the prestigious National Humanities Medal (2007) and the Bradley Prize (2008), his writing is generally seen as well reasoned and insightful.
Hanson offered a blistering attack on Republicans and left-wingimmigration policy, pointing out that Republican leaders have stopped using the word assimilation. Assimilation used to be the ideal that was strived for by immigrants and encouraged by our society. Instead of urging assimilation, some Republicans are bizarrely promoting amnesty for people who are not assimilating.
Hanson pointed out that many of today's immigrants are not repeating the pattern of the Italians or Greeks, as just two examples. While Latino studies programs can be found at almost all universities, one does not find such "studies" for Italians or Greeks. That is just one dramatic distinction between immigrants today and past immigrants.
The GOP's Strategic Blunder
Hanson lampooned Republicans for floating amnesty at a time when the executive branch is increasingly lawless. "I don't know why they would trust [Obama] after they told us not to trust him."
As he has done with Obamacare, the president would simply ignore parts of any immigration law he disliked. If amnesty passed, the president would reject enforcement, but keep the amnesty.
That's not the only ridiculous aspect of the pro-"legalization" approach. The timing of the proposal couldn't have been worse, and there were several better alternatives. The pro-amnesty GOP could have delayed the proposal, or only discussed enforcement, but instead took the most divisive approach at the worst possible time.
Aside from being incompetent, the amnesty effort is also futile. "The establishment thinks it will be better liked and it can appeal to so-called Latinos which are not going to vote for them anyway because now they are going to add the wage of being weak in addition to being considered illiberal," Hanson warned.
If the idea is to be liked by MSM, "we're going to lose every time by trying to be liked."
In a challenge to Republicans, Hanson said that the pro-amnesty GOP is ready to fall into Obama's trap. "He's going to not only make you look ridiculous, he's going to make you look weak."
Rather than playing into his hands, Hanson suggested a response to Obama rooted in the concerns of the middle-class. The response should emphasize that "[t]his president favors the very wealthy liberal elite and he's creating a dependent culture for everybody on the bottom, and he does not care about the middle class. He finds the [middle class] without the romance of the poor and without the connections of the elite."
Instead of amnesty, the Republicans should be pushing for limits on immigration. Hanson suggests that we can take 100,000 legal immigrants per year, but we can't take one million per year, especially when they lack high school diplomas or English proficiency.
The "Destroyed" State of California
A Californian, Hanson has seen firsthand the fiscal, social, and educational problems stemming from illegal immigration. Illegal immigration is "the reason the state is destroyed," Hanson bluntly stated.
Hanson mentioned some astonishing facts about California's educational system. The state of California is ranked 47th in eighth-grade science scores. 40% of children are not fluent in English. 44% of incoming freshmen in the Cal state university system are not prepared for college-level English and math. Hanson points out that it is forbidden to notice that there is a cause-and-effect relationship between illegal immigration and these woes.
California, as a state, serves as the shining example of what happens under lax enforcement of immigration laws. The state is going bankrupt. The Republican Party is going extinct. At their lowest level of registration since 1922, Republicans are 29% of registered voters in California, while Democrats are 44%. In the face of population changes of the type that have occurred, the Republicans can't modify, they can't adjust, they can only die out.
A Nation of Left-Wing Immigrants
Hanson took on the popular idea that immigrants are latent conservatives, especially on social issues. "You can be against abortion and Hispanic and vote for an abortionist if they're for big government."
"Its just a fantasy that's spun somewhere in Washington" he added, that Hispanics will be conservative for social reasons.
True conservative voters understand that "blanket amnesties" are "going to unravel the American experiment and its also going to empower the Democratic Party for 40 years."
Besides, any Republican effort to pander can be easily outdone by the Democrats. "Trying to outrace and outclass and outgender the Democratic Party is a losing proposition."
While they pander, the Republicans would be losing a core group of voters who do actually support them in large numbers. "Why is this leadership deliberately trying to estrange and alienate 70% of the people who will go out and vote?" Hanson asked.
Relativism, the "Path to Armageddon"
Hanson concluded by describing the "postmodern relativism" inherent in local efforts to nullify immigration law, efforts driven by racial pandering.
There are "sanctuary cities" that forbid local law enforcement from asking about immigration status or engaging with federal authorities. Hanson urged that Republicans should be seizing on this "nullification" of federal law, to illustrate the left's hypocrisy and recklessness. Even convicted violent felons have been harbored by cities like San Francisco, where one violent felon who should have been deported went on to murder a father and two of his sons.
Legalizing illegal immigration, Hanson said, "erodes the entire fabric of the law. It says, I can pick and choose which laws I want to follow. And once you go down that slippery slope then anyone can do it." He pointed to the "racial context" of amnesty, which combines pandering and relativism to create a disturbing left-wing policy:
Everything depends on the social context, the economic context, the gender context, the racial context, whether its right or wrong, or true or false. I just think historically that's just a path to Armageddon as far as I'm concerned. [italics added]
John Bennett (MA, University of Chicago, Master of Arts Program in the Social Sciences '07) is a writer whose work has appeared in The Daily Caller, Townhall.com, World Net Daily, Human Events, Accuracy in Media, and FrontPage Magazine, among others. He has been a featured guest on the Laura Ingraham, Lars Larson, and Rusty Humphries programs. Follow @JthomasbennettImprove React performance with Babel
Doctolib Nerds Blocked Unblock Follow Following Apr 6, 2016
by Olivier Tassinari
React is well known for its virtual DOM implementation and its good performance out of the box.
There are many ways to speed it up. Just to name a few:
You can use process.env.node_env = ‘production’ to disable all the checks that React is doing in the development environment. For instance, that’s going to bypass the propTypes validation.
You can prune the reconciliation tree with the shouldComponentUpdate lifecycle method. The depth of the pruned node matters a lot. The lower the depth, the better.
You can smartly use the key property on a long list of elements. The idea is to give useful information to React so it can identify each element and perform as few DOM mutations as possible.
These three approaches are very efficient. You will sooner or later have to use them as your application grows and you want to give users the best possible experience. Sometimes, these speedup tips are not enough and you start to investigate ways to push performance further.
Babel, a powerful tool
You may already know Babel. It has gotten famous by allowing us to use ES6 in production with browsers that are not supporting it yet.
It used to be called 6to5, but with version 6, Babel has become much more than that. It’s now a powerful tool to apply code transforms at the AST level. You can do such things with other tools but this one is pretty convenient. People may not realize it, but they are already using a lot of AST transformation functions when they write ES6 and JSX code. Those ES6 and JSX transformation functions are packaged under two presets:
Things started to be really interesting when Facebook released React 0.14.0. They have introduced two compiler optimizations that we can enable in production. We hadn’t heard anything about it on Twitter nor Medium. We have realized it by carefully reading the release note:
React now supports two compiler optimizations that can be enabled in Babel 5.8.24 and newer. Both of these transforms should be enabled only in production (e.g., just before minifying your code) because although they improve runtime performance, they make warning messages more cryptic and skip important checks that happen in development mode, including propTypes.
Constant hoisting for React elements
The first compiler optimization proposed by Facebook hoists the creation of elements that are fully static to the top level. A component is fully static or referentially transparent when it can be replaced with its value without changing the behavior.
It’s a Babel plugin called transform-react-constant-elements. Let’s have a look at how it behaves with a simple example:
In
const Hr = () => {
return <hr className="hr" />;
}
Out
const _ref = <hr className="hr" />;
const Hr = () => {
return _ref;
};
This transform has two advantages:
It tells React that the subtree hasn’t changed so React can completely skip it when reconciling.
It reduces calls to React.createElement and the resulting memory allocations.
However, there are some limitations that you should be aware of. It has two documented deoptimizations. It won’t work if you are using the ref property or if you are spreading properties.
Inlining React elements
The second compiler optimization proposed by Facebook is replacing the React.createElement function with a more optimized one for production: babelHelpers.jsx.
It’s a Babel plugin called transform-react-inline-elements. Let’s have a look at how it behaves with a simple example:
In
<Baz foo="bar" key="1" />;
Out
babelHelpers.jsx(Baz, {
foo: 'bar'
}, '1');
/**
* Instead of
*
* React.createElement(Baz, {
* foo: 'bar',
* key: '1',
* });
*/
The advantage of this transform is skipping a loop through props. The babelHelpers.jsx method has a slightly different API than the React.createElement. It accepts a props argument that skips this specific loop:
// Remaining properties are added to a new props object
for (propName in config) {
if (config.hasOwnProperty(propName) &&
!RESERVED_PROPS.hasOwnProperty(propName)) {
props[propName] = config[propName];
}
}
However, there are some limitations that you should be aware of. It has two documented deoptimizations, the same than before. It won’t work if you are using the ref property or if you are spreading properties.
If you are targeting older browser and not parsing the node_modules with Babel, you need a global polyfill for ES6 Symbol.
I have also noticed one issue. You can’t use the JSX syntax like this:
<Navbar.Header />
Remove propTypes
Looking at the power of the previous transforms, we have soon been wondering if we couldn’t get rid of propTypes in production. As soon as we set process.env.node_env = ‘production’ all propTypes definitions are simply dead code.
I had found a great plugin written by Nikita Gusakov for this specific use case. Unfortunately, at that time, it was only working with Babel 5. I ended up forking it with transform-react-remove-prop-types. Let’s have a look at how it behaves with a simple example:
In
const Baz = () => (
<div />
);
Baz.propTypes = {
foo: React.PropTypes.string
};
Out
const Baz = () => (
<div />
);
The advantage of this transform is saving bandwidth. We are not aware of any limitation.
Let’s benchmark this!
Applying plugins in production without ways to measure their impact is like shooting in the dark. You shouldn’t do it.
How efficient are those optimizations? At Doctolib, we were wondering the same thing. We have built a complex calendar that can display thousands of appointments with doctors on a single view. We want the interface to be as fast as possible so that doctors can focus on what matters.
Anonymized calendar
Thankfully, some tools are available.
react-addons-perf
The first tool that we can use to benchmark is an addon built by Facebook: react-addons-perf. It’s pretty convenient to measure wasted time by component. In our case, we are going to focus on the inclusive time. The protocol is the following. We are rendering 50 times the calendar component with a fair amount of events (500). In the meantime, react-addons-perf is measuring the inclusive time spent. Here are the results (the lower the better):
Notice that we can significantly improve the runtime performance with the three previous transforms. The runtime win is around 25% without significant build size impact.
However, we can’t rely on this benchmark as the addon requires process.env.node_env!= ‘production’ to work. We need a way to benchmark the rendering with process.env.node_env = ‘production’.
benchmark.js
The second tool that we have used is React agnostic: benchmark.js. The protocol is pretty much the same. We are mounting and unmounting the calendar component 100 times. Here are the results:
Notice that the very first step benchmarked is setting process.env.node_env = ‘production’ and that the runtime unit changed. We are measuring operation per second, the higher, the better.
The runtime win is 7.24% ± 0.45% with those three previous transforms. That’s less impressive but still interesting as enabling these transforms is cheap.
You can check out the code for this benchmarks.
To wrap up
We highly advise you to consider adding those different compiler optimizations. We have already started spreading the word to the community: spectacle, react-redux-starter-kit, react-starter-kit, react-redux-universal-hot-example.
But keep in mind that these transforms should only be enabled in production. They make warning messages more cryptic and skip important checks that happen in development mode, like propTypes.US telecoms giant Verizon announced on Tuesday it was buying AOL in a deal that will see one of the world’s biggest mobile players takeover the one-time king of the internet for $4.4bn.
Verizon, the US’s largest mobile player, said it was making the move to strengthen its position in mobile video and advertising. The all-cash offer will give Verizon access to AOL’s advertising technology and content businesses such as Huffington Post, MovieFone and TechCrunch.
When completed, the acquisition will end AOL’s independence six years after the company was split off from media conglomerate Time Warner. The company has long been seen as a takeover target and had previously been rumoured to be in merger talks with Yahoo.
In an interview with financial news channel CNBC, AOL’s chairman and chief executive Tim Armstrong said the company needed to get bigger to survive amid the consolidation of the media and technology sectors.
“If you look at AOL over the last five years... we turned the company around,” he said. “But if you look forward five years, you’re going to be in a space where there are going to be massive, global-scale networks, and there’s no better partner for us to go forward with than Verizon.”
Time Warner and AOL entered an ill-fated $165bn merger agreement in January 2000. The deal, effectively a takeover of Time Warner by AOL, has often been described as the worst merger in history and was a pivotal moment in the last tech boom. AOL continued to struggle as the phone subscribers who made up the bulk of its business drifted away to cable and was spun off from Time Warner in 2009.
Under Armstrong AOL has built an advertising platform and bought content companies including Huffington Post. The price is high compared to content rivals like Vice, now valued at $2.5bn. But it is a fraction of the values attached too the latest generation of hot tech firms. Snapchat, a profit free disappearing message service, is currently valued at $10bn. Uber, a taxi app and would-be logistics company, is valued at $15bn.
AOL is still heavily reliant on fees from dial-up internet subscribers who last year contributed about a quarter of AOL’s sales. Those subscribers either live in areas too remote for cable access or have forgotten to cancel subscriptions.
AOL took 0.74% market share of the $145bn digital advertising market worldwide in 2014, according to eMarketer. Google was the worldwide market leader with 31.4% share last year, followed by Facebook with 7.9%. While AOL remains a small player, the market is massive. Mobile advertising worldwide totalled $42.63bn in 2014, and is expected to increase 61% to reach $68.7bn in 2015, according to eMarketer.
Verizon’s offer values AOL at $50 a share, a 17% premium over Monday’s closing price. AOL shares rose 19% in morning trading to $50.61. Verizon shares dipped slightly.
“Verizon’s vision is to provide customers with a premium digital experience based on a global multiscreen network platform,” Lowell McAdam, Verizon’s chief executive, said in a statement. “This acquisition supports our strategy to provide a cross-screen connection for consumers, creators and advertisers to deliver that premium customer experience.”
In a statement Armstrong said he would remain at his position once the deal is finalized.
“Verizon is a leader in mobile and OTT [over the top – ie video services like Netflix and Hulu] connected platforms, and the combination of Verizon and AOL creates a unique and scaled mobile and OTT media platform for creators, consumers and advertisers,” Armstrong said.
The former Google executive, who took over as AOL’s chief executive in 2009, told staff that “AOL is back and now we are joining forces with Verizon to build the best media technology company in the world. Let’s mobilize”.
“AOL has once again become a digital trailblazer, and we are excited at the prospect of charting a new course together in the digitally connected world,” McAdam, said in a statement.The way we talk about sexual misconduct, abuse, harassment, coercion and assault within the music industry feels, in many ways, short-sighted. When abusers are outed and accusations are believed (if they are believed), conversation turns to consequence and anger, resentment for the past and concern for the future. What will become of Pinegrove or R. Kelly or Pierce the Veil? (Those are only a few artist names from the last week of accusations. There are countless others.) What will happen to their fans? Most importantly, what will become of the survivors?
These situations are, more often than not, impossibly challenging to navigate, leaving us with more questions than answers. Here at TrackRecord, we’ve been wondering what steps we can take as ethical, inclusive music fans and professionals. We believe victims and are aware that many will not. How can assault be addressed after an abuser is outed within our industry? What happens when the news cycle moves on, distracted by the next tragedy?
I reached out to Sheridan Allen, a Philadelphia-based social worker who runs Punk Talks, an organization that offers free professional therapy to music workers. They provide education, awareness, and advocacy around mental illness and accessibility to treatment. She and her team of 15 volunteers (including three licensed therapists and a pharmacist) have been asking the same questions for a long time, so I asked her: What does restorative justice look like within the music industry?
Hey Sheridan, thanks for talking with TrackRecord. We’re chatting because of the sexual abuse allegations that continue to crop up within the music industry, across genres and scenes. Do you think there’s a particular reason we’re seeing these cases becoming increasingly more public?
I think many survivors of abuse, largely women, have reached their maximum bullshit level. An attack like [those being reported] strip away any sense of safety from a person. When you have no sense of safety, taking down the scariest person in your life seems impossible. I believe that the sheer volume of survivors speaking out gives many individuals who had been carrying this secret burden the opportunity to gain a semblance of safety back. In finding courage and strength through the voices of others, on top of the courage and strength they embody each day just by existing, I believe that many survivors chose to speak publicly as a way to gain some closure, to protect others, or to gain control of their life back.
Advertisement
“Many survivors of abuse, largely women, have reached their maximum bullshit level.”
Do you think we’ll continue to hear these stories? I struggle to call it a “trend.”
I certainly hope it will continue—our [music] community (and our society as a whole) is really listening right now and we are at a crucial point where the entire industry is changing around the idea that music workers should also be good people, which is an idea I can certainly get behind.
Advertisement
Part of me wants to believe we’re hearing more about abusers to cease future abuse, but also because there seem to be some consequences now—Matt Mondanile of Ducktails and PWR BTTM getting dropped by their labels and taken off major streaming platforms, for example. There are, of course, exceptions to the rule— I don’t know if anything has come of the Brand New allegations. There seems to be a power hierarchy even within abuse.
PWR BTTM may be one of the first examples of powerful people being taken down for their behavior. It is hard to believe that was only six months ago. There was a specific kind of betrayal associated with the PWR BTTM abuse—this was a band that preached safety and acceptance to LGBTQ youth and used that platform of fake safety to gain access to the fans they would go on to harm.
Advertisement
It is an intimate relationship, the one between fan and artist, and when the artist abuses that power, it takes all legitimacy out of music that shapes you. It is devastating. We are also in a unique place where the industry is expected to do something about problematic behavior, because once that behavior is exposed, media, social or otherwise, will be shining an enormous light on them. Are [accused abusers] reacting because they want to ensure the safety of their consumers and fans? Are they trying to cover their bases so that they can make more money while still appearing moral?
When we talk about accountability in the music industry, what are we referring to?
We are all kind of figuring out what that means as we go—this is an unprecedented period within the history of music as an industry. To me, accountability within the industry goes far beyond addressing poor or abusive behavior and is based around the response to the survivors and the treatment of survivors by industry and fans alike.
Advertisement
How can abusers be held accountable after allegations arise?
Personal accountability is, in its simplest form, genuinely admitting to and apologizing for wrongdoing and taking concrete steps to prevent further wrongdoing in the future. Unfortunately, accountability is not always so simple and its simplest form may not work for everyone. In these circumstances, accountability can be defined only by the victim of the abuse. I often see people wondering how they can maintain a relationship with someone who has been outed as abusive, and my answer is by continuing to hold them accountable in making an earnest effort toward positive and healthy change.
“Accountability can be defined only by the victim of the abuse.”
Advertisement
Yesterday morning, Pinegrove frontman Evan Stephens Hall wrote a long note on Facebook detailing an account of sexual coercion with a woman he believed to be in a relationship with, among other various inappropriate behaviors with fans and others on tour. Do you think his apology— essentially responding to accusations before the victim went public, if she or they so choose to do so in the future— is an example of restorative justice?
It is difficult for me to speak about this situation objectively, because I was directly involved in facilitating communication between the victim in this situation and the band’s label. In this situation, I believe that the best example of restorative justice is in Evan’s decision to stop touring and to enter treatment. I believe Evan will benefit from intensive treatment and time away from the road.
The important takeaway with restorative justice is that the foundation is repairing the harm you have caused another. In order to ensure that harm is repaired, the abuser needs to listen to and understand the requests of the victim, should the victim feel comfortable discussing those directly or through a neutral and trusted party.
Advertisement
Punk Talks works on a treatment model based on personal accountability and sex abuse prevention. What does that entail?
The workshop focuses on four areas: consent workshops, mediation facilitated by trained community members/professional therapists, personal accountability based on restorative justice, and sexual assault prevention fellowship.
Advertisement
I understand it’s for abusers attempting to re-enter the music community. I suppose this is more of a personal inquiry, but do you think there is space for them? I’m weary of that distinction.
This is a difficult topic, but I have always held steadfast to the belief that every person is capable of positive change—if I didn’t believe this, I would be in the wrong field of work. I think the idea of pushing abusers out of our community seems like the best idea at the time, but in the long-run, I believe that social isolation is incredibly more harmful.
[Often abusers will] find other social circles to perpetuate the same behavior in until the cycle repeats itself or the person becomes a danger to themselves. I believe that abusers can be rehabilitated if they have genuine remorse and a genuine desire to achieve positive change and a healthy lifestyle. If we are not willing to give someone a chance to become better (in a controlled and therapeutic environment), we are only perpetuating a dangerous problem. In offering rehabilitation, I believe we will also be able to prevent sexual assault from happening by using early intervention and peer fellowship for sobriety from sexually problematic behavior.
Advertisement
“The idea of pushing abusers out of [the music] community seems like the best idea at the time, but in the long-run...social isolation is incredibly more harmful.“
In the face of a lot of sexual misconduct, abuse and especially assault allegations, the music industry seems to view these situations as moral questions instead of how we punish other crimes: with the law. Is there a particular reason, in your opinion, that we view these cases as almost a conversation of “What is fair punishment?” instead of other serious violations?
I believe that this is seen as a moral issue purely on the grounds of the difficulty of legal action in a sexual assault case. Social work professionals often encourage victims to take legal action to set a precedent, but coping with an assault is complicated and intimate and this decision is entirely up to the victim. Before we get to a point where we can normalize and destigmatize reporting sexual assault, we have to begin clearly defining consent among legal professionals and law enforcement and see a change in the accountability of law enforcement officers.
Advertisement
You’re starting a restorative justice workshop next year. What does that include? Will those outside your base of Philadelphia have access to that information?
We will be adopting the workshop model developed by a smaller DIY multi-disciplinary team and it will focus on education as a form of prevention, peer support, and accountability based on restorative justice. The restorative justice component is especially significant, because we will be working alongside victims who are courageously stepping forward with their stories. Working with victims to ensure that they feel supported in seeking justice and offering facilitated mediations by trained community members and therapists can help give a voice to the victim without compromising their safety or involving law enforcement. We will be able to provide these services to any interested parties remotely, and we have plans to train any individuals interested in implementing this service within their community.Gabriel Lee pleaded guilty to culpable homicide after trying to decapitate his fiancee, Elsie Lie, and killing her in the process.
SINGAPORE: Months into their relationship, security guard Gabriel Lee proposed to his girlfriend Elsie Lie. A week after his proposal, he killed her.
Believing she was the devil - he called her “Elsie Lucifer” - Lee tried to decapitate Ms Lie, 24, and gouged out her eyeballs. Ms Lie’s mangled body was found on Mar 31, 2012, in the rented room in Jurong West she shared with Lee.
Advertisement
A few bent metal spoons were entwined in her hair, and a bizarre assortment of tools - a can opener, two pairs of scissors, a hammer and pruning shears - were littered around the room. Lee, then 37, was found naked and kneeling next to his fiancee’s topless body, chanting loudly and holding a yellow object resembling a cross.
He pleaded guilty on Thursday (Feb 23) to a reduced charge of culpable homicide not amounting to murder, on account of a diagnosis that he was suffering a "brief psychotic disorder" at the time of her killing.
Lee was sentenced to 10 years’ jail.
MET ONLINE, MOVED IN SHORTLY AFTER
Advertisement
Advertisement
The couple had met online in 2011 and moved in together just three months later. But Lee believed the couple’s rented room was haunted and that Ms Lie was possessed.
He took her to a Catholic church to be exorcised and on one occasion made Ms Lie, an administrative assistant, “wear a bible” to work. When Ms Lie’s colleague asked why she had a huge waist pouch with a bible strapped to her body, she said she was possessed.
Despite believing his girlfriend was the devil, Lee nevertheless proposed to her on a family holiday to Genting Highlands in March 2012.
A week later, she was dead.
On Mar 30, the couple’s flatmate, Mr Muhammad Shahin Talukder, heard Lee “groaning” in the bathroom while giving Ms Lie a bath.
Nearly three hours later, the couple were still in the bathroom and Mr Shahin asked them to come out.
When they emerged at about 9pm, Mr Shahin saw that Ms Lie looked pale and had to be supported by Lee. The couple then disappeared into their bedroom.
But when the groaning persisted an hour and a half later, a concerned Mr Shahin knocked on the bedroom door. Lee refused to speak to him, prompting the flatmate to call the police for help at 11.05pm. When Sergeant Muhammad Suffian Suaini arrived, he too heard groaning from inside the bedroom.
Lee eventually opened the door and Sergeant Suffian saw the room was in a mess, with clothes strewn about and Ms Lie lying on a mattress on the floor. She appeared weak, but assured Sergeant Suffian it was because she had recently had an abortion and was not feeling well.
Sergeant Suffian left shortly after.
GOUGED OUT EYEBALLS AS PARAMEDIC WAITED OUTSIDE
But when Sergeant Suffian returned the next morning, he found Ms Lie dead.
Between his departure at 11.45pm on Mar 30 and 6.50am the next day, Lee had killed Ms Lie by trying to behead her.
Another flatmate had woken up to use the bathroom at about 6.30am, when he saw blood splattered on the couple’s bedroom door. He told Mr Shahin, who called the police.
Staff Sergeant Low Lye Leng, a paramedic, arrived at the scene first, and was greeted with the sight of a topless Ms Lie lying face-up on top of the naked Lee, who had his arm around the woman's neck.
Having assessed the situation to be “unsafe”, the paramedic decided to wait in the living room for the police to arrive. As he waited, Lee gouged out Ms Lie’s eyeballs and threw them out of the bedroom window.
Sergeant Suffian arrived minutes later to see Lee kneeling naked next to Ms Lie’s body, groaning and chanting loudly while holding a yellow object resembling a cross. He arrested Lee.
Ms Lie’s eyeballs as well as clumps of her hair were recovered from a grass patch directly below the couple’s bedroom window.
An autopsy revealed that Ms Lie had died from multiple neck injuries. Lee had tried to behead her, in the process completely severing Ms Lie’s spinal cord and removing part of her wind pipe, which was found next to her body.
Lee had also tried to cut off Ms Lie’s right foot. He did not succeed, but nevertheless inflicted a deep cut, exposing the ankle bone. Ms Lie also suffered multiple other injuries.
"HE LEFT HER NO DIGNITY IN DEATH": PROSECUTORS
Lee was subsequently diagnosed to have been suffering a “brief psychotic disorder” at the time he killed Ms Lie.
Even though he knew all along he was killing his fiancee, the mental breakdown affected his ability to think clearly and “substantially reduced his mental responsibility for the (killing)”, according to an Institute of Mental Health (IMH) psychiatrist.
In the High Court on Thursday, deputy public prosecutors Hay Hung Chun and Krystle Chiang sought a 12-year jail term for Lee. “The accused had attempted to behead her and amputate her foot. He gouged out both her eyes. He left her no dignity in death,” they said.
Although Lee’s psychotic disorder is now in remission, “one needs only to glance at photographs of (Ms Lie’s) mutilated body to appreciate the danger (Lee) would pose in the event of relapse”, the prosecutors added.
Defence lawyers Sunil Sudheesan and Diana Ngiam, however, urged the court to impose a jail term of nine to 10 years. “Our client comes from a strong Catholic background and has believed in ghosts, evil spirits and Lucifer since he was a child,” the lawyers argued. “Our client was under the delusion that (Ms Lie) was the devil and thought that she was trying to kill him.”
Lee is extremely remorseful, the lawyers added.
He had told a psychiatrist: “No words I say will bring back my girlfriend … she was the only one who truly loved me.”In some sense, it doesn't really matter how the Supreme Court rules on the gay marriage case it's hearing today. The culture war is over on this front, and gay marriage has won. Even if it loses at the Supreme Court this term, it will win in the legislatures... because it is already winning in popular opinion. Few people much under the age of sixty see a compelling reason that straights should marry and gays should not. For that matter, my Republican grandfather is rumored to have said, at the age of 86, "I think gays should marry! We'll see how much they like it, though."
At this point, it's just a matter of time. In some sense, the sexual revolution is over... and the forces of bourgeois repression have won.
That's right, I said it: this is a landmark victory for the forces of staid, bourgeois sexual morality. Once gays can marry, they'll be expected to marry. And to buy sensible, boring cars that are good for car seats. I believe we're witnessing the high water mark for "People should be able to do whatever they want, and it's none of my business." You thought the fifties were conformist? Wait until all those fabulous "confirmed bachelors" and maiden schoolteachers are expected to ditch their cute little one-bedrooms and join the rest of America in whining about crab grass, HOA restrictions, and the outrageous fees that schools want to charge for overnight soccer trips.
I know, it feels like we're riding an exciting wave away from the moral dark ages and into the bright, judgement free future. But moral history is not a long road down which we're all marching; it's more like a track. Maybe you change lanes a bit, but you generally end up back where you started. Sometimes you're on the licentious, "anything goes" portion near the bleachers, and sometimes you're on the straight-and-narrow prudish bit in front of the press box. Most of the time you're in between. But you're still going in circles. Victorian morality was an overreaction to the rather freewheeling period which proceeded it, which was itself an overreaction to Oliver Cromwell's puritanism. (Cromwell actually did declare a War on Christmas, which he deemed to be sensuous paganism.)
We've been moving away from the Victorian view of marriage for a long time, which means that we're probably due to circle back around the prudish front that drove Charles Dickens to lie when he left his wife for another woman.
The 1970s were an open revolt against the idea of the dutiful pair bond, in favor of a life of perpetual infatuation. The elites led the way--and now they're leading it back. Compare Newt Gingrich or John McCain to the new generation of Republican hopefuls. Jindal, Ryan, Christie, Rubio... all of them are married to their first wives. Jindal met his wife in high school, Christie in college. By their age, McCain was preparing for his first divorce, and Gingrich was just a few years from his second.
Meanwhile, it's becoming increasingly impossible to ignore the disastrous collapse of marriage outside the elite. It turns out that there aren't a diverse array of good ways to raise a child, as the progressive academics of the 1970s had suggested. Or at least, if there are, they don't include having children with an array of men you're not willing to marry, and who will subsequently drift in and out of your life. And that, in post-sexual revolution America, is increasingly the norm in many areas.
But one major and more dystopian feature of actual contemporary twentysomething life is conspicuously absent from small-screen depictions: parenthood. Hard as it might be for Hannah and Mindy—and their viewers—to imagine, most American women without college degrees have their first child in their 20s. These young women and their partners—who make up about two-thirds of twentysomething adults in the |
5 p.m.Though the idea of crunching on crickets is repulsive to many people, insects are an important food source in many parts of the world, and there's a growing movement to introduce them into Western diets as an eco-friendly source of protein.
But if bug burgers don't whet your appetite, you're probably not the target audience for this latest insect-related dietary suggestion either: cockroach milk.
Yes, you read that right. There's a species of cockroach, Diploptera punctata, that is viviparous, meaning it gives birth to live young. And just like mammals, this roach feeds its young with milk. Now scientists have discovered a way to produce this milk efficiently in the lab, and the creamy concoction could one day be transformed into a highly nutritious protein shake, reports the Times of India.
The key reason why scientists are interested in extracting this roach's milk is because it's so nutritious. A single protein crystal from the milk is estimated to contain more than three times the amount of energy found in an equivalent mass of dairy milk.
"The crystals are like a complete food — they have proteins, fats and sugars. If you look into the protein sequences, they have all the essential amino acids," said Sanchari Banerjee, one of the main authors of a recent paper on the new lab-generated substance.
As you might imagine, however, milking cockroaches isn't so easy as milking cows. Even if you do succeed, not a lot of milk is produced by a single roach. So Banerjee and colleagues developed a more sophisticated way of extracting this buggy goodness, by sequencing the genes responsible for producing the protein crystals in a mommy roach's gut. This allowed the researchers to produce the milk in the lab, potentially making it easier to mass produce.
Though these cockroach milkshakes have the potential to be the power protein of the future, there aren't any plans yet to go commercial. No doubt, any product containing milk drawn from a roach will need a pretty amazing ad campaign to turn it into serious merchandise.
But perhaps with some clever labeling, the nutritional benefits might make it worth a shot.
Cockroach milk: Protein shake of the future?
A certain species of cockroach produces a highly nutritious milk that scientists can now make in the lab.In July of 2016, with his Chicago Cubs in the midst of an epic season, team president Theo Epstein had two simple words written on a board in the baseball operations offices at Wrigley Field:
FIND PITCHING.
His team had the game’s best rotation at that time with stars like Jake Arrieta and Jon Lester headlining a group of arms that Epstein, GM Jed Hoyer and their staff had acquired since they arrived in Chicago in 2011. But Epstein knew that sooner, rather than later, the Cubs would need to add significant starting pitching to their organization if the Cubs were going to go on a run of contending for multiple World Series titles.
As the glow of the 2016 World Series title faded and the 2017 season kicked into gear, Epstein and Hoyer again turned their attention to finding high level starting pitching, which is the hardest commodity to stockpile in baseball. As the 2017 season turned towards the All-Star break, the Cubs stunned the baseball world by trading two of their best prospects to the crosstown White Sox in exchange for highly dependable lefty Jose Quintana who was a solid addition to the Cubs rotation and under contract through the 2020 season, giving the Cubs 3/5 of their rotation (plus Lester and Kyle Hendricks) under team control for three more seasons.
Now, as the baseball winter meetings get ready to commence in Orlando, Fla. on Dec. 9, the Cubs are looking to add two high-level arms to fill out their rotation. While there are a few attractive options in free agency such as Alex Cobb (Tampa Bay), Lance Lynn (St. Louis) and Yu Darvish (LA Dodgers), there is no one at the level of Japanese sensation Shohei Ohtani who is not only the best available pitcher in the world, but is also considered a high-level offensive player with 30+ HR potential.
Multiple MLB scouts — including one rival front office executive — spoke with me regarding Ohtani with all of them concurring that Ohtani is indeed the real deal:
“Remember the time you first watched a superstar player and you just knew he was going to be great? That’s what this kid is," the front office executive told me. "There is no way he isn’t going to be a superstar. He has all of the qualities that a player needs to be a success."
Ohtani is a true No. 1 starter with elite velocity that has reached 102 mph in the latter stages of his starts. He has a five-pitch mix at various speeds that make him very tough to game plan for.
“Shohei can blow you away at 100 mph and he can make you look ridiculous with a breaking ball at 88," said an MLB scout who has watched Ohtani play over 50 times. "He can also sit somewhere in between and throw ANY of his pitches for a strike at varying speeds. Whoever gets him has a true ace who is only 23 years old and should be an instant star."
MLB sources have confirmed to me that the Cubs have spent significant time and money in their pursuit of Ohtani. The club has sent multiple scouts to Japan for weeks at a time and they have watched him pitch and play the outfield and they believe he can indeed do both on the north side of Chicago.
A rival NL executive who has scouted Ohtani believes the Cubs will be on the short list of teams that have a realistic chance of signing him:
“Theo has been fascinated by this kid for a long time," the executive said. "He and Jed have been strategizing on how to land him in Chicago. They have the support system needed to make this work. They landed Daisuke Matsuzaka when he was in Boston and they have a good relationship with Ohtani’s agent (Nez Balelo) at CAA.
"They are definitely one of the teams on his short list. But will he end up in the National League? That’s the big challenge.”
The buzz in the baseball world has only a handful of teams with a real chance to land the franchise-changing star with the Yankees, Dodgers, Cubs, Red Sox, Mariners, Rangers and Blue Jays all considered possible landing spots. However, with Ohtani insistent on spending some time playing a position (either OF or DH) some in the game believe that favors an AL team.
So is this kid that good that NL teams are willing to allow him to pitch and play the OF for them?
"The dude throws 100 mph consistently," former MLB outfielder Jonny Gomes — who played in Japan and saw Ohtani firsthand — told MLB Network Radio. "That plays. If you have the arm speed to throw 100 mph, guess what your slider's gonna do — yikes. And he also has a split, which is yikes with that arm speed. And he also has a changeup, and he also has a curveball. You're talking about five plus-plus-plus pitches.
"If he was in the draft, I think it would be a no-brainer right now that he'd be No. 1 overall."
What about Ohtani’s offensive potential and how it could translate to Major League Baseball?
In 2017, Ohtani hit.332 with eight home runs in 65 games. The OF/DH sports a.286/.358/.500 career slash line with 48 home runs.
"Now hitting-wise, is it gonna transfer, or is it not?," Gomes said. "I've seen the dude hit a fly ball that hit the roof of the Tokyo Dome. So, what does that tell you? That bat speed's there, that power’s there, that he's generating a lot out front.
"To be able to hit the roof of the Tokyo Dome is way more impressive than hitting any other roof in the states. It would be like hitting the roof in Seattle when it was closed, it's way up there."
Ohtani will have a major cultural adjustment coming from Japan to the United States, but he will also have a major adjustment transitioning into a veteran-laden major league locker room. Gomes believe that will be no problem for the 23 year old superstar.
"I'm a big fan of the dude," Gomes told MLB Network. "I saw his work ethic, I saw how players treated him, I saw how respectful he was. Over there, it's all about seniority. Granted, he was the biggest star on the field at any given moment, but he still gave the utmost respect to seniority guys on his ball club."
Ohtani is also not about landing the highest contract at this point in his career. The Cubs and Dodgers are handicapped by having only $300,000 available to spend on an international signing while the Texas Rangers have $3.5 million dollars they can offer.
“Shohei will probably make $20-30 million dollars in endorsements once he signs with an MLB team so whatever a team can offer him to sign right now is really irrelevant," an MLB executive said. "The kid is not about getting the last dollar. He doesn’t run the streets, he doesn’t party, all he is in love with is baseball. He is a phenomenal young man in every way which makes him a perfect fit wherever he signs.”In the genteel world of clay pigeon and game shooting, the Sportsman Gun Centre is something of a household name as Britain's leading purveyor of hunting rifles and related paraphernalia ranging from silk ties adorned with pheasant motifs, through moleskin breeches and tweed gilets, to full camouflage suits.
Lately however, the Exeter-based company appears to have been branching out into rather more exotic territory: details released by the government under the Freedom of Information Act reveal that it received licences last year to export more than 1,000 assault rifles, combat shotguns, pistols and other weapons to Sri Lanka.
The licences were granted at a time when UK arms exports to the south Asian country have been on the increase. Sri Lanka was the stated destination for military items worth more than £3m in just three months last year. More than £2m of those exports was under the "ML1" label – used by the UK's Export Control Organisation (ECO) to denote small arms and weapons.
Yet, rather than going to the military of a country still classified by the Foreign Office as a "country of concern" for human rights abuses, the weapons sales are an apparent spin-off from a boom area for many British businesses – the protection of shipping from Somali pirates.
It is four years since raiders based on the Somali coast began to terrorise the busy shipping lanes of the Indian Ocean, and in that time the maritime security business has mushroomed on an unprecedented scale. It is now worth £100m a year to British companies according to ADS, a trade organisation for the UK's aerospace, defence, security and space industries.
UK-based maritime security companies account for some 75% of the market, and more than 300 security companies operate in the Indian Ocean region including from Sri Lanka. "We absolutely dominate the market," says Paul Gibson, a former army officer and director of counterterrorism at the Ministry of Defence who now directs the Security in Complex Environments Group (SCEG), which was established by ADS in 2011.
"On the back of Iraq and Afghanistan and our general reputation, shipowners feel that a British security company is going to do the right sort of thing. We were in at the beginning and we have pretty much maintained that reputation, remaining the first choice for many of the big owners. There are an awful lot of ex-Royal Marines in the business."
The arms sales do not only go to Sri Lanka, where private military security companies involved in anti-piracy operations store their munitions and weapons. Further export control statistics show that export licences for £8.5m of specifically military items, together with £36.8m worth of dual-use (civil and military) items, were granted last year for exports to Kenya – another base for maritime security companies (and, incidentally, pirate bosses).
The export records come with a footnote explaining exactly what is being sent to protect the shipping lanes: "Licences … were issued for use in maritime anti-piracy operations – assault rifles, body armour, components for assault rifles, components for pistols, components for rifles, direct view imaging equipment, military helmets, pistols, rifles, small arms ammunition, weapon sights, components for body armour, components for sporting guns, high quantities of sporting guns and combat shotguns."
The increased focus on security at sea appears to be working. To date, no ship with armed guards has been hijacked in the Indian Ocean, a region that saw 189 pirate attacks in 2011 alone. Estimated ransom payments in that year were $160m (£106m), a considerable financial blow for many companies.
But the maritime security industry is not without its critics. Kaye Stearman of the Campaign Against Arms Trade said there was widespread concern about the use of private security companies. A UN working group on mercenaries has warned that a lack of regulation for armed security on ships, together with an absence of robust reporting for incidents at sea, create human rights risks.
"Although hundreds of companies have signed up to an international code of conduct for private security providers, this is a voluntary agreement," said Stearman.
"In the case of Sri Lanka, there is always the possibility that weapons supposedly licensed for use in anti-piracy operations will be used within Sri Lanka. Once weapons are licensed and despatched abroad, the exporter has no control over how or where they are used."
Gibson argues that the British government's decision to let the industry self-regulate is working. "It was a completely unregulated sector but there are an awful lot of ex-British military involved. They brought with them that conscience of trying to do the right thing, operating within the rule of law and respecting human rights," he said. There is now a specialist City & Guilds qualification for maritime security operatives, and an international standard has been created, audited by a third party. From September there will also be an international code of conduct for security providers and a Geneva-based international association charged with oversight.
A spokesman for the Foreign Office said that the government operated one of the most rigorous arms export control regimes in the world.
He added: "This includes requiring end users to provide a declaration that states the intended use and location for the products. They are also assessed carefully against the risk that the goods might be diverted or re-exported to undesirable end uses or end users."
The Sportsman Gun Centre – which is run by businessman Gary Lamburn and has three outlets in the West Country, Dorset and Wales – was not forthcoming about who placed the orders for the 1,000 weapons it was granted licences to export to Sri Lanka. The company may have yet to act on the licences, the deals may have been cancelled, or Sportsman may simply not accept they are exporting to Sri Lanka when the arms are for use at sea by a private company.
"It is our policy to respect client confidentiality so we are unable to comment on specific transactions," the firm said. "However, we have never exported any weapons to Sri Lanka."The United Arab Emirates recently celebrated its 44th birthday with the usual celebrations, performances and rallies. The country certainly has much to be proud of – since its founding in 1971, it has achieved a near-miraculous rise in virtually all human development indicators.
Starting as an underdeveloped country with a small, mostly uneducated native population in a forgotten corner of the world, the UAE is now a global hub, a regional economic powerhouse and a popular tourist destination. The country ranks high in GDP per capita, infrastructure maturity and global competitiveness. It leads the Arab region in ease of doing business and leads the world in connectivity.
Empty wilderness was transformed into advanced, bustling metropolises. Rolling desert was transformed into some of the most valuable real estate in the region, if not the world. Man-made islands rose from the sea. But first and most importantly, a small nation of fishermen, traders, bedouins and peasants was transformed into one of the most prosperous, sophisticated and optimistic societies in the world. I watched the saga from the inside, having lived my entire life in the UAE, until I was extra-judicially forced into exile in 2014 (but that's another story...).
The UAE I grew up in was home to a proud, optimistic, dynamic society, but today much of its population are silenced into a resigned acquiescence, and wonder only privately where the country may be heading
The country is still riding high, with new mega projects announced (including plans for a mission to Mars). It still leads the Arab region in optimism and is the country most Arab youths aspire to live in. But behind the flashy news lurks a disturbing story.
The United Arab Emirates has peaked. The social, political and economic model that initially worked for the UAE so well carries within it the seeds of its own demise. The model of a rentier state in which citizens are a tiny privileged minority is internally coherent, but dangerously unsustainable, and is moving towards an inevitable moment of reckoning. The coming years, I predict, will see this distressing reality become far more urgently manifest.
When the UAE was founded, it had a population of less than 300,000. Today, it is home to over 10 million – and 88% of those are non-citizens. Officially, these non-citizens are labelled "temporary migrant workers", but many are in fact life-long residents. Since the 1970s, hundreds of thousands of Arab and Asian families moved to the country, contributing significantly to its success story, and founding most of its key development sectors. But the UAE did not provide a path to citizenship and decades later, a significant and growing demographic in the country is second and third-generation immigrants, who have never known another home. They are still referred to as "temporary". Notwithstanding their inferior legal status, these non-citizen natives are undeniably an integral part of the UAE's history and of its multicultural, modern society.
The government often refers to the country's striking population make-up as a "demographic imbalance" (or a "defect in demographic make-up") – but more than just being a defect, it's a solid trend. The UAE's rapid advancement in human development has predictably caused its family size to plummet – more education and more fulfilling careers for women came with a delayed age of first marriage and delayed child bearing. The UAE's birth rate has plummeted from nearly seven births per woman before the union, to 1.82 today (the replacement birth rate is 2.1). Local Emiratis, in short, cannot bridge the demographic gap through natural birth.
But this demographic defect is actually the cornerstone of some of the UAE's most important political and economic models. The local population is small enough to allow a generous and moderately sustainable cradle-to-grave welfare system – a system that would not scale up well if the population was much larger.
The vast majority of Emirati citizens work either directly for the government, or for semi-government corporations (99% of the private-sector workforce are non-citizens). For the vast majority of Emiratis, the government is – literally – their boss. The significance of this cannot be overstated – it sets the dynamic for the relationship between Emiratis and their government.
The model has been stable so far but can it continue? Studies project that by 2050, the UAE will be made up of only 4% citizens, and 96% non-citizens – which by then would include third and fourth-generation immigrants. The current regime cannot subsume such a big and diverse population as citizens without serious social, cultural, and political transformation; it cannot make up the difference via natural birth; it cannot "deport" nine-tenth of its population; and it cannot continue down the path of "demographic imbalance" without something or the other giving way. How sustainable is a country in which only 4% of the population are citizens?
What's most alarming about this picture, though, is that it is not debated in the UAE at all – the most serious problem is that nobody is talking about the problem. Since the start of the Arab Spring (whose fifth anniversary we just observed), the government's decision making seems to have been hijacked towards an autocratic, counter-revolutionary, nearly paranoid bent.
Its attention is committed outwards towards foreign intervention, and inwards towards shutting the space for debate and free speech. Without dissent, the country has no internal resistance to bad decision making. The ever-tighter sovereign leadership circle has chosen a familiar policy of unapologetic severity towards dissidents, coupled with the promotion of a closed nationalistic chauvinism, buoyed by the country's recent foreign military adventurism.
Today, in the UAE, dissent is punished as treason, and potential dissenters are mistrusted or pre-emptively expelled. The country I grew up in was home to a proud, optimistic, dynamic society but today, much of its population are silenced into a resigned acquiescence, and wonder only privately where the country may be heading. Many are oblivious to the threats, caught up in the rush of their daily lives. It's abnormal how normal life looks under these conditions.
Some non-citizen families have "emergency packs" ready in case a "deportation" order comes along; others are pondering emigration. But many are caught up in the rat race, trying to get ahead in one of the most dynamic economies and societies in the region. Others find solace in consumerism, or find escape in entertainment or in art and literature.
Poignantly enough, I could have never written this article had I not been summarily expelled from the UAE in April 2014, against the background of my Arab Spring activism. The government did not need to produce any charges against me – as a non-citizen native, I was "temporary" anyway. I am a product of the United Arab Emirates, and everything that I am was made there. I cannot find words to express how much I love it, how much I miss it, and how grateful I am to its society and its human saga for contributing to making me the man I am today.
The UAE to me was not a "port" to be "deported" from – it was my country, my home, the only home I ever knew. I worry for my first home – for the most successful and inspiring modern Arab story. The UAE is worth saving – but it would take the courage of dissent to make a difference before it's too late. If you really love your country, then dare to dissent for its sake. God bless the UAE.
Iyad El-Baghdadi is a career entrepreneur, writer, and Arab Spring activist. Follow him on Twitter: @iyad_elbaghdadi.How would you feel if the police stopped you on a whim, took your phone, your laptop, your digital camera, your MP3 player, your USB sticks and your memory cards then copied everything on them?
How would you feel if they told you they were going to keep all your photographs, your documents, your address book, your financial data, your browsing history, your emails, your chat logs, your electronic diary, your music and recordings and anything else they liked for at least six years - indeed maybe they’d keep them until you reached the age of a hundred in case they might prove useful one day?
How would you feel if they then demanded all of your passwords and threatened you with years in jail if you refused to hand them over?
Welcome to Britain.
These are the rights granted to the police at the border controls of this country.
Within the UK, police officers are authorised to seize phones and download information only after making an arrest. The border control officers have no such limitations.
Anyone entering or leaving the UK faces this possible treatment under port powers contained in Schedule 7 to the Terrorism Act 2000. No prior authorisation is needed to stop you and there does not need to be any suspicion. Your data can be kept even if you are not arrested and the police can find no evidence of any crime.
The Terrorism Act 2000 was introduced after the IRA ceasefire to make permanent previous emergency legislation that had been intended to be used for six months only but had been renewed and extended annually for 25 years. The new act is based on the recommendations of Lord Lloyd of Berwick's 1996 Inquiry yet arguably fails to address his concerns about human rights or meet his principle "that permanent anti-terrorist legislation should approximate as closely as possible to ordinary criminal law and procedure".
Each year around half a million people are stopped as they enter or leave the UK for screening questions which last for a few seconds or minutes. Nearly 70,000 are examined for longer periods. Less than 0.03 per cent of those questioned for longer are arrested.
The Office for Security and Counter-Terrorism advises that there are no national records kept of data downloads taken and that downloads are conducted at the examining officer’s discretion on a case-by-case basis but that they occur “in a substantial number of cases”.
Noting the arguments for allowing stops without suspicion, David Anderson QC, the independent reviewer of terrorism laws, warned in 2012 and again in 2013
...despite having made the necessary enquiries, I have not been able to identify from the police any case of a Schedule 7 examination leading directly to arrest followed by conviction in which the initial stop was not prompted by intelligence of some kind.
In spite of this the police still have the legal power to act on a hunch or a whim.
Whistleblower Edward Snowden memorably described the NSA and GCHQ spying apparatus as “turnkey totalitarianism”. When asked why the British seem so complacent about this, the academic, journalist and author John Naughton noted
“Britain has no recent historical experience of being invaded, and so the culture has no clear understanding of the consequences of intensive surveillance technology and records falling into the 'wrong' hands.”
The retention of data for as long as the state feels it might be useful, should alarm everyone. Everyone should have something to hide. Just because we live in a nominally democratic society right now doesn’t mean it will always be that way. Russia, ironically the first country to decriminalise homosexuality, is fast criminalising it again. Right now you would have good reason to feel worried if the Russian state was holding copies of your mobile telephone and computer data if that included evidence of your sexuality.
Within the UK, there is a growing litany of abuse by police officers being exposed. This is alleged to include spying on the friends and families of victims of police brutality, seemingly with the intent to discredit. How happy are you that your most intimate messages and photographs could be in the hands of people who have shown themselves only too willing to leak sensitive information to the press?
David Anderson has warned in his latest annual report on terror legislation in the UK:
The fact that such powers are useful does not automatically mean that they are proportionate. It is ultimately for Parliament, prompted if necessary by the courts, to strike the appropriate balance. Even if a no-suspicion power to stop and examine is thought acceptable, it might for example be possible to require some level of suspicion before a phone can be downloaded or a person can be taken into detention... by analogy with the proposal that reasonable suspicion should be required before a strip search is conducted.
The comparison to a strip search is a good one. As the boundaries between the physical and the digital dissolve and more of our most intimate moments and experiences occur in places that overlap both spheres, the cold scientific language of “data” and “downloads” becomes insufficient to describe the sense of violation such behaviour by the state can cause.
Borders are strange places. We accept perhaps that we may be subject to invasive procedures when we cross but at the very least we expect that there must be reasonable suspicion for the degrading experience of a strip or cavity search. In the same way, we must demand that at the very least that our personal data be considered inviolable unless there are very clear grounds for this invasion. Privacy is a right we should not surrender easily, yet without our paying attention the state signed it away for all people trying to enter or leave the country.
There are many grounds for concern about these laws and the reluctance of the government to consult on the issues raised by David Anderson in his review of them. That the data of innocent people stopped without a warrant and without clear grounds for suspicion can be kept effectively forever is wrong.
Due to an ambiguity over whether the existing act provides sufficient legal authority for this copying of personal data, the government has proposed an amendment inserting a new paragraph 11A into Schedule 7, headed “Power to make and retain copies” as part of The Anti-Social Behaviour, Crime and Policing Bill passing through Parliament at the moment.
Although the government’s intention is simply to protect itself from legal challenges, this is potentially an opportunity to have stricter controls over these extensive powers written into the law.
The Bill has just entered the report stage. MPs now have the chance to introduce proposals for change. Unfortunately there seems to be little government will to make any changes to a bill that gives way too much authority to the police with too little accountability and too few safeguards. Little wonder given how few people seem to be aware of these sweeping powers.
This article was originally published on ORG Zine and is crossposted here with the author's permissionIn a quarterback-driven league like the NFL, it is logical that the best team is led by the division’s best passer.
But in a division with a two-time Super Bowl champion in Eli Manning, and two highly-touted under-achievers in Tony Romo and Sam Bradford, it’s noteworthy when a respected analyst selects Kirk Cousins as the division’s rising star.
“I think it has to be Kirk. It has to be,” CBS Sports Radio host Tiki Barber told 106.7 The Fan’s Chad Dukes. “None of the guys from the Eagles excite me. Eli and Tony are old, and Kirk just feels like he took the right steps.
“We were talking early about how Tom Coughlin reinvented himself. Kirk, who is only 24 years old, reinvented who he was. There’s a lot to be excited about with him, especially if he keeps continuity with his coordinators and just keeps taking the small steps forward. You don’t need to take leaps and bounds but just take small steps forward.
“Especially if you have talent around you, which the Washington Redskins do.”
Unlike the last time the Redskins won the NFC East, there are few questions about the future of the quarterback position. With a seemingly stable combination of front office, coaching and supporting cast, Cousins has the tools necessary to compete and succeed.
“The most important thing you can take away is that your quarterback, Kirk Cousins, actually is a viable player in the National Football League,” Barber explained. “You see what happens when there’s a commitment to a guy. There’s no bickering and–I don’t want to say ‘divas,’ because Robert Griffin wasn’t really a diva. But it felt like it, right? It just felt like the message was wrong. The brand was wrong.
“But when you get a head coach that believes in the kid, who encourages and pushes to the kid, who let’s him go through the mistakes that he was bound to make–because he was interception-prone earlier–he comes out of it. What you get is a kid who played unbelievable down the stretch. He was one of the highest-rated quarterbacks in the league over the last six games of the year.”
Going into an offseason in which the foundation for success is already in place, the biggest task will be getting Cousins under a long-term contract.
“Continuity is king,” Barber said. “Getting him back, getting an offensive game-plan…that’s what you have to be excited about with this Washington Redskins team.”
Listen for the full audio:
Follow Brian Tinsman and 106.7 The Fan.It's a basic fact of life that once you publish something on the Internet, it's pretty much impossible to get it back. Now illustrating that point with painful clarity, images of the TSA's master luggage keys have been published online, meaning that anyone with a 3D printer can make their own.
It all started when The Washington Post published a story last November about "the secret life of baggage" that was reportedly accompanied -- only briefly -- by a photo of the master keys the Transportation Security Administration uses to open what it calls "TSA recognized" luggage locks.
The photo was hastily taken down, but -- predictably -- not before it was snagged and circulated. Reports about the leak began to appear last month, but it wasn't until this week that detailed blueprints showed up on GitHub.
"Security researchers have long warned of the dangers of using master-keyed locks," wrote Xyl2k, the GitHub user who posted the detailed plans.
Now, anyone with a 3D printer can create their own copies of the TSA master keys -- and create them they have, according to reports from exuberant users.
"OMG, it's actually working!!!" wrote Bernard Bolduc on Twitter, for example.
The TSA's master keys are designed to enable security officers to inspect luggage without having to cut off any locks protecting it. They work on locks created specifically for that purpose through partnerships between the agency and lock manufacturers.
"These locks are available at most airports and many travel stores nationwide," the TSA noted in a blog post early last year. "The packaging on the locks indicates whether they can be opened by TSA."
Neither The Washington Post nor the TSA responded immediately to a request for comment.Ask any venture capital company for the key ingredient that persuades them to invest in a company and they will all say the same thing - the people.
Ask any venture capital company for the key ingredient that persuades them to invest in a company and they will all say the same thing - the people.
How one Dublin startup raised €15m by focusing on hiring the smartest Irish engineers
A commercial idea is essential but unless the people pitching it have the character to triumph over adversity they are unlikely to get the funding they need.
Steve Collins and Hugh Reynolds had it spades, according to Frank Walsh, partner in Enterprise Equity Venture Capital.
The two men had an impressive track record with Havok and Kore, two game middleware companies they founded and subsequently sold.
The regional venture capital company would become the first investor in their new venture, Swrve, as it was about to embark on a go-to-market journey that would highlight why the calibre of the people involved is so important.
Started as an in-game platform, the firm was doing nicely, if not spectacularly, when the iPhone launched in 2007 and the apps market was born.
Collins and Reynolds saw a fundamental shift in the software market and a much bigger opportunity. "Free and low cost apps were hugely disruptive and became fundamental to mobile marketing automation, which is what we started moving towards," says Collins.
Many startups go through a 'pivot', a strategic change in direction to capitalise on a market opportunity, but this was more radical, according TO Frank Walsh.
"When you make a pivot you are still generally pointing in the same direction.
"What Swrve did was an about-face which involved coming up with a completely new product aimed at an entirely new and different customer base," he says.
"That's a really brave and frightening board meeting to be at."
It was also the meeting that would vindicate Enterprise Equity's faith in Collins and Reynolds. "You invest in people not a proposal because proposals change; people don't," Walsh says.
Identifying a new opportunity is one thing, commercialising it is quite another. Steve Collins advises every start-up to spend less time writing five-year business plans - "because no-one really knows what's going to happen" - and concentrate more on partnering customers to get the idea into the marketplace.
"Don't spend three years engineering a solution you think is going to go take the world by storm when you release it," says Collins.
"Develop everything in partnership with customers from day one."
After several pivots and pilots, Swrve arrived at the marketing automation product it sells today. The solution optimises customer engagement through mobile apps that companies are increasingly using to get closer to customers.
Swrve's platform takes signals from customers' in-app and responds to them in real time. "Simultaneous conversations with millions of customers," is how Collins describes it.
"You have to engage them very quickly," he says. "The whole point is to make apps relevant and contextual as quickly as possible because people spend more time on mobile devices but less time on individual apps."
This big idea plunged Swrve into a very hot space and attracted funding from Atlantic Bridge, an Irish venture capital company that invests when it sees a mature idea with a sizeable market opportunity.
It led a US$6.25m funding round that propelled the firm into a new phase of growth. More recently, the company raised $10m in a round led by US investor Acero Capital.
Today, the company employs 70 people with offices in Dublin, London, New York and San Francisco, and it's monitoring more than three billion transactions per day across more than 750 million users for customers that include Sony, Activision and Electronic Arts.
For Collins, chief technology officer, and Hugh Reynolds, chief strategy officer, Swrve has become a different kind of start-up from their earlier ventures.
"The market potential is enormous and Swrve has a greater opportunity to scale," says Collins.
"We're learning a lot about building sales and marketing organisations, where the risks are around execution and bringing in the right people at the right time."
As the firm delved deeper into marketing automation it needed to recruit marketing expertise, including chief executive Christopher Dean, who is based in the company's headquarters in San Francisco.
To grow market share in an increasingly competitive sector, the long-term plan is to differentiate with backend technology that is ahead of the curve. All the engineering takes place in Dublin and it's the heartbeat of the company. Collins was a Trinity College graduate and retains his ties with the university where he is an adjunct professor.
This keeps him in touch with the up-and-coming talent needed to stoke the innovation that is central to Swrve.
"We'll continue to base our engineering in Ireland where we access some of the brightest students coming out of college. In the last year alone, we've taken on 12 engineers," he says.
When it come to investors, he speaks highly of the partnerships with Enterprise Equity and Atlantic Bridge. He calculates that he's been through 14 investment rounds at this stage and while the landscape is constantly changing, some fundamentals stay the same.
"You need capital investment to give you the oxygen to grow and you need people to believe in the team and the plan," he says. "Investors like Enterprise Equity who can weather a storm, because there are always going to be ups and downs."
Coming at it from the other side, Frank Walsh reflects on what he looks for in entrepreneurs: "I like them to be lucky," he says, only half in jest, "and smart enough to realise that luck will play a part, as well as being aware enough to recognise that they don't know it all."
He wants to see self-confidence but is wary |
wish the blockage away whilst driving here, using actual equipment is extra sorry" - TLADNMPS employee A customer in this scenario will be expected to pay for “extras” like: travel costs (e.g. $80) / use of drain cleaning machine (e.g. $300) / drain camera (e.g. $180) / “it’s a two man job” (e.g. $90) / obtaining footage (e.g. $50) etc. misleading at best, potentially drip pricing at worst.
Both these strategies have the same simple goal. To get ‘a foot in the customers door’ then deliver the well rehearsed sales pitch on a more expensive service – or – wait to explain the full costs once on-site (got to get those advertising dollars back somehow, right?).
So, what should someone who needs a blocked drain plumber be looking for?
Rather than continue to call out other companies for what they’re doing wrong (note – I purposefully not mentioned specific company names etc. in this article). Instead, let’s discuss what the good plumbing companies out there are doing right:
– Realistic about costs (and preferably display them on their website)
– Include as many costs as they practically can in their price (e.g. call out costs, use of drain camera etc.)
– Plumbers are happy (must be dispiriting having to deliver the bad news about the real costs on every job)
– Don’t force their staff to deliver pushy and rehearsed sales pitches
– No history of bulk online reviews from people who have only ever written 1 review (for obvious reasons)
– Not targeting overly competitive PPC keywords (I’m a big fan of Google & I love PPC, but the numbers simply don’t work in Sydney unless you plan on charging $600 to unblock a drain – no thanks, I like seeing my customers in public without having to cross the road).
It’s simple, right?Fast Facts: › Rover inspected a site where a valley was cut into bedrock, then refilled. › A site of that type had not been seen previously on Mars.
Researchers slightly detoured NASA's Curiosity Mars rover from the mission's planned path in recent days for a closer look at a hillside site where an ancient valley had been carved out and refilled.
The rover made observations and measurements there to address questions about how the channel formed and filled. Then it resumed driving up Mount Sharp, where the mission is studying the rock layers. The layers reveal chapters in how environmental conditions and the potential to support microbial life changed in Mars' early history.
Two new panoramas of stitched-together telephoto images from Curiosity's Mast Camera (Mastcam) present the increasingly hilly region the rover has been investigating, and more distant portions of Mount Sharp. These large images are online, with pan and zoom controls for exploring them, at:
http://mars.nasa.gov/msl/multimedia/deepzoom/PIA19397
http://mars.nasa.gov/msl/multimedia/deepzoom/PIA19398
Curiosity has been exploring on Mars since 2012. It reached the base of Mount Sharp last year after fruitfully investigating outcrops closer to its landing site and then trekking to the mountain. The main mission objective now is to examine successively higher layers of Mount Sharp. Curiosity spent several months examining the lowest levels of the mountain's basal geological unit, the Murray formation, at an outcrop called "Pahrump Hills." Then it set off toward a site called "Logan Pass," where the team anticipates a first chance to place the contact-science instruments at the end of the rover's arm onto a darker geological unit overlying or within the Murray formation.
"In pictures we took on the way from Pahrump Hills toward Logan Pass, some of the geologists on the team noticed a feature that looked like what's called an 'incised valley fill,' which is where a valley has been cut into bedrock and then filled in with other sediment," said Curiosity Project Scientist Ashwin Vasavada of NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory, Pasadena, California.
This unusual geometry of the rock layers was noted on the side of a rise called "Mount Shields," which sits northwest of the planned route to Logan Pass. The team chose in late April to divert the rover to the base of Mount Shields.
"We wanted to investigate what cut into the mudstone bedrock, and what process filled it back in," Vasavada said. "The fill material looks like sand. Was the sand transported by wind or by water? What were the relative times for when the mudstone formed, when the valley was cut into it, when the cut was filled in?
"It's exciting to see this on Mars for the first time," he continued. "Features like this on Earth capture evidence of change. What in the environment changed to go from depositing one kind of sediment, to eroding it away in a valley, to then depositing a different kind of sediment? It's a fascinating puzzle that Mars has left for us."
Scientists are examining the evidence collected at Mount Shields as the rover approaches its next study area, at Logan Pass.
JPL, a division of the California Institute of Technology in Pasadena, built the rover and manages the project for NASA's Science Mission Directorate in Washington. For more information about Curiosity, visit:
http://www.nasa.gov/msl
http://mars.jpl.nasa.gov/msl/
You can follow the mission on Facebook and Twitter at:
http://www.facebook.com/marscuriosity
http://www.twitter.com/marscuriosity
News Media Contact
Guy WebsterJet Propulsion Laboratory, Pasadena, Calif.818-354-6278guy.webster@jpl.nasa.govDwayne BrownNASA Headquarters, Washington202-358-1726dwayne.c.brown@nasa.gov2015-158Industrial robots used to be big, unwieldy, and dangerous, but new “human-safe” robots are now commonplace on automotive lines, working right next to people. Yet these robots are awkward coworkers; they coexist with us but do not meaningfully collaborate. Robots often need to be explicitly told how to be helpful or when to stay out of the way — things human teammates seem to learn intuitively. A good human apprentice is a keen observer, inferring unspoken rules and customs, watching how others work, and then generalizing this knowledge for new situations. We are able to accomplish this partly because the human mind is able to process very complex information very efficiently. This type of inference has traditionally been hard for machines to perform.
Recent research indicates that we are at an inflection point in how robots observe and process data, and therefore how they work with people.
Roboticists are starting to reverse-engineer the human mind by translating the cognitive models that humans use intuitively into computational models that machines can use. With this approach, robots and humans working in pairs have been able to accomplish complex tasks as well or better than human teams.
The implications are vast. Imagine a robot that participates as a team member in planning an emergency response deployment. The robot listens to the human team’s conversation to automatically learn the game plan. Such a robot would not have to wait until after the meeting to be told what to do — it could immediately take initiative to accomplish tasks that help the team achieve its goals. This basic ability is expected from humans working in emergency response and other time-critical situations, but it is transformative for robots.
The challenge is that collaborative dialog is complex: It unfolds in cycles, agreements are fluid, and proposals are often implicitly or passively communicated and accepted. The team may consider and reject many options and revise the plan many times. It is hard for a machine to infer our plans efficiently; the robot may have to consider and explore trillions of possible plans for even a simple scenario with just a few team members and a few goals.
In contrast, human team members do not need hours after a meeting to figure out what was agreed on. We are generally able to leave meetings with a clear picture of the plan. We do this by employing a mental scaffolding to piece together the conversation. Every member of the team is motivated by the same goals and has the same basic knowledge of the team’s capabilities, and every suggestion a team member makes is considered in context.
My research group, the Interactive Robotics Group at MIT, leveraged this insight to design a computational model that replicates the inherent structure in how a team discusses and negotiates a plan. We gave the machine just a little bit of information — for example, the number of team members, their capabilities, the team’s goals, and information about the tasks. The machine used this information to infer the final plan by piecing together the plan that was most likely to be valid, given the context of the problem. For instance, if the machine was told the team has four members but eight tasks are to be performed concurrently, it could infer that either the teammates will be multitasking or the plan needs to be revised around tasks being performed in sequence. The approach proved successful for emergency response planning. Teams of people were tasked with formulating a complex team response plan, and the machine was able to infer the final plan with up to 86% accuracy, on average.
The same approach also enables robots to learn complex plans just by watching us make decisions in our jobs. In fact, our most recent studies show that robots can learn the complex decision-making strategies of experts performing real-world tasks in defense and health care.
The key was to design the structure of our model to make very efficient use of each observation of the human expert. Each decision an expert makes provides a great deal of information, revealing how that particular option was prioritized over other options. We designed a model to leverage this logical structure by transforming the observed data into pairwise rankings on options. This approach substantially improved the machine’s ability to efficiently learn a high-quality model of the human expert’s decision-making strategy.
This technique was successfully applied in two settings.
In the first, domain experts played a serious game in which ships were defended from a set of missile threats. A machine may need days or weeks to solve this kind of problem well, but human experts are able to make good decisions very quickly. Using our structured computational model, the machine was able to learn effective strategies with just 16 human expert demonstrations. In fact, the machine was able to outperform the average expert score on many of the missile defense tasks.
In the second setting, a machine learned strategies for coordinating patient care in a hospital unit from health care professionals. Specifically, it learned decision-making strategies for where and when to move patients among room types and how to assign nurses under varying workload conditions. The technology was evaluated through experiments in which a robot provided decision support to nurses and doctors as they made decisions on patient care in a high-fidelity simulation. The nurses and doctors complied with the robot’s recommendations at a rate of 90%, a strong indication that the robot had learned high-quality strategies for the task.
These recent advances indicate that there is tremendous potential for machines to collaborate with us in rich ways that will extend and enhance human capability in many sectors of the economy. Robots of the future won’t need to sit on the sidelines or wait to be told what to do. Robots will truly be at our service, ready, willing, and able to learn from watching us. They will work shoulder-to-shoulder on assembly lines, in hospitals, and on the front lines of emergency response. The awkward robots of the past will be replaced by valued members of the team.For other people named John McNamara, see John McNamara (disambiguation)
John M. McNamara is an American convicted felon and former businessman. McNamara was convicted of a Ponzi scheme fraud through gaining loans to a value of $6 billion from General Motors financing arm GMAC, to develop a $400M car sales and property development business.
Background [ edit ]
The son of an Irish immigrant, raised in Port Jefferson, Long Island in the State of New York, McNamara was a devout Roman Catholic who was college educated.[1] Twice-divorced, he had been declared bankrupt from a failed business venture in Florida.[1]
Returning to the single family-owned Pontiac-Buick auto dealership in Port Jefferson which his father started,[1] as President of Sales, McNamara had ambitions in property development and politics. He made large contributions to his church, and single-handedly bankrolled a haven for wayward teenagers. Refused credit by some others, he hired bodyguards to intimidate those probing his business dealings.[1]
Business scheme [ edit ]
With access to financing via GMAC, from 1980 McNamara applied for a series of loans to buy non-GM vans, valued at US$25,000 each,[2] which he said would be customized, before being pre-sold and shipped to the Mediterranean island country of Cyprus.[3]
McNamara established a company called Kay Industries Inc in Indiana, who were supposedly responsible for customization. Kay Industries gave McNamara Pontiac-Buick invoices stamped "paid," which they then submitted to GMAC. GMAC in return gave McNamara Pontiac-Buick a 30-day loan on each customized vehicle, to allow for its export and sale. McNamara Pontiac-Buick would then supposedly sell the vans to another McNamara-owned corporation, which in turn claimed to be shipping them to a McNamara owned buyer in Cyprus, Cydonia Trading CTD. After shipping the vans overseas, McNamara Pontiac-Buick would then repay the loans (within 30 days) while, at the same time, borrowing additional funds from GMAC for the next shipment of vehicles.[1]
Ponzi scheme [ edit ]
No vans in McNamara's scheme were ever purchased, customized or sold. McNamara used the $400 million of money skimmed from the loans to finance the purchase and operations of 70 different corporations and partnerships, including:[1]
two additional auto dealerships
a car loan company
Real estate companies that owned more than 100 properties in New York, Maryland, Georgia, Florida and the Middle East, including a Days Inn motel
a mortgage financing company [3]
two gold mines in Nevada
an oil business [3]
two seats on the New York Mercantile Exchange
a newspaper company
a pharmaceutical company
considerable amounts of stocks, bonds and notes
a $500,000 personal home
a $350,000 home for his ex-wife
a $500,000 trust fund for his daughter
a private jet and a limousine
Part of the money McNamara skimmed was used to bribe local and state level officials in Brookhaven over his property development business, by offering higher trade-ins, lower purchase prices or lease payments on cars, and in limited cases direct cash.[3]
In the 11 years the operation ran, as is typical of a Ponzi scheme, McNamara had to take out larger and larger loans each year to pay off the payments due on previous loans. In 1985 he took out loans totaling $250 million, $715 million in 1989, $1.88 billion in 1990 and $1.93 billion in 1991. Loans over the 11-year period totaled $6 billion for 17,000 vans.[2][3] Since all loan payments were made on time, GMAC viewed McNamara as a valued and even profitable customer, extending him special terms, such as increasing the time required for his first payment from the standard 30 days to 60 days.[2] Over the last four years of the scheme, the total amount of the loans made to McNamara exceeded the gross domestic product of the country of Panama.[1]
Collapse and analysis [ edit ]
In 1991, GM internal auditors discovered the size and scale of McNamara's loans, but did not see the corresponding vans being purchased from GM. They refused further loans, which directly led to the collapse of McNamara's entire business. With the fraud eventually discovered, after loans totalling over US$6 billion repaid, it resulted in approximately $436 million in unpaid inventory financing.[2]
GMAC conducted an in-depth analysis of the events that had enabled the fraud to take place, resulting in a significant re-structuring of the commercial credit operations of GMAC.[2] A report concluded that the fraud was made possible by organizational and relationship symptoms, as well as anomalies in the lending practices of GMAC, including:[1]
Deviation from GMAC's standard operating procedures, granting privileges to McNamara that were unavailable to others. The extent of lending exceeded credit limits for any other customer
GMAC never physically inspected any of the vehicles, none of which were GM products. The number of vans bought represented more converted vans than the entire US industry produced, requiring Kay Industries to have a factory capable of producing 200-400 vans per day [1]
The sales to Cydonia Trading violated GM's franchise agreements, because domestic dealers are not supposed to sell cars to overseas buyers
The local GMAC office occasionally closed its doors to other customers so it could process McNamara's pile of paperwork, referred to as "Mac Attacks."
GMAC's computer software was modified to handle the unique demands of McNamara's volume business
Trial and conviction [ edit ]
Brought to trial in 1992 at the Federal District Court in Brooklyn over various charges of fraud, McNamara faced a maximum sentence of $800 million in fines and 20 years in jail. A plea bargaining deal with state and federal prosecutors reduced this considerably, on the condition that he provide evidence against the officials he had bribed with regards to his property development projects. In concluding the case, the judge agreed that McNamara's sentence could be reviewed further, should the value of his evidence prove great and should he choose to enter the Federal Witness Protection Program.[3]Presidential Primary Ballot
Donald Trump maintains a strong lead in New Hampshire, earning 31% of the vote on the Presidential Republican Primary ballot test. Jeb Bush (14%) leads the field in the race for second place, followed by John Kasich (12%) and more distantly by Marco Rubio (10%), Ted Cruz (9%) and Chris Christie (6%). Note: The results from night two of our survey were largely unchanged from pre-Iowa Caucus results on Monday night.
Trump’s advantage increases among likely voters who self-affiliate with the Republican Party (34%, Bush 16%). He leads John Kasich among likely independent primary voters (23%, Kasich 16%, Rubio 12%, Bush 11%) while Trump (20%) and Fiorina (20%) tie among Democrats who say they are likely to vote in the Republican primary.
Although Trump leads in every region of the state, Jeb Bush increases his proportion of the vote substantially in the Boston (18%) and Portland-Auburn (21%) media markets. Jeb Bush (15%) and Marco Rubio (15%) tie for second in the Burlington- Plattsburgh market and Kasich pulls into second in Hillsborough County (18%) and Rockingham County (11%). Trump has comparable leads among both women (28%, Bush 18%) and men (32%, Kasich 14%).
While Trump leads among the three older age brackets (40-54: 39%, 55-65: 31%, 66+: 26%), Jeb Bush shows strength among younger voters (18-39: 25%-26% Trump). Among self-identified Very Conservative voters, Trump leads (32%) followed by Ted Cruz (18%) and Jeb Bush (16%). He also leads among Somewhat Conservatives (35%) followed by Jeb Bush (14%, Rubio 13%). John Kasich leads Trump among Moderates (25-24%, Bush 14%).
Note: Gilmore, Huckabee and Santorum are not shown in the chart below as they earned 0% of the vote.A population in the heart of the Rust Belt has higher-than-average levels of an industrial chemical that may cause numerous health problems, according to a new study.
For decades, a chemical called PFOA and other related substances were used to create non-stick coatings on things like cookware and food contact papers. These substances are completely man-made and take a really long time to break down, so they linger in the environment, where they often get into drinking water. Human bodies readily absorb PFOAs, and they can build up over time. Researchers believe that higher concentrations n the body can lead to health conditions like increased cancer risk, decreased fertility, altered immune function, and effects on developing fetuses and children.
Though use of these substances is slowly declining in the U.S., the impacts are much longer-lived— this year, DuPont paid $617 million to settle 3,500 lawsuits from residents of states with drinking water contaminated with PFOA, which is the substance used to make Teflon. A 2016 study found that six million Americans may be drinking water tainted.
The researchers behind this study, published Friday in the journal Environmental Pollution, suspected that the residents of the mid-Ohio River Valley, which extends between Huntington, West Virginia and Louisville, Kentucky, might have higher levels of PFOAs and related compounds in their bodies because the chemicals were in their water supply. Between 1991 and 2013 — that’s over 22 years — the researchers collected blood from 931 people throughout the valley to test for 11 different PFOA and related compounds.
The researchers found that 99.9 percent of the samples from mid-Ohio River Valley residents had these compounds in their blood. Many of those had high concentrations of PFOA, in particular. While nearly every person has some PFOA in their body, 47 percent of those tested had concentrations higher than 95 percent of the rest of the U.S. population.
Using a statistical method, the researchers were able to determine that contaminated water was very likely behind the high numbers; the chemicals would have flowed down the river from Parkersburg, West Virginia, in some cases hundreds of miles from the people who would eventually absorb them.
“These data from the 1990s demonstrate that that the contaminants have been in our water a long time, at unchecked levels, before anyone was paying attention to it,” said Susan Pinney, a professor of environmental health at the University of Cincinnati College of Medicine and one of the authors of the study, in a press release.
Though these chemicals may be common in the water supply, it’s not inevitable that they make it into humans. A particular type of water filtration method called granular activated carbon filtration was found to reduce concentrations by 60 percent. Studies like this could help change water treatment practices in the U.S. and particularly abroad, where use of these chemicals has not slowed down.Joseph Hirt said he fabricated story of being sent to camp and meeting Nazi doctor Josef Mengele to ‘keep memories alive’ about history of the Holocaust
A Pennsylvania man who claimed for years to have escaped from Auschwitz, met track and field star Jesse Owens and Nazi doctor Josef Mengele, confessed on Friday that he had fabricated the entire story.
“I am writing today to apologize publicly for harm caused to anyone because of my inserting myself into the descriptions of life in Auschwitz,” Joseph Hirt, 86, wrote in a letter sent to his local paper, LNP, this week. “I was not a prisoner there. I did not intend to lessen or overshadow the events which truly happened there by falsely claiming to have been personally involved.”
“I was wrong. I ask forgiveness,” he added. “I determined at that moment to do everything in my power to prevent the loss of the truth about wartime life (and death) at Auschwitz.”
For years, Hirt gave public speeches about his experiences in the second world war, including his Jewish family’s flight from Poland to Belgrade. But he also told people that he was arrested by the Nazis, sent to the concentration camp at Auschwitz, and met Mengele, the SS physician who tortured prisoners of the concentration camp. Hirt claimed to have escaped under an electric fence at the camp.
He added an extraordinary prologue and epilogue to the story, saying that he saw Adolf Hitler turn his back on Jesse Owens at the 1936 Olympics in Berlin, and that he met Eleanor Roosevelt and Owens after his arrival in the United States.
In his letter, Hirt said that he realized “it wasn’t about me”, and that he was motivated to lie by his fears that the history and horror of the camps would be forgotten. He said that he was shocked to find that Auschwitz, now a museum and memorial, had become a “clean and polished tourist destination” where visitors laughed and joked about “propaganda”.
“Flagrant denial and ignorance of the truth made me determined to keep the memories alive,” Hirt said. “I used poor judgment and faulty reasoning, risking a sullying of the truth I was trying to share.”
Hirt did not immediately reply to a request for an interview.
Earlier this year, New York history teacher Andrew Reid became suspicious of Hirt’s story and wrote a refutation of many of Hirt’s points.
The names of concentration camp victims and survivors are publicly available, and there is no record of Hirt at Auschwitz or elsewhere. Hirt admitted in his letter that he had tattooed the camp number of Auschwitz survivor Primo Levi, the acclaimed author and chemist, on his left forearm – “in no way an attempt to take on his identity, but in an effort to incorporate his symbol as a way of remembering him”.
Reid also found that Hirt’s escape story did not fit with camp records, that Mengele did not arrive at the camp until after the alleged escape, and other lies, errors and far-fetched claims in Hirt’s account. He was a six-year-old Polish boy and extraordinarily unlikely to be anywhere near Hitler at the Olympics, for instance, and Owens’ biographer found the snub was likely a fabrication, possibly conflated with another black sprinter’s story.
“I want to be clear – I am not a Holocaust denier,” Reid wrote in his own letter, noting that he got his first job from a concentration camp survivor. “It is partly in his memory and for the preservation of the truth of what millions of people endured that I have taken upon myself the task of exposing Mr Hirt’s shameful deception.”
Hirt is not the first to fabricate or exaggerate a Holocaust story, worrying historians who fear these voices encourage people who deny the deaths of six million people. Herman Rosenblat, a Polish survivor, embellished his 1993 memoir and made up some parts entirely, including the love story at its heart. At the time, historian Ken Waltzer wrote in the New Republic that he was alarmed by how quickly people accepted the story.
“This was not Holocaust education but miseducation,” he said. “This shows something about the broad unwillingness in our culture to confront the difficult knowledge of the Holocaust. All the more important then to have real memoirs that tell of real experience in the camps.”RUSSIA MAKES NOTHING. In the last month, its Superjet 100 has been delivered to the first Western customer; its battle robots have been displayed; its new nuclear-powered icebreaker, the largest ever built, has been launched; it has exported more grain than anyone else; its anti-Ebola vaccine has passed the first round of trials; its space capsule returned three astronauts from the ISS. And, for the future: five of the top-ten spots in the ACM-International Collegiate Programming Competition were Russian.
SPIEF. Mercouris contrasts it with 2014: “In summary, the mood this year at SPIEF was of a country emerging from a period when it had been forced onto the defensive and which is now preparing itself for fresh advances both in its foreign policy and in its economic life.” Many more European attendees too.
SANCTIONS. Time to stop them and change policy say French Senate, writers in a British paper and a German paper, former German Chancellor, former German cabinet minister, former OSCE vice-president, former French President. Why? Because they’re costing: drop in EU food exports, Finnish factory shuts down, Le Monde sums it up. Russian agriculture, on the other hand is booming: even Bloomberg agrees, Russia is self-sufficient in chickens, nearly so in pork and moving fast in beef. And is the biggest exporter of grain. Sergey Ivanov rather hopes sanctions continue. His wish will be granted.
NONSENSE. It’s always a difficult choice, but I nominate “Putin’s Russia is a poor, drunk soccer hooligan” as the stupidest thing on Russia published lately. Out-of-date statistics and simple-minded direct USD-RUB comparisons.
MORE NONSENSE. A NATO general says “any attempted aggression by Russia using methods like it did in Crimea would not be allowed to go as far as it did there… ” Perhaps he can name a NATO country in which up to 25 thousand Russian troops, supported by 90% of the population, are legally stationed.
PROPAGANDA IS… “British navy intercepts Russian submarine on way to Channel“. More truthful is “UK Illegally Harasses Russian Submarine Engaged in Lawful Passage of English Channel“. No wonder the British press is dying.
…NOT WORKING. I take what comfort I can from polls like this one. It shows Europeans aren’t all that scared of Russia and that they don’t approve of the way relations with Russia are conducted. This after years and years of anti-Russia and anti-Putin propaganda.
RUSSIAN HACKERS… DNC. More unsourced accusations.
BROWDER. Nekrasov’s documentary “The Magnitsky Act—Behind the Scenes” has finally been shown and in Washington, despite attempts by Browder to shut it down. Doctorow reviews it.
IT’S A MYSTERY. Turkey’s President Erdoğan bemoans poor relations with both Obama and Putin and sent a letter to Putin hoping for better relations.
MIRROR IMAGE. I’ve been doing this since Chernyenko and am ever bemused by the reversal of positions. Then Moscow banned our broadcasts, now we want to ban its. Some want to restrict Russian Open Skies flights because Russia is using them to “expand its espionage capabilities“. When Eisenhower proposed the idea the Soviets rejected it for much the same reason. That’s what it’s for: open skies for transparency and confidence-building.
NATO AND STABILITY. Global Peace Index rates Syria, Iraq, Afghanistan, Somalia, Ukraine and Libya as among the ten most dangerous countries; all have seen NATO’s “stability generation“. The German Foreign Minister says “Anyone who thinks you can increase security in the alliance with symbolic parades of tanks near the eastern borders, is mistaken.” Another German Foreign Ministry person agrees. Der Spiegel intimates some allies are disturbed by Poland’s anti-Russia stance.
UKRAINE MISCELLANY. The Azov founder threatens to overthrow the government if it agrees to Minsk-style elections in Donbass. Sikorski (a cheerleader for Maidan) says Kiev should forget about Donbass and Crimea because it can’t afford to re-integrate them. Kiev had better get used to the end of Russian-subsidised gas. (Didn’t that used to be Russia’s “gas weapon“?) Hungary notices Transcarpathia and Kiev notices too. Poll shows Ukrainians still loath their politicians and are just as split on everything else. About five million citizens are now out of the country: that’s over ten percent.
© Patrick Armstrong Analysis, Canada Russia Observer1,742,400 Minutes I’ve Been Missing You
3 years, 3 months and 22 days since the last time we were together
Joshua Anon Blocked Unblock Follow Following Mar 6, 2015
WOW, it sure has been a long haul. I remember the first moment I met you. I was a 15-year-old crying boy up at the cottage with Jeff. He had no clue how to make me better so he introduced us. For me it was love at first touch, but hey, anyone would love you considering your assets. We really hit it off right away. I always wanted to be near you, and if not with you, close to you. I wanted you to be touching my lips 24/7. Those were the days; I was dumb, young and didn’t care that you were not the right thing for me; I just said fuck it.
At first I hid you from everyone, you knew I had to. I could barely even see you without sneaking around, but I found a way. I would go out every night just to be with you. I even hid you in my bathroom and let you sneak out the windows a couple times.
Things got intense, maybe too intense in University, I couldn’t be social without you, I even brought you out with my parents. I remember the day they first saw you and I together, the shock on their faces was intolerable but I was proud of who I was and that made it ok.
I dreamt about you every night, I would even wake up in the middle of the night just to be with you for a moment. Funny, looking back now we probably should have separated earlier but I think when I moved back home it was a good time to move on.
I think about you everyday. My dreams vividly remind me of you as if a spirit is making sure that I never forget you. When I awake every morning the first moment of the day is spent thinking of you before realizing we aren’t together anymore. When I see you with my friends it takes unlimited self control to not scream I love you, grab you and kiss you. I just wish you would go away, forever, because I cannot look at you. I don’t want to, because I want you and ill always want you. You are permanently a part of me.
I hope I never see you again.
I love you more than I hate you,
JoshuaAnon
Ps: she’s a cigarette and apparently I’ll be addicted forever.Over the past eighteen months, I’ve become much better acquainted with myself.
That’a strange statement to make, I know, but it’s true. You can coast through life without knowing very much about yourself at all - until you fetch up against something. Until you stumble, or trip, or are knocked right off your feet.
Life knocks us all off our feet, sooner or later. Sometimes, though, we do it to ourselves. We choose it, by attempting to discipline ourselves, against a natural tendency to over-indulge and relentlessly seek novelty. That’s what happened with me, and it’s been eye-opening.
There are two areas of my life where I’m engaged in a battle with myself: work, and fitness. Work is a matter of self-discipline because I work from home, and set my own schedule. It’s entirely up to me to make sure that things get done, and that working hours neither vanish, nor completely consume my life. The latter is the biggest danger.
Fitness is probably a more common challenge. Working out is difficult, tiring, and so very easy to skip when enthusiasm is low. Even finding time for it in the first place is a problem for most people - though I’m luckier in that regard. Many don’t even bother. I used to be among them.
So, where does the motivation come from? Where does it come from, on the days where your starting position is no? The answer is probably different for each of us, and when you find it, you learn a hell of a lot about yourself and what makes you tick.
The best - and often least useful - advice to help you do something is to love what you do. You should also do what you love, so that you automatically love what you do. In an ideal world, that’s all the advice you’ll ever need.
But this isn’t a perfect world, and even if you do manage to do what you love, you won’t always love it. There will be days when your dream job - or hobby, or whatever that thing is that you want to do - will seem like a chore. Suddenly, motivation will be required. Today, you’re just like everyone else.
Finding that push may be easy on most days, but on this day, you have to find it; to dredge it up. Enough to get out of bed with the dawn, put on your running gear, and slip out the door. To get your feet slapping against the tarmac when you’d much rather be in bed, or sipping coffee, or already cocooned in the heat of the shower.
Where does the motivation come from on those days?
Let’s get straight to the core of it: there’s hate involved. Hatred of yourself, or of what you might become. Hate isn’t a word that comes up in motivational material very often, and I can understand that - positivity is generally best. But truth is better still. For me, motivation is inextricably linked with the offsetting of regret.
Hate is what you draw on when motivation isn’t sitting there, eagerly waiting. Hate can turn the winch until the cable glows hot, and haul motivation up from unseen depths, like a shipwreck untouched for a long, silent century.
Hate isn’t a trusty companion, loyally at your side for the adventure, but rather your inner coach - or maybe your drill sergeant. It laments and despises what you’ve become, or what you might again become, or what you’ll never become if you continue along your current path.
It believes that there’s another way, son, but by god you’re going to have to work for it - and you are going to start now.
The goal just isn’t enough. If you’re going to make a difference to yourself, you need the fear. “Get in shape” isn’t a patch against “You’re fat, and you’re going to die”. “Write a book” doesn’t quite have the urgency of “You’re wasting your talent in obscurity” (and you’re going to die).
Which one gets straight to your hind-brain, where the animal lives?
Motivation can be another word for obsession. It most definitely is for me. There are other words, too, like willpower. I’m not sure what that one even means. It’s too vague; too wishy-washy and equivocal. Willpower is what people proudly lay claim to, like it’s one of their personal stats, then tell you how they’ve mustered it to slay some particular dragon. It’s a lovely story, but I think the truth is rather more mundane - and darker.
Motivation is self-denial. If the enemy is procrastination, then you’re denying yourself leisure, or the mindless pleasure of a lack of occupation. If the enemy is getting to the gym, then you’re denying yourself rest, and ease. If the enemy is your diet, then you’re denying yourself indulgence. I know a lot about that last one.
For the past year, I’ve been in a state of near-constant fixation on the next meal. I live in a vortex of food envy, cravings, and painful awareness of calories and nutrients. Upon finishing dinner, I know how long it is until breakfast. I barely remember how it is to feel any other way.
I deny myself things all the time. Mostly, I deny myself the luxury of skipping a workout. I deny myself those french fries, or the second biscuit, or the full-fat Coke. That cheeky home-delivered pizza for lunch, that my wife would never even know about. So many things that I |
Searching for 2 patient. - Katherine Main### — LAFD (@LAFD) December 12, 2014
Glendora | 10:35 a.m. Morning showers turn to light sprinkles Though city officials braced for heavy rain and mudslides, Glendora had relatively few effects from Friday's storm. By mid-morning, the early morning showers were a light sprinkle. At the Crowther Teen and Family Center, the evacuation point for the city, there were more staff members than evacuees. Throughout the night, the center hosted about nine people, said Lt. Matt Williams of the Glendora police department. Now, they're down to three still at the center, he said. Williams said there are no reported injuries or reports of buildings impacted by rain or mud. The most important task now, he said, was to clean up the streets. Only Hicrest Road was still closed, as of 10 a.m. --Samantha Masunaga
10:17 a.m. Formula for disaster: Fire, rain, mudslides Dozens of Southern California residents in burn areas in Camarillo Springs, Glendora and Azusa saw a treacherous scenario play out Friday as communities previously scorched by wildfire were hammered by a powerful storm. The storm, the largest to hit the Southland in several years, once again brought devastation to areas charred by wildfire. With every significant rain, residents in these communities face the threat of rocks and debris flooding their homes. -- Veronica Rocha Read more
L.A. River | 10:10 a.m. One person found UPDATE: @LAFD has located one person stuck in L.A. River, one person still missing — L.A. Times: L.A. Now (@LANow) December 12, 2014
Long Beach | 10:05 a.m. Roof collapse Roof collapsed at an apt complex/liquor store in Long Beach, crushing a car and displacing tenants. Details at 11a pic.twitter.com/pZrjBzEN5m — Bri Winkler (@ABC7BriWinkler) December 12, 2014
Echo Park | 10:04 a.m. Report of people clinging to trees BREAKING: @LAFD got report of 2 people clinging to trees in L.A. River in Echo Park; units dispatched to search by air and land — L.A. Times: L.A. Now (@LANow) December 12, 2014
9:57 a.m. Storm closes few schools in Southern California Despite destructive mud flows and widespread power outages from the powerful storm moving through Southern California Friday, few schools have been closed. Sierra Madre Elementary School in the Pasadena Unified School District was closed due to a power outage, officials said. School officials announced Thursday evening that Goddard Middle School in Glendora would be closed Friday, as evacuation orders were announced. County education officials in Los Angeles County, Orange County, and Ventura County reported no other known school closures. --Christine Mai-Duc
Long Beach | 9:50 a.m. Balcony collapses, no injuries The wind and rain were so strong this morning that a second-story balcony on a mixed-use building in Long Beach partially collapsed, KTLA reported. The building houses a few residential units on the second story and businesses below. There were no injuries reported. Rain causes second-story balcony on Los Coyotes Diagonal to collapse in #LongBeach. pic.twitter.com/H1XRrUaEz2 — Jennifer Thang (@jenniferthang) December 12, 2014
Garden Grove | 9:49 a.m. Reports of swift water rescue #BREAKING Swift water recovery: McFadden Ave and Ward St in #GardenGrove. Body found in the water. pic.twitter.com/Mc2tYKQgjo — Jennifer Thang (@jenniferthang) December 12, 2014
9:47 a.m. Ray of light Looks like the sun is out. pic.twitter.com/jq71jZCl6u — Marcus Yam (@yamphoto) December 12, 2014
Glendora | 9:41 a.m. 'We're kind of getting used to it' A steady stream of muddy water flowed down the side of Rainbow Drive in Glendora as Morgan Marich, 19, came outside her house around 8:30 a.m. to check on the reinforcements. Sturdy pieces of wood, anchored to metal pipes, blocked the entrance to her driveway, while sandbags padded the ground behind the makeshift wall. Sandbags also lined the front of her house. Her pre-rain routine gets faster every time. "I think we're kind of getting used to it," she said. "The routine of having to put everything up and go through the rain." Sandbags and K-rails line the street in front of homes. Few neighbors are out as the rain continues its steady fall. --Samantha Masunaga
Los Feliz | 9:30 a.m. Clearing up that fallen tree City workers move quick to clear up fallen tree blocking Vermont Ave in Los Feliz neighborhood during rainstorm. pic.twitter.com/UYIOvPLjQR — Marcus Yam (@yamphoto) December 12, 2014
9:25 a.m. Latest radar update The 9:17am shot from Santa Ana radar: storm lingering over LA, OC, San Bernardino and Riverside counties. pic.twitter.com/6WQNTybaMW — Matt Hamilton (@MattHjourno) December 12, 2014
Boyle Heights | 9:23 a.m. A slow day for musicians in Mariachi Plaza At about 8:45 a.m., mariachi musicians Arturo Maier and Antonio Lopez trudged to a mostly empty Mariachi Plaza. Maier carried a blue plaid umbrella, Lopez carried a bright red, green yellow and blue umbrella. The men were wrapped in coats and scarves, but their crisp white button-up shirts showed underneath. They looked around the plaza as they walked up. It was empty. Maier said he didn't know if they'd get work today. They come out to the plaza usually every weekend to get playing gigs. "No matter if it's raining, we need the work," said Maier, a guitar player. A few other musicians began trickling in, trying to keep their black uniforms dry. Around the plaza, standing water in the road splashed every time a car turned the corner. Nearby, the L.A. river flowed rapidly under the 1st Street Bridge, the downtown skyline shrouded in cloud. --Hailey Branson-Potts
Azusa | 9:18 a.m. Mud so high it half-buried his basketball hoop Edward Heinlein, 66, points to a steel fence fortified with plywood. "There it is," said the resident of Ridgeview Drive in Azusa. "That's the monster." Heinlein points at a mass of mud that has taken over the upper part of his backyard. Tree trunks are halfway buried. A regulation basketball hoop is covered up with enough mud for Heinlein's 6-foot-tall daughter Amanda, 35, to grab the rim with ease. Here's another view of that resident's backyard - this is a regulation hoop pic.twitter.com/u3QP24ifdZ — Samantha Masunaga (@smasunaga) December 12, 2014 Two hours ago, Heinline got the call for mandatory evacuations. His property sits at the foot of a giant mountain, burned by the Colby fire, that he says has almost a "straight down" incline. He started to pack his car. He had tried to prepare: He replaced his fence with a stronger steel barrier, and got 400 sandbags to barricade the outside perimeter of his house. Behind the sandbags, he has plywood, covered in plastic sheeting. But it might not be enough. He points to his stone wall, located just below the steel fence on the upper part of his property. "It turns to Niagara Falls here with water and mud," he said. The house is a retirement home for he and his wife. She has already evacuated to their daughter's home, and Heinlein said he may go to his son's home. "We were hoping to get through Christmas," Heinlein said. "But we might have to move out." --Samantha Masunaga
9:06 a.m. Tree at Vermont Avenue being cleared Large tree that fell during rainstorm on Vermont ave in the Loz Feliz neighborhood is being cleared out. pic.twitter.com/Z90WOp1VsB — Marcus Yam (@yamphoto) December 12, 2014
8:57 a.m. Silverado Canyon: High risk area, mandatory evacuations Shannon Widor, public information officer for the Emergency Operations Center, said about 60 homes are affected by the mandatory evacuation order that was issued early this morning. Orange County Sheriff deputies are going door to door advising residents of the evacuation. The evacuation affects the burn area east of 30311 Silverado Canyon Road. "It is a high risk area from the September fire," Widor said. He said crews with heavy equipment are on standby to respond to any area affected by today's storm. --Ruben Vives
8:44 a.m. L.A River swells Water is flowing rapidly in the Los Angeles River under the 1st Street Bridge in Boyle Heights. Downtown sk... https://t.co/L8D2shKYHP — Hailey Branson-Potts (@haileybranson) December 12, 2014
Echo Park | 8:42 a.m. Traffic lights out Traffic lights are out on Coronado and along Sunset Boulevard in Echo Park. Looks like house lights out, to... https://t.co/EAUTmH0hvZ — Hailey Branson-Potts (@haileybranson) December 12, 2014
Silverado Canyon | 8:31 a.m. Mandatory evacuations in Orange County's Silverado Canyons burn area Homes in burn areas in Orange County’s Silverado Canyon were ordered evacuated at about 5:45 a.m. because of the danger of flooding and debris flows. The mandatory evacuation was for homes east of 30311 Silverado Canyon Road, county emergency officials said. Of particular worry were homes against steep slopes that were burnt during the Silverado Fire, which burned more than 1,500 acres in September. The blaze was caused by the sun reflecting off metal sheeting that had been put up to keep animals out of a vegetable garden.
8:24 a.m. Latest look at radar The latest radar as of 810 am PST. Flash flood watch still in effect til 10 pm for recent burn areas. #LArain #cawx pic.twitter.com/hVapE4mYOz — NWS Los Angeles (@NWSLosAngeles) December 12, 2014
8:18 a.m. Mud flows damage 8 homes in Camarillo Springs At least eight homes in Camarillo Springs have suffered "significant damage" after walls of rocks, mud, and debris trapped some residents in their homes. Ventura County firefighters said they responded to more than 30 calls about flooding overnight, and had to rescue several people who were trapped in their homes by the mud flows. #CamarilloSprings #flooding #cawx several structures damaged. Overnight @VCFD responded to 37 flooding calls pic.twitter.com/XXsWyOP2Cs — Capt Mike Lindbery (@VCFD_PIO) December 12, 2014 Photos from the scene showed homes buried in rocks several feet high, and piles of mud and debris. Rocks up to the rooftops of some homes in Camarillo springs. pic.twitter.com/vrqneAxxag — eric spillman (@ericspillman) December 12, 2014 #camarillosprings #flooding debris flow has impacted several homes in the area @VCFD pic.twitter.com/429o8ddqIv — Capt Mike Lindbery (@VCFD_PIO) December 12, 2014 Evacuations are in place in the area, which has large swaths of fire scarring from the 2013 Springs Fire. City officials are assessing other homes for damage.
8:04 a.m. The commute is starting: Here's how to drive in the rain Southern Californians got some practice with this during last week's storm, but a reminder never hurts. Read on for Lauren Raab's collection of tips for driving in this kind of rain. Read more
Glendora | 8:02 a.m. Here's what Glendora's debris basin looks like right now Good morning from Harrow Debris Basin in Glendora, which is working just the way it should #LARain pic.twitter.com/T4Utynyceh — LA Co Public Works (@LAPublicWorks) December 12, 2014
Ventura | 8:00 a.m. Closed: PCH at Yerba Buena in Ventura Pacific Coast Highway at Yerba Buena was closed in both directions in Ventura due to a mudslide, according to the Los Angeles County Sheriff’s Department. A mud slide and low hanging power lines also forced the closure of Westlake Boulevard at Mulholland Highway. Sheriff’s officials say the 30800 block of Agoura Road is flooded, and some drivers may not be able to pass through the area due to deep water. --Veronica Rocha
Camarillo Springs | 7:59 a.m. 'The mud hit my front door' Camarillo Springs homeowner Bill Golubics heard a loud boom then mud burst through his front window. #LArain pic.twitter.com/cidiJHo9Uw — Amanda Covarrubias (@amcovarrubias) December 12, 2014 Bill Golubics was standing on his front porch in Camarillo Springs watching the rain come shortly after 2 a.m. when he heard a loud boom. "The mud hit my front door and blew out the front window," he said. Unable to get back in, he waited outside until firefighters came and too him to a Red Cross shelter. "There was no way I could open the door," he said. He says he knows his home, where he lives alone, will be red tagged. It's right next to the one that was red tagged after the Halloween debris flow. He said the downpour was heavy before the hill behind his home on San Como Lane gave way. "I've never seen rain come down that hard for 30 minutes," he said. He's 77 years old. He said the street was "just filled with debris." He had slept Thursday night in a recliner in his living room, fully clothed, thinking he would evacuate after it started raining. "I didn't have time," he said. --Amanda Covarrubias
7:34 a.m. Amtrak temporarily suspends service Amtrak has temporarily suspended service between Los Angeles and San Luis Obispo due to “severe weather conditions." Pacific Surfliner and Coast Starlight trains are being affected, and Amtrak is providing other transportation for Coast Starlight passengers between Los Angeles and points further north on the line, the rail service said. Service between Los Angeles and San Diego is operating as normal. Check for service alerts
Power outages | 7:21 a.m. 69,100 without power in Southern California In Southern California, 69,100 customers were without power. PG&E has reported widespread outages after 6,400 customers in San Luis Obispo County, 2,800 in Santa Barbara County and 4,100 people in Kern County, spokesman J.D. Guidi said. He said PG&E crews from Oregon, Washington and throughout California were working quickly to restore power. The Los Angeles Department of Water & Power reported that 11,800 customers from San Pedro to Granada Hills were without power, utility spokeswoman Terry Schneider said. The utility saw a surge in outages between 3:00 and 3:30 a.m., when strong rain and wind hit the area. She said she expected the worst was over. Southern California Edison crews were working to restore power to 44,000 customers from the Central Valley to the San Diego border, agency spokesman Robert Villegas said. At least 26,000 of those customers were in Los Angeles County. “It’s a pretty fluid situation,” he said. --Veronica Rocha
Azusa | 7:07 a.m. Backyard of an evacuating resident Mud in the backyard of an evacuating resident on Ridgeview Drive in Azusa pic.twitter.com/WyMXkaOVOE — Samantha Masunaga (@smasunaga) December 12, 2014
7:06 a.m. Speed of storm may mean less damage Bill Patzert, climatologist for the Jet Propulsion Laboratory, said that although the storm did some damage, it also moved quickly and will probably not be a record-breaker. Compare this one to the storm of December 2010, he said, when 10.23 inches of rain fell from Dec. 6 to 29, causing massive flooding. “That one just kept coming. It was memorable,” he said. “This storm was like a 12-hour event. That was like a 12-day event.” Although the storm is good for a region parched by years of drought, Patzert said it was important not to consider the recent rains a harbinger for the coming winter. He said after the powerful December rains of 2010, Southern California went dry. By contrast, in December 1997 -- the massive El Niño year -- there was 2.52 inches of rain for the month. The heavy rains came in January, February and March, with a historic 13.68 inches of rain falling in February alone. The National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration has said there’s a chance of an El Niño forming in the Pacific this winter. But even if that happens, scientists said it would be a weak one. The driest year in L.A.’s recorded history in 2006-07 happened during one such El Niño. Patzert said the greatest upside of the recent storms were for the northern and central Sierras, where places like Southern California get much of their water. “They’re definitely getting snow. The snow season for a change got off to a fast start,” he said. “That’s probably the biggest thing regarding drought relief.” --Hector Becerra
Camarillo Springs | 7:03 a.m. Muddy rescue In Camarillo Springs, as many as 24 homes had been damaged by mud, and crews rescued some residents this morning who had not evacuated. Torrential rain triggering mudslides in Camarillo Springs. Residents rescued after mud trapped them in their homes. pic.twitter.com/0S8K09ZHMF — KTLA 5 Morning News (@KTLAMorningNews) December 12, 2014
Glendora | 6:40 a.m. Evacuations ordered in Glendora but 'we're not done yet' About five Glendora intersections and streets were closed earlier this morning because of the rains and some people around the Colby fire burn area were ordered to evacuate last night, said Tim Staab, spokesman for the Glendora Police Department. Staab said he didn't have estimates on how many people have already evacuated. "I would hope people would heed our advice," he said. "Because we're not done yet." K-rails guarded homes along Rainbow Road near Sierra Madre Avenue as a small, but fast-moving stream of water rushed by. Near a storm drain, David Fredendall, 59, checked for any tree branches or debris that might clog it. Fredendall said he's been "sleeping lightly," and has been clearing any blockages he sees in the street since the heavy rains started around 1:30 am. He and some neighbors have already cleared cacti and rocks. He's had some experience with this -- he estimates that he's come out to clear blockages and avoid potential slides about six times since February. He said he's staying home from work today because of the rains. "I'm just kind of watching," he said. "We'll see what comes." --Samantha Masunaga
Long Beach | 6:28 a.m. How things unfolded: Streets flooding, trees falling Light winds began to develop late Thursday night. By midnight the gusty winds picked up speed, shaking street signs and leaves of swaying trees. By 4 a.m., heavy rain began to pour down in Long Beach and the surrounding cities. The heavy downpour lasted several minutes. When it was over, the winds had died down. There was light rain. Reports of street flooding, car accidents and two separate incidents of trees falling on a house and a car came through the police radio. By 5 a.m., a second wave of heavy rain hit, but it was a short downpour. Wet leaves and trash lay scattered on the streets of Long Beach as steady rain fell.
Camarillo Springs | 6:12 a.m. 'The rocks were moving in the middle of the street. We just kind of watched.' John Calka and his wife Connie were awakened about 2 a.m. this morning in their house by authorities when the rocks started rolling down their street. John said the slide occurred in the same place it happened on Halloween. "The rocks were 2 feet in diameter the rocks were moving in the middle of the street. We just kind of watched." John, Connie and their golden retriever, Jake, were evacuated to the recreation center in their complex, which is for people 55 and over. They just moved to the house this year and didn't expect this. "This is a great place to live. What caused all this is the fire," John said. He was referring to the fire in the hillsides in May 2013. --Amanda Covarrubias
Camarillo Springs | 6:10 a.m. Mud, rocks and debris damage homes At least six homes are flooded with mud, rocks and debris as the hill behind them came down Friday morning. A living room chair is in the front yard of one home and tires are scattered across the mud covered front yard. A carpet of mud and rocks and water is streaming down San Como Lane. All the residents were evacuated this morning but bulldozers and tractors are trying to clear the area. Flooding in Camarillo Springs. pic.twitter.com/Zp5MBLg9Iv — Amanda Covarrubias (@amcovarrubias) December 12, 2014 --Amanda Covarrubias
5:45 a.m. Power outages so far Wind, rain pounds SoCal. A slew of power outages, according to latest @SCE outage map: http://t.co/UQQZl9kCDy pic.twitter.com/iZUoL7eJdp — Joe Serna, LAT (@JosephSerna) December 12, 2014Asceticism is necessary in order to think straight – about ourselves (anthropology), the world (cosmology), and God (theology). The place where we can think straight is the place where we stand straight. At the opening of the anaphora in the Divine Liturgy of St. John Chrysostom, the deacon bids the Church, “Let us stand aright; let us stand in fear; let us attend, that we may offer the Holy Oblation in peace.” There is nothing wrong with matter, but matter has been wronged by us. By turning away from the Creator, anthropos does not use matter eucharistically or receive matter sacramentally. We have wounded creation, and by our fault matter does not fulfill its end any more. Ephrem [the Syrian] describes the reaction of the sun to human idolatry:
The sun bellowed out in silence to the Lord against his worshippers.
It was a suffering for him, the servant, that instead of his Lord he was worshipped.
Behold the creation is joyful that the Creator is worshipped…
Since fools honored the sun, they diminished him in his honor.
Now that they know he is a servant, by his course he worships the Lord.
All the servants are glad to be counted servants.
Blessed is he who sets the natures in order!
We have done perverse things that we should be servants to servants…
Since fools honored the sun, they diminished him in his honor.
Now that they know he is a servant, by his course he worships his Lord.
All the servants are glad to be counted as servants.
Blessed is he who set the natures in order!
We have done perverse things that we should be servants to servants…
That is why creation groans in travail, waiting for the redemption of anthropos. Asceticism is required of the liturgist so that earth may be healed; asceticism is required of the theologian in order to see matter more clearly.
David W. Fagerberg, Theologia Prima: What Is Liturgical Theology? 27-28.
I was given this book a few months ago and have only dipped into it – I wasn’t sure whether to rejoice at being given it, or mourn because the bookshop worker gave it to me because she didn’t think any of their regular clients would be interested in it! But Fagerberg is eminently quotable and what he says about asceticism highly worthshile. (I once quoted from a podcast of his here).
*****
P.S. A gem from the Preface that I quoted on FB a few months ago: “Christianity involves liturgy, theology, and asceticism the way a pancake involves flour, milk and eggs: They are ingredients to the end result. Leave one out and you don’t have exactly the same thing any more.” (x)
AdvertisementsMale allies. We love them dearly. Those men so stalwart they’re willing, nay, eager to overcome their own privilege and biases, dip a toe into uncomfortable waters, try on the feminist label, and leave the safety of saying and doing nothing at all in the face of deeply entrenched inequality and the maligning of women, the feminine, and anything that isn’t hyper-privileged pure masculinity.
Yup, the world would be an incredibly different and much nicer place if more of those who enjoy power and privilege decided to consciously use it to challenge and dismantle the systems that give them that privilege over their fellow human planet-walkers. Why wouldn’t we want to support that? I support the carrot-topped green Jello with pineapple chunks outta that. People with privilege? Would be allies? Do that. Do that for feminism, for anti-racism, for anti-ablism, for the whole big oppression-battling cornucopia. Yes, please.
Of course, that begs the question, “how?” No matter how good someone’s intentions, nobody is going to go from Blindly Privileged to Super Ally in two-point-four seconds, fueled only by good will. Challenging systems of privilege takes a lot of deconstruction, a lot of homework, and a lot of work. It is something that can benefit immensely from proper support.
So, let’s talk about what it means to support allies, because while that term is all kinds of positive, it’s really pretty vague. What does it mean to support an ally? It’s been an unfortunate pattern in MoFem spaces that “support” starts to look like making sure the fellas never ever feel even a teensy bit unappreciated for their efforts in just being around and interested in us.
This isn’t terribly surprising. In Mormony spaces, most of us come from a very specific and particular paradigm of what support means, especially when you’re talking about how women support men, (as we necessarily are when we’re talking about supporting male allies.) We come from a culture where men are our leaders, and we support and sustain our leaders, and we’re not even generations removed yet from explicit rhetoric that put husbands in this same category. In lived practicality, supporting and sustaining men is more or less synonymous with not questioning them or giving them pushback (let alone in front of other people) and letting all kinds of things slide so they can just get on with business. Where, if it’s not obviously, inarguably, odiously, jaw-droppingly bad, then it’s the fault of the person who sees it for bringing it up. Small corrections aren’t to be bothered with, (and women don’t have the authority to decide what’s large and what is small.) Just trust that, with God’s help, they are working for your welfare and best interest with all wisdom and due diligence, and they know it better than you do. It’s not your place, it’s ark-steadying, it’s talking out of turn, it’s taking up too much of the brethren’s time, it’s just not nice. Give that RM a chance and go out with him, he’s a decent fella. If we are anything less than pleasantly and artfully nurturing in our every measured approach, we’re doing it wrong. It’s our job to do the work to reach the men where they are. If men do any work to reach out to the women, well, aren’t they just so great? We should be so grateful. We are so blessed to have good men in our lives.
I’ve been fortunate to know many women who have come to decide for themselves that this is not what support actually means, and that they can support and sustain their leaders without just going along with everything they say and do and setting their own concerns aside. However, they do so against a cultural tide, and often at the expense of social capital in their wards and communities. All it takes is a losing spin at leadership roulette for this approach to cost a woman her recommend, her calling, her social standing in her community, and all chance of ever being heard. Not even just a losing one. A neutral one that lacks explicit leadership support for such an approach can leave her at the mercy of the censure of those who don’t see things her way.
It should be needless to say: this is a dynamic that privileges men wholesale. It is a dynamic that we are thoroughly trained in, both men and women.
It is a dynamic that we, as a community comprised mostly of LDS people by faith, family, culture, and/or heritage, are at very high risk for reproducing wherever we gather. This is something we need to be constantly and carefully mindful of in order to avoid reproducing. It’s just so easy to unthinkingly revert to that default pattern and expectation, and reinforce each other in doing so.
When it comes to supporting male allies, it’s a dynamic that we cannot afford to reproduce. Men who come into our spaces in order to perform as allies cannot expect to keep such privilege intact; that is antithetical to the work of allyship. Men who come into Mormon feminist spaces need to be prepared for the fact that support from women for their allyship is going to look very different from what support from women has looked like in nearly every other Mormon context they have experienced. This will be jarring. It is what it is.
However, my sisters and my friends, it is even more important that we do the work to examine and be mindful of this training in ourselves. It’s not just men who can experience discomfort when someone deviates from the script we’ve all memorized. Even as women, we can experience it as jarring when someone dares to publically and immediately question or correct a man’s behavior, to experience it as not being nice enough, to treat the person who is pushing back like they are being mean and unreasonable instead of listening to and engaging with what they are saying. Mormons are Nice, and that’s not a Nice thing for women to do to men, especially men who are doing that oh-so-laudable superhero extra bonus golden cookie nuggets with sugar star sprinkles work of going out of their way to pay attention to women at all because it’s not their job and they don’t have to if they don’t want to so we should be grateful if they are and never make them feel bad ever or they might not want to anymore.
Except, folks, if they are here as allies then that is their job. It is the purpose of their presence. It is a bare minimum requirement pre-requisite for admission, not extra credit. (And most definitely not qualification for a TA position, let alone being the teacher.)
We can be respectful and forgiving of mistakes and acknowledge difficulty, because mistakes will happen, but we cannot protect allies from the pain of having mistakes pointed out or the necessity for correction if their presence and actions are, at any point, antithetical to their stated purpose of allyship. We cannot protect them from the necessity of learning to listen to and hear women even when they’re not being Nice.
Rushing to men’s defense against facing the discomforts of allyship, script-breaking, and un-Nice women may be supporting a male person, in a manner of speaking, but it is not supporting a male ally. He may be a good husband, brother, boyfriend, friend, or colleague, someone you respect, love, and care about. A man can express interest, sympathy, and even conceptual agreement for and fluency in feminism without actually being an ally. Being an ally is a job, and if we’re actually going to support our allies, we have to support them in doing that job. We have to expect them to do that work, to be able to take feedback, to be humble about their own mistakes, to understand that it’s not about them. We absolutely must be careful about siding with men’s hurt feelings at each other’s expense, or shutting each other down for our allies (and supposed allies, and potential allies) sake. We are always at risk of recreating that powerful and ubiquitous patriarchal dynamic of what Mormons (generally) expect support to look like. We must always be mindful. If you have the diplomacy and desire to maintain kindness and sympathy in such interactions and discussions, that is truly wonderful and there is a welcome place for you to do so, but none of us can afford to center the discussion, yet again, on men, and call it kindness. Those who feel it is their calling can work to provide a soft landing from privilege, but we cannot, any of us, protect the privilege itself. That is poor training for the ally, and always comes at the expense of the goals of feminism and allyship both. It’s a disservice to everyone involved. And, well, if the man’s desire and ability to do the work is so fragile that pushback destroys it, then he’s just not ready for the job yet.
Most of all, we have to be really and truly okay with men being really truly here for us for maybe the first time ever in our own Mormon experience. It’s a pretty significant paradigm shift from just being happy that they set out our padded chairs for us each Sunday or occasionally validate instead of shut down our desire to do something for ourselves. (Important bonus: this gives us a strong boundary against men who would use the ally label abusively or self-servingly. If someone isn’t helping you, then they’re not helping you.)
This is work that we need to do in ourselves, and it doesn’t rely in the least on the good or bad behavior of this or that man who claims to be working for our welfare. Some would-be allies aren’t ready for the job. We are not undone by it. Some would-be allies will be able to do the job. We can appreciate the help without being beholden to it. We can appreciate the friendship and other good qualities of men who are sympathetic and trying, but not quite there yet. But we cannot ever sacrifice the facts of what allyship entails for the comfort of those who want to wear it as a label. That does not support allies, it turns them into liabilities. That is a disservice to true allies who don’t want to put themselves first, and to ourselves.BOSTON — When the digital clocks along Boylston Street flashed 2:49 on Marathon Monday, nothing out of the ordinary happened. And that was reason for joyous celebration.
At that moment last year, the first of two bombs exploded near the finish line of the Boston Marathon, killing three spectators and wounding more than 260 people. At that same moment this year, as the city held its collective breath for a moment of silence, runners crossed the line without incident. That feat sent up a Super Bowl’s worth of cheers from throngs of spectators, who clapped, hooted and rang cowbells under the warm afternoon sun.
“They got their city back!” said Kay Weir, 50, a runner from San Diego, who was one of several people crossing the finish line at that moment. “I’m stoked,” she said, despite having just run 26.2 miles, the first mile of which she spent in tears remembering the events of last year.
Monday was the day that Boston reclaimed the finish line, converting a symbolic wound on the city’s psyche back to its utilitarian function as the end point of one of the world’s oldest and most prestigious road races. Of course, it will always be the scene of last year’s crime. But the footfalls of thousands of runners on Monday pounded down its symbolic significance.Good Monday Morning, Fellow Seekers.
Everyone's favorite conservative Republican firebrand, state Sen. Scott Wagner, was in St. Louis over the weekend, where he threw a shout-out to ex-Trump White House consigliere Steve Bannon and said the conservative grassroots gives him "courage."
The 2018 GOP gubernatorial hopeful was spotted at this weekend's sold-out "Put America First" rally, where he sat next to the former White House adviser in the crowd at the St. Louis Marriott hotel.
Bannon, who's returned to the fold of the conservative news site Breitbart, addressed rally-goers and picked up the "Phyllis Schlafly Eagle Award" for his work on behalf of the glorious cause.
Speaking now: @gatewaypundit, on the mainstream media. Steve Bannon has been ushered into the room. pic.twitter.com/3ZDr6CZQ20 -- Gabe Fleisher (@WakeUp2Politics) September 24, 2017
Speaking to attendees at a luncheon on Sunday, Wagner, R-York County, heaped praise on Schlafly, a leading conservative who died last September.
"This is a highly, highly energized organization," Wagner told the crowd. "Phyllis was an amazing person. There's one thing I have heard repeatedly about Phyllis, and this is an important word, and this is what it takes moving forward. The word is courage."
Wagner told the crowd he took courage from them: "You give me courage. I'm going to do the job and take out the trash in Pennsylvania."
Pennsylvania State Senator Scott Wagner speaking at Put Americans First Rally featuring Steve Bannon in Saint Louis, MO September 24, 2017 A post shared by Goodman Productions (@goodman_productions) on Sep 24, 2017 at |
via a roadmap outlined by a newly appointed board, Gov. Chris Christie and city Mayor Ras Baraka said in a joint announcement Friday afternoon.
"Together, we have created a Newark Educational Success Board that will be charged by us with developing a clear, specific pathway with appropriate timelines and benchmarks for the return of local control to the Newark community," the politicians said in the announcement.
Addressing complaints from city residents that the state-controlled district was not responsive to the community, the two said the panel "will immediately begin to solicit input from and engage the local community in its deliberations."
The announcement comes less than a week after the state confirmed controversial Superintendent Cami Anderson would be stepping down, and that former Education Commissioner Chris Cerf would likely replace her. The state board of education is slated to vote on Cerf's appointment on July 8.
The group - a panel of nine people with four appointed by the mayor and five, including Cerf, appointed by the governor - will be tasked with providing a return-to-local-control plan, with benchmarks, by the end of the 2015-16 school year, the announcement said.
The goal is to "(restore) full local control as soon as possible after the established benchmarks have been met," it said.
The other members of the panel are:
Mary Bennett - Educator, Coalition for Effective Public Schools
Ross Danis - President and CEO, Newark Trust for Education
Honorable Rochelle Hendricks - Secretary of Higher Education
Donald Katz - Founder and CEO of Audible, Inc.
Al Koeppe - Trustee, St. Benedict's Preparatory School; Former CEO Newark Alliance; Retired CEO Verizon: Retired COO PSE&G
Jose Leonardo - Student, Science Park High School
Grace Sergio - Parent, Newark Public Schools
Rev. Perry Simmons - Pastor, Abyssinia Baptist Church
The panel will also work to outline what the district will look like after the state hands it over. The two said the panel will help "ensure that the problems that led to the state takeover of the school district will never reoccur."
The joint statement puts aside past differences between the two politicians. Baraka - a longtime proponent of local control - refused to endorse Christie for reelection in 2013, and has been critical of the time Christie has spent out of the state in preparation for his anticipated presidential run.
But, in their statement, the two said they would work together throughout the transition process.
"We have also agreed to communicate fully and effectively with each other throughout the transitional period and with students, parents and the community," they said.
Jessica Mazzola may be reached at jmazzola@njadvancemedia.com. Follow her on Twitter @JessMazzola. Find NJ.com on Facebook.On September 2, the complete works of P.S. Eliot—an early band from Katie and Allison Crutchfield, best known for Waxahatchee and Swearin’ respectively—will be released as an anthology via Don Giovanni. In addition to featuring both P.S. Eliot albums (2009’s Introverted Romance in Our Troubled Minds and 2011’s Sadie*), their 2010* Living in Squalor EP, and various demos, this retrospective includes an extensive oral history of the band, in the form of a zine penned by Liz Pelly (who has contributed to Pitchfork, among others). What follows is an excerpt from this zine, chronicling P.S. Eliot’s earliest days, as well as a song from the anthology.
Within the creaks of scrappy, homemade punk songs, we hear so much. Process, mistakes, learning. Signs that life is actually happening. This is what I hear in the songs of P.S. Eliot, the feminist pop punk band formed in 2008 by Katie and Allison Crutchfield as teenagers in Birmingham, Alabama. Across their discography of sweetly angsty, off-balance guitar pop—a demo CD-R, one 7-inch, and two full-length records—is a palpable sense of a group of musicians becoming themselves. It is timelessly energizing.
Grown from the roots of their high school band, guitar-and-keys power-pop quartet the Ackleys, P.S. Eliot was an act of autonomy and opposition. “We don’t grow/when/we huddle into groups and we cry all the time,” goes the chorus on “Like How You Are,” one of the first songs they penned. And indeed, with this band, its members were learning to grow, having formed with the intention to travel as much as possible, with a pure DIY heart. A version of “Like How You Are” appears on the band’s first release, The Bike Wreck demo, a tinny 5-song CD-R recorded one afternoon in the Crutchfields’ parents’ garage. It perfectly sounds like shit, but the lyrics are tricky and literate, and the hooks are extraordinarily catchy. It perfectly sounds like a singer finding her voice in a stifling suburb, like feeling aimlessly alive, like trying to figure out where to put all of her feelings, like being young. “I don’t really care about the future I care about/what keeps you away,” she goes on to sing.
As much as we can learn from the sound of these records, there is even more to glean from the story of P.S. Eliot. Their story is one of Southern teen feminist outsiders coming into their own personal politics, learning to speak out, leaving their hometown, and finding their community. It is a story of how all-ages community art spaces can open doors for young people. How male-dominated hardcore scenes can be truly oppressive, but finding it within yourself to push back can be life-changing. How failed first tours can be platforms for self-education. It is the story of overnight drives from Birmingham to New Brunswick, NJ, fueled by a contagious, tour-obsessed lifestyle. It is the story of a specific moment in the history of feminist punk, in the mid-to-late ’00s, where non-dudes making melodic, expressive music could “find their people” through Myspace “top eights” and shared MediaFire links.
In 2011, before P.S. Eliot disbanded, Katie Crutchfield contributed a personal essay to the zine International Girl Gang Underground, co-edited by Kate Wadkins, who also made album artwork for Sadie. The essay is titled “Cold Bright and Clear,” and details Katie’s first experience watching an all-female punk band play at Cave 9, coming to the realization that her experience in punk had been marked explicitly by sexist, homophobic, “gym-shorts-wearing straight-up jock hardcore.” “The punk community is made up of all kinds of blanketed bigots and lazy, indifferent beardos and Pabst-guzzling empty talkers,” Katie writes. “Luckily it is also full of some pretty unyielding crusaders. The reality of it is disappointing but it’s an incentive to make it better. It’s an invitation to stand up for something and feel proud later on.” And P.S. Eliot would go on to spread an empowering attitude in basements and makeshift spaces around the country, as unyielding crusaders themselves.
There are reasons we need bands like P.S. Eliot when we are young, because there is transformative power in girly punk songs, in queer punk songs. These are also the reasons why P.S. Eliot are a life-affirming band to return to time and again over the years. Because it is rejuvenating to hear the sounds of potential being realized, of agency being actualized. Because their eternal spirit is something we can carry with us.
Beginnings
Katie Crutchfield: It took me a long time to learn guitar. I started playing guitar when I was 13. But I didn’t have any sort of example. Everything having to do with playing guitar—tuning, changing strings, playing power chords—all of these little things were huge hurdles for me. It took me a whole year before I could really do it. But once I could, I really stuck with it. I started writing really simple songs and would record them to tape.
In high school, Allison and I didn’t share interests with a lot of our peers. We didn’t have a ton of friends, so we just put everything into making music. Starting freshman year, every day after school, we would come home, have a snack, and go downstairs and play music. When it got too late to make noise, we would make stencils and work on recordings.
Our first band, the Ackleys, played our first proper show at this silly school event. We played with Carter’s band, who eventually became the Ackleys drummer. Before, it was mostly just Allison and I playing alone, though we sometimes played with our friend Carly. My mom recently remembered me coming home from school in ninth grade and saying, “I think I have to kick Carly out of the band, she just cares too much about school.”
The same night as that first Ackleys show, we met this guy Derek, who was the same age as us at the time, 15. He knew about Cave 9 and said he’d set up a show for us there. And then he did book it, but he didn’t tell us. A couple of days before, someone was like, “Oh I saw your band name on the Cave 9 website.” And we were like, “What? Oh my god, we’re playing this show!” I couldn’t even drive yet.
In the early ’00s, the scene in Birmingham was really small, so Cave 9 would have these shows with all different local bands—a hardcore band, a metal band, a pop punk band—all on the same bill, and everyone would support each other. This was one of those shows. We were super intimidated by Cave 9 and thought of it as this larger-than-life place where cool music people played, but once we went there for the first time, we started hanging out there a lot.
This was all around when we first started getting into punk, and forming our own musical tastes and interests. It was at a time when you could download any kind of music that you wanted, at any time, for free. Allison and I became both obsessed with riot-grrrl, but also a lot of other music.
And we made friends with a lot of cool, older people who were setting up shows in Birmingham and making music. I would help them mark hands, and take money, and do whatever I could to help out. That’s how I learned about the whole process of DIY shows, and discovered how this larger community operates.
Cave 9
Cave 9 was a volunteer-run, non-profit, all-ages venue that existed in Birmingham from 2003 until 2009. In the All-Ages Movement Project’s 2010 book, In Every Town: An All-Ages Music Manuelfesto*, an entire chapter is dedicated to the space, describing it as a bare-bones, 300 capacity youth-oriented community center where shows would start around 7 p.m. and usually end before 11 p.m. “Nestled on the street corner at the edge of a residential neighborhood, Cave 9 is surrounded by several other warehouse and industrial spaces,” Katy Otto writes. “You have to walk up close to the venue to see the sign with its name, and the posters and flyers announcing upcoming shows in the windows.” In a mini-doc about the space, titled “We’ve Got Too Much Heart,” that* can be found on YouTube, the Ackleys can be spotted playing, hanging out, and working at the venue.
Will Granger (guitar in P.S. Eliot): Cave 9 was a cool community. If you went to the shows, you’d get to know everyone there. We were all regulars.
Katie: Cave 9 was a collectively run space, but over the years it became clear that Cave 9 was what it was because of Aaron Hamilton. I really feel Aaron taught me how to be in a DIY band. Cave 9 was where we met a lot of touring bands. Through them, when I booked my first few tours, those were my contacts, people who we met through playing shows at Cave 9. It was a super organic DIY process, and Aaron sort of angled me towards all of that. It made such a huge impression on my entire life.
Aaron Hamilton (of Cave 9)____: Cave 9 was an all-ages music venue. We opened in 2003, and we were a non-profit, and had shows and classes. We were trying to make it a safe place, and inclusive for everybody. We wanted to be inclusive for younger people in the DIY punk rock scene.
It was important for Cave 9 to exist because everyone needs a place to go and be creative. A place to go and see art or music where everyone is welcome no matter what part of town they came from. Parents and peers are an important part of growing up but sometimes you need a place to go out of the shadow of your high school to figure yourself out. It was important for Birmingham to have it because every city should have some form of place like that. It was especially important to me for Birmingham to have it because I love this city. It's flawed and has a terrible past. But the people in it are diverse and beautiful. I wanted bands that toured through to see that. And I wanted the people that grew up here to know that the people that toured through Cave 9 were just like them. Whether they were from Gainesville, San Francisco, Okinawa, Paris, or Atlanta. If you were in a Birmingham band and wanted to tour, you have as much of a chance as anyone.
We had a lot of hardcore shows. One of the guys who would come a lot was named Derek. He hit me up one day and said he knew some kids in a band who wanted to play. I think this was going to be their second show. So he set it up, we had them play, the band was called the Ackleys. They were very new and young, but you could tell they really had it together. And they had a lot of potential. As soon as they finished playing, I spoke to Katie and said if they wanted to play again, to just be in touch. And then it kind of started with the Ackleys just being regulars and playing a lot at Cave 9. They were a kind of straight-up indie rock band, but they had a lot of punk and hardcore influences, and they were friends with all of those people. So they were at shows a lot, and they were around. Once they could drive, they started coming up a lot more. I think they were 15 when they played their first show there.
There was a lot of good music in town. But having all of the experiences I had, meeting the number of people I’d met, booking shows and having touring bands come through, going to other cities and meeting people... You hear so much great music, but there’s a point where, you hear things and think, “I’ve got something better than this, and everybody needs to hear it.” When musicians are as talented as they are, they deserve to actually progress, to get out in the world, to be heard by everybody. You kind of want to keep it to yourself, because that’s your band that you discovered, but you have to realize that they are going to get stifled and they just need to be out there. I felt like when I heard them, every time they wrote a new song it was better and better and better. It never got stagnant. They just needed to be out in the world. The Crutchfield sisters were destined for bigger things. They had to get out and be heard by other people. And anything I could do to help that, I wanted to do.
Reena (second bassist): Cave 9 was home for a lot of us. I spent more time there than anywhere else from ages 16 to 21... For me, it was really important. I was always bullied in high school. People were mean to me. I never really fit in anywhere. I was sad and lonely and pissed off, and I had a lot of loss early in life in my family. Punk was a good outlet. When I was around 15, I discovered DIY punk shows because I started hanging out at the mall. This was way back in the day before the internet, when people still flyered for shows at the mall. At Cave 9 it was just like, “Oh okay, here’s somewhere I don’t feel awful being all the time.” It was such a tight knit community. Being 16, it was so different to finally not feel completely left out of something. Aaron is like the entire city’s big brother.
Cave 9 is also how me, Katie, and Allison met and became friends in high school. I met them going to Ackleys shows. I remember the first time I saw them playing, thinking, “They are so cool, I would love to be their friend.” When they asked me to be in P.S. Eliot, I was 21 and they were around 19. I didn’t even play any instruments but I had been involved with the DIY punk scene in Birmingham. My involvement was always more supporting the scene, going to shows, putting bands up when they needed somewhere to sleep. Supporting all of my friends who were in bands. There weren’t really any all-female bands in Birmingham at the time. It was a very hardcore scene, very masculine, very gym shorts and tank tops and mosh pits. I started learning how to play bass for P.S. Eliot.
It was just cool to get to be a part of something where you always just expected to be a spectator. There were all of the typical social pressures and drama, but what I really liked about P.S. Eliot, since it was all ladies, it eradicated all of that. It was just us. There’s this whole intimidation factor I would have felt if I ever tried to do a project like that with guys. It was nice to do something that would support us, without being for the male gaze. That was always a big thing with P.S. Eliot. It wasn’t for anyone else. It was for us.
‘Sadie’ release show at Brooklyn's Cedar Mansion; photo by Kate Wadkins
Us Against the World
Before Katie and Allison Crutchfield started P.S. Eliot together, the twin sisters played together in the Ackleys. And after P.S. Eliot disbanded, they continued to work creatively and collaboratively together as Bad Banana. Katie, who would go on to start Waxahatchee, also contributed songwriting to some of the earliest songs by Swearin’, Allison’s band after P.S. Eliot, and Allison would go on to play as a member of Waxahatchee’s live band. Their synchronicity as artists and collaborators is a testament to the unique energy that can result from twin experiences, pushing and pulling each other along the way.
Allison Crutchfield: We learned so much about punk and punk politics in Cave 9, because of Aaron. But punk is so vast, and means so many things for so many different people. Inevitably there’s going to be a lot of headbutting and a lot of people with a lot to say. It probably would have happened in any small town. Maybe because it was in the South, it was a little more intense.
Katie: Around when we started P.S. Eliot, in Birmingham, a lot of the kids our age were into moshy-hardcore stuff. We didn’t identify with it and it didn’t inspire us. There were so many kids in our school who were into punk, but it was a lot of boys. We were the only girls who played music. The absence of a conversation about it would eventually leave us feeling alienated. At first, though, we were really young and blissfully unaware about that lack of diversity.
The Ackleys played locally so much, made a record, toured together. But our bass player and our drummer were flawless musicians. It was so polished. Allison and I started wanting to be in a band that sounded more raw. We were just excited to do another band but politically and musically start over. We just wanted to get a fresh start. That’s kind of why we started P.S. Eliot.
Allison: When we started the Ackleys, we didn’t really have any friends. Nobody thought we were cool, so we were really obsessive about making this band. People started paying attention to it when we started playing shows, so then it became this thing where it felt like a form of acceptance. We were in this band that people liked. And then I think with P.S. Eliot, it was just like, ok, we don’t really give a fuck about being accepted, so much as we care about our own convictions and how we feel and being true to ourselves.
When Katie and I feel really inspired by something, we can build each other up in this way where we have complete courage in ourselves and complete confidence in ourselves, in a way that is really powerful. P.S. Eliot was a moment where we really realized that. This was a way for us to be like, “We’re going to do everything ourselves, fuck everybody else.” It’s a really powerful feeling. You almost feel high off this level of agreement or support.
It’s happened a few times in our lives, like when we first started the Ackleys. And we didn’t have any friends and we were like, “Fuck everybody we’re going to do this band and that’s all that matters. We don’t need any friends, we don’t need anything.” And then P.S. Eliot was really the second real time when we were like, “Fuck all these people, this is an unsafe place, we’re trying to carve out a place for women to feel safe in this community.” But also we were like 18, and we didn’t know how to do that, and we were probably being fucked up, too. We were just learning about this stuff.
Reena: I always love when Katie and Allison play music together. There’s something about the connection between the two of them. It’s like they just look at each other and they know exactly what’s going on. It’s that weird twin thing they do.To be honest, I never expected Better Call Saul to be as riveting as the series has proven itself to be. Yet here we are. Halfway through Season 3 of the Breaking Bad prequel/spinoff, each week I’m reminded of the brilliance of the show creators Vince Gilligan and Peter Gould. The cast they’ve brought together to explore the beginnings of Saul Goodman (Bob Odenkirk), Mike Ehrmantraut (Jonathan Banks) and Gustavo Fring (Giancarlo Esposito) aren’t too shabby, either.
And while these names are the main players in the Better Call Saul game, it would simply be unfair to not speak on the ongoing morality struggle of one Ignacio Varga – better known as Nacho (Michael Mando).
Monday’s (May 15) episode checked back in with Nacho as he continued his climb on that oft bloodied Cartel ladder. The seeds may have already been planted that will eventually see Mike and Gus team up – leading Jimmy closer to becoming Saul Goodman.
As each character deals with their own struggles between right and wrong, dark and light, and all the gray area in between, what we’re left with is one hell of an engaging law drama. And needless-to-say, Nacho’s return to the story just adds one more layer to AMC’s complex and quirky series.
To help me unpack the events of the latest episode, Michael Mando hopped on the phone for a quick chat about his return to the series and further breaks down Nacho’s internal struggle – while also explaining an exciting new entertainment venture he’s presenting to the fans, as some extra, unexpected bonus content.
It’s Season 3 and Nacho’s still here. Congratulations!
Thanks so much it’s good to be alive.
Nacho’s story takes a turn in Monday’s episode that makes the audience feel a sense of empathy for the man. He’s not a good guy – but it’s hard not to feel sorry for him. Did you know this conflict was coming?
I’ll be very honest with you, I had no idea. The first season, [Nacho] was supposed to be in it a lot more than he actually was. Vince and Peter called me halfway through and they said they were watching the rushes – especially in the relationship with Jimmy and Chuck (Michael McKean) – and realized that Chuck was going to be sort of Jimmy’s antagonist. That wasn’t the way they had originally planned it. So that kind of shifted things a little bit around. But I believe good things come to those who wait … and I couldn’t be happier with where Nacho is right now and his storyline this season.
They really do a great job at populating both the good and bad aspects of each character on the show. And while Nacho has done some bad stuff, it’s hard not to see his empathy shine through.
I’ve come to really fall in love with this character. I find him very mysterious and I find that he has a very rich tapestry. Here’s a guy who joined the cartel, I imagine, at a very young age. He was looking for prosperity and freedom outside of his father’s tapped reality – he was born with a wooden spoon but has always aspired to be in shining armor. And his mentality has always been: Why me and not them?
Despite Hector (Mark Margolis) recognizing him as a prodigy, he refuses to allow him to strive because he’s not of Salamanca blood. And this has led him to a very heightened struggle between morality and survival; between the way of the outlaw and the way of the higher man. On one side, he has this very vicious and dangerous — but rich — cartel Dad. And then, on the other side, there’s his very god-loving, god-fearing biological father that is nowhere as successful, financially … I think he’s desperately trying to reconcile that within himself.
That’s an easier said than done scenario, to be sure.
Here’s the thing: Nacho is a person who is confident, who has ego, who is able and who is, at the same time, capable of restraining his ego. He’s someone who has his eye on the long endgame and that’s one of the reasons why Nacho is able to survive this long – and do it under the radar.
Leave it up to Hector Salamanca to throw a wrench in Nacho’s plans…
Yeah! What happens now is that Hector puts this demon — or sort of obstacle — in his path as he brings his father into it. It forces [Nacho] to have to go through his father to attain the prosperity he’s looking for. In other words, he finds himself in a place where he has to get Hector’s love. And this is probably — as far as we know with Nacho — the only thing that could completely steer him the opposite way.
You know in Season 1 and 2, Nacho had been unwilling to dive into that dark ocean of the criminal world – he’s just been walking on the edge of the cliff. This season, Hector literally pushes him off and he’s free-falling. He realizes that, man I might not be able to make it out alive when I land! And the other thing that is even deeper in his soul is, he asks himself, Is this going to turn me into the monster that I’m trying to avoid? It’s kind of a Greek tragedy, about this man who chooses light and becomes darkness. It’s almost like the antithesis of Walter White. You know, Walter White is a man who was considered innocent and pure and who, deep down, was craving the thrill of darkness and power. I think Nacho is, in a way, the antithesis of that.
That morality struggle between good and evil is something you’ve explored a lot in your work. And now, you’re doing something that’s never been done before: Performing an original short film live on social media. Explanation, please!
I got into acting sort of later in my life … I didn’t grow up wanting to be an actor and I really got into it because I thought it was, probably, the most complete tool to self-expression — you know, to sort of figure out what life is really all about. That always pushes you towards the edge of what you know and how to go further …
We thought that, with Nacho having his comeback in Better Call Saul, what is the best way to give something to the fans? We contacted Instagram and Facebook and realized this has never actually been done before: It’s an innovative idea which obviously made us want to do it even more. So, it’s a six-minute short film that is shot in first-person shooter mode where the audience is the main character. It’s all done in one take – a very, highly choreographed take. And I t’s done live. It’s called Gateway and it stars myself, Madeline Zima (Californication) and Craig Olejnik (The Listener) and I really hope that people get to tune in. It’s about a man who highjacks his higher consciousness to break his bad habits and cross over to the next level of consciousness.
Well that sounds … deep.
Yeah, and we’re doing another thing that’s never been done: We’re shooting a first-person POV on two different cameras simultaneously – it’s the same POV for Instagram and Facebook Live at the same time.
Aside from doing the Cartel’s dirty work and exploring new avenues of social media storytelling, Michael Mando can be seen in the upcoming Spiderman: Homecoming. Until then, you can find him walking the line between good and evil on Better Call Saul, which airs every Monday at 10 p.m. ET/PT on AMC.Man holds gun in front of US flag (Shutterstock.com)
An Ohio gun show featured so much responsible firearms ownership that authorities were not initially sure how many attendees were wounded when a gun accidentally discharged.
At least one person was wounded Saturday at an Ohio gun show — but investigators said another person might also have been injured in the accidental shooting, reported the Wilmington News Journal.
A spokesman for the Clinton County Sheriff’s Office said one man was injured when the gun fired at the Ohio Gun Collectors Association Show, which was held over the weekend at the Roberts Centre in Wilmington.
The spokesman, Col. Brian Prickett, said at least one other person may have been wounded — but authorities don’t think any of the injuries were life-threatening.
Prickett insisted the Ohio Gun Collectors Association was a “top-notch” organization that promoted firearms safety.
The spokesman said the only loaded guns at the event ordinarily “are ours,” meaning sheriff’s deputies, so it’s not clear who owned the gun that was accidentally discharged.
No arrests have been announced, and the shooting remains under investigation.
The organization’s gun shows regularly draw Ohio elected officials, including Clinton County Auditor Terry Habermehl — who said he spent Saturday morning “exercising (his) second amendment rights … with 1,000 or so like-minded people” at the gun show.Nash Bridges is an American television police drama created by Carlton Cuse starring Don Johnson[2] and Cheech Marin as two Inspectors with the San Francisco Police Department's Special Investigations Unit. The series ran for six seasons on CBS from March 29, 1996, to May 4, 2001, for a total of 122 episodes.
Story [ edit ]
Nash Bridges debuted on March 29, 1996 on the CBS television network. The show starred Don Johnson as the eponymous Nash Bridges, an inspector (and later captain) with the San Francisco Police Department's elite "Special Investigations Unit". As the show begins, he's in his 40s, twice-divorced, and dealing with a feisty teenage daughter, Cassidy (Jodi Lyn O'Keefe). Nash convinces recently retired Inspector Joe Dominguez (Cheech Marin) to return to the force to partner with him. Nash and Joe cruise the streets of San Francisco in Nash's "curious yellow" 1971 Plymouth Barracuda convertible, a gift from Nash's brother Bobby just before Bobby left for the Vietnam War.
Bobby Bridges was reported as MIA, but turns up in the Season 3 episode 'Revelations,' played by Jan-Michael Vincent. Nash's father Nick (James Gammon) suffers from mild dementia and has a habit of getting kicked out of nursing homes. He eventually moves in with Nash, and is often involved in comic subplots.
Aiding Nash in his police work is the technically savvy Harvey Leek (Jeff Perry), a middle-aged "Deadhead" (a diehard Grateful Dead fan), and young, hotheaded Evan Cortez (Jaime P. Gomez), who has an off-and-on, stormy relationship with Cassidy. In later seasons, other inspectors and supporting characters were added to and subtracted from the cast.
For the first nine episodes, the commander of the SIU was Lieutenant A. J. Shimamura (Cary-Hiroyuki Tagawa), a character who was said to have returned to his native Hawaii after failing to be promoted to captain. Shimamura's departure opened the door for Bridges to be promoted to captain and given command of the SIU.
Episodes [ edit ]
Season Episodes Originally aired First aired Last aired 1 8 March 29, 1996 ( ) May 17, 1996 ( 1996-05-17 ) 2 23 September 13, 1996 ( ) May 2, 1997 ( 1997-05-02 ) 3 23 September 19, 1997 ( ) May 15, 1998 ( 1998-05-15 ) 4 24 September 25, 1998 ( ) May 14, 1999 ( 1999-05-14 ) 5 22 September 24, 1999 ( ) May 19, 2000 ( 2000-05-19 ) 6 22 October 6, 2000 ( ) May 4, 2001 ( 2001-05-04 )
Cast and characters [ edit ]
Overview [ edit ]
Cheech Marin (left) with Don Johnson.
Main [ edit ]
Don Johnson as Inspector/Acting Lieutenant/Captain Nash Bridges: Nash is a seasoned police Inspector in his 40s, with a lifelong devotion to the SFPD. He's got a photographic memory and a tendency to call everyone "Bubba" or "Sister." His personal life isn't as balanced as his professional one, starting with his two divorces and a strained relationship with both his aged father and a feisty daughter. An amateur magician with a talent for handcuff tricks. Don Johnson is the only member of the cast to appear in all 122 episodes of the series.
Cheech Marin as Inspector/Lieutenant Joe Dominguez: At the start of the series, Insp. Dominguez is talked out of retirement to partner with Nash. He is married to a statuesque Swedish woman, Inger, and together they have a daughter, Lucia, and a son, JJ. Dominguez's character is light-hearted, often making witty, off-the-cuff observations at crime scenes. He has a penchant for getting involved in get-rich quick schemes, often having to be rescued by Nash. The details of Nash & Dominguez's relationship (and why they are such close friends,) is revealed during the course of the series: As a young cop with a bright future, Dominguez ruined his reputation by being busted for a DUI. The only person to stand by him was his partner at the time, later revealed to be Nash. In later seasons, Nash & Joe form a private detective agency to make extra money.
James Gammon as Nick Bridges: Nash's retired longshoreman father who lives with him. He sometimes gets into some minor trouble which leaves Nash to save him. He also tends to get involved in Joe Dominguez's get-rich-quick schemes. Nick suffers from light dementia, and that affectation was dealt with thoughtfully throughout the series. A source of conflict between him and his son was the character's preference for his older son, Bobby Bridges, over Nash.
Jodi Lyn O'Keefe as Officer Cassidy Bridges: Nash's 20-something daughter who originally aspired to be an actress. Cassidy had a tough relationship with Evan that had them eventually reconciling and about to marry, before Evan was killed. This inspired Cassidy to join the SFPD after his death. She was then assigned to the SIU as a plain-clothes officer, under her father's command, something that most likely would not happen in real life. By the end of the series, Cassidy relocated to Paris to be with her mother.
Jeff Perry as Inspector Harvey Leek: A die-hard Grateful Dead fan with a technical background. His wife left him after 5 and a 1/2 years of marriage because of his commitment to police work. Best friend to Evan and one of Nash's team, and very passionate about his '72 Ford Ranchero. The Ranchero is seen in the series almost as often as Nash's Barracuda until the car was irreparably damaged in a shootout near the end of the fifth season.
Jaime P. Gomez as Inspector Evan Cortez: (season 1–5) Best friend to Harvey and the youngest partner of Nash, who suggested he rejoin working with Joe at the beginning of the series. Evan reminded Nash of what he used to be long ago. He had a stormy relationship with Cassidy, which after many ups and downs, ended when he was killed in the line of duty. Evan had reconciled with Cassidy at the time and was engaged to her for a Las Vegas wedding. Previous to that, Evan went through a painful period during the fifth season after his breakup with Cassidy (after he'd cheated on her on the eve of their wedding) and the loss of his job as a drunk on a downward spiral. With Joe's intervention and his own participation in a 12-Step Alcoholics Anonymous program, the character became a Christian and recovering alcoholic. Jaime Gomez appeared in all but six episodes of the series' first five seasons.
Annette O'Toole as Lisa Bridges: (seasons 1–2, guest star in season 4) A caterer by trade, she is Nash's ex-wife and mother of Cassidy. She moved to Paris after she and Nash revealed their true feelings to each other.
Serena Scott Thomas as Kelly Bridges (season 1–2, guest star in season 3) a socialite and former drug addict, and Nash's second ex-wife.
Cary-Hiroyuki Tagawa as Lieutenant A.J. Shimamura: (season 1–2) Former police superior who worked closely with Nash and the SIU as both co-worker and friend. A.J. held true to a promise that if he wasn't promoted to Captain, he would leave the force and move back to his native Hawaii. Shimamura lasted 16 episodes.
Mary Mara as Inspector Bryn Carson: (season 1–3) The only female member |
tucked away in Endeavour’s original OPF, while the latter moved into storage inside the colossal Vehicle Assembly Building. Atlantis, which became the last shuttle in space despite original plans to retire her early, touched down last month and is presumably undergoing decommissioning in OPF-2 alongside Discovery’s current storage location.
For now, we’re hoping NASA won’t pass up the opportunity to photograph all three Space Shuttle orbiters together before they go their separate ways to museums around the country. Meanwhile, Discovery’s long time home – Orbiter Processing Facility-3 – apparently lies empty.Warren Buffett Bullish on AXP Stock
American Express Company (NYSE:AXP) timidly gained about one percent last week, going as high as $59.80 on Friday on Wall Street. American Express stock has made the gains despite potentially harmful rumors surrounding the credit card specialist company. Fox Business News said that American Express (“AMEX” to its friends) wants to oust embattled CEO Ken Chenault amid festering relations with the company’s board of directors. (Source: “American Express CEO Chenault On Thin Ice, Company Possibly in Play,” Fox Business News, March 6, 2016.)
Therein lies the opportunity factor. AMEX stock’s timid but steady rise as the buzz over Chenault’s imminent departure intensifies offers a glimpse of its potential. Pundits are speculating that American Express could try to replace Chenault.
However, the American Express board may go one step further and sidestep the succession issue altogether. The board may seek an outside buyer. This would resolve the executive succession problem and give AXP stock, which lost some 27% over the past 12 months, a bolder push. (Source: Ibid.) The rumors suggest that Wells Fargo is one of the companies on the short list for a takeover, even if the U.S. bank has denied it. (Source: Ibid.)
News of the acquisition plans has certainly generated optimism over American Express. The intensity of Chenault’s struggle with the board should help supply more fuel until the rumors are settled.
Advertisement
Warren Buffett and his Berkshire Hathaway (NYSE:BRK.A) are fans of financial services companies like American Express. Indeed, Buffett has a liking for American Express stock itself. The billionaire investor has added it to the top of his 2016 picks. Berkshire Hathaway now owns some 151.6 million shares, or $10.5 billion, in American Express shares. (Source: “Key Changes in Warren Buffett and Berkshire Hathaway Stock Holdings,” 24/7 Wall Street, August 15, 2015; http://247wallst.com/investing/2015/08/14/key-changes-in-warren-buffett-and-berkshire-hathaway-stock-holdings/.)
Evidently, Buffett has bullish expectations for AXP stock. Buffett is AMEX’s biggest single shareholder; he owns some 15% of the company. (Source: “Warren Buffett will decide when it’s time for changes at American Express,” Business Insider, January 22, 2016.)
The Buffett connection becomes more interesting considering that Berkshire Hathaway is also a major investor in Wells Fargo & Co. (NYSE:WFC). Wells Fargo is another of Buffett’s top picks for 2016. The San Francisco, California-based group is the fourth-largest U.S. bank by assets. Although WFC stock has spent more time in the red than the black this year, Buffett has invested up to $26.1 billion, or approximately 479.7 million shares, in Wells Fargo. (Source: “Key Changes in Warren Buffett and Berkshire Hathaway Stock Holdings,” 24/7 Wall Street, August 15, 2015.)
Given the links between Buffett, Wells Fargo, and American Express, the rumors of a takeover are more likely true than not, making AXP stock a potentially bullish investment opportunity. As with any investment, though, due diligence is key.Last year I wrote an article about Why You Should Play Goat Format and I argued that Goat Format had something for everyone. It was fun, cheap, simple, popular, skillful, and most importantly, it was the most logical starting point for a new custom format because it wouldn't take much effort for players to acclimate to its card pool. NEWGIOH is that custom format.
What is NEWGIOH?
NEWGIOH is a custom format based on the popular Goat Format and the NEWGIOH Forbidden & Limited List are changes with respect to that format. Cards released in limited quantities at the time, such as Cyber-Stein, are excluded from the card pool whereas both Exarion Universe and Cybernetic Revolution are included in the card pool. The format changes every six months to give players enough time to adapt to the format without letting it get stale, at which point cards will be rotated in and out of the card pool.
Meanwhile NEWGIOH won't ever host ads, sell cards, or host tournaments to prevent any conflict of interest. We don't care about making money. We only want to make a fun format. That's why we're an independent organization designed to be open to everybody ARG, your local shop, you and your friends and we encourage everyone to use our list in unsanctioned tournaments, side events, and individual matches as they see fit.
As far as individual rulings and things like priority: if it was legal in Goat Format then play it as it was in Goat Format. Otherwise, play it as it is today. Rely on Google if necessary but understand that priority exists, your extra deck is limited to 15 cards, and all modern rules regarding XYZ summoning are in effect. For reference purposes, the Format Library has a nice list of relevant rulings from this time period.
For more information about the cards on our list, please see this post explaining Our First Format.
The Need for a NEW YUGIOH Format
YUGIOH is a great game. It's been around for a long time but it's still fun to play because Konami has always managed to keep things fresh and interesting. However, power creep and the focus on pre-built archetypes has made a whole host of older cards irrelevant in the context of modern YUGIOH and that has two major consequences:
A lot of new and returning players often feel overwhelmed by the vast card pool and some of the newer game mechanics. It's frustrating that a lot of us have cards in our binders that aren't likely to ever get used again without a second format.
Here's where NEWGIOH comes in.
It's designed to be easy to get into. Modern YUGIOH is comprised of 50 sets whereas Goat Format was comprised of just 16 sets so it's really easy to study the card pool. Moreover, the Format Library hosts a small, readable list of cards generally considered playable to make it even easier to sort through your options. It's also affordable. Modern decks can cost upwards of several hundred dollars but competitive NEWGIOH decks can be bought for as low as $21.76 there's also a good chance you already have a lot of these cards lying around. Either way, the great thing about playing a format where all your cards have been reprinted a dozen times is that you can get started for the price of a tournament entry.
Note that NEWGIOH isn't meant to replace the current Advanced Format. Modern YUGIOH is just as fun, interesting, and skillful as it's ever been. NEWGIOH is all that too butin a different way and it exists so players aren't forced to choose between a format that isn't right for them and quitting. That's what?NEWGIOH is the choice to play in a competitive environment with a focus on the fundamentals, fair cards, and without the fear of scary turn one plays that can outright win the game.
Make No Mistake: This Is NOT Goat Format
Goat Format is the beloved basis for NEWGIOH but they're hardly the same thing.
They may have a lot in common but the biggest change is that you're no longer tied to running Goat Control because decks like Monarchs, Beasts, Spellcasters, Zombies, Gravekeepers, and many more are just as competitive. That's why players of all kinds will find it easy to pick a NEWGIOH deck that suites their style of play. That's also why the best players will find plenty of room to flex their creativity, so be careful: it's a mistake to load up your old Goat list, make a few changes, and think you've solved the format.
That's actually my favorite thing about NEWGIOH: it's completely unsolved. It's got familiar cards but we're all in unfamiliar territory. Our decade of hindsight can't help us.
This is something new.
Discussion
commentsWhen you are a young musician and still new to the game, there is often a moment when you have a choice: Do something the quick and easy way or do it the right way. Jessica Hernandez took the latter approach when it came time to record Secret Evil, her debut full-length album with her band, the Deltas, due out August 19.
"I wanted my first full-length to be fun, but I didn't want to make it perfect by bringing in session players and studio guys and have it be this really impersonal thing," Hernandez says. "A lot of people get pressured into doing that, and I did feel a little pressure from people at the label and management. They told me it would be faster and easier that way, but for me it wasn't about that. It was about working with people I like working with and having my band feel included."
As a result, Secret Evil sounds as bold and brash as you would expect from a band that has been given freedom to do whatever it wants. "No Place to Hide" is the perfect introduction to Hernandez's electric, soulful vocals as she rips through this piece of rock and soul with all the confidence of a seasoned veteran, while the rock track "Downtown Man" boils with sexiness. But it's not all rock 'n' roll, as the surf-pop track "Sorry I Stole Your Man" demonstrates. This song also gives a unique insight into Hernandez's fearless songwriting process and how her honesty can get her into trouble sometimes.EVERETT, Wash. – Mayor Ray Stephanson is ready to move forward with a civil lawsuit against Purdue Pharma, a drug manufacturer.
Mayor Stephanson says the city has internal emails that show the company knowingly allowed OxyContin into the black market, and he claims the city will have to spend tens of millions of dollars to deal with the drug problem now plaguing Everett.
Hil Kaman is the city's Public Health and Safety Director, and he's been investigating the problem.
"In 2009-10 the formula for OxyContin was reformulated and that made it more difficult to use on the street. And there was a dramatic drop in the use of prescription opioids, and a dramatic spike in the use of heroin," said Kaman.
Kaman added that the numbers show a dramatic spike in heroin-related deaths followed.
Wednesday evening, Mayor Stephanson went before City Council.
"I'm recommending that the city commence legal action against Purdue Pharma," he announced.
Mayor Stephanson received support from City Council, and plans to pursue a civil lawsuit.
"Theres always a risk when you file a lawsuit. We believe that the evidence is very strong that Purdue directly caused what we are seeing on our streets," said Kaman.
In a statement, Purdue Pharma spokesperson Bob Josephson writes, "We share public officials' concerns about the opioid crisis and we are committed to working collaboratively to find solutions. Although OxyContin accounts for only 2% of all pain-related opioid prescriptions, Purdue is an industry leader in abuse detterence as we were the first pharmaceutical company to develop an opioid medication with abuse-deterrent properties."
Mayor Stephanson says, "Right is right. We have discovered a problem. We have discovered that there is a pharmaceutical company that is responsible, and they need to be held accountable."
Copyright 2016 KINGFifth in a 13-part series of previews for Bears training camp.
One thing the departure of veteran Israel Idonije ensures is more playing time for 2012 first-round draft pick Shea McClellin.
McClellin was the team's fourth-most productive defensive end last season. Idonije, who earned $2.5 million from the Bears in 2012 while finishing second on the defense with 71/2 sacks, had a standing offer from the team for a good portion of the offseason. But late last month, he agreed to a minimum salary benefit deal with the Lions that will pay him $840,000 but count only $620,000 against the salary cap.
It appears to be a bargain price for the player who will turn 33 in November. Idonije played a lot for the Bears in the previous three seasons but it is clear no team wanted to pay him big bucks in a depressed market for veterans. Some may be upset Idonije isn't returning but at some point teams have to let young players emerge.
That is what happened last season when Idonije started the first nine games at left end before Corey Wootton, now 26, replaced him in the lineup. Wootton put together a solid season with seven sacks, 12 quarterback pressures and two forced fumbles. It was the breakout season the team had been seeking from the 2010 fourth-round draft pick.
Idonije spent time at tackle and end in the final months of the season and his versatility certainly will be missed. Now it's time for McClellin to push Wootton for the starting spot opposite Julius Peppers.
To do that, McClellin will have to be more than the mostly situational player he was in 2012 when he played 34.7 percent of the snaps. This spring, he said he added five to seven pounds to his frame and was at 258. That indicates he was playing below his club listing of 260 pounds.
The Bears need McClellin to perform up to expectations of a first-round pick. Pressure is on him as general manager Phil Emery's first draft pick and the club didn't get a lot from the class a year ago. McClellin can't control what other players in his class are doing, but he can shape his own destiny.
"I need to take a big step," he said this spring. "That is what I am planning on doing."
At the same time, this is a contract season for Wootton so he can assure his future with a solid season.
Preview: You have to look at the left side when it comes to playing time decisions.
Peppers remains entrenched on the right side entering the fourth season of the contract he signed in 2010 that guaranteed him $42 million. As it stands, he counts $16,383,333 versus the club's cap this season — roughly 12.7 percent of the Bears' adjusted cap figure of $128.9 million. His base salary is $12.9 million for this season but he's worth it because no one on the defense can harass the opposing quarterback with his ferociousness and regularity. If you can't rush the passer, you can't play any defense with sustained success.
The numbers get bigger for Peppers moving forward. His base salary jumps to $13.9 million in 2014 when his cap number is $17,183,333. Sound too big to keep? Before you go down that path, realize the team has committed only $88.6 million to the 2014 cap so far. There is room to keep Peppers if he's still playing at a high level.
Peppers doesn't say much but his actions this spring were telling. He was regularly on the field and he was hustling. He was sprinting to the sideline to track down ball carriers, the kind of maximum effort you want to see from your highest-paid players.
That's a clear sign he has bought into new coordinator Mel Tucker and the changes that are afoot at Halas Hall.
In the meantime, the team has to remain hopeful Wootton and McClellin can make improvements while also considering some other athletic options.
Turk McBride looked like a good fit as a role player throughout the spring and will have a clear opportunity to make the roster. Kyle Moore did some nice things as a pass rusher for the Bills last season but was vulnerable versus the run. Cheta Ozougwu and Aston Whiteside return as projects.
Glass half-full: Peppers doesn't have to challenge for the newly-created Deacon Jones Award, presented annually to the player with the most sacks, but a strong showing and double digits in the category ought to be good enough for him to make the NFC Pro Bowl team for the fourth straight year.
For true progress at the position, Wootton and McClellin need to take significant steps.
Glass half-empty: If Peppers' teammates cannot support him, this easily could be the No. 1 need area in 2014. Peppers turns 34 in January and eventually there needs to be a succession plan. Right now, there needs to be support.
Coaching change: Mike Phair was one of two position coach holdovers from the Lovie Smith era. He should get some credit for some of Wootton's development.
Added to the mix is Michael Sinclair, who worked for five seasons under Marc Trestman in Canada. This is Sinclair's first coaching gig in the NFL but he also worked in NFL Europe and at West Texas A&M.; He was a three-time Pro Bowl performer in 11 seasons with the Seahawks and finished his career with 731/2 sacks, the second-most in Seattle history. The hope is he will aid the pass rush.Michael Wilbon went looking for something, and he found it while talking with his friends. That something, in this case, was to show that “advanced analytics” and black people don’t mix.
The mission was to find black folks who spend anytime talking about advanced analytics, whose conversations are framed by — or even casually include references to — win shares or effective shooting percentage, WHIP (walks and hits per inning pitched) or points per 100 possessions. It’s a failed mission so far. Totally empty. Conclusion: Advanced analytics and black folks hardly ever mix. Set aside the tiny handful of black men who make a living somewhere in the sports industry dealing directly with the numbers and there is absolutely zero mingling.
You know where else you won’t find people at water coolers and barbershops talking about VORP and Win Probability Added when you wander around your community? Pretty much everywhere, regardless of race or creed.
I can say this as someone who is, I think, analytical. Most people don’t talk about this in their daily lives, and it still represents a small minority of sports fans. Let’s face it, it’s all minorities and small groups of interests, whether we are talking analytics or something else. Less than 2% of the United States population watched Monday night’s Cleveland-Toronto game 4 on ESPN, to put in perspective how much of a bubble we may be in.
You can’t find anyone to talk analytics, a subgroup of a subgroup of a small minority of people you come in contact in real life? Oh, well that’s amazing and probably an insular viewpoint. Most people you will come in contact in real life will not be interested in (insert topic here).
I still have yet to meet anyone in my personal real-world interactions who cares about which Instagram personality is dating which athlete, yet our traffic numbers suggest you exist. I have yet (living in Missouri) to meet anyone who has ever talked about Mike Francesa, yet I know people care (probably because people who live in the Northeast, even though they do not represent the majority of the country, do). If I were to do a sampling of the friends I come in contact a la Wilbon, I might conclude that Mike Francesa has no appeal.
Over a decade ago, when I discovered message boards at Football Outsiders and then started writing at Pro Football Reference, I discovered people I didn’t come into contact in my every day life, but who shared similar interests with me when it came to sports. We were a small minority of people in a nation of 370 million. It was awesome to interact with people (I’m pretty sure they existed, even if I didn’t know who they were) who had a similar interest.
So Wilbon didn’t find any cross-examples of black people who embrace analytics. Since the article posted, others have pointed out that he didn’t ask them. It would require some analytical interest in finding the truth, but if you want to say that race matters when it comes to those small groups interested in analytics, you could maybe do a poll, and ask questions that isolate hardcore sports fans, race and income and age, and knowledge of certain stats. This piece is not persuasive at all that it matters. Maybe it does, maybe it doesn’t.
What constitutes “advanced analytics” is kind of a moving target, also. Those that that can lay out the intricacies of Wins Above Replacement may be a limited subset. Things like OPS, and simply looking at on-base percentage rather than batting average, or talking effective field goal percentage, are common place now, and would have been treated much differently thirty years ago.
I thought the Wilbon piece had some potential for some good points. In particular, I think the one raised by Amin Elhassan is the most interesting. Elhassan said “Don’t tell me that there are no black people who are good at math. There are black people who [are] expert at qualitative analysis, I worry that it becomes a way to exclude.” That point would be a great one to expound on, and I think it could have gone more in-depth on that issue, that teams that are going all-in on analytics are engaged in a closed buddy system just like many other sports management scenarios in the past.
But the case is largely made by Wilbon by talking to friends, and citing two of them by name. The piece closes with one of them wanting to blame anyone choosing to sign Dwight Howard on advanced analytics. This is a bogey man case of blaming literally anything on analytics.
Over the last four years, while bouncing from the Lakers to Houston between ages 27 and 30, here are Dwight Howard’s ranks in “win shares” (warning: advanced analytics alert): 43rd, 138th (injured half the year), 27th, 29th.
Like anything, you can justify anything after the fact, but my gut is Howard gets signed because he is a former first overall pick who was a dominant player five years ago, and someone will take a chance on talent and finding a “good situation”, not metrics. I can’t confirm that though, because everyone that I talk to says they don’t care where Dwight Howard signs. I conclude then, that no one cares where Dwight Howard goes.After seeing a 15 percent increase in water and sewer rates last year, Baltimore County residents will face another 12 percent hike this summer.
And an additional 8 percent increase is planned in 2017.
Officials say the rate hikes, announced Tuesday, are needed to raise $54 million to repair aging infrastructure.
"These ongoing improvements must be made to protect our citizens, now and for the next generation," said County Executive Kevin Kamenetz in a statement. "As a responsible government, we must bite the bullet now and not kick the can down the road."
When the two new hikes are taken into account, customers will pay nearly 21 percent more beginning July 1, 2017, compared to what they are paying now — amounting to an additional $227 a year for the average family of four, according to the county.
The hikes will take effect July 1 of this year and next.
"My gut reaction is: That's a lot of money," said Michael Ertel, president of the Greater Towson Council of Community Associations, an umbrella group of Towson-area homeowner organizations. "Do I want to pay another 220 bucks a year? No. But honestly, it's got to be done, and as you read around the country, everybody is grappling with [water and sewer infrastructure issues].
"Unfortunately, it costs money to deal with this stuff," Ertel said.
The money will help replace water pipes, reline sewer pipes and improve treatment plants, measures needed to help prevent water main breaks and sewage overflows, officials said.
County Council Chairwoman Vicki Almond, a Reisterstown Democrat, called the fee hikes "another burden on taxpayers," but said she did not believe the county executive would increase the rate if it weren't necessary.
"The issue here is aging infrastructure in an older county," said County Councilman David Marks, a Perry Hall Republican. "I do think the county needs to look at how we are paying for infrastructure for new development. That adds up."
While the County Council does not have oversight over the rate increases, some members say they were taken aback by the size of the increase.
"It was sort of a shock to me when I heard about it," said Councilman Julian Jones, a Woodstock Democrat. "It is a lot of money. It causes me to stop in my tracks."
Still, Jones said he wanted to reserve judgment until learning more from the county executive's office.
The county is under a 2005 consent decree with the federal government requiring it to pay for improvements in the sewer system.
"The goal of the consent decree … is to eliminate all sanitary sewer overflows," said Ed Adams, the county's director of public works. "That's our goal, to have a perfect system, and also to be proactive."
Officials say they have nearly completed inspections of more than 3,000 miles of sewer lines and modernized or replaced half of the county's sewage pumping stations.
"We have shown a massive amount of improvement," Adams said. "We're a lot better today than we were several years ago."
The county finished or worked on more than $51 million in water and sewer projects in the past year, according to the department. Projects now under construction include water main replacements, pipe cleaning and lining, and rehabilitation of pumping stations.
"A large part of the county's water and sewer system is over 50 years old," said Steve Walsh, chief of the county Department of Public Works' bureau of engineering and construction.
The county executive sets the rates through an executive order. In noting his rationale for the increases, Kamenetz pointed to a report by bond ratings agency Standard & Poor's that warned that funding wasn't keeping pace with needed repairs in the county and said the increase will satisfy those concerns.
Baltimore City and the county share the cost of the regional water and sewer system through the Metropolitan District, and each sets its own rates and fees.
Last year's increase was the first increase for the county since 2010. In 2013, the city passed a multiyear increase that raised rates through the current fiscal year.
Baltimore Sun reporter Jessica Anderson contributed to this article.
alisonk@baltsun.com
twitter.com/aliknezJeff Larentowicz is looking forward to Atlanta United’s game at Chicago on Saturday because it will be a chance to see friends. It may also be a chance to see what manager Gerardo Martino is going to do with the lineup should Josef Martinez return.
Larentowicz played for Chicago from 2013-15, serving as the team’s captain in his final season.
Though in 2015 Chicago had a disappointing record of 8-6-20, the team went 14-13-7 in 2013 with Mike Magee winning MVP. The team 6-10-18 in 2014.
Magee winning an MVP stuck with Larentowicz. It was one of two times Larentowicz played with an MVP. Taylor Twellman winning in 2005 with New England was the other.
“Whenever you are on a team with an MVP season it’s exciting,” Larentowicz said.
Twellman winning happened during Larentowicz’s rookie season. He spent five seasons with the Revs and three with Colorado, where he helped the Rapids when the MLS Cup in 2010. He was on the New England teams that were beaten in three consecutive finals.
After Colorado, Larentowciz joined Chicago, then Los Angeles for one season and then he signed as a free agent with Atlanta United.
He has 12 appearances, including 10 starts, for Martino’s team.
It will be interesting to see if Larentowicz will start against Chicago on Saturday. It’s not that he wouldn’t because of poor performances.
Instead, it would be because of the return of Martinez from injury.
Martinez and Larentowicz don’t play the same position, but if the Venezuelan returns it would likely necessitate a domino of decisions. Martino’s weekly press conference is scheduled for Thursday afternoon.
Martinez has been out since March after suffering a thigh injury while playing with his national team. Each week, he has gotten closer to returning. He travelled with the team to Vancouver last week, but didn’t make the 18.
If Martinez makes the 18 this week, and if he starts, Hector Villalba will likely move from striker back into the right side of the midfield, which is his natural position and where he started the season.
That would mean Julian Gressel, who moved from the middle to the right in the past four games, either moves to the bench, or he moves back into central midfield, where he started the season, in place of either Larentowicz or Carlos Carmona. Because Gressel has played well this season, including two goals and three assists in the past four games, it seems unlikely he wouldn’t be in the starting lineup.
Carmona started the season opener as the holding midfielder, so it seems unlikely he will be pulled out of the starting lineup.
That means Larentowicz may come out….but only if Martinez, Gressel and Miguel Almiron are in the starting lineup.
There are other options.
Almiron may not be able to play on Saturday because he may play for Paraguay against Peru in a friendly on Thursday. If he doesn’t play, Gressel could slide into that position. He has played there at least once already this season. That would leave Larentowicz and Carmona as the holding midfielders.
Or, Martino could opt to keep Gressel on the right and bring Villalba off the bench as a super sub. That seems unlikely, though, because Villalba is one of the team’s three Designated Players.Leonardo DiCaprio portrays Jordan Belfort in Martin Scorsese's "The Wolf of Wall Street." The Wolf of Wall Street/Paramount Pictures Martin Scorsese unleashed his latest, The Wolf of Wall Street, on unsuspecting audience members Christmas Day.
It turned out to be an unusual film with which to commemorate the birth of baby Jesus.
Sex, drugs, sex, violence, butt candles, sex, midgets, sex and more sex crammed each frame of Scorsese's depiction of financial corruption and excess. Critics fawned.
The debauchery-laden drama has a healthy 77% Fresh on Rotten Tomatoes, with our own Eric saying that the movie is DiCaprio and Scorsese's best collaboration yet.
Audiences don't seem to agree, however. Though the movie got off to a fast start, earning north of $9 million on Christmas Day, those lured to the cinemas by the promise of DiCaprio and Scorsese bombarding Wall Street are leaving disappointed.
CinemaScore polls moviegoers as they exit theaters, calculating "a distinctive CinemaScore grade" that gives the industry a ballpark reaction.
"Wolf," so far, has earned a C. That sounds average. On CinemaScore, it isn't. It's terrible. Audience rarely trash a movie to the CinemaScore pollsters.
Currently, "Wolf" has the lowest grade, behind such movies as "47 Ronin" (B+), "Walking With Dinosaurs" (B), "Homefront" (B), and "Jackass: Bad Grandpa" (B). Yes, "Bad Grandpa." I can't say I'm surprised. In fact, I tend to agree with the general consensus on this point. But critics created such a stir on Twitter about the disconnect between movie and audience that we thought it required further analysis. (Read CinemaScore pollster Kenny Miles' feed for some of the general, hateful reaction.)
There has to be a reason why a movie trumpeted by critics is failing to connect with mainstream America. Here are the three that jump to mind.
1. Scorsese's Ode To Excess Is Too Excessive
"Wolf" has no interest in moderation. The point of Scorsese's movie (I believe) is that power corrupts those who lack a moral compass.
And it's entertaining, in a depraved sort of way, to see financial wunderkind Jordan Belfort (DiCaprio) abuse his fortunes, paying for competitive dwarf tossing in his Wall Street office, dropping untold fortunes on drugs and women, and narrating every step of his own personal orgy.
That high lasts, in my own opinion, for about an hour. Scorsese needed to shift focus away from Jordan after establishing what an asshole this character is if he hoped to keep audiences invested in this slog through sleaze.
Instead, "Wolf" gives us two additional hours in the presence of this douchebag. By the midpoint of "Wolf," I'd had more than enough. The experience is exhausting in the way it shovels Jordan's excessive abuses.
There's a two-hour cut of "Wolf "begging to emerge, if Scorsese had more time and wasn't racing to reach an end-of-year deadline for awards consideration.
2. Christmas Was the Wrong Date
Not that Hollywood hasn't released counter programming on the most joyous holiday of the year.
Just last season, audiences were invited to Tom Hooper's "Les Miserables," a depressing musical march through several individual hardships that at least had the backing of a famous stage show in its corner.
I'm guessing that audiences looking for something different this Christmas season were shocked (and possibly appalled) by the gratuitous nature of Scorsese's latest. It recently caught an Academy member by surprise. Personally, I was prepared for extreme levels of debauchery in "Wolf," and was still taken aback by the amount of profanity in the director's theatrical cut. Not that I'm a prude. Sex, violence, drug use and debauchery have a place when they are helping to make a point in a movie.
I'm not sure Scorsese's "Wolf" has anything to say about the empty suits on the Wall Street circuit … at least, nothing we haven't heard before, especially in earlier Scorsese films about men who are obsessed with (and ultimately corrupted by) power.
Guy Lodge says it best on InContention: "I wasn't left with much when the circus was over: its moral stance, such as it is, is laid out early on, leaving us jogging furiously in place for three hours." Audiences tended to agree.
Paramount Pictures and Red Granite Picture To be honest, I'm not sure WHEN Paramount should have dropped "Wolf" into theaters. Perhaps in October, when controversial Oscar fare seeks approval (though Scorsese's opus wasn't ready, so NEXT October would have been the option). It's merely possible that Christmas was an odd time to unleash a sex-and-drug-fueled extravaganza.
3. It Was Marketed Incorrectly
This doesn't necessarily put the blame on Paramount, which had a new Martin Scorsese/Leonardo DiCaprio collaboration on its plate and knew a certain audience would turn up, no matter the content. Watch that trailer, though. It paints "Wolf" as "Goodfellas." A couple of colorful characters pull themselves up by their bootstraps (illegally, mind you), but pay the price when the FBI catches on to their schemes. That's only a small sliver of "Wolf," as anyone who has seen it knows, and the debauchery is barely hinted at in the film's full trailer. Now, buyer beware, right? It's up to an individual to read up on a movie, to see what they are in store for. And there have been plenty of in-depth think pieces analyzing the filth and depravity Scorsese willingly put into "Wolf."
But the CinemaScore, accurate by its own standards, illustrates how audience members checking out "Wolf" on Christmas Day either didn't know what they were getting, or simply didn't like what they got.The star of Heathers, Girl Interrupted and Black Swan – an actress who has been reductively if accurately described as “the poster girl for the 1990s” – has been telling me about “this weird thing I do if I have to get emotional in a film. It always works.” She doesn’t just want me to take her word for it; she wants me to try it. Which I do because this is Los Angeles and nobody would bat an eyelid if you were to assume the lotus pose in the middle of a bar and start chanting, “Om shanti, shanti.” But also, simply, because Ryder wants me do it.
Something about the actress draws you in from the outset, making you want to befriend and protect her – both uncomfortable sensations for an interviewer. She talks in open-ended sentences, dipping in and out of whispers and veering off on tangents.
And at 42, in a battered cream leather jacket, vintage T-shirt and jeans, she’s still as fragile and translucent-skinned as she was at 18, as Cher’s pious teenage daughter in Mermaids, with the underlying grit of Lelaina, her character in the Generation X time-capsule that was Reality Bites, and the quiet wisdom of May Welland in Martin Scorsese's The Age of Innocence.
Maybe she was too memorable in those early years, capturing the zeitgeist of that decade too well both professionally and personally, in her highly scrutinised relationships with Johnny Depp and Matt Damon. Or maybe that shoplifting incident in 2001, after which she was ordered to undergo psychological and drug counselling and then took time off from her career, has overshadowed the excellent work she has done since: her portrayal of the embittered, ageing ballerina in Black Swan and the cheating wife in The Dilemma. Either way, with a role as a mysterious financial PR in David Hare’s new BBC political thriller, Turks & Caicos, alongside Christopher Walken, Bill Nighy and Helena Bonham Carter, Ryder’s bemused by talk of a comeback.
Winona Ryder and Bill Nighy in David Hare's political thriller Turks & Caicos
“Only because they’ve been saying it for so long,” she says with a laugh. “And I’m, like, where was I? There’s a big part of me that just wants to do good work and not have that pressure. I don’t have any interest in being a movie star. And although I’d love to say that everything I’ve done has been a |
circuit also appears to include a part of the midbrain called the substantia nigra, which has dopamine-containing cells that play an important role in motivation and movement. The researchers believe that when activated by input from the striosomes, these substantia nigra cells produce a long-term effect on an animal or human patient’s decision-making attitudes.
“We would so like to find a way to use these findings to relieve anxiety disorder, and other disorders in which mood and emotion are affected,” Graybiel says. “That kind of work has a real priority to it.”
In addition to pursuing possible treatments for anxiety disorders, the researchers are now trying to better understand the role of the dopamine-containing substantia nigra cells in this circuit, which plays a critical role in Parkinson’s disease and may also be involved in related disorders.
The research was funded by the National Institute of Mental Health, the CHDI Foundation, the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency, the U.S. Army Research Office, the Bachmann-Strauss Dystonia and Parkinson Foundation, and the William N. and Bernice E. Bumpus Foundation.
Publication: Alexander Friedman, et al., “A Corticostriatal Path Targeting Striosomes Controls Decision-Making under Conflict,” Cell, 2015; doi:10.1016/j.cell.2015.04.049
Image: Courtesy of the researchersUSA Basketball officially announced the 25-man roster for the 2016 Men's Select Team, which will practice with the U.S. Men's National Team during training camp this July in Las Vegas.
Trail Blazers guard CJ McCollum was among the players chosen for the Select Team which features, "some of the game's brightest and most promising young players."
The Select Team will scrimmage and train with the senior men's national team during a four-day training camp July 18-21 ahead of the 2016 Summer Olympics, which begin in August in Brazil.
San Antonio Spurs coach Greg Popovich, who will take over as the head coach of the national team in 2017, will serve as the head coach of the Select Team. Spurs assistant coach, and former Trail Blazer, Ime Udoka and Villanova University head coach Jay Wright will serve as the Select Team assistants under Popovich.
Despite the invitation, McCollum is still deciding whether he'll attend the week of training. He plans to make a decision after the NBA draft on June 23.
There is obvious value in practicing with the Select Team as players get involvement with the highest level of USA Basketball. But it also serves as a showcase for younger NBA players, who may not necessarily be involved in future World Championship or Olympic Team consideration.
Kevin Durant, Russell Westbrook and Kyrie Irving played for the Select Team before joining the U.S. National Team. But the Select Team has also regularly featured younger non-stars such as Jimmer Fredette, Shelvin Mack, Kyle Singler and Nolan Smith.
The 2016 USA Select Team features eight players who completed their rookie NBA season in 2015-16, nine who wrapped up their second NBA season, three third-year NBA players and five players who are eligible for the 2016 NBA Draft.
Here's the full roster:
Malcolm Brogdon (University of Virginia); Devin Booker (Phoenix Suns); Kentavious Caldwell-Pope (Detroit Pistons);Willie Cauley-Stein (Sacramento Kings); Kris Dunn (Providence College); Aaron Gordon(Orlando Magic); Jerami Grant (Philadelphia 76ers); Gary Harris (Denver Nuggets); Rodney Hood (Utah Jazz); Brandon Ingram (Duke University); Brice Johnson (University of North Carolina), Stanley Johnson (Detroit Pistons); Zach LaVine (Minnesota Timberwolves); CJ McCollum (Portland Trail Blazers); Doug McDermott (Chicago Bulls); Emmanuel Mudiay(Denver Nuggets); Jahlil Okafor (Philadelphia 76ers); Jabari Parker (Milwaukee Bucks);Julius Randle (Los Angeles Lakers); D'Angelo Russell (Los Angeles Lakers); Marcus Smart (Boston Celtics); Myles Turner (Indiana Pacers); Denzel Valentine (Michigan State University);Justise Winslow (Miami Heat) and Cody Zeller (Charlotte Hornets).This article is over 3 years old
Both Jesuit schools – Fordham and Marquette universities – say it is the first time they have rescinded an honorary degree
Fordham and Marquette universities on Thursday rescinded honorary degrees from Bill Cosby amid allegations from women accusing the comedian of sexual assault.
In Milwaukee, Marquette’s board of trustees approved a resolution rescinding an honorary degree presented to Cosby in 2013. The degree was immediately rescinded, the school said.
Fordham’s board of trustees also voted to take back an honorary doctor of fine arts degree given to him in 2001.
Both Jesuit schools said it was the first time they had rescinded an honorary degree.
Cosby admitted having extramarital relationships with several women, including some who now accuse him of sexual assault. He has never been charged with a crime and has consistently denied the allegations.
Fordham University, in New York City, said: “As a Jesuit university, Fordham could no longer stand behind the degree it had bestowed upon Mr Cosby, hence this unprecedented action.”
Spelman College suspends Bill Cosby ties over sex abuse controversy Read more
Marquette president Michael Lovell and provost Daniel Myers issued a letter to the university community after the vote that said, “By his own admission, Mr Cosby engaged in behaviors that go entirely against our university’s mission and the guiding values we have worked so hard to instill on our campus.”
Fordham and Marquette are the latest schools to distance themselves from the comedian, joining Central State University, Temple University and Spelman College.Ubuntu is relatively straightforward to set up and use for the common day-to-day types of uses. With time, though, most users want to change their software, add and experiment with other software that Ubuntu has to offer, install and use hardware devices and printers, access remote files, use the famous (and sometimes feared) terminal, and maybe even run some Windows programs. Ubuntu provides many ways to do each of these things. While they are a little more complex than the material covered in previous chapters, the Ubuntu community has worked hard to make them as easy as possible, and this chapter shows you how to do all of them.
Adding and Removing Programs and Packages
Keeping Your Computer Updated
Moving to the Next Ubuntu Release
Using and Abusing Devices and Media
Configuring a Printer in Ubuntu
Graphically Accessing Remote Files
The Terminal
Backup Stategies
Working with Windows
Summary
AS YOU’VE SEEN SO FAR, Ubuntu is relatively straightforward to set up and use for the common day-to-day tasks. With time, though, most users want to change their software, add and experiment with other software options available in Ubuntu, install and use hardware devices like printers, access remote files, use the famous (and sometimes feared) terminal, and maybe even run some Windows programs. Ubuntu provides many ways to do each of these things. While they are a little more complex than the material covered in previous chapters, the Ubuntu community has worked hard to make them as easy as possible, and this chapter gets you started with each of them and more.
Adding and Removing Programs and Packages
While Ubuntu already includes the things most people need, sometimes you want or need something extra, such as a desktop publishing application for school or a game to pass the time. The easiest way to add these is with Add/Remove Applications, which is extremely simple to use but has a few limitations.
Installing and Using Add/Remove Applications
Like Synaptic and the other tools discussed later in this chapter, Add/Remove Applications installs software from the same online Ubuntu software repositories. Using one tool to add or remove software will be recognized by the other, related tools.
To launch Add/Remove Applications, simply click on the Add/Remove entry at the bottom of the Applications menu. When it is run for the first time, and occasionally afterward, it will take a few moments to initialize itself and the list of available and installed applications. Once this is complete, you will see the main screen shown in Figure 4-1.
The interface is divided into three parts. On the left is a list of all the various types of applications, laid out in the same way as the menu. Select a category to see a list of all the applications in that category in the upper right. Selecting an application in the upper right section will display a description in the lower right section of what that program does.
In addition to the categories, Add/Remove Applications also allows you to filter the list with searches. Search results are based on the program name, the package name, or the description of the program. Enter the search term into the text box in the upper right, and it will search as you type. Figure 4-2 shows an example of search bar results.
By default, Add/Remove Applications will show only applications that are supported by Ubuntu. While this is a large list, there are even more to find. By changing the option in the box labeled Show in the top, you will be able to see all the programs available to you.
Additionally, Add/Remove Applications can list proprietary applications, those applications that are not released under a free software or open source license. Change the Show option accordingly, and they will become visible both via the listing and through search. As with any other application, they can be clicked to install, although similar to community-supported applications, you may be asked to confirm your intention to install the application. When you attempt to install an application that is community supported or has a restricted license, you will be asked to confirm your intention to do so (Figure 4-3).
Terminology
You might need to know a few terms before you start, such as words used to describe how the software gets installed on your machine as well as how the system works.
APT: Advanced Package Tool, or APT, describes the entire system of online repositories and the parts that download them and install them.
Repositories or software channels: In the Ubuntu world, these giant online warehouses of software are divided between official Ubuntu repositories and nonofficial ones.
Packages: Applications are stored in packages that not only describe the program you want to install but also tell your package manager what the program needs to run and how to safely install and uninstall it.
Installing with Synaptic
Synaptic is a powerful graphical tool called a package manager. While Add/Remove Applications deals with packages that contain applications, Synaptic deals with all packages, including applications, system libraries, and other pieces of software. Changing the system on this level is more difficult but allows more detailed control. For instance, you can choose to install a specific library if you need it for a program that is not available in a package format.
To find Synaptic, look under the System menu and then the Administration menu. It is listed as Synaptic Package Manager. Launch the task by clicking on the icon, and you will see the main window, as shown in Figure 4-4.
Tip: What’s in a Name? Why the name Synaptic? Synaptic is a play on words, based on the word apt, which is the Debian package management system. Ubuntu is based on Debian and also uses APT.
Synaptic works a little differently from Add/Remove Applications. Unlike Add/Remove Applications, Synaptic deals directly with packages, which allows for a greater level of control while exposing the details of how package management works.
Installing a Package
As with Add/Remove Applications, installing packages with Synaptic is fairly easy. After you find the package you wish to install, click the checkbox to the right of the name of the package and select Mark for Installation. A dialog box may pop up (Figure 4-5) showing you what else needs to be installed—if anything—which you can accept by clicking the Mark button. After you have selected the package(s) you wish to install, click Apply on the Synaptic toolbar to begin installation.
Removing a Package
To remove a package, click on the green box, and choose Mark for Removal. As with installing a package, you may be asked to mark additional packages for removal (Figure 4-6). If you wish to remove all the configuration files too, choose Mark for Complete Removal. After you have selected the packages you wish to remove, click Apply on the toolbar to start the actual process of removing the package.
Finding That Package
So you are looking for a package but don’t know where to start? The fastest and easiest way is to simply click the Search button on the toolbar or type Ctrl-F. That will launch a search dialog box. By default, it searches both the package name and the description, but it can also search just by name or a number of other fields.
If you know what section the package is in, select it in the left pane (you may need to go back to the Sections pane). Select the button in the lower right labeled Sections, and browse through the packages in that section. The upper right pane also has a neat feature called Type-ahead (Figure 4-7).
Simply select any package, and then start typing the first few letters of the package name. The cursor should jump right to that section.Description
The International Journal of Adaptive, Resilient and Autonomic Systems (IJARAS) examines systems and organizations characterized by the following two properties: the ability to self-adapt to the characteristics of rapidly changing and turbulent environments by adopting complex individual and social strategies and the ability to control their changes to prevent the invalidation of their original mission statements. The central focus of IJARAS is on modeling, simulating, designing, developing, maintaining, evaluating, and benchmarking such “entelechial systems.” Perception, awareness, and the planning and execution of resilient adaptation behaviors in systems and organizations are central topics of the journal. Such systems range from individual and simple embedded systems with limited perception and predefined specialized behaviors to complex hybrid social organizations like cyber-physical societies or service-oriented communities, whose emerging behaviors are many and, in some cases, difficult to predict. IJARAS focuses on the full spectrum of these problems providing academicians, practitioners, and researchers with awareness and insight on conceptual models, applied and theoretical approaches, paradigms, and other technological innovations on self-adaptive and/or self-resilient systems and organizations of any scale and nature.
Topics Covered
Adaptive data integrity
Adaptive fault-tolerance
Analytical and simulation tools to measure a system’s ability to withstand faults and optimally re-adjust to new environments
Architecture-based adaptation
Autonomic applications
Autonomous and adaptive systems in robotics
Biologically inspired mechanisms to enact complex adaptation strategies
Collective strategies for adaptation and resilience, including cooperation, competition, co-opetition, co-innovation, and co-evolution
Complex adaptive-and-resilient systems and organizations
Context- and situation-awareness
Design-time/run-time methods and tools to identify and enforce optimal trade-offs between energy consumption, performance, safety, and security
Dynamics of complex adaptive and resilient systems and organizations
Evolutionary approaches to autonomic computing, resilience, and adaptive systems
Human aspects
Mechanisms to model, design, express, and develop adaptive, autonomic, and resilient systems
Methods to express resilience (e.g., resilience policies and contracts)
Perception and introspection capabilities
Personalization
Quality of experience
Recovery-oriented computing
Resilience and adaptation in management science
Resilience engineering
Resilient adaptation behavior composition
Resilient adaptation planning
Role of diversity in the emergence of survivability, innovability, value capture, etc.
Role of organizations on the emergence of adaptation and resilience: heterarchies, holarchies, fractal social organizations, etc.
Scalable, maintainable, and cost-effective provisions located at all system levels to achieve adaptability and dependability
Self-adaptive and self-resilient systems: models, design, development, maintenance, evaluation, and benchmarking issues
Software elasticity: techniques, tools, and approaches to absorb and tolerate the consequences of failures, attacks, and changes within and without system boundaries
Mission and Scope
Table of Contents and List of Contributors Search this Journal: Reset Open Access Articles: Forthcoming Volume 7: 1 Issue (2016) Volume 7: 1 Issue (2016): Forthcoming, Available for Pre-Order Volume 6: 2 Issues (2015) Volume 6: 2 Issues (2015): Forthcoming, Available for Pre-Order Volume 5: 4 Issues (2014) Volume 5: 4 Issues (2014): Forthcoming, Available for Pre-Order Volume 4: 4 Issues (2013) Volume 4: 4 Issues (2013): Forthcoming, Available for Pre-Order Volume 3: 4 Issues (2012) Volume 3: 4 Issues (2012): Forthcoming, Available for Pre-Order Volume 2: 4 Issues (2011) Volume 2: 4 Issues (2011): Forthcoming, Available for Pre-Order Volume 1: 4 Issues (2010) Volume 1: 4 Issues (2010): Forthcoming, Available for Pre-Order View Complete Journal Contents Listing
Reviews and Testimonials Both on academic and industrial areas the design, the development, the selection and the maintenance of complex systems able to guarantee their working despite failures of their components is more and more strategic. IJARAS collects advanced material really useful in all the above fields and creates a natural cross fertilization to design and to understand solutions able to work within different scenarios. Dr. Vincenzo de Florio, as EiC, is able to make the journal always interesting by selecting contribution that in other journals is hard to find integrated. – Gianluca Mazzini, University of Ferrara, Italy The burgeoning field of adaptive software systems is evidenced by the growing number workshops and conferences targeting this important research area. The International Journal of Adaptive, Resilient and Autonomic Systems (IJARAS) provides an excellent venue for the latest research involving adaptive and autonomic systems. As an author of an article published in the journal I have also appreciated the professionalism and courtesy extended to the article submitters. The editorial staff in general and Dr. Vincenzo De Florio were great to work with and timely in their reviews and responses to any questions that I had. – Joseph Hoffert, the King's University College, Canada
Promotional Video
Indices
Editor(s)-in-Chief Biography Mehdi Khosrow-Pour, D.B.A., received his Doctorate in Business Administration from the Nova Southeastern University (Florida, USA). Dr. Khosrow-Pour taught undergraduate and graduate information system courses at the Pennsylvania State University – Harrisburg for almost 20 years. He is currently Executive Editor at IGI Global (International Journal of Green Computing, International Journal of Library and Information Services, International Journal of E-Entrepreneurship and Innovation, and International Journal of Natural Computing Research, and is also the founding Editor-in-Chief of the Information Resources Management Journal, Journal of Electronic Commerce in Organizations, Journal of Cases on Information Technology, and the Journal of Information Technology Research, and has authored more than 50 articles published in various conference proceedings and scholarly journals., received his Doctorate in Business Administration from the Nova Southeastern University (Florida, USA). Dr. Khosrow-Pour taught undergraduate and graduate information system courses at the Pennsylvania State University – Harrisburg for almost 20 years. He is currently Executive Editor at IGI Global ( www.igi-global.com ). He also serves as Executive Director of the Information Resources Management Association (IRMA) ( www.irma-international.org ) and Executive Director of the World Forgotten Children’s Foundation ( www.world-forgotten-children.org ). He is the author/editor of more than 100 books in information technology management. He is also currently the Editor-in-Chief of theand, and is also the founding Editor-in-Chief of theand the, and has authored more than 50 articles published in various conference proceedings and scholarly journals.
Editorial Board Editor-in-Chief Emeritus Vincenzo De Florio, Vrije Universiteit Brussel and Vlaamse Instelling Voor Technologisch Onderzoek (VITO), Belgium International Advisory Board Surajit Bag, University of Johannesburg, South Africa https://orcid.org/0000-0002-2344-9551 Patrizia Grifoni, Institute Of Research On Population and Social Policies, National Research Council, Italy Maher Ben Jemaa, University of Sfax, Tunisia Angioletta Voghera, Politecnico di Torino, Italy Editorial Review Board Mohamed Bakhouya, Aalto University, Finland Chris Blondia, University of Antwerp, Belgium Jonas Buys, University of Antwerp, Belgium Gabriella Caporaletti, EICAS Automazione, Italy Llorenç Cerdà-Alabern, Universitat Politècnica de Catalunya, Spain Walid Chainbi, Sousse National School of Engineers, Tunisia Marcello Cinque, University of Napoli “Federico II”, Italy Domenico Cotroneo, University of Napoli “Federico II”, Italy Masoud Daneshtalab, University of Turku, Finland Rony Dayan, KnowAndManage Ltd, Israel, Israel Cristiano di Flora, Nokia Research Center, Finland Markus Endler, Pontifical Catholic University of Rio de Janeiro, Brazil Luca Foschini, Università di Bologna, Italy Stéphane Frénot, University of Lyon, France Lorenz Froihofer, Vienna University of Technology, Austria Ning Gui, University of Leuven, Belgium Tom Holvoet, University of Leuven, Belgium Geir Horn, Sintec System, Norway Eija Kaasinen, VTT Technical Research Centre of Finland, Finland Konrad Klöckner, Fraunhofer FIT, Germany Marc Leeman, Barco, Belgium Nicolas Letor, University of Antwerp, Belgium Zhe Ma, IMEC, Belgium Leo G Marcus, The Aerospace Corporation, United States Gianluca Mazzini, University of Ferrara, Italy Gabriele Mencagli, University of Pisa, Italy Eric Pardede, La Trobe University, Australia Massimiliano Rak, University of Naples, Italy Francesca Saglietti, University of Erlangen-Nuremberg, Germany Hong Sun, AGFA Research, Belgium David Taniar, Monash University, Australia Gianluca Tempesti, University of York, United Kingdom Andrew Tyrrell, University of York, United Kingdom Josef Van Vaerenbergh, Center for Multidisciplinary Approach and Technology, Belgium Hans Vangheluwe, University of Antwerp, Belgium Chao Wang, Oak Ridge National Laboratory, United States Xinheng Wang, Swansea University, United Kingdom Maarten Weyn, Artesis University College of Antwerp, Belgium Yan Zhang, Simula Research Lab, Norway
Society is currently experiencing the increasing population of “things,” able to autonomously link with each other and enact complex strategies to achieve tasks. The emergence of the Semantic Web, the Internet-of-Things, Ambient Intelligence, and cyber-physical societies make it impossible to capture the intricacies of the future highly dynamic and turbulent networks of interrelated computer-based and hybrid components. As such, it is important that systems are designed to self-adapt to changes without diverging from their intended functions as prescribed in their specifications. The mission of theis to offer awareness and visibility to novel techniques and methods to achieve self-adaptability and self-resilience when systems and organizations are deployed in environments where change is the rule rather than the exception. IJARAS is also a tool to enhance the awareness of the key role played by said techniques and methods: engineering self-adaptive and self-resilient systems and organizations is an urgent necessity to keep society resilient in the face of the technology that sustains it. The journal pursues its mission by addressing researchers, practitioners, engineers, educators, and professionals and by publishing novel results on each of the diverse components of such a complex and multi-disciplinary research problem.A MASS brawl erupted between two teenage cheerleading teams after an impromptu dance off turned nasty.
Parents waded into the fight between two high school cheerleading teams after the contest descended into violence. Hair was pulled, there were blows to the head and one girl was left with a fat lip after the tense dance battle boiled over. Worried parents streamed from the stands – at the US football game – but quickly became embroiled in the melee.
FOX 4 AGGRESSION: The trouble started with an aggressive dance
The two drill teams had stayed on the Dallas football pitch for an after hours dance battle. A 13-year-old member of the James Madison Trojanettes went up and performed an aggressive dance very close to a Shamyra Cooper – a 15-year-old member of the Wilmer Hutchins Blue Bells. Shamyra – who claims her personal space was invaded – turned her back on the dancer – who appeared to respond by flicking Shamyra's hair – and striking the back of her head.
FOX 4 TURN AROUND: Shamyra Cooper turns her back on the dancer
FOX 4 STRIKE: The dancer strikes Shamyra Cooper's head
“I immediately leaped over the rail and ran to the field – trying to get my baby. By that time it was chaos.” Mum Deshannon Roberts Temperatures rocketed in seconds – with parents flooding onto the scene – and blows were exchanged. Shamyra's mum – Deshannon Roberts – told Fox 4 News: “You do have a personal space in which you are supposed to respect. “That was not respected so it was heated at that point. "I immediately leaped over the rail and ran to the field – trying to get my baby. "By that time it was chaos.”
FOX 4 BRAWL: The fight descended into a general melee with parentsIf the legal marijuana industry is looking for accidental boosters, it may have just found two: U.S. Agriculture Secretary Tom Vilsack and former President Bill Clinton. In remarks to the Clinton Global Initiative in Denver -- just blocks away from the country’s first legal marijuana stores -- Vilsack noted that cannabis has become one of the most valuable commodities in American agriculture.
During an on-stage conversation with Clinton, Vilsack, a former governor of Iowa, recounted a recent visit to Milwaukee. He said a farmer there showed him some specialty commodities (not marijuana) "he was raising for local restaurants and grocery stores, and he said, 'you know, an acre of this sells for a million dollars.'” Vilsack then said: “With the exception of the state of Colorado and a few other states that have legalized another product, there are not very many commodities that you can plant, Mr. President, and then grow up to get a million bucks.”
“Dear Lord, that’s all I need is one more story,” Clinton said as the assembled crowd burst into laughter. He then poked fun at the controversy surrounding his paid appearances, saying, “If only the marijuana growers would invite me to give a speech.”
Colorado voters in 2012 passed an initiative to legalize marijuana for recreational use. In the first year of legalization, the state raked in $76 million in tax revenue and fees from the sale of the drug. Vilsack has said he is working with the Justice Department to permit the importation of hemp seeds for industrial production. In recent weeks, the U.S. House backed measures aimed at preventing the Justice Department from undermining state efforts to legalize marijuana.
“There’s unprecedented support on both sides of the aisle for ending the federal war on marijuana and letting states set their own drug policies based on science, compassion, health and human rights,” said Bill Piper, director of national affairs for the Drug Policy Alliance, which favors legalization.
Clinton’s light-hearted take on the marijuana issue comes almost a quarter-century after he became a lightning rod in the debate about the drug. In 1992, during his first run for president, he was asked about his own personal use and famously said, “When I was in England, I experimented with marijuana a time or two, and I didn’t like it -- and didn’t inhale and never tried it again.”Gold Prediction Technical Outlook:
Gold Prediction Conclusion:
Here is my(silver and gold mining stocks, should be the same) looking forward 24 months.Since the top in gold in 2011 gold has been selling off. Depending on how you analyze the market, this 3 year sell off could be seen as consolidation within a major cyclical bull market or that it’s in a bear market. But know this, either way, the outlook is bullish, and all gold has to do is find a bottom here and rally above the $1400 per ounce level. This would kick start a major feeding frenzy of gold buying.Gold bear market in the past have on average corrected 33% and lasted a total of 550 days. So if we look at the stats of the current pullback in gold it has dropped 38% and about 700 days long. Time for a bottom and bull market? It sure seems like it.You can see my recent report on the U.S. Dollar andGold remains in a down trend, but looks to be starting a possible stage 1 basing pattern. Technical analysis is pointing to strength as the MACD moving higher, relative strength, and the down trendline show price and momentum being bullish.A few weeks ago the chart completed a Golden Cross. This is not shown on the chart, but it is when the 50 SMA crosses above the 200 SMA. Investors tend to look at this as a major long term buy signal, although I do not use it for any of my analysis or timing of the market.If historical data, statistics, and technical analysis prove to be correct we can expect gold to rise. Myis for price to reach $2300 - $2500 per ounce within 24 months.The average gold bull market last roughly 450 days and posts a gain of 95%. So with the current correction which is beyond these levels already, expect price to firm up this year and complete the stage 1 base. Note that until gold breaks out of its Stage 1 Basing pattern, I will remain bearish/neutral on the metal. There is a huge opportunities else where unfolding.Chris VermeulenShortly after the passage of Citizens United, the group MovetoAmend.org began developing language for an amendment to correct the flawed conclusions of a 5-4 majority on the Supreme Court.
In October, 2011, as one of its first public policy actions, the General Assembly of Occupy Portland called for the end of corporate personhood. Occupy Portland established a working group to research and develop a policy. The group found that the MoveToAmend language was the best proposal out there, clearer and stronger than any of the amendments proposed in Congress at that time.
In December, 2011, Mayor Sam Adams published a draft resolution calling for an end to corporate personhood.
The draft proposal contained language that at first seems right, but has a critical flaw. It said that "corporations do not have the same Constitutional rights as people". This statement contains within it the assumption that corporations have some Constitutional rights, just not the same ones as real people. Occupy Portland and Move To Amend both worked hard to convince the staff that the resolution needed to state that corporations did not have any Constitutional rights at all; that all their rights spring from the acts of the legislature, not the Constitution.
In the end, our arguments won over the staff, and the resolution was changed.
We also worked hard to get the city to call for a vote of the people. In the cities that have voted on the issue, it has passed by 75-85% majorities. We wanted the city to put it on the ballot both to make a stronger statement and to provide a way to educate the citizens about the damage caused by the Citizens United decision. We got close: a commitment to start the ball rolling, but not yet a commitment to put it on the ballot.
The Mayor and Council also pointed out correctly that this is not an anti-corporate action; it's a pro-democracy action. There are hundreds of small corporations in Portland and they employ thousands of people. And they probably aren't spending any money on independent campaign expenditures.
Final Draft of the Resolution. (Official document not published yet.)
Of course these resolutions don't really change the law. But they cannot be completely ignored either. FDR said, "I agree with you; now make me do it." Portland now joins New York, Los Angeles, Seattle, Missoula, Madison, and Boulder in sending a message to Congress that they must move to overcome the court's decision. We ARE going to make them do it.
You are affirming that our democracy is of, by, for real people, and not a tool of artificial entities created for the convenience of investors. Corporations are not people and money is not speech.
Now on to the State Legislature!It was… a strange dream.
I was racing across a great field, untouched plains of gorgeous emerald spreading endlessly in every direction. The scenery flowed past me. I knew it was a dream, but the sensations I felt in these two legs were more real than anything else.
I ran.
I was running.
Further, ever further, in an unwavering line. Indecent sounds began pouring from my mouth. Never had I imagined that running on my own two feet could bring such pleasure and stimulation.
In the blink of an eye, the scene changed and I reached a cave at the foot of a beautiful mountain.
Ah… I know this… yes, I know the name of this mountain.
This was Mount Pelion, a famous tourist attraction in Greece, and in one of its caves dwelt the famous centaur Chiron, the great sage and pride of the Greeks who educated many heroes.
By this point, even I began to understand that this was the past of my Servant. Due to the connection between us, I could see into his memories during sleep. Of course, it was possible for me to decide to cut off these visions, but that would be a waste; if anything, I dove further down the hole, tuning my level of my consciousness. It took quite some time for me to adjust – not quite having done this sort of thing before – but now, whenever I dreamed, I would be able to see Chiron.
I could see the Chiron that I did not yet know.
As I approached the cave, a boy began running towards us, calling out “master!”
Was he one of his students?
The boy jumped lightly onto the rock next to us. Looking down at Chiron with some sort of anticipation, he spoke.
“Master, let’s go out and hunt!”
“We cannot.”
I began to laugh, seeing him pout at Chiron’s curt response. The boy was very handsome, one could say exceptionally so. He felt neither male nor female, instead appearing androgynous. Yet his words and manners clearly belonged to a boy, something that I as a sister knew very well.
“It is good that you enjoy the hunt. Considering your future, it is better to be good at it than to be poor. But is it a hunter that you aim to become? No, you wish to be a hero. No one would recognize a brute as a hero. It is not enough to learn your letters. A man with no sense of music or decorum brings only shame to himself.”
Despite his advice, it seemed the boy was still dissatisfied. With a difficult expression, he grumbled in affirmation. Although he could see the logic was correct and he should not speak out of selfishness, he also knew that the rest of his day would not be enjoyable. Seeing this, Chiron smiled wryly.
“However… being cooped up in a cave for an entire day must surely be unbearable torture to you. A compromise, then. Finish memorizing the rest of your words for today, and write them onto the slate. If you finish before nightfall, I will teach you how to fight in the dark.”
“Really?!”
“There are some risks, but I am sure you will be all right. And of course, that is assuming you can remember all your words by dusk.”
Naturally, the boy had no complaints. Laughing, Chiron put his hand on the head of the boy jumping for joy, who blushed but accepted it with a smile.
I felt envy for the boy – as well as shock. I knew that Chiron had a wife and daughters, but they were all close to divine beings. The boy, on the other hand, was overflowing with the radiance of humanity. However, Chiron’s behavior towards the boy was exactly that of a loving father to his son.
“Now, it is time for your lesson… Achilles.”
Achilles.
It can’t be…
But the boy did not deny this name. In other words, he was the Rider of Red, the great hero who was likely the most famous figure of all in our Holy Grail War.
Achilles was born from the hero Peleus and his wife, the sea goddess Thetis, and they opposed one another concerning their son. While Thetis wished to complete his godhood, Peleus believed that making his demigod son fully divine would destroy the human side of Achilles.
In the end, Thetis accepted his point of view, but left Peleus and Achilles, returning to her home on the ocean’s floor. Not even a son was enough to bind the goddess to the man.
Peleus decided to put young Achilles in the care of his old friend Chiron. After all, he was the son of a hero and a goddess, and Chiron was the greatest teacher that Peleus knew. Chiron readily accepted his friend’s request and began teaching all manners of things to this highly gifted boy. Words, songs, poems, virtues, and manners; how to hunt, fight, and ride horses; and even the art of healing.
To Achilles, forced to separate from his parents at a young age, Chiron must have been a stern, kind, and attentive father.
Likely because it was a dream, the past went by quickly. Achilles grew up before my eyes, becoming tall and powerful. The shaky thrusts of his spear became god-like blows. Like a freed horse, he was unstoppable and untameable, galloping across the fields and surpassing all obstacles with his swift feet.
He was also extremely knowledgeable, of course. In the wild, he could find edible plants and fruits with a single glance, and he knew the ways to treat injuries.
The way he behaved and held himself, both as a hero and in a royal court, was perfect.
Most surprising of all, Achilles was barely ten years old when he had accomplished all of this. What a figure he must have been, to reach this age and be told by Chiron that there was already nothing left for him to teach the boy.
In any case, it was time for them to part ways. Chiron and his wife Chariclo saw Achilles off as he began his journey.
“Master… lady Chariclo… thank you for coming this far with me.”
“Take care, Achilles. Stay safe and watch your health.”
Chariclo tearfully wrapped her arms around Achilles. |
stay with “Christopher” while his mother was away.
In the phone calls, Payne feigns the voice of a naïve young boy while the man seems to acknowledge that his behaviour has progressed from inappropriate to illegal.
“Your mom don’t know does she? She doesn’t go through your phone, does she?” he asks.
Payne assures him that he locks his phone and deletes all his messages.
“Your mom would probably have me locked up,” the man responds.
Payne then asks: “Do you think it’s okay for people older to date people my age?”
“I don’t see anything wrong with it,” the man responds. “But in today’s world, they really don’t go for that. But I’m cool with it.”
“The boy that I did have sex with, his thing wasn’t that big…how big is yours?” the man asks while Payne records the conversation from his car.
“I would love to see it,” the man continues, prodding who he believes is a 13-year-old boy for explicit photos.
“I like to look at pictures of little boys…on the internet,” he continues, trying to normalize the request. “I just like to look at their dicks.”
When Payne asks how old the boys are, the man responds: “Oh about your age…13, 14, maybe 15.”
“The boy that I did have sex with, his thing wasn’t that big…how big is yours?” the man asks while Payne records the conversation from his car.
Payne made plans to meet the man at the border, hoping to see him hauled away in handcuffs.
“He was the one who suggested coming here, so after he suggested he was going to come to Canada, we were basically going to call the police when he got here.”
But his plan unraveled when he accidentally posted the man’s telephone number online, leading to him being bombarded with thousands of calls.
Even though Payne’s plan didn’t come to fruition, he still believes the countless hours he spent chatting with the man from Alabama can offer parents valuable insight into the behaviour and grooming tactics of pedophiles.
“I feel there is some sense of something that can be taken from this,” he says. “A lot of parents get an inside look on how a predator will lure a child.”
“I was able to show everybody the inside look on how they talk to kids.”
Payne admits that speaking with an alleged predator for days on end can take a toll on his mental health, but he maintains it’s worth it.
After his lengthy correspondence with the man from Alabama, he was flooded with emotion for the victims, and potential victims that are out there.
“For the first time in a long time, I bawled my eyes out.”
“We are doing it to make a difference,” he insists. “To put a buffer between these guys and the kids.”If you ask most University of Idaho students if the athletics department is profitable, they would probably say “yes.”
They would be wrong.
Not only is the UI athletics department not profitable, it is subsidized more than 50 percent by the state and the university. The department is subsidized about $8 million, with program revenues making up $7 million of its $15 million budget for fiscal year 2017. It is also running at a projected deficit of $900,000 to $1 million, said Vice President of Finance Brian Foisy.
Foisy said many factors resulted in the deficit, the biggest of which being the loss of more than $500,000 in game guarantees. Other components included a loss in donations of about $320,000, which could be attributed to the decision to move to the FCS conference, and a lower amount of student fees supporting athletics due to a decline in enrollment, he said. Although, overall student enrollment actually increased this academic year by 3.6 percent, according to the UI Fall 2016 Enrollment Report.
And yet, a majority of students believe the athletics department is profitable, said Zachary Lien, a junior who spent six months compiling research on the subject. Lien surveyed more than 1,300 UI students and found about 62 percent of them believe the program is profitable without subsidies.
In reality, very few collegiate athletics programs across the country are profitable, Foisy said. But the assumption that the UI athletics department makes money for the university is not a thoughtless one to make. According to Lien’s report, university officials have perpetuated a false narrative that athletics is a profitable enterprise for at least 10 years.
Lien said the argument that the department was profitable became a common defense when the program was questioned. In a 2012 Argonaut article cited in the report, former Senior Associate Athletics Director Matt Kleffner used the argument while discussing student fees in relation to collegiate athletics.
“Not only do we write a check back to the university, but we bring in money from all the other student athletes — we bring in a lot of money to the university,” Kleffner said in the article.
In 2014, Director of Athletics Rob Spear said athletics generates revenue for the university in the form of tuition and fees paid by student athletes. But in Lien’s report, Spear said he could no longer make that argument.
“The subsidies will be greater than any payments made back to the institution,” Spear said in Lien’s report.
Spear was not available to comment to The Argonaut on Lien’s report.
Foisy said he is not sure why officials would claim athletics was profitable. Perhaps the people propagating the narrative used the term “profit” loosely, or even misused the term entirely, he said. However, Foisy said the athletics department does have an economic impact on the community in the amount of an estimated $34 million.
Lien said this figure likely comes from a 2011 report from economics professor Steven Peterson. Peterson told Lien that parts of the $34 million total were based on speculation. The report was not subject to academic review, Lien said.
Despite the common misconception that athletics is profitable, the program still has a projected $1 million deficit that the university aims to fix. In February, Foisy met with the Idaho State Board of Education (SBOE) to request the cap on institutional support be raised from $949,500 to $1,949,500 for the next four years to fill the deficit and to help ease the program’s transition from the FBS to the FCS.
Institutional support is one of the subsidies that comes directly from UI reserves, Foisy said.
“If SBOE approves this request, the cap would rise to $1,949,500 for the next four years, which would result in $4 million dollars of institutional support that could go to academic pursuits and institutions to, instead, go to UI Athletics,” Lien said in his report.
The SBOE delayed approving the request until the next meeting — which will be held in Moscow April 19-20 — because Foisy did not provide enough detail on what the university’s plan to fill the deficit would be if the request to increase the institutional support cap was not approved.
At the February SBOE meeting, Foisy said the athletics department proposed increasing student fees, which would help fill the deficit. The department proposed increasing fees by 3 percent, although the student fee committee only approved increasing student fees by 1.2 percent for athletics.
In the survey Lien conducted, he found only 5.8 percent of students want to increase student fees for athletics. That number dropped to just 2.7 percent when considering the students who knew athletics was not profitable.
Growing enrollment is a high priority for university administrators, and athletics is seen as helpful in this regard. Faculty Senate Chair Liz Brandt said athletics is a strong recruitment tool for the university in an interview with The Argonaut. But Lien found data that contradicted this claim.
When conducting research for his report, Lien said he found a study on the relationship between collegiate athletics and recruitment. The study found when collegiate athletics programs are extremely successful, it can have a positive impact on the number of applications the institution receives the following year — it’s called the “Flutie Effect.”
Lien said recent examples of the Flutie Effect happened with two of UI’s neighbors — Boise State University and Gonzaga University.
“Right now, Idaho is in the very interesting situation where the nearest football team and the nearest basketball team both were achievers of the Flutie Effect,” Lien said. “We really want it bad.”
Though this phenomenon is real, it is incredibly rare, Lien said. The same study also found that the same increase in applications can happen if tuition decreases by 3.8 percent or if the mean faculty salary increases by 5.1 percent.
UI President Chuck Staben said athletics also contributes to the university in the form of alumni donations.
“(Athletics) has roles in generating revenues that don’t come back to athletics,” Staben said. “So it certainly is a way we engage our alumni. And some of those alumni will donate back to athletics, but some of them will donate back to other things at the university.”
However, in researching academic literature on the subject, Lien found there is little correlation between the prominence of collegiate athletics programs and alumni donations. He said alumni donate significant sums to the university, but he saw no evidence that donations to academic programs are linked to the athletics program. The donations due to the success of athletics are often restricted to athletics, he said.
Foisy said athletics also influences the sense of identity people have at UI, and provides students and others in the community with a connection to campus. Beyond that, he said the program offers entertainment opportunities for residents.
“Let’s be honest, we’re in Moscow, Idaho, right? It’s not like there are a million other things that you might pick from,” Foisy said.
Lien wrote the report — not with the intent to damage UI athletics — but with the hope that it would raise awareness and increase transparency from the university. He said he encourages students who feel strongly about the issue to get involved.
“Put simply, you do not have to be an ASUI President or Senator to affect change at the University of Idaho,” Lien said in his report. “It takes the thought, contribution, and activism of typically uninvolved students to prompt real change.”
Erin Bamer can be reached at arg-news@uidaho.edu or on Twitter @ErinBamer
Read Lien’s full report here: Vandalized Perception (1)This Time is Different
I’ve been kicking around the idea of writing an essay on why this year will be different for the Cowboys, unlike so many others. I truly believe that they could win a Super Bowl. Of course, you can never know that as a certainty, as any number of wrinkles can get in the way: an injury to a star player, a single bad playoff game, or a team that is simply better. Still, on today, the start of training camp, I think it is worth reflecting on the last 25 years of Cowboys football, what it means to really love a team, and why regardless of what happens this year, the Cowboys should be competitive for a long time.
Where do I start? Some of you are much older fans than I, but my first real memory of the Cowboys was when they were playing the Bills in one of their Super Bowl match ups. We sat in the living room of our old house as a family and ate buffalo wings. Only being a child at the time, it seemed like this was exactly how life was supposed to work: the Cowboys were always the best team and of course it made perfect sense to eat buffalo wings. For a sports fan this was an idyllic childhood.
The first event which taught me that fandom was sometimes painful was the 1994 NFC Championship Game between the 49ers and the Cowboys. Remember, had they won this one, it was quite possible that they would have won four Super Bowls in a row. Perhaps not, maybe if they had won three in a row, the team doesn’t come back as motivated for the next. Anyway, my dad had to make a trip to his office so we listened to the start of the game on the radio in the car and then another part on an old durable-as-hell radio that might be sitting in that same spot today. Of course in that game the Cowboys dug themselves a 21-0 hole in the first quarter. They fought back, and if not for a missed PI call on Deion covering Irvin, the Cowboys may very well have pulled off the comeback. But it wasn’t to be. I remember watching the end of the game at home on the TV and specifically remember my mom complaining about how rude Steve Young was because he knocked over a reporter while making a victory lap around muddy Candlestick. This loss wasn’t particularly heartbreaking, it was just confusing. The Cowboys could lose?
The next year they won a Super Bowl and things were back to normal. It was only the year after that when it became obvious that the good times couldn’t last forever. Irvin got suspended for cocaine and didn’t make it back until late in the season. The Cowboys had to travel to Carolina to play an upstart Panthers team with a young Kerry Collins and a tight end that seemed like a god that day, Wesley Walls. As the time ran down on that defeat, I remember sitting there crying. It seems silly now, but my little mind just couldn’t get over it. This was a loss that really hurt, more so than others. The saddest thing might be that few at the time realized that it also signaled the end of a dynasty and that we wouldn’t see a great Cowboys team for another 20 years.
The next two coaching eras are known more for their futility than anything else. There was Randy Moss destroying the Cowboys on multiple occasions and showing why Jerry should have drafted him. Ironic for a team which has since made dance partners with characters like TO, Pacman Jones, and the less troubled but still controversial Dez and Randy Gregory, but Moss was Jerry learning a hard lesson.
These years also included an upset by Jake Plummer and the Cardinals in Texas Stadium (the Cardinals were never seen as anything more than a joke up until this point). There was the slow attrition of players who had been on those great teams; Irvin was done in 99, Aikman two years later. We had George Teague destroying TO after TO mocked the Star repeatedly (it’s easy in 2015 to forget just how much TO was hated around here at one point; he more than anyone else should be proof that winning forgives all sins). There were three 5-11 seasons, and the Year of Four Quarterbacks starring Quincy Carter, Clint Stoerner, Antony Wright, and Ryan Leaf. Things got so bad that I remember talking excitedly on the phone with a friend about a Chad Hutchinson overthrow. Sure, he overthrew his receiver by two yards, but boy did he have an arm!
Then, Along Came Parcells. 2003, while only modestly successful, was a light in the darkness. It was a memory that winning was possible. The first sign that things were different came on a Monday night game in New York when Quincy Carter threw for over 300 yards and the team willed itself to a come-from-behind victory on a Billy Cundiff field goal against a Giants team only a year and a half removed from a Super Bowl appearance. That was electrifying. There was the game that Emmitt returned to Texas Stadium as a Cardinal and Roy Williams destroyed his shoulder. There was an early match up with the Eagles where the great Randal Williams returned an attempted onside kick for a touchdown three seconds into the game. The Cowboys managed to hold on despite a late Eagles rally. I was there. I remember how into the game that whole crowd was, especially on the final drive by Philly. I remember some Eagles fan talking shit in the parking lot and getting punched in the face. Pro tip: don’t ever go to someone else’s stadium, get liquored up, and talk trash. It can’t end well.
That team ended up getting exposed as the season wore on: Miami scored at will on Thanksgiving and the Eagles were back on top of the division after a 36-10 drumming in at their place. Still, it is easy to forget how much talent was on that team. There was a healthy Darren Woodson, Dat Nyugen, Greg Ellis and others in their prime, as well as Roy Williams at his best and Terence Newman playing like a veteran even as a rookie. On offense Quincy Carter was getting compared to Donovan McNabb (it seems silly now, less so in his third season). Terry Glenn and Joey Galloway could still play at a high level, Witten was a rookie, and old greats like Flozell and Larry Adams were still around. Sean Peyton was the QB coach (for a laugh, check out this article just prior to the Cowboys breaking out last year), and Mike Zimmer was the DC. Ask Bengals and Vikings fans just how much they love him. Most importantly, 2003 was a return to some kind of competitiveness. Parcells said it best: “you can’t call us losers anymore” after a gritty win against the Panthers late in the year.
Partially thanks to Quincy loving white powder even more than Irvin had, 2004 was lost before it even started. Still, our first glimpse of Romo happened in a preseason game against the Raiders in which this brash, maybe naive, maybe obnoxious backup came in and drove his team all the way down the field before running a QB sneak in for a touchdown. I’m a little proud that I saw that live. Romo wouldn’t see true action that year, but we did see old man Testaverde give it his all and we got to hear commentators talk about how strong his legs were just about every game. We also got to see a rookie Julius Jones look like the next great Cowboys running back. He flashed that a few times in the coming years, but he never looked as elusive and electrifying as he did as a rookie. Perhaps unfairly, I’ll always believe that Parcells coached his natural talent out of him. Oh, and speaking of talent, we got to see a couple games of Drew Henson, Jerry’s heir apparent for the QB job. The delusional homerism of I and thousands of other naive souls will miss you, Drew.
The next year brought an new Drew, Drew Bledsoe. I don’t know that Cowboys fans ever really loved Drew. He was like that person you get into a relationship with because you just want a relationship. Nothing against that person (or Drew), but neither of you really like each other as much as someone else has or will. Bledsoe was always a Patriot first and foremost and he’s loved in New England in ways that he never was here. Still, Drew gave everything he had, and that’s all you can ask for. Along with Drew, 2005 brought a trend of maddeningly consistent inconsistency. There were some great moments, like a real demolition of the Eagles at home, as well as that impossible victory in Philly where Roy Williams intercepted a McNabb pass to no one in particular and took it to the “promised land” as he’d later say. On the other hand, there was a missed Jose Cortez field goal in Seattle and a missed Billy Cundiff field goal against the Broncos on Thanksgiving, both games that would wind up as losses. We really shouldn’t even talk about being up 13-0 and utterly dominating the Redskins in Dallas only to see Santana Moss catch two long bombs in the closing minutes. 2005 sucked because it could have been so much more, but as I said, it’s real lasting impact, aside from the drafting of Demarcus Ware, was the start of the Cowboys being a team that would win games they had no business winning and losing games everyone thought they were going to win.
With 2006 came the birth of Romosexuality. Tomes have already been written on Romo, but we have a much different outlook on him 9 years later than we did at the time. In 2006 it seemed as if he emerged out of nowhere to replace Bledsoe and become the next Staubach or Aikman. Even in his first extended action against the Giants, a game in which his first pass was an interception for a touchdown, you could tell he had something special. That was made concrete the next week on Sunday Night Football where Michaels and Madden specifically raved about his savvy. There was that great moment of him standing on the sideline with tears in his eyes as Parcells came by and touched him like a proud father. Fans stood outside the stadium that night chanting “Romo! Romo! Romo!”. As a proud Boys fan, that brought chills. There was his breakout on Thanksgiving with five touchdowns against the Bucs, where we also saw his predilection for famous women (Carrie Underwood at the time, Jessica would come later). There was that magic in the Meadowlands where Romo rolled to his left and found Witten forty yards down the field just over the shoulder of Antonio Pierce to put the them into field goal range for the win. Of course, that season ended on that muffed field goal in Seattle, and we’ll see that footage for the next 30 years. That play isn’t as haunting as the fact that Parcells has said that he thought they had something special that year. Had Greg Ellis not tore up his knee in garbage time in Arizona in December, maybe he’s right. Maybe the Cowboys win the Super Bowl that year and Romo’s legacy takes a drastic turn. It could have happened. Nobody else was especially scary that year. It’s too damn bad. No matter. We had found our Romo.
Thus began the Romo era. Unfortunately, for as brilliant as the Romo era has been at times, it has always let us down. Too often that is placed at his feet, but it is more of a reflection of the franchise as a whole. 2007 was greatness. It felt like the return of the old Cowboys after a decade of futility. But we all know how that ended. Despite moments like Nick “Folk Hero”’s winning field goal in Buffalo (where I found myself holding hands with a stranger before the kick, like a player on the sideline), and Joe Buck’s “and the legend of [Tony Romo] continues to grow”, we had other moments like a late season Eagles loss (with Jessica Simpson in attendance and the hoopla that ensued). We had Cabo and Bobby Carpenter. We had that miserable Giants game in the playoffs where the Cowboys just made stupid plays, like that scamper down the sideline by Amani Toomer for a touchdown. Finally, there was that last drive with a phantom intentional grounding call, the Patrick Crayton slow down on a sure touchdown (maybe a preview of Miles Austin’s similar slowdown against the Giants several years later), and the interception that ended it all. Close, but no cigar. The story of the Romo Cowboys.
Before we continue further, something needs to be said. People always criticize Romo on the fact that his teams have constantly come up short. They act like he’ll just never get it together or you can never win with him. What they miss is the only reason that the Cowboys are close at all is due to him. Even within a single game, there are four to five plays he makes that that most QBs cannot. Within a given season there are one or two plays that Romo, and only Romo, can. Take Romo off this team and replace him with an average quarterback or even a very good one, like Drew Bledsoe, and you lose another three to four games a year. If you are one of those fans who believe that Romo is the problem, I’m sorry to tell you, but you are wrong. We have year after year of clutch moments by him to prove it.
2008 was where the disillusionment started. Coming off that 2007 season, you had to figure that the Cowboys were going to the Super Bowl. Felix Jones and Mike Jenkins were added in the draft and Pacman Jones was added at a bargain price. This team had to be great. Through the first three games, this certainly seemed to be the case. Then, mostly due to a Romo injury, exacerbated by the decision to have Brad Johnson and Brooks Bollinger as backups, the season slipped away. A 44-6 stinker that presaged every 8-8 “playoff” game in the years to come sealed the deal on a disappointment of a season. 2008 started to write the story that Romo couldn’t win it all and the Cowboys would always be a giant tease.
2009 surprised everyone, though that was really just the 2008 team without injury problems. The first playoff win in a decade was a nice get. But that success wasn’t sustained the next year and Wade was gone. Thus began the Jason Garrett era which everyone knows had been in the wings since his hiring (before Wade) in 2007. Garrett was exciting. He looked like a head coach. He came from the old 90s dynasty. He was fresh blood. But that initial excitement could only go so far as we entered those three years of 8-8.
We started clamoring for Garrett’s head. What wasn’t obvious, unless you were really paying attention, is that Garrett was building something. Him, Jerry, Stephen, and Will McClay started shifting the roster from a bunch of overpaid veterans from the Parcell’s era to a young team built off of draft steals and forged first in the trenches. Jason was around for that dominant offensive line in the 90s and knew that it was key to continued success (and to the ability of Romo to stand up straight in his old age). His at times robotic persona and “three phases” of the game mantra, which seemed at first boring and then infuriating when the team wasn’t winning, slowly became instilled into the players. A team that had for years folded in big situations because it was so up and down slowly became steady and constant. When things would get good they wouldn’t eat the cheese (an old Parcellsism), but when things got bad, they wouldn’t panic.
I don’t want to talk too much about 2011-2013 because there’s not a lot to stay. Those Cowboys were still learning. 2013 was amazing simply for the fact that the defense was historically bad but somehow the team still managed to end up at.500. Everyone saw the Lions and Packers collapses. I’ll admit it, for the first time in my life, I stopped paying attention to the Cowboys. I turned off the Saints game at half because I realized I had better things to do with my life.
How could we have known 2014 was going to be different? Nobody but the biggest homer did. But this is where the shift in culture started to pay off. The first game seemed like a return to form. I turned off the TV in the first quarter out of disgust and tweeted that I had “standards”. Why waste your time on bad football? But I couldn’t help myself. Throughout the season I’d tune in until the old Cowboys apparently showed up and then I’d turn off the TV only to be goaded by a friend into turning it back on. Time after time, instead of folding like the Cowboys had in the past, the Cowboys showed something I’d never seen before. They showed poise and confidence. They showed heart and fire. Down 21-0 against the Rams they roared back. After blowing a lead against the Texans they showed some moxie and won in OT off a brilliant Romo to Dez connection (and that wasn’t even the best pass of the day). They went into Seattle and surprised everyone after going down 10-0. T. Will’s toe drag on the final drive still gives me chills. Down 11, the Cowboys came back in New York with a beautiful touchdown run by Beasley. Despite all these struggles, we had no idea that the real test was about to begin.
The team was already on a downward slide after losses to Washington and Arizona when Philly came into town on Thanksgiving and absolutely destroyed them. Still to come was December (the historically bad month) with games against very good teams: Chicago, Philly, Indianapolis. What happened next was incredible. The demolition of the Bears in Chicago on Thursday Night Football. The ability to come back and beat the Eagles after giving up a 21-0 lead and losing all momentum in Philadelphia. Making the Colts (an AFC Championship Game team) look silly and clinching, and then, in a reversal of 2007, Garrett went all in and played his starters in the last week of the season for a dominating performance against the Redskins. If we didn’t know this was a different team before, we knew it then.
In to town came Detroit. Would the Cowboys keep it up? I certainly didn’t look like it early. When they went down 14-0, I turned off the TV. Sorry, old habits die hard and it was hard to imagine the Cowboys coming back from this. But somehow they did. The magical long touchdown by T. Will before the half (something he’s becoming known for). Still, the Lions went up 20-7 in the third. Were the Cowboys really going to rally? Had they lost that way it would have been disappointing, but not surprising, and ultimately it still would have been a positive season. It was at this point that it was as if the team collectively shouted “No! No!” like Kurt Russell in Tombstone and decided that they were not going to lose. You saw the desire in the late great Demarco Murray’s face as he scored on 4th and 1 to make it a six point game. You saw it in continued stands by the defense. And finally, you saw it in that last fateful drive.
I didn’t know how that drive would end at the time, but that playoff game against the Giants during the 2007 season came to mind. Here was Romo at home with time running down and the ball in his hands driving for the winning score. Had he come up short I’m not sure that he’d ever overcome his now cementing legacy no matter how good his regular season had been. After the ball made it to midfield, Garrett put the game on the line on 4th down. Of course, they went to old faithful, Witten, who made the same move he’s made his whole career on a brilliant little juke over the middle. Finally, Romo threw that touchdown just before his pocket collapsed after what seemed like an interminable length of time. The crowed absolutely erupted, perhaps as loud as it has ever been at the new stadium. When Romo slapped the ground out of pure joy, you knew exactly how much it meant to him. His joy reflected our joy as fans. Here he was, here was Witten, here was Garrett, here was this team who, put in the same situation as the 2007 team, did something very different. The Dallas Cowboys and Tony Romo had exorcised their demons.
Of course, that game wasn’t sealed until D. Law pulls a Leon Lett and then totally redeems himself on the final drive. Fun fact: I was at that icy Thanksgiving game in 1993 when the Big Cat made one of his now legendary blunders. Unfortunately, all I remember was getting home and my laces being frozen due to jumping in cold puddles of water. Anyways, better we recall that then the Packers game the next week. That game could have turned on a few plays and it’s very possible that Seattle and New England could have been beaten, as hard as it may have been. When it gets down to it, I can’t get too upset about the Dez catch, as the only reason that was possible at all was because of a very favorable call for the Cowboys just the week before. Regardless, they went down swinging. As much as I wish they would have just pounded the ball on 4th and short, I love the guts it took to throw a deep pass down the sideline to the team’s greatest weapon, who very nearly made one of the great miracle catches of all time. There is no shame in that loss. In fact, if it does anything, it has placed a chip on the team’s shoulder, which is invaluable.
This brings us to the start of training camp. Will this team progress even further or will we just see a repeat of 2008? Outside of injury, I don’t see how this team could regress. Except for running back, the entire offense returns pretty much intact. Hell, it may have even improved with the signing of Collins in one of the great draft hauls of all time (3 first-round talents with the 27th pick). All teams rave about their players during the off season, but Dez’s time off may have helped T. Will turn into a more complete receiver. Irvin and Harper are back, baby. Perhaps Cole Beasley becomes an even more important part of this offense. The biggest question is obviously RB, but McFadden may have a career year and Randle’s speed might be the perfect compliment to this line that produces gaping holes.
Then there is the defense, which truthfully excites me more than any other part of this team. In Byron Jones, the Cowboys have added one of the elite athletic talents of this draft, not to mention a very intelligent player. I believe that at worst he will become a Terence Newman, in other words, a savvy veteran who plays for a long time. His ceiling is even higher. Randy Gregory almost certainly won’t dominate this year, but he has the ability in coming years, and as D. Law showed last year, rookies can start to pick things up towards the end of the season. Speaking of which, D. Law will be in his second year, which has the possibility for a real leap forward. The same goes for Hitchens who was a gem of a draft pick at linebacker last year.
There are also the veteran additions. Greg Hardy could be an elite pass rushing presence. Sean Lee, essentially an All-Pro player except for injury also returns. Everyone is low on Claiborne, but if we only performs as a second round pick instead of the top five pick he was, he’s a huge addition. With Marinelli driving, this could be a very, very good defense, something they were not last year in spite of that 12-4 record, great December, and playoff win.
That’s why I’m incredibly excited about this year. It’s not just the talent on the roster, it is also the mindset of the franchise as a whole, and that’s why I’m excited about the team in the coming years. It took Jerry a long, long time to learn some hard lessons, and god knows at times we all wanted a different GM no matter how good of an owner he has been. However, it seems with Garrett, his son, and Will McClay, Jerry finally has people around him that he really trusts. He has a nucleus of partners and a foundation to build on, which he hasn’t had since Jimmy left. Even when Jerry is gone, Stephen seems like he’s learned a lot of those same lessons from his father. We don’t really think of it this way, but sports franchises are pretty much the last remaining little kingdoms. You might have a great king or queen for a time, only to have their child be a complete moron and destroy everything. The best sports franchises have consistent ownership. The Steelers are a great example of this. It isn’t unthinkable that Stephen could own the team for forty years. If he’s a good owner, then the team should be consistent, and when you are talking about success, that’s what you need: consistency. The Patriots, Packers, and Steelers don’t win every year but they are almost always in the chase because they have a stable foundation. When you are always in the case, sometimes things go your way and you win a Super Bowl. It’s simple odds.
If the Cowboys don’t win it all this year, I truly believe that they’ll win one or two in the next decade. I don’t mean to eat the cheese, but I think that Garrett and company have built a foundation for success. I hope it is sooner rather than later, though. More than anything else Witten and Romo need one. They are two of the most deserving guys in the league. I would love to see Tony have one of those runs like Dirk’s 2011 playoff performance. If you don’t remember (and it can be hard to because opinion has shifted so dramatically), Dirk was labeled as soft and a choker, even though his stats said anything but. He shocked everyone and secured his legacy with that win. Dirk probably won’t win another championship, but it doesn’t matter. He will always be a legend for that short stretch of a sublime summer.
Tony is one of the greatest undrafted free agents ever. He has put this team on his back year after year and made it much better than it would be without him. Despite this, and no matter how good last year was, for him to take that next step and be great, he’s gotta win it all. On that last touchdown against Detroit you saw just how badly he wanted it. You saw how much it meant to him. Tony is not a choker, he’s not a loser, and more than anything else, I’d like for him to be able to prove it to everyone else, especially those idiots who have said for years that he isn’t good enough.
You see, sometimes you start to personally take on the story of your team or of a player. These loves which are completely irrational at their heart slowly start to seep into your life. You feel pain and joy based on how your team is doing. Hopefully sports aren’t the only driver off that in your life, but in the right amounts they can lend some kind of weight or perspective. A franchise or season becomes a kind of soundtrack of your life. This isn’t a new idea. Go watch Invincible or Silver Linings Playbook or Fever Pitch or a number of other movies which connect life, love, and sports. As silly as it is, a team can literally change the mindset of a single person or an entire region. It can give a little hope and pride that wasn’t there before.
My profession is computer programming, so I talk to a bunch of very intelligent people who hate sports because they were at best ignored by by athletic douchebags for most of their life. When they ask how I can love sports, this is why: sports are some of the purest comedies, dramas, and tragedies around. When you see an old veteran get beat around year after year but still keep going to work, when you see a team that’s always a loser, you want nothing more than to see them overcome. You root for them. Those are the stories, the people that we love most. It isn’t those who had it all and succeeded because of that whom we adore. We might respect them but we can never really love them. It’s those individuals, those groups whom despite failure after failure surprise the hell out of everyone and succeed. Those are the stories we care about. Those stories give us a little hope that it can happen in our own lives.
So, recognizing just how irrational sports fandom is, I hope Tony, I hope Witten, I hope Jerry and I hope Jason pull this off. I hope this team can show us that |
ones he loves.Posted April 4, 2016 at 1:01 am
Ways to increase your odds of persuading people, robots, and mutants through speech in the Fallout universe:
- Wear sexy clothing
- Drink the right booze
- Consume other questionable substances
- Wear the right hat
- Wear ridiculous glasses
- Locate a bobblehead
- Be given, but not necessarily do anything with, a bear necklace
- Intensely train your charisma
- Read magazines about meeting people
- Find and consume copies of a particular book
- Read a book intended for infants
- Surgically implant simulated empathy into your skull
Note that context makes absolutely no difference as to whether any of the above will improve your chances. All of them will help regardless of who you're talking to or what you're trying to persuade them about.The French government has launched an inquiry after a study by the health authorities revealed that an additive used in toothpaste, sweets, and chewing gum can cause precancerous lesions in laboratory rats.
A report by France’s National Institute of Agricultural Research (INRA) from Friday states that the study results show “for the first time that E171 crosses the intestinal barrier in animals and reaches other parts of the body.”
The additive E171, or titanium dioxide, is used for whitening of products and is found in sweets, chocolate products, cookies, chewing gum, and food supplements, as well as in pharmaceutical products and toothpaste.
Read more
The study is a part of the Nanogut project, financed by the French Agency for Food, Environmental and Occupational Health & Safety (ANSES). The results were published in the journal Nature.
The scientists said they exposed rats to “regular oral doses” of titanium dioxide through drinking water for 100 days. They said they later found dioxide particles in the animals’ livers.
“The researchers also showed that chronic oral exposure to the additive spontaneously induced preneoplastic lesions in the colon, a non-malignant stage of carcinogenesis, in 40% of exposed animals [rats],” a statement from INRA says.
“While the findings show that the additive plays a role in initiating and promoting the early stages of colorectal carcinogenesis, they cannot be extrapolated to humans or more advanced stages of the disease.”
IRNA says that exposure to titanium dioxide is a concern, especially in children “who tend to eat a lot of sweets.”
“These results indicate that E171 both initiates and promotes the early stages of colorectal carcinogenesis in animals”
These findings should prompt the continuation of “observations at a later stage of cancer,” the researchers said.
“They provide new data for evaluating the risks of the E171 additive in humans,” the study concludes.
The report was reviewed by France's ministers of health, agriculture, and economy, who called upon ANSES to investigate whether E171 poses a risk for human health. ANSES is scheduled to complete the investigation by the end of March 2017.
The US Food and Drug Administration states that E171 should be consumed at levels of no more than one percent of the product’s weight.
The information, however, has not been renewed since 1966.Description
High school student Ibuki Keita has been haunted by misfortune for as long as he can remember. For no apparent reason, everyone around him dies tragically. Ultimately, he refuses to become too close to anyone, even his childhood friend Akane. This leaves Keita alone in a life full of misery and disgrace.
While eating at his favorite ramen shop one evening, Keita meets a strange young girl named Kuro. Possessing abilities that surpass that of a normal human being, Kuro classifies herself as a Mototsumitama. She explains to Keita about “Terra”, a life-energy force split between three identical looking people; a global phenomenon dubbed the “Doppeliner System”. As a Mototsumitama, Kuro guards the “Coexistence Equilibrium”, the beings that protect the flow of Terra around the world. Keita refuses to believe her story, until he is caught up in the crossfire of this hidden world. On the verge of death, he makes a contract with Kuro, unbeknownst to its true meaning. Now he is bound to Kuro, and must be with her at all times. Could Keita's misfortune possibly get any greater?
[Written by MAL Rewrite]It’s like Hooters, only with guns and Jesus: Gun toting waitresses serving gun loving customers in what must be a delicious wet dream for America’s ammosexuals.
Folks at Shooters Grill, in Rifle, Colorado, are proudly clinging to their guns and Bibles, as pretty ladies packing loaded firearms serve heaping plates to Bible thumping, gun loving, locals.
USA Today reports:
All nine of the servers at the restaurant pack heat as they shuttle plates of food to diners, from Glock semi-automatics to Ashlee Saenz’s thigh-length Rueger Blackhawk.357 six-shooter. On the wall, posted alongside copies of the Declaration of Independence and Bill of Rights, is a sign declaring that those inside are still “proudly clinging to my guns and Bible.”
Owner Lauren Boebert said:
“I consulted with my Christian friends and everyone said ‘Shooters’ sounded like a bar or a strip joint. But I thought, this is Rifle — it was founded around guns and the Old West. We called it Shooters and started throwing guns and Jesus all over the place.” “We don’t worship guns. We worship Jesus. We’re here to serve people.” “Customers love that they can come here and express their rights,” Boebert explained. “People can come in carrying their gun, and they can pray over their food.”
Keeping with the Christian theme, no alcohol is served at the restaurant.
The waitresses’ guns are loaded, but they’re under strict orders to keep safeties on and their weapons holstered “unless there’s a darn good reason to draw.”
In what must be every ammosexual’s dream come true, menu items include the M16 burrito, the Swiss and Wesson grilled cheese, and Locked and Loaded nachos.MOSCOW — The Kremlin’s much-vaunted “pivot to China” takes another big step forward Saturday when Russian President Vladimir Putin arrives in Beijing on a state visit that Moscow hopes will strengthen relations between the countries and provide a boost to Russia’s tanking economy.
The visit offers Mr. Putin a welcome break from a string of challenges elsewhere, but whether the Chinese will be such accommodating hosts is another question.
Mr. Putin is in talks with President Xi Jinping in Beijing after the European Union agreed this month to extend energy, financial and defense sanctions against Russia over the Kremlin’s annexation of Crimea in 2014. The United States also extended a sanctions program in May. Paired with low global prices for oil, the sanctions have slashed the value of the ruble by half against the dollar since 2014, while inflation and falling wages have plunged millions of people into poverty.
Among a number of deals expected to be signed during Mr. Putin’s visit are a multibillion-dollar loan by Chinese banks to help build a high-speed rail link between Moscow and the Volga River city of Kazan. In April, two Chinese state banks agreed to provide Moscow with more than $12 billion in loans to develop a liquefied natural gas plant in the Russian Arctic. Details of the first part of that loan are expected to be finalized during Mr. Putin’s stay in Beijing.
Mr. Putin has been eager to talk up the potential of Chinese-Russian action in trade, security and challenging the U.S.-dominated international order that Moscow and Beijing resist.
“To say we have strategic cooperation is not enough anymore,” Mr. Putin told the official Chinese Xinhua News Agency in a pre-trip interview. “This is why we have started talking about a comprehensive partnership and strategic collaboration. ‘Comprehensive’ means that we work virtually on all major avenues; ‘strategic’ means that we attach enormous intergovernmental importance to this work.”
High-level discussions also are expected on the proposed sale to China of a 19.5 percent stake in Russia’s state-owned Rosneft oil company. Such a deal would be worth $11 billion to Russia.
“We need the money,” Mr. Putin acknowledged this week. Rosneft’s chairman, Igor Sechin, is part of the Russian delegation traveling to Beijing.
As tensions with the West escalate over conflicts in Ukraine and Syria, Moscow has increasingly sought closer ties with Beijing. In May 2014, just months after Russian troops seized Crimea from Ukraine, Mr. Putin presided over the signing of multiple deals in Beijing, including a landmark 30-year contract to sell natural gas to China worth $400 billion. That was followed by the purchase of a stake in Russia’s Sibur energy company by the Chinese company Sinopec. In September, during a visit to Beijing, Mr. Putin said Chinese-Russian relations had “reached a peak in their entire history.”
There is a growing awareness in Moscow, however, that China is unable and unwilling to provide a quick fix for Russia’s myriad economic problems.
“The euphoria has come down, and everybody understands that we cannot expect quick progress in economic relations with China,” said Fyodor Lukyanov, a well-connected political analyst in Moscow and editor of Russia in Global Affairs, a foreign policy journal. “This Russian rebalancing to Asia is a long-term process that will take years.”
Declining trade
The dramatic devaluation of the Russian currency and the worldwide collapse in oil prices have sparked a sharp decline in Russian-Chinese trade, which is projected to be $60 billion this year compared with $100 billion in 2014. Plans to open oil and gas fields in Siberia and construct more China-bound pipelines have not gone beyond the planning stages, mainly because of Beijing’s wariness over low energy prices.
“The Chinese and Russians are more or less clear that China has no capacity to bail out Russia,” said Alexander Gabuev, an Asia analyst at the Carnegie Moscow Center think tank. “Firstly, because it requires a lot of capital, but also because it requires a lot of interest from Chinese investors, who remain wary of the state of mismanagement of the Russian economy, which creates a lot of risks, no matter how much money you pour on the problem. China also has an oversupply of everything right now.”
Along with economic arrangements, Russia and China have intensified cooperation between their armed forces.
In May, Moscow and Beijing held their first computer-aided missile defense drills. This month, in a highly symbolic move, the Chinese and Russian navies sailed into disputed waters near the Diaoyu islands — known as the Senkakus in Japan — in the East China Sea. The islands are administered by Japan but claimed by China and Taiwan.
Most significantly, perhaps, Russia has sold China its cutting-edge S-400 surface-to-air missile system. The advanced system has a range of 250 miles and would allow China to strike any target in Taiwan. It also would boost China’s capabilities if the missiles were placed on Beijing’s artificial islands in the South China Sea. The United States has accused China of militarizing the South China Sea, while Beijing has lashed out against what it says are provocative American naval patrols and exercises in the region.
Anti-Americanism has also united the two countries, but sheer pragmatism makes it unlikely that Moscow and Beijing will enter into any formal military alliance against the United States.
“They will maintain some symbolic posture, some flag-waving, but they will refrain from any real action,” said Mr. Gabuev. “China doesn’t want to be dragged into a confrontation with the West over something as unimportant for it as Ukraine, while Russia feels the same over the South China Sea.”
The diverging interests is one reason the Obama administration has taken a relatively low-key approach to Mr. Putin’s regular visits to Beijing, analysts said.
“Russia would like to present Sino-Russian relations as balancing or a bulwark against the West, but this notion is more posturing than reality,” Agnia Grigas, senior fellow at the Atlantic Council, recently told Newsweek magazine. “It is Russia that needs this relationship more, both for pragmatic and political reasons.”
China will be keen to enlist Russia’s support for its “One Belt, One Road” development strategy. The ambitious project, a rival to the Washington-led Trans-Pacific Partnership free trade pact, is an attempt to build a trade and infrastructure network from China to Western Europe and Africa. Russia’s backing for the project is viewed as key in Beijing given Russia’s influence over Balkan region states.
Mr. Putin and Mr. Xi “understand each other, maybe even like each other,” said Nadine Godehardt, a China analyst at the German Institute for International and Security Affairs in Berlin. “They have probably the same view on many things, but Xi Jinping has his own agenda, and it’s very clear: He wants to implement the Belt and Road initiative, and he needs Russia for that.”
Copyright © 2019 The Washington Times, LLC. Click here for reprint permission.---
2017.10.
Bran's Dream, from "A Game of Thrones" Chapter 17, the most magic moment in book one.It is with great pity that the TV series remove this prophetic dream. Bran's chapters always my favorite, so I drew this dream in a TV version.Excerpts form the book:LOOK DOWN!Bran looked down, and felt his insides turn to water. The ground was rushing up at him now. The whole world was spread out below him, a tapestry of white and brown and green. He could see everything so clearly that for a moment he forgot to be afraid. He could see the whole realm, and everyone in it.He saw Winterfell as the eagles see it, the tall towers looking squat and stubby from above, the castle walls just lines in the dirt. He saw Maester Luwin on his balcony, studying the sky through a polished bronze tube and frowning as he made notes in a book. He saw his brother Robb, taller and stronger than he remembered him, practicing swordplay in the yard with real steel in his hand. He saw Hodor, the simple giant from the stables, carrying an anvil to Mikken’s forge, hefting it onto his shoulder as easily as another man might heft a bale of hay. At the heart of the godswood, the great white weirwood brooded over its reflection in the black pool, its leaves rustling in a chill wind. When it felt Bran watching, it lifted its eyes from the still waters and stared back at him knowingly.He looked east, and saw a galley racing across the waters of the Bite. He saw his mother sitting alone in a cabin, looking at a bloodstained knife on a table in front of her, as the rowers pulled at their oars and Ser Rodrik leaned across a rail, shaking and heaving. A storm was gathering ahead of them, a vast dark roaring lashed by lightning, but somehow they could not see it.He looked south, and saw the great blue-green rush of the Trident. He saw his father pleading with the king, his face etched with grief. He saw Sansa crying herself to sleep at night, and he saw Arya watching in silence and holding her secrets hard in her heart. There were shadows all around them. One shadow was dark as ash, with the terrible face of a hound. Another was armored like the sun, golden and beautiful. Over them both loomed a giant in armor made of stone, but when he opened his visor, there was nothing inside but darkness and thick black blood.He lifted his eyes and saw clear across the narrow sea, to the Free Cities and the green Dothraki sea and beyond, to Vaes Dothrak under its mountain, to the fabled lands of the Jade Sea, to Asshai by the Shadow, where dragons stirred beneath the sunrise.Finally he looked north. He saw the Wall shining like blue crystal, and his bastard brother Jon sleeping alone in a cold bed, his skin growing pale and hard as the memory of all warmth fled from him. And he looked past the Wall, past endless forests cloaked in snow, past the frozen shore and the great blue-white rivers of ice and the dead plains where nothing grew or lived. North and north and north he looked, to the curtain of light at the end of the world, and then beyond that curtain. He looked deep into the heart of winter, and then he cried out, afraid, and the heat of his tears burned on his cheeks.Now you know, the crow whispered as it sat on his shoulder. Now you know why you must live.“Why?” Bran said, not understanding, falling, falling.Because winter is coming.Bran looked at the crow on his shoulder, and the crow looked back. It had three eyes, and the third eye was full of a terrible knowledge. Bran looked down. There was nothing below him now but snow and cold and death, a frozen wasteland where jagged blue-white spires of ice waited to embrace him. They flew up at him like spears. He saw the bones of a thousand other dreamers impaled upon their points. He was desperately afraid.“Can a man still be brave if he’s afraid?” he heard his own voice saying, small and far away.And his father’s voice replied to him. “That is the only time a man can be brave.”Now, Bran, the crow urged. Choose. Fly or die.Death reached for him, screaming.Bran spread his arms and flew.Wings unseen drank the wind and filled and pulled him upward. The terrible needles of ice receded below him. The sky opened up above. Bran soared. It was better than climbing. It was better than anything. The world grew small beneath him.“I’m flying!” he cried out in delight.I’ve noticed, said the three-eyed crow. It took to the air, flapping its wings in his face, slowing him, blinding him. He faltered in the air as its pinions beat against his cheeks. Its beak stabbed at him fiercely, and Bran felt a sudden blinding pain in the middle of his forehead, between his eyes.“What are you doing?” he shrieked.The crow opened its beak and cawed at him, a shrill scream of fear, and the grey mists shuddered and swirled around him and ripped away like a veil, and he saw that the crow was really a woman, a serving woman with long black hair, and he knew her from somewhere, from Winterfell, yes, that was it, he remembered her now, and then he realized that he was in Winterfell, in a bed high in some chilly tower room, and the black-haired woman dropped a basin of water to shatter on the floor and ran down the steps, shouting, “He’s awake, he’s awake, he’s awake.”---My drawing with the same ASOIAF" Bran s Dream" theme 4 years ago: sharksden.deviantart.com/art/B… ( Warning! Completely different style---I can't believe it! I got another DD, in halloween!Thank you! Thank you for all~The English Premier League is working to design new software which will stop piratical football fans uploading footage of goals to Vine or social media.
It has apologised for being a "killjoy" after warning fans that spaffing images of goals all over the internet is a breach of copyright.
Now it is developing software to search and destroy illegal videos of balls hitting the back of nets.
Dan Johnson, director of communications at the Premier League, said: "You can understand that fans see something, they can capture it, they can share it, but ultimately it is against the law.
"It's a breach of copyright and we would discourage fans from doing it, we're developing technologies like gif crawlers, Vine crawlers, working with Twitter to look to curtail this kind of activity."
He added: "I know it sounds as if we're killjoys but we have to protect our intellectual property."
Balls are big business in Blighty, with BSkyB and BT locked into a vicious struggle to win the eyes of footie fans across the nation.
Just last year, BT splurged £900m for the rights to screen UEFA Champions League and UEFA Europa League football matches, adding to the whopping £738m it previously spent on screening 38 live Premier League games on BT Sport.
The online rights are owned by Rupert Murdoch's The Sun and The Times newspapers, which both skulk behind paywalls and want football action to stay as hidden as the rest of their content.
Dean Scoggins, deputy head of sport at The Sun, told the Beeb: "It's important to underline that it's illegal to do this, we've obviously signed a very big deal with the Premier League to be a rights holder and to show it, we've got legal teams talking with them about what we can do."
The other key battle in the footie world is between the officially sanctioned networks and pirates offering games for free over the internet.
Last year, the Premier League won a court order forcing UK ISPs to block footie streaming service FirstRow1.eu in the UK. ®A Cheyenne River Sioux Tribe leader issued a damning response Wednesday to President Donald Trump’s “Pocahontas” slur earlier this week during an event meant to honor Navajo Code Talkers.
Harold Frazier, chairman of the South Dakota-based tribe, said he was “deeply ashamed” of Trump’s “disgusting” treatment of the World War II veterans and appeared to suggest that the president should resign.
“The President of the United States had an opportunity to honor veterans and bridge gaps in the relationship Tribes have with the Federal government,” Frazier said in a statement sent to HuffPost. “Instead, he chose to disgrace himself, his position and the nation he represents.”
Frazier continued, “The President of the United States wanted to utilize an opportunity to honor native warriors who defended this land to make a political attack. I have one for him, leave the office you bought and take your swamp things with you.”
For many Native Americans, Trump’s racist remark was a reminder of the trauma they have faced since European colonization began in the 1600s.
“We have been forced to learn the way of the American life,” Frazier said. “We have learned American religions, language, economy, politics and society.... The President’s comments are another reminder that we are not allowed to participate.”
Frazier also pointed out that sexual assault and abuse, much like the violence that the real Pocahontas endured, affect Native American women atstaggering rates.
“What happened to Pocahontas is still happening today to our women,” Frazier said. “Native American women continue to be victims of rape and exploitation by white men. The President of the United States is practicing that by exploiting native women as an insult for political machismo.”
Trump hasn’t addressed the outpouring of condemnation he’s received fromNative American leadersandU.S. lawmakerssince Monday.
Read Frazier’s full statement below:
I am deeply ashamed of the way the President of the United States has treated the veterans during an honoring ceremony at the White House. Veterans are brave heroes who sacrificed everything, despite the historical trauma to tribal nations, when asked to defend the United States. Absolutely nothing should have taken away from honoring the veterans for their contributions to the war that ensured the American way of life. The President of the United States had an opportunity to honor veterans and bridge gaps in the relationship Tribes have with the Federal government. Instead, he chose to disgrace himself, his position and the nation he represents. It has been more than 200 years of living together yet the President of the United States knows nothing about us. We have been forced to learn the way of the American life. We have learned American religions, language, economy, politics and society. We all share in following the American dream of life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness. A dream that all of those things we learn about, try to keep us from achieving. The President’s comments are another reminder that we are not allowed to participate. Pocahontas was only a child when she became a victim of rape, kidnapping, imprisonment, and her forced conversion to Christianity. What happened to Pocahontas is still happening today to our women. Native American women continue to be victims of rape and exploitation by white men. The President of the United States is practicing that by exploiting native women as an insult for political machismo. Pocahontas is beloved by native people and is recognized as a victim of European colonialism. To use her name in that manner is disgusting and reflective of the President of the United States’ ignorance. This President of the United States does not deserve to represent the American people if he cannot acknowledge the contributions of the people who make America great. The President of the United States has shown no responsibility when caring for American resources or the people. An apology is in order for the warriors that were present, to the native nations and the United States for his behavior. The President of the United States wanted to utilize an opportunity to honor native warriors who defended this land to make a political attack. I have one for him, leave the office you bought and take your swamp things with you.
This article originally appeared on HuffPost.great bird food
Birds in the Maritimes are starving, unable to find food in deep snow
Find Your Forecast Search for a location
Katie Jones
Digital Reporter
Saturday, April 11, 2015, 3:36 PM - Maritime residents are being asked to come to the aid of starving birds across the region in the midst of persisting cold temperatures and heavy snow.
Piles of snow left behind by months of wintry storms still cover much of the ground across the Maritime provinces, preventing birds from foraging for food.
The issue has become a growing concern as it coincides with the beginning of spring. A lack of proper food sources is taking the greatest toll on migratory birds that have recently returned from the south.
The delayed start to the spring season is hindering birds from getting to the bugs, worms and seeds that they typically feast on at this time of year.
RELATED: Starving sea lions washing up in huge numbers
Robins, sparrows and woodcocks are among those being found starving or dead by local residents, and that population numbers of smaller birds are especially at risk.
Owls are also being affected, as mice are also scarce because of snow cover and cold.
Lots of starving birds in the maritimes right now. Putting out birdseed, fruit and even cooked ground meat will help. pic.twitter.com/UDGWIIx2Wl — Maya Groner (@maya_groner) April 10, 2015
Veterinarians are asking for the public's help in coming to the aid of the winged creatures while wintry conditions persist.
They recommend spreading seeds and fruit, and even putting out worms if possible. Clearing an area of snow on lawns will also help the frozen ground thaw, enabling birds to get at food in the fresh earth. Anyone who finds an ailing bird is advised to place it in a small, warm box and bring it to a nearby animal shelter.
Conditions are expected to improve for the Maritimes provinces leading into mid-April, with no further snow accumulation in the short-term forecast.
"Temperatures will be more reminiscent of spring this week, with seasonal or above seasonal conditions over the next five days," explains Weather Network meteorologist Brett Soderholm. "There is a chance of rain by next weekend, which should help wash away some of the lingering snow in the region and soften the ground."
Source: CBC
MUST SEE: Squirrel takes GIANT leap of faith for bird feederNew documents reveal that Donald Trump Jr. was in touch with WikiLeaks for nearly a year — and the Trump campaign knew all about it.
On Veterans Day weekend, Donald Trump doubled down on his attacks against the Russia investigation by claiming that Putin told him he had “nothing to do with” interference in the 2016 presidential election.
But a bombshell trove of emails obtained by the Atlantic reveal that Trump’s own son was in contact with WikiLeaks — an organization that played a key role in Russia’s influence operation — for nearly an entire year:
The messages, obtained by The Atlantic, were also turned over by Trump Jr.’s lawyers to congressional investigators. They are part of a long—and largely one-sided—correspondence between WikiLeaks and the president’s son that continued until at least July 2017. The messages show WikiLeaks, a radical transparency organization that the American intelligence community believes was chosen by the Russian government to disseminate the information it had hacked, actively soliciting Trump Jr.’s cooperation.
This in and of itself is incredible in its sheer brazenness, but Trump Jr. took it one step further.
According to an anonymous source speaking to the Atlantic, “on the same day that Trump Jr. received the first message from WikiLeaks, he emailed other senior officials with the Trump campaign, including Steve Bannon, Kellyanne Conway, Brad Parscale, and Trump son-in-law Jared Kushner, telling them WikiLeaks had made contact. Kushner then forwarded the email to campaign communications staffer Hope Hicks.”
The conversations between WikiLeaks and Trump Jr. are incredibly damning.
In one conversation, WikiLeaks urged Trump Jr. to have his father tweet out links to the hacked emails of Clinton campaign chair John Podesta — emails that forensic evidence proves were stolen by Russian hackers. Trump tweeted about the Podesta emails 15 minutes later.
In another, WikiLeaks asked if they could publish Trump’s tax returns, because it would “improve the perception of our impartiality,” and “the vast amount of stuff that we are publishing on Clinton will have much higher impact, because it won’t be perceived as coming from a ‘pro-Trump’ ‘pro-Russia’ source.”
WikiLeaks even asked Trump Jr. on Nov. 8, 2016, to have his father “contest” the election results as “rigged” if he lost — something he had repeatedly threatened to do — and to pressure Australia to name WikiLeaks’ international fugitive founder Julian Assange as their ambassador to the United States.
The idea that Trump Jr. not only had these conversations, but actually relayed the details of them to key Trump campaign advisers — none of whom apparently found anything wrong with what was going on — is mind-boggling.
These documents not only reveal the utter cluelessness of Trump Jr., they also put the lie yet again to any claim on the part of Trump and his associates that there was no attempt to collude with Russia. His own son was doing it openly — and his campaign let it happen.
Every time the American people learn more about the Trump campaign’s contact with hostile foreign actors, it raises more questions. It is time to get answers — and accountability.The Cubs have announced the signing of second-round choice Donnie Dewees. Bonus information has not yet been reported.
Dewees was taken 47th overall out of the University of North Florida. That draft slot comes with a $1,292,100 allocation (info via Baseball America).
The Cubs have added a player that MLB.com and Kiley McDaniel of Fangraphs rated the 35th-best available prospect. While Dewees does not come with any particularly loud tools, he’s a consistent performer who could potentially play center field.
Providing somewhat less optimistic rankings were Baseball America (66th) and ESPN.com’s Keith Law (73rd). Law acknowledges that Dewees is an excellent pure hitter and good runner, but questions his his ultimate power capabilities and overall upside. BA adds that Dewees is already nearly 22 years old, noting that it remains to be seen whether he can stick in center.
Chicago’s already-reported signings from the first ten rounds of the draft have delivered some fairly significant savings to the club. It may need that bonus pool availability to make a run at high school picks such as third-rounder Bryan Hudson and fourth-round selection Darryl Wilson.In the latest twist in a high-profile murder trial in India, prosecutors say a Delhi couple accused of killing their daughter and cook should not be given access to test results that may have shown the involvement of three other men. Nor, prosecutors argued, should they be allowed to call witnesses in their defence. Aarushi Talwar murder: The inside story of India’s most controversial trial
A snapshot of Aarushi Talwar in her younger and happier days. ( Toronto Star photo )
The dozen or so witnesses the defence sought to call were “irrelevant,” R.K. Saini told a district court Thursday. Any attempt to call other witnesses was a delaying tactic and should also be rejected, he said, and the request for scientific records was a waste of the court’s time. India’s central investigative agency, the CBI, accuses Rajesh and Nupur Talwar, both dentists, of coming across their only child, 13-year-old Aarushi and 45-year-old live-in male cook, Hemraj Banjade, in her bedroom and killing them in a fit of rage five years ago. The lead investigator testified that Rajesh hit Hemraj on the head with a golf club and accidentally killed his daughter. Nupur and he then dragged Hemraj’s body to the roof terrace and slit his throat with a “surgical” instrument, A.G.L. Kaul said. The couple came back downstairs, slit their daughter’s throat, and wiped out all evidence.
Article Continued Below
“Every day gets more difficult,” the child’s mother, Nupur, tells me. She is my cousin — our mothers are sisters — and in January, I wrote at length about the murders at www.thestar.com/aarushi. Prosecutors took one year to make their case, calling 39 witnesses. A doctor who conducted the post-mortem on Hemraj told court that the dead man’s erect penis was evidence that sexual activity was either about to take place or was taking place. This knowledge, said the doctor, did not come from any scientific authority, but was based on his experience as a married man. The golf club, as the prosecution admitted, has no blood or body fluid linking it to the murder. But one club was said to have less dirt on it than others in the bag; the CBI alleges that is sign of a “cleanup.” The “surgical instrument” that investigators had previously identified as a dental scalpel was not presented.
The absence of Hemraj’s blood in Aarushi’s room was also a sign of a cleanup by the Talwars, prosecutors alleged. The CBI had originally drawn up a list of 141 witnesses.
Article Continued Below
The testimony of 14 of those dropped is crucial for defence. Among them: A doctor who examined Aarushi’s vaginal swab and told police there was no sign of semen;
A constable who stated in police records she allowed cleaners to clean the crime scene hours after Aarushi’s body was discovered;
A high-ranking police official, Arun Kumar, who, during his stint at the CBI, headed a team that conducted extensive investigations and exonerated Rajesh in July 2008. His team found no evidence that Hemraj had been killed in the house. Hemraj’s blood was not in Aarushi’s room or on the Talwars’ clothes. Kumar’s team emerged with an alternative narrative of a sexual assault gone wrong and pointed the finger at the Talwars’ dental clinic assistant Krishna Thadarai, and two other domestic workers from the neighbourhood. Kumar was taken off the case. A second CBI team did not investigate the three alternative suspects further; instead, it accused the Talwars of the murders. The Talwars are seeking reports of the tests on the dental clinic assistant and the other two men. They are also asking that evidence collected by police, including a blood-stained palm print on a stucco wall, blood on an alcohol bottle and a blood-stained pillow cover and blood-stained knife seized from Krishna’s house be examined by a DNA expert in England. The trial continues. How the Indian court system works: The Indian Constitution, framed on Jan. 26, 1950, is heavily influenced by British, American, Irish and French laws. The Indian legal system, like Canada’s, is based on the British common law, with one crucial difference. There is no jury. Juries were abolished in 1960 for fear they could be influenced by the media and misled. Today, judges alone hear the cases, make the verdicts and decide the sentences.
The criminal code is called Indian Penal Code. A murder conviction gets life imprisonment or the death penalty, a punishment rarely carried out.
Most cases first go to district court, with appeals going to the High Court and then the Supreme Court. Special CBI courts — on par with district courts — hear cases from the Central Bureau of Investigation. Transcripts are rigorously kept at the Supreme Court, but are not a record of every word uttered in the lowest courts. Court reporters often write only what the judges ask them to.
Trials can stretch for years, with frequent gaps between hearings. Urgent cases can be held on a “fast-track” basis, which might mean most working days or just twice a week.
Read more about:First published in 2003, Book of Lies was hailed as a 21st century grimoire and instantly became a cult classic. Now reformatted for the next generation of magicians and all counterculture devotees, it gathers an unprecedented cabal of occultists, esoteric scholars,and forward thinkers, all curated by Disinformation’s former "wicked warlock" Richard Metzger.
This compendium of the occult includes entries on topics as diverse and dangerous as Aleister Crowley, secret societies, psychedelics, and magick in theory and practice. The result is an alchemical formula that may well rip a hole in the fabric of your reality:
Mark Pesce, author of, compares computer programming and spellcasting. Genesis Breyer P-Orridge, father of Industrial Music and Rave culture explains how samples in a rave song can have magical consequences. William Burroughs and the occult. Nevill Drury, Australia's most noted occult writer, tells of Dion Fortune, Austin Spare, and Rosaleen Norton. Donald Tyson's "The Enochian Apocalypse Working" ask if the seeds of the end of the world sown in the Elizabethan era. A biographical essay on Marjorie Cameron, the fascinating character from Los Angeles' occult and beatnik scene. Hitler and the occult--Peter Levenda interview by Tracy Twyman. Robert Temple on how his book, controversial thesis (for which he was ridiculed) was proven by the Hubble telescope twenty-five years late. An exclusive Anton LaVey interview by Michael Moynihan, author of best-selling book. Erik Davis, author of, looks at H. P. Lovecraft'sRobert Anton Wilson on Timothy Leary and Aleister Crowley Comics genius Grant Morrison offers Magic for the people.
It’s all here and more!By Ezra Butler on August 22nd, 2013
McDonald’s is symbolic of American industry, with a massive $95 billion market capitalisation, and could effect real change if it so chose. From its beginnings, McDonald’s embraced heightened efficiency in its kitchen, employing a Henry Ford-inspired assembly line for hamburgers. The early McDonald’s kitchen was largely mechanised and |
highest honor and privilege, getting to work at the Pentagon every day. I treat the people inside that building like my family. When I go down to get my laundry in the basement, I factor in ten extra minutes every trip just so I can talk with people. Ya know, they see me coming down the hallway and want to ask something, they should be able to. We work just like a family.
I asked the Secretary of Defense if he actually does his own laundry at the Pentagon. “Well, yes,” he said, looking at me as though it would be strange if he did not do his own laundry.
I asked the Secretary why he carries his own bags everywhere he goes. The question was in reference to this recent story we had published about the Secretary always carrying his own bags, behavior that is not standard for D.C.’s powerful.
“Well, I have two hands, don’t I?” was Mattis’s response, looking down at his open palms.
His aide was pulling him in another direction and I sensed this would be the final question, so I asked if anyone in the Pentagon calls him ‘Mad Dog.” He paused and said:
You know, that is not my real call sign? That was something made up by the press. Some reporter, who needed a quick name for me. My real name is Chaos. “Colonel Has An Outstanding Solution.” That is my real call sign and what my men used to call me. Anyone who has ever worked with me calls me Chaos. That’s the name I prefer.
I stood there, shellshocked from Mattis’s response. The Secretary of Defense leaned in toward me and said, “Call me Chaos,” winked, and walked away.
I hope my experience can serve as a public service announcement for you and your family: If you ever have the good fortune of meeting the man in charge of the most powerful military in human history, call him “Chaos.”This is a week which brings all the scary and dreadful experiences you`ve been longing for as the myth goes the dead will walk the earth on the 30th of October.We thought you may be interested in some Halloween data so xHamster team has gathered them up for you from the other world!is the most favoured word in Germany, Great Britain, Brazil, France, Italy, Spain, and Mexico. It is also quite popular in USA and India- The most popular word to search among the citizens of USA is. This word is popular in Germany, Great Britain, France, Italy, and Mexico. The number of searches in these countries has been constantly increasing for the past few weeks. Brazilians, Japanese and Indians seem to be less interested in this holiday, though- Interestingly, Brazilians and Japanese users tend to search formore than the others in the samplingscores high in India, beating the similar data from Germany and Great Britain put together- People of Spain and Japan are particularly interested inmost probably due to the viral videos around the web- No wonder that aword has been popular in USA and Great Britain due to the recent creepy clown sightings. Lately xHamster reported that searches for clown porn have risen by 50%, with footage featuring men and women in fancy dress titillating audiences. Only in Great Britain the “clown” searches increased on 199.5% during last weekP.S. Check our social media channels for more scary details #hallowbeer!The Israeli army shot dead a Palestinian man who purportedly attempted to seize a soldier’s weapon at Allenby Bridge crossing between the West Bank and Jordan.
A military spokeswoman told Agence France-Presse that the Palestinian man died of his wounds shortly afterwards.
“I can confirm he's dead,” a military spokeswoman told AFP.
Israeli officials said the man was shot while trying to snatch a weapon from an Israeli soldier.
“A short while ago a Palestinian attempted to seize the weapon of a soldier at the Allenby Bridge crossing from Jordan. In response the forces at the scene opened fire towards the suspect. A hit was identified,” a military statement said.
The victim was identified as 38-year-old Raed Zeiter from the northern West Bank city of Nablus, Palestinian security officials said.
Zeiter had left the West Bank in 2011 and had not returned since, but Palestinian officials said they did not know where he had been living.
Ofer Lefler, spokesman for the Israel Airports Authority which is responsible for all border crossings, said the frontier had been closed in the wake of the attack.
(With AFP)
Last Update: Monday, 10 March 2014 KSA 13:05 - GMT 10:05Posted by Darren Urban on June 17, 2015 – 3:01 pm
Every year the website profootballfocus.com compiles a list of players it dubs “secret superstars” — guys who are under the radar but have the potential to break out in some way, shape or form. Their choice for the Cardinals is tight end Darren Fells, which makes a lot of sense given the circumstances.
It’s pointed out that Fells does his best work as a blocker, and at this point, it’s obvious that is what Bruce Arians is looking for first from his tight ends. What strikes me is Fells’ possibility as a leader at the position. Fells is modest, in keeping with his humble NFL beginnings being late to the party after playing professional basketball overseas. He is still inexperienced but he isn’t young — he’s 29 — and the tight ends room needs a voice now that John Carlson has retired. He is definitely playing with more confidence now than he did when he showed up in 2013 or even late last season when he was getting some playing time.
“Superstar” is a loaded term. Fells isn’t going to turn into Antonio Gates. (At least, I don’t think he will.) The Cardinals will need more from the position. Troy Niklas, another blocker-first, is a guy who has to come along, and it wouldn’t be a surprise to see GM Steve Keim bring in a veteran tight end when training camp begins. But on a team that needs steady tight end play, I think PFF is on the right track in pegging Fells as a guy who can deliver.
Tags: Darren Fells Posted in BlogNext month, Sony’s long-awaited PlayStation 4 (PS4) will hit shelves, and likely disappear from them just as quickly as gamers are eager to upgrade to the eighth generation of gaming consoles. Sony hasn’t just revamped the PS4, they’ve also improved the way gamers interact with their digital content to provide users with more functionality.
Users download games directly to the console will be able to share them with other accounts on the same PS4. This means that games can be shared by multiple accounts without additional purchase as long as they are one the same system. This will also extend to PS Plus, PlayStation’s premium service.
To top it all off, according to Sony, there will be no limit to how many PS4 systems a user can sign in from to access their digital content.
So what is digital content?
Typically, digital content refers to information available for distribution on electronic media. This digital content can also be downloaded. Digital content comes in many forms, from text and audio and videos files, to games, graphics, animations, and images.
With the continued popularity of smartphones, tablets, and e-readers, the average consumer now has a variety of options to turn to besides their computer to get the latest digital content. The question that arises for vendors today is not what kind of content to create, but how to deliver it.
Currently, 56 percent of the games are digitized and by 2016 it is expected to reach 72 percent. Therefore, to be successful in the digital content realm, content creators must determine the best way to present their digital content to consumers. And that’s exactly what Sony did.
In fact, developments in the Global Digital Content Market aren’t just revolutionizing the Video Gaming Console Industry. With the growing smartphone and tablet users and increasing numbers of internet users, there is a high need for digitization of all different types of content.
Globally, the number of internet users exceeds just over 2.4 billion. With new users added daily, the data consumed by them is increasing and the growing consumption is creating a demand for digital content. Thus, this growing need for digitization is expected to drive the Global Digital Content Market at a CAGR of 11.71 percent for the 2012-2016 period.
The majority of internet users around the world use mobile devices to access digital content. This in turn has led to the increased adoption of smartphones and tablets for playing games and entertainment. Further, there are around 6.8 billion mobile phones in the world, which is equivalent to 96 percent of the world’s population.
It has been witnessed that 63-65 percent of the users use their mobile devices daily to play games, which has increased the demand for mobile games and applications development. Hence, the growing use of smartphones and tablets for playing games is one of the key drivers which will propel the growth of the Global Digital Content market in the years to come.
For more information, view our 2012-2016 Global Digital Content Market report.
You might also be interested in:
Global Internet of Things Market 2012-2016
Social Gaming Market in the US 2012-2016
Global Content Delivery Network Market 2012-2016They're the party everyone has an opinion on (be it good or bad) - and this morning Twitter had its say on UKIP too.
Ahead of the European elections starting tomorrow, the hashtag #WhyImVotingUKIP became a top trending topic on Twitter for most of Wednesday.
It's unclear whether the social media campaign was started by the party itself or its opponents (of which there are many), but Twitter users were keen to join the fun either way.
Such is the level of satire on Twitter these days, it genuinely difficult to separate the pro-UKIP tweets from the tongue-in-cheek mocking.
Here's a selection of the best #WhyImVotingUKIP responses:
#WhyImVotingUkip because I find spelling foreign surnames daunting and difficult — Rachael Krishna (@RachaelKrishna) May 20, 2014
#WhyImVotingUkip I heard an African American and 2 (gay?) French robots on the radio telling me to "get lucky". Now I'm scared to go outside — Jamie Karran (@NoDrNo) May 21, 2014
#WhyImVotingUkip one time I got food poisoning from a kebab — Matty (@_MattyyAllen) May 21, 2014
#WhyImVotingUkip Spanish dominance in the European Champions League means I don't want to be a part of it — David Bullin (@BullinDavid) May 21, 2014
#WhyImVotingUkip historically, most vampires have been Romanian. Do you want millions of vampires living on your street? I don't think so! — kevin Bolanos (@gusekuxykam) May 21, 2014
#WhyImVotingUkip because the floodgates opened on New Year's Day, and Heathrow was swamped by that one Romanian bloke — La inglesa (@HelenCadierno) May 21, 2014
#WhyImVotingUkip Because I like to think that people from other countries who live in mine are the main reason I have failed in life. — R-Mattz (@RealMattLucas) May 20, 2014
#WhyImVotingUkip im worried as a gay man i may get too many rights and start floods — Daniel (@MrD_P_W) May 21, 2014
#WhyImVotingUkip Because they really know how to throw a great carnival. Oh wait... — Daniel C. Stevens (@dc_stevens) May 21, 2014
#WhyImVotingUkip Because I saw a photo of Nigel Farage holding a pint and I drink pints so he must be alright. — Andy Kelly (@ultrabrilliant) May 21, 2014BY Joan Russow PEJ News - Amman, Jordan April 1 2013 After meeting with AbdullahII ibn Al-Hussein, King of Jordan, the Canadian Foreign Minister, John Baird held a press conference. A reporter from the Jordan Times asked Minister John Baird if Canada was governed by a coalition government. Baird explained that there was not a tradition of coalition governments in Canada, and that the Harper Conservatives, with 38% of the national vote, had elected the majority of seats in Parliament, and now have a stable majority. The reporter asked a supplemental question for clarification because he thought that he had misunderstood Minister Baird. He asked: “How is it possible that you could have a majority government with only 38 % of the popular vote?” Baird was taken aback because he was not prepared for questions about Canada’s quirky Westminster electoral system; he had come to discuss Syria and increase trade with Jordan This response provoked a question from a reporter from AD-Dustour to ask about Canada’s being under the rule of the Queen of England and about the role of the Governor General. Baird pointed out that the Governor General is appointed by the Prime Minister, with the approval of the Queen of England, and he or she has three roles: to summon Parliament; to dissolve or prorogue parliament; and to suspend members of Parliament for sufficient cause. Generally, he added, the Governor General, supports requests of the Prime Minister; rarely has the Governor General not acceded to a Prime Minister’s requests. For example, in 2008, Prime Minister Harper had a minority government with 34% of seats in Parliament with the opposition holding 66% of the seats. Prime Minister Harper claimed that parliament had become dysfunctional because it was being slowed down with frivolous votes on motions by the opposition parties; the opposition parties, in a vote in Parliament, had even advocated strong measures to reduce greenhouse gas emissions, and to fulfill the obligations under the Framework Convention on Climate Change, and its Protocol - the Kyoto Protocol. Prime Minister Harper explained that Canada’s economy would collapse if Canada seriously addressed the issue of climate change. He pointed out that the oil sands would have to be closed down, pipelines, to not be built, and tankers not transferring Canadian oil to key foreign markets. Prime Minister Harper then stepped down, went to the Governor General, and requested the dissolution of Parliament. While under Canadian Protocol, the Governor General could have called on the opposition parties to form a coalition government, the Governor General decided, at Prime Minister’s request, to allow for the dissolution of Parliament and for a General Election. A reporter from Efranews followed up on the Kyoto Protocol, and asked about the issue of Canada’s withdrawal from the Kyoto protocol, and thus Canada’s failure to seriously address the issue of clmate change and how, at the Conference of the Parties in Copenhagen, Canada had pledged to reduce greenhouse gas emissions by only about 3% below 1990 level while the EU had agreed to 20% and was willing to go further to 30% if other developed states would follow.
A reporter from The Jordan Star, then raised the issue of Canada being the only country at the UN to withdraw from the Convention on Combatting Desertification – a major issue in parts of the Middle East; he then asked about the process in Canada vis-a-vis international agreements. Baird responded that it was not necessary for international issues to be brought to Parliament; under the Canadian Constitution the Prime Minister could determine whether to sign or ratify or withdraw from international instruments. Baird explained that, in Canada, in order to sign and ratify an international, covenant, convention, treaty, all that was required was consent by the Prime Minister and cabinet, which The Prime Minister appoints from the elected members in the Prime Minister’s Party. A reporter from Petra-Jordanian News Agency raised a concern about Canada’s refusal to adopt the UN Declaration on a nuclear arms free Middle East. And about Canada’s double standard in condoning Israel’s possession of nuclear weapons while condemning Iran for possibly developing nuclear Weapons, Baird responded that Israel was a democracy whereas Iran was not. An unidentified reporter suggested that Canada sounded more like an autocracy than a democracy At this point Minister Baird indicated that the Press Conference was over. @ RickARoth. @ joanRussow Now that April Fools is over - will you now admit that this was a fictional story? @ kady I asked @ HonJohnBaird's intrepid @ RickARoth. @ C_onfessor: @ kady The PEJ thing is like wildfire. How do you know it's a hoax? Retweeted by Rick Roth ADDENDUM; RESPONSE TO RICK ROTH, BAIRD'S PRESS SECRETARY While the actual press conference did not take place, everything that was stated about the Harper government, the office of the Governor General and international policy is true I could have added how in 2011 at the New York Prep Com in for the Least developed countries, the Harper government ignored the pleas made by the spokesperson for the Least developed countries I could have expanded on the fact that the Harper government has constantly obstructed international conferences including the Rio+20 conference where, for example, the Harper government opposed any language related to the precautionary principle or ending subsidies for the fossil fuel industry Or how the Harper government describes the UN Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples as being only aspirational, and interprets Art. 19 which includes; the expression “fair prior informed consent”as being nothing more than “consultation” Or how the Harper government has violated he Convention on refugees by distinguishing between ‘safe and unsafe” states when there is to be no discrimination on the grounds of country of origin Or how the Harper government ignored the obligation under the UN Convention on the Law of the Seas and its agreement on protecting fish habitat;,when a statutory act like the Fisheries Act impedes the expansion of the Tar sands, the article that protects fish habitat is gutted. Or how the Harper government, by transferring prisoners in Afghanistan, was complicit in violating the Convention against Torture Or how Harper misrepresented the cost of major government purchases, such as the F35 fighter planes Or even how the Harper government came to power because of its 2006 fraudulent in and out funding scheme used in the election Or how the Harper government has been muzzling scientists or even intimidating librarians and archivists. While the 2006 reference is too local for an internal press conference, the muzzling issue has even been reported internationally Perhaps next it will be anyone who uses April Fool’s day to communicate internationally what is happening in Canada government -30-British politician and former commodity broker
"Farage" redirects here. For the surname, see Farage (surname)
Nigel Paul Farage (;[3] born 3 April 1964) is a British politician, broadcaster[4], campaigner, political analyst[5] and former businessman. He has been a Member of the European Parliament (MEP) for the South East England constituency since 1999 and since 2019 has sat as a member of the Brexit Party. Outside of his MEP duties, he also serves as a Vice-Chairman of the pro-Brexit organisation Leave Means Leave, and is the host of The Nigel Farage Show, a live radio phone-in on the Global-owned station LBC.
He is best known as the former leader of the UK Independence Party (UKIP) from 2006 to 2009 and again from 2010 to 2016.[6] He co-chairs the Europe of Freedom and Direct Democracy (formerly "Europe of Freedom and Democracy") group.[7] A long-time prominent Eurosceptic in the UK, he has been noted for his speeches in the European Parliament,[8][9] and is a strong critic of the euro currency.
Farage was a founding member of UKIP, having left the Conservative Party in 1992 after the signing of the Maastricht Treaty.[10] After unsuccessfully campaigning in European and Westminster parliamentary elections for UKIP since 1994, he was elected MEP for South East England in the 1999 European Parliament election. He was re-elected in the 2004, 2009 and 2014 European Parliament elections.
In September 2006, Farage became the UKIP Leader and led the party through the 2009 European Parliament election, when it won the second highest share of the UK popular vote, defeating Labour and the Liberal Democrats with over two million votes. He stepped down in November 2009 to concentrate on contesting Buckingham, the constituency of the Speaker, John Bercow, at the 2010 general election, coming third. In November 2010, Farage successfully stood in the 2010 UKIP leadership contest,[11] becoming Leader of the Party once again following the resignation of Lord Pearson of Rannoch, who voluntarily stepped down as Leader in August that year.
Farage announced his resignation as leader when he did not win the South Thanet seat in Kent at the 2015 general election, but his resignation was rejected and he remained in his post. In June 2016, Farage was a prominent supporter of the successful campaign for a vote in favour of leaving the EU in the UK EU membership referendum.[12] On 4 July 2016, Farage again announced his resignation as leader of UKIP, triggering a leadership election.[13] Diane James was elected to succeed him, but she resigned as leader after just 18 days and Farage became interim leader on 5 October 2016.[14] A second leadership election was held in November, which was won by Paul Nuttall, who thus succeeded Farage. Farage was ranked second in The Daily Telegraph's Top 100 most influential right-wingers poll in October 2013, behind Prime Minister David Cameron.[15] He was also named "Briton of the Year" by The Times in 2014.[16] In 2017, Farage began contributing to the American television network Fox News.[17] In 2018, Farage joined Leave Means Leave.[18] On 4 December 2018, Farage announced his resignation from UKIP over the appointment of Tommy Robinson as an adviser to the UKIP leader Gerard Batten and the decision of the National Executive of UKIP to keep Batten as leader of the party.[1][19] On 13 February 2019, Farage confirmed on his Twitter account that he would now sit as a member of the Brexit Party in the European Parliament.[20]
Early life
Farage was born in Downe in Kent, England, the son of Barbara (née Stevens) and Guy Justus Oscar Farage.[21][22][23] The Farage name comes from a distant Huguenot ancestor.[24] One of his great-grandfathers was born to German parents who migrated to London in the 19th century.[25] His grandfather, Private Harry Farage, fought and was wounded in the First World War.[26] His father was a stockbroker who worked in the City of London. A 2012 BBC Radio 4 profile described Guy Farage as an alcoholic[21] who left the family home when Nigel was five years old.[9] In 1971, Guy Farage gave up alcohol and entered the antiques trade, having lost his Stock Exchange position; the next year, endorsed by friends, he returned to the trading floor at the new Stock Exchange Tower on Threadneedle Street.[27]
Education
From 1975 to 1982, Farage was educated at Dulwich College, a fee-paying independent school in south London. In his autobiography he pays tribute to the careers advice he received there from England Test cricketer John Dewes, "who must have spotted that I was quite ballsy, probably good on a platform, unafraid of the limelight, a bit noisy and good at selling things".[28]
Business career
After leaving college in 1982, Farage decided to seek employment in the City of London, trading commodities at the London Metal Exchange.[21] Initially, he joined the American commodity operation of brokerage firm Drexel Burnham Lambert,[23] transferring to Crédit Lyonnais Rouse in 1986.[23] He joined Refco in 1994, and Natexis Metals in 2003.[23]
Political career
Early years
Farage was active in the Conservative Party from his school days, having seen a visit to his school by Enoch Powell and Keith Joseph.[29] In 1981, an English teacher, Chloe Deakin, wrote to the head teacher of Dulwich College, David Emms, asking him to reconsider his decision to appoint Farage as a prefect; she had not met Farage, but cited concerns expressed by others over Farage's alleged 'fascist' views. Farage later stated that some teachers were hostile to him because he was an admirer of Enoch Powell. Farage said: "Any accusation I was ever involved in far right politics is utterly untrue."[30] He voted for the Green Party in 1989 because of what he saw as their then "sensible" and Eurosceptic policies.[29] He left the Conservatives in 1992 in protest at Prime Minister John Major's government's signing of the Treaty on European Union at Maastricht.[31][32] He was a founding member of UKIP in 1993.
European Parliament
Farage was elected to the European Parliament in 1999 and re-elected in 2004, 2009 and 2014. In 1999 the BBC spent four months filming a documentary about his European election campaign but did not air it. Farage, then head of the UKIP's South East office, asked for a video and had friends make copies which were sold for £5 through the UKIP's magazine. Surrey Trading Standards investigated and Farage admitted the offence.[33] Farage was the leader of the 24-member UKIP contingent in the European Parliament, and co-leader of the multinational Eurosceptic group, Europe of Freedom and Direct Democracy. Farage was ranked the fifth-most influential MEP by Politico in 2016, who described him as "one of the two most effective speakers in the chamber".[34]
Jacques Barrot
On 18 November 2004, Farage announced in the European Parliament that Jacques Barrot, then French Commissioner-designate, had been barred from elected office in France for two years, after being convicted in 2000 of embezzling £2 million from government funds and diverting it into the coffers of his party. He said that French President Jacques Chirac had granted Barrot amnesty; initial BBC reports said that, under French law, it was perhaps illegal to mention that conviction.[35] The prohibition in question applies only to French officials in the course of their duties.[36] The President of the Parliament, Josep Borrell, enjoined him to retract his comments under threat of "legal consequences".[37] The following day, it was confirmed that Barrot had received an eight-month suspended jail sentence in the case, and that this had been quickly expunged by the amnesty decided by Chirac and his parliamentary majority.[citation needed] The Socialist and Liberal groups in the European Parliament then joined forces with UKIP in demanding the resignation of Barrot for failing to disclose the conviction during his confirmation hearings.[citation needed]
José Manuel Barroso
In early 2005, Farage requested that the European Commission disclose where the individual Commissioners had spent their holidays. The Commission did not provide the information requested, on the basis that the Commissioners had a right of privacy. The German newspaper Die Welt reported that the President of the European Commission, José Manuel Barroso, had spent a week on the yacht of the Greek shipping billionaire Spiros Latsis. It emerged soon afterwards that this had occurred a month before the Commission under Barroso's predecessor Romano Prodi approved 10.3 million euros of Greek state aid for Latsis's shipping company.[38] It also became known that Peter Mandelson, then the British EU Commissioner, had accepted a trip to Jamaica from an unrevealed source.
Farage persuaded around 75 MEPs from across the political divide to back a motion of no confidence in Barroso, which would be sufficient to compel Barroso to appear before the European Parliament to be questioned on the issue.[39] The motion was successfully tabled on 12 May 2005, and Barroso appeared before Parliament[40] at a debate on 26 May 2005. The motion was heavily defeated. A Conservative MEP, Roger Helmer, was expelled from his group, the European People's Party – European Democrats (EPP-ED), in the middle of the debate by that group's leader Hans-Gert Pöttering as a result of his support for Farage's motion.
Herman Van Rompuy
After the speech of Herman Van Rompuy on 24 February 2010 to the European Parliament, Farage – to protests from other MEPs – addressed the former Belgian Prime Minister and first long-term President of the European Council saying that he had the "charisma of a damp rag and the appearance of low grade bank clerk".[41] Farage questioned the legitimacy of Van Rompuy's appointment, asking, "Who are you? I'd never heard of you, nobody in Europe had ever heard of you." He also asserted that Van Rompuy's "intention [is] to be the quiet assassin of European democracy and of the European nation states".[41][42] Van Rompuy commented afterwards, "There was one contribution that I can only hold in contempt, but I'm not going to comment further."[41] After refusing to apologise for behaviour that was, in the words of the President of the European Parliament, Jerzy Buzek, "inappropriate, unparliamentary and insulting to the dignity of the House", Farage was reprimanded and had his right to ten days' allowance (expenses) "docked".[43][44]
Buzek said after his meeting with Farage:
I defend absolutely Mr Farage's right to disagree about the policy or institutions of the Union, but not to personally insult our guests in the European Parliament or the country from which they may come... I myself fought for free speech as the absolute cornerstone of a democratic society. But with freedom comes responsibility – in this case, to respect the dignity of others and of our institutions. I am disappointed by Mr Farage's behaviour, which sits ill with the great parliamentary tradition of his own country. I cannot accept this sort of behaviour in the European Parliament. I invited him to apologise, but he declined to do so. I have therefore – as an expression of the seriousness of the matter – rescinded his right to ten days' daily allowance as a Member.[44]
Questioned by Camilla Long of The Times, Farage described his speech: "it wasn't abusive, it was right."[45]
UKIP leadership and resignations
Farage at the UKIP Conference in 2009
On 12 September 2006, Farage was elected leader of UKIP with 45 percent of the vote, 20 percentage points ahead of his nearest rival.[46] He pledged to bring discipline to the party and to maximise UKIP's representation in local, parliamentary and other elections. In a PM programme interview on BBC Radio 4 that day he pledged to end the public perception of UKIP as a single-issue party and to work with allied politicians in the Better Off Out campaign, committing himself not to stand against the MPs who have signed up to that campaign.[47]
In his maiden speech to the UKIP conference, on 8 October 2006, Farage told delegates that the party was "at the centre-ground of British public opinion" and the "real voice of opposition". He said: "We've got three social democratic parties in Britain – Labour, Lib Dem and Conservative are virtually indistinguishable from each other on nearly all the main issues" and "you can't put a cigarette paper between them and that is why there are nine million people who don't vote now in general elections that did back in 1992."[48]
At 10pm on 19 October 2006, Farage took part in a three-hour live interview and phone-in with James Whale on the national radio station talkSPORT. Four days later, Whale announced on his show his intention to stand as UKIP's candidate in the 2008 London Mayoral Election. Farage said that Whale "not only has guts, but an understanding of what real people think". Whale later decided not to stand and UKIP was represented by Gerard Batten.[49]
Farage stood again for the UKIP leadership in 2010 (having stood down the year before, to focus on his unsuccessful campaign for the Buckingham seat) after his successor Lord Pearson had stood down,[11] and on 5 November 2010 it was announced he had won the leadership contest.[50]
In May 2014, Farage led UKIP to win the European Parliament election with 4,376,635 votes,[51] the first time a UK political party other than Labour or Conservatives had won a national election in over 100 years. Farage was returned as MEP for the South East region, a seat he has represented since 1999.
As an MEP, Farage leads the Europe of Freedom and Direct Democracy grouping in the European Parliament.[52]
On 8 May 2015, Farage resigned as leader of UKIP after he failed to win the seat of Thanet South in the general election held the previous day, although he kept open the possibility of re-entering the ensuing leadership contest.[53]
On 11 May 2015, it was announced that Farage would continue to serve as the party's leader, with the BBC reporting: "Party chairman Steve Crowther said the national executive committee believed the election campaign had been a ‘great success’ and members had ‘unanimously’ rejected Mr Farage's letter of resignation".[54] Interviewed about his continued leadership by the BBC the following day, Farage said: "I resigned. I said I'd resign. I turned up to the NEC meeting with letter in hand fully intending to carry that through. They unanimously said they didn't want me to do that, they presented me with petitions, signatures, statements from candidates saying it would be a bad thing for UKIP. So I left the meeting, went and sat in darkened room to think about what to do, and decided for the interest of the party I would accept their kind offer for me to stay and tear up the letter." He added that he would consider standing for parliament again should a by-election be called in a Labour-held seat.[55]
Farage resigned as UKIP leader on 4 July 2016 with the following comment: "During the [Brexit] referendum I said I wanted my country back … now I want my life back"[56] and added that this resignation was final: "I won’t be changing my mind again, I can promise you",[57] apparently referring to his two previous resignations (in 2009 and 2015).[58]
Westminster elections
Farage had unsuccessfully contested British parliamentary elections for UKIP five times, both before and after his election as an MEP in 1999. Under the 2002 European Union decision to forbid MEPs from holding a dual mandate, if he were to be elected to the House of Commons, he would have to resign his seat as MEP.
When he contested the Bromley & Chislehurst constituency in a May 2006 by-election, following the death of Eurosceptic Conservative MP Eric Forth, Farage came third, winning 8 per cent of the vote, beating the Labour Party candidate. This was the second-best by-election result recorded by UKIP out of 25 results, and the first time since the Liverpool Walton by-election in 1991 that a party in government had been pushed into fourth place in a parliamentary by-election on mainland Britain.[citation needed]
Prince Charles
Charles, Prince of Wales was invited to speak to the European Parliament on 14 February 2008; in his speech he called for EU leadership in the battle against climate change. During the standing ovation that followed, Farage was the only MEP to remain seated, and he went on to describe the Prince's advisers as "naïve and foolish at best."[59] Farage continued: "How can somebody like Prince Charles be allowed to come to the European Parliament at this time to announce he thinks it should have more powers? It would have been better for the country he wants to rule one day if he had stayed home and tried to persuade Gordon Brown to give the people the promised referendum on the Treaty of Lisbon." The leader of the UK Labour Party's MEPs, Gary Titley, accused Farage of anti-Royalism. Titley said: "I was embarrassed and disgusted when the Leader of the UK Independence Party, Nigel Farage, remained firmly seated during the lengthy standing ovation Prince Charles received. I had not realised Mr Farage's blind adherence to right-wing politics involved disloyalty and discourtesy to the Royal Family. He should be thoroughly ashamed of himself and should apologise to the British people he represents."[59]
Expenses disclosure
In May 2009, The Observer reported a Foreign Press Association speech given by Farage in which he had said that over his period as a Member of the European Parliament he had received a total of £2 million of taxpayers' money in staff, travel, and other expenses.[60] In response, Farage said that in future all UKIP MEPs would provide monthly expense details.[60]
2010 UK general election
On 4 September 2009, Farage resigned as the UKIP's leader to focus on his campaign to become Member of Parliament for Buckingham at Westminster in the 2010 general election.[61] He later told The Times journalist Camilla Long that UKIP internal fights took up far too much time.[45]
Farage stood against sitting Buckingham MP, John Bercow, the newly elected Speaker of the House of Commons, despite the convention that the Speaker, as a political neutral, is not normally challenged in his or her bid for re-election by any of the major parties.[62]
Farage came third with 8,401 votes. Bercow was re-elected and in second place with 10,331 votes was John Stevens, a former Conservative MEP who campaigned as an independent accompanied by "Flipper the Dolphin" (a reference to MPs flipping second homes).[63]
Injury in air crash
On 6 May 2010, the morning of the election, Farage was travelling in a two-seater PZL-104 Wilga aircraft with a pro-UKIP banner attached, when the plane crashed.[64] Farage suffered injuries that were described as non-life-threatening.[65] Although his injuries were originally described as minor,[64] his sternum and ribs were broken and his lung punctured.[66] The Air Accidents Investigation Branch (AAIB) report said that the aeroplane was towing a banner, which caught in the tailplane, forcing the nose down.[67]
On 1 December 2010, Justin Adams, the pilot of the aircraft involved in the accident, was charged with threatening to kill Farage in a separate incident. He was also charged with threatening to kill an AAIB official involved in the investigation into the accident.[68] In April 2011, the pilot was found guilty of making death threats. The judge said that the defendant |
Venezuela - 17%Nicaragua - 16%Croatia - 15%Palau - 14%Hong Kong - 14%Panama - 13%South Korea - 12%Chile - 12%Portugal - 12%A group of Iranian protesters chant slogans in front of the Saudi Embassy in Tehran, Iran, April 11, 2015.
For Friday's updates, click here
Latest updates:
9:50 P.M. Saudi media: Over 500 Houthis killed by Saudi army on Yemen border since conflict began (Reuters)
9:35 P.M. Three Saudi army officers killed by mortar shell fired into kingdom from Yemen (Reuters)
5:22 Islamic State destroys key bridge in Iraq Sunni heartland
Islamic State on Saturday destroyed a strategic bridge in the western Iraqi province of Anbar where government troops are engaged in a major offensive against the extremist militia in the mostly Sunni area, military officials said.
The hardline jihadists blew up the bridge in the area of Albu Faraj north of Ramadi, the capital city of Anbar, an official told dpa.
Keep updated: Sign up to our newsletter Email * Please enter a valid email address Sign up Please wait… Thank you for signing up. We've got more newsletters we think you'll find interesting. Click here Oops. Something went wrong. Please try again later. Try again Thank you, The email address you have provided is already registered. Close
The facility, built in 2013, links Ramadi to a major highway.
"The bridge was completely destroyed with the aim preventing security forces from advancing into Albu Faraj controlled by the [Islamic State] organization," the official added on condition of anonymity. (DPA)
12:28 P.M. Hundreds of Iranians defy ban to protest Saudi Arabia in Tehran
Defying a government ban, hundreds of Iranians protested against Saudi Arabia on Saturday over the alleged abuse of two Iranian pilgrims visiting the Sunni kingdom.
Over 300 protesters gathered in front of the Saudi Embassy in north Tehran to call for its closure. Demonstrators shouted: "Shame on you!" and "Death to House of Saud!" in reference to the ruling family.
Earlier, Mohammad Reza Yousefi, director of Tehran's Governor Office for Political Affairs, was quoted by the official IRNA news agency as saying any public protest would be illegal.
The protesters walked toward the embassy, wanting to pull down the Saudi flag, but anti-riot police stopped them. (AP)
The demonstration came after two male Iranian pilgrims alleged abuse after Saudi officers at Jeddah's international airport searched them. Details of the abuse have not been made public though Iran formally has called for the Saudi officers to be punished.
12:09 P.M. Four Turkish soldiers injured in Kurdish militant attack, army says
Four Turkish soldiers were injured in an attack by Kurdish militants in the far east of the country, the military said in a statement Saturday.
Clashes with the militants, allegedly from the banned Kurdistan Workers' Party (PKK), were ongoing, the military stated. Websites affiliated with the PKK had no information on the incident.
The military said the attack came after 15 army teams positioned themselves inside Agri province as a security measure ahead of parliamentary elections, scheduled for June 7.
The PKK and the state have largely observed a ceasefire since 2013, but sporadic incidents do occur. Tensions have particularly been rising since September, after the Kurdish region of Kobane in northern Syria came under attack from the Islamic State militia. (DPA)
11:29 A.M. Three said killed, several wounded after rebels shell Syria's Aleppo
Syrian state television and an activist group say opposition fighters have shelled a government-held neighborhood in the northern city of Aleppo, killing at least three people and wounding dozens.
The TV report said the shelling of the Suleimaniyeh neighborhood on Saturday morning killed six, wounded more than 50 and damaged several building.
The Britain-based Syrian Observatory for Human Rights, which has a network of activists around the country, said the shelling killed three and wounded "tens." (AP)
11:25 A.M. Report: Two Iranian officers fighting with Houthis captured in Yemen
Loyalists of embattled Yemeni President Abd Rabu Mansour Hadi have captured two Iranian officers fighting along Houthi rebels in Yemen's restive southern city of Aden, Saudi-owned broadcaster Al Arabiya reported on Saturday.
The captives, who hold the ranks of colonel and captain, were reportedly detained in two separate parts of Aden, which is at the center of fighting between pro-Hadi militiamen and the Houthis, according to the report.
Al Arabiya posted a photo of what it said was one of the alleged officers, without saying when either he or his countryman had been captured.
There was no immediate Iranian comment. (DPA)
10:03 A.M. Saudi Arabia detains man suspected of killing two policemen
Saudi Arabia's security services have detained a Saudi Arabian man on suspicion of shooting dead two policemen and wounding two others in separate attacks in Riyadh on Wednesday and in March, state media reported on Saturday, citing the Interior Ministry.
Police found the weapon and car used for the shootings at the home of Rami Abdullah Thulab al-Shammari, according to a ministry statement published by state news agency SPA on Saturday.
Last year militant group Islamic State called on sympathizers in the kingdom to assassinate members of the security services or government, non-Muslim residents and members of the Shi'ite Muslim minority. Al-Qaida has also vowed to bring down Saudi Arabia's ruling family.
Although the conservative Sunni Muslim kingdom imposes a version of sharia law supported by jihadists, the ruling family are seen by some as having betrayed Islam through having strong ties with Western countries.
Three other Saudi citizens and two Yemenis, one of whom was living in the kingdom illegally, have also been detained on suspicion of trying to help Shammari flee the country. He was detained in Jizan province close to the border with Yemen, the Interior Ministry said.
Riyadh's police spokesman said on March 30 that shots fired from an unidentified car had injured two policemen in a patrol car late the previous night, and said on Wednesday that two policemen had been killed after a similar attack. (Reuters)
1:40 A.M. U.S. expands intelligence sharing with Saudi Arabia in Yemen operation
The United States is expanding its intelligence-sharing with Saudi Arabia to provide more information about potential targets in the kingdom's air campaign against Houthi militias in Yemen, U.S. officials told Reuters.
The stepped-up assistance comes as two weeks of relentless air strikes by the Saudis and other Gulf Arab allies have largely failed to halt advances by the Iran-linked Houthi forces.
The U.S. officials said the expanded assistance includes sensitive intelligence data that will allow the Saudis to better review the kingdom's targets in fighting that has killed hundreds and displaced tens of thousands since March.
"We have opened up the aperture a bit wider with what we are sharing with our Saudi partners," said one U.S. official.
"We are helping them get a better sense of the battlefield and the state of play with the Houthi forces. We are also helping identify 'no strike' areas they should avoid" to minimize any civilian casualties, the official said. (Reuters)Collabora Productivity today launched a new edition of its enterprise office suite, LibreOffice-from-Collabora, for Amazon WorkSpaces users, available in AWS Marketplace for Desktop Apps. LibreOffice-from-Collabora brings support for more than 100 document formats, including Microsoft Office files, to virtual desktops on a range of operating systems and devices via the Amazon Web Services (AWS) edition. Maintenance and patch updates are included, while international code fix support is available from Collabora’s engineers, with competitive pricing for enterprises.
“We are pleased to welcome Collabora’s solutions to AWS Marketplace for Desktop Apps,” said Dave McCann, Vice President, AWS Marketplace, Amazon Web Services, Inc. “By making their software available in AWS Marketplace for Desktop Apps, Collabora’s users can take advantage of a streamlined selection and procurement process for high-performance desktop apps.”
The release furthers the expansion of LibreOffice-based products to new platforms, following Collabora’s LibreOffice Viewer for Android, published in January, and RollApp’s web-browser-based LibreOffice applications launched early last year.
“The global footprint of Amazon WorkSpaces virtual desktops in the AWS Cloud along with AWS Marketplace for Desktop Apps expands LibreOffice’s reach to an important, rapidly growing market,” said Michael Meeks, Vice President of Collabra Productivity. “Today’s launch means there are few customers LibreOffice cannot reach — whatever the platform, budget, or file-format, LibreOffice provides a competitive solution.”Here’s a tour that you will not soon forget. It’s a tour of the city’s wastewater treatment plant, found on Unity Island. This unusual tour is presented by Vision Niagara.
Just last week, a BRO reader asked about the possibilities of relocating the treatment plant, to another location other than the one that it currently occupies along the Niagara River. Years ago, there was a lively discussion about this on BRO. The conclusion? Not in our lifetime, if ever. Actually, the only way that you would ever see it moved is if there was a complete overhaul of the waterfront along the Niagara River. Everything would need to be reconfigured – the I-190, the wastewater treatment plant, et al. I’m not saying that it’s impossible – it would just be an enormous lift, but something to consider someday when the removal of the I-190 is on the table. Would it be worth it? Yes. Would we need another Buffalo Billion? Probably.
In the meantime, this is your chance to get up close and with the wastewater treatment plant, both inside and out. This tour does not come along very often. Following are the details:
Vision Niagara Presents: Wastewater Treatment Plant Tour
Tuesday, June 26, 2017
3:45 PM – 6 PM
Meet at Broderick Park’s shelter – foot of West Ferry Street – 90 West Ferry Street
No sandals or flipflops!
Modest donation of $10 requested to cover Vision Niagara events
Registration required through Eventbrite
See Facebook eventKorea schools may have more LGBTI includsion
LGBTI groups in South Korea are calling on the government to have LGBTI content added to sex education in schools.
The Department of Education currently has a sex education policy which preventions any mention of sexual minorities.
LGBTI advocates have labelled the policy as discriminatory.
Korea’s education ministry announced it would exclude LGBTI issues in sex education blaming anti-LGBTI sentiment in the country.
‘The education ministry should discard the sex education guidelines which only promote discrimination and prejudice against sexual minorities and should opt to give LGBT-inclusive education,’ a group of LGBTI advocates said in a press conference.
‘The education ministry’s sex education guidelines are a regression excluding sexual minorities and solidifying gender roles,’ said Park Hyun-yi, an activist at Seoul Youth Sex Culture Center.
‘The guidelines that do not even mention ‘masturbation’ or ‘sexual minority’ are stifling sex education.’
In the face of the backlash, the Education Ministry said that guidelines are only to help teachers with giving their students sex education and that teachers can educate their students about homosexuality at their own discretion.
Last year Korea’s education ministry released a 40-page guideline for schools which drew criticism for reinforcing gender roles and promoting abstinence from sex.
One of the guidelines which caused a lot of controversy recommend girls should not be alone with their boyfriends in order to avoid sexual violence.
Things are rough for Korean LGBTI youth
Same-sex activity is illegal in Korea and LGBTI people face many legal discriminations.
A 2015 survey revealed one in five LGBT youth between the ages of 13 to 18 had attempted suicide.
The survey also showed seven out of 11 LGBT youth quit school because of discrimination, isolation and fear.
Former United Nations Secretary General Ban Ki-Moon said conditions for LGBTI people in his home country were an ‘outrage’.
‘Even in societies where homosexuality or atypical gender identity are not criminalized, they often remain sensitive issues, in particular in relation to young people and education,’ he said.
‘This is the case in my home country of the Republic of Korea, where homosexuality is largely taboo.
‘In the Republic of Korea and around the world, let us make schools safer for all young people, including the LGBT members of our human family.
‘The abuses and indignity suffered by members of the LGBT community are an outrage – an affront to the values of the United Nations and to the very idea of universal human rights.’After last week’s recall election caused two pro-gun control Democrats to lose their State Senate seats in Colorado, Bill Maher has decided that “gun control is dead” for good. “I think the message was ‘Do not fuck with gun nuts, because they are nuts about their guns,'” Maher said, as part of his “epigraph” for the gun control movement. “You cannot overestimate how much Americans love guns.”
Weighing in from the right, Michael Steele said the push for stricter gun laws in America “died on the vine” this past spring, “when the momentum was not taken up by the Congress and the White House, quite frankly.” When Maher pushed back on this idea, Steele said “There was no real impetus to push this thing through, to get it to president’s desk, because if there were, we’d have the law in place, wouldn’t we?”
Maher and his other guests were flabbergasted by Steele’s assertion, with the host saying, “There was plenty of impetus, they just voted against it.”
Steele tried to pin the fault on the Democrats, but Rolling Stone’s Matt Taibbi countered with, “I think they voted against it because they’re crazy for guns.”
Bringing up the Iowa law granting legally people the ability to obtain gun permits, which has been Piers Morgan’s main beef this week, Maher said it sounded like something out of The Onion. “What could not get passed?” he asked. “Isn’t the NRA just fucking with us at this point? They realize that nothing they propose is ever going to get shot down.”
The Economist’s Zanny Minton-Beddoes picked up on Maher’s point about the NRA, saying they now seem to have the ability to recall any politician who does something their members don’t like. “I’m all for representative democracy,” she said, “but this seems kind of like buyers remorse.”
“If you think Democrats got scared about guns after Al Gore lost Tennessee in 2000,” Maher said, “this is where they’re really going to get scared.”
Watch video below, via HBO:
[photo via screengrab]
— —
>> Follow Matt Wilstein (@TheMattWilstein) on Twitter
Have a tip we should know? tips@mediaite.com"I look at any vector of attack as troublesome," said Scott Aaronson, senior director of national security policy at the Edison Electric Institute, the association for all publicly traded electric companies.
"Given that you have all digital equipment helping to operate the grid … all threats are taken very seriously," Aaronson said in an interview. "But if you mandate a 10-foot wall, our adversaries will try to bring a 12-foot ladder."
However, he said that grid security has been on the industry's radar "for decades"—despite headlines that have only recently given the subject of technological breaches more attention.
"Our standards on cybersecurity were first drafted in 2007, before the urge to follow the shiniest object or Chicken Little with movie-script scenarios," he said.
Read MoreEnemy within: The danger of 'insider hacking'
"We're making sure people get the right intelligence at the right time, and that threats are mitigated in near-real time," he said, even as he acknowledged utilities aren't "pretending we can protect everyone from everything."
Still, fears about U.S. energy security are becoming more than just abstract theories, or movie scenarios.
A widely circulated white paper by Symantec in June cited an "ongoing cyber-espionage campaign" against the energy sector by a shadowy hacker group known as Dragonfly. The report added that energy grid operators, utilities, oil and gas firms were at risk—not just domestically, but abroad as well. Additionally, others say the industry has far more work to do in the face of rapidly multiplying challenges to U.S. interests.
Utilities and regulators "are doing a lot, but there's more to be done," said one official with knowledge of the industry's cybersecurity efforts, who spoke to CNBC on the condition of anonymity.
Read MoreSolar storm heading for earth
He said major population centers such as Washington, D.C., Los Angeles and New York City were always a big source of worry "not because of specific threats, but there's an elevated sense of a terrorist getting the biggest bang for the buck."
A grid hack "is certainly on people's radar, and it's a matter of how they address these risks internally," the official said. "It depends on what information you are getting, but nothing is being ignored, it's just a matter of how they prioritize it."
—By CNBC's Javier E. DavidEurope’s new Energy Union aims at securing European energy supply – but, if not from Russia, where will Europe obtain its gas?
In February, the European Commission published a Communication that describes the rationale for a European Energy Union, which was first proposed by then Polish Prime Minster Donald Tusk, now president of the European Council.
Energy insecurity in the European Union has two main sources: gaps in the integration of the European energy market, especially in regions such as Central and Eastern Europe, and disruptions of imports. To combat these problems, the Energy Union strategy focuses in two of its five dimensions on removing energy islands and bottlenecks from the infrastructure map of Europe, and on developing solidarity mechanisms for preventive planning and emergency responses for scenarios in which supply is disrupted.
Part of the aim of the Energy Union is to diversify the EU’s gas supplies away from Russia, which has already proved to be an unreliable partner.
Part of the aim of the Energy Union is to diversify the EU’s gas supplies away from Russia, which has already proved to be an unreliable partner, first in 2006 and then in 2009, and which threatened to become one again at the outbreak of the conflict in Ukraine in 2013-2014. With its February 2014 Communication, the Commission acknowledged the foreign policy implications of energy policy and the need for a coordinated energy policy, something that was largely under-emphasised in previous discussions about the future of EU energy security.
The Energy Union strategy suggests a number of measures to boost Europe’s energy security, both internally and externally. One of the external aspects involves granting the Commission a watchdog role in the process of the renegotiation of Intergovernmental Agreements (IGAs) with third countries to ensure compliance with European rules and security of supply criteria. This would enable the Commission to raise concerns about projects such as South Stream whenever they fail to accommodate European interests. The other aspect provides an answer to the problem of dependency on Russian gas.
Although diversifying away from Russian gas is not unrealistic in the medium term, several technical and political obstacles must be overcome.
Russia is the main supplier of crude oil and natural gas to the EU, and although diversifying away from Russian gas is not unrealistic in the medium term, several technical and political obstacles must be overcome. In the short term, part of the solution lies in targeted investment and in mobilising existing EU instruments to improve internal connections and expand links with EU neighbours. The February Communication mentions strengthening four alternative routes and sources of gas supplies, as well as creating regional hubs to deal with potential disruptions. Among the alternatives are:
· Importing gas from the Middle East and North Africa;
· Intensifying work on the Southern Gas Corridor through Azerbaijan, Kazakhstan, and Turkmenistan;
· Importing Liquefied Natural Gas (LNG) from the United States and Australia as well as from East Africa.
Our analysis covers the timeframe until 2025. Most of the EU’s Russian gas contracts are expected to expire within this period, which will provide member states with the option to diversify their sources of supply. Ensuring European energy security will require more than investment in infrastructure and energy-specific know-how about interconnections and gas transit disruptions. It should form part of European energy diplomacy, with more concerted planning and action on the external side, including dialogue with global actors such as China (which is expected to be the major energy demand centre), the US, and Turkey (which is still only an observer in the Energy Community). This requires better coordination and shared decision-making within the Energy Union, with input both from the Commission and from the European External Action Service. A Special Envoy on International Energy Affairs could be appointed to oversee better coordination.
Energy should be central to the EU’s policy towards its neighbours, and the EU should also take a leadership role in promoting energy security beyond its borders.
Europe’s external energy security is linked to its neighbours, and its relations with these neighbours is managed by the European Neighbourhood Policy. Energy should be central to the EU’s policy towards its neighbours, and the EU should also take a leadership role in promoting energy security beyond its borders.
Regional alternatives
Iran, Iraq, and Kurdistan
With their vast oil and gas resources, Iran and Iraq constitute potential sources of energy supplies for Europe. Iran does not seem to represent a viable alternative to Russian gas, at least in the short to medium term. However, if the ongoing E3+3 talks over Iran’s nuclear programme reach a successful outcome beyond the tentative deal reached in Lausanne, it would create possibilities to explore the country’s resources and integrate it into the regional energy infrastructure.
Substantial investment would be needed to bring gas to the northwest to tap into Europe’s Southern Gas Corridor.
The political constraints to using Iranian energy, such as the international sanctions now in place, are obvious. But there are also infrastructural constraints, such as the geographical distribution of resources in Iran relative to its consumption, as well as the lack of production and export infrastructure. Iran’s gas resources (for example, the South Pars field) are in the south. Therefore, substantial investment would be needed to bring gas to the northwest to tap into Europe’s Southern Gas Corridor.
Iraq – and in particular, Kurdistan – is another potential supply option for Europe: it has massive oil and gas resources and international exploration and production companies are present and active. However, the parlous political situation in the country presents a major impediment to large-scale investment in developing the production and export capacities that would be needed to bring its energy to Europe.
The rapprochement in recent years between Turkey and the Kurdistan Regional Government in Iraq (KRG) has opened up the option of exporting gas supplies from Northern Iraq.
The rapprochement in recent years between Turkey and the Kurdistan Regional Government in Iraq (KRG) has opened up the option of exporting gas supplies from Northern Iraq. The KRG could play a large part in supplying Turkey with natural gas. And, given its huge gas reserves, it could also become a supplier to Europe in the long run, if disputes between Erbil and Baghdad over hydrocarbon development, export strategy, and revenue sharing are sorted out.
Algeria
Algeria has in the past been Europe’s second largest external gas supplier (behind Russia), supplying around 25 billion cubic metres (bcm) via pipelines and 13.5 bcm via LNG for a market share of 9 percent in 2013. Algeria’s export potential is limited going forward, however, since it is struggling to launch new projects and those that are scheduled to come on line in 2015-2017 are not enough to compensate for the decline of its mature production fields. In addition to the supply side constraints, the domestic market is expected to grow, particularly in the utility, desalination, and industrial and chemical sectors. These two factors limit the extent to which Europe will be able to rely on additional supplies from Algeria in the coming years to replace the decline in European production.
Libya
Algeria’s neighbour, Libya, could theoretically supply up to 15 bcm per year to Europe by the mid-2020s. In 2013 Libya produced 12 bcm and supplied around 5 bcm to Italy via the Greenstream pipeline. Unlike Algeria, Libya is expected to remain a net exporter, since the growth of its domestic market remains slow due to continued economic and political unrest in the country. However, its net export position is limited by the lack of potential for growth in Libya’s supplies, which is constrained by lack of export infrastructure. At the moment, Libya exports gas to Europe via the Greenstream pipeline (11 bcm per annum), which connects the country with Sicily.
Libya is expected to remain a net exporter, since the growth of its domestic market remains slow due to continued economic and political unrest in the country.
Libya also has an LNG export facility (in fact, the second LNG export plant ever built, after Algeria’s), which has a nameplate capacity of 3.2 million tonnes per annum. However, the facility is not in operation because of the heavy damage it has sustained during the conflict. It is unlikely to come back online in the short to medium term.
Thus, Libya’s gas export growth would have to be supplemented by new pipelines and/or by LNG plants, which, given the political uncertainties, seem unlikely to materialise any time soon.
Egypt
It is highly unlikely that Egypt will remove energy subsidies in order to moderate the growth of demand.
Egypt is another traditional gas supplier to Europe, but it too is becoming an importer because of its growing domestic market – over the last 20 years, consumption has grown by 8 percent a year. Domestic demand is expected to catch up with production by 2015, limiting the country’s export potential. It is highly unlikely that Egypt will remove energy subsidies in order to moderate the growth of demand: the political turmoil in which the country has found itself since 2011 makes the Egyptian government reluctant to adopt unpopular measures such as increasing utility and gas prices. Therefore, Egypt is likely to become a net importer.
Israel
The discovery of the offshore Leviathan and Tamar gas fields in the Eastern Mediterranean Sea could make Israel a regional gas exporter. These two fields have total estimated reserves of 792 bcm. Despite its potential for exports, however, Israel’s priority has been to protect its national interests, including its energy security: 60 percent of its gas reserves must be supplied to the domestic market.
Israel has seemed to be more willing to supply its gas surplus at market prices to neighbouring countries (notably, Egypt and Jordan) rather than to invest in expensive infrastructure to tap into European markets.
Moreover, given the expected growth in regional energy demand, Israel has seemed to be more willing to supply its gas surplus at market prices to neighbouring countries (notably, Egypt and Jordan) rather than to invest in expensive infrastructure to tap into European markets. Israel has agreed to supply 45 bcm to Jordan and negotiations are under way to supply excess gas through a pipeline to Egypt’s LNG facilities, which represents a potential export route for Israeli gas. Another export option would be to supply gas to Turkey – but in view of the political disagreements between the two countries, that does not seem likely in the near term.
Azerbaijan
Azerbaijan is the supplier best placed to respond to the EU’s strategy of diversifying gas supply away from Russia. Azerbaijan has long been cooperating with Western energy companies on projects such as the Azeri-Chirag-Deepwater Guneshli oil project and the Shah Deniz gas condensate project (both led by BP), as well as the Baku-Tbilisi-Ceyhan (BTC) and the Baku-Tbilisi-Erzurum (BTE) pipelines. Thus, the scope for increasing gas supply from Azerbaijan seems to be simply a matter of the economics of the potential supply projects.
Azerbaijan is the supplier best placed to respond to the EU’s strategy of diversifying gas supply away from Russia.
The supply is expected to come from the second phase of the Shah Deniz project, with an estimated cost of over $45 billion, or $380-430/billion cubic metres at the Turkey-Greece border, and from the Umid gas field (SOCAR and Nobel Oil). The two projects could potentially supply up to 18-19 bcm per year of gas by 2020, with at least 6 bcm committed to the Turkish market and 10 bcm to Greece, Albania, and Italy. In 2014, the Shah Deniz consortium finally agreed to commit gas resources to the Trans Adriatic Pipeline (TAP), which will bring Azeri gas to Europe through Turkey; although it has a small transport capacity, this project will certainly contribute to the EU’s diversification efforts.
Turkmenistan
Turkmenistan’s rich gas reserves are a logical source for European supplies and the option of obtaining gas from the country has been discussed for a long time. However, after long and unsuccessful negotiations on building the Trans-Caspian Pipeline under the Caspian Sea to bring Turkmen gas to Europe, Turkmenistan has shifted its export strategy towards China. China has secured most of the prospective and relatively cheap upstream projects: the first two phases of the Yolotan gas field (up to 60 bcm/year) and the Bagtyyarlyk gas fields (15-30 bcm/year). And in 2003, Moscow managed to make Ashgabat commit its entire gas export capacity to Gazprom for the next 25 years.
After long and unsuccessful negotiations on building the Trans-Caspian Pipeline under the Caspian Sea to bring Turkmen gas to Europe, Turkmenistan has shifted its export strategy towards China.
Competition with China and Russia is one factor militating against Turkmen gas being sent to Europe. Another is the need to resolve the Caspian Sea water boundaries among its five littoral states, which is required in order to allow the construction of the Trans-Caspian Pipeline. That said, negotiations on the issue between Turkmenistan and Azerbaijan, which had been stalled, have been revived as a result of the current crisis in Ukraine.
Turkey
Turkey has been able to implement a fairly successful energy policy, securing significant volumes of hydrocarbons and attracting huge investments for the country’s ambitious energy transportation projects. The recent discussion of the possibility of building a “Turkish Stream” in place of the failed South Stream project was yet another illustration of the key transit position of Turkey with regard to Europe. In a sense, the key to Europe’s diversification lies with Turkey – but the relationship between the EU and Turkey has been somewhat icy for the past few years.
In Ankara, Europe’s energy security is treated more as a bargaining chip than as a shared strategic vision.
Arguably, contributing to European energy security is no longer an objective in itself for Turkey. In Ankara, Europe’s energy security is treated more as a bargaining chip than as a shared strategic vision. That being said, especially when it comes to Russian pressure on Azerbaijan, the EU and Turkey’s interests are fully aligned on routing more Azerbaijani gas through Turkey to Europe, as opposed to allowing Moscow to have more of it channelled to Russia.
Recent major gas discoveries in the Eastern Mediterranean (offshore of Israel and Cyprus) may be used to supply the Turkish market and transported beyond to Europe, if the underlying geopolitical frictions can be sorted out. EU diplomatic engagement could be critical here: persuading the Republic of Cyprus to allow an Israeli pipeline to pass through its Exclusive Economic Zone (EEZ) would give the EU an instrument to influence Turkey’s position on other issues.
The EU could lead a diplomatic initiative in which, together with Turkey and the US, it could mediate between the governments of Erbil and Baghdad.
As mentioned above, closer relations between Turkey and the Kurdistan Regional Government in Iraq (KRG) and Turkey in recent years have made possible the option of gas supplies from Northern Iraq. The KRG could supply Turkey with natural gas, and in the long term could also supply Europe, if Erbil and Baghdad could resolve their disputes over development, export strategy, and revenue sharing. Turkey has little diplomatic leverage to enable it to contribute to settling the dispute. So, the EU could lead a diplomatic initiative in which, together with Turkey and the US, it could mediate between the governments of Erbil and Baghdad.
If the nuclear issue is resolved, Iran could well become an exporter of gas to Europe via Turkey towards the second half of the decade, though that would also require fundamental reform in the Iranian hydrocarbon sector.
Turkey’s role as a transit corridor for Azerbaijani gas should also be mentioned, but Europe’s leverage here has been considerably reduced since the pipeline to be used is the Trans-Anatolian Natural Gas Pipeline (TANAP, owned by Azerbaijan and Turkey) as opposed to Nabucco (which was a European consortium) – and particularly because of the way this happened, with Nabucco stalled for several years and causing resentment.
Turkey will need vast investment in its energy infrastructure, and also liberalisation and reform of its electricity and gas markets.
In the longer term, Turkey will need vast investment in its energy infrastructure, and also liberalisation and reform of its electricity and gas markets. Solid EU-Turkey energy cooperation could deliver these goals, as the EU has already played an important role in this area. A competitive energy market could well lower the country’s energy bill, while reinforcing an energy infrastructure that would help Europe’s energy diversification.
The new developments around TAP and the cancellation of South Stream highlighted yet again the importance of the Southern Gas Corridor. Turkey’s role is crucial for the energy diversification of Europe, and of its southeast and south in particular. The perception of Turkey as a gas hub is very high on President Recep Tayyip Erdogan’s agenda, and the EU would be well served by enhancing its political dialogue with Turkey on the issue of gas transit.
Europe’s goal of significantly diversifying away from Russian gas is challenging but not impossible in the short to medium term.
To sum up, Europe’s goal of significantly diversifying away from Russian gas is challenging but not impossible in the short to medium term (through 2020-2025). Among the many challenges are the uncertainties regarding some of the most promising non-Russian gas supply options, such those from the Middle East and Caspian regions. The resolution of these uncertainties depends on the actions and political will of others (such as the US, Russia, and China) as well as Europe’s ability to speak in its own voice. This latter would be significantly boosted by the introduction of a Special Envoy.
Read more on: Wider Europe,Turkey,Russia,EaP,UkraineThe city also filed a motion in state court seeking an injunction to temporarily halt the SEPTA strike for Election Day.
Pennsylvania Gov. Tom Wolf has some harsh words for striking SEPTA workers: Time for this to end.
The first-term Democrat released a statement Sunday night saying he will file an amicus brief in support of an immediate injunction to end the strike that’s been filed by SEPTA. The transit authority asked a Philadelphia Court of Common Pleas judge Friday to issue an injunction. That request was denied, and another hearing was set for first thing Monday morning.
Wolf said in a statement that it’s “clear” both sides have failed to come to an agreement and “the work stoppage has crippled” the city’s transportation system.
“It has become not only an issue that is impacting the ability of the elderly and individuals with disabilities to access care, and students to receive an education, but it is also one that has grave economic consequences for both the city and the Commonwealth of Pennsylvania,” Wolf said in the statement. He continued: “This strike has been devastating for so many individuals and their families and has created extreme hardships for the city and for businesses. The time for it to end is now.”
The city of Philadelphia also announced Sunday night it filed a motion in state court seeking an injunction to temporarily halt the SEPTA strike for Election Day. City Solicitor Sozi Pedro Tulante said in a statement that “The City has a legal responsibility to ensure that Philadelphians can exercise their constitutional right to vote.”
“Though there are extensive efforts to minimize the effect of any transit strike on Election Day, unquestionably, such an Election-Day strike will make it practically impossible for many Philadelphians to participate in this election,” he continued.
The city isn’t taking a position on the merits of SEPTA’s filing to end the strike entirely. Attorneys representing both SEPTA and TWU Local 234 will appear in court Monday morning at 9:30 a.m. as the strike heads into its seventh day.Friends of Jars of Clay!
We are well into 2014, and if you haven’t heard, this is a special year in the story of Jars of Clay.
20 years ago, we wrote our first songs together in college, and with the recent release of Inland, we are found grateful for the continued opportunity to share our stories and songs and hear how they connect to yours. After discussing how to celebrate such a moment, we’ve planned an exciting opportunity with PledgeMusic.
Recently, we’ve been playing StageIt concerts, featuring each album in our catalog. Your positive feedback from those acoustic, intimate arrangements gave us an idea. We have decided, in our 20th year, to record your 20 favorite Jars songs in that acoustic fashion.
Here’s how it will work- when you pledge, you will not only get the digital album of these 20 songs, but you will also get a vote on what songs make it on the record. Over the next several weeks, we will use a “polling” function here on PledgeMusic that will allow you all to cast your votes. The Top Two songs per album from our 10 studio albums will then make up the 20 songs. So this album will be created based on your votes!!
For those of you wanting more than digital downloads, we will make CDs available for you plus both black and colored vinyl. (And if you love vinyl like we do, then you can even get a vote on what vinyl color!)
And PledgeMusic will also allow us to offer 10% of all money we raise after meeting our production goal to Blood:Water Mission.
Besides the new Jars 20 album, we dug into our archives and found some unique and cool items to offer you long-time fans. Some of these we will make available as time goes on via this project and some we have right now, like our Stringtown CDs and our White Elephant Sessions CDs. Stay tuned for more fun stuff!
Ah, but there’s EVEN more! Dun-dun-duuuuun! We are putting a limited number of tickets on sale for a very special fan-celebration weekend event on September 26th & 27th, right here in Nashville.
We will be playing a special intimate show at the Franklin Theater which accommodates less than 300 people. It will include a special reception at our new Blood:Water Mission offices and a fun Q & A Studio Tour at our Gray Matters Studio. We will also be thinking up some other cool fan-related events for you all to partake in that weekend…more to follow on that in the months to come.
Of course, we would like to invite all of you into town for this amazing weekend but know that not all of you can travel, so we will be developing ways to involve all of you as we continue on with this exciting project.
We hope you are as |
iff). The model is particularly useful for developing instructional programs that blend technology, pedagogy and content to deliver effective, inclusive (reliable) and efficient learning. According to McGriff, Kemp identifies nine key elements: Identify instructional problems, and specify goals for designing an instructional program. Examine learner characteristics that should receive attention during planning. Identify subject content, and analyze task components related to stated goals and purposes. State instructional objectives for the learner. Sequence content within each instructional unit for logical learning. Design instructional strategies so that each learner can master the objectives. Plan the instructional message and delivery. Develop evaluation instruments to assess objectives. Select resources to support instruction and learning activities." Source: www.edutechwiki.unige.ch
Kemp Instructional Design Model
Kirkpatrick's Four Levels of Training Evaluation
"The Kirkpatrick Model is the worldwide standard for evaluating the effectiveness of training. It considers the value of any type of training, formal or informal, across four levels. Level 1 Reaction evaluates how participants respond to the training.
Level 2 Learning measures if they actually learned the material.
Level 3 Behavior considers if they are using what they learned on the job.
Level 4 Results evaluates if the training positively impacted the organization. Created by Dr. Don Kirkpatrick in the 1950s, the model is applied before, during and after training to both maximize and demonstrate training's value to the organization." Source: http://www.kirkpatrickpartners.com
Kirkpatrick's Four Levels of Training EvaluationTata reveals Barca difficulties
By Football Espana staff
Former Barcelona boss Gerardo ‘Tata’ Martino has spoken of the difficulties of coaching the Catalans and keeping the players there happy.
The current Argentina boss, who stands by the self-critical comments he made after his departure from the club at the end of last season, also feels his honesty in assessing the situation at Barca in public was probably not the best policy.
“The Argentina and Barcelona dressing rooms are similar in terms of the quality of players at your disposal but the circumstances are different,” he is quoted as saying by Marca.
“The games come one after another and the squad quickly get the measure of the Coach, but rotations are made so everyone feels happy and motivated.
“However, that goes out of the window when you get to the first crucial match and the player says to himself that the reality of rotations are great but for the important games this is the team.
“I try to be self-critical about everything and the difference when I was with Barca was that I said things in public.
“Maybe others do the same thing but prefer to keep quiet about it,” he maintained.The myth of anti-Black police brutality seems to be making the rounds again. Recently, two separate incidents in which Blacks were killed by police were caught on video tape.
In the first incident, police were called after Alton Sterling allegedly threatened to shoot someone. He resisted arrest and ended up pinned to the ground. One officer yelled “He’s got a gun!” and then one of the two officers present shot him several times. Whether or not he was, in fact, reaching for a gun in his pocket is impossible to tell from the angle from which the videos of the incident were filmed.
The video of the second incident begins right after Philando Castile was shot several times by police. Philando’s girlfriend, who video taped the incident, claims that the police pulled her over for a broken taillight. They asked for licence and registration. Philando reached for his pockets to get the requested documents while telling police that he was, legally, carrying a firearm on him. At this point she says the police instantly began shooting him. The police officer who did the shooting, by contrast, says that he told Philando to remove his hands from near his pocket after being told that he had a gun, then Philando continued to reach for the area where the gun was anyhow, and that is why he was shot.
Who is telling the truth? I have no clue. That being said, even if Philando was not responding to the officers request it seems highly unlikely that he was trying to do anything other than getting his licence. Of course, the officer could not know that in the moment, and had to make a split second decision, but this death is obviously extremely unfortunate regardless of which story is more accurate.
Alton Sterling’s case is a little different. His arrest record includes everything from domestic abuse, to the illegal possession of firearms, to battery, to burglary, to carnal knowledge of a juvenile. On top of this, the police were called because he was, allegedly, threatening to kill people with a gun. Given all this, the idea that Alton was reaching for a gun with the intention of killing people is less than far fetched. If he wasn’t, the killing was not justified, but the degree of tragedy involved is obviously not the same.
Many have been quick to blame both of these incidents on anti-Black racism. The fact that neither video gives us enough evidence to determine whether or not the police were justified in their actions, or the fact that the officer who shot Philando was Asian, not White, does not deter them.
These stories seem destined for the same fate as the Trayvon story, the Freddie Grey Story, and the Mike Brown story. People pushing the idea that Blacks are being systemically and unjustly killed by police have a strong tendency to focus on colorful (and often dishonest) anecdotes. This is for good reason.
A quick look at the relevant statistics quickly dispels notion that the police are waging some kind of war against Blacks. In any society, a certain proportion of people who interact with police are going to end up being killed by police. This will be for both just and unjust reasons. An even larger proportion of people being arrested for violent crimes are going to end up being killed by police, and a still larger proportion of people being arrested for homicide will end up being killed by police.
To test whether or not there really is a bias against Blacks in police killings, we can compare the proportion of people who are arrestd for all crime, violent crime, and homicide, who are Black to the proportion of people who are killed by police who are Black. If the “system” really is biased against Blacks, Blacks should make up a larger proportion of people killed by police than they do criminals.
We therefore need two sets of data: one on crime and one on police killings. Unfortunately, both of these sorts of data are controversial.
The most obvious place to look for crime data is the FBI’s uniform crime report which is based on arrest data. However, some people will claim that there is bias in the arrest numbers as well and that, in reality, Blacks are less criminal than what arrest data would suggest.
This argument can easily be refuted using data from the The National Crime Victimization Survey (NCVS). The NCVS is a survey carried out yearly by the Department of Justice in which a random sample of approximately 90,000 households and 160,000 individuals are asked about their experience with crime over the last 6 months. Participants are asked if they have been the victim of a violent crime in the last 6 months. If they have then they are asked to answer various questions about the crime and the perpetrator of said crime. These bi-yearly interviews are combined on a yearly basis.
Using this data, the proportion of violent criminals who are Black, according to the victims of violent crimes, can easily be calculated. We can then compare these figures to the crime rates suggested by the FBI’s arrest data.
“The National Crime Victimization Survey Validates the Uniform Crime Report’s Data on Black Crime“
As can be seen, the two reports come to essentially identical conclusions. Arrest data, at least for violent crime, is not biased against Black people.
Data from the 2014 UCR shows that Blacks accounted for roughly 51% of murders, 38% of all violent criminals, and 28% of all persons arrested (2014, Crime in the United States, Table 43).
These numbers are highly representative of Black crime rates in general, as can be seen by comparing this to aggregated data from each UCR published from 1995 to 2014.
So, we have some good crime data, now let’s talk about data on who police kill.There are various sources on police killings. Which one is best is a matter of controversy, but it doesn’t really matter, because they all show basically the same thing in terms of the proportion of people killed by police who are Black.
To begin with, the Harvard economist Sendhil Mullainathan analyzed UCR data and found that 32% of those killed by police were black (Mullainathan, 2015).
Similarly, the sociologist Peter Moskos analyzed data from the website Killedbypolice.net, which claims to be “The most accurate, most comprehensive and always up-to-date list of people killed by U.S. law enforcement officers.” The site basically aggregates all news stories in the country about someone being killed by a cop. The site is supposed to offer a rigorous alternative to biased and lazy statistics released by the government. Using this data set, Moskos found that 30% of those killed by police in 2013-2015 were Black (Moskos, 2015).
A third source we can use is the CDC’s Compressed Mortality Database. This database’s focus isn’t on crime but, rather, the causes of American deaths. However, one such cause is being killed by law enforcement (excluding legal execution). Using this data, we can see that the CDC estimates Blacks to have been 27% of those killed by police between 1999 and 2014 (Compressed Mortality Database).
Thus, across multiple data sources, we see that, if anything, Blacks make up a lower proportion of those killed by police than what we would expect given their crime rates. In light of this, there is no justifiable reason for supposing that the police are running around unjustly killing Blacks.
This does not mean that the police never unjustly kill Black people or that any particular anecdote is false. But it does mean that we can not infer from any anecdote the sort of generalized narratives which BLM types are prone to pushing.Fuck it, I’m feeling educational today.
There’s this thing that none of you seem to know about called metonymy and it’s where you use a whole to stand in for a part. To give you an example, metonymy would be when someone says, “Washington is so corrupt these days,” and you understand that they do not mean that every citizen of Washington, D.C., or even every congressperson in Washington, D.C. is completely morally bankrupt, and that they are actually talking about the idea of Washington, D.C. and the structure that is in place being corrupt. When “America” goes to war, every single American does not simultaneously take up arms. When “the internet” attacks someone, every person with an internet connection does not become a hivemind of anger aimed at an individual.
So when I say, “I hate straight people,” I am saying exactly what I mean. “I hate the system of oppression and homophobia that was set up by and benefits straights.” Metonymy. Boom.
But furthermore, it’s not even that I “hate the oppression” (although I do). I also hate those who are complicit, who benefit from a system that I can’t access, and when I demand entry, deny that they had any part of it or received any benefits, and tell me that I should make it the same way they did - without any help.
I do not care whether you get mad at me for saying that. I could not give a flying shit if that upsets you. I will say what I want to say and you will accept it, because as an ally that is your job.When you decided to call yourself an ally, you didn’t just sign up for the rainbow bracelets and the pretty gay marriage.gifs. You signed up to support the queer community and that means supporting queer people in what they say, feel and believe. Don’t blame me because you didn’t read the fine print.It is no secret among most folks who know me that I hate PETA.
Yup, that group. The People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals, or as I like to call it: The People Who Don’t Give a Damn About Animals But Love Antagonizing People, Particularly Blacks and All Women. Seriously, why the Southern Poverty Law Center doesn’t list them among other eco-terrorist groups is beyond me.
And I mean this sincerely. When someone tells me that they are a member of PETA, I instantly think hipster-bigot. PETA is habitually offensive. But as of late (or possibly always), the organization has been extremely sexist and racist too. They love to evoke imagery related to Black people and our history – as well as other oppressed people’s history – and use it as comparison for their alleged animal liberation: like the time when some PETA members dressed as Klan members to protest the Westminster Kennel Club show and then followed up that bad idea with an equally offensive Klan commercial; or the time when they compared slaughtering cows for food to lynching Black people; or the time when the entire country of Germany had to ban a PETA campaign that compared the Jewish Holocaust to slaughtering animals for food; or the time the organization evoked the names of Trayvon Martin and Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. in the same campaign to remind PETA followers to “speak up for anyone, regardless of how hard it is for us to relate to them or how alien their behavior, culture, or looks seem to us, including the individuals gunned down for a millionaire’s casual amusement, the chimpanzees poisoned in experiments, the elephants beaten to make them perform in circuses, and the foxes caught in steel-jaw traps for their fur.”
Some people I have encountered believe that such comparisons, while harsh, are a necessary truth. They argue that fighting against how we treat animals and how we have industrialized our food, particularly our meat, is also a fight against White supremacy. I can certainly understand this. However, using the holidays, memorials and general history of the oppressed to make this point just seems unnecessarily antagonistic to me; and at the very least, hollow.
After all, if PETA was actually genuinely concerned about ending the oppression of all species as they claim, then how come the organization was silent about the Department of Justice’s Ferguson report? In particular, the part in the report that brought to light the Ferguson Police Department’s “unreasonable” use of canines on “low-level, unarmed offenders.”
According to the report:
FPD engages in a pattern of deploying canines to bite individuals when the articulated facts do not justify this significant use of force. The department’s own records demonstrate that, as with other types of force, canines officers use dogs out of proportion to the threat posed by the people they encounter, leaving serious puncture wounds to nonviolent offenders, some of them children. Furthermore, in every canine bite incident for which racial information is available, the subject was African American.
As we are all aware, the use of canines against Black people has a long history in this country. Most memorably, the Birmingham Campaign of 1963. But according to this article in the New Yorker entitled, “Police Dog Bites Black Man,” the use of police dogs has gone up since September 11 in just about all aspects of policing, including bomb detonation. And according to Citylab, a 2013 report by the Police Assessment Resource Center reveals that in the first six months of that year, all of the people bitten by L.A. County Sheriff’s Department canine unit were Black or Hispanic.
In spite of the clear exploitation of dogs here, particularly by training them to see and react violently to people based on their race, PETA has been pretty silent about all of it. To the contrary, the animals rights organization, founded on the principles of animal liberation, could be seen as pro-K-9 unit. It even gave a special shout-out on its blog to Kirk the K-9 dog, who was on the presidential security detail during Ronald Reagan’s administration when his partner, Officer Thomas K. Delahanty, was shot in the neck during an assassination attempt.
In fact, the only time PETA takes issue with the use of canines as weapons and tools for law enforcement is when they are not protected enough from heatstroke; not when they are being unnecessarily deployed on mostly Black and brown people.
This may seem like a petty observation, but it’s a total head-scratcher. How can PETA can be okay with canine police dogs being used in this manner while also supporting positions that say the use of service dogs, including guide dogs, is ethically wrong (yes, the organization believes that)? Besides, if they are going to continuously evoke the image of truly oppressed people in the hopes of liberating animals, then they better make for damn sure that their allyship is genuine. Or else, it all comes off as a bit racist.Attorney General Derek Schmidt is asking the state Supreme Court to strike down the ballot initiative Wichita voters passed Tuesday to reduce penalties for marijuana possession.
“There are no facts in dispute – only the legal question of whether the City of Wichita acted outside its authority by purporting to adopt this ordinance in conflict with state law,” Schmidt said in a news release Thursday accompanying his filing. “A quick, authoritative and final resolution in the Supreme Court will provide the clarity needed to guide everyone involved.”
A lawyer for the marijuana activists who forced Tuesday’s vote said he finds it funny that Schmidt is moving on the case only after his side lost.
“I guess if the wrong people win an election in Wichita, Kansas, the attorney general is going to want a do-over,” said Scott Poor, a lawyer for the Wichita Marijuana Reform Initiative group.
Sign Up and Save Get six months of free digital access to The Wichita Eagle
The initiative – approved by voters 54 percent to 46 percent – seeks to reduce the penalty for first-time marijuana possession to a $50 fine for adults over 21. Violations would be an infraction that wouldn’t have to be disclosed on most job or scholarship applications.
The state law defines pot possession a Class A misdemeanor, on par with violent offenses such as assaulting a police officer. The maximum penalty is a year in jail and a $2,500 fine.
In his court filing released late Thursday, Schmidt cited several reasons why he thinks the initiative should be intercepted by the court before it takes effect.
Foremost, Schmidt wrote in the court filing, “The Kansas Constitution prohibits cities from adopting ordinances that conflict with uniform state law.”
Not only does state law treat marijuana possession as a much more serious crime, the Wichita initiative could keep marijuana convictions from being counted as prior offenses in sentencing for other crimes, Schmidt argued.
He also alleged the initiative tries to give unlawful directions to city police and municipal judges And he claimed it was not properly filed because the city clerk didn’t have a copy and the wording didn’t include a “be it ordained” clause required by state law.
Poor disputed the attorney general’s opinion that the Wichita initiative conflicts with state law.
“We passed a city ordinance,” he said. “We didn’t change state law in the city of Wichita. We changed the ordinance as enforced by the city of Wichita.”
The district attorney, a state official, remains free to pursue state marijuana charges in state courts, he said.
“Our ordinance only related to city cops, city prosecutors and city courts,” he said.
On the technical complaints, he said the petitioners complied with everything that the city clerk, the city law department, the Sedgwick County counsel and the county election commissioner told them they had to do.
In fact, they circulated the petition twice after falling a few signatures short of the number they needed in August. The second effort was done with direct advice from city staff.
Poor said Schmidt’s procedural challenges “are not a particularly relevant argument after the election,” because the attorney general had plenty of time to challenge that earlier in the process.
“It’s just interesting they only decide to raise these issues after they figure out they don’t like the outcome,” Poor said.
Schmidt requested that the Supreme Court issue an order “declaring the Wichita Marijuana Ordinance null and void, and permanently prohibiting the city of Wichita from publishing, implementing and enforcing the same.”
In addition, Schmidt asked the Supreme Court to stay proceedings in a district court action where the city has sued marijuana activist Janice Bradley, seeking a court ruling on the initiative’s legality.
Schmidt also asked the Supreme Court to issue a temporary restraining order blocking implementation of the ordinance until his court case is decided.
The city of Wichita is the only named defendant in Schmidt’s filing.
The petitioners who forced the city to put the measure to a vote will have to file for permission to intervene, Poor said. He said intervention will likely be granted, especially because part of the issue has to do with how petitions were filed.The International Champions Cup will showcase eight of the world’s highest-profile soccer clubs in venues across the U.S. this summer. With it have come starkly different interests in Michigan and Minnesota.
The match between Manchester United and Real Madrid at Michigan Stadium sold out its 109,000 seats in about four days, the University of Michigan ticket office said.
Meanwhile, the match between Manchester City and Olympiacos at TCF Bank Stadium has sold an estimated 20,000 seats as of Wednesday, according to Relevent Sports, the event’s promoter.
Premium tickets priced at $130 for a midfield view of the Aug. 2 game were still available Wednesday at the University of Minnesota’s 50,000-seat stadium.
Relevent Sports is an international soccer marketing company that started the International Champions Cup last year, with predecessor tournament and games dating to 2003.
“There are crazy games like (the one at) the University of Michigan,” said Charlie Stillitano, CEO of Relevent Sports.
The inaugural International Champions Cup drew an estimated 300,000 fans last summer. The championship game between Real Madrid and Chelsea was played in front of about 67,000 fans in Miami, while about 22,000 came out to see Juventus and Everton in pool play in San Francisco.
This year’s field also includes Liverpool, AC Milan, AS Roma and Inter. Games will be played at 12 venues starting July 24; the title game will be at Sun Life Stadium in Miami on Aug. 4.
Sales for the Minnesota game rank in the middle of the pack of the 12 games, Stillitano said.
Relevent Sports, which is owned by Miami Dolphins owner Stephen Ross, and the Minnesota Vikings have formed a “strategic alliance” to host more than just this game. They will work toward games in Minnesota in 2015 and 2016, and Relevent Sports will consult on the NFL franchise’s bid to bring a Major League Soccer franchise to Minnesota.
“We like to go to new markets,” Stillitano said. “It seems wherever we go an MLS team follows (in Toronto and Seattle). I think it’s a good thing. We test the market, really.”
The Twin Cities market, which will be scrutinized by MLS, has an incomplete grade on this test so far.
But, Stillitano said, “We fully expect a sellout.”
To achieve that, Relevent Sports and the Vikings “relaunched” the game with a news conference Wednesday at TCF Bank Stadium.
“We have six weeks to sell the building out, and we are all in,” said Lester Bagley, the Vikings’ vice president of public affairs. “We have a great organization that has great expertise in sales and marketing and tickets. We are putting that all on the line for August 2 right now.”
A North American Soccer League match between Minnesota United FC and Ottawa will follow the Aug. 2. match between the European clubs. And a temporary natural grass surface will be installed over the field turf before the games.
Manchester United and Real Madrid might be better-known clubs playing in Ann Arbor, Mich., but Manchester City is the reigning English Premier League champion, and Olympiacos is the 41-time and defending champion in Superleague Greece.
Andrei Markovits, a professor at the University of Michigan and author of “Offside: Soccer and American Exceptionalism,” is convinced the quick sellout of the Michigan Stadium game would not have happened a decade ago.
“Granted, it’s the two most pedigreed teams, but still, the speed,” Markovits said. “Let’s say it was (less well-known teams) Milan and Manchester City, eh, maybe sold out in two weeks.”
Minnesota will need even more time to see about a sellout.
Follow Andy Greder at twitter.com/andygreder.Summers, Osborne, and Zakaria on British vs. US Austerity: Fact Check in One Chart
Yesterday Fareed Zakaria presented an interview with British Chancellor of the ExchequerGeorge Osborne on his CNN talk show GPS. (CNN did not post the video, but you can read the transcript here.) In the course of the interview, Zakaria brought up Larry Summers’ recent criticism of Britain’s austerity policy. The resulting exchange immediately set off my fact check alert. Here is the relevant bit in full:
ZAKARIA: Let me ask you, to begin with, you’ve been touting Britain’s growth. You’ve written an op-ed in the Wall Street Journal. But, of course, there are a lot of people who say Britain’s recovery has been very weak, the weakest in the G7 other than Italy. And there is a specific charge made which is that it was your austerity program, especially the spending cuts that was responsible for this very weak recovery. Let me read to you something Larry Summers said on British television. He said Britain’s economic policies, meaning yours, “Are a powerful empirical test of the efficacy of determined, resolute austerity and the results so far have not been encouraging to advocates of that strategy. They are in line with predictions that this austerity would lead to reductions in demand, reductions in GDP,” et cetera. What’s your response? GEORGE OSBORNE, CHANCELLOR OF THE EXCHEQUER AND SECOND LORD OF THE TREASURY OF THE UNITED KINGDOM: Well, I totally reject his analysis. If you look at the situation the U.K. found itself in three-and-a-half years ago, we had had one of the deepest recessions of any of the major economies of the world. Our GDP had shrunk by over 7 percent of GDP. We had the largest banking crisis of any financial center, the biggest bank bailout. And we exited with a very high budget deficit, an 11 percent budget deficit. Really only the United States had a similar sized deficit and, of course, the U.S. has a reserve currency. That was the situation we were confronting and we set out a deliberate plan to bring that deficit down, reduce the structural deficit to sort out some of the structural problems in our financial system and to rebalance the British economy. And I think three-and-a-half years on, the British economy is currently growing faster than pretty much any other Western economy, jobs are being created at a rapid rate each month and you can see a rebalancing happening. ZAKARIA: One of the points Summers makes though is that the, “path to deficit reduction ultimately lies in stronger growth.” You pointed out that Britain and the United States had roughly comparable budget deficits when the — sooner after the crisis. The U.S. budget deficit has gone down dramatically, more so than Britain, and the reason, I think Summers would argue, is that we’ve grown faster. And the reason we’ve grown faster is we didn’t have as much spending cuts and as much austerity. OSBORNE: The thing to focus here is on the structural deficit and there’s been a sharper fall in the structural deficit in the U.K. than any of the other G7 nations.
Is Zakaria, channeling Summers, correct to say that “the reason [the US has] grown faster is we didn’t have as much as spending cuts and as much austerity”? Is Osborne right to say there’s been a sharper fall in the structural deficit in the U.K. than any of the other G7 nations?
Sorry, we are in pants-on-fire territory here. Take a look at this chart that shows the evolution of the primary structural balance in the United States and the UK.
The primary structural balance (the OECD calls it the “underlying” primary balance), which corrects the budget deficit or surplus for both the state of the business cycle and interest on past debts, is generally accepted as the best measure of fiscal austerity and fiscal consolidation. Two things stand out in the chart:
First, the trajectories of fiscal policy in the two countries are remarkably similar. Both engaged briefly in fiscal stimulus in the immediate aftermath of the global crisis, and both since then have sharply closed their structural budget gaps.
Second, if we look very closely, we see that it is the United States, not the UK, that has imposed the harsher austerity measures. Between 2009 and 2013, the total movement toward surplus of the primary structural balance has been 4.6 percentage points in the United States and just 3.9 percent in the UK.
Yes, the United States has grown faster. From 2009 to 2013, the arithmetic average of annual growth rates has been +1.2 percent for the United States and -0.2 percent for the UK. (For 2013 alone, the projected rates are 1.7 percent for the United States and 1.4 percent for the UK.)
Note that these figures do not prove that austerity is bad for growth. They leave us free to agree with Osborne that austerity is good for the economy. If so, then it could be that greater austerity is just what has propelled the United States to greater growth. On the other hand, Summers could be right that austerity is bad for the economy. If so, then something else is powering US growth and holding the UK back.
But hey, let’s at least get our facts right!This list was the hardest I have done in years. It's always easy to point out players on poor teams like the Wizards, Kings, Nets, etcetera. But you realize even if those players were playing out of their minds, it wouldn’t make a great difference so you back off. I tend to target players that, in my estimation, would be the difference in wins and losses. I often try to avoid rookies because, quite frankly, I have never expected much from them. It wouldn't be fair.
I also will not list players I believe have had to make a serious transition and are playing in a system not conducive to the success of their individual games. Jamal Crawford, along with a few others, come to mind, but no one will resonate more in my comment section than Carmelo Anthony. Well, I think the 3-0 record since Mike Woodson took over the Knicks is why he is not on the list. I can’t think of any superstar in the NBA that is a wing player and doesn't get touches consistently on the offensive end. That's what Melo encountered with Mike D’Antoni. If you are going to pay Amare Stoudemire and Anthony mega millions, well, you have to give them the ball and function through them. So because of early season injuries and system, I will give him a pass and see if the Knicks continue to flourish with a style structured towards his strengths.
So here are my Top 10 disappointments so far this season. I emphatically state there is a gap as wide as the Grand Canyon between No. 1 and No. 2.
10. Jose Juan Barea, Minnesota
Barea has not lived up to his play of last year in the Finals. He is shooting a poor 37 percent from the field and showing poor leadership skills. Arguing on the bench with the hardest working player in the league? Come on. He will need to step up and help replace Ricky Rubio for the Timberwolves to make the playoffs.
9. Dirk Nowitzki, Dallas
I have high expectations for Dirk because I believe he has the best array of shot-making skills ever in a 7-foot player, but what has always impressed me about him has been his ability to be in great shape and produce every night. The way he put the Mavericks on his back last year has been done by only one player over the last 20 years – Hakeem Olajuwon. I was disappointed when he openly admitted he was not in great shape to open the season and had to take a number of games off. That had a domino effect on a team that should be riding high from winning a championship last year. Nowitzki has since raised his level of play to expectations, but will it get them back to the Finals?
8. Kendrick Perkins, Oklahoma City
When the Thunder acquired Perkins last season, they expected a Bill Russell-type of player, but Perkins has not lived up to expectations. He needs to spend more time working on completing high-percentage shots in the paint and blocking shots and less scowling at opponents and officials.
7. DeAndre Jordan, Los Angeles Clippers
I heard a Clipper announcer joke when Jordan scored his first basket ever outside the paint in the NBA this season. His teammates made fun about it. His response was, “I have scored because I have made free throws.” Oh really, so he boasts about making 49 percent of his free throws? Jordan should have been embarrassed and gotten into the gym determined to build on something that should already be a part of his arsenal. I would expect a player with freakish athletic skills to at least make progress outside of dunking the ball and blocking shots. Jordan is stagnant and seems to be content, which is disappointing.
6. Raymond Felton, Portland
What has happened to the player that seemed to be headed towards numerous All-Star berths? Felton seems to be a shell of himself since he exploded in a New York Knick uniform and continued his fine play in Denver. Now Felton is shooting a poor 39 percent with Portland while showing subpar leadership on a team that looked like a lock for the playoffs. With a new coach and teammates, all eyes will be on Felton to see if he can actually lead a team on a consistent basis.
5. Metta World Peace, Los Angeles Lakers
I have no problem with the name change, but I do have a problem with him continuing to submit and become content with subpar performances. Just a few years ago, World Peace was one the best players in the NBA and arguably a Top 5 defender. Age no doubt has had an effect, but he is still in tremendous shape and I believe he has lost the confidence that allowed him to be a beast on both ends of the floor. It would be easy to blame Kobe Bryant and the Lakers' system, but you don’t expect that to happen to a player that was viewed to be as physically tough on the court as any in the league. No way he should be shooting 34 percent from the field and averaging less than a steal a game.
4. Jameer Nelson, Orlando
The Magic scored 59 points against the Bulls the other night and the finger is pointed squarely at Nelson. He has a plethora of scorers at his disposal, but has not been able to consistently keep them involved. Nelson, a one-time All-Star, has always been a shoot-first point guard who thrives when he is making shots. But if the Magic are going to finally have a chance to win a championship and keep Dwight Howard in town, Nelson can’t keep shooting 42 percent from the field and dishing out only 5 assists per contest. I realize he is actually above his 4.9 career assist mark, but he has the ability to average 8-plus a game with the offensive talent around him.
3. Blake Griffin, Los Angeles Clippers
There is no doubt Griffin is a monster you have to deal with every night. He works extremely hard and because of that he will consistently put up All-NBA numbers. But there are two characteristics in his game that will need drastic improvement for the Clippers to have any chance of winning a first-round playoff series. I watch Griffin shoot free throws and I cringe at the poor mechanical execution from beginning to end. There is no way he should be shooting 55 percent from the line with his athletic ability to change it. Also, we highlight and boast about his tremendous dunks, but he averages less than one block and steal a game. The Clippers will go into the playoffs with the most dominant in-the-paint finishers in DeAndre Jordan and Griffin, but will not run a play for them because they can’t shoot free throws.
2. Danny Granger, Indiana
This one hurts me because I love Danny Granger as a basketball player. If I picked any player that played like I did, it would be Granger. He is old school personified with a crafty and efficient below-the-rim game, but his struggles this year will undoubtedly short-circuit a tremendous playoff run by one of my favorite squads. Rule of thumb should be this: If you are going to take five shots more per game than any other teammate, especially if those teammates are proven All-Stars like Roy Hibbert and David West, then you should be shooting a good percentage. Granger is shooting a career-worst 39 percent from the field and 33 percent from behind the arc. I am not in the Pacer locker room, but I don’t have to be to know that it is a recipe for discord when it comes to post players wanting more touches. Granger needs to tone down the shot selection and concentrate more on making his post players a weapon. Then he will find out the contested shots on the perimeter he takes now will open up and raise his percentage and points per game.
1. Lamar Odom, Dallas
Granger is No. 2 on this list, but he is so far removed from No. 1 that Odom is an article all by himself. When you think a player has an opportunity to finally show his worth, Odom shows us why he was traded. I am appalled that he has the gall to be upset he was moved to a world champion when he, more than most, understands what it takes and feels like to become a champion. He has acted like he was traded to the worst team in the league. I am disappointed in Odom mainly because young players are viewing a grown man who has won championships, had success as an individual player and gets a chance to rejuvenate himself on the defending champion and he pouts and plays as if he was back in high school. I have always been an admirer of Odom’s skills as a 6-foot-10 basketball player, but I have no explanation as to how he can shoot 34 percent from the field, 58 percent from the free-throw line and grab just 4 rpg when we have seen astronomical numbers from him.
I know Nowitzki is kicking himself for not reporting in great shape because now he can't criticize a player that he knows can help him repeat for a championship this season.2 years ago
Hey guys! How’re you doing this fine day?
Man, life has been absolutely bonkers lately. I haven’t had a chance to express how awesome you guys were at Let’s Play Live LA, or E3, or RTX, or with the announcement of LPL Chicago, or the fact I’m going to RTX Sydney… so |
has stepped down after posting a comedy video that appeared to compare First Minister Alex Salmond with Adolf Hitler.
Tom Harris, who came third in the Scottish Labour leadership race last year, had been given the role of carrying out a review of Labour’s online operations by new party chief Johann Lamont.
The video uses subtitles to compare Adolf Hitler to Alex Salmond
Mr Harris has apologised for posting the video, which superimposed satirical subtitles referring to the SNP and Mr Salmond onto footage of actor Bruno Ganz playing the character of Hitler in German from the 2004 film Downfall.
The video was attacked as “tasteless” by the SNP. However, the same footage has been used to mock a number of well-known names in recent years, including former prime minister Gordon Brown.
Mr Harris’s particular version was entitled ‘Joan’s Downfall’, in reference to SNP MSP Joan McAlpine’s recent “anti-Scottish” Twitter jibe against her Labour and Liberal Democrat peers.
Mr Harris, Labour MP for Glasgow South, said: “Having spoken to Johann, I have decided to step down from leading the party’s social media review.
“The video I posted has been a well worn joke used to parody a range of public figures.
“However, context is everything and in the context of Johann’s and my desire to improve the level of political debate on social media and the context of Joan McAlpine’s much more serious statements about all political opponents of the SNP being anti-Scottish, my actions have been an unhelpful distraction for which I apologise.”
A Scottish Labour spokesperson added: “Tom Harris did the decent thing after a lapse of judgment.
“It is about time that Joan McAlpine does the right thing and apologises for her much more serious error of judgment in saying that anyone who opposes the SNP is anti-Scottish.
“By her own logic, she must see that she regards the majority of Scots as anti-Scottish.
“If she doesn’t do the decent thing then Alex Salmond should sack her as ministerial aide.”
An SNP spokeswoman said: “Across Scotland people want a debate on independence and the options for Scotland’s future that focuses on the issue of how we can go about making Scotland better.
“It is silly, negative nonsense like this that helps explain why Labour are in the doldrums in Scotland.
“It is hugely embarrassing for Labour that one of their MPs and a leadership contender - who should have better things to do with his time - is promoting tasteless stuff like this through his official MP website.”EMILY’s List — a national group that endorses Democratic women running for office — is pledging to help Patty Judge in her race against Republican Chuck Grassley.
“We are a network of three million members nationwide,” says Rachel Thomas, press secretary for EMILY’s List. “We will be communicating with that network about her candidacy, about the stakes in this race.”
The group’s website features videos of each of the candidates it has endorsed in 2016, along with a direct link to donate. A portal for Patty Judge’s campaign is going up the EMILY’s List website today.
“We are excited to support so many woman across the country and make sure that we are helping them build strong and successful campaigns where it’s needed most,” Thomas says.
Iowa State University political science professor Dianne Bystrom says since its founding in 1985, no other group raised more money than EMILY’s List has for Democratic women running for office.
“One of the things we know from research is that donations to women’s campaigns, because there are so few women in elected office — especially congress — come from other women and men from throughout the country who are interested in electing females to local, state and federal government,” Bystrom says.
Iowa Democratic Party chairwoman Andy McGuire says 30 years ago when EMILY’s List started, it helped provide “seed money” for female candidates as they started competing against men in primaries.
“You know, early money is like yeast and it grows, so that’s how you got to the General (Election), but they’ve become very effective in the General (Election) as well,” McGuire says.
The group describes U.S. Senate candidate Patty Judge as “a champion for women and families who will make sure all Iowans’ voices are heard in the U.S. Senate.” The group’s endorsement announcement emphasizes Judge’s status as the first woman elected to be Iowa’s secretary of agriculture. It also mentions Judge is the mother of three children and lists her careers as a nurse, a realtor, a farm mediator and as a farmer, alongside her husband.
EMILY’s List is backing another Iowa Democrat on the November ballot. Fifteen months ago the group endorsed Monica Vernon in her bid for Iowa’s first district congressional seat and EMILY’s List ran ads this spring supporting Vernon in the Democratic Primary. EMILY’s List has not yet indicated whether it will buy ad time for commercials supporting Patty Judge.
In 2014, the EMILY’s List PAC raised and spent nearly $45 million on female candidates around the country.Coming Soon
I Am Not Okay With This
A teen navigates the complexities of high school, family and her sexuality while dealing with new superpowers. Based on Charles Forsman's graphic novel.
Nate Bargatze: The Tennessee Kid
Comedian Nate Bargatze takes aim at the absurdity of everyday life in an approachable and deadpan stand-up set shot in Duluth, Georgia.
Space Force
A comedy series about the people tasked with creating Space Force, a new branch of the U.S. military. From Greg Daniels and star Steve Carell.
Selling Sunset
The elite real estate brokers at The Oppenheim Group sell the luxe life to affluent buyers in LA. The drama ramps up when a new agent joins the team.
ReMastered: The Miami Showband Massacre
Ambushed by Ulster loyalists, three members of the Miami Showband were killed in Northern Ireland in 1975. Was the crime linked to the government?
Top Boy
After being forced to flee his East London housing estate, a former kingpin returns home to take back his throne.
The Spy
This drama series tells the astonishing true story of Israel's most prominent spy, Eli Cohen, who infiltrated the Syrian government in the 1960s.
Chip & Potato
A loveable pug and her mouse BFF start kindergarten, welcome new siblings and learn to become part of their community in this series for preschoolers.The Wildcats were down 2-0 until Ray knocked in two with a double to tie the game in the fourth.
KENNESAW, Ga. -- Kentucky sophomore outfielder Breanne Ray belted a two-run double in the fourth inning to tie the game before senior catcher Griffin Joiner added a two-run double in the fifth inning, lifting the No. 5 Wildcats to a 5-2 victory against Southern Illinois on Friday at Bailey Park in the 2015 Phyllis Rafter Memorial Invitational.
Kentucky (5-1) got a career day from Ray, who went 2-for-2 in the game with two doubles and two RBI, reaching base all three times she stepped to the plate. In her first at-bat in the second inning, she fouled off several pitches for a 10-pitch at-bat that ended with a double down the rightfield line.
Ray had similar success her next at bat in the fourth inning, seeing eight pitches before hitting a line drive to rightfield to score two runs and put Kentucky on the board. Ray walked in her final at bat.
Joiner, junior infielder Nikki Sagermann and junior outfielder Sylver Samuel were the other stars at the plate for Kentucky. Joiner went 1-for-3 with a double and two RBI, while Sagermann drove in the game-winning run with an RBI single, finishing the game 1-for-4 with a run scored. Samuel went 2-for-3 with two runs scored, while juniors Christian Stokes and Maisie Steed each recorded singles.
Joiner and Sagermann did their damage offensively in Kentucky’s key two-out rally in the fifth inning. After back-to-back groundouts to start the fifth inning, Stokes reached on an error, advancing to second when Samuel slapped a single to leftfield.
That set the scene for Sagermann, who blasted a single up the middle to score Stokes and give UK a 3-2 lead. Joiner followed a few pitches later with a double to rightfield to give the Wildcats some breathing room at 5-2.
The offensive production in the fourth and fifth innings helped sophomore pitcher Meagan Prince settling in as she retired nine of the next 10 batters she faced before allowing two runners to reach in the seventh inning.
Prince went the distance for Kentucky, allowing two runs -- one earned -- on three hits with four strikeouts and three walks allowed. The sophomore is now 3-1 on the season with a 1.22 ERA.
SIU (1-4) started senior Katie Bertelsen in the circle, who went seven innings, allowing five runs -- two earned -- on eight hits with two strikeouts. Bertelsen held the Wildcats scoreless the first three innings before UK posted two runs in the fourth, three in the fifth and had two runners on in the sixth and seventh innings.
Offensively, freshman Sydney Jones led SIU by going 1-for-2 with a triple, run scored and RBI, while freshman Savannah Fisher was 1-for-3 with a run scored and senior Meredith Wilson went 1-for-2.
SIU had several base runners the first three innings, but the Kentucky defense limited damage by turning three double plays, which tied the school record for most double plays turned in a game. UK has turned three double plays in a game eight different times with the last coming in April of 2007 against LSU.
The Salukis scored their only runs in the second inning after Wilson singled to get the rally started, but was erased on a 6-3 double play turned smoothly by Stokes. SIU followed with a single and a triple to score the game’s first run, before an error by UK allowed another run to score and make it 2-0.Tomgram: Ira Chernus, Ass-Backwards in the Middle East
[Note to TomDispatch Readers: This site will take the Memorial Day weekend off. Remember as well that the popular TD offer of a signed, personalized copy of Adam Hochschild’s new book, To End All Wars: A Story of Loyalty and Rebellion, 1914-1918, in return for a $100 contribution to this website has only a week left. Check it out here or here. Tom]
It’s been like dueling banjos in Washington this week. President Obama and Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu each got to say the same thing at length and at least twice. Last Thursday, the president gave his “Arab Spring” speech in which -- after a reportedly “furious phone call” between Netanyahu and Secretary of State Hillary Clinton -- he included the following line: “We believe the borders of Israel and Palestine should be based on the 1967 lines with mutually agreed swaps, so that secure and recognized borders are established for both states.”
And a storm of commentary burst forth. Though this, it was said, had long been a privately agreed upon American presidential position, it had never before been stated publicly by a president (or perhaps any other top U.S. official). Netanyahu was reportedly incensed and on Friday could be found “hectoring” a polite but uncomfortable-looking Obama before the cameras in the Oval Office on the “indefensibility” of those 1967 borders. On Sunday, Obama nonetheless went before the wildly pro-Israeli lobbying group AIPAC and gave a speech restating his position on the 1967 borders, but qualifying it as well.
On Monday, to rapturous ovations, Netanyahu appeared before the same crew to restate his position on the indefensibility of those borders and on Tuesday before Congress -- in an invitation initiated by the House Republican leadership and clearly meant to embarrass the president -- he did it again to more standing ovations (29 of them).
It was a clash of titans over a difference so basic that... in November, the two governments were theoretically in accord on the very same point. Chris Nelson of the insider Washington newsletter The Nelson Report has just uncovered a “joint statement” agreed to and issued after a Netanyahu meeting with Secretary of State Clinton last November which said in part: “The Prime Minister and the Secretary agreed on the importance of continuing direct negotiations to achieve our goals. The Secretary reiterated that ‘the United States believes that through good faith negotiations, the parties can mutually agree on an outcome which ends the conflict and reconciles the Palestinian goal of an independent and viable state, based on the 1967 lines, with agreed swaps, and the Israeli goal of a Jewish state with secure and recognized borders that reflect subsequent developments and meet Israeli security requirements.’"
No screaming. No complaints. No hectoring. Nothing. An old Miller Lite ad comes to mind: “Tastes Great. Less Filling.” Or perhaps the immortal lyrics given to Eliza Doolittle in the musical My Fair Lady: “Words, words, words! I’m so sick of words!... Is that all you blighters can do?”
All that sound and fury signifying, well, maybe nothing at all. As TomDispatch regular Ira Chernus points out, it’s not just what the president says, but what he does that counts. And when it comes to doing, with George Mitchell, Obama’s special Middle Eastern envoy (appointed on his second day in office) abruptly quitting -- whether in frustration, despair, or disgust we don’t know -- there’s no evidence that the president will do anything at all when it comes to those 1967 borders, not before the 2012 election anyway.
Let’s give David Bromwich, writing on the President’s Thursday speech for the New York Review of Books, the last word for now: “Obama has always preferred the symbolic authority of the grand utterance to the actual authority of a directed policy -- a policy fought for in particulars, carefully sustained, and traceable to his own intentions.” (To catch Timothy MacBain’s latest TomCast audio interview in which Chernus discusses the strange, looking-glass world of Israeli-Palestinian nonnegotiations, click here, or download it to your iPod here.) Tom
Israel and the Palestinians Through the Looking Glass
The Myths That Underpin the Failure of American Policy in the Middle East
By Ira Chernus Tuches aufn tish: Buttocks on the table. That’s the colorful way my Yiddish-speaking ancestors said, “Let’s cut the BS and talk about honest truth.” It seems like a particularly apt expression after a week watching the shadow-boxing between President Obama and Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu that brought no tangible progress toward an Israeli-Palestinian peace. The truth, like the table, is usually hard and uncomfortable. President Obama’s carefully hedged public call for a two-state solution along Israel’s 1967 borders may indeed represent a new step. Maybe it will even prove part of some long-range game plan that will eventually pay off. But here’s the problem: as of now, Obama shows no inclination to back his words with the power the U.S. government could wield. Until he does, those words won’t provoke any change in Israel’s domination of the Palestinians. And there’s a deeper issue. The influential Israeli columnist Sever Plocker pointed to the heart of the matter: the American president has “unequivocally adopted the essence of the Israeli-Zionist narrative.” Plocker might have said the same about all top American political leaders and the U.S. media as well. The American conversation about the Israeli-Palestinian conflict is dominated by the story that most Israelis tell.JSF 2.2 Final Draft Approved; Java EE 7 Coming Soon
JavaServer Faces 2.2 (JSR 344) was officially approved on April 18th last week. The results were unanimous, with the exception of a couple of members whose voting rights were suspended (such as Google), and a couple that didn't vote (such as Nokia). JSF 2.2 is part of the Java EE 7 release train, which includes a bunch of other JSRs:
There are also a few new JSRs in Java EE 7:
Personally, I'm particularly excited about having a standard API for JSON processing and WebSocket. All of these JSRs have either been approved, or are in the final review stages. According to the Java EE 7 schedule, all of the JSRs are expected to be approved by the end of the month, and the reference implementation (Glassfish 4.0) should be out in the middle of May. So, what about JSF 2.2? First, keep in mind that even though it's part of Java EE 7, you can still use it without the rest of the release train, although it now requires a minimum of Servlet 3.0 (which ships with Java EE 6 containers). That being said, some new features require CDI. This means that Spring shops will have to roll their own integration with Spring for these features, much like they must do today in order to support JSF's view scope with Spring.
Even though JSF 2.2 is a point release, it includes a few major features, plus several other enhancements and bug fixes. Even though HTML5 has always been supported, it's easier than ever with HTML5-friendly markup (you can now build JSF pages using HTML syntax instead of component tags). Faces flows allow you to package up navigation, pages, and code into easy-to-manage modules. Enhanced Cross-Site Request Forgery (CSRF) protection makes your applications more secure, and finally there is a standard File Upload component. Resource library contracts allow you to swap sets of templates, images, stylesheets, and JavaScript files across your application, simplifying customization for different clients or deployments. Other features include loading Facelets via the ResourceHandler, view actions, and window scope.Posted by
Aaron Nielsen,
April 21, 2017 Email
Aaron Nielsen
Twitter
@ENBSports
Read this on your iPhone/iPad or Android device
Earlier this month, Toronto FC President Bill Manning was on the Vocal Minority Podcast, whose hosts did an excellent job asking him questions regarding MLS, the Canadian Premier League ("CanPL") as well as discussing other soccer stories. To his credit, Manning was articulate and very knowledgeable about the game from an American perspective. So much so he seems like the next MLS Commissioner in waiting, and in similar vein to current commissioner Don Garber, sold the company line of how much he sees the game growing in Canada and United States. In the past I have written about MLS in what might be described as an American perspective. I’ve looked at the league as a whole, what it needs to do to be successful and monitored its growth as a business as well as a product. This was aligned with MLS, who have said by 2020 they wish to be one of the top leagues in the World. In the podcast Manning gave his own view saying he sees MLS as a top ten league, and adds MLS teams such as the LA Galaxy side with Beckham, Keane and Donovan would compete regularly in leagues such as Portugal, Holland, Russia and Mexico. As a business I like much of what MLS does. Although I do have issue with the league as a product, and I think what Manning and most American MLS fans think with regards to overall quality are kidding themselves. Highlighted by both Vancouver and FC Dallas’ elimination to Mexican teams in the CONCACAF Champions League, MLS clubs by the nature of how they are put together and developed would struggle in almost any league in the world. Weak players in MLS would be exploited by any foreign club, while what MLS calls their stars would never get the same performance opportunities (scoring, creating, etc…) in a game in another league like they get weekly in MLS. In my MLS preview I talked about a new direction that the league has taken this year regarding recruiting and scouting, a must if they wish to keep their increasingly knowledgeable fan base happy. Players like Almiron, Villalba, Martinez, Nikolic, Boateng, Colman and others, are interesting, against MLS tradition and are also younger players. The quality of these players doesn't compete with transfer signings in other top soccer leagues and this doesn't even take into account other countries own player development system. Using the English Premier League as an example, a single poor team in that league, such as a Hull or Sunderland, sign a greater talent of players as a club than the whole MLS. What MLS has been able to do is try to get the most from this product through marketing as well as, at least locally, create a monopoly on the product. This results in no direct comparison or competition regarding quality outside of tournaments such as the CONCACAF Champions League. This in many ways is an American way of life of needing to be number one, an example of recent politics of "Make American Great Again", assuming America was great to begin with. In comparison, the CanPL is completely different. The Canadian Premier League is not about trying to compete as a top league, especially in the beginning, but is about becoming and being viable. It is also about giving opportunities to people in Canada who love the game to be able to work in it professionally, and it is about providing a product in areas underserved, which in soccer is most of the country. Outside of Hockey, this has always been the Canadian struggle regarding sports, and even with hockey the NHL has very little directly to do with that sport’s success in our country. Why Hockey is successful in Canada is because it is a viable sport in almost every community. In Ontario alone, millions attend Junior Hockey games, more than they do Toronto Maple Leaf or Ottawa Senators games. Why Canada fails in the other sports has been the talent pool of players and being overshadowed by the American market for sports like baseball and basketball, which is not the case for soccer. We are all aware of how many people in Canada play the sport of soccer, and unlike the other premier sports, MLS is not the pinnacle sought after destination as is the case with other North American professional leagues. Added, unlike other sports, MLS soccer is not broadcast in Canada through accessible American television, so if TSN or Sportsnet elected not to show MLS games, most Canadians would have no clue the sport even exists. Circling back to the Vocal Minority episode, while I can respect Bill Manning for his views and opinions on the game in general, we have to take into account he is an American and pro MLS, so in reality despite being a spokesperson for Toronto FC, his opinion on the CanPL, or landscape of Canadian soccer, doesn't count for much. The main highlight from the podcast was the discussion of a CanPL team in Toronto. Manning’s main and overarching opinion about the CanPL and a team in Toronto were about how it should be a TFC II team, how they could field a competitive team, how it would be great for developing players for TFC, and how if another group put a team in the GTA it likely wouldn’t succeed and that TFC were most equipped for success. He also added the view that Toronto FC is good for Canadian Soccer and Canadian Soccer is good for Toronto FC. As is often the case with MLSE and Toronto FC, there is a disconnect with what they think or envision themselves to be, and reality. If TFC II’s record in USL is any indication, they will not be competitive. The team has been amongst the worst sides in the league, both in terms of performance on the field as well as attendance in the stands. Of all the teams in USL, it may not be a coincidence that the unaffiliated ones such as Cincinnati, Sacramento and Lousiville that recently have proven to be the most successful in the stands. It should also be noted that Toronto FC II played their home opener the same weekend of this interview, with only three Canadians in the starting line-up and an announced attendance of just over 500. Concerns about whether the team would be a priority should be raised, and if they are capable technically of building a competitive team, as in terms of looking at TFC, it wasn’t until they spent upwards of $100 million that they became a competitive team in MLS. With regards to developing players for TFC, Manning cites two American players, Alex Bono and Nick Hagglund, although in the same breath puts Canadian Quillan Roberts under the bus for not being good enough to play in MLS. Ironically, one would assume Roberts would be good enough to play in the CPL, but if not, then that even raises more questions regarding Toronto FC’s player development. In terms of the landscape of player development in the GTA, and TFC being best equipped, it appeared as though Manning is unaware of the several academies already developing top players, one of which became the top rookie scorer in MLS history. Sigma, Vaughan, Durham and ANB, for example, are all equipped technically to take players up to the professional level and any would be an ideal fit to integrate into a professional set-up. His view is that the CanPL is a minor /2nd League for MLS and went on showing his Americanism that he once wished the Canadian clubs could be a division in USL. His primary belief is that a CanPL team in Toronto would compete with TFC II, and that this is a bad thing. However, in a market the size of Toronto, if Manning had the best interests of Canadian soccer in mind, he would be for more clubs, academies, and opportunities for players to play professionally, not less. As I noted in a previous article, instances in world soccer where player development and opportunities became centralized, or limited to one source or destination, these initiatives failed to succeed. Throughout this portion of the interview, it becomes clear that Manning is outlining what is good for MLS, and Toronto FC in MLS, not what is good for Canada soccer or the development of the Canadian soccer player and I feel MLSE’s real concern with CanPL is the new league taking momentum away from Toronto FC and cutting into their perceived or desired monopoly of the market. Although an extreme view, my take is that eventually Whitecaps, Impact, and TFC could leave MLS and join the CanPL. I think there are many reasons why it would be a success, mostly financial, and truthfully I don't feel the Canadian teams, or specifically Canadian soccer, get much from MLS. Maybe Seattle and Portland provide added interest to Whitecaps fans, although outside of a few big names who might join the MLS, many don't play their away games in Canada anyway. Meanwhile, if the CFL salary cap at $5 million is any kind of precedent, that is more than enough to compete with MLS if the CanPL could ever reach that level. Now much of the league is still more talk than a reality, and until we get more solid information or an official announcement regarding the CanPL, its owners, financials and other news, it is difficult to give real opinions on what the CanPL will be or can become. Ironically, I feel if Manning is right that the CanPL becomes basically a minor league for the MLS, the league will fail, as we have seen with falling attendance with the Ottawa Fury over the last few years. For this reason I feel the farther CanPL steps away from MLS, the better. Although I do like the idea of Toronto FC II fielding a team in the CanPL and finishing last place to at least prove to Manning and Toronto FC management, at least in terms of development, they know neither about creating a winning team or being the best. Aaron Neilsen is a co-founder of Prospect XI (Prospect Eleven), a scouting network and online magazine dedicated to tracking/highlighting young players that refer to as "prospects" as well as their development pathways both within North America and worldwide. Follow PXI via www.prospectxi.com or on twitter @ProspectXI.Raking in the money
An officer who’s angry because he didn’t get what he wanted
In the Soussou language that is spoken in Guinea, bribes are known as "wo feraba" (“come forward” or “show yourself”) and "wo décompté" (“count yourselves”) because that’s what soldiers and gendarmes often say when people pass through their checkpoints.In reality, these questions mean that the driver will have to pay up. Soldiers or others at a roadblock usually invent a reason to ask for money. Often, they’ll claim that the driver has to hand over money because he or she wasn’t carrying an ID. Other times, they say it is a charge for extra passengers.This extortion might be illegal, but it is common practice. That’s what a 5-minute film made by the NGO National Platform for United Citizens for Development (PCUD, or Plateforme Nationale des Citoyens Unis pour le Développement) found. Their method was simple: they used a mobile phone to secretly film interactions at four different roadblocks to expose the extortion going on there. We’ve selected some sections of the footage they captured.In the excerpt below, for example, several members of the armed forces show off money that they took from drivers who weren’t able to show an ID card.In this excerpt, a man in civilian clothes chastises a driver because he didn’t give him the money required to pass.You can see the full film at the bottom of this article. It shows other instances when the men manning several different roadblocks extorted money. The footage was shot at the KK and Kouria roadblocks on the road that runs from Conakry, the Guinean capital, to Kindia (Guinea’s fourth largest city) as well as the Khoria and Four Points roadblocks on the road that runs from the capital to Tanènè, a town in western Guinea.By the end of the month, two new flags will be flying outside the United Nations headquarters in New York – the Palestinian flag and that of the Holy See, the central government of the Roman Catholic Church.
The Palestinians are hailing the move. The Holy See, less so.
Last week, 119 countries voted "yes" to a General Assembly resolution allowing the flags of non-member observer states to fly alongside those of the 193 full member nations, while eight countries — including the U.S., Israel, Australia and Canada — voted "no." (Forty-five countries abstained.)
Seeing it as a symbolic step toward eventual statehood recognition, the Palestinians are applauding the adoption of the resolution as a "historic vote."
The Holy See, on the other hand, did not co-sponsor the draft text, and in an internal memo sent to various UN missions, asked that all references to the Holy See be removed from the original draft.
As the only other observer state at the UN, however, the Holy See said it will abide by the General Assembly decision and raise its flag, which sources tell CBC will happen just ahead of Pope Francis' visit to the UN on Sept. 25.
The Pope's envoy to the UN, Archbishop Bernardito Auza, had originally told reporters the Holy See had "no intention" of raising its flag in time for the papal visit.
The Holy See Mission changed its plans, says a source familiar with the issue, following a request from the UN that "expressed a desire" to have the Holy See flag raised in time for the pontiff's address to the world body.
'No great advantage'
The UN General Assembly recently voted to allow non-member observer states to fly their flags outside the building. The poles have gone up, and the flags for the Palestinian Authority and the Holy See will be raised later this month. (Patrick Ferguson/CBC)
As the central government of the Roman Catholic Church, the Holy See enjoys a diplomatic status unequaled by any other religion – it maintains diplomatic relations with 177 of the 193 member countries of the UN.
But the Holy See doesn't regard full UN membership, or raising its flag outside UN buildings, as enhancing this, says Thomas Reese, a Jesuit priest and analyst for National Catholic Reporter.
"The Vatican sees no great advantage to having its flag fly out there, and sees all sorts of disadvantages about getting in the middle of this conflict," says Reese in reference to the resolution, which Israel, for one, called a ''photo op'' and counterproductive to the Middle East peace process.
Now codified in international law, the diplomatic status of the Holy See has been recognized in customary law dating back to the 4th century, Reese explains.
"It goes back to when popes sent diplomats to the emperor in Constantinople, before Germany and France existed —when there were just tribes running around in bearskins in Europe."
Reese adds that the Holy See's legal personality, akin to that of a state, has never been dependent on or tied to physical territory, whether it be the early Papal States (754 A.D. to 1870) or Vatican City, which was established in 1929.
"The fact that it has a few acres in the middle of Rome is totally irrelevant. [The Holy See] is unique," says Reese.
"Basically, it exists because the rest of the world accepts it," he says. "And international law is very respectful of tradition."
No vote? No problem
After Switzerland — the first state to obtain Permanent Observer status, in 1946 — decided to join the UN as a full member in 2002, there was an internal debate at the Vatican on whether to follow suit.
"There were some who were in favour of full membership," said Archbishop Auza during a recent interview at the Holy See Mission to the UN.
''In the end, John Paul II, who was very sick at the time, decided that we should remain an observer state."
As such, the Holy See, like the Palestinian Authority, can only speak in the General Assembly after member states have finished talking. It cannot put forward candidates for various UN offices and it does not have the right to vote on resolutions.
"I know that some people still don't understand why we don't want to vote," Auza says. "The primary reason… is that we want to maintain our political neutrality."
Palestinians officials are hoping President Mahmoud Abbas can raise their flag after he addresses the General Assembly's annual gathering of world leaders on Sept. 30. (Majdi Mohammed/Reuters)
Auza argues that the decision to remain an observer state does not prevent the Holy See from participating in debates and making its position known on all UN matters.
There is an "independence to be able to express your position in a very specific manner [without] submitting yourself to a formula that is presented to you," says Auza.
The Palestinians, who are seeking full UN membership, essentially pulled the Holy See into the flag debate, just two months after signing a historic first treaty formalizing the Vatican's support for Palestinian statehood.
The flag of the Holy See will go up without any fanfare, CBC was told, sometime in the coming days, and will be flying by the time the Palestinians hold their own flag-raising ceremony on Sept. 30. That's the day Mahmoud Abbas, the president of the Palestinian Authority, addresses the UN General Assembly.
Many diplomats and others have been invited to celebrate the moment, which the Palestinian envoy to the UN has called a "glorious day."A New York man who identifies himself as the "Red Light Robin Hood" pleaded not guilty Friday to a 17-count indictment accusing him of cutting the wires of more than a dozen red light cameras in Suffolk County. This modern-day digital do-gooder has no apologies and wants a jury trial.
Stephen Ruth, who remains free on bail, was arrested in April shortly after he told a CBS affiliate that he was the culprit and that he dismantled the cameras "in order to save lives." He said the county shortened the yellow light duration from 5 seconds to 3 seconds in a bid to make more money.
He's accused of 17 felonies and faces a maximum seven-year prison sentence if convicted on all the charges. He pleaded not guilty Friday in a local court and wants to go to trial for snipping the wires on as many as 16 red light cameras on intersections on Route 25 between Coram and Centereach.
"They call it a crime. I call it saving lives,” he told the affiliate. “I never hid from my actions. I believe in what I’m doing, and I’m only trying to save lives.”
A Suffolk County study concluded in April that about half the intersections with red-light cameras have seen an uptick in accidents following the installation of cameras in 2010, while other intersections saw a drop.
This isn't the first time Ruth has gotten into hot water with the authorities. He was arrested in August for allegedly tampering with red light cameras by pointing them to the sky. He posted a video on YouTube, showing people how to do it and encouraging them to follow his path. "I'm going to show you how easy it is to take the power back,” Ruth says in the video. "It doesn’t take more than a minute, and the gratification is huge."
The cameras are the subject of a new proposed class-action lawsuit representing those ticketed by the program. The attorney on the case, Dave Raimondo, said yellow light times have been reduced to milk motorists for money, and drivers have to pay a $30 administrative fee per ticket.
"They just manipulate it slightly to make sure it is a little bit shorter to force red light running as a result create revenue for the county," he said. The county said it uses "the nationally accepted methodology" to calculate yellow and red light times.A series of interviews has been making the rounds on conspiracy websites in which Dutchman Ronald Bernard talks about a sinister elite of about 8000 Luciferians who rule our world. According to Bernard, he was involved in all kind of financial services for this elite. He crashed emotionally and physically when he was invited to participate in child sacrifices, which take part during their satanic ceremonies.
Nowadays, Bernard is trying to make the world a better place, for instance with his B of Joy, a grassroots initiative which aims to be “a full reserve, interest-free, community bank”, “based on good stewardship of all life.” Bernard also encourages his listeners, however, to read the infamous and antisemitic Protocols of the Elders of Zion, which he apparently sees as a blueprint that is getting implemented in our lifetime.
“Dutch Illuminati Banker blows the Whistle”
Three parts (out of five) have been published online at this moment. They are made by Irma Schiffers, who last year co-founded Dutch website, Coöperatie De Vrije Media, which brings the usual conspiracy theories and anti-vaccine propaganda. Only the first part was published on that website, as she recently decided to go her own way.
You can have a look at his bizarre story yourself, but don’t expect any proof as he delivers nothing as such, we are expected to believe him prima facie. The most bizarre statements are in part 1, at about 22:50 the insane story on the Luciferians starts, and at about 29:15 you can here him on the Protocols.
Is Bernard an antisemite or ‘just’ a crank?
Fellow skeptic Frank Verhoft from Belgium visited one of Bernard’s presentations in June |
50 percent, with Verizon believing that the true number of ransomware cases likely even surpasses the amount they’ve reported. This is due to the fact that Verizon suspects the true number of ransomware attacks and victims is likely going under-reported
The DBIR is an analysis of incidences or attempted breaches, including a noted 1,935 successful attacks. According to the report, of the sectors of the economy that were targeted, cyber-criminals attacked manufacturing, the public sector, education, and healthcare the most.
Of those industries, healthcare seems to have gotten the brunt of these attacks. Ransomware attacks in the healthcare industry have increased, with many instances of the malware inflicting damage last year.
Two prominent examples were the Locky ransomware attacks against the hospital chain, MedStar, and SamSam Ransomware attacks that brought down two California hospitals. One of these hospitals, the Hollywood Presbyterian Medical Center, was forced to pay a $17,000 bitcoin ransom for the decryption key for patient data.
Furthermore, according to Verizon, cybercriminals are adapting to changing conditions, with ransomware evolving to become more effective blackmail tools for hackers. They now focus more on high-value data, taking their time rather than immediately encrypting the first files they come across.
A Brief History of Ransomware
The idea of using public key cryptography for ransom attacks was first introduced by computer scientists and cryptographers Adam L. Young and Moti Yung in 1996. However, it wasn’t until 2005 that extortionate ransomware became prominent among hackers.
By mid-2006, Trojans such as Gpcode, TROJ.RANSOM.A, Archiveus, Krotten, Cryzip, and MayArchive began utilizing more sophisticated RSA encryption schemes, with ever-increasing key-sizes.
Then, for a period of time, ransomware sort of fell off the map as a cyber threat. That is, until its recent return to prominence in 2013 with the rise of Cryptolocker, which leveraged bitcoin as a relatively anonymous way to collect ransom money.
The use of bitcoin and other cryptocurrencies have, in a way, fueled the return of ransomware because it has made it easier to carry out these kinds of attacks. Other developers have since mimicked Cryptolocker’s design, one of these copycats being Cryptolocker 2.0.
Since its reemergence, ransomware has exploded in popularity — especially between 2015 and 2016. One study by Infoblox found that ransomware increased 3,500 percent from the fourth quarter of 2015 to the first quarter of 2016.The danger that ransomware now poses caused security firm, Kaspersky, to call ransomware the biggest cybersecurity threat today.
In fact, its popularity even resulted in a ransomware app making it into the Google Play store in January 2017.
Anonymous monetization has been key to its success and, combined with anonymity services like Tor — has made cybercriminals employing ransomware nearly impossible to track down.
What do you think of Verizon’s report and their subsequent findings? Let’s hear your thoughts.
Images via Kaspersky and VerizonImage copyright New Syrian Army Image caption The New Syrian Army published photographs purportedly showing its forces near Albu Kamal
US-backed Syrian rebels say they are closing in on a town on the border with Iraq held by so-called Islamic State.
The New Syrian Army (NSA) said it had captured a number of IS positions on the outskirts of Albu Kamal, after overrunning a nearby military airport.
However, a raid into the town launched at dawn is reported to have been repelled by militants.
The offensive, which began on Tuesday, is aimed at cutting a key route between IS-controlled areas in Syria and Iraq.
The NSA said it was co-ordinating the assault with Iraqi government forces, who were advancing on the border from the other side.
Several hundred rebels are reportedly involved in the attack on Albu Kamal, just a few kilometres from the Iraqi border in Deir al-Zour province.
The NSA and the Syrian Observatory for Human Rights, a UK-based monitoring group, both said on Wednesday morning that the rebels had taken control of Hamdan airport, about 5km (3 miles) north-west of the town.
Fighting was continuing between the two sides in agricultural areas around the town, and coalition warplanes were conducting air strikes on IS hideouts in the town, according to the Syrian Observatory.
NSA spokesman Mozahem al-Saloum told the Associated Press that airborne fighters had also been dropped onto the southern edge of Albu Kamal.
Later on Wednesday, the NSA issued a statement saying its forces had "conducted a deep penetration raid" into Albu Kamal.
"At this time fighting is still ongoing, but the NSA maintains control of the desert, the approaches to Albu Kamal, and maintains freedom of manoeuvre," it added.
The Reuters news agency cited two rebel sources as saying that the NSA had been forced to retreat to the outskirts after an IS counter-attack.
Image copyright New Syrian Army Image caption The NSA's fighters have reportedly been trained at US-run camps in Jordan
One of the sources said militants had encircled the rebels in a surprise ambush. The rebels had incurred heavy casualties and lost some of their weapons, the source added.
As the rebels advanced on Albu Kamal, IS released a video showing militants beheading five young men in the town who they claimed were working with the NSA, the Syrian Observatory said.
The NSA was formed about 18 months ago by rebel factions driven out of eastern Syria by IS, which proclaimed the creation of a "caliphate" in June 2014.
NSA fighters, who have been trained at US-run camps in Jordan, captured the Tanf border crossing between Syria and Iraq from IS earlier this year.
IS is also facing pressure from a US-backed offensive in northern Syria by an alliance of Kurdish and Arab fighters, who have surrounded the town of Manbij and cut a route to the Turkish border from the IS stronghold of Raqqa.
In a separate development on Wednesday, at least seven people were killed in a car bomb attack in the Kurdish-controlled northern town of Tal Abyad, near the Turkish border, state media reported.Paul Pogba was the first Premier League player to get his very own hashtag emoji on Twitter earlier this season, now Chelsea have become the first Premier League team to receive one as well. It sure is a brave new world.
So put your hands in the air and wave them like you just won the Premier League.
Champions!
'Antoniooo, Antoniooo.'
Get the Antonio Conte emoji whenever you tweet with #ChelseaChampions pic.twitter.com/5hybdOmIWD — Chelsea FC (@ChelseaFC) May 19, 2017
I wonder how long the hashtag will be active. Apparently they’re expecting it to be used a lot this weekend as Chelsea get ready to lift the trophy and hopefully set a Premier League record with 30 wins on the season.
"We really excited about launching this emoji. Chelsea have long been incredibly innovative in their use of Twitter. Couple this with Conte being one of the highest regarded coaches in world football at present, and it seemed like a natural fit to get this special emoji live for fans ahead of Chelsea's crowning weekend." -Bruna Zanin, Twitter UK; source: Evening Standard
So there you have it. Get those thumbs a-tapping and butts a-tweeting, or however you consume your social media.The Massachusetts pharmacy linked to the outbreak has demanded a cleaning contractor take legal responsibility.
A nationwide outbreak of fungal meningitis has been linked to New England Compounding Center's doses of methylprednisolone acetate. The company is based in Framingham, Mass. (Photo: Jared Wickerham, Getty Images) Story Highlights 39 people died in meningitis outbreak
Compounding pharmacy sent a letter to cleaning contractor
Contractor says it believes the claims are without merit
BOSTON — Gov. Deval Patrick on Friday proposed tighter regulations on sterile compounding pharmacies following a deadly nationwide meningitis outbreak linked to a Massachusetts company.
The proposal comes as the New England Compounding Center is trying to place blame for the outbreak on a cleaning contractor that provided once-a-month services to NECC's cleanroom facilities.
The outbreak linked to NECC has been blamed for 39 deaths and hundreds of illnesses nationwide.
MORE: CDC map of meningitis cases
Patrick said he's filing a bill that would require compounding pharmacies to obtain a special state license that he said would make it easier for regulators to hold them accountable. The bill would also create whistle-blower protections for pharmacy workers and enforce new fines and penalties for compounding pharmacies that break the rules.
"There is, of course, no action that we in government can take to prevent all abuses in all industries, but we must do what we can," Patrick said.
Patrick's bill would also require that out-of-state pharmacies that deliver and dispense medications in Massachusetts also obtain a state license.
Pharmacies and pharmacists would also have to report to an overhauled 11-member state oversight board whenever they are the subject of any disciplinary action by other state or federal agency, under the bill.
The Colorado pharmacy board had complained about the New England Compounding Center in July, before the third of three batches of tainted steroids tied to the outbreak was shipped in August, but the Massachusetts pharmacy board's director and attorney didn't notify leadership at the Department of Public Health.
Patrick said the change would enable the oversight board "to know when issues arise with Massachusetts' pharmacies doing business outside of our state." Patrick also wants to hire more inspectors to keep an eye on the industry.
Patrick's recommendation came as NECC sent a letter to UniFirst Corp., demanding it take legal responsibility for claims against the compounding center related to the outbreak.
The letter was referenced in a Thursday filing by UniFirst to the Securities and Exchange Commission. In the filing, UniFirst wrote that the demand relates to the once-a-month cleaning services they provided to NECC.
UniFirst said it believes the claims are without merit.
UniFirst spokesman Adam Soreff said in a statement the company's UniClean business sent two technicians to NECC monthly for 90 minutes each. He said the cleaners used the NECC's own cleaning solution.
"UniClean was not in any way responsible for NECC's day-to-day operations, its overall facility cleanliness, or the integrity of the products they produced," he said.
A tainted steroid produced by Framingham-based NECC, and given mainly for back pain, has been tied to the fungal meningitis outbreak, which was discovered in Tennessee in September.
The company has shut down and recalled its products. Inspections at NECC's facility found various potential contaminants, including standing water and mold. Last month, the company declared Chapter 11 bankruptcy and said it was seeking to set up a fund to pay victims.
Messages were left for the attorney for NECC's insurance company requesting comment, including on whether letters similar to the one sent to UniFirst have or will be sent to other companies.
Patrick said the state needs to take other steps. He said he supports a bill proposed by Attorney General Martha Coakley that would raise the maximum fine for corporate manslaughter from $1,000 to $250,000.
The $1,000 penalty hasn't been updated since it was first established in state law nearly 200 years ago.
In November, Massachusetts also began requiring sterile compounding pharmacies to report the volume and distribution of their medications to state regulators for the first time. Patrick said the new rule will help alert the state when a pharmacy like NECC is acting like a manufacturer and should obtain a license from the federal Food and Drug Administration.
Compounding pharmacies custom-mix drugs in doses or forms that generally aren't commercially available.
"Taken together, these changes can ensure that the significant harms that we've seen from substandard compounding never happen again," Patrick said.
Associated Press reporter Jay Lindsay contributed to this report.
Copyright 2013 The Associated Press. All rights reserved. This material may not be published, broadcast, rewritten or redistributed.
Read or Share this story: http://usat.ly/UoI8daThank you, Bishop DiMarzio, for inadvertently reminding the apathetic public why separating religion from government is so critically important. In trying to become more politically relevant, I hope the latest pronouncement of the Catholic Church will make that church even less relevant. As far as I can tell, the Catholic Church is on the wrong side of all issues pertaining to sex.
Let’s see if I have this right. The Church wants heterosexual couples to remain celibate until marriage and then to have as many children as nature (excuse me, “God”) provides, whether they want or can afford them. The exception is for priests and nuns who must remain celibate their entire lives because …. (Fill in the blank, since the reasons have changed over centuries.) It’s bad for straight couples to cohabitate, but good if they commit to a monogamous marriage; it’s bad for gay couples to cohabitate, and even worse if they commit to a monogamous marriage. Don’t anyone even think of the sin of masturbation, which is safe sex for pleasure only. And I won’t get into why the church concluded that the sexual permissiveness of the 1960s led to pedophilia by church officials.
I want to keep my country secular and certainly wouldn’t want to live under any form of religious law. Surprisingly, some irrational Christians fear that unless we have actual laws opposing Sharia law we will be forced to live under it. This is far less likely than that we will be forced to live under some form of Christian law. Recently, Republican candidates for president were asked about Sharia law. Here are some of their answers, where I take the liberty to substitute “Christian” for “Sharia.”
Herman Cain: There is this creeping attempt to gradually ease [Christian] law into our government. It does not belong in our government.”
Newt Gingrich: “We should have a federal law that says [Christian] law cannot be recognized by any court in the United States.”
Sarah Palin: “[Christian] law, if that were allowed to govern in our country, it will be the downfall of America.”
Tim Pawlenty: “The United States should be governed by the U.S. Constitution, not religious laws.”
Rick Santorum: “[Christian] law is incompatible with American jurisprudence and our Constitution.”
As long as we keep high the wall of separation between religion and government, neither Catholic Bishops nor any other religious leaders will have a right to dictate public policy for those outside their faith tradition.The NSA has cracked the secure internet: 3 things to know about the latest Snowden leaks
In the latest development in the ongoing scandal over U.S. surveillance practices, new reports show that the National Security Agency can break into a wide range of encrypted internet communications that have long been considered secure.
The revelations come from former NSA contractor Edward Snowden, who obtained a trough of highly-classifed information and has been slowly leaking it to the Guardian and the New York Times. The news outlets, along with Pro Publica, set out the new facts on Thursday in long articles that include slides and technical details.
Advertisement
Here are three important findings as to how the government is using “supercomputers, technical trickery, court orders and behind-the-scenes persuasion” to access supposedly secure communications.
The U.S. government and its allies have “backdoors” to break into encrypted communications
In the 1990s, the Clinton White House lost a political battle to introduce the “Clipper chip,” which would have, in the words of the Times, “effectively neutered digital encryption by ensuring that the NSA always had the key” to devices and networking equipment.
After failing to obtain official permission, the NSA responded by creating a program called Bullrun that uses hacking techniques to create so-called “backdoors” into a wide variety of encrypted communications. For instance, the articles cite: email transmissions, bank networks, private computer networks, airlines and even “one foreign government’s nuclear department.”
The average person is most familiar with this type of encrypted communication through the little padlock symbol they see when using a banking or other secured site — it signifies that the communications that flow when the lock is present are supposed to be encrypted and unreadable. Now, in many cases, the government is able to crack those encryptions, or else get access to machines before a communication is encrypted, through the Bullrun program.
The program, which involves elite hacking and cryptography teams, is immense in scope. According to records, the government is spending $255 million this year — more than ten times what it spends on the controversial PRISM program — and $800 million since 2011.
Intelligence sources said in the reports that the backdoor programs are necessary to prevent “going dark” — allowing terrorists or criminals to foil eavesdropping through the use of encryption. In recent weeks, the tactics reportedly let America listen in on Al Qaeda and to Syria’s official communications about chemical weapons. The NSA is also sharing the tactics with its allies in the “Five Eyes” program: Britain, Canada, Australia and New Zealand.
Tech companies and privacy standards are compromised
The new disclosures also contain another major revelation: how successfully the NSA was able to apply human pressure in order to undermine security principles in standards-setting organizations and in companies like Microsoft(s msft). The result is that the government, in some cases, is obtaining the pre-built backdoors that it wanted in the first place.
In the case of Microsoft, the NSA has “pre-encryption access to Microsoft’s most popular services, including Outlook e-mail, Skype Internet phone calls and chats, and SkyDrive, the company’s cloud storage service,” the Times reported.
Meanwhile, the NSA is making a successful push to get encrypted traffic on the “big four” service providers: Hotmail, Google(s goog), Yahoo(s yhoo) and Facebook(s fb). In response to the relentless pressure from the agency, the Times said, the tech companies capitulated.
The situation with the standards bodies is more nuanced. It involved the NSA deliberately planting weaknesses in what came to be the international norms for encryption — in other words, it made security protocols weaker than they should have been in order to exploit them:
“Cryptographers have long suspected that the agency planted vulnerabilities in a standard adopted in 2006,” said the Times, adding that the NSA is now the “sole editor” of official security standards.
The government hasn’t broken every form of encryption but we don’t know all the details
While the Bullrun program has allowed the government to gain access to a wide range of secure communications, its success has not been absolute.
Some forms of encryption, including the ones used by the leaker Edward Snowden, appear to be still secure.
Meanwhile, people can use a variety of other technical tricks to avoid the government’s tracking tools or at least minimize the risk of being discovered. Bruce Schneier, a security authority, described for the Guardian five of them here.
Despite Thursday’s detailed revelations, the precise scope of the government’s power to break encryption is not clear. This is in part because the New York Times and Guardian did not publish all that they know. While the government asked the news agencies not to publish the stories, they only withheld certain details.
(Image by Maksim Kabakou via Shutterstock)Russian firefighters have been battling wildfires for months. More than 30 wildfires were burning today (July 10, 2012) in far eastern Russia, according to NASA. Greenpeace says more land in Russia has already burned in 2012 than in 2010, a year that intense wildfires affected western Russia. Here’s an image from NASA’s Terra satellite, of wildfires burning yesterday.
Smoke from large wildfires in Siberia is often lofted high enough into the atmosphere that winds push plumes of it across the Pacific Ocean to North America, NASA says. Significant amounts of smoke arrived in British Columbia in Canada this week, according to CBC News.
Bottom line: NASA’s Terra satellite captured this image of wildfires burning in eastern Russia (Siberia) yesterday (July 9, 2012). NASA says more than 30 wildfires are burning in Russia today (July 10).
Read more about this image from NASA
Day of mourning in Russia after floods kill at least 171
View from space: Wildfires in Colorado and RussiaTerry Collins is not panicking and he still believes in his team, he told the NY Post's Kevin Kernan.
Kernan's article is more or less one long quote from the manager, who -- among other talking points, cliches and wisdom -- says...
"We got a long way to go.... We put one streak together we are right back in this.... That's big league baseball.... It's just the nature of the game.... You run into a team that's hot, you get beat sometimes.... We will get through it.... You gotta have some patience."
Mets 2B Neil Walker appreciates his manager's confidence and consistent approach, especially since they handled adversity so well last season, he told Kernan.
"He never panicked," Walker said of Collins in 2016. "We never sensed that last year in him, and we haven't sensed that this year.''
Matthew Cerrone (Twitter | Instagram | About Me) :
I've been hard on Terry. I think it's fair criticism at times. But, I also know I can be unfair and irrational, because, well, that's what fans do. In New York, we play 162 one-game seasons, as Bobby Valentine once said. Thankfully, this is where Terry Collins shines. He has his in-game flaws, no doubt. But, the way he handles you and I, the media and the potential for panic inside his clubhouse is strategic, political and effective.
Apr 10, 2017; Cespedes (52) Granderson (3) and Bruce (19) celebrate a win. Credit: USA TODAY Sports
In 2015, the Mets lost three games in late-July with John Mayberry Jr. and Eric Campbell in the middle of their batting order. It dropped them to one game above.500 as a result of losing 11 out of 15 games. At that time, literally everyone was freaking out on Sandy Alderson, including typically level-headed national reporters, like ESPN.com's Buster Olney...
In less than two weeks, Yoenis Cespedes would be crushing baseballs out of Citi Field and leading the Mets through an outstanding August and September, an amazing postseason and their first World Series appearance in more than a decade.
In other words, this is not unfamiliar territory, as long-time MetsBlog reader Nathan K underscored by sending this image of the last two season's schedules...
It's possible the Mets end April just 10-13. But, the fact is, it'll still be just May 1. And, this is still essentially the same roster everyone loved less than a month ago with a manager they trust and respect, who has led them through fire before. It could be worse, especially if Alderson doesn't make decisions this season focused on winning today and not tomorrow.
Nevertheless, the point is, as cliched as it might be to say, 'We've got a long way to go,' and, 'We have to have patience,' or, 'Ya gotta believe,' it's also true.A U.S. Navy Marine Mammal Program dolphin named KDog, wearing a locating pinger, performed mine clearance work in the Persian Gulf during the Iraq War
A military dolphin is a dolphin trained for military uses. The United States and Soviet militaries have trained and employed oceanic dolphins for several reasons. Such military dolphins have been trained to rescue lost naval swimmers or to locate underwater mines.
Use [ edit ]
Soviet Union Navy dolphins [ edit ]
The Soviet Navy operated a research facility to explore military uses of marine mammals at Kazachya Bukhta, near Sevastopol. The Russian military is believed to have closed its marine mammal program in the early 1990s. In 2000, the press reported that dolphins trained to kill by the Soviet Navy had been sold to Iran.[1]
Due to the secrecy of such practice, rumors of military dolphins include training them to lay underwater mines, to locate enemy combatants, or to seek and destroy submarines using kamikaze methods.[2] There has even been speculation about the potential development of sophisticated equipment, such as poison darts, sonar jamming devices, and so on for dolphins, and about combat between cetaceans of both superpowers. The U.S. Navy denies ever having trained its marine mammals to harm or injure humans in any fashion or to carry weapons to destroy ships.[3]
United States Navy dolphins [ edit ]
The U.S. Navy trains dolphins and sea lions under the U.S. Navy Marine Mammal Program, which is based in San Diego, California. They get some of their dolphins from the Gulf of Mexico. Military dolphins were used by the U.S. Navy during the First and Second Gulf Wars.[4] About 75 dolphins are in the program.[5]
The United States Navy implemented a program in 1960 to work with dolphins and sea lions in order to help with defense, mine detection, and design of new submarines and new underwater weapons. The Navy did many tests with several marine mammals to determine which would be best for the jobs they needed done. "More than 19 species were tested, including some sharks and birds." Eventually, the bottlenose dolphin and California sea lion were shown to be the best at what the Navy needed them for. The bottlenose dolphins' asset was their highly evolved biosonar, helping to find underwater mines, and the sea lions' asset was their impeccable underwater vision, which can help to detect enemy swimmers. In fiscal year 2007, the United States Navy spent $14 million on research on marine mammals as weapons and marine mammal training programs in object recovery and mine detection and have 75 trained dolphins.[6] Dolphins have contributed to saving more lives in open water than specially trained life savers[citation needed].
In 2005, there were press reports that some U.S. military dolphins based on Lake Pontchartrain had escaped during the Hurricane Katrina flooding.[7] The U.S. Navy dismissed these stories as nonsense or a hoax, though they may be taking on the status of an urban myth.[8]
Care of animals [ edit ]
The marine mammals used for the Navy's research and operations are cared for by a full-time staff of veterinarians, veterinarian technicians, and highly trained marine biologists.[9] The doctors and staff are on call around the clock so that the animals get the care that they need. Their focus is to keep the dolphins and sea lions healthy and fit for duty with routine physicals, nutrition oversight, and extensive data collection and management.
Training [ edit ]
The dolphins and sea lions are trained by five teams of the Navy's Marine Mammal fleet members. One team specializes in swimmer detection, three teams in mine location, and another team in object recoveries. The quick-response goal of this fleet is to mobilize a team and be on site within 72 hours. Dolphins are trained much as police dogs and hunting dogs are. They are given rewards such as fish on correct completion of a task. Dolphins are trained to detect underwater mines and enemy swimmers and then report back to their handlers.[10]
Retired US Admiral Tim Keating claimed that military dolphins could be used to detect mines in the Strait of Hormuz, after Iran threatened to close the waterway in January 2012.[11]
Other countries [ edit ]
After the fall of the Soviet Union, the Soviet military dolphin program was passed to the Ukrainian Navy. After the annexation of Crimea, the Ukrainian dolphin program was taken over by Russia.[12]
In March 2000 the Ukrainian navy transferred their military dolphin project from Sevastopol to Iran. Iran bought the animals and the chief trainer carried on his research at their new oceanarium.[13]
See also [ edit ]
References [ edit ]The next update will bring expeditions to the world of Albion. But what are expeditions? Time to find out!
February 3, 2017 at 6:00 PM by Enya
What are Expeditions?
Expeditions are instanced PvE missions which can be accessed through the Expedition Master NPC in cities. These expeditions are relatively short, with a successful run taking 20 to 30 minutes on average, and can also be considered fairly safe; if you die, you will be transferred to the start of the expedition without losing any gear, but it will lose durability.
To start an expedition, find the Expedition Master NPC in the city. He will give you the option to select whether you want to play a solo or group (five-man) expedition, as well as the Tier you want to play. You will need to unlock the different Tiers through the Destiny Board in order to play higher tiered expeditions! You can queue up for group expeditions as a single player or as a pre-made group. When signing up for a group expedition, you will automatically be assigned a role (offense/defense/support) depending on your equipment, so make sure you are wearing the correct gear before signing up!
Once you have selected the size and tier of your choice, you will be teleported to an expedition, where you will be given a mission. Complete the mission and a portal will appear to bring you back to the city you came from. You will have 60 minutes to complete solo expeditions and 120 minutes for group expeditions, failing to complete the mission will teleport you back to the city. Leaving an expedition prematurely will put you on a penalty timer before you can start another expedition.
With the upcoming Galahad update, the following Expeditions will be available (do note that exact names might change):
Tier 3: Heretic Mines (Solo)
Tier 4: Fishy Business (Solo and Group) and Recruitment of the Dead (Solo and Group)
Tier 5: Lumber Camp (Solo and Group), Stone War (Solo and Group) and Sewer Maintenance (Solo and Group)
Tier 6: Mushroom Cave (Group)
Throughout the upcoming weeks, we will have a look at every single one of them.
What’s in it for you?
Expeditions are ideal content if you are not quite ready to venture into the open world or if you are simply lacking the time. Not only will you earn silver and fame during the expedition (albeit less than in the open world) finishing an expedition will give you additional fame and Royal Sigils. The first expedition you finish of the day will give you bonus fame and Sigils!
These Royal Sigils, in combination with regular resources, can be used to craft Royal armor. There are three different Royal equipment sets: Cloth, Leather and Plate. Similarly to Artifact items, they are unlocked through the combat-tree of the Destiny Board. Each Royal equipment piece will also boast a unique spell, which makes for 9 new spells! Royal armor has an Item Power on par with level 1 Artifact equipment.
First Look: Recruitment of the Dead
Adventurer, we need your help! An ancient graveyard is suddenly crawling with the Undead. Something – or someone – is bringing them back to life. Find out what is happening and bring a stop to the source!
Enter the misty graveyard, which is overrun by skeletons. As you venture deeper, the atmosphere starts to change and dangerous Undead mobs cross your path.
Careful! Right before you enter the churchyard, a Cursed Sharpshooter appears.
Phew, you made it through alive… for now. The churchyard is overrun by Undead mobs, which means you are getting closer to the source. There are several ways to progress, choose your path wisely!
You finally make it to the ruins of what once was a beautiful church. It now reeks of death and is surrounded by a thick mist. At the heart of this church, you finally find the Cursed Deathlord that has been the source of all this evil… Do you have what it takes to bring him down?
Are you looking forward to playing the Recruitment of the Dead expedition? Let us know your thoughts and feedback in the comments below or on our forums!Groundsmen and curators will likely be brought into the anti-corruption education loop in the future, as investigations into the Pune pitch controversy intensify. In a sign of how seriously it is treating the matter, the ICC has sent additional officials from its anti-corruption unit (ACU) in Dubai to assist with investigations.
Hours before the second ODI between India and New Zealand on Wednesday, the BCCI "dismissed" Pandurang Salgaoncar, the head groundsman, for alleged "malpractice" that was captured by two undercover reporters from an Indian television network.
This is the second time in recent years the ACU has investigated a groundsman. In January 2016, the ICC suspended former Sri Lankan player Jayananda Warnaweera, who was the curator at Galle International Stadium, for three years for failing to cooperate with an ACU investigation.
Bir Singh, the ACU officer travelling with the Indian and New Zealand teams, is understood to have already started his probe and has been joined by Steve Richardson, the ACU's coordinator (investigations). That investigation will be carried out independently and will not involve the BCCI's anti-corruption unit. In addition to Salgaoncar, the ACU is likely to also speak to the undercover reporters that carried out the sting.
India Today TV, which carried out the sting operation, has said the reporters shot the video with Salgaoncar over two days (October 23 and 24) before the game, but a BCCI official said only the ACU probe would be able to confirm that. In the video, Salgaoncar is seen telling the reporters that the pitch would be full of runs. "It is very good. It will garner 337 runs. And 337 will be chaseable."
In the game itself, New Zealand were restricted to 230, a target India chased down with four overs to spare on a pitch that slowed during the latter part of the match.
Though it is not yet clear what charges Salgaoncar could face, a BCCI official said that in apparently allowing what appear to be unaccredited personnel into the ground and onto the pitch, there is a case for "misconduct". According to the anti-corruption code, no unaccredited personnel can be on the ground, let alone the pitch, days before an international match. "He had no business giving them access or information about the pitch," the official said.
The BCCI has since alerted groundstaff at the Green Park stadium in Kanpur, which hosts the series' decider on Sunday, to not allow any outsiders onto the ground. Only authorised staff can go near the pitch and media will not be allowed onto the ground. All the gates at Green Park have been locked and security personnel have been asked to only allow groundstaff and Uttar Pradesh Cricket Association (the ground's host) officials entry.
Once its investigations are wrapped up, the ICC's ACU is likely to point out to the BCCI the lack or absence of anti-corruption information available to curators and local groundstaff across India. The BCCI has only made it mandatory for the players and coaches to adhere to the anti-corruption code. With just one ACU officer present at the ground, and usually manning the players and match officials area, it is often difficult to widen his gaze and keep an eye on groundstaff as well.
"The curators and groundstaff should be brought under the ambit of the anti-corruption education programme to develop the awareness," the board official said. "They should be careful who they speak with including the media. And if any approach is made they should immediately report the matter and follow the same protocol that is followed by the players. That is the main takeaway."
A senior Indian curator welcomed the suggestion. "We should not disclose anything on the pitch to anybody including media. We are not authorised and any communication should go from the BCCI. So educating the groundstaff is a good idea."
But the curator also pointed out that Ramesh Mahmunkar, the member of the BCCI's grounds and pitches committee, was present in the ground when Salgaoncar was speaking with the reporters on the pitch - Salgaoncar, in fact, is seen referring to him in the video when telling the reporters that protocol does not allow them to be on the pitch. Usually, however, it is the head groundsman - in this case Salgaoncar - who holds control of the ground and makes sure that only authorised personnel can enter the ground and go near to the pitch.
The MCA, too, is in favour of educating the groundstaff. "Because some times people talk very loosely," an MCA official said. "They have to monitor what is said and to whom."On May 4, 2006, Cardinal George Pell gave a speech to the Legatus Summit in the southern American city of Naples, Florida.
He was ostensibly there to talk about Islam and he made headlines for suggesting the Koran was effectively an incitement to violence.
But towards the end of his address Pell made a short, lesser-noted side trip to the issue of climate change, suggesting the abandonment of Christian faith was fuelling concern about it and making people lose trust in the future.
Pell said some of the “hysteric and extreme claims about global warming” were “a symptom of pagan emptiness, of Western fear” of the “immense and basically uncontrollable forces of nature”.
“In the past, pagans sacrificed animals and even humans in vain attempts to placate capricious and cruel gods,” Pell said. “Today they demand a reduction in carbon dioxide emissions.”
This week, Tony Abbott made a curiously similar speech.
Addressing the climate-sceptic Global Warming Policy Foundation in London, Abbott returned to his own scepticism about whether climate change is occurring to worrying degrees. He adopted his private confessor’s argument and his style.
“Environmentalism has managed to combine a post-socialist instinct for big government with a post-Christian nostalgia for making sacrifices in a good cause,” Abbott said.
“Primitive people once killed goats to appease the volcano gods. We’re more sophisticated now but are still sacrificing our industries and our living standards to the climate gods to little more effect.”
Abbott said higher concentrations of carbon dioxide were greening the planet and that “far more people die in cold snaps than in heatwaves, so a gradual lift in global temperatures, especially if it’s accompanied by more prosperity and more capacity to adapt to change, might even be beneficial”.
Among the levers being considered is a legislated requirement that renewable energy generators be able to give a day-ahead guarantee of supply.
He said those who insisted the science was settled were invoking “the spirit of the Inquisition, the thought police down the ages” and that it was climate change policy doing harm, whereas climate change itself was “probably doing good”.
Pell’s original observations may have gone largely unremarked but Abbott’s version has attracted plenty of attention.
Since Abbott’s speech, Labor and the Greens have suggested the former prime minister’s ideas are driving government policy.
Deputy Labor leader Tanya Plibersek said: “I think Tony Abbott has gone from just destructive to quite loopy.”
Fellow frontbencher Anthony Albanese called the speech “off the reservation” and “frankly bizarre”.
Greens climate |
monitor Kubernetes itself, and finally you can run Prometheus on Kubernetes.
JAXenter: What’s next for Prometheus?
Björn Rabenstein: Personally, I’m most looking forward to the upcoming clustered highly-available Alertmanager because that concludes Prometheus’s concept of extremely robust HA in monitoring and alerting.
The community is most keen on a distributed long-term storage for time series data. Multiple efforts in this area are underway, so stay tuned for results in the not too distant future.
Thank you very much!You try to sleep, but the noises keep you awake, It's like something's scratching on wood.And Growling. You tell yourself it's only the wind, and only the trees outside, but the soundgoes on. And on. And on.Finally, you just can't take it. You stand up, turning the lights on. The sound is coming fromyour front door. You talk into the living room on unsteady legs, and the growling gets louder,the scraping more pronounced, more... vicious. With shaking hands, you reach for thetelephone... and the noises stopped. Like they never were there.For what feels like hours, you stand there with the phone in your hand, waiting for the sounds to begin again.Thy never do. Finally, heart in you throat, unable to stop yourself, you walk to the door. You open it.... on the night air.Nothing. You study the door. It should be almost clawed to pieces, you could have swore you heard the wood start to give. But it's unmarked. You shake your head. Just your imagination. Then you close the door.The claw marks are on the inside.WWE Smackdown received lots of social media buzz for a different type of clash in the squared circle on Tuesday (July 4). Instead of wrestling, the company staged a rap battle between two of their biggest tag teams: The New Day and The Usos. The battle was hosted by Wale and featured plenty of references to battle culture such as the “Don Demarco” drop and Loaded Lux’s famous “you gon’ get this work” line.
Wale wasn’t the only rapper involved in the popular segment though. Mega Ran, a longtime friend of The New Day’s Xavier Woods, was part of his buddy’s entourage in the ring and actually helped the group prepare for the battle.
Two weeks ago, Woods told Ran about a rap battle idea he pitched to WWE’s creative team and his desire to get the veteran MC involved. By Sunday (July 2), WWE had contacted him about being on Smackdown.
The day of the show, Ran arrived at Phoenix’s Talking Stick Resort Arena with Woods, and met an assortment of wrestlers and crew members. The New Day were given their script for the show, which originally had Wale set to kick off the battle with his own rhymes. Big E, a member of The New Day, said it wouldn’t work. The other members and Ran agreed, which led to a change. Soon after, the trio began practicing their raps, which Ran swears he didn’t write.
“For everybody who’s asking me, I did not write rhymes,” Ran tells HipHopDX. “I just kinda sat and listened. I helped them with their deliveries and getting down the cadence and stuff.”
Although the producers of the segment requested both teams send in their rhymes for the script, only The New Day obliged. The Usos showed theirs to one producer, but made a point to not let The New Day see their bars, which referenced a salacious story involving Woods.
“[The Usos] were able to write rebuttal lines,” Ran revealed. “I felt it gave them an advantage. They might’ve gotten a little better crowd response, but they went a little below the belt to get it.”
Although Ran is used to performing in front of big crowds, the MC said being in a WWE ring was nerve-racking. While hanging out with Wale backstage, Ran admitted to jitters about his role. Wale tried to play it cool, but Smoke DZA, who was also in attendance, egged the D.C. rapper on in an attempt to make him cop to some anxiety.
“Luckily, we had a walkthrough,” Ran said. “We got to come up on the ramp and see what it’s like before we went live. It went great though. The producers were going crazy and saying it was awesome when we got to the back. It was like we won the Super Bowl.”
Ran, a lifelong wrestling fan, is excited about the possibility of more opportunities with WWE. With Ran’s reach in the video game industry, it’s easy to see why Vince McMahon could view him as a potential asset to the company.
“Hopefully, this is just the beginning of a relationship with the WWE,” Ran said. “I would love to work on music projects with them and this could be a great start.”I'm not entirely I should be the one to be posting this, nor am I sure this should be posted her at all, but I feel this needs to be known and seen. Some of you may know this but Parcel is completely stepping away from all minecraft things and is selling his gaming PC, from playing, to developing the wonderful packs that he has made.I'm not here to ask him to stay.I'm not here to create drama.I'm not here to attack his possible motives for this.I'm here to thank him. @parcel31u, thank you for what you have done for this community. You, and your incredible creativity will be sorely missed. You were not always met with the most understanding criticism, whether it be due to making the player think to much on creative strategies to taking on hordes of mobs, to creating a pack that was vastly different from your others. All in all, I wish you luck in your further endeavors.Live long and prosper.“It’s only the tip of the iceberg. A grand geopolitical project is beginning to materialize…”
On June 6 2014, the official Russian news agency Itar Tass announced what many were expecting since at least the beginning of the Ukrainian crisis: Russian main energy company, Gazprom Neft has finally “signed agreements with its consumers” to switch from Dollars to Euros (as transition to the ruble) “for payments under contracts”.
The announcement that the agreement has been actually signed and not just discussed was made by Gazprom’s Chief Executive Officer, Alexander Dyukov.
Despite the pressures from Wall Street and its military, propaganda and political apparatus, 9 out of 10 consumers of Gazprom’s oil and gas agreed to pay in Euros. Of course, the big watershed was the Gazprom unprecedented 30-years $400Bl natural gas supply to China signed in Shanghai last May 21 in the presence of President Putin and President Xi Jinping in the middle of the Anglo-american sponsored violent destabilization of Ukraine. In fact it is improper to talk a dollar denominated $400Bl, because this “biggest deal” will not be using dollars but the Renminbi (or Yuan) and the Russian Ruble. It links China and Russia economically and strategically for three decades, de facto (and maybe later also de jure) creating an unshakable symbiotic alliance that necessarily will involve the military aspect.
The Russia-China agreement is a clear defeat of the obsessive geopolitical attempts by Wall Street to keep the two country in a situation of competition or, ideally, war-like confrontation. It changes the structure of alliances. It strikes at the historical foundations of British colonial geopolitics (Divide and Rule). Under escalating pressures and threats to their national security, Russia and China overcame brilliantly historical, ideological, cultural differences which had previously been been by the colonial powers (and their financial heirs in Wall Street and the London’s city) for their “Divide & Conquer” strategy.
Furthermore, to the horror of London and Washington, China and Russia concluded an agreement with India (the BRICS!) breaking the other holy tenet of British colonial geopolitics: The secret to controlling Asia, and thus Eurasia has always been to instigate a perennial rivalry between India, China, and Russia. This was the formula for the 19th century “Great Game”. This was why Obama was selected to succeed George W Bush. The then vice Presidential candidate Joseph Biden announced it very openly on Aug 27 2008 at the Democratic Convention in Denver, explaining why the Obama-Biden duo had been chosen to take over the White House. The greatest mistake of the Bush administration and the Republicans, he said, was not their atrocious unchained warmongering, but their failure
“to face the biggest forces shaping this century. The emergence of Russia, China and India’s great powers”. Zbigniew Brzezinski’s protégé Barack Obama was to defeat this “threat”. Obviously they failed! But this explains the dogged, irrational, King Canute-style self-destructive arrogance that has taken over the present Administration.
The significance of these developments should be emphasized in relation to both the real economy and the underlying financial structures. These developments in Eurasia are likely to have weaken on “the chains that have tied the European Union to Wall Street and the City of London”. The end of the dollar payment system (Aka Petro-dollar) does not concern the currency of the United States or the United States as such. In fact overcoming this system could mean the restoration of a rational and prosperous economy in the United States itself. What is known as “dollar system” has been just an instrument of feudal financial centers to loot the economy of the world. These centers are ready to do anything to save their right to loot. It is well known that whoever tried, until now, to create an alternative to the dollar system, met a ferocious reaction.
It is fitting to remember in this moment of great hope, the words of one of the very few great living strategists, Gen. Leonid Ivashov. On June 15 2011, reflecting on the savage destruction of Libya, the general who is an unofficial spokesman of the Russian armed forces and has been Russia’s representative in NATO, wrote
“BRICS and the Mission of Reconfiguring the World.”
Whoever challenges the dollar hegemony, explained Ivashov, becomes a target.
He gave precise examples: Iraq, Libya, Iran:
“the countries which defied dollar dominance invariably came under heavy pressure and in a number of cases – under devastating attacks.” But the “the financial empires built by Rothschilds and Rockefellers are powerless against the five largest civilizations represented by the BRICS.”
Thus, Ivashov advocated a coordinated strategy by countries representing half of the world population to win their independence using their own currency.
“The shift to national currencies in the financial transactions between the BRICS countries should guarantee an unprecedented level of their independence…”
Since the collapse of the USSR, the countries which defied dollar dominance invariably came under heavy pressure and in a number of cases – under devastating attacks. Saddam Hussein –who banned dollar circulation in all spheres of Iraq’s economy including oil trade– was displaced and executed and his country was left in ruins. M. Gaddafi started switching Libya’s oil and gas business to gold-backed Arab currencies and air raids against the country followed almost immediately… Tehran had to put its plan to stay dollar-free on hold to avoid falling victim to aggression.
Still, even enjoying unlimited US support, the financial empires built by the Rothschilds and Rockefellers are powerless against the five largest civilizations represented by countries accounting for nearly half of the world’s population. BRICS is clearly immune to forceful pressure, its member countries do not appear vulnerable to color revolutions, and the strategy of provoking and exporting financial crises may easily backfire.
In contrast to the US and the EU, BRICS countries altogether own natural resources sufficient not only to keep their economies afloat in the settings of contracting availability of hydrocarbon fuels, food, potable water, and electric power but also to sustain vigorous economic growth. The shift to national currencies in the financial transactions between the BRICS countries should guarantee an unprecedented level of their independence from the US and from the West in general, but even that is only the tip of the iceberg. A grand geopolitical project is beginning to materialize
Now it’s the moment for Europe to decide the big step. The Ukrainian crisis is in reality a Battle for Europe.
The elites of Continental Europe — The Germany of Alfred Herrausen, the France of Charles De Gaulle, the Italy of Enrico Mattei and Aldo Moro, the Europe that tried to road of sovereignty and independence … have been until now terrorized and threatened exactly in the terms explained by Gen Ivashov. Now the Battle for Europe is raging. We will look in a coming article at the great European forces, the silent partners, still traumatized and scared, who are looking with trepidation and painful memories of the past defeats at the firm stand of Russia.Former Northern Ireland police ombudsman Nuala O'Loan has told RTÉ that trust between An Garda Síochána and the Irish people "has been seriously undermined" as a result of recent controversies.
Ms O'Loan told RTÉ's This Week programme that a commission of inquiry, staffed by international experts and with powers to access garda documents, would be required to restore trust in policing.
"I think a national commission of inquiry is required now, and possibly an international commission of inquiry, that would send a very clear message about the intentions of Government,” she said.
"I think if such commission were appointed, it would need to have people from outside the island of Ireland serving on it."
Ms O’Loan described the recent revelations about the near 100% over-reporting of breathalyser statistics as "mind-boggling", and questioned how the thousands of hours associated with conducting such tests might have been factored into the budget for An Garda Síochána.
She said the recent revelations on inappropriate fixed-charge notice convictions, financial irregularity in the Garda Training College and media reports on investigations into homicide statistics raised serious questions about the basis for planning and funding An Garda Síochána.
"The whole planning and funding of the guards is predicated on the work that they do and it seems unlikely to me that erroneous statistics are going to be limited to these three or four areas," she said.
Asked if she believed GSOC should investigate if any overtime was claimed for conducting the over-reported breath tests, Ms O'Loan said "You'd have to look at the individual facts of each case, but that would certainly suggest to me a criminal inquiry. Certainly in the event of evidence of criminality, you are looking at something that is very serious and independent, in terms of an inquiry into the guards".
She was also critical of the speed with which An Garda Síochána had reacted to concerns raised by whistleblowers.
"I can't help noticing, because it's quite unusual, the number of whistleblowers who've come forward to raise concerns about the guards. And then you look at the way in which it's treated. And you look at the time that elapses before anything is either done or not done and I think there's a cultural issue around how you actually deal with it," she said.
She was also critical of the pace of the gardaí in dealing with the fixed-charge notice and breathalyser issues.
"They should have moved much faster. As soon as they became aware of it. As soon as you realise that your police force is putting people before the courts who shouldn't be there, there should be immediate action,” she said.
“You should be talking to the courts immediately, starting to write the letters, starting to alert people that this has been wrongly done".
Ms O'Loan said it would not be appropriate for her to comment on whether the current Garda Commissioner Nóirín O'Sullivan should step down, but said that the findings of an internationally staffed commission would inform such decisions: "I think that if you started with a commission, what will need to happen, in terms of the current senior management will evolve as more inquiries take place and more questions are asked. I don't think it would be appropriate for me to comment at all".
She also said that any programme of policing reform should involve strengthening the powers of garda oversight bodies like GSOC and the Policing Authority.
Furthermore, she said: "I would suspect there are reforms needed in the Department of Justice because I think if we just look at what has happened to the Gardaí over the last few years, there have been clear, consistent indications that things are not as they should be.
“The role of the Department of Justice and the closeness between the Department of Justice and the Garda Commissioner and senior garda management doesn't seem to have produced the level of robust management that's needed.
“So my suspicion is you would have to look at the role of the Department of Justice."
Ms O'Loan served as Northern Ireland Police Ombudsman from 1999-2007, during the reforms recommended by the Patten Commission being implemented, which saw the transition of the RUC into the PSNI.(CNN) -- A county sheriff's deputy killed his ex-wife in a convenience store parking lot Monday, then shot a Virginia state trooper before being seriously wounded himself, police said.
Roanoke Police Chief Chris Perkins told reporters Monday that a murder warrant has been received for Jonathan Agee, who is now at Carilion Roanoke Memorial Hospital after suffering multiple gunshot wounds following a shootout with a pair of Virginia state police officers.
The bloodshed began at 11:30 a.m., when Jennifer Agee, 30, pulled into a Sheetz convenience store parking lot in Roanoke, Virginia, Perkins said. Trailing behind her in a marked Franklin County sheriff's office car was her ex-husband, Jonathan Agee. The 32-year-old sheriff's deputy from Boones Mill was off-duty at the time.
Perkins said that Agee and his ex-wife both got out of their cars. Jonathan Agee then shot Jennifer Agee, while another person believed to be a child sat in her vehicle, according to the police chief.
Jennifer Agee, who lived in Salem, was then taken to Carilion Roanoke Memorial Hospital where she died, Perkins said.
Almost immediately afterward, police issued an alert asking authorities to look out for Agee's sheriff's office vehicle.
Virginia State Police Superintendent Steven Flaherty said that Sgt. Matt Brannock spotted the marked car on Route 460 and followed it. At about 11:48 a.m., the two vehicles stopped at the Ironto exit ramp off I-81 ramp in Montgomery County.
There, Jonathan Agee opened fire and shot Brannock "at least once," Flaherty said.
Two other state police officers soon arrived at the scene, exchanging fire with Agee. They subdued the suspect after shooting him "several times," Flaherty said.
Both Brannock, a 35-year-old U.S. Air Force veteran who joined the state police force 13 years ago, and Agee were flown by helicopter to Carilion Roanoke Memorial Hospital. Police said the suspect's injuries are considered life-threatening, but those suffered by the state trooper are not.
This incident tied up Memorial Day traffic in parts of western Virginia, after authorities closed several lanes on I-81 northbound to give them more space to conduct their investigation.
Those lanes reopened shortly before 7 p.m., said Virginia State Police spokewoman Corinne Geller. But in the subsequent hours, traffic still moved slowly through Montgomery County due to the earlier back-up and influx of holiday travelers.
CNN's Greg Botelho contributed to this report."I'll never know what made you run away, I only know there's nothing in this wide world, left for me to see." (The Brothers Four)
"Love of my life don't leave me, Bring it back bring it back,
Don't take it away from me, Because you don't know what it means to me" (Queen)
"What have I got to do to make you love me?" (Elton John)
Romantic Ideology describes the best case scenario of love that only very few people will ever experience-a passionate love that lasts forever. A more common experience in the romantic realm is that of separation, which is often interpreted as rejection. The essential role of love in our life, and our profound personal involvement in love, makes such separation very painful.
People look for a heavenly haven in love. The intensity of love and the perceived unity of the lovers create the illusion of feeling secure: the desire to live happily ever after in the safety of the beloved's arms underlies. However, love is not safe, but rather risky. Lovers are quite vulnerable to the risk of being separated from the object of their love. The dynamic and changing nature of love constantly threatens its existence. Lovers wish their love to last forever; however, they are aware how fragile and transitory love can be.
Adhering to Romantic Ideology, which assumes that love is eternal, eternal, not susceptible to waning, and invulnerable to any threat, complicates and intensifies the painful situation of the rejected person. In such a case, it is harder to interpret romantic rejection as a normal behavior which could happen to anyone. There is no evaluative (or ideological) framework in which the rejected lover can find consolation. On the contrary, the framework he or she believes in denies such an option, as the Carpenters ask about the reason why the sun goes on shining and the sea rushes to shore: "Don't they know it's the end of the world, because you don't love me anymore?"
The pain of romantic separation is exacerbated by the feeling of personal failure, because of the expectation that it should be otherwise (even when the current rate is quite high). This may explain why people take romantic separation, and in particular romantic rejection, in such a harsh manner. It is evident that the separated or rejected lover can find another lover who may even be more suitable; nevertheless, some lovers cannot stand the separation or rejection and commit or kill their beloved. Romantic rejection is painful not merely because of the event itself, but also because of the damage it inflicts upon our, which is determined to some extent by the way people evaluate us. Public knowledge of our failures typically hurts our self-esteem.
It is interesting to mention that men often take romantic rejection in a more dramatic manner than women: men are three to four times more likely than women to commit suicide after a love affair has decayed.
When our responsibility for a certain event is reduced, emotional intensity decreases as well (see here). Accordingly, people are less distressed by rejection when it is due to external circumstances. Such circumstances reduce the relevancy of the event to the rejectee's self-esteem and hence reduce the event's strength.
Accordingly, the reasons people prefer to give for refusing dates are primarily impersonal, uncontrollable, and unstable, even though the true reasons may be quite different. The major reason for telling such "white lies" is concern about the rejectee's possible emotional reaction. People are less distressed by rejection when it is due to impersonal reasons ("I'm going out of town") than when it is due to their own characteristics ("You're a boring person"). A common excuse in this regard is "You are too good for me." People are also less upset by uncontrollable reasons (the rejector has to study that night) than controllable ones (the rejector does not want to go to a movie that night). Reducing controllability here reduces emotional intensity. In addition, reasons that are unstable and temporary (the rejector is ill) are less disheartening than more stable, permanent reasons (the rejector is engaged to be married). Unstable, temporary reasons diminish the reality of the rejection somewhat and hence emotional intensity is reduced (see here).
The phenomenon of refusing dates by offering reasons which reduce the hurt to the other person is so common by now that it is no longer so effective. In the television show Seinfeld, a woman who wants to stop George explains: "It's not you (who is to be blamed for this), it's me." This hurts George, mostly because he claims that no one else should be entitled to use this line, which he believes he invented and has often used. Indeed, in another episode, George, in an attempt to get rid of his current girlfriend, says: "You can do better than me. You could throw a dart out the window and hit someone better than me. I'm no good!"
Although we are willing to reduce pain for the person from whom we wish to separate, there are some limits to what we are prepared to do for other people. For example, a man may plan to offer several reasons in order to reduce the personal liability of the woman from whom he wants to separate, but in their next meeting she anticipates him and suggests the value of such a separation, while, of course, trying to reduce his personal liability. Such a situation is bound to hurt the man. It is true that there is now no danger that the woman will be hurt from the separation (and this was his primary purpose), but preventing the hurt was not achieved by a generous (though superficial) sacrifice on his behalf, but in a manner which could places him as the inferior-after all, he knows that the reasons given are merely an attempt to reduce his pain and are not genuine.
The wish to fuse with the beloved and to form a single unit is understandable in light of the greatest of lovers: separation. The solution for preventing the separation from the beloved is that of making the beloved an inseparable part of the lover (see here).
The above considerations can be encapsulated in the following statement that a lover might express: "Darling, if you want to reject my love, please do it in a considerate manner-if possible, one that will lead me to think that actually it is I who wish to reject you."(Update: listen to my interview with Oxford professor Dr. Simon Saunders on this subject.)
Patriotism has been called the “last refuge of a scoundrel,” and for good reason. But over the last few years, I’m afraid that phrase has become outdated. Patriotism is now the second-to-last refuge. Quantum physics has become the last refuge of a scoundrel.
I’ve noticed a fashionable worldview which embraces a very particular way of thinking: the idea that reality is not concrete, that our rational faculties are fundamentally flawed, and that language is a wholly inadequate tool for discovering truths about the world. They often take this idea to its extreme, arguing that outright logical contradictions aren’t as big a deal as philosophers make them out to be. They think contradictions and paradoxes are actually a fundamental part of reality. So, we shouldn’t be shocked or concerned when we find a contradiction in our worldview. In fact, a kind of spiritual enlightenment occurs when one finally makes peace with a paradoxical world. This is perhaps best summarized by the popular Walt Whitman quote:
“Do I contradict myself? Very well, then I contradict myself. I am large; I contain multitudes.”
Naturally, such theories are profound if true. I’ve spoken with many people in substantial detail about these ideas, and – almost universally – a fundamental justification for their beliefs comes back to quantum physics. They say, “Yes, binary logic is practical for human beings, but it’s fundamentally imprecise. When you get down to “quantum” level (the micro-microscopic level) of reality, binary logic doesn’t hold. Things can be true and false at the same time, and experimentally, this has been demonstrated for 80 years. The universe does not play by logical rules, which are merely constructed by human minds.”
They often add – especially the more spiritually-inclined ones – “Reality itself is mind-dependent. We can empirically demonstrate that the state of the universe depends on our observation of it. And, if the universe goes unobserved, then it remains in an indeterminate state.”
Before diving into the explanation of this argument, I’ll give you my evaluation up front: I believe these ideas are catastrophically flawed. Interpreting quantum physics in this particular way is nothing short of an abuse of Reason – an embarrassment to critical thinking. I don’t say that glibly. It’s akin to writing the equation “2 + 2 = 5” and thinking that you’ve demonstrated mathematics is flawed, and when somebody challenges your conclusion, you simply point back to your formula. You show an empirical “test” with your fingers – you add two fingers to two fingers, but mistakenly end up extending all five fingers, then walk around showing your open hand to people as proof of the paradoxical nature of mathematics.
The Proof
Alright, so let’s get into the meat of their argument. What exactly is the data which seems to show reality contradicting itself? And what’s the proof that the universe is mind-dependent? I won’t go into super technical detail, but it can all be illustrated by one famous example. It’s called the “double-slit experiment.”
It begins with a question: is light a particle or a wave? According to the standard model of physics, it’s impossible for something to be both a particle and wave at the same time – those concepts are mutually exclusive. But in different circumstances, light appears to act like both. Take a light source, shine it through a single slit in a plate, and examine the resulting pattern left on a screen behind the plate. You’ll find evidence that light is a particle (see image below). The light which travels through the slit will leave a corresponding “blob” of light on the screen – no different than pouring sand through a small hole and seeing the particles land in one particular place. But, open up a second slit right next to the first, and we get a very different result. Instead of getting two corresponding blobs, we get an interference pattern (shown below). The light which travels through both slits creates waves which interfere with one another. Some waves cancel each other out; others blend together to create a stronger wave, creating a predictable pattern. So, by simply opening and closing a slit, light appears to behave as both a particle and a wave.
It gets weirder. Instead of having a constant light source in our experiment, what if we send one “piece” of light (one photon) through the slits at a time, and keep track of the results? Oddly enough, we still get an interference pattern. But what could one photon be interfering with? Itself? Indeed, that’s what the experiment seems to show. One photon acts like a wave and a particle at the same time, seems to go through both slits at the same time, and it follows the same interference pattern.
But there’s yet another problem: every time we actually measure which slit the photon travels through with detectors, it only travels through one slit at a time, not both. The “wave-function” completely disappears, along with the corresponding interference. When we remove the detectors, the wave-function seems to spring back into existence, along with the interference pattern. Here’s a quote from a physicist explaining their predicament:
“It seems that light passes through one slit or the other in the form of photons if we set up an experiment to detect which slit the photon passes, but passes through both slits in the form of a wave if we perform an interference experiment.”
Puzzling indeed. Another question: is it possible to predict beforehand which slit our single photon will pass through? For example, we can easily predict the motion of billiard balls being struck on a pool table, but can we apply the same principle to phenomena on the quantum level? Apparently not. Physicists do their best to control every possible variable in these experiments, and by repeating the same test over and over, they have never found a way to “predict” which slit the photon will travel through. They can, with a great degree of accuracy, predict their results only in the aggregate – the probability that any particular photon will travel through a particular slit.
Think about flipping a coin a hundred times. You’re going to end up with about fifty heads and fifty tails. But for each particular flip, you won’t be able to predict beforehand heads or tails. The same is true for the double-slit experiment. There’s a 50% chance that the photon will pass through the slit on the right or the left, but we can’t know beforehand which one.
The Interpretations
OK, so that’s the rough overview of the double-slit experiment. Now, for the interpretations of the data. Here’s where things start getting funky. What many scoundrels won’t tell you is this: there are several different, mutually exclusive theories regarding quantum phenomena. The most popular one happens to be the most preposterous. It’s called the “Copenhagen interpretation” (CI). Virtually all of my objections about quantum-tomfoolery are related to the Copenhagen interpretation, and I am far from alone in my criticism.
At first glance, these odd quantum phenomena seem to posit a fundamental problem. On the one hand, modern physics is built on top of so-called “classical mechanics,” which successfully explains the motion of particles through space. This is especially true for macroscopic objects – classical mechanics gives a practically full explanation (and prediction) for all motion, and it’s based on a central premise: future states of reality (or future positions of particles) are based off of previous states of reality. In other words, a particle’s momentum, trajectory, charge, etc., determines its future position. Boiled down to four words: effects have distinct causes.
However, the predictions of classical mechanics do not seem to apply to quantum mechanics. Given the exact same inputs (momentum, charge, etc.), we cannot accurately predict the outputs. Shooting one photon at a time through the double-slit experiment shows unpredictable results, and we’re left describing the quantum world in terms of probability, rather than certainty. If this is an accurate reflection of reality, it implies that quantum phenomena are fundamentally indetermined – their behavior is not “caused” by anything and the final position of individual particles is ultimately left to chance.
So, we’re left with two mutually exclusive theories. On the one hand, you have a classically-determined universe, where motion is caused by concrete inputs. And on the other hand, you have the world of quantum indeterminacy, where motion is probabilistic and fundamentally random at the smallest levels. How do we resolve this conflict? We have several options.
First, we might examine our theories. Let’s say theory X and theory Y are both useful in their current forms, but they contradict each other in some way. Obviously, something needs to be amended – either theory X, theory Y, or both. In terms of Physics, that means either classical mechanics or quantum mechanics needs to be tweaked. We could say, “Quantum phenomena are more fundamental than classical phenomena, and therefore the principle of indeterminacy is ultimately true. Macroscopic-level motion only appears to be determined, but in reality, it’s probabilistic.”
Or, we might say, “Classical mechanics more accurately describes reality, and the odd results of quantum experiments are due to a lack of sophisticated-enough equipment. We’re simply missing a variable in our experiments which causes the particles to behave in seemingly-unpredictable ways. Once we learn more and can measure more accurately, the missing variable will be found, and we will be able to correctly predict the motion of quantum particles.”
Another option might be to say both theories are inaccurate, and we need to come up with an altogether new theory to explain both macro and micro-level phenomena with consistency (e.g. matter is fundamentally a new type of thing – akin to waves and particles together, at the same time, in a non-mutually-exclusive way).
These approaches seem sensible and logical. Let me introduce you to a final option, closely associated (though not necessarily so) with the Copenhagen interpretation. It’s called the “principle of complementarity,” and it states that “wave-ness” and “particle-ness” are present at the same time, but they are impossible to measure at the same time. To the extent you’re measuring the wave-ness of something, the particle-ness disappears. And to the extent you measure the particle-ness, the wave-ness disappears. This is not a quirk of the experiment, but rather a fundamental principle of the universe.
In other words, the theories of classical mechanics and quantum mechanics are mutually exclusive and true at the same time. It all depends on your perspective. Classical mechanics is true when you observe macro-scale phenomena, and quantum mechanics is true when you observe micro-scale phenomena. Depending on how you look at it, either interpretation is true, and yet, both theories contradict each other.
Why, then, does the world appear to be in only one state at a time? Here we find the central claim of the Copenhagen interpretation: it’s only upon observation that reality resolves itself into definite particles. Without observation, the universe remains in no particular state. To be precise, the universe is in a “superposition” of mutually exclusive states at the same time. What does it mean to be in a “superposition”? Well, the argument goes, it’s not really interpretable in ordinary terms. It’s something akin to a probability cloud that isn’t in any state at all. If that’s a paradox, so be it.
Schrödinger’s cat
If that sounds like an extraordinary claim, you’re not alone. Erwin Schrödinger was an Austrian physicist who came up with a famous thought experiment in the 1930’s. In essence, he said, “Imagine a cat in a box. Within the box, there’s a flask containing acid which, when broken, would kill the cat. Whether or not the flask breaks is determined by a ‘probabilistic’ quantum event.” In his example, he chose radioactive decay. “Say, over the course of an hour, there’s an equal probability that an atom will decay or not. If the atom decays, the flask is broken, and the cat is killed. If the atom does not decay, the cat lives.
So after an hour, the cat has an equal probability of living or dying. According to the Copenhagen interpretation, until we look inside the box, the cat is in a ‘superposition’ of alive and dead at the same time. Only when we look inside the box does one version of reality collapse, and the cat appears either alive or dead.”
What a preposterous conclusion! The cat is both alive and not-alive at the same time, and the universe waits with bated breath for our mere observation to determine which state it (randomly) collapses into. Astoundingly, Schrödinger’s cat is often used by proponents of the CI, not realizing he actually created the thought experiment to show the absurdity of their theory.
But it gets worse. Some supporters of the CI have taken the absurdity a step further. Reality, they say, is not only determined by observation, but conscious observation. Meaning, the collapse of the wave-function only happens when being viewed by a conscious observer, putting consciousness squarely in the middle of what defines reality. Our awareness becomes a necessary part in determining the structure of the universe – in effect, there’s no such thing as “external” reality, because “reality” is suspended in probabilities which are only concretely resolved by our conscious awareness. We are not passive observers of reality – nay, we’re creators of reality. In this way, the entire universe is quite literally mind-dependent.
It’s no surprise that this line of reasoning is popular with the Deepak Chopra’s of the world |
was one of several Leagues that appeared over the centuries, Moore and O'Neill deepened the mythology with a satisfying second volume and the frustrating The League Of Extraordinary Gentlemen: The Black Dossier, the latter as much a sourcebook as a proper story.
Advertisement
Watchmen overshadows most of Alan Moore's other superhero work, but it was neither his first nor his last plunge into the world of capes and tights. The tangled history of Miracleman—from its origins as a British derivation of the 1940s Captain Marvel character to its current status as the source of a seemingly bottomless legal quagmire—is a Primer unto itself. Moore's run on the title stretched from its 1982 revival as a feature in Warrior through 16 issues. It begins with the middle-aged Micky Moran remembering he has the ability to transform into a superhero with the use of a magic word, and it ends with Moran's alter ego becoming a god on earth. In between, Moore teases out the troubling implications always present in the genre. What do these power fantasies mean, and, if left unchecked, where would they take us? Can the gulf between humanity and superhumanity ever be closed? "His emotions are so pure," Moran tells his wife early in the run, "when he loves you it's gigantic. His love is so strong and clean… When I love you it's all tangled up with who's not doing their share of the washing up and twisted neurotic things like that." By the end of Moore's story, the part of Moran that asks such questions is gone.
Moore was growing up in public as he wrote Miracleman. His progression and the wildly variable art—it begins beautifully with pencils by Garry Leach and Alan Davis, and ends with John Totleben's masterful pointillist work, but suffers in between—makes Miracleman show its seams a bit. But should it ever become widely available again, it should assume its proper status as one of Moore's best work. (The A.V. Club would never endorse illegal downloads, but there are rumors that it's digitally available online.)
Advertisement
After stripping superheroes down to their base elements in the '80s with Miracleman and Watchmen, Moore began putting them back together again in the '90s. Invited by the artists at Image to do more or less whatever he wanted with their creations—whenever he needed a quick influx of cash to help him finish From Hell—Moore initially responded with the muddled, unfinished miniseries 1963, and some routine work-for-hire on Spawn and WildC.A.T.s. Then he took over Rob Liefeld's grotesque Superman rip-off Supreme, and renewed a love affair with the genre that Watchmen had effectively killed off. Over the course of 22 Supreme issues, Moore strove to write superhero stories as imaginative and light-hearted as the best of the Silver Age, while subtly acknowledging that times had changed, and that throwback comics can never be more than a self-conscious construct. Though Moore was mainly spitballing ideas that he'd bring to fruition with the America's Best Comic line a few years later, and though he never got to bring Supreme to the big battle-royal finale he'd planned, the series' individual issues—collected in two sloppily produced trade paperbacks by Checker—are in many ways the most purely "fun" comics Moore has ever written, and some of the best "Superman" stories since the '60s.
Like Supreme, a lot of Alan Moore's projects in the '90s went unfinished or unrealized, as he struggled to make the transition from genre writer to serious writer, while independent comics publishers and unreliable artists folded all around him. But in 1991, Moore completed an entire graphic novella that has gone practically unnoticed. A Small Killing, illustrated by Argentinean painter Oscar Zarate, jumps around the consciousness of a rising young advertising executive as he prepares to start pitching a soft drink to the Soviets. He flashes back to his childhood in the low-rent suburbs, and tries to puzzle out the reasons behind his intuition that someone's trying to kill him. The secret isn't that hard to figure out, but A Small Killing isn't the kind of story that relies on surprise. It's more a poignant depiction of how the ghosts of our choices linger, as well as a demonstration that Moore is capable of writing a sophisticated non-adventure book that doesn't descend to pretentious incomprehensibility. A Small Killing is his most underrated work.
[pagebreak]
Advanced Studies
Advertisement
Moore's interest in fringe science and the occult has grown more intense through the years. By the mid-'90s, he was publicly professing to worship the Roman snake god Glycon (though his attraction to the deity seems largely tied to the probability that the original Glycon cult was defrauding the devout). Promethea began as the ABC line's take on Wonder Woman, and became a clearinghouse for Moore's thoughts on Alesteir Crowley, tarot, and the Kabbalah, before circling not quite all the way back again in its final apocalyptic issues. Reading it can feel a lot like being buttonholed by a genial, disturbingly persuasive madman with fully considered ideas about the mystic forces that secretly guide the world. The gorgeous art by J.H. Williams, who guides Promethea from a slightly dystopian city to the afterlife and all points beyond, stays in lockstep with Moore's ideas, no matter how outré they become.
DC's Swamp Thing was on the verge of cancellation when Alan Moore assumed writing duties in 1984. It became his breakthrough into American comics, one accomplished by turning the title on its head. Swamp Thing's origin was pretty simple: Alec Holland, a scientist working on a secret project in the Louisiana swamps, has been turned into a horrific vegetable monster thanks to an explosion intended to kill him. With his second issue, Moore used a story called "The Anatomy Lesson" to unravel that origin, revealing that Holland had died in the explosion, leaving behind a vegetable creature who only thought he was Holland. Instead of a man who had turned into a plant, he was a plant laboring under the illusion that he'd once been a man. From that inversion, Moore spun horror stories with a mystical bent, sending Swamp Thing off to explore the afterlife, the dark side of America (in a long storyline that introduced acerbic magician John Constantine, soon to star in his own series), and, less successfully, outer space. Stephen Bissette and John Totleben supplied the lion's share of the art for a run that, by the time it concluded, had helped redefine what could and couldn't be done with comics, and built a mythical system out of the fringe elements of the DC Universe. That's what makes it simultaneously brilliant and a little forbidding to comics newcomers, who may not immediately get the references to Adam Strange, Deadman, and other venerable-but-obscure characters. The poetic storytelling that balances creepiness with tenderness—the latter courtesy of Swamp Thing's odd romance with an understanding woman named Abby—makes the problem easy to overlook.
Advertisement
Soon after Moore launched From Hell in Steve Bissette's short-lived (but glorious) horror anthology Taboo, he added the erotic juvenile fiction deconstruction Lost Girls to the Taboo roster. When Taboo folded, Moore and artist Melinda Gebbie (who became Moore's romantic partner as well) decided to complete the whole story before publishing it, and 15 years later, they convinced independent publisher Top Shelf to release Lost Girls as a three-volume hardbound box set, retailing for $75. The book sold more than 30,000 copies, which is a testament to Moore's reputation, because while Lost Girls is one of his most straightforward stories—divided, like V For Vendetta and so many other Moore works, into digestible chunks—the subject matter couldn't be more repellent. Attempting to demystify pornography and pull apart the psychological underpinning of children's stories, Moore and Gebbie have The Wizard Of Oz's Dorothy, Peter Pan's Wendy, and Alice In Wonderland's Alice enjoying a sexy country vacation on the eve of World War I. The material set in 1913 is explicit but fairly benign, while the retellings of each woman's personal history are at times stomach-turningly shocking, including graphic depictions of well-loved children's book characters—some of them children themselves—engaging in sexual activity. Lost Girls is a bold work that dares to ask whether fantasy alone can be harmful, and while it isn't always successful as a statement of principles, it's as emotionally affecting a book as the comics medium has ever produced.
The Essentials
1.From Hell
2.Watchmen
3.Top 10
4.Promethea
5.V For Vendetta
Essential Stories
1. "Whatever Happened To The Man Of Tomorrow?"
Alan Moore only had three cracks at Superman, but he made all three count: first with the rich Superman's-greatest-wish story "For The Man Who Has Everything," then with the surreal Swamp Thing team-up "The Jungle Line," and finally with "Whatever Happened To The Man Of Tomorrow?," a two-issue farewell to Superman designed to clear the decks before the series rebooted in 1986. Set free to come up with a logical endpoint to 46 years of Superman lore, Moore made the bad guys badder, brought back nearly every Superman character and concept for one last hurrah, and found a way to spread wanton destruction throughout the DC universe, while still ending with a reassuring wink. Though it's far less dense than Watchmen, the same approach pertains: What if the people who created superhero comics cared as much as the people who read them?
Advertisement
2. "Greyshirt: How Things Work Out":
Appearing in Tomorrow Stories, ABC's uneven but often brilliant anthology series, "How Things Work Out" uses Greyshirt, Moore and Rick Veitch's homage to Will Eisner's masked gumshoe The Spirit, as the anchor for a storytelling experiment with a powerful payoff. Set in a four-story apartment building, with each story of the building capturing a different decade, it follows a father and son's dashed dreams to their tragic conclusion.
3. "Reversible Man"
A lot of Moore's early stories for British magazines are tossed-off goofs, heavy on punchlines and gleeful oddity. But "The Reversible Man" is a powerful exception. Like a lot of that early work, it explores a single idea—in this case, it's that old fantasy-fiction chestnut, "What would it be like to live your life backward, from death to birth?"—but rather than going for laughs, Moore finds the sweetness in the concept, observing how irritation with spouses turns to fervent affection, and how work gets "progressively easier… and I had to give less and less money to the firm every Friday night." In four short pages, Moore packs in dozens of touching observations on the pains and pleasures of everyday life, before ending on a moment of existential horror.
Advertisement
4. "Swamp Thing: Pog"
Moore never let his affection for classic comics creations stop him from using them to heartbreaking ends. Originally published in Swamp Thing #32, "Pog" recasts Walt Kelly's Pogo characters as visitors from another planet who drop by Swamp Thing's Louisiana turf in search of a more hospitable environment. Instead, they find the same problems they left behind, discovering that a world overrun with humanity has little use for funny animals, no matter how whimsical their speech or sharp their social commentary. (Moore has never let his own complicity in the darkening tone of modern comics get in the way of mourning what's been lost. See also the brief, brutal one-off story "Pictopia.")
5. The Killing Joke
Advertisement
While Watchmen had a lot to do with the darkening of superhero comics in the decade to come, Moore's 48-page, Brian Bolland-illustrated Batman story The Killing Joke—along with Frank Miller's badass Batman revival The Dark Knight Returns—showed future writers and artists how to add a coat of grime to preexisting characters. Even Moore has regretted the influence of The Killing Joke, a nasty re-telling of the Joker's origin story that spills over into the sexualized torture of Batgirl. But while its chin-stroking "are good and evil really the same?" theme isn't all that profound—and its punk nihilism loses its cool once readers get past their sophomore year of college—The Killing Joke is undeniably upsetting, and it carries Moore's obsession with rhyming images to a mind-bending extreme. Even now, adolescent comic-book fans can read The Killing Joke for the first time and think, "This is how superhero comics are supposed to be," while middle-aged comics fans read it and think, "This is the moment where the genre went wrong." Either way, The Killing Joke remains an impressive achievement.
Demerits
Even the most brilliant writer in comicdom takes some wrong turns. In Moore's case, the mistakes have either been the result of his taking a job strictly for money, or trying something that stretches the comics form a little too much. In the mid-'90s, with From Hell still uncompleted and his other art-comics on hiatus, Moore cashed some checks from Image and Awesome Comics, and worked on their superhero properties. Some of those comics, like Supreme, Youngblood, and Glory, are slight but highly entertaining, while others are jumbled and indifferent. Moore spent a year writing the adventures of the interstellar super-team WildC.A.T.s, but while he tries to riff on class conflict and the distinctions between human and artificial intelligence, his plots are overly convoluted, and he doesn't seem especially interested in reining them in. Meanwhile, in the spin-off miniseries Voodoo, Moore crafts a bayou mystery around a telepathic WildC.A.T.s heroine/stripper, but his interjections of local color are blaringly awkward, and the mystery story fairly bland.
Advertisement
On the flip side, Moore has also been involved with some work that exposes his weakness for the willfully obscure. Periodically, he's allowed artists to adapt his prose stories and performance-art pieces into comics, and the results have been generally dire. The book A Disease Of Language collects two Moore lectures on magic, history, and human consciousness, illustrated by From Hell's Eddie Campbell. Both "The Birth Caul" and "Snakes And Ladders" are beautifully drawn and sporadically insightful, but they suffer from Moore's persistent belief that incomprehensibility is a prerequisite to mystic understanding.
Miscellany
Advertisement
Perhaps the biggest "what might've been" in Moore's bibliography is Big Numbers, a self-published, serialized graphic novel that he and artist Bill Sienkiewicz completed two issues of in 1990, before Sienkiewicz crumpled under the workload and Moore's publishing imprint Mad Love collapsed financially. In retrospect, maybe it was all for the best. Big Numbers was insanely ambitious, attempting to connect up the patterns in a handful of strangers' lives via fractal geometry, while also pushing comics design forward with a purposeful mix of black-and-white and color, collage and paint. But on the page, Moore's "everyday people" seem a little shallow, and his "big picture" pretty unfocused. A lot of the major ideas in Big Numbers were being explored simultaneously in From Hell, and once Moore turned his attention more fully to the latter, he was able to write a stealthier masterpiece, without the pressure of expectation that weighed down Big Numbers.
Continuing the "unfinished" trend, in 1993 Moore crafted an elaborate homage to the boisterous early days of Marvel Comics with the miniseries 1963, a six-part riff on Stan Lee's hyperbolic prose and Jack Kirby and Steve Ditko's dynamic art, featuring characters based on Spider-Man, Nick Fury, The Fantastic Four, Thor, Doctor Strange and the like. The whole endeavor was supposed to culminate in an 80-page "annual" that would contrast the imaginative simplicity of early Marvel with the simplistic imagination of the early '90s, but 1963's publisher Image got wrapped up in internal turmoil, and the story never got its contextual epilogue. All that remains are six issues of overly rigid pastiche, lacking the spirit of later Moore superhero works like Supreme and Tom Strong.
Advertisement
And speaking of Tom Strong, while it hardly counts as "unfinished" (since Moore masterminded 36 issues and a wealth of spin-offs), it may be the one property in the America's Best Comics line that never hit its full stride. After a stellar debut issue that introduced the Doc Savage-like superhero and his extended family of do-gooders, Tom Strong rarely recreated the same mix of wonder, wit, and wisdom. The book quickly became another Supreme-like romp through the Silver Age, full of incomplete thoughts and only mildly amusing structural experiments. Increasingly, Moore gave the Tom Strong stories over to guest writers and co-writers, and the concept lost cohesion. One recurring trait in Moore's career has been that intense focus and follow-through results in greatness, while dabbling produces something, well, less than legendary.
Twilight Of The Superheroes is only slightly less frustrating than Big Numbers or 1963, if only because, instead of dead-ending, it never got started. Intended as a Ragnarok for the DC Universe, it imagines a future in which the House Of Steel (ruled by Superman) and the House Of Thunder (ruled by Captain Marvel) have helped steer the Earth toward its apocalypse. Moore broke with DC before it could be realized, but not before leaving behind a detailed proposal filled with twists and turns that suggest the mind-blowing comic that might have been.I met up with writer Seth Grahame-Smith (Abraham Lincoln: Vampire Hunter, Pride, Prejudice And Zombies) today at the SLS Hotel in Beverly Hills to talk about Dark Shadows. While he’s made a name for himself with his novels and has several high-profile screenplay credits on the horizon, it’s his first major release as a screenwriter. We had a nice long chat about the film, the bulk of which will be hitting later this week. But I figured I’d go ahead and share his update on Beetlejuice 2 with you guys. It’s not too much different than updates he’s offered in the past, though things seem to be progressing – and he’s acknowledging that some other favorite characters may return.
I have to ask, what’s that status of Beetlejuice 2?
The status is everyone’s waiting for me to get off my ass. I’ve met with Michael Keaton about it, I’ve met with Tim [Burton] about it. Warner Brothers is obviously eager. But right now the ball’s in my court to sort of crack the story that will make it worth of doing this again. I’ve said it before, and I’ll say it to you. I don’t want to have to look fans in the face and apologize for making a bad Beetlejuice movie, because it’s one of my favorite movies. And I don’t want to make anything just because I can. I don’t think Tim would participate [with those motives in mind] and I certainly know Michael wouldn’t. If we get something worthy…
Any chance of Alec Baldwin, Geena Davis or Winona Ryder’s characters returning?
It’s all possible. In terms of the story, however many years that are between the two films will be the amount of years that are between the two story lines. It’s not a reboot or a remake, it’s a straight sequel with Michael Keaton returning as Beetlejuice.
Check back later in the week for the rest of the interview. Tim Burton’s Dark Shadows stars Johnny Depp, Michelle Pfeiffer, Eva Green, Chloe Moretz and Helena Bonham Carter. It opens this Friday, May 8th.This video is no longer available
This video was hosted on Vidme, which is no longer in operation. However, you might find this video at one of these links:
Video title:
Roadtrippin' to Yorkton, Saskatchewan
Upload date:
May 5 2017
Uploaded by:
Roamancing
Video description:
One of the many things we love about Saskatchewan are the many wonderful characters that reside there. It is for that reason that Emme Rogers makes a yearly pilgrimage to Yorkton, Saskatchewan. For the characters that partake in the Yorkton Film Festival, along with the stories that they tell. This my friends is the story of our 2011 road trip to Yorkton with the calamity that is Emme Rogers, the glamorous Katrina Ham, dry wit of Dave Schultz, and talented schutter bug from Naidu Photography. A road trip that rather than ending in disaster, ended with Kat and Emme being presented with the keys to the city (who knows maybe that does spell disaster for Yorkton). http://www.goldensheafawards.com/ Katrina and Emme's make up courtesy of Saskatoon's Chop Chop Salon, along with Kat's hair. The music in this video is Pourquoi by Marie-Pierre Arthur. Starring Emme Rogers, Katrina German, Dave Schultz, Naidu Photography and the Mayor of Yorkton, with Emme on camera. Edited by Wendy Dallian. For more Roamancing Adventures, catch us at: http://roamancing.com http://twitter.com/roamancing http://facebook.com/roamancing http://youtube.com/roamancing #roadtrip #roadtrippin #roadtripping #Canada #Saskatchewan #Yorkton #filmfest
Total views:
227In other cases, the few speakers of an Indian tongue are the old people, never their grandchildren, and so the research is a desperate attempt to save another language from burial with a departing generation.
The passing of a language diminishes cultural diversity, anthropologists say, and the restoration of at least some part of a language is an act of reclaiming a people's heritage.
Blair A. Rudes, a linguist at the University of North Carolina, Charlotte, who specializes in reconstructing Indian languages, said several Algonquian communities in the East had efforts under way to recover their lost languages and return them to daily use.
"What turns out to be really important is just that they learn some piece of the language because it is reclaiming their heritage," Dr. Rudes said. "So much was lost that reclaiming any of it is a major event."
Ives Goddard, who is a curator for linguistics and anthropology at the Smithsonian Institution, said, "The loss of languages continues, and it's a worldwide phenomenon."
At least half the world's estimated 6,000 languages, Dr. Goddard said, have so few remaining speakers that they are threatened with extinction. By 2100, he predicted, "there will be fewer than 3,000 languages still spoken."
When the director of "The New World," Terrence Malick, decided that for authenticity Powhatan should speak in his own language, he called in Dr. Rudes, who has worked with Dr. Goddard in reconstructing the defunct Algonquian language of the Pequot of Connecticut. He is also engaged in language restoration for the Catawba of North Carolina and is collaborating with Helen Rountree, emeritus professor of anthropology at Old Dominion University, on a dictionary of Virginia Algonquian.
Advertisement Continue reading the main story
Dr. Rudes was asked what Powhatan and his daughter Pocahontas would say and how they would say it. It was a daunting assignment.
The related Algonquian languages were among the first in America to die out, and no one is known to have spoken Virginia Algonquian since 1785. Like many other Indians, except some cultures in Mexico and Central America, Algonquian speakers had no writing system, and their grammar and most of their vocabulary were lost.
Just two contemporary accounts — one by Captain Smith and the other by the Jamestown colony secretary, William Strachey — preserved some Virginia Algonquian words, including ones that have passed into modern English as raccoon, terrapin, moccasins and tomahawk.
Clearly, even the wits of the celebrated roundtable at the namesake Algonquin Hotel, who had something cutting to say about everything and everybody, would have for once been at a loss for words in the presence of Powhatan and Pocahontas. Unless, perhaps, the two happened to wear their moccasins and the soup of the day was terrapin.
The first challenge for Dr. Rudes was the limited vocabulary. Smith, the colony leader, set down just 50 Indian words, and Strachey compiled 600. The lists were written phonetically by Englishmen who were not expert in linguistics and whose spelling and pronunciation differed considerably from modern usage, making it difficult to determine the words' actual Indian form.
Newsletter Sign Up Continue reading the main story Please verify you're not a robot by clicking the box. Invalid email address. Please re-enter. You must select a newsletter to subscribe to. Sign Up You will receive emails containing news content, updates and promotions from The New York Times. You may opt-out at any time. You agree to receive occasional updates and special offers for The New York Times's products and services. Thank you for subscribing. An error has occurred. Please try again later. View all New York Times newsletters.
Dr. Rudes had to apply techniques of historical linguistics to rebuilding a language from these sketchy, unreliable word lists. He compared Strachey's recorded words with vocabularies of related Algonquian languages, especially those spoken from the Carolinas north into Canada that had survived longer and are thus better known.
This family of Indian tongues, in one respect, reminded linguists of the Romance languages. Each was distinctive but as closely related as Spanish is to Italian or Italian to Romanian. Comparisons with related languages revealed the common elements of grammar and sentence structure and many similarities in vocabulary.
A translation of the Bible into the language once spoken by Massachusetts Indians offered more insights into the grammar. The Munsee Delaware version spoken by coastal Indians from Delaware to New York, including those who sold Manhattan, may be dead, but its grammar and vocabulary are fairly well known to scholars.
"We have a big fat dictionary of Munsee Delaware," said Dr. Rudes, who adapted some of those words when needed for Virginia Algonquian. Recordings of the last Munsee Delaware speakers, a century ago, were a valuable guide to pronunciations.
Photo
Another research tool was what is called Proto-Algonquian. It is the hypothetical ancestor common to all Algonquian speech, 4,000 words that scholars have compiled from the surviving tongues and documentation of the extinct ones.
Advertisement Continue reading the main story
The reconstruction involves educated guesses. Strachey set down words for walnut, shoes and two kinds of beast, "paukauns," "mawhcasuns," "aroughcoune" and "opposum." In Proto-Algonquian, similar words are paka-ni (meaning large nut), maxkesen (shoe), la-le-ckani (raccoon) and wa-pa'oemwi (white dog).
From this, Dr. Rudes reconstructed the Virginia Algonquian words pakán, mahkusun, árehkan and wápahshum," or pecan, moccasin, raccoon and opossum.
When he started the project, he was handed the movie script for the parts to be translated. "I had to rewrite terms for the dialogue," he said. "For example, we often use nonspecific verbs, 'He went to town.' In Algonquian, you have to tell the mode of travel, 'He walked to town.' "
The peculiar sentence structure required changes in the Indian translation. Pocahontas would not have said to Smith, if she ever actually did, "I love you." She would have used the verb for love, with a prefix meaning you and a suffix for I. "It is one of the few languages that give greater importance to the listener than the speaker," Dr. Rudes said.
Then there was the problem of creating dialogue reflecting what the Indians would have understood in the early 17th century. This also required changing the script for the initial Powhatan-Smith conversation.
In a paper summarizing his methods, Dr. Rudes said the original script had Smith saying: "The sky? No. From England, a land to the east." At the time, though, a land to the east was for the Indians more myth than reality, he noted, but they probably had already heard about "white-skinned people who lived on islands in the Caribbean."
So Smith's reply was changed to "We came from England, an island on the other side of the sea," and the translator then used documented words of Virginia Algonquian for sky, no, island and sea. The spelling was slightly modified to account for Strachey's misspellings and conform to similar words in other Algonquian speech. Because the word signifying a question is not known in Virginia Algonquian, Dr. Rudes borrowed the word sá from a related language.
Advertisement Continue reading the main story
Of course, Powhatan's interpreter could not be expected to have a word for England. He presumably did his best to reproduce what it sounded like in Algonquian, Inkurent, to which he added the general locational ending -unk, meaning at or in. He also followed the practice of naming the place first and adding the word for "we come from there."
The translation thus reads: "Sá arahqat? Mahta. Inkurent-unk kunowamun - mununag akamunk yapam."
William M. Kelso, director of archaeology of the Association for the Preservation of Virginia Antiquities, which owns the Jamestown fort site, said that he could not assess the language of the dialogue, but that the costumes, armor, arms and nearly all aspects of the fort were realistic.
Dr. Kelso and other archaeologists found the remains of the three-sided Jamestown fort in 1996. Their goal between now and the 400th anniversary celebration of Jamestown next year is to excavate the well at the site, search for artifacts and look for the foundations of the colony's storehouse and church. At the festivities next spring, some of the words of celebration may echo the Virginia Algonquian of 1607, the resurrected language of Powhatan and Pocahontas.I like the idea of the lightning network. I think the developers behind it are very smart and it’s a very clever use of Bitcoin contracts. I’m sure that whatever comes from it will be useful to some parts of the Bitcoin ecosystem at a minimum. What I’m not for, however, is prematurely deprecating critical parts of bitcoin (zeroconf transactions and low transaction fees) when it’s not yet clear that the lightning network will be a viable replacement for them. Yet that’s what the core developers seems bent on doing.
We know that lightning is at least technically feasible. We don’t know if it’s economically feasible or even a desirable alternative. Will it be a decentralized peer-to-peer payment layer or will it end up as a quasi-centralized payment network similar modern banking? We don’t know the answer to this question and probably wont know until we see it in action. Which is why it comes across as irresponsible to go “all-in” on lightning at this point.
My main concern from the beginning was that, as a hub-and-spoke payment layer, there would be very few hubs and the network would be quasi-centralized and a regulatory sitting duck. It seems I wasn’t the only one with this concern as there’s been a fairly recent pivot away from the hub-and-spoke network topology to a more organic, wallet-to-wallet routing. The network is now envisioned as a more pure p2p payment layer without those large scale payment hubs.
Certainly this has to be viewed as a promising development as it begins to address my primary concern. Unfortunately, I find this view of the lightning network overly optimistic. In what follows I will give a lightning network overview and some reasons why I think it’s likely the network will end up with the hub-and-spoke topology anyway.
How it works
At the core of the lightning network is the concept of payment channels. Using some complex bitcoin scripts, two parties can create a “channel” that, once opened, can allow them to make an unlimited number of trustless “off-chain” transactions.
To open the channel, both parties jointly create a transaction in which one or both of them deposits bitcoins into the channel. This transaction gets broadcast to the bitcoin blockchain. In the above example Alice has funded the channel with 0.5 bitcoins and Bob with 0.8.
To close the channel either party can broadcast a second, on-chain transaction to the bitcoin network that will payout both parties what they paid in. However, at any time while the channel is open, both parties can jointly agree to modify the payout distribution of the channel without needing to make an on-chain transaction. For example, if Alice wants to pay Bob 0.1 BTC, they could update the payout distribution such that Bob gets 0.9 BTC and Alice gets 0.4. And payments can be made back and forth like this an unlimited number of times as long as the channel remains open.
A network of channels
To see how this could be expanded into a payment network consider the following:
Above, Alice wants to pay Bob 0.5 BTC, but she does not have a channel open with him. Fortunately, she does have a channel open with Charlie, who has a channel open with Bob. Alice can basically route her payment to Bob through Charlie using something called a hashed timelock contract (HTLC).
To do this Alice sends a message to Bob saying “Hey, I want to send you a payment”. Bob responds by generating a random number (R) and sending Alice the hash of that number (H) (you can think of the hash of R as an encrypted form of that number). Alice’s wallet then contacts Charlie and says, “Hey Charlie, if you can provide me with the unencrypted value (R) that produced (H) then I will consent to updating the payout distribution of our channel so that you get 0.5 BTC more and I get 0.5 BTC less”. Charlie agrees even though he doesn’t (yet) know R. Charlie then goes to Bob and says, “Hey Bob, if you can provide me with the unencrypted value (R) that produced (H) then I will consent to updating the payout distribution of our channel so that you get 0.5 BTC more and I get 0.5 BTC less.
Now Bob knows R since he’s the one who generated it, so he immediately gives R to Charlie and updates the payout distribution of the channel. Charlie then gives R to Alice and updates their channel and then boom, Alice paid Bob 0.5 BTC off chain.
The original vision of the lightning network was that of a hub-and-spoke network.
Your wallet would connect to a “payment hub” which would play the role of “Charlie” in the above example. By having the various payment hubs maintain channels with each other Alice, who has a channel open with hub A, could pay Bob, who has a channel open with hub B, the same way as before only with one or two extra hops in between.
This network topology would be OK if there are many small payment hubs (like hundreds or thousands), but would royally suck if there are only handful of large hubs. It would be Visa, MasterCard, and Amex all over again.
How many hubs?
It’s impossible to forecast the exact number of hubs that would exist in the network in equilibrium, but there is at least some reason to think the number will be smaller rather than larger. While it’s true that the software will be open source and anyone will be able to run a payment hub (at least until the government decides to regulate it), the high cost of running a payment hub is likely to serve as a severe barrier to entry and create centralization pressure.
What cost am I talking about? Let’s go back to the example where Charlie played the role of the “payment hub”:
Recall that for Alice to send bitcoin to Bob (through Charlie), Charlie had to update the distribution of the channel he had with Bob (paying Bob more and himeself less) before he updated the distribution of his channel with Alice. In other words, Charlie had front Bob 0.5 BTC (for a very short period of time) before he was reimbursed by Alice.
This implies that if Charlie wants to be a payment hub, he needs to deposit enough of his own bitcoin into a channel with each of his “customers” to facilitate these off-chain payments. If Charlie didn’t have at least 0.5 BTC ($220 at today’s price) pre-deposited in Bob’s channel, then the payment could not have been made.
Now this money does not constitute a loan of any sort. Charlie would retain 100% control of it. But the money at least needs to sit there in these channels to facilitate these off-chain payments. We know that the time value of money is a thing, so there is a very real cost to operating a payment hub. Not to mention you need to come up with a lot of money up front just to get started.
How much should a payment hub pre-deposit in each channel? I have no idea, but let’s just say it’s $500 worth of bitcoin. If you want to run a payment hub that serves just 100 people, you would need $50,000 capital just to start up (and more realistically will be in the millions). Some redditors I’ve run into seem to think people will be able to run payment hubs from their bedrooms. I’d like to suggest that’s not going to be the case.
So at the end of the day centralization is a major cause for concern if the lightning network ends up with a hub-and-spoke topology.
Wallet-to-wallet routing
Can we do better than the hub-and-spoke model? Recently there’s been a lot of talk about avoiding payment hubs and trying to create a more decentralized, organic routing between wallets. How would this work? Consider an example where Alice wants to pay for a cup of coffee. Using the same technique as before her wallet would try to find a route through other nodes in the network to pay the coffee shop. If it can’t find one, the wallet will just open a new channel with the coffee shop, pay for the cup of coffee, then leave the channel open for future use. Alice’s wallet could theoretically maintain dozens of open channels.
If a new channel is opened every time someone tries to pay for something but can’t find a route, eventually some organic routing paths between users will start to form. For example:
What we see above is Alice left her channel with the coffee shop open. Bob did the same thing last time he went to that coffee shop. He also recently bought a new tie from a retailer and his wallet opened a channel for that |
has been largely absent of facts,” a spokesperson for the Treasury said in a statement. “The facts remain that the Secretary was on official government travel in Kentucky where he and Leader McConnell met with members of the business community to discuss tax reform. The Secretary and Leader McConnell were joined by Governor Bevin, Congressman Guthrie and U.S. Treasurer Carranza for a visit to the United States Bullion Depository at Fort Knox. The trip was originally planned for earlier in August but was postponed to accommodate the Congressional calendar. Not only did the group not watch the eclipse from the roof, the eclipse did not even factor in the travel decision. In fact the Mint staff had originally suggested that the delegation watch the eclipse from the roof but the Secretary specifically canceled that part of the tour. They watched it briefly from outside before they entered (prior to the actual time of full eclipse). The Secretary was more interested in meeting with Mint personnel, reviewing the security procedures, and viewing the contents of the Depository. These facts should provide the necessary information for responsible coverage on this going forward.”
Investors are worried Trump is crazy enough to let the U.S. default if he doesn’t get his wall
Speaking of the wall, the threat of the the president letting the federal government shut down basically out of spite is actually not the most concerning part of the situation. Complicating things even further is that in addition to facing a September 30 deadline to pass a spending bill, Congress must raise the debt ceiling this fall, or risk the U.S. defaulting on its obligations. And in the wake of the deepening Trump-McConnell feud, investors are increasingly worried the president might actually be crazy enough to send the markets into a potential worldwide financial panic if he doesn’t get his way. Per Bloomberg:
The rate on Treasury bills maturing Oct. 12 jumped by as much as 5 basis points Thursday, the largest intraday move since March, after Trump blamed Congress’s inability to increase America’s borrowing authority on the Republican leaders in a series of tweets. The bills, which mature around the time when Treasury is estimated to run out of money unless lawmakers extend or suspend the statutory limit on the nation’s borrowing, are currently trading at 1.17 percent. The recent rise in October rates is “the culmination of the passage of time coupled with President Trump threatening a government shutdown to get his border wall funding and the fact that his tweets make it seem like raising the debt ceiling is going to be a bigger challenge,” said Mark Cabana, head of U.S. short rates strategy at Bank of America Corp. “Shifting blame onto other Republican leaders just increases the headline risk.”
Wall Street’s reason for pivoting on debt will surprise you
No, just kidding, it won’t surprise you at all. Bloomberg’s Max Abelson reports that despite the 2012 formation of a campaign called “Fix the Debt”—the joint effort of hedge-fund managers, private-equity executives, and C.E.O.s of the five biggest banks, all of whom warned that the catastrophic consequences of excess debt could “drag down the economy, burden future generations, and even threaten national security”—suddenly nobody seems to care particularly much about a tax-reform plan that could reduce federal revenue by $3.9 trillion over the next decade. Sure, it’s theoretically possible that slashing corporate rates will increase wages, but there is also another motivation. Can you guess what it might be?
[Seth] Waugh, another Fix the Debt member, recalls playing golf with a private equity executive. Waugh told him about a conversation with a Washington insider who said there was no chance of repealing Obamacare—but tax cuts were another story. Waugh told his friend it would be nice if Congress addressed deficits, too. The private equity executive said nobody was talking about that. It was a dead issue, and they should take the good news: Paying less in taxes, the friend reminded him, means getting richer.
Elsewhere!
Fitch: US ‘AAA’ rating at risk if debt ceiling not raised (Reuters)
In a Boon to Prosecutors, Insider Trading Rule Is Reshaped (Dealbook)
Investors Pour Back into Crisis-Era Credit Product (Financial Times)
$758M Powerball Winner Already Quit Her Job (CNN Money)
Bill Ackman takes kinder, gentler tone with ADP (NYP)
Investor Benchmark Claims Ex-Uber C.E.O. Is a “Corrosive Influence” (Reuters)
Americans Can’t Get Enough Chicken Wings (Bloomberg)
G.O.P. Leaders Don’t Expect White House Tax-Plan Details (Bloomberg)
Amazon Says Whole Foods Deal Will Close Monday, With Discounts to Begin Then (CNBC)
Justin Trudeau’s famous panda cuddle sculpted in butter (UPI)PART TWO
THE CELEBRATION OF THE CHRISTIAN MYSTERY
SECTION TWO
THE SEVEN SACRAMENTS OF THE CHURCH
CHAPTER ONE
THE SACRAMENTS OF CHRISTIAN INITIATION
ARTICLE 1
THE SACRAMENT OF BAPTISM
1213 Holy Baptism is the basis of the whole Christian life, the gateway to life in the Spirit (vitae spiritualis ianua),4 and the door which gives access to the other sacraments. Through Baptism we are freed from sin and reborn as sons of God; we become members of Christ, are incorporated into the Church and made sharers in her mission: "Baptism is the sacrament of regeneration through water in the word."5
I. WHAT IS THIS SACRAMENT CALLED?
1214 This sacrament is called Baptism, after the central rite by which it is carried out: to baptize (Greek baptizein) means to "plunge" or "immerse"; the "plunge" into the water symbolizes the catechumen's burial into Christ's death, from which he rises up by resurrection with him, as "a new creature."6
1215 This sacrament is also called "the washing of regeneration and renewal by the Holy Spirit," for it signifies and actually brings about the birth of water and the Spirit without which no one "can enter the kingdom of God."7
1216 "This bath is called enlightenment, because those who receive this [catechetical] instruction are enlightened in their understanding...."8 Having received in Baptism the Word, "the true light that enlightens every man," the person baptized has been "enlightened," he becomes a "son of light," indeed, he becomes "light" himself:9
Baptism is God's most beautiful and magnificent gift....We call it gift, grace, anointing, enlightenment, garment of immortality, bath of rebirth, seal, and most precious gift. It is called gift because it is conferred on those who bring nothing of their own; grace since it is given even to the guilty; Baptism because sin is buried in the water; anointing for it is priestly and royal as are those who are anointed; enlightenment because it radiates light; clothing since it veils our shame; bath because it washes; and seal as it is our guard and the sign of God's Lordship.10
II. BAPTISM IN THE ECONOMY OF SALVATION
Prefigurations of Baptism in the Old Covenant
1217 In the liturgy of the Easter Vigil, during the blessing of the baptismal water, the Church solemnly commemorates the great events in salvation history that already prefigured the mystery of Baptism:
which tell us of the wonders of your unseen power. Father, you give us grace through sacramental signs,which tell us of the wonders of your unseen power. In Baptism we use your gift of water,
which you have made a rich symbol
of the grace you give us in this sacrament.11
1218 Since the beginning of the world, water, so humble and wonderful a creature, has been the source of life and fruitfulness. Sacred Scripture sees it as "overshadowed" by the Spirit of God:12
At the very dawn of creation
your Spirit breathed on the waters,
making them the wellspring of all holiness.13
1219 The Church has seen in Noah's ark a prefiguring of salvation by Baptism, for by it "a few, that is, eight persons, were saved through water":14
The waters of the great flood
you made a sign of the waters of Baptism,
that make an end of sin and a new beginning of goodness.15
1220 If water springing up from the earth symbolizes life, the water of the sea is a symbol of death and so can represent the mystery of the cross. By this symbolism Baptism signifies communion with Christ's death.
1221 But above all, the crossing of the Red Sea, literally the liberation of Israel from the slavery of Egypt, announces the liberation wrought by Baptism:
You freed the children of Abraham from the slavery of Pharaoh,
bringing them dry-shod through the waters of the Red Sea,
to be an image of the people set free in Baptism.16
1222 Finally, Baptism is prefigured in the crossing of the Jordan River by which the People of God received the gift of the land promised to Abraham's descendants, an image of eternal life. The promise of this blessed inheritance is fulfilled in the New Covenant.
Christ's Baptism
1223 All the Old Covenant prefigurations find their fulfillment in Christ Jesus. He begins his public life after having himself baptized by St. John the Baptist in the Jordan.17 After his resurrection Christ gives this mission to his apostles: "Go therefore and make disciples of all nations, baptizing them in the name of the Father and of the Son and of the Holy Spirit, teaching them to observe all that I have commanded you."18
1224 Our Lord voluntarily submitted himself to the baptism of St. John, intended for sinners, in order to "fulfill all righteousness."19 Jesus' gesture is a manifestation of his self-emptying.20 The Spirit who had hovered over the waters of the first creation descended then on the Christ as a prelude of the new creation, and the Father revealed Jesus as his "beloved Son."21
1225 In his Passover Christ opened to all men the fountain of Baptism. He had already spoken of his Passion, which he was about to suffer in Jerusalem, as a "Baptism" with which he had to be baptized.22 The blood and water that flowed from the pierced side of the crucified Jesus are types of Baptism and the Eucharist, the sacraments of new life.23 From then on, it is possible "to be born of water and the Spirit"24 in order to enter the Kingdom of God.
See where you are baptized, see where Baptism comes from, if not from the cross of Christ, from his death. There is the whole mystery: he died for you. In him you are redeemed, in him you are saved.25
Baptism in the Church
1226 From the very day of Pentecost the Church has celebrated and administered holy Baptism. Indeed St. Peter declares to the crowd astounded by his preaching: "Repent, and be baptized every one of you in the name of Jesus Christ for the forgiveness of your sins; and you shall receive the gift of the Holy Spirit."26 The apostles and their collaborators offer Baptism to anyone who believed in Jesus: Jews, the God-fearing, pagans.27 Always, Baptism is seen as connected with faith: "Believe in the Lord Jesus, and you will be saved, you and your household," St. Paul declared to his jailer in Philippi. And the narrative continues, the jailer "was baptized at once, with all his family."28
1227 According to the Apostle Paul, the believer enters through Baptism into communion with Christ's death, is buried with him, and rises with him:
Do you not know that all of us who have been baptized into Christ Jesus were baptized into his death? We were buried therefore with him by baptism into death, so that as Christ was raised from the dead by the glory of the Father, we too might walk in newness of life.29
The baptized have "put on Christ."30 Through the Holy Spirit, Baptism is a bath that purifies, justifies, and sanctifies.31
1228 Hence Baptism is a bath of water in which the "imperishable seed" of the Word of God produces its life-giving effect.32 St. Augustine says of Baptism: "The word is brought to the material element, and it becomes a sacrament."33
III. HOW IS THE SACRAMENT OF BAPTISM CELEBRATED?
Christian Initiation
1229 From the time of the apostles, becoming a Christian has been accomplished by a journey and initiation in several stages. This journey can be covered rapidly or slowly, but certain essential elements will always have to be present: proclamation of the Word, acceptance of the Gospel entailing conversion, profession of faith, Baptism itself, the outpouring of the Holy Spirit, and admission to Eucharistic communion.
1230 This initiation has varied greatly through the centuries according to circumstances. In the first centuries of the Church, Christian initiation saw considerable development. A long period of catechumenate included a series of preparatory rites, which were liturgical landmarks along the path of catechumenal preparation and culminated in the celebration of the sacraments of Christian initiation.
1231 Where infant Baptism has become the form in which this sacrament is usually celebrated, it has become a single act encapsulating the preparatory stages of Christian initiation in a very abridged way. By its very nature infant Baptism requires a post-baptismal catechumenate. Not only is there a need for instruction after Baptism, but also for the necessary flowering of baptismal grace in personal growth. The catechism has its proper place here.
1232 The second Vatican Council restored for the Latin Church "the catechumenate for adults, comprising several distinct steps."34 The rites for these stages are to be found in the Rite of Christian Initiation of Adults (RCIA).35 The Council also gives permission that: "In mission countries, in addition to what is furnished by the Christian tradition, those elements of initiation rites may be admitted which are already in use among some peoples insofar as they can be adapted to the Christian ritual."36
1233 Today in all the rites, Latin and Eastern, the Christian initiation of adults begins with their entry into the catechumenate and reaches its culmination in a single celebration of the three sacraments of initiation: Baptism, Confirmation, and the Eucharist.37 In the Eastern rites the Christian initiation of infants also begins with Baptism followed immediately by Confirmation and the Eucharist, while in the Roman rite it is followed by years of catechesis before being completed later by Confirmation and the Eucharist, the summit of their Christian initiation.38
The mystagogy of the celebration
1234 The meaning and grace of the sacrament of Baptism are clearly seen in the rites of its celebration. By following the gestures and words of this celebration with attentive participation, the faithful are initiated into the riches this sacrament signifies and actually brings about in each newly baptized person.
1235 The sign of the cross, on the threshold of the celebration, marks with the imprint of Christ the one who is going to belong to him and signifies the grace of the redemption Christ won for us by his cross.
1236 The proclamation of the Word of God enlightens the candidates and the assembly with the revealed truth and elicits the response of faith, which is inseparable from Baptism. Indeed Baptism is "the sacrament of faith" in a particular way, since it is the sacramental entry into the life of faith.
1237 Since Baptism signifies liberation from sin and from its instigator the devil, one or more exorcisms are pronounced over the candidate. The celebrant then anoints him with the oil of catechumens, or lays his hands on him, and he explicitly renounces Satan. Thus prepared, he is able to confess the faith of the Church, to which he will be "entrusted" by Baptism.39
1238 The baptismal water is consecrated by a prayer of epiclesis (either at this moment or at the Easter Vigil). The Church asks God that through his Son the power of the Holy Spirit may be sent upon the water, so that those who will be baptized in it may be "born of water and the Spirit."40
1239 The essential rite of the sacrament follows: Baptism properly speaking. It signifies and actually brings about death to sin and entry into the life of the Most Holy Trinity through configuration to the Paschal mystery of Christ. Baptism is performed in the most expressive way by triple immersion in the baptismal water. However, from ancient times it has also been able to be conferred by pouring the water three times over the candidate's head.
1240 In the Latin Church this triple infusion is accompanied by the minister's words: "N., I baptize you in the name of the Father, and of the Son, and of the Holy Spirit." In the Eastern liturgies the catechumen turns toward the East and the priest says: "The servant of God, N., is baptized in the name of the Father, and of the Son, and of the Holy Spirit." At the invocation of each person of the Most Holy Trinity, the priest immerses the candidate in the water and raises him up again.
1241 The anointing with sacred chrism, perfumed oil consecrated by the bishop, signifies the gift of the Holy Spirit to the newly baptized, who has become a Christian, that is, one "anointed" by the Holy Spirit, incorporated into Christ who is anointed priest, prophet, and king.41
1242 In the liturgy of the Eastern Churches, the post-baptismal anointing is the sacrament of Chrismation (Confirmation). In the Roman liturgy the post- baptismal anointing announces a second anointing with sacred chrism to be conferred later by the bishop Confirmation, which will as it were "confirm" and complete the baptismal anointing.
1243 The white garment symbolizes that the person baptized has "put on Christ,"42 has risen with Christ. The candle, lit from the Easter candle, signifies that Christ has enlightened the neophyte. In him the baptized are "the light of the world."43
The newly baptized is now, in the only Son, a child of God entitled to say the prayer of the children of God: "Our Father."
1244 First Holy Communion. Having become a child of God clothed with the wedding garment, the neophyte is admitted "to the marriage supper of the Lamb"44 and receives the food of the new life, the body and blood of Christ. The Eastern Churches maintain a lively awareness of the unity of Christian initiation by giving Holy Communion to all the newly baptized and confirmed, even little children, recalling the Lord's words: "Let the children come to me, do not hinder them."45 The Latin Church, which reserves admission to Holy Communion to those who have attained the age of reason, expresses the orientation of Baptism to the Eucharist by having the newly baptized child brought to the altar for the praying of the Our Father.
1245 The solemn blessing concludes the celebration of Baptism. At the Baptism of newborns the blessing of the mother occupies a special place.
IV. WHO CAN RECEIVE BAPTISM?
1246 "Every person not yet baptized and only such a person is able to be baptized."46
The Baptism of adults
1247 Since the beginning of the Church, adult Baptism is the common practice where the proclamation of the Gospel is still new. The catechumenate (preparation for Baptism) therefore occupies an important place. This initiation into Christian faith and life should dispose the catechumen to receive the gift of God in Baptism, Confirmation, and the Eucharist.
1248 The catechumenate, or formation of catechumens, aims at bringing their conversion and faith to maturity, in response to the divine initiative and in union with an ecclesial community. The catechumenate is to be "a formation in the whole Christian life... during which the disciples will be joined to Christ their teacher. The catechumens should be properly initiated into the mystery of salvation and the practice of the evangelical virtues, and they should be introduced into the life of faith, liturgy, and charity of the People of God by successive sacred rites."47
1249 Catechumens "are already joined to the Church, they are already of the household of Christ, and are quite frequently already living a life of faith, hope, and charity."48 "With love and solicitude mother Church already embraces them as her own."49
The Baptism of infants
1250 Born with a fallen human nature and tainted by original sin, children also have need of the new birth in Baptism to be freed from the power of darkness and brought into the realm of the freedom of the children of God, to which all men are called.50 The sheer gratuitousness of the grace of salvation is particularly manifest in infant Baptism. The Church and the parents would deny a child the priceless grace of becoming a child of God were they not to confer Baptism shortly after birth.51
1251 Christian parents will recognize that this practice also accords with their role as nurturers of the life that God has entrusted to them.52
1252 The practice of infant Baptism is an immemorial tradition of the Church. There is explicit testimony to this practice from the second century on, and it is quite possible that, from the beginning of the apostolic preaching, when whole "households" received baptism, infants may also have been baptized.53
Faith and Baptism
1253 Baptism is the sacrament of faith.54 But faith needs the community of believers. It is only within the faith of the Church that each of the faithful can believe. The faith required for Baptism is not a perfect and mature faith, but a beginning that is called to develop. The catechumen or the godparent is asked: "What do you ask of God's Church?" The response is: "Faith!"
1254 For all the baptized, children or adults, faith must grow after Baptism. For this reason the Church celebrates each year at the Easter Vigil the renewal of baptismal promises. Preparation for Baptism leads only to the threshold of new life. Baptism is the source of that new life in Christ from which the entire Christian life springs forth.
1255 For the grace of Baptism to unfold, the parents' help is important. So too is the role of the godfather and godmother, who must be firm believers, able and ready to help the newly baptized - child or adult on the road of Christian life.55 Their task is a truly ecclesial function (officium).56 The whole ecclesial community bears some responsibility for the development and safeguarding of the grace given at Baptism.
V. WHO CAN BAPTIZE?
1256 The ordinary ministers of Baptism are the bishop and priest and, in the Latin Church, also the deacon.57 In case of necessity, anyone, even a non-baptized person, with the required intention, can baptize58, by using the Trinitarian baptismal formula. The intention required is to will to do what the Church does when she baptizes. The Church finds the reason for this possibility in the universal saving will of God and the necessity of Baptism for salvation.59
VI. THE NECESSITY OF BAPTISM
1257 The Lord himself affirms that Baptism is necessary for salvation.60 He also commands his disciples to proclaim the Gospel to all nations and to baptize them.61 Baptism is necessary for salvation for those to whom the Gospel has been proclaimed and who have had the possibility of asking for this sacrament.62 The Church does not know of any means other than Baptism that assures entry into eternal beatitude; this is why she takes care not to neglect the mission she has received from the Lord to see that all who can be baptized are "reborn of water and the Spirit." God has bound salvation to the sacrament of Baptism, but he himself is not bound by his sacraments.
1258 The Church has always held the firm conviction that those who suffer death for the sake of the faith without having received Baptism are baptized by their death for and with Christ. This Baptism of blood, like the desire for Baptism, brings about the fruits of Baptism without being a sacrament.
1259 For catechumens who die before their Baptism, their explicit desire to receive it, together with repentance for their sins, and charity, assures them the salvation that they were not able to receive through the sacrament.
1260 "Since Christ died for all, and since all men are in fact called to one and the same destiny, which is divine, we must hold that the Holy Spirit offers to all the possibility of being made partakers, in a way known to God, of the Paschal mystery."63 Every man who is ignorant of the Gospel of Christ and of his Church, but seeks the truth and does the will of God in accordance with his understanding of it, can be saved. It may be supposed that such persons would have desired Baptism explicitly if they had known its necessity.
1261 As regards children who have died without Baptism, the Church can only entrust them to the mercy of God, as she does in her funeral rites for them. Indeed, the great mercy of God who desires that all men should be saved, and Jesus' tenderness toward children which caused him to say: "Let the children come to me, do not hinder them,"64 allow us to hope that there is a way of salvation for children who have died without Baptism. All the more urgent is the Church's call not to prevent little children coming to Christ through the gift of holy Baptism.
VII. THE GRACE OF BAPTISM
1262 The different effects of Baptism are signified by the perceptible elements of the sacramental rite. Immersion in water symbolizes not only death and purification, but also regeneration and renewal. Thus the two principal effects are purification from sins and new birth in the Holy Spirit.65
For the forgiveness of sins...
1263 By Baptism all sins are forgiven, original sin and all personal sins, as well as all punishment for sin.66 In those who have been reborn nothing remains that would impede their entry into the Kingdom of God, neither Adam's sin, nor personal sin, nor the consequences of sin, the gravest of which is separation from God.
1264 Yet certain temporal consequences of sin remain in the baptized, such as suffering, illness, death, and such frailties inherent in life as weaknesses of character, and so on, as well as an inclination to sin that Tradition calls concupiscence, or metaphorically, "the tinder for sin" (fomes peccati); since concupiscence "is left for us to wrestle with, it cannot harm those who do not consent but manfully resist it by the grace of Jesus Christ."67 Indeed, "an athlete is not crowned unless he competes according to the rules."68
"A new creature"
1265 Baptism not only purifies from all sins, but also makes the neophyte "a new creature," an adopted son of God, who has become a "partaker of the divine nature,"69 member of Christ and co-heir with him,70 and a temple of the Holy Spirit.71
1266 The Most Holy Trinity gives the baptized sanctifying grace, the grace of justification:
- enabling them to believe in God, to hope in him, and to love him through the theological virtues;
- giving them the power to live and act under the prompting of the Holy Spirit through the gifts of the Holy Spirit;
- allowing them to grow in goodness through the moral virtues.
Thus the whole organism of the Christian's supernatural life has its roots in Baptism.
Incorporated into the Church, the Body of Christ
1267 Baptism makes us members of the Body of Christ: "Therefore... we are members one of another."72 Baptism incorporates us into the Church. From the baptismal fonts is born the one People of God of the New Covenant, which transcends all the natural or human limits of nations, cultures, races, and sexes: "For by one Spirit we were all baptized into one body."73
1268 The baptized have become "living stones" to be "built into a spiritual house, to be a holy priesthood."74 By Baptism they share in the priesthood of Christ, in his prophetic and royal mission. They are "a chosen race, a royal priesthood, a holy nation, God's own people, that [they] may declare the wonderful deeds of him who called [them] out of darkness into his marvelous light."75 Baptism gives a share in the common priesthood of all believers.
1269 Having become a member of the Church, the person baptized belongs no longer to himself, but to him who died and rose for us.76 From now on, he is called to be subject to others, to serve them in the communion of the Church, and to "obey and submit" to the Church's leaders,77 holding them in respect and affection.78 Just as Baptism is the source of responsibilities and duties, the baptized person also enjoys rights within the Church: to receive the sacraments, to be nourished with the Word of God and to be sustained by the other spiritual helps of the Church.79
1270 "Reborn as sons of God, [the baptized] must profess before men the faith they have received from God through the Church" and participate in the apostolic and missionary activity of the People of God.80
The sacramental bond of the unity of Christians
1271 Baptism constitutes the foundation of communion among all Christians, including those who are not yet in full communion with the Catholic Church: "For men who believe in Christ and have been properly baptized are put in some, though imperfect, communion with the Catholic Church. Justified by faith in Baptism, [they] are incorporated into Christ; they therefore have a right to be called Christians, and with good reason are accepted as brothers by the children of the Catholic Church."81 "Baptism therefore constitutes the sacramental bond of unity existing among all who through it are reborn."82
An indelible spiritual mark...
1272 Incorporated into Christ by Baptism, the person baptized is configured to Christ. Baptism seals the Christian with the indelible spiritual mark (character) of his belonging to Christ. No sin can erase this mark, even if sin prevents Baptism from bearing the fruits of salvation.83 Given once for all, Baptism cannot be repeated.
1273 Incorporated into the Church by Baptism, the faithful have received the sacramental character that consecrates them for Christian religious worship.84 The baptismal seal enables and commits Christians to serve God by a vital participation in the holy liturgy of the Church and to exercise their baptismal priesthood by the witness of holy lives and practical charity.85
1274 The Holy Spirit has marked us with the seal of the Lord ("Dominicus character") "for the day of redemption."86 "Baptism indeed is the seal of eternal life."87 The faithful Christian who has "kept the seal" until the end, remaining faithful to the demands of his Baptism, will be able to depart this life "marked with the sign of faith,"88 with his baptismal faith, in expectation of the blessed vision of God - the consummation of faith - and in the hope of resurrection.
IN BRIEF
1275 Christian initiation is accomplished by three sacraments together: Baptism which is the beginning of new life; Confirmation which is its strengthening; and the Eucharist which nourishes the disciple with Christ's Body and Blood for his transformation in Christ.
1276 "Go therefore and make disciples of all nations, baptizing them in the name of the Father and of the Son and of the Holy Spirit, teaching them to observe all that I have commanded you" (Mt 28:19-20).
1277 Baptism is birth into the new life in Christ. In accordance with the Lord's will, it is necessary for salvation, as is the Church herself, which we enter by Baptism.
1278 The essential rite of Baptism consists in immersing the candidate in water or pouring water on his head, while pronouncing the invocation of the Most Holy Trinity: the Father, the Son, and the Holy Spirit.
1279 The fruit of Baptism, or baptismal grace, is a rich reality that includes forgiveness of original sin and all personal sins, birth into the new life by which man becomes an adoptive son of the Father, a member of Christ and a temple of the Holy Spirit. By this very fact the person baptized is incorporated into the Church, the Body of Christ, and made a sharer in the priesthood of Christ.
1280 Baptism imprints on the soul an indelible spiritual sign, the character, which consecrates the baptized person for Christian worship. Because of the character Baptism cannot be repeated (cf. DS 1609 and DS 1624).
1281 Those who die for the faith, those who are catechumens, and all those who, without knowing of the Church but acting under the inspiration of grace, seek God sincerely and strive to fulfill his will, can be saved even if they have not been baptized (cf. LG 16).
1282 Since the earliest times, Baptism has been administered to children, for it is a grace and a gift of God that does not presuppose any human merit; children are baptized in the faith of the Church. Entry into Christian life gives access to true freedom.
1283 With respect to children who have died without Baptism, the liturgy of the Church invites us to trust in God's mercy and to pray for their salvation.
1284 In case of necessity, any person can baptize provided that he have the intention of doing that which the Church does and provided that he pours water on the candidate's head while saying: "I baptize you in the name of the Father, and of the Son, and of the Holy Spirit."
4 Cf. Council Of Florence: DS 1314: vitae spiritualis ianua.
5 Roman Catechism II,2,5; Cf. Council Of Florence: DS 1314; CIC, cann. 204 § 1; 849; CCEO, can. 675 § 1.
6 2 Cor 5:17; Gal 6:15; Cf. Rom 6:34; Col 2:12.
7 Titus 3:5; Jn 3:5.
8 St. Justin, Apol. 1,61,12:PG 6,421.
9 Jn 1:9; 1 Thess 5:5; Heb 10:32; Eph 5:8.
10 St. Gregory Of Nazianzus, Oratio 40,3-4:PG 36,361C.
11 Roman Missal, Easter Vigil 42: Blessing of Water.
12 Cf. Gen 1:2.
13 Roman Missal, Easter Vigil 42: Blessing of Water.
14 1 Pet 3:20.
15 Roman Missal, Easter Vigil 42: Blessing of Water.
16 Roman Missal, Easter Vigil 42: Blessing of Water: "Abrahae filios per mare Rubrum sicco vestigio transire fecisti, ut plebs, a Pharaonis servitute liberata, populum baptizatorum præfiguraret."
17 Cf. Mt 3:13.
18 Mt 28:19-20; cf. Mk 16:15-16.
19 Mt 3:15.
20 Cf. Phil 2:7.
21 Mt 3:16-17.
22 Mk 10:38; cf. Lk 12:50.
23 Cf. Jn 19:34; 1 Jn 5:6-8.
24 Cf. Jn 3:5.
25 St. Ambrose, De sacr. 2,2,6:PL 16,444; cf. Jn 3:5.
26 Acts 2:38.
27 Cf. Acts 2:41; 8:12-13; 10:48; 16:15.
28 Acts 16:31-33.
29 Rom 6:3-4; cf. Col 2:12.
30 Gal 3:27.
31 CE 1 Cor 6:11; 12:13.
32 1 Pet 1:23; cf. Eph 5:26.
33 St. Augustine, In Jo. ev. 80,3:PL 35,1840.
34 SC 64.
35 Cf. RCIA (1972).
36 SC 65; cf. SC 37-40.
37 Cf. AG 14; CIC, cann. 851; 865; 866.
38 Cf. CIC, cann. 851, 2o; 868.
39 Cf. Rom 6:17.
40 Jn 3:5.
41 Cf. RBC 62.
42 Gal 3:27.
43 Mt 5:14; cf. Phil 2:15.
44 Rev 19:9.
45 Mk 10:14.
46 CIC, can. 864; cf. CCEO, can. 679.
47 AG 14; cf. RCIA 19; 98.
48 AG 14 § 5.
49 LG 14 § 3; cf. CIC, cann. 206; 788 § 3.
50 Cf. Council of Trent (1546): DS 1514; cf. Col 1:12-14.
51 Cf. CIC, can. 867; CCEO, cann. 681; 686,1.
52 Cf. LG 11; 41; GS 48; CIC, can. 868.
53 Cf. Acts 16:15,33; 18:8; 1 Cor 1:16; CDF, instruction, Pastoralis actio: AAS 72 (1980) 1137-1156.
54 Cf. Mk 16:16.
55 Cf. CIC, cann. 872-874.
56 Cf. SC 67.
57 Cf. CIC, can. 861 § 1; CCEO, can. 677 § 1.
58 CIC, can. 861.2.
59 Cf. 1 Tim 2:4.
60 Cf. Jn 3:5.
61 Cf. Mt 28:19-20; cf. Council of Trent (1547) DS 1618; LG 14; AG 5.
62 Cf. Mk 16:16.
63 |
would upend the entertainment industry. The gadget looked as unassuming as the original iPod—a sleek black box, about the size of a paperback novel, with a few jacks in back—and Hastings, CEO of Netflix, believed its impact would be just as massive. Called the Netflix Player, it would allow most of his company's regular DVD-by-mail subscribers to stream unlimited movies and TV shows from Netflix's library directly to their television—at no extra charge.
The potential was enormous: Although Netflix initially could offer only about 10,000 titles, Hastings planned to one day deliver the entire recorded output of Hollywood, instantly and in high definition, to any screen, anywhere. Like many tech romantics, he had harbored visions of using the Internet to rout around cable companies and network programmers for years. Even back when he formed Netflix in 1997, Hastings predicted a day when he would deliver video over the Net rather than through the mail. (There was a reason he called the company Netflix and not, say, DVDs by Mail.) Now, in mid-December 2007, the launch of the player was just weeks away. Promotional ads were being shot, and internal beta testers were thrilled.
But Hastings wasn't celebrating. Instead, he felt queasy. For weeks, he had tried to ignore the nagging doubts he had about the Netflix Player. Consumers' living rooms were already full of gadgets—from DVD players to set-top boxes. Was a dedicated Netflix device really the best way to bring about his video-on-demand revolution? So on a Friday morning, he asked the six members of his senior management team to meet him in the amphitheater in Netflix's Los Gatos offices, near San Jose. He leaned up against the stage and asked the unthinkable: Should he kill the player?
Three days later, at an all-company meeting in the same amphitheater, Hastings announced that there would be no Netflix Player. Instead, he would spin off the device, letting developer Anthony Wood take the technology and his 19-person team to a small company Wood had founded years earlier called Roku. But Netflix, which had already begun streaming movies to users' PCs, was hardly giving up on the idea of streaming them to televisions as well. Instead, the company would take a more stealthy—and potentially even more ambitious—approach. Rather than design its own product, it would embed its streaming-video service into existing devices: TVs, DVD players, game consoles, laptops, even smartphones. Netflix wouldn't be a hardware company; it would be a services firm. The crowd was stunned. In half an hour, Hastings had completely reinvented Netflix's strategy.
Today, nearly 3 million users access Netflix's instant streaming service, watching an estimated 5 million movies and TV shows every week on their PCs or living room sets. They get it through Roku's player, which was successfully launched in May 2008. (The Roku now also offers more than 45,000 movies and TV shows on demand through Amazon.com and, since August, live and archived Major League Baseball games.) They get it through their Xbox 360s—Microsoft added Netflix to its Xbox Live service last fall. They get it through LG and Samsung Blu-ray players. They get it through their TiVos and new flatscreen TVs. By the end of 2009, nearly 10 million Netflix-equipped gadgets will be hanging on walls and sitting in entertainment centers. And Hastings says this is just the beginning: "It's possible that within a few years, nearly all Internet-connected consumer electronics devices will include Netflix."
And the devices won't just be streaming remaindered basic-cable or art-house fare: Already, Netflix customers can call up just about any episode of SpongeBob SquarePants, The IT Crowd, or Lost whenever they like. They can watch recent releases like WALL-E and Pineapple Express. In other words, they can get unlimited access to the kinds of programming that previously required a cable subscription. (One visitor to the Netflix blog was particularly pleased to see that they could stream old episodes of Dora the Explorer: "We couldn't cancel cable until more kids' shows were available to watch instantly. Thanks for saving us another $400/year.") Netflix has taken the boldest step yet toward a world in which consumers, not programmers, determine not only what they watch but when, where, and how. The dream of routing around cable companies just may be in sight.
You'll never hear Hastings point that out, however. Unlike many in the tech world, he's a quiet disrupter, sabotaging business models silently and irretrievably. His first hit was to the DVD business. Netflix, which lets subscribers hold on to movies for as long as they like, was cheaper, easier, and more convenient for consumers than building film libraries; DVD sales have plummeted as Netflix has grown. And while his streaming service would seem to present a similar threat to cable companies, Hastings argues that their real challenge comes from the Internet in general, not just Netflix. "I mean, will people disconnect their cable over time?" He shrugs. "Potentially." Hastings may undersell the impact of his service, but some of his partners don't share his gift for diplomacy. "Our goal is to have everyone cancel their cable subscription," Roku's Wood says.
Whether Hastings cops to it or not, that day could be coming soon. That's why, for Hastings to fully accomplish his vision, he'll have to go up against some of the most powerful incumbents in media: the cable companies and content providers that have successfully stymied or co-opted all previous entrepreneurial efforts. So far, Hastings has avoided the wrath of the giants by building his Netflix service surreptitiously, slowly amassing his library of streaming content and giving viewers new ways to access it. And now, even if the cable and content companies do take him on, it may be too late. Hastings' Trojan horse—Netflix's software, embedded on myriad consumer devices—is already in place.
It is odd, in an era when the Internet seems able to worm its way into every part of life, that nearly all of us still watch television the old-fashioned way, piped over cable or beamed in by satellite and available only in bloated packages of channels programmed by network executives. Breaking out of this system requires more patience, money, and technical expertise than the average couch potato is willing or able to expend: Plunk an expensive streaming device or PC tower in the living room, wire up a connection to the TV, and install the Boxee app or program a BitTorrent RSS feed to get the content. Watching live shows in real time requires an even more elaborate work-around. Cable companies have made some feints toward giving subscribers more control over what they watch, but most of their efforts have been lackluster. Verizon's FiOS TV offers access to a few user-generated Web sites; Comcast and Time Warner Cable are rolling out services that let subscribers stream cable channels to their PCs.
The set-top box has proven to be a closed and well-guarded fortress against a world of clouds and openness. The cable and satellite industries, and their partners in Hollywood, work strenuously to keep it that way. It's easy to see why: Those little boxes bankroll their business. While the cable companies offer telephone and broadband, TV subscriptions still account for about 60 percent of their revenue. About a third of those fees get funneled to cable networks like Disney and Discovery, where they account for at least half of their revenue. Another chunk of subscription revenue goes to movie studios, which make more than $1 billion a year charging premium channels like HBO for the right to air their films. Even broadcast networks like ABC and NBC, which don't make any money from cable bills, would still prefer that the content they make available online not be viewed on a TV set, because they can't sell as many ads for their Web versions. Fox crams 18 commercials into every Sunday night airing of The Simpsons, earning 54 cents per viewer. But, according to research firm Sanford C. Bernstein, Fox airs just three commercials for the same show on Hulu—a site it co-owns with NBC Universal and Disney—earning a measly 18 cents per viewer.
Netflix CEO Reed Hastings.
Photo: Robert Maxwell The man who would overturn this decades-old system is an unlikely revolutionary. Hastings carries himself with a laconic modesty that contradicts an ambitious and restless mind. He has the deep tan of a dedicated snowboarder and a salt-and-pepper goatee that gives him a casual, approachable air. A quiet, hands-off leader, he sets the tone and objectives and lets his employees figure out how to execute them. His main directive is that everyone act like an adult: Netflix has no vacation policy (take as much as you need, when you need it), pay is flexible (stock or cash, your choice), and though firings are unusually common, severance checks are unusually generous. Hastings is comfortable creating his own rules for how to run a business; you don't see any management tomes in his office. In fact, he doesn't even have an office. The CEO prefers to stroll around, a ThinkPad in hand, pitching camp in an empty conference room or huddling in an engineer's cubicle to whiteboard some formula.
One recent morning, Hastings gathered a group of seven newly hired Netflixers in a sunny conference room on the roof of the company's headquarters. He does this once a month and, as always, kicks off the discussion by asking everyone to talk about the best movie they've seen in the past few weeks. He picks Jimmy Carter Man From Plains: "Five minutes in, I was hooked. The filmmaker did a good job making him not boring." The talk flows easily, but the goal is bigger than making everyone comfortable; he's reinforcing the idea that Netflix culture revolves around serving up content.
Since starting the company in 1997, Hastings' goal has always been the same: to deliver the right content in the fastest and most economical way. Obsessed with designing the perfect algorithm for helping viewers discover new movies, he has packed the place with mathematicians and engineers. They test everything, from the recommendations engine to the Web site's design. But if Hastings uses geeky number-crunching to help customers find their movies, his process of delivering them has been decidedly low tech: sending DVDs in red envelopes via the US Postal Service, which costs him roughly a quarter of his $1.4 billion in annual revenue.
Hastings has wanted to move beyond the silver discs for years, but his early attempts to deliver movies over the Net were slow and kludgy. In 2000, his engineers came up with a service that took 16 hours to download a two-hour movie. Hastings killed the project and disbanded the team. In 2003, a new group of engineers built a small, TV-connected Linux PC that could pull in movies. It cost $300 and took two hours to download a film. Again he wielded his ax. Hastings' decisions may have seemed coldhearted, but ultimately they were proven correct. Other competitors like Akimbo brought similar boxes to market—and failed.
It wasn't until 2006 that he tried again. By this time, the long-download problem had been solved by widespread adoption of broadband among consumers. Meanwhile, the spread of YouTube had gotten users used to the idea of streaming content rather than downloading and saving it. So Hastings put together another team of engineers, who developed a way to navigate unreliable home networks, allowing bitrates to shift midstream to maintain the best picture quality with the least amount of buffering.
But the technology was the easy part. Once Hastings decided not to release his own player, he encountered a different challenge: finding devices beyond Roku that would agree to host Netflix's streaming service. One of the first companies he turned to was Microsoft. Practically since releasing its Xbox in 2001, the company had dreamed of making the console into more than just a gaming machine for teenage boys. It offered more than 17,000 movies and TV shows over Xbox Live, but consumers mostly ignored them; apparently they still saw the console as a Halo delivery device. Providing unlimited access to Netflix's streaming library could change that. Microsoft executives were won over, but even they were surprised at the service's success: Within three months of the late 2008 launch, more than 1 million people had signed on, a huge percentage of whom had never touched an Xbox before. "There's a whole demographic—women—that we now pick up," says Robbie Bach, president of Microsoft's entertainment and devices division. "They always thought of Xbox as a hardcore gaming machine. It belonged in the kid's bedroom or the den or some place where'my husband cocooned when he wanted to play games.' Now its front and center in the house because everyone wants to stream a movie."
Since then, a full Netflix pandemic has broken out. Microsoft incorporated the service into its Windows Media Center software, meaning anyone with Vista can stream Netflix to their TV. Hastings inked deals with Sony and Samsung to put the service into Bravia TVs and Blu-ray players, respectively. The service started showing up in TVs made by Vizio, the largest seller of LCD televisions in the country. And Broadcom began baking the software into some of its flatscreen chips, making it easy for any TV maker to offer sets pre-loaded with Netflix. (As an extra incentive, Netflix pays manufacturers a bounty for any new subscribers that sign up via their products.) Investment bank Piper Jaffray estimates that 25 percent of Netflix's 2.4 million new subscribers this year will come through one of the streaming devices.
With the device makers on board, Hastings had an even tougher task. He needed more and better content. The interface could be the slickest around, but nobody would tune to Netflix's service if it only had back-catalog flicks and old TV shows. In other words, Netflix needed Hollywood.
Despite having run a movie-distribution company, Hastings was far from a Hollywood insider. Netflix simply bought DVDs like any other customer (albeit one with a major movie jones), occasionally striking special revenue-sharing deals for certain titles. The studios couldn't do much: A section of the US copyright law known as the First Sale Doctrine states that, as long as you own it, you can basically do whatever you want with a physical disc. As one studio exec says, "We don't have a choice. We were backed into the business model."
But with online streaming, Netflix has no such advantage. The First Sale Doctrine gives Netflix the right to do what it wants with the disc, not the movie. Netflix suddenly needed to craft more-complicated licensing deals. Push too hard or offer the wrong incentives and the studios could block Netflix from getting good content; acquiesce too easily and Hollywood would happily impose intolerable rules regulating when a movie could be shown, on what platform, and for what price. Part of Netflix's promise is that it offers, like cable and broadcast TV, all-you-can-eat content. If the company bargained away that feature, its service would become just another pay-per-view platform.
To woo Hollywood, Hastings turned to Ted Sarandos, who oversees a staff of 75 at Netflix's Beverly Hills beachhead. Sarandos, a former executive at a video distribution company, serves as translator between the geeks and the studio executives. "There's a lot about the entertainment industry that drives Silicon Valley insane," Sarandos says. "Just the way things work, the politics of it, the pace of it."
Sarandos asked his team to use their data-mining skills to help him find deals. While other video providers might ask studios for a sack full of sure things—new releases by big-name stars—Netflix's engineers could dig through their queue and review databases to find sleeper hits that its users actually wanted to watch but that studios might be willing to license for a pittance. Earlier this year, for instance, Netflix jumped at the chance to stream a French film called Tell No One. The movie pulled in just $6 million at the US box office, but enough subscribers added it to their rental queues that Netflix was able to calculate an estimate of how popular the film would be. Almost immediately after Netflix started streaming it, Tell No One became the fourth-most-watched piece of content. "We have the rental history and the queue insight that enables us to go after things that other people may not be really even hunting," Sarandos says.
Unearthing overlooked gems is great, but Netflix's service will never take off until it can offer up its share of blockbusters. To get those titles, the company needed some way to hack the so-called windowing system, the complicated schedule that governs which distributors can show what films and in what format. First, national and international theatrical distributors pay to show a film in their theaters. Next, there's the DVD and pay-per-view windows. Then there's the combined $1.7 billion a year that channels like HBO, Starz, and Showtime spend to secure the exclusive rights to show movies to subscribers. (Each studio usually signs with just one pay channel; all Warner Bros. movies appear only on HBO, while Sony's go to Starz.) After a few months, the pay-TV networks hand off their rights to broadcasters and ad-supported cable stations. A few years later, the premium channels get the films back, giving them exclusive rights to air them. The windowing system can keep films locked up for years; Disney's National Treasure: Book of Secrets came out in 2007 and is spoken for until 2016. Unless Hastings and Sarandos could find a way around the windowing system, it would be a challenge to show any major movies that had been released in the recent past.
Then they discovered a loophole: Why couldn't Starz sell Netflix the right to air its movies, just as it did with Comcast? Starz had the pay-TV rights to newer titles, exactly what Netflix lacked. Netflix had nearly 9 million (now almost 11 million) subscribers; if it were a cable company, it would be number three, bigger than Cablevision and Charter combined. "We looked at our contract rights and saw that they were an aggregator of content just like the other distributors," says Starz CEO Robert Clasen.
Anthony Wood created the Roku media streamer while working at Netflix.
Photo: Robert Maxwell In October 2008, the two companies announced a deal that would add 2,500 fresh titles to Netflix's service. The studios were stunned. "This is the last thing you want," moaned one studio executive. "More eyeballs with no incremental revenue."
Hastings' window probably won't stay open forever. Unhappy studios or cable companies could easily renegotiate their contract with Starz to discourage it from working with Netflix. Still, the deal kicked off what Hastings hopes will be an unstoppable virtuous cycle. If Netflix can use the Starz offerings to sign up more subscribers, those subscription fees will generate more revenue. And with more revenue, Netflix can afford to pay more studios for rights to more films—which will draw in still more subscribers. And so on. Ultimately, if Netflix can grow and maintain a big enough library by working directly with the studios, it won't need the likes of Starz. Sure, it could potentially overturn the way Hollywood has done business, but as long as the studios are getting paid, why should they mind? "Think of all things in Hollywood as'money talks,'" Hastings says. "If we can generate enough money for studios, we can get any content we want."
As Hastings chips away at Hollywood, he's also moving as fast as possible to cement Netflix's presence in the next generation of home entertainment devices. He knows he has limited time before the rest of the movie-distribution industry realizes what has hit it. "We had DVD by mail mostly to ourselves for five years before Blockbuster attacked," he says. "And then they gave us hell for five years. So, as great as things are going now, I'm like, remember, hell will return."
It could come from anywhere. Maybe one day the studios decide they don't need Netflix and start dealing directly with device manufacturers. Or they could just jack up the fees they charge Netflix. Amazon or Apple could emerge as a tough competitor. Cable behemoths could use their power to block Netflix's access to content, or they could try to put together their own Netflix-like services. ("There is no reason why this isn't something we can compete with," says Peter Stern, chief strategy officer of Time Warner Cable.)
There are a million different ways for Netflix to fail. But that has always been the case. Netflix should have failed already, taken down by Blockbuster or Wal-Mart, kneecapped by Hollywood, made irrelevant by BitTorrent or iTunes. Yet time and again, the company has not only survived but quietly thrived—on the strength of its unique algorithms and its relentless focus on getting customers content they didn't even know they wanted.
Speaking to his new hires, Hastings lets slip a rare glimpse of immodesty. "When people connect with a movie, it really makes them happy, and that's fundamentally what we're trying to do," he says. "Today you love one out of three movies that you watch. If we can raise that to two out of three, we can completely transform the market and increase human happiness." He makes it all sound so easy—never mind the powerful competitors. Ultimately, the key to film nirvana, whether delivered by DVD or streamed over the Internet, can be as simple as cracking an equation.
Senior writer Daniel Roth (daniel_roth@wired.com) wrote about reforming Wall Street in issue 17.03.Solinsky to coach at University of Portland
"
A big Pilot welcome to new University of Portland Asst. XC and T&F coach Chris Solinsky!
August 7th, 2012Chris Solinsky has been relatively quiet in 2012. The broad shouldered American battled his way through injuries that required him to miss the Olympic Trials and is currently on a slow road to recover following a surgery to his hamstring. He announced recently via twitter that his first race back will be the Falmouth Road Race, a 7.1 mile jaunt up the Massachusetts coastline this coming weekend; the running community rejoiced.Today, the running community has more to rejoice--particularly those located in the Pacific Northwest--as Jonathan Marcus, an assistant coach at the University of Portland, posted a picture of Solinsky donning Portland Pilots gear with the captionThe new career seems like the right one, as doing nothing but train, think about training, and train some more can be taxing. Much like Alan Webb was forced to pick up piano, Solinsky taking on the new career can only be a good thing for the psyche of former American Record holder.And notch one in the victory category for University of Portland. Imagine being an athlete--a Portland Pilot, if you will--coming down to the last few reps in an interval session. You're really starting to grind, hoping your coach calls the workout, then, out of nowhere, a man who would hold his own against Sylvester Stallone in an arm wrestling match starts screaming "you think you know pain? I'm the first white man to break 27 minutes in the 10k! I'll show you pain!" as he rips off his shirt and you finish having run the workout of a lifetime.Sen. Al Franken Mark Wilson/Getty Images
A Democratic official, who reportedly spoke with Sen. Al Franken and his aides, told Minnesota Public Radio on Wednesday that the Democratic lawmaker would resign on Thursday.
A member of Franken's staff reportedly told the official, who asked to remain anonymous, that Franken discussed his decision with family members at his Washington home on Wednesday.
But a spokesperson for Franken disputed the report, calling it "not accurate," and said that "no final decision has been made" as the Minnesota Democrat is "still talking with his family."
If Franken leaves office, Minnesota Gov. Mark Dayton, also a Democrat, will be required to name his successor. A special election to replace the interim senator would be held in November 2018.
Speculation that Franken would resign grew widespread on Wednesday after a flood of Democratic senators publicly called on Franken to step down as he faced new allegations of sexual misconduct.
By Wednesday afternoon dozens of Senate Democrats had called on Franken to step down, including Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer. A representative for Franken said the senator would make an announcement on Thursday, but did not provide further details.
Earlier Wednesday, a seventh woman accused Franken of sexual misconduct. The woman, a former Democratic congressional aide, says Franken attempted to forcibly kiss her after a taping of his radio show in 2006, three years before he became a senator.
An eighth woman also came forward later in the day to accuse Franken of groping her as she posed with the newly-elected senator in 2009.
Franken insists he doesn't remember meeting several of the women who have accused him of groping them during photo ops, and he says he has a different recollection of a 2006 incident with Leeann Tweeden, a California TV and radio host who says Franken groped and forcibly kissed her.
Franken has said he is "ashamed" by the allegations and apologized to the women who have felt disrespected by his behavior.
"I know that I am going to have to be much more conscious in these circumstances — much more careful, much more sensitive," Franken said during a press conference last week, adding, "It's going to take a long time for me to regain people's trust, but I hope that starting work today that I can start to do that."Photo
The 24 Hours of LeMons beater-car racing series has fielded just about every theme-based car you can imagine since it began several years ago. There has been an “A-Team” van, a few “Animal House” Deathmobiles and even a plane-car loosely based on the Spirit of St. Louis (if Charles Lindbergh had been an underachieving ground-dweller with low expectations about where he was going in life).
But not until this week has someone had the audacity to recreate Homer Simpson’s ultimate car. The Homer, the creation of television’s dimwitted cartoon everyman, was featured in season 2, episode 15 of “The Simpsons.” The plot has Homer finding his long-lost half-brother, Herb Powell, (voiced by Danny DeVito) who owns a car company in Detroit. Very fond of his new family, Herb asks Homer to design a car for him and, well, the rest is history. Herb’s company goes broke because the hideous/ridiculous car is a flop.
As far as we know, this is the first time the car has made the jump to real life, other than small children’s toys. Like the car on the show, the LeMons Homer is powerful like a gorilla, soft and yielding like a Nerf ball, has a bowling trophy hood ornament, a bubble-top back seat, horrifying fins, lights that would make a 1950s sci-fi director cringe and, of course, a roof-mounted “La Cucaracha” air horn.
“We are Simpsons fans, and we knew that the race organizers had wondered why nobody had ever built the Homer, so we decided that we had to tackle it,” said Kris Linquist, one of the members of Porcubimmer Racing, the team fielding the car.
Mr. Linquist said the team knew their entry, built out of a 1987 BMW E30 sedan, would have to be creative. So many 3 Series cars enter LeMons races, because they’re cheap and they’re decent performers, that the event’s judges needed to be wowed into thinking it was something other than just another Bimmer. (LeMons judges aren’t necessarily “fair” about how they class cars, but they can be bribed with booze and impressed by original decorations.)
Photo
“Buttonturrible was the Homer’s first race, but not the car’s first race,” Mr. Linquist said. “This is actually its ninth or 10th race.”
The car began its racing life as a giant porcupine, he said, then morphed into a compact Teutonic version of Stephen King’s creepy ’58 Plymouth Fury from “Christine.”
All it took to change it from Christine into the Homer was a can of green latex paint, which they matched to the hue of a plastic toy they took to the paint store, and many hours of work. Although the car used to have its original 4,500 r.p.m. redline sixer, the team substituted a more powerful engine from a 1992 325is when the low-power mill blew up. Now it’s one of the faster entries, albeit in a field of pretty wretched cars.
Porcubimmer Racing consists of an auto parts salesman, a couple of engineers and some tech guys, says Scott Chamberlain, another of the team’s members.
Photo
“I was previously an automotive technician for a few years, but nobody else on the team has any professional automotive experience,” he said. “It’s a hobby for most of us. We don’t even have a shop. The car was fully put together in my town home’s two-car garage, affectionately known as the Wrong Tool Chop Shop since we often had to get creative and improvise when we were lacking the correct tools or supplies to get a job done.”
But git ‘er done they did, although the team had to cry a collective “D’oh!” when they lost their transmission at the end of the first day of racing and had to spend much of the night putting in a spare.
“The fact that it actually survived a grueling 14-hour race in 110-degree temps and finished in fifth place out of 150-plus cars is the icing on the cake, but we couldn’t have done it without the support of our friends who make up the team,” said Mr. Chamberlain.It's fun to think about virtual reality's best-case scenario: a theoretical future in which we all run around in living rooms that have treadmill floors, immersed in whatever types of gaming experiences only VR can offer. But that's a long ways off. The Oculus Rift still isn't available to consumers, and even when it launches, it'll be a PC-only peripheral, leaving the massive console crowd out of the picture entirely. Even the PS4 and Xbox One, according to Oculus VR CEO Palmer Luckey, are "too limited" to support the device. Sony, however, thinks the PS4 is a perfect machine for virtual reality. According to our pals at TechRadar, Sony is set to unveil its very own virtual reality headset for the PS4 during this year's Game Developers Conference in March. And while this could be exciting news for VR's future, it also has the potential to cripple its long-term growth.
First, let's start with why Luckey believes VR--or the Oculus Rift, specifically--isn't well-suited for console gaming. As he told TechRadar, creating convincing, immersive VR programs requires that the hardware in question be able to render high resolutions at more than 60 frames per second in 3D. That automatically cuts last-gen consoles from the list of platform options. It also puts a damper on the Xbox One, where developers have struggled to deliver 1080p performances. In this regard, the PS4 seems to be the only possible option in the current console space. BUT! Luckey expects that the jump in VR tech over the next five years is going to be massive, and he argues that quality VR--that is, virtual reality which provides the type of experiences we all think about when we imagine what games will look like 60 years from now--can only exist on platforms that aren't closed. Thus: PC is its future.
So what does this have to do with Sony's alleged upcoming announcement? I'd argue that a PS4 VR headset could have a surprisingly large impact on virtual reality's future. I think that initially, it'll be a good thing. I love PC gaming, but it's a scientific fact proven by scientists that there are far more console gamers than there are people willing to shell out $800 to build a mid-ranged gaming machine. The PS4 is selling like crazy, and if this continues, Sony will likely have a rather large install base to tap into once its VR headset is available--not to mention a bank vault capable of financing the operation. Assuming Sony takes its time developing a set that is lightweight, comfortable, and capable of supporting experiences at least on par with those in development for the Oculus Rift, I suspect the next few years for VR will be very exciting indeed. Just thinking about playing the next [insert AAA shooter here] in virtual reality has me all shades of pumped. Of course, if this hypothetical headset flops, Sony also risks prematurely damaging the public's perception of what VR can accomplish. The last thing virtual reality needs is to be written off as a gimmick yet again.
But let's look past the short term. As time goes on, VR experiences will outscale the processing power of the PS4's hardware. I know, I know, that sounds silly at this exact point in time--these are brand-new consoles we're talking about. But remember: Luckey's not even bothering with consoles because their potential is hard-capped. We've written before about how next-gen consoles are being held back by their last-gen counterparts, but PC enthusiasts are quick to point out that games in general are held back by closed platforms with locked-in specs--aka gaming consoles.
So, if Sony's VR headset is accepted with open arms by the gaming community, and it sells enough units to kick VR game development off in full swing, then virtual reality will have officially arrived. But what does that mean for VR's future seven years from now, when its possibilities are bottlenecked by hardware that can't evolve to support them? To keep VR delegated only to the PC space is admittedly a selfish notion--it's entirely possible that the Oculus Rift alone isn't enough to get things going. But I can't help but think that, ultimately, my PC is where I'll be headed when it comes time to explore a game world from a true first-person perspective.The FBI has long maintained that fingerprint identification is an exact science that can be used to match prints with 100 percent certainty. But recently, the bureau was forced to admit that three top analysts all made the same mistake when they swore that fingerprint evidence linked Oregon lawyer Brandon Mayfield to the terrorist bombings in Madrid. Mayfield spent two weeks in jail before the FBI admitted its error and offered an apology.
Mayfield is one of a small but growing number of Americans who've been jailed on the basis a fingerprint match that turned out to be false. And as Correspondent Lesley Stahl first reported last year, it also happened to Rick Jackson.
When the police in Upper Darby, Pa., arrested Rick Jackson, they told him they had solid evidence that he had committed a gruesome crime - his friend's murder.
They said they had his bloody fingerprints, and showed Jackson Polaroids of what they said were his fingerprints.
"I actually felt relieved because I knew there was no way they could be, and that it was just going to be a matter of like, 'Ah, somebody made a mistake,'" says Jackson.
His father, Richard Jackson Sr., was with him when he was taken into custody. He says the local police told him their own fingerprint experts had made the match: "Several of them, with their professional experience, had read these prints, and they, without a doubt, knew they were my son's."
He hired a local attorney, Mike Malloy, to defend his son.
Malloy decided to call in his own expert, retired FBI examiner George Wynn, who drove up from his home in Virginia to see the evidence firsthand.
"When we leave the police department that day, he turns to me, in his southern drawl, and says to me, 'Michael, those prints don't match,'" recalls Malloy.
For a second opinion, Wynn sent the evidence to another former FBI examiner, Vernon McCloud. Between them, the two experts had 75 years of fingerprint experience.
"McCloud did to Wynn what Wynn had done to me and called up and said, 'Are you kidding me?'" says Malloy. "The expression that they would continually say to me was, 'It's not even a close call.'"
On TV, fingerprints are matched automatically, by computer. But that never happens in real-life forensic work.
Steve Meagher heads up the crimes scene fingerprint unit at the FBI. He says a computer, like the one at the Bureau, sorts through a database of 44 million sets of prints, but that merely narrows the search.
And then the humans, the fingerprint examiners, make the actual match the way they always have - by eye. In fact, it's arduous work involving human judgment. An examiner can spend hours, even days, analyzing a fragment of a fingerprint.
Usually, police lift only fragments at a crime scene, and they can be contaminated or distorted. The first thing an examiner compares is what's called ridge flow.
An examiner studies the width of the ridges and the direction in which they flow. "We could select any ridge that we wanted and follow the path of the ridge. At this point, you'd see a bifurcation [point of similarity]," says Meagher, who looked at several of those points and double-checked to make sure there wasn't the slightest discrepancy between the two.
Robert Epstein, a public defender in Philadelphia, is challenging the very notion that fingerprint identification is absolute, something he began to question when he was assigned to an armed robbery case, where the critical evidence was two partial fingerprints.
The uncertainty in his own mind led him to do some research, and he says he discovered that not only has there never been a study of the reliability of crime-scene fingerprint matching, there are no agreed-upon standards for what constitutes a match.
"There's complete disagreement amongst fingerprint examiners themselves as to what they need to see in order to declare a match," says Epstein.
In Italy, for example, examiners say they have to see 16 or 17 points of similarity. In Brazil, it's 30; in Sweden, it's seven points; and in Australia, it's 12. And most examiners in the United States, including those at the FBI, don't even use a point system.
Robert Epstein did something audacious. In a pretrial hearing, he argued that since the reliability of fingerprint matching had never been tested or proven, it should be barred as evidence from the courtroom.
"There isn't a single experiment that's ever been done, literally," says Dr. Ralph Haber, a forensic scientist.
Haber thinks Epstein is on to something, and he says he's ready to do the research to test reliability himself, if law enforcement will cooperate.
Over the last 100 years, there have been only a handful of cases where convictions have been reversed because of faulty fingerprint identification, but that doesn't mean examiners don't make mistakes. In fact, there's plenty of evidence they make lots of mistakes. Consider the certification tests given by the International Association of Identification, or IAI, which only professionals who are already working in the field can take.
"Half of the examiners who take the test fail it. There are 15 items. They can make no more than three mistakes, and they're out," says Haber.
But that doesn't mean they can't do analysis anymore. "Virtually no crime laboratory requires that you be certified to work |
within seven (7) days of attempted notification, refuses the prize or is ineligible to accept the prize, prize may be forfeited and awarded to an alternate winner. All prizes claimed in accordance with the Official Rules will be awarded. The prizes will be applied to the Winners’ respective RIFT Accounts (to the RIFT Character displayed on the Entry) within a commercially reasonable time frame.
D. Use of any prizes is subject to Trion’s Terms of Use, Privacy Policy and the RIFT EULA. All prizes are non-transferable, and no substitutions of the prizes for cash or other goods and services are permitted by the Winners. Notwithstanding the foregoing, Sponsor reserves the right to provide a substitute prize of approximately equal value for any reason.
E. All federal, state, local and or other applicable taxes, licenses, title and/or registration fees or others costs, associated with winning a prize are the sole responsibility of the Winners. The Sponsor and its affiliates, subsidiaries and advertising and promotion agencies, and each of their directors, officers, employees, agents and assigns, shall not be responsible for any such taxes, fees and costs.
F. Winners may have their Entries and usernames posted on the Official Rift Forums and RIFT Community Blog. Except where legally prohibited, by participating in the Contest, the Winners hereby give Sponsor and its affiliates, subsidiaries and advertising and promotion agencies full permission, right and authority to use their likeness, photograph, name, hometown, and Entries, or any other information that they provide about themselves, the prize, the Contest, or RIFT, for the purposes of advertising and promotion (in any media, including but not limited to in print media, television, film, video, radio, internet or otherwise) related to the Contest, RIFT or the Sponsor, without any further notification or compensation to you other than that set out herein. Notwithstanding the foregoing, Winners will be given an opportunity to decline inclusion in such advertising and promotions without affecting their eligibility to the prizes.
G. Winners may be required to complete and sign an Affidavit of Eligibility and, except where prohibited, Liability/Publicity Release, in the form provided by Sponsor, within seven (7) days of attempted notification in order to claim prizes. If a minor wins a prize, it will be awarded in the name of the minor’s parent or legal guardian, who will also be responsible for signing any necessary releases, consents and affidavits.
H. Any prize details not specified herein shall be determined solely by the Sponsor.
6. GENERAL CONDITIONS.
A. You represent and warrant that your Entry is:
1. Your own original work and that it does not violate any intellectual property rights or any other rights of any third party (including, without limitation, any privacy, publicity or publishing rights); and
2. Not libelous, obscene or otherwise contrary to law. Use of obscenities, racist, sexist, hateful or other material or depictions that, in Sponsor’s sole judgment, are inappropriate or offensive will disqualify an Entry.
B. You agree to:
1. Be contacted by Sponsor or its agents by email; and
2. Sign any requested documentation set forth in Provision 5 herein (and have your parent or guardian sign such documentation where applicable or requested by Sponsor), including, without limitation an Affidavit of Eligibility and Liability/Publicity Release, in the event that your Entry is a winning Entry.
C. You waive the right to claim any damages whatsoever, including, but not limited to, punitive, consequential, direct, or indirect damages.
D. Except where prohibited, you agree that any and all disputes, claims and causes of action arising out of or connected with this contest or any prize awarded shall be resolved under the laws of the State of California.
E. Neither Sponsor nor any of its affiliates, subsidiaries and advertising and promotion agencies, and each of their directors, officers, employees, agents and assigns, are responsible for lost, interrupted, or unavailable network server or other connections, miscommunications, failed telephone or computer transmissions, or technical failure, jumbled, scrambled or misdirected transmissions, or other errors of any kind whether human, mechanical or electronic or for phone, electrical, network, computer hardware or software program malfunctions, failures or difficulties, or for ISP/network/Web site accessibility or unavailability, any incorrect or inaccurate entry information; human errors; technical malfunctions; theft, tampering, destruction, or unauthorized access to, or alteration of, Entries; typographical, printing or other errors.
F. Illegible, incomplete, duplicate and mechanically reproduced Entries will be disqualified.
G. False, fraudulent or deceptive Entries or acts shall render Participants ineligible.
H. Persons found tampering with or abusing any aspect of this Contest, as solely determined by Sponsor, will be disqualified.
I. If disqualified for any tampering or abuses, Sponsor reserves the right to terminate Participant’s eligibility to participate in this Contest or any other contest run by Sponsor.
J. In the event any portion of this Contest is compromised by virus, bugs, non-authorized human intervention or other causes beyond the control of Sponsor which, in the sole opinion of Sponsor, corrupts, or impairs the administration, security, fairness or proper submission of entries, Sponsor reserves the right at their sole discretion to suspend or terminate the Contest, and select Winners from Entries received prior to the action taken.
K. All of Sponsor’s decisions regarding the application and interpretation of the Rules are final.
7. LIMITATIONS OF LIABILITY.
A. Sponsor is not responsible for late, lost, stolen, misdirected, damaged, incomplete, or illegible Entries or Entries that are lost due to computer, Internet, or electronic malfunction.
B. By entering this contest, you agree that Sponsor and its affiliates, subsidiaries and advertising and promotion agencies, and each of their directors, officers, employees, agents and assigns, shall not be liable for personal injuries, death, damages, expenses or costs or losses of any kind resulting from participation or inability to participate in this Contest or acceptance of or use or inability to use a prize or parts thereof including, without limitation, claims, suits, injuries, losses and damages related to personal injuries, death, damage to or destruction of property, rights of publicity or privacy, defamation or portrayal in a false light (whether intentional or unintentional), whether under a theory of contract, tort (including negligence), warranty or other theory.
C. Winners release the Sponsor and its affiliates, subsidiaries and advertising and promotion agencies, and its directors, officers, employees, agents and assigns from any and all liability and responsibility with respect to a prize (including any property loss, damage, personal injury or death).
D. For residents of the EU: The provisions of B and C of this Section do not apply to claims against Sponsor, its representatives and its vicarious agents for damages because of personal injury or death, and to claims for damages in case of intent or gross negligence by Sponsor, its representatives or vicarious agents. In such circumstances, the release will apply to the fullest extent permitted by law.
E. Winners acknowledge that Sponsor and its affiliates, subsidiaries and advertising and promotion agencies, and each of their directors, officers, employees, agents and assigns, have neither made nor are in any manner responsible for any warranty, representation or guarantee, expressed or implied, in fact or in law, related to a prize.
8. PRIVACY.
A. Information submitted in connection with the Contest in accordance with these Official Rules and Conditions and Sponsor’s Privacy Policy located at http://www.trionworlds.com/en/legal/privacy-policy.
B. Any personal data you submit in association with this Contest will be stored on a server in the United States of America. Entry into the Contest constitutes your acknowledgement to the storage of your personal data in the United States of America and its use there for the purposes of administering this Contest and associated processing (e.g., but not limited to back-up, archiving). This server is controlled by the Sponsor who is not a participant in the U.S. Department of Commerce’s Safe Harbor Framework. Your personal data will be stored on these servers and used for the purposes of administering this Contest and associated processing of Entries.
C. By entering this Contest, you (or, on behalf of a minor participant, your parent or guardian) agree that your personal information may be collected, used, by Sponsor and its affiliates, subsidiaries and advertising and promotion agencies, and each of their directors, officers, employees, agents and assigns, for the sole purpose of conducting, administering, and fulfilling the Contest, including, without limitation notifying you if you are chosen as the potential Winner and for prize delivery.
D. For Residents of France Only: Pursuant to French law pertaining to data collection and processing, you have a right of access to, modification and withdrawal of your personal data. You also have the right of opposition to the data collection, under certain circumstances. To exercise such right, you may write an e-mail to: privacy@trionworlds.com. The data controller is Sponsor. The recipient of your personal data is the Sponsor. Your data will be transferred outside the European Union.
E. For Residents of Germany Only: Pursuant to the German Federal Data Protection Act, you have a right to information about the personal data stored about you, including its origin, recipient or categories of recipients of the data and the purpose of the storage. In addition, you have the right of correction and, in certain circumstances, to disabling and deletion of your data and, in certain circumstances, the right to object to the collection, processing and use of your personal data. To exercise such right, you may write to: privacy@trionworlds.com.
F. For Residents of United Kingdom Only: Participants have the right to access, withdraw, and correct their personal data. Participants may request such action by sending a message to privacy@trionworlds.com.
G. If allowed under applicable law, you may exercise your right to access and modify the personal information about you stored by Sponsor by writing to privacy@trionworlds.com, and detailing your request.
9. WINNERS LIST. A list of Winners will be posted on the RIFT Community Blog no later than 5:00pm PDT on November 11, 2011. A list of Winners can also be obtained by sending a self-addressed stamped envelope to Trion Worlds, Inc., ATTN: Community, 303 Twin Dolphin Drive, Redwood City, CA 94065, USA. Do not send Entries or other correspondence to this address.
10. SEVERABILITY. In the event any Provision of these Official Rules and Conditions prove unenforceable, void or incomplete, the validity of the other conditions will remain unaffected.
11. SPONSOR. This contest is sponsored by Trion Worlds, Inc., 303 Twin Dolphin Drive, Redwood City, CA 94065, USA.
© 2011 Trion Worlds, Inc. Trion, Trion Worlds, RIFT, Rift: Planes of Telara, Telara, and their respective logos, are trademarks or registered trademarks of Trion Worlds, Inc. in the U.S. and other countries. All other trademarks and logos belong to their respective owners. All rights reserved.Offensive Wicked Campers vehicles face de-registration on Queensland roads under new law
Updated
Sexist, obscene and other offensive slogans on vans and vehicles are being made illegal in Queensland.
State Parliament on Tuesday night passed the Transport Operations (Road Use Management) (Offensive Advertising) Amendment Bill 2016 to rid Queensland roads of the offensive vehicles.
Advertising on vehicles is currently self-regulated by the industry, and action cannot be taken on complaints made to the Advertising Standards Bureau (ASB).
The Queensland laws would allow the Department of Transport and Main Roads to cancel a vehicle's registration if the owners did not remove the offending slogans within 14 days of being advised to do so by the ASB's Standards Board.
The Government introduced the laws in response to complaints about slogans displayed on holiday hire vehicles such as Wicked Camper Vans, which is based in Brisbane but operates around Australia.
Their campervans are characterised by vibrant imagery or slogans on the vehicles but have drawn criticism for some of the messages.
Main Roads Minister Mark Bailey told Parliament the changes would take effect from next month.
"Offensive advertising includes advertising that uses obscene language, that is degrading, that deals inappropriately with sex or violence or very importantly that discriminates against or vilifies any section of the community," he said.
'Once registered in another state these laws won't apply'
Opposition Spokesman Andrew Powell did not oppose the changes but raised concerns that they would not work.
"Rookie minister Bailey has just ensured that the Wicked Campers fleet will potentially relocate to NSW. Once they're registered in another state these laws won't apply," Mr Powell said.
Shadow Minister for the Prevention of Family and Domestic Violence, Ros Bates, said she was shocked and appalled by what continued to be displayed on the vans.
"[The slogans] include 'it's easier to apologise than ask for permission', and 'I can already imagine the gaffer tape on your mouth'... and for any member of our society these slogans are sickening and perverse," Ms Bates said.
"These vans promote rape, encourage sexism and incite violence and control, but this do nothing Government has given us weak ineffective legislation that will do nothing to take these offensive vans off our streets."
Attorney General Yvette D'Ath said other states were looking at potentially developing their own legislation.
"I do believe it's an initiative that we do need to see rolled out in other jurisdictions, because we know this is only part of the solution, " she said.
Wicked Campers' critics welcome change in law
Anna McCormack from the group Wicked Pickets, which has protested against the van slogans, said the Government's decision was a step in the right direction.
"At the moment in Queensland, it's unlawful to vilify on the grounds of race, religion, sexuality or gender identity... but it's not unlawful to vilify on the grounds of sex, which means women and girls are still fair game," she said.
"We're happy that they've seen the Wicked campervan slogans as inappropriate and the dangers of those slogans in promoting rape culture.
"A lot of misogynist advertising is much more subtle, but these ones are so very obvious that people from a whole range of groups were outraged by them.
The ABC has contacted Wicked Campers for comment.
Topics: government-and-politics, parliament, state-parliament, brisbane-4000, qld
First postedWe’ve written before about the appalling state of access to public court records, recently made dramatically worse by the decision of the Administrative Office of the Courts (AO) to effectively terminate electronic access to documents on PACER (Public Access to Court Electronic Records), the fee-based system administered by the AO for searching, viewing and downloading federal court records. The removal affects five courts, including four federal courts of appeals. As we wrote earlier, the AO should give them to someone who will make them available for free, and we know of a few organizations that will be more than happy to do so at absolutely no cost to the taxpayers.
PACER fee-based access has always been problematic in terms of erecting economic barriers to access to public court records. But if the documents are not on PACER, and are already digitized, giving them to another entity poses no threat to PACER’s economic model.
Now it looks like Congress has waded into the debate about access to these public records.
On September 12, the Washington Post revealed that Senator Leahy sent a letter to the Administrative Office of the U.S. Courts urging that access to archives of court documents be restored. The letter, which was obtained by the Washington Post and published by Free Law Project, stated:
Wholesale removal of thousands of cases from PACER, particularly from four of our federal courts of appeals, will severely limit access to information not only for legal practitioners, but also for legal scholars, historians, journalists, and private litigants for whom PACER has become the go-to source for most court filings…. Given the potential impact of the AO's recent decision, I urge that the AO take immediate steps to restore access to these documents.
Senator Leahy’s letter implies something that really should be explicit: the removal of these historic documents should be seen as a blow to access to democracy. The fact that a PACER account is required to view court records is already an unacceptable obstruction of access to public information. The United States Code is available for free online, as is the Code of Federal Regulations. The activities of Congress are likewise publicly available for free. Courts, as much as Congress and the President, influence the laws of this country. And yet, these historical records aren’t available online, even with an account on PACER.
We repeat our plea that the AO “restore access,” as requested by Senator Leahy, and give the removed documents to an entity that is ready and willing to make them freely available.Shot by cinematographer Stefan Czapsky.
On this week’s Shot by Shot podcast, myself – H. Perry Horton – and co-host/OPS Founder Geoff Todd are discussing one of the greatest sequels of our childhood, Tim Burton’s 1992 flick Batman Returns, shot by Stefan Czapsky.
Batman Returns was Czapsky’s second of three collaborations with Burton, the first being Edward Scissorhands and the third being Ed Wood. Outside of Burton, Czapsky was somewhat all over the place, shooting horror (Child’s Play 2), drama (Last Exit to Brooklyn, Prelude to a Kiss), comedy (Blades of Glory) and family films (Matilda, Max), but Batman Returns with its aesthetic influenced by both Gothic architecture and German Expressionism is easily the best work of his career, and we’re about to tell you why.
If this is your first listen to our show, the format’s simple: each week Geoff and I each pick a few shots from a certain film and discuss their effect and significance. Check out our previous episodes:
Next week we’re off but the week after that we’re going to talking about Jordan Peele’s phenomenal Get Out.
Be sure to give us a follow so you can be kept up to date on new episodes. We’re on Twitter and Facebook, and you can find your two hosts on Twitter as well: @TheGeoffTodd and @HPerryHorton.
And if you like what you hear — spoiler alert: you’re going to — be sure to subscribe on Apple Podcasts, Stitcher, Tune In, or wherever you get your podcasts so you don’t miss a single episode of us or any of the other shows.
Dig the ‘cast below:What are the haps my friends
all your problems are over
August 22nd, 2007: Golly Jreen Jiant sent me his rendition of the Party Party Party (Hard) song in yesterday's comic. My goodness. If you want more lyrics that I can only assume show up in the 10 minute version, check out this thread here!
GUESS WHAT JUST CAME OUT: IT'S MY NEW BOOK!! If you've ever wondered what you'd do if you were stranded in the past, wonder no longer! With HOW TO INVENT EVERYTHING, you'll reinvent civilization from scratch, no matter what time period you're in. You'll become the single most influential, decisive, and important person ever born. You'll make history...
...better.
Here's the trailer!
One year ago today: okay so last night i accidentally superglued a two foot long scale plastic model of the enterprise d to my left hand? i don't know what i can say so i can come off looking like a winner here
– RyanOn January 26, 2012, I attended the final meeting in Batavia, NY, for the Finger Lakes “Regional “Sustainability’ Plan,” part of New York State Energy Research and Development Authority’s $10 million statewide program to have regional Planning Departments orchestrate “sustainability” plans described in NYSERDA’s “Cleaner, Greener Communities” Program. Here is my take on what is going on in regard to this extensive plan across New York State.
At the “open-house style” meeting in Batavia last week, folks were asked to read the poster boards relevant to each part of the overall plan: Land Use, Water Use, Agriculture, Forestry, Waste Management, Economic Development, and Energy—and to then use sticky notes to post their comments on the boards for each particular segment of the plan.
As those who have studied the United Nations’s “Agenda 21” plan know, “Sustainability” is a key buzzword that is part-and-parcel of the UN’s “Agenda 21”. There is no doubt that the “Sustainability” Plan currently being devised by Planning Departments across the state, who are acting “under NYSERDA’s thumb” (as one Planner phrased it at their first meeting in Batavia), is “Agenda 21” in the works (think carbon taxes, “green’ energy transfer-of-wealth schemes, and one-world governance).
“Planning” is Theirs, Not Ours
Free-market economists sharply differentiate between central government planning and decentralized market planning (see Hayek appendix below). So while many see little wrong with developing an overall plan, remember that their coercion crowds out your own planning. And while different aspects of the extensive plans look good at first glance, the devil is in the details.
The fact that NYSERDA is the bureaucracy over-seeing this process is the tell-tale warning sign, as the development of renewable energy across the state and ways to regulate carbon emissions is the overarching goal in each area of the plan.
This should leave everyone very wary about the remaining $90 million — that came from the Northeast’s Regional Greenhouse Gas Initiative (RGGI) ratepayer dollars, that will be offered as “grants’ (the proverbial “carrots’ used to lead the sheep) to guide our communities into “compliance” with the overall underlying agenda — that of “Agenda 21”.
Who knows where the money will come from for Governor Cuomo’s proposed billion-dollar “Green Bank”, and $1.5 Billion dollar Solar fund? Remember when Obama said there were other ways to skin the cat than cap-and-trade?
One of the biggest warning flags I noted last evening (besides the “green’ energy push and carbon regulation goals) was on the chart regarding ‘Land Use’. I noted one line that said, “Home Rule” interferes with inter-municipal cooperation…” The obvious subliminal message here is that “Home Rule” is a bad thing.
Our municipalities’ long-held, Constitutionalright to “Home Rule” is being progressively undermined in this whole process of State-led planning. We are unwittingly, slowly and methodically giving over total control to unelected bureaucrats and planners who are devising these “green”, “sustainability” plans — which are part and parcel of “Agenda 21” (which many officials and bureaucrats say they still know nothing about).
Planners Lack Expertise
The sad reality is that most of these planners are not at all educated about energy and power. As I was getting ready to leave the meeting, one of the FL Planners asked me what I had thought of the display.
I told him straight out that the obvious push for “unreliables” (aka “renewables’) like wind is a complete waste of our tax- and rate-payer dollars. I told him that while I am certainly all for scientifically-vetted, economically-sound energy-innovation, industrial wind was the biggest scam to ever come down the pike. Not surprisingly, he did not like my response.
Sadly, he responded with the decades-old propaganda line, “Well, we have to do something. Oil is responsible for so much of our pollution.”
I responded, “I’m not talking about oil – which is used for transportation. I’m talking about unreliable wind power — which is used for electricity!”
He tried to argue that eventually we would end up going to all electric vehicles. I just laughed, and said, “Sir, I’m afraid you’ve drank the Kool-Aid! I couldn’t even make it home and back in an electric car.”
Thankfully, a local guy who does get it, stepped in and said that even if electric vehicles became more prevalent, they could never be used to do the kind of heavy work required on our farms.
As our conversation proceeded, we had the attention of the entire small crowd that was in the room — which played out great, as the facts totally destroyed this planner’s entire argument.
Not one of the five planners who were there knew what “Capacity Value” was, nor that wind provided virtually NONE. I told him that wind is not the future, and in all actuality, there is a direct correlation between RELIABLE, AFFORDABLE power, and increased health and longevity in this country, which he could verify by doing a little research.
Some Reading
I ended up leaving a copy of John Etherington’s The Wind Farm Scam: An Ecologist’s Evaluation and Robert Bryce’s Power Hungry: The Myths of “Green” Energy and the Real Fuels of the Future with one of the head planners there.
Hopefully, they will actually read them and reverse course for New York State to cut its budget and environmentally gain at the same time. As it is now, the energy-illiterate planners who are guiding the development of [UN-initiated] “Sustainability Plans” in New York State (Governor Andrew Cuomo and his cohorts at NYSERDA) are not basing their decisions on sound science, but on politics surrounding the UN’s “New World” religion of “Environmentalism.”
Climate alarmism and pseudo science have justified all manner of regulations, carbon trading, carbon taxes, renewable energy programs and other initiatives that increase the cost of everything we make, grow, ship, eat, heat, cool, wear and do – and thus impair job creation, economic growth, living standards, health, welfare and ecological values.
Whether it be “Sustainability Plans” in New York State, or Timbuktu, there is nothing at all that is “sustainable” about any of this.
Mary Kay Barton is a retired health educator and New York State small business owner, and a tireless advocate for scientifically sound, affordable and reliable electricity for all Americans. She has served over the past decade in local water quality organizations and enjoys gardening and birding in her National Wildlife Federation “Backyard Wildlife Habitat.”Four years is a measurement of time that America has used for centuries to indicate change. Presidential terms last four years; high school diplomas and college degrees typically take four years apiece, too. It’s not an arbitrary thing, either: It typically takes that much time from the declaration of something changing for it to actually change.
Meet Laura Jane Grace. Four years ago, the Against Me! frontwoman came out as transgender; 18 months later, she released the band’s sixth album, the fiery Transgender Dysphoria Blues, one which she began working on before her transition and helped document the struggles she was facing. It was an intensely personal record that took on a life of its own, connecting with thousands of new listeners drawn to Grace’s honesty and complexity while still pleasing Against Me!’s dedicated fanbase.
Now, four years after Grace’s public reintroduction, Against Me! is ready to release their new album, Shape Shift With Me, September 16 on Total Treble. While much has changed in the lives of Grace and her bandmates—guitarist James Bowman, bassist Inge Johansson and drummer Atom Willard—in that time period, it’s clear that those intervening years have done wonders for creativity.
“Everything with Shape Shift With Me has been really about keeping momentum going,” she says. “In between every tour we did for Transgender Dysphoria Blues, I would have a couple songs I had written and we would demo them. At the end of two years of touring, we had an album ready to record. Usually, you come off of touring for a record and you're back at square one. But this was so fully formed it felt like there was no choice but to go ahead and record the songs.”
Shape Shift With Me has the distinction of the first album Grace has written truly from the heart, with no metaphorical cloaks cast over the lyrics. It’s an album about love, that deceptively complex emotion we all struggle with yet has somehow eluded most of Grace’s songwriting for the past 20 years.
“Tons of people have written about love. But while love is cliché, it’s infinitely relevant. For me, having always been in a punk band that was expected to be political, I never felt like I had that option to write about feelings in that way. That’s what I ended up being drawn to this time. It’s writing in a way I thought I could never write before, and not giving a shit about expectations.”
As such, Shape Shift With Me is a loose concept album about traveling the world and falling in and out of love, with Grace serving as the narrator. But even though she was opening herself up to new songwriting topics, she knew what her mission was from the start.
“Is there a record that is about relationships from a trans perspective?” she asks rhetorically. “There needs to be more records about trans rights and everything like that, but feeling like I already did that, I wanted to move on to write commentary on living from a trans perspective. I wanted to write the transgender response to the Rolling Stones’ Exile On Main St., Liz Phair’s Exile In Guyville and the Streets’ A Grand Don’t Come For Free. All those records are relationship records. There’s been an infinite amount of records talking about what love means from a cisgender perspective. I wanted to present the trans perspective on sex, love and heartbreak.”
With Grace’s new motivation came a new outlook on the band, as well. Previous albums found the songwriting process to be a largely solitary experience, but she embraced the spirit of collaboration for Shape Shift With Me—so much so that when Cody Votolato of the Blood Brothers sent her some demos of songs he was working on for another project, she became inspired and ended up co-writing “Boyfriend” and “Norse Truth,” two of the album’s most memorable tracks, with him.
“It was just about opening up to whatever comes my way karmically,” Grace says. “Whatever everyone in the band is willing to offer, I just wanted to be open to it. I didn’t want it to be like what it was in the past where it may have felt closed. I want it to be different.”
In a career already full of classic punk records, Shape Shift With Me feels like the definitive Against Me! album—it’s poppy and catchy (“Rebecca,” “Suicide Bomber”), aggressive and in-your-face (“ProVision L-3,” “Dead Rats”), sentimental and longing (“Crash,” “All This And More”). Moreover, it’s the culmination of four years of existence as Laura Jane Grace—there’s no going back now, so she might as well embrace it.
“While I’ve always wanted the moon and the stars, I have a certain amount of humbleness,” she admits. “I just want to play shows and make records and write songs. That’s what I’ve always wanted to do. Of course I always want the biggest and best things for those shows and records and songs, but when it comes down to it, I just love doing it. I have no other ambitions or career goals.
“David Bowie put out 27 full-lengths. Prince put out 39 full-lengths,” Grace remarks. “That is so inspiring to me—working, creating art, creating records and let everyone else sort it out. That’s what I’ve always wanted to do and that’s what I will keep on doing.”
Booklet is signed by the whole band.Today, in partnership with EA SPORTS, Microsoft announced plans to celebrate Madden NFL 15 with a special Xbox One console bundle, which launches at select US retailers such as Microsoft retail stores on Aug. 26 for $399, and includes a copy of the game at no additional cost.
The “Madden NFL” series from Electronic Arts has spanned more than 25 years and five console generations. It’s a franchise that’s synonymous with intense realistic sports action, technical innovation and rabid football fandom. Only on Xbox One, the Official Game Console of the NFL, can you play a game of Madden while tracking your fantasy football team with the NFL on Xbox app snapped to the side.
If you’re a football fan that’s been holding out to make the next-gen leap, now is the time to get into the game on Xbox One.
Available soon for pre-order and in limited supply only, the bundle includes:
Download code for Madden NFL 15 on Xbox One
Standard Xbox One console
Standard Xbox One wireless controller
Standard Xbox One chat headset
Special edition Madden NFL 15 packaging
Token for three Madden NFL Ultimate Team Pro Packs
Madden NFL 15 transforms you into your rival’s worst nightmare with a new breed of defense built to challenge the best offenses in the NFL. A new arsenal of pass rush moves, an intuitive tackling system, improved coverage logic, and immersive new camera angles make defense exciting and fun to play. Call plays with confidence thanks to an all-new crowd-sourced recommendation engine built from millions of online games played by the Madden community. Add in all-new NFL Films inspired presentation and it’s not just football, it’s Madden Season!
See below for more details:
Deliver on Defense
A New Point of View – See defense through a whole new lens with all-new camera angles that let you attack the play from the defensive’s perspective. Lock in on a single defender and go for the big play or follow the action wherever the ball goes.
See defense through a whole new lens with all-new camera angles that let you attack the play from the defensive’s perspective. Lock in on a single defender and go for the big play or follow the action wherever the ball goes. Bring the Heat – Utilize a new set of pass rush tools to beat your blocker and disrupt the backfield. New mechanics to jump the snap, shed blocks and steer offensive linemen put your in control and make defensive linemen more powerful and versatile than ever.
Utilize a new set of pass rush tools to beat your blocker and disrupt the backfield. New mechanics to jump the snap, shed blocks and steer offensive linemen put your in control and make defensive linemen more powerful and versatile than ever. Risk vs. Reward – Defenders can now make aggressive or conservative tackles in the open field, with proximity cones showing the effective range of each. Aggressive tackles can lead to big plays and fumbles, but conservative tackles are more likely to bring the ball-carrier down without giving up extra yards. The choice is yours, but so are the consequences.
Best of Broadcast
Director’s Cut – Broadcast and NFL Films –inspired presentation redefines the way games are presented. New cameras capture the emotion of every play from fresh new perspectives, and choose from 6 gameplay cameras pre-snap to get the best view of the action.
Broadcast and NFL Films –inspired presentation redefines the way games are presented. New cameras capture the emotion of every play from fresh new perspectives, and choose from 6 gameplay cameras pre-snap to get the best view of the action. Show Time – The new pre-game and halftime shows, complete with studio commentary, tell the story of the game, with special emphasis on game-changing matchups and big play highlights.
Be a Student of the Game
Crowd-sourced Play Call – A revolutionary recommendation engine utilizes data from millions of online games to surface the best selection of plays possible for the match-up and situation. Sort from traditional sets and formations, to expert recommendations, to what’s working the best in the “Madden NFL” community.
A revolutionary recommendation engine utilizes data from millions of online games to surface the best selection of plays possible for the match-up and situation. Sort from traditional sets and formations, to expert recommendations, to what’s working the best in the “Madden NFL” community. Run The Gauntlet – Skills Trainer has been expanded to teach not only gameplay skills, but strategy and football concepts as well. Learn how to read zone defenses, when to hot route a receiver, and more with nearly 50 new tutorials and drills. Once you’ve mastered the basics, enter The Gauntlet where your skills will be put to the ultimate test through intense challenges and boss battles.
Additionally, be sure to check out the new Madden NFL 15 screenshots here and be sure to tune into EAsports.com for more information.In February 2009, Michelle Mismas met nail polish namesake Essie Weingarten backstage at a fashion week show. Mismas, who runs the popular nail blog All Lacquered Up, casually mentioned how much she loved Dominica Green, a discontinued Essie polish with a cult following so devoted that bottles on eBay routinely fetched upwards of $100. Several months later, she received a bottle of the reissued polish, with a label handwritten by Essie herself. "The fact that she had even heard of my blog made me feel special," Mismas said. "Like I had made an impression on the industry beyond the true fanatics who were following my blog." It feels impossible nowadays to scroll through Pinterest or Instagram or Tumblr without seeing close-ups of people's nails, adorned with glitter and geometric patterns and pictures of fruit. Although nail art has been popular for years in African-American communities and avant-garde foreign fashion magazines, recently social media has helped jazzy nails go viral. And the people behind some of the most viral nail looks are not professional nail technicians — they're women who have leveraged doing their own nails as a hobby to a very influential place in the nail industry, with numerous sponsorship deals and their own polish lines. Their work has caused women previously unaware of nail art to clamor for intricate designs and new unconventional polish colors, while prompting rapid innovation in at-home nail care. The nail polish industry is currently worth $1.1 billion, according to market research by IBISWorld Inc. A recent article in NAILS magazine reports that dollar sales of mass market nail care products grew by 26% in 2011, suggesting that the masses are increasingly testing new looks at home. Mainstream brands like Sally Hansen are selling products like nail art pens and gel polish kits so that experimenting with nail art from the comfort of your own bedroom is easier and more affordable than ever. And many thousands of consumers are introduced to new products and new looks by bloggers like Mismas. "We're that best friend you've never met," said Melissa Osburn, who runs the blog The Daily Nail. Osburn became a known "lacquerista," as nail obsessives are called, after posting photos of her bacon manicure, which went viral in 2009 and netted her blog nearly 1,000 subscribers practically overnight.
thedailynailblog.com The Daily Nail's bacon manicure. The best comment out of the over 300 on this post has to be "Bacon is disgusting!!!!"
Mismas, who refers to herself as a nail-focused beauty blogger, started blogging about nail polish in 2007, primarily for other members of MakeupAlley, the beauty review website and message board where she was active. The blog got attention from popular makeup blog Blogdorf Goodman and from Andrea Lustig, a beauty editor at Glamour, and now gets around 250,000 unique visitors each month. In 2009 |
in order to discover possible Russian connections.
We know, of course, that Trump had no connections with Russia. How do we know? Because if there were anything legitimate to be found, Obama would have revealed long before he left office. If Trump were colluding with Russia to undermine our democracy, surely the sitting President of the United States would have had to act on it, right? That wouldn't have meant Hillary would then get the office, but at least Trump would have been brought to justice.
The fact that nothing credible has come out from the former White House or intelligence agencies strongly indicates that nothing happened between Russia or Trump's campaign, or that Russia was even involved in the Wikileaks email dump.
But, hang on, maybe Obama didn't violate the Fourth Amendment and tap Trump's phone calls. Maybe that is just a wild accusation on the part of President Trump.
Then where is all this evidence of Trump's connection with Russia coming from?
Do you see what I'm getting at, here? Trump, in a brilliant move, has trapped the left in their own scheme. By suggesting that President Obama illegally spied on his conversations, he is forcing the Democrats to either admit Obama broke the law (thus damning his legacy once and for all) or backing down on their obviously false accusations about Russia.
Until now, Democrats and their media have been pleased to create the impression that all kinds of wiretapping operations were conducted against the Trump campaign, uncovering many scandalous, possibly illegal connections. Only by reading those articles carefully does one discover the sources are highly speculative and the evidence is thin at best...
Whatever President Trump’s intentions were in using Twitter to touch off this firestorm, one of the immediate effects has been letting the gas out of all those speculative Trump stories. The Democratic media is now furiously working to prove all of its own previous coverage of the Trump-Russia allegations was little more than idle speculation, every bit as lacking in hard evidence as Trump’s accusation that Obama was tapping his phones. (via Breitbart)
Trump's got the liberal media by the balls. They can't stand on so-called "evidence" that Trump was working with Russia, without implicating that it was President Obama who got his hands dirty.
But if they do that, then they have to admit their accusations against the man were unfounded to begin with. So the liberal media is stuck with a big problem: either protect the man they had worshiped for eight years or destroy his credibility in continuing to attack Trump.
You see, the real problem is that Obama doesn't have the best track record when it comes to illegal spying. In 2013 we learned about the NSA's PRISM program that allowed intelligence agencies to gather data on just about everything you are doing.
According to the Post, the National Security Agency and FBI are “tapping directly into the central servers of nine leading US Internet companies, extracting audio, video, photographs, e-mails, documents and connection logs that enable analysts to track a person’s movements and contacts over time.” The program is code-named PRISM, and was leaked to the newspaper by a “career intelligence offer” who said, “They quite literally can watch your ideas form as you type.” (via Breitbart)
The program was created in 2007 (yes we always have reason to hate Bush), but instead of closing it down, President Obama expanded it.
Why is this so wrong? Because it is a violation of our Fourth Amendment rights, which are:
The right of the people to be secure in their persons, houses, papers, and effects, against unreasonable searches and seizures, shall not be violated, and no warrants shall issue, but upon probable cause, supported by oath or affirmation, and particularly describing the place to be searched, and the persons or things to be seized.
"Papers and effects" means the things we own, including letters and communications. That extends to emails, text messages, images, video, etc., everything Obama's cronies were siphoning from the Internet. All without the oversight of the judicial system in the issuing of warrants.
What was all this spying for? Was it to combat terrorism? Obviously not, considering some of the recent terror attacks on U.S. soil had obvious clues on social media. Both the San Bernardino and Orlando killers used Facebook extensively. You mean to tell me the NSA couldn't find posts and data on those people about their allegiance to ISIS before they killed innocent people?
I'm sure they did, but under Obama, our deep state wasn't in the business of protecting America, but acquiring dirt on his political rivals. Obama used the IRS to bully Tea Party and conservative non-profits. We know that he ordered spying on German Chancellor Angela Merkel. And even recently we discovered he tried to influence French elections.
When considering the depths Obama would go to secure his own power or have his way, it's not a big stretch to think he'd abuse his executive authority to spy on Donald Trump. The temptation to uncover a Russian connection would have been too overwhelming, for the man who strongly opposed Trump from the very beginning. Had President Obama discovered a smoking gun, the liberal media would have overlooked whatever steps he took to find it. If he found nothing, he was convinced his cronies in the deep state would have kept their mouths shut.
But clearly someone didn't and let the dirty secret slip to the most dangerous man in American politics: President Trump. Now the House Intelligence Committee will be investigating the allegations in their larger case in Russian involvement during the election. Rest assured, if President Obama was breaking the law to spy on Trump, it will come to light.
Either way, President Trump has put a cap on this Russian hysteria, and once again, the Democrats are on the losing end.While most literary sleuths are busy trying to discern whether and how Jessica (Mrs. Jerry) Seinfeld plagiarized recipes from a similar cookbook by Missy Chase Lapine, I say: a plague on both their houses. Both propose a culinary scheme that is, basically, totally stupid, to say nothing of dishonest. Seinfeld’s Deceptively Delicious and Lapine’s The Sneaky Chef advocate tricking kids into eating their fruits and, mostly, their veggies by pureeing them and oozing them into acknowledged goodies. Think mushes of cauliflower, squash, spinach, and avocado leaked into brownies, chocolate pudding, lasagna, macaroni and cheese, and grilled cheese sandwiches. Even hot cocoa, to which Seinfeld wants you to add mashed sweet potatoes; Lapine advises cherry juice.
The twin major flaws in this faulty reasoning, are that, first, children get the wrong message that sweets and starches are good for them. After all, if you tell your offspring to stop eating brownies, he might not get enough iron via spinach. With the dangerous rise of childhood obesity and diabetes, do we really want to encourage the eating of sugars and starches? And, ultimately, and more seriously perhaps, lying to children via trickery—even “for their own good”—can feed a lifetime of distrust, as it should. I wonder how these undercover mothers keep their secrets. Are children locked out of the kitchens at cooking time, lest they see Mommy slipping pureed zucchini into their beloved mac ‘n’ cheese?
A second problem raised by this hide-the-veggies duo is the invisibility of vegetables in their own recognizable forms. As a result, children are not afforded the opportunity to get used to the idea of trying and learning about them. Nor will they consider them necessary for good health. I’ll admit that getting a kid to down peas, string beans, or broccoli that he or she hates can be a discouraging chore. In this I speak from experience as the mother of a son who, until about the age of 14, hated all vegetables, except potatoes, corn, and raw carrot sticks and who once declared that the only edible green food was green noodles. Deciding not to turn every meal into a contest, I began only offering him small portions of those he liked, along with peeled, sliced pears, apples, peaches, and other seasonal fruits that he substituted for veggies.
Another great favorite with him—as with most children I know—was authentic (no funny business) olive-oil-based Italian tomato sauce, either with or without meat. Simmered with onion, finely diced carrot, and garlic that disappeared into an amalgam in the cooking, combined with a generous tossing of minced Italian parsley added in the last few seconds, that sauce gave him considerable vegetable credits. And I did not always serve this over starchy pasta, but ladled it over meatballs, chicken, fish, or finally, as it is often served in southern Italy, over broccoli, the first green vegetable I remember him eating—and liking—until one magical day he suddenly seemed to like almost all.
Therein lies a solution no more demanding than what is required in either of these stealth cookbooks—namely, coming up with recipes that don’t force vegetables to masquerade as treats, presenting them in forms that appeal to young palates. Instead of compromising lasagna, or tuna fish, or mashed potatoes with strongly flavored cauliflower, why not Japanese tempura or Italian fritto misto versions of cauliflower florets and other cut-up vegetables? Kids seem to love anything fried and crisp; fortunately, careful, quick frying at the right temperature in light vegetable oil minimizes the health dangers of that cooking method. (A thought: Given the overpowering flavor and aroma of cauliflower, any kid who can’t tell it lurks in macaroni and cheese or mashed potatoes may have a sensory development problem worth looking into.)
Both of these books also suggest what seems to be unnecessary trickery, most notably with sweet potatoes. Never have I fed a child who didn’t love them, whether baked and dabbed with butter and salt, or lightly candied with an orange juice-honey glaze, or, since we are talking sweet, under a mantle of melting marshmallows as an annual Thanksgiving treat. Why have them muck up grilled cheese sandwiches, as both authors recommend, or, even worse, add a yuck factor to hot cocoa?
In the end, I suppose one has to ask an even more basic question: Do vegetables treated as prescribed and in the amounts indicated by Seinfeld-the-Deceptive and Lapine-the-Sneak really add enough nutrients to a child’s diet to make the plotting and pureeing worthwhile? How valuable can one half-cup of spinach puree and one half-cup of carrot puree be when they are first cooked, then are again subjected to the heat of baking, finally to be divided among 12 brownies? And can there be any meaningful nutrition from a quarter-cup each of carrot and sweet potato puree divided amongst 10 portions of soup?
To answer this, I sought the advice of Marion Nestle, a professor of nutrition at New York University and the author of What To Eat. “Philosophically and practically, this is not really an effective approach,” she said. “It will not develop an appreciation of the flavors, textures, and interests of various vegetables, which is what you should try to do by introducing them over and over again until they catch on.”
As to the nutritional worth of such cooked and recooked vegetables, in miniscule amounts, Dr. Nestle first chuckled wildly and then answered, “All you can do is laugh.”WWE.com has just gotten word that Ric Flair will be in attendance at the 2012 WWE Hall of Fame induction ceremony at Miami's American Airlines Arena on Saturday, March 31.
On that night, The Nature Boy will gain a record second entry into the hallowed Hall. Only this time, Flair will be entering alongside his legendary Four Horsemen allies: Arn Anderson, Tully Blanchard, Barry Windham and JJ Dillon. ( MORE ABOUT THE HORSEMEN)
First inducted into the WWE Hall of Fame in 2008 on the night before he faced Shawn Michaels at WrestleMania XXIV, The Nature Boy became the first active Superstar to ever receive the honor. The Dirtiest Player in the Game retired from the ring after losing to HBK on The Grandest Stage of Them All, but his legacy as one of the most respected and influential performers in sports-entertainment endures. ( WATCH)
The induction ceremony, which will be held on the eve of WrestleMania XXVIII, will air on USA on Monday, April 2 at 8 p.m.How To Chassis Suspension
Jerry Heasley December 6, 2016
Anytime you need work on the suspension on anything under a Mustang you have to lift it in the air, whether on a floor jack or a lift. But what you might not have ever heard is that raising a 1965-1973 Mustang on a regular two-post lift without a support between the upper control arm and the frame rail will damage the shocks and strut rods. There’s no telling how many times over the last 50-odd years of lifting a Mustang for a simple oil change that possibly has broken shock and strut rod bushings. The numbers must be in the millions.
Ford supplied dealers with a factory service tool, which they also used on the assembly line, to support the front suspension. Without this support, lifting the car drops the front suspension down and places all that weight on the front shocks and strut rod bushings. This damage is much more than cosmetic. The car will now be unstable at speed, more or less depending on the severity of the damage. Maybe one gentle lift will not result in visible damage, but with multiple unsupported lifts, the damage gets worse.
Bob Perkins of Perkins Restoration (www.perkinsrestoration.com) showed us how to avoid busting out shock tower and strut rod bushings when raising a Mustang on a conventional, two-post lift—or any lift with side arms.
01. This 1973 Mustang front suspension drops and “hangs free” when raised on a two-post lift. This lift picks up the car with arms at the side for access to the undercarriage.
02. Most of these Ford suspension support tools from the 1960s and 1970s have disappeared. Ford shop manuals instructed mechanics to place this support between the upper arm and the frame side rail. Notice the notch on one end. This original suspension support tool has a Ford part number.
03. Because original support tools are scarce, Bob Perkins has fabricated his own for everyday use. On the left are two supports he made. On the right is an original Ford support tool from the 1960s.
04. This illustration from Ford’s 1965 Mustang shop manual shows where to place the support tool when lifting a Mustang on a lift with side arms. The shock is inside the coil spring on top of the upper control arm.
05. The Perkins-built suspension tool, as seen on this 1973 model, fits between the frame rail (bottom) and the upper control arm under the ball joint. To install, first lift the car enough for the tool to fit.
06. Bob Perkins shows us damage to this shock on a car that was lifted without a support tool. The suspension dropped down and tore the rubber bushings in the top of this original shock.
07. Installing a support tool also protects strut rod bushings from damage.
08. On 1965-1970 Mustangs, the shock bushing at the top is apt to break when the suspension falls without support.
09. Likewise, the shock bushings in the 1971-1973 shock tower will have to absorb the weight of the front suspension if the support tool is not used.Protesters sit locked in arms in St. Louis on August 10, 2015. They marched to the Federal Building as part of a day of disobedience held during the one-year anniversary of the Michael Brown Jr. shooting death by police in Ferguson, Mo. A Gallup survey shows 61 percent of Americans think racism against blacks is widespread in the United States. File photo by Bill Greenblatt/UPI | License Photo
PRINCETON, N.J., Aug. 17 (UPI) -- More than three-fifths of Americans say racism against black people is widespread in the United States, according to Gallup's Minority Rights and Relations survey released Wednesday.
The survey results showed 61 percent of U.S. adults think racism is widespread, 1 percent higher than measured last year but 10 percent more than in 2009 during the first year of Barack Obama's presidency.
Conversely, the latest survey found 41 percent think racism against white people is widespread.
Recent deadly encounters between police and residents this summer, including in Dallas and Louisiana in which black men shot and killed white police officers, occurred after interviewing for the poll finished July 1.
The survey was conducted June 7-July 1 with 3,270 U.S. adults, including 1,320 non-Hispanic whites and 912 non-Hispanic blacks who previously were interviewed in the Gallup Daily tracking poll and agreed to be re-interviewed for a later study. The survey's margin of error is 3 percent among the total sample.
Among black people, 82 percent say racism against black people is widespread compared with 56 percent of white people. These figures are higher than 2009 -- 10 percent among black people and 7 percentage points among white people.
Hispanics are more likely than white people but less likely than black people to perceive racism against blacks as widespread: 66 percent, which is an increase of 59 percent from 2008. Gallup did not break down the percentage of Hispanics in 2009.
Among those who believe racism against white people is widespread, it's 43 percent among white people and 33 percent among black people. Last year the figures were 32 percent among both races.
Among Hispanics, 42 percent believe racism against white people is widespread in the United States.
"The trend on whites' opinions about racism against whites indicates 2015 was the unusual year," Gallup's Jeffrey M. Jones wrote in a release. "Perhaps the extensive news coverage of racial incidents, particularly those resulting in the deaths of black men, may have left the impression that racism in the U.S. was largely directed against blacks."BEIRUT,— A coalition of US-backed Kurdish militia and rebel groups has launched its first operation against territory controlled by the Islamic State jihadist group in northeast Syria, a spokesman said Saturday.
The Syrian Democratic Forces (SDF) were formed in mid-October as an alliance between the powerful Kurdish People’s Protection Units (YPG) and other Syrian rebel groups.
“This is the first step of the Syrian Democratic Forces,” said Sherfan Darwish, spokesman for the Burkan al-Furat Arab rebel group, which is part of the SDF.
Speaking to AFP by phone from Syria, Darwish said the SDF’s operation began on Friday night and would target IS-held areas in the northeast Kurdish province of Hasaka, including the towns of Shadadi and al-Hol.
Darwish said the fresh operation would receive air support from a US-led coalition striking IS in Syria since September 2014.
In a video statement published online, the YPG confirmed the beginning of the operation “with all of the members of the SDF, and with support from and coordination with the international coalition, to liberate the southern parts of Hasaka province.”
The video showed several dozen men in fatigues standing outdoors with yellow flags and banners carrying the name of the Democratic Forces of Syria in Arabic and Kurdish.
The Kurdish YPG has been working closely with the U.S.-led anti-IS coalition since early this year, and has to date proved Washington’s most effective partner on the ground against IS in Syria.
Clashes on Saturday raged between the SDF and IS outside al-Hol, said Rami Abdel Rahman, head of the Syrian Observatory for Human Rights.
He said coalition air strikes had hit the area on Friday night.
The SDF announcement came a day after the White House said it would send “fewer than 50” special forces personnel to Syrian Kurdistan (Syria’s north), reversing a long-standing refusal to put US boots on the ground.
The U.S. force is expected to be assisting the Syrian Kurdish YPG, and its allies in Syrian Kurdistan (Rojava).
Copyright ©, respective author or news agency, AFP | Reuters | Ekurd.net
Comments
CommentsAs the lick of flames runs its course over the insignificant outer shell,
I shudder from the thrill accompanying my fury and misery.
Happiness is fickle! It is impossible to draw pleasure from a single instance of joy.
Fleeting sentiments hold no value in my eyes. I laugh at Happiness.
For misery is the only true sentiment there is.
I have never felt more alive then when the wave of sadness swept me over…
Toppled me over past the point of no return. The goosebumps have taken me
Once again. There is no loss in the intensity of my emotions.
I ache to scar the outer shall. She is magnificent though insignificant.
She must have her fun! The joy which evades Her as She is in love,
As She makes love, with beings far inferior to even her! That immense, profound,
Total, overwhelming, frenzied, mad, ecstatic, immersive joy
Lies with her blades. I have only one desire, and I shan’t deny Her.
The very thought sets Her off again; hair pricking in anticipation.
Her reactions are beyond Her control. And here, I feel Her feelings.
She and I comprehend each other in totality. So what if She is insignificant?
I love Her more than I love myself (and oh I do love myself!) I will suffer
Anything to make Her happy. And I have already. I suffer her lovers.
I suffer her frivolous Happiness! Her lapses in judgement. Oh, I suffer!
But She is still so blanketed in perfection, I cannot but love Her every piece.
And in my overpowering love, I can’t hope, any longer, for peace.
With us, in our ruinous love, there is only deepest despair and greatest Happiness!
She does not make me Happy, and for this I love her most of all.
And from each occasion of true sadness, I draw the pleasure which will last
Through my lifetime. I can’t wait for later today, when I will finally
Satisfy Her cravings, and enjoy together for a few moments, the
Sensation of being well and truly alive- and despairing!Firefighters look over maps in Cascade Locks, Ore., Wednesday, Sept. 6, 2017, near where the Eagle Creek wildfire continues to burn. Firefighting crews are in the town in anticipation of west winds possibly pushing the fire into town. (AP Photo/Randy L. Rasmussen)
Updated at 7:01 a.m.
CASCADE LOCKS, Ore. – The Eagle Creek Fire was 5 percent contained Wednesday night.
Thursday morning, Eagle Creek Joint Information Center said the fire is 33,382 acres. They said the acreage increase is partly due to the burnouts they did Wednesday.
They hope Thursday's cooler temperature and higher humidity will help firefighting efforts. But, they're concerned about west winds and a red flag warning expected Thursday afternoon.
Wednesday, crews worked to build fire lines near Cascade Locks and Bridal Veil on Wednesday. More than 900 people are involved in fighting the fire.
Firefighters are taking extra precautions to protect homes and other structures near the fire.
Fire officials said some roads are opening for access and potential future fire breaks southeast of the fire.
Union Pacific said the rails in the Gorge reopened to train traffic early Tuesday morning.
The U.S. Coast Guard also plans to allow commercial vessels to travel down the Columbia River at night.
I-84 remains closed.
Level 3 GO! evacuations remain for Cascade Locks, Warrendale, Dodson, Larch Mountain, Latourell, Bridal Veil and Corbett (east of 38700 block of Columbia River Highway). Approximately 220 people have sought shelter assistance.
Fire officials will hold a community meeting at Bowe Theater in Hood River Valley High School on Thursday at 6 p.m.
They are in the process of planning another public meeting for Friday or Saturday in the Troutdale area.
RELATED | Schools alter schedules as evacuations, air quality continueWith opposition lawmakers now calling the shots, Ukraine's parliament spent February 23 steamrolling through a litany of key appointments -- including an interim president to replace ousted leader Viktor Yanukovych.
Deputies elected Oleksandr Turchynov, a close ally of newly freed Yulia Tymoshenko and, since February 22, parliament speaker, to fill the presidential post until early elections are held on May 25.
The vote, however, is unlikely to silence questions from the Yanukovych camp about whether his removal from power was legal.
Yanukovych has taken several steps that appear to undermine his own faith in his presidential legitimacy -- among them, abandoning his office and recording an official statement of resignation.
But the 63-year-old leader, having decamped Kyiv, later retracted his resignation and asserted his role as head of state, calling the vote "illegal." "I'm not going to leave Ukraine or go anywhere. I'm not going to resign. I'm a legitimately elected president," he said.
A majority of 328 lawmakers of the 450-seat parliament voted on February 22 to remove Yanukovych from power, citing as grounds his abandoning office and the deaths of more than 80 protesters and police in the past chaotic week of violence.
Dueling Constitutions
But a legal gap remains. According to the terms of an EU-brokered peace deal finalized on February 21, Yanukovych was due to sign a measure returning Ukraine to its 2004 constitution. (In 2010, Yanukovych restored the country's 1996 constitution, which hands greater power to the presidency.)
WATCH: Ukraine's parliament votes to hand presidential duties to speaker.
Get Adobe Flash Player Embed share Ukrainian Parliament Votes To Hand Presidential Duties To Speaker Embed share The code has been copied to your clipboard. width px height px Share on Facebook
Share on Twitter
The URL has been copied to your clipboard No media source currently available 0:00 0:01:12 0:00 But a legal gap remains. According to the terms of an EU-brokered peace deal finalized on February 21, Yanukovych was due to sign a measure returning Ukraine to its 2004 constitution. (In 2010, Yanukovych restored the country's 1996 constitution, which hands greater power to the presidency.)
Yanukovych, however, failed to sign the measure. The omission appears to leave Kyiv in the kind of legal limbo that may prove fodder for future arguments against the current government transition.
The 1996 and the 2004 constitutions are uniform when it comes to the reasons for removing a president, with Article 111 stating the parliament has the right to initiate a procedure of impeachment "if he commits treason or other crime."
However, it is not clear that the hasty February 22 vote upholds constitutional guidelines, which call for a review of the case by Ukraine's Constitutional Court and a three-fourths majority vote by the Verkhovna Rada -- i.e., 338 lawmakers.
Pro-Yanukovych lawmakers may also argue that under the 1996 constitution, it should have been the current acting prime minister, Serhiy Arbuzov, who assumed power after Yanukovych's removal.
The 2004 constitution designates the parliament speaker as the No. 2 position.
That discrepancy may soon become irrelevant, with parliament expected to elect a new prime minister no later than February 24. That post is expected to go to either Tymoshenko, fellow Batkivshchyna (Fatherland) member Arseniy Yatsenyuk, or independent lawmaker and chocolate magnate Petro Poroshenko.
Regardless of the outcome, the vote is expected to leave all possible positions of power in the hands of the opposition, according to both the 1996 and 2004 constitutions.
It remains to be seen how the parliament's internal transformation will affect the planned formation of a national-unity government, another concession brokered in the EU deal.
But European officials appear to have tentatively approved the parliament's current progress. In a February 21 tweet published shortly before the Rada's vote to remove Yanukovych, Polish Foreign Minister Radoslaw Sikorski said there had been "no coup" in Kyiv, and that Turchynov had been "legally" elected parliament speaker.Published: 16 Mar 2017
Ford set to launch RS versions of leading SUV models?
With the increase in the SUV market in the UK, it has been previously rumoured that Ford may be looking to roll out the RS performance range across models including the Kuga and Edge. Finally, the rumours may be becoming true.
Ford’s Performance Chief, Dave Pericak, when questioned about the potential of a performance version of a Ford SUV commented that it was definitely “an opportunity” that can be explored. Pushed further about the possibility of the famous RS badge working on the latest 4x4 range he added “If you did what you needed to do to make it perform the way that an RS should, the answer would be sure.”
Search For Your Next New Ford Car Today Click here
With leading manufacturers including Audi, BMW and Porsche offering high performance SUV models, Pericak thinks Ford’s potential version would be a true performance vehicle. Most likely to get the RS SUV makeover is the Ford Kuga, followed by the Edge and possibly the EcoSport. He commented “I think customers love performance. I think the definition of what that means for an SUV might be different than what it means for a Focus or for a Fiesta. But I think that we’ve seen, even in the US, and globally, that people like aggressive-looking cars, they like sporty, they want the power and pick-up and engine improvement, so I think the answer is yes. SUV customers would appreciate performance, for sure.”
The latest Ford SUV range, including the Ford Kuga ST-Line, is available to test drive today at Jennings Ford. Call 0333 414 9750 to speak to a Ford SUV specialist today, or visit a dealership in Stockton, Gateshead or Middlesbrough.Please enable Javascript to watch this video
MOORE, Okla. - An early morning armed-robbery caught on camera, the suspect caught and admitted to the crime.
On Thursday, 18-year-old Skyler Copeland is accused of holding up the Alon convenience store on S. Eastern Avenue.
According to police, he entered the store wearing a mask and pointing a handgun he stole the night before from a nearby business at the cashier demanding money.
"The gun was loaded, it was an old gun, so he very easily could have accidentally fired it," said Moore Police Lt. Kyle Dudley.
The cashier told police he feared for his life.
Copeland allegedly made away with cash, cigarettes, and cigars.
But he was discovered shortly after nearby on the empty early morning streets.
"When there`s a robbery, most of the units available are going to respond to that area and you`ll have a few that will go to the scene but most of them will just be looking around that area," Lt. Dudley said.
He matched the clerk's description and once he was in custody, he admitted to robbing the store.
Officers also matched him to surveillance video from the robbery, Copeland had the stolen goods on him, and the stolen gun.
Copeland has been charged with first degree robbery and second degree robbery.You know who wants Jeb Bush to run for president? The pundits.
It's not that they pine for another Bush in the White House; it's that they need a GOP front-runner, preferably a household name.
The Republican race is too amorphous for their taste. Every story has to mention Rand Paul, Ted Cruz, Chris Christie, Scott Walker, Marco Rubio and on and on. What journalists love is a two-person showdown, especially if each candidate hails from a different wing of the party, paving the way for lots of civil war themes.
Christie was their guy. A brash, blunt blue-stater with a relatively moderate approach. But the governor’s bus hit the bridge pothole, and even after the self-exoneration and those interviews with Megyn Kelly and Diane Sawyer, he is rolling on punctured tires.
So the media are gravitating back toward Jeb, who is plainly ambivalent about running. And here's how it works: reporters call up a bunch of party stalwarts and money men and ask if they'd like to see Bush get in. Sure, these folks say. Then we report a "surge" of interest in Jeb.
The story's foundation is real; Jeb Bush could easily get the backing of the establishment wing of the party, which doesn't want a hyper-conservative nominee in 2016. You could make a case that New York and Beltway pundits would also be more comfortable with a third President Bush than with a President Rand Paul.
But Jeb is no more likely to run this week than he was last week. What's changed is the media climate.
The Washington Post kickstarted the process with this piece:
"Many of the Republican Party’s most powerful insiders and financiers have begun a behind-the-scenes campaign to draft former Florida governor Jeb Bush into the 2016 presidential race, courting him and his intimates and starting talks on fundraising strategy.
"Concerned that the George Washington Bridge traffic scandal has damaged New Jersey Gov. Chris Christie’s political standing and alarmed by the steady rise of Sen. Rand Paul (Ky.), prominent donors, conservative leaders and longtime operatives say they consider Bush the GOP’s brightest hope to win back the White House."
Of course, such stories eventually have to pause and consider the Bush baggage.
The former Florida governor hasn't run for anything since 2002. That was pre-Twitter, and he may not have the agility and determination to withstand today's crazy obstacle course.
This is not his brother's GOP. On issues from education to immigration, he is out of step with the party's Tea Party direction. Bush has openly questioned whether his father—and his dad’s running mate, Ronald Reagan—would fit in today’s Republican Party and an “orthodoxy that doesn’t allow for disagreement.”
Then there's the last name. George W. Bush was not exactly popular when he left office after Iraq, Katrina and a financial crisis. Jeb is his own man, but the association is a powerful one.
Yes, yes, Hillary would be a perfect opponent, neutralizing the royal-family argument. But Bill Clinton will have left the presidency 16 years earlier; W. will have vacated eight years earlier.
As Slate's John Dickerson points out:
"On domestic issues, the Bush family is synonymous among some conservatives with tax increases and federal spending. Perhaps the greatest sin in the modern conservative movement is George H. W. Bush’s 1990 budget deal where he traded tax increases for budget savings. Jeb Bush, on the other hand, has cited his father’s compromise as the epitome of presidential leadership. George W. Bush is criticized for his lack of spending restraint as well as his support for the Troubled Asset Relief Program (which some might count as the second greatest sin)."
And then there's Iraq. It's virtually impossible for Bush to renounce his brother's war, a quagmire that turned out to be extremely unpopular.
Another problem is that conservatives will argue that Bush is cut from the same cloth as John McCain and Mitt Romney (whose backers are pushing Jeb), and therefore destined to lose. As Dickerson notes, Bush "isn’t being called from the counter in coffee shops or Tuesday Tips club meetings. The support is coming from what one GOP veteran referred to as 'the donor class.' This group is also variously referred to as the establishment, Country Club Republicans, and the moderate wing of the party. These Republicans are tired of being defined by the unpopular Tea Party wing of the party."
One quote that jumped out from the Post story involves the specter of Bush fatigue. Former Mississippi governor Haley Barbour was sympathetic, saying: “If his name was Jeb Brown instead of Jeb Bush, he’d be the front-runner.”
But actually, if his name was Jeb Brown, he might never have become governor.
On the plus side, Jeb would inherit his brother's (and father's) fundraising network, and that provides instant credibility.
But will he run? Bush has been making speeches around the country, campaigning for other Republicans, and clearly keeping the door ajar.
And the pundits are happy to keep holding it wide open for him.
Top Twitter Talk
Dems crow about ObamaCare enrollmentThe percentage of Defense Department contract dollars the Pentagon awards via competitive bids has been falling every year since 2008. And its self-imposed goals for contract competition, in place since 2010, have been missed every year since then.
Undersecretary of Defense for acquisition, technology and logistics Frank Kendall, who frequently reminds the acquisition community that competition is the department’s single best tool for getting better prices, is not happy about this. So he’s ordering a new round of policy changes and new guidelines designed to boost DoD’s competition numbers. For example, even though contracting officers already have to justify their decisions on paper when they decide to make a sole-source award, they’ll now have to prove they’ve scoured the marketplace for potential second bidders by first publicizing a request for information and then publishing the results in their decision to go with a noncompetitive contract.
Also, the department is trying to address what it perceives as a gap in safeguards designed to make sure the same contract isn’t awarded as sole-source over and over again. When contracting officers write up a “justification and approval” (J&A) document for a noncompetitive solicitation, they’re already required to lay out plans to make sure there’s competition in the next round. But as of now no mechanism is in place to determine whether they followed through with those plans. So going forward, any time a military department or Defense agency wants to buy a product or service as sole-source more than once, the second J&A will need to explain why the plan for more competition didn’t pan out, and will need the sign-off an acquisition official at least one level higher in the chain of command.
Kendall announced the changes and several others in a memo DoD distributed to defense leaders on Friday. On the same day, Kendall’s office published a new 24-page book of guidelines for building competitive acquisition strategies within DoD.
Advertisement
“Given the declining trend in competition in the department and in light of today’s limited resources, we must maximize our use of direct and indirect competition. Every dollar saved through competition benefits the warfighter and the taxpayers,” Kendall wrote. “The aforementioned guidance and requirements will be incorporated in the Defense Acquisition Guidebook and Defense Federal Acquisition Regulation Supplement.”
For now, the book of guidelines DoD published Friday generally shies away from prescriptive language, and instead, offers best practices for fostering competition and highlights examples of defense programs that have managed to do so in the past, even in cases where there was no direct head-to-head competition.
For instance, the guidelines urge several ways to prevent managers from getting their programs locked into a single vendor, including by embracing an open systems architecture wherever possible so that they can continue to conduct ongoing competitions at the level of individual components. It also admonishes managers to come up with a well-thought-strategy for making sure the government owns just enough of |
. First, we have the action tiles. Each of these represents one of the transition rules depicted in the state diagram above. So if we have a rule that states: “in state A, with 0 on the tape, write a 1, move right, and go into state B“, we’ll end up with a tile that looks like this:
On the top, we have the familiar “X”, which allows us to place it below an existing tape cell, whether it’s a “0” or a “1”. The left side is given a unique color that represents the combination of state “A” and symbol “0“. The bottom of the tile is given a unique color that represents the state the head is moving to, “B”; it’s on the bottom in this tile because the head is moving right (tilt your head 90° to the right if this doesn’t make sense 😉 ). Finally, the symbol being written is at the right; its color matches the left side of our “1” alphabet tile, which will allow us to correctly place a “1” on the tape in the next column.
Action tiles only do half the job of representing the tape head, however. To finish the job, we need tiles that can take an alphabet tile like 0 on the left and a state like B above and propagate the head forward into the state (B,0). This is accomplished with merging tiles, like the following:
We can see how this tile works with the action tile to transfer the state of the head into a new place on the tape. The top color, which represents the state B, pairs with the bottom color of the action tile we just saw, and the left color will pair with the “0” alphabet tile.
With these tiles in hand, we are almost ready to begin our computation, but we’re still missing a way to set up the initial state of the tape, and a way to signal that the computation has halted. First let’s consider how to set up the initial tape state. We need a tile that holds the initial state (A) of the tape head, positioned over a 0 cell, and then, throughout the rest of the column, tiles that represent blanks and can match up with “0” alphabet tiles.
Let’s look at the tape head first. We have to be a bit careful to construct a head that can only be placed once, or we may end up with a multi-headed Turing machine!
To guarantee that we only get one tape head, I’ve used a unique bottom color (“v“) and a unique top color (“^“); the initial blank tiles will use these colors to ensure that the tape head can only be placed once. These initial-“0” tiles will be constructed so that it’s impossible for them to be used anywhere else except at the beginning, by making their left side an “X” — a color that no tile has on its right. They will come in two flavors: those meant to be placed above the tape head, and those that will be placed below:
We can see that due to the unique colors used for the tops and bottoms of these tiles, the tape head can only appear on the board once.
A final technicality is how we get the machine to halt. This is fairly easy: we know that in the final column of computation there will be a motion tile whose right side is either (H,0) or (H,1). So to halt the machine, we just need tiles with matching colors on the left, and either “0” or “1” on the right. This will mean that all the remaining columns are simply copies of the tape’s state when the computation ended. The halt tile looks like:
The key difference between the halt tile and a regular action tile is that its top and bottom are both “X“, which means that only alphabet tiles can be placed next to it. And so in the following columns, the only legal placement of tiles will be alphabet tiles that propagate the final state of the tape forward.
Putting these all together, we get this set of tiles for the 3 state, 2 symbol Busy Beaver:
And, the full computation, in all its glorious 14 steps:
Using this construction, we can use tiles to compute anything that can be computed by a Turing machine. For example, here’s a machine that counts upward toward infinity in binary, starting at 3141592653 (an arbitrarily chosen number 😉 ): the board, the legend. The resulting diagrams look pretty cool, and I ended up making a poster for my wall showing an incrementer and two Busy Beavers.
This all seemed very counter-intuitive to me when I first encountered it. You can easily write a program to figure out a way to arrange a set of tiles, and it will know absolutely nothing about Turing machines or computation (in fact, that’s how these diagrams were generated). But by repeated application of a simple rule (match the colors), all the complexity of universal computation emerges. And yet, the computations done on your laptop are essentially no different: the transistors in your processor and the electrons that flow through them know nothing of computation, but by following physical laws down paths of least resistance they perform incredible feats of computation.
I’ll close by taking this hitherto theoretical and abstract exercise into the real world. An exciting area of research in the past 20 years has been DNA Computing, which attempts to perform massively parallel calculations just by using the molecular action of DNA molecules. As it turns out, it is possible to create DNA molecules with different kinds of “sticky ends”, that will bond only to matching ends — precisely what’s needed to create a molecular Wang Tile. Although this strategy for self-assembling computation has been superseded by DNA Origami, simple Wang Tile-based computations such as XOR have been demonstrated in the laboratory. Science fiction writer Greg Egan even took this concept further, envisioning immense sheets of such molecules, computing simulations of complex ecosystems and even intelligent life.
Hopefully this post has given you a taste of just how many forms computation can take. It doesn’t end here, though. Long before Turing, German mathematician Gottfried Leibniz imagined performing computation using marbles rolling down a specially designed track, using gravity to guide them into computing arithmetic and solving algebraic equations. Turing machines have been simulated within Conway’s Game of Life. And a certain webcomic artist considered the possibility of one person, in the desert, moving rocks to simulate a universe. So next time you use your smartphone to throw some birds at pigs, stop to consider the miraculous nature of computation that makes it possible (I can’t wait for someone to show that you can simulate a Turing machine within Angry Birds).
Addendum: You can obtain the programs used to generate these images here (wangtiles.tar.gz); Python and either Cairo or Pygame+PIL are required (depending on which renderer you use).
Correction: An earlier version of this article used a different construction to ensure a unique tape head. Reddit user dmwit noted that it was not sufficient to guarantee uniqueness, and suggested a replacement, which has been incorporated into the article.
AdvertisementsFCC regulations are fairly easy to follow. Don’t say anything you wouldn’t within earshot of grandma dearest. Stick to her blunt vocab. When speaking of people with same-genital attraction, use words like”queers, trannies, and homosexuals.” All FCC compliant.
But one college radio show was canceled after a host used the word “tranny.” Because hate speech.
“Deplorable Radio” is a weekly show on KUMM hosted by students Brandon Albrecht and Tayler Lehmann. Albrecht told The College Fix in an email that the programming is “a mix of politics, music, and some random musings about current events locally and around the world.” “Did you really have to call the police?” the students ask. “Yes,” she responds. “It’s a violation, you are breaking the law.” “That is a specific hate speech word never allowed on radio,” she tells the students as they pack up, “in the same way that you can never say ‘cocksucker’ on radio.”
Um, except she’s wrong. And gross. The station’s board later admitted the word “tranny” is not against FCC regulations. Their official reason for the show’s cancellation was a complaint that the boys sounded “intoxicated” a few weeks earlier. Instead of standing for the rights of their students, the spineless pansies would rather flap flamboyantly in the wind like loose-wristed homosexuals.
According to First Amendment and media lawyer Bob Corn-Revere, the board’s assertions regarding federal communication laws are false. “The officials are wrong,” Corn-Revere told The Fix via email. “Neither [saying the word ‘tranny’ nor broadcasting while under the influence] is a violation of FCC rules.”
Oops, they were wrong. What this tells us? The school cares not about FCC rules. They’re simply using it as a means to justify censorship of content they don’t like. Content which doesn’t fit the politically correct agenda. Hence we’ve yet to see any official apology or crap being given on behalf of the school officials. Imagine my shock. It’s almost as fake as Caitlyn Jenner’s bewbs.
NOT SUBSCRIBED TO THE PODCAST? FIX THAT! IT’S COMPLETELY FREE ON BOTH ITUNES HERE AND SOUNDCLOUD HERE.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.
Thank you for signing up. For more from The Nation, check out our latest issue
Subscribe now for as little as $2 a month!
Support Progressive Journalism The Nation is reader supported: Chip in $10 or more to help us continue to write about the issues that matter. The Nation is reader supported: Chip in $10 or more to help us continue to write about the issues that matter.
Fight Back! Sign up for Take Action Now and we’ll send you three meaningful actions you can take each 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 we’ll send you three meaningful actions you can take each week.
Thank you for signing up. For more from The Nation, check out our latest issue
Travel With The Nation Be the first to hear about Nation Travels destinations, and explore the world with kindred spirits. Be the first to hear about Nation Travels destinations, and explore the world with kindred spirits.
Sign up for our Wine Club today. Did you know you can support The Nation by drinking wine?
The Federal Communications Commission voted Thursday to eliminate “the First Amendment of the Internet,” and in so doing it delivered the Trump administration’s most brutal blow yet to democracy in America. Ad Policy
Despite overwhelming public support for a free and open Internet, the CFC’s Trump-aligned majority engineered a 3-2 vote to overturn net-neutrality rules that have required Internet service providers to treat all online communications equally—and, in a related move, the commission majority rejected the authority of the FCC to protect a free and open Internet. Commission chair Ajit Pai, the telecommunications-industry lawyer who has done Donald Trump’s bidding in debates on a host of media and democracy issues, has cleared the way for service providers to establish information superhighways for political and corporate elites, while consigning communications from grassroots activists to digital dirt roads.
Addressing the American people on the day when the FCC dismissed millions of appeals on behalf of net neutrality, dissenting Commissioner Mignon Clyburn said Thursday: “What saddens me is that the agency that is supposed to protect you is abandoning you.”
Pai and his associates have moved to create what former FCC commissioner Michael Copps refers to as “a gatekeeper’s paradise,” where “our civic dialogue—the news and information upon which a successful self-governing society depends upon—would be further eroded.”
“Telecom and media consolidation have wreaked havoc with investigative journalism and turned political campaigns into a crass reality show and our ‘news’ into bottom-feeding infotainment,” warns Copps, who now works with Common Cause on media and democracy issues.
I don’t believe democracy can survive on such thin gruel. Throw in [the fact] that we, the people, will be paying ever-more exorbitant prices for this constricted future and you will understand why so many millions of people all across the land have contacted the FCC and Congress telling them to preserve our current net-neutrality rules.
Much of the debate about overturning net neutrality has been focused on the damage the move will do to consumers, and there can be no question that clearing the way for unprecedented profiteering by telecommunications corporations barters off our digital future to the same grifters who have turned broadcast- and cable-media platforms into vast wastelands of commercial excess. “ISPs want to turn the internet into cable,” says Congressman Ro Khanna (D-CA). “[They] want people to pay for every application.” Current Issue View our current issue
But the biggest cost of eliminating net neutrality will be to the American experiment in citizen-driven dialogue, discourse, and decision making. New York Mayor Bill de Blasio says:
The internet makes it easier for people to get organized and amplify their voices. Ending Net Neutrality will make it harder for the people to fight powerful interests.
That assessment was confirmed by activists who rallied outside the FCC headquarters Thursday. “You don’t have the modern day anti-police violence movement without the open Internet,” said editor and cultural critic Jamilah Lemieux. “Saving the Net is a civil rights issue that effects Asian Americans across the US,” said Deepa Iyer, a senior fellow with the Center for Social Inclusion. Symone Sanders, who served as press secretary for the 2016 Bernie Sanders presidential campaign and is now a CNN commentator, said: “There is no resistance without a free and open Internet.”
Describing net neutrality as a racial-justice, social-justice, and economic-justice issue, Congressman Keith Ellison, D-Minnesota, explained that “A free and open Internet allows us to organize and resist. We need that now more than ever.”
Ellison is right. Those who would resist the Trump administration’s most authoritarian and anti-democratic instincts—on issues ranging from voter suppression to freedom of the press to civil rights and civil liberties—have used a free and open Internet to organize throughout 2017. They will need to continue to do so in 2018 and beyond. “If you believe in democracy, you benefit from internet openness.” —FCC commissioner Jessica Rosenworcel
This is why the elimination of net neutrality raises so much concern among democracy activists. If the agendas of the elites move at warp speed while the the ideas, the policy proposals, the protests, and the candidacies of dissenters move at a snail’s pace, existing inequalities in our political and governing processes will be amplified and extended. “Make no mistake,” says Oregon Senator Jeff Merkley, “The FCC’s plan to repeal Net Neutrality [allows] massive corporations, and the rich and powerful individuals who run them, to throttle the Internet at YOUR expense.”
Chairman Pai and his allies refused to maintain an open and honest debate on this issue. “Unlike its predecessors,” noted dissenting Commissioner Jessica Rosenworcel, “this FCC has not held a single public hearing on Net Neutrality.” In a statement that decried “the corrupt process that has brought us to this point,” Rosenworcel said: “This decision puts the Federal Communications Commission on the wrong side of history, the wrong side of the law, and the wrong side of the American public.”
This is not good. Not good for consumers. Not good for businesses. Not good for anyone who connects and creates online. Not good for the democratizing force that depends on openness to thrive. Moreover, it is not good for American leadership on the global stage of our new and complex digital world,
Rosenworcel said of the FCC vote.
I’m not alone with these concerns. Everyone from the creator of the world wide web to religious leaders to governors and mayors of big cities and small towns to musicians to actors and actresses to entrepreneurs and academics and activists has registered their upset and anger. They are reeling at how this agency could make this kind of mistake. They are wondering how it could be so tone deaf. And they are justifiably concerned that just a few un-elected officials could make such vast and far-reaching decisions about the future of the Internet.
So is the FCC’s 3-2 vote the end of it?
No. Net neutrality’s defenders will fight on in Congress, in the courts and at the ballot box to overturn this wrongheaded decision. Groups associated with the Voices for Internet Freedom Coalition—led by the Center for Media Justice, Color Of Change, Free Press Action Fund, the National Hispanic Media Coalition, and 18 Million Rising—intend to fight on for net neutrality with legislative and legal strategies.
They have reason to be confident.
Past legal victories tell us that wrongheaded decisions by the FCC can be blocked and overturned. “Let me be clear: Ajit Pai will not have the last word on Net Neutrality,” says Free Press President Craig Aaron.
Free Press intends to sue the FCC on the basis of its broken process, deeply flawed legal reasoning, willful rejection of evidence that contradicts its preordained conclusions, and absolute disregard for public input. We have a very strong case in court.
State attorneys general will also be suing. California, New York and Washington have all announced plans to sue — and New York Attorney General Eric Schneiderman says he expects to that many more states will join the initiative. “What saddens me is that the agency that is supposed to protect you is abandoning you.” —FCC commissioner Mignon Clyburn
Legal observers say as many as 18 states could sue. In addition to the chief law enforcement officers of California, New York and Washington, the attorneys general of 15 additional states signed a recent letter urging the FCC to delay the Net Neutrality vote: Delaware, Hawaii, Illinois, Iowa, Kentucky, Maine, Maryland, Massachusetts, Mississippi, North Carolina, Oregon, Pennsylvania, Rhode Island, Vermont and Virginia.
“While not all of us may agree on any given policy, we stand together today as prosecutors of fraud and as defenders of the democratic process,” that letter concluded. “It is essential that the Commission gets a full and accurate picture of how changes to net neutrality will affect the everyday lives of Americans before they can act on such sweeping policy changes.”
Both dissenting FCC commissioners, Clyburn and Rosenworcel, used their statements prior to Thursday’s vote to encourage resistance.
“I’m not going to give up—and neither should you,” says Rosenworcel.
If the arc of history is long, we are going to bend this toward a more just outcome. In the courts. In Congress. Wherever we need to go to ensure that Net Neutrality stays the law of the land. Because if you are conservative or progressive, you benefit from internet openness. If you come from a small town or big city, you benefit from Internet openness. If you are a company or non-profit, you benefit from Internet openness. If you are a start-up or an established business, you benefit from Internet openness. If you are a consumer or a creator, you benefit from Internet openness. If you believe in democracy, you benefit from Internet openness.
On a disappointing day for the defenders of democracy, the commissioner concluded by assuring them that this struggle is far from finished.
“So let’s persist. Let’s fight. Let’s not stop here or now,” declared Rosenworcel. “It’s too important. The future depends on it.”Three months before the 1992 election, with Labour and the Conservatives – as now – sweatily close in the opinion polls and a grappling pre-campaign under way, one of the admen Labour were using phoned his Tory counterpart. “Congratulations!” said the Labour adman. “What for?” said the Tory adman. “You’ve won the election,” said the Labour adman. “You’ve hit us on tax and we haven’t responded properly … I’d like to take you for a very expensive meal to congratulate you.” Soon afterwards, the two men – the protagonists in this swaggering book almost always are – had dinner in Soho. Soon after that, the Conservatives defied widespread forecasts of a Labour victory or hung parliament by winning outright, with the largest vote ever secured at a British general election.
Mad Men and Bad Men is a history heavily dependent on good anecdotes. It divides the half century since admen first took on the challenging job of selling British politicians and parties – and the easier one of rubbishing rival political products – into bite-sized chapters, like a tasting menu, which the general reader can quickly work through without spoiling their appetite. Famous admen such as Tim Bell and Charles and Maurice Saatchi strut and slither through the narrative, sometimes even more cunning and shamelessly pragmatic than the politicians. A few years before the Saatchis helped Margaret Thatcher into power with their celebrated late-70s poster assault about joblessness under the Callaghan government, “Labour Isn’t Working”, Delaney notes tellingly that their ultra-ambitious agency produced some posters for Labour. The theme of this long-forgotten campaign? The difficulty of reducing unemployment.
Delaney has written a previous, less politically focused book about modern British advertising, Get Smashed: The Story of the Men Who Made the Adverts that Changed Our Lives (2007). He comes from a family of admen: his father, Barry, and uncles Greg and Tim are all industry names. Mad Men and Bad Men describes the incestuous, sometimes disingenuous world of London advertising with authority and clarity.
The harder task this slim book faces is to bring something new to the story of British politics. Anyone reasonably well-versed in it will already know about the legendary handful of posters and party political broadcasts with a claim to have influenced the results of general elections – not least because Bell et al have profitably reminded us about them ever since. Nor is the fact that the Conservatives usually have the best and most talked-about advertising – something Delaney makes much of – necessarily of great significance any longer. For all their expensive and exhaustively choreographed poster bombardments, the Tories haven’t actually won a general election since their 1992 surprise triumph.
As early as the 50s, the party hired admen to apply market-research methods to the identification and attraction of key voters. At the 1959 election, a Conservative government which had already been in office eight years, usually long enough to disenchant the electorate, almost doubled its Commons majority under the slyly sunny-but-barbed slogan, “Life’s Better with the Conservatives. Don’t Let Labour Ruin It.” Expect to be browbeaten by its descendants over the coming weeks.
Labour began taking an interest in political marketing soon afterwards. During his zestier early governments, Harold Wilson successfully used a trio of advertising, PR and media-management professionals known as the “Three Wise Men”. Twenty years later, in the mid-80s, during another period of Labour preoccupation with matters presentational, the newly hired spin doctor Peter Mandelson was introduced to one of them, Peter Lovell-Davis. “I was invited to his house in Highgate,” Mandelson tells Delaney in one of several revelatory interviews here. “He had this huge archive of [Labour] marketing memorabilia from the 60s and 70s … It became the basis of the changes I eventually made to the party image.”
Delaney’s material about early political advertising is fresh and spiced with surprises – such as the fact that his uncle Tim worked on a forgotten, state-of-the-art anti-Tory campaign in the late 70s for supposedly fusty old Callaghan. The Thatcher-era chapters that dominate the middle of the book are lively but less intriguing. Her chocolatey-voiced favourite, Bell, makes a good interviewee, as always: explaining that the “key trick” to persuading the self-important Tory hierarchy of a particular advertising strategy “was to give them a little nugget of information to take away”, such as “the reason we are using that particular font … is because it is the oldest font in existence”.
But there are no interviews with the Saatchis. And there is no new information about, or interpretation of, the “Labour Isn’t Working” campaign, despite Delaney calling it “the poster that changed everything”. Instead the book breezes along, like an adman cruising down Charlotte Street in a new convertible, or a modern TV documentary skilfully steering clear of anything too complicated or counter-intuitive, with Delaney’s bright, matey prose linking the interviews like a voiceover: “There was still no word from Maurice Saatchi. What was his problem? Well, whatever, I went back for a chat with the creative overlord of his agency, Jeremy Sinclair … ”
In Delaney’s entertaining but rather conventional account, the admen – usually taken at their own estimation, without much cross-checking – dazzle and brag, guzzle champagne and cocaine, and come up with brilliantly clarifying ideas. Meanwhile the politicians are generally cautious and verbose and bureaucratic. He quotes Sinclair, who has worked for the Tories for decades: “Making ads forces you to sieve your thoughts … to get the essence of your argument. All the waffle and detail that a politician can get away in a speech isn’t allowed … We helped politicians understand how to speak to people in a way that they could hear.”
More originally, the book shows that this simplifying – many would say shrinking – of politics has not been a relentless process: the influence of admen over the main parties has ebbed and flowed, depending on their leaders’ attitudes to presentation and communication; on whether the parties can afford the admen; and whether the polls are close enough to make ads seem worthwhile. During the 1983 election campaign the Tory chairman, Cecil Parkinson, became so confident of victory, with his party consistently almost 20% ahead of Labour, that he abruptly cancelled the final week of Conservative advertisements, to the consternation of the admen. “All of those newspaper spreads would have won [Saatchi & Saatchi] all sorts of plaudits,” he tells Delaney. “But [they] would have cost us millions and … we got a majority of 146 without [them].”
Yet for more anxious or vulnerable parties, ads have an unspoken value beyond the electoral. They boost internal morale: during the 2001 election, Delaney deliciously records, Tony Blair and Alastair Campbell “would take diversions during car journeys in order to seek out Labour posters”. Ads can also make voters and the media think a party is slicker, more sure of itself, and wealthier than it actually is.
Whether these symbolic functions will survive much longer in the digital age, with online poster parodists ready to pounce, is something the book considers too briefly – like the present state of political advertising in general. Lynton Crosby and the other shadowy current masters of electoral communication were presumably too busy to talk. Nor does Delaney ever fully acknowledge that one reason ads resonate with voters, beside the adman’s caffeinated alchemy of catchphrase and image, may be that the boring old politicians and traditional media have created a context for them first. “Labour Isn’t Working” hit home partly because Thatcher and her newspaper allies had already convinced many voters that Callaghan’s Britain was grinding to a halt. Without such deep swells in public opinion, as Labour and the Tories may discover this May, political ads are often just froth.
• Andy Beckett’s book about how Britain changed in the early 80s, Promised You a Miracle, will be published by Penguin in September. To order Mad Men & Bad Men for £11.99 go to bookshop.theguardian.com or call 0330 333 6846.By Kiley Kievit
Here is a recipe for Sweet Potato Latkes from Rachel Haus of Kalamazoo.
to read more about how Haus and her family celebrate Hanukkah.
SWEET POTATO LATKES
(adapted from a recipe from the New Prospect Café in Park Slope, Brooklyn, found on epicurious.com)
Makes about 15 latkes
Ingredients:
1 lb. sweet potatoes, peeled or un-peeled
½ cup all-purpose flour
1 t. brown sugar (or to taste)
1 t. baking powder
1 T. garam masala
Salt and pepper to taste
Pinch cayenne pepper, to taste (optional)
2 large eggs, beaten
½ cup milk or coconut or soy milk (approx)
Vegetable oil for frying
Instructions:
Cut potatoes to fit in feed tube of food processor, fitted with shredding blade. After shredding, transfer shreds to a large colander. Alternatively, hand grate potatoes into a large colander. Squeeze or press any liquid out of shreds and discard liquid. Transfer shreds to large bowl.
In a separate bowl, mix flour, sugar, baking powder, garam masala, salt and pepper and cayenne pepper (if using). Pour beaten eggs and just enough milk into the dry ingredients to make a stiff batter. Pour batter onto potato shreds, mixing to coat. Mixture should be moist, but not runny; if too stiff, add more milk. Set aside. Pour approximately ¼ inch of oil (or more or less to taste) in large skillet over medium-high heat. (Too high a heat will brown outside of latkes before inside cooks.)
Using a large spoon, scoop a heaping amount of latke mixture from bowl and slide it into pan. Press down gently with spoon. (Latkes may be any size, but 2-½ to 3 inches in diameter is common.) Repeat until most of skillet is filled.
Fry latkes until well browned on bottom. Then flip each carefully and fry until browned on second side and crispy around edges. Drain finished latkes on paper towels. Repeat process until all latkes are fried, adding oil to skillet as needed.
Latkes are best eaten right away, traditionally with applesauce or sour cream as a topping or on the side. However, they may be reheated in a microwave, a 400-degree oven, refrigerated (store with paper towels between layers) or frozen (freeze in single layers, then transfer to freezer bags).
Click through the link for more articles from Your Home, Your Life magazine. Follow Booth Features on Twitter: @BoothFeatures.We have a HESI benchmark exam tomorrow. This is something that only nursing students have to deal with, so don’t fret if you’ve never heard of it or anything. Basically they gauge our ability to pass our licensing examination throughout our tenure in the program. It’s kind of a big deal, and if any student fails to bench they pretty much make our lives a living hell that following semester. I’ve been doing practice questions in EVOLVE off and on all day, when suddenly….
So here I am, trying not to panic. This blog post is something I’ve had rattling around in my brain for a few days. Since my study time has been rudely cut short I guess I’ll go ahead and write it now.
Let me start by saying that data is a wonderful thing. We live in a time where we have more access to data and information than at any other point in history. This is an amazing achievement. However, it’s not always presented in a way that’s easily digestible.
With education costs rising and income inequality climbing, there are a lot of people who have some understandable anxiety when it comes to choosing a career path. The medical sphere is no exception to this. So let’s look at what the research says about nursing and where it’s headed over the next fifty years.
First, before we go crazy with the nursing stats, we should probably cover two important bits of information in regards to life expectancy/median age and population growth. My main man Hans Rosling will do a much better job at this than I will, so watch this very short video.
What I want you to focus on about this video is that population started skyrocketing around 1850-1950. This was due to a number of factors, not least of which is industrialization and the discovery of penicillin in 1928. During this time, life expectancy rose dramatically and child mortality saw just as big of a drop. But compare this information against the earmarked years in this next video and see what you can see.
Did you catch it? In case you didn’t here’s the answer: the number of children born per woman didn’t really start decreasing quickly until around 1965. That means that for almost a hundred years, people were crankin’ out a lot of kids and almost all of them were surviving into adulthood. They also enjoyed longer lives than had previously ever been seen in human history.
This resulted in the current situation we have in the United States today where the median age is higher than it’s ever been. We’re finally at a point where less children are being born, but we still have all of these people that were minted in the 40s and 50s. And there’s a lot of them. That’s not a bad thing by any means, but it does correlate with my next point rather well. You can see the increase very easily if you graph it out. Fortunately we don’t have to, as the US Census Bureau has done it for us already.
The lion’s share of the healthcare resources in this country go towards the older adult population. That makes sense when you consider the fact that about 80% of people in this age demographic have at least one disease process that requires management. Over 50% have two chronic conditions. Average life expectancy is higher than ever. The older a person lives to be, the more healthcare resources they consume. Again, this is not a bad thing. Just a thing.
What this means for our field is that there will be more and more demand for nurses as the overall population continues to age. Considering that this trend upwards in median age isn’t supposed to level off until about 2050, I think it’s pretty safe to say that my generation of nursing students has little to worry about in the way of employment opportunities. In fact, some would argue that the projected increase in demand is already starting to rear its head.
The vacancy rate for Registered Nurses continues to rise and currently stands at 7.2%. A year ago, this stood at 6.7%. Thirty-four percent (34.3%) of hospitals reported a RN vacancy rate of “less than 5%”. This is a 5.7 point drop from 2014 and a 25 point decrease from 2012. In 2012, 59.5% of the hospitals indicated a vacancy rate of “less than 5%”. This rightward shift, along with the RN Recruitment Difficulty Index, (see page 7) is a clear indication that the RN labor shortage has returned and is becoming more intense. The vacancy rate of “5.0% to 7.49%” saw the greatest increase to 25.7% of the respondents. Of significant concern is that 24.2% of all hospitals have a RN vacancy rate higher than 10%. This is up from 4.8% in 2012. As the economy improves, as RNs no longer delay retirement, as RNs reconsider travel nursing, as part time RNs take less shifts and as the demand for RNs increase expect the vacancy rate to further deteriorate. 2015 National Healthcare Retention & RN Staffing Report
“But Meg,” you might say. “There’s quite a bit of negative chatter among nurses and nursing students about how difficult it is to find a job after graduation. Haven’t nursing graduates had problems finding a job in the past few years? And if they have, won’t these un/underemployed nurses be available to fill the shortage? Won’t we still have an overabundance of labor?”
The answer to the first question is ‘yes.’ Even back in 2005 the field was beginning to reach saturation. The economic crash in 2008 threw every field into a tailspin, and nursing was no exception. This was particularly hard on nurses who had entered their peak earning years, as they were the first to be targeted for layoffs. Even those who kept their jobs faced financial hardship as spouses lost 401Ks and were themselves given the boot. Delayed retirements made life miserable for graduates who were looking to enter the workforce. These forces finally started to break starting in 2012, and by 2013 the data showed a much better outlook for everybody involved.
The answer to the second question is ‘no.’ We’ll get to that in a minute.
The web is full of snapshots of how hard it is to get a job, but those in-depth looks are only worth so much. Anecdotes and case studies are great and all, but if you focus exclusively on them, you’ll miss the forest for the trees. Or the big picture window. Or…something. Anyway. Here’s more data:
With respect to job offers for new graduates 4–6 months after the completion of their programs, the survey found this rate to be 88% and 92% for entry-level BSN and MSN graduates, respectively. Once again the survey found little variation based on school type and institutional characteristics. The job offer rate for BSN graduates did vary by region, from 79% for schools in the West to 82% in the North Atlantic to 91% in the Midwest to 92% in the South. Though employment of graduates in the West lags behind the rest of the country, the job offer rate did increase considerably, by 37 percentage points from the time of graduation to the period 4-6 months out of school (42% to 79%). For entry-level MSN program graduates, the job offer rate at 4-6 months post-graduation ranged from 84% in the West to 92% in the South and North Atlantic to 95% in the Midwest. Employment of New Nurse Graduates and Employer Preferences for Baccalaureate-Prepared Nurses
Those numbers are staggering. Almost 60% of nursing students have a job immediately upon graduation. They can’t even be called RNs yet, because most graduates don’t sit for the NCLEX until around 90 days after they walk down an aisle wearing a pointy hat. There are some regional differences, sure. California is a freakin’ wasteland for new graduates right now which is why the west has such low employment numbers (relatively speaking). But by and large, nursing students are in the 90-somethingth percentile of degrees that lead directly to gainful employment.
Wanna know the kicker?
These numbers are six years old. They were printed in 2010, just two years after the recession hit. In the midst of the biggest economic turmoil since the Great Depression, new grad nurses were still employed at a rate of 88% in the first six months following completion of their degrees. Hundreds of thousands of people have been delaying retirement due to the crash, and still the demand for nursing continued to grow.
Speaking of retirement. We’ve talked about the median age of the population at large. Maybe we should look at the median age of practicing RNs?
|
he doesn't say is more important than what he does says, and while answering a question on whether or not the addition of Wes Welker would change the offense he let loose, "If you look at the success that [Welker] has had in New England, he has been so successful in the slot. He is going to be a tremendous asset to Peyton. He's going to take some pressure off the outside guys, you can't cover [Demaryius Thomas], Eric [Decker] and Wes [Welker]-- [all three] at a time."
Elway went on to mention the talents that Jacob Tamme and Joel Dreessen possess as pass catchers before ending with, "You throw Montee Ball into the running back position and we're going to have a very successful offense."
Why just Montee Ball getting a mention here? He could have said healthy Willis McGahee, he could have said more experienced Ronnie Hillman or Knowshon Moreno. Nope, he says Montee Ball and him exclusively.
Robert Ayers is Elvis Dumervil's replacement, except maybe in nickel formations (which the Broncos played 65% of their defensive snaps in last season).
There were at least two questions from fans about Robert Ayers and Elway held no qualms in stating that the position was Ayers' to lose. Russell also held steady on how much improvement Ayers had between his second season and third season, despite maybe the numbers not being gaudy.
Where Elway did give some extra information was how the team planned to replace Elvis Dumervil, stating that there were three phases, "I think number one Shaun Phillips has some pass rushing experience, number two we push Robert Ayers [in training camp and practice] and number three we drafted Quanterus Smith in the fifth round. We more than replaced Elvis, we were number one in the league last season in sacks. We have a number of guys who can put pressure on the quarterback whether it be through individual [measures] or Jack Del Rio's scheme."
A quick note with the mention of rookie Quanterus Smith, Russell said that the team expects Smith to be rehabbed by June or July at the latest.
"We have a lot of expectations, [Ayers is] replacing Elvis Dumervil. He really has made great strides between two years ago and last year. We'll see how Robert reacts, I think that he'll perform well."
The team is set at the safety position.
It seemed as though once every ten questions Rahim Moore would come up, Elway and Russell were vehement in defending him. Since the AFC Divisional loss even ProFootballFocus has come to Moore's defense, showing that statistically Moore is a top five to top ten NFL safety.
The fans though, it seems like the vocal majority want blood, despite the statistics, despite the proof. So when Elway was asked point blank whether Mike Adams and Rahim Moore were Denver's starting safeties he said, "Adams and Moore are the projected starters, [and] Quinton Carter is coming back off an injury. I think that Mike made some tremendous strides last season and Rahim showed great improvement over the course of last year."
Elway did go on to point out that the team would nab a safety if they felt that he would help at the position, but it felt like the team was all in at safety with their current crew: Mike Adams, Rahim Moore, Quinton Carter and David Bruton.
Though this isn't one of the featured takeaways, I know that people want to know what it was about Kayvon Webster that made Denver draft him so early, "His physicality against the run game; we feel like we've got a safety playing corner. We really thought that he was one of the better corners in the draft. Just the combination of cover skills and physicality."
Russell also mentioned Webster's speed at the combine, although Elway took the tail end by adding, "Size is imperative at the corner position and we were able to find that in Kayvon."
Elway zinged the heck out of Alfred Williams and his distaste for the Sylvester Williams pick.
"I would say this, we're thrilled that Alfred Williams didn't like the pick. He didn't like the pick last year and Derek Wolfe ended up being a tremendous pick for us last year," so Elway really likes Wolfe.
Russell followed up with, "We feel like we got a steal [drafting Williams] at twenty-eight. He's a unique player and very strong on first and second down and he's an even better person than player."
A season ticket holder stated in a later question that he actually coached against Williams. While Williams was playing junior college football at Coffeyville Community College, the caller said he observed, 'Maturity issues and coachability issues,' in Sly.
Russell defended the Broncos first round draft pick though, "We're not concerned about Sly (Sylvester Williams) at all, we have done our homework on him. Sly had some tough times growing up and really worked his way up the totem poll. He's a tough kid and we're going to work with him when he gets here. We're very fortunate to have him."
Denver chose Montee Ball over Eddie Lacy because of an injury to Lacy.
Another question that consistently comes up is why Ball was chosen over Lacy, Russell explained that, "We had both of these backs in similar positions on the [draft] board, the issue with Eddie Lacy in Alabama-- we were worried about a toe injury that he had. We liked them both [about the same], we just worry about Eddie Lacy's medical, we feel like we got a career back in Montee Ball."
Russell went on to wish Lacy the best with his career.
Earlier Elway took an opportunity to again compare Ball to Terrell Davis as he has done in several post draft interviews, "He's a lot like Terrell Davis, we hope that he has a career, even a longer career than Terrell Davis... He's extremely productive and has been extremely durable."
At points throughout the session Elway talked about the $30 million the team had put into stadium improvements and stated that these fan forum sessions would come more often throughout the season. That they would bring in different guests and Gray Caldwell the moderator offered an opportunity for season ticket holders to fill out a questionnaire on improving the experience.
Did anyone else catch the conversation? Anything that I missed? If anyone has questions or wants me to go more in depth feel free to ask in the comments.Toronto public health is investigating a confirmed case of the measles.
Toronto Public Health (TPH) is investigating a lab-confirmed case of measles. This includes following up with individuals who may have been exposed.
The public may have been exposed to measles between august 19-24 including a British airways flight from london(BA0099) to toronto august 19th.
Terminal 3 at Pearson that same evening, as well as the Tennessee tavern on Queen street west in Toronto
the same night.
There's also a warning for people who were either at St. Joseph's Health Centre emergency and or diagnostic
imaging on the 22nd to 24th from 7am to 3 pm and St. Joseph's diagnostic imaging on the 23rd in the afternoon or at night.
All people who may have been exposed are advised to do the followin
1. Check your immunization record to make sure you and your family members are up to date with the measles vaccination (MMR or MMRV). If you are unsure, please check with your health care provider. In general, those born before 1970 are considered protected against measles.
2. Even if you are up to date with your measles vaccine, watch for symptoms of measles. These include a high fever, cold-like symptoms (cough/runny nose), sore eyes or sensitivity to light and a red rash lasting four to seven days.
3. For people exposed on August 23 or 24, if you are susceptible to measles (you have not had two doses of vaccine and you were born after 1970), a dose of vaccine is recommended to prevent the infection. This is only effective if given within three days of the exposure. TPH is offering vaccine to these individuals on:
Saturday, August 26 from 11 a.m. to 2 p.m. at Etobicoke Civic Centre, 399 The West Mall
4. Infants under one year of age, pregnant women and people with weakened immune systems can get very ill with measles. These individuals are encouraged to call our hotline at 416-338-7600 to discuss followup recommendations.
More information on this is on the city's website or toronto.ca/health
with files from the City of Toronto.caPaul Daniels brought a new dimension to the art of the stage magician, mixing complex tricks with jokes and non-stop patter.
An older generation of practitioners had traditionally relied on a long-established formula, performing illusions that were often mysterious but lacking in spontaneity and humour.
Daniels brought a chirpy, cheeky persona to his act - albeit one which was not to everyone's taste - which seemed to thrive on close contact with his audience.
Modern technology allowed TV cameras to home in on the close magic at which he excelled, yet on a larger scale, his illusions - most of which he devised himself - broke new ground in terms of complexity and sophistication.
He was born Newton Edward Daniels in the South Bank area of Middlesbrough on 6 April 1938. His father worked as a projectionist at the local Hippodrome Theatre.
His interest in magic was sparked when he read a book entitled How to Entertain at Parties and he began practising tricks for his family and friends before performing in local youth clubs.
There was an added bonus in that, as a small and shy child, he finally had a skill that would boost his confidence and make people take notice of him.
"From that moment," he later said, "I can safely say that all I ever wanted to do in life was to become a professional magician."
Image caption He got his first TV show in 1978
After leaving grammar school, the young Daniels found a job as a junior clerk in the treasury department of the local council.
He did his national service with the Green Howards, a regiment with close connections to the north-east of England. He found himself posted to Hong Kong, where he continued to hone his skills as a magician by giving impromptu performances to fellow soldiers.
After he was demobbed, he began training as an accountant before joining his parents in a small grocery business. Eventually he set up his own mobile shop.
But magic remained his abiding interest and his evenings were spent performing in local variety clubs. After marrying Jacqueline Skipworth in 1960, the couple often performed together as The Eldanis, an anagram of his surname.
Northern club audiences had a reputation for being somewhat unforgiving and prone to heckle performers who, in their opinion, did not come up to the mark.
According to Daniels, it was abuse from one heckler in Bradford that made him come up with the retort: "You'll like this - not a lot, but you'll like it," which would become his catchphrase.
He developed his style of patter as a way of keeping the audience entertained and as a useful diversion when he had to perform a particularly tricky sleight of hand.
His breakthrough came in 1969 when he was offered a summer season in Newquay. He sold his grocery shop and became a full-time entertainer.
Image caption He first worked with Debbie McGee in a summer season in Great Yarmouth
After an appearance on the talent show Opportunity Knocks, Daniels caught the eye of Johnny Hamp, a senior executive with Granada Television who gave him a regular slot on The Wheeltappers and Shunters Social Club, a variety show compered by Bernard Manning and set in a fictional working men's club.
In 1978, ITV gave him his own Sunday night television show and, the following year, he moved to the BBC with the Paul Daniels Magic Show, which ran for 15 years.
As well as performing his own tricks, Daniels had a segment of the show known as the Bunco Booth, in which he exposed the underhand methods used by street confidence tricksters. A 1985 Easter edition of his show won the prestigious Golden Rose of Montreux.
By this time, he was in both a professional and personal relationship with the woman who became his on-stage assistant, the former ballerina Debbie McGee. The couple, who had first worked together during a 1979 summer season in Great Yarmouth, married in 1988.
At the peak of his fame, he also hosted a number of other television series including the quiz shows Odd One Out, Every Second Counts and Wipeout, and the children's television programme Wizbit.
There was controversy in 1987 when Daniels performed, on live TV, a recreation of a Harry Houdini trick in which he was chained inside a replica of a medieval iron maiden, an instrument of torture. He had to escape before the door swung fully shut to avoid being impaled on spikes.
Image caption His 1987 Halloween show caused controversy
When Daniels failed to appear, the screen cut to black, giving the impression the trick had gone badly wrong. The BBC's phone lines were jammed with calls from viewers, whose concern turned to complaints when it was all revealed to be a hoax. Daniels hadn't even warned family members who had been watching.
He was bitter when the BBC failed to renew his contract but continued to work in the theatre. There was a six-week run in The Magic Man in London's West End in 1994 and he created and staged special effects for hit shows such as Phantom of the Opera.
He often seemed more relaxed on the stage, where he saw himself as an actor, performing what seemed to be the impossible. He preferred to describe himself as a conjuror than a magician.
Daniels and his wife took part in a programme in the series When Louis Met... in which documentary maker Louis Theroux delved into the lives of celebrities with a mocking wit.
He was also mercilessly lampooned on the satirical puppet show Spitting Image, in which his wig would rise up from his head and spin around on its own.
McGee herself became a target of comedian Caroline Aherne's Mrs Merton character, who memorably asked her: "What first attracted you to the millionaire Paul Daniels?". It became one of television's most popular one-liners.
Image caption He bought showbusiness tinsel to magic
Daniels was outspoken in his political views and took a strong line on law and order, once publicly offering to help Ian Huntley, convicted of the Soham schoolgirl murders, to end his own life.
Three years ago at the height of the Jimmy Savile revelations he recalled being routinely offered sex earlier in his career and admitted he couldn't be sure all the women he'd slept with were over 16.
He also had little truck with younger illusionists such as David Blaine, saying: "If people were better educated in the world of magic, he would have greater difficulty than he's having. He's not very original."
If public tastes in TV magicians had changed from Daniels' heyday in the 70s and 80s, he did not let it affect his profile on British TV.
In 2004, he and McGee appeared in the Channel 5 reality TV show The Farm and, two years later, they appeared in the X Factor: Battle of the Stars.
Image caption Daniels appeared on Strictly Come Dancing in 2010
They were the first act voted off the show, after singing Let Me Entertain You by Robbie Williams.
In 2010, Daniels also appeared on the eighth series of BBC One's Strictly Come Dancing, where he was paired with Ola Jordan.
He was the second celebrity voted off, following DJ and actor Goldie.
Of his experience on the show, he told the Daily Mirror: "It got rid of my inhibitions. That's a good thing that came out of Strictly.
"Debbie and I renewed our vows the other week and, for the first time in 22 and a half years, I danced properly with her."The link between dangerous memes and terrorism
The term ‘meme’ was originally coined by Richard Dawkins in his 1976 seminal book, The Selfish Gene. It was meant as a useful analogy to the gene; a thinking tool to aid in understanding the fundamental unit of biological evolution.
Dawkins defined a meme as “an idea, behavior, or style that spreads from person to person.” Just as a gene may enact strategies that run counter to the goals of its host organism (and are hence ‘selfish’), memes can and do often run rampant among individuals, wreaking havoc on their path to proliferation.
Memes don’t care who dies on their way to immortality, so long as they get there.
Modern memes are relatable images or GIFs that quickly convey ideas ranging from simple to nuanced.
In the information age, where the relaying of knowledge is less encumbered by distance, memes have emerged as a popular form of popular and sub culture, the uses of which are as varied as their creators and consumers.
Information is more of a facet of civilization than ever before. Ideas don’t just spread like viruses; they often are viruses, snaking from host brain to social media to new host brains in an endless, prolific cycle.
Most memes are useful to society’s purposes, so they propagate without cause for concern. The idea of the wheel, for example, needs no apologies on its behalf for selfishly spreading from mind to mind. Its utility is so self-evident that it takes work just to view it as a selfish meme.
But host utility is not the only strategy that memes employ to ensure immortality. There are bloodier ways to make a living in the space of our minds.
There have been several terrorist attacks recently, from Barcelona to Libya to the Philippines. The attackers were hosts of a dangerous meme. This meme lost a few copies of itself in the terrorists’ deaths, but news of the attack has already reached the minds of millions of potential new hosts.
This dark meme has effectively emboldened older copies of itself — those in hosts who had held the meme before the attack — and birthed new copies of itself in fresh, young hosts with vulnerable minds.
This meme is no more ruthless than that of the idea-wheel, but this time, blood follows its spores.
The meme to which I am referring, of course, is Islamic extremism.
Common counterarguments, at this point, run as follows: The vast majority of Muslims are not terrorists, so how could Islam play a role?
Opponents might also say: The West has attacked the Muslim world far more than vice versa, and only an Islamophobe would entertain such an idea.
Viewing Islamic extremism as a dangerous meme depersonalizes the issue. The degree to which this meme contributes to suicide bombings is unclear, but it is surely more than zero.
Incidentally, this meme-view implies that we ought not hate terrorists — at least those who are sincere in their faith. They’ve simply been infected by the wrong meme.
We are in a war of memes. Sanctimony, platitudes and obfuscation will not help us. Only better memes — better ideas — will. Those who are vulnerable to extremism simply lack access to constructive ideas. Starved for the opportunity to create, they are indoctrinated into a system of destruction.
We have forgotten what makes our civilization great, and we have left barren and cold the values we once held universally, for all people, in all places, for all time. Only when we recall the reasons why we cherish our institutions and freedoms will we realize that there is no room for double standards here. The memes of the West thrived because they went the way of the wheel.
We can’t bomb a meme into oblivion, but we can out-compete it. And we can’t begin to do that until we admit that our memes are better than those of the terrorists — without apology, without masochism. Only with reason and explanation.
Columnist Logan Chipkin is an ecology and evolution graduate student and can be reached at [email protected]Avastin can stabilize tumors in ovarian cancer, studies find
Two independent groups working with advanced-stage cases say the drug extended the period before the disease worsened by more than 3.5 months.
Ovarian cancer affects an estimated 200,000 women worldwide and causes 125,000 deaths each year, including more than 15,000 in the U.S. The cancer is particularly difficult to treat because it usually found after it has already spread to other organs. Surgery can remove only some of the tumors, and the two chemotherapy drugs most commonly used aren't very good at killing the cancer cells left behind.
Though Avastin has not been shown to prolong the lives of women with ovarian cancer and does come with significant side effects, it offers some hope for treating what remains the deadliest of gynecologic cancers, researchers said.
The findings, published in Thursday's edition of the New England Journal of Medicine, come less than a week after the European Commission approved Avastin for treating women newly diagnosed with advanced ovarian cancer. The drug, known generically as bevacizumab, has not yet been approved by the Food and Drug Administration to treat ovarian cancer in the U.S.
Avastin can stabilize tumors in women suffering from advanced-stage ovarian cancer, extending the period before the disease worsens by more than 3.5 months, according to the results of two large, international clinical trials conducted by separate research teams.
But the study results suggest that treatment for ovarian cancer could improve for the first time in 15 years, said Dr. Robert Burger, a surgical oncologist at Fox Chase Cancer Center and lead author for one of the studies.
"I think we finally have a third component of treatment that works differently and that may greatly complement our therapeutics for ovarian cancers," he said.
Avastin is a biological antibody that interferes with a growth factor that cancer cells need to grow new blood vessels. When used in concert with chemotherapy, the drug helps keep cancers that have metastasized from growing and spreading. The FDA has approved the drug for use in a number of different cancers, including non-small-cell lung, kidney, brain and colon cancer.
Most recently, its use in treating breast cancer has become a source of controversy, as the FDA last month withdrew its approval of Avastin for patients with advanced breast cancer because the modest benefits were not seen as outweighing the drug's side effects. Physicians, however, can still prescribe Avastin off-label.
Burger's team, known as the Gynecologic Oncology Group, looked at what's called progression-free survival — the length of time before the cancer gets worse — in 1,873 women with newly diagnosed stage III and stage IV ovarian cancers, which typically have 5-year survival rates ranging from 18% to 45%. The investigators found that patients who received Avastin throughout their chemotherapy treatment experienced 14.1 months of progression-free survival, compared with the 10.3 months for patients who received standard chemotherapy plus a placebo. (Patients who received Avastin only during the initial treatments had 11.2 months of progression-free survival.)
The second study, by the International Collaboration on Ovarian Neoplasms, looked at 1,528 ovarian cancer patients and found a smaller difference in progression-free survival — 24.1 months for those who took Avastin versus 22.4 months for those who didn't.
But when they focused on the 465 patients with the most advanced cancers, they found a bigger benefit — 14.5 months with standard therapy alone and 18.1 months with Avastin added. They also found that overall survival for these patients was better with Avastin, at 28.8 versus 36.6 months.
On the whole, however, the researchers said they would not able to say much about overall survival rates until the patients had been tracked for a few more years.
The studies documented some notable side effects from the drug, including an increased risk of hypertension and gastrointestinal wall disruption, when a hole develops in the gastrointestinal tract. But these problems did not affect patients' quality of life, both studies found.
Avastin does not come cheap. The drug, made by Genentech Inc., can cost about $50,000 to $100,000 a year, which may be a lot to pay for just a few months more of remission, said Dr. Joanne Mortimer, director of the Women's Cancers Program at the City of Hope Comprehensive Cancer Center in Duarte. Many insurance companies cover at least some of that cost.Image copyright Reuters Image caption Mr Kanter is a centre for the Oklahoma City Thunder basketball team
An NBA basketball player from Turkey, Enes Kanter, has been stopped at a Romanian airport, after Turkey cancelled his passport.
Kanter, an Oklahoma City Thunder star, posted a video on Twitter saying this was due to his political views.
He blamed Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan, who he called "a bad, bad man", and a "dictator".
Kanter, who turned 25 on Saturday, was later allowed to fly to London. It is unclear what documents he was using.
"They've been holding us here for hours," Kanter said in his video. "The reason behind it is, of course, my political views."
He posted a similar message in Turkish.
Romanian border police confirmed facts related to Mr Kanter's story, but did not speculate over the reasons.
Image copyright Twitter Image caption The professional athlete did not seem to hold a grudge against local police
In a statement - accompanied on social media by a photo of the sports star with police - border officials said he was detained at around 13:00 (12:00 GMT) after arriving on a plane from Frankfurt.
His passport was not valid, having been cancelled by "the issuing state", it said, and they could not allow him to enter Romania. But he was not under arrest.
He left at around 17:00 on a flight bound for London, it said.
When mentioning President Erdogan, Kanter told his audience: "You guys know him by, you know, he has attacked the people in Washington."
Media playback is unsupported on your device Media caption Protesters injured outside Turkish embassy in Washington
He was referring to a controversial clash between protesters and men apparently linked to Mr Erdogan's security detail during the Turkish leader's recent trip to the US.
Kanter is a supporter of Fethullah Gulen, the US-based cleric blamed by the Turkish president for inciting a failed coup in 2016.
Turkey has demanded the preacher, who runs a network of schools in Turkey, be extradited, but the US has said it will only do on the basis of evidence.
In August 2016, Kanter cut ties with his family after his father publicly disowned him in the Turkish press.
Since the failed coup, suspected Gulenist supporters have been purged from jobs in Turkey. Many have been arrested.Littering the field behind the workshop of giant-building firm Fiberglass Animals, Shapes, and Trademarks (FAST) is an eerie collection of titanic molds, left over from almost every job they’ve ever done.
FAST specializes in creating giant, eye-grabbing figures and items, the likes of which one might see outside of kitschy roadside restaurants and gas stations across the country. After a job, the company keeps the mold, which is often bigger than the piece itself, and stores it in the field out back. Now there are hundreds of giant unpainted forms scattered all across the lot in every imaginable variety and shape. There are giant skulls and colossal dogs; over-sized Santa Clauses and titanic mice. The fiberglass of the molds has weathered, giving the molds the feeling of ancient stone, as though the yard was left over from some surreal ancient culture.
The operators of FAST welcome visitors who want to stroll among the bizarre rural collection. They do warn you to look out for hornet’s nests, although whether they mean giant or otherwise is unclear.We are giving out free pocket editions of the white paper that started it all.
In 2009, the concept of cryptocurrency was introduced in “Bitcoin: A Peer-to-Peer Electronic Cash System” by Satoshi Nakamoto, or as it has come to be known, The Bitcoin White Paper.
Coin Center, the leading Bitcoin policy research and advocacy group, has created a special pocket edition of the Bitcoin white paper. Due to popular demand, we are making this booklet FREE for a limited time. All we ask is that you share this giveaway.
Sign up to receive your FREE Coin Center edition pocket Satoshi White Paper.
[This form is closed]
Please allow up to 60 days for fulfillment. Offer limited to United States residents due to shipping costs.
Coin Center is a not for profit 501(c)4 organization. Contributions are not deductible for income tax purposes. No goods or services will be received in return for this gift. Coin Center funds will not be used to make contributions to candidates for elected office or political committees that support such candidates.One person has died at a Havelock North nursing home from a gastric illness which may be connected to the township's contaminated water supply.
Photo: 123rf
The Hawke's Bay District Health Board confirmed today that a spate of gastric illnesses stemmed from contamination in the water supply, though the cause of the contamination is not yet known.
Dozens of people were admitted to hospital on Friday and Saturday, with eight taken to the emergency department.
DHB chief executive Kevin Snee said a person had died, but could not confirm the death was caused by drinking contaminated water.
"We've seen eight quite unwell patients in one residential care home, and we've also, over the last 24 hours, had a death in a nursing home which may or may not be related to this problem, but is the consequence of a gastric-like illness."
The DHB said it was at a loss as to when the contaminant entered the water supply.
It said tests had been carried out on the water following heavy storms last weekend, but had not shown any contaminants present.
Further tests were performed on Friday after widespread gastric illnesses struck the township, which showed e coli had entered the water supply.
The DHB confirmed on Saturday the water supply was contaminated.
Hastings district mayor Lawrence Yule said while e coli was not itself a harmful bacterium, it was an indicator that other harmful bacteria could be present.
"It looks most likely, based on what we now know, that campylobacter may actually be the disease. But we won't actually know that in proper terms until proper tests are completed early next week, even right up until Wednesday."
Campylobacter is a bactium that causes campylobacteriosis, a gastrointestinal infection characterised by diarrhoea, vomiting, fever and pain.
It was easily removed from water supplies through chlorine treatment, which the council introduced on Friday.
Hundreds of schoolchildren were absent from school on Thursday and Friday, with Havelock North High School saying nearly a fifth of all students had missed school - many due to stomach illnesses.
In a statement on Friday, Te Mata School said about three-quarters of its 120 absences yesterday were due to stomach illness.
Havelock North High School principal Greg Fenton said nearly 20 percent of the school's roll was absent on Friday with 170 students of the school's 900 away.
"The majority of them had phoned in with stomach illnesses," he said.
Other affected schools included Hereworth School, Woodford House and Iona College.
The DHB said it would know more about the cause of the illness by Wednesday next week.Image caption Amnesty says severe sentences for young offenders often do not take account of mitigating factors
Amnesty International has called for the US to stop sentencing juveniles to life in prison without parole.
More than 2,500 adults are in US jails for crimes committed as a child - under current rules they will never be freed.
In its new report, Amnesty says the practice is incompatible with the basic principles of juvenile justice.
The US and Somalia are the only two countries not to have ratified a UN convention that bans life in jail without parole for under-18 year olds.
'Potential for rehabilitation'
Amnesty says offenders as young as 11 have faced such sentences in the US.
"In the USA, people under 18 years old cannot vote, buy alcohol, lottery tickets or consent to most forms of medical treatment," said Natacha Mension, of the human rights group.
AMNESTY CASE STUDY Christi Cheramie was jailed for life without parole in 1994 in Louisiana when she was 16 years old. She was convicted of second-degree murder in the killing of her 18-year-old fiance's great aunt. Cheramie says he did it. She says she pleaded guilty just before her trial in an adult court began to avert a potential death sentence. A psychiatrist who saw Cheramie before trial said she seemed "fearful of crossing" her fiance. Her childhood was marked by sexual abuse. At age 13, she was admitted to a psychiatric clinic after suicide attempts. In 2001, Cheramie tried to withdraw her guilty plea, but the request was denied. Now 33, she has a high-school equivalency diploma and a degree in agricultural studies. A warden says Cheramie is "worthy of a second chance". She is applying to the state prison board for executive clemency.
"But they can be sentenced to die in prison for their actions. This needs to change."
More than half of US states have approved the use of mandatory life sentences without parole for some serious crimes, such as murder.
The US Supreme Court has already acted on some aspects of youth sentencing - and a review is underway.
In May last year it banned sentences of life without parole for minors in non-murder cases.
Earlier this month, it agreed to consider the issue in relation to homicide cases, too; a decision is not expected until next year.
Amnesty's report, This is where I'm going to be when I die, says such sentences are handed down without considering factors such as history of abuse or mental health.
"We are not excusing crimes committed by children or minimizing their consequences, but the simple reality is that these sentences ignore the special potential for rehabilitation and change that young offenders have," said Ms Mension.
Amnesty wants the US to ratify the UN Convention on the Rights of the Child, which has been in force for two decades.
It prohibits the imposition of life imprisonment without the possibility of release for any offence committed by under-18-year-olds.There is perhaps no one among us, particularly at this point in our nation’s history, who is not facing a crisis on some level. Maybe yours is of a financial nature. Maybe your home is in foreclosure or you are facing a short sale. Perhaps your marriage needs healing or you are newly bereaved. Maybe you lost your job and are unable to find meaningful employment. Whatever your suffering is on a physical, fiscal, mental, emotional or spiritual level, one thing is certain – your problem appears to be immoveable, impassable, and simply impossible to solve! Perhaps you even feel like giving up. In other words – you have become desperate!
Whatever challenges you are facing in life– know that there is a powerful Saint of the early Church who eagerly awaits your call for help. Even now, in our present age, he stands ready to robustly assist you in the seemingly impossible problems of life.
I speak of a Saint of which little is known. A Saint who was ordinary until Christ made him extraordinary. A Saint mentioned little in the Gospels – but who broke his silence to write a short, powerful letter which speaks to the challenges of our times. A Saint who bore the ultimate witness, dying a martyr’s death with a spirit steeped in courage.
I speak of Saint Jude – the Saint of the impossible! The inconsolable! The desperate! A Saint who has never been known to fail! Saint Jude is specifically invoked in despairing situations because his New Testament letter, The Letter of Saint Jude, stresses to us the importance of persevering despite harsh and difficult times. Therefore, he has been appointed as the Patron Saint of desperate cases. And I can tell you from experience, he takes his title very seriously! In our challenging times, would it not be wise to befriend such a faithful ally?
As one of the twelve apostles hand-picked by our Savior, this cousin of Jesus and brother of James has come to my assistance countless times over the years. One of the most extraordinary instances was when I was down to the wire in having to find a rental home quickly after selling my condo. Not having any luck in my search – and needing to find a home within two weeks, I was growing more desperate by the hour. I decided to take it to Saint Jude. On the advice of a friend, I wrote out a list of everything I was looking for in a home – a fireplace, wood flooring, two car garage, office space, desert landscaping, not to mention, something to fit my budget! I began my novena, praying to Saint Jude to intercede before the Most Holy Trinity. Throughout my novena, I also continued to thank Saint Jude for his assistance.
Time went on and I kept checking the MLS with no luck. However, late on the eighth night of the novena, I suddenly felt a strong urge to get up and check the latest MLS listings despite having checked them just a few hours before. On the top of the MLS list was a home that just posted. Viewing the photos, I could easily see it was just what I wanted! I was able to check off each item on my wish list, and noticed the home offered even more than I imagined. Due to the competitive market, I called my realtor immediately and we were able to file the necessary paperwork the next morning. I moved in less than a week later! Saint Jude had come through big time and I am remain eternally grateful!
This was not the first time Saint Jude so deftly answered my prayers. He again came to my rescue a few months ago when I found myself in the exact same situation. I again created my wish list for my next home and began my novena. Once more, this powerful Saint heard my pleas and answered them in a way that could only have come from above.
As an act of thanksgiving, I promised him I would write an article about his wondrous intercession, encouraging others to trust in his powerful intercession before the Most Holy Trinity. However, I don’t want to tout Saint Jude as a spiritual candy machine who answers prayers exactly as we want, when we want and how we want. As with all prayer, you must be willing to accept whatever answer comes, even if it is not exactly what you hoped for or expected. I know this from experience. There have been many prayers in my life answered with a resounding, “No!” Only later did I see the wisdom and providential protection of God in not answering some of my prayers. So do not despair if you do not receive an immediate answer following your novena. From our faith, we know God’s timing is perfect. So keep hope that Saint Jude is indeed working with God in answering your prayers in the best possible way for you! At the very least, you will experience the necessary peace and strength to carry on knowing that you are |
more inclusive and tolerant than modern day Christians.
(Image via Medill DC on Flickr)New research from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention has revealed that diagnoses for attention deficit hyperactivity disorder (ADHD) are on the rise, with one out of every five high school-aged boys receiving the medical diagnosis, the New York Times reported.
Overall, 11 percent of school-age children are being diagnosed with ADHD, the study found, and the numbers have been on the rise over the last decade.
Approximately 6.4 million children between the ages of 4 and 17 have received an ADHD diagnosis, which is a 16 percent increase from the amount of children diagnosed with ADHD in 2007, as well as 53 percent increase over the past 10 years.
In terms of medication, the CDC also found that two-thirds of those diagnosed with ADHD are taking prescription stimulants such as Ritalin and Adderall. While these drugs can be beneficial for those with hyperactivity, they also have worrying side effects – such as addiction and anxiety.
“Those are astronomical numbers. I’m floored,” Dr. William Graf, a pediatric neurologist in New Haven and a professor at the Yale School of Medicine, told the New York Times. “Mild symptoms are being diagnosed so readily, which goes well beyond the disorder and beyond the zone of ambiguity to pure enhancement of children who are otherwise healthy.”
To get these findings, the CDC interviewed more than 76,000 parents about their child’s medical history. Fifteen percent of school-aged boys were found to have ADHD, while 7 percent of girls had the disorder. For those of high school age, 10 percent of girls had received the diagnosis, compared to 19 percent of boys.
Many doctors believe the numbers may reflect better recognition of the disorder, others are worried about over-diagnosis of ADHD, which can ultimately lead to unnecessary treatment with stimulant drugs. Some speculate that since these drugs – such as Ritalin, Adderall, Concerta and Vyvanse – help to improve focus, they are being prescribed more and more to help students perform better in school – not to help treat ADHD.
The current procedure for diagnosing ADHD involves subjectively speaking with parents, teachers and patients about possible symptoms, while ruling out other medical explanations. There is no definitive test for the disorder.
Click for more from the New York Times.US Immigration held Dean for hours, threatened to deport him and would not allow him to see his managers while flying to LAX for a concert.
US Immigrations (TSA) are known for their mistreatment of people entering the US. Cases in the past have included incredibly intrusive body searches and angrily questioning those who do not speak English. It seems like this time, Dean was questioned for hours and it caused the delay of his Los Angeles concert.
The artist went to Instagram to speak up, after the traumatizing incident. Here’s what his management revealed about the incident:
“Dean was supposed to arrive in LA Thursday morning with plenty of time to get some rest and rehearse for the show. For some reason, the immigration personnel in the U.S. city where Dean had a layover on the way to LA detained Dean and refused his entry into the US. Even though Dean has the proper Visa they put him through intense questioning, took his cell phone, took all his luggage, placed him in a holding facility, and were going to deport him to Korea. The immigration officials would not give any explanation why Dean was being held and would not let anyone talk to him or see him. His management and label worked frantically to try to understand what was happening and how to get Dean released. Dean and his team kept fighting because Dean wanted to get to LA to perform for his fans. Finally, early Friday morning, the day of the show, Dean was released and had just enough time to fly to LA. The doors were opened late because Dean was still rushing to get to the venue. He got to the venue and didn’t even have time to do a proper sound check. Dean performed not having slept in almost 2 days. Even with everything Dean had been put through he insisted on not canceling the show. He still performed almost all the songs he has released to date for his fans. Dean would like to thank everyone who helped resolve the misunderstanding. Dean especially wants to thank all his fans for the love and support they showed him. He always appreciates his fans support but it especially meant a lot after what he was put through the two days leading up to the show.”
In the past, Oh My Girls also went through issues at the border, although they were accused of not having the proper visas. The group was assumed to be sex workers by US Immigration due to their young age.
Hopefully, TSA is able to fix their behavior in the future or at least be less threatening to those entering the US. Well, maybe not, with Trump as President.Overview (5)
Mini Bio (2)
Hedy Lamarr, the woman many critics and fans alike regard as the most beautiful ever to appear in films, was born Hedwig Eva Kiesler in Vienna, Austria. She was the daughter of Gertrud (Lichtwitz), from Budapest, and Emil Kiesler, a banker from Lember (now known as Lviv). Her parents were both from Jewish families. Hedwig had a calm childhood, but it was cinema that fascinated her. By the time she was a teenager, she decided to drop out of school and seek fame as an actress, and was a student of theater director Max Reinhardt in Berlin. Her first role was a bit part in the German film Geld auf der Straße (1930) (aka "Money on the Street") in 1930. She was attractive and talented enough to be in three more German productions in 1931, but it would be her fifth film that catapulted her to worldwide fame. In 1932 she appeared in a German film called Ecstasy (1933) (US title: "Ecstasy") and had made the gutsy move to be nude. It's the story of a young girl who is married to a gentleman much older than she, but she winds up falling in love with a young soldier. The film's nude scenes created a sensation all over the world. The scenes, very tame by today's standards, caused the film to be banned by the US government at the time.
Hedy soon married Fritz Mandl, a munitions manufacturer and a prominent Austrofascist. He attempted to buy up all the prints of "Ecstasy" he could lay his hands on (Italy's dictator, Benito Mussolini, had a copy but refused to sell it to Mandl), but to no avail (there are prints floating around the world today). The notoriety of the film brought Hollywood to her door. She was brought to the attention of MGM mogul Louis B. Mayer, who signed her to a contract (a notorious prude when it came to his studio's films, Mayer signed her against his better judgment, but the money he knew her notoriety would bring in to the studio overrode any moral concerns he may have had). However, he insisted she change her name and make good, wholesome films.
Hedy starred in a series of exotic adventure epics. She made her American film debut as Gaby in Algiers (1938). This was followed a year later by Lady of the Tropics (1939). In 1942, she played the plum role of Tondelayo in the classic White Cargo (1942). After World War II, her career began to decline, and MGM decided it would be in the interest of all concerned if her contract were not renewed. Unfortunately for Hedy, she turned down the leads in both Gaslight (1940) and Casablanca (1942), both of which would have cemented her standing in the minds of the American public. In 1949, she starred as Delilah opposite Victor Mature's Samson in Cecil B. DeMille's epic Samson and Delilah (1949). This proved to be Paramount Pictures' then most profitable movie to date, bringing in $12 million in rental from theaters. The film's success led to more parts, but it was not enough to ease her financial crunch. She made only six more films between 1949 and 1957, the last being The Female Animal (1958).
Hedy retired to Florida. She died there, in the city of Casselberry, on January 19, 2000.
- IMDb Mini Biography By: Volker Boehm and BlueGreen
Hedwig Eva Maria Kiesler was born in Vienna, Austria, to a banker and his wife. Hedwig, who obviously became Hedy, had a rather calm childhood, but it was cinema that fascinated her. By the time she was a teenager she decided to drop out of school and seek fame as an actress. Her first role was a bit part in the German film Geld auf der Straße (1930) (aka "Money on the Street") in 1930. She was attractive and talented enough to be in three more German productions in 1931, but it would be her fifth film that catapulted her to worldwide fame. In 1932 she appeared in a German film called Ecstasy (1933) (US title: "Ecstasy") and had made the gutsy move to be nude. It's the story of a young girl who is married to a gentleman much older than she, but she winds up falling in love with a young soldier. The film's nude scenes created a sensation all over the world. The scenes, very tame by today's standards, caused the film to be banned by the US government at the time. Hedy soon married Fritz Mandl, a munitions manufacturer and a prominent Austrofascist (not the same as Nazi). He attempted to buy up all the prints of "Ecstasy" he could lay his hands on (Italy's dictator, Benito Mussolini, had a copy but refused to sell it to Mandl), but to no avail (there are prints floating around the world today). The notoriety of the film brought Hollywood to her door. She was brought to the attention of MGM mogul Louis B. Mayer, who signed her to a contract (a notorious prude when it came to his studio's films, Mayer signed her against his better judgment, but the money he knew her notoriety would bring in to the studio overrode any "moral" concerns he may have had). However, he insisted she change her name and make good, wholesome films. Hedy made her American film debut as Gaby in Algiers (1938). This was followed a year later by Lady of the Tropics (1939). In 1942 she landed the plum role of Tondelayo in the classic White Cargo (1942). After World War II her career began to decline and MGM decided it would be in the interest of all concerned if her contract were not renewed. Unfortunately for Hedy, she turned down the leads in both Gaslight (1940) and Casablanca (1942), both of which would have cemented her standing in the minds of the American public. In 1949 she appeared as Delilah opposite Victor Mature's Samson in Cecil B. DeMille's epic Samson and Delilah (1949). This proved to be Paramount Pictures' most profitable movie to date, bringing in $12 million in rental from theaters. The film's success led to more parts, but it was not enough to ease her financial crunch. She was to make only six more films between 1949 and 1957, the last being The Female Animal (1958). Hedy then retired to Florida, where she died on January 19, 2000.
- IMDb Mini Biography By: BlueGreen (partly)
Spouse (6)
Trade Mark (4)
Natural brunette hair
Pale skin and green eyes
Voluptuous figure
Seductive deep voice
Trivia (40)
Inspired by an early Philco wireless radio remote and player piano rolls, she worked with composer George Antheil (who created a symphony played by eight synchronized player pianos) she invented a frequency-hopping system for remotely controlling torpedoes during World War II. The invention was examined superficially and filed away. In 1959 it was developed for controlling drones that would later be used in Viet Nam. Frequency hopping radio became a Navy standard by 1960. Due to the expiration of the patent and Lamarr's unawareness of time limits for filing claims, she was never compensated. Her invention is used today for WiFi, Bluetooth, and even top secret military defense satellites. While the current estimate of the value of the invention is approximately $30 billion, during her final years she was getting by on SAG and social security checks totaling only $300 a month.
Had three children: Anthony Loder (born March 1, 1947), Denise Hedy Loder (born May 29, 1945), James Loder (born March 6, 1939; Hedy's husband John Loder adopted him October 16, 1939 as James Markey Lamarr).
Sued Mel Brooks for mocking her name in his film Blazing Saddles (1974) by naming a character "Hedley Lamarr". They settled out of court.
In April 1998 she sued software company Corel Corp. for using her photo on the cover of its product CorelDRAW.
After a screen test, it was Louis B. Mayer who changed her last name to Lamarr in honor of silent film star Barbara La Marr
Arrested for shoplifting in January 1966. Found not guilty.
Arrested for shoplifting in 1991. She was found guilty at trial and sentenced to one year of probation.
During her marriage to screenwriter Gene Markey, the two adopted a son, James. She soon after gave birth to two children, Denise Hedy and Antony, while married to actor John Loder
She received an award from the Electronic Frontier Foundation in 1997 for her pioneering work in spread-spectrum technology.
Was co-inventor (with composer George Antheil ) of the earliest known form of the telecommunications method known as "frequency hopping", which used a piano roll to change between 88 frequencies and was intended to make radio-guided torpedoes harder for enemies to detect or to jam. The method received U.S. patent number 2,292,387 on August 11, 1942, under the name "Secret Communications System". Frequency hopping is now widely used in cellular phones and other modern technology. However, neither she nor Antheil profited from this fact, because their patents were allowed to expire decades before the modern wireless boom.She received an award from the Electronic Frontier Foundation in 1997 for her pioneering work in spread-spectrum technology.
For her appearance in Ecstasy (1933), she has been credited as being the first nude woman as well as portraying the first sex-scene in film history (scenes were cut and additional ones added in order to be able to release it in some countries). However, she was actually at least 18 years too late to be the first nude woman in film, as both Inspiration (1915) and Lois Weber's Hypocrites (1915) had beaten her to it.
Her profile was the most requested in the 1940s by women to their plastic surgeons.
Biography in: "American National Biography". Supplement 1, pp. 337-338. New York: Oxford University Press, 2002.
The mansion used in The Sound of Music (1965) belonged to her at the time.
The first Inventor's Day in Germany was held in her honor on November 9, 2005, on what would have been her 92nd birthday.
Became a naturalized US citizen on April 10, 1953.
Dr. Kleiner's pet head-crab "Lamarr" in the computer game Half-Life 2 (2004) is named after her.
Was considered for the role of Ilsa Lund in Casablanca (1942), but Ingrid Bergman was cast instead. When Julius Epstein, one of the film's several screenwriters, was trying to "pitch" (explain the plot) to producer David O. Selznick, he started a long, drawn-out summary but finally wrapped up with "Oh, what the hell! It's going to be a lot of shit like Algiers (1938)!", which was one of her starring films.
Was cast in the movie Picture Mommy Dead (1966), but fired on February 3, 1966, when she did not show up for the first day of shooting.
Was the inspiration for the DC Comics antiheroine and Batman's love interest, Catwoman.
She was married six times.
Although she earned a great deal of money during her career, she lost her fortune with her production company. She died impoverished in Florida in 2000.
Her father was a bank director and her mother was a pianist.
After an education that included ballet and dancing lessons and learning to speak such languages as English, Italian and Hungarian, she rounded off her apprenticeship by attending a Swiss boarding school.
Her nude and sex scenes in Ecstasy (1933) caused a scandal in Europe at the time. Even Benito Mussolini had a copy of the movie in his private possession. Today these nude scenes looks harmless.
When Ecstasy (1933) was showed in the cinemas the name Hedy Kiesler was the talk of the town. However, instead of a great film career, she followed with a marriage to Austrian munitions manufacturer Fritz Mandl. She retired from the film business at her husband's request and devoted herself to the marriage. Mandl tried to buy up all existing copies of "Extase" but was unsuccessful. The marriage turned out to be a disaster, however--her husband beat her regularly and was an ardent Nazi supporter--and she escaped from the marriage and her home country and fled to England, where she met producer Louis B. Mayer, who changed her name to Hedy Lamarr in honor of silent-screen star Barbara La Marr
She admitted that she made one of her biggest career mistakes when she turned down the leading role in Casablanca (1942).
She studied at Max Reinhardt's theater school at the Deutsches Theater.
She was the daughter of Gertrud (Lichtwitz) and Emil Kiesler. Her father was born in Lviv (now in Ukraine) and her mother was born in Budapest, Hungary. Both were from Jewish families.
She was awarded a Star on the Hollywood Walk of Fame at 6247 Hollywood Blvd. on February 8, 1960.
Met 'Max Reinhardt (I)' (v) at a party in 1929 when she was 15.
When she first arrived in Hollywood MGM set her up in a roommate situation with Hungarian actress Ilona Massey
May be the only screen actor to be in the National Inventors Hall of Fame. She was inducted in 2014 along with former Hollywood composer George Antheil. At the start of World War II, the two invented a frequency hopping technique that could be used by the Allies to prevent jamming of torpedo guidance systems. It later became an important aspect for wireless communications. The inventors received no compensation for their discovery. The original 1942 patent expired and the technique became part of the public domain.
Several reference sources (including Ephraim Katz's "The Film Encyclopedia") list Hedy Lamarr's birth year as 1913.
Introduced to husband John Loder by Bette Davis.
Personal Quotes (11)
I must quit marrying men who feel inferior to me. Somewhere, there must be a man who could be my husband and not feel inferior. I need a superior inferior man.
My problem is, I'm a hell of a nice dame, The most horrible whores are famous. I did what I did for love. The others did it for money.
If you use your imagination, you can look at any actress and see her nude, I hope to make you use your imagination
Any girl can be glamorous. All you have to do is stand still and look stupid.
[1960s] It would be wrong of me to say so, but in this country [USA] money is more important than love. Most people here betray you and that's why there is so much chaos. I want to get away from here. I am homesick for Vienna... because my home is Vienna and Austria, not America... never!
[referring to the EFF award for invention frequency hopping] It's about time.
The ladder of success in Hollywood is usually agent, actor, director, producer, leading man. And you are a star if you sleep with them in that order. Crude but true.
To be a star is--to own the world and all the people in it. After a taste of stardom, everything else is poverty.
I win because I learned years ago that scared money always loses. I never care, so I win.
I was the highest-priced and most important star in Hollywood, but I was "difficult".
[on working for Cecil B. DeMille in Samson and Delilah (1949)] I was won over to appearing in the picture from the moment I entered his office and saw the extent of the research that he had done on the whole subject. You have no idea how thorough and comprehensive that research is. He has the first suggestion of a script and treatment down to the final shooting script. He has documents and evidence to support everything he does.
Salary (4)Sony has added 22 games to its PlayStation Now subscription streaming service.
Did you say... £12.99?
Now available is the Uncharted trilogy, Journey, Flow and Flower, and more Ratchet & Clank and God of War games.
Here's the list of 22 games added today:
Uncharted 2: Among Thieves
Uncharted 3: Drake's Deception
Journey
FlOw
Flower
Ratchet & Clank All 4 One
Eat Them!
Go! Puzzle
Numblast
Pixeljunk Racers 2nd Lap
Armageddon Riders
Big Sky:Infinity
.detuned
Invizimals The Lost Kingdom
Savage Moon
Elefunk
God Of War: Ghost Of Sparta HD
God Of War: Chains Of Olympus HD
Anarchy: Rush Hour
Ricochet HD
Snakeball
Magus
At £12.99 a month PlayStation Now is still considered too expensive by many. Newcomers can get a free, one week trial, but be warned: you have to manually stop the service if you want to avoid a charge.By Manuel Veth –
In late summer 2014 for the first time in their history Spartak Moscow played a true home game at the newly-erected Otkrytie Arena against their Serbian allies Crvena Zvezda. Initially, the stadium was supposed to open in 2006, but Russian construction projects are not known for their punctuality and this was no exception. The eight-year delay prolonged a lifelong wait for the club and their fans because, as Edelman writes in his eloquent history Spartak: The Peoples’ Team in the Workers State, Spartak had been without a true stadium of their own throughout their history.
The opening of the stadium was a stately affair with Vladimir Putin among the high-profile figures attending the ceremony, who was later described the arena as “worthy of Russia’s most beloved team.” Indeed the Otkritie Arena, which was built by the German company Hochtief and is similar in appearance to Bayern’s Allianz Arena, is a fitting home for a team that many still regard as Moscow’s most popular club.
The opening of the new stadium intends to represent a much-needed revival for Spartak who have now gone without a major trophy since winning the Russian Cup in 2003, and have not won a league title since 2001.
Ruling Russian Football in the 1990s
Between 1992 and 2001, Spartak were Russian champions nine times out of ten, making do with third place in 1995 behind city rival Lokomotiv Moscow, and surprise winners Alania Vladikavkaz. The club’s continued success in the Russian Vysshaia Liga gave it access to the bountiful riches of the then-nascent Champions League, which provided the club with a stable income that was far above what their domestic competitors could generate.
In economic terms, Spartak had a head start over other clubs in post-Soviet Russia. For instance, prior to the club’s independence from the state the club’s patrons Mossovet (the city soviet) and gorkom (city government) provided Spartak with free apartments for their players. It transpires that, in keeping with the spirit of the post-Soviet great grab in the midst of the anarchy that ensued after the fall of the Soviet Union, Spartak never returned the property with Russian journalist Arkadii Galinskii later stating that Spartak‘s property empire was such that it could constitute an entire city in itself.
With the fall of communism, Spartak’s football operations were placed under the stewardship of legendary coach Oleg Romantsev, who was hired by the club in 1989. The privatisation of the club that year would be the foundation for Romantsev to become Spartak’s de-facto owner by 1993. Over the next decade, the image of Romantsev smoking on the Spartak bench while stoically watching his team would become synonymous with Spartak.
Spartak, Romantsev and the smuggling mafia
Spartak were now a club without any real competition in the new Russian Premier League (RPL) and their domestic dominance also meant that they had a monopoly on Russia’s entry to the lucrative Champions League.
But Champions League money was not the only source of income for Spartak Moscow. In the late 1990s, as a way to subsidise sport clubs, the Russian government under sobriety-averse president Boris Yeltsin had given some sporting organisations within the Russian Federation the right to import alcohol and cigarettes tax-free, as a means of partially financing professional football after the fall of the Soviet Union, with Spartak Moscow one of many clubs that took advantage.
But the club’s import/export licence would bring them into conflict with local mafia groups. In 1997, Spartak’s co-owner and director of finance Larisa Nechayeva was shot dead whilst driving home from the club’s Tarasovka training ground. Nechaeva was a young and ambitious businesswoman who was brought in by the club on the understanding that she could generate money by bringing in high profile sponsors.
Nechaeva’s murder case was never solved and, according to The Independent, it was part of a tussle between mafia-like clans in the Russian Federation over the smuggling of cigarettes and alcohol in which both Spartak and Nechaeva had become involved.
Spartak’s Struggle in Russian Football’s Oil Boom
In 2001, the burly Andrei Chervichenko approached Romantsev over the possible purchase of several shares in Spartak. Chervichenko, through his connections with the now-defunct Krasbank, knew that Spartak were experiencing financial difficulties and offered Romantsev a deal in which LUKoil would become the kit sponsor of the club, with Chervichenko assuming his position as the new vice-president.
However, Spartak were not alone in attracting oil money as their rivals across the city, Lokomotiv and CSKA, followed suit and by 2003 Spartak’s dominance of Russian football was well and truly over, languishing in 13th position in the RPL half-way through the season, much closer to the relegation zone than the European spots. Yet the firing of Romantsev surprised many as just days earlier the club had salvaged some silverware from a humble season, by winning the Russian Cup.
In the end, the decision reflected a power struggle between Romantsev and Chervichenko with the latter describing the former as unapproachable and accusing him of having ignored and abused players.
While Chervichenko’s comments were not entirely objective, Romantsev’s affection for vodka had, by 2003, become an unmanageable issue that could no longer be hidden from the public. Under the circumstances, the club’s board expressed reluctance to release funds for new players if Romantsev remained at the helm. In June 2003, Chervichenko stated diplomatically that Romantsev needed a rest and would leave the club. Spartak would eventually finish the 2003 RPL season in 10th place.
With Romantsev out of the picture, the club were now up for sale and in 2004 Leonid Fedun, billionaire and board member of LUKoil, bought the club. After the takeover Fedun, who is often seen in public with a Spartak baseball cap to accentuate his mullet, moved quickly to fill all major positions at Spartak with people who were also involved with LUKoil.
Spartak and LUKoil – a volatile marriage
The takeover, however, came at a price. The undermining of Romantsev’s role and the ownership struggle between LUKoil and Romantsev meant that the club were being outperformed by the nouveau riche clubs that emerged as the Russian economy started to recover under the early leadership of Putin.
From 2003, city rivals Lokomotiv (led by the Ministry of Transport) and CSKA Moscow (officially owned by Evgenii Giner, but sponsored by Abramovich-owned companies), dominated the league. The two clubs were later joined by Zenit, which, thanks to Gazprom’s billions, are now Russia’s richest and most popular club. In addition, both Zenit, in 2008, and CSKA, in 2005, won the UEFA Cup, making both clubs more recognised continental brands in the modern era than Spartak.
There are several reasons why the above-mentioned clubs have surpassed Spartak. Lokomotiv, for instance, moved into a brand new arena in 2002, a move which symbolised Russian Railways RZhD’s motivation to build a club that could dethrone Spartak as Moscow’s most beloved. As the Lokomotiv Stadium was the most modern facility in Russia, the stadium was also used by the Russian national team, which paid a handsome rental fee for the facility.
The alluring Lokomotiv Arena also brought about an increase in Lokomotiv’s popularity in the city. Lokomotiv were always considered the weakest link in Moscow’s football pyramid and in the 1990s the club registered very low attendance numbers. Since the opening of the new arena, however, attendances at Lokomotiv home games increased from 4,480 in 2001 to around 15,000 in 2010.
Russian clubs also have to be understood as social-marketing projects by their mother companies, and in the case of Lokomotiv the increase in attendance indicated to RZhD that football as a marketing tool would be successful as long as money is invested into both players and infrastructure. The new stadium, therefore became a symbol of intent by RZhD, and the improved atmosphere at home games, together with new training facilities enabled Lokomotiv to attract more foreign talent to play in Moscow including the wayward Scot Garry O’Connor, Uzbekistan-born Peter Odemwingie and Branislav Ivanovic.
In addition Zenit and Rubin had a natural advantage over the Moscow-based clubs as they were the only significant football representatives in their respective cities, and in the case of Rubin the entire Republic of Tatarstan.
Meanwhile, CSKA, thanks to the arrival of Evgenii Giner, were able to merge local Russian talent with expensive players from South America, such as the dreadlocked Brazilian striker Vagner Love, and his fellow countryman and recent World Cup fall guy Jo: a strategy similar to what Shakhtar Donetsk have developed more extensively in Ukraine.
Spartak, now owned by Fedun, were not only left behind on the sporting front but also started to lose their identity as the people’s club even though Fedun has often insisted that Spartak is his project rather than being owned by LUKoil. The strong connection, however, between Fedun, LUKoil and Spartak cannot be denied.
Spartak, throughout Russian and Soviet football history, were often regarded as trendsetters, but the fact that the club have now been without a title for more than a decade means they are no longer in vogue. In many ways, the situation is reminiscent of what happened at Ajax Amsterdam where the Dutch giants went without a title from 2004 to 2011. Ajax, however, have managed to regain some of their domestic glory by winning four consecutive championships since 2011. A similar re-emergence for Spartak however appears highly unlikely.
Spartak to the Future?
The national makeover necessitated by Russia’s hosting of the 2018 World Cup means that many of Spartak’s main rivals will move, or have already moved, into brand new arenas. Spartak has always been one of the best-attended clubs in Russian football. Therefore, realising that a new stadium might not be enough to make Spartak more competitive domestically, Fedun has begun to change the ownership structure of Spartak by floating the club on the stock exchange. This was not the first time that Spartak had toyed with this idea in order to create an open joint stock company (Otkrytoe Aktsionernoe Obshchestvo), similar to a Limited Company in the United Kingdom.
Fedun hopes that by changing the economic structure of Spartak the club will become more self-sufficient and less reliant on the his own continued funding and that of LUKoil. Fedun has admitted that, on average, he has had to spend $60 million a season, since taking over the club, just to keep the club competitive in the RPL, and has invested another $500 million in the construction of Spartak’s new stadium.
In theory, the stock market floatation could be good news for Spartak as the club may be able to generate more income by selling shares. This, together with a new stadium, and the supposed marketing possibilities, could perhaps narrow the gap between Spartak and Russia’s newly rich top clubs.
But there are also plenty of risks. First and foremost, the fact that Fedun is willing to float the club suggests that he is no longer willing to finance the operations of the club himself. In a statement to Al-Jazeera, Fedun voiced his optimism that he could recuperate some of the US$1billion that he had invested in the club. He also hopes that the stock market launch “will increase the club’s profit three or four times by 2017 or 2018.” This statement indeed implies that Fedun is willing to leave the club sooner rather than later, a move that could open up the club to investors and potentially another power struggle at the top.
Despite Spartak’s new stadium, the current season has been another rollercoaster ride for the Krasno-Belye, with their Swiss coach Murat Yakin perilously close to a dismissal before a listless 2-0 victory against Ural Yekaterinburg as the winter break was about to commence. The result keeps the club within five points of a Champions League spot, leaving some hope that a successful season can be salvaged when the ice thaws and the league resumes in March.
Failure to at least qualify for the Europa League would make it difficult for Yakin, if he is spared, to hold on to the club’s best players such as bullish Armenian striker Yura Movsisyan, already linked with a move to the Bundesliga. For Spartak’s fans meanwhile, their club’s place at the pinnacle of Russian football looks set to remain on grainy video footage and creased magazines, rather than in the modern setting of their long-awaited shiny new home.
Manuel Veth is a PhD candidate at the University of London King’s College, London. Originally from Munich, his thesis is entitled: “Selling the People’s Game: Football’s transition from Communism to Capitalism in the Soviet Union and its Successor States”. Follow Manuel on Twitter @homosovieticus
Share this: Email
Pocket
Reddit
LinkedIn
Twitter
FacebookRecently, we've discussed how the US public is confused about some of the basic factual aspects of climate change, from the clear indications that temperatures are rising to the fact that there's very little disagreement within the scientific community about the basic outlines of anthropogenic climate change. Now, a study suggests that there's a causal relationship between the latter and the former: people who don't understand how broad the scientific agreement is are less likely to accept what the scientists are agreeing upon.
On its face, this sounds like one of those "it took a study to show this?" moments. After all, there's a lot of literature showing that most people can't or don't understand issues in detail, and therefore they use some sort of mental shortcut to reach conclusions. In the case of scientific information, this will typically involve accepting what scientists are saying; many surveys place scientists as one of the most trusted professions in the nation.
But in many corners of the Internet, relying on expertise is dismissed as an argument from authority. And a number of science communicators (including, to some degree, the Ars staff) have suggested that the basic outlines of greenhouse warming are so simple and intuitive that the public shouldn't necessarily be forced into relying on experts. Finally, it's always dangerous to assume that you can simply reason your way to conclusions without bothering with supporting evidence.
To get some actual evidence, researchers surveyed a representative group of 750 US adults, asking them to rate their acceptance of various aspects of climate change, along with some basic demographic and political information. To an even greater degree than in other polls, this population doesn't realize that there's a scientific consensus on climate change. A full half fell into that category, with most of them thinking that there was a lot of disagreement among scientists and five percent thinking that scientists don't even think global warming is happening. Another 16 percent didn't know enough to answer.
Controlling for things like political orientation and cultural worldview didn't change the results, suggesting that people don't misunderstand the scientific consensus because they are ideologically predisposed to do so. There was also no indication that people believe there's a scientific controversy because they are mistaken about the details of climate science.
As a result, the authors suggest that people start off being confused about what the scientific community actually thinks, and that leads to confusion about the factual details of climate change. Unsurprisingly, confusion about the factual details leads to an indifference about policy solutions. Although the data don't provide a clear demonstration of causation, they're clearly not consistent with the sort of motivated reasoning that some have suggested drives climate confusion.
A couple of things are worth noting about these results. One is that they're largely consistent with the study linked in the top paragraph, which suggested that a misleading picture of the science and scientific consensus leaves at least some segments of the society confused about climate science. The second is |
direction. The chances of bad thoughts coming into our mind are greatly reduced." On why such a study was undertaken in UP, Kumar said, "Well, UP is a special state for us. Our first school was started in Gorakhpur, inaugurated by the early leaders of the RSS including sarsanghchalak Golwalkar. We have a long history here," he said. MS Golwalkar, the second chief of the RSS, had described Muslims as an "internal threat" to India. "We are sitting as if on a volcano, feeling that all is well with our'secular world'," he wrote. With 2,600 schools in UP, Kumar estimated that there is now one RSS school in every block of India's most populous and politically significant state.
Betwa Sharma/HuffPost India
'My best friend is Ram' The school that HuffPost India visited in Agra is famous for conducting examinations without invigilators to monitor the students. Teachers proudly narrated how they drill their students in the value of honesty and trust them not to cheat. Located in a middle-income neighborhood, the English-medium school is among the best that the Vidya Bharti has to offer. In addition to a chemistry laboratory and a computer room, and several shelves piled high with trophies for everything from sports to science, there are teachers who appear to take a genuine interest in the students. Religion is built into the school's soul and psyche. As one enters the campus, one is welcomed by an image of goddess Saraswati looming large over a basketball court. A photo of students making a human Swastika stands out among the many displayed near the porch. On a Wednesday, a mathematics teacher wrote down a series of numbers on the blackboard and asked his class, "Is this arithmetic progression?" In another classroom, a student stood at the front of the room, reciting an essay on female infanticide in the country. In the corridor, drawings of Hindu gods including Ram and Sita were pinned onto notice boards among the more mundane announcements. In the computer room, one student typed out, "My best friend is Ram" as a practice sentence. During the break, the students recited a bhojan mantra before eating tiffin. Between their classes, Hussain, Adil and Khan spoke with HuffPost India about how they navigate the minefield of Hindu nationalism. There were no easy answers from the boys who straddle two religions. This is how Hussain put it: "I'm probably too young to know what the world considers to be right and wrong. If I say something, one religion gets offended. If I say something else, then another religion gets offended. I do know what feels right, and being here feels right." If I say something, one religion gets offended. If I say something else, then another religion gets offended. Gateway to the world Hussain, Adil and Khan had four things in common. They were intelligent, articulate, ambitious, and knew what they wanted to become. Hussain, whose father is a building contractor, wants to be a chartered accountant. Adil, son of a shopkeeper, wants to be a civil engineer. Khan's father sells clothes in a shop, but he wants to be an astro-biologist. Hussain had spent five years at the school because he was satisfied with the quality of education. "My father only studied till class six but we are now a highly educated family. My sisters have all been in the commerce field. One has just got a job in State Bank of India as a clerk," he said. Hussain preferred the RSS school to another English-medium school called Holy Angel from which he had transferred. The teenager said he did not like the "English" prayers that he had to recite at Holy Angel. "This is also an English medium school, but teachers here explain things in Hindi as well. Here, I feel free to ask teachers to explain me something again and again." For Adil, the RSS school promises a way out of his low-income neighborhood that has a significant Muslim population, most of whom are shopkeepers and tailors. "The choices in the Muslim community are limited. Madrassas won't help you in your career. There are a few Muslim-run private schools but those are not very good. The government schools are bad. The fancy private schools, we can't afford them," he said matter-of-factly. The choices in the Muslim community are limited. Adil already feels the distance between him and the other Muslim children in his locality who either attend madrassas or the public schools. "I know more about how the world works and I want more from the world," he said. "In the end, what really matters are our careers." Leaning back in his chair, Adil asked why we had so many questions about the prayers he recited. As long as the Muslim students sat in the morning assembly and kept their head down, he said, no one who forced them to recite any words. "Isn't prayer just a medium to calm one's heart and mind? There are students coming from different places. Who knows what is happening in their homes or the troubles they are dealing with. Prayer just gives us a moment to ready ourselves for the day," he said.
Betwa Sharma/HuffPost India
Who wants to eat beef anyway? Adil appeared exasperated with questions about religion. His relatives asked him similar questions all the time: Are you now a Hindu? Do you believe in Hindu gods? Do they tell you to not eat meat? His replies to the first two questions: No and no. The answer to the third question, however, is more complicated. Students cannot eat meat inside the school. While the virtues of vegetarianism are exhorted, the Muslim students said their teachers have never asked them what they eat at home. It just so happens that Hussain, Adil and Khan have chosen to not eat beef (buffalo meat) at home. It was Khan who was the least apologetic about what his relatives have described as his "Hindu ways". The 15-year-old attributed his loathing of beef to his Hindu mother's influence. His family is almost completely vegetarian. "My mother is non-vegetarian. One of my aunts is vegetarian, another eats meat. When my dad wants chicken, my mom makes it, but that isn't often," he said. Hussain said what he hears at the school does influence his thinking. His parents have questioned him about why he doesn't like to eat meat at home. "They say 'is this something that they are telling you at school?' But that isn't the only reason. It is bad for your health. You see, the new generation of Muslims, people who are educated and have money, they don't want to eat beef (buffalo meat). Only the poor and uneducated eat beef, even among the Hindus," he said. Hussain, however, said that he has often felt the Hindu right feigned concern for the cow but didn't really mean it. He pointed out how little was done to ensure the health and safety of the animals. The 17-year-old then told me this story: "I went to get milk the other day and it broke my heart to see our milkman beating his cow. The old cow can't give milk anymore. I told him 'you are a Hindu and this is how you mistreat your cow'. We don't use that milkman any more," he said. Contested histories The hypocrisy around the cow isn't the only thing that has troubled Hussain in the recent past. In a rare criticism of his school, the teenager said it bothered him when a teacher repeated a story about how the Mughal Emperor Akbar would fall at the feet of the renowned poet Tulsidas. Hussain was so unsettled by the story that he even mentioned it to his father. "This is not about being Hindu or Muslim. It is about whether it happened. I don't think a great ruler would have fallen at the feet of the poet, even a great one," he said. The controversy around Tulsidas and Akbar had started earlier this year after UP chief minister Yogi Adityanath said the poet had never regarded Akbar to be his king. And while people do tell stories about Akbar falling at Tulsidas' feet, these are not backed by historical evidence. It is common for teachers at RSS schools to express deep animosity towards Muslim "invaders" of medieval India. They make little or no distinction between ruthless raiders like Mohammad Ghori and the Mughal emperor Akbar, a skilled administrator who ended the jizya tax imposed on non-Muslims and tried to float a new religion Din-i-Ilahi based on the teachings of different religions. Hussain wasn't the only one troubled by recent attempts to rewrite history by the Hindu right. Khan, the news buff, has been following the controversial changes that the BJP-ruled Rajasthan government has introduced in the school textbooks. Khan believes it is fair to debate whether Akbar defeated Maharana Pratap or the other way around at the Battle of Haldighati in 1576. "We should be open to new ideas. But changes to textbooks should only be made if there is enough evidence and the majority of experts agree," he said. The 15-year-old fell silent for a few seconds after he was told that textbooks in Rajasthan had already been altered to say that Akbar did not defeat Maharana Pratap. "But how is that possible?" he asked. "They have not collected enough proof yet. How can they teach children something that may never have happened?" READ: Inside The Surreal Battle For Mind Control Playing Out In Rajasthan's Classrooms
Betwa Sharma/HuffPost India
Demand and Supply While RSS officials make no attempt to conceal that their schools promote Hindu supremacy, they have been accused of promoting religious intolerance too. In West Bengal, for instance, the ruling Trinamool Congress (TMC) has alleged that over 100 RSS-affiliated schools have been spreading hate and ordered for them to be shutdown. "It is all politics. They are afraid because the BJP won Assam and now they it might win West Bengal too," said Kumar, the national secretary of Vidya Bharti. There are times when the connection between the RSS schools and the political agenda of the Hindu right is as clear as daylight. Take the example of Sarfaraz Hussain who topped the class X board in Assam in 2015. While students from the RSS schools often make it to merit lists of state administered examinations, the BJP latched onto Hussain as if his achievement vindicated their objectives. The state education minister Himanta Biswas quickly declared that Hussain's achievement was "a matter of pride for our ideological family." He also declared that every panchayat in Assam should have a RSS school. Why do some Muslims send their children to RSS schools, despite knowing they promote Hindu supremacy and even religious intolerance? Education activists within the Muslim community do not entirely discount the RSS' claims about the rise of Muslim students in its schools. Rather than endorsing the RSS' worldview, they attribute such increase to a problem of demand and supply of schools. In the ten years since the Sacchar Committee Report found Muslims to be the least literate religious minority in the country, education activists say change has been gradual. There are an unprecedented number of Muslim families trying to get their children into good schools. Even underprivileged and low-income families want to do better than public schools, which charge a minimal fee, but are plagued by apathetic teachers and poor infrastructure. By contrast, RSS schools charge a moderate fee that ranges from Rs.1000 to Rs.5000, depending on the location and the economic background of the people in the area. Vidya Bharti is known to set up schools in remote and destitute areas where even public schools are scarce. By and large, these schools maintain discipline and provide a decent standard of education. RSS-run schools follow either the curriculum set by the Central Board of Senior Education (CBSE) or state boards. In addition to regular coursework, all students have to learn Sanskrit and take "moral science" classes for which Vidya Bharti provides specially designed books and organises competitions at the state and national levels. As Athar Hussain, director of the Centre for Objective Research and Development in Lucknow, put it, "I think many Muslims have come to accept that the RSS has the prevailing ideology at the moment. It is a compromise that they are willing to make for a good education. You have to understand both students and their parents are able to cope with the situation in the schools. Yes, students have to sit in the morning assembly but it is not that they are being punished or beaten for not performing the prayers. It's not like that." From a governance point of view it was impossible for the BJP and its ideological parent to exclude Muslims from their calculations both political and electoral. As Hussain puts it, "What can they do? They cannot just throw 17 percent of the population into the ocean. This is not America. Here the lives of Hindus and Muslims are intertwined which makes it more complicated." "I think many Muslims have come to accept that the RSS has the prevailing ideology at the moment. It is a compromise that they are willing to make for a good education.
Betwa Sharma/HuffPost India
The Hafiz Who Does Not Mind Hussain's observation quite literally played out in a poor neighborhood on the right bank of the Yamuna river in Agra, where a significant Muslim population lives side-by-side with Hindus. Most of them are manual labourers, tailors and employees of the shoe factories in the area. The RSS school in this locality shares its boundary wall with the Itmad-ud-Daula, a mausoleum of the Mughal era, which looks like a miniature version of the Taj Mahal. One dome of the monument rises above the school wall on which a large image of the goddess Durga is plastered. There was no band at the morning assembly of this less-than-affluent primary school. The school principal here spent the better part of one morning looking for light bulbs to replace the ones that had conked off in the heavy downpour. He then sat with a parent who cried out that she could not afford to pay the increase in the school fees and pleaded to be excused. Given its location in an area populated by Muslims, the RSS school had a significantly higher Muslim presence than its counterpart in the middle-income neighborhood where Hussain, Adil and Khan study. School records showed that the number of Muslims who were taking admission had increased almost every year since 2014-2015. "Muslim students are coming to us from the madrassas and the Muslim school next door because we provide better quality education," he said. This assertion is the common refrain one hears from principals of all RSS schools. The RSS would have one believe that "sensible" Muslims are pulling their children out of madrassas and sending them to RSS schools. They also claim that local religious leaders resent the change and actively dissuade Muslim parents from sending them to join RSS schools. Education activists say that situation is not as black-and-white as the RSS make it out to be. There is indeed anger at the Muslim clergy for having done little to promote education. Yet, as the Sachhar Committee report had found, only three percent of Muslims attend madrassas. The majority of them attend public schools followed by private schools. Instead of madrassas where students also live while pursuing religious studies, there are more Muslims who attend maktabs. These are places where children go to learn the Quran while also attending regular school. One such maktab runs two streets away from the RSS primary school, inside an imposing green mosque with two large domes.
Betwa Sharma/HuffPost India
At the maktab, Maulana Hafiz Abdul Kadir, who teaches the Quran to hundreds of children, told HuffPost India that he has never discouraged them from joining the RSS schools. "I tell them that they should go to any school that gives one a good education. If the RSS school is a good one then go there," he said. "If they have to say some prayers that is okay. True prayer comes from the heart not from the mouth." Even as he criticized the RSS for relentlessly pushing its Hindutva agenda on the country, Kadir sounded helpless when talking about Muslims joining its schools. "What choice do we have?" he said. "We are so behind in education and we don't have good schools of our own. I don't blame parents for taking that option." We are so behind in education and we don't have good schools of our own. I don't blame parents for taking that option. On the humid afternoon that we talked, Kadir sat in an open courtyard surrounded by children between the ages of four and fourteen. A humming noise emanated from the gathering of boys in skullcaps and girls in headscarves, who rocked backward and forward as they recited the Koran. When the more inquisitive children crowded around us, Kadir waved his swatter at them and yelled, "Go back to your studies." After descending into giggles and scattering for a few moments, the children pushed closer to hear their hafiz explain why the Muslim community had fallen so far behind in education. "I believe that it goes back to the partition. Most Muslims who stayed back were poor and powerless. Many felt that they would lose their religious identity by learning Hindi. This kind of thinking was encouraged by religious leaders," Kadir said. "We were wrong. It was a mistake," he added. The Koran instructor, who himself dropped out of a public school after class VI, believes he is now doing his bit in sending children to school. "I run two shifts, one in the morning and one in afternoon, but hardly anyone comes in the morning. I have told my students that they should go to school in the morning and come here in the afternoon," he said. Many felt that they would lose their religious identity by learning Hindi.
Betwa Sharma/HuffPost IndiaPresident-elect Donald Trump said Saturday that he will dissolve his philanthropic foundation to avoid “even the appearance” of a conflict of interest, as he prepares to take over the White House next month.
The plan to shutter the Donald J. Trump Foundation was not unexpected, amid continuing criticism that Trump’s international real estate holdings and other business ventures will present for him as president potential conflicts of interest.
“The foundation has done enormous good works over the years in contributing millions of dollars to countless worthy groups, including supporting veterans, law enforcement officers and children,” Trump said in a statement released by his presidential transition office. “However, to avoid even the appearance of any conflict with my role as president, I have decided to continue to pursue my strong interest in philanthropy in other ways.”
The statement also said that Trump has asked his legal team to start dissolving the foundation, which he said operated for decades at essentially no cost and funneled 100 percent of the money to charity.
“But because I will be devoting so much time and energy to the presidency and solving the many problems facing our country and the world, I don’t want to allow good work to be associated with a possible conflict of interest," he said.
The foundation is already under investigation by the New York attorney general in connection with fundraising efforts.
Who will run the Trump Organization while Trump is in the White House also remains unclear, since daughter Ivanka and son-in-law Jared Kushner now appear headed to work in the administration.
Trump’s announcement Saturday follows son Eric Trump saying last week that he would stop fundraising for his self-named foundation.
In recent weeks, Eric, Ivanka and Donald Trump Jr., another son, have pulled out of fundraising events apparently to avoid the appearance that they could be trying to sell access to the incoming president.Status Views 9963 Last Updated 8 years ago Created 8 years ago Series Batman: Arkham Asylum Character Harley Quinn
Comments
YukaiAmarante Best AS Harley so far!
PKMNtrainerAnna This is the most amazing Harley Quinn I have ever seen! Well done :D <3
Nilyah Ótima Harley, merece um Showcase mesmo ^^
Lucrecia_ that's just...perfect! thanks for the character, thanks for my eyes...that's wonderfull, i really love it... Your face is exactly as in the video game, the make up is perfect... no really...IT'S AMAZING!!!
Criana This is fantastic! Great job!
Diemer Esse cosplay ta merecendo um Showcased!o negão tb ta ^^
Rinoa07 This is beyond a doubt, one of the best Arkham Harley's I've seen. Period. The costume is spot on, and the make is particularly well done. You're absolutely adorable!White House counselor Kellyanne Conway speaks at the Values Voter Summit of the Family Research Council in Washington, DC, U.S. October 13, 2017. REUTERS/James Lawler Duggan
WASHINGTON (Reuters) - The former head of a U.S. government ethics watchdog said on Wednesday he had filed a complaint claiming senior White House adviser Kellyanne Conway violated a law barring executive branch employees from engaging in political activity when she spoke on television against a Democratic candidate for the U.S. Senate.
Conway, in an interview on Fox News Channel on Monday, railed against Doug Jones, the Democratic candidate in the Dec. 12 special election for an Alabama seat in the U.S. Senate.
“Doug Jones in Alabama? Folks, don’t be fooled. He’ll be a vote against tax cuts,” Conway said. Jones’s Republican rival, Roy Moore, has been accused of pursuing teenage girls when he was in his 30s.
Walter Shaub, who stepped down as director of the Office of Government Ethics in July, said in a Twitter post: “I have filed a complaint with the U.S. Office of Special Counsel, which investigates Hatch Act violations.”
The 1939 Hatch Act prohibits federal employees from using their official authority to influence an election.
White House spokesman Raj Shah said: “Ms. Conway did not advocate for or against the election of a candidate, and specifically declined to encourage Alabamans to vote a certain way.”
Conway came under criticism from the ethics office in February when she publicly endorsed fashion products sold by President Donald Trump’s daughter Ivanka Trump.
Shaub, then head of the ethics office, wrote a letter to the White House in March voicing concern about the White House decision not to discipline Conway.
Shaub, who had clashed with the Trump administration over its business entanglements, has joined the Campaign Legal Center, a Washington-based nonpartisan group advocating for democratic reform.Speak With a Geek (SWAG) has been providing small businesses with tech support for 15 years. SWAG has a stable of IT experts and when a business requests assistance the appropriate provider is assigned to solve the problem. According to SWAG its experts can handle a range of support areas including hardware and software, training, app development, and design.
SWAG is now making it easier to get a tech support expert with the release of an app on Android and iOS. The SWAG Client app lets prospective clients request a geek with the tap of a button, and the service will recommend a list of providers by skills, certifications, and price.
Special Feature IT Innovation for Small Businesses Many of today’s small businesses and startups have become leading-edge adopters and innovators in technology because they are not chained to big, legacy systems. Read More
Small businesses are able to obtain support 24/7 with or without the app. Given its long time in this business SWAG has a large group of experts in most areas of IT and tech support.
SWAG is always looking for experts wishing to get income from such support. It carefully vets applicants to make sure they have everything required to represent the firm with clients.
The company maintains a database of skilled individuals for companies looking to hire someone full-time. To facilitate getting full time employment for those it represents, rather than charge companies upfront, a small percentage of the new employee's salary is charged for 12 months.
The SWAG Client app is available from the iTunes App Store and Google Play Store.Two store owners were facing charges Saturday after they were involved in an argument about a restroom.Authorities with the Daytona Beach Police Department said they were called to the Stop N Save on Mason Avenue about 12:45 a.m.An arrest report stated Marvin Stinson entered the store and asked to use the restroom, and the store owners, Vikesh and Hemant Patell, told him it wasn't open.Investigators said there was an argument, and the owners told Stinson to leave the store. They said Stinson complied.Surveillance video and witness reports indicated that Vikesh Patel fired two shots at Stinson as he was leaving.Vikesh Patel faces a charge of aggravated assault with a deadly weapon, and Hemant Patel was charged with battery.Both men were able to bond out of the Volusia County Branch Jail.Related: Florida mug shots
Two store owners were facing charges Saturday after they were involved in an argument about a restroom.
Authorities with the Daytona Beach Police Department said they were called to the Stop N Save on Mason Avenue about 12:45 a.m.
Advertisement
An arrest report stated Marvin Stinson entered the store and asked to use the restroom, and the store owners, Vikesh and Hemant Patell, told him it wasn't open.
Investigators said there was an argument, and the owners told Stinson to leave the store. They said Stinson complied.
Surveillance video and witness reports indicated that Vikesh Patel fired two shots at Stinson as he was leaving.
Vikesh Patel faces a charge of aggravated assault with a deadly weapon, and Hemant Patel was charged with battery.
Both men were able to bond out of the Volusia County Branch Jail.
Related: Florida mug shots
AlertMeLew Lukens, the highest-ranking U.S. official in London, is a piece of work. The Chargé d'Affaires, or acting U.S. ambassador to the United Kingdom, undercut President Trump's criticism of London's Mayor Sadiq Khan in the wake of the recent terror attack by brazenly tweeting high praise to the leftist leader, whose hostility to Trump is well known.
I commend the strong leadership of the @MayorofLondon as he leads the city forward after this heinous attack. – LLukens 3/3 https://t.co/p4dDZuCpyO — U.S. Embassy London (@USAinUK) June 4, 2017
Just in time for U.K. elections, giving a boost to the fast rising Labour Party, it seems.
Electioneering or not, it was an unusually insolent act against the current U.S. president, a signed statement to undercut Trump, and evidence that the U.S. embassy is being managed as a Democratic Party outpost rather than a representation of the entire U.S. government.
A day or two ago, Trump tweeted this:
At least 7 dead and 48 wounded in terror attack and Mayor of London says there is "no reason to be alarmed!" — Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) June 4, 2017
So who is Acting Ambassador Lewis Lukens, anyway?
Turns out he's a career diplomat, with nearly 30 years' experience in assorted outposts. His most prominent positions, however, have been at the side of the person who must have served as a sort of mentor, then-Secretary of State Hillary Clinton, serving as her chief administrative officer. In that time frame, he managed to reach the inner circle of Clinton's tight little circle of acolytes – on the same level as Cheryl Mills and Huma Abedin.
In testimony to Congress, Lukens claimed to have come up with the idea of having Clinton set up a private server:
Q: And so what did you – did you propose a solution at that point? A: So my proposal was to set up a computer on her desk, a standalone computer [not part of the State Department's system], for her to be able to access the internet to check her e-mails [privatized — and therefore not subject to FOIA requests or historians' investigations].
For what it's worth, Sundance at Conservative Treehouse points out that a mysterious fire that destroyed documents related to Clinton's illegal email server occurred at the State Department on administrative officer Lukens's watch, too.
Given his administrative role, it is possible he was involved in turning down Ambassador Chris Stevens of Libya as Stevens futilely sought additional embassy protective staff, although he seems to have moved on before the envoy was killed in 2012. One thing is for certain: Lukens has always been onboard with Hillary Clinton.
Here's the next peculiarity:
Clinton seems to have a relationship to Khan, whom Lukens went so far out of his way to defend on Twitter. According to a report from the London bureau of the Voice of America:
The London mayor said he is "a big fan" of Democrat Hillary Clinton, and called her "arguably the most experienced candidate to run to be president." He went on to say, "As the father of two daughters, I think the message it sends when the most powerful politician in the world is a woman is phenomenal, and hope she wins."
He wasn't shy about wanting to help Hillary Clinton win the 2016 election, either:
London's new mayor Sadiq Khan Wednesday promised to help Hillary Clinton defeat Donald Trump in November's presidential election – insisting the race for the White House was now "personal." Khan, the first Muslim leader of any major Western capital, said Clinton should use his mayoral campaign as a "template" because he had seen off a "Donald Trump approach" to elections in the U.K.
Now Lukens, Clinton's private server enabler and close inner circle member, is returning the favor to Khan from the U.S. embassy walls, through his Trump-contradicting tweets. Sure, it might be coordinated. But given the history, and Trump's latest tweets about not getting his envoys confirmed, it's more likely it's not.
Any question as to what the face of the Deep State looks like? What is this guy doing in the U.S. embassy in London, and who put him there?Pro-Duterte political analyst, Netherlands scholar Sass Rogando Sasot asked Esquire PH editor-in-chief Kristine Fonacier a few questions about her experience with drug pushers and addicts and their exchange of questions and answers on Facebook went viral, gaining hundreds of shares.
Sasot first asked Fonacier two questions, saying, “So Kristine, have you already talked and visited a victim of a shabu addict and pusher? Have you ever been victimised by a shabu addict or pusher?”
To this, Fonacier also took to her Facebook page to give her response on April 22, expressing her eagerness to address such questions.
“Question 1: “So Kristine, have you already talked [sic] and visited a victim of a shabu addict and pusher?” Fonacier wrote.
Note that the Esquire editor also pointed out Sasot’s grammatical error. The Duterte supporter wrote “talked and visited…” instead of “talked to and visited…”
“Answer: Yes. For a couple of years, I was friends with a woman whose husband was a shabu addict who victimized their daughter. They live in a poor community in Montalban. I also am friends with people who live in communities where Oplan Tokhang is in place,” Fonacier said.
To Sasot’s second question about whether Fonacier had fallen victim to a drug dealer or addict, she said: “Answer: Tricky, since they never caught the guy who drew a home-made gun on me to hold me up. Police suspect he did it for drug money, but without the perpetrator being caught and without due process, we’ll never know.”
Fonacier then posed her own set of four questions to Sasot.
“My turn to ask the questions: When did you last accompany media people on the night beat to see if indeed they manufactured fake news? When did you last speak to the families of innocents killed in this drug war? When did you last visit a poor community to ask if they feel safer? Heck, here’s an easy one: how much time have you spent in the Philippines in the last five years?” she wrote.
Sasot responded to Fonacier’s questions on the same day.
On whether she has tried accompanying media people covering the night beat to verify if they write manufactured fake news, Sasot said that no, she hasn’t. She reasoned and clapped back at Fonacier, saying, “But I don’t really need to accompany them in order to check if what they’ve written is correct. I guess you haven’t accompanied 7,000 night beats to verify that each of them were EJKs right? Oh, BTW, it’s now 9000. Be honest.”
Sasot also said that she talked to a Filipina domestic helper in the Middle East, who told her via Facebook messenger that her youngest sister was raped and killed by a drug addict.
“The last time I talked to a family of an innocent victim was two weeks ago I think. Ate Jenney, a proud DH in the Middle East, messaged me, to check out on me after that LP Spy issue. Her sister, whom she fondly calls Bunso, was raped and murdered by a shabu addict. Her sister is innocent. Regularly, I get messages from random people sharing to me the inhumanity and brutality they experienced from drug addicts and pushers. I have two friends who were brutally murdered by shabu addicts,” she wrote.
“Unlike you Ms Fonacier, I believe that this drug war was started by drug cartels and their government protectors, which include your favorite senator, Senator Leila de Lima, against our country. It wasn’t Duterte who started it. Our government is simply fighting back,” Sasot said, defending the Duterte administration’s war on drugs.
“The drug war launched by drug cartels has caused a lot of families to break, including the family of your friend, girls and women raped, has terrorised a lot of communities, and cities, people murdered dahil napag-“tripan” sila ng adik.”
To the question about when she last visited a poor community to inquire about their feeling of safety, Sasot said that while she hasn’t been to such a community in the last five years, she was raised in one, in contrast to Fonacier’s residence “in a gated community.”
“I have a lot of childhood friends who lived in looban. And yup, drug addicts and pushers were a pest in their lives,” she added.
“I believe you’ve been frequenting those “poor communities” a lot. So have you asked them if they love their drug addicts and pushers?”
Sasot also included a Bacoor kagawa’s message to her:
“Sass baka naman pede ako huningi ng tulong regarding sa lugar namin dito sa Bacoor Cavite, lalong lalo na dito sa amin sa Mabolo merong isang tulak dito na ilang bes na nai report sa tagal na panahon hanggang ngayun d magalaw,kasi balita namin may mga among pulis na naka pwesto dito sa Bacoor.marami na sa amin ang natatakot dahil kahit pulis walang magawa sa tulak na ito… Akoy iaang kagawad dito sa lugar namin tagal na namin naiteport to pero walang nangayyari kaya susubukan kong lumapit sayo…. Natatakot kasi kami lalo sa pamilya namin ngayung nalaman namin na kasabwat nya ang mga pulis bacoor… Tulad nung iaang bes ung kumnder ng station namin dito kinausap namin pero ang sagot sa amin wag muna daw ung tao nayun…. Kaya tanong namin sa aming mga sarili BAKIT… sana matulungan mo kami maipaalam sa nakakataas o kaya maipost public….. Senaya na sass natatakot kasi kami na balikan kami.. Salanat po at pasensya na sa storbo….. Ang pangalan po angvtulak dito sa amin ay si ********* may kapangalan po yaan fito sa lugar namin ung isa po kalbo ung isa…… Ung hindi kalbo ang tulak dto sa amin… Maraming salamat po”
And posed this question to Fonacier, “since you are in the Philippines, why don’t you visit his community and tell them to love their pusher?”
“I’m turning 35 this year darling. Why are the five years of my life lived here in The Netherlands more relevant than the 30 years of my life lived in the Philippines? If you are asking that question to passive-aggressively call out my “privilege” life, I bet you haven’t sold your puke or pwet yet just to have food on your table,” Sasot concluded her response to Fonacier’s last question about how much time she has spent in her homeland in the last five years.
[50_50_first]
[/50_50_first][50_50_second]
[/50_50_second]
What do you think of this exchange?Paul Matthew Tanglao may have posted bail, giving him temporary liberty.
But the 21-year-old former supermarket salesclerk who spent over a week in jail for stealing a can of corned beef worth P31.50 remains shackled by a more formidable force. And he sees only one way out of it.
ADVERTISEMENT
To those who were touched by his story and moved into offering him help, Tanglao has one request: Help him complete his education.
Inside the cramped cell of the Sta. Ana police station, a day before his mother bailed him out on Dec. 18, Tanglao expressed gratitude upon learning that people were eager to help him out upon learning of his plight.
He said he felt humbled and embarrassed at the same time. Being caught for stealing, according to him, was not something he was proud of. His only excuse was that he was extremely hungry at that time and he had no money to pay for the can of corned beef.
“I am really grateful,” Tanglao said. “But can I also make an appeal? If they really want to help me, can they send me back to school?” he told the Inquirer in a recent interview.
“I really want to resume my studies. I want to finish school. Maybe they can help me enroll in school, even for just one semester. I want to prove to myself that I am not a bad person; I was just hungry at that time,” he said.
Second chances
For Tanglao, going back to school means redemption, a second shot at life.
“We’re all humans. We make mistakes, but we all deserve a second chance, don’t we?” he asked.
Life, according to Tanglao, has not been kind to him although he has not been a model citizen either, he admitted. He said he took a lot of opportunities for granted.
“I got into a gang that’s why my relatives refuse to send me back to |
ill the R&B, bass, and electronic stew that's come to define pop in recent years into an infectious surrealism..Paak's verses shadowbox with the production, chasing the off-beats and filling breaks rather than falling into place with the groove. The result is a song as unpredictable as it is addictive, a success worthy of its title and talents. —Andrea Domanick | LISTEN
This is post-"Hotline Bling" Drake at his finest, and "Feel No Ways" will make a great opener for the 6 God's eventual Las Vegas residency. With Views, the rapper attempted to show diversity in his sound, from rap to pop to dancehall to whatever other music trend he could shamelessly jump on and claim his own. This made the project a bit of a mess, but when Drizzy stopped obsessing with sounding like everything, he flourished. "Feel No Ways" is essentially a B-side from a random early 2010s chillwave project, and that's why it's so good: Drake is sad about a girl, so he made a sad song about the girl. Nice. —Eric Sundermann | LISTEN
Open urbandictionary.com, find the word "wavy," and erase whatever description is there with a link to Later and Casisdead's track "Before This." No matter where you are in the world—a desolate, air-conditioned office, a budget holiday beach, the backseat of a cab—the pair's consummate track acts as a teleportation device to the moodboard for Nicolas Winding Refn's Drive by way of a fuck-ton of drugs. A desirable effect, then, and one on par with the loosening of limbs via the medium of colored, sugary-looking alcohol. —Ryan Bassil | LISTEN
Moor Mother's Camae Aweya makes Afrofuturist protest songs for a generation left numb with rage, and inspires movement in a movement long leaden. Power electronics, spoken words, snapping beats, political screeds, sampled laments—her new album Fetish Bones is a wholly unique entity, and one whose message has never felt more important than right now. The entire album is crucial listening in 2016, but "Deadbeat Protest" in particular encapsulates Aweya's disgust, her pride, and her fierce commitment to political revolt, as above a crackling bed of white noise, she spits in a hypnotic, malevolent purr: "You can see my dead body at the protest / trying to save my black life by fetishizing my dead life / Fuck! Get away from me!" —Kim Kelly | LISTEN
If the Weeknd's first collaboration with Daft Punk—the title track to this year's super-sized Starboy—was a gridlock of industrial pop hiss, then "I Feel It Coming" is all flesh and blood. In the throes of his improbably successful second act as the pop sellout du jour, the Weeknd's Abel Tesfaye swaps his usual shot-glass lyricism for something more full-bodied and luscious, pouring a glass of loverboy vintage that, if not wholly convincing, makes for satisfying performative romance on the level of spreading rose petals on a bed. —Larry Fitzmaurice | LISTEN
Just because Drake heard Rihanna say something about "wining" and mistook it as a suggestion for some "and dining" as well doesn't mean that we should be so quick to discount the chemistry between these two. Among Rihanna's many superpowers—the way she makes your tongue dissolve into a post-language mess as you repeat the word "work," the way that she says "hope that it gets to you" and makes you reconsider your whole life, etc.—is making Drake the charming pop star he wants to be. As always, there's a lesson here: Shut up, and let Rihanna take control. —Kyle Kramer | LISTEN
"American girl" is a loaded term for melting pot conformity, an apt description of the insecurity we've all had in relationships at one point or another: that we have to bend who we are, our backgrounds or desires to fit some unattainable ideal for a lover. Mitski beautifully scores this hurt through guitar on "Your Best American Girl," an amplified cry in the throes of a love doomed by difference. Distortion painfully crashes against passion so real that "Your Best American Girl" feels like revisiting a breakup with every listen. The upside is the cure: playing Mitski over and over. —Jill Krajewski | LISTEN
With "OOOUUU," Brooklyn's Young M.A provided the world with a self-released track that would become the most objectively perfect rap song of 2016. Its glory is in how effortless it moves, with the young spitter's catchy slurs over a low-key, driving beat—one that would then get remixed by countless other rappers. As the world began to debate, once again, about whether or not a young talent could "bring New York back" with a viral video that reached over 100 million views, she seemed to not give a shit and said one thing: "OOOUUU." —Eric Sundermann | LISTEN
"Pick Up the Phone" is not a Travis Scott song. We mean that literally—it's widely known, at this point, that the bouncy, should've-been-the-hit-of-the-summer song was originally Young Thug's, with a peacemaking Lyor Cohen brokering a song-share deal between the two rappers that could only happen in 2016—but figuratively, the song also features Scott getting shown up not once, but twice by his counterparts. Young Thug sounds, as ever, like a joyous stream of emojis, detailing his verse with personal touches and contemplative asides—and then there's Quavo, who delivers the verse of the year in detailing relationship woes and rhyming "discriminize" with "ostrich seat with the frog eyes." It's almost enough to make you forget that no one actually picks up the phone anymore. —Larry Fitzmaurice | LISTEN
Desiigner proved something that hip-hop truthers have long feared and detested in internet circles over the years: words don't matter in today's rap. To an extent, that may be true and that's not to devalue his contribution to the genre. Desiigner's lyrics are barely distinguishable here but his energy never wavers; the production sparked countless dance challenges, and Kanye West introduced the world to Desiigner. It was hard for "Panda" to lose. —Lawrence Burney | LISTEN
With a music video that's (maybe) a tribute to Vanessa Carlton and a piano line that feels like floating on top of clouds, "Broccoli" is a song that's more fun than recess. Its massive success (number one on the rap charts, baby) cemented D.R.A.M. as a hit-maker (following last year's lack of credit on running the world with "Hotline Bling") and Lil Yachty as a rightful teen icon. Plus, let's be real: who doesn't love a good song about smoking weed? —Eric Sundermann | LISTEN
Kanye promised a gospel album then proceeded to kick off the project's presentation in Madison Square Garden with a song that featured Kelly Price, Kirk Franklin, and a choir. That alone could be the biggest flex of 2016. But "Ultralight Beam" is one to note because, looking back, all Ye was doing was professing his faith in a higher power and asking that source to grant him peace in his own life. Paired with Chance The Rapper breathing life into his own forthcoming album Coloring Book with his strongest verse of the year make this song one of 2016's best. —Lawrence Burney | LISTEN
Ragana's is an iconoclastic blend of black metal, doom, screamo, and overwhelming gloom. The band's sole output this year, the song "You Take Nothing," is devastatingly sad, and angry, and defiant; its understated power, aggressive fragility, and overwhelming bleakness exemplify the state of 2016. The vocals signal yearning and desperation through cleanly sung passages that crack with emotion, and echoing howls that bleed; the lingering, blue-gray atmosphere and forceful percussion drive the point home further. While it's a pay-what-you-want download, bear in mind that any proceeds go to the water protectors at Standing Rock, and open your wallet accordingly. —Kim Kelly | LISTEN
"Blue Lights" is one of the most pertinent songs to come out of the UK this year. Sampling Dizzee Rascal's "Sirens," it's an aching portrait of the forms racial profiling can take, whether it's being "kept after class for answering back" or the increased likelihood of being stopped by police for no reason. "There's no need to run if you've done nothing wrong," Smith sings over a silky soundscape that lands somewhere somewhere between Hot Sugar and Lauryn Hill. It's a mammoth achievement for a 19-year-old who started out fitting her songwriting in between shifts at Starbucks. —Emma Garland | LISTEN
Beach Slang's songs can be respectively judged by how Beach Slangy they are. (Definition: Beach Slangy - adjective - possessing mawkish and nostalgic lyrical qualities that border on being overly saccharine) And on "Hot Tramps," off the band's rapidly churned out sophomore LP, A Loud Bash of Teenage Feelings, frontman James Alex is at his Beach Slangiest as he compares his subject's eyelashes to plastic diamonds and mouth to a pile of sirens. The fuzzy vocals and thick guitar tone on this song mask the sentiment underneath as he goes full heart-on-sleeve with the chorus: "I can't love you raw enough." It's so wonderfully and unabashedly Beach Slangy. —Dan Ozzi | LISTEN
One thing that sets rap apart from other music genres is the art of the collaboration, which is exemplified to perfection on Chance the Rapper's "No Problem." In a year where we've had no Carter V, Wayne still managed to pull out a verse of fire. 2 Chainz commands the listener to take their shirt off and wave it around like a helicopter. "No Problem" is the sound of unadulterated joy in a stress-free world, making it a crucial and necessary respite from the fuckery that has been 2016. —Ryan Bassil | LISTEN
With "Devil Is Fine," Zeal & Ardor—the spiritual black metal project from Switzerland's Manuel Gagneux—is a fucking force. On the track, Gagneux's arresting voice is gravelly, powerful, and fearless—a sonic statement that embraces soul traditions layered into raw and harsh electronics. Don't really understand that description? Yeah, same. That's what makes it so goddamn good. —Eric Sundermann | LISTEN
One of the reasons grime has become so prominent in 2016 is because it isn't just about the tentpole artists like Skepta, JME, or Wiley anymore; it's about artists at every single tier of the scene, young and old, grinding and creating harder than ever before. Named after a fancy Brazilian footballer of the same name, "Thiago Silva" was one of this year's fiercest underground heaters, birthed from the brains of AJ Tracey, one of the most exciting new grime talents around, and Dave, UK rap's best young prospect.
Written over a re-work of the classic "Pied Piper" instrumental, and with an incredible music video that sees the pair juxtapose London street scenes with those of Paris, the message of "Thiago Silva" is simple: no matter what 2016 made everyone think, the sound of Britain is not reverting back to church bells, spoons stirring tea, Jeremy Clarkson revving a Bentley, a flaccid Union Jack flopping in the breeze, or cricket players having cheery banter on the village green. The sound of Britain is an 18-year-old rapper from Streatham and a grime MC from Ladbroke Grove swapping bars about football, Nandos, and knocking your teeth out. —Joe Zadeh | LISTEN
Frank Ocean's Blonde dabbled in many shades, but the two-toned "Nights" was the inarguable anchor of the singer/songwriter's sparse, lovely, and altogether beguiling masterpiece. The first half marks "Nights" as one of the few songs on the album to feature percussion of any kind, a distant drum hit in congress with soft bass patter, as Ocean offers lyrical points of advice and well-wishing to someone just out-of-scene. Before you know it, a few synths zoom in, a thicket of guitar noise encroaches, and the bottom drops out, revealing pitch-shifted autobiographical bon mots and astral-projection tones on top of a gently skittering beat. It's one of the most mesmerizing musical moments of 2016 (in years, maybe), like running full-speed on gravel only to find yourself weightless in motion, stars surrounding you and the sky below.
Since its release, the moody, mercurial textures of Blonde have given me a similar unquantifiable feeling as listening to the late Arthur Russell. There is so much beauty that, for all the sonic abstractions attached to it, is almost plaintive in its presentation, with Ocean's lyrics touching on a variety of big themes—sex, death, youth, drugs, aging, trust, safety, alienation—without giving too much away. On the surface (how else to approach art made by someone who refuses, brilliantly, to give much else away?), "Nights" is about nostalgia as much as it is about the daily basics of survival, undeniably generational topics for anyone who's been worried about the uncertainties tomorrow brings and has reflected on the past with a purity of intent—no negatives, no positives, facts only. Right before that gravity-defying moment, Ocean sums up eight years of millennial angst in one devastating couplet, highlighting the eternal conflict between wanting to remove yourself from the world and realizing that sometimes there's no place else to go: "Wanna see nirvana, but don't wanna die." Who doesn't? —Larry Fitzmaurice | LISTEN
Angel Olsen has made her career out of exposing emotional wounds to her audience. Whether they are characters she's created or her own experiences she's re-telling, Olsen lets us see the sometimes unpretty and contradictory aspects of humanity, especially when it involves love. The single "Shut Up Kiss Me" from her third album, My Woman, picks up on similar beats that Olsen gave us on her the aching sophomore Burn Your Fire For No Witness. It's an oddly comforting anthemic track; something good to sing along to on full blast. On "Shut Up Kiss Me," we're presented with the quietly defiant, but soon-to-be obstinate, tone of a person fighting, grasping even, at the last straws of a relationship on the brink of falling over the edge. The lyrics "shutupkissmeholdmetight" run together and suggest a fluid, frantic urgency—emphasizing how vital it is for whomever the other character is to stop fighting and fucking kiss her already. Olsen is bold in the face of her faceless antagonist: she gives us a real-time spectrum of emotional reactions moving between the soft tone of "we could still be making some sweet memories" to an almost exasperated "it's all over, baby, but I'm still young." The final "shutupkissmeholdmetight" sounds like a realization, a goodbye even, her groaning "ahhhsss" all over the song have been waiting for. —Sarah MacDonald | LISTEN
You can deconstruct, analyze, genre-categorize, and objectively critique all you want, but in essence: songs are just like people, you either like them or you don't. If "3 Wheel-Ups" by British MC Kano was a person, it would be the direct rudeboy; the one who thunders into a dying house party at 2 AM with a liberal crate of ice cold beers, an inviting but not disturbing amount of illegal substances, a magnetism for the aux cord, and a facial expression that suggests everything that had gone before was inadequate and the real party starts now—then exits early, leaving you all crawling around on the floor and yearning for more. From the thumping trumpet-led instrumental to the searing bars of three UK legends (Kano, Wiley, Giggs)—this song made many an MC look at themselves hard in the mirror and wonder if this life was truly for them. You are "Drill Time" by Slim Jesus, and "3 Wheel-Ups" is the guy she told you not to worry about. —Joe Zadeh | LISTEN
PUP fans were waiting on The Dream Is Over, the Toronto band's sophomore album. Like, reeeeally waiting on it. So much so that when the band tossed them "DVP," a teaser song off the album which had technically already been floating around (if you knew where to look on the interwebs), they went apeshit, and the track racked up a few hundred thousand plays in just a couple of days. There's just something about "DVP" that's like pure audio crack—maybe it's guitarist Steve Sladkowski's underlying hypnotic riffs, maybe it's the relatable nature of its subject matter of acting like an immature asshole after three beers, or maybe it's those catchy woooooohs that need to be pried out of your head with a crowbar. Most likely, it's a combination of it all, a perfect pop punk storm captured in under two and a half minutes. Not to mention, "DVP" holds the title for the only non-terrible lyric video ever made. Once The Dream Is Over was finally released, it was revealed that the song was part of a helluva one-two punch to kick off a solid record that fans were happy with. But then again, the album could've been "DVP" ten times in a row and that would've been fine too. —Dan Ozzi | LISTEN
"Mad" doesn't sound like a song about anger, and that's partially the point. Solange floats in over airy piano chords to reclaim anger as resilience—she takes back her right to express indignation over oppression and injustice from those who don't believe that expression is worth fighting for. "You got the right to be mad / But when you carry it alone, you find it only getting in the way / They say you gotta let it go," she sings. The song negotiates the weight and catharsis of that sentiment. You hear it embedded in the sigh and shuffle of the brushed snare, in the major key progression, and in the quivering backing harmonies of Moses Sumney, The-Dream, and Tweet. It's tough to recall a more nuanced and graceful twist to the gut as their repeated exhale of "Where'd your love go? / Where'd your love go, baby?" The song's epiphany is as much about embracing anger as it is a takedown of the loneliness and estrangement of holding it in. That's where Wayne comes in with one of his best verses in recent memory, recounting his travails with disarming frankness: "And when I attempted suicide, I didn't die / I remember how mad I was on that day." It's a line you don't forget, but he already "let it go, let it go, let it go." As with the rest of A Seat at the Table, "Mad" is a work of subtlety, offering release in laying its most difficult truths to bare. —Andrea Domanick | LISTEN
It's impossible to talk about "Formation" without talking about the video. That's true of Lemonade as a whole, but as its lead single, "Formation," both verbally and visually set the direction Beyoncé would be taking and asserted, very clearly, who this album would be for. It's accessible to anyone with a passing interest in her as an artist, but "Formation" is principally a celebration of black people, black culture, and black power. That extends from the black and queer bodies depicted in the video who bear the brunt of societal violence—replete with Big Freedia's presence and implicitly the New Orleans bounce scene she helped popularize—to the team who worked on it. It references everything from police brutality to Hurricane Katrina, natural hair to hot sauce, Givenchy to Red Lobster—folding the personal and the political into an empowerment anthem that spawned a thousand "slay" shirts. Sonically, it's one of the weirdest things Beyoncé has ever released. It's off-kilter, full of several layers of unusual noises, and stops and starts in a way chart music doesn't often tolerate. It's rare in pop that resistance is so overtly political, so celebratory and goes hard as hell. But that's what Beyoncé delivered; boosting the voices, lives, and concerns of the marginalized at a time when systematic oppression is doing its best to brush them aside. —Emma Garland | LISTEN
Running jokes on Twitter about how The Beatles never did anything that could rival Migos or any other black music stars were fun enough when Desus had Good Morning America believing that he really didn't know who Paul McCartney was. But now, rappers are increasingly interested in being rock stars, and what better way to do so than to claim the title of the most successful band to date? Rae Sremmurd's "Black Beatles" song and video successfully makes the case for the the duo's rockstar aspirations, but it mainly wins because it makes you feel like a rockstar too. From Swae Lee's falsetto ad libs, to Jxmmi's claim of being kin to McCartney, to enlisting Gucci Mane for a feature in a year where he's defied all the odds, "Black Beatles" is equally effective when getting dressed or out at a club. It also doesn't hurt to have one of the last remaining Beatles do the #mannequinchallenge to your track. —Lawrence Burney | LISTEN
According to Roman myth, there once existed a being named Bacchus, god of wine and ecstasy. Relentless in his hedonistic pursuits, Bacchus held gatherings allowing those present to gorge themselves in carnal and drunken displays of pleasure called "bacchanals." Eons later, the term "bacchanal" in present day still means much the same thing—that is, "an occasion of wild and drunken revelry." Its spirit has been distilled into a realm without wine but instead "vodka and water, and a lemon," and reincarnated into a majestic hymn called "Sex With Me."
One of three bonus cuts that close out ANTI, "Sex" is an explicit decree of Rihanna's fleshly beauty and sensual greatness, as she proclaims in its opening line from on high, "Sex with me, so amazing!" While Rihanna-as-sexual-goddess is far from a novel motif (see that classic, "Cockiness (Love It)"), what "Sex" does differently is gear down her usual aggressive tenor, instead relishing in pure elation and delight. You can hear Rihanna smiling as she teases, "I know, I know, I make it hard to let go." Her natural conviction, through in what is really a three-and-a-half minute brag, evokes that most elusive of all feelings: knowing you are the shit.
This year, especially in music, the phrase "self love" has been often used in juxtaposition to the crushing sense of oppression from the outside world. "Sex With Me"'s greatest ability, then, is the sphere of internal optimism it sits in. Even in the inconceivable scenario her lover is absent, Rihanna will happily carry on, more than content in pursuing satisfaction by her lonesome ("Tonight, all night, I'm Monroe / Even if I'm alone"). Truly, self-love in its purest, literal sense. —Jabbari Weekes | LISTEN
In a just world, YG's song about the foremost racist clown of American politics should have gone down in history as an entertaining piece of trivia, and Donald Trump should have been buried with his mail-order steaks in the garbage bin of irrelevance. But that's not what happened. Donald Trump was elected president, and "FDT" took on new urgency, blossoming from a novelty into an anthem. The rapper who once made "Toot It and Boot It" has found himself recast as the unlikely voice of resistance. Reality made "fuck Donald Trump" a hot line, and, to his credit, YG made it a hot song.
Times of political urgency do not necessarily demand political music, nor should that be the standard to which we hold our art, especially when the catalyst for that political urgency is a man who looks like a honeybaked ham. But at the same time, a line like "Fuck Donald Trump" can and should serve as a moral guidepost for the music ahead. We can respond to our fear and anger not just with statements of what we see—i.e. YG saying, "He's too rich, he ain't got the answers / he can't make decisions for this country, he gon' crash us"; Nipsey pointing out he's "from a place where [Trump] prolly can't go / Speaking for some people that you prolly ain't know"—but with the catharsis of a beat that bangs and a hook so memorable that it becomes an instantaneous rallying cry. We can take solace in the idea of collaboration—not just that a Blood and Crip might link up, as YG quips, but that we can create something better working together, as YG and Nip do when they trade bars on a new LA anthem, when they unite for a hard-knocking slice of modern G-funk, when they transform a heavy idea into a dirty-as-hell bassline you can rock to at a barbecue. This is what rap should be: Party music that makes the craven political establishment piss their pants and yell about propriety.
Standing up to Trump—an imperative as he and his cronies come for us and the literal planet we live on—will necessarily take many forms. Having faith in each other will be key. As Nipsey observes, on reaching across racial lines, "If it's time to team up, shit, let's begin." But it will also be important to just say "no," over and over. For the next four years, it will be our duty as Americans to blast the ever-living fuck out of this song, to remind everyone that the message isn't going away, that a man who has publicly feuded with both Cher and American democracy can never be on the right side of history.
"We the youth," YG says. "We the people of this country. We got a voice too. We will be seen, and we will be heard." Don't forget it. —Kyle Kramer | LISTEN
Follow Noisey on TwitterBy now most of us have had an opportunity to hit balls on a launch monitor or maybe even had a chance to see some really cool computer animated analysis of their swing. The information you can gather from this type of technology is absolutely priceless. Everything your golf club is doing at any point in your swing is displayed right there on the computer screen. There is however one drawback to all of this, in order to get access to it you have to pay, and pay a pretty steep price most of the time. New in 2012 is a device called SwingByte, the SwingByte is a small device that is designed to get all of this valuable data but without having to pay expensive fees for instructors utilizing the technology. Let’s check it out.
About SwingByte:
Swingbyte was founded in 2010 by three University of Chicago Booth School of Business colleagues, Alex Pedenko, Brian Payne and Nathan Wojtkiewicz. Frustrated with the challenge of learning golf on his own, tech expert Alex sought a simple and affordable technology-based solution for this centuries old endeavor. After two years of work with former golf pro Brian and operations expert Nathan, Swingbyte was released this spring to widespread acclaim, including Golf Digest naming Swingbyte one of the “12 Coolest Items” at the 2012 PGA Merchandise Show.
Swingbyte is a patent-pending 3-D golf swing analyzer that helps golfers of all skill levels to improve their game in real-time, right on their smartphone or tablet. Swingbyte instantly captures key metrics from a golf swing and wirelessly transmits the information and a visual representation of the swing to a golfer’s Apple or Android mobile device.
THP Testing:
Before I get into the data I was able to obtain from the SwingByte let me start with talking about ease of use. Immediately after receiving the package I had the device powered on and the minute I enabled Bluetooth on my iPhone things were communicating and I was ready to start taking swings. I was happy with how quickly and easily the setup was, because I am not someone who likes to read instructions. I like it when things just work like I think they should and initial setup of the device is a breeze.
Ok so we’re setup and taking swings, just to let you know the type of data that is being displayed here let me list a few. At address you can find out the club loft, lie and face angles. Perhaps even more valuable, at impact the SwingByte will show you your club head speed, club loft, lie, face, angle of attack, club path and tempo. Throughout the swing you get data such as linear acceleration and plane angle. Basically anything you could imagine wanting to know about the position of your club is provided and all in easy to read layouts.
All of this data can be a bit of information overload but the way SwingByte displays the swing on your mobile device it’s actually all pretty easy to follow along and to understand what you’re looking at. As you swing the club with the SwingByte collecting data it keeps a swing history that is easy to access and view as you are working through some swings and tracking certain areas of the swing for improvements. The SwingByte App (free download on iOS or Andriod) comes setup with a standard golf bag of club specs, but I recommend going through the default settings and making sure everything you use is in there and the specs are accurate.
Initially I seemed to be on this trip to track swing speed and nothing but swing speed, and early on I did not think I saw the numbers I expected to see. This was fixed by properly inputting my driver specs into the app, once that was done the SwingByte seemed to be giving my swing speed numbers that were right in line with what I’ve seen on various launch monitors I’ve used. Another thing that I was set out to prove inaccurate was what the device told me about my swing in terms of the ball flight. Seems early on I kept seeing my shot shape displayed as a push slice or sometimes a pull slice. Once in a while I’d get it to say straight but not real often. So to the driving range I went armed with the SwingByte and my iPhone ready to prove this thing wrong.
Shot after shot I watched as the analysis from the SwingByte matched what I was seeing on the range. I will say that I tend to be a little more apt to call a ball straight than SwingByte is, but it really just spits out what my swing tells it and most of the time it was pretty well accurate. I will say that at first I thought having the device attached to the club might be a little distracting but you really don’t even notice that it’s there. I had absolutely no issues with my SwingByte moving or slipping at all. I have heard a couple of reports of devices moving on a couple of people on the THP forum but the company was quick to respond with a resolution.
One club that I was able to get some immediate assistance with after using the SwingByte on it was the putter. The data captured showed that I had been over exaggerating my strong arc putting stroke to the point that I was almost never getting the putter head squared back at impact. I was able to use the data from the SwingByte and immediately improve my putting on the course. I will say that on the iPhone the putter stroke is a little difficult to see which I believe is due to the shorter swing you take but the stroke is there and you can see what you’re doing pretty easily. I have seen videos of putting stroke data viewed on an iPad and it was much easier to see in more detail.
Overall:
I definitely see the SwingByte as a very useful device for a lot of people. The ability to see where your club is at during all points of the swing is something that can really take someone’s game to the next level. Using the SwingByte was both fun and very informative. I found myself almost becoming too fixed on what data came across the screen and not focusing on just hitting the golf ball. That can be a common problem for anyone whether or not the SwingByte or an instructor is giving you the information. There certainly is a lot of data packed in this device and if you’re not careful you can become a victim of “paralysis by analysis” but as with many pieces of technology out there if you use it for what you need and don’t try to dig too far into what you don’t you’ll be just fine.
The SwingByte is not a replacement for an instructor or for launch monitor fittings in my opinion but it is a great tool for some self-diagnosis of some of the flaws in your golf swing. I found the SwingByte to be quite accurate in terms of what it displayed my ball flight and what I saw on the course. I always liked to call my shot shape a baby fade, not so much a push slice but the SwingByte doesn’t care about my feelings, it just calls it like it sees it. The SwingByte is available by going to the company’s website www.swingbyte.com as well as at over 1300 AT&T stores across the country for $149.In the United States, there appears to be a virtual news-blackout of what is happening in Ukraine and of why; and the following news-report breaks through it, so that the American public will know the situation that actually exists there:
The Ukrainian government that was installed after the nationally elected and pro-Russian President of Ukraine was overthrown in a violent coup on February 22nd is now bombing the country’s southeast, where that President had received almost all of his votes. (Those are the areas of the country where Ukraine’s Russian-speakers live.) Videos that show this have been confirmed as authentic by Stopfake.org, a website that was recently established by an independent group of journalism students in order to defeat propaganda that is being created and spread by both sides in the Ukrainian civil war; these students are doing this so that honest news reporting can be separated out from that which is based on, and spreading, lies. None of the videos or other information-sources that will be linked to in the present news report is, at least to this reporter’s knowledge as of the moment that this news report is being written, among the ones that have been exposed there as having been fabricated, or as being claimed to show what they do not actually show. Every precaution has been taken to reconstruct events from only the highest-quality news sources on any given matter that is being discussed here. No news-report can be better than are its sources. It is presumed by the writer of this news report that if any of its sources turns out to be bogus, that will be noticed and pointed out in reader-comments that will be posted to it. (Even the best journalist can overlook something that subsequently turns out to have been important.) All of that is said here in the way of introduction.
Russian media (which are the only news-media that are reporting the Ukrainian civil war from the side of the residents of southeastern Ukraine) are reporting that Ihor Kolomoysky, who is the gangster-oligarch who hired Joe Biden’s son and who was made a governor in southeastern Ukraine by the woman whom Obama had hoped would be elected to become Ukraine’s President (Yulia Tymoshenko), is one of two Ukrainian officials who are directing the bombing campaign against the residents of southeastern Ukraine. This bombing campaign is being carried out in order to compel residents in the southeast to accept rule by the Obama-imposed group, who gained power on February 22nd in the Ukrainian coup (CIA manipulation of the “Maidan” demonstrations). Elsewhere has been reported that Kolomoysky’s colleague in this bombing-campaign, Arsen Avakov, had been one of the chief organizers (along with Kolomoysky himselkf) of the May 2nd massacre of independence-supporters inside the Odessa Trade Unions building. (Odessa is in the south of Ukraine, within the area that is resisting.) That event in Odessa sparked Ukraine’s civil war, because it confirmed to the people of southeastern Ukraine that Obama’s people want to kill them, at least until the survivors accept the coup-imposed government. That’s what this bombing-campaign is actually all about: persuading the residents there that their choice is either surrender or else continued bombing: their death. This is the ‘democracy’ that Obama imposed in Ukraine.
The Washington Post, in one of its rare instances of relatively non-biased reporting about the Ukrainian situation, reported on March 25th, in a blogpost (not in the printed newspaper, because this news did not fit the U.S. regime’s propaganda-line but instead that of the regime’s victims), that a “recording, apparently made March 8, details a conversation between Tymoshenko and Nestor Shufrych from Ukraine’s National Security Council,” which “has Tymoshenko suggesting that Ukrainians should kill Russians, and, in particular, Russian President Vladimir Putin. The recording … also apparently features Tymoshenko suggesting that the 8 million Russians living in Ukraine should be killed with ‘nuclear weapons.’” That news report then went on to speculate whether the recording “may have been altered,” and it provided Ms. Tymoshenko’s allegation to that effect (since she was Obama’s intended next President of Ukraine). However, if one clicks on the link to the conversation, that claim by her seems not credible. The residents in southeastern Ukraine thus possessed sound reason to think that the government that had been imposed in Kiev want them dead, or else enslaved. And the May 2nd massacre in Odessa confirmed it to them.
The best brief video report on that May 2nd massacre — the event that made clear what the Administration’s intentions regarding them were, and that thus sparked Ukraine’s civil war — appeared on Russian TV, and it was further confirmed by an independent American-produced video (only ten minutes long, but devastating) that contains damning evidence disproving the type of “news” reporting that’s provided by America’s “news” media. That brief video, which this present reporter has verified in regards to every particular, is one of the most brilliant succinct pieces of investigative news reporting to appear |
bled and uplifted by guileless young warriors; I have been trusted and have trusted others with my life; I have walked with heroes, and count them as friends; I have had adventures you can't pay for and rewards you can't buy. I would not change my career, but I know it's come at a cost. One day I might accept I am wounded, but the memory of the physically ruined men I once commanded is too raw to allow that yet. What I do know is this: I have been a soldier; I have served my country; I am proud of what I have accomplished; I have endured hardship, trauma, pain and loss; I have done so voluntarily; I am not a victim, I am a survivor. I understand that I am on a long journey of recovery, but I know also that I will complete that journey, someday. I am determined to get better. I will beat this thing.
Edited extract from Exit Wounds: One Australian's War on Terror by Major General John Cantwell (with Greg Bearup), published by MUP on October 1. Lead-in photograph by Tim Bauer. Like Good Weekend on Facebook and get regular updates on upcoming stories and events: facebook.com/GoodWeekendMagazineResearchers on the New Horizons team have released a set of five scientific papers describing results from the July 2015 flyby of the Pluto system.
“These five detailed papers completely transform our view of Pluto – revealing the former ‘astronomer’s planet’ to be a real world with diverse and active geology, exotic surface chemistry, a complex atmosphere, puzzling interaction with the Sun and an intriguing system of small moons,” said New Horizons principal investigator Dr. Alan Stern, from the Southwest Research Institute.
In the first of the five papers, published this week in the journal Science, Dr. Jeffrey Moore from NASA’s Ames Research Center and co-authors offer some of the first descriptions of the wide array of geological features on Pluto and its largest moon, Charon.
The scientists report evidence of tectonics, glacial flow, transport of large water-ice blocks, and broad mounds on the dwarf planet – possibly a result of cryovolcanoes.
Data on the variability of terrain suggests the dwarf planet has been frequently resurfaced by processes like erosion, pointing to active geomorphic processes within the last few hundred million years.
Such processes have not been active so recently on Charon; divided into a rugged north and a smooth south, the moon is marked with older craters and troughs, contrasting with Pluto.
“Observing Pluto and Charon up close has caused us to completely reassess thinking on what sort of geological activity can be sustained on isolated planetary bodies in this distant region of the Solar System, worlds that formerly had been thought to be relics little changed since the Kuiper Belt’s formation,” Dr. Moore said.
In a second study, Dr. Will Grundy of the Lowell Observatory and his colleagues analyze the colors and chemical compositions of the icy surfaces of Pluto and Charon.
The volatile ices, including water ice and solid nitrogen, that dominate Pluto’s surface are distributed in a complicated way — a result of geomorphic processes acting on the surface over different seasonal and geological timescales. Broad expanses of reddish-brown molecules called tholins accumulated in some parts of Pluto.
“We see variations in the distribution of Pluto’s volatile ices that point to fascinating cycles of evaporation and condensation,” Dr. Grundy said. “These cycles are a lot richer than those on Earth, where there’s really only one material that condenses and evaporates – water.”
“On Pluto, there are at least three materials, and while they interact in ways we don’t yet fully understand, we definitely see their effects all across Pluto’s surface.”
In a third study, Dr. Fran Bagenal from the University of Colorado, Boulder, and co-authors report how Pluto modifies its space environment, including interactions with the solar wind and a lack of dust in the system.
“We’ve discovered that pre-New Horizons estimates wildly overestimated the loss of material from Pluto’s atmosphere,” Dr. Bagenal said.
“The thought was that Pluto’s atmosphere was escaping like a comet, but it is actually escaping at a rate much more like Earth’s atmosphere.”
“We’ve discovered that methane, rather than nitrogen, is Pluto’s primary escaping gas,” added Dr. Randall Gladstone of the Southwest Research Institute, lead author of the fourth study. “This is pretty surprising, since near Pluto’s surface the atmosphere is more than 99% nitrogen.”
In their study, Dr. Gladstone and co-authors investigate the atmosphere of Pluto, which is colder and more compact than expected and hosts numerous extensive layers of haze.
Finally, Dr. Hal Weaver from the Johns Hopkins University Applied Physics Laboratory and co-authors examine Pluto’s small moons — Styx, Nix, Kerberos and Hydra.
According to the scientists, the four moons range in diameter from about 25 miles (40 km) for Nix and Hydra to about 6 miles (10 km) for Styx and Kerberos.
They observed that the moons have highly anomalous rotation rates and uniformly unusual pole orientations, as well as icy surfaces with brightness and colors distinctly different from those of Pluto and Charon.
They’ve found evidence that some of the moons resulted from mergers of even smaller bodies, and that their surface ages date back at least 4 billion years.
“These latter two results reinforce the hypothesis that the small moons formed in the aftermath of a collision that produced the Pluto-Charon binary system,” Dr. Weaver said.
Taken together, these results from the flyby of the Pluto system pave the way for scientists’ better understanding of processes of planetary evolution.
_____
Jeffrey M. Moore et al. 2016. The geology of Pluto and Charon through the eyes of New Horizons. Science, vol. 351, no. 6279; doi: 10.1126/science.aad7055
W.M. Grundy et al. 2016. Surface compositions across Pluto and Charon. Science, vol. 351, no. 6279; doi: 10.1126/science.aad9189
F. Bagenal et al. 2016. Pluto’s interaction with its space environment: Solar wind, energetic particles, and dust. Science, vol. 351, no. 6279; doi: 10.1126/science.aad9045
G. Randall Gladstone et al. 2016. The atmosphere of Pluto as observed by New Horizons. Science, vol. 351, no. 6279; doi: 10.1126/science.aad8866
H.A. Weaver et al. 2016. The small satellites of Pluto as observed by New Horizons. Science, vol. 351, no. 6279; doi: 10.1126/science.aae0030A California judge on Thursday ruled against Facebook (FB) in a lawsuit that says the company violated user privacy by scanning their faces without permission and inviting others to “tag” them in photographs.
The case is significant because it’s one of the first to test the boundaries of how companies use facial recognition software, a rapidly-advancing technology that treats faces as the modern-day equivalent of a fingerprint. (At Facebook, the company has internally referred to the tool as a “faceprint.”)
Thursday’s court ruling involved three Facebook users from Illinois who sued under a state law that regulates how companies use “biometric identifiers,” including iris scans and “face geometry.” The lawsuit is in the form a class action complaint, and it could let every Facebook user in Illinois collect $1,000 or $5,000, which are the penalties for violating the law.
Read More: Facebook Loses the First Round in Its Battle Over Users’ Biometrics
In the ruling, which you can read here, U.S. District Judge James Donato agreed that Facebook’s scanning and tagging feature qualified as a use of biometric identifier covered by the statute. On a key procedural issue, he refused Facebook’s request to decide the case under California law, where companies don’t face restrictions on the use of biometrics.
The procedural issue is important because, under Facebook’s terms of service, consumers must agree to settle any legal dispute in California. While agreeing to hear the case in San Francisco, the judge, however, nonetheless ruled that the law of Illinois should apply.
“Taking all of these factors as a whole, the plain language of BIPA indisputably evinces a fundamental privacy policy of Illinois,” the ruling states. “But if California law is applied, the Illinois policy of protecting its citizens’ privacy interests in their biometric data, especially in the context of dealing with ‘major national corporations’ like Facebook, would be written out of existence.”
While the Thursday ruling does not amount a final decision, it effectively puts Facebook on the hook for violating the biometrics law. Facebook, which can appeal the finding, did not immediately reply to a request for comment.
The case could also have ripple effects for the growing number of other tech companies that use facial scanning software. Google (GOOG), for instance, is facing a similar class action case in Illinois, while the online scrapbook company Shutterfly (SFLY) quietly settled another such case in April.
Subscribe to Data Sheet, Fortune’s daily technology newsletter
In an email statement, a lawyer representing the Facebook users said the ruling could affect other cases.
“We are pleased with the court’s well-reasoned decision and look forward to the continued prosecution of the action on behalf of consumers whose biometric information has been collected in violation of the Illinois Biometric Information Privacy Act,” said Shawn Williams, of Robbins Geller Rudman and Dowd. “Given the detailed analysis undertaken by the court, it’s possible that it may impact other pending lawsuits arising under the same statute, though that remains to be seen.”
The ruling is also likely to provide for grist for the debate over who owns your face, and could spur others states to pass biometric laws of their own.
Meanwhile, other countries, including Canada and many European nations, have banned Facebook’s tagging feature on privacy grounds. And last year, the retailer Wal-Mart (WMT) has abandoned a trial program in which it used the technology to identify shoplifters.Text size
In 2001, long before Bernard Madoff burst into the spotlight with his massive Ponzi scheme, Erin Arvedlund wrote an exposé for Barron's questioning Madoff's claimed investment returns. When Arvedlund, then a staff writer for the magazine, pressed Madoff on how he did it, he replied: "It's a proprietary strategy. I can't go into it in great detail." Well, sorry, Bernie -- Arvedlund now has the details. Her book about Madoff, Too Good To Be True, will be published Aug. 11 by Portfolio, a division of Penguin Group (USA). In the exclusive excerpts that follow, she explains the key roles played by Madoff's London office, and raises questions about just when JPMorgan Chase realized he was a fraud.
-
MADOFF'S LONDON OFFICE PLAYED A LARGE role in helping hide his fraud. London may have started out legitimate, but over the decades it morphed into a financial outpost for the family, a place where they felt comfortable stashing what they considered their personal money -- which by 2008 amounted to some 113 million British pounds.
Madoff Securities International Limited, as the London operation was called, opened its doors in 1983. The business entity was owned by Madoff, his wife, their sons, and a longtime friend of Bernie's, Paul Konigsberg. Later, Konigsberg's accounting firm would show up hundreds of times on the list of victims, since Madoff often referred his investors to the firm -- as good accountants for handling securities.
Bernie's Savile Row tailors visited him in the boardroom as Ruth knitted. Scott Pollack for Barron's
The London office had electronic terminals that made it possible to log in directly to and trade on the Nasdaq exchange from overseas. As usual, the Madoffs were early adopters of technology, and they were among the first to use these market-making terminals outside the U.S. This meant the U.K. office could trade when traders in the United States could not: domestic U.S. trades were allowed only when the U.S. markets were actually open.
By 1989, however, the Nasdaq extended its hours and traded several hundred over-the-counter stocks during the predawn hours in the United States, thus allowing firms there to trade during London hours -- part of the gradual globalization that would one day overtake securities trading. This may have made the London office less essential to the daily operations of Madoff's broker-dealer and proprietary-trading businesses.
Over time, however, the London branch would become the family bank teller. It was offshore as well, so Madoff could wire money from his U.S. operations to London, in transactions of hundreds of millions of dollars that covered fake trades, or simply wash the funds out of his American accounts and then spend them on luxury items like the Leopard speedboat he purchased in France. (This is also known as money laundering.)
The Original Scoop Author Erin Arvedlund raised serious questions about Bernard Madoff's claimed investment returns in a Barron's story in 2001, "Don't Ask, Don't Tell." You can read the full story at www.barrons.com/madoff
Although the sons, Mark and Andrew, were located in New York, they held ownership and titles as directors in the London operation. And Bernie's wife, Ruth, and his brother, Peter, also held shares, as did his old friend Sonny Cohn, at least originally. Paul Konigsberg was another director. Charles Stillman, an attorney for Konigsberg, said Konigsberg received nonvoting shares for work he did to help open the London operation, in the 1980s. Konigsberg, he added, didn't have any "meaningful business role" in the London operation, which suggests he didn't have any say in how the business was run.
Konigsberg, however, was a major fund-raiser for Madoff's New York hedge fund at least since 1998, according to Madoff investor Steven Leber. Leber filed a $4 million lawsuit in Florida against Konigsberg and his accounting firm, Konigsberg Wolf & Co., charging negligence and professional malpractice with respect to a Madoff account opened by Leber in 1998. In that suit, Leber alleged that Konigsberg offered to act as a conduit to Madoff for Leber's $4 million or so in family money -- but only if Leber started using Konigsberg's accounting firm as well. Konigsberg Wolf has offices in New York and is listed on the Madoff victims' trustee list. Konigsberg himself, as well as his firm and some of his family members, also appears on the victims' list more than three hundred times -- sometimes on his own behalf, other times on behalf of accounts set up for others, such as the Norman F. Levy Foundation.
Author Arvedlund, right, says London employees had "no clue Madoff was using his British outpost as a money launderette." Paul Colliton (photo inset)
It's possible the London operation was a way to repay Konigsberg for his fund-raising services without the commission money being traced. After all, through Madoff Securities International, Madoff was able to handsomely compensate other family members. In 1998, for example, directors of the London operation received emoluments, or payments, totaling £688,570 while the operation reported profits of £1.03 million, according to the Wall Street Journal. In 2007, Madoff directors altogether received £1.09 million, with the highest-paid director alone receiving £301,437.
Meanwhile, Madoff had two primary bank accounts set up for him in New York. One account was with the Bank of New York Mellon, account number 866-1126-621 (referred to as BONY 621). It was supposed to be the broker-dealer's primary cash account. He also had an account at JPMorgan Chase, numbered 140081703 (referred to as JPM 703), which was the account investors used to wire money or send checks to the fake advisory business. This was also the account used to pay investors when they withdrew funds. Many were able to get hold of their money within days; Madoff always had it ready, no matter how large the amount. It was one of his biggest selling points.
After his arrest, Madoff would claim in court that the legitimate brokerage firm and the criminal hedge fund, the advisory business, were completely separate. However, in 2001, money began to slosh back and forth between the two accounts, and this continued up until the day Madoff turned himself in. Money was regularly transferred from both the Bank of New York and the JPMorgan Chase accounts to the London office. Madoff personally wired roughly $500 million over to London and then back again between 2001 and 2008, according to copies of the documents filed by the Madoff trustee, Irving Picard. Over those seven years, Madoff also withdrew cash from the broker-dealer's account with Bank of New York, sometimes as much as $2 million in a single day.
Madoff Securities International in London also "traded for Bernard Madoff's personal accounts and members of his family," said Picard. And the trustee's revelations didn't stop there. In a filing with the U.S. Bankruptcy Court, Picard laid out how the London accounts had been used as Madoff's personal piggy bank. Madoff began regularly wiring money to the London office to pay for personal luxuries.
He purchased the $7 million Leopard yacht in the south of France by sending cash through his U.K. office. The yacht, named The Bull, just like his cruiser in Palm Beach, was built for Madoff in 2006. The boat was also registered in Ruth Madoff's name, as were many of the couple's high-priced trophies. The 27-meter (89-foot) Leopard, built by French luxury boat-builder Rodriguez Group, was moored at Port Gallice, France, between Cannes and Nice. The annual fee to keep a yacht of this size there is nearly $50,000. Madoff told employees in London to transfer money to the shipyard, reasoning that the builders already had euro-denominated bank accounts, which would make the transaction easier -- or at least, that was the explanation he gave. The employees sent the money after receiving an invoice from the boatyard, and Madoff later transferred cash to the London firm's accounts to cover the expense. At least $250 million was allegedly wired back and forth between Madoff's New York and London offices for such purchases.
In November 2008, Madoff phoned Chris Dale, the finance director of Madoff Securities International in London, and told him to sell an entire portfolio of British bonds. Madoff then instructed Dale to transfer the money -- $165 million -- to his New York business, so he could buy U.S. Treasuries on London's behalf. Madoff claimed he was worried about the return because of the pound sterling's fall against the U.S. dollar. "He was worried about the British economy and said he preferred his investments in U.S. Treasuries," Dale told The Independent on Sunday, a British newspaper. "This seemed perfectly realistic at the time, because of the banking crisis and the pound's weakness."
Madoff's London employees didn't think to question the wires, what they were for, or any other transactions. After all, he was the boss. One employee told the London Times: "He was the chairman of the company and it was his capital in the business. If he phoned up and told us to move money for him, we did it." Employees in London claimed they had no clue that Madoff was using his British outpost as a money launderette.
The Friday after Madoff was arrested, Stephen Raven, chief executive of Madoff Securities International, was still unwittingly defending the London office against Madoff's larger fraud, and issued an indignant statement: "We only became aware overnight of the news relating to our chairman, Bernard Madoff. His major shareholding in our firm is a personal investment. MSIL in London is a small proprietary trading firm -- we are not client-facing and we trade only with the firm's own money." That was true, but the ultimate purpose of the London outpost was very different from what Raven saw: It was where the Madoffs washed their investors' money and then spent it on expensive furnishings, yachts, automobiles, and other luxuries.
Julia Fenwick, another employee at Madoff's London office, was a good friend of Peter's daughter Shana. Because of their friendship, Fenwick sometimes vacationed with the extended family. She even attended Bernie's seventieth birthday party -- held just months before his arrest -- and became intimately familiar with his and Ruth's love of Fleet Street tailors, Boots-brand face cream, and the jet-set lifestyle.
When Madoff visited London, Fenwick said in an interview with The Mail on Sunday, he was often accompanied by a personal designer who was charged with polishing Bernie's appearance and selecting Ruth's clothes. Bernie collected watches through vintage dealers in London's Piccadilly shopping district and sported wedding bands that matched each watch. During his two or three visits a year to London, Madoff would patronize Savile Row and have his tailors from the upscale shop Kilgour pay visits to him at the firm's "Hedge Fund Alley" offices in tony Mayfair. While he was being fitted for high-priced suits in the boardroom, his wife would pass the time knitting.
While in London, Madoff stayed at the Lanesborough Hotel, among the most expensive in the world. Guests pay up to £8,000 per night and are provided with their own private on-call butler. Madoff would leave a trunk of clothes at the Lanesborough, which the hotel stored, cleaned, pressed, and hung in his suite for the next stay.
As her friendship with Shana grew, Fenwick spent more time with the Madoffs outside the office.
In 2007, Fenwick attended Shana Madoff's wedding to Eric Swanson, a lawyer with the SEC. Other SEC people also attended, including Swanson's boss, Lori Richards. (Because she attended this wedding, Richards, in front of Congress after the scandal broke, testified awkwardly that she was recusing herself from the SEC's Madoff investigation.) What struck Fenwick as odd was a joke Bernie Madoff privately made to her. At the wedding reception at the Bowery Hotel in New York City, Bernie leaned in and pointed to other SEC employees among the guests. "Look over there," he told her. "That's the enemy."
BY SEPTEMBER 2008, JPMORGAN CHASE may have had indications, or actually known, that Madoff was a fraud. How might they have found out before everyone else?
JPMorgan Chase is an enormous enterprise, which on one side -- JPMorgan -- operates as an investment bank, and on the other -- Chase -- runs as a typical commercial bank, with loans and deposits. On this commercial banking side, Chase was handling Madoff's billion-dollar advisory business bank account, JPM 703. Earlier in 2008, JPMorgan Chase had taken over Bear Stearns' operations in a government-orchestrated bailout.
Madoff was a close friend and business associate of longtime over-the-counter trader Aldo Parcesepe, a senior managing director and head of Nasdaq market-making at Bear Stearns. He regularly traded with Madoff's broker-dealer firm. Between 2005 and 2008, Parcesepe served on the board of the National Stock Exchange (NSX), the electronic exchange for equities and options that the Madoffs had subsidized in the late 1970s. Peter Madoff served on the NSX board with Parcesepe, who retired from the board in 2008. Madoff owned 10% of the NSX, and Bear Stearns regularly traded through the exchange.
The NSX was familiar ground for the Madoffs. It had once been known as the Cincinnati Stock Exchange, and the Madoffs had refurbished and reinvigorated the exchange with their own money. It was the same exchange that had helped the Madoffs attract orders from Wall Street customer firms all over the country, and the hub for payments made to Madoff for order flows.
Brokers who traded at Bear Stearns used the firm's automated equity order system to buy and sell stocks. A broker would enter the stock symbol and the number of shares he or she wanted to trade. The system was supposed to do the rest: work to find the best counterparty to trade with from among the many market makers that traded with Bear Stearns. However, for Nasdaq stocks, Bear Stearns had an unwritten code: the system automatically defaulted to trade with Madoff.
Madoff reportedly paid Bear Stearns substantial fees for this default setting on their equity order system, and he may have paid other customers to do the same as well. Between 2000 and 2008, Bear Stearns' 400 or so brokers all used this system, and all their Nasdaq trades defaulted to Madoff. It was a big source of revenue for Madoff, and it vaulted Bear Stearns to a position as the largest counterparty trading with Madoff. The arrangement was in place when Bear Stearns went under in early 2008, and it continued under JPMorgan Chase.
Since at least 1992, and separate from the Bear Stearns connection, Madoff had that other strong relationship with Chase Bank: the account named JPM 703, which Madoff used for his phony advisory business. The account had swelled over the years; by 2006 he had billions of dollars in cash on deposit. These were "demand" deposits, meaning Chase had full use of the funds until Madoff withdrew them. All the funds were commingled in a single account, and Madoff could withdraw the money as he saw fit, without any limitation.
Between 2006 and 2008, Chase Bank's accounts from Madoff averaged several billion dollars. However, in 2008, as the stock markets began dropping precipitously, so did Madoff's cash balance. Between September 2008 and December 11, 2008, it had to be pulled out of numerous nose-dives. In November alone, the balance dropped close to zero several times, forcing Madoff to transfer roughly $160 million from Madoff Securities International in London. He was juggling payouts to investors demanding their money back and moving money around from different offices and bank accounts around the world.
And all the while, he continued to take in new investors. In the month of November, investors deposited $300 million of new cash in the Chase account while Madoff withdrew $320 million. Meanwhile, he was hitting up his old friend Carl Shapiro, one of his earliest clients, for a new investment -- of $250 million.
Chase, meanwhile, was doing other business with Madoff besides banking. In 2006, JPMorgan Chase developed a derivative product for its wealthy clients. It was linked to the Fairfield Sentry Fund offered by the Madoff feeder Fairfield Greenwich. The bank offered investors -- mostly in Europe -- a note that paid three times the earnings, or returns, of the Sentry Fund. The note matured in five years. To hedge its risk on the derivative product, the bank invested in the Sentry Fund itself. This way, if the Sentry Fund did well, the bank's returns would offset its obligation on the notes.
By the summer of 2008, JPMorgan Chase had deposited $250 million with the Sentry Fund. With the financial meltdown on Wall Street and around the world in full swing, most of the markets were down 30% or more, and yet the Sentry Fund reported gains of 5%. JPMorgan Chase began to grow suspicious.
Chase representatives from the commercial banking side met with Madoff. They wanted to discuss his cash flows and to know what percentage of his portfolio was leveraged, or invested using borrowed money -- and with whom he traded options contracts. The simple math was just as many others had concluded: the options market was too small to handle the size and capacity Madoff was claiming to manage in his supposed options strategy. Moreover, it was implausible that Madoff could be generating substantial positive returns when the S&P 500 index was down 30%.
Madoff wouldn't provide Chase with any of the key information, so managers from Chase's London office, along with colleagues in New York, decided they would go through the back door.
PARCESEPE'S TRADING DESK HAD PEOPLE who regularly traded with Madoff, and they knew the number of trades executed through Madoff. On its trading side, JPMorgan learned that Madoff's trades with Bear Stearns -- by then a part of Chase, and now Madoff's largest counterparty -- could not possibly sustain a portfolio returning 10% to 12% a year on what the bank knew from the deposit side had to exceed at least $7 billion. The Chase team had access to Madoff's account records, which showed huge cash positions until the middle of 2008, when the stock market went into free fall. It was obvious: Madoff was a fraud.
Barron's Phil Roosevelt speaks with Erin Arvedlund, author of the new book on Bernie Madoff, "Too Good top Be True," which reveals new details about the MAdoff scandal.
In September 2008, JPMorgan Chase quietly liquidated its entire $250 million position in the Sentry Fund, even though it remained liable on the derivatives it had sold to the wealthy clients. At the time, the Fairfield Sentry investment notes were showing a 5% gain for the year. The bank had concluded Madoff was a phony, and the only way to protect itself was to liquidate anything connected with Madoff.
Not only that, but by September 2008 Chase may have known that if Madoff's hedge fund was a fraud, he was likely diverting his advisory-side funds. Still, Chase continued accepting wires and checks from Madoff's latest round of investors. Throughout the fall of 2008, according to one lawsuit filed against Chase (MLSMK Investments Co. v. JPMorgan Chase & Co. et al., SDNY 2009), the bank "continued to work in partnership with Madoff despite being privy to information that the fraud was collapsing and therefore consuming more and more of the victim proceeds."
A JPMorgan Chase spokeswoman, Kristin Lemkau, told the New York Times the bank withdrew from the Madoff-linked funds after "a wide-ranging review of our hedge-fund exposure." Lemkau acknowledged, however, that the bank also "became concerned about the lack of transparency to some questions we posed as part of our review." Investors weren't told because, under sales agreements, the issues did not meet the threshold necessary to permit the bank to restructure the notes, she said. Under those circumstances, she told the paper, "we did not have the right to disclose our concerns."Please enable Javascript to watch this video
NORMAN, Okla. - Norman police have preliminarily classified a shooting at the Norman Regional HealthPlex as a murder-suicide.
The shooting happened in the hospital's parking lot shortly before 2:30 p.m. Friday afternoon.
Authorities told KFOR that a man and woman were found shot in the parking lot by employees from Norman Regional.
They were taken into emergency room by employees for treatment, but both died of their injuries once inside the hospital.
Investigators now know the man and woman, Darrel East and Laura East, were once husband and wife.
The estranged couple was at Norman Regional to visit a relative, but according to chilling Facebook post, Darrel East's thinking had taken a deadly turn Thursday evening.
Police believe Darrel East shot Laura East and then turned the weapon on himself.
The two are believed to have had children together.
This is a developing story. Check back for updates.
Report a typoBertie the Brain was an early computer game, and one of the first games developed in the early history of video games. It was built in Toronto by Josef Kates for the 1950 Canadian National Exhibition. The four meter tall computer allowed exhibition attendees to play a game of tic-tac-toe against an artificial intelligence. The player entered a move on a lit keypad in the form of a three-by-three grid, and the game played out on a grid of lights overhead. The machine had an adjustable difficulty level. After two weeks on display by Rogers Majestic, the machine was disassembled at the end of the exhibition and largely forgotten as a curiosity.
Kates built the game to showcase his additron tube, a miniature version of the vacuum tube, though the transistor overtook it in computer development shortly thereafter. Patent issues prevented the additron tube from being used in computers besides Bertie before it was no longer useful. Bertie the Brain is a candidate for the first video game, as it was potentially the first computer game to have any sort of visual display of the game. It appeared only three years after the 1947 invention of the cathode-ray tube amusement device, the earliest known interactive electronic game to use an electronic display. Bertie's use of light bulbs rather than a screen with real-time visual graphics, however, much less moving graphics, does not meet some definitions of a video game.
History [ edit ]
Bertie the Brain was a computer game of tic-tac-toe, built by Dr. Josef Kates for the 1950 Canadian National Exhibition.[1] Kates had previously worked at Rogers Majestic designing and building radar tubes during World War II, then after the war pursued graduate studies in the computing center at the University of Toronto while continuing to work at Rogers Majestic.[2] While there, he helped build the University of Toronto Electronic Computer (UTEC), one of the first working computers in the world. He also designed his own miniature version of the vacuum tube, called the additron tube, which he registered with the Radio Electronics Television Manufacturers' Association on 20 March 1951 as type 6047.[2][3][4][5]
After filing for a patent for the additron tube, Rogers Majestic pushed Kates to create a device to showcase the tube to potential buyers. Kates designed a specialized computer incorporating the technology and built it with the assistance of engineers from Rogers Majestic.[2][6] The large, four meter tall metal computer could only play tic-tac-toe and was installed in the Engineering Building at the Canadian National Exhibition from 25 August–9 September 1950.[2]
The additron-based computer, labeled as "Bertie the Brain" and subtitled "The Electronic Wonder by Rogers Majestic", was a success at the two-week exhibition, with attendees lining up to play it. Kates stayed by the machine when possible, adjusting the difficulty up or down for adults and children. Comedian Danny Kaye was photographed defeating the machine (after several attempts) for Life magazine.[2]
Gameplay [ edit ]
Bertie the Brain was a game of tic-tac-toe in which the player would select the position for their next move from a grid of nine lit buttons on a raised panel. The moves would appear on a grid of nine large squares set vertically on the machine as well as on the buttons, with either an X- or O-shaped light turning on in the corresponding space. The computer would make its move shortly after. A pair of signs to the right of the playfield, alternately lit up with "Electronic Brain" and an X or "Human Brain" and an O, marked which player's turn it was, and would light up along with "Win" when a player had won. Bertie could be set to several difficulty levels.[2] The computer responded almost instantly to the player's moves and at the highest difficulty level was almost unbeatable.[6]
Legacy [ edit ]
Circuitry schematic from the US patent for the additron tube
After the exhibition, Bertie was dismantled and "largely forgotten" as a novelty. Kates has said that he was working on so many projects at the same time that he had no energy to spare for preserving it, despite its significance.[2] Despite being the first implemented computer game—preceded only by theorized chess programs—and featured in a Life magazine article, the game was largely forgotten, even by video game history books.[6] Bertie's primary purpose, to promote the additron tube, went unfulfilled, as it was the only completed application of the technology. By the time Rogers Majestic pushed Kates to develop a working model for the Exhibition, he had been working on the tubes for a year, developing several revisions, and the University of Toronto team felt that the development was too slow to attempt to integrate them into the UTEC.[8]
Although other firms expressed interest to Kates and Rogers Majestic in using the tubes, issues with acquiring patents prevented him, Rogers Majestic, or the University of Toronto from patenting the tubes anywhere outside Canada until 1955, and the patent application was not accepted in the United States until March 1957, six years after filing.[8][9] By then, research and use of vacuum tubes was heavily waning in the face of the rise of the superior transistor, preventing any re-visitation of Bertie or similar machines.[8] Kates went on to a distinguished career in Canadian engineering, but did not return to working on vacuum tubes or computer games.[6][8]
Bertie was created only three years after the 1947 invention of the cathode-ray tube amusement device, the earliest known interactive electronic game, and while non-visual games had been developed for research computers such as Alan Turing and Dietrich Prinz's chess program for the Ferranti Mark 1 at the University of Manchester, Bertie was the first computer-based game to feature a visual display of any sort.[2][10][11] Bertie is considered under some definitions in contention for the title of the first video game. While definitions vary, the prior cathode-ray tube amusement device was a purely analog electrical game, and while Bertie did not feature an electronic screen it did run on a computer.[12] Another special-purpose computer-based game, Nimrod, was built in 1951, while the software-based tic-tac-toe game OXO and a draughts program by Christopher Strachey were in 1952 the first computer games to display visuals on an electronic screen rather than light bulbs.[6][10][13]3.5M TxTag transactions not billed on time Copyright by KXAN - All rights reserved Copyright by KXAN - All rights reserved 3.5M TxTag transactions not billed on time prev next
AUSTIN (KXAN) -- Texas Department of Transportation leaders were in the hot seat Wednesday during the state's Senate Transportation Committee, which had a hearing on an issue KXAN News has been following for you |
time you’ll only have to stick me down. Up to you, some people find it easier, some don’t.”
“There. Now we’re ready for real. Do you remember everything?”
Yeah, yeah, give me the dubious eye waiting for me to remember one more one more thing all you want, I’m not going to, because we’re done.
To both our amazement, I’m able to rattle off both the ritual and mythological lesson with only very minor corrections, a skill I’m undecidedly proud or embarrassed to admit comes from doing programming tutorials on a computer that was slow enough to make switching between web browser and development environment painful.
Try to set as subby a tone as I can after all that, awkward as it may sound.
“Okay, I’m ready, Master.”
Which is pretty awkward. I need like, style lessons or something. Thank Sade I can be sure you won’t want me all polite like Mintie. Who’d have thought you’d actually get off on a femme swearing?
“Are we going to cut me, or am I biting myself?”
Cut...oh. The opposite end of the brush is a knife, a scalpel-like blade I’ve somehow managed not to cut myself with while holding the box, but I’m iffy on my ability to cut without cutting dangerously deep, and I’ve seen that Lyra knows how to use her fangs safely.
There’s an anticipation between us, dangerous and exhilarating, as she waits for my answer, and I let it linger, feeling the moment, and then pull her face to mine by way of a horn and kiss her gently.
“Bite your hand and give me some ichor.”
Munchouch!
Water, Air, Fire, Spirit, Earth. There, five elements, five nice blobs of ichor.
“Kneel.”
Yep, called it. Sit on my heels, palms up on my thighs, wouldn’t be much of a first night without ending up in the standard slave pose at some point. Nice touch, leaving me like this while you do up the pentagram.
Water, Air, Fire, Spirit, Earth. Just painting over the symbols, well, good. Basic but classic. I suppose a spoken collect would make you think of church too much, more’s the pity...
I should probably stop picking apart my Master’s technique while we’re doing a scene that’s affected by my emotional state quite so much as a first summoning. He’s not being unsafe, that’s enough.
This time.
Dip the brush in an element, dip it in ichor, twirl to mix, clean it in the rag after each element. The mercury (it’s weird not to fear it, but if nectar can do something as fiddly as fixing carpal I’m sure it can handle a little heavy-metal poisoning) and gold glitter in the brush’s wake, but the other elements vanish into the dim.
At the end, Lyra’s name in ink mixed with ichor, looking awkward in my unsteady hand at the bottom of the pentagram, English text sticking out against the elegant Infernal script. The beginning is the worst, like the capital ‘L’ doesn’t want to be drawn there.
Now, Taking Hold.
“Hands behind your back, and bend over a little. More.”
OMG, the pic with the pink leather bondage gear. God damn I had no idea how much I’d missed being her. Let’s see, there were cuffs on my upper arms too, and my arms were cuffed folded behind me, not just back there, do I have to be a skinny hentai girl to make that work? Oof...nope! Go Sade superpowers. She had the cutest fists but for this you’re going to want my palms out.
And by bend over, you mean far enough to be asking for an ass-fucking. Yes Master.
It takes me a moment to realize where I’ve seen the pose she strikes and why I’ve asked for it, and another moment to for the slow-motion thunderbolt of what it means that she remembers the image before I do to hit me: I’ve had the pieces, and the guide to their assembly, but been too distracted to assemble them.
What might the past five years have been, if I’d known? If I’d understood what I was feeling in those times, those certain images or fantasies that seemed to burn like stars and haunt me even through the following day? Could we have made contact?
“You remember.”
This totally pins my wings, too, I wouldn’t even need wing binders. It’s always kind of sexy feeling like I am a knot and not just held by them.
“Happy thoughts. This was one of my favorites. I miss the gag.”
And the dildo you’d always decide I had strapped into me to make me drip like that.
She remembers fondly. Of all the uncomfortable-looking things about BDSM, I’d always assumed that gags were entirely for the benefit of doms. But then, Lyra is...atypical.
Instead of putting my foot in my mouth by any possible reply, I respond with a kiss to the top of her head, and then move behind her to her feet and upturned palms, almost starting the star of elements in the wrong direction before I remember she’s facing away from me.
For some style, I finger-paint (it seems wrong not to touch her directly for this) a crude version of each element’s corresponding symbol, using the box as a reference, rather than just smearing some of it onto her.
Pale grey skin. Maddening, flowers-of-lust scent.
Okay, that’s kind of soothing even with how hard it is to hold this position without actually being tied up. It’s almost enough to...ooh.
Something’s taking hold in my manner around her during these times: instead of walking around in front of her, I realize I can pull her head back gently by her hair, just enough to reach to draw the circle of Spirit on her forehead. She makes the dominant gesture worth my while, exhaling soft pleasure and arching her superhumanly flexible back rather than lowering her hips as I pull, eyes rolled back to peer at me.
Kindness. Wicked smirk. Breasts I could drown in...
You look so beautiful when you’re concentrating on me. I wish I could watch you anoint me.
A presence of contradictions, beautiful and monstrous, brilliant and vulgar, softly submissive but never demure.
And my entire adolescence, a warm, lusty presence haunting my dreams. I have hold.
The image she’s mimicking haunts my mind - from this angle her proportions are so like that of the improbable girl it had depicted. I’m reaching through her hair for the collar that encircled her neck in the image before I realize what I’m doing...and almost cry out loud when my hand finds leather anyway: the thin strap of her necklace.
Collars collars wait until you get a collar on me, yum...
Very well. I tug gently, and she takes the hint silently, straightening and rising as I continue pulling, and following deftly as I shift my grip and place her against the pentagram, the pendant jabbing into my palm, warm with the heat of our bodies and somehow paradoxically comforting in the way its point digs into my flesh, reassuringly, unavoidably there.
Oooh, that’s a different sort of flavor. That’s...huh, I thought you had to be succubus to feel the amulet’s consecration. Maybe part of you knows what it’s about and you feel that somehow?
Bump. That’ll be the pentagram, then. Arms out, spread legs a little, good.
Okay, here we go.
Now how do I make a thing of this? I’m not, on the whole, given to the sort of theatrics that’d be appropriate here, and it’s further hard to come up with anything that doesn’t make me feel like I’m in danger of becoming that certain less savory brand of LaRPer...though, in my defense, they aren’t aboard dirty-old-but-superhot-woman-Charon’s ferry on the way to sexy hell and they don’t have any actual demons to summon when they’re doing this sort of thing and they didn’t just anoint their lover’s head with stuff that based on how it acted and felt on my finger is almost certainly not made of atoms.
I wish I’d planned, but I have this ugly habit of forcing myself into Indy Ploy situations when I’m uncomfortable.
No time. Let’s go with quiet and intense, that’s me. Taking up the box of elements from where I’ve set it, I take a finger dipped in each element and then the dishes of Lyra’s ichor, underlining the symbols of the elements as I name them, falling into a stilted poetry as I go:
“By the Water of all Seas.”
“By the Winds that carry us across them.”
“By the Fire of stars and hearths.”
“By her Spirit, pure and nasty.”
Hah! Nice. Grin.
“By the Earth on which we stand, rocks in the Water.”
Oh, well played closing the star that way, you noticed that the Rocks are technically Earth, cute...goddammit, critiquing again. I was starting to fall into subspace a little, too.
“By Lilith, the Seducer.” In my mind, a vast endless garden, a pandemonium of orgies and dances. There’s a flaming sword that turns every which way, but the only people it’s keeping out are the moral guardians.
Maybe this should be more of a sticking point for me, but there’s a strange satisfaction in crossing this supposed moral event horizon and finding it to look different from the other side just like all the others. These aren’t gods you worship or serve, which is good, because I’m starting to see as we move so literally away from it that I was never particularly good at either of those things. Kneeling is, simply - the metaphor is unavoidable in this situation, but still mind-breaking - not my kink. These gods are just...true.
“By Valkyr, the Strong.” Valkyries, Valhalla, straight from the myths, I can’t imagine it needing or wanting to change to join this pantheon.
“By Venus, the Thoughtful.” Of all things, an anime fanart that scrolled by once on my tumblr and lodged in my head and harddrive: an angelic girl standing in front of a sunset, the sun outlining her body through her flimsy nightie, white-feathered wings spread wide, her face a perfectly captured, sweet and innocent “I’m going to fuck you so meaningfully you’ll forget your name” smile.
“And by Sade, the Wicked.” Lyra. And so much more I can’t begin to do justice.
Momentarily lost, I look for the first time since we began actually out the window.
And words fail.
Words run away and hide under the bed.
But I’m transfixed, because monstrous things look beautiful to me.
There are specks in the water, thousands, scattered as far as I can see, all moving downwards, in the same directions as this ship, and then the nearby specks resolve into figures, people, monsters, creatures beautiful and unspeakable, winged men, horned women, things I can’t describe, every size, all swimming together in groups or alone or pairs.
Nearby, we pass a huge masculine succubus - short white robe off one shoulder like a greek god and with massive white-feathered angel wings and a paper-white-skinned devil tail tows along three naked human-looking women, one holding each hand and the third clutching his tail.
Beside them, two women together, one dark-haired and slight, one blonde and sturdy, both human-looking, no way to tell who’s predator and who’s prey, wearing nothing but glowing tattoos and jewelry that glints in the light shining up from below us, keep pace with a regal-faced, black-clad woman holding the leashes of two slightly-built, green-skinned succubi, one masculine and one feminine, who wear nothing but the collars to which the leashes attach.
(Lyra and I: which of us is the predator? Her form, spread ready to be bound inspires a need in me that is so very like hunger...)
In the distance beyond them, an actual dragon so help me god, with a human-shaped rider who waves to a tentacled silhouette nearby as they pass, the tentacles saluting smartly in return.
Darting past them, a group of shapes that move too fast and lithely for me to convince myself I haven’t just seen a school of mermaids.
Among the swimmers are ships like ours, some larger, some smaller, some shiny metal or matte-black, every design of propulsion system, one ship ensconsed in scintillating hexagonal forcefields that obscure its design, all heading downwards with us.
And everything in between. And more. The sleepers aboard this ship were a sample, sleeping and seen in shadow, human enough to fit on and desire a ship. Awake and seen in the lights that shine up from below us, they’re transformed, terrifying, beautiful, dreams, dreams, and things that are both.
By Sade, the wicked...
“By these elements...”
I’m stepping back, covering my free hand in the remainder of the ichor-and-element mixtures, the haunting of Lyra’s presence gripped mentally by the neck.
Hand raised, then falling: “Lyra, my succubus, I summon and bind you here.”
On ‘here’, I hit the window above Lyra’s head that bows to make room for the blow, ichorous palm open and flat, and with a dull smack it—
WHOOF.
—reality jumps, and instead of flat against glass my hand is curled around Lyra’s horn where her face is level with mine, her head cocked a bit by my hand which had been centered above it holding her horn in that position. She’s trying to straighten, weakly, and I let her.
...face level with mine, which is impossible because there’s nothing for her to...
Ooohf, did it...yup. Can I...nope. Stuck but good.
Siiiiigh. I forgot how comfy this is.
...oh. She’s suspended a good foot off the floor, spread-eagled in the center of the star, one limb on the centerline of each point, hands splayed and feet pointing where they dangle as if some force holds them to the glass, tail dangling limply and wings folded tightly as she does when leaning against something, head still lolling a bit in my grip, grinning broadly.
Her presence against the glass reveals what has to be an intentional arrangement of lighting that casts the shadows of two control chains crossing over her navel, invisible before because there was nothing to catch them but the unreasonably transparent glass.
And I’ve got her head at the perfect angle...
OmiGOD making out while bound is so hot. I swear you find a way to kiss me deeper every time, mmm...
Her mouth is soft, and yielding, but, oddly, she resists when I pull her horn with the motion of the kiss.
Mmm...yep, bound tight, see? Pulls me right back to the middle when you let go, I can barely even turn on my own.
She’s bound, not resisting: what I feel is the magic fighting me. I’ve forgotten that the binding will be stronger to her than to me, and, moreover, it seems to hold every part of her with equal strength. Without my hand pulling, she’s able to follow my mouth only fractionally, and I can feel the tension of her muscles working against the force when I lay an affectionate hand against her neck.
My other hand needs to not be full of tools anymore.
Seriously unf this is amazing, I dunno if it’s just been too long or if I never knew just how much I like this, I...hey, come back! Boo. Nnnf. NNF!
Well, it’s not a weak binding, that’s for sure.
She tries to follow when I break the kiss, but can’t lift her head more than half an inch despite struggling mightily, and whimpers quietly when I’m finally out of reach.
Setting the box to the floor, I step back to take the scene in. She’s lying there, totally relaxed, as if the window is a horizontal table, chest heaving with the effort of struggling (does exertion make her feel winded, despite not getting winded?), looking happy and now a bit lustful.
“It worked.”
Pant. “Don’t sound so surprised. Oooh...”
Hands on my sides, hands tracing down my front just under my breasts—
Gaspgaspgaaaasp fuck this always makes me feel so sensitive...
“Feeling vulnerable?”
“Y—” Waitohfuckgasp “EEEEEEEEP neep neep neeeep YES!”
Omigod and I thought I was ticklish when I was free. Gah. Never thought I’d be so glad the people I played with back home were so serious.
Oh crap, now what are you going to...nnnnn...ooh. Okay, yes, like that. Less tickles, more pinching of nipples. See how...gasp...that can make me squirm too?
Keeping my hands off her is hard (if blessedly unnecessary) normally, but like this it’s impossible. Another kiss, but with this one I reach between her legs for her tail, other hand cupping a breast, and bring it up between us, pulling it tight against her cunt, feeling her strain beneath my other hand, squirming against the binding and moaning harmonically into the kiss.
I’m close to her, and making out draws me closer, until the back of my hand on her breast contacts my own chest, and her tail beyond where my hand grips it is in reach to trail the point of her softened barb down my face, a tender warm point like a fingertip tracing the contours of my cheek and neck, tickly-arousing but sweet and then burning in my mind with the remembrance of the effect stroking the point has on her.
We could, I realize as my cock fights to escape from the towel and get between her legs, have sex like this, and even with the audience it’s likely we would if I weren’t so curious what the dismissal is going to do.
Ooooh hell yeah, just a little more, come on...you’re a nice Master, you’ll say yes...
Releasing the breast that overfills a hand for which I custom-ordered a keyboard with the key-spacing increased by a full millimeter over standard, I break the kiss to take a step back, still clutching her tail, and she looks out of lustful half-closed eyes, disappointed to lose the kiss but still concentrating on something: she’s still stroking my face with the point of her tail, having settled into a rhythm in the soft place behind my earlobe that’s all kinds of noticeable now that I’m less distracted by the rest of her body.
“Are you about to come by playing with my ear?”
Nod n—...nrf. Keep forgetting.
“If you...let me...keep...going...oooohohgod...”
Swallowing the universe of implications, I gently pull her barb from my ear and kiss the tip, licking it slowly, and then, remembering the sensitivity of the other two points, shift my grip and, two-fisted, give them the gentle rolling pinch one does to nipples before letting her tail drop free.
“Soon. We’re going to try out this dismissal thing first.”
“AH!”
Holy FUCK unf they really do multiply when you play with more than one...
“Please soon...”
Jeez, begging without even thinking about it. When a Hollow Heart wants something and knows how to get it...
“As soon as we’re alone.”
“Audience is...fine...”
“Soon.”
Now, how to do this? Presumably she’s going to drop free when Dismissed, so I should be ready to catch her. Well, that will make a good gesture: I wrap my hands around her waist, ready to encircle her as she falls.
“Get ready.”
Mm, hands.
Okay. Better look Master in the eyes for this instead of doing the downcast thing.
Two endless abysses, starry with the reflection of my face, rimmed - impossibly in the monochromatic red light - with purple fire.
They do glow.
Take hold, her presence in my head as well as in front of me.
Short. A phrase, if I can. Poetry, overcompressed. Sliding my arms around her and pulling with the final word: “Lyra, I release you into the bonds of my will.”
Whooop! Whoah, hehe, always so weird weighing something again...ooh. Oh that’s weird, that’s...yum, it’s all silky. It’s all silky and it tastes like you, unf...
There’s a moment of resistance and the something snaps around us as Lyra comes free and reflexively wraps herself around me, gripping tightly and laying her head on my shoulder...
And then I’m transfixed again, because I’ve looked out the window.
Okay, so what does this...oooh. How literal. Nnnf...sheesh, almost as strong as when I was on the pentagram. Not bad for your first shot, Master.
Framed by Lyra’s horned, metal-haired head, half-unfolded wing, and grey arm around me, metered out by the red-gleaming pentagram etching, beyond the ever-densening crowd of swimmers, is...
Mountains. An undersea asteroid field. A city, exploding, ignoring up and down and horizion in the same way the Sea does, illuminated by the light of its own windows and that of great lights hanging in the Sea between the buildings...
Statues. Great figures, massive stone effigies in gleaming black and alabaster white and every color between, contrasting as they intertwine, the same style as the inlay on Cleavage’s blade but on the scale of buildings, of mountains, of planets in the distance, every size down to the limit of sight and up to geologic, every gender and every possibility in between, every possible kind of monster, tentacles and scales, claws and horns, wings feathered or batlike or translucent like fairy-wings catching the light in that rainbow-edged high-refractive-index way only possible by way of gemstone, all reflecting the riot of variety in the demons swimming alongside us, a...
Words fail, and mythology breaks.
This actually is Hell. It must be, because here’s the wall of tortured souls, but these souls are in ecstasy.
Ecstasy and agony.
And it’s not a wall, it’s a web worked throughout the endless 3D fractal of this place. There are places that are more buildings and mad geology and places that are more empty Sea, but there’s no hard boundary anywhere.
An orgy worked in stone. Every sex act, speakable and unspeakable, is written here, in perfect pornographic detail - why, I realize, would succubus sculptors do anything but disdain a line between art and pornography, if they know of one at all?
And with them are written the emotions, the lust and pain and hunger and hope and fear and need and love, carved into the stone faces with a sense of life I’ve never seen in stonework: A bound woman, spread-eagled and affixed to the rock she’s carved from - among the statues are rocks, mountains hanging in the sea - face-down, twists around to sweetly kiss the angel-winged man who stands over her, hand in her hair, a whip captured in the moment of being shaken out of its coils in his other hand. Two men, one with long tapered horns curving back along his skull, embracing, the horned one supple, wrists held behind his back by his larger human partner as they kiss. Unapologetically phallic tentacles from an indeterminate source twine through the scenes, wrapping limbs or gripped for support, penetrating where they will, devoured with the lusty hunger I saw on Lyra’s face during that first ritual. And on, every possible combination of partners and activity, caught in moments of connection or passion or wicked-grinning fun.
And here, on the doorstep, I understand: people have seen this, and turned back, fought back through the ordeal we survived to come here, turned away from the greeting the captain gave me, cast aside companions like Lyra.
Who would do that?
The ones who saw Hell here, and described it to the rest of us, because they’re the people who looked at this, and saw only the agony. Only the danger on the faces of those statues holding whips or floggers or just raising hands to strike. Only the fear on the faces of those statues gripped by the neck or held to the rocks and fucked with cock, finger, or tentacle.
None of the lust, none of the care, none of the excitement and love.
To see this, and turn back here, you have to be someone who can look into the light that burns like the birth of a universe for us monsters, and see only darkness. Look into that light, and not even see it reflecting off us.
They see Hell here, because they carry Hell with them everywhere they go.
For the course of human history, those are the people who’ve described this place to us, and today I’m seeing the truth just like I’ve felt the truth about this in the fire Lyra’s helplessness sets in me. This was the light that claimed Persephone, and for millennia poets have called it the kingdom of the dead because they couldn’t see.
Something pulls at my mind. Lyra, struggling, trying to turn her head. We’re wrapped together in cords, as if the force that bound her to the window has come free with her and snapped around us both as I took her in my arms. She embraced me with a happy sigh when I pulled her free, but she had no choice: the cords bind her to me as tightly as they held her to the window...cords is the wrong word.
They bind like cords but merge and separate like something fluid, clinging and stretching and reforming like...well, come...but they obey my will, drunkenly, tightening or dissolving to reform elsewhere with a thought, and they pay no regard to physicality: strands around limbs tie us together, but, following the strands I find myself falling vertiginously through Lyra’s body, seeing ‘places’ I could wrap strands to still her breathing or silence her voice. It’s bizarre, like a new sense, not a vision that obscures the mindshattering view out the window, but makes me unsteady on my feet all the same.
Lyra pulls again, and I withdraw all the bonds above her neck, her fingers splaying against me as they reform at her hands.
“Mmf. This is fun...”
And stretchy, I bet I can almost grind...mmm, almost. Rubbing against you is nice, anyway...
It takes me a moment between Lyra’s squirming and the view to form words.
“What does it feel like?”
Almost, it moves around almost like rope, if I can just wiggle my hips out of it a little...oh, right, question.
“It’s...mm...it’s all silky and warm but it feels like it’s you touching me, not just a...binding. It’s almost like you have...tentacles or...something...this is awesome...”
Her voice is full of lust, still horny from my playing with her tail, presumably.
Well, we can do something about that. Can we use whatever this is tying us together to do it? The cords seem to obey strange, shifting rules: when I release my arms from around her, she stays wrapped, bound, but trying to pull the cords to lift her into the air is impossible like trying to lift myself by my own armpits, and yet I’m able to carefully unwrap them from around myself and free her legs so that she’s lowered gently to the floor as if I’ve set her down.
Wait, fuck, can I stand? Oh, legs free, okay. Arms sorta free, too, good, because even I’m about ready to take things into my own...whoop, oof.
Yeah, should have seen that coming.
She reaches between her legs as soon as she’s free, so I pull the cords that still wrap her arms and they come together behind her back, leaving me with a tangle that draws them down and arches her back fractionally when I tug on it. Glorious.
“I said, soon. You really don’t mind an audience?”
Mrf, come on. You wanna show off and you know it.
“Do...you?”
Not as much as I probably should. I steal a glance up at the captain, but she and the co-pilot are intent, she watching out the window and adjusting course constantly while he focuses on the ring of panels that surrounds him: piloting in this crowd must be somewhat of a challenge.
Experimentally, I pull at a strand that metaphorically wraps around one of her thighs, pulling it up to grind against her cunt, but this is apparently impossible: the magic is definitely pulling at her body and not controlling her muscles, but it’s bondage magic and can’t be used like an appendage to probe and stroke.
Well, there’s another approach to what I want to do...
That little smirk, what are you going to—
Wait eep no I need that to stand don’t...whew. Mmm hands holding me up by my waist, but what ooooh oh god dammit unf why do I have to have such sensitive thighs...
There’s just enough coherence to the cords to bring her thighs together tightly and make her squirm to rub them, but I can feel that I’m pushing the magic to its limit, making the cords begin to unravel and dissipate. I’d wanted to fix the tip of her tail between her thighs, but there was a tearing moment that told me that level of complexity would push things too far for the magic to hold, so instead it ends up just looped into the bonds that hold her thighs. Best carry out my evil plan if I’m going to get to.
I hope I have the social conventions of this place right.
Now, carefully, not wrecking the spell anymore. Can it handle this?
My tail is free? Oop! Nope. My tail is bound to your hand? That should be...whee!
Okay, that was cool.
Pulling bonds individually tears at the already-weakening magic too much, but it’s possible to take the bonds wrapping her arms and torso and pull them over us both all at once so that she’s whipped around to lean with her back against me, legs bound to mine, arms bound to mine, and I find myself wishing again to have remembered to doff the towel, but now there’s no time.
There’s just enough precision left to line her hand up with mine where it’s bound to the end of her tail and draw the three together, the bond snapping over them all like a latex glove. Her barb is just the right length to lay my first two fingers along its length with the point between them while I grip the rear point to my palm with my thumb.
Okay, this is going to be interesting. Yes, holding it in front of me I see how you’ve got my tail, I can feel it too lemme tell you. What do you...oh. Do the same thing with my hand so both pooints ooh are held, okay. I can have some fun with thaaaat. Can’t reach the tip this way but think I’d just be in the way anyhow, if I know what you’re about to do to me...
“Now, question. Your tail and clit come separately, right?”
Nod nod nod. Why...ooh, fuuuck, I see where this I going. Good thing I’m tied up.
“We’re gonna make them both come, but you have to save whichever one is first so they both come at once, or at least as close as we can get them. Understand?”
Grin. Nodnod.
“And do have some fun with that tail-point in your hand, or anything else you can reach while I play.”
What else can I reach? Folding my other arm around her to cup a breast pushes her other hand up from where it’s splayed around my wrist and I let it slide through the bindings until her open hand is cupped in my palm, our fingers interlaced, so that I’m holding her holding her breast, raking our ten fingers gently over the nipple, rewarded with a cooing unevenness in her answer:
“Yes Master.”
Oooh, that...oh fuck, two fingers and a tail-tip, you can nestle ‘em around my clit and it even keeps your fingernails away, oh FUUUUCK...
She arches against me, moaning quietly, head lolling, when I rake the group of fingers and tail-tip up her outer lips, and after a moment strains her legs, trying to open, reminding me I need to spread my own to let her, a maneuver that leaves my towel only dubiously attached, mostly held by the pressure of her body against mine, and then I’m going at her clit properly and she’s moaning out loud...
“Ooo—” Wait crap gasp holy fuck it can bind that? Whoah...
Oh my fuck so intense against each other oh FUCK it feels like I’m gonna explode when you pinch the back point too wait I can play with the one I’ve got if I could just concen...traaate...
Ooh, okay tail, just hang on now...hang...
Momentarily: her eyes widen and she gasps, fighting the bond, when I pull the small band I’d found in my first plunge through the spell’s strangeness, the one that quiets her voice, then relaxes into it, having realized I’ve saved her this piece of self-restraint, and then she’s inhaling in an endless gasp, filling her seemingly bottomless lungs for the explosion I know is coming and then—
Oh fuck, oh my fuck, just a little...oooooooh yum fuck I can’t control UNH
She comes all in a burst and there’s a snapping feeling in my head as bonds let go with the force of it - she strains against me with a strength that almost knocks me off my feet, breath exploding in a silent scream that pushes the magic to its limit as she fights to make noise and then it’s over, almost suddenly, and she’s panting and shuddering with oversensitivity at my playing.
“Wow. OhmiGOD that was intense.”
Pant. Flop. Really glad I’ve got the binding holding me up right now.
Ooh, the binding and now your arms around me, okay, that’s cool.
...our arms around me. This is the oddest bondage.
Feels weird only being able to whisper, I never knew I liked my voice so much...
“Feeling good now?”
It’s a genuine question, this was a bit of an experiment.
Nod nod.
“That tasted almost as good as when you cum. Unf.”
To say nothing of cumming so hard I can’t stand up anymore. Jeez.
“Good. It’s fun getting you off.”
The binding is in tatters, still holding us together but only barely and fading away perceptibly as Lyra pants limply against me, head lolled back against my shoulder. Something above or behind us catches her eye and I follow her gaze.
“I can tell...”
Heh, that got both your attention up there, didn’t it. Enjoy the show?
Sniffsniff. Captain was clearly into watching us, but it’s not...it’s just sweet like when people watch you play in a dungeon. Huh.
The captain is laying back in the pilot’s seat, smiling a lopsided smile at us, until the co-pilot says something to her and she snaps her attention back to the window, hauling one of the control sticks with a maneuver we can feel even through the artificial gravity.
“Apparently you put on a good show.”
“You put on a good show, I was just the instrument this time.”
“I do want to learn to play you like one.”
“Hot.”
Nuzzle nuzzle grind.
“You’re going to make me lose my towel if you keep at that.”
“Tragedy. And you’re all hard under there, too.”
I know, I know. Making me cum in front of strangers is already a bigger step than most new Earthlings will take at a time, I’m already going to get all the kudos just for getting this far. I shouldn’t expect you to already fuck me in front of someone we know, let alone this lady I’m not even really sure about. But come ooooon...oh, fine.
“Sooo.” Grind. “How did the word get into English, anyway?”
Phoo! I’m actually worn out from cumming like that, even with all the lust it got out of you. Guess I should just relax if you’re really not right about to fuck me.
“Huh?”
“Lyra. It’s the Infernal word for...”
Oh god dammit English. Infernal word for what? Toy? Implement? Musical instrument? How the Balls do I render this connotation? Bleh. Well, go with where this got started.
“...instrument.”
And like ten pages of notes on poetics and music and play. Mrf.
“It’s a constellation, the harp. I forget if the word is Latin or Greek or something else, but you have stars and they’re prettier than anything in the sky, so...”
“Aw!”
Ki...nnf. Okay, fine, I can reach your cheek at least. Kiss.
Oh god, home. Dear Sade I had no idea how glad I’d be to see the Falls again, I mean I’ve only been outside what, two or three times?
Home.
She relaxes into me again, hanging against the last of the binding. I could tear it away with a thought, but it seems somehow more right to hold her to me while the bonds fade so that after a few moments she’s hanging only against my encircling arms and leaning her weight against me, and we - I, Lyra’s weight is on me, not her feet - stand thus regarding the view for a while, watching the buildings and mountains loom slowly closer, peaceful.
The statues decorate, support, interconnect, are, buildings in every style, gothic cathedrals with no top or bottom, double ended towers free-floating but for where they’re made part of the larger whole by intertwining statuary, massive terraced complexities dotted with the multicolored lights of windows like stars, and the buildings are worked of stone, or steel-and-glass, or insane techno-medieval fusion like |
general manager J.P. Ricciardi and A’s GM Billy Beane turned down the Boston job, and told the Red Sox’ owners they should give it to Epstein, then their assistant GM.
It wasn’t just Vedder’s thoughtful, piercing music that appealed to Epstein. When they met, he was the same age Vedder had been in 1994, when his reaction to enormous fame—the release of a third platinum-selling album just months after he appeared on the cover of Time—was akin to treating a wildfire: You had to tamp down the beast, not stoke it. The band refused, for instance, to produce music videos. Building an image can create expectations of what a person should be, and those expectations, and the falseness of them, Vedder told Melody Maker that year, “just start tearing you apart.”
Epstein shared the same ethos. Upon being named Boston GM, he had turned down offers to appear on The Tonight Show with Jay Leno and the Late Show with David Letterman. “It felt wrong at that point,” Epstein says. “I would have been on as a reward for being a young GM—a novelty, a gimmick. Even though it was appealing on the face of it, I passed on all that.
“Once you thrust yourself out there in the public domain, it’s really hard to retreat, to say no or reclaim that certain part of your life as private. It’s hypocritical to say when things are going well, ‘Interview me. Ask me how great I am. Ask me about family and personal life.’ At some point later when someone wants information and you want to draw the line, how do you do that?”
Ian Johnson/Icon Sportswire
In spring training of 2004, when Epstein and eight of his baseball ops bandmates rented a place in Cape Coral, Fla.—filling it with laptops, poker games, Mexican beer and a youthful energy and intellect that would change the game—Epstein declined a request from SI for a group photo at the house known as Phi Sign-a Playa.
“We haven’t done anything yet,” he explained, before his Sox won the franchise’s first title in 86 years that season, then earned another in 2007.
The nightly talk shows, as well as the morning news shows, came calling again last month after Epstein, in his fifth year as president of baseball operations of the Cubs, ended an even bigger drought than the one in Boston: He presided over their first World Series title in 108 years. Again, he declined the offers. Instead, on Saturday, Nov. 5, the day after the championship parade in Chicago that drew millions of people, Epstein and Jed Hoyer, his GM and close friend, were in the office preparing for the general managers’ meetings.
• Get SI's 2016 Chicago Cubs World Series champions commemorative package
“Eddie Vedder has been a really good model, and not just him, but the whole band,” Epstein says. “They’re great at carving out just enough space for their music, their art and their fans. They created their art, they enjoyed it, and they made sure their fans enjoyed it.
“They didn’t make music videos just to broaden their appeal, because that would get in the way of their art. There’s a real lesson there. Be intentional about the spaces you create but not at the cost of compromising other elements. I’ve gotten to know [Vedder] extensively, but everything I need to know I can see by the choices he makes. I’ve been around him long enough to know how the [band members] create careers, but at the same time their lives and families reflect their values appropriately. It comes back to being genuine, slowing things down, being thoughtful of others and being true to yourself.”
Epstein turns 43 this month. In only 14 years as a chief architect, his teams have won three World Series and made the playoffs five other times. That is beyond a lifetime’s worth of achievements for almost any baseball executive, but it is sui generis when you consider the mythology he conquered three times over. First in Boston and then in Chicago, Epstein won world championships that could not be won in the combined 194 years before he took his turn. His third conquest, which spanned both jobs, was not just ending the war between traditional scouting and the guerilla uprising of analytics but also melding those factions into what he likes to call “a scouting and player-development machine.”
He is King Arthur pulling swords from three stones—except “king” would be a bad place to start for someone taking a lunch break in a denim Pearl Jam cap, plaid shirt, jeans and boots while making his way through coffee, eggs, chorizo and a key lime vinaigrette-avocado salad at Uncommon Ground, a Wrigleyville eatery with an emphasis on organic ingredients.
His money, of course, is no good here. The bill, amounting to zero, will be presented with sincerest thanks for building a Cubs team that won the World Series three weeks earlier.
Al Tielemans
In the one pointed departure in his otherwise sweet love song to his Cubs, Vedder made sure to frame his wish “in a world full of greed.” It’s a reminder that he doesn’t want what so many achievers of this age want: the extras, the parasitic trappings of achievement. What does Epstein want? Where does he go from here? How did he pull this off? The clues to that last question, at least, can be found in an assessment from Joe Maddon, the manager he hired two years ago as a key piece of his years-long rebuild in Chicago.
“One word: empathy,” Maddon says.
Epstein had interviewed Maddon, then the Angels’ bench coach, for the Red Sox’ job after the 2003 season. He hired Terry Francona instead because he wanted a manager with experience, but he turned back to Maddon, who had gone on to the Rays, after the ’14 season when he needed a seasoned hand to bring the same upbeat, authentic vibe to the major league clubhouse that existed in the Cubs’ player-development system. (In hiring Maddon, Epstein took advantage of the rare opportunity of an elite manager’s free agency, but that meant he had to replace the incumbent, Rick Renteria. Epstein insisted that he write part of the press release himself to stress his high regard for Renteria. “That wasn’t easy,” Epstein says.)
As a newly minted world champion, Maddon recently leaned back in a booth at Ava, his Tampa restaurant. He knew one word wasn’t enough to describe the Cubs’ president.
“He’s brilliant, he’s sabermetrically inclined, he understands old-school-scouting techniques, he understands the game,” Maddon says. “But of all the guys I’ve met, he’s more empathetic than all of them. He understands people.
“When you have a conversation with him, it isn’t sterile. There’s feel. Feel is a part of his method. We get involved in [analytics], but we never get involved in that to where other stuff doesn’t matter. I might even be the cold one, and he comes in with the warm and fuzzy to me, which normally never happens from the GM.”
Tom Ricketts bought the Cubs in 2009, when they lost 14 more games than they had the previous year. They lost nine more the year after that, and four more the year after that before he hired Epstein away from Boston.
“The reason he’s successful is he has a great leadership style and an eye for talent,” Ricketts says, “but an eye not so much for how a slider breaks but for people who work collaboratively, and he engages them. There’s an element of those soft skills that would cause some people on the baseball side to roll their eyes, because he’s very concerned about the character of players he signs and the atmosphere in the clubhouse. Is the player going to be additive or does he subtract? What I see is someone who treats people well.”
Empathy? Ricketts had to laugh when told of Maddon’s assessment: “I made the joke one day, when [Epstein] first got here and he had to let some people go. I told him, ‘If I ever have to be fired by anybody I hope it’s you.’ It’s his empathy.”
Empathy? Epstein didn’t laugh when he heard the word Maddon used. He fell silent, gave thanks and then, after giving it proper study, tried to explain it. He remembered what his parents told him about how he would drive himself crazy as a young child with thoughts of mortality. That someone he loved could die seemed so heavy and unfair to him. He next thought about writers—the Russian novelists, Dickens, Faulkner, Hemingway and the other greats that were as much of a part of his childhood as baseball.
Epstein’s father, Leslie, is an acclaimed novelist who chaired the creative writing program at Boston University. His grandfather and great-uncle wrote the screenplay for Casablanca. An Epstein house rule stipulated that every minute spent watching baseball on television had to be equaled by reading books.
“A doubleheader,” Theo says, “was a lot of reading.” The material, nuanced and evocative, nurtured compassion. One more piece of data he considers: “Maybe it’s part of being a twin. I’m a twin. [His brother, Paul, is a social worker at Brookline (Mass.) High, their alma mater.] My mom’s a twin. My grandfather’s a twin.”
Epstein turned to writing at Yale, but the solitude did not suit him. He wanted a collaborative life.
“When I was writing or competing in individual sports, it felt unfulfilling and lonely,” he says. “When I was able to find a group of people I believed in and liked, that all worked in pursuit of a common goal, it felt incredibly rewarding.”
While still an undergraduate Epstein took an internship under the Orioles’ president, Larry Lucchino. He later followed Lucchino to the Padres, where his desk served as the DMZ in a burgeoning war, smack between the analytics guru and the scouting director. They couldn’t stand each other and rarely spoke, but both of them enjoyed the company of Epstein. In 2002 he followed Lucchino to Boston.
The curse-busting championship came two years later, unleashing a catharsis across New England unmatched in baseball history. It was in the wake of such emotional outpouring that the idea of someday running the Cubs first occurred to Epstein, if only in a fleeting manner.
“As far back as the aftermath of the ’04 World Series, I would talk about it with my friends a little bit—‘If I ever move on, the Cubs would be the one spot because it was so powerful to win in Boston,’” Epstein says. “The best aspect of the job was seeing how much it resonated with people and families. You never let go of that. It adds meaning to the whole thing.”
The glow in Boston eventually waned. The Red Sox won 95 games the next year but were swept in the Division Series. Rather than sign a contract extension, Epstein resigned on Halloween, escaping the media by slipping out of Fenway in a gorilla suit. He came back a few months later and won another title in 2007, but under the groaning and growing weight of expectations he began falling out of love with his hometown team.
The 2010 season especially buckled him. Epstein caught flak for mentioning that it could be a “bridge” year in which he kept one eye on long-term development. That season he had an epiphany while attending the funeral of a long-time team employee. Funeral pamphlets included the Red Sox’ logo. The deceased rested in a Red Sox casket.
“I remember thinking, I really don’t want this to be me,” he says. “Because when you’re not unconditionally in love with a place any more, I think you resent to a certain extent the degree to which you’re identified with that place, or you self-identify with that place. So I just began to distance myself from it a little bit emotionally.”
• Timeline: Journey through the history of the Chicago Cubs
In 2010, Boston won 89 games and missed the playoffs for a second time in his eight seasons. Early the next season, with a year left on his contract, Epstein told the Red Sox’ owners about the “internal conflicts” he was experiencing.
In August 2011, Ricketts fired his general manager, Jim Hendry. He spent the next few weeks canvassing 20 people he knew in baseball on the best person for the job, regardless of contract status. Nineteen of them told him Theo Epstein.
Epstein’s Boston team collapsed that September, losing 20 of its final 27 games to spit away a playoff spot. Ricketts waited only two days after the final loss to call Red Sox owner John Henry and ask for permission to talk to Epstein. The next night the two of them were having dinner at the owner’s New York City apartment overlooking Central Park. A Phillies-Cardinals playoff game played on the television. Ten minutes into the conversation both men knew this was a perfect fit. Epstein had to divorce his hometown.
“I blame myself for this more than anything,” Epstein says, “because I hate it when people blame their environment. Especially in a leadership position, you’re responsible for how you react to your environment and how you change your environment, and for being a positive force to change it for the better if you think something is toxic.
“I wouldn’t blame anyone else for it. I know everyone said, ‘Well, it was you and Larry, it was a power struggle.’ It really wasn’t. Our dynamic never really changed. He never got super involved in baseball operations, but he was my boss and always had the right to question me on things, and I never really resented that.
“It wasn’t any one person. It was just the weight of the nine or 10 years in Boston.”
The Cubs opportunity removed all the weight. It was a chance to figuratively return to Cape Coral, only with much more accumulated wisdom.
Dylan Buell/Getty Images
One of Epstein’s guiding principles in Chicago would be considering the character of the players he acquired.
“I used to scoff at it, when I first took the job in Boston,” Epstein says. “I just felt like, You know how we’re going to win? By getting guys who get on base more than the other team, and by getting pitchers who miss bats and get ground balls. Talent wins. But... it’s like every year I did the job, I just developed a greater appreciation for how much the human element matters and how much more you can achieve as a team when you have players who care about winning, care about each other, develop those relationships, have those conversations. It creates an environment where the sum is greater than the parts.”
When Epstein needed to fortify his bullpen in July, he traded for Aroldis Chapman from the Yankees, but not before, he says, satisfying his concerns about Chapman’s character. Chapman served a 30-game suspension at the start of the season for his behavior in a domestic incident on Oct. 30, 2015, in which after an argument with his girlfriend, he fired eight shots from a gun in his garage. Epstein and owner Tom Ricketts insisted on speaking to Chapman on a conference call before agreeing to the trade. They told Chapman they held their players to a high standard and needed to hear from him that they could fully expect him to meet those standards. Chapman assured them he had learned from it and would meet their expectations.
Back in January 2012, Epstein summoned every manager, coach, scout, instructor, trainer and baseball operations person in the Cubs’ organization to a budget hotel in Mesa, Ariz., for a four-day summit. They spent one day on hitting philosophy, one day on pitching philosophy, one day on defense and baserunning philosophy—and one day on character: “What types of human beings we wanted and what our expectations would be for players, how we want them to behave,” says Epstein.
From the summit Epstein crafted a 259-page spiral-bound book that would be the “living, breathing document” to define his organizational doctrine. He called it The Cubs Way: 2012 Player Development Manual.
The first page of the first chapter established six “Department Principles.” The first principle read, “We will treat the development of every player as if we were making a personal investment in him.” The sixth and final principle was this: “At all times we will keep this in mind: Our mission is to help the Chicago Cubs win a World Championship!”
Epstein delivered the championship in his fifth season. He did so with a core of young position players—eight under the age of 28 played in the seventh game of the World Series, a record—and a staff in which not one homegrown pitcher took the mound in the postseason. The defining moment occurred during a rain delay in Game 7, tied with the Indians after nine innings: The Cubs packed shoulder-to-shoulder for a players-only meeting in a small weight room behind the visiting dugout at Progressive Field—a strong visual of Epstein’s ideals of collaboration and character.
To that group, Epstein has since added free-agent centerfielder Jon Jay as a replacement for Dexter Fowler, let Chapman leave for the Yankees as a free agent and traded outfielder Jorge Soler to the Royals for closer Wade Davis. The work goes on. From his tiny room in the team’s temporary quarters on North Clark Street, Epstein can hear the construction of the building next to Wrigley Field that next year will house the new offices. He has arranged to have a modern, sprawling common area—similar to the hip clubhouse digs that opened this year—with a wall of television screens. He lives a 10-minute walk from Wrigley. Married with two children, Epstein will walk home during visitors’ batting practice for night games, have dinner with his family, then walk back in time for the first pitch. He has never been happier.
“This place is amazing,” he says. “So many people have worked so hard at building this up, there is no place else I’d rather be. The Cubs won back-to-back [World Series] in 1907 and ’08, and that’s a great short-term goal. I’m signed through 2021. It would be wonderful if this team gets to October with a chance every year. We feel like this is just the beginning.
“I love being around these players and the people I work with. It’s fun to come to work every day.”
He found magic in the ivy. In October, many hours (and more libations) after the Cubs won their first pennant since 1945, beating Clayton Kershaw and the Dodgers 5–0 at Wrigley Field, two men slipped onto the diamond in the hush of the empty ballpark. It was five in the morning, about two hours before sunrise. They played catch and took batting practice. In those small hours of a historic night, carefree, Eddie and Theo looked not like the rock stars we expect but like children at play.This article was first posted on The Havok Journal on 05FEB15.
_____
I am often critical of my own country. That is my right as a citizen and though I love my country, I feel that it has sometimes failed to live up to the higher principles which its society is predicated upon. Some of my fellow citizens are quick to cry exigency and resort to baser instincts and occasionally atrocity – and then have the temerity to cry ‘treason’ or wrap themselves in the flag when they are called upon it.
Times of great tribulation are times to retreat towards values, not away from them…a fact which I feel we sometimes forget. I don’t apologize for pointing this out and demanding the highest standard and accountability because if you want to be the good guys and wear the white hat, you have to wear it all of the time, not merely when it is convenient.
Sometimes though, you just have to kill people.
Yesterday, the Islamic State, (ISIL, ISIS) executed First Lieutenant Moaz al Kasabeh of the Jordanian Air Force. That in itself was not extraordinary and not even unexpected given the known viciousness of this group and fates of other hostages they had captured. The method was unique. I won’t link the video here, mostly because they are being pulled off the net as soon as they come up but I will summarize. 1LT Kasabeh was locked in a cage, doused with accelerant, a fuse was lit in such a manner that he could see the flames moving towards him, and he was burned alive. 1LT Kasabeh was 26 years old, married, reputedly a principled man and died in service of his country.
I think everyone should watch the video should they get the opportunity because I think it reinforces an important fact. Beyond the borders of our nation in other unfortunate parts of the world, there are evil people who the normal principles of civil society don’t exist – for who torture, rape and murder are not crimes but tools to achieve their aims and perhaps even enjoyed. My friends on the right make the mistake of assuming this is about religion, but they are wrong. Islam is merely the excuse – this is about power, the original sin of mankind, a primal and nasty story that happens time and time again across the globe and throughout history.
Thinking this is about Islam is playing into the terrorist’s narrative and potentially making enemies out the very people we need to decisively deal with this problem (like the Jordanians). But equally wrong is the naivety of my friends on the left. You can’t reason with people who do things like this or attempt to equivocate.
Certainly there are people in this world who oppose us, who sometimes have valid reasons for what they do and we ought to try to understand them in order to reach peace…but those aren’t these people. These are monsters who we do not owe understanding, who we owe nothing but blades, bullets and bombs. There is no ethical position that makes mercy or justifying their actions acceptable. If you believe different, watch the video and please tell me how you reason with such people?
This is not a call to atrocity, or to excess. I already see people out there making the connection between this event and water boarding, attempting to excuse the latter as acceptable while missing the irony that all of those executed are dressed in orange jumpsuits…that is no accidental message. I would say ignore those people. The Law of Armed Conflict is sufficient to see these people dealt with and any departure to barbarity is a betrayal of the sacrifice 1LT Kasabeh and thousands of US and Allied soldiers who gave their lives in the past decade. The men who did this deserve to die at the hands of honorable men and women.
You should be fine with that fact.
Like this article?On Saturday 12th March, just 17 minutes into an Evo-Stik League First Division South game between Market Drayton Town and Goole AFC, debutant goalkeeper Jack Wheat was involved in a collision on the pitch.
Jack was taken to hospital and later diagnosed with a fractured skull, fractured eye socket, broken jaw and a compressed cheekbone.
He underwent surgery in Sheffield on Tuesday 22nd March to have his jaw temporarily wired and plates fitted.
Due to his injuries, Jack is likely to be unable to work for a considerable length of time and has been told he will be unable to play football again.
Goole AFC have set up this page to help support Jack over the coming months as he recovers from from his injuries.
Many thanks to you all for your amazing support!In an update to the $1 million lawsuit filed by WWE doctor Chris Amann against CM Punk and Colt Cabana for comments made during Cabana's Art of Wrestling podcast last November, The Washington Post reports that a Cook County Circuit Court judge denied motions from Punk and Cabana to dismiss the case. The case will move forward, and Punk and Cabana will have until August 24th to file a response to Amann's complaint.
Amaan claims that the comments made by Punk and Cabana were false and defamatory. It was noted that the episode has been streamed over 1 million times on YouTube, as well as many other times on other platforms.
Punk stated on the podcast that, amongst other claims, Amann misdiagnosed a MRSA staph infection as a fatty deposit and noted that a doctor recommended to him by wife AJ Lee said that he should be dead after wrestling with it for months. WWE sent us a statement shortly after Amann filed suit disputing Punk's claims, noting that Punk claimed that he performed at The Royal Rumble last year with a baseball-sized, purple lump on his back located near the waistband of his tights. They sent the video below with nearly four minutes of ass shots of Punk from The Royal Rumble to show that there was no growth on his back.
It should be noted that Punk appeared on Opie radio last December and showed the scar from his staph infection. The growth would have been located below the waistband of his tights. You can see video of Punk showing the scar below at the 0:35 mark:
Court documents reveal that the case has been assigned to category 2, and the judge has allowed 28 months for discovery.The wars that brought to a close the feudal period in Europe started as feudal wars, but ended as national wars. Taking the 14th century as the start of the Late Middle Ages, The Hundred Years’ War would be the start of that end phase. It began as a war between kings, leading armies of conscripts and mercenaries of various ethnicities. By the end, it was a war between two nations, fought by the people of those two nations. It is why most historians point to this as the beginning of the nation-state in Europe.
Similarly, the Thirty Years’ War started as a war of religion, among the smaller states that comprised the Holy Roman Empire. By the end, it was a war fought by nations, carving up central Europe. More important, the defining characteristic of people would not be their king or their religion, but their nation. By the time we get to the Napoleonic Wars, nations were mobilizing their people around love of country, not loyalty to a king. War had evolved to match the new social arrangements brought on by new economic arrangements.
The point here is that wars eventually reflect the age in which they are fought. At the start of the Great War, the French were still using the cavalry charge. They had their line officers wearing brightly colored uniforms so they were easy to spot. The Maxim gun put an end to those old tactics and by the end of the war, both sides were fully employing the weapons and tactics of the industrial age. In many respects, the Second World War was the perfection of the lessons learned in the first industrial age war.
It is not a perfect framing, but a useful one, when thinking about the current crisis and the inevitable wars that will come. Ours is the information age, so the wars will be information wars, especially the civil wars. The corruption of the internet by global corporations on behalf of the emerging global elite is an obvious example. In fact, the corruption of the registrars by companies like Google should be read as a phase change in the information war. The globalists have moved onto a new tactic, as the old tactics have failed.
That is an important aspect here. Up until recently, the Progs had a monopoly on our cultural morality. Labeling someone or something as racist or fascist, was enough to sideline that person or idea. The general public was willing to take their word for it and play along. Now, our Progressive rulers find themselves facing an increasingly skeptical public. Merely calling someone racist or fascist is not enough. That’s why they are moving on to using the blunt force of raw power against threats to their authority.
Now, it is entirely possible that Anglin reported himself to the registrar of Gab, in order to generate attention for himself. He faked the hacking of his site as a publicity stunt. Anglin is a nihilistic provocateur, but he is also just a sideshow. What matters is that we have an extra-judicial set of entities that can regulate political speech on-line. The mere fact that these companies can censor speech on-line, based on their whim or in response to pressure brought by the state, is a serious problem for civilized society.
This is, morally, no different than the decision by the Germans to use poison gas in the Great War. Once it was clear that their conventional weapons were not enough, they made the choice to throw off any moral limits to waging war. That’s what is going on with Big Tech, at the behest of our rulers. In America, speech is considered sacred. Everyone alive has grown up hearing the line about giving your life to defend the right of someone to say offensive things in public. The First Amendment, broadly understood, is sacred.
Our rulers have decided they must abandon that principle.
The response from the dissidents, to the attack on speech by Big Tech, has been an effort to create separate platforms. Gab is an alternative social media platform and others are now in the works. A parallel internet is slowly starting to sprout up with people looking into creating new registrars, new search engines and new funding mechanisms. It is a slow process, and as the attack on Gab shows, one that will be met with escalating attacks from Silicon Valley. We are into a total information war now.
Alt-tech is a defensive response, like the trench was in the Great War. The good guys need weapons to damage the other side’s lines. That will come in time. The old order no longer makes a lot of sense, so it can only be held together by force. The people in charge feel they need to use any means necessary, even if it means squandering what little moral authority they have left. Put another way, they no longer care if we respect them, just as long as we fear them. They’ll choose tyranny if that’s what it takes to remain in control.
That’s why it is important to not follow guys like Andrew Anglin or Chris Cantwell down the rabbit hole. Anglin, to a limited degree, is useful. His site being zapped provides a chance for our side to grab the moral high ground, even if he is mostly a moron. Cantwell is just a sad sack, who should never be encouraged. He makes resistance look bad. This is an information war. Impressions, narratives and imagery are the weapons of this war. Defending reckless lunatics or feckless trouble makers just hands the other side ammo.
When the Germans moved to the use of gas, it was a sign of weakness. When they unleashed unlimited submarine warfare, it was a sign they were scared. Desperate people reach for any weapon that is handy, regardless of the results. That’s our ruling class. They are losing the information war so they seek to reshape the battlefield by shutting off the dissidents from having access to the battlefield. It’s a sign of weakness that they are willing to squander their moral authority. It’s also a sign that they are losing.Packers Eagles Football
Philadelphia Eagles strong safety Malcolm Jenkins (27) during an NFL football game against the Washington Redskins Sunday, Dec. 11, 2016, in Philadelphia. (AP Photo/Matt Rourke)
(Matt Rourke)
HOUSTON -- Philadelphia Eagles safety Malcolm Jenkins spent five years with the New Orleans Saints, and the Crescent City left a lasting impression.
As he walked around radio row at Super Bowl 51, Jenkins professed his love for New Orleans and said he hopes to find an offseason home there in the near future.
"I'm going back out there for Mardi Gras," he said. "I love New Orleans. As soon as I can find a place, I'm trying to get a condo out there so I can make it back. My wife's from Mississippi, so we'll find our way back down there some time. We got a lot of friends still out there."
Letting Jenkins leave in free agency remains one of the most questionable offseason moves the Saints have made in recent years.
A first-round pick in 2009, Jenkins was a full-time starter from 2010-13, but when he became a free agent, he signed with the Eagles in 2014 and the Saints signed Jairus Byrd to a massive contract. Jenkins' deal with Philadelphia was for three years and $15.5 million while New Orleans gave Byrd a six-year, $54 million deal.
In the three years since the Saints swapped safeties, Jenkins has been far more successful than Byrd. Jenkins has started all 48 games the past three seasons and produced 261 tackles, 34 passes defensed, eight interceptions, four forced fumbles and four touchdowns. Comparatively, injuries have limited Byrd to 33 games, and he's tallied 157 tackles, eight passes defensed, three interceptions and two forced fumbles.
Jenkins said the Saints moving on from him was upsetting for a bit, but he's moved on.
"I was for a little while, but that has nothing to do with the city," he said. "I still love that city."The negotiations that produced the US constitution left us with a democracy that's not quite representative. Even the most sparsely populated states have a single representative, and every state has ended up with two senators. That means that very populous states, like California, have fewer representatives per capita than places like Wyoming.
According to an analysis released by PNAS, being well represented pays off. States with the most representatives per capita also end up taking home the most federal cash per capita. And this isn't just a peculiarity of the US system; comparisons across nine countries shows that the same thing happens in Europe, South America, and Australia.
The authors aren't the first ones to look at this issue, but the previous studies have often been limited and US-centric. In contrast, the authors built a database for nine countries in which representation on a state or provincial level is disproportionate: Argentina, Australia, Brazil, Canada, Germany, Mexico, Spain, Switzerland, and the United States. They also obtained several decades worth of fiscal data on each of them, providing a broader perspective that covers time periods before or after reapportionment brought representation closer into line with population.
The analysis is quite simple: take the total representatives and the national population, and figure out how many legislators per capita there are. Then do the same calculation with individual states and provinces, and figure out how badly they differ from the national value. That creates a simple index for representation, and a similar process can provide an equivalent index for the amount of national budget expenditures that flow to each state. With those in hand, it's a simple matter to see if there's a correlation between the two.
The initial analysis showed that over-represented states are clearly the beneficiaries of fiscal largesse—they take home more national money than their less-represented peers. The cross-country analysis might suggest that this effect is robust, but the authors did extensive controls, looking at whether money flows disproportionately to poorer provinces, the impact of reapportionment of representation, the impact of sparse population, etc. None of these were sufficient to change the overall conclusion: if you're better represented, you get more money.
The authors were even able to confirm that this wasn't simply a hangover from whatever compromise produced the disproportionate representation in the first place. With the exception of Spain, all of the countries have added additional provinces since their representation system originated—in Germany's case, it added all of East Germany. Even though these late-comers didn't participate in making the rules for representation, their budgetary situation fell right in line with the states and provinces that had been there from the start.
How much money is involved? The most extreme case is in Brazil, where states in the northeast of the country get five times the amount of money per capita compared to the most under-represented state, Sao Paulo. Argentina has similar examples. Things are less severe elsewhere, but in the US, Australia, and Europe, the most underrepresented states only get about half the per-capita expenditures of the most over-represented ones.
On some level, these inequalities violate our general impression of democratic fairness. But for most countries, they've been around for decades, if not centuries, and the populaces involved have become very comfortable with them, with only very sporadic and poorly heeded calls for reform. Many nations, however, are just beginning to experiment with representative democracy, and the road for a number of them has already been bumpy. The authors warn that the sorts of trends we see in mature democracies might cause problems there, writing, "It is possible that in an unstable new federation characterized by mutual mistrust and hostility, highly visible and disproportionate fiscal flows to overrepresented regions could generate a challenge to the legitimacy of the union."
PNAS, 2011. DOI: 10.1073/pnas.1019061108 (About DOIs).Twitter
The Twitter for Windows 8 app has finally hit Microsoft's Windows Store. The social network announced today that it was launching the new app, which was uniquely tailored for Windows 8 devices.
Besides the usual Home, Connect, Discover, and Me tabs, the Windows 8 app has a host of other features. There's Snap view, which lets users adjust the size of the Twitter app and use other apps alongside it. Photos can also be expanded or shown in a photo gallery. There are two new charms -- Share and Search -- which let users tweet or search from any app. And, finally, there are Twitter Live Tiles and notifications that are on-view no matter which app is running.
"Twitter for Windows 8 brings you all the design, features and functionality of Twitter combined with the fast and fluid technology of Windows 8," Twitter says in its app description.
Despite having apps for most major platforms, Twitter has never been on Windows for PC. The microblogging site announced it was working on a native Windows 8 app back in October but has been mum on the project ever since. Over the past year, Twitter has been making a push to create a consistent experience across as many platforms as possible, be it the Web, iOS, Android, OS X, BlackBerry, and even the Windows Phone.Sprint confirmed on Wednesday that it still plans to offer unlimited data on the iPhone 4 and 4S when they launch on the network next week. Speaking to All Things D, Sprint spokesperson Michelle Leff Mermelstein said the company will be offering a $69.99 per month plan that includes 450 voice minutes and unlimited data on its 3G network, confirming previous rumors about Sprint's plans for the iPhone.
AT&T was the first network in the US to begin offering the iPhone, followed almost four years later by Verizon. Both companies offered unlimited data on the device initially, but both have since eliminated these plans completely and have instead introduced capped, tiered data plans.
Now, with the addition of new player to the roster, Sprint is taking advantage of its position as the newbie to use uncapped plans as a form of competition. The company's decision to offer unlimited data plans to iPhone users is an ironic twist—Sprint actually does cap 3G data usage on its other devices at 5GB per month. Only its "4G"/WiMAX network |
of Health, wood dust, grain dust, animal dander, fungi, and various chemicals are some of the most common asthma triggers that patients encounter in the workplace. Bakers, farmers, laboratory workers, millers, and woodworkers predisposed to asthma are all at higher risk.
10. There's no cure for asthma, but symptoms can lessen over time.
Though asthma is treatable, there’s no cure for the chronic illness. Some people, however, do appear to grow out of the condition after suffering from it as kids. It’s possible for asthma symptoms to become less severe and go into remission as patients get older, but once someone is diagnosed with asthma, the risk of an episode never goes away completely. Changes in hormone levels are a factor that could possibly bring asthma symptoms back in patients who haven’t experienced an attack in years.CHARLESTON – Republican leaders around the country were ecstatic Christmas morning to receive coal from Santa.
“Another promise, another victory,” declared President Trump at the White House. “Bring back coal? Well we did just that for the American people, delivered by Santa’s American hands.”
Republicans received lumps of coal in an apparent repudiation from Santa Claus, having found their way firmly onto Santa’s notorious “Naughty List” in 2017. Long feared by the planet’s wealthiest and most powerful, the list is associated with punitive gifts, snubs, and occasionally violent revolutions.
However, this year, Republicans saw Santa and his documents as a potential long-shot bid to reignite the nation’s flagging coal industry. Bringing back tens of thousands of coal mining jobs lost to competition and regulatory pressure was a promise of then-candidate Trump on last year’s campaign trail, and one with no feasible route to achievement.
Except from the North Pole. Republicans believe a steady stream of free coal deliveries may help the dirty fossil fuel compete in the market with wildly cheaper, safer, cleaner, more efficient power methods.
“This was one of those things we’d say and then, you know, pray for a miracle,” said West Virginia Senator Shelley Moore Capito, a Republican. “I want to personally thank Santa for acknowledging how hard we worked for this gift.”
“Ho-ho-ho,” said Santa, riding his sleigh to China to deliver reins to Chinese President Xi Jingping. “They earned it! Sometime between when they took healthcare away from 13 million people and when they gave massive tax breaks to half the naughty list, I knew I’d be sending the elves to West Virginia this year.”
Republican leaders have already worked out how to earn coal for next year as well, planning massive Social Security and Medicare cuts in 2018. Santa, however, is planning ahead.
“I’m thinking I’ll start putting wind turbines in their stockings instead.”
A dissenting Elf contributed to this report. He can be reached at theflatearthtimes@gmail.com
Like us!
Follow us!
Like this: Like Loading...The Never-Spotted Leopard
Are repeated sightings of non-existent big cats evidence of a yearning for a wilder life?
An extract from Feral: searching for enchantment on the frontiers of rewilding, by George Monbiot, published in the Guardian, 22nd May 2013.
The setting was unimprovable. Across the fields, Maiden Castle, a turretted fortress of living rock, clawed at the sky. Beyond it was the village of Wolf’s Castle – Casblaidd – distinguished as one of only twenty places in which Owain Glyndŵr was born (he died in quite a few as well), and said to be the spot where the last wolf in Wales was killed. Below us a tangled willow carr smothered the valley.
“This gap in the hedge here: that could be where it came through. Then it came down the bank, sauntered across the road and disappeared into the scrub.”
I peered into the woods on the other side of the lane. The trees were hooded with ivy. Their mossy trunks sprawled over the ground, or leant on each other, dark-cowled, like drunken friars. Beneath them was an impenetrable thicket of brambles and ferns.
“You wouldn’t see him in there, would you?”
“You have no doubt about what it was?”
Michael Disney looked around and shrugged.
“It’s not an issue for me. I saw what I saw and that’s that. People can either believe it or not. I’m not trying to convince anyone.”
He had heard the stories, seen pictures in the local paper of the prints found at Princes Gate, a few miles to the other side of Haverfordwest, and had not believed a word of it.
“If I’d been dreaming or thinking about them at the time, it might have been another matter. But it was the last thing on my mind. I was just driving along – and one crosses the road. He was probably about 3 feet high and six feet long. I would say bigger than a medium-sized dog, but definitely not a dog. He was powerful-looking, with a black, glossy, shiny coat, incredibly muscular, like a horse’s shoulders.”
Michael Disney, former policeman, county council officer, had, to his own astonishment, become one of roughly two thousand people who see a big cat in the wild in Britain every year.
By the time Michael saw the beast now known as the Pembrokeshire Panther, there had, according to Wales on Sunday, been ten “confirmed sightings”(1). Some of those who claimed to have seen it were farmers or farm workers, familiar with the county’s less exotic wildlife. Among them were the farmer and – independently – his wife, whose land bordered the lane in which we stood. All described it, as Michael had done, as huge, jet-black, glossy, with a long tail, definitely a cat. One person claimed to have seen it with a lamb in its mouth. It was blamed for the grisly carcasses of sheep and calves found in remote corners of the farms.
But it was only when the former policeman reported it that the beast began to be taken seriously. Three weeks later, when five people saw it at Rudbaxton, the police sent out an armed response unit.
I became certain that Michael is an honest, reliable, unexcitable man who has no interest in publicity – in fact he seemed embarrassed by it. I am certain that, in common with other people who claim to have spotted the Beast, he faithfully described what he saw. I am equally certain that the Pembrokeshire Panther does not exist.
There is scarcely a self-respecting borough in Britain which does not now possess a Beast. Even the London suburbs claim to be infested with big cats: there is a Beast of Barnet, a Beast of Cricklewood, a Crystal Palace Puma and a Sydenham Panther. There have been occasional reports of mysterious British cats throughout history, but over the past few years the sightings have boomed. In her book Mystery Big Cats, Merrily Harpur finds that “cat-flaps”, as she calls them, are occurring at the rate of 2000-4000 a year(2).
Harpur notes that around three-quarters of all the cats reported are black, and they are commonly described as glossy and muscular. She also makes the fascinating observation that while the most likely candidate is a melanistic leopard (the leopard is the species in which the black form, though rare, occurs most often) she has not been able to find a single account of an ordinary, spotted leopard seen in the wild in Britain.
Some species of large cat are among the shyest and most cunning of all wild animals, but they are creatures of regular habits. They have territories, dens in which cubs are raised, spraying points and scratching posts. They scatter prints, spraints and hairs wherever they go: the first are immediately recognisable, the provenance of the second and third can be confirmed by DNA testing.
The 2008 Wildlife Photographer of the Year competition was won by a photograph of one of the world’s most elusive animals – the snow leopard – taken in one of the world’s least accessible places: the Ladakhi Himalayas, 13,000 feet above sea level. The photograph did not just document the existence of the leopard: after 13 months of experiments, and hundreds of less satisfactory pictures of his quarry, Steve Winter, through a cunning arrangement of camera traps and lights, eventually produced a perfectly-composed portrait. “I knew the animal would come;” he reported. His equipment “was just waiting for the actor to walk on stage and break the beam.”(3)
Yet, despite camera traps deployed in likely places throughout Britain, despite the best efforts of hundreds of enthusiasts armed with long lenses and thermal imaging equipment, we have yet to see a single unequivocal image captured in this country. Of the photographs and fragments of footage I have seen, around half are evidently domestic cats. Roughly a quarter are cardboard cut-outs, cuddly toys, crude photoshopping or – as the surrounding vegetation reveals – pictures taken in the tropics. The remainder are so distant and indistinct that they could be almost anything: dogs, deer, foxes, bin liners, yetis on all fours.
Nor have the tireless efforts to catch or kill these animals yielded anything more convincing. The hundreds of traps set for big cats in Britain have caught only two large predators. One, in 1980, was a tame puma, which had been released by a man about to be sent to prison. The other was a cryptozoologist called Pete Bailey. Mr Bailey, who had spent 15 years hunting the Beast of Exmoor, entered one of his traps to change the bait and accidentally tripped the mechanism. He was stuck there for two nights, eating the raw meat he had set for the cat, before he was rescued(4). We hunt the Beast, but the Beast is us.
That is about the extent of it: no photos, no captures, no dung, no corpses (except a couple of skulls, which later turned out to have gone feral after they had escaped from a leopardskin rug and a wall trophy), not even a certain footprint. The Beasts of Britain have evaded police helicopters and armed response teams (it beats logging car crime), a five-week hunt by the Royal Marines, a succession of big cat experts and bounty hunters and the mass deployment of tracking, attracting and sensing technologies.
In 1995 the government sent investigators to Bodmin Moor in Cornwall, where the evidence for big cats was said to be strongest. They spent six months in the field. There is something of the 19th Century royal commission about this investigation. The report contains photos of a strapping fellow with a large moustache and a measuring pole, demonstrating the heights of the natural features on which the creatures were photographed(5). The text reads in places like the final chapters of The Hound of the Baskervilles. It is thorough, exhaustive, and devastating to those who argued that, while other reputed big cats might not exist, the Beast of Bodmin was real.
They examined the famous video sequence, broadcast widely on television, which shows a cat leaping cleanly over a drystone wall. It looks impressive, until you see the man from the ministry standing beside the wall with his pole, and realise that the barrier is knee-high. A monstrous cat sitting on a gatepost shrinks, when the pole arrives, from a yard at the shoulder to a foot. In one case, where the Beast was filmed crossing a field, the investigators brought a black domestic cat to the scene, set it down in the same spot and photographed it from where the video had been taken. The moggie looks slightly bigger than the monster.
The investigators compared a chilling nocturnal close-up of the Beast with a picture of a real black leopard, and spotted an obvious but hitherto-unnoticed problem. The panther in the cage, like all big cats, has round pupils, while the creature in the photograph has vertical slits, a feature confined to smaller species, such as the domestic cat.
They examined the plaster casts of footprints taken from the moor. Two were made by a domestic cat; one by a dog. They attended the gruesome corpses of sheep that local people insisted had been ripped apart by the Beast. That they had been ripped apart was indisputable; but the villains were crows, badgers, foxes or dogs, and in most cases they had struck after the sheep had died of other causes. While the scientists conceded that it was impossible to prove that a big cat did not exist, they found that there was no hard evidence to support the story.
I would go a step further: if a breeding population of these animals existed, hard evidence would be abundant and commonplace. Its absence shows that there is no such population. With the possible exception of the very occasional fugitive, the beasts reported by so many sober, upright, reputable people are imaginary.
None of this has made the slightest difference, either to the volume of sightings or to the breathless credulity with which they are reported in the papers. My favourite story, from the Mail, was headlined “Is this the Beast of Exmoor? Body of mystery animal washes up on beach”(6). It reported that “great fangs jutted from its huge jaw, gleaming in the afternoon sun. Then there was the carcass. Up to 5ft long, powerful chest, and what could be the remains of a tail.” The paper interviewed a local police sergeant, who made the cryptic observation that “it almost definitely looks like it could be a Beast of Exmoor.” Only at the bottom of the page did the report reveal that it was a putrefying seal.
Beast fever has doubtless been heightened by these stories, but many of those who claim to have seen big cats in Britain also maintain that they had never heard of them before their own encounter. While a few are hoaxers, most report their sightings in good faith. In many cases an animal has been seen by a group of people, all of whom give similar accounts. So what is going on? Why, over the past three decades, have reports of big cats in Britain risen from a few dozen a year to thousands?
There is no discussion of this phenomenom in the scientific literature: I cannot find a single journal article on big cat sightings. None of the psychologists I’ve contacted have been able to direct me to anyone studying it. But in his book Paranormality, the psychologist Professor Richard Wiseman tells us this. “Many people think that human observation and memory work like a video recorder or film camera. Nothing could be further from the truth … At any one moment, your eyes and brain only have the processing power to look at a very small part of your surroundings.”(7)
The brain, he says, scans the scene like a torch searching a darkened room. It fills in the gaps, to construct what appears to be a complete image from partial information. We then treat this image as if it were as concrete and definitive as a photograph in an album. If we focus on a cat and not on its surroundings, perhaps the process of singling out the beast magnifies it and shrinks the setting.
I wonder, too, whether there might be a kind of template in our minds in the form of a big cat. As these were once our ancestors’ foremost predators, we have a powerful evolutionary interest in recognising them before the conscious mind can process and interpret the image. Perhaps anything which vaguely fits the template triggers the big cat alarm. But none of this explains why big cat sightings appear to have become more common in recent years.
Certain paranormal phenomena afflict every society, and they appear to reflect our desires; desires of which we may not always be fully conscious. In Victorian Britain, large numbers of people believed that they were communicating with the dead. Walk around any graveyard of that era and you will read a tragic story of premature loss: ours was a nation in perpetual mourning. The notion that the dead could return in this life must have been almost as comforting as the belief that we would be reunited with them in the afterlife.
As the space race between the United States and the Soviet Union gripped the world’s imagination, sightings of UFOs and aliens, little known in previous eras, multiplied. This was a period in which we entertained great hopes for the transformative potential of technology. It was also an epoch in which the world was shrinking. The age of terrestrial exploration and encounters with peoples unknown to us was ending; planet earth was perhaps a less exciting and more certain place than it had been hitherto. Aliens and their craft filled a gap, while promising that we too would achieve the mastery of technology and physics we ascribed to extraterrestrials. Today, perhaps because our belief in technological deliverance has declined, we hear less about UFOs.
Could it be that illusory big cats also answer an unmet need? As our lives have become tamer and more predictable, as the abundance and diversity of nature has declined, could these imaginary creatures have brought us something we miss?
Perhaps the beasts many people now believe are lurking in the dark corners of the land inject into our lives a thrill that can otherwise be delivered only by artificial means. Perhaps they reawaken vestigial evolutionary memories of conflict and survival, memories which must incorporate encounters – possibly the most challenging encounters our ancestors faced – with large predatory cats. They hint at an unexpressed wish for lives wilder and fiercer than those we now lead. Our desires stare back at us, yellow-eyed and snarling, from the thickets of the mind.
Feral: searching for enchantment on the frontiers of rewilding is published on May 30th by Allen Lane.
References:
1. Sion Morgan, 12th December 2010. Pembrokeshire ‘panther’ strikes again. Wales On Sunday. http://www.walesonline.co.uk/news/wales-news/2010/12/12/pembrokeshire-panther-strikes-again-91466-27810028/
2. Merrily Harpur, 2006. Mystery Big Cats. Heart of Albion, Market Harborough.
3. Mark Kinver, 30th October 2008. Snow leopard wins top photo prize. http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/sci/tech/7696188.stm
4. Merrily Harpur, 2006, as above.
5. S J Baker and C J Wilson, 1995. The Evidence for the Presence of Large Exotic Cats in the Bodmin Area and their Possible Impact on Livestock. A report by ADAS on behalf of the Ministry of Agriculture Fisheries and Food. http://www.naturalengland.org.uk/Images/exoticcats_tcm6-4645.pdf
6. Paul Harris, 9th January 2009. Is this the Beast of Exmoor? Body of mystery animal washes up on beach. Daily Mail. http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-1109174/Is-Beast-Exmoor-Body-mystery-animal-washes-beach.html
7. Richard Wiseman, 2011. Paranormality: why we see what isn’t there. Macmillan, London.For India Post, the boom in e-commerce deliveries is proving to be a big money spinner, especially the surging cash-on-delivery consignments of the country’s top online sellers — Amazon, Snapdeal and Flipkart-Myntra. The postal department’s revenues by ways of COD consignments from e-commerce majors have more than doubled in the first nine months of this fiscal at Rs 1,000 crore, up from Rs 500 crore during the whole of 2014-15, and just Rs 100 crore in 2013-14.
Advertising
The deliveries are primarily directed at tier-II towns, and parts of the rural heartland, where India Post has unparalleled reach. The incremental e-commerce revenue boost, said Minister for Communications and Information Technology, Ravi Shankar Prasad, are at the heart of his plans to revive the fortunes of India’s postal service.
Average monthly consignments from the department’s top six e-commerce customers is up over six-fold in the first nine months of this fiscal, primarily on account of a big surge in Amazon’s deliveries, which have sharply jumped to 3 lakh consignments until December 2015 from an average of 50,000 in 2014-15.
[related-post]
Average numbers of consignments from Snapdeal had reached 80,000 until December 2015, as against 35,000 in 2014-15. Flipkart-Myntra have clocked average consignment numbers of about 80,000 so far this year.
“The new facet is cash-on-delivery. India Post has become the premium courier service for e-commerce, so that is a definite improvement. (India Post’s revenues from) cash-on-delivery is going to be Rs 1,500 crore by the end of this year (fiscal ending March, 2016),” Prasad told The Indian Express.
With 1.56 lakh post offices, 1.25 lakh of which are in rural areas, India Post is also seeing a sharp uptick in the parcel business, including the e-commerce business of Speed Post. Revenues have risen to over Rs 165 crore till November this fiscal, as against Rs 172 crore in 2014-15, and Rs 80 crore in 2013-14. “… There are local products such as Madhubani paintings of Bihar, so they (India Post) are also going big on these deliveries. They are getting good money for handicrafts and artisans. About 65 per cent of the catchment area is small towns for e-commerce,” Prasad said.
Over the last 24 months, India Post has entered into tie-ups with online retailers, introducing COD facility, and offering e-commerce companies credible last mile connectivity outside of large cities. India Post has set up 57 modern delivery centers to handle the e-commerce traffic, with a big centre at Parel, Mumbai.
Prasad said the other key aspect in the postal services’ turnaround plan is for India Post to enter into banking services with the launch of a payment bank that is likely to commence operations by March next year. It would be a “game changer”, Prasad said: “It will be a big platform for delivery of subsidies, third party delivery in banking.”
He said a total of 62 players had approached India Post for partnership for banking products. The domestic players include NABARD, HSBC, Allahabad Bank, Indian Overseas Bank, Kotak Life Insurance, HDFC, PNB Metlife, ICICI Lombard, ICICI Prudential, and Bajaj Allianz, while the international ones include Deutsche Bank, Barclays, Transport USA for renting solutions, Western Union, ClearSecurity and Japan’s Hitachi.
These companies have approached the postal department for partnering on banking products, banking solutions, consultancy, banking correspondents, physical security products, ATMs and digital payment services. “I have given them full permission to hire as many as possible so that good competition takes place,” Prasad said.
Advertising
In August 2015, the Reserve Bank of India had granted in-principle approval to 11 applicants to set up payments banks, including India Post.An interest in the gender gap between the representations of female candidates in U.S. elections compared to their male counterparts led two University of Pittsburgh professors to take the issue into the laboratory for three years of research.
Associate Professors of Political Science Kristin Kanthak and Jonathan Woon have published an article about the first phase of their research findings. "Women Don't Run? Election Aversion and Candidate Entry" was published online Dec. 2 in the American Journal of Political Science.
"Past research has shown that women seem to be under confident in their ability to hold office," Woon said. "We tried to examine scientifically what the factors were in the decision-making process."
Kanthak and Woon enlisted 350 undergraduate Pitt students to participate in the laboratory experiments, which Kanthak said appeared to show women are more "election averse" than men.
Their research was conducted in three phases in the Pittsburgh Experimental Economics Lab in Posvar Hall, an interdisciplinary research center funded by the National Science Foundation and the Kenneth P. Dietrich School of Arts and Sciences. In the first phase, men and women were divided into random groups and given a task of adding up numbers. Participants solved as many addition problems as they wanted in a limited time and were paid for correct answers.
In the second phase, participants were asked if they were willing to represent the group. One volunteer was randomly selected, and everyone repeated the addition task. That time, participants earned 2/3 of their money through the addition problems answered correctly by their group leader and 1/3 through their own correctly answered questions. In that scenario, Kanthak and Woon said, men and women each volunteered to lead the group equally--about 80 percent of the time.
In the final phase of the experiment, the participants were asked to declare whether they wanted to be elected as the leader. In that case, they were told to run a short campaign and give a message to the group. Kanthak and Woon found that when a competitive election process was introduced, 78 percent of men chose to run, but only 60 percent of women did.
Women will volunteer to lead a group, Kanthak said, but are less likely than men to go through an actual competition or election to do so.
"We wanted to control the incentives potential candidates face and place men and women with similar qualifications, ambitions, and political environments alongside one another and see if they still made the same decisions to put themselves out there as a candidate. We wanted to level the playing field, and we were able to do that by taking our questions into a lab environment," Kanthak said.
"We also found that election aversion persists with variations in the electoral environment, disappearing only when campaigns are both costless and completely truthful."Firstly, it needs to be understood that ‘religious Zionism’ and ‘political Zionism’ are two entirely different beliefs: the former is integral to an ancient and respected religion whilst the latter is a political movement. The issue here is political Zionism: the movement in Israel and the US that forms the agenda of the right-wing Likud Party of Binyamin Netanyahu.
By endeavouring to equate anti-Zionism, which is the rejection of the political agenda of the Likud Party, with anti-Semitism, Netanyahu attempts to deflect all criticism of Israel’s illegal settlements in the Occupied Territories and its illegal blockade of essential goods for 1.8 million in Gaza, now in its seventh year.
Political Zionism is a movement that crystallised with the publication of ‘Der Judenstaat’ (‘The Jewish state’) by Theodor Herzl, a Viennese journalist based in Paris in February 1896. However, it would be more than 50 years before the Political Zionist Movement, through AIPAC, eventually succeeded in persuading US President Harry S. Truman, to recognise the forced establishment of an Israeli state, in the centre of the Muslim Middle East, designed to take in hundreds of thousands of European Jewish survivors from the horrors of WW2 and its Nazi implemented Holocaust.
Tragically, the problem that was conveniently ignored by the Political Zionists, both then [and now], was that Palestine in 1947 was not an empty space but a land populated with a million Arabs which was the inconvenient fact of which Israel’s future prime minister, David Ben Gurion, was all too well aware but kept silent.
The Palestinian Arabs with their neighbouring states, voted against the UN resolution of 1947 to partition their land in order to accommodate the victims of a European war thousands of miles away. Land that they had populated for over a millennium. Furthermore, war was explicitly threatened if the proposal to partition Palestine was passed.
In the event, it was passed by a minority representative UN, and war was declared, but lost, and over 700,000 Palestinian civilians were forced to flee to avoid being massacred by an Israeli militia in an orgy of terrorist atrocities that had previously culminated in the bombing of Jerusalem’s King David Hotel, killing 92, and the razing of the Arab village of Deir Yassin and the murder of all its residents.
The above is a very brief history of Mr Netanyahu’s brand of Political Zionism. It has virtually nothing whatsoever to do with Judaism. Israel is a secular state whose government uses biblical quotations to justify its unlawful actions against the civilian populations of the West Bank, East Jerusalem and Gaza.
The conflation of anti-Likud Zionism with anti-Semitism is an odious political ploy used to conceal a very dangerous threat to both the Middle East and Europe by the extremist government of today’s only secret nuclear-weaponised state.
© EUNewsdesk London 2016 (but freely distributable), [email protected]FOXBORO – The Patriots’ leading rusher in 2014 was Jonas Gray (89 carries, 412 yards). In 2013, it was Stevan Ridley (178 for 773) and in 2012 it was also Ridley (290 for 1,263). Prior to Ridley carrying 290 times, the only time since 2006 that a Patriots back had over 200 carries was BenJarvus Green-Ellis in 2010 (229).
The Patriots – much to the consternation of fantasy owners – spread the ball around among their running backs.
But the stage seems set this season for LeGarrette Blount to be the lead back the Patriots can lean on. And he wants that job.
“I don’t know who our No. 1 guy is,” Blount said Thursday after a Patriots OTA practice. “Sometimes we started the game (in 2014) with Shane (Vereen), sometimes we started the game with me, sometimes we started the game with Brandon (Bolden). I don’t know who our No. 1 back is but I know I will work my butt off to try and maximize my chances of being that guy.”
With Ridley gone to the Jets and Vereen to the Giants, the glut of experienced backs doesn’t exist this year. There’s Gray, Bolden, second-year man James White and newcomers Travaris Cadet and Dion Lewis (both seemingly third down backs) and Tyler Gaffney, a second-year player that lost his rookie season to an ACL injury.
In both of his seasons with the Patriots (Blount came aboard late in 2014 after being released by the Steelers), he needed a break to ascend to lead back status. In 2013, it was Ridley’s fumble problems. In 2014, Blount emerged after Gray followed up a breakout game against the Colts with a spate of tardiness that got him benched.
Blount looks different this spring. More streamlined. Asked if he lost weight, Blount smiled and said, “Maybe.” He then added, “I’ve been working hard. Anything to improve. I’ve been working pretty hard.
Blount’s high-water mark for NFL carries came in his rookie season with Tampa when he ran 201 times in 13 games. Dropping weight to increase his endurance could be an indication that the Patriots may be looking to ride one guy more than they usually do. It’s unlikely, though, that the team would shelve its pattern of divvying up reps to the point Blount approaches 300 carries. They will still be a matchup team that cycles players through.
Blount was asked about the departures of Ridley and Vereen and his role as a more veteran player.
“We got a good group,” he said. “They learn on the fly just like I learn on the fly. We’re all getting a lot of stuff thrown at us. You just gotta study your playbook, study and make sure you don’t fall behind. I just do everything I can to make sure I set a good example for whoever’s looking up to me and whoever’s behind me. I just do whatever it takes to get better and stay on the field and that’s doing whatever they ask me to do.”
These OTAs, Blount said, are where the finishing touches are being put on the offense the Patriots will begin running in late July when training camp begins.
“After we leave here, I’m gonna have everything that I need to come to training camp,” he said. “Everything’s installed that we’re getting right now, all the new stuff, so that will be big for me to help me get better and stay on track for everything that they want me to do. You gotta go back to the basics (at this time of year). We were off for a while, vacation, we’re just getting back in the swing of things and we’re having everything thrown at us at once. We just gotta be able to stay on top of it.”
In his time with the Patriots, Blount has pleasantly surprised. Now, though, the expectations are going to be higher because of his experience and he doesn’t want any letdowns.
“Anything they tell me to do I make sure I’m prepared for it,” he explained. “Whatever it is, whatever things they ask me to do, I’m ready for it. … I just want to make sure I know it and they have full confidence in me that I know what to do.”Though I agree with the title, I’m not the one who said it. Matthew Miller, a ZDnet blogger who writes on Smartphones and Cell Phones category has shared his experience with different smartphones in the past. Why bother about his opinion? Because, Matthew Miller started using a Pilot 1000 in 1997 and has been writing news, reviews, and opinion pieces ever since on mobile phones in general and smartphones too. His summary of his post says it all,
Windows Phone 7 may not be flying off the shelves, but in my extensive experience the platform is the most stable and reliable out there. I recommend that you at least give the platform a try because it is NOTHING like Windows Mobile and the Microsoft name does not kill the experience.
This is not a research study, but still an extensive research on his own personal expereinces. His post was more about stability of the operating system rather than features. He writes on Windows Phone as follows,
Zero! That is how many times I have seen a reset on ANY Windows Phone 7 device that I have been using in over a year. During that time I have used at least six WP7 devices on all four wireless carriers. This includes running the early tech preview on the first WP7 device all the way through the latest RTM version of Mango I have on my HTC HD7. I even have the Dell Venue Pro, with a 32GB microSD card in it, that has been rock solid stable even though I have read a number of reports of issues with that device. I don’t know if I have just been blessed with an uncanny knack for using stable WP7 devices, but from what I read online there are many more customers just as pleased as I am with the stability of Windows Phone 7.
He also shared his opinion on stability of iPhone, Android, Blackberry, Symbian and even Palm OS. Its good to see more and more people are realizing the potential of Windows Phones. May be, Brandon Watson’s attempt in the recent times to lure Internet celebrties with Windows Phones may help change the perception on Windows Phones and Microsoft in general when they share their experiences.
Read his full post here.
Update: Photo of Miller updated.South Africa's public corruption watchdog is investigating whether questionable fees were paid to win a $3-billion train contract awarded to a consortium involving Canadian transportation giant Bombardier, CBC News has learned.
The probe is looking at previous reports that millions of dollars in success fees were paid as part of the contract, as well as new revelations, uncovered by CBC News, that a secret deal was brokered by Bombardier to pay $5 million to a South African middleman, Peter-Paul Ngwenya, who describes himself as an "influential individual in political circles."
"There's something totally disproportionate about that kind of payment," says Paul Hoffman, a lawyer with the independent Institute for Accountability in Southern Africa.
"You don't just throw around commissions to people who are not entitled to commissions, because it undermines the cost-effectiveness of the deal, and it leads to bribery and corruption — the kind that this deal appears to reek of."
Bombardier is one of five partners in a consortium that began constructing what's called the Gautrain in 2006. The 80-kilometre rapid transit rail line in the northern end of the country links Johannesburg and Pretoria with South Africa's biggest airport.
Construction finished in 2012 and an extension is currently being studied.
South Africa's Office of the Public Protector told CBC News it received a complaint about how cost overruns were handled by political decision makers, and Public Protector Thuli Madonsela now says she's scrutinizing the entire deal.
"There were allegations of political interference," Madonsela said in an interview at her office in Pretoria. "However, whenever there are allegations of political interference, we look at whether there was any alleged or suspected gratification, what you would call bribery in your country."
South Africa's Public Protector Thuli Madonsela says her office is now scrutinizing the entire deal involving the high-speed Gautrain. (CBC)
Bombardier declined to be interviewed, but did send a statement saying it hasn't been informed about the Office of the Public Protector investigation.
"Should we be invited to collaborate with the public protector's investigation, we will fully collaborate," the company says. "Bombardier has always maintained and will continue to maintain the highest standards of ethical behaviour in all of our business operations worldwide."
Middleman speaks
Documents obtained by CBC News show Bombardier drafted and signed a secret deal in 2010 that would see one of two middlemen based in Africa paid $5 million after he threatened to go public with information that "might harm [Bombardier's] reputation."
Peter-Paul Ngwenya, speaking in detail for the first time about the deal, says Bombardier has failed to pay him more than $6 million for his help in winning the contract for the rail project in South Africa. He claims the money was supposed to flow through a second Tunisia-based middleman, Youssef Zarrouk. South Africa media has reported that Zarrouk received $35 million in so-called success fees from Bombardier.
"It's a company of cheats," Ngwenya told CBC News in an interview at his Johannesburg estate, referring to Bombardier. "That's the only way I can describe it. It's a company that's run by hooligans, by crooks, people who won't honour their written word."
Bombardier says it owes Ngwenya nothing.
"As we have stated several times before, Bombardier has never had any agreement for services with Mr. Ngwenya," the company said in its statement to CBC News. "Bombardier therefore continues to view his claims against Bombardier as baseless and without any merit whatsoever."
CBC News has obtained letters from 2009 that show Ngwenya wrote to Bombardier making threats and |
may not have had much access to this.
But it is in the impact on trust among allies where the greatest damage may be, according to a British source.
Worst nightmare
A Canadian official conceded to the BBC that the case was very significant but was at pains to emphasise that Delisle had been dealt with.
British intelligence officials say that one of their worst nightmares is a mole like Delisle who spills classified secrets of allies - particularly those of the United States.
Given the much greater size of its intelligence agencies, allies know they need the US more than the US needs them.
The US may have the odd mole itself but no-one would dare suggest cutting the Americans out of the relationship, yet if the Americans fear too many leaks from allies then they might restrict what they share with serious consequences.
"If we lose information from our allies we might not get that indication of an impending terrorist attack… I think this is going to push us back to the Stone Age." Canadian officials feared, according to the Globe and Mail newspaper.
Image caption Most intelligence agencies place restrictions on the use of memory sticks on classified computers
The Delisle case also underscores the worry some intelligence officials have about the security of computer networks - especially among allies.
The Wikileaks case - in which one soldier allegedly downloaded vast amounts of diplomatic traffic stored on a single database - highlighted the dangers when information is collected into one place where relatively low-level staff have access.
Most intelligence agencies (including the UK's) place restrictions on the use of memory sticks on classified computers and also carry out traffic analysis to look for the suspicious downloading of data or unusual searches.
But when intelligence is shared among allies, all that matters is a breach at the weakest link in the chain for other people's secrets to escape.
Canada will be facing tough questions from allies about what went wrong.
So how much damage has the case done? No-one is saying partly because they may not know since Delisle was only discovered years into betrayal.
And his guilty plea means there will be no trial in which what is known comes out.Benitez used to manage Liverpool and Chelsea
Napoli coach Rafa Benitez was mystified by the first red card of his managerial career in Sunday's 1-1 draw with Atalanta.
Benitez was sent off late on for complaining to the officials, having been angered by Mauricio Pinilla's earlier goal where he appeared to shove Henrique.
"I have never being cautioned by a yellow card in my career as a manager and I cannot explain how they could have ruled me out for misunderstanding," he said.
"After having managed more than 600 matches, I have never being shown a yellow card, If I get angry there is a fair reason. The result was influenced by an event that cannot be considered a fair football decision.
"Maybe six referees are not enough. It should be better to have eight indeed, some decisions could not be explained otherwise."Clint Dempsey's legend at Fulham continues to grow with every goal he scores.
The Texas native did it again on Monday, scoring an 85th-minute winner for Fulham in a 1-0 victory over Liverpool. Minutes after hitting the crossbar with a bending effort from the top of the area, Dempsey found himself in perfect position to slot home a spilled rebound by Pepe Reina from close range.
With the goal, Dempsey set a new standard for Americans in the Premier League. He entered the match tied with Brian McBride with 36 Premiership goals but now owns that record for his own.
Here's video of Dempsey's goal that etched his name in the record books and gave Fulham a much-needed three points:
——————-
What do you make of Dempsey's goal record? What did you think of his performance against Liverpool?
Share your thoughts below.Ted Cruz delivers a speech on the third day of the Republican National Convention on Wednesday at the Quicken Loans Arena in Cleveland. Alex Wong/Getty Images
Ted Cruz’s refusal to formally endorse Donald Trump onstage in Cleveland on Wednesday drew agitated chants of “EN-DORSE TRUMP” from the crowd, followed by audible boos from angry delegates when he didn’t heed their calls. From the sounds of it, though, the reception the Texas senator received when he stepped off the stage was even harsher.
CNN reports that a man in a donor suite had to be restrained from assaulting Ted Cruz after he entered it after his speech. — Conor Friedersdorf (@conor64) July 21, 2016
CNN’s Manu Raju and BuzzFeed’s Rosie Gray with more from the scene:
HEIDI CRUZ escorted out by security as crowd gets angry at Cruz for his speech. One Trump supporter shouting "Goldman Sachs!" at her — Manu Raju (@mkraju) July 21, 2016
Ken Cuccinelli told me he cleared the way for Heidi Cruz to leave because of "all the people physically approaching her, berating her." — Manu Raju (@mkraju) July 21, 2016
Just spoke to a source who says witnessed the head of the WA delegation go "bananas" on Cruz and call him a traitor — Rosie Gray (@RosieGray) July 21, 2016
this was on bottom level suites in Q. source says aggressor was a woman who ID'ed herself as head of WA state delegation — Rosie Gray (@RosieGray) July 21, 2016
Source: "security kind of stepped in" but it "wasn't like anyone got arrested it was just really dramatic" — Rosie Gray (@RosieGray) July 21, 2016
Meanwhile, on the floor:
WATCH: Gov. Christie on Ted Cruz: "Awful, selfish speech... showed himself tonight to not be a man of his word." https://t.co/jjvRlWX3Wf — NBC Nightly News with Lester Holt (@NBCNightlyNews) July 21, 2016
There’s no doubt Cruz knew that his endorsement-free convention speech wasn’t going to be warmly received by Republican politicians and donors who have cast their lot with Trump, but he probably wasn’t expecting this. Meanwhile, the Trump campaign reportedly signed off on Cruz’s prepared remarks, so it would have known no endorsement was forthcoming—which makes this report all the more interesting:
Two sources tell me Trump team actively whipped the “boos” at the end of Cruz speech — Zeke Miller (@ZekeJMiller) July 21, 2016
Read more Slate coverage of the 2016 campaign.TONY JONES, PRESENTER: Today the Government announced what it describes as its newest security weapon, the National Facial Biometric Matching Capability. It's a system where photos taken of any citizen can be matched against existing databases which contain up to 100 million images to check identity. It works, we're told, because your face is unique, just like your fingerprints. The images can come from driver's licences, passport photos or security cameras in your local shopping centre.
MICHAEL KEENAN, JUSTICE MINISTER: Look, it keeps Australians safe by protecting their identity and it allows our law enforcement authorities to accurately and efficiently identify someone who might take their interest.
TONY JONES: Well there's no doubt this system, known as "The Capability", could be a powerful tool to catch criminals and run terrorists to the ground, but there are some key questions. How will it be used? Who will be able to access the database? And is it foolproof? In other words, could you be accused of something you didn't do because the system makes a mistake?
Well tonight, in the first of a two-part special, reporter Margot O'Neill takes a look at this new technology.
MARGOT O'NEILL, REPORTER: This is what facial recognition used to mean for police: mug shots of known offenders, the usual suspects.
Well you can put those mug shot books away. Now there's going to be a system called The Capability, short for the National Facial Biometric Matching Capability.
It'll allow law enforcement and other security agencies to quickly scan up to 100 million facial images which are held in various databases around Australia. And yes, you heard right: 100 million facial images. It'll ultimately cover every Australian citizen with a passport or a driver's licence. And, for many of us, obviously, it'll hold multiple images.
Including the Justice Minister.
MICHAEL KEENAN: Well it would be because I have photo identity documents. I have a passport and I have a driver's licence.... Most Australians will have identity documents that do identify them using their face.
PATRICK GRAY, CYBER SECURITY ANALYST: This is a whole other league of creepy. This is a whole other league of invasive. And the fact that there's been no discussion around this is really weird.
MARGOT O'NEILL: The Federal Government says the proposed system will help combat identity fraud and identity theft, as well as terrorism and organised crime.
So how will it work? Facial recognition software identifies your most unique facial characteristics, especially around the eyes and the nose. It's called your faceprint and it's matched against a database of known individuals. The bigger the database, the more effective the system.
Because passports and driver's licences contain reliable and clear photos, they provide a perfect baseline for almost the entire adult population.
MICHAEL KEENAN: In the first instance, the Australian Federal Police and DFAT, the Immigration departments, will be the primary users, but if other people have a lawful use for this technology, then we could look at them accessing this information over time.
PATRICK GRAY: My concern is because there's no restriction on the way in which law enforcement can use this, it's gonna become a staple tool for law enforcement eventually. And, you know, they might not be saying - well, they might be saying, "We don't have plans to do this right now." It's the natural trajectory for a technology like this. I'm really curious to know what the threshold is before some police officer can take a photo of me on the street and then without my knowledge submit it to this system for identification. Do I have to be suspected of murder? Do I have to be suspected of disorderly conduct? Or can they submit a photo because I littered?
MARGOT O'NEILL: We asked state and federal police about their use of facial recognition. New South Wales, South Australia and Western Australia police didn't answer our questions.
Victoria Police said it uses facial recognition and has a database of 1.4 million facial images.
Queensland Police said it trialled the technology during last year's G20 in Brisbane. It also has a database of nearly 3.7 million facial images, although that includes some tattoos and artist drawings.
And the number of photos police could process through The Capability is set to escalate.
Northern Territory Police showed the ABC its recently-adopted facial recognition system. With a population of 240,000, the Top End already has a database of 100,000 facial images.
JOURNALIST: So you're going to try to match it to those 100,000 photos on the database?
NT POLICE OFFICER: Yep.
MARGOT O'NEILL: NT police are also using mobile CCTV and tablets and trialling body cameras to work with facial recognition.
Then there's the thousands of CCTV cameras around Australia. City Councils are rapidly expanding their use to deter violence and vandalism and the footage can help police catch offenders.
Sydney City Council says that its 100-odd cameras lead to about three police tip-offs every day. The problem is that the footage is often low grade and grainy, making it hard to get a clear picture. But that's all about to change. The cameras are getting an upgrade. From this, to this. New high-definition cameras will improve the quality of CCTV footage by 1,000 per cent, making identification day or night far easier.
MARK GREGORY, INTERNET SECURITY, RMIT: For the police and government, councils, they're aggregating all this CCTV and using much larger systems so that they're able to process many thousands of people, many thousands of faces in real time. And they're able to identify particular individuals or they're able to identify things that are unusual. Having CCTV and facial recognition doesn't mean that we're living in a police state. It means that we're using modern technologies to solve crime, terrorism and other problems in a modern way.
MARGOT O'NEILL: The Federal Government's facial matching capability won't use live CCTV feeds, but it will use stills. And despite big improvements in the accuracy of facial recognition, it's not foolproof.
ADAM MOLNAR, CRIMINOLOGY LECTURER, DEAKIN UNI.: I think we need to be concerned about the potential error rate of the technology. The FBI accepts a 20 per cent inaccuracy. So, that's one in five images that could be a false identification of an individual. The technology is notoriously problematic in uncontrolled environments, so with bad angles or bad lighting. And so this raises a lot of concerns about how false positives can unnecessarily impact an individual's life.
MARGOT O'NEILL: Do you think having such ubiquitous cameras watching us all the time, does it change the way society feels, the way people feel about it?
MARK GREGORY: I think for some people it will, especially if they're going to a protest or some sort of anti-government event or some other event that they're particularly involved with, then they're going to feel very much that they're being watched.
MARGOT O'NEILL: Which is why security, privacy and technology experts we spoke to believe there needs to be more public discussion about this quiet but dramatic transformation of police and government surveillance and identification capability.
PATRICK GRAY: Some, you know, creepy Orwellian system will be flagging the fact that you walked down that street at that particular time. Now this of course is not what's being proposed now, but, you know, surely we would like to have the conversation before we even arrive at a proposal like that.(Fred Kfoury III/Icon sportswire)
By Court Lalonde
When Peter Chiarelli traded Johnny Boychuk on October 4th, 2014, all of Causeway Street was up in arms. He traded the defensemen for two second-round picks in 2015 and 2016, and it looked like Chiarelli gave him away to the New York Islanders. We can’t say that Chiarelli knew what he was doing and at the end of that season was relieved of his duties. Don Sweeney took over the GM duties of the Boston Bruins after the departure of Chiarelli and selected Brandon Carlo with the 37th pick of the 2015 National Hockey League entry draft. That was one of the picks the Bruins obtained in the Boychuk trade from the Islanders. The 6’5′ Carlo was projected at the time to be a top four defensemen in the NHL but would be a project and wouldn’t be NHL ready until at least 2018 according to most scouts. He wasn’t even the highest rated defensemen that drafted that year on their depth charts, which was first-round pick Jakub Zboril, who Bruins selected with their 13th overall pick.
Carlo would surprise us all and make the Bruins at the beginning of the 2016 season, right out of training camp. He didn’t just make the team but also earn a spot on the top pairing alongside team captain Zdeno Chara. Being paired with Chara has been a learning experience, and couldn’t have lucked out with a better teacher. Bruins fans started to like Carlo early because he registered an assist in his first game and scored in his second. He was able to move the opposing player away from the front of the net with his size and was able to move the puck the ice quickly to create scoring chances.
Carlo’s November showed us the potential we had with this rookie defensemen, and it became apparent that he was our future on the backend. If you look at his stats from the 15 games in November, the Bruins played you would never second guess his top pair status. During the 15 game period, he registered three points with a plus-five rating. The next couple month we have a different story because the play from the Bruins became very inconsistent, showing Carlo’s flaws which every rookie has. We started to see Carlo second guess himself and get caught out of position, and his lack of confidence with the puck caused he to dump it or give it away. It didn’t help that the media was speculating that he would trade him to the Colorado Avalanche for Gabriel Landeskog.
To Sweeney’s credit, he pushed those rumors aside and let the media know that he wasn’t trading Carlo. Sweeney said. “We want to be a team that believes it has internal fixes, which you are growing those players.” The trade deadline came and went, and so did Carlo’s first head coach Claude Julien, who was fired a couple weeks before. Julien was replaced by Bruce Cassidy, and that hasn’t change Carlo’s status as part of the top pairing beside Chara.
Carlo is having a great rookie campaign and people need to realize that he is going to make some mistakes from time to time, it’s what rookie do. I think he is going to be one of the cornerstones on the Bruins backend for years to come. Not every good defenseman shoots the lights out in his rookie year. Victor Hedman, who I feel Carlo plays a lot like only scored 20 points and was a minus-three in his rookie year. Carlo is part of the future for the Bruins, and that a good thing.I was on Israel English-language TV last week debating the army draft issue with Yochanan Plessner, the head of the government committee established to make recommendations on the issue in the last Knesset. The moderator began by asking me: “More and more Israelis are asking themselves whether it’s fair that young men like Yochanan Plessner [who served in an elite combat division] should go off at the age of eighteen, risk their lives, endure great hardship, in order to defend us – all of us – while at the same time eighteen year old yeshiva students are exempted from that burden. Rabbi Rosenblum, is that fair?”
I have heard chareidi debaters counter this argument: Well, is it fair that we have to do all the Torah learning for the country?
It’s safe to say that argument has never convinced a single non-chareidi. Not just because of the emotional response – How many yeshiva bochurim are killed in the tents of Torah? – but because it misses a fundamental distinction: Yeshiva bochurim are doing what they most want to do. IDF recruits are acting under legal compulsion
The argument of “equality of burdens,” in short, cannot be easily dismissed, on either an intellectual or emotional level. Equality before the law is an important societal value.
YET, IRONICALLY, THE MORE the argument turns on matters of high principle, vociferously expressed, the more the Torah world hears a desire to “break” the chareidi world. For if equality of service – i.e., submission to the dictates of the State – is the key, then it makes no difference whether the IDF needs chareidi soldiers or is prepared to accommodate their religious needs. The crucial point is that chareidi 18-year-olds close their Gemaros and do some task upon orders of the State.
That goal is exposed every time someone says, “We understand why chareidim can’t go into the army, but why can’t you do some form of national service?” In fact, most of the national service programs are make-work of little value. Closing one’s Gemara to perform make-work to satisfy a government quota is a much bigger bizayon haTorah than service in a combat unit.
Those most insistently brandishing the banner of “equality of service” have said little about the nitty-gritty of programs to be created for chareidi soldiers or how the army will accommodate their religious needs. Nor has the IDF had much to say about its manpower needs. Because those issues are irrelevant if the primary goal is forcing the chareidi community to submit to the authority of the State.
Those same questions would be crucial if the debate were a practical one, as Prime Minister Netanyahu prefers – e.g., How can increased chareidi participation in the IDF be achieved?
Chareidim will never agree that the laws of the State take precedence over those of G-d. Indeed, I cannot see how any religious person, no matter what his religion, could ever agree to that proposition.Nor will chareidi parents willingly agree to their sons entering the army in frameworks that are incompatible with halacha or in which the danger of not remaining religious are great. A prominent national religious rosh yeshiva recently stated that the importance of the mitzvah of army service overrides the fact that many soldiers from national religious homes – minimally 20% and likely over twice that – do not remain religious. That view finds no echoes in the chareidi community.
The IDF has shown little interest in religiously accommodating large numbers of chareidi recruits. At present, the number of young men from chareidi homes seeking to enlist is greater than the IDF’s ability to integrate them. The IDF has consistently resisted efforts to expand Nahal Haredi by adding new units, and is turning away potential recruits.
Rabbi Yoel Schwartz, one of the founders of the Nahal Haredi, told HaModia last week that the IDF has proven unwilling or incapable of living up to commitments to chareidi recruits. For instance, a new elite frogmen unit for chareidi recruits had to be closed very shortly after opening because the IDF did not keep its promises. He also said that the level of kashrus in IDF kitchens is rapidly declining.
AS LONG AS THE SOCIETAL DEBATE remains at the level of high principle, there is no hope of resolution. Worse, trends that benefit both the IDF and the chareidi community may well be reversed. Nahal Haredi has proven to be of great benefit to many young men from chareidi homes who never found themselves within the mainstream yeshiva system. There are others who for whatever reason feel little satisfaction with the rigors of the full yeshiva schedule, and who could theoretically benefit from frameworks that would include both learning and some form of service and training, under the same requirements as Nahal Haredi.
Modern warfare is fought as much on the computer as on the battle front, and the greatest current manpower needs of the IDF are in technical areas..In these areas, those who will stay in the armed services for a long time period are much preferred to draftees, who generally leave after three years. The success of the various Shachar programs, in which chareidi (mostly) married men receive training in technical fields, have demonstrated two things: First, chareidi married men who need to support their families could prove to be the solution to some of the army’s most critical manpower needs. Second, the IDF is potentially an ideal employer for chareidim because of its willingness to provide on-the-job training and environments in many respects more suitable than the private sector. The Shachar units have had some of the highest re-enlistment rates in the IDF, and chareidi recruits with whom I have spoken have expressed a high level of satisfaction.
But if the government declares all-out ideological war on the chareidi world and insists on the draft of 18-year-old yeshiva students, then all the trends towards greater chareidi participation in the IDF, and in the private economy as well, will likely be reversed. Participation in the IDF will then be viewed as submission to a government decree against the citadels of Torah.
This article first appeared in Mishpacha.LOS ANGELES (Hollywood Reporter) - Tom McCarthy, writer-director of “The Visitor,” will direct HBO’s fantasy pilot “Game of Thrones,” which will feature Peter Dinklage — the star of McCarthy’s first feature, “The Station Agent” — in a key role.
Based on George R.R. Martin’s best-selling “Songs of Fire and Ice” novels, “Thrones” is described as the story of an epic struggle for power set in a vast and violent fantasy kingdom. Dinklage will play Tyrion, the Queen’s brother who is treated as an outsider because of his size.
David Benioff and D.B. Weiss wrote the pilot script.
“Thrones” is slated to film in the third quarter in Belfast, Northern Ireland, in what First Minister Peter Robinson hails as “the first TV production of such vast size and scale” to film in the country.
Dinklage is filming two comedy features: the indie “Pete Smalls Is Dead,” and the remake of “Death at a Funeral.”
“Thrones” marks the first TV directorial gig for McCarthy, an actor who received Independent Spirit Awards for both his features as writer-director. On the acting side, McCarthy next appears in the disaster thriller “2012.”Sen. Rand Paul (R-Ky.) is a hard no on Graham-Cassidy, the last-ditch Senate Republican plan to gut the Affordable Care Act, and Sen. Susan Collins (R-Maine) is leaning no, but every other iffy Senate Republican appears on the fence, and GOP leaders emerged from a Monday night meeting cautiously optimistic. The 140-page bill, introduced by Sens. Bill Cassidy (R-La.), Lindsey Graham (R-S.C.), Ron Johnson (R-Wis.), and Dean Heller (R-Nev.), faces a Sept. 30 deadline if Republicans want to pass it with 50 votes, without Democrats.
The Congressional Budget Office (CBO) said it will have a preliminary analysis on the bill's fiscal impact next week, but won't have an estimate on how Graham-Cassidy would affect coverage numbers, premiums, or the federal deficit for "at least several weeks." Previous CBO scores of similar bills estimated that millions of Americans would lose coverage. "The odds are improving," Sen. John Thune (R-S.D.) said Monday night. "I told Bill Cassidy he's the grave robber. This thing was 6 feet under. And I think he's revived it to the point that there's a lot of positive buzz and forward momentum."
Sen. John McCain (R-Ariz.), who voted no when the last ObamaCare repeal vote fell short, said he wants to see a bipartisan bill debated in "a regular process rather than, 'Hey I've got an idea, let's run this through the Senate and give them an up-or-down vote.'" He's considered a maybe, and Sen. Orrin Hatch (R-Utah) announced that the Senate Finance Committee will hold one hearing on Graham-Cassidy on Monday, a move derided by the committee's ranking Democrat, Sen. Ron Wyden (Ore.), as "a sham process that makes a mockery of regular order."
Also opposing the bill is Louisiana Health Secretary Rebekah Gee, who reminded Cassidy that his namesake legislation "uniquely and disproportionately hurts Louisiana." The bill would end ObamaCare's Medicare expansion and subsidies, transferring much of those funds to states that did not expand Medicaid; Louisiana expanded Medicaid last year. The legislation would also give states wide latitude to end protections on people with pre-existing conditions and allow skimpier plans.
There's no guarantee the House would pass the bill, which it couldn't modify, but House Republicans would be under enormous pressure to do so. Meanwhile, a bipartisan health-care effort is being negotiated between Sen. Lamar Alexander (R-Tenn.) and Sen. Patty Murray (D-Wash.). Peter WeberIf your life ever takes a turn for the worst and you decide to fund your insatiable thirst for custom motorcycles by joining a gang that pillages and plunders, there’s a few things you should remember. Firstly, you’ll need to be nimble and light on your feet lest you be caught in the act. Next, you’ll need a nice little secret compartment to stash your ill-gotten gains should the law come a-knocking at a bad time. And finally, you’d best arm yourself with a gun or pistol should the worst come to the worst. Which brings us to today’s build, a bike that fits this bill perfectly and not by coincidence, either. Introducing the latest build from Emporio Elaborazioni Meccaniche with their very aptly named ‘Brigante’ or ‘Bandit’.
“The Bandit follows our philosophy perfectly: to build a special bike re-using other old bike pieces to give them new life and a new dignity”, explains Leo, Dopz and Schizzo from EEM. “The donor bike was a Honda CB400N. We worked on the idea of doing a very short bike, not really a bobber but something shorter and a little different. The real key to the whole build was our decision to use an old Piaggio ‘Ciao’ moped seat.”
“Next we shortened, reinforced and cleaned up the rear frame, changed the rear shocks and mounted two reworked blinkers inside the rear frame to make them seem fully integrated and to leave the seat as clean as possible.”
“We definitely do not like the trend of leaving the space under the seat empty, so we had some fun reworking an old Kawasaki filter to hide the battery and fuses… and fill the space, too. Naturally, we simplified the wires while we were at it and hid them inside the frame.”
“On the opposite side to the battery we mounted and old flask. It has a clip on the bike-side that allows you to open it up and use it for storage. Tools, keys, loot – whatever you want.
The tank is from an old Gilera, which we reworked to fit the frame. The ‘machine gun’ muffler is from a Triumph scrambler which we then cut, built a 2-into-2 under the brake pedal and left its nice internal metal padding visible.”
“We reworked the Piaggio Ciao seat and covered it with leather; the same leather we used to hold down the tank.”
“The colour scheme was mainly influenced by our decision to follow the original gold rim colour and the old colours on the Gilera tank. There’s a small yellow LED headlight that’s been installed upside down, new brake reservoirs, navy brake cables, bespoke EEM aluminium footplates, flat ‘bars like a bobber, a handmade bronzed mudguard, new shock absorber… and that’s just the big things.”“I went from loving elephants to now being terrified of them."
Some resorts in Thailand offer tourists the opportunity to learn the ropes of being a mahout, an elephant handler in Asia that works with, rides on and tends to elephants.
In some cases, tourists are allowed to bath the elephants in a river, and while that sounds like it might be fun, one woman discovered the downside of doing so:
The video was posted Friday on LiveLeak, and though it's hard to say how recent the incident occurred, it nevertheless offers a reminder that elephants are still wild animals, even captive ones.
In this instance, the woman unfortunately did something that the elephant did not like.
As she wiped down the top of the elephant's trunk with a sponge, the elephant suddenly swept its head forward and with its tusks, bound together at the tips, tossed the woman into the air, sending her and her sunglasses and headband flying.
RELATED: Baby elephant tries to act grown-up, charges tourists; video
She landed in the water where she quickly stood up to gather herself. Evidently she was OK, but we suspect she was more than a little shook up.
LiveLeak posted a quote with the video that we assume comes from the woman in the video, which would confirm our suspicions:
“I went to Thailand with a group of friends after planning the trip for about 8 months. Elephants were my favorite animal. Elephant things are all over my desk at work. I have elephant clothes and elephant kitchen tools. So, going to the elephant sanctuary was supposed to be the highlight of my trip. I was also planning on getting an elephant bamboo tattoo while I was in Thailand, which I definitely didn’t do after this experience. I went from loving elephants to now being terrified of them.”Early afternoon at a photographic studio tucked away in sleepy suburban Surrey, a stone’s throw from the Thames, and Diego Costa is intent upon keeping himself busy. The Chelsea striker is playing the outcast at present. He has trained back at Cobham with his customary gusto, an attempt to avoid being blunted by suspension, and has crammed commitments with sponsors into his schedule to occupy his time, but the three-game ban that condemned him to the periphery has clearly left him as bored as he is exasperated. His return at Paris Saint-Germain next Tuesday night cannot come soon enough.
The last few weeks have been spent marooned on the sidelines, sitting in the East Stand alongside a hamstrung Cesc Fàbregas when Manchester City visited Stamford Bridge at the end of last month, absent altogether at Villa Park, and back between the masseurs twiddling their thumbs behind the home dugout when Everton were narrowly beaten in midweek. “It is frustrating not being able to play because I cannot help my team-mates out on the pitch,” he admits. “If the game is hard out there, really tight as they have been, I sit there kicking every ball. Being very active. I get very caught up in it. I can only watch calmly if the match is decided or my team are dominating. But I get passionate very easily.” Those substitutes sitting directly in front of the forward, a bag of nerves as he thumped the Perspex barrier through the dying moments of Wednesday’s tight win, would vouch for that commitment.
The impartial might argue that Costa brought all this upon himself. Had he not planted his right foot on to Emre Can’s shin near the touchline early in Chelsea’s Capital One Cup semi-final second-leg victory over Liverpool – contact that was deemed deliberate when viewed retrospectively by the referee, Michael Oliver, and then assessed by an independent regulatory commission after the player had contested the Football Association’s violent conduct charge – there would have been no suspension to serve. His manager has regularly disagreed, outraged as he still is by the focus the incident has drawn. The striker feels he has said enough on the subject. His stance has not changed, his insistence of innocence maintained.
The contact was clumsy rather than malicious – “not on purpose, just look at the video”. As far as he is concerned his conscience is clear. There is no reason to change his approach. When he returns to action in the Champions League he will be as aggressive as ever, intent upon unnerving Thiago Silva and David Luiz in the heart of the Parisian defence in just the same way as he muscled into Vincent Kompany and Pablo Zabaleta at Manchester City, and Martin Skrtel and Mamadou Sakho at Liverpool earlier this season. Or even John Terry when Atlético Madrid prevailed at Stamford Bridge in last April’s semi-final, an occasion swung by what remains his most recent goal in European competition. A competitive spirit takes over and always will. He admits that, on the pitch, “I transform myself”. Without that ferocity he would not be the same player who boasts 17 goals from 19 Premier League appearances.
Facebook Twitter Pinterest Diego Costa flicks the ball past West Bromwich Albion’s Ben Foster. Photograph: Tom Dulat/Getty Images
There will inevitably be ramifications from the Can affair, whether that means even greater scrutiny from referees and pundits, or more eagerness from opponents to make the most of any contact. Logic suggests he may find himself provoked. “But I’ve been a target for defenders for a long time, and I am used to getting kicked by them, to get knocked by them,” he says, the response drawing a nod of approval from the entourage of agents hovering on the fringe of the interview.
“I know all about that already. I also fight and tackle, even if some defenders complain at the slightest contact. To me, you draw a line under all that as soon as the game is over. We shake hands and it is all [left] on the field. I think the referees should think about how many times I am hit or kicked before I get angry about it. But referees here in England are good enough and professional, and they also understand well and realise what happens out on the pitch. They take that into account.
“I don’t go into a game with specific targets. I don’t pinpoint an opposing player before a match, trying to exploit a kind of weakness. If you pinpointed someone before the kick-off, probably you would become embroiled in a fight and you would be distracted from what really matters and not play well. When you are going in to a game to confront Thiago Silva and David Luiz, you can’t modify your way of playing. They are both great players, great defenders, in a great PSG team. I may argue with them on the pitch, there may be contact, but that is not a plan. That is the emotion. The battle. Forget about specific plans. My only goal is to score, and to play as well as I can for my team. All I can do is try and be in the best possible shape.”
Last season Costa was La Liga’s most fouled player, ahead of Cristiano Ronaldo and Lionel Messi. Team-mates rejoice in his rugged refusal to wilt, using it as a sense of inspiration as well as reassurance. He had endured regular ugly run-ins with Real Madrid’s Sergio Ramos at the Vicente Calderón and Bernabéu, but it was the defender who persuaded the Brazilian to adopt Spanish nationality.
It transpires that talk of Costa approaching Terry before the opening game of the season, at Burnley, to seek assurances the captain would back up the striker’s approach – “I go to the limit” – is nothing more than an urban myth, but that scenario still feels eminently plausible. There may be the odd ban to endure along the way, but his team-mates recognise the 26-year-old is an asset.
The raw aggression is a reflection of a career struggling to clamber up the football ladder. It is that of a player toughened on the streets of his home town, Lagarto in Brazil’s Sergipe state, rather than a European superclub’s plush academy, and an upbringing that took him from his parents, at 14, to São Paulo over 2,000km away ostensibly to help on his cousins’ market stall selling clothes. There he lived with his uncle, Edson, who offered work in his own store, frequented by local coaches, and the youngster duly forged a reputation at Barcelona Esportivo Capela, a club in the favela in the south of the city. He earned £100 a month and made an immediate impression by flooring the team’s most promising defender, Felipe, in his first training session.
Costa had his first taste of the “professional” game at Barcelona EC, impressing in the youth setup, though prospective moves to the junior teams at Portuguesa, São Paulo and Palmeiras came to nothing. Then a scout working for the agent Jorge Mendes saw him play in the flesh |
there should be consumer protections. We support a lot of consumer protections. But taking consumers access to credit away isn’t a consumer protection. It denies people the ability to have economic benefits.”
That logic doesn’t sit well with everyone.
“There’s a market for prostitution. There’s a market for crack. Why should I deny the crack addict? He wants his drugs, and he’s willing to pay good money for his drugs.”
That’s Delegate Mark Levine of Alexandria.
“When you start on crack, it’s very addictive and it’s hard to get off crack. There are people for whom borrowing $200 and having to pay back $20,000 is not a good life choice. And I know they need that $200. And I know they need it now.”
Levine says he’s still meeting with online lenders in an effort to find some kind of compromise. They want the ability to get a license to offer loans in Virginia. They don’t actually need a license to do this, but it would help them market the products. Levine feels that might give him leverage to implement some kind of a cap on the interest rates they can charge.
Meanwhile, on the other side of town, Teena Hamlin has returned to the Allied Cash Advance.
“I can’t believe I’m standing here, and this is open for business. And that’s just upsetting.”
She says she hopes Levine can come to some kind of compromise with lenders who she says are out of control.
"Do we live in a country where capitalism can be balanced with accountability and responsibility? Do we live in that America? I don’t know.”
This report, provided by Virginia Public Radio, was made possible with support from the Virginia Education Association.Country singer Rob Quist is running for Congress in Montana. The 1 percent wants to stop him.
By Jimmy Tobias
Rob Quist at a campaign stop in Helena, Montana. (Photo: Montanabw/Wikimedia Commons)
Rob Quist’s local roots, his rustic style, and, most importantly, his populist positions on issues like public land management and universal health care, make him the sort of homegrown Democrat that might actually succeed in a rural state like Montana. The banjo-picking country singer is running to be the Big Sky’s next Congressman and, as I wrote in a previous column, his political beliefs and his public image are a promising combination. He’s a contender and he’s catching on.
ADVERTISEMENT Thanks for watching! Visit Website
Earlier this month, for instance, the Great Falls Tribune published a series of letters from Montana voters supporting Quist over his opponent, the wealthy technology entrepreneur Greg Gianforte. One of the voters, a Dulcy Zoellner of Whitefish, summed up the race in a concise and cutting fashion: “Any state can elect a Gianforte. Only Montana can elect a Rob Quist. He’s the real deal.”
ADVERTISEMENT Thanks for watching! Visit Website
ADVERTISEMENT Thanks for watching! Visit Website
On April 11th, meanwhile, the Quist campaign reported that it had raised more than $1.3 million from more than 20,000 individuals at an average contribution of approximately $40 in just a little over a month. That’s a mighty haul for a candidate that the Democratic establishment has largely ignored and who has refused to accept donations from lobbyists and corporate PACs.
As he traverses the state talking health care, conservation, and Main Street economics, as he shakes hands and holds town halls in anticipation of Montana’s May 25th special election, Quist’s campaign appears to be making the Republican Party afraid. GOP operatives are already hard at work and spending heavily to smear their Democratic opponent as out of touch and out of place in the state that bore and bred him. As the Wall Street Journal reported last week, a group called the Congressional Leadership Fund, or CLF, has committed at least $1 million to combat Quist. Much of that spending will go toward attack ads meant to sully the country singer’s reputation.
In early March, in its first foray into the race, CLF started running an advertisement titled “Out of Tune.”
“Rob Quist may be entertaining,” it proclaims. “But on the issues he’s out of tune with Montana.” The ad features images of rifle-toting jihadists and an ominous shot of Capitol Hill, among other fear-inducing visuals. It concludes by claiming Quist is “too liberal and out-of-touch for Montana.”
But, folks, here’s the tragicomic truth: The Congressional Leadership Fund, or CLF, has a few credibility issues. Not only is it a Republican Super PAC headquartered in Washington, D.C., but the people who pay its bills aren’t exactly the embodiment of Big Sky values. CLF, after all, is largely funded by an elite group of billionaires, millionaires, and enormous corporations based in places like New York, Chicago, Las Vegas, and California. It gets its cash from city-living tycoons who have made their millions in hedge funds, casinos, energy extraction, and banking. This — this! — is the organization challenging Quist’s Montana bona fides.
Here, according to the Center for Responsive Politics, are some of the grandees who have given to CLF in the last year:
Sheldon Adelson, founder, chairman, and CEO of the Las Vegas Sands Corporation, an enormous casino enterprise, donated at least $10 million. His wife Miriam donated another $10 million.
Stephen Schwarzman, the chairman and CEO of the New-York-based Blackstone Group, a private equity firm, donated at least $1.7 million.
Paul E. Singer, who runs a New York-based hedge fund called Elliot Management Corporation, donated at least $1.5 million.
Kenneth C. Griffin, founder and chief executive of the Chicago-based investment firm Citadel, donated at least $1 million.
Charles Schwab, the California-based billionaire investor, donated at least $250,000.
Thomas E. McInerney, CEO of the Connecticut-based private equity firm Bluff Point Associates, donated at least $200,000.
The Chevron Corporation, based in California, donated at least $1.25 million.
Devon Energy, the Oklahoma-based oil and gas corporation, donated at least $500,000.
Altria, the Virginia-based cigarette conglomerate, donated at least $175,000.
A few of the individuals above, it’s worth noting, are also allies of the billionaire brothers Charles and David Koch, who lead a powerful network of right-wing think tanks, pressure groups, and academic institutes that operate across the country. As I’ve written before, Koch-backed organizations like the American Legislative Exchange Council and the State Policy Network have been key players in the land transfer movement, an effort to hand over federal public lands to state and private interests. Both Charles Schwab and Paul Singer have given at least $1 million to support the Koch’s agenda over the years, according toMother Jones. Investigative reporter Jane Mayer, in her book Dark Money: The Hidden History of the Billionaires Behind the Rise of the Radical Right, also names J. Larry Nichols, the head of Devon Energy, as a key Koch network donor.
These are halcyon days for hypocrisy: The Congressional Leadership Fund, avatar of the ultra-wealthy, is trying to convince Montanans that Rob Quist is out of touch. It is trying to persuade people using poisonous rhetoric and slick posturing that Quist’s kind of politics have no place in his home state. Backed by magnates so rich they can spend their extra millions on Super PACs, it wants voters to believe that a country singer from Cut Bank doesn’t represent Big Sky priorities. Imagine that.During an extensive news conference at the White House yesterday, President Donald Trump did not back down from his assertion that CNN is “fake news.”
In fact, as CNN reporter Jim Acosta confronted Trump about the matter, the president took things one step further and claimed CNN was not fake news but “very fake news.”
Acosta tried to reply that the network was “real news,” but Trump wasn’t having any of it.
The president told Acosta that the tone of the news coming from CNN was one of hatred, adding, “I’m really not a bad person, by the way.”
Acosta defended the network, and claimed that it didn’t hate Trump. Then he tried to take the moral high ground by injecting the First Amendment into the exchange.
“When you call it ‘fake news,’ you’re undermining confidence in our news media,” Acosta said, adding that Trump was “undermining the people’s faith in the First Amendment.”
The real issue is that every time CNN attempts to pass off fake news as real news, it’s undermining actual news and the media’s responsibility to report it. Moreover, anyone watching CNN would understand that the network doesn’t appear to be as concerned about the First Amendment as it is about giving airtime to one Trump-hater after another.
Take a look at the exchange during the news conference below:
Once again, Trump let the mainstream media know that he does not need them in any capacity. He also let them know that since they can’t be trusted, he would simply take his message to the people without them. Which, of course, will only infuriate them to the point that they will continue to make up stories about the president and his administration, ultimately proving him right. Like us on Facebook – USA Liberty News Share this story on Facebook and Twitter if you agree that CNN is very fake news.
What do you think of President Trump doubling down on his assertion that CNN is fake news? Scroll down to comment below!
Source: conservativetribune.com
H/T BreitbartFor the objects used in studies of object and facial recognition, see Greeble (psychology)
A cube and its greebled version
A greeble () or nurnie is a fine detailing added to the surface of a larger object that makes it appear more complex, and therefore more visually interesting. It usually gives the audience an impression of increased scale. The detail can be made from simple geometric primitives (such as cylinders, cubes, and rectangles), or more complex shapes, such as pieces of machinery (cables, tanks, sprockets). Greebles are often present on models or drawings of fictional spacecraft or architectural constructs in science fiction and are used in the movie industry (special effects).
Etymology [ edit ]
The earliest recorded use of the term "greeble" found to date was by those working on the special effects for Star Wars – the group who would later become Industrial Light and Magic. They also described this design method as "guts on the outside".
Ron Thornton is widely believed to have coined the term "nurnies" referring to CGI technical detail that his company Foundation Imaging produced for the Babylon 5 series.[1]
In science fiction films and television [ edit ]
Greeble effects on a Lego spaceship model
An early physical example of their application was in the production of the spaceships in 2001: A Space Odyssey (1968) where they were called wiggets.[citation needed][clarification needed Is this a misspelling of widgets?]
In physical models, these greebles could be anything from parts of plastic cut to an interesting shape, or actual elements taken from shop-bought model kits. For instance, in Star Wars the original Imperial Star Destroyer was constructed from a plywood frame and adorned with sheet styrene. Panel lines were cut into the sheet styrene, but this technique left the ship looking bare. Hundreds of model kits were purchased and the model department promptly cut apart pieces of the model kits and stuck them, along with more sheet styrene, to the surfaces of the ship. The ultimate effect was to make the ship appear more believable to the viewer through the addition of these large areas of ancillary details. The greebles themselves served no purpose other than to fill space and individually had no definite function to the design of the ship, although later each greeble was given a specific function by either fans or technical illustrators for fan guides. A plastic soldier was part of the greebling on the Executor.[citation needed]
Another example of greeble application was the Battlestar Galactica model for the original 1970s series, which featured on its hull pieces from a wide assortment of kits, including Apollo orbiters, Saturn rocket boosters, F-16 fighter jets, and various tanks.
Plastic model sprue
As would be expected, given these origins, greebling is most commonly associated with the particular kind of large city-like spaceships made popular in Star Wars, but has been generalized to refer to any dense covering by different (usually mechanical) components. Similarly, Borg starships (and drones) in Star Trek appear heavily "greebled" using leftover sprues from previous kitbashing and photoetched bits.
An anecdote from the creation of the first Star Wars movie involves the Tunisian customs enquiring what a part of C-3PO's costume (listed as "assorted greebles") was. Their response was allegedly "Something that looks cool but doesn't actually do anything."
Used in interiors [ edit ]
Greebles are also used to enhance the interest of interior sets. In Star Trek, the original series, walls of the corridors were decorated with bits and pieces of things that looked interesting. Pieces of pipe poked out of walls, usually with several fittings, and a label implying this was an important piece of the infrastructure of the ship. In the original movie Alien, the interior of the ship, Nostromo, was thoroughly greebled. Art director Roger Christian said, "Let's have a go at it. So we recruited some dressing prop people, got a hold of several tons of scrap, and went to work on the Nostromo's bridge... encrusting the set with pipes and wires and switches and tubing... then we painted it military green and began stenciling labels on everything."[2]
Automated greebling [ edit ]
In 3D computer graphics, greebles can be created by specific software in order to avoid the time-consuming process of manually creating large numbers of precise, custom geometry. This is often tedious, repetitive work, and may be best suited to automatic, software-based procedural generation, particularly if a great degree of control is unnecessary or the greebles will be small on screen. Most greeble-generating software work by subdividing the surface to be greebled into smaller regions, adding some detail to each new surface, and then recursively continuing this process on each new surface to some specified level of detail. Similar algorithms are used in the creation of fractal surfaces.
See also [ edit ]"There is no evidence that an individual DA in his office is any more punitive today than he was in 1974," explains John Pfaff, author of Locked in: The True Causes of Mass Incarceration and How to Achieve Real Reform. "We just have 30,000 of them instead of 17,000 even though the crime rate is roughly the same as it was in 1974. They've got to do something. They can't just play minesweeper all day and keep their jobs."
On May 25th, 2017, at Reason's Washington, D.C. office, Reason hosted a panel discussion with Pfaff and Ken White, former assistant United States attorney and co-founder of the blog Popehat. Moderated by Lauren Krisai, director of Criminal Justice Reform at the Reason Foundation, the discussion touched on the power of prosecutors in the criminal justice system, how prosecutors have served as barriers to meaningful criminal justice reform, and whether an influx of forward-looking district attorneys could change the status quo.
Edited by Ian Keyser. Cameras by Mark McDaniel and Todd Krainin.
Jolanta Blues by Doxent Zsigmond is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution license
(https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/3.0/)
Source: http://ccmixter.org/files/doxent/48705
Artist: http://ccmixter.org/people/doxent/profile
Subscribe to our YouTube channel.
Like us on Facebook.
Follow us on Twitter.
Subscribe to our podcast at iTunes.With an assist from LCG, neighborhood coteries in historic neighborhoods have broken ground on communities gardens - and you can help.
Residents and students in UL's SOUL Camp prepare the Freetown-Port Rico community garden.
Residents in two historic neighborhoods adjacent to Downtown Lafayette are set to be the stewards of community gardens with an assist from Lafayette Consolidated Government.
LCG's Department of Planning, Zoning and Codes worked with representatives of the McComb-Veazey Neighborhood Coterie and the Freetown Neighborhood Coteries for the projects, helping the groups secure grant funding to begin the community gardens. The former also worked through the Great Southwest Louisiana Black Chamber of Commerce for its community garden at Immaculate Heart of Mary Church via a $5,000 Fiskars Project Orange Thumb Grant.
"It was indeed the Chamber's pleasure to have worked alongside the McComb-Veazey Coterie members to receive this wonderful grant," says Black Chamber President Courtney Reynolds. "This community garden is a first for the area and it is so exciting. The Fiskars grant has really made this a reality for us all. The garden falls right into the revitalization plans we have for our neighborhood. This is all part of bringing the neighbors together and having them join in on the planting."
Ground will be broken on the McComb-Veazey community garden on Aug. 16 and is a public event that will include a poboy sale to help fund the start-up cost. Local filmmaker Stephen Meaux will be on hand to document the endeavor.
Ground was broken this week on the community garden in Freetown-Port Rico. Located in the green space between Garfield Street and the railroad tracks, the garden is just the first phase of a larger project, Garfield Linear Park, that will one day include walking paths, benches and landscaping. Residents along with students from UL Lafayette's SOUL Camp, an orientation program for incoming UL students; it's short for Service, Outreach, Unity & Leadership.
A $1,500 grant through the Freetown Commission is helping get the project started, but a crowd-funding effort is under way online at civicside in an effort to generate an additional $1,500. Organizers plan a "garden party" this fall.
According to Emily Neustrom, LCG's community garden planner, "each garden is unique and seen as a neighborhood catalyst project to enhance food access, beautification and community pride."
To donate to the Freetown-Port Rico community garden, click here.Title Artist(s)
"101 Ventura Freeway Blues" Speedtwinn
"80 Blocks from Silverlake" People Under The Stairs
"99 Miles from L.A." Roman Alcocer
"Alameda" Elliott Smith (could also be about Alameda Street in Portland, Oregon)
"Always Remember Me" Ry Cuming
"Back in L.A." Apathy
"Beverly Hills Hotel" Whitestarr
"Big in LA" Joelle
"Bloody Mary Morning" Willie Nelson (reference to L.A.)
"Blue Jay Way" The Beatles (refers to a street in the Hollywood Hills)
"Born and Raised in Compton" DJ Quik
"Boulevard" Jackson Browne (references Hollywood Boulevard)
"Boyz n da Hood" Eazy-E
"Broken Headlights" Roscoe & Etta ft. Maia Sharp & Anna Schulze
"Burn Hollywood Burn" Public Enemy
"Buzzbomb From Pasadena" Dead Kennedys
"Christmas in Hollywood" Hollywood Undead
"City of Angels" The Distillers
"City of the Angels" Journey
"City of Angels" Pangea Project
"City of Angels" Red Elvises
"City of Angels" Thirty Seconds To Mars
"City of Devils" Yellowcard
"City of Satan" Turbonegro
"The City with Two Faces" Goldfinger
"Come a Long Way" Michelle Shocked
"Come to L.A." Chilly
"Coming into Los Angeles" Arlo Guthrie
"Compton's in the House" N.W.A
"Country Boy (You've Got Your Feet in LA)" Glen Campbell
"Cowboy" Kid Rock (references to Hollywood and Vine)
"Dead in Hollywood" Murderdolls
"Dead Loss Angeles" The Stranglers
"Dizz Knee Land" Dada
"Don’t Move Back To LA" Okkervil River
"Down in LA" People Under The Stairs
"Down On Rodeo" Lindsey Buckingham
"Down Rodeo" Rage Against the Machine, referring to Rodeo Drive in Beverly Hills
"Down Whittier Blvd" Thee Midniters
"Drinkin' and Dreamin'" Waylon Jennings, reference to L.A.
"Drive North" SWMRS
"Drove Up from Pedro" Mike Watt (an ode to Watt's hometown, San Pedro)
"Drugs not Working" Ryan Adams
"DTLA (Downtown Los Angeles)" Gary Jules
"Everyone Is Someone in L.A." Felix da Housecat
"Fallen Angel" Poison (referring to kids moving away from home in the 1980s to make it big in L.A.)
"Girl from Malibu" Red Elvises
"Going Out West" Gomez (cover of "Goin' Out West" by Tom Waits)
"Goin' Out West" Tom Waits
"Going to Malibu" The Mountain Goats
"Goodnight, Hollywood Blvd" Ryan Adams
"The Great Los Angeles Flood" Woody Guthrie
"Grey in L.A." Loudon Wainwright III
"The Haircut Song" Ray Stevens (reference to L.A.)
"Heaven Help the Fool" Bob Weir
"Hell Looks A Lot Like L.A." Less than Jake
"Hello L.A., Bye Bye Birmingham" Blue Cheer
"Here I Am in Hollywood" Red Elvises
"Here in L.A." Roy Joseph
"Hollywood" Jay-Z featuring Beyoncé
"Hollywood" The Jonas Brothers
"Hollywood (Down On Your Luck)" Thin Lizzy
"Hollywood (Is Burning Down)" Calibretto 13
"Hollywood the Second Time" Wall of Voodoo
"Hollywood's Not America" Ferras
"Honey Don’t Leave L.A." James Taylor
"Hot Box City" Klaatu
"Hot Fudge (Moving to L.A.)" Robbie Williams
"Hot Rod Lincoln" C. Ryan, W.S. Stevenson (San Pedro and the Grapevine)
"How to Survive in South Central" Ice Cube
"I Am Hollywood" He Is Legend
"I Can't Stand L.A" Bowling For Soup
"I Left My Wallet in El Segundo" A Tribe Called Quest
"I Love Cali" Roscoe
"I Love L.A." Rilo Kiley
"I Loved the Way She Said 'L.A.'" Spitalfield
"I Remember L.A." Celine Dion
"If Hollywood Don't Need You (Honey I Still Do)" Don Williams
"I'm From L.A." Go Betty Go
"I'm So L.A." MYNX
"(I'm Spending) Hanukkah in Santa Monica" Tom Lehrer
"Into the Great Wide Open" Tom Petty (Hollywood)
"It's a Beautiful Day" The Beach Boys
"It's Christmas Once Again in Santa Barbara" Barry De Vorzon
"Johnny Hit and Run Paulene" X
"Join Me in L.A." Warren Zevon
"Kalifornian Ruosteiset Kukkulat" (California's Rusty Hills) Ultra Bra
"The Kelly Affair" Be Your Own Pet (references to LA and the Valley)
"L.A. Baby (Where Dreams Are Made Of)" Jonas Brothers
"L.A. Feeding Fire" Negative
"L.A. Is My Lady" Frank Sinatra
"L.A. Is The Place" N.W.A
"L.A., L.A. (remix)" Capone-N-Noreaga featuring Tragedy Khadafi, Prodigy (Mobb Deep)
"L.A. Made Me" Alexz Johnson
"L.A. My Town" The Four Tops
"The L.A. Of My Dreams" Sony Holland
"La Cienega Just Smiled" Ryan Adams
"The Last Resort" Eagles
"Late Night, Early Town" Lloyd Cole
"Let Me Back In" Rilo Kiley
"Let's Go!" The Olympic Hopefuls (now known as The Hopefuls; "Like the Hollywood vampires / We sleep until the sun sets")
"Letter to L.A." Joe Ely
"A Long December" Counting Crows
"Long Way to Hollywood" Hank Williams Jr.
"Los Angeles" Frank Black (although Black sings "not the one in South California", this song deliberately continues to be featured here, because its title would appear to place it among songs about California)
"Los Angeles Daze" People Under The Stairs
"Los Angeles November 2019" Vangelis (Blade Runner)
"Lost in Hollywood" System of a Down
"Love in L.A." Ernie Halter
"Love is the Movement" Switchfoot
"Malibu Beaches" Benjamin Boczulak
"Malibu Gas Station" Sonic Youth
"Malibu Love Nest" Luna
"Marina Del Rey" Kenny Chesney
"Midnight Train to Georgia" Gladys Knight
"Moving to L.A." Art Brut
"My Heart Is Lost" Blackbear
"Next to Highway Number 10" John George Campbell
"No Other Place" Hollywood Undead
"No Se Vende La Calle" Doc Gyneco
"Number 13 Baby" Pixies
"O.C. Supertones (That's just life in Orange County California)" The O.C. Supertones
"Ode to L.A." The Raveonettes
"Old School Hollywood" System of a Down
"Ole Mulholland" Frank Black (about the Los Angeles Aqueduct)
"On The Edge" Terry Woods
"One in a Million" Guns N' Roses
"Orange County Girl" Gwen Stefani
"Orange County Suite" The Doors
"Orange County Lumber Truck" Frank Zappa
"Out in L.A." Red Hot Chili Peppers
"Out of L.A." Jude
"Out on the Weekend" Young, Neil Neil Young
"Pacific Coast Highway" Burt Bacharach
"Party in the USA" Miley Cyrus
"Please Please Please (Young Hollywood)" Head Automatica
"Pico and Sepulveda" Freddy Martin (as Felix Figueroa and his Orchestra)
"Picture Postcards from L.A." Joshua Kadison
"The Promised Land" Chuck Berry
"Ride Wit Me" The Relativez feat. Butch Cassidy
"Rooming House on Venice Beach" Jonathan Richman
"Saints of Los Angeles" Mötley Crüe
"San Fernando Valley" Bing Crosby
"Santa Ana Wind" Tom Russell
"Save Me, San Francisco" Train
"Say Goodbye to Hollywood" Eminem
"Skies Of L.A." Celine Dion
"Sleepless in Silverlake" Les Savy Fav
"Some Other Time" X
"Stephanie's for L.A." The Mother Hips
"Still in Hollywood" Concrete Blonde
"Stories from Hollywood" Jon Peter Lewis
"Strait of Gibraltar" Val Holler
"Streets of LBC" Warren G
"Summertime in the LBC" The Dove Shack
"Surf Ain't No City (It's the Whole South Bay)" Brakkers
"Surf Route 101" Jan and Dean
"This is L.A." Delinquent Habits
"This is L.A." The Briggs
"This Old Town" Tom Petty
"Time Spent in Los Angeles" Dawes
"To Die in L.A." West Indian Girl
"Two Lost Angels" Franky Perez
"Two More Bottles of Wine" Emmylou Harris
"Under the Bridge" The All Saints
"Valley of the Dollz" Lexington & 3rd
"The Vicodin Song" Terra Naomi
"Wailin' in West Covina" The Spectrums
"Walking in L.A." Missing Persons
"Walking in Los Angeles" Kate Micucci
"Wannabe in L.A." Eagles of Death Metal
"War Within a Breath" Rage Against the Machine
"The Way The Story Goes" Tim Foust
"We Lost Our Way" Chris Isaak
"We Run L.A." Ya Boy
"Weekend in L.A." The Toasters
"Welcome to the Boomtown David & David
"Welcome to Hollywood" Mitchel Musso
"White Guilt" The Bronx
"Why You'd Want to Live Here" Death Cab for Cutie
"William Faulkner in Hollywood" Tom Russell Band
"The World Began in Eden and Ended in Los Angeles" Phil Ochs
"Wrong Way to Hollywood" Wall of Voodoo
"Yo Home to Bel-Air" DJ Jazzy Jeff & The Fresh PrinceDERAA, Syria (Reuters) - President Bashar al-Assad made a rare public pledge to look into granting Syrians greater freedom on Thursday as anger mounted following attacks by security forces on protesters that left at least 37 dead.
Protesters drag away a body as it lies among others in a street during a demonstration in Deraa, March 23, 2011 and posted on a social media website. REUTERS/Social Media Website via Reuters TV
Despite the promise and the offer of large public pay rises, thousands of Syrians turned out to chant “freedom, revolution” in the center of the southern city of Deraa, the focal point of protests against 48 years of Baath Party rule.
“The Syrian people do not bow,” they also chanted around the main Omari mosque, shortly after security forces evacuated the building which they stormed on Wednesday.
Syrian opposition figures said the promises did not meet the aspirations of the people and were similar to those repeated at regular Baath Party conferences, where committees would be formed to study reforms that then never saw the light of day.
“The leadership is trying to absorb the rage of the streets. We want to see reform on the ground,” said a Deraa protester.
A hospital official said at least 37 people had been killed in Deraa on Wednesday when security forces opened fire on demonstrators inspired by uprisings across the Arab world that have shaken authoritarian leaders.
While an aide said Assad would study a possible end to 48 years of emergency rule, a human rights group said a leading pro-democracy activist, Mazen Darwish, had been arrested.
Announcing promises for reform in a manner that would have seemed almost unimaginable three months ago in Syria, Assad adviser Bouthaina Shaaban told a news conference the president had not himself ordered his forces to fire on protesters:
“I was a witness to the instructions of His Excellency that live ammunition should not be fired, even if the police, security forces or officers of the state were being killed.”
On Jan 31 Assad had said there was no chance political upheavals then shaking Tunisia and Egypt would spread to Syria.
After Thursday’s announcement, Syrian television showed a large procession of cars in Deraa driving in support of Assad with pictures of the president plastered on the vehicles.
The Baath Party, which has ruled for half a century, will draft laws to provide for media freedoms, and will look at allowing other political movements. The party will also seek to lift living standards and consider ending the rule of emergency law.
Authorities released all those arrested in the Deraa region since the protests erupted, an official statement said but it did not give a figure. The statement also said Assad ordered a 20 to 30 percent salary rise for public employees across Syria.
DERAA KILLINGS
“When you first hear it you think they’re making major concessions, but when you look at it you realize there’s not a lot there besides the salary boost,” said Joshua Landis, a Syria expert at Oklahoma University in the U.S.. “You understand the regime is in a very difficult spot and they’re flustered.”
Security forces opened fire on hundreds of youths on the outskirts of Deraa on Wednesday, witnesses said, after nearly a week of protests in which seven civilians had already died.
The main hospital in Deraa, near the Jordanian border, had received the bodies of at least 37 protesters killed on Wednesday, a hospital official said. That brings the number killed to at least 44 in a week of protests.
About 20,000 people marched on Thursday in the funerals for nine of those killed, chanting freedom slogans and denying official accounts that “armed gangs” were behind the killings and violence.
Slideshow (2 Images)
“Traitors do not kill their own people,” they chanted. “God, Syria, Freedom. The blood of martyrs is not spilled in vain!”
As Syrian soldiers armed patrolled the streets, residents emptied shops of basic goods and said they feared Assad’s government was intent on crushing the revolt by force.
Assad, a close ally of Iran, a key player in neighboring Lebanon and supporter of militant groups opposed to Israel, had dismissed demands for reform in Syria, a country of 20 million.Some central tenets of good health: more vegetables, less soda, lots of exercise. And let’s not forget water: at least eight glasses a day. Much ink is spilled over the first three of these recommendations, but the last sometimes seems to be taken for granted by all the people lugging around Nalgene bottles. Is drinking so much water necessary? Is reaching eight glasses per day crucial to good health?
The short answer — at least to the specific question of eight glasses versus, say, seven or nine — is no, there is nothing special about eight. This threshold appears to be a long-standing medical myth. It’s not even clear where it started. The best answer I can find (based on this review) is that the source was a 1945 publication by the National Food and Nutrition Board, a government advisory agency, that stated this: “A suitable allowance of water for adults is 2.5 liters daily in most instances. … Most of this quantity is contained in prepared foods.” The theory is that people read this, ignored the last sentence, and the eight glasses a day (about 2.5 liters) recommendation was born.
So let’s dispense immediately with glass-counting attempts to reach this magical threshold. If we take a more charitable view of the goals of the water lobby, however, its goal is not to get us to some specific cutoff but to increase water consumption in general. So really the question shouldn’t be so much about eight glasses versus seven, but whether there is evidence that drinking more water makes you healthier.
There is one clear benefit of water: It is calorie-free. Given the magnitude of the obesity epidemic in the United States, it would be a huge public health boon if everyone replaced their fruit juice or soda with water.
But the eight-glasses claim is not about weight, it’s about flushing toxins, avoiding dehydration, and improving various bodily functions. And when researchers study these things, they typically do not focus on water alone but on total consumption of fluid. When the Mayo Clinic gives recommendations for fluid intake, it specifically notes that these are about all beverages, not just water.
So while it’s safe to say that you are a lot better off with a bottle of water than a can of soda, the question then becomes whether it’s better to drink more fluids or not. And here, the evidence conflicts.
Many papers show no effect of fluid intake on mortality. One very large study was run in the Netherlands in the 1980s, and published in the British Journal of Nutrition in 2010. Researchers followed over 120,000 individuals for a period of 10 years, and studied the relationships between fluid intake levels and mortality from heart attack and stroke. The authors found no link between total fluid intake or water intake and either cause of mortality.
Other studies echo this. This one found no impact of fluid intake (although, oddly, the authors exclude water) on chronic kidney disease or cardiovascular mortality. And this one, which randomized people into two groups — more and less water intake — and recorded outcomes like blood sodium levels, found no effect. And lest you think the reason to drink water is to improve your outer beauty, this study found no impacts of hydration on skin quality. (These studies all focus on healthy people. For individuals with particular medical conditions — kidney stones, for example — there are likely larger benefits of hydration.)
But some studies do find effects. Most notable is a study of 20,000 Seventh-Day Adventists, who were followed for six years to look for impact of fluid intake on mortality. The researchers found that drinking more water lowered the risk of dying. For women, the risk was lowered by having three or more cups per day, versus fewer than three. For men, three to four cups was much better than fewer than three, and five or more cups was a bit better than that. And at least one study has found that more than six cups of water a day lowers bladder cancer risk relative to less than one cup.
It’s important to note that other than the study on blood sodium, none of these studies were randomized trials. It’s therefore entirely possible that the effects were driven by other differences between water-drinkers and non-water-drinkers, and are not really due to the water at all.
And here is the other thing: Even in the studies that found effects, the threshold was significantly below eight glasses. Based only on the Seventh-Day Adventist study, we would conclude that women should be having at least three cups a day for maximum effect, and men at least five. Nothing here would suggest that eight glasses are necessary.
About now, you may be wondering: If there’s any evidence at all — even possibly flawed evidence — that more water is better, isn’t that reason enough to stick with the Nalgene, given that there doesn’t seem to be any downside to hydration? The answer is probably yes. But it is worth noting that there is such a thing as too much water. It’s possible to die from water intoxication — and people have — although it’s very rare and drinking eight glasses a day (or 10, or 12) isn’t going to do it.
What you can take from the evidence is that obsessing about reaching some water goal every day is unproductive. Most of us are going to get in three to four cups without doing anything out of the ordinary, and that’s likely to deliver nearly all of the benefits of water intake (if there are any). Probably the best advice is some I got from a doctor colleague recently: “When my patients ask when is a good time to drink water, I tell them: ‘When you are thirsty.’”UPDATE 4.21pm: WYNDHAM Mayor Heather Marcus says the council is still to decide whether it will ban exercising pigeons at certain times of day and leaving dogs unattended in frontyards.
The Herald Sun reported yesterday that the bylaws had been introduced by Wyndham Council last month.
But despite the proposals being drafted, Cr Marcus said the council was undecided on the issue and would not vote on the laws until after the submission period closed on March 25.
The vote would be put to council in the following weeks, she said.
The proposed bylaws could join changes imposed by councils to exert further control on their ratepayers.
The Herald |
er
The first thing to do when you go to the store is pick up the flyer.
"Absolutely," Marks says. "The flyer is indispensable. It's like your textbook for shopping."
The front page is where stores dangle their hottest specials which, Marks says, "are sold at or below cost just to get you into the store where, hopefully, you'll buy a few more profitable items!"
But just because something is featured in a flyer doesn't mean it's on sale.
"It may not mean it's a great deal at all," Marks says. "It may mean a manufacturer paid advertising dollars toward the mention of that product."
According to Consumer Reports, the mere mention of a product in a store flyer can send sales soaring as much as 500 percent.
Lesson 2: The End of the Aisle -- The "End Cap" -- Is the Single Hottest Selling Spot in the Entire Store
"When you put anything there," Marks says, "sales can go up as much as a third, simply by their placement on an end cap."
But be careful, Koeppen cautioned: Those items aren't always sale items. And it's a good idea to check their freshness dates.
"Because it's such a great selling spot," Marks says, "retailers may actually put something there from time-to-time that's nearing the end of its shelf life."
Lesson 3: Product Placement Is Key
"Prime selling space is right in the center, eye-level if you will," Marks says.
In fact, companies sometimes pay thousands of dollars to have their products placed on the center shelf. And, Koeppen continues, those items tend to be more expensive than the ones found high or low.
"The lower level and the high-on-top level, they're kind of the low-rent districts," Marks notes. "You put commodities there -- things that don't bring in a lot of profits that people are going to buy, no matter what."
Lesson 4: Convenience Will Cost You
How much more are we paying to have our stuff chopped up for us instead of cutting them up ourselves, Koeppen wondered.
"Prices vary all the time
Koeppen noticed that a three pound bag of red apples was just a dollar a pound; hand-picking your own from a bin made them $1.50 a pound; but if you buy the apples already cut up, they're a whopping $5 a pound.
Lesson 5: Saving Money Is in the Bag
"Generally speaking," Marks says, "the better deal is almost always to be had when you buy the bag versus the loose produce."
Potatoes at that store were 50 cents a pound for a 5 pound bag, compared to one dollar a pound for loose potatoes.
That's twice the price. "Savings, again, can really add up buying that bagged produce," Marks says.
Another point: Grocers put milk and eggs in the back of the store because they want you to grab other items as you walk back to get them.It has been over 50 years since a review has focused exclusively on the monoamine oxidase (MAO) inhibitor tranylcypromine (TCP). A new review has therefore been conducted for TCP in two parts which are written to be read preferably in close conjunction: Part I – pharmacodynamics, pharmacokinetics, drug interactions, toxicology; and Part II – clinical studies with meta-analysis of controlled studies in depression, practice of TCP treatment, place in therapy. Pharmacological data of this review part I characterize TCP as an irreversible and nonselective MAO-A/B inhibitor at low therapeutic doses of 20 mg/day with supplementary norepinephrine reuptake inhibition at higher doses of 40–60 mg/day. Serotonin, norepinephrine, dopamine, and trace amines, such as the “endogenous amphetamine” phenylethylamine, are increased in brain, which leads to changes in neuroplasticity by e.g. increased neurotrophic growth factors and translates to reduced stress-induced hypersecretion of corticotropin releasing factor (CRF) and positive testing in animal studies of depression. TCP has a pharmacokinetic half-life (t 1/2 ) of only 2 h which is considerably lower than for most other antidepressant drugs. However, a very long pharmacodynamic half-life of about one week is found because of the irreversible MAO inhibition. New studies show that, except for cytochrome P450 (CYP) 2A6, no other drug metabolizing CYP-enzymes are inhibited by TCP at therapeutic doses which defines a low potential of pharmacokinetic interactions in the direction from TCP to other drugs. Insufficient information is available, however, for plasma concentrations of TCP influenced by comedication. More quantitative data are also needed for TCP metabolites such as p-hydroxytranylcypromine and N-acetyltranylcypromine. Pharmacodynamic drug interactions comprise for instance severe serotonin toxicity (SST) with serotonergic drugs and hypertensive crisis with indirect sympathomimetics. Because of the risk of severe food interaction, TCP treatment remains beset with the need for a mandatory tyramine-restricted diet. Toxicity in overdose is similar to amitriptyline and imipramine according to the distance of therapeutic to toxic doses. In conclusion, TCP is characterized by an exceptional pharmacology which is different to most other antidepressant drugs, and a more special evaluation of clinical efficacy and safety may therefore be needed.COLD OPEN FADE IN: INT. ARCHER’S PENTHOUSE - EARLY MORNING It’s fucking disgusting. Art hangs askew covered in mysterious stains, the couches are torn open. A DEAD DUCK floats in the fish tank. The fish, somehow, are still alive. A bubble from the tank floats the surface with a sickening POP. ARCHER, sitting, naked, shaggy hair and beard, hugs his legs, his chin rests on his knee. He is deathly skinny. Empty bottles of Wild Turkey and other booze is everywhere. Archer is fixated on the fish tank, and the duck inside. ARCHER Quack! He looks around. ARCHER (CONT’D) Holy shit, I live here? Nancy! He rocks back and forth. ARCHER (CONT’D) Nancy! Nancy! NAAANCY! A GROWL, then, a small young OCELOT pounces into the room. ARCHER (CONT’D) Nancy, yes, finally. Fetch me my heroin. Nancy cocks her head in confusion. Archer wipes the sweat of his forehead. ARCHER (CONT’D) Oh. Of course. Felines don’t enable. Bitch. Nancy seems offended. ARCHER (CONT’D) I’m sorry, but you are being a bitch. What am I supposed to do, not call you out on it? What kind of a father would I be then? HUH!? Nancy lies down. Archer feebly stands up. We see his nude decrepit body."Surf the Web" is a happy coincidence.
You don't have to be young to learn about technology. You have to feel young.
There was no one "Ah-ha!" moment. Not in the sense that many people want to hear. They see the Internet now and think, Well, thirty-six years ago someone imagined what it would look like in 2008, and that is what drove the process. It wasn't like that at all.
When I first joined Google in October of 2005, I was warned that I shouldn't be offended if people were doing their e-mails while a meeting was going on.
There was a first "Oh, no!" moment. That was the first time I saw spam pop up. It could have been as early as '79. A digital-equipment corporation sent a note around announcing a job opening, and we all blew up, saying, This is not for advertising! This is for serious work!
I was disappointed that pornography got to the Net. But I've come to learn that pornographers are almost always the first ones to adopt new technology. If there is a new way of distributing their product, they'll find it.
Will we shoot virtually at each other over the Internet? Probably not. On the other hand, there may be wars fought about the Internet.
Instant messaging and chat rooms have basically created a level playing field for deaf people.
When I was a teenager, I used to wear a sport coat and tie to high school. Mostly so I didn't look like anyone else. Instead of nose rings or whatever it is kids do these days, I was carrying a briefcase.
The three-piece suit has become sort of my trademark. You don't see them much anymore. It has several benefits: You may be overdressed on some occasions, but you can manage to fit into a huge range of circumstances.
I wouldn't go on a safari in a three-piece suit.
One of my favorite books is The Swiss Family Robinson. The reason is, I'm fascinated by the postapocalyptic recovery. What do we do in a disaster? How do we make do?
It may seem like sort of a waste of time to play World of Warcraft with your son. But you're actually interacting with each other. You're solving problems. They may seem like simple problems, but you're solving them. You're posed with challenges that you have to overcome. You're on a quest to gain certain capabilities. I haven't spent a lot of time playing World of Warcraft, because my impression is that it takes a serious amount of time to play it well.
Humor is the only thing that allows you to survive every pressure and crisis.
I find classical music a very beautiful way to focus my thoughts.
Al Gore had seen what happened with the National Interstate and Defense Highways Act of 1956, which his father introduced as a military bill. It was very powerful. Housing went up, suburban boom happened, everybody became mobile. Al was attuned to the power of networking much more than any of his elective colleagues. His initiatives led directly to the commercialization of the Internet. So he really does deserve credit.
People on foot, donkeys, the standard sedan, lorries, bicycles, people on skates. You don't see too many elephants, but you do see a lot of cattle. The horn is not used there in the way Americans use horns. The way I get around India is someone else drives.
In Silicon Valley, failure is experience. Now, if you fail at everything, that's different. But a failure is a mark of experience more than anything else.
The joke is that there are four words you have to remember in a successful marriage: "You're absolutely right, dear."
My wife and I look at our kids and say, They're not ready for marriage. Then we look at each other and say, Why did we think we were?
People are inventing not only virtual places but new economic principles. We have economists in the Second Life environment studying what people are doing, because these are real people making decisions. Maybe you want to have a different hairdo or different clothing or a boob job -- whatever it is. People will pay to enhance their avatar.
Reproducing isn't nearly as much fun in Second Life.
At the roots, people are still people. That's why Shakespeare is so popular no matter what the language.
The closer you look at something,the more complex it seems to be.
Over a period of a hundred or a thousand years, the probability of maintaining continuity of the software to interpret the old stuff is probably close to zero. Where would you find a projector for an 8mm film these days? If the new software can't understand, we've lost the information. I call this bit rot. It's a serious problem.
I'd like to know what the Internet is going to look like in 2050. Thinking about it makes me wish I were eight years old.
Published in the May 2008 issue.Image copyright AFP Image caption Oleg Kalashnikov and Oles Buzyna were found dead within hours of each other
A Ukrainian nationalist group has said it was behind the deaths of two public figures in Kiev earlier this week.
Oleg Kalashnikov, a former MP, and Oles Buzyna, a writer and former newspaper editor, were gunned down in separate attacks within hours of each other.
A group calling itself the Ukrainian Insurgent Army claimed it carried out the killings in an email to political expert Volodomyr Fesenko.
Both of the victims were known for their strong anti-government views.
Kiev officials immediately questioned the authenticity of the claim.
The email received by Mr Fesenko was addressed to members of the Opposition Bloc, the successors to former President Viktor Yanukovych's Party of Regions. It fell apart after Mr Yanukovych fled the country last year.
In it, the group also said it was to blame for the deaths of several other politicians and officials linked to Mr Yanukovych, some of which were believed to be suicides.
The Insurgent Army, which is named after controversial Ukrainian nationalist partisans who fought during World War Two, said it was giving those it considered guilty of "anti-Ukrainian" activity until Monday to leave the country.
"We are unleashing a ruthless insurgency against the anti-Ukrainian regime of traitors and Moscow's lackeys. From now on, we will only speak to them using the language of weapons, all the way to their elimination," Mr Fesenko quoted the letter as saying.
Image copyright AP Image caption Former Ukrainian Prime Minister Viktor Yanukovych was ousted from power in 2014
Image copyright AFP Image caption Ukraine's authorities have promised to investigate this week's murders
Mr Kalashnikov, a former MP from Mr Yanukovych's party, was found dead from gunshot wounds in his apartment block on Wednesday evening.
Hours later two masked assailants gunned down Oles Buzyna in the courtyard of his building.
Olena Bondarenko, a former MP from the Party of Regions, said Ukraine's interior ministry had agreed to provide her with security guards, after she received anonymous threats.
But Markiyan Lubkivsky, a spokesman for the security services, said "the authenticity of the email and the author's intentions" were questionable.
He said the email was sent from an address in Germany and contained grammatical mistakes not typical for a native Ukrainian speaker. This could not be independently verified.
Mr Lubkivsky also claimed that the Ukrainian Insurgent Army (UPA) did not exist.
Others disagreed. Anton Shevkhovtsov, a Ukrainian expert in far-right groups, said on Facebook that although he could not say who killed Mr Buzyna and Mr Kalashnikov, a group calling itself the UPA did indeed exist back in January, 2014.
Mr Shekovtsov said it was a "small radical nationalist group" among a number of organisations that had occupied Kiev City Hall. He also claimed he had interviewed its representatives.
Ukrainian officials have promised an open and thorough investigation to track down the two men's killers.
But they also have already voiced a number of accusations, for which, they admit, at the moment they have no proof.
These include the prospect that Moscow was behind the murders, as a provocation. Russian officials deny the charge.
One scenario, in which they seem less interested, is the possibility that Mr Buzyna and Mr Kalashnikov were targeted after their personal information was published on a local website, just days before their shootings.
The site, called "The Peacekeeper" collects information on people who, it says, are "pro-Russian terrorists, separatists, mercenaries, war criminals, and murderers".
However, Anton Geraschenko, a top advisor to the Ukrainian interior ministry, played down the theory.
"I think it's a coincidence," he said, noting that the site gives information on thousands of people.
However, Gerashchenko is also a strong supporter of the site, having encouraged his Facebook followers to send information to it on suspected "terrorists and separatists".Screen grab from the FDA website on Jerky treats making pets sick (Photo: www.fda.gov)
The Food and Drug Administration is asking pet owners and veterinarians to help solve a mystery: Why have jerky treats sickened more than 3,600 dogs and cats and killed at least 580 of them since 2007?
The agency needs details on more cases and more blood, tissue and urine samples from affected pets, according to an update posted Tuesday. The FDA has sent letters to U.S. veterinarians outlining the needed testing.
FDA will cover the cost of the tests to get to the bottom of the outbreak, which has mostly affected dogs, the agency says. Just 10 of the cases reported so far have been in cats.
What the pets have in common: They became ill, usually within hours, after consuming treats sold as jerky tenders or strips. The treats are made of chicken, duck, sweet potatoes or dried fruit. Typical symptoms include decreased appetite and activity, vomiting, diarrhea, increased water consumption and increased urination. Some affected pets suffer kidney failure.
In the update, FDA official Bernadette Dunham called the wave of pet illnesses "one of the most elusive and mysterious outbreaks we've encountered."
Dunham directs the FDA's Center for Veterinary Medicine, which says it has already conducted 1,200 tests and visited jerky manufacturers in China.
The agency is not issuing a recall or naming brands of jerky treats. It says most have been made in China, but notes that manufacturers are not required to list the country of origin for ingredients on pet food labels.
FDA says several jerky pet treats were removed from the market in January after testing found they contained "up to six drugs." The agency says it's unlikely the drugs caused the illnesses, but that the rate of illnesses dropped after that, probably because fewer of the products were available.
The update says consumers should "be cautious about providing jerky treats" to pets. "If you do provide them and your pet becomes sick, stop the treats immediately, consider seeing your veterinarian, and save any remaining treats and the packaging for possible testing."
More information for consumers is in an FDA fact sheet. The fact sheet says consumers can help the investigation by reporting complaints about treats through www.safetyreporting.hhs.gov or contacting pet food companies.
Read or Share this story: http://usat.ly/1gFbHqMTV Reviews All of our TV reviews in one convenient place.
At this point in Louie’s run, the show can go anywhere and do anything. When I say “go anywhere” I’m not exaggerating. One of the places it can travel is the mountains of Afghanistan. One of the things it can do is go to war. Think about that for a moment. How remarkable is it that a low-budget television comedy show on basic cable can travel halfway around the world to do a show about the unbearable loneliness of being a soldier thousands of miles away from home?
Advertisement
Is there anything Louie can’t do? One of the things that makes Louie so special and singular is the palpable sense of joy Louis CK takes in filmmaking. I’m not just talking about the composition of shots. I’m talking about every element of filmmaking: writing and editing and direction and lighting and music and cinematography.
CK is in love with the possibilities of filmmaking. It’s a source of almost sensual joy for him; you can only imagine how exhilarating it must have been for him to direct an episode filled with helicopters and helicopter shots. He must have felt like a boy given the very best present in the world come Christmas morning.
Louie always feels cinematic, but it’s never felt quite as boldly cinematic as it does here. Part of that is attributable to time. The hour-long format affords CK plenty of time to stretch his legs, creatively speaking, and simply watch his characters live. There’s plenty of dead time in “Duckling” where nothing much happens beyond CK simply hanging out and getting accustomed to some very strange surroundings. But dead time is not wasted time. Thank God, “Duckling” is content to ramble rather than rush, to meander and mosey rather than getting right to the heart of the matter.
Advertisement
“Duckling” begins with an especially scatological CK set. CK’s stand-up is unusually testicle-centric. For a cerebral comedian and darling of the smart set, a lot of CK’s stand-up is literally ballsy: The man’s testicles have been discussed as extensively and with as much passion and care as anything else in CK’s life.
We then head to CK’s daughter’s school, and there is a great two-second callback of the mother who “enjoyed” dispiriting sex with CK in an earlier episode glaring coldly at him. Ah, but CK has more than ill-fated flings to worry about. I love how supporting characters in Louie often speak with a confrontational edge in their voice that’s preemptive more than anything else. It’s a way of communicating to the world, “This is how it is. If you don’t like it, then you can go fuck yourself." That's a very New York state of mind.
That’s certainly the tone of voice the teacher employed when she told CK that he had no choice in the matter: Whether he liked it or not he was going to be taking ducklings home to care for even if he was shipping out to Afghanistan the next day. Considering the episode’s name, I don’t think it’s too much of a spoiler to reveal that one of the ducklings is tucked away into CK’s luggage by one of CK's daughters as a form of protection.
Advertisement
There’s a great shock cut that takes us from CK’s dingy little apartment to a helicopter in Afghanistan where he sports an expression that’s a little bit badass (he is in camouflage in a helicopter in Afghanistan after all) but mostly freaked out. Why shouldn’t he be? While his heroism is largely symbolic, he's in genuine danger, performing in places where there is a very real possibility he’ll take enemy fire. True, that Bob Hope guy made it through an awful lot of USO tours with his limbs intact, but it involves an element of danger all the same.
This is drilled into CK when the country singer he’ll be performing with very casually pulls out a gun and says, “Never go into a hostile area unarmed.” He’s not saying it to be a badass: There is no point posturing like a badass when you’re surrounded by men with machine guns. He’s merely being practical.
I really liked the way the episode handled the country singer. It began by acknowledging that he has enormous innate advantages when it comes to entertaining the troops. As a former military man himself, he can speak to the troops with a directness and a sense of familiarity unreachable even through stand-up comedy. He has the advantage of having been in their shoes, of knowing their experiences intimately.
Advertisement
“Duckling” delves deep into the contradictions and joys of being a USO performer: You’re serving your country and being heroic, but you’re also there to entertain the people who are doing the real job. You can leave. They cannot. You get an amazing anecdote out of the experience. They get nightmares and PTSD.
I had a powerfully bifurcated response to the country songs CK’s companion sang. My mind recoiled against the maudlin sentiments and rank sentimentality even as I went for them in a big way. Like so much contemporary country, the songs the crooner sings grabs your heart in a way that leaves your brain unaffected. CK and the country singer occupy very different places in our culture, but they share a common goal in wanting to provide comfort and escape for young men in desperate need of both. That bond proves powerful and resonant.
CK has a lesser bond with a 19-year-old cheerleader who greets CK’s questions about Led Zeppelin and Van Halen with a puzzled stare and is able to identify Steven Tyler not as the lead singer of Aerosmith but rather as a judge on American Idol. In a different context, this could have been a hacky bit, but as a representation of a middle-aged man’s attempt to find common ground it rang true. I love the way the cheerleader says that Steven Tyler is a judge on American Idol as if she is correcting CK’s earlier, incorrect assertion that he is in fact the lead singer for a band called Aerosmith.
Advertisement
For the second time in the last few episodes, we found ourselves watching Louie try and fail to pick up a Christian. His seduction attempt proves fruitless, but he does succeed in finding common ground with her in the duckling. The adorability of a duckling crosses all cultural, gender, religious, and political boundaries.
In “Duckling,” it does more than just that. After entertaining in two different camps, Louis and the gang are forced to make an emergency landing in their helicopter and have a tense face-off with armed Afghanistan villagers that is resolved when the duckling gets loose and both parties break into ecstatic, cathartic laughter watching the ridiculous white American man chasing after the baby duck.
The clown brings everyone together after all. In his buffoonery, there is heroism. In his heroism, there is buffoonery. I am not too proud to admit that I choked up a little at the end of “Duckling.” Oh, who am I kidding? I fucking cried and cried and cried.
Advertisement
In its own idiosyncratic way, “Duckling” is an incredibly patriotic tribute to boys forced to be men in defense of our freedom. In the end, it’s CK’s freedom they’re fighting for as much as anyone else’s. Everyone is simply playing their part: soldiers by defending Afghanistan and CK by elucidating the human condition via dick jokes and a television show that’s shaping up to be something pretty goddamned special and unique.
Stray Observations—
"Duckling" goes long stretches without anything even resembling a joke. I like that.
“Get on the dick train, bitches! That’s how dumb you have to be.”
How great is the music and editing in this episode? It really lends it an epic feel.The pasta company Barilla is opening a restaurant on the campus of the University of Southern California – and there hasn’t been a backlash from the LGBT community. Why not?
The school finished work on its $700 million “USC Village,” a commercial area open to the public during the day. Many big retail chains are moving into the space, including Trader Joe’s, Target, and now Barilla.
In 2013 the chairman of the pasta company, Guido Barilla, told a radio station that his company will never feature LGBTQ people in its ads.
“I would never do an ad with a homosexual family… If the gays don’t like it they can go an eat another brand.”
“For us the concept of the sacred family remains one of the fundamental values of the company,” he said. “I have no respect for adoption by gay families because this concerns a person who is not able to choose.”
Several days later, Barilla apologized in a Facebook video, saying that he planned “to meet representatives of the group that best represent the evolution of the family, including those who have been offended by my words.” That didn’t stop calls for a boycott of the company.
In the years since then, the company appointed a Diversity and Inclusion Board and earned a perfect score several years in a row on HRC’s Corporate Equality Index, which tracks corporate policy for LGBTQ people. The transformation was acknowledged by several media outlets, including the Huffington Post, which discussed Barilla as “Most Improved” in an article entitled “Here Are 5 Companies Going Above And Beyond For The LGBT Community.”
Still, the internet has a long memory. A search of #boicottabarilla on Twitter shows many tweets from just the past few weeks from people who refuse to eat that pasta. One commenter on an LGBTQ Nation article that ran in February, 2017, wrote:
Nice to know the guy made amends. Still, I have no plans to go back to purchasing Barilla products. (Barilla had been my brand for years.) While it’s possible he had a change of heart, it’s more likely that the pain he felt was in his wallet and not his heart. When it comes to businesses revealing an ideology that differs from mine, one strike and you’re out. Sorry, Guido.
Other companies with anti-LGBTQ records have had trouble moving onto college campuses. In 2012, student protests at Davidson College in North Carolina got the school to stop serving Chick-Fil-A because the restaurant was, among other things, donating money to anti-LGBTQ causes.
USC’s students, for the moment, haven’t made much noise about the Barilla restaurant.
This Story Filed UnderBack in October when cylentbutdeadly previewed Iowa State's bigs he wrote the following about Melvin Ejim:
Ejim has evolved from a promising freshman to a sophomore glue guy to a dynamic junior. The next step in his evolution is becoming a complete offensive player.
Little did we know how true those words would become but we found out quickly when Ejim made his season debut against Michigan on November 17th and stated his intention for the season by dropping 22 points, collecting 9 rebounds, and shooting 60% from the field in a win over the Wolverines.
Ejim has done a lot of things at Iowa State and is just as synonymous with the rebirth of Hilton Magic as Fred Hoiberg is. He's alarmingly consistent and until this year was not a double-double machine by having one great night followed up by one terrible one.
Despite his consistency Ejim's improvement since first taking the floor in 2010 has been noticeable. A guy who couldn't handle passes from Royce White two years ago is now catching alley oops on his fingertips. A man who missed the bunnies when wide open shows up against Michigan with legitimate NBA post moves. To say Ejim took a glass ceiling and shattered it would be doing a disservice to the amount of work he's put in during his four years in Ames.
I could go on all day about how Ejim has changed in front of our eyes, but CanAzn already did that. Instead I'm going to break down the numbers of one of the greatest Cyclones of this generation, and possibly ever.
31
Career double-doubles for Ejim, tying him for 5th all-time on Iowa State's career list, and making him the active leader in the Big XII. One more gives him 5th place all by himself, and six more ties him for 4th.
In an ode to his development Ejim pulled in four double-doubles in his freshman campaign, three as a sophomore, an astounding 15 as a junior, and nine through Tuesday's game against Baylor.
1,500/1,000
Ejim needs just one rebound to become the fourth player in Big XII history to join the 1,500 points and 1,000 rebound club. The other three are Damion James (Texas), Nick Collison (Kansas), and Aleks Maric (Nebraska).
999
The aforementioned total rebounds number for Ejim, which ranks him 3rd on the all-time Iowa State list. 26 more will move him to 2nd place.
2
Capital One First Team All-Americans have played for the Cyclones: Ejim and Fred Hoiberg.
0
Capital One First Team All-Americans have led the Big XII in scoring. Ejim is attempting to become the first.
48 & 18
138
Ejim's career steals, yes steals, ranking him 12th on Iowa State's all-time list.
119
Ejim's career starts, which is 3rd on Iowa State's all-time list. Four behind Fred Hoiberg and five behind Jeff Grayer. I'll let the peanut gallery do the math on what Ejim needs to do to move to #1.
128
The school record for games played, which Ejim tied on Tuesday night against Baylor and will break Saturday against Oklahoma State. The previous record holder: Diante Garrett.
82
The number of wins Ejim has been a part of at Iowa State, one shy of the record set by Jacy Holloway from 1994-1997.
1/2/3/6/5/3/8
Ejim's Big XII rankings in points, rebounding, field goal percentage, free throw percentage, offensive rebounds, defensive rebounds, and minutes played, respectively.
12
The number of times Ejim has scored 20 or more points this season.
23
The number of teams that Ejim has recorded a double-double against.
9
The number of Big XII teams Ejim has recorded a double-double against...yes, that's all of them.
13
Ejim's current ranking in Iowa State's all-time scoring list. With four points Ejim will pass Craig Brakins for 12th and another 137, or three games vs TCU, puts him into the Top 10.
3.70
Ejim's GPA in History. A true throwback to when the term "student-athlete" actually meant being a student.
7
The number of jerseys currently hanging from the rafters in Hilton.
3
The next number that should join them.TRENTON — Warren Buffett can be hard to silence.
Gov. Chris Christie told the billionaire investor to shut up on national television last week, saying he was "tired of hearing about" his proposal to raise taxes on the country’s wealthiest earners.
"He should just write a check and shut up," the governor told CNN’s Piers Morgan. "If he wants to give the government more money, he’s got the ability to write a check."
Not quite shutting up, Buffett — known as the "Oracle of Omaha" — spent more than an hour on CNBC Monday, and somewhere between oil prices and unemployment rates got around to Christie, describing the governor’s suggestion as endearing but naïve.
"It’s sort of a touching response to a $1.2 trillion deficit, isn’t it?" Buffett asked. "That somehow the American people will just all send in checks and take care of it?"
He said the federal government needs spending cuts and new tax revenue to tame the soaring deficit.
Who do you side with in the debate? Noting that income inequality has grown drastically in the last decades, Buffett said he was shocked to see his secretary and other employees paying much higher tax rates than he does. Part of the solution, he said, is taking a bigger cut from top earners’ paychecks.
"The real problem we have is we’re taking in too little money and we’re spending too much, and that’s not going to be solved by voluntary contributions," he said.
Buffett’s suggestion, now part of President Obama’s budget plan, has made the billionaire a sort of black sheep among some chief executives, and a target for Republicans, including Christie and Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell of Kentucky.
It is, Buffett says, the price he has to pay.
"If you’re into something where the Republicans tend to be on one side and the Democrats on the other side, all you do is you make half the people of the United States mad at you for coming out of the chute," he said.
The governor has been playing a high-stakes game of Whack-a-Mole over a millionaire’s tax, fighting Democrats with vetoes at every turn.Knausgaard and the Meaning of Fiction
William Pierce Blocked Unblock Follow Following Jun 10, 2015
The history of the novel, as much as that of any other art, is a history of experimentation and change. And, after decades of post-postmodern confusion, the novel is finally in a new phase of form expansion. One of the authors helping to define the moment is Karl Ove Knausgaard, whose name is so ubiquitous it’s almost embarrassing to type.
What the gesture of My Struggle — an autobiographical megatome written in the key of memoir — seems to imply, at first glance at least, is that the novel is dead. It’s not our fault for thinking so. Knausgaard writes that he was “sick of fiction,” tired of finding “made-up people” everywhere. And, to shake off that falseness, he set out to write exclusively from his own life. Taken in that light, the project can seem to be a repudiation of imagination itself.
But when Knausgaard describes “fiction,” he includes things like the TV news. He includes newspapers. Narratives of events that actually took place. What’s more, year by year, we have access to more of his grand project in English: a six-volume, 3,600-page... novel. One of the great feats of imagination in our era — built from the kind of ephemeral detail that fills each moment but just as instantly disappears.
On May 9th I went to Knausgaard’s screening of Lars von Trier’s The Idiots (1998) at New York City’s Lincoln Center. He introduced the film and afterward discussed it with the audience. I’ve found before, for instance in his essay on Peter Handke’s A Sorrow Beyond Dreams, that Knausgaard lowers a shield when he talks about other people’s work and, in what he says, reveals more than usual about his own. It happened again at Lincoln Center. He clarified for me one of his quirky ways of thinking. And it all comes down — again — to the meaning of the word fiction.
In von Trier’s groundbreaking film, a circle of young Danes, living together commune-style in a borrowed house, makes forays into the world to play at being “Idiots.” With one or more assigned to the role of “minder,” or guardian — that is, even those acting normal are acting — they tour factories, eat at restaurants, and swim at the local pool, gruesomely pretending to be patients from a group home. Three years before releasing the film, von Trier co-authored a manifesto declaring Dogme 95, a new movement of filmmakers dedicated to “chastity” — which meant, in part, no artificial sets, no requisitioned props, and no pretense of a different time or place. Like the other films sanctioned by the movement, The Idiots dispenses with high-shine production values and goes for immediacy and rawness. This gives the scenes a documentary feel. The structure, too, imitates documentary — characters are “interviewed” after the breakup of their group, and these on-the-couch conversations punctuate the “footage” from their “spassing” missions and their days camped out in the house.
But, at root, there’s no mistaking that this is a fictional project — about people, characters, played by actors, who engage the world through an explicit fiction of their own. A play within a play.
Yet this, to Knausgaard, is the opposite of fiction. He first saw the movie while writing his novel Out of the World. “And I knew what I was doing wasn’t real. Compared to this.” The presence and immediacy of The Idiots made him reassess his own work. It sparked his frustration with whatever failed to break through the shell of habit, or |
razilians, composing 0.8%, and a small Amerindian community (0.2%).
Southeast Brazil is home to the oldest Portuguese village in the Americas, São Vicente, São Paulo, established in 1532.[86] The region, since the beginning of its colonization, is a melting pot of Europeans, Indians and Africans. The Amerindians of the region were enslaved by the Portuguese. The race mixing between the Indian females and their European masters produced the Bandeirante, the colonial inhabitant of São Paulo, who formed expeditions that crossed the interior of Brazil and greatly increased the Portuguese colonial territory. The main language spoken by these people of mixed Indian/Portuguese heritage was Língua geral, a language that mixed Tupi and Portuguese words.
In the late 17th century the Bandeirantes found gold in the area that nowadays is Minas Gerais. A gold rush took place in Brazil and thousands of Portuguese colonists arrived during this period. The confrontation between the Bandeirantes and the Portuguese for obtaining possession of the mines led to the Emboabas' War. The Portuguese won the war. The Amerindian culture declined, giving space to a stronger Portuguese cultural domination. In order to control the wealth, the Portuguese Crown moved the capital of Brazil from Salvador, Bahia to Rio de Janeiro. Thousands of African slaves were brought to work in the gold mines. They were landed in Rio de Janeiro and sent to other regions. By the late 18th century, Rio de Janeiro was an "African city": most of its inhabitants were slaves. No other place in the world had as many slaves since the end of the Roman Empire.[87] In 1808 the Portuguese Royal Family, fleeing from Napoleon, took charge in Rio de Janeiro. Some 15,000 Portuguese nobles moved to Brazil. The region changed a lot, becoming more European.
After independence and principally after 1850, Southeast Brazil was "inundated" by European immigrants, who were attracted by the government to replace the African slaves in the coffee plantations. Most immigrants landed in the Port of Santos and have been forwarded to the coffee farms within São Paulo. The vast majority of the immigrants came from Italy. Brazil attracted nearly 5 million immigrants between 1870 and 1953. The large number of Italians are visible in many parts of Southeast Brazil. Their descendants are nowadays predominant in many areas. For example, Northeast São Paulo is 65% Italian.[88]
The arrival of immigrants from several parts of Europe, the Middle-East and Asia produced an ethnically diverse population. The city of Bastos, in São Paulo, is 11.4% Japanese. The city of São Paulo is home to the largest Japanese population outside Japan itself. [89]
Northeast [ edit ]
The population of Northeast Brazil is a result of an intensive race mixing, which has occurred in the region for more than four centuries. According to the 2006 census people reported as "brown" make up 62.5% of the population. Those reported as African account for 7.8%.
This region did not have much effect from the massive European immigration that took place in Southern Brazil in the late 19th century and first decades of the 20th century. The Northeast has been a poorer region of Brazil since the decline of sugar cane plantations in the late 17th century, so its economy did not require immigrants.
The ethnic composition of the population starts in the 16th century. The Portuguese settlers rarely brought women, which led to relationships with the Indian women. Later, interracial relationships occurred between Portuguese males and African females. The coast, in the past the place where millions of African slaves arrived (mostly from modern-day Angola, Ghana, Nigeria and Benin) to work in sugar-cane plantations, is where nowadays there is a predominance of Mulattoes, those of African and European ancestry. Salvador, Bahia is considered the largest African city outside of Africa, with over 80% of its inhabitants being African-Brazilians. In the interior, there is a predominance of Indian and European mixture.[90]
North [ edit ]
Northern Brazil, largely covered by the Amazon rainforest, is the Brazilian region with the largest Amerindian influences, both in culture and ethnicity. Inhabited by diverse indigenous tribes, this part of Brazil was reached by Portuguese and Spanish colonists in the 17th century, but it started to be populated by non-Indians only in the late 19th and early 20th centuries. The exploitation of rubber used in the growing industries of automobiles, has emerged a huge migration to the region.
Many people from the poor Northeast Brazil, mostly Ceará, moved to the Amazon area. The contact between the Indians and the northeastern rubbers created the base of the ethnic composition of the region, with its mixed-race majority.
The Central-West region of Brazil was inhabited by diverse Indians when the Portuguese arrived in the early 18th century. The Portuguese came to explore the precious stones that were found there. Contact between the Portuguese and the Indians created a mixed-race population. Until the mid-20th century, Central-West Brazil had a very small population. The situation changed with the construction of Brasília, the new capital of Brazil, in 1960. Many workers were attracted to the region, mostly from northeastern Brazil.
A new wave of settlers started arriving from the 1970s. With the mechanization of agriculture in the South of Brazil, many rural workers of German and Italian origin migrated to Central-West Brazil. In some areas, they are already the majority of the population.
Education and health [ edit ]
The Federal Constitution of 1988 and the 1996 General Law of Education in Brazil (LDB) attributed to the Federal Government, states, Federal District and municipalities the responsibility of managing the Brazilian educational system, considering three educational public systems as a basis for collaboration between these federal systems. Each of these public educational systems is responsible for its own maintenance, which manages funds as well as mechanisms and sources for financial resources. The new Constitution reserves 25% of state and municipal taxes and 18% of federal taxes for education.[91]
As set out by the Brazilian Constitution, the main responsibility for basic education is attributed to the states and municipalities. Hence, a historical feature of Brazilian basic education is its extremely decentralized nature, which gives great organizational autonomy to sub-national governments (27 states and 5,546 municipalities) in organizing their educational systems. Early childhood education, from 0–6 years, is under exclusive responsibility of the municipalities. Responsibility for compulsory primary education from 1st to 9th grades is shared between states and municipalities. Kindergarten and pre-school education are the responsibility of local levels of government, whereas secondary schools are under the responsibility of the states. Maintenance of the system, including salaries, the definition of teacher career structures and supervision of early childhood, primary, and secondary levels (which make up basic education) is decentralized, and these levels are responsible for defining their respective curriculum content.
Higher education starts with undergraduate or sequential courses, which may offer different specialization choices such as academic or vocational paths. Depending on the choice, students may improve their educational background with Stricto Sensu or Lato Sensu postgraduate courses. Higher education has three main purposes: teaching, research and extension, each with their own specific contribution to make to a particular course. Diplomas and certificates are proof of having passed through higher education.
In 2003, the literacy rate was at 88 percent of the population, and the youth literacy rate (ages 15–19) was 93.2 percent.[91] However, Brazilian analysts[who?] tend to approach these favorable numbers with suspicion, considering the generally poor levels of performance displayed by students, especially in the public school network.[citation needed]
According to Brazilian Government, the most serious health problems are:[92]
Childhood mortality: about 2.51% of childhood mortality, reaching 3.77% in the northeast region.
Motherhood mortality: about 73.1 deaths per 100,000 born children in 2002.
Mortality by non-transmissible illness: 151.7 deaths per 100,000 inhabitants caused by heart and circulatory diseases, along with 72.7 deaths per 100,000 inhabitants caused by cancer.
Mortality caused by external causes (transportation, violence and suicide): 71.7 deaths per 100,000 inhabitants (14.9% of all deaths in the country), reaching 82.3 deaths in the southeast region.
Religion [ edit ]
According to the IBGE census 2010[93] 64.6% are Roman Catholics; 24% are Protestants and other Christians, 8% are agnostics, atheists or have no religion, 2% are followers of Spiritism, and 1% are members of other religions. Some of these are Jehovah's Witnesses (1,100,000), Latter-day Saints (200,000), Buddhism (215,000), Judaism (86,000), and Islam (27,000)[94] and some practice a mixture of different religions, such as Catholicism, Candomblé, and indigenous American religions[citation needed].
Brazil has the largest Roman Catholic population in the world.
Followers of Protestantism are rising in number. Until 1970, the majority of Brazilian Protestants were adherents of "traditional churches", mostly Lutherans, Presbyterians and Baptists. There are 120,000 Episcopalians in 9 dioceses (Anglican Episcopal Church of Brazil). Since then, numbers of Pentecostal and Neopentecostal adherents have increased significantly.
Islam in Brazil was first practiced by African slaves.[95] Today, the Muslim population in Brazil is made up mostly of Arab immigrants. The US Department of State claims there is a recent trend of increased conversions to Islam among non-Arab citizens.[96]
The largest population of Buddhists in Latin America lives in Brazil, due greatly to Brazil's large Japanese population.
According to IBGE 2000 Census,[97] the following are the largest religious denominations in Brazil, with those with more than a half million members only shown.
Languages [ edit ]
Portuguese is the only official language of Brazil.[98] It is spoken by nearly the entire population and is virtually the only language used in schools, newspapers, radio, TV and for all business and administrative purposes. Moreover, Brazil is the only Portuguese-speaking nation in the Americas, making the language an important part of Brazilian national identity.
Many Amerindian languages are spoken daily in indigenous communities, primarily in Northern Brazil. Although many of these communities have significant contact with Portuguese,[99] today there are incentives stimulating preservation and the teaching of native languages. According to SIL International, 133 Native American languages are currently endangered. Some of the largest indigenous language groups include Arawak, Carib, Macro-Gê and Tupi.[100] In 2006, the City of São Gabriel da Cachoeira in the region of Cabeça do Cachorro (Northwestern region of the State of Amazonas), has adopted some indigenous languages as some of its other official languages along with Portuguese.
Other languages are spoken by descendants of immigrants, who are usually bilingual, in small rural communities in Southern Brazil. The most important are the Brazilian German dialects, such as Riograndenser Hunsrückisch and the East Pomeranian dialect, and also the Talian, based on the Italian Venetian language. There are also bilingual speakers of Polish, Ukrainian and Russian in Southern Brazil, especially Paraná. In the city of São Paulo, Levantine Arabic, Japanese, Chinese and Korean can be heard in the immigrant neighborhoods, such as Liberdade. Yiddish and Hebrew are used by Jewish communities mainly in São Paulo, Rio de Janeiro, Porto Alegre, Curitiba, Brasília, Belo Horizonte and Recife as well as the Vlax Romani dialect by Gypsy communities all across the nation.
The World Factbook demographic statistics [ edit ]
The following demographic statistics are from The World Factbook, unless otherwise indicated [101]
Nationality [ edit ]
noun: Brazilian(s)
adjective: Brazilian
Population [ edit ]
211,464,935
Languages [ edit ]
Ethnic groups [ edit ]
Literacy [ edit ]
Total population: 92.6%
Male: 92.2%
Female: 92.9% (2015 est.)
Religions [ edit ]
See also [ edit ]
References [ edit ]
This article incorporates public domain material from the CIA World Factbook document "2006 edition".A small protest camp with tents is up behind Oak Bay municipal hall.
“The issue of homelessness is complex and polarizing. Police must use a measured approach when enforcing the law, particularly at a peaceful protest where there is a set date for departure,” said Deputy Chief Ray Bernoties, Oak Bay Police Department. “Our primary objective is to ensure public safety and we are committed to doing that.”
Chrissy Brett is on week six of a cultural fast that includes a travelling tent city that set up in the park that abuts Granite Street Oct. 10.
“I’m calling to the municipalities across the province, the provincial governments and federal government in addressing the housing crisis we’re currently in, as well as addressing some of the lack of services and service delivery dollars that people end up homeless,” Brett said. “We need to look at not just at the housing crisis but the things behind the housing crisis. I’d like to see municipalities start their own poverty reduction plans.”
The camp came from Saanich, and has previously set up in Cowichan Valley sites as well as
“This camp has moved to a new location in the CRD every seven days, arriving today from Saanich. The camp organizer has personally committed that the camp will leave Oak Bay on Tuesday, Oct. 17. At this time, we have no reason to doubt her word,” said Oak Bay Police Deputy Chief Ray Bernoties. “We understand this may be uncomfortable for some residents and we’re asking for your patience and understanding. We want to assure you that we’re closely monitoring the camp and will continue to do so throughout the seven days, both day and night.”
Brett cites examples of veterans and paramedics not supported with their post traumatic stress disorder as examples discovered during the tent city outside Victoria provincial court that came down in August 2016.
While Oak Bay police do not anticipate resident impact by the temporary camp, they plan to increase foot and bike patrols in the neighbourhood.
“The organizer has committed to cleaning up upon their departure and maintaining cleanliness while here,” Bernoties said. “The Parks Department will be monitoring the camp throughout the week and will attend the site after their departure to ensure its returned to its normal state.”
@OakBayNews
cvanreeuwyk@oakbaynews.com
Like us on Facebook and follow us on Twitter.The new billionaire in town is a maverick, a visionary, an art collector and businessman.
And it is likely these qualities that led Dai Zhikang, founder and chairperson of the Shanghai Zendai group, to commit to investing tens of billions in a development in Modderfontein — a move which is not only a vote of confidence in the country, but is set to change the face of Johannesburg.
Shanghai Zendai announced this week it would pay over R1-billion to explosives and specialist chemicals company AECI for the East Rand land with the intention of developing it over 10 to 15 years into a "mini city".
The transaction makes it one of the largest single foreign direct investments in South Africa: in a recent report, Goldman Sachs said South Africa has attracted an annual average foreign direct investment of R19-billion over the past two decades.
Dai (49) founded the property group Shanghai Zendai Investment Group in 1994 and Shanghai Zendai Property in 1998.
The latter boasts landmark developments across 12 cities in China and one project under way in Auckland, New Zealand.
Austerity measures
The company has completed more than one million square metres of development, listed on the Hong Kong stock exchange in 2002 and now has an estimated market capitalisation of $300-million. Dai has a 39% shareholding.
Austerity measures, in the form of property purchase restrictions, enforced by the Chinese government in a bid to slow down rising property prices, caused the company to look outside of its own country for growth, Shanghai Zendai said in a notice detailing the South African acquisition.
The BBC reported that Dai was the fourth of six children. His early years were spent looking after the family's pigs and cows in Jiangsu province.
Dai earned a bachelor's degree from the Renmin University of China, majoring in international finance, and a master's degree from the Graduate School of Finance at People's Bank of China.
He began his career in the financial industry by working as the secretary to the president at China CITIC Bank Corporation and a year later joined the Dresdner Bank as the chief representative of its Beijing office.
He was also the manager of Hainan Securities Company from 1990 to 1992.
More often than not seen sporting a mandarin-collared suit, Dai reportedly dreamed of being the Warren Buffet of China.
Dai's net worth
The BBC estimated his net worth at $1.2-billion in 2011 — although the Forbes rich list puts it at a much lower $665-million.
ENSafrica is the legal transaction adviser for the project. The firm's China head and specialist tax practitioner, Ernie Lai King, joined the company two years ago, but has been involved in the Shanghai Zendai project from the outset.
Lai King said the deal was a major vote of confidence in South Africa. Asked about other potential opportunities, he said: "The whole world was an opportunity and they chose South Africa.
"Mr Dai is known as a very sophisticated operator in China." And he takes a keen interest in culture. "When he arrived last week the first thing he did on the weekend was to go visit art galleries.
"With some of his investments [in China] people thought he was mad, but he made a lot of money out of those."
Asked how he tells a good risk from a bad risk, Dai told BBC reporter Nick Rose quite simply: "From [the] heart".
What Dai has in store for Johannesburg
Perhaps it is only a visionary who can dream up what Dai has in store for Johannesburg.
The lush 1 600-hectare site in Modderfontein, owned by AECI since 1896, is home to little more than overgrown vegetation and wetlands, through which cyclists are apt to enjoy the odd weekend trail.
It has obvious advantages as it is on the Gautrain route and located between the central business district of Sandton and OR Tambo International Airport.
The first deadline for the transfer of the property is July 2014. From Shanghai Zendai's side, there is a payment guarantee from the Bank of China in South Africa and, for AECI, performance guarantees from Standard Bank.
Shanghai Zendai's vision for the land is to make it a future centre of Johannesburg.
It will have seven focus sectors: finance and trade; an industrial zone for light industry such as warehousing and manufacturing; a convention centre; an African heritage theme park; facilities for education, training, sports and recreation; and up to 35 000 families living on the property.
Direct and indirect benefits
Over the next 10 to 15 years, Shanghai Zendai will invest about R80-billion in the project and an estimated 12-million square metres of building will be constructed.
Direct and indirect benefits for the national economy could be R14-billion and R1-billion will be generated in local government rates and taxes.
This is according to a high-level economic impact assessment of the Modderfontein development on the Gauteng and national economy by the Bureau of Economic Research at Stellenbosch University.
About 24 000 direct jobs will be created out of the project although concerns have already been raised as to how many of these jobs would be for South Africans.
"Without a doubt there has been criticism from certain quarters," Lai King said, referring to claims that Chinese companies flood a country, bring their own workers, take the benefits and flee.
"I can't talk for the company, but we have had a lot of discussion with Shanghai Zendai and we have been constantly assured the economic benefits would be shared … My view is that this is not a 12-month construction project. This a 10- to 15-year project.
A need to use locals
"Obviously there is going to be a need to use local people. [But] time will tell and actions will speak louder than words."
Lai King said Dai and his company would have no problem raising the R1-billion from its own balance sheet. But for subsequent development, Shanghai Zendai intends to bring in other partners.
A Standard & Poor's analysis rated the company as B (more vulnerable to adverse business, financial and economic conditions but currently has the capacity to meet financial commitments) with a stable outlook.
In December last year S&P's said the outlook for Shanghai Zendai's property sales remains weak, given the government's continued reiteration of its firm stance on restricting home purchases and increased competition due to a slowdown in transactions.
S&P's noted that in 2012 the company had purchased three land parcels in Nanjing, Changchun, and Yantai and the cost of the land and its development will be largely debt-funded.
"Accordingly, we expect the company's leverage ratios to remain high," it said.TORONTO - The man the Liberal government brought in to fix problems with Toronto's Pan Am Games committee will head the agency overseeing the Ontario Retirement Pension Plan.
Saad Rafi, who had also been a deputy minister in several government departments, will be paid $525,000 as CEO of the ORPP Administration Corporation, and will be eligible for an annual performance bonus of up to 25 per cent.
The government says Rafi will focus on building the administration corporation and delivering on its mandate to implement the provincial pension plan, with deductions from paycheques and contributions by employers scheduled to begin next January.
However, it could not point to any pension plan experience in Rafi's resume, which also includes time as an equity partner with Deloitte, a professional services firm.
Finance Ministry spokesman Scott Blodgett says pension and investment knowledge is important for the organization once it's established, but adds there are distinct skills needed for the start-up phase which the board knows that Rafi can provide.
Rafi will be responsible for developing the corporation's organizational structure and overseeing the set-up of the infrastructure and technology needed to administer the new pension plan.End SEC Officials' Anti-Alabama Prejudice, Now!
by: Ricky G
recipient: Steve Shaw, Greg Sankey
Numbers do not lie. The University of Alabama football team has been put in a position the last several years, where it not only must face an opponent each Saturday during regular season SEC play, but also must unjustly face and overcome obviously biased officiating as well. This petition is meant to be the collective voice of Alabama fans worldwide, as well as fans of the game that desire to see fair and unbiased officiating not only for games that feature the Alabama Crimson Tide, but for all SEC games across the board. The Southeastern Conference has gained a reputation for having the worst officiating in all of the NCAA. It is time for us to band together and call upon Steve Shaw, Greg Sankey, and others within the SEC to make a change.
In 2016, we ranked 132 out of 132 in penalties against nationally. So far this year, we are 127 of 130. To further illustrate this, in 2015, we were only 54th, and we won a National Championship. See what's going on here? I do, as do many others, and enough is enough!
The link for this data was provided to me by Abrell, and a thank you goes out to her for the information, and her continued support for UA athletics. The time is now. Join us. Sign the petition, and make a stand for Alabama football. Once enough signatures have been gathered, this petition will be delivered to the SEC headquarters. ***Data taken from: www.teamrankings.com/college-football/stat/opponent-penalties-per-game1. Barry Melrose
With a greased-back mane to match, Melrose was handed the keys to the Ferrari in his return to the NHL when he was lured from ESPN to coach the Tampa Bay Lightning just a week before Steven Stamkos was selected first overall in 2008.
His ability to coach superstars unfortunately vanished during his time away from the game, after coaching Wayne Gretzky and the Los Angeles Kings to the Stanley Cup Final in 1993.
Melrose grossly mismanaged Stamkos's usage in his introduction to the NHL, playing him third-line minutes on a retooling roster. But it wasn't until the axe fell, after compiling a 5-7-4 record, that he revealed his uninhibited and utterly ridiculous take on the future star.
"Steven is not ready for the NHL," said Melrose.
Tampa Bay didn't have an immediate reversal in fortune, though, but the effect on Stamkos was striking. With increased ice time, he improved on his two goals under Melrose to finish with 23 - tops among players in the 2008 draft class.
2) Mario Tremblay
Sure, his coaching record is hardly egregious. But as we've recently been reminded, the job is as much about relationships as it is results.
Tremblay spent two seasons behind the Montreal Canadiens' bench after being handed a roster two seasons removed from the franchise's NHL-record 24th Stanley Cup. He led the Canadiens to two postseason appearances, but suffered consecutive first-round defeats.
The ho-hum record was disappointing - not damning - but he managed to do irrevocable damage to the proudest of franchises in his short-lived stint.
Tremblay's long-running feud with Patrick Roy came to a crescendo 24 games into his tenure, when he left the star goalie in net for nine goals against the Detroit Red Wings. That night, Roy - the greatest of his generation - vowed to never play for Montreal again, and he was traded to the Colorado Avalanche two days later.
3) Wayne Gretzky
There's a reason why The Great One is apprehensive about joining another NHL front office. It didn't go terribly well the first time 'round.
Gretzky was more of a failed investment than a reputable boss in four seasons with the Phoenix Coyotes. He made an exorbitant amount of money (more than anyone in pads, skates and a helmet) as the floundering franchise attempted to create a winning identity by having the game's greatest player front its supposed revival.
He was given every opportunity to right the ship, but when his cache wore off on his misfit roster, Gretzky lost his voice and the movement stalled. The Coyotes finished above the.500 mark just once in his four seasons and never made the playoffs.
4) Dave Lewis
In 2002, after winning his third Stanley Cup as an assistant, Dave Lewis inherited arguably the greatest team of that generation: the 116-point, President's Trophy-winning, Stanley Cup champion Red Wings.
It was supposed to be a seamless passing of the torch, having a coach groomed by the likes of Jacques Demers, Bryan Murray and Scottie Bowman use his lettered education to keep the Wings in cruise control.
That was the case in the regular season, as he posted back-to-back 48-win seasons, but Lewis failed to make the necessary playoff adjustments and was canned after consecutive postseason upsets.
Lewis would resurface with the Boston Bruins in 2006, only to have his inadequacies exposed further without the likes of Nicklas Lidstrom, Sergei Federov and Brendan Shanahan. He was promptly fired after a last-place finish in the Northeast Division
5) Dallas Eakins
From coaches who failed miserably to one assembling the trump card, there isn't an active bench boss with a track record worse than Edmonton Oilers head coach Dallas Eakins.
Now in his second season, Eakins' peerless.409 career winning percentage continues to regress as the Oilers have stumbled to a league-worst 6-14-2 record.
Once the hottest coaching prospect in the game, Eakins' experimental tactics have crashed and burned. In failing to produce any semblance of team defense, he's spearheaded the spoiled development of a cast of former first-round selections.
Through the on-ice misery, and even an attempt to impose dietary restrictions on the media, Eakins continues to survive it all despite the mounting losses.The California Legislature is moving forward on a plan to switch the state's presidential primary election from June to March, a move that would change the national strategy for presidential candidates but has unclear implications for local voters.
S.B. 568 appears to have broad support among lawmakers. Final votes in the Senate and Assembly are expected by Friday; it would then advance to Gov. Jerry Brown for his signature.
With Brown's checkoff, the statewide primary would shift to the Tuesday after the first Monday in March, giving California among the earliest primary elections of all 50 states. In 2016, California was one of the last in the country to hold its primary, leaving some voters feeling left out of the process.
Over the past few decades, California has ping-ponged between early primaries in February or March and primaries in June. Officials held the most recent early presidential primary in February 2008. In that year, Hillary Clinton beat Barack Obama in California's Democratic primary, but failed to win the party's nomination. Voter turnout in the presidential primary hit 57.7 percent of registered voters, among the better turnouts in recent years.
But early primaries have not always led to higher voter participation rates in California.
"Particularly in primaries, the big majority of voters are still white and higher income," said Karla Zombro, a field director at the nonprofit California Calls. The organization focuses on mobilizing and educating voters of color, young voters and voters with low incomes.
These demographic groups are largely seen as having major potential at the polls, but have not showed up in large numbers in California.
Zombro believes an early primary has the potential to make voter education and engagement more challenging for the voters she works with, particularly in down ballot races.
"There's a concern that in a presidential year, you kind of suck all the air out of the room, and everything is focused on the presidential," she said.
Kim Alexander, president and founder of the California Voter Foundation, said her organization supports the early primary bill.
"One out of eight voters lives in California and yet we have virtually no say in the outcome of the presidential election because everyone presumes to know how we're going to vote, so there's no competition here," she said. "I'm happy to see this change appears to be likely to be made."
Alexander said while she doesn't know if moving the primary to March will impact voter participation rates, she does think it will increase enthusiasm among voters.
"I would like to see California have more of a voice in selecting who the nominees are," she said.
The state is often viewed as more valuable for fundraising because of the wealth in locations like Silicon Valley and Hollywood. But an earlier primary would force presidential candidates to wage a costly campaign for votes in populous California.
Politico reported the move to an early primary could benefit two Californians who may run for president in 2020 — California's junior senator Kamala Harris and Los Angeles Mayor Eric Garcetti, neither of whom have announced their intentions to run for higher office.
S.B. 568 was introduced by state Sen. Ricardo Lara (D-Bell Gardens). Assemblyman Kevin Mullin (D-San Mateo) is the principal co-author. The bill is sponsored by Secretary of State Alex Padilla.Meeting in Whitehall between government and mobile phone companies will see the manufacturers urged to bring in ‘drive safe’ modes
Mobile phone manufacturers and providers are facing demands from ministers to introduce software that will prevent drivers from being distracted by calls and texts.
An informal meeting in Whitehall is due to take place early in the new year, the Guardian can reveal, in which ministers and officials will tell mobile companies that “drive safe” modes, similar to the airplane mode that has become standard, must be included in basic software ahead of a broader crackdown on illegal mobile phone use on the roads.
Drive safe mode differs from a flight safe mode because it can potentially let the driver make emergency calls or accept calls from certain designated persons. There is also the possibility of automatically blocking the phone using GPS technology if certain speeds are reached.
In spring 2017, the fixed penalty for using a mobile phone while driving without a hands-free device will double to £200. The fixed penalty notice will increase from three to six points.
Ministers are concerned by the number of deaths that are at least partly attributed to being distracted by mobile phones – about 20 a year – with “distraction in vehicle” a factor in 70 deaths annually.
Holding a mobile phone while driving has been illegal since December 2003, but there has been an alarming change in motorists’ attitudes to talking to friends or colleagues without using hands-free devices.
Two-thirds of the population own smartphones and the vast array of apps and functions means there are increasing distractions for drivers.
The RAC’s annual report on motoring, published in September, found the number of drivers who admitted to using a handheld mobile phone on the road had increased from 8% in 2014 to 31%.
Nearly one-fifth admitted to sending a text or email, or posting on social media, while 14% filmed a video or took a photo while driving. The number of drivers who thought it was acceptable to take a quick call on a handheld phone doubled to 14%.
The transport minister Lord Ahmad said the meeting would “consider safe drive modes, or other practical applications, when a person is driving”.
But road safety campaigners said the government should compel manufacturers to include a drive safe button, if they resisted ministerial pressure.
A separate RAC Foundation-commissioned report published this summer found that without a legal obligation, few companies would include software that limited the use of their equipment, because it would put them at a commercial disadvantage and they felt the onus was on the driver to make sure their use of technology complied with the law.
Steve Gooding, the director of the RAC Foundation, said: “New smartphones and tablets come fresh out of the box loaded with apps and other functions, easily activated through on-screen icons. While flight safe mode comes as standard issue, where is the drive safe equivalent?
“Drivers must carry the personal responsibility for avoiding distraction when they are at the wheel, but telecoms companies surely have an obligation to help them do the right thing, something we’re discussing with the Department for Transport (DfT).
“If industry doesn’t help voluntarily, then maybe we need to consider legislative options.”
Gary Rae, the campaigns director for road safety charity Brake, said: “We’re pleased that Lord Ahmad is looking into this. The use of mobiles behind the wheel is a growing menace.
“Drivers who use phones, either hands-free or handheld, have been found by researchers to be four times more likely to be in a crash resulting in injuries than drivers who were not distracted.
“The technology exists now to shut off mobiles when they’re in a vehicle. It just needs the political will to make this happen. We’re ready to take part in any talks between government, vehicle manufacturers and mobile operators.”
A DfT spokesman said: “We are determined to crack down on mobile phone use at the wheel. Our plans to double penalties for this serious crime should act as an incredibly strong deterrent. We will continue to explore what more can be done to tackle this crime.”Saint Ambrose (right) disciplines Emperor Theodosius (left)
In AD 390, the Christian Roman Emperor Theodosius was threatened with excommunication by Saint Ambrose of Milan for having ordered the massacre of all the spectators in the Thessalonian circus as retaliation for a local uprising. Saint Ambrose ordered months of penance for the Emperor who was then allowed once again to receive Holy Communion at the hand of Saint Ambrose.
Shortly after this date, the Roman Emperor Theodosius began to zealously criminalize the practice of paganism in the Roman Empire. (Paganism refers to any polytheistic cult of worship. For example, the worship of Jupiter, Juno, Minerva, Mars.) Emperor Theodosius accomplished this by passing anti-pagan laws and by destroying pagan temples. He abolished pagan holidays, criminalized witchcraft, snuffed out the eternal fire at the Temple of Vesta in the Roman Forum, and disbanded the Vestal Virgins.
The Olympic Games were traditionally held in honor of Zeus and the Olympiad gods. The Games were also well known for their athletic nudity (did they have also have beach volley ball?!). These Olympic Games, being celebrated every four years, were due to be held in AD 393. Emperor Theodosius condemned and banned the Olympic Games as pagan and unworthy of Christian culture, with the approval of the Catholic bishops (Saint Ambrose in particular). The Olympics were seen as one of the most popular pagan celebrations in the Empire, and so they came to an end in that year.
Under Christian rule, the Olympics remained forgotten for over 1,400 years.
In 1796, the anti-Christian regime of revolutionary France re-instituted the Olympic Games, but it was short lived. The Olympics were celebrated again in England in the 1850s. The Greeks began to hold Olympic Games in the 1870s. The International Olympics that we know today began in 1896 and have been held every four years (with several exceptions) till this very year.Upon the Double Murder of King Charles
In Answer to a Libelous Rhyme made by V.P. I think not on the state, nor am concerned
Which way soever that great helm is turned,
But as that son whose father's danger nigh
Did force his native dumbness, and untie
His fettered organs: so here is a cause
That will excuse the breach of nature's laws.
Silence were now a sin: nay passion now
Wise men themselves for merit would allow.
What noble eye could see, (and careless pass)
The dying lion kicked by every ass?
Hath Charles so broke God's laws, he must not have
A quiet crown, nor yet a quiet grave?
Tombs have been sanctuaries; thieves lie here
Secure from all their penalty and fear.
Great Charles his double misery was this,
Unfaithful friends, ignoble enemies;
Had any heathen been this prince's foe,
He would have wept to see him injured so.
His title was his crime, they'd reason good
To quarrel at the right they had withstood.
He broke God's laws, and therefor he must die,
And what shall then become of thee and I?
Slander must follow treason; but yet stay,
Take not our reason with our king away.
Though you have seized upon all our defense,
Yet do not sequester our common sense.
But I admire not at this new supply:
No bounds will hold those who at scepters fly.
Christ will be King, but I ne'er understood |
close to the 50.0 stabilization point.France moved in the opposite direction, however, with data showing that the contraction in the country’s manufacturing sector deepened in December. France’s manufacturing PMI fell to a seven-month low of 47.0 from 48.4 in November.The weak data raised concerns that the French economy could post a second successive quarterly decline in the three months to December, after a contraction of 0.1% in the third quarter, which would push the country back into a recession.
Euro zone manufacturing sector continues to recover but France lagsWASHINGTON, D. C. -- After French President Francois Hollande in an interview Tuesday hinted at an openness to military intervention in Syria, the question of whether NATO should intervene in the violence-rattled country has again come to the forefront. While distinct differences exist between the conflicts in Libya and Syria, Gallup data from 2012 show pluralities in the Arab world opposed NATO's intervention in Libya in 2011, suggesting that similar moves in Syria could meet with considerable disapproval in the region.
The NATO-led air campaign against Libyan government forces, which began in March 2011, ended seven months later in a decisive victory for NATO and Libyan rebel groups. The overthrow of the 42-year-old regime represented the third North African government to fall in 2011 amid the uprisings in the Arab world and was the first in the region to receive military support from Western nations.
At least a plurality in all nine Arab countries surveyed and the region of Somaliland opposed NATO intervention in Libya. Residents in several North African countries, including Morocco (12%), Egypt (13%), and Algeria (14%) were the least likely to say they were in favor of NATO intervention. In Tunisia, where the region's first successful revolution was publicly denounced by the late Libyan leader Moammar Gadhafi, attitudes were significantly more mixed (33% in favor vs. 40% opposed).
For complete data sets or custom research from the more than 150 countries Gallup continually surveys, please contact SocialandEconomicAnalysis@gallup.com or call 202.715.3030.
Survey Methods
Results are based on face-to-face interviews with approximately 1,000 adults per country, aged 15 and older, conducted from February-April 2012. For results based on the total samples, one can say with 95% confidence that the maximum margin of sampling error ranges from ±3.3 percentage points to ±3.7 percentage points. The margin of error reflects the influence of data weighting. In addition to sampling error, question wording and practical difficulties in conducting surveys can introduce error or bias into the findings of public opinion polls.
For more complete methodology and specific survey dates, please review Gallup's Country Data Set details.One thing is for sure, Captain America’s March 1941 debut issue isn’t remembered for the subtlety of its cover.
“Smashing thru, Captain America came to face to face with Hitler …” reads one of the captions below an image of the star-spangled superhero bursting into a Nazi bunker as the bullets of stunned SS troopers bounce off his invincible shield, while Cap cold-cocks Adolf on the jaw. It’s memorably straightforward and endearingly sincere, with no hidden context to read between the lines. Created by Joe Simon and Jack Kirby, the newest comic book hero on the block wasn’t here to save the United States from deadly aliens or evil genius supervillains – all that would come later – he was here to punch out real-world, tyrannical bigots. No amount of Nazi ammunition could kill Captain America. We didn’t need to fear his demise, because he and his ideals were here to stay. A children’s comic book giving a statement on ethical and moral imperatives, nine months before America actually entered World War II.
There’s no real surprise as to why the Golden Age of comic books refers to the period stretching from the late 1930s to the early 1950s. DC’s Trinity of Superman, Batman and Wonder Woman, along with those from other publishers, like Captain Marvel, the Human Torch and Namor, came into their own during this time, entertaining and inspiring a young generation through a fledgling medium that was cheap to produce and sold at high volumes. There was as much to protect us from outside our doors as there were invented enemies on the paneled pages.
As time wore on and the Axis powers were defeated, comics drew less from real-world evils and instead began focusing on fictional antagonists. Those foes could mirror real individuals, groups or institutions, but rarely did they include outright villains like Hitler and his cronies. In the modern era, you’ll hardly, if ever, find Captain America and company going toe-to-toe with a dictator covered on the nightly news. In fact, rarely do publishers even address the current global events like those that peppered the medium’s Golden Age.
In light of all our recent troubles, however, it’s well past time for them to return to what made them so special in the first place. Comics should fight the good fight once again. It’s pretty unanimously agreed that 2016 will not be looked back upon kindly. The challenges facing Americans are too numerous to count, and too serious to dismiss as irrelevant or exaggerated. It’s safe to say that one of the many reasons comic books have seen such a resurgence in popularity is their ability to briefly entertain and distract us from the horrors in the headlines. While comics were immensely popular during the mid-20th century, few could have anticipated just how they would take over almost every other cultural medium, from film to television to video games. The cinematic superhero renaissance of the past decade and a half churns out a caped hero flick every four months or so, while seasons of interwoven TV adaptations air in between, all to the tune of billions of dollars annually.
Like always, detractors will dismiss superhero stories as vacuous or overly simplistic, doing more of a disservice to audiences than providing any real benefit. But superhero comics — like with jazz, blues and baseball — are a distinctly American innovation. In a country as relatively young as this one, superheroes give our nation its own Olympian mythology, telling us how to handle intangible hardships while also astounding us with legendary tales of amazing feats in outlandish worlds. But superheroes are at their most classic, and most American, when they are standing up to the bullies who are scaring not just the voting public, but our children, as well.
These aren’t mutually exclusive goals. The Big Two publishers can, and should, explore original and wholly unrealistic worlds. But at a time when we face a national identity crisis the likes of which we haven’t encountered for generations, when kids are afraid of being deported due to their nationality, or ridiculed for their beliefs, superheroes can inspire and entertain them in ways few other mediums can. The heroes of the Marvel and DC universes need to take on real-world villains, because political criminals go unpunished so frequently that the least we can do is exact some modicum of justice on the page.
We need Superman addressing Congress on the importance of climate change accords. Aquaman should pay a visit to BP oil executives. The X-Men owe the resurgent Klan a visit. Captain America should stop by the Oval Office.
Some of those individuals and groups clutching for power today in the United States aren’t a threat to us in the same way their Nazi forebears were — they’re too disparate, disorganized and reckless to establish any Reich equivalency. But that recklessness could be just as dangerous in other ways, and it needs to be checked at any available opportunity.
As comic books and their various iterations continue their slow march toward equal representation, many argue that this is not the place for political statements and protest. That, however, ignores the very foundations of the industry, storylines and artwork that’s as iconic as it is necessary to our cultural identity. Seriously, what’s more patriotic than Captain America beating the hell out of Nazis? It’s time to get in the ring again.Although a donkey fits the Democrat Party well as a mascot, a shifting goalpost would work even better. With liberals, it’s almost always a bait and switch.
Take the Confederate flag, for example.
Back in 2015, liberals demanded that Confederate flags be taken down because Dylann Roof had a picture of one on his Facebook page. Most Republicans, even Southern Republicans, didn’t care all that much about the Confederate flag. So, in South Carolina for example, Republicans voluntarily removed the Confederate flag.
That’s what liberals wanted, right? So, that was it? No, that was the start of the bait and switch.
The Dukes of Hazzard was taken off the air. Confederate flags were ripped down. There were liberals who said that waving a Confederate flag should be considered a hate crime and Southerners in general were attacked as racist. Then people who protested this stupidity were labeled as bigots.
Next the Left moved on to statues. Liberals demanded that the statues be taken down and began to vandalize them. Now, they are taking it further. In fact, the Left has gotten so hysterical about this subject that ESPN pulled an Asian broadcaster by the name of Robert Lee off of a University of Virginia game because there was a controversy over a Robert E. Lee statue. Now, we begin a fight over taking down the hundreds and hundreds of Confederate monuments across the country. After that (and, yes, this part has already started) the battle will be over renaming buildings and streets. Liberals in Memphis literally dug up the graves of Nathan Forrest and his wife; so even removing the corpses of Confederate soldiers isn’t off the table. But that’s it, right?
Wrong.
On my new Twitter account What Liberals Say: Liberals in their own words, you’ll see that New York is discussing tearing down a statue of Columbus and even Grant’s Tomb. Meanwhile, liberals in Baltimore took a sledgehammer to a Christopher Columbus monument and even Al Sharpton came out againstthe Thomas Jefferson memorial.
So, you may think you’re arguing about the Confederate flag or the statue of Robert E. Lee, but liberals are also really arguing about memorials to Columbus, Grant, Jefferson, Washington, Lincoln, you name it.
Furthermore, not only are you never really arguing about what you think you’re arguing about with a liberal, liberals will paint you as evil for continuing to support something they were backing five minutes ago. How many liberals did you hear demanding gay marriage 20 years ago? Almost none. Then, the second Barack Obama changed his mind about it, everyone who disagreed with gay marriage became a gay-hating homophobe. Did you notice the shocking speed with which we moved from “Liberals would never demand that women share bathrooms with men. That’s crazy….” to, “Anyone who doesn’t support men and women in the same bathroom is transphobic”?
Along similar lines, condemning whatever liberals want you to condemn to try to win favor with them is pointless. Go ahead and support their call to take down Confederate monuments. Do that and they’ll then demand that you oppose any sort of efforts to prevent voter fraud. Agree to that and they’ll insist that you admit that you’re racist by default since you’re white. Go along with that and they’ll say you have to vote for whatever tyrannical socialist they run in 2020 to be a good person. Then finally, if you say that’s a bridge too far, they’ll say, “Ha! Knew it! You’re just another one of those white supremacist Republicans!” There is no win/win to be had. There is no honest debate. There’s only a bait and switch designed to elevate liberals at everyone else’s expense.
Let me also note that I am not against apologizing when you’re wrong. I do it. It’s the right thing to do….except when you’re dealing with liberals. Never apologize to liberals. But, what if you’re 100 percent wrong? Still, don’t apologize. Why? Because liberals don’t view apologies like normal human beings. They view even the most sincere apology from a non-liberal as a club they can use to beat you. If you get in the crosshairs of some mob of social justice warriors, you’re a fool if you think that they will let you be because you were big enough to admit you were wrong. To the contrary, they will demand that you be fired, that you be scorned, that no good person could ever have anything to do with you again and they will point to your own apology as absolute proof that they’re right.
Other times, the liberal bait and switch is more insidious. Remember how it worked with Obamacare?
Democrats promised Obamacare would dramatically cut the cost of health care, that people could keep their doctors and plans if they liked them and everything was going to be wonderful, amazing and better in every way. Of course, none of that turned out to be true. Later, after trying to blame the failures of Obamacare on Republicans, liberals admitted that they had to lie to get the bill passed and said we should all be grateful that they did. Besides, everyone knew they were lying, right? Now that the system that they promised would be the best thing ever is falling to pieces, their solution is single-payer health care, which coincidentally turns out to be what many Republicans said they were trying to do all along. According to Republicans, the idea was to design a plan that would fail so they could try to do a full government takeover. That might sound a bit conspiratorial, except as it turns out, that’s exactly what happened. Going along with a bad liberal idea almost inevitably turns out to be a set-up or justification for an even worse idea down the road.
You want intellectual honesty from liberals? You’re not going to get it. Human decency? Fairness? Logic? A consideration of the societal or economic costs of their ideas? Do you even just want them to care whether the programs they propose work or not? You’re not getting any of those things from the vast majority of liberals. All you’re going to get is an unwavering conviction that everything liberals want to do is good because it’s liberal along with baiting and switching until they get their way.Ms. Handel and her supporters portrayed Mr. Ossoff as far too liberal for a district that, covering somewhat different territory, was represented from 1979 to 1999 by Newt Gingrich, a Republican and former House speaker. They also criticized Mr. Ossoff for his youth and inexperience and assailed him for living outside the district, although he was raised in it.
Mr. Ossoff’s allies, for their part, paid for an advertising campaign deriding Ms. Handel, a former chairwoman of the Fulton County Board of Commissioners, as a profligate spender while in office. And Mr. Ossoff ran television ads that rehashed Ms. Handel’s resignation from the Susan G. Komen Foundation over her belief that the group, which raises money to fight breast cancer, should cut ties with Planned Parenthood.
While Mr. Ossoff’s supporters showed great passion, Republicans were presumed to have a heavy mathematical advantage in the district, which Tom Price, now Mr. Trump’s health secretary, won by 23 points in 2016. And it was unclear throughout the contest how the two campaigns would ultimately be buffeted by tempestuous events in Washington, including Mr. Trump’s handling of the investigation into Russian meddling in the presidential election, the House’s passage of an unpopular health care overhaul bill, and the attack last week on a group of Republican lawmakers by an anti-Trump liberal.
Republicans, fearing the symbolic and tangible repercussions of a loss in Georgia, spared no expense in propping up Ms. Handel’s candidacy. Mr. Trump, Vice President Mike Pence and House Speaker Paul D. Ryan all came to Atlanta to help her raise money, and conservative groups poured $12 million into the runoff, nearly all of it assailing Mr. Ossoff.
A “super PAC” aligned with Mr. Ryan, the Congressional Leadership Fund, spent more than $7 million from April to June.
Still, the $8 million gusher of liberal money that Mr. Ossoff enjoyed leading up to the April vote only intensified during the two-month approach to the runoff. He brought in another $15 million, much of it in small contributions from beyond Georgia’s borders. And national Democratic groups, persuaded that he had a strong shot at winning, rushed in with their own advertisements denouncing Ms. Handel.
Although they received enormous political and financial support from allies in Washington, the two candidates tiptoed around more polarizing national political figures. Ms. Handel rarely uttered Mr. Trump’s name of her own volition, preferring instead to highlight the district’s Republican lineage and warn that Mr. Ossoff would do Ms. Pelosi’s bidding. Only in declaring victory late Tuesday night did Ms. Handel make a point of offering “special thanks to the president of the United States of America,” a line that set off a boisterous chant of Mr. Trump’s name by the crowd.MOSCOW, May 27 (Reuters) - Russian police have taken into care a 5-year-old girl who has been shut up in a flat in the company of cats and dogs for her entire life, police said on Wednesday.
The girl, who lived in the Eastern Siberian city of Chita, could not speak Russian and acted like an dog when police took her into care.
"For five years, the girl was ‘brought up’ by several dogs and cats and had never been outside," a police statement said.
"The unwashed girl was dressed in filthy clothes, had the clear attributes of an animal and jumped at people," it said.
The flat had no heat, water or sewage system.
A police spokeswoman said the girl, known as Natasha, is being monitored by psychologists in an orphanage. Her mother was being questioned but her father has not been found yet.
She appears to be about 2-years-old, though her real age is five, refuses to eat with a spoon and has taken on many of the gestures of the animals with which she lived, police said.
"When carers leave the room, the girl jumps at the door and barks," the police said.
Feral children, the stuff of folklore all over the world, usually exhibit the behaviour of the animals with whom they have had closest contact, a condition known as the Mowgli Syndrome after the fictional child from Rudyard Kipling’s "The Jungle Book" who was raised by wolves in the jungle.
Such children have usually built strong ties with the animals with whom they lived and find the transition to normal human contact extremely traumatic. (Reporting by Guy Faulconbridge, editing by Farah Master)IN THE LAST TWO DAYS OF JULY, the façade fractured. When the electricity inexplicably cut out across 22 Indian states on Blackout Monday, nearly 700 million Indians were left in the dark. It was the largest power outage in world history. Even the throttling noise of generators starting up couldn’t drown out the embarrassment Indians felt as they read the headlines: “Superpower India, RIP” in The Economic Times and “Powerless and Clueless” in TheTimes of India. As much as the media covered the power outage and who was to blame, publications as prominent as The New York Times and Wall Street Journal also stressed a simple fact that normally doesn’t make the news. Even when electricity generation here is in full operation, a third of India’s population has no access to what has become a basic resource in the developed world. By contrast, India’s sprawling Asian neighbour, China, has 99 percent electricity coverage. By Wednesday, India’s power, if not pride restored, the American satirical publication, The Onion, jokingly quoted the Union minister of power saying, “Since restoring our infrastructure to 100 percent capacity following Monday and Tuesday’s blackouts, vast swaths of India are now completely without access to electricity.”
Like America’s Katrina or Japan’s Fukushima, India’s blackout laid bare the fissures in the nation’s foundation. There is the India of BRIC prestige, shining and rising; and then there is Bharat, the other India, which contains the majority of the nation’s population. It exists in rural outposts, as well as in the alleyways of major cities. Though breaks in electric supply are altogether common, the widespread blackout seemed a more dramatic reminder about those who live in an electricity-less Bharat every day and night. In this land, less than half the population has toilets. Three-quarters of households cook over an open fire. Nearly a million citizens, rural and urban, die each year from drinking contaminated water or breathing polluted air. The generators that thrummed across India sheltered some inhabitants from the genuine experience of Bharat, but that other India never ceases to exist.
And one can only stay sheltered for so long. The blackout provided a double revelation. First, it served as a reminder that India’s infrastructure is completely out of sync with the demands being placed upon it by a growing population. In every realm—food production and security, energy generation and distribution, water purification and availability, human wellbeing and physical health—there is a grave imbalance between what is available and what is needed.Illegal street racing is a growing trend, and has been since the advent of the automobile, but in recent years there has been a dramatic increase in the amount of street races. There are several possible causes for this trend such as: a recent installment of several car and car racing movies that may have inspired young drivers to race, young drivers seek new ways to satisfy their hunger for adrenaline, and it’s just another way that teenagers can ‘prove’ themselves to one another, feel good about themselves, and achieve celebrity status.
What exactly is street racing? According to my sources it is any of the following: “… two guys showing up at a stop light and trying to out-race each other." (Armijo) or “an organized race,” (Thompson) where upwards of twenty or thirty people show up to race each other. Oftentimes, the racers will place bets on which car will win, or even on how long until the cops show. Normally, a race isn’t organized and typically goes like this: a driver will pull up to a red light, and rev his engine to another driver to signify that he wants to race. If the other driver accepts his offer, he too will rev his engine. Then, the light turns green and the drivers jam the accelerator pedal. Most of the time, a street race like this is a short one that ends when it is clear who the winner is. These types of races are very dangerous and can cause many accidents. Street racing can be considered a form of aggressive driving.This is a recurring TFM series. Catch up with all installments of Celebrity Composite Photos by visiting the archive.
======= ======= ====== ====== ====== ===== ==== ====== ====== ===== ==== ======= ======= ====== ====== ====== ===== ==== ====== ====== ===== ====
Yesterday, I inducted celebrity chef and UNLV Alpha Tau Omega brother Guy Fieri into the Frat Hall of Fame. There isn’t a more deserving man on this earth, and I am honored to be the one who placed him among the greats.
In my write-up, I dubbed Guy’s fraternity composite photo “the most sought-after composite photo in the country,” and offered five dollars to whoever could send me a picture of it.
Well, folks, someone came through — and they didn’t even charge me.
I have the golden ticket. The great white buffalo has been captured. I have Guy Fieri’s actual composite photo from the 1987-1988 UNLV ATO composite.
Keep in mind before viewing the below photo that Guy Fieri changed his name from “Guy Ferry” in 1995 when he got married to honor his Italian immigrant great-grandfather. The name difference is not a mistake, and this photo is not a fake. It’s the real deal.
Feast your eyes.
All of my questions have been answered. I wondered for so long if he’d have the bleach blonde hair, earrings, the sweet goatee. It turns out he has none of that — just a sweet fucking mullet. Some people might say that’s a “business in the front, party in the back” look, but I beg to disagree. Guy Fieri’s all party. If Guy wasn’t party in the front, as well as the back, could he do this?
No, and I’m positive that there are a lot of lovely, licked ladies out there who can personally attest to that fact.
Apparently being a member of UNLV’s ATO chapter is a family thing for the Ferry-Fieri clan — Guy’s brother and his son, Hunter, are rumored to be UNLV ATOs as well.
My life has been made..
Do you have any celebrity composite photos from your chapter or another chapter on campus? How about just plain ol’ hilarious composite photos from normal brothers? Email both to jared@totalfratmove.comPragmatic Pep proving doubters wrong by adapting to Premier League
The Catalan has been accused of putting performances above results but he showed once again on Saturday that he can and will adapt to English football
COMMENT
have enough star quality to take the by storm this season but at on Saturday Pep Guardiola showed his critics that he is as pragmatic as they come.
The charge against the Catalan coach - brought not only by sections of the media but by a significant number of match-going City fans - is that he is too attacking; that he refuses to adapt to English football. He doesn't even coach tackles, after all.
City v Everton over 3.5 goals 13/10
It is said that the most successful Premier League managers - like Jose Mourinho and, as last season progressed, Antonio Conte - would prioritise defence when needed, and grind out results in the big games. And often in the small games.
"I think the one thing where Mourinho gets a head start, he’s a very pragmatic manager, he wants to win games, he doesn’t really care how," Frank Lampard, one of the more reasonable television pundits, said in April.
Therefore, it only made things worse for Guardiola when he blamed his forwards, rather than the defence, when City were breached and beaten. This is a man, they say, who does not pay sufficient attention to the uglier side of the game.
Now, he has the finest squad in the country at his disposal, and it would be no surprise if City put six or seven past teams this season.
In Leroy Sane, Raheem Sterling and Gabriel Jesus, who showed so much promise towards the end of last season, City have a blistering attacking trio capable of wreaking havoc for years to come. And let's not forget Sergio Aguero, either.
The forwards will be supplied not just by Kevin De Bruyne and David Silva, but by Bernardo Silva, who City did well to sign so early. Had they been chasing him now, could probably demand close to €100m for the classy playmaker.
However, Guardiola has shown already that he will not just cram as many forwards into the line-up as possible. Not unless the time is right, anyway.
Guardiola actually had a bigger squad last season but by replacing the deadwood with quality options, he will probably have more selection headaches than he's ever had before.
"Our midfield positions are ‘phwoar!’ Really good," he said on Saturday. Not that he is concerned about the effects of his rotations: "They will all be involved. After that, it depends on them and if they accept my decision or not. If they don’t accept it, it will be their problem not mine."
Official: Barca sign Paulinho for €40m
There were certainly a few quality players left on the bench at the Amex Stadium at the weekend. Guardiola, just like Mourinho, Conte, and indeed every other coach on the planet, picked a team that would win the match, not one that would rack up a cricket score.
"We would like to be a little faster in the last metres," Guardiola lamented after the 2-0 win, "but with the players we had on the pitch, it was even more complicated."
Was the Catalan bemoaning his own selection? Pretty much: "When you have Leroy, when you have especially Raz, even Bernardo Silva, they are guys who are more dynamic than we had on the pitch today."
Why not pick them, then? Because the other forwards were better suited to picking apart a massed defence, while five defenders provided plenty of cover.
The basic principles will be the same whether it's 3-5-2, 4-3-3 or whatever else, but by reverting to the "three-at-the-back" set-up which had fans wincing in mid-winter, Guardiola gave City a solid foundation.
"We were stable," Guardiola said after. "We conceded just one option after one corner and after that, nothing happened
"We are on a good path, still there is a lot to do, but it is important for the goalkeeper, for the defenders, for the way we want to play, [to say] ‘Oh guys, we didn’t concede chances. No scoring chances,’ and that’s good for our future."
Guardiola, surely to the surprise of many, had prioritised the result. The game was not always a work of art, but City were in complete control throughout.
It should be no surprise that Guardiola set out to take control of the game, and ordinarily a manager selecting a team capable of beating the opposition should not be worthy of special note, but the former boss' pragmatism has been ignored so often during his time in.
There is no question that his debut campaign was disappointing, but too often his attempts to get to grips with the Premier League were overlooked.
Ronaldo facing 12-match ban for ref shove
After all, the decision to ditch the 3-5-2 in the first place was largely ignored. Guardiola switched to a traditional back four for 30 of City's 31 games after defeat at Leicester in December, but still the charge was that he refused to adapt.
Article continues below
There was plenty of attention, however, when City went out of the at Monaco, ironically on the one occasion when Guardiola's players so noticeably went against what he had instructed.
If Guardiola is to take City to the dizzying heights many expected when he arrived last summer, he will have to convince his young squad to stick to the game plan when the stakes are highest.
Those challenges lay further down the line but, for now, Guardiola's doubters should realise that he is savvy enough to go for substance over style.PITTSBURGH -- The player who dressed next to Joey Porter in the Steelers’ locker room and is still good friends with him doesn’t just predict success for Porter in coaching.
Larry Foote sees Porter going all the way to the top if he chooses to make a career out of coaching.
“I think he’s going to be a head coach in this league one day,” Foote told ESPN.com earlier this week. “I think he has that ‘it’ factor to be a head coach if he stays the course. He has an enthusiasm and excitement that you can’t teach, you can’t develop, you’ve just got to be born with it and I’m excited. Hopefully he grows from the coaching side, X's and O's, organization and stuff like that. But shoot, he’s on the fast track because he can lead men, he can get men to run through a wall.”
Porter has returned to Pittsburgh to do that and learn his new trade as a Steelers defensive assistant. Porter, who joined coach Mike Tomlin’s staff in February, has already shown the same kind of enthusiasm for coaching as he did for playing.
“He brings it every day like he’s a player and guys respect that," said Steelers outside linebacker Jarvis Jones, who has become one of Porter's proteges. "When the linebackers hit the field you can see the energy and positivity and that’s what we need and that’s how we’re going to continue to get better.”
That comes as no surprise to Foote, who was teammates with Porter from 2002-06.
Foote signed with Arizona in March, and he has already heard plenty about Porter there. He said Cardinals wide receiver Larry Fitzgerald told him that Porter is the best leader he has ever seen.
Porter spent two seasons with the Cardinals before retiring in 2012.
Fitzgerald’s praise only reaffirmed to Foote that Porter’s contributions in Pittsburgh transcend his 60 sacks in seven seasons, which rank fifth on the organization’s all-time list.
“Through my time in Pittsburgh there was no better leader,” said Foote, who played for the Steelers from 2002-08 and 2010-13. “He wasn’t on that second Super Bowl team [in 2008] but his imprint was still on that team and it still lives in that locker room a little bit.
“He is selfless, putting his team first and that just sets the tone for the team and the way he played week in and week out. He was an established Pro Bowl guy and he was hungry every week. He loved the game.”
Porter has transferred that love to coaching, and his enthusiasm as well as his expertise at playing outside linebacker and rushing the passer should only help players like Jones and Jason Worilds.
“That’s the thing about Joey, he has one speed,” Foote said. “The game is changing. You need coaches coming in with that energy. A lot of players can feed off the coaches’ energy and what a perfect guy to do it.”Tom Steyer.
Billionaire Democrat Tom Steyer, a liberal megadonor who pumped $91 million into the bank accounts of Democratic candidates in 2016 alone, is launching a campaign to impeach President Trump.
The first TV spot, which makes the case for “impeaching and removing a dangerous president,” and implores “elected officials to take a stand on impeachment,” was uploaded to YouTube Thursday.
At the end of the 60-second spot, which will be plastered on both TV and social media, Steyer points people to NeedtoImpeach.com, where he writes that “Congress has impeached past presidents for far less” and asks people to sign a petition.
A hedge funder with a soft spot for environmental causes, Steyer has already stipulated that Democrats who want his money in 2018 will need to sign on to the effort to impeach Trump. And while he doesn’t expect to have trouble getting the signatures of rank-and-file Democrats — a recent poll found that nearly 70 percent want Trump removed from office — finding politicians willing to join the effort doesn’t look to be as easy.ESD - PlayStation Network - PlayStation Plus 12 maanden (NL)
Deze code geeft je recht op 12 maanden PlayStation Plus.
Belangrijke tips bij het inlossen van een PlayStation Plus abonnement lees je onderaan.
PlayStation Plus is een abonnementsservice die een uitbreiding vormt op je bestaande, gratis Sony Entertainment Network account en je helpt het maximale uit je PS4 te halen. Neem een abonnement op PlayStation Plus en profiteer meteen van al deze mogelijkheden:
PS4 online multiplayer voor de grootste en beste games
Automatisch downloaden van gamepatches
Online opslag voor gamesaves
Download twee door Sony geselecteerde games per maand zonder extra kosten
Een heel jaar lang exclusieve kortingen in de PlayStation Store
Regelmatig online game-evenementen alleen voor PS Plus-leden
All PlayStation Network codes only work in the Dutch PlayStation Store. If you do not own a PlayStation account registered on an address in the Netherlands, these codes will not work.
Opgelet: Content en services van PlayStation Plus variëren per leeftijd van de abonnee. Ook eigenaars van sub-accounts kunnen zich aanmelden voor PlayStation Plus. Wij adviseren om PlayStation Plus altijd te koppelen aan het hoofdaccount. Omdat sub-accounts specifiek bedoeld zijn voor jongere Sony Entertainment Network-gebruikers, ontzegt Sony gebruikers van sub-accounts toegang tot leeftijdsgebonden materiaal dat een hogere leeftijdsclassificatie heeft dan de leeftijd van de eigenaar van het sub-account. Deze leeftijdslimiet kan niet worden omzeild en alleen leden van 18 jaar of ouder hebben toegang tot alle leeftijdsgebonden PlayStation Plus-content.
Gebruikers moeten 7 jaar of ouder zijn en voor gebruikers onder de 18 jaar is goedkeuring door een ouder/voogd vereist.About eight years ago, ViaSat Chief Executive Mark Dankberg bet the company he co-founded on satellite broadband, eventually spending $1 billion to transform a technology considered barely better than dial-up into a service that smoothly streams YouTube video.
At the time, the space industry didn’t believe ViaSat could build a satellite with more capacity than all the other Internet satellites in orbit combined.
And even if it did, there wasn’t enough demand to justify the cost of the satellite and distribution network needed to sell satellite Internet service which, while better, still fell short of cable and many telephone company alternatives.
Today ViaSat-1, which launched in 2011, is full with 700,000 Internet subscribers. In addition, the satellite powers in-flight Wi-Fi on more than 500 commercial aircraft from JetBlue, American Airlines, United Airlines and Virgin America, delivering video streaming speeds to each seat. ViaSat-1 also provides in-flight Wi-Fi to Air Force One and other government VIP aircraft.
The uptake for ViaSat-1 affirmed Dankberg’s belief in satellite broadband. So the company has doubled down, and then some. It plans to launch ViaSat-2 in late March/early April. The satellite will blast off from French Guiana on an Ariane 5 rocket.
At around 300 gigabits per second capacity, the new satellite has about twice the bandwidth of ViaSat-1. The added horsepower will enable faster speeds and bulked up monthly data allowances so subscribers can watch more online video.
“There are more and more over the top services – DirecTV Now, HBO Now,” said Dankberg in an interview. “There is just an enormous demand for bandwidth.”
The new satellite also will expand coverage beyond North America and into Mexico, Central America and the Caribbean, parts of South America and over the Atlantic Ocean.
ViaSat-2 represents the latest test to Dankberg’s strategy of engineering satellites to maximize speed and economical bandwidth in hopes of mitigating the Achilles heel of satellite Internet – costly ground equipment/installation, data usage caps and latency.
“We are not perfect but we are markedly better than (satellite Internet) used to be,” said Dankberg. “With ViaSat-2, we will be a lot better than ViaSat-1.”
If ViaSat gets it right, the market for satellite Internet might expand beyond its traditional niche of farms and mountain cabins.
“The better we can make our service, the bigger our market,” said Dankberg. “But that doesn’t mean we are going after people who have Google Fiber. What we are trying to do is go after a bigger segment of people who don’t have those speeds.”
ViaSat ViaSat-1 undergoing |
scientific results that conflict with a literal interpretation of the Bible must be rejected. Both groups have lengthy pages of “technical documents” where they try to twist science to match a literal interpretation of the Bible, and both groups claim that anyone who uses science to interpret the Bible has compromised and given into man’s wisdom, which is where things get interesting. The geocentrists claim that groups like Answers in Genesis have compromised their faith by accepting the scientific interpretation of Joshua. All of those claims that creationists make about the dangers of theistic evolution are also claims that geocentrists make about the dangers of heliocentrism. Meanwhile, the creationists claim that the geocentrists are wrong to try to interpret Joshua literally, and they find it absurd to think that accepting heliocentrism somehow compromises their faith, even though they use identical arguments against theistic evolutionists. The genocentrists may be nuts, but at least they are logically consistent, which is more than I can say for the creationists.
To summarize, my point in all of this is that if you are a Christian who accepts that the earth moves around, then you have already accepted that science can be used to interpret the Bible. Therefore, you should carefully consider the evidence for evolution rather than blindly writing it off. At least according to legend, Galileo recounted a frustrating tale where he took one of his opponents onto a roof at night and offered him a telescope so that he could see the evidence for heliocentrism with his own eyes, but this man was so persuaded by his religious convictions that he refused to even look through the telescope. Today, we laugh at that man’s foolishness, but that is no different from what most creationists do. Most of them refuse to look at the evidence for evolution and groups like Answers in Genesis openly admit that they are starting with the assumption that the earth is young and then trying to make the data fit that assumption (which is not how science works). So, to any creationists reading this, please actually consider the scientific evidence. Accepting evolution does not require you to reject your faith. Just as Galileo interpreted Joshua figuratively in light of the science of heliocentrism, you can interpret Genesis figuratively in light of the science of evolution. Insisting that you cannot use science to interpret the Genesis is irrational and logically inconsistent.
“I do not feel obliged to believe that the same God who has endowed us with senses, reason, and intellect has intended us to forgo their use and by some other means to give us knowledge which we can attain by them.” – Galileo Galilei
AdvertisementsThings are happening down in Lake Havasu. Havasu Smash has been going at it with their weekly tournaments for over a year now and the top dogs have mostly remained the same. Over 50 weekly tournaments have happened and until recently, there’s only been one player to win those tournaments. Daniels. Well now, things might be changing. Other players are now challenging him for the throne.
In 2009, 3 of the leaders of what would today become Havasu Smash lined up for first period freshman PE Class. Daniels, Dusttin and Aces all met in that first class of their high school years. All of which were there when the Nintendo 64 was brought out of the closet in 2014. They all played on an HD TV for a year before they discovered the competitive scene. At the start of 2015 Havasu Smash as we know it, was born.
Dusttin, friends with Cody Daniels, became one of the top players in Havasu as a Fox player. Back in 2015, Dusttin’s Fox quickly became king in the Havasu community. Daniels and Dusttin would battle for supremacy with Green and Purple Foxes on the HD TV. As more players became involved in the scene, Dusttin took a short hiatus but he then returned stronger. He began teaming with his long time friend Daniels at tournaments such as ODS I and Snosa. Following ODS I and Genesis 3, Havasu started their weekly tournaments and began the local competitive drive Dusttin and other players needed to get better.
After the weeklies started, the birth of the Power Rankings were soon to follow. The top 4 on the list consisted of Daniels, Dusttin, Aces and SonicFuzz. Daniels and Dusttin battled it out in Fox dittos for many games of their sets in the early days of the weeklies. Until around Havasu Smash 10, when Dusttin picked up and quickly learned the way of the Rat, Pikachu. Daniels believed Dusttin started going Pikachu in their matches, instead of their tradition of going Fox dittos week after week, because he now believed he had what it took to take Daniels down. Dusttin, Aces and Sonicfuzz battled it out for their spots in the top 4. Many tournaments and months had passed and nobody had yet taken a set off of Daniels. Until July 16, 2016. Havasu Smash 19 was going as expected when Dusttin pulled out Pika to face Daniels in winners finals. He made history upsetting Daniels 3-2 and advancing to Grand Finals where he fell just short of winning the whole tournament. Dusttin made history by taking the first set, but was not satisfied as he wanted to be the one to take the first tournament. Sonicfuzz followed by making his mark on history by taking his first set off of Daniels. It seemed that Daniels was getting closer than ever to losing his first tournament. Come Havasu Smash 28, the day had come when Dusttin and Daniels battled it out for 3 sets before Dusttin won and made a lasting impression on Havasu Smash. To this day Dusttin has been the only one to take a tournament off of Daniels. He’s taken a total of two tournaments off of him with more than 10 sets as well. The only other player to take a set of Daniels is Sonicfuzz.
Dusttin has attended multiple majors including both ODSs, Snosa and Genesis 4. He teamed with Stranded at ODS 2 and they made a run to 9th place before being eliminated by team CodyKeroppi. Dusttin has slowly been climbing his way up through the ranks of the Smash Bros. community and was on the cusp of making bracket at Genesis 4 and Snosa. He’s leveled up in the months since Genesis 4. We expect a great showing when he and the Havasu scene travel out to Snosa 3 on June 16. Daniels and Dusttin will once again team at Snosa 3. Tune in to the Super Smash Bros 64 League Twitch to see how Dusttin and the Havasu Smash Scene perform at Snosa 3.
AdvertisementsPublic Space is CBC Calgary's online portal for opinion. Feel free to add your thoughts below the story, but please keep the comments respectful.
Dave Brand wrote a blog post about the tragedy this week at the Bott family farm near Withrow, Alta. He has agreed to allow CBC Calgary to use his blog post titled A Loss Beyond Words.
On the night of Tuesday, Oct. 13, our quiet little agricultural community — and the western Canadian agricultural community as a whole — was rocked by an accident that resulted in the deaths of Catie, Dara and Jana Bott. The sisters were taken from this earth far too young. I'm about to type words that shouldn't need to be typed, but no parent should ever have to bury their child — ever.
So why am I compelled to write this piece? For one, as a method of grieving. You see, these girls were my neighbours; the daughters of close friends. The girls grew up on my farm too, along with the farms of countless other neighbours and relatives that dot the landscape and make up the close-knit fabric of our community.
This tragedy is beyond words for those impacted by it. We will never heal fully and we will never be the same. It's only by God's grace that we can find the hope in the outcome of Tuesday night's events.
Keyboard warriors quick to post comments
Which leads me to my second reason for penning (does anyone even pen anything anymore?!) this piece: tragedies like this could happen to any of us — and all too often on farms throughout North America they do. Within hours of the accident occurring, and mere minutes of it being reported by news outlets on social media, I grew weary of the keyboard warriors deriding the parents for lack of supervision or an implied lack of education of the dangers of farming.
Give your head a shake. These kids grew up on the farm. They likely know more about farming and the inherent perils and risks than most adults do. Given that the vast majority of the population now lives in urban areas, I don't doubt this claim for an instant.
The point of an accident however, is that it can't necessarily be foreseen, or even prevented. Short of not getting out of bed in the morning, there aren't very many ways to eliminate risk of injury or death on the farm. However, there are always ways to mitigate risk just as there are always human moments that occur.
'We all did stuff like that as kids'
A friend of mine texted me saying how terrible the tragedy was. I responded by how closely hit we were and a conversation ensued.
Her comment? "It could have been any of us. We all did stuff like that as kids."
I want you to reflect on that for a moment.
People all over the world are telling their kids to get outside and play more, so where do you think farm kids have to go when they go outside to play? - Dave Brand
It's a scene that plays out on farms across the continent. Have you ever tried telling a child they can't go for a ride with dad on the family tractor-combine-swather-grain cart-grain truck, etc., or that they can't run through the corn field until they get lost or that they can't enter that pen full of cows?
People all over the world are telling their kids to get outside and play more, so where do you think farm kids have to go when they go outside to play? It is incumbent upon us as farm parents to teach our children the dangers of the activities they participate in. It's our role to allow them to grow and make decisions for their own based upon what we teach them.
Ultimately, accidents happen
How many adults know that texting and driving is dangerous? How many still do it? Exactly. Even as adults we can't resist a behaviour even though we know it poses a risk to our own personal safety or that of others.
Do we really expect children to act any differently despite what we teach them or what they know? Children are children, after all. Tragedy is tragedy and accidents are accidents.
No family should have to bear the burden of losing their child, regardless of how it occurs, but many do and many persevere. Farm families are no different. We persevere through hardship, through loss, through pain and through grief. We support one another in good times and in bad, and when the absolutely unthinkable occurs, as it did on that cool October evening.
So if you have children and you're reading this, give them a hug. Hold them tight. Teach them what you know but grant them the freedom to explore the world with the knowledge that you are empowering them. Don't strip them of their natural curiosity or their inclination to explore and push boundaries. Don't coddle or helicopter parent them or raise them in a bubble.
Children must be free to explore
Some of the greatest talents in the world came from a childhood of exploration and encouragement, so don't deprive your children of that opportunity. At the same time, remain vigilant. Teach them consequences. Teach them about hazards. Train and equip them with the resources (mental and physical) to be prepared. Be their mentor, confidante and biggest supporter.
The time we have with them is precious — remember that, cherish that and be grateful for every moment — and despite all of our best intentions, all of our knowledge transfer, all of our urges to save our children from the world, we have to let them go out into it and to experience it. It's as much our role as parents as it is theirs as children.
Loss is never easy to deal with and you can't strike deals with loss either. Our community will grieve for a very, very long time. The girls will forever be remembered as bright, inquisitive, energetic young souls with a love for exploring and a passion for the outdoors. Their family will never be the same; a void will never be filled.
Oct. 13, 2015, is a day that will forever change our landscape. It is the day we all tragically and inexplicably lost neighbours, daughters, sisters, nieces, granddaughters, cousins and friends. Prayers are welcome. Positive thoughts are encouraged. Mourning is expected.
We will endure
We are a large farming family — made up of farming families joining together to comprise one grander unit. Whether related by blood, or geography, or simply the passion for working the land, we are family. And even when we cannot find the words to caption our loss or express our grief, we will remain buoyed by the knowledge that we are a part of that family and a part of something much larger than us all.
A GoFundMe page has been set up to help the family with expenses and loss of income that may be incurred during their recovery process. Please donate.
You can submit your ideas for the next Public Space by emailing us at publicspace@cbc.ca.
CBC Calgary will contact those who submit ideas that are being considered for publishing online. Submissions can no more than 800 words. The pieces that are posted represent the views of the author, not of the CBC.DP Mitch Martinez has been shooting 4K for quite some time, and he's made tons of clips free to download.
He's been shooting on cameras like the RED EPIC DRAGON, RED EPIC MX, and RED ONE MX, and with so many extra 4K clips, he decided to release them for free online as stock footage, even for commercial projects. If it's a commercial project, he just asks that you fill out a release form. Here's more on this, thanks to Nino over at cinema5D:
The overall goal is to help the film community by sharing my footage with the world. It evolved really organically – starting with just two clips of fire that I uploaded to my website in January 2013 and shared with my Facebook friends. After time, Google search results led more and more people to my website so I needed to develop official license agreements due to the volume of clips and number of users. Originally, each release form I issued was created manually in Microsoft Word to create the pdf, so it wasn’t long before I needed software development to help generate approved release forms for users. A year ago, it would take me five or six minutes to issue one license agreement manually; now I can approve a license agreement and send it to the user in a matter of seconds.
All of the clips are available for free in the MP4 file format, but if you want higher quality ProRes, original R3D RAW files, or DPX files (or anything else), those won't be free. Some of the individual ProRes files are $45 for 4K or $30 for 1080p, but there are discounts for larger bundles, and he will also make custom bundles for you depending on what you need. Check out some examples of the footage he has to offer:
Here are the categories to choose from when selecting clips:
And if you're wondering, yes his footage has been used in major commercial projects. As PetaPixel pointed out, his footage has appeared in both Sin City: A Dame to Kill For and in The Hunger Games: Mockingjay Part I. The first film used a fireworks clip from Mitch and the second used clouds and tall weeds, as well as the fireball at the end:
To see what Mitch has to offer, or to download some clips, head on over to his site here.by
On January 8, in his sparsely-furnished New York City office, the Syrian Arab Republic Ambassador and Permanent Representative to the United Nations, Dr. Bashar al-Ja’afari, sat down with for an interview. The veteran diplomat, who has held his position at the UN since 2006, and lives restricted to a 25-mile radius of New York City, has much more to say than the half hour allowed. Defiant as always, he discussed the challenges he faces at the UN, explained why he thinks the organization has lost its way, and censured Western states and media for their hostility toward the Syrian government.
First, however, we discussed the exhibition of Aleppo-based Syrian photographer Hagop Vanesian, titled “My Homeland,” which opened the same day at the United Nations headquarters.
Eva Bartlett: How did this exhibition come about?
Ambassador al-Ja’afari: This is the first breakthrough we’ve had at the level of the United Nations since the beginning of what is commonly called “the Syrian crisis.” For four years, I have been trying very hard to do something inside the UN. Every time we attempted to do something, we were confronted by a huge amount of bureaucracy, excuses, apologies (sometimes), denial of our rights (sometimes), negligence, etc.
I’m very glad that we finally succeeded in organizing this exhibition — which doesn’t address the whole, dramatic picture of the Syrian crisis, but only focuses on what happened to and in Aleppo, the second-largest city in Syria, after the capital, Damascus. It’s about Syria, it’s about the Syrian people. It’s not about the Syrian government or the Syrian opposition or the Syrian coalition thugs or Da’esh (ISIS). It’s about Syria, about what happened in Aleppo, through undeniable photos.
The exhibition is the work of a highly-professional Syrian photographer of Armenian origin, who is himself a citizen of Aleppo. He is an eyewitness to the terrorist rampage that hit this beautiful city, Aleppo, which has always been a cradle of civilization. He is suffering greatly. He lost his home, his family. He will show only 26 photos, but he has an archive of thousands of photos. He has complete archives of Aleppo, before and after, building by building, how it was before and how it became.
EB: Why do you think that the UN has allowed this exhibition now? You mentioned you’d wanted to sponsor exhibitions in the past but hadn’t been allowed.
Ambassador al-Ja’afari: The Saudi mission, the French mission, the Danish mission, the British mission, the German mission… they have countered Syrian government activities in the UN. Every time we complained about it they said, “You can do the same.” Today we said, “We have an exhibition.” They were cornered. They couldn’t say no (chuckles), because they kept telling me “You can do the same.” We are not attacking Germany or France or others, we are showing the reality in our country.
EB: An Associated Press article that has been running in the mainstream papers slammed this exhibit; citing an official in the opposition Syrian National Coalition calling the photographer a “propagandist.”
Ambassador al-Ja’afari: This is what they are good at. They don’t look at the picture in its entirety, in its comprehensiveness. They don’t address what the photographs are talking about objectively. They have prejudices, wrong preconceived ideas about what’s taking place in Syria. They start with wrong ideas and end with wrong ideas. It’s really unfortunate, because here we are not talking about just some gallery in New York. We are talking about the United Nations headquarters!
We are speaking the language of the UN: territorial integrity of states, political independence of states, sovereignty of states, equal membership of states. All these sacrosanct terms are enshrined in the Charter of the United Nations. We are not starting from scratch or re-inventing new language. We are in full harmony with the UN language and the UN provisions of the Charter.
Others are not, because they don’t belong to the UN world. They [the media] are, of course, against the Syrian government. They are against anything that might explain positively, or objectively speaking [the Syrian crisis], to the so-called “international community” — I don’t believe in this word. They have been falsifying facts, spreading rumours, making propaganda against the Syrian government for years. And they are living off this criticism, it has become a source of their livelihood, their own welfare. The more you criticize the Syrian government, the more money you get from the petrodollar countries, the more visas you get from Western world, the more you go to five-star hotels, the more you appear on TV screens as dignitaries of the Syrian people, as representatives — exclusive representatives — of the Syrian people.
Anybody who opposes this exhibition belongs to a political current opposing the truth. Any honest, objective Syrian who loves his homeland, who says he feels sick because of what is going on in Syria, should have a great interest in showing what is going on in Syria. All Syrians should push for organizing more exhibitions, not only at the United Nations but all over the world, to explain what Da’esh and al-Nusra Front and the other terrorist groups sponsored by Saudi Arabia, Qatar, Turkey, are doing. The Turkish intelligence is deeply involved in sponsoring Da’esh, and in stealing our plants and factories.
EB: You are the representative of the Syrian Arab Republic at the United Nations, and Syria is an important subject in the news. Are you asked to appear on major TV channels?
Ambassador al-Ja’afari: Mainly, I address the media at the UN, at the stakeout, which is the podium for diplomats, for ambassadors. I also go on TV from time to time. But to be honest, when they record interviews, I speak for 20 minutes, then they show only 20 seconds, 10 seconds, whatever fits their agenda. You saw what happened with Anderson Cooper, Christiane Amanpour, and others. They always try to manipulate the facts, and they do their best to deviate from the direction of the conversation into little, negative, details, so that the audience will have a negative idea of what I am saying. Simultaneously, as I am speaking, they show a negative video clip on what’s going on in Syria, accusing the government of doing so and so. Which means that they are indirectly telling viewers that this ambassador is not telling the truth. You see how they manipulate?
Christiane Amanpour was lying when she was interviewing me on the so-called chemical weapons. She was lying, not telling the truth at all! This is why I told her, “You know what? You also may be a weapon of mass destruction, because you are poisoning public opinion and deviating from the main points I’m making.”
EB: You are now under a 25-mile travel ban, how did they justify imposing this restriction on you?
Ambassador al-Ja’afari: Yes. They didn’t give me any reason, they didn’t explain anything. They just notified me that from now on, you won’t be able to go beyond 25 miles [of New York City’s Columbus Circle]. It’s an American sovereign decision. I’m an ambassador to the United Nations, not to the United States, so maybe they are taking advantage of that nuance. Of course, it is not justifiable. I have the right to move according to the Vienna Diplomatic Convention. But if they want it this way, let it be.
EB: Prior to this, had you been traveling in the US or elsewhere?
Ambassador al-Ja’afari: Yes. Maybe my activism caused me this trouble.
EB: Your activism consisted of meeting with members of the Syrian-American community?
Ambassador al-Ja’afari: Yes, meeting with them, explaining to them what’s going on in Syria. They needed information, they needed to be briefed about what’s going on in their homeland. They are all extremely worried, they have families there.
EB: Speaking of traveling, recently, there were reports that you launched an official complaint at the UN regarding US Senator John McCain and other heads of states traveling illegally to Syria and meeting with anti-government fighters.
Ambassador al-Ja’afari: Yes, this is what transpired in the media. I didn’t ask to circulate the letter, I wanted it to be shared only by the members of the Security Council, but it was somehow leaked. But I would like to confirm that, yes, I sent a letter drawing the kind attention of the secretary-general and the members of the Security Council to this flagrant and blatant interference in domestic affairs, this violation of our sovereignty, the illegal crossing of our borders. Whenever one of those who cross illegally into Syria gets killed by the terrorists, then the Syrian government is blamed for not protecting him, although they entered Syria illegally. Many journalists have been killed, unfortunately. It is unfortunate, but they are responsible for their own fate. They didn’t enter Syria via the Syrian government. We would have protected them. We would have shown them where to go and where not to go. But they had bad intentions. So, many of them got killed, beheaded, kidnapped.
So, indeed, I forwarded this letter with some specific names, even though there are thousands, but we gave just some names. John McCain, an American senator, goes and meets with Da’esh (ISIS) in Aleppo. In one picture, he was with a man from ISIS. And the other “moderate” criminals. The American weapons delivered to them ended up in the hands of al-Nusra Front and Da’esh. All these people are “moderate,” as you know. Bernard Kouchner, the former French Foreign Minister, entered Syria illegally, too. Can you imagine that? A senator from the USA, a former minister from France, Turkish intelligence… and then they tell you that, “you know what, we are extremely worried about the spread of terrorism.”
EB: In UN sessions, your microphone has repeatedly had suddenly “technical difficulties” and been cut, or the video feed has had sudden inexplicable “technical difficulties”…
Ambassador al-Ja’afari: Many times, many times. I have been the only Ambassador at the United Nations since 1945 whose speeches were cut off, or not recorded at all. It has never happened otherwise in UN meetings. Never. Two of my speeches were not recorded. One, under the Chairmanship of the former Qatari ambassador… of course, Qatar. But what adds insult to injury was that Ban Ki-moon himself was at sitting at the podium, and he supported the move taken by the President of the General Assembly. That triggered a very negative reaction from many ambassadors who intervened. The biased position of the Secretary-General and the President of the General Assembly was obvious from the very first days, thanks to these wrongdoings.
This has been a phenomenon related exclusively to me. Let me elaborate. Every time I speak, for instance, at the Security Council, they choose a bad interpreter who is unable to fully interpret what I am saying. So the people do not get my message. They do it on purpose. One day, I was invited to address the Security Council. I saw one of the Security Council staff members addressing the interpreters. He gave them a hand signal: change. I saw it with my own eyes. So they changed the good interpreter with a poor one, thus ensuring that my political message does not transpire fully.
They do the same things in the General Assembly. The British ambassador cut me off one time while I was speaking. He said “you have exceeded four minutes.” I said, “Who gave you the right to fix four minutes? I am a member of a concerned party, and I have the right to explain.” To justify his wrongdoing, he also cut off the Iraqi ambassador after me. We were the only two ambassadors speaking at that session, and it was on Syria and Iraq. The issue was on terrorism in Syria and Iraq, and he cut off both of us after four minutes!
The UN has lost its credibility. The UN has lost a lot of the principles of its founding fathers. The UN of today has nothing to do with the UN of the Charter. This is why everybody has forgotten about the Charter; people do not speak of the Charter. They don’t speak about sovereignty, territorial integrity, political independence, equality among members. Now they speak about the rule of law, human rights, the environment — because this is very dear to the heart of the private sector: money — partnerships. Now the Secretary-General is focused on partnerships, because he wants to privatize the United Nations.
The budget of peacekeeping operations is three times higher than the regular budget! Rather than extinguishing the conflicts, and decreasing the number of peacekeeping operations, we have increased the peace-keeping operations. We have right now 36 special political missions, aside from 15 peacekeeping operations. Twenty years ago, we didn’t have any special political missions. This is a new phenomenon. By the way, the special political missions and the peace-keeping operations are not in the Charter. These are some of the ways they are deviating from the Charter itself. Together they consume $7.9 billion per year. And they are solving nothing.
When one of the peacekeeping operations, such as the United Nations Disengagement Observer Force Zone (UNDOF) on the Syrian occupied Golan makes mistakes, they hide it, they don’t share the information with the Security Council. For instance, Israel is dealing with Jabhat al-Nusra (the Nusra Front) right now in the Golan, helping the terrorists and treating their wounded in Israeli hospitals. Israeli TV shows Netanyahu visiting them. Still, the report of the secretary-general denies this fact, and the report of the Secretary-General does not address this fact, does not acknowledge that there is cooperation between Israel and the terrorists in the Golan.
EB: The media accuses President al-Assad of being responsible for Da’esh, and other terrorists. Who do you blame for the proliferation of terrorists in Syria?
Ambassador al-Ja’afari: I’m sure you’re aware of the alarming reports of Da’esh coming from Camp Bucca in Iraq, the famous American prison in Iraq. Al-Baghdadi, the caliph of Da’esh, was at Bucca. He was released by the Americans, not by the Syrian president. The men who committed the massacre in Paris, they were fighting in Syria and came back to France. France allowed them to go to Syria, where they killed scores of people, and in Iraq. Then they came back, normally, and the French police let them in. The same terrorists. They are good when they kill Syrians, and they are bad when they kill the French.
In 2012, Laurent Fabius, the French minister of foreign affairs, said himself that the jihadists — he didn’t call them terrorists then — were doing well. The French minister! A permanent member of the Security Council in charge of maintaining international peace and security. He described their dirty actions by saying that they are doing well. The French minister of the interior, who is now the prime minister of France — the one who was crying over the bodies of the people killed in Paris — what did he say? At that time, the French ministers were competing to see who could go furthest in their animosity towards President al-Assad. “He should step down; he should go; he should resign.” It was à la mode then. The French minister of the interior said at the time, “I cannot do anything to prevent and stop French jihadists from going to make jihad in Syria.” He cannot, as minister of the interior, stop the terrorists coming from France from going to Syria to kill Syrians! Through Turkey, of course. Why? Because freedom of speech, freedom of what… freedom of lies. He “cannot stop them.”
Now, he can. Now, he knows the outcome of what he did. We warned him, in our statements: don’t play with the terrorists, they will come back to you. They thought they were big powers and exempt, immune against this terrorist disease.
It is said publicly today that the Americans with the Turks will start training the terrorists in Turkey in spring. It has become public, no shame whatsoever. The Jordanians are doing the same, in secret camps in the northern part of Jordan, run by the French and the British and the Americans. The same thing in Saudi Arabia. The same thing in Doha and Qatar. This is scandalous behaviour.
That’s why I say, there’s no United Nations anymore, it’s over. Multilateral diplomacy is not working, it’s being manipulated by the powerful. This is why they want to privatize the United Nations, so that the influential donors can control the decision-making mechanisms, without giving a damn about the provisions of the Charter.
We are member states, and we are here based on this famous concept and principle of equal sovereignty. All that has disappeared, it’s about business now. Can you believe that Saudi Arabia is sponsoring the United Nations Counter-Terrorism Centre? Can you believe for a second that Qatar is sponsoring the committee for alliance amongst civilizations, the dialogue among cultures and civilizations and religions? They are buying the UN with dirty money.
EB: In reference to Syria’s destroyed heritage, US Secretary of State John Kerry has implied that it is America’s duty to protect Syria’s heritage. What is your take on his statement in light of the US’ involvement in the Syrian war?
Ambassador al-Ja’afari: This man is disconnected from reality, totally disconnected. I heard this from an American man who fought with him in Vietnam. He told me, “This man has always been disconnected.” But, he’s not the only one.
On the other hand, there are many honest senators and genuine people in Congress who opposed the American administration’s plan to attack Syria. There are genuine people, and the American constitution is based on beautiful values. Once applied, that is.
Eva Bartlett is a Canadian freelance journalist and activist who has lived in and written from the Gaza Strip, Syria, and Lebanon.
This interview originally ran in Al Akhbar.Overview Jonathan is one of two tackle prospects in this year's class that could be considered elite, and given the value of the position will be a likely first-round pick because of it. He embodied all that Stanford football was throughout his time there, as he is an aggressive, smart, technically sound prospect who will enter the league at a stage in his development where he should be able to contribute immediately.
Analysis Strengths Martin has prototypical starting skills for the tackle position. He missed just two games in his career and is extremely tough. He carries his weight well and is one of the most technically sound prospects in the draft. He has a smooth, efficient pass set that allows him to get a solid base and work from a balanced state. He is powerful and aggressive against the run and a very good foot athlete at his size. Martin was the anchor of a very polished offensive line and is simply an NFL-ready tackle who possesses all the traits. Weaknesses Martin has a tendency to pop upright on contact and get slightly off balance, usually when slanting in the run game. He isn't a real powerful or violent puncher, and at times his punches will slow his feet and he can get caught off guard. He isn't a quick-twitched mover off the snap and could have some issues against the league's best speed rushers.Might we see the return of Bishop?
Set for release next August, Ridley Scott’s Alien: Covenant will serve as both a sequel to Prometheus and another prequel to the original Alien, but it’s not the only project in the works that’s intent on expanding that iconic universe. District 9 director Neill Blomkamp has been working on his own sequel to Aliens, which is being tentatively referred to as Alien 5, and though the film ran into a brick wall when Scott began production on his own franchise return, the key players still seem certain – and, if nothing more, hopeful – that Blomkamp’s vision will soon take flight.
Those key players include Sigourney Weaver and Michael Biehn, who are set to reprise the roles of Ellen Ripley and Corporal Dwayne Hicks. Newt, who was unceremoniously killed off between the events of Aliens and Alien 3, is also set to return, though will be played by a new actor. But what about Bishop? Will Lance Henriksen reprise the role of the lovable android?
Speaking with IGN this week, Henriksen seemed as hopeful as Weaver and Biehn about Blomkamp’s potential sequel, and he also suggested that there will be a place for him in the film.
The actor told the site:
You know they’re going to make another one. It picks up right where Aliens ended. I don’t know if I’m going to be in a baggie or how I’m going to be in it. Blomkamp is a really wonderful, wonderful writer. I have a feeling that if he did it, it would be something spectacular. And there’s an audience for it.
For now, Alien 5 remains on indefinite hold.There aren't many unplanned moments on television these days, but when it happens, it immediately becomes must-see TV.
Case in point: Gawker reports that an infamous white supremacist was literally stunned into silence upon learning he was in fact part African during an appearance on a daytime talk show.
The remarkable incident occurred during a recent taping of Trisha, a syndicated daytime talk show hosted by TV veteran Trisha Goddard.
Story continues below advertisement
As part of the show's theme exploring "race in America," Trisha producers booked Craig Cobb, an anti-Semitic white supremacist activist who proudly proclaims that, "racism is my religion."
In news-making terms, Cobb is likely best known for trying to transform his current residence of Leith, N.D., into a racist haven for other white supremacists. The local city council voted in several ordinances that crushed his plan before it began.
Closer to home, back in 2010, Cobb launched an unsuccessful attempt to register a non-profit society called Whitepeace in Vancouver.
On this occasion, however, the 62-year-old Cobb had voluntarily submitted to a DNA test before the Trisha taping. When Goddard – who is black – reveals the results, her studio audience seems to know what's coming, even if Cobb remains oblivious.
"Eighty-six per cent European," said Goddard, as the audience noise slowly mounts. And then: "14 per cent sub-Saharan African."
While Goddard and another unidentified guest join in with the audience laughter, Cobb tries to interject by claiming his genetic makeup is "statistical noise."
Adding insult to injury, Goddard tells Cobb: "You have a little black in you." She then tries to fist-bump her new "bro," who does not return the gesture.
Story continues below advertisement
Story continues below advertisement
Interviewed later by the MailOnline, Cobb said he only agreed to the test "because I assumed it was science." After hearing the results, Cobb described the test as a "scientifically bankrupt procedure," intended only to "shock."
No word on whether Cobb plans on making a return visit to Trisha.Photo: FOX
Arrested Development Photo: FOX
In a move to outflank fierce rival |
been at record lows for a record length of time (click on links to see charts). Low interest rate environments create economic bubbles that burst when interest rates eventually normalize. The reason why low interest rate environments inevitably lead to the inflation of bubbles is because low borrowing costs encourage credit booms and discourage saving by reducing the rate of return on savings accounts and fixed income investments.
Prior Libor rate troughs have resulted in bubbles that ended in crises when the rate rose again:
Chart source: Mortgage-X.com
Here are the bubbles and crises of the past three decades that low Libor rates have contributed to:
1) Japan's economic bubble and the U.S. savings & loans crisis (late-1980s)
2) The 1994 Mexican financial crisis and the Asian financial crisis (mid-1990s)
3) The Dot-com bubble (late-1990s)
4) The U.S. housing bubble and European housing bubbles (mid-2000s)
5) Post-2009 economic bubbles that have not yet popped (to be discussed in the next section)
To reiterate, the current Libor rate trough that started in 2009 has created another global bubble that is far more extreme than the bubbles created by prior Libor troughs simply due to the fact that rates have never been this low for such a long period of time. Libor rates have been at such unusually low levels because most Libor rate-setting banks are based in the U.K. and U.S., which have both experienced severe credit busts and balance sheet recessions during the financial crisis as a result of their large debt and asset bubble overhangs. Economies that experience credit busts are at risk of experiencing deflationary depressions, which central banks try to combat by cutting interest rates as low as possible.
While the U.S., U.K., Japan, and peripheral European nations have suffered with balance sheet recessions and now weak credit growth and recoveries, most other nations escaped from the financial crisis largely unscathed and have been growing at a steady rate. In a normal world, borrowing costs in these faster-growing economies would be in the 4 to 7 percent range, but instead borrowers in these countries are taking advantage of the record-low sub-1 percent Libor rates that are geared for truly sick economies. Today's Libor rates are simply too low for non-crisis economies, so this cheap credit bonanza is helping to fuel borrowing binges and asset bubbles almost everywhere that is not the U.S., U.K., Japan, and peripheral Europe.
As the world’s most important benchmark interest rate, approximately $10 trillion worth of loans and $350 trillion worth of derivatives use the Libor as a reference rate. Libor-based corporate loans are very prevalent in emerging economies, which is helping to inflate the emerging markets bubble that I am warning about. In Asia, for example, Libor is used as the reference rate for nearly two-thirds of all large-scale corporate borrowings. Considering this fact, it is no surprise that credit and asset bubbles are ballooning throughout Asia, as my report on Southeast Asia's bubble has shown.
Though the ongoing tapering of the U.S. Federal Reserve's QE3 policy in the past year caused emerging market bond yields to rise, the emerging markets bubble is still very much in its prime because corporations are now choosing to take advantage of cheaper Libor-based bank loans instead of raising funds via the bond market. For this reason, the ultimate popping of the emerging markets bubble is more likely to be a result of rising Libor and local benchmark interest rates rather than the Fed's QE3 taper.
The post-2009 global bubble is hardly confined to emerging markets, as it is also inflating in China, Australia, Canada, New Zealand, and Nordic countries as well. In addition, record-low Libor rates are contributing to bubbles in some areas within the U.S. economy such as higher education, auto loans, and certain segments of the housing market. Most private student loans, 45 percent of adjustable-rate prime mortgages and 80 percent of adjustable-rate subprime mortgages, and many auto loans and credit cards use the Libor as a reference rate.
The bubbles that I have listed are just a few of the bubbles that are inflating around the world thanks in large part to record-low Libor rates. There are likely countless smaller bubbles, massive systemic malinvestment, and other distortions that will only be identified in hindsight after the post-2009 global bubble economy ends. As Warren Buffett once said, "only when the tide goes out do you discover who's been swimming naked."
How The "Libor Bubble" Will Pop
The Libor and similar benchmark interest rates simply cannot stay this low for such a long time without causing serious consequences. These low rates are driving what mainstream economists call the global economic "recovery", but there is no such thing as a free lunch because this recovery is actually another credit and asset bubble. The global bubble will pop when the current low interest rate environment ends, no matter how long it takes for interest rates to eventually rise again. While interest rates are likely to stay at very low levels for another few more years because of the tepid pace of growth in the U.S. and U.K., this simply means that the global credit bubble will grow far larger and even more threatening than it is now, particularly in the non-crisis countries that were previously discussed.
There are several different scenarios that I foresee leading to higher interest rates and the concomitant popping of the "Libor Bubble":
Scenario 1: Growth and employment in the U.S. and U.K. continues to improve over the next few years, causing central banks to raise their benchmark interest rates, which will cause the Libor to rise in tandem.
Scenario 2: Even if growth and employment in the U.S. and U.K. grow at an anemic pace, central banks may be forced to raise their interest rates to curb dangerous asset bubbles in the equity and housing markets. A similar and related scenario is one in which inflation or stagflation eventually rears its ugly head, forcing central banks to hike rates.
Scenario 3: Even if the Libor rates themselves do not increase for many years due to a lack of a full recovery in the U.S. and U.K., ballooning credit and asset bubbles in non-crisis countries cause banks to charge increasingly larger spreads over the Libor reference rate to compensate for the higher risk of lending in these economies. This scenario would have a similar net effect as if the Libor rates themselves increased, i.e., the ending of abnormally cheap credit conditions.
The popping of the "Libor Bubble" may not even require Libor rates to rise because the bubbles may endogenously collapse under their own weight after growing even larger in the next few years. Though the popping of the global bubble is likely several years away, the time to worry about this situation is now because the damage (the debt buildup and asset price inflation) is occurring at this very moment.
I will be publishing many more reports about dangerous bubbles that are currently developing around the entire world – most of which you probably never even knew existed. Please follow me on Twitter, Google+ and Facebook to stay informed about the most important bubble news and my related commentary.Ahead of tonight's first official public hearing for distressed L train riders, the MTA revealed that it is considering two proposals to repair the saltwater damage that Hurricane Sandy wrought on the Canarsie Tube that runs under the East River between North Brooklyn and lower Manhattan. Under scenario one, the MTA would shut down the tube entirely for a projected 18 months. Scenario two calls for a longer, partial shutdownone tube closed at a time, with repair work lasting for three years.
The reduction in service under the three-year plan would be significantNBC reports that service would be reduced 80% between Bedford Avenue in Williamsburg and Eighth Avenue in Manhattan, meaning straphangers who use the L primarily in Manhattan would be impacted as well. Trains would run every 12 to 15 minutes during rush hour, compared to every three to four minutes under normal circumstances.
The NY Times points out that under this scenario, the L would be able to handle about 20% of the 225,000 riders who currently take it under the tunnel on a typical weekday. And a typical weekday isn't exactly a pleasant experience.
A full shutdown would extend, as was hinted last month, from Bedford Avenue all the way to 8th Avenue. (Because the L train tracks in Manhattan don't merge with any other train lines, L subway cars in need of maintenance or routine inspections would have limited access to their train yard in East New York.)
New York City Transit President Veronique Hakim told reporters on Wednesday that the MTA has ruled out the possibility of conducting repair work only on nights and weekends, as the required work is too complex to conduct in short bursts. Hopes for a new tunnel under the East River have also been dashedthe MTA said this week that construction would be too expensive and time consuming.
Asked if he was leaning towards a full or partial shutdown, MTA Chairman Tom Prendergast told the Times this week that while he's waiting to hear from the community at large, he has a feeling people will be swayed by the efficiency of the total shutdown. "I think there is an 'Aha' moment they have in their minds, like, 'Geez if it's only one in five people you can carry, maybe it would be better to have two tracks,'" he said.
Either way, repairs will not begin until early 2019. Normal service between Lorimer Street and Canarsie-Rockaway Parkway will be maintained throughout. The MTA says it plans to make a final decision within the next three months, based on input from residents and impacted businesses.
The MTA has already confirmed plans to repair the M train before L train work gets underway, in an effort to better serve L train refugees in Brooklyn. Repairs to a metal bridge and aging viaduct along the M line will prompt lengthy closures, and displace dozens of Bushwick residents. The Authority added on Wednesday that it may run extra buses over the Williamsburg Bridge and expand ferry service.
The repair work is expected to cost between $800 million and $1 billion all told, with most of the funding coming from the federal government.
Girded with this news, you're now cordially invited to vent directly to Hakim and Prendergast, at the Marcy Avenue Armory at 6:00 p.m tonight. A second public meeting has been scheduled for May 12th, at the Salvation Army Theater in Manhattan.
"In order for there to be trust, there must first be communication," Councilmember Stephen Levin said in a statement after tonight's meeting was announced. "Thousands of straphangers are trusting those in charge to listen to their needs."If you tuned in to the AWS/NASA live stream from space that happened on Wednesday, then you already know: It looked very, very good. The 4K quality and relatively shallow depth of field made it feel like you were watching Chef’s Table on Netflix, rather than a live feed from a space station orbiting Earth around 220 miles above the planet. Astronauts Dr. Peggy Whitson and Jack Fischer talked to NAB show attendees on the ground for only a few minutes, but they still had time to run some crazy experiments in amazingly detailed resolution.
Dr. Whitson and Fischer also explained some of the benefits of having 4K live streaming technology in space: providing live footage of experiments under way on the International Space Station being one, since it means they can use things like slow motion cameras capturing extremely high detail to transmit results in real-time to their researcher colleagues on Earth. Fischer also noted that being able to broadcast an outside view of the station has big potential benefits, too.
In addition to that, high resolution imaging, and broadcast capabilities, will be important to efforts to reach further into space, including to Mars. Advanced imaging capabilities will be crucial as a part of the decision-making process in the lead-up to a Mars journey, since a very important part of that planning will be able to see and study the destination in advance, Dr. Whitson explained.
For now, Mars is still a pretty distant target – but high-quality GIFs derived from 4K streams of antics in space is still well within reach.Looks like public image can go out the window now that someone doesn’t have to compete for that tedious Top Ten popularity contest in the Star Awards.
Singapore actress Rui En has made it into the news again, this time not for negligent driving, but for a run in with her neighbour.
Her interaction with her neighbour was so distasteful that he wrote in to Lianhe Wanbao to complain.
According to Lianhe Wanbao, Rui En (probably locked out of her home without her keys) turned up at her neighbour’s door on April 20 (at about 6pm). Her first words to him were, “Lend me your power bank. My phone is dead.”
Unfortunately the elderly neighbour did not have a power bank, so he invited Rui En into his house to use his landline.
The neighbour said that Rui En dialled two to three numbers which did not get through, causing her to throw the phone in a rage twice. Finally, she got through to her helper. Rui En told her helper that she was waiting for the latter to come home to open the door.
The elderly neighbour’s wife mentioned to the newspaper that throughout the calls, Rui En appeared to be impatient and agitated. She even ordered the neighbour’s wife to head upstairs to retrieve some of her items, without a word of thanks throughout.
According to Lianhe Wanbao, Rui En brought a gift basket as a peace offering to her neighbours to apologise on April 21. Her neighbours accepted her apology but declined the gift.
They hope that she would learn from this episode, saying that as a public figure, she should be aware of her words and actions, and not vent her emotions in return for the goodwill of others.
When contacted by Lianhe Wanbao, Rui En’s manager said that this was a private dispute between neighbours which has been settled.
At the 2016 Star Awards, Rui En was awarded the All Time Favourite Artiste honour after winning Top Ten Most Popular Female Artiste for 10 times, where she apologised for driving negligently.
Well, on the bright side, with all these media coverage, people will really know who she is.
Update: A previous version of this article stated that Rui En apologised after the news was published. We could not verify it hence the article was updated. It also corrected misspellings of ‘Lianhe Wanbao’.
H/T to Lianhe Wanbao
Here are other articles you should check out.
One of these destinations is the perfect post-tax filing vacay because 99% off
This video of a couple going through adult things together will hit you right in the feels
Related Article
Rui En reportedly asked to assist in investigation for alleged drink-driving case
Top screengrab via YouTube.
If you like what you read, follow us on Facebook and Twitter to get the latest updates.@NumbersMuncher so is political violence cool again — Razor (@hale_razor) May 29, 2017
@hale_razor It's back in style again — Josh Jordan (@NumbersMuncher) May 29, 2017
Last week, when then-congressional candidate, Republican Greg Gianforte, allegedly physically assaulted reporter Ben Jacobs, Democrats — and Republicans — were outraged.
Today, a fight broke out when after Republican Texas State Rep. Matt Rinaldi called ICE on illegal immigrant protesters:
Near fistfight erupts after Irving GOP Rep. @MattRinaldiTX reportedly tells several Hispanic Ds he called ICE on #SB4 protesters. #txlege — Bob Garrett (@RobertTGarrett) May 29, 2017
You can see video of the incident here.
More from the Austin-American Statesman:
The incident occurred as protesters opposed to the new law banning so-called sanctuary cities were being ushered out of the House galleries after disrupting the proceedings on the floor by chanting, “Here to stay!” Rep. Ramon Romero Jr., D-Fort Worth, said Rinaldi then told several lawmakers that he had called Immigration and Customs Enforcement to report the protesters, prompting the confrontation between Rinaldi and the Democrats. … During the heated exchange, Rinaldi said, the Democrats pushed and shoved him and threatened his life. Democratic Rep. Philip Cortez of San Antonio, however, said he heard Rinaldi threaten to put a bullet in the head of another Democrat, Rep. Poncho Nevarez of Eagle Pass.
According to Rinaldi, the worst threats and actions targeted him — and they came from Democrats:
A statement regarding today. pic.twitter.com/M0BcBXa43P — Matt Rinaldi (@MattRinaldiTX) May 29, 2017
So, if Rinaldi was indeed threatened and assaulted by Democratic colleagues, shouldn’t the media be all over this?
Democrat State Representative threatens Republican. MSM: zzzzzzzzzzzzzzzz https://t.co/agpPhb6RyZ — Nathan Wurtzel (@NathanWurtzel) May 29, 2017
Well, not quite “zzzzzzzzzzzzzzzz”:
Texas Republican called ICE on immigration protesters — and threatened to “put a bullet” in colleague on House floor https://t.co/hGr9n9etLw — Bradd Jaffy (@BraddJaffy) May 29, 2017
Leaving a few things out, maybe?
You left out half the story. And then you wonder why voters don't care about the media or what they say anymore. https://t.co/N8y0PZ4FiR — Meech (@michi83) May 29, 2017
Pathetic.
@NathanWurtzel That’s a pretty solid “imagine if things were reversed” scenario. — Walter ShitGibbon (@MetricButtload) May 29, 2017
Yep, it is. Gianforte was raked over the coals for what he did to Ben Jacobs. Where’s the outrage from the Left over this?
Also, no matter what you think of this guy's decision, the responses to his statement are horrifying. https://t.co/fPLBZyXStn — Ellen L. Carmichael (@ellencarmichael) May 29, 2017
They’re pretty disgusting:
@MattRinaldiTX I am also issuing a statement here: You are a shitheel. — Chet (@Chet_G_NFL) May 29, 2017
@MattRinaldiTX A statement regarding today: Small, small man abused his power because he couldn't defend his ideas. — CM (@cmoore8ji) May 29, 2017
@MattRinaldiTX You friends with Gianforte?
Sounds like it.
You did a cheap, shitty thing calling ICE on those protestors you know it. — Badpuddytat (@zippyhorsemom) May 29, 2017
@MattRinaldiTX Yet another Republican snowflake — Robert Weintraub (@robwein) May 29, 2017
@MattRinaldiTX You sound pretty triggered there, snowflake — Joshua (@JoshuaDiemert) May 29, 2017
@MattRinaldiTX If what you say is true, Ramon Romero is a fucking hero. — punch nazis always (@MichaelBloomer8) May 29, 2017
@MattRinaldiTX Hey man, just chiming in to say that even in your version of the story, you come off as a major wimp — Patrick Monahan (@pattymo) May 29, 2017
@MattRinaldiTX Well, don't you sound like a sack of shit. — Based Aspie ✖️ (@Based_Aspie) May 29, 2017
@MattRinaldiTX What you did was hateful and unnecessary. I'd want to kick your ass too. — #Vets Can… (@VetScanID) May 29, 2017
@MattRinaldiTX you had it coming — Alex Nichols (@Lowenaffchen) May 29, 2017
@MattRinaldiTX Only thing I regret is that this helps build your bullshit persecution complex. — Nasty Nas (@Schism2131) May 29, 2017
@MattRinaldiTX You are so cool that you called ICE. You must be so proud you can name drop “I called ICE on illegals” in your 2018 campaign. — Tristan Vick (@TristanVick) May 29, 2017
@MattRinaldiTX @PatrickSvitek Maybe don't threaten frightened people with arrest and deportation in a hall of Democracy. — peregrinus (@Paragryn) May 29, 2017
@MattRinaldiTX Like school in the summertime… No class. Grow up, Rinaldi. — #LETSGOPENS (@agent45) May 29, 2017
Cowardly Nazis like Matt Rinaldi who call the SS on peaceful protesters will be among the first against the wall — Olivia Haidar (@hitherehaidar) May 29, 2017
@MattRinaldiTX You're not the good guy here — William Johns (@thelatedent) May 29, 2017
@MattRinaldiTX How does it feel to be such a little tiny bitch? — YoungMittRomney (@youngmittromney) May 29, 2017
@MattRinaldiTX Awe.. Poor widdle baby.. Baby wanna bottle??? — Chaoss Corp. (@ChaossCorp) May 29, 2017
@MattRinaldiTX Playing the victim and threatening to shoot your colleague is an extremely good double-down my dude. — Happy-Go-Letzter (@RafiLetzter) May 29, 2017
@MattRinaldiTX It could be that you are a complete dick who simply fits too perfectly in Trumpworld. — Dave Clark (@realdaveclark6) May 29, 2017
@MattRinaldiTX You whiny little twit! You're not indigenous, therefore you are just an immigrant too. Grow up, will you! — Welansa Asrat, MD (@Dr_Asrat) May 29, 2017
@MattRinaldiTX You should never have left in one piece. But I guess a bruised ego is just as good. #coward — Sam Gonzalez Jr (@SamIsGonzo1978) May 29, 2017
@MattRinaldiTX Hey Matt just chiming in to say you're a fucking ghoul and you deserved to have your face caved in — sick transit, gloria (@samknight1) May 29, 2017
Rinaldi’s claims should at the very least be investigated — but why are so many liberals so quick to dismiss them? It’s almost as if their outrage is a one-way street.
Bur remember, liberals are very concerned about political violence. https://t.co/nakHyHDUWl — Drew McCoy (@_Drew_McCoy_) May 29, 2017
He was assaulted and threatened. The Left is so used to playing the victim that they've forgotten what actual victims look like. https://t.co/6q6VTF7Nyz — Eric Spencer (@JustEric) May 29, 2017
Editor’s note: Autoplay video has been removed from this post.President Donald Trump says the nation faces a "once in a lifetime opportunity" to overhaul the tax system.
Trump spoke during a White House meeting with a group of senators. The president is convening Republicans and Democrats from the tax-writing Senate Finance Committee to build support for his plan. Trump says it will provide the largest tax cuts in the country's history and is outlining details of the plan.
It calls for a large cut to the corporate tax rate, reducing it from 35 percent to 20 percent, and an end to the estate tax. The president was seated next to Utah Sen. Orrin Hatch, a Republican, and Missouri Sen. Claire McCaskill, a Democrat.
Trump says, "a lot of people are liking" his plan, which still lacks specific legislation.There have been reports in certain quarters of media and online space stating that Navistar USA will produce Mahindra's T20 and T40 pickups in Alabama, USA in 2012, which are completely baseless & incorrect. If and when there are any material developments, Mahindra & Mahindra Limited will communicate them directly and transparently.
Fans of small, fuel-efficient pickup trucks: We hate to tell you this, but it's becoming increasingly clear that Mahindra's long-awaited entry into the United States market just isn't going to happen anytime soon. We're just as disappointed as the rest of you – with the recent demise of the Ford Ranger, there simply aren't any truly compact trucks left in American dealership showrooms.We got a wee bit of unfounded hope when rumors began swirling that Mahindra was in the midst of closing a deal with Navistar, a longtime partner in its home market of India, to manufacture the T20 and T40 trucks in a new plant in Alabama. According to the Indian automaker, that's not going to happen. Here's a snippet from Mahindra's statement on the matter:So there you have it. To put it mildly, we've lost nearly all hope of seeing these small diesel-powered pickup trucks in American driveways, which is a shame.AUSTRALIA’s two biggest science and weather bodies, CSIRO and the Bureau of Meteorology have released new climate change data and information on how it will affect Australia.
“There is very high confidence that hot days will become more frequent and hotter,” CSIRO principal research scientist, Kevin Hennessy said.
“We also have very high confidence that sea levels will rise, oceans will become more acidic, and snow depths will decline.
“We expect that extreme rainfall events across the nation are likely to become more intense, even where annual-average rainfall is projected to decline.”
The projections are the most comprehensive ever released for Australia, and renowned science expert Dr Karl Kruszelnicki says they’re only just the tip of the iceberg.
Where are we headed?
According to the CSIRO report, in Australia specifically, oceans will become much warmer and more acidic. Cyclones will decrease, but when they do occur they will be significantly fiercer and occur further south. Droughts will become more intense and ‘severe’ bushfire ratings will become more common.
Water temperatures will also continue to rise, which means storms can suck up more moisture resulting in heavier rain and snow fall.
Dr Karl believes there are also two lesser-known phenomenons that we should all get our heads around because of their impact on the future: permafrost and arctic meltdown.
“Permafrost is defined as any ground that has been frozen for at least two years, with one quarter of all the land mass in the northern hemisphere being permafrost,” he says.
The problem with permafrost is that with temperatures rising and more permafrost thawing, enormous amounts of harmful carbon contained within the ice are being released into the atmosphere. About 1.7 trillion tonnes of organic carbon, or four times the amount humans have dumped in modern times, could be released, says Dr Karl.
Since 1980, 80 per cent of the Arctic summer ice has been lost which is resulting in more extreme weather across the world and new areas for oil and gas companies to drill.
How will this affect us?
Homes will be destroyed, food will become more expensive and lives will be lost.
According to the National Climate Council, hundreds of thousands of coastal homes are at risk, with 80 per cent of the Victorian coast and 62 per cent of the Queensland coast at risk of being wiped out by 2100.
One of the hardest hit areas could be the Gold Coast, a massive tourist drawcard and an economy worth $1.5 billion per year.
With droughts intensified, farmers will struggle to grow crops, resulting in them losing their livelihoods. But on top of that, our food will become much more expensive, for everything from meat to Weet-Bix.
The government’s Australian Climate Change Program warns that an increased number of bushfire days could result in more homes and lives lost as they become harder to fight.
Dr Karl points out that in Australia, our biggest issue will come from heatwaves caused by rising temperatures.
“Heatwaves have killed more Australians than all other natural hazards combined,” he says.
“In the European heatwave of 2003, some 70,000 people died. The Russian heatwave of 2010 killed around 55,000 people.”
“Back in 1961, heatwaves with temperatures significantly above average covered 1 per cent of our planet’s land area. By 2010, this had risen to about 5 per cent. By 2020, it’s expected to rise to 10 per cent — and for 2040, to 20 per cent.”
What can we do about it?
“We have to move to a 100% renewable energy based country,” says Matthew Wright, the Executive Director of Zero Carbon Australia and 2010’s Young Environmentalist of the Year.
“We need more resilience on our buildings so they consume energy more efficiently and also move towards using electricity in its place.”
Our government also has more work to do. “We need to make sure governments put in legislation that make sure energy companies don’t block people from installing solar panels,” says Mr Wright.
“It’s also risky for the Australian people that our government has clearly steered towards an economy for coal producers.”
Dr Karl agrees, adding that “if we move to a renewable economy, it would take around 10 years to build, and over the next 30 years our overall energy costs would be much lower.”
The problem, of course, with that is “one government will start it, but another will have to finish it.”
You can grab Dr Karl’s latest book ‘House of Karls’ from book stores now.Patrons of Champions in the Marriott Hotel in Boston enjoy drinks and sports on TVs around the bar. Credit: Maisie Crow for The Boston Globe via Getty Images
Every day, hundreds of thousands of TV impressions that occur beyond the bounds of home and hearth go undocumented, which translates into a whole lot of uncredited deliveries for networks that traffic in news and live sports programming. But as the industry gears up for the $20 billion upfront bazaar, ESPN and Fox Sports both say they are about to take the first steps toward making ratings guarantees using Nielsen's years-in-the-making out-of-home measurement scheme.
While there's no hard and fast deadline for when Nielsen's Portable People Meter-derived out-of-home sample to be folded in with its linear TV ratings, execs from ESPN's ad sales and research divisions say the preliminary data they've seen from bar, restaurants, gyms and other public spaces merits the consideration of media buyers and advertisers.
Buyers' openness remains a question, when they currently get out-of-home impressions free or would even argue that those viewers are already implictly priced in.
But ESPN has seen significant lifts in its audience deliveries when those previously undocumented out of home views were recaptured by Nielsen, according to Artie Bulgrin, senior VP-global research and analytics at ESPN.
"The lift we're seeing is actually better than we've expected," Mr. Bulgrin said. "It's a high quality audience -- slightly younger, a bit more female-skewing, and also a bit more multicultural. Out-of-home extends our reach to a number of very attractive segments."
Its flagship "SportsCenter" show has experienced double-digit declines in traditional ratings over the last few years, but the show's out-of-home viewing has grown 6% from September 2015 to March 2016, ESPN said.
ESPN's primetime college football games gained 9% upon application of the data culled from fans in bars and other external venues.
The bigger the traditional in-home audience, the greater the out-of-home lift. For example, ESPN's coverage of the Jan. 9 AFC Wild Card Game between the Chiefs and Texans drew a 2.3 rating in the adults 25-to-54 demo, which translates to a little over 2.67 million viewers in that age bracket. When the out-of-home numbers were added to the vanilla live-plus-same-day stream, the game averaged 3.13 million adults 25-to-54, a lift of nearly half a million (457,000).
The preliminary data suggests that over the course of a given week, between 30% and 40% of ESPN viewers are accessing the network's feed from an out-of-home location. Bars and restaurants are the most popular venues outside the home, accounting for 30% of ESPN's out-of-home composition, while the gym (11%), the office (8%) and hotel rooms (7%) also contribute to the mix.
Mr. Bulgrin said ESPN is in the early stages of discussing the out-of-home numbers with media agencies and advertisers. "We're just starting the process now, but you can be sure we'll be sharing the data with our clients in a very big way," he said.
While it's anyone's guess when the data officially will be rolled up with Nielsen's in-home ratings, ESPN is ready to begin transacting against the bonus impressions. "We've had advanced conversations with certain folks already, and we expect to see [the OOH deliveries] reflected in deals with our marketing partners in this year's upfront," said Eric Johnson, exec VP of global multimedia sales, ESPN.
Fox advertising and programming executives on Monday echoed ESPN's sentiments, saying that out-of-home will be a factor during the summer sell-off, as it looks to monetize this historically untapped source of ratings points.
"We're definitely going to be talking about this in a big way," said one Fox ad exec. Like ESPN, Fox has documented significant out-ofhome deliveries for its marquee sports properties.
Previous attempts by Nielsen to measure out-of-home TV viewing never quite got off the ground. In 2008, with economic headwinds bearing down, the ratings giant shuttered its Nielsen Out-of-Home initiative just months after Zenith Media, ESPN and Turner Sports had signed on as clients.
A year after Nielsen ended that initial foray, Turner inked a deal to have Arbitron's ARB-TV service monitor TBS deliveries in bars, restaurants and other public spaces, with an eye toward quantifying the out-of-home audience for its Major League Baseball telecasts. CBS then signed on to have Arbitron track its out-of-home Sunday NFL deliveries. Advertisers didn't bite, and Nielsen acquired Arbitron in 2013.
Under the current system, Nielsen collects its out of home data via a portable device that detects a special cue tone embedded in the ESPN signal, which indicates that a panelist is in close proximity to a TV displaying the network's programming. Some advertisers have said that the Portable People Meter readings are, by their very nature, passive and don't necessarily capture active viewing -- a complaint that has long applied to traditional in-home ratings as well. (Short of eyeball tracking, it's difficult to "prove" that anyone is actually paying attention to the TV when it's on.)
"ESPN perhaps may be more underreported than any network out there, and this is a perfectly valid audience," Mr. Bulgrin said. "We've waited a long time for this."
Nielsen's Total Audience Measurement scheme isn't expected to be fully deployed and adopted until 2017, but Mr. Johnson believes that ESPN is on the verge of getting compensated for all those views that would otherwise go undocumented. "This is an engaged audience that marketers are pining for, and not counting them is, and always has been, ridiculous," he said.Last month, the South Carolina House voted to cut $70,000 from the budgets of two state universities to punish them for assigning books about LGBT people to students. Now, a state senator is accusing one of the schools of gay “recruitment” for hosting a one-woman comedy show called “How To Be A Lesbian In 10 Days Or Less,” and has caused the show to be canceled.
“That’s not an explanation of ‘I was born this way,’” Sen. Mike Fair told Greenville’s WYFF of the planned show at University of South Carolina-Upstate. “That’s recruiting.”
Fair added that the assigned reading at USC-Upstate and the College of Charleston was “just not normal” and amounted to the “glorification of same-sex culture.”
In response, USC-Upstate noted that the show and its title are meant to be “satirical in nature,” but canceled the performance, saying that it had “become a distraction.”
Fair was one of a handful of state legislators who voted against every incumbent USC trustee last week in protest. Joining him was Sen. Lee Bright, who is running in the GOP primary for U.S. Senate, who lamented, “USC-Upstate has become a place of indoctrination not free inquiry.”Gov. Jerry Brown on Friday reversed a parole board and denied release of a former Charles Manson follower who has served more than 40 years in prison.
The board had recently approved the release of 70-year-old Bruce Davis but left the final decision to the governor.
Brown gave his decision to The Associated Press at the downtown Los Angeles County courthouse after a meeting with District Attorney Jackie Lacey.
"I find the evidence... shows why he currently poses a danger to society if released from prison. Therefore, I reverse the decision to parole Mr. Davis," the written decision said.
Davis would have been only the second Manson-related murder defendant to be granted parole since Manson's killing spree began in 1969.
Davis was not involved in the notorious Sharon Tate-LaBianca killings but was convicted with Manson and others in the murders of a musician and a stuntman.
Steve Grogan, another participant in those murders, was released many years ago after he agreed to lead police to where the bodies were buried on a remote movie ranch in the San Fernando Valley.
Davis was 30 when he was sentenced to life in prison in 1972 in the case that was a postscript to Manson's notorious reign as leader of the murderous communal cult known as the Manson family.
Davis long maintained that he was a bystander in the killings of the two men, but in recent years, he has acknowledged his shared responsibility
Davis became a born-again Christian in prison and ministered to other inmates, married a woman he met through the prison ministry, and has a grown daughter. The couple recently divorced.
Davis also earned a master's degree and a doctorate in philosophy of religion.
Manson and three of his followers, Leslie Van Houten, Patricia Krenwinkel and Charles "Tex" Watson, remain in prison for life in the Tate killings. Their co-defendant, Susan Atkins, died of cancer behind bars in 2009.AT |
eat a mouse," Womas wrote.
He said in a follow-up post that he and his neighbor decided to let the spider go about its business unharmed and they gave it a name, Hermie.
"OK guys so just letting you all know that the spider is fine. We have named him Hermie, we have adopted him and he is now running his own extermination business out of our town Coppabella. Oh and he is now paying rent," Womas posted.Read more: “2014 preview: 10 ideas that will matter next year“
Did you know that the Empire State Building’s spire was designed as a mooring point for hydrogen airships? That proved too dangerous, though, and then a deadly fire on the Hindenburg in 1937 brought the hydrogen fad to an abrupt end. Now the lightest of elements is making a comeback as the first mass-market hydrogen car gears up to hit the road.
Whereas airships harnessed hydrogen’s buoyancy, the Hyundai Tucson Fuel Cell, an SUV, uses it to make electricity. Its fuel cell combines hydrogen from the tank with oxygen in the air, creating an electrochemical reaction that generates current to supply electric motors. Water is the only waste product, making the cars green. Unlike battery-powered vehicles, which need hours to charge, refuelling takes minutes – and a full tank should last for 480 kilometres. Hyundai says the Tucson can hit 160 kilometres per hour.
Starting in spring next year, the firm will lease the cars for $499 a month in southern California. Home to nine of the US’s 10 existing hydrogen refuelling stations, and committed to building 100 more, the Golden State is ahead of the hydrogen curve. Honda and Toyota plan to follow Hyundai’s lead with fuel-cell cars in 2015. By contrast, a 2006 BMW offering burned liquid hydrogen but it was inefficient and never mass-produced.
Advertisement
Is the Tucson safe? If the tank springs a leak, fuel vents up into the air rather than pooling below, as in ordinary, gasoline-powered cars. Extensive crash and fire tests make Hyundai confident its offering won’t go the way of the Hindenburg. The cars may just be the start of an environmentally friendly, 21st-century hydrogen economy.
This article appeared in print under the headline “Fill her up… with liquid hydrogen”The Federal Communications Commission (FCC) is considering whether or not to punish broadcasters for using the term ‘Redskins’ when referring to Washington, DC’s NFL football franchise.
Legal activist and George Washington University law professor John Banzhaf III has petitioned the FCC to revoke the broadcasting license of the capitol’s WWXX-FM over the station’s use of the name ‘Redskins’. Banzhaf says the word is racist, derogatory, profane and hateful, making its use "akin to broadcasting obscenity."
"We'll be looking at that petition, we will be dealing with that issue on the merits and we'll be responding accordingly," FCC Chairman Tom Wheeler told reporters.
"There are a lot of names and descriptions that were used over time that are inappropriate today. And I think the name that is attributed to the Washington football club is one of those," Wheeler added.
In 1992, a group of Native Americans, led by Suzan Shown Harjo, filed a petition with the US Patent and Trademark Office, asking the PTO to cancel the team’s ‘Redskins’ trademark protection, calling the name derogatory. While the federal agency initially sided with the petitioners, a court overturned the decision on a technicality.
In 2006, a second group petitioned the PTO to cancel the trademark, arguing that federal trademark law bars the office from registering trademarks that “may disparage” groups or individuals. In June, the federal agency upheld the petition and canceled the Redskins’ trademark. The team has sued the group, asking for a chance to defend their name in court.
Current owner Dan Snyder has repeatedly said that he would “never” change the team’s name. Over the past few years, the controversy has intensified, with several media outlets (including the Washington Post’s editorial board), local columnists, and national broadcasting analysts (such as CBS’ Phil Simms and NBC’s Tony Dungy) refusing to use the moniker. Half of the US Senate ‒ all Democrats ‒ sent NFL Commissioner Roger Goodell a letter in May urging the league to pressure Snyder into changing the team’s name.
The University of Maryland’s Capital News Service (CNS) is one of the outlets that has chosen not to use the team’s name, referring to it instead as “the Washington NFL franchise” and similar terms.
“It’s a controversial subject with strong feelings on both sides,” broadcast bureau director Sue Kopen Katcef told RT. “We explained to our sports reporting class and show that they should talk about the team in more general terms. They know from the get-go what our policy is.”
“It’s a continued discussion,” she added.
Despite the wire service’s decision, both Kopen Katcef and Washington bureau chief Rafael Lorente believe that the FCC should not punish broadcasters for using the moniker.
“Any time I hear any ‘ban language’, I cringe,” Lorente said. “We made an editorial decision, just as we made an editorial decision not to name rape victims or children who are the victims of crime.”
The Washington Post’s Eugene Volokh argues that the FCC likely will not side with Banzhaf. “[T]he FCC has in the past agreed that it may not restrict broadcast speech on the grounds of its supposed racism,” he wrote for the Volokh Conspiracy blog, citing ‘In re Fox Television Stations, Inc.’ (1993).
Hogs Haven blogger Tom Garrett believes an FCC-imposed ban on the word ‘Redskins’ would be legally impossible, and that the moniker does not fit into the “very narrow” definition of obscenity laid out in the 1973 Miller v California court case. However, he wrote, it could be regulated under the agency’s profanity definition.
“The FCC defines profanity as ‘including language so grossly offensive to members of the public who actually hear it as to amount to a nuisance.’ The FCC may confine the use of profanity by over-the-air broadcasters between 10pm and 6am local time,” Garrett wrote. “The more observant among you will notice that the Redskins play nearly all of their games after 6am and before 10pm.”
Despite the controversy over the name, the FCC ruling may come down to freedom of speech.
“The FCC chairman has suggested that the agency will take a look at that petition and consider what to do with it,” Republican FCC Commissioner Ajit Pai said Wednesday during a CNBC appearance. “For my own part, as a supporter of the First Amendment, I don’t think the government should ban the use of the ‘Washington Redskins’ team name from the airwaves. But we will see what the agency proposes to do in the near future.”
Until the FCC rules on Banzhaf’s petition, it could cause a headache for those broadcasters ‒ especially in the Washington, DC, market ‒ whose licenses are up for renewal, adding between six months and three years to the process, and making it difficult for station owners to sell or obtain loans, John Garziglia, a District-based communications law attorney told the Post.
“Stations should probably take a second look at using words that large segments of the population think are offensive,” he said.It was a big weekend for lava flows at volcanoes around the globe. Let’s check out some highlights:
Hawai’i
We almost saw new lava flows inside the Halema’uma’u Crater at Kilauea, as the lava lake was close to reaching its rim (see above). This was highest the lava lake has been since April-May 2015, when a small outbreak occurred as the lake overflowed. However, the night of September 11 saw a small deflation of Kilauea’s summit, leading to the lava lake dropping 10-15 meters (33-49 feet). The Hawaii Volcano Observatory thinks that we might expect to see inflation return at the summit soon and the lake level to rise again. A few small earthquake swarms hit the summit and East Rift as well, likely related to pressurization at Halema’uma’u and lava moving within the volcano.
HVO released some cool video of spattering within the summit lava lake. While you’re watching that video, be sure to watch the surface of the lava lake as it moves and shifts like black leather. Near the spattering area, you can see some of the lake crust crumpling and then disappearing back into the lava lake.
Be sure to watch the webcams that watch the lava lake, including both a panorama cam of the lava and an infrared thermal cam.
Reunion Island
Piton de la Fournaise had another fissure eruption over the weekend, with their typical lava fountains and flows (see below) that followed. Video of the eruption (below) shows the long tendrils of lava snake down the volcano from the actively fountaining vent. The vigor of the eruption has dropped four-fold since it began on September 11 according to the latest report from the Observatories Volcanologique du Piton de la Fournaise (OVPF). A brief earthquake swarm on September 10 preceded the eruption, but the initiation of the eruption was more rapid than most at the Indian Ocean volcano. In May, a similar eruption occurred from the Château Fort cone. You can watch the eruption on one of the OVPF webcams.
Guatemala
Continuing on the lava flow front, the NASA Earth Observatory posted a great image of the long lava flow on the slopes of Fuego in Guatemala. The flow, imaged in infrared from Landsat 8, reached ~2.5 kilometers (1.5 miles) from the summit vent. This lava has been interspersed with small explosive eruption throwing blocks 250 meters (~820 feet) as well during this very busy year at Fuego.
Vanuatu
Volcanologist Shane Cronin posted some impressive video on Twitter of explosions at Yasur in Vanuatu. The blasts threw ballistic blocks straight upwards, showing the force of these explosions.
Yasur, Vanuatu, nice vertical explosion with ballistics, 5_9_16 1023 local time pic.twitter.com/kbcaVkYGPb — Shane Cronin (@scronin70) September 9, 2016
You can also see some video of the eruption Dr. Cronin took at night as well. These explosions are relatively common this year at Yasur, with those blocks getting throw hundreds of meters from the vent as bubbles of magma burst.
Philippines
In monitoring news, PHIVOLCS has raised the alert status at Mayon in the Philippines after increased seismic unrest. Most importantly, the base of the volcano appears to have inflated since July according to the latest PHIVIOLCS report, suggesting new magma is rising into the volcanic edifice and some wells around the volcano have seen decreased water or dried. No glow has been spotted at the summit at this point.
PHIVOLCS does not think a large eruption is coming soon and raised the alert status to remind local authorities to be ready if Mayon starts to awaken. The last significant eruption of Mayon was in 2013, when a small phreatic (steam-driven) blast killed five hikers. That explosion happened without warning, which is why there is a permanent 6 kilometer exclusion zone around the volcano.
New Zealand
Finally, White Island had a small explosive eruption on September 13. This new activity has prompted GNS Science to move the alert status to 3 and aviation alert to Orange. Check out the GeoNET webcam on the crater floor at White Island to see if the eruptions continue.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
Bolivian champions Bolivar are trying to tempt David Beckham out of retirement.
The South American club’s billionaire owner Marcelo Claure wants to sign the 38-year-old former England captain.
And Claure carries some clout as he is also the man helping to finance Beckham’s potential purchase of a Florida-based Major League Soccer franchise in 2015.
The ambitious deal would see Beckham only take part in Bolivar’s matches in the Copa Libertadores – South America’s version of the Champions League.
Last June, Claure tweeted a picture of Beckham holding the Bolivar shirt, with the caption: “My associate in the MLS and maybe he wants to visit Bolivia and... fill the rest in yourselves.”
Bolivar president Guido Loayza admitted that Becks could make the shock move, “even if it’s only for a couple of games in the Copa Libertadores”.A freshman House Republican is calling for the removal of signs restricting facilities in the Capitol complex to members of Congress.
Rep. Brian Fitzpatrick (R-Pa.) has introduced legislation to take away the “Members Only” signs that have for years designated certain elevators, meeting rooms, stairwells and bathrooms in the Capitol for lawmakers.
The bathrooms immediately off the House and Senate floors, for instance, can only be used by members of Congress. It’s a setup similar to common practice at schools and universities where the students and teachers use different bathrooms.
ADVERTISEMENT
Elevators near both chambers are also set aside for lawmakers rushing to votes. But they can otherwise be used by the general public at any time.Moreover, the elevator customs are typically not enforced. It’s not unusual to see staffers board at the same time as lawmakers.But Fitzpatrick said he was “disgusted” by the signs during his first four weeks serving in Congress.“Even little things like this highlight why too many Americans feel left out. They see a system that does more to preserve the status quo than it does solving our most pressing challenges, and a class of career politicians and elite insiders who see themselves as a separate class than their constituents. That mindset needs to stop — and I will do anything I can to end it,” Fitzpatrick said in a statement on Thursday.Fitzpatrick’s resolution would apply just to the House wing of the Capitol and surrounding office buildings. Only the Senate would have the power to make the same changes on its side.Image credit: flickr/Surian Soosay
This morning I was reading a TechCrunch story about Google’s official explanation for those “mystery barges” that keep cropping up in various harbors. There’s been a fair amount of speculation about the purpose of these containers, first reported by CNET’s Daniel Terdiman a week ago. Could they be offshore data centers? Nautical disaster recovery modules? Seaworthy stores for Google Glass Geeks? Or something more sinister?
Inevitably, rumors floated (ahem) they were either secret NSA listening posts being built with the help of Google, or the search giant’s way of keeping spooks from tapping its networks.
The official explanation was far less exciting. A Google spokesperson told TechCrunch the barges are “an interactive space where people can learn about new technology.”
Yeah. Like anybody would believe that.
See the USA with the NSA
Then I looked to the right of the story, where I found the following Flash-based advertisement.
Yes, that’s right. The National Security Agency is deliberately recruiting TechCrunch readers. This isn’t a random ad that changes every time the page loads. I’ve tried it on three different machines. The NSA (or its agency) bought this space directly from TechCrunch, most likely via an intermediary like BuyAds.com.
Clicking the ad launches an electro-disco soundtrack that would have sounded right at home in a corporate sales presentation circa 1998. As words fly in and out of the screen via a variety of Powerpoint-style transition effects, you hear a serious-sounding female voice:
“What you know can make a difference at the National Security Agency. Whether it's collecting foreign intelligence or preventing our adversaries from hacking US secrets, what you know can protect the nation. Explore our many technical career fields, paid internships, and co-op and scholarship opportunities to see how you fit in at NSA. With a career at NSA, you'll realize just how much knowing matters.”
Another version of the ad features a male voice, presumably that of some NSA geek who is thrilled to have landed a job inside the Industrial Surveillance Complex. He goes on thusly:
“There are activities that I've worked on that make, you know, front page headlines. And I can say, I know all about that, I had a hand in that. The things that happen here at NSA really have national and world ramifications.”
Ya think?
Apparently, all those Snowden revelations haven’t dampened the NSA’s ardor for geeks, let alone improved its ability to recognize irony. Or maybe the spooks believe the Snowden stories actually help it recruit candidates. After all, if you’re going to spy on millions of law-abiding citizens around the world, you probably want employees who think that’s a fantastic idea.
Knowing matters
The company behind these videos is Spongecell, which does interactive ads for a wide range of clients including Arby’s, Microsoft, Florida Orange Juice, and Girl Scouts of America. Their Web site sports an alphabetized gallery of nearly 400 interactive ads created for clients ranging from Amazon to Zulily.
Interestingly, though, the NSA ad is not among them. Maybe Spongecell has been asked by the spooks to keep that on the DL. Or maybe they’re just embarrassed by it.
Spongecell is, however, big into zombies, creating ads for both AMC’s “The Walking Dead” and World War Z comics.
Brains -- they’re not just for breakfast any more
Now get ready to strap on your tin foil hat. Spongecell got a big chunk of funding from none other than former Google CEO Eric Schmidt.
You see where I’m going with this. The NSA, zombies, and Google. All together in one place. Coincidence? I think not.
Now, of course, I’ve just spent all morning running and rerunning those ads on different computers, visiting the NSA’s site, and installing its iPad app (yes, the NSA has apps). If I wasn’t on their radar before, I certainly am now.
So if I suddenly disappear, you’ll know why. Whether it will be spooks or zombies is unclear. I put the odds at 50/50.
Update: Cartoonist Mark Fiore has created a mock NSA recruiting ad for kids that is remarkably like the ones the NSA actually uses. You can see it here.
Update Part Deux: I spoke with Spongecell CEO Ben Kartzman after this post appeared. He says his firm did deliver the ad, but is only responsible for the interactivity built into it -- the links to Web sites, Facebook, iTunes Store, etc. -- not the content or placement of the ad. I also contacted TechCrunch's ad representative, but he has yet to respond.
Got a question about social media or privacy? TY4NS blogger Dan Tynan may have the answer (and if not, he’ll make something up). Follow him on Twitter: @tynanwrites. For the latest IT news, analysis and how-to’s, follow ITworld on Twitter and Facebook.
What’s wrong with the NSA’s womb-to-tomb 24/7 surveillance
How to tell the NSA to go &*$! itself
Hey NSA, read this -- if you canOverview Desmond is looking to become the third Trufant brother to play professional football. Marcus has been a regular starter for the Seattle Seahawks since they picked him in the first round out of Washington State in 2003. Isaiah starred at Eastern Washington before playing in the Arena Football League and becoming the UFL?s Defensive Player of the Year in 2010 before finally getting his shot to play with the Jets the past two seasons.
Trufant seems to be on the right path to join his brothers in the NFL. Starting 45 straight games before missing a game against Colorado this year. Trufant was named honorable mention All-Pac 12 by league coaches in 2009, intercepting two passes (one that sealed the team?s win against Arizona) and breaking up six others. His numbers dropped in 2010 (one interception, four pass breakups) before picking up again in another honorable mention all-conference season as a junior (two interceptions, 14 pass breakups). His pick in the end zone in the season opener against Isaiah?s FCS alma mater prevented a disastrous home loss for the Huskies. As a senior, Trufant grabbed one pick, broke up 8 passes, forced a fumble, and blocked a kick. His play earned him 2012 All-Pac-12 first team honors.
Analysis Strengths Legacy pick with NFL size and athleticism. Very good short-area foot quickness, mirrors receivers on the outside on double moves up the sideline or quick out routes. Capable of playing either outside or in the slot. Has speed to run with better receivers. Plays a lot of press-bail but has length and tenacity in coverage. Regularly rips off and out-quicks receiver blocks to get into position to make plays. Competes for the ball in the air and won?t back down from physical challenges from receivers. Weaknesses Only adequate in his overall strength and physicality, often whiffs at tackle attempts, jumping at feet or throwing a weak shoulder. Has mental lapses in coverage that lead to big plays. Poor technique in press makes him susceptible to giving up plays. Gives up the sideline in the run game when failing to get outside leverage against receiver blocks. Will open up his hips far too quickly and immediately give up inside leverage. NFL Comparison Antoine Cason Bottom Line The brother of NFL cornerbacks Marcus and Isaiah flashes playmaking ability and very good foot quickness, but must play stronger, smarter, and avoid technique breakdowns to be considered a sure-fire NFL starter. His skillset will still likely see him as a Day 2 selection.Thai authorities have arrested two men charged with human trafficking, police said on Tuesday, following the discovery of 134 suspected victims in southern Thailand at a time when the military government is under international pressure to tackle the crime.
The two Thais were charged in relation to a group of 53 men found on Saturday at a rubber plantation - 38 from Bangladesh and 15 Rohingya, a mostly stateless Muslim minority from western Myanmar.
“The two men have been charged with trafficking and bringing foreign labor into the country illegally,” a senior police official, who declined to be identified, told Reuters.
He said police were still looking for the gang leaders.
If found guilty, the men face up to 10 years in jail.
Thailand was downgraded in June to the lowest “Tier 3” category in the U.S. State Department's 2014 Trafficking in Persons Report for not fully complying with the minimum standards for eliminating trafficking.
Prime Minister Prayuth Chan-ocha, the army chief who seized power in a May coup, has vowed to “prevent and suppress human trafficking.”
A human rights group said the latest discovery showed little progress had been made.
“Although the arrest of alleged traffickers can be viewed as a positive step, the discovery of these groups shows that trafficking routes in Thailand are still very active,” Sunai Phasuk, Thailand senior researcher at Human Rights Watch, told Reuters. “Regardless of the promises of the junta, nothing seems to have been done in concrete terms to stop trafficking gangs.”
The discovery is in keeping with what a leading advocacy group says is an alarming rise in “forced departures” from Bangladesh.
The 134 people have been found since Saturday in Phang Nga, said Churin Kwanthong, head of the Phang Nga office of the Ministry and Social Development and Human Security. The province is popular with tourists,
The 53-strong group was found at a rubber plantation in the province. He said authorities were interviewing the remaining 79, who were discovered on a remote island on Monday.
“We have to wait for further information on this group to see if they were tricked in to coming or whether they came of their own volition,” said Churin. “If they were tricked then we would also consider them victims of human trafficking”.
Reuters reported last year how thousands of Rohingya were held and sometimes tortured by traffickers at jungle camps in southern Thailand.
Tens of thousands of Rohingya have fled Myanmar, which is also known as Burma, since 2012, when violent clashes with ethnic Rakhine Buddhists killed hundreds and made about 140,000 homeless.
Sunai at Human Rights Watch said Thailand's efforts to combat trafficking amounted to little more than lip service.
Government spokesman Yongyuth Mayalarp defended its record.
“We are talking about cooperation on how to combat human trafficking all the time, including during Prayuth's visit last week to Myanmar,” Yongyuth said. “Prayuth has asked all agencies to pay particular attention to this issue.”In a letter obtained by One Green Planet, New Jersey Senator Cory Booker and California Senator Dianne Feinstein urged Secretary of Agriculture Tom Vilsack to require claims such as “humanely raised” and “cage-free” on food labels to, you know, actually mean something.
Oh, that clears things right up.
Wonderopolis
Advertisement
Currently, a product can be labeled as “humanely raised” if it meets a certain set of criteria. We’d tell you what that criteria is, but it varies from producer to producer and is entirely self-defined. In a nut shell, a meat producer gets to decide how they define the term “humane” and then they label their product as such if they feel they’ve lived up to their own standards. You know, it’s like in college when you tell the university what a medical degree means to you and then they give you one if you feel you’ve learned everything you outlined as pertinent to the field of study … oh, it doesn’t work like that? Wow, that’s probably because that would be completely ridiculous. Not unlike the current “humanely raised” label.
What’s more, no one is required to double check if the producer is even living up to their own standards. The Food Safety and Inspection Service (FSIS) will simply take a producer’s word for it. True, there are some industrious folks out there that can voluntarily ask FSIS to give their standards a once over, thusly earning them a “USDA Process Verified” seal. But again, they’re verifying that these producers are merely living up to their own hype. Hype that, by definition (or really, lack thereof), might be no better than industry standard.
Well, all you really succeeded in doing today was turning on the lights and wandering around, but that’s all you promised you were going to do in the first place. Process Verified!
Quotes and Movies
In the letter, Senators Booker and Feinstein urged FSIS to tighten the standards for these labels, admonishing Vilsack that, “it is a violation of the Federal Meat Inspection Act and Poultry Products Inspection Act to label a product in a manner that is misleading or false.”
Advertisement
Advertisement
The Senators want to see the term receive a real definition and ensure that it’s adherence is directly observed, saying, “It is our view that claims like ‘humanely raised’ should only be approved by FSIS, or verified through the Process Verified Program, when there is evidence that animal welfare standards set by an independent third party, and which significantly exceed standard industry practice, are being met.”
The terms “cage-free” and “no hormones added” were at issue for the senators as well and referred to as “misleading.” Basically, without proper checks and a structure to the labeling system, the labels that appear on chicken or turkey meat packaging are largely pointless. The FDA does not approve any hormones for use in chickens or turkeys, and for the most part, the only birds kept in cages are egg-laying hens. Throwing these labels on poultry packaging is akin to wearing a button on your shirt all day that reads, “I breathe and also blink my eyes at regular intervals.”
Advertisement
When the label appears on a carton of eggs it carries more weight, but is still confusing to the average consumer. While “cage-free” eggs are not produced by hens confined to cruel battery cages, most are still confined to a largely overcrowded factory barn that limits their movement and makes outdoor access virtually impossible. It’s an improvement, but a minimal one.
That’s waaaay better. Just like nature intended.
Woodstock Sanctuary
Advertisement
In reference to the term for this use, the letter stated, “A ‘cage free‘ label leads consumers to believe that a company raised birds with exceptional animal welfare standards, when in fact this label provides a consumer no meaningful insight into how one poultry product differs from any other.”
Considering that a recent survey found that 25 percent of Americans think that “cage-free” and “free-range” mean the same thing, while 170 million Americans don’t really know what the definition of “cage-free” actually is at all, we’d say they’re right on the money.
Advertisement
So, why do they care? The letter wraps up by saying, “Apart from being a statutory mandate, accurate labeling is critical to ensure the integrity of interstate commerce and to provide consumers truthful information about the meat and poultry products they buy.”
You know how senators can get, right? Caring about things like statutory mandates and stuff. Plus, according to an ORC International survey nearly two thirds (69 percent) of Americans asked said they prioritize animal welfare as a significant factor in deciding what foods to buy, which means these labels need to be clear in order for the American people to make educated choices about where they spend their hard earned dollars. And they aren’t.
Hmm, let’s see, it says right here that this product is made using ingredients that come from some place in a process that was overseen by someone in accordance with a statute. Sounds clear to me!
Online Learning Tips
Don’t believe us (or the compassionate senators, for that matter)? According to the Humane Heartland Animal Welfare Survey, 95 percent of the respondents indicated that a humanely raised certified label signified “better treatment of animals,” and the humanely raised label was ranked as the highest in importance over organic, natural and antibiotic free. You remember that label, right? The one that doesn’t actually have a definition? People clearly want to make the most compassionate choices that they can and murky labeling doesn’t help us to do that.
Advertisement
While eating plant-based and cutting the entire meat and dairy industry out of the equation is the simplest and easiest way to ensure your dollars don’t go where you’d rather they didn’t, forcing governmental agencies to adhere to honest and transparent guidelines is critical. Thank you Senator Booker and Senator Feinstein for standing up for animals and consumers!
Lead Image Credit: Liberty News/Huffington PostThe following remarks on a famous work by Alexis de Tocqueville (1805 - 1859) were presented as a lecture to the Faculty of Arts and Social Sciences Scholars Program at the University of Sydney, 24th April, 2015.
Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library, Yale University
Alexis de Tocqueville’s four-volume Democracy in America (1835-1840) is commonly said to be among the greatest works of nineteenth-century political writing. Its daring conjectures, elegant prose, formidable length and narrative complexity make it a masterpiece, yet exactly those qualities have together ensured, through time, that opinions greatly differ about the roots of its greatness.
Some observers cautiously mine the text for its fresh insights on such perennial themes as liberty of the press, the tyranny of the majority and civil society; or they focus on such topics as why it is that modern democracies are vulnerable to ‘commercial panics’ and why they simultaneously value equality, reduce the threat of revolution and grow complacent. Some readers of the text treat its author as a ‘classical liberal’ who loved parliamentary government and loathed the extremes of democracy. More often, the text is treated as a brilliant grand commentary on the decisive historical significance for old Europe of the rise of the new American republic, which was soon to become a world empire. Some observers, very often American, push this interpretation to the limit. They think of Democracy in America in almost nationalist terms: for them, it is a lavish hymn to the United States, a celebration of its emerging authority in the world, an ode to its 19th-century greatness and future 20th-century global dominance.
How should we make sense of these conflicting interpretations? Each arguably suffers serious flaws, but at the outset it’s important to recognise that the act of reading past texts is always an exercise in selection. There are no ‘true’ and ‘faithful’ readings of what others have written. Readers like to say that they have ‘really grasped’ the intended meanings of dead authors, whose texts belong to a context, but ‘full disclosure’ of that kind is forbidden to the living. Hemmed in by language and horizons of time and space, reading is always a stylising of past reality. Just as walking is a pale imitation of dancing, and dancing an exaggerated form of walking, so interpretations frame past realities. They are acts of narration. Acts of reading past texts are always time- and space-bound interpretations and, as one of my teachers Hans-Georg Gadamer liked to remark, all such interpretations of past texts turn out to be misinterpretations. That is why differences of interpretation are not only to be expected but, in order to prevent any one of them becoming dominant, to be welcomed, especially when they push beyond familiar horizons, towards ‘wild’ perspectives that force us to rethink things that we have so far taken for granted.
Democratic Literature
It is the spirit of ‘wild reading’ that infuses the following notes on Tocqueville’s ‘classic’ work. When approached one hundred and seventy years after its first publication as a four-volume set, Democracy in America teaches us more than a few things about the subject of democracy. But what exactly can we learn from it? It may seem far-fetched, but the first striking thing about the text is not just that it is the first-ever lengthy analytic treatment in any language of the subject of democracy but a treatment whose narrative form both mirrors and amplifies (‘mimics’) the dynamic openness of its subject matter: a way of life and a method of handling power Tocqueville repeatedly calls democracy. Democracy in America is a democratic text. Striking is its openness, its willingness to entertain paradoxes and juggle opposites, its powerful sense of adventure constructed from extensive field notes gathered by means of a grand adventure.
It may not seem obvious, but this sense of adventure has everything to do with the spirit of ‘democracy’. Democracy in America brilliantly captures and mimics in literary form the growth of an open, experimental society, a dynamic political order deeply aware of its own originality. Its grasp of these qualities of democracy was undoubtedly nurtured by Tocqueville’s peripatetic through the young American republic. It opened his eyes, widened his horizons, and changed his mind about democracy. In 1831, for nine short but action-filled months, the 26-year-old young French aristocrat (1805-1859) travelled through the United States. Accompanied by his colleague and friend Gustave de Beaumont, he ventured almost everywhere. Like a well-briefed tourist, he rode on steamboats (one of which sunk), found himself trapped by blizzards, sampled the local cuisine, and slept rough in log cabins. He found time for research and for rest, and for conversation, despite his imperfect English, with useful or prominent Americans, among them John Quincy Adams, Andrew Jackson and Daniel Webster.
Setting out from New York, he travelled upstate to Buffalo, then through the frontier, as it was then called, to Michigan and Wisconsin. He sojourned two weeks in Canada, from where he descended to Boston and Philadelphia and Baltimore. Next he went west, to Pittsburgh and Cincinatti; then south to Nashville, Memphis, and New Orleans; then north through the south-eastern states to the capital, Washington; and at last back to New York, where he returned by packet to Le Havre, France. At the beginning of his journey, in New York, where he sojourned from May 11th for some six weeks, Tocqueville was openly hesitant about this bustling market society whose system of democratic government was still in its infancy. ‘Everything I see fails to excite my enthusiasm,’ he wrote in his journal, ‘because I attribute more to the nature of things than to human will.’
Talk of the God-given nature of things appears from time to time between the lines of Democracy in America. Seemingly still under the influence of the political false starts of his native France, the ‘nature of things’ principle stands in some tension with its sense of adventure, with its feeling for the novelty of democracy as a transformative experience. But Tocqueville, the slightly built son of a count from Normandy - the Château Tocqueville still stands, within sight of the harbour of Cherbourg - was soon to change his mind about democracy. Sometime during his stay in Boston (7 September - 3 October, 1831), Tocqueville became a convert of the American way of life. He began to talk of ‘a great democratic revolution’ now sweeping the world from its American heartlands. He was persuaded that ‘the advent of democracy as a governing power in the world’s affairs, universal and irresistible, was at hand’. He became convinced that ‘the time was coming’ when democracy would triumph in Europe, as it was doing in America. The future was America. It was therefore imperative to understand its strengths and weaknesses, he thought. And so, on January 12th 1832, just before boarding his packet for France, he sketched plans to bring to the French public a work about democracy in America. ‘If royalists could see the internal functioning of this well-ordered republic,’ he wrote, ‘the deep respect its people profess for their acquired rights, the power of those rights over crowds, the religion of law, the real and effective liberty people enjoy, the true rule of the majority, the easy and natural way things proceed, they would realise that they apply a single name to diverse forms of government which have nothing in common. Our republicans would feel that what we have called the Republic was never more than an unclassifiable monster…covered in blood and mud, clothed in the rages of antiquity’s quarrels.’
Tocqueville’s epiphany produced a string of extraordinary insights, as well as paradoxes. Consider his claim in Democracy in America that the political form known as democracy, all things considered, extinguishes the aesthetic dimension of life. It produces no lasting works of art, no poetry, no fine literature. Lacking a leisure class, he reasoned, the young American democracy cultivated people with practical minds. ‘The language, the dress, and the daily actions of men in democracies are repugnant to conceptions of the ideal’, he wrote. The whole ‘philosophical method’ of democracy is pragmatic, centred on the effort of individuals to make sense of their world by harnessing their own individual understanding of things. Even in matters of religion, ‘everyone shuts himself up tightly within |
The House Appropriations Committee has once again decided that the American public can’t have its cake and eat it too.
That is, they can continue to fund the Congressional Research Service (CRS), which produces reports for the benefit of Congress, but the committee denied CRS any funding to make those reports available to taxpayers. The committee refused a CRS request to increase its funding by $5 million for 2016. Instead, it voted to give CRS $107 million, the same amount as this year.
The only way for the public to access such reports is if a non-governmental entity compiles and publishes them. The Federation of American Scientists is one such group; FAS maintains a database of reports.
And even with the cuts, the vultures are circling. The Appropriations Committee report directed “the Library of Congress to commission an independent survey of all Members and committees of the House of Representatives to ascertain their fundamental and optimal requirements for services and support from the Library of Congress and especially the Congressional Research Service.”
The problem is that some of the service’s work for congressmen is not very significant, such as answering odd requests from constituents. CRS’s talents lie in dissecting policy issues without regard to the ideological biases of those making its budget.
“Even when we did find time and space to do serious research, lawmakers ignored our work or trashed us if our findings ran contrary to their beliefs,” former CRS analyst Kevin Kosar wrote earlier this year.
-Steve Straehley
To Learn More:
House Renews Ban on CRS Publication of Its Reports (by Steven Aftergood, Federation of American Scientists)
Congressional Research Service Reports (Federation of American Scientists)
Why I Quit the Congressional Research Service (by Kevin R. Kosar, Washington Monthly)
Bipartisan House Bill Would Open Congressional Research Service Reports to the Public (by Noel Brinkerhoff, AllGov)Fox & Friends today interviewed a member of the National Federation of Independent Businesses (NFIB) to attack the Affordable Care Act without disclosing his ties to the anti-health care group. NFIB member and small business owner Mike Paine appeared on the program to claim that the health care bill will hurt his business, an attack that has been repeated by other NFIB members. During the interview, Fox & Friends co-host Dave Briggs asked Paine to explain, "[w]hy, in your opinion, does Obamacare hurt small businesses like yours?" Paine went on to talk about his uncertainty over the law and claimed he believed President Obama wants to get rid of employer-based health care: An error occurred with the video embed. At no point during the interview did Briggs mention that Paine was a member of the NFIB, a group that has spent millions opposing the health care reform law, even though the NFIB's Twitter account promoted his appearance on Thursday:.@NFIB member Mike Paine of CT on @foxandfriends tomorrow morning to discuss how #Obamacare will affect his #smallbiz bit.ly/PiPHo2 -- NFIB (@NFIB) July 5, 2012 The NFIB has long been involved in the effort to overturn the Affordable Care Act. Salon.com's Alex Seitz-Weld noted that the NFIB is the lead plaintiff in one of the lawsuits against the law that went before the Supreme Court, and reported that the group's lawsuit against the Affordable Care Act "cost at least $2.9 million in 2010 alone." He also reported that: The NFIB presents itself as the "nonpartisan" voice of small businesses, but liberal critics charge that, much like the U.S. Chamber of Commerce, the NFIB has become a partisan conservative attack dog. The group has given vastly more to GOP candidates than to Democrats, with over 90 percent of its contributions going to Republicans for the past 15 years, on average. So far this year, they've given almost $300,000 to GOP candidates and just $3,500 to Democrats. Crossroads GPS, the 501(c)4 arm of Karl Rove's American Crossroads, also gave $3.7 million to the NFIB last year. But Paine isn't the only small business owner affiliated with the NFIB that Fox has hosted to criticize health care reform, and it isn't the first time they failed to disclose the guest's NFIB membership.
The blog Balloon Juice pointed out that a small business owner named Joe Olivo recently appeared on NPR and NBC News to bash the Affordable Care Act - without his membership in the NFIB being disclosed. Olivo has also appeared several times on Fox to criticize the law:
Wow--two news organizations covering the same story scoured the nation for a random small business owner to comment on that story--and they both found the same one! How'd that happen? What are the odds? Well, as it turns out, Joe Olivo of Perfect Printing turns up quite a bit in public discussions of this and other issues. Here he is testifying against the health care law before House and Senate committees in January 2011. Here he is on the Fox Business Network around the same time, discussing the same subject. Here he is a few days ago, also on Fox Business, talking to John Stossel about the law. Here he is discussing the same subject on a New Jersey Fox affiliate. And here he is in July 2010 discussing small business hiring with Neil Cavuto on Fox News. Here he is opposing an increase in the minimum wage in an MSNBC debate a couple of weeks ago. Go to many of these links and you find out something about Joe Olivo that NPR and NBC didn't tell you: he's a member of the National Federation of Independent Business. NFIB's site and YouTube page promote many of Olivo's public appearances. He was the subject of an NFIB "My Voice in Washington" online video in 2011.
A Nexis search shows that Joe Olivo has been hosted by Fox News and Fox Business six times since July 2010, and in those appearances he criticized health care reform and claimed it will hurt his business - without his membership in the NFIB being disclosed.
UPDATE: Balloon Juice notes that National Federation of Independent Business member Joe Olivo appeared on NPR again on Sunday -- and again, his affiliation with the NFIB was not disclosed:
He was being interviewed by Guy Raz on All Things Considered on the subject of a bill championed by Senator Tom Harkin that would raise the minimum wage. (Needless to say, Olivo's against the idea.) [...] No mention of his NFIB ties--none. And there's none in the audio version of the story. (Olivo comes in at about 7:06.) What's odd is that the Olivo interview is followed by a chat with Bill Dunkelberg, NFIB's chief economist. He's ID'd as an NFIB guy. (He also thinks that maybe we shouldn't have a minimum wage at all.) But Olivo gets no such ID.Hardware
The Nexus 5X is by no means a premium smartphone. Its polycarbonate, lightweight shell and vanilla design make it feel more sporty than posh; more family sedan than luxury sports car. Compared to the larger, all-metal 6P, the 5X and its plastic hardware seem downright homely. Still, taken on its own, the 5X isn't exactly lacking in the looks department. On the contrary, it's rather adorable, with gently rounded corners, a slender profile and smooth, curved edges that lead to an incredibly comfortable feel in the hand. I like the look of the creamy white backplate -- which also comes in a beautiful robin's egg blue and the standard black -- especially in contrast with the black front frame. Sure, it won't win any design awards, but for an affordable phone, the 5X's simple style is more than acceptable.
Part of the 5X's appeal is its smaller size. While there's certainly a growing trend toward larger phones like the Nexus 6P, there's still a segment of the population that is much more comfortable with something more pocket-friendly. Measuring 147 x 72.6 x 7.9mm, the 5X is definitely tinier than both the Nexus 6 and the 6P, and would likely please anyone who was a fan of the original Nexus 5. As someone with relatively small hands, I have to say I appreciate the form factor. I could easily tap through apps while holding the phone one-handed and it fits into my back pocket with only a tiny bit sticking out. And although it might be small, the 5X still manages to squeeze in a roomy 5.2-inch display, thanks to some relatively slim bezels.
Much of the phone's hardware doesn't seem too different from other Android phones -- there's the volume rocker and power button on the right side and a SIM card tray on the left. Sitting above the aforementioned screen is a 5-megapixel, front-facing camera plus an ambient light sensor. Underneath the display is the front-facing speaker grille, which hides an RGB LED indicator behind it. At the bottom is a headset jack plus a USB Type-C port, which is newly supported by Android 6.0 Marshmallow. For the uninitiated, USB Type-C is a reversible connector that will fit in the port no matter how you put it in, and it promises to transmit data at faster speeds too. This is great, but Google has only included a USB-C-to-USB-C cable in the box. That means you'll need to get an additional USB-C-to-USB-A cable in order to charge the phone with most computers. Of course, you can just use the included USB Type-C power adapter to charge the phone, but it's less convenient.
Flip the phone around and you'll find the 12-megapixel camera along with a broad-spectrum CRI-90 dual flash and an infrared laser-assisted autofocus sensor (You'll find more thoughts on the camera below). Underneath that is something brand-new to the Nexus line of phones, and that is the Nexus Imprint fingerprint reader. To start using it, rest your fingertip inside the metal ring. The phone will then immediately launch the fingerprint setup wizard, which requests that you touch the sensor a few times in different positions so that it can read your fingerprint accurately. And voila -- from then on, you can just rest your finger on the reader to unlock your phone. The entire process is easy and straightforward. The reader itself works really fast -- it takes less than a second for it to trigger. And, similar to Touch ID on the iPhone, the sensor can also be used to authenticate payments via Android Pay.
As far as internals go, both the Nexus 5X and 6P have something called the Android Sensor Hub, a low-power, always-on co-processor dedicated to data from sensors like the accelerometer and the gyroscope. The idea here is that it'll automatically gather data for fitness stats like steps and distance without you having to wake the phone and without involving the device's main processor, potentially saving you quite a bit of battery life. Additionally, it'll know when you've picked it up and will automatically display the time and any missed notifications without you having to press anything.
Aside from that, the Nexus 5X has pretty solid specs for a sub-$400 handset. It has a Qualcomm Snapdragon 808 1.8GHz hexa-core 64-bit processor, an Adreno 418 GPU and 2GB of LPDDR3 RAM. Unfortunately for media hoarders, you won't find a microSD card slot here -- you'll have to make do with either 16GB or 32GB of internal storage.
The Nexus 5X is compatible with all major US carriers as well as most networks around the globe thanks to its wide-range band support. Of note here is that just like the Nexus 6 and the Nexus 6P, the 5X is one of a few phones to support Google's new Fi carrier service. As a reminder, the service relies mostly on WiFi for calls and data, and it piggybacks on top of both Sprint's and T-Mobile's networks, alternating between the two when necessary. The genius behind Fi is that it's very affordable -- you only need to pay $20 a month for the basic plan. So if you buy both the budget-friendly 5X and sign up for Fi, you could get away with a very good deal.
Display and sound
Considering the 5X is a more mid-range phone, I was pleasantly surprised by the quality of its display. Sure it's not a WQHD AMOLED like the 6P, but the 5X's 5.2-inch LCD is still lovely in its own right. It boasts full HD resolution (1,920 x 1,080), resulting in a pixel-dense 423-ppi display that's brilliant, sharp and pops with rich colors. Darks are deep and whites are practically blinding if you max out the brightness. The screen is perfectly usable in direct sunlight and the viewing angles are wide. Topping it off is a sheet of Corning Gorilla Glass 3, which has been treated with an oleophobic coating that supposedly wards off fingerprints and smudges. Although it doesn't prevent streaks 100 percent of the time, I will admit it does a good job of keeping the panel blemish-free.
As for sound, well, all you'll get with the 5X is a single front-facing speaker, so don't expect to replicate a stereo system here. Even at max volume, the audio is terribly tinny, metallic and shallow, with almost no bass or depth to speak of. Still, at least it's pretty loud, which should be useful for the occasional conference call.
Android 6.0 Marshmallow
As with every new Nexus, the 5X ships with the very latest in Android versions, which in this case is Android 6.0 Marshmallow. It brings several innovations to the party, which we'll soon detail in a more extensive review. For our purposes today, however, I'll run through some of the key highlights of the most recent in Google's candy-named OSes to give you a brief overview of the new software.
First, there's a new UI. It was actually introduced to the Google Now launcher in September, so it might not be so new to some of you. The app launcher features an alphabetical list that you scroll through vertically instead of side to side. At the very top of the launcher is a row of four shortcut icons leading to your most oft-used apps -- this list changes dynamically depending on what you happen to be using at any given time. In my experience, the phone is pretty smart at guessing what apps I'm obsessed with (which is mostly Gmail, Facebook and Instagram). A dynamic quick-launch bar also sometimes appears when you're typing in a keyword in the Google search field, automatically listing any app that begins with the corresponding letters.
But one of the most standout features of Android Marshmallow, by far, is Now on Tap, which lets you dive deeper into anything you're reading or watching by bringing up additional information. So, for example, if you're watching The X-Files on Google's Play Movies app, you can hold down the home button to bring up the show's IMDb page as well as links to Google search results, YouTube videos, Facebook pages and other assorted images and links associated with the show. On a restaurant page on Yelp, Now on Tap would bring up navigation instructions, the establishment's phone number, the menu, Street View and any other related links or images. It's essentially a smarter and faster way to find the information you're looking for, without having to do a search.
App permissions are also now a lot more flexible and customizable. You can selectively choose what permissions to allow, and whether or not you'd rather have those permissions on all the time or just for certain periods. A verified security boot feature shows whether or not the firmware has been modified and there's a new Direct Share function that lets you easily send and receive files with your favorite contacts. I'm also a fan of Auto Backup for Apps, which (as the name suggests) automatically backs up everything in your phone, even certain system settings. This makes it so much easier to switch out Android devices. Indeed, I transitioned to the 5X from an older Nexus 6 that had Android Marshmallow on board, and with just a few taps, I had all my apps installed.
A few of Android Marshmallow's features are tied to hardware. It allows for the Nexus Imprint fingerprint sensor as well as the support for USB Type-C. It also boasts better power management; there's a Doze mode that puts the phone in a sleep state when it's not in use, and apps that don't get much use will be put in App Standby so that they don't take up too much power.
CameraThis is the latest entry in MLBTR’s Offseason In Review series. The full index of Offseason In Review posts can be found here.
As they open SunTrust Park for the 2017 season, the Braves have begun to transition toward competitiveness — though they carefully avoided any lengthy veteran entanglements this winter.
Major League Signings
Trades And Claims
Notable Minor League Signings
Extensions
Notable Losses
[Braves Depth Chart; Braves Payroll Information]
Needs Addressed
The pace of moves coming from the Atlanta front office remains dizzying. This time around, while there were still many forward-looking transactions, the club increasingly turned its attention to investing in the 2017 roster.
That’s not to say that the Braves went wild in a push to win now; after all, the club won only 68 games in 2016, despite a strong finish. Instead, the vast bulk of the club’s investments in veteran players are of the one-year variety. The club clearly hopes to boost its on-field product with a new park opening while steering clear of the kinds of moves that could hamper more dedicated future efforts at contending.
GM John Coppolella promised that the rotation would be the focus, and he followed through on that early. Atlanta added two of the game’s oldest players, Bartolo Colon and R.A. Dickey, on mid-priced, one-year deals. Talented lefty Jaime Garcia joined the fold, too, in a deal that cost the organization two reasonably promising pitching prospects in John Gant and Chris Ellis.
All said, the rotation promises to be worlds better than the 2016 unit, though it’ll likely be more of a reliably solid unit than any kind of top-tier staff. With the trade rumors in the rear-view — at least until the deadline — top hurler Julio Teheran will look to repeat a strong season. High-octane righty Mike Foltynewicz seems the obvious choice for the fifth spot, and he’ll also seek to build off of the promise he showed in 2016.
The Braves would surely be glad to see that quintet succeed for a full season, though it’s possible to imagine a summer trade if the organization isn’t sticking in the postseason picture. Garcia, in particular, could hold appeal if he performs. Meanwhile, Atlanta will see whether Matt Wisler, Aaron Blair, and Lucas Sims can regain their footing, while veterans such as John Danks, Andrew Albers, and perhaps old favorite Kris Medlen will take up spots in the depth department. Most importantly, perhaps, the club will closely watch the progress of touted arms as Sean Newcomb, Patrick Weigel, Max Fried, Touki Toussaint, Mike Soroka, Kolby Allard, and the newly acquired Luiz Gohara as they plot a course for the future.
Despite all the changes in the rotation, the bullpen largely returns in its 2016 form. Jim Johnson took an extension just before reaching free agency, and he’s expected to handle closing duties. That job could be contested at some point during the year, though, particularly if Arodys Vizcaino can find his form or Mauricio Cabrera proves as overwhelming as his stuff. Josh Collmenter and Ian Krol are back after agreeing to arb deals, while Jose Ramirez also figures to have a spot locked down. Righty Chaz Roe, who showed well (11.7 K/9, 3.2 BB/9, 3.60 ERA) in 20 frames after a mid-season claim, is in the mix too, though he’s struggled badly in Spring Training thus far. Rounding out the pen may come down to a camp battle involving veteran minor-league signees Eric O’Flaherty, Sam Freeman, Rex Brothers, Blaine Boyer, and perhaps also 40-man members Luke Jackson and Akeel Morris.
The Braves’ most notable moves on the position-player side came at second base. The team thought it had its man in Sean Rodriguez, who got a two-year deal after a career year in Pittsburgh, but a terrifying car crash left him with an injured shoulder and a lengthy rehab timeline. He could miss the majority of the 2017 campaign. That led the Braves to pivot back to Brandon Phillips, who was acquired for a light price and will hold down the fort at second while the team waits for top prospect Ozzie Albies to return from injury, finish his development, and join exciting young shortstop Dansby Swanson in the bigs.
While there was chatter that the Braves would pursue an upgrade behind the dish, the club ultimately passed on free agents such as Matt Wieters, Jason Castro, and the recovering Wilson Ramos. Instead, the club added Kurt Suzuki on a modest pact to join Tyler Flowers in some kind of time share. Anthony Recker remains on hand as a third option, so things are set for the time being. In the long term, though, the catching position remains one of uncertainty.
Questions Remaining
Most of the organization’s notable holes were plugged in some way, as might have been expected. But there’s plenty of variability on this roster, and there are a few areas which remain unsettled as the season draws near.
There was speculation before the offseason that Atlanta might look to upgrade at third base, where the team is set to feature Adonis Garcia. The 31-year-old has shown flashes of ability in his brief time in the majors, but he has yet to show the kind of consistency that warrants regular playing time. Garcia improved with the bat and the glove after a rough first half in 2016, though he still ended the year with a below-average.273/.311/.406 batting line and negative grades on the bases and in the field.
To be fair, parting with significant resources to add a player such as Todd Frazier (via trade) or Justin Turner (through free agency) probably wasn’t sensible from a long-term perspective. And it’s certainly possible that Atlanta foresaw a scenario where Rodriguez would have shifted to the hot corner upon the ascension of Albies, or where Garcia would give way to prospect Rio Ruiz. But the Braves could have placed a smaller bet on someone like Luis Valbuena or Trevor Plouffe to bolster the third base situation, so there were alternatives. Whether the team made the right call to give Garcia another full season of playing time remains to be seen.
The outfield, too, still seems in need of a supplemental player. Ender Inciarte is undoubtedly deserving of the vast bulk of the time in center, which he’ll surely receive (more on him below). But Matt Kemp and Nick Markakis aren’t exactly mid-prime corner options. While they’ll see the lion’s share of the time, their own value would likely be maximized if they receive regular rest.
Among the organization’s current options, veteran Emilio Bonifacio may have the inside track on such a role. He’s more of a utilityman than a true outfielder, but would generally meet the team’s reported desire for a right-handed hitter who can play center. (Bonifacio does have a good bit of MLB experience there; the switch-hitter has also traditionally fared better against southpaw pitching.) Other internal reserve possibilities, such as Micah Johnson and Adam Walker, don’t quite match the job description, and Johnson is now out of the picture in the short term anyhow after suffering a fractured wrist. There’s been some chatter that the Braves are interested in veteran Angel Pagan, though it seems the team hasn’t offered enough to draw him in.
There are broader bench questions, too. The left-handed-hitting Jace Peterson is a rather obvious choice to earn one spot; he’ll likely spend some time spelling the team’s right-handed-hitting second and third basemen. Otherwise, light-hitting utilityman Chase d’Arnaud seems to have the inside track. If it’s d’Arnaud, Peterson, and Bonifacio to go with the second catcher, and the Braves use an eight-man pen, that doesn’t leave much in the way of offensive ability on the bench.
On the pitching side, there is certainly a fair bit of depth, and the bullpen is in solid shape. Despite all the additions to the rotation, though, that unit may not be as great an asset as might be hoped. Dickey and Colon are both over 40; while that hasn’t stopped them from being sturdy and effective to this point, there’s always the possibility of a significant fall-off given their age. Garcia carries long-term health questions and wasn’t that effective in 2016. And while there’s talent beyond that group, only Teheran has clearly established himself as a high-quality MLB starter.
It obviously wouldn’t have made much sense for the Braves to prioritize 2017 too heavily in making winter moves. But the club did dabble in the market for such quality, controllable arms as Jose Quintana and Chris Archer. Any such acquisition would’ve been a major trade that could well have required paying too high a price (quite possibly including Swanson), but clearly that kind of arm would’ve represented a more significant upgrade. The Braves will be content to roll the dice with what they have, and to keep knocking on those doors, but as presently constituted the rotation has plenty of potential to disappoint.
Deal Of Note
The rebuilding process isn’t just about securing young talent. It’s also about sorting through it and planning ahead for when it’s all available at the MLB level.
When the Braves struck the stunning deal last winter that sent Shelby Miller to the Diamondbacks, much of the focus landed on Swanson — and rightfully so. But the deal also delivered Blair and the underappreciated Ender Inciarte, who many thought might be flipped.
Inciarte, however, wasn’t dealt. And though he struggled early, he turned things on in the second half and ended up with another 3+ WAR campaign. While the Braves had another chance to weigh trade offers, the club chose instead to commit to the Super Two-eligible player this winter in the form of a five-year contract extension.
The total outlay to Inciarte — just over $30MM — is low enough that it won’t hurt too badly if the investment falls flat. That’s an unlikely outcome, as his defensive and baserunning abilities give him a fairly sturdy floor as a useful fourth outfielder even in a downside scenario.
While the Braves have been downright aggressive in hunting for high-upside players in recent years, and have also committed some near-term funds to veterans, the Inciarte deal is another kind of transaction entirely. Much like the division-rival Phillies’ nearly identical deal with Odubel Herrera, this extension represents the placement of a piece of the puzzle for seasons far beyond the present. Particularly given the most likely alternative — shopping Inciarte for yet more pre-MLB talent — the contract is as clear an indication as any that the organization is ramping up for contention.
Overview
Few will pick the Braves to make the postseason in 2017, or even to remain in the hunt as summer turns to fall. But there’s an expectation for improvement — and, perhaps, also the beginnings of some pressure. Fan expectations are rising with the new park and new player investments. Some of the organization’s hyped upper-level players are entering the phase where they will need to prove their worth in the majors or step aside. And the plans of the front office will increasingly be put to the test as the organization seeks to convert the talent it has accumulated into wins.
What’s your take on the Braves’ winter? (Link to poll for mobile app users …)
Photos courtesy of USA Today Sports Images.One afternoon a stranger called at Muhammad Faizanullah's stationery shop in Karachi, Pakistan's commercial capital, and wordlessly handed the man behind the counter two items: a piece of paper with a phone number scrawled on it, and a bullet.
"The letter contained a demand for 200,000 Pakistani rupees," Faizanullah, 20, said. "The man said 'Just call this number and pay the amount, otherwise the bullet is meant for you.'"
Businesses in Karachi are facing a surge in extortion demands from criminal gangs, forcing many owners to delay new investment or to relocate their families to escape the sense of insecurity gripping the urban heart of Pakistan's economy.
The worsening law and order situation in Karachi, which generates 25 per cent of Pakistan's economic activity, presents one of the many challenges new Prime Minister Nawaz Sharif must overcome to fulfill promises to set Pakistan on a path to faster growth.
An expanding middle class is fuelling consumer spending but extortion is hurting confidence among thousands of family-run firms that form the backbone of the economy.
With the month of Ramazan due to start in July, a traditional time for extortionists to come calling, Karachi traders and shopkeepers are braced for what police say will be a record year of demands.
"The extortion racket has blown out of all proportion with the previous year," said Ahmed Chinoy, chief of the Citizen Police Liaison Committee (CPLC), a Karachi body set up to help police by providing crime statistics and technical support.
The growing demands reflect the shifting dynamics of a city of 18 million people where new challengers, including Pakistan's Taliban movement, are locked in an increasingly violent, neighbourhood-by-neighbourhood battle for control.
Figures collected by Chinoy's committee show there were more than 630 extortion complaints registered in Karachi from January to mid-June, compared to 589 in the whole of last year. Most cases were registered by people who have refused to pay.
Police say the actual number of incidents is many times higher since the vast majority of extortion demands go unreported and victims usually decide to pay. There is no way to know the sums involved, but police say payments run into tens of millions of dollars annually and that 2013 will be a record year.
Ten days after the extortionist paid his visit to Faizanullah's shop in the bustling Alam cloth market in December, two men on motorbikes stopped him, his father and uncle as they were driving home from work.
One of the men, a gun visible in his waistband, told Faizanullah: "You people don't seem to understand our polite attitude, we will have to shoot you." They demanded the men's cellphones and roared away.
"We live under constant stress," Faizanullah said. But he has insisted that his family refuse to hand over any cash.
Professionals, not just shopkeepers, are also targets.
When Javed Hanif, a doctor, answered his cellphone in June the caller reeled off a list of Hanif's personal details: his work in a government hospital, the registration number of his car, and preparations for his son's wedding. The man demanded 500,000 Pakistani rupees.
Hand grenades
Karachi traders say paying extortion has long been part of the cost of doing business in Karachi.
The police have also linked political parties to extortion in Karachi, although the parties repeatedly deny any involvement.
In the past year, the rules of the game have changed as competing political parties, militant groups and criminal entrepreneurs have expanded their extortion rackets to fund ever deadlier turf wars, police officials say.
The number of killings in Karachi jumped to more than 2,300 in 2012 from 1,700 the previous year. More than 1,400 murders have already been recorded since the start of this year. The increasing death toll has made it easier for gangs to coerce people into paying money, although there have been few reports of extortion-related killings.
"The extortion racket in Karachi has become an industry," said senior police officer Niaz Ahmed Khosa.
"There are around 50 no-go areas in Karachi, which police can not enter. Most of the extortion rackets and other crime are being generated from these population pockets."
The police blame much of the increase in extortion on a criminal gang based in the district of Lyari, which they say is expanding into new parts of the city. The gang, the police say, is linked to a political party.
"If some political party says they are not involved in the extortion racket, they are lying," said Majyad Aziz Balagamwala, a former president of the Karachi Chamber of Commerce and Industry.
Police say Pakistan's Taliban movement, which originated on the northwestern frontier with Afghanistan, has also ramped up extortion operations in Karachi in the past year and has been blamed for attacks that have killed dozens of police.
In spite of the climate of fear, business sentiment is not universally bleak. Retail is booming in Karachi, symbolised by the opening of a flashy modern shopping centre called Dolmen Mall Clifton in 2011 which showcases international brands such as Debenhams and Fatburger.
But nobody is immune from an extortionist's call.
Byram D. Avari, the owner of a prominent hotel chain and a well-known figure in Karachi, refused to pay the demands of a caller who threatened to set off hand grenades at his hotels and home. But many others dare not say no.HOUSTON (CN) – A deputy county constable who had been fired for misconduct, then rehired, stopped a woman driver and told her “that his penis was erect and that she needed to ‘adjust it’ or she would go to jail,” then sexually groped her while she was handcuffed, the woman claims in Federal Court.
M.M. sued Harris County, Harris County Constable Precinct 3 and Precinct 3 Constable Kenneth Jones – but Jones is not the officer she accused of assaulting her. She says she was assaulted by Deputy Constable Christopher Kerr, who is not named as a defendant in the case.
The complaint states: “On August 19, 2011, plaintiff, a 28-year-old female, was pulled over by Deputy Constable Christopher Kerr on Beltway 8 near John Ralston Road. Deputy Kerr handcuffed plaintiff and then proceeded to grope and fondle her.
“Deputy Kerr then told plaintiff that his penis was erect and that she needed to ‘adjust it’ or she would go to jail. Deputy Kerr then placed his hands under plaintiff’s skirt and fondled her.
“At all times plaintiff was in Deputy Kerr’s custody and restrained by handcuffs. The traffic stop lasted about 30 minutes, but there is not any video record of it, because video of the incident was erased from the camera in Kerr’s patrol car.
“Defendant Constable Kenneth Jones, in the course and scope of his employment as Harris County Constable, Pct. 3, had previously fired Kerr for misconduct. Nevertheless, defendant Harris County rehired Kerr in January 2011. Defendant Harris County Texas was aware of the propensities of Kerr to disregard the department’s policies and procedures, but rehired and retained him in spite of such knowledge.”
M.M. says she “still has nightmares involving the attack upon her, and has a justified fear of police officers and others in positions of power.”
She seeks $150,000 in damages for civil rights deprivation, supervisor liability, assault by offensive physical contact, assault by threat of bodily injury, mental anguish and negligent hiring.
She is represented by David A. Bryant Jr. with Bryant-Gonzalez, of Houston.
Like this: Like Loading...Design cognition research aims to investigate the cognitive mechanisms and thought processes of human designers. In previous research, the cognitive activity of experienced and inexperienced designers has been compared in order to identify design strategies leading to design creativity. However, it is still unknown whether the design strategies applied are effective and whether the design processes are efficiently improved. In this paper, cognitive efficiency, describing how designers optimize mental resources to achieve creativity in conceptual design processes, was directly measured by the mental effort of designers and the creativity level of design outcomes. The results showed that the experienced designers generated more design concepts with higher quality and variety than did the inexperienced designers. The cognitive efficiency measures indicated that design expertise contributed to improving cognitive efficiency scores of quality. In addition, the systematic design method used by some designers was found to be related to high cognitive efficiency. It can be seen that the evaluation of cognitive efficiency has practical applications for designer training, design methodology evaluation, and design process improvement.
Adams, R. S. ( 2001 ). Cognitive processes in iterative design behavior (PhD dissertation). University of Washington, Seattle, WA.
Google Scholar
Ahern, S., Beatty, J. ( 1979 ). Pupillary responses during information processing vary with Scholastic Aptitude Test scores. Science, 205, 1289 – 1292. doi: 10.1126/science.472746
Google Scholar Crossref | Medline | ISI
Atman, C. J., Cardella, M. E., Turns, J., Adams, R. ( 2005 ). Comparing freshman and senior engineering design processes: An in-depth follow-up study. Design Studies, 26, 325 – 357. doi: 10.1016/j.destud.2004.09.005
Google Scholar Crossref | ISI
Baer, J. ( 2011 ). Domains of creativity. In Mark, A. R., Steven, R. P. (Eds.), Encyclopedia of creativity ( 2nd ed., pp. 404 – 408 ). San Diego, CA : Academic Press.
Google Scholar Crossref
“Become a P.Eng./Requirements for Licensure.” ( 2013 ). Retrieved from http://www.peo.on.ca/index.php/ci_id/2057/la_id/1.htm
Google Scholar
Benami, O., Jin, Y. ( 2002 ). Creative stimulation in conceptual design. In Proceedings of the ASME 2002 International Design Engineering Technical Conferences and Computer and Information in Engineering Conference (pp. 251 – 263 ). doi: 10.1115/DETC2002/DTM-34023
Google Scholar Crossref
Bilda, Z., Gero, J. S. ( 2007 ). The impact of working memory limitations on the design process during conceptualization. Design Studies, 28, 343 – 367. doi: 10.1016/j.destud.2007.02.005
Google Scholar Crossref | ISI
Byrne, E. A., Parasuraman, R. ( 1996 ). Psychophysiology and adaptive automation. Biological Psychology, 42, 249 – 268. doi: 10.1016/0301-0511(95)05161-9
Google Scholar Crossref | Medline | ISI
Cai, H., Do, E. Y. L., Zimring, C. M. ( 2010 ). Extended linkography and distance graph in design evaluation: an empirical study of |
both workers’ rights and public revenue, a publicly owned and operated system is far superior to private enterprise. Because LCBO employees are unionized, we know wages start out at $15 [PDF] for casual retail employees and that senior retail clerks can earn up to $35 per hour. In an expensive city with high and growing numbers of people forced into insecure jobs, we need to protect the jobs that actually offer a living wage ($18.52 in Toronto). Rank and File reported in 2013 that there are dramatic gender inequities in both the LCBO workforce and in which LCBO employees have access to health benefits (a function of how many hours need to be worked in order to qualify). Those divides are serious, and must be addressed. The reason we know about them, though, and the reason workers are able to fight to address them with public support rather than in the shadows, is that their employer is accountable to the public and the government. None of the issues people often take with the LCBO are intrinsic to its nature, despite the fact that they’re often framed as public sector “inefficiencies.” With enough public outcry, issues like store hours and prices could feasibly be changed, and there’s no way to know that a private market would necessarily be better in these (or any other) regards. Glassdoor.ca, which tracks wages and salaries, lists an average sales associate wage of $11 per hour, or $11.26 for “wine merchants,” at the Wine Rack, the province’s privatized wine and cooler sales operation. Wine Rack employees are unionized but compensated at levels far below those of their public employee counterparts. Monopolies are something of a dirty word these days, and with good reason. There are few methods of recourse when a monopoly, either public or private, raises prices or cuts services. Of course, with a public monopoly, we can complain to the government, whereas with a private one (like the Wine Rack and Beer Store) we can neither take our business elsewhere nor raise the problem with an outside body. The Canadian Centre for Policy Alternatives wrote in one report [PDF]: “When ownership of the monopoly belongs to the state, all of the benefits of the monopoly can be directed toward the public good.” That’s what governments do with the profits they make off alcohol sales: they fund essential services, such as education and health care. The LCBO brought $1.6 billion into the public purse in 2012, according to Rank and File. That same CCPA report found that, while publicly retailed alcohol is often derided as being wildly expensive in comparison to private sales, publicly controlled alcohol sales in Saskatchewan and BC tended to be cheaper than private sales in either BC or Alberta. The much-maligned public sector offers two things we need desperately in the current economic climate: secure jobs and steady revenue. The latter is especially true of public alcohol sales, because our appetite for getting drunk isn’t going anywhere. Rather than lining the pockets of a few behind-the-scenes businesspeople at the expense of the public at large and of employees, the obvious solution is to support the LCBO and to, where necessary, look for changes within it. Lucky for us, we know exactly where to apply pressure for those changes.
NO
I am going to open this by saying I am not opposed to Crown corporations. I grew up in Saskatchewan, and I was fortunate enough to have SGI to insure my car and Sasktel for my cell phone—both were fantastic. These Crown corporations offered a fair product and were working to offer a service to the people at a fair price because they were working for the people. Sadly, the same can’t be said for what I’ve seen in Ontario, where nothing is more frustrating to me than the LCBO. It makes me uneasy that the government dictates who has access to the market. If you sell wine, your only option is to sell through the LCBO. The Wine Rack and the Wine Shop, while they sell wine, are privately owned and exist under grandfathered licenses. There are people at the LCBO who make the decision on what gets stocked on the shelves. If you own a small vineyard in Niagara, it is incredibly difficult to get a product listed by the LCBO. As a winery owner, you are only able to sell your wine out the cellar door, or at a farmers’ market. It doesn’t seem fair to have such a restricted market for what amounts to grape juice produced in our own backyard. Over the past few years, I have had the opportunity to travel outside of Canada in search of great wine to drink. Outside of Canada, you can get your wine and beer from grocery stores, gas stations, or even take away from restaurants. This isn’t just great because it offers easy access to booze. Rather, as a business owner, if I wanted to carry a bottle of wine from a producer up the road, I could. In this city, I can’t. Even within the craft beer, wine, and spirits movement, we still cling to Prohibition-era laws that put alcohol on a forbidden pedestal. But the reality is that alcohol is an agricultural product. Quite possibly it’s the only agricultural product that generates tourism interest. I understand that revenue from the LCBO is important to the province. But as a Crown corporation, it should be operating to benefit the people: taxpayers and consumers. Using Prohibition-era laws, the LCBO is deliberately gouging consumers under the guise of “social responsibility.” According to one story in Toronto Life, the LCBO decides on a price from a supplier and will ask them to raise the price to keep us socially responsible. Am I the only one who still misses buck-a-beer? It would seem that the LCBO talks out of both sides of its mouth by keeping its prices high while at the same time pouring out slick, glossy catalogues and magazines (Vintages, Food and Drink), and every quarter hour, you can be sure to hear the very well-produced radio jingles. If the LCBO is the only place to purchase booze, why does it need to advertise? Meanwhile, head south of the border to see how much more booze costs for us Torontonians. A bottle of Toasted Head Chardonnay, for instance, costs $18.95 from the LCBO; the same bottle of wine in Arizona will cost as little as $9. I will cede that the LCBO is definitely the best booze monopoly in the country. But it’s still a broken system. It’s not time to completely dismantle the LCBO, but we need to give our local producers access to the market. As it stands, that just isn’t happening.People who like to smoke when they drink may be at greater risk of suffering a hangover the next morning, according to a study in the January 2013 issue of the Journal of Studies on Alcohol and Drugs.
For anyone who has ever had too much to drink, that day-after combination of headache, nausea and fatigue may be a familiar feeling. But some drinkers appear hangover-resistant: about one-quarter of people who drink enough to spur a hangover in most of us don’t actually develop one. No one is sure why that is. But the new study suggests that smoking could be one factor that boosts the hangover odds.
Researchers found that college students were more likely to report hangover symptoms after a heavy drinking episode if they smoked more heavily on the day they drank. And it wasn’t simply because they smoked more when they drank more.
“At the same number of drinks, people who smoke more that day are more likely to have a hangover and have more intense hangovers,” said researcher Damaris J. Rohsenow, Ph.D., of the Center for Alcohol and Addiction Studies at Brown University in Providence, Rhode Island.
Her team controlled for some other factors as well, such as whether students reported drug use in the past year. And smoking, itself, was linked to an increased risk of hangover compared with not smoking at all.
That raises the likelihood that there is some direct effect of tobacco smoking on hangovers, Rohsenow said.
The “how” isn’t fully clear. But other research has shown that nicotine receptors in the brain are involved in our subjective response to drinking, Rohsenow said. For example, smoking and drinking at the same time boosts the release of dopamine, a “feel-good” brain chemical.
So the fact that nicotine and alcohol are connected in the brain may explain why smoking is tied to hangover.
The findings are based on a Web survey of 113 college students who recorded their drinking and smoking habits, and any hangover symptoms, every day for eight weeks. Overall, when students drank heavily — the equivalent of five or six cans of beer in about an hour — those who’d smoked more on that same day had higher odds of suffering a hangover the next morning and suffered more when they did.
Why a worse hangover from smoking is bad
That leaves the question of “So what?” Hangovers may make you feel bad, but is there any more harm than that?
There is evidence that a hangover affects your attention and reaction time in the short term, Rohsenow said. So it might be unwise to drive or work in safety sensitive occupations with a hangover, for instance. No one is sure yet whether hangovers may signal some type of damage to the brain, but smoking is already known from other studies to aggravate the ill effects on the brain caused by years of heavy drinking.
There are already plenty of reasons to avoid both smoking and heavy drinking. But Rohsenow said these findings suggest that if smokers are going to indulge in heavy alcohol use, it would be wise to at least cut down on cigarettes.There’s Nothing Wrong with Love is the second full-length album released by legendary indie rock band Built to Spill. It was originally released September 13, 1994 on the Up Records label. The line-up for the album was Doug Martsch, bassist Brett Nelson, and drummer Andy Capps, with Phil Ek producing. The album features the enduring singles “In the Morning,” “Car,” and “Distopian Dream Girl.” There’s Nothing Wrong With Love will be available October 30th from Up Records, which is distributed through Sub Pop.
There’s Nothing Wrong with Love was wonderfully received by critics upon its release. It went on to earn “Best Albums of 90’s” notices from the likes of Pitchfork, PASTE, SPIN, and has sold nearly 140k copies to date. This new, vinyl edition is the first time the album has been available on vinyl since its original run.
All orders receive an immediate digital download of the full album.AUG 6 2017 BY MARK KANE
The U.S. automotive market of late has entered the dangerous area of decreasing sales, notching a large 7% drop year-over-year in July. In such a circumstance, any growth of plug-in vehicle sales will show an improved market share, even more so with gains.
And sure enough, in July some 15,607 plug-ins were delivered, good for a sturdy 19.4% increase in the sector – the 22nd consecutive month of gains.
Through 7 months, the full year counter for electric vehicles has moved into 6 digits, with ~104,863 sold thus far – up 35% year-over-year. See the full July sales report here.
The gains for plug-ins, and the worsening overall automotive segment in the US, meant the electric market share rose to roughly 1.1%.
We should also note this is the first time in US history that plug-in sales have exceeded 1% market share for three consecutive months (see chart below).
For the month, the best selling EV, for the very first time, was the Chevrolet Bolt EV with 1,971 units moved, about 300 units ahead of the Tesla Model X, estimated at 1,650 deliveries.
Of course in the “newcomer category”, all eyes were on the Tesla Model 3 (view launch party/full specs here), although surprisingly, the Honda Clarity Electric also went on sale and bested the Tesla in deliveries 34 to 30 … but, we suspect it won’t stay ahead in that sales race for very long.
Given the second half of the year sales gains normally seen with plug-in vehicles, the addition of the Model 3 in volume, increased Toyota Prius Prime inventory, the Chevy Bolt EV being made available nationwide this month, and the new LEAF’s introduction in December, we suspect the US market will easily be crossing the 2% mark by year’s end.
Check out all the individual sales for every plug-in model sold in July (and all-time) on our Monthly Plug-In Sales Scorecard.The Democratic Party has changed over the last few elections, and that change may be the main culprit in its stunning defeat in 2016. The party’s shift from an FDR-style concern for the common man to racial divisiveness and gender ideology alienated an enormous number of Americans throughout the country, including about one million people who cast a vote for Barack Obama in both elections. This isn’t a matter of racism or bigotry or “whitelash,” it’s a matter of once-solid Democrats being left behind by their party.
Also left behind by the Democratic Party is former Senator Jim Webb, one of the major candidates for the Democratic nomination in the recent election. Webb said it best on the “Tucker Carlson Tonight” last week: white working people have become the “whipping posts” of a Democratic Party that has moved into interest-group politics, and so they obviously don’t think that the Democrats like them.
This seems like an obvious point in hindsight. Even the culturally liberal commentariat has taken this as a given – Donald Trump’s surprise victory has removed doubt in the minds of all but the most delusional ideologues.
But Webb has been talking about this suddenly incontrovertible fact for years. In August 2015, When Donald Trump’s candidacy was still considered a joke by the media, the former Senator made prophetically stated that “the Democratic Party needs to get back to basics” to appeal to the white lower and middle classes. Tens of millions of dollars in strategists and algorithms couldn’t drive this simple fact home in the Hillary campaign.
Webb, a Vietnam war hero who served as Secretary of the Navy under Ronald Reagan, is no DINO, though, even though he is a former Republican. He has long had a socially progressive message that was as prescient as his take on the 2016 election. From the start of his tenure as a U.S. senator from Virginia in 2007, he fought against mass incarceration before most politically connected people had even heard of the term “criminal justice reform,” holding hearings on the costs of our nation’s drug enforcement policies. Even though conventional wisdom within both parties was to be “tough on crime,” Webb introduced legislation in 2009 that would cause first comprehensive review of the nation’s crime policy in 45 years. The legislation was doomed, but the senator’s tireless fighting sparked a national conversation about how the US has 25 percent of the world’s prisoners despite having only 5 percent of the population. President Obama didn’t even mention the issue until 2015.
President Obama was, however, early to the game of Democrats being A-Okay with the executive’s unilateral use of military force. The left’s narrative had a strange shift away from belief that Congress needs to authorize war as soon as President Obama took power.
Jim Webb is a different story. He opposed the disastrous 2011 intervention in Libya, introducing a resolution to require the White House to seek approval from Congress before continuing the mission. The pitch fell on deaf ears, but he was right – Libya went from being a stable country to a nation that is torn apart by war and breeding terrorism.
Webb spoke out against arming rebel groups who ended up joining ISIS. He was the first member of congress to note the gathering storm of territorial disputes over the South China Sea and recommend a firmer stance by the U.S., years before China violate international law by building artificial islands there to expand their dominion.
But perhaps the most cogent of Webb’s criticisms was his opposition to the War in Iraq. Back in 2002, when the invasion was just a hypothetical, Webb said, “Do we really want to occupy Iraq for the next 30 years?” Now such pragmatic opposition to the war seems to be common sense within both parties. It should be clear why he was a member of the Armed Services and Foreign Relations committees; he was the most knowledgeable member of the senate when it came to those matters.
Webb beat everyone to the punch when it comes to veterans, too. In 2008, he introduced and got passed the landmark “New GI Bill of Rights,” a feat unheard of for a junior senator. In the following elections, it – strangely enough – became cool to talk big about helping those who have served.
Where your average politician has hindsight, Jim Webb had foresight first. He’s been dead-on every single time for the last 15 years. Jim Webb needs to be our next secretary of state because there just isn’t anyone that comes close in terms of wisdom and experience.
Robert Mariani is the opinion editor at The Daily Caller. Follow him on Twitter.Yesterday Game of Thrones and A Song of Ice and Fire fans received a glimpse into the future of what might have been, thanks to a tweet from Harper Collins UK.
Harper Collins is the publisher of the ASOIAF books, and yesterday the Twitter account posted the early proposal for a “high fantasy” trilogy featuring the warring houses of Westeros. Martin outlines his thoughts for the entire series- but don’t get too excited as the last paragraph has been blacked out.
The tweet has since been deleted but the information contained is still floating around the internet, reposted on multiple Twitter, Reddit and Tumblr pages.
Though a great deal of the story has changed already, it should be treated as a possible spoiler, so proceed with caution.
The proposal includes notable events such as Ned and Robb Stark’s deaths, but Catelyn’s death happens later in this version. Jaime is a straightforward villain, and Martin goes so far as to say which five central characters will live to the end. There is a rather un-ASOIAF-like love story included, and it’s all rather strange, frankly. I think it’s safe to say Martin has changed his mind about most of this, based on the books we’ve read, but it’s fascinating to see what could have happened.
Sue the Fury: Well, what do you think? This is pretty mind-blowing. They’re like fanfic versions of our favorite characters.5 Tips for Working Smarter Rather than Harder
While working hard can help you make more money, you don’t always need to work harder. Sometimes, you can get more done, and boost your income, by working smarter.
There’s no reason to work extra hard to earn just a little bit more. Here are 5 tips for working smarter:
1. Know When You’re Most Productive
One of the best ways to work smart is to know when you’re most productive. For me, the morning hours are more productive. I’m able to get a lot more done. Pay attention to how you work, and when you get the most done. Once you pinpoint when you are most productive, do your most important projects then. Make it a point to do as much as you can during that time period.
You might be surprised to learn that, according to a recent study, concentrated effort for four hours can be one of the most effective ways to be productive. Identify the four hours a day that you are most likely to productive, and then focus your energy at that time period to get more done.
2. Delegate Less Important or Mundane Tasks
One of the best things I did was to outsource some of my social media tasks. You can hire a virtual assistant to take care of the mundane tasks that are part of your day. While you might have to pay someone to do these tasks, think about how much more you could make if you could spend that time focusing on the more important tasks. The cost of paying a virtual assistant is much less than what I can make in an hour, and that’s an hour of my day that I’m not doing social media stuff. Instead, I’m doing something I enjoy. The work gets done, and I’m earning more than when I was doing it myself.
Rather than getting stuck in the tedium of administrative work, consider what you can delegate to someone else. The work still gets done, but you are able to concentrate more on growing your wealth, and improving your business.
3. Say No
It can be hard to say no, but sometimes it’s what you need to do to stay on track. Whether it’s doing something extra for a project, or whether it’s taking on another client, or doing one more volunteer activity, sometimes you need to say no. Learn how to say no, and you can focus on the things that are most important for you. While you don’t always want to be saying no to projects, it can help to occasionally say no so that you can attend to more profitable matters.
4. Prioritize and Focus on One Thing at a Time
Multitasking really isn’t the best way to work smarter. In fact, it might actually lead to you working much harder, instead of working smarter. Studies indicate that multitasking is counter-productive. If you want to get more done in less time — and with less effort — stop trying to do more than one thing at a time. Instead, prioritize your to-do list, focusing on the most important items first. Focus on that one thing at a time, giving it your full attention. You’ll finish faster, and be ready to move on to the next task.
If you prioritize ahead of time, you’ll get the most important/profitable items done first. Combine your priorities with the time of the day when you are most productive, and you might surprise yourself with how quickly and easily you accomplish more.
5. Network
The ultimate way to work smarter rather than harder is to take advantage of networking opportunities. Who you know really matters. While you don’t want to spend all your time schmoozing, the reality is that taking the time to get to know the right people can be helpful in providing access to better opportunities. The boss is more likely to promote the person he or she is most comfortable with. You can have the inside track on new openings in other companies when you network. Additionally, being connected can give you an idea of when to ask for a raise, and what actions you can take to improve your performance reviews.
With a little planning and effort, it’s possible to re-arrange your work time so that you are working smarter instead of breaking your back by working harder.Share this infographic on your site!
<a href=”https://www.bestmedicaldegrees.com/racial-disparities-health-care/”><img src=”https://www.bestmedicaldegrees.com/wp-content/uploads/2016/01/RacialDisparitiesHealthCare.jpg” alt=”Racial Disparities in Health Care” width=”500″ border=”0″ /></a><br />Source: <a href=”https://www.bestmedicaldegrees.com/”>Best Medical Degrees.com</a>
Racial Disparities in Health Care
Not all citizens are offered equal health care in the U.S. Barriers like insurance, access to care and discrimination keep a large part of the country’s population from receiving much-needed medicine and procedures. Let’s take a look at what racial disparities exist in health care today.
Racial Minorities in the U.S.
In the year 2000, 33% of the U.S. population identified as a racial or ethnic minority. By 2050, it is expected that this group will comprise of 50% of the U.S. population. (2)
43%
Percentage of children who belong to a racial or ethnic minority (1)
Minority numbers today (2)
Race/Ethnicity Identifier: Population in U.S.:: Percentage of population
Hispanic/Latino: 45.5 million:: 15.1%
Black: 38.8 million:: 12.9%
Asian: 13.4 million:: 4.4%
Native American/Alaskan Native: 2.9 million:: 1%
Hawaii Native/ Other Pacific Islander: 0.5 million:: 0.2%
Poorer Health in Minorities
The occurrence of preventable diseases in minorities is much higher than in white Americans. Each racial group faces their own heightened propensity toward specific diseases because of the lack of access to regular care. (1,3)
African-Americans
40% greater risk than whites of having high blood pressure, leading to heart disease and failure, kidney disease and stroke.
2.1 times more likely to get diabetes and much more likely to experience massive complications due to the disease, often requiring amputation.
37.3% of blacks are obese.
Almost 50% of blacks live with a chronic illness or disability.
Infant mortality rate for blacks is 2.5 times greater than whites.
Blacks are 10 times more likely to have AIDS than whites.
American Indians
2.3 times more likely than whites to get diabetes.
Much higher rates of mental illness persists in the American Indian population, including addiction and
PTSD.
Over 9% of American Indians suffer from asthma that remains untreated.
Mexican-Americans
More than twice as likely to get diabetes than whites.
Why?
Why do such differences exist?
Access (4)
Minority groups often lack access to clinics and specialists because of income and housing areas.
Black and Hispanics are twice as likely to live in poverty as whites.
Hispanics are three times less likely to have a regular health care provider than whites. 51% report having no doctor.
Insurance (4)
An inability to afford insurance as well as working fewer jobs that offer company-paid coverage contributes to less access to preventative medicine.
The average cost of health insurance for an individual is $6,025. For family coverage, this jumps to $16,834.
69%
Percentage of increase in insurance premiums since 2004.
Screenings (3)
Cases of preventative or diagnostic screenings are much lower in minorities, yet cancer rates are higher.
Black men are 50% more likely to have prostate cancer than white men and twice as likely to die from it.
What Can We Do?
Racial disparities in health care account for $35 billion in excess expenditures each year. So the need for equality in care isn’t just a moral issue, but a financial one as well. What can be done to close the gaps?(5)
1. Provide affordable insurance coverage to all Americans.
2. Promote a diverse health care workforce that cares about these issues.
3. Build more and better clinics in low-income areas for higher rates of health care access.
4. Maintain accurate data to document racial disparities in care and screenings.
5. Educate people of all racial groups about their risks and medical predispositions.
Sources:
1. http://www.medicareadvocacy.org
2. http://archive.ahrq.gov
3. http://www.commonwealthfund.org
4. http://kff.org
5. https://hbr.orgMemories are like dots in a puzzle, some puzzles already solved and some waiting for other dots to complete them. However, till now we had only our mind to preserve our memories. Not any more, for Hyun Jin Park concepts have developed a technology concepts that does not only store videos, but also the feelings and odor of a particular memory.
Astonishing it sounds, astonishing it is, yet it is true that now you can actually capture the smell, sight and texture of a memory in a device. It’s always pleasant to see wonderful technology, and this device is the most wonderful concepts that you can ever imagine.
This device, christened as memories in a bottle, is a beautiful blue appliance shaped like a bottle. This sophisticated bottle can record a person’s experience not only in sounds and sights but also as sensations of touch and smell; that can be communicated to others with whom you would like to share your memories. The transparent touch bio screen consists of icons that can be operated by fingers. The icons appear as holograms on the touch bio screen. This transparent touch bio screen has been enriched with bio-particles that protrude evenly out of the surface of the bio screen to record sensations of touch. The sense of touch is conveyed through these even bio protrusions and the sense of smell is conveyed through the top part, the bottle opening so as to say.
In order to record the smell essence of a beautiful memory, you just have to press a button at the top part to record it. Finally, you have a gadget that brings to you the same charm that usually emanates from a perfumery. The device actually allows the sensory pleasure to go beyond bounds and express more forcefully than ever before. Again, imagine you visit a fabulous sea shore. You sprinkle dry sand on the device to preserve the memory of the texture of the sand, how it felt slowly passing between the spaces of your fingers. It’s just astonishing concepts!
The hologram icons of memories in a bottle are designed in a rotational manner, so they look wonderfully cool while you select them. Not only that, you can even transfer the memories from one device to another or share it in your network of devices. Not to mention are the features of clicking the photos and the videos, what we have conventionally known as memories to be recorded in devices until now.
Via: C9designSimone Manuel competes in the 100-meter freestyle preliminaries during day four of the Arena Pro Swim Series at the Skyline Aquatic Center on Saturday in Mesa, Ariz. (Chris Coduto/Getty Images)
Simone Manuel was 11 years old, right around that time when kids start to take particular notice of the world around them, when something she noticed led her to her mother with a question: Mommy, little Simone asked in the kitchen of their Sugar Land, Tex. home, why aren’t there other kids who look like me at these swim meets?
Sharron Manuel didn’t have the answer off the top of her head, so together mother and daughter took to the Internet in search of it. They printed out pages upon pages of articles and book excerpts, and read through them together.
“I think it was really helpful for her because it enlightened her that the reason a lot of blacks haven’t been involved in swimming was that in the past we didn’t have access to facilities,” Sharron Manuel said. “It wasn’t something where we didn’t have the physical ability to do it. It was access and exposure. It was a history lesson for me as well, because I didn’t know either.”
If many years from now the ranks of African American swimmers — both at the elite and grass-root levels of the sport — have ballooned and thrived, folks may look back to a day in March 2015 as a turning point, and to Simone Manuel as a pioneer.
On that particular day, at the NCAA Swimming and Diving Championship, Manuel, her Stanford teammate Lia Neal and Natalie Hinds of the University of Florida finished 1-2-3 in the women’s 100-yard freestyle, respectively, marking the first time in NCAA history three African American swimmers swept the medals in a championship event.
At the time, history never crossed Manuel’s mind. As she stood on the podium, she thought of the two young women flanking her as her friends and competitors — not necessarily fellow history makers. In those first moments, her mind turned not to their shared race, but her next swimming race, a relay.
But then came the texts and tweets, with their references to history being made, followed by the news headlines and interview requests. “That,” Manuel said, “is when I realized the impact it had on a lot of people.”
If you ask Cullen Jones where he ranks the women’s medal sweep, on a scale from Swimming’s Jackie Robinson Moment to No Big Deal At All, he doesn’t hesitate:
“It’s definitely a Jackie Robinson Moment for swimming,” said Jones, who at the 2008 Beijing Games became the second African American swimmer to win a gold medal. “This was groundbreaking. This was history. Three African American women on the podium? It was amazing. I had goosebumps. Friends were texting me saying they had tears in their eyes.”
Manuel, an 18-year-old just finishing her freshman year at Stanford, thinks back to that Internet search for answers with her mother some seven years before as a personal turning point.
“It was kind of inspiring, because I knew how far [I] had to go to reach my goals and dreams,” she said during last week’s Mesa Arena Pro Swim Series meet. “I like challenges.”
“It just added that extra motivation for her,” Sharron Manuel said. “It taught her, ‘There’s no reason why I can’t do this. I can do this.’ It helped her stick with it.”
It doesn’t take long to summarize the history of top-level African American swimmers. There was Fred Evans, who was a three-time NCAA Division II national champion breaststroker in the 1970s. There was Chris Silva, the first African American swimmer to make the U.S. national team in 1982, and Sabir Muhammad, who broke 10 American records in the late 1990s and early 2000s. There was Anthony Ervin, the first African American to win Olympic gold, in the 50 free at Sydney in 2000, and Maritza Correia, a Puerto Rican of African descent, who became the first to set a world record. And there is Jones.
“You’re starting to see the change now,” Jones, 31, said. “I remember when it was just Maritza and Sabir and me, we always talked about it. We wanted to see more kids coming up, and now we’re seeing it. It’s awesome. It’s been slow, but it’s coming. As our generation bows out, we know the future is in good hands.”
It was eight years ago, after realizing the presence of a handful of high-profile black swimmers wasn’t making a difference in the overall numbers, USA Swimming decided to make it a priority to recruit African Americans to the sport.
“Not unlike golf, the challenge in swimming was access,” said Chuck Wielgus, USA Swimming’s executive director. “It wasn’t something we were going to do overnight. This was going to be a generational, 30-year mission.... We’ve done a lot of pilot programs and initiatives. Some have failed, some have succeeded.”
Of the NCAA medal sweep last month, Wielgus said: “This is a significant moment, but what I’m especially pleased about is that it’s a moment that has come on the shoulders of time. I think what you’re seeing with [Manuel, Neal and Hinds] is a progression. And I think you’re going to see more of it. It’s like this growing wave.”
The Stanford women have already seen circumstantial evidence of the way their achievement has resonated with other African Americans. At a recent practice, a woman showed up with her young daughter, just to meet Manuel and Neal and to show the child what she could aspire to.
“The mom wanted her daughter to see African American girls swimming and doing special stuff in the sport, just to show her daughter this is what she can do as well,” Neal said. “I feel a lot of other kids out there really looked up to us in that way. It’s really humbling to be able to have the effect on people’s lives.”
It isn’t easy to absorb the label of “trailblazer” when you’re 18 years old and just trying to establish yourself at the highest level of your sport. Manuel, a sprinter, is the American record holder in the 100-yard freestyle, but is focusing on long-course training — in meters — in preparation for this summer’s world championships and next summer’s U.S. Olympic Trials. On the starting blocks, she isn’t looking to change the sport — just dominate it.
“If that’s the title people want to give me — trailblazer — I’ll take it,” she said. “I’m just trying to swim and do the best I can. Who I am is who I am.”A railway station is the perfect setting for a farewell song, and the video for singer Emm Gryner’s Math Wiz is proving the perfect vehicle for her community’s plea to have Via Rail service restored. Trains to many southwestern Ontario locations were cut last year in what Via called “right-sizing” of its service. But communities who depended on passenger trains say they haven’t given up on having those trips restored.
Gryner has lent her voice and her video from an upcoming album called Music for Scholars to the fight that continues months after cuts to Stratford, Sarnia and Niagara service as well as some national Via runs. The video was made on the tracks near the St. Marys train station. When the Stratford-area town’s ‘Save-VIA’ committee asked its local celebrity to speak to visiting VIA officials, Gryner couldn’t attend so she decided to make a video message.
Article Continued Below
Then it occurred to her that the music, with the idle rail tracks featured, would make the point better than a speech. “The St. Marys rail station is very picturesque. So are those tracks and the huge train bridge. It’s something I really love, living in a town with the train. I thought of the video as writing a letter to these trains, as though they are lost loves,” she said. Gryner, 37, who moved to St. Marys from Montreal about 10 years ago, lives with her partner and children, ages 3 and 9 months. She travels regularly to Toronto to work and perform, and she likes to take the kids with her since the performances occupy a brief interval in many of those trips. Until last year, they used Via. It was faster and it gave her busy toddler room to move. “Sometimes strapping them into a car seat for extended periods of time just seems inhumane,” said Gryner.
The drive on Highway 401 can mean a six-hour round trip. The train is better for the children, a better choice for the environment and safer, she said. “Before they cut the trains, there were two morning trains and two in the evening coming back. To be honest, it’s a huge selling point of why we moved here, to have that convenience,” she said.
Article Continued Below
“Everyone’s pretty much afraid they’re just going to phase it right out,” said Gryner. The remaining train trip doesn’t leave until after 8 a.m. and arrives in Toronto too late for early morning meetings, she said. The return trip doesn’t leave Toronto until 8:36 p.m. In the music video Gryner sings, “Minus, minus, take away the finest love and leave me with the sadness.” It ends on a message that reads, “Bring back the trains.” Even before the local Via committee has begun its letter-writing campaign to federal and provincial officials, Math Wiz has gathered 830 YouTube hits in three days, said Chris West, a car dealer who used to regularly take the train to Toronto for business but now finds the schedule doesn’t suit him either. He fears people won’t move to his pretty town, preferring destinations along the |
as the Coast Guard and BP are preparing to make the oil-collection system at the leaking well on the sea floor more hurricane-ready.
For now, it appears as if Alex will pass far west of the Gulf oil spill. But even before Alex developed, the end of June and the beginning of July was shaping up to be a crucial moment in BP’s bid to collect all the oil gushing into the Gulf of Mexico.
During the next two to three weeks, BP will make major changes at and above the well. It will bring in a host of new ships to replace those currently on site and radically change the underwater architecture that has captured 15,000 to 25,000 barrels of oil (630,000 to 1 million gallons) daily during much of the past month.
IN PICTURES: Response to the oil spill on the Gulf Coast
In the process, the company will make it easier for ships to connect to and disconnect from its network of subsea pipes in the event of a hurricane.
Here is a snapshot of what is happening now and how that is expected to change during the next few weeks.
What is going on now
Currently, two ships are collecting about 25,000 barrels of oil a day combined.
The first is the Discoverer Enterprise, which can process – in other words, separate from the water and natural gas also captured – about 15,000 barrels of oil a day. This oil is being sent to shore on tankers, and BP is donating revenues from the oil to a Gulf wildlife fund.
The second ship is the Q4000, which can only burn the oil it collects. It is currently burning about 10,000 barrels of oil a day.
Each of these ships collects oil flowing through the failed blowout preventer on the sea floor in a different way, which is important for what comes next.
The Discoverer Enterprise is connected to the containment cap, which is fitted atop the stump of the riser pipe that led to the Deepwater Horizon before the rig sank.
The Q4000 is connected to a valve on the side of the blowout preventer – the choke line, which was used to pump in drilling mud during the failed “top kill” operation.
Both ships, however, are connected to the blowout preventer via fixed riser pipes that would have to be disconnected when ships went to shore during a hurricane.
Making the system more hurricane-ready
BP’s primary goal in the weeks ahead is to replace these fixed riser pipes with flexible riser pipes that would remain connected to the well during a hurricane, their mouths floating about 300 feet below the surface.
Ships returning after a hurricane could more easily connect to a floating riser pipe just below the surface than with the various blowout preventer valves a mile down.
The first flexible riser pipe is almost finished. It will be attached to a second valve on the side of the blowout preventer known as the kill line. A new ship called the Helix Producer will connect to this flexible riser.
The Helix Producer can process about 25,000 barrels of oil a day. It is expected to come online Tuesday.
On Wednesday, BP and the Coast Guard are expected to decide whether to greenlight a project that would remove the containment cap and replace it with a larger cap connected to two flexible riser pipes.
The replacement cap, called an overshot tool, would not sit atop the stump of the original riser pipe, but would bolt directly to the blowout preventer, perhaps creating a better seal.
With two flexible riser pipes, the tool would also allow for two ships to connect to it, potentially doubling capacity. Media reports suggest that the two ships would be the Discoverer Enterprise and the Toisa Pisces.
Several tankers, including the Loch Rannoch, would ferry the processed oil to shore.
This system, if given the go-ahead Wednesday, would be in place by mid-July.
Around the same time, BP plans to replace the Q4000 and its fixed riser pipe with the Clear Leader and a new flexible riser pipe to the choke line.
In total, the new system would be able to process about 80,000 barrels daily.
This system to collect oil at the well is separate from the efforts to skim the oil slick on the surface. In those efforts, the A Whale supertanker is on its way to the Gulf. The supertanker could skim 500,000 gallons of oil-contaminated water from the surface of the Gulf daily.
IN PICTURES: Response to the oil spill on the Gulf Coast
Related:Carl Fogarty explains how riders deal with risk: People often ask how road racers are able to cope with the risks. Personally speaking, single mindedness and mental strength were vital factors. Throughout my career racing on roads and circuits, I had an obsession with winning, so I wasn't concerned about the danger. I felt I was the best out there so just wanted to go out and win races. Riders accept the risks and just put them to the back of their minds in order to do what they love.
Road race organisers continually monitor their safety procedures to ensure events are as safe as they can possibly be. Riders may take a different approach to racing on roads, compared with purpose-built circuits. Veteran rider Michael Rutter explains how he adapts to this unique challenge: "When I take part in road racing I always leave a safety margin. I ride at 80%, whereas on circuits I never hold back."
Ultimately, given the nature of the sport, road racing will always be dangerous. Yet for riders, nothing compares to the buzz of racing at 200mph, heart pounding.Few cities have as rich a cultural and sporting history as Detroit. From the ’80s Pistons to Bob Seger, Eminem to Miguel Cabrera, the Motor City is a rich tapestry of compelling figures, unbelievable moments, and uniquely American ingenuity.
On April 17, ESPN will premiere 30 for 30: Bad Boys, a documentary about those unforgettable Pistons teams. To celebrate, Grantland will devote an entire week, from April 11 through April 18, to the various stories of this wholly original place.
♦♦♦
Opening Day was just around the corner. But the Detroiters whose hearts never left “The Corner” — the intersection of Michigan and Trumbull where baseball lived for more than a century at Tiger Stadium — were filing in to the Detroit Institute of Arts to honor a lost masterpiece. It was the closing day of the Freep Film Festival, and the museum was hosting a screening of Stealing Home, a documentary about the Navin Field Grounds Crew, an all-volunteer group of Michiganders who tend to the original ball field that survived the stadium’s demolition in 2009. The stands are long gone, but the patch of dirt where Ty Cobb, who scored the first-ever run at the original Navin Field with an intrepid steal at home plate, still remain. With a diamond picked clean of trash and an outfield stripped clear of towering weeds by the grounds crew, pickup baseball has returned to the Corner the past four seasons, as have scores of pilgrims from the Midwest and beyond, who travel there to stand at home plate, flipping the script on the city’s institutional neglect.
Though fans lost the decadelong battle to preserve the stadium, hundreds of them still filed into the museum that Sunday in good spirits, their Verlander and Gibson jerseys tucked under layers of winter wear. Even the treasures lining these walls and corridors are no longer safe, as creditors continue to size up the museum’s holdings as collateral to potentially offset a portion of the city’s debt. The strength in numbers from baseball fans, groundskeepers, and museumgoers in attendance made a simple point clear: It takes more than a wrecking ball or art auctioneer’s gavel to crush the culture that defines Detroit.
The story of the groundskeepers evokes a return to nature, a memory of baseball’s pioneering days in the Midwest, when oak groves were cleared to make way for wooden ballparks and wildcat fans on rooftops witnessed amateur nines develop into pro clubs before their eyes. A mile from the Detroit Institute of Arts, the first recorded baseball game in the city’s history — the Early Risers versus the Detroits — was played on August 8, 1859, in the vicinity of what is today Cass Park. For the next half-century, baseball teams battled for supremacy, and the Tigers — originally dubbed the Creams by local sportswriters — emerged as the focal point, with the Corner their stronghold. In 2010, when Tom Derry, a 50-year-old mail carrier in Redford Township, saw what had become of the field that begat so many memories, he took action, organizing a self-financed group to shred an urban jungle that had grown as tall as eight feet.
“I refer to those weeds as redwoods,” Derry told me in March. “I rented a brush hog for 10 weeks in a row — that’s how long it took to knock them down, in 90-degree heat. We brought a baseball field back from the dead. The first year was the most difficult. Not only was it physically difficult, it was mentally exhausting, being under the constant threat of arrest.”
Derry’s volunteers engage in a kind of graffiti in reverse, with crew members swooping in to groom the field before being instructed to vacate by the Detroit police. Even the police on the beat have, at times, expressed reluctance to treat the NFGC as trespassers; many share the community’s view that the historic site should be preserved. Four years later, the field has hosted pickup games, Father’s Day throat lumps, wedding vows, historic reenactments, Sunday barbecues, and scowls from developers who want to pulp these memories for profit.
With Derry’s encouragement, I drove from Chicago to Detroit to see the field and a screening of Stealing Home firsthand. When I conceded I was a White Sox fan, Derry graciously shared my lament that both Comiskey Park, the onetime Baseball Palace of the World, and Chicago Stadium had been leveled and transformed into parking lots in service of soulless replacements across the street. When Comiskey faced the wrecking ball, Derry was there, clunky ’80s camcorder perched on his shoulder, documenting the destruction. He can rewatch the VHS footage of Comiskey being leveled, he notes, but never Tiger Stadium.
The scars were still healing among the fans at the DIA that Sunday, though the mood was comforting. In the second-floor lobby, Tigers legend Willie Horton reminisced with early arrivals about the old ballpark. He stressed it was the fans and the ushers and the grounds crew — a nod to the Navin Field crew members circulating the theater, Jedi-like, in matching hoodies — who made him understand the stadium’s true scope. His words carried weight; Horton grew up in the shadow of then–Briggs Stadium in the Jefferson Projects. When asked about his favorite Tiger Stadium memory, he recounted the ball he hit into the 440s during his second at-bat. When he tracked down his family after the game, he was told his father had missed it — after a skirmish in the stands, he’d been sent to stadium lockup. A laugh rippled across the room, followed by a hush. A sense of homesickness seemed to set in. The prevailing sentiment: That would never happen at Comerica.
In the theater, there was a convention atmosphere when a group of ballplayers dressed in 1860s garb filed down the aisle and converted a section of seats into a makeshift dugout. Known as the Regular Base Ball Club of Mount Clemens, the team plays gloveless ball with 19th-century rules at the Corner, with assistance from the grounds crew. The vintage uniforms came in handy during the after-show Q&A, when a team member passed his cap, which the audience stuffed with hard-earned twenties — alms in the form of gas money to keep the groundskeepers’ lawn mowers running. A majority of the theatergoers bypassed questions and simply offered their thanks — for keeping the Corner alive, for tending to the sacred ground where they once sat shoulder to shoulder with their long-lost fathers. A photographer in the front row turned to the audience and implored them to view the corner of Michigan and Trumbull on Google Earth so they could see how beautiful Tom Derry’s efforts look from space.
Asked how often the groundskeepers encounter human ashes scattered on the field, Derry said it had happened at least a few dozen times. “The field might just be nine acres, but it means a lot to people in Detroit,” he said, humbled by the elegiac response from the crowd.
While speaking with Derry in the lobby, grateful spectators would offer him a final backslap before braving the cold outside. Some promised to swing by the field soon, maybe chip in on a mower. I asked Derry what impact all the visitors and souvenir hounds were having on the field. “People are continuously coming down and taking bricks and rocks, which is good, because [the rocks] destroy our equipment,” he said. “When we first started, there were thousands of pieces of concrete and rocks breaking our blades and belts, giving us flat tires. We had four mowers down there one day, and three broke. The playing field itself is in good shape, but when you’re doing the areas where the stands used to be, it’s rough terrain.”
As the crowd dispersed, I paired up with Dave Mesrey, a groundskeeper who, like Derry, is a fount of information about his hometown. Both agreed it was time I saw the field. While driving toward Corktown, Mesrey pointed out old bars and beloved buildings that once were, and stretches that may never be again. We talked about the sprawl and the overgrowth that both enlivens and haunts the city. I ran a quote by him from 19th-century mayor William G. Thompson. Surveying his surroundings from the roof of City Hall in 1881, Thompson rhapsodized that “it seemed to me as if Detroit was a city situated in the midst of a green forest.” Mesrey nodded enthusiastically in the passenger seat. It reminded him of the city’s brush with Banksy in 2010. During a brief residency, the English kingmaker of blight spray-painted a stenciled street urchin on the cinder-block wall of the abandoned Packard Automotive Plant. Beside the boy was a site-specific requiem: “I remember when all this was trees.”
In 1900, trees that predated the Revolutionary War still stood in the outfield of Bennett Park, a Tiger Stadium precursor. Now the park’s horizon is punctuated by the Motor City Casino, a neon-skinned high-rise built by Tigers owner Mike Ilitch that looks drab in daylight, perhaps even more so on a clear day filled with the promise of a new season.
As I joined the grounds crew gathered near the pitcher’s mound, Derry in particular was apologetic about the field’s appearance. Endless snowfall from the “worst winter ever” had thwarted their usual springtime preparations. In February, the snow was so thick, crew member Bart Wilhelm adorned the field with nine snowmen, each in its proper defensive position. The snow had since melted, but a recent St. Patrick’s Day parade down Michigan Avenue clogged the perimeter with litter. Making matters worse, someone had slipped a pack of dogs past the gates earlier in the week, and paw prints now covered every square inch of Cobb’s old base paths.
Cosmetics aside, the field remains as faithful to its original configuration as possible. “We found the anchors for home plate and for the pitcher’s plate and we measured it up,” Derry says. “Everything is in the right spot. The dimensions from 1912 are still here in 2014.”
Towering above center field is the 125-foot flagpole, the largest in-play obstacle in league history. “My understanding is that the organization planned on taking that flagpole to the new stadium,” Derry says. “They took home plate, but when they saw how large and heavy the flagpole was, and what a job it would be to move it, they changed their minds. I’m glad they didn’t take it. It’s the only physical structure left.”
The flagpole also serves as a kind of core sample to chart bygone eras. There are three layers of paint on the pole, the crew members noted, starting with the most recent gunmetal gray. Beneath that is blue paint from the 1977-99 seasons, preceded by green from Briggs Stadium and Navin Field. The reason the pole is still gray today is that Billy Crystal used the stadium as a double for Yankee Stadium when he filmed 61* in 2000. The pole was never gray in its playing days, just during its brief turn as a stand-in on HBO.
The grounds crew welcomed a pair of flag keepers into the mix, and two flags fly at the Corner to this day — another ancient echo of hometown devotion. In Crazy ’08, author Cait Murphy recounts the celebrations that erupted citywide when the Tigers clinched the pennant in 1907. “At dawn the following day, the city [raised] a victory flag — the same banner that had flown over the USS Detroit in the Spanish-American War.”
Each day the field remains unscathed is a victory of sorts for the grounds crew. The patch of land, which is owned by the city of Detroit, has been the focal point of repeated renewal projects, none of which have taken flight. “My opinion is that once they put something on the site, any kind of development, the field is going to be destroyed,” Derry says. He singled out the latest redevelopment plan from George Jackson, former head of the Detroit Economic Growth Corporation, which would swallow the outfield. “I hope it doesn’t happen,” Derry says. “What’re you gonna build there, a parking lot? You can’t put a house there. If you do, it’s gonna be hit by baseballs all day long.”
One of the more perplexing proposals of late, since shelved, was the sale of the outfield to a company seeking to build a warehouse for parade floats. “We’re not hearing too much about that now, and thank goodness,” Derry says. “I mean, how many hundreds of warehouses are just sitting empty in the city of Detroit? They can store their floats somewhere else. To build new structures costs millions of dollars that nobody has. I’d rather see these nine acres turned into a park. Just plant some trees and put in some fences and some stands at the baselines so people can watch baseball. What’s wrong with having green space in Corktown?”
Considering the land was a Civil War–era picnic grounds and hay market, I wondered if Derry had reached out to Detroit’s community of urban farmers about pooling resources. Derry made clear he’s a proponent of urban farming, but prefers that the site remain a ball field.
“People are into Hollywood,” he shrugged. “A couple people had the idea, ‘Oh, you should plant some corn out there, like in Field of Dreams.’ We don’t need corn out there, because we have a real field of dreams. Joe Jackson never played in Dyersville, Iowa, but he did play at Michigan and Trumbull. He scored the first run in the very first game at Navin Field in 1912. The integrity of the field needs to be preserved.”
In a new proposal, a nonprofit youth sports organization, Detroit PAL, “would build a new 10,000-square-foot headquarters on the site and maintain much of the historic playing field for youth baseball.”
As a point of comparison, the NFGC looks to the Bronx, where the site of old Yankee Stadium, which is approximately the same size as the Tiger Stadium site, now offers three diamonds for public use: a Little League diamond, a softball diamond, and a major league diamond. The crew members note, however, that the major league diamond is not in the exact same location as the original Yankee Stadium. In Detroit, they feel there is a unique opportunity to preserve the historic major league diamond, while still leaving plenty of room for Little Leaguers to roam the same field where greats like Hank Greenberg and Sweet Lou Whitaker played.
The following week, I called Derry after Opening Day for a rundown of the fourth inaugural at the Corner. “Hundreds of people came by to visit the old ball field,” he said. “Many of them stopped by on their way to Comerica, and some just to hang out on the field, throw the ball around.” The first game of the year was played, a cross-generational scrimmage between a men’s senior league and a high school team from nearby Cass Tech. Even more encouraging for Derry, however, was seeing the new crop he needed most lining his freshly chalked field: volunteers.
♦♦♦
James Hughes is a Chicago-based writer and editor who has contributed to Slate, The Atlantic, Wax Poetics, and The Village Voice. For a decade, he was an editor and publisher of Stop Smiling magazine and its book imprint.
Illustration by Gluekit.“You think you’ve got gridlock now?” said Senator Carl Levin, Democrat of Michigan. “You think you’ve got problems now? You will have a huge, huge outpouring of real anger.”
“That means the next Senate,” he added, “if the Republicans control it, you can expect them by majority vote to put through any rules change they want.”
But the level of frustration among Democrats now has pushed many of them, including Mr. Reid, to believe that the situation has deteriorated so badly that it can be fixed only by doing something they once would have never considered.
The level to which the squabbling over nominees has sunk was vividly evident on Thursday as the Environment and Public Works Committee voted to send Ms. McCarthy’s nomination to the full Senate. Republicans on the committee boycotted a vote scheduled for last week, leaving Democrats without a quorum.
That left Senator Barbara Boxer, Democrat of California and the committee chairwoman, with no other way to obtain a quorum but to round up Senator Frank R. Lautenberg, the ailing New Jersey Democrat who has been largely absent from the Senate in recent weeks. Mr. Lautenberg appeared on Thursday to cast his vote, as did Republicans. All eight of them voted no, and Ms. McCarthy’s nomination was reported out of committee by a 10-to-8 party-line vote.
Republicans said they could not vote yes because they believe that Ms. McCarthy and the E.P.A. have not been sufficiently transparent, including what they said was a failure to adequately answer almost 1,100 questions that they submitted. “We’re asking for openness and transparency as required by law,” said Senator David Vitter of Louisiana, the committee’s ranking Republican.
During the vote for Mr. Perez, who was reported out of the Committee on Health, Education, Labor and Pensions with a 12-to-10 vote, Senator Tom Harkin, the chairman, said that Republican efforts to block the nomination were not based on any legitimate concerns. “That was just delay for delay’s sake,” he said.“We ruined the countries we govern and the people in our care. We slaughter our enemies and sacrifice all our allies. We’ll keep killing until there’s nothing left but to destroy ourselves. It will never be enough. We are encourageable warmongers, aren’t we, Major?”
– Alucard, Hellsing Ultimate (Ep. 03)
The Toonami Trending Rundown for October 4-5, 2014. Not a good night for trending with the MLB postseason underway and a slew of college football upsets among other moments dominating the trends, with only Cowboy Bebop and Big O being the only shows that trended during the night. We did however, get a character trend with Alucard (the first of such for Hellsing), as he and Seras slaughter “the Dandy Man” and members of the Millennium when they tried to assassinate them.
Not much else to say this week other then both Attack on Titan and Bleach have 4 episodes left in their respective seasons, and you definitely don’t want to miss either. Till next week, stay gold.
Legend: 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 mobile app trends, the listed number of tweets are also sorely based on the highest number shown based on the images on the rundown.
US Trends:
Alucard (From Hellsing Ultimate) [#7]
#CowboyBebop [#8]
#BigO [#4]
Notes and Other Statistics:
Special thanks to @mmorse1017 and others I forgot to mention for spotting some of the trends on this list.
You Are Dismissed. Only Toonami on [adult swim] on Cartoon Network.The inconvenient truth for the Coalition's NBN
Updated
We knew before today that the Coalition's NBN plan would cost much more than claimed, and that the odds were stacked against its easy implementation, writes David Braue.
After six years of attacking Labor's National Broadband Network (NBN) rollout in opposition, the reality check handed to the Coalition about its own alternative policy has substantially rephrased the entire conversation about the future of broadband in Australia.
In presenting the long-awaited Strategic Review into the current state of the NBN, Communications Minister Malcolm Turnbull said the review marked "the beginning of the era of truth on broadband, and the beginning of an era where we will have facts to work with, objective analysis instead of political spin".
It's quite a claim since in opposition Turnbull was, in my view, a master of political spin, engaged in a ruthless smear campaign against Labor's fibre-to-the-premises (FttP) rollout while promoting a less technically-capable alternative NBN built on fibre-to-the-node (FttN) technology that, among other things, requires the government to somehow gain control of Telstra's century-old copper phone network.
The Strategic Review's revelation that the Coalition had seriously underestimated the costs of its alternative policy going into the election - and made rollout promises that it can not deliver - made the review a Pyrrhic victory for Turnbull, who had previously concocted a worst-case scenario putting Labor's version of the NBN at up to $94 billion.
The reality is much humbler - $73 billion if the current FttP rollout is continued, versus $41 billion for the Coalition's mostly FttN model. Factor in potential financial and social returns, and it's not even clear that the Coalition's option represents the best value-for-money option.
Yet behind the headline figures is an interesting story you may have missed, which was played out on the pages of Fairfax Media newspapers and specialist telecommunications site ZDNet Australia, in which I processed and published NBN Co's unadulterated advice to the incoming government in small pieces over the last fortnight.
This advice - which was prepared by NBN Co during the caretaker period to help the now Department of Communications prepare its 'blue book' incoming government brief for Turnbull - was the first formal evaluation of the Coalition's policy and spelled out in some detail just how many challenges the Coalition's NBN model would present.
It was leaked after Turnbull resisted repeated calls to publish the blue book, and the Department of Communications has knocked back repeated freedom of information requests for its release - even in redacted form.
After my stories based on the leaked document began appearing, Turnbull continued to defy calls for the release of the blue book - and said that the NBN Co advice was not part of the blue book.
Just to recap: the advice was prepared by NBN Co for inclusion in the blue book, cleared by its board and, it would be assumed, delivered to the department for inclusion in the blue book. If it did not eventually make it into the blue book, that could only be because either the new minister, or someone in the department, had instructed that it not be included in the incoming government brief.
In other words, the expert and objective opinion of NBN Co - whose over 3,000 staff include some of Australia's most talented telecommunications engineers - was deemed to be so politically tainted that it did not merit presentation to the incoming minister. Turnbull, whether by design or by what we might infer, preferred to make his own truth about the NBN.
As you read through the NBN Strategic Review, it's important to also consider the advice that was given to Turnbull by NBN Co's experts as they sought to paint a realistic portrait of the challenges facing the Coalition in its construction of a mostly FttN NBN.
The NBN Co knew months ago that the Coalition was "unlikely" to make its 2016 deadline for delivering 25Mbps broadband to all Australian premises, and would struggle to meet its 2019 secondary deadline of boosting this to 50Mbps on 90 percent of fixed-line services.
In response to the Strategic Review announcement today, the Shadow Minister for Communications, Jason Clare, was quick to condemn the timeframe blowout as an indictment of a government that had made grandiose promises before the election that it was showing it couldn't keep. Yet that's only the beginning of what became a stream of stories highlighting different aspects of the NBN Co advice.
Much of that advice is damning and suggests that the Coalition has painted itself into a corner by advocating the widespread use of technically inferior FttN technology. For example, use of FttN would not only force the biggest spenders on broadband to look elsewhere for connectivity, but would threaten revenues from high-end broadband services.
The problem is so significant, NBN Co warned, that the Coalition needs to plan an eventual fibre-to-the-premises (FttP) rollout now to cost-justify its own approach.
Failing to do so, NBN Co warned, could leave the government facing such an unfavourable FttN revenue model that it could be forced to pay for its NBN out of taxpayer funds rather than funding it off-budget as a strategic investment.
Then there was NBN Co's assessment that the Coalition's preferred FttN technology wouldn't support its policy promise of delivering guaranteed 50Mbps services; that the FttN model's lower revenues could keep prices higher than they need to be for existing FttP customers; that the installation of approximately 60,000 large and unwieldy kerbside FttN cabinets would face resistance from local councils; and that FttN's limited bandwidth would threaten the ability to provide government, e-health and other services across the network.
NBN Co advised that the Coalition's NBN had to be built as a monopoly or risk losing so many customers that it would be financially unviable; and that it should prioritise signing up large numbers of customers quickly rather than racing to cover the entire country.
Not to mention that NBN Co advised the government that its two-stage rollout was completely the wrong approach to take and would blow out costs compared with doing the whole rollout in one hit.
NBN Co also advised that the government should not, as Turnbull has previously suggested, seek to own Telstra's legacy copper network - access to which is a non-negotiable requirement for FttN to work - but should instead seek to lease it to minimise its exposure to the risk of an "unknown" amount of work to fix the century-old network.
It knew that building the complex administrative systems to manage an FttN network posed a "high risk" to the government's project and could hold back the project's timetable. It warned that the VDSL2 technology on which FttN operates would require costly and time-consuming visits inside each and every home on the network to test speeds and fix any performance issues caused by old copper. It even raised concerns that trying to maintain compatibility with existing phones, faxes and other analogue phone equipment might not be a "sensible" use of government funding.
Indeed, NBN Co identified 12 major issues that the Coalition Government would have to remedy - each of them incredibly complex in its own right - within the next 18 months or so if it wanted to have any hope of meeting its objectives.
Not even Turnbull's Strategic Review can change the reality of the NBN, which is that changing the direction of Australia's largest-ever infrastructure project not only involves massive change and unknown risks - but could, by virtue of its own technological limitations, prove unable to deliver enough revenues to justify being built in the first place.
Those issues remain major challenges that will impede whatever rollout the government designs once its revised Corporate Plan becomes available next year. The new government may have chosen to ignore the well-considered advice of the very people that built one of Australia's largest telecommunications carriers from the ground up in just four years - the same people it will task with building its technically inferior alternative NBN - but it now faces an uphill struggle to deliver a functionally limited NBN that will already be outdated by the time it's complete.
Technology journalist David Braue has been covering the telecommunications industry since it was deregulated in 1997. Follow him on Twitter at @zyzzyvamedia. View his full profile here.
First postedReplacing a lead singer is no easy task and can often make or break a band. Typically, the change will go one of three ways: death sentence, warm acceptance or full-on fan war. But let’s face it, when a new guy steps into the shoes of an already deified frontman, we never really know what’s going to happen. Here we pay tribute to the replacement singers who not only have done it, but also have done a pretty damn decent job—some with less drama than others.
1. TYLER “TELLE” SMITH (THE WORD ALIVE)
Naturally, fans were a little pissed when Craig Mabbitt’s side project kicked out Craig Mabbitt. But the Word Alive had become something much more than just a side project to fans. With an exploding fanbase and their singer wrapped up in his full-time band, Escape The Fate, TWA had to act quickly. Enter Tyler “Telle” Smith, at the time, playing bass for Greeley Estates. Fans were apprehensive at first, but after being picked up by Fearless Records, TWA’s first release, Empire, silenced the naysayers and ushered in a new era of the Word Alive. The group have since released two full-lengths, and it’s almost as if the replacement never even happened.
2. SPENCER CHAMBERLAIN (UNDEROATH)
It almost feels disrespectful to think of Mr. Chamberlain as a “replacement,” but pre-Chamberlain Underoath is practically its own entity. From 1997 to 2003, Dallas Taylor fronted Underoath but was asked to leave on the 2003 Vans Warped Tour. Taylor left a final mark on the band—co-creating what would become the song “Reinventing Your Exit”—and would eventually go on to form Maylene And The Sons Of Disaster. After Chamberlain took the reins, Underoath would go on to create four more albums, including their two most acclaimed releases: They’re Only Chasing Safety and Define The Great Line. The band have since called it quits, but Chamberlain is still rocking in his new project, Sleepwave.
3. COVE REBER (SAOSIN)
“Anthony Green vs. Cove Reber” was a thread title on every message board in 2005. Few member changes have riled up the masses like this one. After releasing their fan-favorite EP, Translating The Name, with vocalist Anthony Green, Saosin parted ways with the singer and held a series of auditions. Upon receiving a demo from Cove Reber, the band thought it was a practical joke being played by Green due to the similarity of their voices. In retrospect, it’s hard to imagine a more ideal situation. Now, the only Saosin release that is perhaps more coveted by fans than Translating The Name is the band’s self-titled, debut LP featuring Reber. Green went on to form Circa Survive, and Saosin eventually kicked Cove out—citing smoking as one of the reasons. The band have since moved into a state of hibernation. >>>
4. CRAIG MABBITT (ESCAPE THE FATE)
In a feud that would give Van Hagar a run for their money, Escape The Fate kicked out their then-incarcerated singer Ronnie Radke, and brought in ex-Blessthefall vocalist Craig Mabbitt—and the internet was never the same again. (See the comment section of any Escape The Fate YouTube video.) While the fan reception was mixed—including fans wearing “Team Ronnie” T-shirts to ETF shows—prior to Mabbitt’s arrival, the band were quite literally on the brink of breaking up. Since then, they have released three post-Radke albums. Ronnie went on to have success with his band Falling In Reverse, Escape The Fate are still going strong, and everyone’s happy.
5. MICHAEL “JAG” JAGMIN (A SKYLIT DRIVE)
To be fair, the band had only released one EP with former vocalist Jordan Blake, but this was still a pretty huge deal for ASD fans at the time. After briefly touring with Jonny Craig as a replacement and signing with Fearless Records, the band selected Michael “Jag” Jagmin as their vocalist. A Skylit Drive have released four full-length albums with Jag.
6. BEAU BOKAN (BLESSTHEFALL)
Following the departure of Craig Mabbitt, Blessthefall were in dire need of a dynamic frontman, and Bokan just came in like a wrecking Beau. Shortly after, Fearless Records continued their consolidation of power by signing Blessthefall, and the band have been growing stronger ever since.
7. TILIAN PEARSON (SAOSIN/EMAROSA/DANCE GAVIN DANCE)
Although not an official member of all these bands, for a time, Tilian Pearson was the ultimate gun-for-hire. After becoming the frontrunner for Saosin’s next frontman, the singer had a falling out with his then-band Tides Of Man. After the recoding of two demos featuring Pearson and his inclusion in the plans for a third Saosin LP, fans were juiced. But nothing more ever came out of the collaboration, and Pearson went on to tour with Emarosa following the departure of troubled ex-singer Jonny Craig. After his brief stint with Emarosa, Pearson followed the Jonny Craig trail of destruction to Dance Gavin Dance which he now calls home. The group recently released their first LP with Pearson, Acceptance Speech. ALTTAMPA, Florida – Sure, it took an extra year or so, but Northrop Grumman has finally penciled in the first flight of the giant surveillance airship it's building for the U.S. Army. The Long Endurance Multi-Intelligence Vehicle — a football-field-size, helium-filled robot blimp fitted with sensors and data-links — should take to the air over Lakehurst, New Jersey, the first or second week of June. K.C. Brown, Jr., Northrop's director of Army |
ite knew what Torah said, but the prescription had not been followed in anyone’s memory. The poor had given up on the idea of a Year of Jubilee, but apparently not Jesus.
According to Luke’s gospel, early in the public ministry of Jesus, he went to a synagogue gathering and read a passage from Isaiah:
“The Spirit of the Lord is upon me. God has sent me to bring good news to the poor. God has sent me to proclaim release of captives and liberty to the oppressed. This is the acceptable year of the Lord.”
Everyone in his hearing understood what he was saying. Israelites had gone too long without a Year of Jubilee. It was time for the wealthy to turn loose what they had accumulated. It was time for the poor to receive their full stewardship.
But most poor people had taken on the understanding of life that their oppressors presented and taught. It was true then; it is still true today. So, the Year of Jubilee code was regarded as impractical. However, the principles of the ownership of God, the end of slavery, and economic justice still were possible.
The Israelites who held wealth and power knew what was in Torah, but they were not interested in reading it with new eyes of compassion and justice. (When Jesus finally took his message to Jerusalem riding in on a donkey to mock the rich who favored horses and turning over the money tables at the Temple to protest religious corruption he was deemed an insurrectionist and was executed.)
Jesus died almost 2,000 years ago, but the laws of Sabbaths and Jubilees are still on the books today. Torah still has a powerful message, especially since the evils of greed and mindless ownership are with us in ever growing magnitude. Resulting inequities and injustices surround us.
We Americans live in a secular society, but Christians have a responsibility to influence and to train the conscience of our fellow citizens. Here in election season, Jesus appears on the scene and asks the same two questions: “What does Torah say? How do you read it?”
The Rev. Howard Bess is a retired American Baptist minister, who lives in Palmer, Alaska. His email address is hdbss@mtaonline.net.KUALA LUMPUR -- For years Chinese soccer fans had to watch as teams from South Korea and Japan won the annual Asian Champions League, the continent's biggest club competition. That changed in 2013, when big-spending Guangzhou Evergrande lifted the trophy, following up with another win two years later.
In 2016, the Chinese Super League is hoping for a third win in four years -- and, for the first time in its history, it has two teams in the last eight. Yet Guangzhou, ranked favorite when 32 teams from all over Asia kicked-off in February, is absent after being eliminated in the group stage.
Also out is Jiangsu Suning, the biggest spending Chinese club this year, with almost $100 million spent on buying players in January and February alone.
Instead, Shandong Luneng and Shanghai SIPG are flying the flag in Asia for the increasingly powerful Chinese league. The two teams avoided each other in the quarterfinals draw that took place on June 9 in Kuala Lumpur, but will meet in a semifinal if they defeat their respective South Korean opponents FC Seoul and Jeonbuk Motors. The two legs of the quarterfinals will take place in August and September.
An all-Chinese semifinal would be a huge game for China, which takes the champions league very seriously indeed. Of the 32 clubs that participated in the ACL this year China's four representatives are all in the continent's top seven in terms of average attendances, including three of the top four.
"The tournament is very important for us and the fans," said Shandong's general manager Dong Jan. "We last reached the quarterfinal stage in 2005 and we are delighted to be back here."
Shandong, based in the eastern city of Jinan, is struggling in the Chinese Super League but going well in Asia. "We want to continue in the competition and go as far as possible, and as we have come this far we believe we can win. It would be great for the fans and the reputation of the club," said Dong.
The quarterfinals draw. (Courtesy of the Asian Football Confederation)
The increased investment in Chinese teams has resulted in a growing number of well-known foreign players and coaches heading to Shanghai, Guangzhou, Shandong, Jiangsu and elsewhere. This is not always a guarantee of success in Asia, however, as the exit from the ACL of Guangzhou, the winner of the last five Chinese Super League titles, has demonstrated.
"It is hard to say why Guangzhou did not get this far," Dong said at the quarterfinal draw. "They started slowly and maybe that was the problem. But it is good for China to have both us and Shanghai still involved; it shows that the league is getting stronger and it is not just about Guangzhou."
Foreign glamor
Shanghai SIPG is perhaps better placed to win the trophy, despite the fact that this is the club's first appearance in the tournament. Led by the Swede Sven Goran Eriksson, a former England coach, the team includes the Brazilian striker Elkeson, who scored the winning goal for Guangzhou in the 2015 final in November before being sold to Shanghai for around $23 million.
"For all teams, to become champion of the champions league is a dream, and it is the same for us," said Shanghai's general manager Zhou Yizhen. "That is our goal, and it will be a great honor for us and Chinese football too. Only one Chinese team has won the Asian Champions League and we want to become the second."
Shanghai was runner-up to Guangzhou in the Chinese Super League in 2015, and, unlike Shandong, is going well in 2016. Zhou is confident that the club can chase success simultaneously at home and in Asia.
"Being the champion of Asia brings the name of the club to the world and it helps the image of the club and the league. For China to win again with a different club will show that we are moving in the right direction," he said.
Winning the ACL also grants access to the FIFA Club World Cup, a tournament held in December that features the club champions of each of FIFA's six regional confederations. The world club competition has been a major part of Guangzhou's quest for global status.
The 2016 FIFA Club World Cup will take place in Japan in December. But while the country will have one representative in the tournament by virtue of being host, it will not participate as a continental champion.
No Japanese team has won the ACL title, or reached the final, since 2008, and the rise of Chinese clubs seems to have made it more difficult. Shanghai eliminated FC Tokyo in the second round, while Urawa Reds fell to FC Seoul. Japan has no representatives in the last eight.
"The spending of Chinese teams presents a problem for Japanese and Korean teams," said Seoul's general manager Kim Tae-joo. "They have more money and can buy excellent foreign players, and buy players from Korea too. It is something that Korean and Japanese teams have to learn how to deal with."
Korea has long enjoyed success in Asian club soccer, with 10 championship wins -- double the number won by clubs from any other country. Compared to Japan, K-League clubs seem more able to deal with the new Chinese challenge.
"It is surprising that there are no Japanese teams here because Japanese and Korean teams have been at the top for Asian football for so long," said Dong. "Japan teams send many players to Europe and perhaps this could be a reason."
Money also makes a difference, according to Zhou. "Japanese teams have perhaps not invested as much recently as in the past, but they are still strong," he said. "But these days Chinese teams are getting stronger too."As a devoted Rubyist for the last eleven years, I continue to find things to love about Ruby and its direction as a programming language. This year’s RubyConf is my sixth, and has a fun symmetry with my first attendance back in 2010 when RubyConf first came to New Orleans. Below are my thoughts on some of the talks I was able to attend on day one.
“Good Changes, Bad Changes” (Yukihiro Matsumoto)
It is fitting that Matz kicks of each RubyConf with the opening keynote. This year, like in some years past, the question was asked about how many attendees were coming to RubyConf for the first time. The response was surprising in terms of the overwhelming number of hands that went up, which led to a lot of applause from the rest of the attendees. I found the number of first time attendees encouraging because even though Ruby has faded as a “new and shiny” choice, it remains a meaningful and relevant choice for web development and numerous other fields of pursuit.
Like many of Matz’ talks in the last couple years there was a focus on the health of the Ruby community and the continued work on the CRuby runtime. Remembering the transition from Ruby 1.8 to 1.9 the theme of risk and community adoption were at the center. Ruby is not the only community that has struggled with making breaking changes in the language. The popularity of Rails in particular introduces in our community a strong and vocal counterpoint to certain kinds of changes. But, thankfully there have not been enormous delays in adoption of new versions of the Ruby language. The risk of Second System Syndrome has been well manages, so far. Unlike projects like PHP 6 and ECMAScript 4 Ruby has not had to abandon any upgrade attempts wholesale.
A lot of that owes to the incremental and primarily additive nature of many changes in Ruby since the release of 2.0. Matz made the point that even those incremental approaches can bring risks to the cohesiveness of the community. Looking forward to Ruby 2.5 and 3.0 there are changes that have the potential to introduce breakage. But, sometimes the breaks present enough benefit to justify being undertaken. One example that I feel exemplifies this is the proposed move to frozen string literals by default. The potential performance benefits seem sufficiently desirable and being explicit when strings ought to be mutable seems desirable to me.
The big take away for me from Matz’ keynote was that call he made for the community to get involved with the discussions about the future of Ruby. He was honest that most requests will be rejected, but he wants to hear from those using Ruby. He accepted that ultimately the language is his responsibility, but he does not want to and can not take the language where it needs to go by himself. I hope others will take the same encouragement to get engaged with the discussions around new language features and proposals. In the end, I think this was a great kickoff to RubyConf and struck an inviting, inclusive and hopeful tone.
“There Are No Rules in Ruby” (Max Jacobson)
Ruby is known for its flexibility and expressiveness. Max Jacobson tackled some of the ways that Ruby’s flexibility can be unappealing and even confusing by exploring the concept of rules. The practical example that Max used was the stark difference between these two instructions:
“Employees Must Wash Hands Before Returning to Work”
“Employees May Wash Hands Before Returning to Work”
In comparing Ruby with Rust there was valuable questioning of whether Ruby is too flexible, and whether its suitable as a language for new programmers. In the end Max acknowledged the appeal and the value of Ruby’s flexibility. I think Max rightly identified that the only solid rule in Ruby is “the actual rules are whatever you make them.” This flexibility is what brought me into Ruby and it’s what makes me want to keep working with Ruby. So-called safety in programming languages can only go so far and I’m OK writing tests to supplement for protections my language does not provide me.
“Finding Beauty in the Mundane” (Megan Tiu)
Megan Tiu presentation on how to enjoy what many consider mundane work was helpful in terms of shaping perspective about the nature of this kind of software development work. She started off by noting that enjoying our work has a lot to do with empathy, which is a heavily used term in certain segments of software development right now. I think the concept, both in the context of Megan’s talk and more broadly, gets back to remembering that software is built both by and for people.
One of the most valuable facets of Megan’s talk was her examination of how different tasks can have positive impact on the people we work with and the people we build software for. As an example, she noted that documentation can be a way to reduce siloing of knowledge within a team and it also can provide helpful perspective for those who use our software. Likewise, I appreciated that while she didn’t use the phrase “tests are documentation” she described that very fact in presenting that tests can be a valuable tool for introducing new team members to a codebase.
Unfortunately this talk was cut short by a fire alarm that turned out to be a false alarm. The talk was helpful in pointing out how certain work may be considered mundane, but its all about how we approach it, especially regarding our frame of mind. We have to remember that we are building software for people in most cases, and so our care for those people ought to be reflected in what and how we work.
“Augmenting Human Decision Making with Data Science” (Kelsey Pedersen)
Kelsey’s talk provided some really interesting context for thinking about Machine Learning in a business (Stitch Fix) that relies on highly subjective judgements regarding style. She laid the foundation by exploring the Dual Process Theory of cognition and then describing how Machine Learning has been applied to the business model of Stitch Fix to augment human intuition in order to make the work of their stylists more accurate and more efficient.
Some of the most helpful insights that came out of Kelsey’s talk for me was the recognition that there are certain kinds of decision making that is still difficult for machines. Machine Learning tends to be very good at narrowing down a set of choices, but when there is a subjective component they can struggle with the needed specificity to make a final selection. Also, she noted that algorithms have limitations on the scope of their experience and they lack robust ethical frameworks. The solution to some of these deficiencies for Stitch Fix turned out to be the most valuable.
Both in the context of individual item selection and the finalization of an entire bundle of products, Stitch Fix permits the stylist to override the recommendations of the Machine Learning algorithms. This model she referred to as a System 3 approach that relies on blending computational decision making with human intuition via a feedback mechanism that allows both the human and the machine to grow and learn over time. This struck me as being a useful approach to ensure is built into any robust Machine Learning model.
“Growing Old” (Chad Fowler)
The closing keynote by Chad Fowler resonated with me a lot. During some conversations I had at the O’Reilly Software Architecture Conference in London I expressed and talked through my dislike for the pejorative way that the term legacy is used to describe software. This same theme was a focal point of Chad’s address. I appreciated how in every other pursuit; especially creative ones like music, art and architecture; the term legacy is more often incredibly positive.
The big takeaway for me was that our legacy as builders of software is not the code we write, but the systems we build. The systems we construct are what bring value to the businesses we work for and the users that we serve. I find the idea that the legacy of software developers comes in the form of the whole, and the ideas it embodies, far more appealing than thinking of my legacy as being represented by the code I write, no matter how proud I may be of it in the moment.Media playback is unsupported on your device Media caption The BBC's Guy Hedgecoe in Madrid says the charges are "very bad timing"
A Spanish judge has formalised charges against Princess Cristina, King Felipe's sister, in a tax fraud and money laundering case.
The princess, 49, was questioned in court in February about the business dealings of her husband, Inaki Urdangarin, and could now face trial.
However, an appeal has been lodged against the decision.
The judge's ruling will come as an embarrassment to Felipe VI, who came to the throne only six days ago.
The tax fraud case was one of several scandals that weakened the popularity of the Spanish monarchy and prompted the abdication of King Juan Carlos.
Princess Cristina's appearance in court in Mallorca was unprecedented for the royal family and if she goes to trial, she could face up to 11 years in jail.
She was noticeably absent from Felipe's proclamation as king.
Analysis by Guy Hedgecoe, BBC News Madrid
Image copyright Getty Images Image caption King Felipe, here with Queen Letizia, came to the throne only six days ago
The judge's decision is a major development in this investigation and a huge embarrassment for the Spanish royal family.
Jose Castro believes the princess knew more than she has let on regarding the allegedly corrupt activities of her husband, Inaki Urdangarin.
This inquiry has now lasted more than three years and during that time it has heavily eroded the popularity of the royal family. Princess Cristina has already appeared in court to testify, but the door is now open for her to face trial, which would take the scandal to a new level.
Her brother, Felipe, became king less than a week ago. Of the many challenges he faces as the new monarch, this is perhaps the least welcome.
Daunting challenges for new king
Image copyright AFP Image caption The judge said Princess Cristina would have had to know about her husband's activities
Judge Jose Castro has been investigating allegations that the princess's husband embezzled millions in public funds with a former business partner.
Mr Urdangarin, who is the Duke of Palma, and Diego Torres were alleged to have received 5.6m euros (£4.6m; $7.5m) by overcharging regional governments for organising sporting events as part of a not-for-profit organisation called Noos.
Money from Noos was allegedly channelled into a company called Aizoon that the duke had set up with his wife. It was then allegedly used to pay for work on the couple's Barcelona mansion, luxury trips and dance lessons.
Announcing his decision, Judge Castro said the princess should be tried alongside her husband and other suspects.
Image copyright AFP Image caption Princess Cristina told the investigating judge in February she had no knowledge of her company's activities
"The crimes against the public purse that Inaki Urdangarin allegedly committed against the public purse would have been hard to commit without at least the knowledge and acquiescence of his wife," he said.
As co-owner of Aizoon, she is suspected of co-operating in tax fraud and money-laundering, although she told the judge in February she had no knowledge of the company's activities and simply trusted her husband.
Anti-corruption prosecutors had already opposed his decision to name Cristina as a suspect, saying there was insufficient evidence against her. Prosecutor Pedro Horrach said on Wednesday an appeal was being lodged "because there is still no piece [of evidence] against" the princess.
The next step will involve prosecutors and defendants putting forward their case before Judge Castro, Palma de Mallorca's investigating judge, who will then decide what charges to recommend.
A final decision on whether she should stand trial will be made by the provincial court at Palma de Mallorca.BorgWarner Inc. is expanding its operations in Oconee County
BorgWarner Inc. is expanding its operations in Oconee County, according to a press release sent out by the S.C. Department of Commerce.The $71.9 million investment is projected to create more than 160 new jobs. BorgWarner operates 62 facilities in 17 countries, employing around 27,000 associates worldwide. The company serves a variety of markets, including the passenger car and light truck, commercial vehicle, off-highway construction and agricultural markets. BorgWarner will invest in capital, equipment and infrastructure at its existing facilities located on Wells Highway in Seneca. Hiring is expected to start in late 2017, and you can apply on the company’s careers page online. “South Carolina’s manufacturing sector is on top of the world right now, and today’s announcement by BorgWarner Inc. is a perfect example of that. Our success wouldn’t be possible without the hardworking people who make up our state’s workforce, and we look forward to seeing how these new jobs will benefit South Carolinians,” Gov. Henry McMaster said.
BorgWarner Inc. is expanding its operations in Oconee County, according to a press release sent out by the S.C. Department of Commerce.
The $71.9 million investment is projected to create more than 160 new jobs.
Advertisement
BorgWarner operates 62 facilities in 17 countries, employing around 27,000 associates worldwide.
The company serves a variety of markets, including the passenger car and light truck, commercial vehicle, off-highway construction and agricultural markets.
BorgWarner will invest in capital, equipment and infrastructure at its existing facilities located on Wells Highway in Seneca.
Hiring is expected to start in late 2017, and you can apply on the company’s careers page online.
“South Carolina’s manufacturing sector is on top of the world right now, and today’s announcement by BorgWarner Inc. is a perfect example of that. Our success wouldn’t be possible without the hardworking people who make up our state’s workforce, and we look forward to seeing how these new jobs will benefit South Carolinians,” Gov. Henry McMaster said.
AlertMeSo much has changed in space since Carl Sagan's Cosmos TV series first aired in 1980. We discovered dark energy (but still have no clue what it is). We launched the space shuttle and built a football field-sized space station in orbit. We've found about 1,000 exoplanets orbiting other stars.
What hasn't changed, the producers of the new incarnation of Cosmos hope, is humanity's curiosity about the universe, our thirst to understand where we came from and where we're headed. A rebooted version of Cosmos premieres this Sunday on Fox (9 p.m. ET), hosted by the modern era's Carl Sagan—Neil deGrasse Tyson. Tyson, an astrophysicist and director of the American Museum of Natural History's Hayden Planetarium, worked with executive producers Seth MacFarlane and Ann Druyan, Carl Sagan's widow, among a larger team, to update Cosmos for today's viewers.
The show is impressive. Current visual effects can do a lot to illustrate the wonders of the universe that the graphics technology of the 1980s wasn't up to. Cosmos makes good use of the visual splendor of images from the Hubble Space Telescope, which was still 10 years away from launching when Cosmos first aired. Tyson is an affable, accessible and intelligent host. If the whole of cosmic history was 365 days long, he explains, recorded human history would fit within the last minute. "It was only in the very last second of the cosmic calendar," he says, "that we began to use science to reveal nature's secrets and her laws."
Tyson himself is a testament to the impact Carl Sagan had on previous generations. Toward the end of the first episode of the reboot, Tyson pulls out Sagan's day calendar from 1975, showing a Saturday where Sagan had scrawled "Neil Tyson" on his to-do list. The astronomer had invited Tyson, then a "17-year-old kid from the Bronx with dreams of becoming a scientist," in Tyson's words, to spend the day with him in Ithaca, N.Y. He even inscribed a book to him, writing to "Neil, a future astronomer."
If anyone today can spread passion for science like Sagan did, it's Tyson. And if any television show can start a modern conversation about science and the universe, this is it. The series is being broadcast in more than 170 countries and 45 languages, on Fox and on the National Geographic Channel, giving it television's largest global opening ever.
Yet a smaller portion of American households are watching broadcast networks—especially live during prime time—than in the 1980s. Our attention these days is divided between apps, emails, TV, podcasts, internet news, cell phone games and a host of other stimulations. Can any series be an event the way Cosmos was three decades ago?
I hope so. We live in an age where a quarter of the American public thinks the sun orbits Earth, and only three in 10 Americans say that “dealing with global warming” should be a priority for the president and Congress. A national, or even global, conversation about science and the scientific method sounds like just what the doctor ordered. As Dennis Overybye wrote in the New York Times, "we all need a unifying dose of curiosity and wonder." Ad astra, Mr. Tyson, and take the rest of us with you.One of the four men accused of the conspiracy to carry out a terrorist attack, in which NSW Police accountant Curtis Cheng was murdered, has reportedly raised his index finger during a court appearance, in a similar gesture used by Islamic State militants.
Milad Atai, 20, appeared in court via video link alongside Mustafa Dirani, 22 and Raban Alou, 18 earlier today.
Mr Atai made the gesture to the camera as the matter concluded in Goulburn Local Court today.
The fourth accused, 23-year-old Talal Alameddine, was the only one to appear in court and to be legally represented.
None of the group applied for bail.
The four men were charged yesterday with conspiracy to prepare and plan for a terrorist attack.
All four were already in police custody over related alleged offences, when the new charges were laid yesterday.
Mr Atai became the fourth person charged in connection to the death of Mr Cheng, who was shot dead outside Parramatta Police Headquarters on October 2 last year.
Mr Atai is accused of helping the sister of the 15-year-old gunman, Farhad Jabar, travel to Syria the day after the shooting.
Jabar was fatally shot by police outside the Parramatta building after Mr Cheng was killed.
Curtis Cheng (left), pictured with his family. (9NEWS) ()
Police allege the four worked alongside Jabar, and say they have information that they congregated on the day of Mr Cheng’s murder.
The matters of all four accused have been adjourned until June.
© Nine Digital Pty Ltd 2019Image copyright Nobby Clark Image caption Mat Fraser plays the "wonderfully evil" Richard III, with Ruth Alexander-Rubin as Elizabeth
Mat Fraser is the first disabled actor to play Shakespeare's twisted anti-hero Richard III - and he's relishing the political incorrectness of the Bard's script. But British TV channels are "pathetic" at giving such juicy roles to disabled actors, he says.
At the end of our interview, Fraser gives me a bit of advice about how to make his quotes suitable for publication.
"Whenever I swear, just put 'hell' or 'damn' instead," he suggests.
That tip comes just after he has been talking about progress with casting disabled actors on TV.
Two minutes earlier: "In terms of opportunity for disabled people, there are four more people on telly than there were 20 years ago. Excuse me for not having a party."
Fraser and other disabled actors "clearly have the experience", he says. "I mean if I didn't have the experience, I wouldn't be asked to be doing damned Richard III, you know?
Image copyright Alamy Image caption Fraser played Paul the Illustrated Seal Boy in American Horror Story: Freak Show
"If people didn't think I could act, no-one would let me near the role. But can I get a look-in in any of the BBC dramas? Can I hell."
Fraser has the experience - although recently, US TV executives have been the most willing to let him use it.
He played Paul the Illustrated Seal Boy in American Horror Story: Freak Show, and will soon be part of an addicts' self-help group in a new TV comedy by Dumb And Dumber co-creator Peter Farrelly.
He has been in bits on Channel 4 and the BBC, has been a regular on stage and played drums with Coldplay during the London 2012 Paralympic closing ceremony.
He is easily recognisable - he was born with underdeveloped arms as a result of his mum being prescribed the morning sickness drug Thalidomide during pregnancy.
Ten minutes earlier in the interview, Fraser is not yet as exasperated as he will get by being asked to talk about the opportunities on TV for disabled actors. More of that later.
Image copyright Nobby Clark Image caption Fraser in rehearsals with Matt Connor, Catherine Kinsella and Dean Whatton
For now, he's talking about playing Richard III for the Northern Broadsides Theatre Company at Hull Truck as part of Hull's 2017 City of Culture events.
He describes Richard with relish as a "wonderfully evil character who has no redeeming qualities at all".
Unlike most actors who have played the scheming monarch, when Fraser steps on stage to deliver the famous opening speech, he won't have a pillow strapped to his back or a walking stick to demonstrate a physical ailment.
"I don't have to start performing my own impairments," Fraser says. "I can just be, in my body.
"I don't have to make any flourishy hand movements to show my wonderfully crippled hand, or prance about on a stick or anything to illustrate the point.
"I can just stand there and be, and I feel be more direct and honest."
Image copyright Nobby Clark Image caption "I can be as horrible as possible and infer it's in part due to my disability and I can relax and enjoy that."
In the opening speech, Richard describes himself as "rudely stamp'd", and "cheated of feature by dissembling nature, deformed, unfinish'd". He is so bitter about his condition and how he's been treated that he is "determined to prove a villain".
Among the blunt insults that come his way, he's called a "poisonous bunchback'd toad" and a "lump of foul deformity".
Rather than having a problem with the way Richard is described, Fraser says Shakespeare's words are liberating in an age when most modern disabled characters are portrayed with the utmost sensitivity.
"It's very freeing, precisely because I don't have to worry about any political correctness or [think] 'Hmmm it's my responsibility as a disabled person to imbue this disabled character with as much sensitive understanding as possible'," he says.
"Au contraire with Richard III. It's literally my job to make him as horrible as possible."
Image copyright Nobby Clark Image caption Richard III is directed by Barrie Rutter, who founded Northern Broadsides in Hull 25 years ago
Fraser says he feels he has to act as an ambassador for disabled people when playing "most characters if they're in the contemporary setting".
But with Richard, he explains: "I can be as horrible as possible and infer it's in part due to my disability and I can relax and enjoy that."
Perhaps Adam Hills, the host of Channel 4's The Last Leg, was referring to the sensitivity - maybe oversensitivity - around portraying disability when he told a recent panel discussion there should be more disabled villains on TV.
"Why are disabled people on TV always portrayed as being nice all the time?" he asked.
'Too politically correct'
"Nice" is not a word that could be applied to Richard III. Fraser responds to Hills' comments by saying: "Disabled people are where black people were in the '80s.
"They can't be baddies. People [in the TV industry] are too politically correct. But they're not ready to give us the hero role yet. So we get no role.
"And for anyone on Channel 4 to have a go about what characters should and shouldn't be with disabled… How about having some damned disabled actors who actually are damned characters for some of their damned dramas, yeah?
"BBC are all right. ITV are OK. I mean it's minimal and pathetic. But they have something. Something I can hold on to."
He lists Liz Carr in Silent Witness, Lisa Hammond in EastEnders and Cherylee Houston in Coronation Street.
"What have I got on Channel 4? Some damned lad who's on The Last Leg. Woo. Doesn't impress me, mate.
"And as for those panels - I've been doing panels since 1996 about trying to get disabled actors in. I'm just done with panels. Jobs not panels."
'Nothing's changed'
We're back where we started, and Fraser's exasperation is growing. He stresses he's "not having a go at Adam Hills".
"But if people want to talk to me about roles for dramas, the conversation should be, 'We'd like you to audition for…' Any other conversation is going to get short shrift from me."
How does the conversation normally go?
"It's the same as it has since 1996. 'Do you think there should be more disabled actors in different roles and what are the barriers that prevent them?'
"Yes I do. Attitudinal barriers and the fact that commissioning editors didn't go to school with disabled people.
"The questions and the answers have not changed in 21 years.
"But what has changed is my tolerance for the conversation."
Richard III is at Hull Truck until 27 May, then at the Viaduct Theatre, Halifax, from 30 May-3 June.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
Aston Villa boss Paul Lambert is making a shock move to team up with Grant Holt again - in a surprise raid on Wigan.
Experienced striker Holt has had a hard time in the Championship since signing from Norwich and he is available.
And now Lambert - his old boss from Carrow Road days - is lining up a move to take him for the rest of the season.
Villa will have to pick up Holt’s wages in full but they will gladly do that as they fill a vacancy in their squad.
Lambert had looked at Everton’s Nikica Jelavic but refused to pay the asking price and wages - with Holt a cheaper option.
Wigan chief Uwe Rosler will let Holt go. He has struggled for fitness and form since injuring a knee soon after signing for Owen Coyle.
The move would give Wigan extra cash for signings of their own - and give them extra money to land Nicky Maynard from Cardiff City.FIGHTING FIT: Warriors forward Ben Matulino is expected to return from injury in time for his side's clash with the Eels on Saturday week.
Warriors coach Andrew McFadden is hopeful Ben Matulino will be back for next weekend's game against the Eels at Mt Smart Stadium and that Thomas Leuluai and Sione Lousi won't be far behind him.
Matulino, one of the key players for the Warriors this season, has been out in recent weeks after undergoing a knee operation.
The surgery went well and McFadden says he should be back for in time for his side's crucial game against the Eels.
''We're pretty hopeful we'll get Ben Matulino after the bye,'' McFadden told Stuff.
''The other ones who are looking very good at the moment are Sione Lousi (knee) and Thomas Leuluai (groin).
''I'm not sure whether they'll be right for Parramatta, but they're not very far away at all.''
Having a bye this weekend has allowed McFadden to take it easy with players who've had heavy workloads this season, while it's also given Leuluai the opportunity to train fully without having to build towards a game.
The five-eighth has been troubled with a groin problem since last year's World Cup. There have been numerous times when it looked like he was over the issue, only for him to suffer another problem.
''With that type of injury you always have setbacks, but he's building up pretty nicely and looking good at the moment,'' McFadden said.
''He's been building up his running now over the past month and he's not getting sore after training sessions, so we're very optimistic that we're through the worst of it.
''But we are going to have to manage it right throughout the year; they're not easy injuries.
''We've got to manage the load while we build him back up, because he hasn't done the volume of work like the rest of the group and we don't want him to have another setback.''
Meanwhile, McFadden said they're still weighing up whether Ben Henry should have an operation on his knee at the end of the season to repair some damage that he's had to battle through during this campaign.
''We are looking at all of our options there,'' McFadden said. ''Ben has got the troublesome knee, whether he needs that operation at the end of the year we'll see how it goes. We'll try to manage it through at the moment, but it is a possibility.''
Centre Dane Nielsen played his first NRL game for the Warriors since April in last weekend's win over the Panthers and while he wasn't back to his very best, his performance showed he's heading in the right direction.
Nielsen will never be the type of centre who scores try after try, but McFadden said he's not looking at him to fill that role in the team.
''He's certainly not as big a threat as Konrad [Hurrell] in attack, but Dane's real asset is his skill and football awareness,'' McFadden said.
''We've got Manu [Vatuvei] outside him, so Dane doesn't carry the ball as much, because Manu does and that's the balance we get in our team.
''But Dane has got the skills and when he gets the opportunities I'm sure he'll take them.''It is said that the average modern woman consumes more than 3 kilograms of lipstick in her lifetime.
A leather bag and cosmetic sticks have been excavated from Xiaohe Cemetery. [Photo/China Daily]
Some might find all that wax, oils and emollients a bit hard to digest, but the prehistoric inhabitants of Northwest China's Xinjiang Uygur autonomous region made their women's cosmetics sticks out of something a little more edible around 3,500 to 4,000 years ago.
According to the latest archaeological research published on Thursday night in Scientific Reports, an online, open access journal from the publishers of Nature, the red cosmetic sticks buried with women in Xiaohe Cemetery (1980-1450 BC) were made from cow hearts.
"In previous excavations, a number of bronze ware items and other inorganic relics were found. But these cosmetic tools, being made of organic matter, are very rare because they are much more difficult to preserve," said Yang Yimin, a professor from the College of Humanities and Social Sciences under the University of Chinese Academy of Sciences, and an author of the newly published research.
The red cosmetic sticks, around 6.5 cm in length and 0.9 cm in diameter, were found in leather bags buried alongside the mummified corpses of several females. |
Tram 13 with direction Sahlgrenska via Skånegatan
Bus 58 with direction Brottkärr
You can also go to Chalmers from the transportation hub Brunnsparken, a few minutes walk from the central station:
Tram 7 with direction Tynnered
Tram 10 with direction Guldheden
Bus 16 with direction Högsbohöjd
Bus 19 with direction Fredriksdal or Bifrost (get off at Chalmers Tvärgata)
Bus 58 with direction Brottkärr
A short walk from the tram stop at Chalmers will take you to the venue Chalmers Teknikpark for the meeting.
If you have trouble finding your way you can call one of the organisers: Dan Rosén (+46-72 96 36 126) or Guilhem Moulin (+46-31 772 54 10).
Projects
Sprints (topics to work on):
Type-theory in Color (Guilhem Moulin, Jean-Philippe Bernardy) add as a feature in Agda Thursday: new bugs were discovered, computational content is yet to be added (fixed) Monday: issue: Unclear what should be the status of erased definitions. Tuesday: possible fix: add the colors that are to be erased in the definitions itself (TypeChecking.Monad.Base.Defn`). Wednesday: still in the middle of the development
Windows installer (Makoto Takeyama) Thursday: experiment: which component is needed for the installer to work? TODO: Agda no longer uses the Haskell-mode Monday: New links have been added to the windows installer page. Should the Haskell platform be part of the Windows installer (required for compilation)? Not clear which fonts should come with the package. Bundling is tricky to do with GPL-flavored licenses. Makoto's idea: Build the installer as part of the release. Nisse's answer:
none of the people who currently release Agda are running Windows. Possible fix: Find a replacement on the Agda mailing-list.
package without the need for separately installing the Haskell Platform.
Bengt's suggestion: we could get some ideas from other projects (the Grammatical Framework for instance). Ideally, a Cabal-like could be written for Agda.
structured semi-formal arguments (Makoto Takeyama, Bengt Nordström, Yoshiki Kinoshita) working on a "request for proposal" (to take existing languages closer to Agda?) Thursday: some discussion took place, nothing concrete has been decided
Co-patterns and co-induction (Andreas Abel, Bengt Nordström) Some missing pieces in frontend (almost done) how to compile? Thursday: State of the art: no longer preprocessed but part of the core on Andreas' local worktree (activated with the `--copatterns` flag). Check for productivity. Some more bugfixes are required before merging, and some preservation properties need to be specified. Worked on the integration with the `with` construct, which turned out to be harder than expected. Pushed \o/. Doesn't work with `with` yet; there's also a syntax issue with instance arguments. And the feature has an efficiency issue since non co-inductive terms are uselessly reduced when comparing.
Finish new version of Agsy and connect it to Agda (Fredrik Lindblad, Andreas Abel, Ulf Norell) + integrate test suite present ord discuss Agsy interface
Prototyping for efficiency tests (Ulf Norell, Nils Anders Danielsson, Andreas Abel, Fredrik Lindblad) identify performance problems and possible solutions representations of substitutions, names etc. ideas from lambda-prolog compare with Agsy representations (delayed substitution, etc.) examples from Fredriks TPTP lib. translated to Agda Thursday: Designed a syntax (subset of Agda including records, datatypes, I-R, equality, Π, meta-variables), implemented a parser. A type system is yet to be fleshed out. Friday: implemented parser and scope checker, type system fleshed out Monday: worked on a simple implementation, perhaps not so efficient, but that should get the typing rules right. Next step: Improve efficiency. Tuesday, Wednesday: Continue to work on the baseline, inefficient implementation.
Parallel Parsing formalization (Jean-Philippe Bernardy, Patrik Jansson) ICFP paper formalization, uses "almost near semirings", matrix multiplication and Valiant's algorithm Tuesday: Done! \o/. (Two minor issues.) Wednesday: no more hole.
Sequential decision problems formalization (Patrik Jansson, Nicola Botta) explore and port parts of an Idris development to Agda translated a few modules. We're waiting for a demo.
Core language (JPB, Guilhem Moulin, Andreas Abel, Bengt Nordström, Fredrik Lindblad) discussion and implementation presentation by JPB Friday morning at 9.15 in EDIT 3364 discussed suject-reduction issues with Nisse. Gabriel is now up-to-date. More discussion on the design.
Setoids (Yoshiki Kinoshita) Background: started from proving the Yoneda lemma, didn't work for propositional equality => refactored into Setoid based development change implementation of NBE proof to use equivalence relations Thursday: postulated the Univalence Axiom, got some ideas how
Implicit Coercions discussion inspired by Coq (Guillaume Brunerie, Bengt Nordström, Ulf Norell) Thursday: Coercions can be implemented using instance arguments. It doesn't compose though, and InstanceSearch is quite slow, and limited to name lookups. Makoto's hint: Another solution is to use a hidden index, at least when the the index is inferable. Nisse: If one doesn't want to add explicit coercions then Agda needs to be changed; otherwise there are already ad-hoc solutions. Guillaume: Perhaps the search algorithm could be changed to be faster.
Web service for coding Agda in your browser (Dan Rosén, Bengt Nordström) Peter Diviansk has done some earlier work Tuesday: Mailed Peter. Idea: Compile Agda to JavaScript; many compilation errors. The JS code would probably be too big anyway. An alternative would be to have Agda on the server and use it as a JS library (with a JS editor which would mimic the agda-mode). Wednesday: Got some answer from Peter, he'll make his work available somewhere. Idea: Import Agda as a library, and make the browser communicate with the backend through a websocket using JSON-formatted expressions.
Simplification (Guillaume Brunerie, Andreas Abel)
Tuesday: Idea (bug #850): Only reduce ι-redexes (cf. `simpl` in Coq). Makoto: Would be good to be able to specify which commands are to be unfolded.
Schedule
(not set in stone)
Thu Sept 12 09:00 Introduction and planning 10:00 Fika 10:30 Talks: Yoshiki Kinoshita: Agda proof of NBE for categories. Andreas Abel: Agda as a Library?! Modularization of the Implementation and Stuff 12:30 Lunch 13:30 Hacking 15:00 Fika, then hacking 16:30 Wrapping up (progress reports) 19:00 Dinner Fri Sept 13 09:00 Gathering, (EDIT room 3364) <- Note the room! 09:15 Talk (EDIT room 3364) Jean-Philippe Bernardy: Presentation and discussion about Core Language 10:00 Talk (EDIT room 3364) Nicola Botta: Sequential decision problems, dependently typed solutions Abstract: We present a dependently typed formalization for a simple class of sequential decision problems. For this class of problems, we derive a generic implementation of Bellman's backwards induction and a machine checkable proof that the implementation is correct. We discuss the problem of extending the formalization to time-dependent monadic decision problems. 11:00 Fika, then hacking 12:30 Lunch 13:30 Hacking 15:15 Fika, then hacking 16:30 Wrapping up 19:00 Dinner, at LinnéTerrassen Sat Sept 14 Excursion, to Marstrand Evening event: Concert with The Western Toneflyers at the new KoM restaurant Sun Sept 15 Optional coding day in the EDIT lunch room on the 7th floor Mon Sept 16 09:00 Talk: Guillaume Brunerie: What is missing for Agda to be suitable for Univalent Foundations? 10:00 Fika, then hacking 12:30 Lunch 13:30 Hacking 15:15 Fika, then hacking 16:30 Wrapping up 19:00 Dinner Tue Sept 17 09:00 Hacking 10:00 Fika, then hacking 12:30 Lunch 13:30 Hacking 15:15 Fika, then hacking 16:30 Wrapping up 19:00 Dinner Wed Sept 17 09:00 Hacking 10:00 Fika, then hacking 12:30 Lunch 13:30 Final wrap up 14:30 Talk: Thierry Coquand: Univalent thoughts 15:15 Fika 16:00 Discussion about AIM XIX. James Chapman has suggested Tallinn. Should AIM XX be held in connection with ICFP in Gothenburg? (The main ICFP 2014 conference will take place 2013-09-01/03 with workshops the (sun)day before and the three days after.) 19:00 Dinner
Travel to Göteborg
Göteborg is served by trains by SJ. For information how to get here from overseas, see for instance The Man in Seat Sixty-One... and Deutsche Bahn.
Local airports: Landvetter and Göteborg City Airport.
Accommodation
You may want to use SGS Veckobostäder (330 SEK/night for a single room if you stay for 8 nights). There are many other options.
Social events
No coding on Saturday 14
Excursion
We will spend the day in Marstrands. Departure from Hjalmar Brantingsplatsen at 10:29. Hjalmar Brantingsplatsen is a central hub for busses & trams; from Chalmers the simplest is to take the 6th tram (25min ride, direction Länsmansgården) or the 10th (15min ride, direction Biskopsgården). Buss and tram tickets cannot be bought onboard, you need to go to a Västtrafik or Pressbyrån kiosk; tell them you want to go to Marstrand to get the proper fare.
Bus Grön Express to Ytterby (direction Kungälv/Ytterby) -- 10:29-11:02
Marstrand Express to Marstrand's ferry terminal -- 11:07-11:36
Ferry 322 to Marstrandsön -- 11:52-11:54
(Back same route, departure at 16:15; public transports go on every two hours only.)
What to see:
Concert
On saturday evening we'll try to find a table (wasn't possible to book) to KoM Musik & Bar to have dinner and listen to The Western Toneflyers. The stage in on Karl Johansgatan 15; the closest stop is Kaptensgatan, and trams 3 and 9 lead there from the central station.
Dinner
The official dinner will take place in LinnéTerrassen on Friday 13 around 19h. We will walk there from the university, but if you want to go on your own, you will find LinnéTerrassen on Linnégatan 32. The closest tram/bus stop is Linnéplatsen, and many trams lead there.
Registration
You register for the meeting by filling out the form below and emailing it to Guilhem Moulin.
Attendance is free, and includes lunch and fika twice a day. Otherwise, participants need to cover all expenses themselves.
The Agda meeting is sponsored by the EU FP7 project GSDP and is part of the effort to define the computer science part of Global Systems Science. If you do research in connection with global systems science then you can apply for funding to cover travel or accommodation expenses. Please email Guilhem as soon as possible if you want to do so.
If you want to give a talk, or lead a discussion on some subject, indicate so on the registration form. We will let you know whether your proposal is accepted closer to the meeting. (The "code sprints" form the core of the meeting, so we do not want to spend too much time on talks and discussions.)
Registration form Agda Implementors' Meeting XVIII Name: Title and abstract (if you want to give a talk or lead a discussion): Additional comments:
Participants
Andreas Abel, Gothenburg University
Stephan Adelsberger, Vienna University
Jean-Philippe Bernardy, Chalmers
Ana Bove, Chalmers
Guillaume Brunerie, University of Nice
Nils Anders Danielsson, Gothenburg University
Peter Dybjer, Chalmers
Patrik Jansson, Chalmers
Yoshiki Kinoshita, Kanagawa University (has to leave on Sunday)
Guilhem Moulin, Chalmers
Ulf Norell, Gothenburg University
Gabriel Radanne (Monday-Wednesday only)
Bengt Nordström, Chalmers
Dan Rosén, Chalmers
Christoph-Simon Senjak, LMU
Makoto Takeyama, Kanagawa University
Talks
Yoshiki Kinoshita: Agda proof of NBE for categories. I wish to explain my Agda code of NBE for categories. An obvious generalisation of the classical topic---NBE for monoids. The aim of the talk is not to insist on the generalisation, but to present my formalisation of E-categories, some syntax for that, and the need for discriminate inductive equality and the equivalence relation attached to homsets.
Andreas Abel: Agda as a Library?! Modularization of the Implementation and Stuff
Guillaume Brunerie: What is missing for Agda to be suitable for Univalent Foundations?
Jean-Philippe Bernardy: Presentation and discussion about Core Language
Nicola Botta: Sequential decision problems, dependently typed solutions (FP talk) We present a dependently typed formalization for a simple class of sequential decision problems. For this class of problems, we derive a generic implementation of Bellman’s backwards induction and a machine checkable proof that the implementation is correct. We discuss the problem of extending the formalization to time-dependent monadic decision problems.
Thierry Coquand: Univalent thoughts
Suggested time for AIM XIX
May 22-28 in Tallinn, Estonia.Casket with child's organ tissue inside found on Philadelphia sidewalk Copyright by WCMH - All rights reserved Video
PHILADELPHIA (AP) - Police are investigating the discovery of a small casket found on a north Philadelphia sidewalk that contained some embalmed remains believed to be those of an infant or child.
Police said the small white casket was reported shortly after 9 p.m. Monday across from the Mount Vernon Cemetery. Inside, officers found no body, but a bag with what appeared to be internal organ tissue.
Police said a medical examiner confirmed that the bag contained embalmed internal organs, which Chief Inspector Scott Small said are believed to have belonged to an infant or child.
The casket was taken to the medical examiner's office. Investigators are checking the cemetery across the street and another nearby cemetery to see if the casket could have come from there, and also contacting nearby funeral homes.Installing Vim plugins with Vundle on Windows
Vundle v0.8 adds Windows suport! If you’re not Windows user it still worth updating Vundle, otherwise read on…
Before you can jump into installing plugins with Vundle, you need to have 2 dependencies configured:
Git on Windows
Thanks to msysgit installation is trivial:
Download msysgit installer run downloaded installer and follow instructions It’s important to configure PATH environment variable properly. That’s why it’s recommended to select Run git from Windows command prompt option, as shown:
After installation try running git --version within command prompt (press Win-R, type cmd, press Enter) to make sure all good:
C:\> git --version git version 1.7.4.msysgit.0
Curl on Windows
Is easy as Curl is bundled with msysgit! But before it can be used with Vundle it’s required make curl run in command prompt. The easies way is to create curl.cmd with this content
and copy it to C:\Program Files\Git\cmd\curl.cmd, assuming msysgit was installed to c:\Program Files\Git
to verify all good, run:
C:\> curl --version curl 7.21.1 (i686-pc-mingw32) libcurl/7.21.1 OpenSSL/0.9.8k zlib/1.2.3 Protocols: dict file ftp ftps http https imap imaps ldap ldaps pop3 pop3s rtsp smtp smtps telnet tftp Features: Largefile NTLM SSL SSPI libz
Vundle on Windows
Run in command prompt
cd % USERPROFILE % git clone http : // github. com /gmarik/ vundle. vim / vundle. git gvim _vimrc
Then follow the steps 2 and 3 of the Quick start
Credits
Credits go to eco and morhetz for pushing windows compatibility.
Wiki
See Vundle Wiki for most up to date instructions.Ties between the United States and one of its most crucial military allies, Turkey, were rapidly fraying Monday as Washington criticized the widespread purges that have followed an abortive coup d'état, and Turkey's Prime Minister said there would be "a questioning of our friendship" if the U.S. didn't extradite the man Ankara believes masterminded the failed putsch.
At the centre of the drama is Fethullah Gulen, a retired imam who Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan says was behind the coup attempt that saw a faction of the army and air force take over strategic locations in Istanbul and Ankara on Friday, only to surrender them when Mr. Erdogan called his supporters into the streets a few hours later. At least 300 people died in the brief but ferocious fighting, which saw soldiers use live ammunition on pro-government protesters and the parliament building in Ankara bombed from the air.
Mr. Gulen, who was an ally of Mr. Erdogan's until 2013, now lives in self-imposed exile in Pennsylvania. Turkey, which accuses Mr. Gulen's followers in the police, army and judiciary of building up a "parallel state," is demanding that the U.S. extradite the cleric immediately to face trial.
Story continues below advertisement
U.S. Secretary of State John Kerry said that will only happen if Turkey can provide evidence of Mr. Gulen's involvement that would withstand the scrutiny of a U.S. court. That answer provoked fury here.
Many Turks feel that American forces stationed on the southern Incirlik air base, from which the U.S.-led coalition is flying missions against Islamic State, could have and should have stopped a refuelling plane which supported the coup plotters' air force from taking off. Many Turks also believe the Obama administration waited several hours as events evolved on Friday before making a statement in support of Turkey's democracy because it was wavering about supporting the coup.
"We would be disappointed if our [American] friends told us to present proof even though members of the assassin organization are trying to destroy an elected government under the directions of that person," Prime Minister Binali Yildirim said Monday, referring to Mr. Kerry's request for evidence of Mr. Gulen's involvement in the coup plot. "At this stage there could even be a questioning of our friendship."
The battle over Mr. Gulen's fate unfolded in parallel with another very public argument between the American and Turkish governments over a widespread purge of Mr. Erdogan's opponents that began just hours after the coup collapsed.
More than 7,500 members of the military, police and judiciary – including 27 generals and admirals, as well as Mr. Erdogan's own chief military adviser – have been detained since Saturday. Almost 9,000 others, including 30 local governors, have been removed from their posts.
The crackdown shows no sign of slowing. On Monday, the government suspended some 1,500 finance ministry officials. It also cancelled annual leave for the country's three million civil servants, demanding that those already on vacation return immediately to their posts. Public officials were also banned indefinitely from travelling abroad.
Mr. Erdogan's government also appears to have zeroed in on former air force chief Akin Ozturk as a co-leader of the coup. The state-run Anadolu agency reported on Monday that Mr. Ozturk had confessed, though other outlets later contradicted the story.
Story continues below advertisement
Story continues below advertisement
Mr. Ozturk and the other high-ranking suspects were paraded for the cameras on Monday. Mr. Ozturk's right ear had a large bandage on it, and there were red marks on his face and neck. The other prisoners also appeared to have been beaten.
Mr. Kerry appeared to suggest that even Turkey's membership in North Atlantic Treaty Organization could come under review if the purge was deemed to go too far. "NATO also has a requirement with respect to democracy, and NATO will indeed measure very carefully what is happening," he told reporters in Brussels on Monday.
Any move to reconsider Turkey's place in the 28-member alliance would be a tectonic geopolitical shift. Turkey boasts NATO's second-largest standing military, after the U.S., and its efforts are seen as crucial to both combatting the so-called Islamic State that occupies parts of neighbouring Syria and Iraq, as well as to controlling the flow of refugees trying to reach Europe.
Underscoring how tense the relationship between Washington and Ankara has become, White House spokesman Josh Earnest said Monday that Mr. Obama had not had an opportunity to speak to Mr. Erdogan since the coup attempt. Meanwhile, Turkey's Foreign Minister Mevlut Cavusoglu said any criticism of how the government treated coup suspects was tantamount to backing for the overthrow bid.
"This entire plan was organized from Pennsylvania. Our Western friends seem to be in support of Fethullah," Yasin Aktay, the deputy chairman of Mr. Erdogan's Justice and Development Party (better known by its Turkish acronym AKP), told The Globe and Mail. "They now have to take a side. Will France and America side with someone who is sabotaging Turkish democracy? Or will they side with the Turkish people?"
Mr. Gulen has denied any involvement in the plot and suggested instead that it was orchestrated by Mr. Erdogan in order to justify the subsequent crackdown.
Story continues below advertisement
A thirst for revenge lingered Monday on the streets of Istanbul, where thousands of demonstrators again rallied on central Taksim Square to show their support for Mr. Erdogan's government. They chanted for a second straight night in support of Turkey reinstating the death penalty, and Mr. Erdogan told CNN that he would support such a change if it was first passed by the AKP-dominated parliament.
"The people on the streets have made that request," Mr. Erdogan said. "The people have the opinion that these terrorists should be killed. … Why should I keep them and feed them in prisons for years to come, that's what the people say."
In an interview with CNN broadcast late Monday, Mr. Erdogan said that he escaped death by only a few minutes before coup plotters stormed the resort in southwest Turkey where he was vacationing last weekend and killed two of his bodyguards.
"Had I stayed 10, 15 additional minutes, I would have been killed or I would have been taken," he told CNN through a translator provided by the presidency.
European Union foreign policy chief Federica Mogherini said a move to reinstate capital punishment – which Turkey abolished in 2004 – would effectively bring an end to 11 years of negotiations over Turkey's potential membership in the EU. "No country can become an EU member state if it introduces the death penalty," she said in Brussels.
Mehmet Solmaz, news editor at the pro-government Daily Sabah newspaper, said such warnings were unlikely to sway Turkish public opinion.
Story continues below advertisement
"A colleague of mine read [the EU statement] out loud and everybody just said 'Damn the EU accession,'" Mr. Solmaz said in an interview. "People need to understand that this country has witnessed a coup and there are going to be consequences. Anyone who was involved in any way is going to pay a price. If you want to call it a witch hunt, so be it."
With a report from Associated PressI’ve recently migrated a React component
package named react-trix to TypeScript and wanted to talk about the experience of creating anNPM package in TypeScript.
I’m not here to convinced you to start using TypeScript, Flow or [insert name of latest JavaScript type checker] compiler. Jason Dreyzehner wrote an excellent article if you want to know more about giving TypeScript a chance here.
I’ve been using TypeScript for ~3 years now but I never published a public NPM package with it and I could not find much in terms of recent article other than this one from Michel Weststrate for TypeScript < 2.0. So here we are.
You can clone this repository if you want to follow from your code editor. This is a quick starting point project where you can simply edit the package.json file, run npm install and create your TypeScript React component(s).
The project structure
I normally create a project directorywith the following directories/files structure for NPM packages.
```shell. ├── lib ├── LICENSE ├── main.js ├── package.json ├── README.md ├── src ├── tests ├── test.sh ├── tsconfig.json
Let’s install TypeScript: `npm install typescript -g` You might need to use `sudo`if you’re not using [NVM](https://github.com/creationix/nvm), but I would suggest you start doing it if you don’t ;), this is out of scope of this article though, but NVM make it easier to have side-by-side Node versions installed in your user space. At minimum you’ll need React and ReactDOM packages with their appropriate typings packages: `npm install react react-dom @types/react @types/react-dom --save-dev` The `@types/react` and `@types/react-dom` are useful to help the TypeScript compiler understand external libraries and also let your code editor offer you a better experience. I’m using [vscode](https://code.visualstudio.com/) and the TypeScript and Go experiences for writing code is what I enjoy at the moment. ### The TypeScript configuration file It’s easier to have a TypeScript configuration file when calling the TypeScript compiler `tsc`rather than having to supply the arguments via the CLI. The file is named `tsconfig.json` and will be loaded automatically. ```json { "compilerOptions": { "outDir": "./lib", "target": "es5", "module": "commonjs", "noImplicitAny": true, "removeComments": true, "declaration": true, "sourceMap": true, "jsx": "react" }, "include": [ "./src/**/*.tsx", "./src/**/*.ts" ], "exclude": [ "node_modules" ] }
To stay compatible with the “world” our TypeScript source files will need to be compiled to JavaScript so when other developers install and use our package they will in fact import a standard EcmaScript 5 source code.
The target is set to es5 meaning that we want the compiler to produce code compatible with this standard and we’re also saying that our module will be the commonjs same as Node.
There’s two important properties in here, the declaration and the jsx.
The jsx option tells the compiler we’re going to have React’s JSX in our TypeScript source.
The declaration indicates that we want to generate declaration files so other TypeScript developers will have a nicer experience when they install our package.
Remember those @types/react packages we installed previously for React? Our package will include its own TypeScript definition files d.ts. They accomplish the same goals as the @types/react for example, but are part of our NPM package.
A first TypeScript React component
It’s time to write a first React component in TypeScript, we’ll write a simple component for now.
import * as React from "react" ; export class Hello extends React. Component < {}, {} > { constructor () { super (); } render () { return < h1 > Hello world < /h1> ; } }
Alright, time to test our component. And no we will not use another project, at least not for now. It’s not time to test our package, it’s time to test our React component and we will also use TypeScript to do that.
We’ll start by installing the needed packages:
react-addons-test-utils mocha --save-dev
Testing React component is out of scope of this article. But this is part of publishing an NPM package I think. So I’m not going to talk much about why I’m using Mocha instead of Jest etc. I’m a strong believer in:
use whatever languages, frameworks and tools you like and #JFDI.
Once you have those packages installed we will first create a TypeScript configuration file inside our tests directory:
{ "compilerOptions" : { "outDir" : "./", "target" : "es5", "module" : "commonjs", "noImplicitAny" : false, "removeComments" : true, "sourceMap" : false, "jsx" : "react" }, "include" : [ "./*.tsx", "./*.ts" ], "exclude" : [ "node_modules" ] }
I’m often using npm test with a bash script to run my tests, so here’s my typical script:
#!/bin/bash cd tests tsc cd.../node_modules/.bin/mocha tests/tests/ * _test.js exit 0
Basically we are running the TypeScript compiler against our _test test files and we run Mocha on the generated JavaScript files.
Let’s create a first test for our Hello component.
import * as React from "react" ; import { expect } from "chai" ; import { shallow, mount, render } from "enzyme" ; import { spy } from "sinon" ; import { Hello } from "../src/hello" ; describe ( "<Hello />", () => { it ( "renders the the h1", () => { const wrapper = shallow ( < Hello /> ); expect ( wrapper. find ( "h1" )). to. have. length ( 1 ); }); });
Thanks to Enzyme it’s easy to test our React component without having to use a full/head-less browser. Depending on the complexity of your component you might need to use the mount function instead of shallow and use something like jsdom to emulate a full DOM for React.
Our Hello component is simple enough that we’re able to test it via shallow and running npm test on a terminal shows us our passing test.
[ dstpierre@roadmap]: ~/projects/tmp> $ npm test > tmp@1.0.0 test /home/dstpierre/projects/tmp >./test.sh <Hello /> ✓ renders the the h1 1 passing ( 11ms )
So Enzyme and Mocha allow us to develop our React component(s) and not have to worry about packaging and testing on another project or a debug HTML page.
This pretty much resume the flow of how you can develop/test your React component:
You create.tsx and.ts files in the src directory You create tests in the tests directory for your TypeScript code You run your tests and start at #1 until your package is at a place where you want to see it in an external app.
Testing the installation of our package
Running tsc on the root of our project creates the standard EcmaScript 5 JavaScript files into the lib directory.
But before someone can installs our package and imports our Hello component we need to make sure it’s exported and that our package.json file has an entry for the main option.
I usually simply create a main.js at the root of my project with the following code:
exports. Hello = require ( "./lib/hello" ). Hello ;
Pointing to this file in package.json :
{... "main" : "main.js"... }
We also need to specify which files we want included in the package. We set this via the files entry of package.json :
{...... }
And lastly our TtypeScript definition file via the types entry of package.json :
{... "types" : "./lib/hello.d.ts"... }
This is just how I like to work, there’s tons of way to do this, so please if you don’t find this to your taste, adjust to whatever makes you happy.
In my package.json file I usually add a prepublish entry on the scripts section like this:
{... "scripts" : [ "build" : "rm./lib/* && tsc", "prepublish" : "npm run build", "test" : "./test.sh" ] }
The prepublish entry will be running every time the npm package is publishing via npm publish or creates a local package via npm pack.
When I want to test my package I just create it with npm pack this creates a.tgz file that I can install in an external app:
$> npm install../my-component/my-component-1.0.0.tgz --save
And now on this testing external app we’re able to use the component as normal via TypeScript or standard es2015:
import { Hello } from "my-component" ;... render () { return ( < div > < p > external app < /p > < Hello /> < /div > ) }
That’s it!
We have a fully testable TypeScript npm package with one or multiple React components ready to be installed locally or published via the public NPM repository.
You might want to check out npm link if you would prefer not to manually pack the component and install it each time. Depending on what you are building this might be a smoother flow. I tend to rely on Enzyme for testing and occasionally test the package in an external app, so the npm pack and npm install is not a big thing for me.
Make sure to click the like button if you have appreciated this tutorial.
Back to postsVideo Game Design Aspects Desperately Behind the Times
Deus Ex: Human Revolution - Director's Cut (2013)
Thief II: The Metal Age (2000)
Turok: Dinosaur Hunter Remaster (2015)
Shadow Warrior (2013)
Fallout 4 (2015)
Of all the game design aspects we discuss in this article, this is the most important one. Let's start with the most obvious: Combat AI in action games has not improved within the last ten years. AI in, oldergames, some of the oldergames, andare not worse than your average shooter today. They respond to the same stimuli and perform mostly the same actions.AI is better than newergames., and especiallycombat AI are steps above most action games old or new, and thenhas by far the best combat AI (at least for any amount of enemies versus a single target, that being the player) of any action game. Although S.T.A.L.K.E.R. AI handles large scale battles better, perhaps better than any action game, best showcased byThe AI in almost all action games, and even tactical RPGs, is still quite dumb and no match for a seasoned player even when the player has no advantages. This is unlike modern strategy games (but not older ones) such as, andall on harder difficulty modes. The AI in these games are a major improvement over past strategy games, and they can actually compete with moderately skilled players. They demonstrate impressive coordination and teamwork. We need combat AI this good in non-strategy games too.An issue most gamers make is mistaking good AI for "an enemy AI's ability to kill you very quickly in a shooter." The only explanation for this is gamers being oblivious to how easy it is from a programming perspective to simply make AI never miss a shot, but what is more baffling is how such gamers fail to realize how unrealistic and inhuman this is.Gamers also struggle to differentiate between scripted and dynamic/procedural events and AI. The latter is infinitely superior, more realistic and more impressive programming, and it leads to diverse gameplay.How about simulation AI for open world and other large scale games? Bethesda Game Studios tried to make a serious advancement here in 2006 with their Radiant AI system in, and then GSC Game World elevated it tremendously with their 2007 gameand continued to improve in their sequels. Nobody has tried to evolve simulation AI since. Bethesda has made some slight, marginal improvements withcompared to Oblivion, and GSC unlocked their simulation AI a bit in(2008) but again, all marginal improvements.The only major improvement since then has come from a mod forcalled, which obliterates the simulation AI from all other games. But aside from this mod, simulation AI still has a large way to go before it starts to resemble something truly impressive, something worthy of being called a virtual world or truly "next gen" games.Sadly, great AI doesn't sell games (excluding certain strategy games), so developers do not bother. It will probably be decades before we see significant evolution in video game AI. Until then, it remains one of gaming's biggest obstacles. Until then, Call of Chernobyl is the only game (and it's actually a mod) that appears to be on the right path, and it is already perhaps a decade ahead of its time just as Shadow of Chernobyl (released in 2007) was, and just as F.E.A.R. (2005) was. The proof is in the pudding; those games are over a decade old now, and still superior to every other game outside their franchises.Hardware and game programming have been somewhat of a barrier for AI as well, but now with the widespread adoption of multicore processors and DX12 and Vulkan APIs, this shouldn't be an issue. Ideally, AI would be GPU accelerated, preferably via OpenCL.Boogie cashed in and still isn’t happy. Last year, the Compton-bred, Long Beach-based rapper spun a national hit—the Jahlil Beats-produced “Oh My”—and its attendant regional buzz into a deal with Interscope. His 2015 mixtape, The Reach, cemented him as one of the funniest, smartest, and most disarmingly confessional young rappers in the world. Like his breakout mixtape from the year prior, it was released on his beloved son’s June birthday.
This week, he dropped two new songs: “Catching Feelings,” which features the Chicago upstart (and Timbaland protégé) Tink, and “Out My Way (Bitter Raps II), |
place on the rear of one fuselage during the tour, while components for the other were being assembled the factory floor.
Stratolaunch declined to give a schedule for completion of the aircraft, but Beames said he was satisfied with the progress the company was making on the plane. “I feel very good about where we are,” he said.
In an interview last July, Beames said the aircraft would be rolled out by early 2016, with flight tests beginning by mid-year. He said at the tour there was no specific issue that was delaying its development, beyond the issues of building a one-of-a-kind plane like this.
“It turned out to be more challenging than they anticipated,” he said of the aircraft’s designers at Scaled Composites. He credited them with innovations in its development, but the scale of the work, he said, created unique challenges. “The common denominator is just building an aircraft of this magnitude. It required thinking and innovation that Scaled certainly delivered on.”
Schedule and Competition
Beames was also hesitant to give a date when Stratolaunch would enter commercial service. “In terms of the overall plan, we’re on track,” he said. “I feel very confident that we have healthy margins built into Paul’s original goal of by the end of the decade.”
In fact, when Paul Allen announced Stratolaunch in late 2011, he and other company officials discussed having the plane completed by 2015 with test launches starting in 2016. Beames noted that he joined the company about two and a half years ago, long after that original announcement.
He said getting the aircraft and overall system done right was more important that meeting a specific schedule. “While this piece, the aircraft, we would love for it to be done today, it’s important that we get it right,” he said. “I think it’s been worth the redoubling of attention to detail to make sure we’re getting this done right.”
Beames said Stratolaunch is discussing schedules with potential customers, although under non-disclosure agreements. “We’re very interested in being their provider,” he said of talks with potential customers.
Stratolaunch, though, is entering a crowded market as several other companies make progress on dedicated launch systems for smallsats, both conventional ground-launched rockets as well as other air-launch systems. Some of those companies are planning to make their initial launches as soon as later this year.
Beames said that Stratolaunch should stand out from the competition based on both its flexibility in accommodating multiple launch vehicles of different sizes, as well as its responsiveness. “I think we’ll be the most responsive,” he said. “There will be no more waiting years to test out a prototype system. There will be no more of the kinds of things that have frankly killed great ideas before they were literally able to get off the ground.”
He added, though, that he thinks the market for smallsats will be large enough to support more than one launch provider. “There’s a lot of folks in the launch business right now,” he said. “A logical fallacy that a lot of people fall into is that they think that there’s only going to be one winner in the end. I don’t think that’s the case.”A plan to build interchanges and overpasses on the Thunder Bay Expressway will come before city councillors Monday night.
The Ministry of Transportation is studying the potential of eliminating traffic lights between Arthur and Balsam Streets. Flyovers, or interchanges, could be built at every intersection along the expressway.
"At this point it's just a planning and preliminary design study," ministry spokesperson Annemarie Piscopo said.
"So, ultimately the long term vision for the Thunder Bay Expressway is a 4-lane divided highway with interchanges."
A similar study was started in the early 1990's, but it was never completed and no environmental work was done.
The current project's studies started in 2013, and are now just getting to the public consultation phase.
A public consultation will be held at the Airlane Hotel on June 23, from 4-8 p.m.
Another consultation will take place in the fall.
Thunder Bay expressway interchange recommendations include:By Michelle Malkin • May 15, 2009 10:28 AM
This is getting to be a habit. During the stimulus debate, President Obama exploited Caterpillar and spread exaggerated claims about the massive spending program’s effects on the manufacturer’s jobs. Caterpillar had to publicly refute Obama.
He’s moved on to his government health care takeover plans. And once again, the b.s.’er-in-chief is using private industry to float inflating promises about the massive spending program.
The health care companies have now publicly refuted Obama:
Hospitals and insurance companies said Thursday that President Obama had substantially overstated their promise earlier this week to reduce the growth of health spending. Mr. Obama invited health industry leaders to the White House on Monday to trumpet their cost-control commitments. But three days later, confusion swirled in Washington as the companies’ trade associations raced to tamp down angst among members around the country. After meeting with six major health care organizations, Mr. Obama hailed their cost-cutting promise as historic. “These groups are voluntarily coming together to make an unprecedented commitment,” Mr. Obama said. “Over the next 10 years, from 2010 to 2019, they are pledging to cut the rate of growth of national health care spending by 1.5 percentage points each year — an amount that’s equal to over $2 trillion.” Health care leaders who attended the meeting have a different interpretation. They say they agreed to slow health spending in a more gradual way and did not pledge specific year-by-year cuts. “There’s been a lot of misunderstanding that has caused a lot of consternation among our members,” said Richard J. Umbdenstock, the president of the American Hospital Association. “I’ve spent the better part of the last three days trying to deal with it.” Nancy-Ann DeParle, director of the White House Office of Health Reform, said “the president misspoke” on Monday and again on Wednesday when he described the industry’s commitment in similar terms. After providing that account, Ms. DeParle called back about an hour later on Thursday and said: “I don’t think the president misspoke. His remarks correctly and accurately described the industry’s commitment.”
O-nocchio!“Souls! Souls! This way, sir!” the enchanted shadow calls, his form is pitch-black except for the white shirt indicating that whoever he was stolen from was wearing a suit, “Souls, souls, souls! Big ones, small ones, angry ones, loving ones… This way, sir, we have them all.”
I nod and step into the well-lit store. This is not the Dark Ages anymore. We have electricity and modern amenities, like this shopping centre hidden in plain sight. There is a booming economy that spans the globe, but there are also the nine layers of the Underworld that tuck into the roots of the World Tree as its swaying branches far above hold Mount Olympus and Valhalla.
“What are you looking for?” the shadow assistant standing next to me asks. His form is completely black. I cannot even make out a mouth or where his voice is coming from.
“Yeh, I’m looking for a good worker for the house. Something chore-related, perhaps?”
He nods and leads me to a back shelf in the shop. Bottles and lamps and other containers are everywhere on the shelves with labels like ‘Strong Warrior – 10gc’, ‘Wiccan Lover – 15gc’ and ‘Malchavian Assassin – 100gc’ written on them in old Arcane scrawl.
“Here’s the ‘Old Housekeeper’ product, sir,” the Shadow says, handing me a small glass bottle with a swirling green mist in it. His touch–or the bottle–is cold. I peer inside and there is a being swirling in and out of shape in there. It looks like an old lady.
“What’s her story?” I ask, intrigued. You have to vet these sort of transactions carefully. No one wants to buy a bad soul.
“Quite standard, sir. Nothing out of the ordinary,” the Shadow says cheerfully. I get the impression that it is smiling: “Sold her soul for long-life and magic, mixed potions and the like from her old house in the woods. She can cook, clean, has good basic knowledge and is not dangerous. Answers to ‘Merve’, but we can alter her Contract with any special requests you may have?”
“Great,” I nod, “I’ll take this one as she comes,” I reach into the hidden pocket in my robe for the fifteen gold coins it will cost.
Back in the castle, I read the instructions and then open the bottle. There is a soft gust of wind that sighs from it and the ethereal form of an old woman slowly materialises in front of me.
“I’ll cut you and cook you, I’ll kill you and clean you–” a distant wailing begins to emanate from her as her face distorts and she starts to advance upon me.
I calmly lift the dusty, old scroll that came with the bottle in front of me. She stops dead, her wailing dying out.
“Merve, do you remember your Contract?”
“Yes, yesss,” her form blinks and hazily shifts a little in front of me, like a hidden wind was blowing through it, “Yes, I remember the wicked little man and the blood on the page. Yes, yesss…”
“Great, Merve,” I smile at her, “The demon’s Contract that gave you power during life was ceded to another and I have bought it. That means that your Contract now lies with me.”
I was met with silence. Sometimes the souls need a little time to adjust.
“Merve, you work for me now,” I try to smile welcomingly to her. It is always better if they accept things willingly.
“Yesss, Master, how can I serve you?”
I smile and lean back in my armchair. Life is good.
Three month’s later, the banshees are wailing outside the castle and the black candles are lit through the chamber. My family is there in all their oddity as well as close friends and even a couple strange, silent observers of the Arcane Lore scratching away in their old, leather-bound notebooks.
“I have lived a long, rich life,” I rasp, on my deathbed, “but–Merve, will you write this down–” Merve appears through a wall in my crowded bedroom and floats over to my desk for a scroll, quill and ink, “I have lived a long, rich life, but all things end…” this time I am interrupted by a fit of coughing. I wipe the blood away and continue. So this is how it ends, I think, strangely disappointed.
“In this order, here is my final will and testament: To my brother, I leave this castle and all that is in it, save those items I mention now. To my sister, I leave my spellbook, wand and I cede all my Contracts. To my nephew…” and so I continue until all the hordes are satisfied, including myself.
Later that night, I find myself staring at my body on the bed. Around it sit, slump or skulk the few family members that remained overnight. Many of them are asleep and the couple that are awake do not seem aware that I am no longer sleeping, but dead.
“Yes, you are dead.”
The slightly high-pitched voice by my side startles me. It is strangely familiar and as I turn to look, it all makes sense.
“You. So this is happening after all,” I state looking down at my ethereal hands rippling in a hidden breeze.
“Yes, of course, this is happening. What else would be happening? Here is the Contract, please verify that you are happy with it,” and the wicked, little man with pointed teeth hands me a page written in my own blood. It is a page that I signed a long, long time ago when I was a lowly apprentice of a lowly wizard. It is a page that offered me a way out of the destitution of my family and a way to fill my life and me with great, history-changing magic.
“Yes, that is the Contract,” I sigh. It really is time. There is nothing I can do, because he has the Contract and I can feel the inescapable tug of its words on me.
I have a last look at the room with my body in it. My family still has not realised that I am gone. Suddenly, I am being pulled down. The room is getting bigger, or am I getting smaller? Glass walls spring up around me, and then a glass ceiling slams shut.
No one hears me start screaming.
***
“Come on, this one is worth a couple hundred, at least?” the wicked, little man with pointed teeth pleads in his high-pitched voice with a shadow.
“I am sorry, sir,” says the Shadow; they are sitting in the back office of the store with a glass bottle with a dark, purple soul flickering in it, “Demand and supply.”
“Exactly,” hisses the wicked, little man, “Exactly. And there aren’t many great wizard souls these days. Worth a lot, no?”
“No,” sighs the Shadow, “because there aren’t all that many people who want a powerful soul that can curse them with magic to help around the house or the office. You got to invest in protection spells and so on. Those dark souls get expensive to maintain. People don’t like them anymore. 50gp, or nothing. Your call, Agares.”
The wicked, little demon, Agares, glares murder at the Shadow, but its form is so black that not even he can see its expression.
“Fine. Fine. I’ll take fifty, but you are robbing me. Back in the day, these were worth something. Bloody electricity and technology; all this bullshit is ruining the old economy and none of them run off souls!”
The Shadow stands up, walks to a chest and take outs a little bag of gold coins for the demon Agares. Outside, the shopping centre is opening and the store doors are swinging open. Soon there will be hordes of people–some aware and some oblivious–crawling all of this place.
The Shadow flicks the bag of gold to the demon, Agares, and picks up the glass bottle with my soul in it. I am no longer screaming, but rather I am contemplating my escape. Before turning and walking out into the shop floor, the Shadow pauses and–perhaps in a show of sympathy–offers the dejected demon a final thought, “Come on, Agares, it’s not all that bad. The future offers opportunities too. Perhaps you should consider a career change? We’ve started stocking iPhones and iPads. The kids love them. Perhaps, instead of selling souls, you should sell some Samsung gear? I hear that Azazel is making a killing with Android stuff or something…”
The dejected, little demon snorts, and that is the last I see of him. My round, glass prison is carried by the Shadow and put on a shelf surrounded by other souls that signed similar Contracts.
In my little, glass bottle, no one hears me screaming bloody vengeance and plague over all the living.More of the global outbreak of mental illness. How long will French authorities, and authorities all over the West, continue to delude themselves, and continue to be allowed to do so by their constituents?
“Suspect in brutal murder of French-Jewish woman may not be tried,” Times of Israel, June 2, 2017 (thanks to the Geller Report):
A Muslim man suspected in the violent murder of an elderly French-Jewish woman in Paris in early April may not face murder charges, as claims that he was not in his right mind when he committed the act are being considered.
The suspect has been hospitalized for psychiatric evaluation since his arrest for the murder of Sarah Halimi, 66, on April 4. His name has not been released but he is known to be a 27-year-old African Muslim and a neighbor of the victim.
Halimi was beaten severely before the suspect pushed her to her death out of the window of her apartment on Vaucouleurs Street in the heavily Muslim 11th district of Paris, considered a crime-ridden area.
His lawyer, Thomas Bidnic, told AFP on Wednesday that there was a strong chance he would not be held “criminally responsible” for the murder. The lawyer based this assessment on the medical advice of the suspect’s examiners.
Judicial experts will now need to determine whether the insanity claims are valid.
The case has riled the Jewish community in France, with some members angry at the police for how it handled the attack and for treating the murder as a possible act of insanity. Community members say it was a hate crime and an act of murder with anti-Semitism and torture as aggravating circumstances. Halimi’s family has demanded it be considered a terror attack.
Halimi’s family and lawyers have also taken on the press for remaining largely silent on the matter, not reporting the details and appearing to treat it as another criminal murder until just recently.
In a press conference last week, a lawyer of the victim’s family revealed the tragic details of her death and the moments leading up to the murder, suggesting the suspect may have undergone radicalization while in prison for drug-related crimes and while attending a salafist mosque nearby when on probation.
The Halimi family lawyer, Jean-Alexandre Buchinger, recounted that the attack began at 4:25 a.m. on the morning of April 4 when the suspect, who lives with his family in a building neighboring Halimi’s, forced his way into her apartment through the residence of his neighbors, a family originally from Mali.
The suspect knocked on their door and forced his way in, appearing so aggressive and agitated and murmuring Koranic verses, that they all locked themselves in a bedroom and called the police. The suspect made his way to Halimi’s apartment through their balcony.
“He surprised her in her sleep, he beat her with fists. Her living room was full of blood, just to inform you how hard the blows were,” said Buchinger at the press conference on May 22.
The suspect shouted “Allahu Akbar” and recited Quranic verses while assaulting Halimi, and trying to strangle her, the lawyer said, adding that the suspect also yelled at Halimi to “shut her mouth” and called her a “sheitan” [devil or satan in Arabic].
Police arrived just 3 minutes after the call, but made their way to the wrong building at first. Meanwhile, another neighbor placed a call to police at 4:45 a.m. to report the beating of Halimi. More officers arrived and congregated in the apartment of the Malian family next door, afraid they were facing a terror attack and waiting for the anti-terror squad. By the time the special unit arrived, around 5:00 a.m., Halimi had been killed.
The suspect returned to the apartment of the Malian family and was arrested there without resistance at 5:35 a.m., according to the report.
A homicide investigation was opened with police on April 14, without the anti-Semitism aspect. A judicial source told AFP that “it has not yet been established that the suspect knew the victim’s religion.”
That remark contradicts earlier reports by relatives of Halimi who said that she had previously experienced anti-Semitic harassment by the suspect and a relative of his.
A second lawyer for the family said the fact that the suspect did not assault any other neighbors during the attack and made his way directly “to the only Jewish woman in the building, breaking into an apartment to access hers, shows premeditation.”
“He has the profile of a radicalized Islamist; the psychiatry [behind it] is secondary,” said a lawyer of Halimi’s sister, Gilles-William Goldnadel.
There were conflicting reports on whether the suspect’s family acknowledged any radicalization, but Bidnic said they “perfectly understand the gravity” of what he has been accused of.
The Halimi family lawyers also criticized police handling of the attack, questioning why it took an hour and 10 minutes to apprehend the suspect, and suggesting a nation and police force on edge since a series of deadly Islamist attacks in recent years….Please contribute documentation!
The Bible
Wireless Networking in the Developing World ver. 2-- This is what you read before you read anything else. 400+ pages of high-level goodness.
Popular Mesh Protocol Documentation
It is best to understand technical mesh documentation by realizing that there are three layers to implementing a mesh build that can be installed on routers. The first layer of what is installed on any mesh router is the algorithm that is used to decide how traffic is routed to other nodes. The second layer is the Protocol where the algorithm is adjusted to suit the needs of the situation the routers will be in. These protocols make the core algorithm make sense in the world of Switched-Packet Routing that derives all "digital" information transfers (for example, VOIP, compared to regular telephone service which, in its basic form, is an analog signal). In the final layer, the protocol can be placed within a firmware. Therefore it is possible to use the OLSR protocol within the DD-WRT and OPEN-WRT firmwares.
There are two classes of routing protocols. Distance-Vector Routing Protocols (which use the Bellman-Ford, Ford-Fulkerson, or DUAL FSM algorithms) and Link-State Protocols (which use XXXX Algorithms.
Distance Vector and Link State protocols. This video explains DVRPs an LSRPs along with how they prevent errors. Positively excellent.
Distance-Vector Routing Protocols
DVRPs are older protocols like RIP (Routing Information Protocol) that update routing tables of the hops it takes to reach a destination at regular intervals. They are not very scalable due to the way they send and receive updates about the topology of the network. In a DVRP network, no one router has a complete vision of the entire network because each router is only concerned with only the number of hops to a destination but not what routers it takes to get there. In other words, It is possible for a router to see a route to a destination that includes a hop through itself without realizing itself is included in the routing path. Because of this problem, DVRP's only allow 15 hops before traffic is marked as in an infinite loop and dropped. Large networks may legitimately require 16 or more hops and thus DVRP networks do not work well in large situations. Even if the hop limit was raised well beyond 15, the update intervals (usually 30 seconds) would eventually cause massive network overhead traffic and would cause bad routes that are physically disconnected for only a few moments to proliferate for a much longer time as updates would tell other routers in the network that the LAN is unreachable. With all this said, however, major improvements have been made to DVRPs in recent years. BABEL protocol is quickly becoming regarded as one of the most scalable and stable protocols in the mesh world.
Algorithms
Bellman-Ford algorithm
Ford-Fulkerson algorithm
DUAL FSM
Protocols
Destination-Sequenced Distance Vector routing (DSDV)
DSDV paper c. 1994DSDV is a table-driven routing scheme built specifically for ad hoc mobile networks.
BABEL
Ad hoc On-Demand Vector routing (AODV)
Link-State Protocols
Algorithms
Dijsktra's
Protocols
OLSR
OLSR.org's set of official documentation-- A mandatory resource for network operators using OLSR as their favored protocol.
BATMAN
ROBIN
Comparisons of Protocols
Configuration Documentation
Quick Mesh... Coming some time
Commotion Wireless... Coming some time
How to configure DD-WRT(OLSR) to mesh-- Click "Save As" if you have trouble with the link.
OpenWRT... Coming Some time
If you have any documentation you want to provide, please link it on this wiki or send it to [email protected] [dot] org.
Development Blogs And Forums
Other DocumentationCressida Dick: 'Beyond my wildest dreams' to be Met's first female Commissioner
Cressida Dick: 'Beyond my wildest dreams' to be Met's first female Commissioner
The first female has been appointed Scotland Yard Commissioner in the force's 188 year history.
Cressida Dick, a former acting Deputy Commissioner at the Metropolitan Police, will take over from Sir Bernard Hogan-Howe, who has held the post since 2011.
Ms Dick said: "I am thrilled and humbled. This is a great responsibility and an amazing opportunity. I'm looking forward immensely to protecting and serving the people of London and working again with the fabulous women and men of the Met.
"It is beyond my wildest dreams. An extraordinary privilege. I am very humbled.
"Thank you so much to everyone who has taught me and supported me along the way."
Ms Dick was one of the UK's most senior female police officers before leaving Scotland Yard to take up a highly sensitive security-related post within the Foreign Office in 2014.
Image: Undated police photo of Jean Charles de Menezes
Her return to lead the country's biggest police force is not without controversy, as she was the officer in charge of the flawed operation which led to the death of a young Brazilian man, Jean Charles de Menezes.
He was mistaken for a suicide bomber and shot dead by armed police in 2005.
The de Menezes family, who waged a sustained campaign for justice in the wake of the shooting, called for Ms Dick's application for Commissioner to be blocked.
Earlier this week, they told the Guardian newspaper: "As a family, we have always felt that those at the highest level, the commissioner and those in operational command, should be held responsible for the mistakes and for the misinformation and lies that were told by the police.
Cressida Dick's delight at being appointed Met Commissioner
"We cannot be expected to accept that the most senior police officer in the country, a post that is expected to uphold the highest standards of professionalism, to command public confidence and ultimately be responsible for ensuring that no police officer acts with impunity, be filled by someone that is clearly tainted by her failure to live up to any of those requirements."
Despite the family's opposition, the new Commissioner is highly regarded within the police service and seen as one of the foremost commanders of her generation.
Although an inquest jury delivered an open verdict over the death of Mr de Menezes, another jury at a subsequent health and safety prosecution said they believed there was "no personal culpability" for then Commander Dick after listening to her evidence.
Jack Straw says Cressida Dick should not be judged on the de Menezes case
The 56-year-old's appointment to the £270,000-a-year post will mean that for the first time, all three top policing jobs in the UK are held by women: the Met Commissioner, the head of the National Crime Agency and the president of the National Police Chief's Council.
The appointment also comes at a time when both the Home Secretary and Justice Secretary posts are held by women.
The decision to appoint the new Scotland Yard Commissioner was made by Home Secretary Amber Rudd, in consultation with London mayor, Sadiq Khan, a former human rights lawyer.
As well as policing London, the Scotland Yard Commissioner has other key UK-wide responsibilities, such as counter-terrorism policing and Royal and diplomatic protection responsibilities.Overstock.com's Stock Shares Soar in Relation to Bitcoin
The e-commerce dark horse, Overstock.com, has experienced stock shares soar as a result of their acceptance of bitcoin and blockchain. Speculation in digital currency has mirrored its effect on Overstock’s shares. According to a CNBC article, the company closed Tuesday up about 11.6%. It briefly soared 14 percent prior to that close.
Also read: Trump’s Attorney General Jeff Sessions: ”Bitcoin is a big problem”
The CNBC article elaborated: “Shares of Overstock.com closed up nearly 11.6 percent Tuesday after briefly surging more than 14 percent. The stock has hit four-year highs on mounting excitement around the company’s venture into blockchain, the technology behind bitcoin.”
Bitcoin’s Impact on Company Shares
Overstock’s share price has begun to skyrocket alongside other company’s interest in blockchain as well. For instance, IBM and JPMorgan Chase have declared interest in the nascent technology. They recently announced interest in building blockchain payment networks or accepting bitcoin.
Furthermore, bitcoin has “shot up six times in value” this year, according to the article. Interestingly, overstock’s share price has mimicked the short term volatility of bitcoin. It seems to surge and then decline with intense ferocity in the same manner as a crypto market.
Overstock’s shares swing with a volatility resembling the speculation often seen in digital currencies like bitcoin. A high 14 percent of shares available for trading are also sold short, or in anticipation of a decline in price, according to FactSet.
Overstock’s Foray into Blockchain
The company has been building its bitcoin and blockchain acceptance strategy for awhile now. Overstock.com was one of the first major company’s to begin accepting online bitcoin payments. They were also the first to start accepting a wide array of crypto payments by integrating Shapeshift functionality. News.Bitcoin.com covered the news when it broke.
“Overstock just became the first major retailer to accept bitcoin cash and altcoins at the point of sale for payment. They announced a partnership with Shapeshift.io to streamline the process. Now Overstock customers can transact via Shapeshift’s native API easily using Bitcoin Cash, Monero, Litecoin, Ethereum, and more.”
The company’s CEO, Patrick Byrne, started a whole division for utilization of blockchain within Overstock. Over the last three years he developed this division, which is called Medici Ventures. According to the CNBC article, it has emerged as a front-runner in applying blockchain technology to trading stocks and digital tokens.
Overstock’s stocks have a market capitalization of $830 million, with ample room for more growth.
What are your thoughts on Overstock’s soaring price shares? Does this mean company’s that leverage bitcoin and blockchain will benefit off of this new economy? Tell us in the comments below!
Images courtesy of Shutterstock
Make sure you do not miss any important Bitcoin-related news! Follow our news feed any which way you prefer; via Twitter, Facebook, Telegram, RSS or email (scroll down to the bottom of this page to subscribe). We’ve got daily, weekly and quarterly summaries in newsletter form. Bitcoin never sleeps. Neither do we.North Korea did it again. Within two weeks of a test of what it claimed to be hydrogen bomb – an act that earned its second round of United Nations sanctions in just two months – it launched another intermediate-range ballistic missile over Japan.
Compared to its first overflight in August, the missile flew higher and longer. In fact, it was North Korea’s most impressive missile flight demonstration, certainly in terms of range. It flew 3,700km, just enough to strike the U.S. territory of Guam.
North Korea overflew Japan in 1998, 2009, 2012 and 2016 with rockets meant to deliver satellites into orbit. But its two launches this year on August 29 and September 15 are a new kind of provocation. These missiles are designed to deliver nuclear warheads to military targets in East Asia and the Pacific.
Notably, North Korea envisages using these weapons to strike the U.S. territory of Guam early in a war. Its state propaganda regularly bemoans the presence of the U.S. Pacific Command’s strategic bomber fleet on the island at Andersen Air Force Base.
While North Korea’s repeated ballistic missile tests may appear to be brazen provocations from an unstable and irascible leader, nothing could be further from the truth. Kim Jong-un’s actions, while provocative, are both rational and win him and his scientists important technical insights and improve the credibility of North Korea’s strategic deterrent.
On a technical level, these kinds of long-range ballistic missile tests allow North Korea to prove the performance of its long-range missiles on trajectories more similar to what they’d encounter during operational use.
The September 15 launch, in particular, saw the Hwasong-12 intermediate-range ballistic missile tested to what is likely its full-range – the maximum theoretical range of this system with a reasonably robust payload. The distance of 3,700 km was no accident. It proved that North Korea would be able to strike Guam.
That brings us to the strategic utility of these ballistic missile tests – North Korea intends to drive a wedge between the United States and its allies.
On the one hand, its long-range missiles, capable of reaching even the mainland United States, bring to the fore the old cold war problem of “decoupling” in East Asia. By placing Los Angeles and Chicago at risk, North Korea considerably increases the difficulty of the United States’ task in reassuring nations in East Asia of their safety.
Moreover, North Korea, in its state-run media, has repeatedly invited the United States and South Korea to modify their military exercises in exchange for a potential slowdown or cessation of ballistic missile testing.
For Japan the implication is clear, too. North Korean provocations that place its territory under direct threat are continuing precisely because the United States continues to maintain a forward presence on the Korean peninsula. The latest launch was intended to showcase that expanding UN Security Council sanctions would do little to stop Pyongyang.
With every missile test, it is worth remembering North Korea’s overarching goal when it comes to its security policy: the country has long sought an end to the United States’ “hostile policy” towards it and it believes that its nuclear weapons, by straining U.S. alliances, will allow it to achieve exactly this goal.
The “hostile policy” first and foremost includes the United States’ permanent forward deployed military presence in East Asia, but has recently extended to include everything from Washington’s push for sanctions at the United Nations and its strategic signaling in Northeast Asia. For example, through the use of B-1B Lancer conventional strategic bombers.
Will North Korea’s plan work? No. That appears unlikely, especially with the Trump administration at the wheel in Washington. Trump and his advisers remain content to remind Pyongyang that “all options” remain on the table – that a military option remains viable.
Following North Korea’s unveiling of its intercontinental-range and intermediate-range ballistic missiles this year, the conditions for stable deterrence may take some time to develop between North Korea and the United States.
Deterrence worked on a conventional level on the Korean peninsula for years, preventing a resumption of the Korean war. Today, however, as North Korea continues to test ballistic missiles and the United States continues to bluster and threaten Pyongyang in kind, the chances of a dramatic miscalculation are high.
A version of this piece first appeared at the South China Morning Post. It is republished here with kind permission.Dave Richardson said persuading the BCCI to accept DRS will take time and that a former player, such as Anil Kumble, could play a role © AFP
Dave Richardson, the ICC chief executive, has said the BCCI is still a "long way" from accepting the Decision Review System (DRS). In Auckland for the third Test between New Zealand and England, Richardson said persuading India's administrators will take time and that a former player, such as Anil Kumble, could play a role if he could be convinced about the system's benefit.
"They are a long way from saying 'it's a good idea,'" Richardson told Test Match Special. "I don't think it's necessarily only the administrators, say people like Anil Kumble for example. He's going to take some persuading."
India, along with Sri Lanka, were the first users of the DRS in 2008, when Kumble was India's captain. Since technology was not as enhanced as it is now, Richardson said it could take longer to convince the BCCI, the only board not to have accepted DRS. "He [Kumble] was captain of the India team when they first trialled it and the technology wasn't very good. The players weren't used to it so every time the Indians asked for a review it went against them.
"I think it was Sehwag or one of their star batsmen who was given out by mistake by ball-tracking. It's going to take a lot of influencing. So Kumble is a very influential guy in Indian cricket at the moment, he is on their technical committee, their working group. He's also now the chairman of our [ICC] cricket committee. Once these people start to see the benefits of DRS, that influence will probably filter back to the Tendulkars and the Dhonis. And once they are convinced, then the administrators will follow."
Richardson also spoke about the ICC's preparation for the World Test Championship, the first such event, which is expected to be played in the summer of 2017.
"Once the Champions Trophy is finished, we'll then make an effort to really promote the road to the World Test Championship finals," Richardson said. "Every series that gets played [between 2013 and 2017] will essentially be counting to the qualification for the Test championship.
"It's a four-year period. We'll start playing all the Test series in 2013 and around about January 2016 or 2017 will be the cut-off time. The top four at that time will go through to the semi-finals to be played in England in June or July in 2017."
The tournament was initially scheduled for 2013, but was delayed due to the ICC's commitments to its broadcaster and sponsors.
© ESPN Sports Media Ltd.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.
Thank you for signing up. For more from The Nation, check out our latest issue
Subscribe now for as little as $2 a month!
Support Progressive Journalism The Nation is reader supported: Chip in $10 or more to help us continue to write about the issues that matter. The Nation is reader supported: Chip in $10 or more to help us continue to write about the issues that matter.
Fight Back! Sign up for Take Action Now and we’ll send you three meaningful actions you can take each 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 we’ll send you three meaningful actions you can take each week.
Thank you for signing up. For more from The Nation, check out our latest issue
Travel With The Nation Be the first to hear about Nation Travels destinations, and explore the world with kindred spirits. Be the first to hear about Nation Travels destinations, and explore the world with kindred spirits.
Sign up for our Wine Club today. Did you know you can support The Nation by drinking wine?
After an Army drill sergeant was accused of raping or assaulting a dozen female soldiers while deployed in Afghanistan and in a bathroom at Missouri’s Fort Leonard Wood, it seemed like the military justice system worked the way it was supposed to. The accused, Angel |
ranges, and then took up our quarters for the night. We were now in the republic of Mendoza. The elevation was probably not under 11,000 feet [...]. At the place where we slept water necessarily boiled, from the diminished pressure of the atmosphere, at a lower temperature than it does in a less lofty country; the case being the converse of that of a Papin's digester. Hence the potatoes, after remaining for some hours in the boiling water, were nearly as hard as ever. The pot was left on the fire all night, and next morning it was boiled again, but yet the potatoes were not cooked."
Boiling point of pure water at elevated altitudes [ edit ]
Based on standard sea-level atmospheric pressure (courtesy, NOAA):
Altitude, ft (m) Boiling point of water, °F (°C) 0 (0 m) 212°F (100°C) 500 (150 m) 211.1°F (99.5°C) 1,000 (305 m) 210.2°F (99°C) 2,000 (610 m) 208.4°F (98°C) 5,000 (1524 m) 203°F (95°C) 6,000 (1829 m) 201.1°F (94°C) 8,000 (2438 m) 197.4°F (91.9°C) 10,000 (3048 m) 193.6°F (89.8°C) 12,000 (3658 m) 189.8°F (87.6°C) 14,000 (4267 m) 185.9°F (85.5°C) 15,000 (4572 m) 184.1°F (84.5°C)
Source: NASA.[3]Sixty six million years ago, the sudden extinction of the dinosaurs started the ascent of the mammals, ultimately resulting in humankind's reign on Earth. Climate scientists now reconstructed how tiny droplets of sulfuric acid formed high up in the air after the well-known impact of a large asteroid and blocking the sunlight for several years, had a profound influence on life on Earth. Plants died, and death spread through the food web. Previous theories focused on the shorter-lived dust ejected by the impact. The new computer simulations show that the droplets resulted in long-lasting cooling, a likely contributor to the death of land-living dinosaurs. An additional kill mechanism might have been a vigorous mixing of the oceans, caused by the surface cooling, severely disturbing marine ecosystems.
"The big chill following the impact of the asteroid that formed the Chicxulub crater in Mexico is a turning point in Earth history," says Julia Brugger from the Potsdam Institute for Climate Impact Research (PIK), lead author of the study to be published in the Geophysical Research Letters. "We can now contribute new insights for understanding the much debated ultimate cause for the demise of the dinosaurs at the end of the Cretaceous era." To investigate the phenomenon, the scientists for the first time used a specific kind of computer simulation normally applied in different contexts, a climate model coupling atmosphere, ocean and sea ice. They build on research showing that sulfur- bearing gases that evaporated from the violent asteroid impact on our planet's surface were the main factor for blocking the sunlight and cooling down Earth.
In the tropics, annual mean temperature fell from 27 to 5 degrees Celsius
"It became cold, I mean, really cold," says Brugger. Global annual mean surface air temperature dropped by at least 26 degrees Celsius. The dinosaurs were used to living in a lush climate. After the asteroid's impact, the annual average temperature was below freezing point for about 3 years. Evidently, the ice caps expanded. Even in the tropics, annual mean temperatures went from 27 degrees to mere 5 degrees. "The long-term cooling caused by the sulfate aerosols was much more important for the mass extinction than the dust that stays in the atmosphere for only a relatively short time. It was also more important than local events like the extreme heat close to the impact, wildfires or tsunamis," says co-author Georg Feulner who leads the research team at PIK. It took the climate about 30 years to recover, the scientists found.
In addition to this, ocean circulation became disturbed. Surface waters cooled down, thereby becoming denser and hence heavier. While these cooler water masses sank into the depths, warmer water from deeper ocean layers rose to the surface, carrying nutrients that likely led to massive blooms of algae, the scientists argue. It is conceivable that these algal blooms produced toxic substances, further affecting life at the coasts. Yet in any case, marine ecosystems were severely shaken up, and this likely contributed to the extinction of species in the oceans, like the ammonites.
"It illustrates how important the climate is for all lifeforms on our planet"
The dinosaurs, until then the masters of Earth, made space for the rise of the mammals, and eventually humankind. The study of Earth's past also shows that efforts to study future threats by asteroids have more than just academic interest. "It is fascinating to see how evolution is partly driven by an accident like an asteroid's impact -- mass extinctions show that life on Earth is vulnerable," says Feulner. "It also illustrates how important the climate is for all lifeforms on our planet. Ironically today, the most immediate threat is not from natural cooling but from human-made global warming."What is Masculinity?
In this interview with Jack Donovan, author of The Way of Men, we explore the meaning of masculinity, its roots, and how feminist and white knights are anti-male.
Want to meet women? Click here.
Jack is a breath of fresh air when it comes to the topic of manliness. Watch the video below or read the full transcription. You can check out Jack’s site here.
Intro: Jack: What is masculinity? People seem to know it when they see it. They assess– [inaudible 0:07]. They react –[inaudible 0:08]. They value –[inaudible 0:09] but, if you ask most men to define “masculinity”, –[inaudible 0:11] get a lot of confused and conflicting answers. In many cases, you’ll get a lecture about morality, about what a real man should–what he–about what he should wear; how he should behave.
Eddy: … your own sense of yourself, anyway.
Jack: Well, every once in a while, I’ll get a vibe from a podcaster that’ll be like, “This guy’s gonna be like–” [incomplete statement] or I’ll get the vibe that they’re super Christian, or something like that. Every once in a while it’s happened and it’s–like fuck! I don’t know what to say! I normally, I swear all the time.
Eddy: Yeah. “This guy’s too edgy. Shut the fuck guys down.”
Jack: Yeah, it’s over.
Eddy: This is over, we can’t do it anymore.
Jack: Right.
Eddy: Well, I’ve started recording and welcome, everyone, [inaudible 1:10] to John–Jack (not John), Jack Donovan, the author of The Way of Man and a number of other books I’m really eager to check out.
I read The Way of Man, recently, and I found out that was an awesome book, actually! I was doing some research on the masculinity topic coming up, of a university, and most of the definitions out there–most of the people talking about masculinity are men. What it means to be a man or, usually, coming from a feminist’s perspective or an emasculated man’s perspective–somebody who’s already had their nuts cut off–and they don’t really go very deeply into why they are in the first place and why we function the way we do. Instead, they kind of give an ideological slant on or filter for everything they basically talk about, right?
Jack: Oh, yeah, yeah. They’re basically helping you to not be a man.
Eddy: Yeah. [inaudible 2:09]
Jack: Let me help you to stop being a man. That’s basically what they’re telling you to do.
Eddy: Yeah, manhood is bad, so we got this new definition of masculinity where you follow that, do what you’re told.
Jack: Right.
Eddy: Be a good, little, lap dog, basically, right?
Jack: Which is always the first thing, because their definition of traditional masculinity–or, masculinity as it actually is. It makes men so controlled and, whatever. Just trying to control men, too.
Eddy: It’s kind of reverse psychology, too, right? Like saying masculinity is controlling you. You gotta do this, instead. Well, yeah, man– So, you know? You just kind of reverse it in a person’s head.
Jack: Yeah. It’s funny. Reverse psychology is about all they have, but… it works so well for them, most of the time.
Eddy: Have you met a–
who are, probably, hurt by messages, you know? Your book’s wrong. That’s not masculinity. Or, you gotta take the more passive route and that’s better for women–or stuff like that?
Jack: You know what’s funny? It’s that, every once in a while, I get a little bit o’ that. And I’m sure there are lots o’ those guys out there. You know? Once in a while, I’ll get an Amazon review or somethin’ like that, but, really, I don’t get a lot of hate mail and I really don’t get a lotta feminists writing about me which is really surprising because the book’s doing pretty well!
If you look at the gender section on Amazon, it’s usually [one of] the top books on the subject, right alongside their books. I don’t know if they have an agreement that they’re never going to talk about me or what, but, yeah, they never ever–or rarely write about me, which, again, is fine with me because I’m not–[incomplete statement] Arguing with them does me no good.
Eddy: No.
Jack: So, I’m actually very lucky that I get to talk to the kind of men who I actually want to reach, rather than people who are already too far gone to be bothered with.
Eddy: So, it’s been mostly a positive response? People who are like, “Oh, yeah, this guy knows his shit” unless they want to connect with a guy who’s a real man, who’s not just a watered-down version?
Jack: Yeah. Yeah, yeah, yeah. You know? My readers are really cool. A lot of ’em are guys I’d really want to hang out with. I’m comin’ from this–really, I went to art school. I have a theoretical background. I have so many readers who are soldiers or lifters. All these, traditionally, manly occupations, who have tested a lot of things that I write about. And they write back, “Nope, you got it.” (laughs) “That’s what I’ve always thought masculinity was.” You know? So, it’s pretty cool to get that verification because I’m never gunna necessarily be in a firefight in Afghanistan. But, the guys who’ve been there are like, “Yep, you got it.”
Eddy: That’s interesting because you look at it, you look like a “lefter”, too. You look like a liberal arts student that men connect with. (laughs)
Jack: Well, yeah, I’ve definitely become the thing, more as a–[incomplete statement] I try to follow my own advice, so, if I say I’m gonna reconnect with this, I’m not gonna do that and then sit, cuddled up with a book and, you know, movies and whatever. I try to go out and do things and, fortunately, right now, I have a lifestyle that I’m able to do all that. I mean, yesterday, I spent two-and-a-half hours in boxing classes.
Eddy: Boxing’s a real trial. I did amateur boxing two years ago. I’m quite soft, now, but I remember boxing toughens you up because you’re getting punched in the face and you gotta learn how to handle it. I mean, most of the guys–and, maybe it’s the same for your club, too, but most of the guys in my past club who had come through–they would act tough. They put on a front when they say they want to fight and you get them in a ring and you spar with ’em and beat the shit outa them and they never come back, right?
I think you talk about that in your book, too, right?
Jack: Mm-hmm.
Eddy: They’re trying to look the part, be like a man, be masculine; have this macho attitude, but not having anything to back it up.
Jack: Yeah, yeah, yeah. I mean, that’s what modern society encourages and that’s what men–
very susceptible to marketing. Feminists get this right, occasionally, that men have this nervousness because they’re untested. Men, who are untested, don’t know that they’re going to be that way, but men, who know they’re untested, will buy a lot more things to make them more masculine, that aren’t necessary. So, you know, they are being tested, in a way.
So, yeah, boxing is fun. We don’t do a lot of sparring in my gym. I mean, I could do more of it, if I wanted to, I guess, ‘cuz I am an MM agent. I haven’t extended out into kick boxing and jujitsu, yet, so, I really have no ground game. But it is–[incomplete statement] I do, obviously, I have a–[incomplete statement] The other club that I belong to, the Wolves of Vinland (an officially-designed hate group), you know, we spar and fight; and, I have to fight a buddy of mine in a couple weeks, here. Yeah, yeah, yeah. We fought a couple times before, so it’s always a good experience either way.
Eddy: Nothing like two buddies punching each other in the face. It’s all in good fun or good sport, right?
Jack: Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. That’s one of those things that feminists and a lotta women just really cannot wrap their head around. They’re like, “Wait, so… you’re going to punch your friend? O… kay.” They don’t get that that’s a thing and that men are okay with that and, you know? You know, we can train for months to punch this guy that we really like in the face. [both laugh]
Eddy: Yeah, it’s not a hate thing, though; it’s a challenge.
Jack: No, no; it makes you a better friend. [inaudible 8:28] Me and my buddy? We talk on the phone about what we’re doin’ for training and stuff like that.
It’s–ya know? I mean, obviously, we’re not tryin’ to kill each other. [inaudible 8:42] … once we start doin’ that stuff, ‘cuz, once you start throwin’ elbows and [laughs] kicks–you’re talkin’ about puttin’ people in the hospital. I think once you’re tryin’ t’ do that you’re just–ya know? We’re just–[incomplete statement] but, definitely, we’re just tryin’ to do that testing thing that you were talking about. The proving and the–that proving kind of thing.
Eddy: I think it makes–[incomplete statement] It creates real confidence because you were tested, at least on some physical level. Maybe, again, not on the battlefield with bullets zinging by your head, but it does test you on some physical level where you’re like, “Okay, I could stand up for myself” on some level or, “I could help somebody in a certain situation.” Like, you just walk more confidently.
Jack: Yeah, and that’s something I’ve–[incomplete statement] One of the self-defense instructors I talk to, sometimes, my buddy, Greg Hamilton, at InSights, up in Seattle. He does that lecture, sometimes, where he talks about body language and looking like a victim versus not looking like a victim. And one of the reasons to train is so that you project that not looking like a victim. You send out that kind of energy because, actually, people who would attack somebody, they’ll pick the person who looks the most vulnerable. You don’t even necessarily have to be the biggest guy, but, if you’re putting out this energy that you’re going to be a problem, that you’re not gonna be just like, “Okay, whatever!”, then they’ll move along to the next person.
Eddy: Yeah. I think that even works for women. People who keep their head up and not walking around looking at the ground, they would be less likely to be attacked. When you don’t look like a victim, you’re probably less likely to get victimized.
Jack: Oh, yeah! Actually, that’s a story he tells. There is some study that they did where they asked a whole bunch of career criminals to watch some videos of some people walking down the street and, you know? One of the ones everybody agreed on that they weren’t gunna pick this one person, that was a woman in high heels [laughs] walkin’ down the street. Which, you would think, that that would be the way to go. But she was just sending outa vibe that, oh, she’s not gonna take any shit. [laughs] You know? Yeah, yeah; she’s gonna be a problem. Pick that person that looks more passive.
Eddy: Weren’t those passive people that they chose, in a vast majority of the cases, those people had been, actual, like, real victims in life. They’d been attacked, in some cases.
Jack: Oh, yeah, yeah. That’s another thing that he’s talked about. Yeah. I mean a lotta people. Actually, a lotta people that have been victimized get victimized over and over again, you know, because they have that thing about them that says that they are “prey” animal. I mean–ya know? [laughs]
Eddy: It’s a big target on their head?
Jack: [laughs] Yeah. Like, maybe their eyes are too far or close to the sides o’ their heads. [laughs] I don’t know. Like–[incomplete statement]
Eddy: Oh, man; tough situation to be in. Imagine the viewpoint you would have, too, if you were one of the people that was just constantly victimized? It’d be almost hard to blame them for seeing the world in a really negative light ‘cuz they keep getting victimized, but, at the same time, they’re perpetuating their own victimization.
Jack: Yeah, I have to wonder, sometimes, when we talk about like feminism, people who are so angry about masculinity and so forth. I wonder if some of those people–I mean, we see about people being triggered, or whatever, because they’ve had these horrible experiences happen to them–and, yeah, I wonder how many of them are seeing them as victims and not understanding how to fix the problem? You know, they’re coming to it from a victim’s standpoint, so, yeah, everything that is victimizing them is wrong, but they’re making an enemy of strength; therefore, continuing to be victims.
Eddy: Instead of becoming stronger, themselves?
Jack: Exactly. Exactly.
Eddy: It’s kind of like the fat acceptance movement. These people are saying, “Hey, I’m fat. You have to accept me and be attracted to me.”
Jack: [laughs] “Have to be attracted to me” is the most hilarious part of that.
Eddy: I know! It’s the worst! I can’t understand, but, instead of just makin’ themselves better, right?
Jack: [laughs]
Eddy: They could do it for themselves, but, instead, they want other people to change, so they’re keeping themselves in a victims’ space.
Jack: Not only that: it’s a very childish mentality, expecting the entire world to change for you.
Eddy: Yeah, I don’t understand where it came from, but all this stuff is pretty rampant right now. It all looks like it comes from some sort of victim mentality, as well. Everybody’s triggered or everyone has to make somebody else’s standards change so that they can be accepted instead of changing themselves.
Jack: Oh, absolutely. Yeah, yeah. You have to wonder why that is and I’m sure there are many reasons. But, one of them I think that is because people have very few children. Or a lot of people come from very small families or have so few children and, you know? People are so precious with their kids, you know, they treat them as though they’re magic and special; then, the kids think they have to be treated as though they’re magic and special throughout their life or they don’t know how to deal with life. They have this entitlement that, “Everyone’s supposed to love me as much as my parents did. Forever.”
Eddy: Forever. Yeah, exactly. It’s the same thing with–oh, what is it called? The trophy you get when you don’t win, like for participation.
Jack: Oh, yeah, yeah; exactly.
Eddy: There was a football player–I can’t remember his name–Maybe you know of him, but he’s caused a bit of a rouse before. He said–He took his kids’ participation trophies away from them, you know? Fuck eye shed. “You don’t get trophies for just showing up. Winning is winning. You don’t get a trophy for just showing up.” (That’s not an exact quote, by the way. He did a much better job wording it.)
Jack: Whatever.
Eddy: But it was kind of cool to see, though. And it was interesting to see people’s reaction to that. People are kind of pissed off about this.
Jack: Yeah. Yeah, yeah, yeah.
Eddy: It’s like everybody wants a participation trophy. Everybody wants success without the work, right? I’m saying everybody. It’s not everybody, but the vast majority of people. People who are in that space. Everybody else has to change for them. It’s not–[incomplete statement] It’s a very strange place. I’ve had trouble understanding it. I don’t come from that. It’s like–if I want something, I need to do something for that. And if I suck, I better start changing myself so I don’t suck so much. Right?
Jack: Yeah! Yeah. That’s a sane way to look at it.
Eddy: [laughs] That’s more empowering.
Jack: Yeah, yeah, yeah. You can change yourself. That’s very empowering. But, a lotta people, you know? Seal it–I think they call them “cry boys”, don’t they? Isn’t that one of the phrases that people used to call–
Eddy: [interrupts] “Cry boy”?
Jack: Yeah, they want to push people around with their emotions and, so, that gives them a feeling of power, instead.
Eddy: Ah.
Jack: “I feel hurt by you; therefore, you have to change.” I grew up with two sisters and the one younger one–she was brilliant–and she could just cry on command. So whenever she wanted to get back at me, she would just start crying [laughs] and, then, I would get in trouble.
Eddy: Yah.
Jack: It seems to be the way these cry bullies are, ya know? They–[incomplete statement] “I’m offended! Everybody has to pay attention to me! You’re horrible for making me feel bad.”
Eddy: Yeah, exactly. Is that like–[incomplete statement] I guess for–[incomplete statement] Actually, on the topic of bullies, the “cry bully”, I guess, is one sub-session or sub-topic. But, do you think bullying–[incomplete statement] Like, is there actually such a thing as bullying? ‘Cause, that’s a big topic, right now. Everyone’s up in arms about bullying now and I kind of think–[incomplete statement] And I’ve heard from guys who were made tougher by it when they were young–when they were getting bullied and teased by other kids, they say they became stronger because of the fact they got beat up. Like their reaction to it made them better men, as opposed to–
Jack: [interrupts] Well, yeah. I suppose there’re basically two ways you can go with that, right? I mean, that’s, again, normal male behavior, you know, for some men. And some kids are just jerks. And that’s the way it is, you know? I mean, you have to get used to it ’cause you’ll have to deal with it the rest of your life. Some people are fuckin’ jerks and that’s–they’re always gonna be jerks and, then, some people grow outa that, too. I mean, people, who are jerks when they’re kids grow outa that. You know?
I mean, I was a little bit more of a jerk. I mean, I was never really a bully; I was probably more bullied, but I was never really a bully, but I was definitely very [laughs] insensitive to other people when I was younger. And, then, you know, some things happened in my young adulthood that kinda–and, now, I’m actually a bit better at kind of seeing what other people around me need.
But, yeah, bullying–I mean, it’s–[incomplete statement] Any kind of male testing behavior is just–you know, men pushing each other to be better, even if they don’t know they’re doing it, is just kind of an instinct for them to tease each other and make fun of each other. You need to be able to deal with that and be able to be “made fun of” in life, a little bit. And, you know? It kinda–it does make you stronger.
And, again, there’s these people who don’t want to have any challenges in life. They just want to cry and push people around and that’s what makes people, who are up in arms about bullying–[incomplete statement] I mean, kids have always been mean to each other. I mean, read Tom Sawyer. [laughs] I mean, that’s the perfect example of kids being kids.
I mean, this bullying is not new. In fact, it’s so bully penalized that it’s–[incomplete statement] There’s probably less of it than ever. I mean, it’s kind of like people say violence and we live in this violent world and the world is probably less violent than it has ever been. Because we see things in the media. It’s like the media distorts–[incomplete statement] Not as an end key, but just because it exists. I mean, before television and radio, you had no idea what was going on in the town twenty miles away. I mean, you would never have had–[incomplete statement] You would never know if someone at school got bullied. [laughs] But, now, if someone has a bad day, somewhere, you’re gonna hear about it. You know the media will pick whatever story they like and push that one. But, yeah, I mean, you’re gonna definitely hear about things that you would normally never hear about, so it seems that there are more horrible things going on in the world than there really are.
Eddy: It seems like all this stuff just perpetuates a much weaker society, like this move to eliminate bullying, which I think is ridiculous and impossible. But, obviously, we should reduce violence wherever possible. But, it’s just like every move people are making is just to make people more sensitive and more weak and more politically correct (P. C.), and unable to handle criticism or even physical threats. People are becoming more androgynous, so–
Jack: [interrupts] Yeah. Well, we being trained to be better slaves.
Eddy: Hmm.
Jack: [laughs] I mean, that’s the end of it. “They” want–[incomplete statement] There are too many people on the planet and it would be better if we could, basically, sit at home and play video games and shut up. [laughs] Basically, if we could just sit at home and collect benefits or do–[incomplete statement]
You know? The jobs that most people do are just really boring and not fulfilling in any way. If you can just learn to adapt to that and be passive, that’s, actually, really ideal for people who actually do have power.
Eddy: Hmm, is that where the men sort-of stepping out of the social world–[incomplete statement] Like universities–[incomplete statement] A lot less males enrolled now and, you know, a lot of these video games are probably a lot more popular than ever. They seem to be upward… upward… (I’m missing the word.) Anyhow, it’s gaining more popularity for people to just sit and play video games instead of actually challenging themselves with physical challenges, sports or whatever?
Jack: Yeah. Yeah, I mean, it’s definitely a trend.
Eddy: Hmm. Is that also why one of the reasons watching sports is so popular for men? I think you mentioned that in your writing: the fact that guys watching guys do something that’s kind of masculine, facing challenges–physical challenges–that kind of get–[incomplete statement] That makes them feel like part of a team? Right? Just seeing somebody else do what they like to do? I mean, they’re not doing it but seeing somebody else do it–they still get some kind of a high out of it.
Jack: Yeah, yeah; it’s kind of a vicarious masculinity. I mean, really. Yeah, it’s like playing video games. It’s a fantasy of action. You know? So they get to be part of this thing. It’s really gross to me. I mean, a lot of people are sports fans and they’re even people that I like. And it is what it is. But, to me, that kind of vicarious association with this group of people who don’t even like you–[incomplete statement] I mean, the sports stars and sports teams? I mean, they don’t really care about these people who care so passionately about them! I mean, they’re just guys and they’re gonna get traded to another team or get moved to another team when someone gives ’em more money, or they have a better opportunity, or whatever. But these people were just, like, religiously devoted to them and it’s like–[incomplete statement] It’s a very perverted version of that tribal instinct and that tribal loyalty, and it’s like these guys who barely have any friends in real life are deeply devoted to this, you know, like, athlete who doesn’t care about ’em.
You know? I’d much rather see people playing amateur sports versus actually playing them. [laughs] I think that’s a much better use of time and, I think, much more fulfilling and much less vicarious.
Eddy: Yeah, it gives you the actual benefits instead of just getting a mental picture while you’re actually getting a beer gut–
Jack: [interrupts] Yeah, yeah! People sitting on the couch, getting fat, watching other people do amazing things and, then, criticizing them, which is also hilarious.
Eddy: Yeah, like how that play–
Jack: [interrupts] Oh! I totally woulda done that different. I woulda kept… sitting on the couch.
Eddy: [laughs]
Jack: That is what you do.
Eddy: Is it also related to the– This kind of spectator society is also kind of related to the way masculinity–or the way men are looked at today. I’ve heard the term “beer and boobies masculinity”.
Jack: [laughs] Okay… I’m not familiar with that term, but I think I know whatcha mean.
Eddy: Yeah, Mike Cernovich [http://www.dangerandplay.com/2016/02/04/bacon-and-boobies-permissible-masculinity/] passed that around before. I think I even heard you say–maybe not that specific one, but something along the lines of like, you know, “being a man is like drinking craft beer” or something like that, right? Basically, the same thing. You have your craft beer and, then, you have your manly thing. When it really has nothing to do with a man.
Jack: No. In fact, you know? Hi-hop beer, basically estrogenic. [laughs] So, it actually get… yeah, drinking hoppy beer’s a really great way to get man boobs. But in excess, obviously. I actually like [inaudible 23:58] every once in a while, as a malt. You know, if you sit and drink do that, the guys who do that–you’re going to look a certain way. [laughs]
Eddy: A little more feminine.
Jack: Yeah! Yeah! A little more feminine every day. But, obviously, it goes back to what we were talking about earlier. You can, you know, guys who are uneasy about their masculinity are easy to market to. So you can just sell something that says “manliness” and they’ll buy it and it doesn’t matter. And that’s one of the benefits of reading it–The Way of Man and the benefit for me of writing it, was if you really understand what masculinity is about, you can categorize things as “masculine” or not, very easily.
So that goes down to marketers. They understand that already, you know? They know what fonts are more masculine. [laughs] You can actually–[incomplete statement] I think the font source that I use you can actually look at the tag “masculine” and it’s very consistent with what those fonts are. Masculine fonts, more masculine shapes. You can look at all kinds of things and categorize them, which, of course, you know, a lot of the romance languages had the masculine and feminine nouns. And people have always assigned genders to things, based on the standing of masculine. Sometimes, it’s idiosyncratic, but a lotta times there’s some sense to it.
And, yeah, I mean, the “beer and boobies” sentiment? I’ve definitely–I think I said something similar to it, because there’s a lot of people who do the same thing with the American flag. You know, they’re like, they don’t realize that it actually means the government. [laughs] And, really, the government really pushes the policies that they hate. [laughs] So, there’s these guys running around with flags on the backs of their pickup truck and I’m like, “Well, but, you’re cheering for Obama’s [laughs] America right now, is what you’re doing. Your American flag doesn’t actually mean, you know, blondes and bikinis and, you know, firearms.
Eddy: And beer.
Jack: Yeah, and beer. Yeah, it’s like that’s kind of what their version of market is, but that actually has nothing to do with what America is as it actually is. It’s just kind of this marketing idea of America, which is kind of ridiculous.
Eddy: So is it kind of marketable–[incomplete statement] Marketers are smart or good marketers are smart. I mean, they can connect to the way men want to feel–
Jack: [interrupts] Oh, yeah!
Eddy: [cont.] … and use that.
Jack: Oh, yeah, a lot of ’em probably don’t even know they’re doing it as explicitly as that, but there’s some truth to marketing, in terms of–[incomplete statement] ‘Cause the bottom line is what actually sells versus what you hope sold. In the same way, feminism–[incomplete statement] They’re trying to make something sell to men that men don’t actually want. I mean, it is changing to a certain extent because this kind of victim-wearing society, you know, everyone wants a way to be a victim. So they’re selling victimhood to men and a lot of men are buying it. But, you know? Feminism.
They’ve always sold men ideas that–[incomplete statement] Like, you could be more free to cry. Well, men don’t actually want to cry more and, if you understood men and testosterone, they don’t actually cry as much. It’s just not a thing. But women don’t really understand that, so they think they want it. “You know, you could be more like me.” So they try and sell that, whereas marketers telling men what they actually want. Like, “Oh. Men want to feel strong.” “Okay. Let’s sell them something that makes them feel strong.” I mean, so there’s truth in that–in the successes in buying. You know. They’re buying. You know? They know you can get men in theatres to watch action movies, but you can’t get men in theatres to watch romantic comedies.
Eddy: You know? A lot of men have jumped on the bandwagon because it seems a lot of men have become more androgynous and they try to be this more sensitive version of men. And I’ve seen this a lot, too, different guys who are in the spotlight who kind of advocate this sensitive masculinity, where you are more touchy-feely about a man and you can cry and it’s okay.
I made a criticism of Trudeau and Obama crying. I said they should go cry together and I got a lotta hate for that on my Facebook page. People came out and they were pissed off at me. All of a sudden I was being called a misogynist. I had no idea how this connected, but I was a misogynist because I was telling them they should go cry together. It just didn’t seem like a thing a strong leader should do. They can cry with their wife or whatever, but that’s not–somebody who’s leading a country, fight off the outsiders or whatever the situation and make sure that con–[incomplete statement] None of this stuff requires crying. It requires a strong mind, right?
Jack: Right. In many cases, they’re–[incomplete statement] |
NN v2 is not a drop-in version upgrade. Applications previously using cuDNN v1 are likely to need minor changes for API compatibility with cuDNN v2. Note that the Im2Col function is exposed as a public function in cuDNN v2, but it is intended for internal use only, and it will likely be removed from the public API in the next version.
cuDNN is still less than one year old. We expect cuDNN to mature rapidly, making API changes rare in the future. The cuDNN library team genuinely appreciates all feedback from the deep learning community, and carefully considers any API change.
Try cuDNN yourself!
cuDNN is free for anyone to use for any purpose: academic, research or commercial. Just sign up for a registered CUDA developer account. Once your account is activated, log in and you will see a link to the cuDNN download page. You will likely want to start by reading the included User Guide. Get started with cuDNN today!“I didn’t want it to be a pastiche rebellion,” said a typically antiestablishment Matthew Miller backstage at his Fall show. “I wanted it to be more sophisticated, more intelligent, where you’re not lashing out at the world with a fist.” He was explaining the collection’s concept, which was conceived as a kind of takedown of the old guard (which, in turn, functioned as a double fuck you, because Miller also proposed that the current generation’s intellectual wealth is pilfered from dead establishments—so, a theft, then a bullet). There was also further description of aesthetically mixing the then and the now, but all of it turned out to be confusing rhetoric for clothes that were ultimately pretty straightforward.
A shearling collar bomber jacket worn over a heathered silver felt topcoat with matching trousers perked up an eyebrow or two in the front row. Yet the look didn’t feel rebellious, nor particularly sophisticated and intelligent. It read simply as a solid mix of wardrobe go-tos. The same was true of the look topped off with a peaked lapel wool overcoat in midnight blue—easy, done. More obvious nods to Miller’s wellspring, like a repurposing of Caravaggio’s David With the Head of Goliath on a frayed trench, just seemed redundant (Givenchy ostensibly rules the heavy-handed imagery-screened-on-outsize-daywear trade), as opposed to revolutionary. Ironically, in this lineup Miller’s clothes were best when the dissonance between his theme and his clothing was greatest. It made one think about the collection he’d produce without all the turbulent chatter behind it.December 18, 2017 — The Sagittarius New Moon arrives on December 17 and 18, just one degree from the Galactic Center. Forming a trine to Uranus and a conjunction to Venus and Saturn, this lunation holds beautiful potentials. Manifestation powers are high, with magic and pragmatism blending together harmoniously. Any intentions we now set stand to blossom into long-term fruition—as long as they’re aligned with the greater good.
If we're starting a project, do we have a vision of how it might contribute to bettering society? If we're beginning a relationship, are we orienting toward growing together and opening our hearts?
Saturn rules karma. As he joins the New Moon and transits over the Galactic Center, he is making sure that our intentions are pure. Any self-serving or egotistical agendas stand to backfire or implode. Encouraging perseverance, integrity, and hard work, Saturn is showing us how to crystalize our dreams. He reminds us to take responsibility for ourselves, laying careful foundations for anything we hope to accomplish. From there, we can move outward in concentric circles. As we generate dignity, deliberation, and self-respect, we can extend that to others—improving society one interaction at a time.
Meanwhile, Uranus is granting us the freedom to be fully ourselves, breaking down any barriers in our way. We are becoming more fearless, moving through self-doubt, insecurities, and fears. Awakening is now possible as insights flash from the ether, sparking epiphanies and creative genius. If we’ve been stuck in any area of our lives—work, love, spirituality, or emotional growth—we could harness this transit to dislodge our stagnancy, finding fresh currents that will lead us to the next phase.
With Mercury still in retrograde as Jupiter trines Neptune, it would be wise to listen to our subconscious. We might pay attention to our dreams and auspicious coincidences. Messages are pouring in from the Universe, helping us heal as we align with our true purpose, expansion, and potential. In order to receive them, we could sit still, or write down our dreams.
With straight spines and soft hearts, may we root to the earth, connecting, at once, with gravity and limitlessness. May we leap into the future, setting pure intentions—fearless, responsible, and free.
To book a reading with Juliana, write: info@etherealculture.comon •
Rules and conventions, as well as liberation, are all simply dhammas. One is higher than the other, but they actually go hand in hand.
There is no way that anything can be guaranteed to be definitely ‘like this’, or definitely ‘like that’. The Buddha said, ‘Just leave it be! Leave it as uncertain.’ However much you like it, or dislike it, you should understand it as uncertain.
The whole practice of dhamma, regardless of time and place, comes to completion at the place where there is no-thing. It’s the place of surrender, of emptiness, of laying down the burden; this is the finish. It’s not like someone asking: ‘Why is the flag fluttering in the wind?’ and me replying, ‘It’s because of the wind,’ and another person saying, ‘No, it’s because of the flag.’ Then someone else retorting, ‘It’s because of the wind!’ There’s no end to that kind of thing. It’s like the old riddle: Which came first, the chicken or the egg? There’s no way reaching a conclusion about that. It’s just nature.
Many of the things we say, are merely conventions that we establish within ourselves. If you understand them with wisdom, however, you will know impermanence, suffering and not-self. This is the outlook which leads to enlightenment.
Training and teaching people with varying levels of understanding is really difficult. Some people have certain ideas. You tell them something, but they don’t believe you. You tell them the truth, and they say, ‘That’s not true! I’m right; you’re wrong.’ But there’s no end to this way of going on.
If you don’t let go, there will be suffering. There’s the story of these four men who go into the forest and hear a chicken crowing. One of them asks, ‘Is that a rooster or a hen?’ Three of them together say, ‘It’s a hen!’ The other man, however, doesn’t agree; he insists it’s a rooster. ‘How could a hen crow like that?’ he asks. ‘Well,’ they retort, ‘it has a mouth, hasn’t it?’ Then they argue and argue until they get very upset and, the tears start to fall. In the end, it turns out, they’re all wrong. The point is, whether you call it a hen or a rooster, they’re only names.
We establish these conventions, saying a rooster is like this, and a hen is like that; a rooster cries like this, and a hen cries like that. But this is how we get stuck in the world. Actually, if you just say that really there is no hen and no rooster, then that’s the end of it.
In the field of conventional reality, one side is right and the other side is wrong, and there can never be complete agreement. Arguing till the tears fall, however, is of no use whatsoever.
The Buddha taught non-clinging. How do we practise non-clinging? We do it simply by giving up clinging. It can be very difficult to understand non-clinging, however. It takes a keen wisdom to investigate it, to really see the depth of it, and then to see the wisdom of it.
Whether people are happy or sad, content or discontent, doesn’t really depend on their having little or having much, it depends on wisdom. In reality, distress can only be transcended through wisdom, through seeing the truth of things.
[From The Collected Teachings of Ajahn Chah]
Click here for more teachings by Ajahn Chan.
Categories: Ajahn Chah, Beginners, TheravadaSpoiler warning! This article contains plot spoilers. If you do not yet know of this information, it is recommended that you read at your own risk or not at all.
Vera Moray Dishonored Vital statistics Age ~72 Date of Birth [1] c. 1765 Nation of origin Morley[citation needed] Location Various First appearance High Overseer Campbell Role Aristocrat (formerly)
"Careful. She treads with purpose. And is not as frail as she seems." —The Heart[2]
Vera Moray, also known as Granny Rags, was a wealthy aristocrat living in the high reaches of society who, after an ill-fated expedition to the Pandyssian Continent, became a practitioner of black magic and descended into madness. During the events of Dishonored, she is a homeless and blind old woman who is often harassed by her fellow citizens, specifically members of the Bottle Street Gang. While she appears on the surface to be vulnerable, destitute, and senile, her true and darker nature lies underneath.
She is a powerful and partially immortal witch who, like Corvo Attano, employs supernatural powers that were granted to her by the Outsider.
Contents show]
Biography
Born Vera Dubhghoill sometime near 1765, she married Lord Preston Moray around 1790,[3] becoming the revered wife of the head of the Moray family (which was, at the time, similar in wealth and prestige to the Perth, Inchmouth, Carmine and Boyle families). It is noted by the Outsider that Vera was once a well-known figure at court; she received marriage proposals from a great variety of men, including Emperor Alexy Olaskir in 1780.[3][4] She also personally notes that of her many friends, she was the only one to be painted by Anton Sokolov when he was first coming to prominence.[5]
When she did marry, she and her husband lived in the Estate District,[6] but traveled widely "to the far ends of the Isles."[5] In 1807,[3] she joined her husband on an expedition to the mysterious continent of Pandyssia. The expedition was marked by madness and death, which started when Vera took an interest in the practices of the continent's ancient peoples. This is where she first came into contact with the Outsider, and during her journey, she received the Outsider's Mark.[3] The experience caused Vera to lose her sanity and later go blind. By 1810, she had been admitted to the Addermire Institute. She realized that, in order to escape, she would have to stop biting the doctors and instead pretend to behave like a "proper lady", asking about afternoon tea and nail polish and the like.[7] Whether this act fooled her doctor is unknown as, early in the Month of Seeds, she was suddenly struck by a disease contracted in Pandyssia. After being cured, she was released.[8] On her return to Dunwall, Vera's circumstances spiraled into misfortune — she lost her status in high society and began living on the streets. In 1814, she killed her husband,[9] using his bones to create runes and bone charms.[5] She officially became Granny Rags in 1815,[9] and by the time Slackjaw was a young child, not many people knew who she had been. At some point, Vera gained a level of immortality by binding her soul to a cameo of herself, an act taken from notes in a fellow explorer's journal concerning an ancient Pandyssian legend.
For a while after going mad, Granny Rags again lived in the Estate District, this time in a small apartment on Barcroft Street. When events forced the rats to leave, Granny Rags found the area "dreary" and moved away.[10] A number of people, including Samuel Beechworth, were aware that she lived there, though many did not at first know that she had gone. The tenant of the apartment next door wrote a sign informing visitors of Granny Rags' departure and left it on the door of her former residence.
Dishonored
Granny Rags provides Corvo with two secondary missions during his quest to kill Thaddeus Campbell, the High Overseer. Her first mission requires that Corvo deal with a group of "gentlemen callers" who have come to collect protection money from her. The second involves infecting their elixir still with the rat plague from viscera found at the Offices of Dr. Galvani. Both may be accomplished non-lethally; however, infecting the elixir still increases chaos, and will lead to the appearance of weepers at the Dunwall Whiskey Distillery during the House of Pleasure mission.
Corvo later comes across Granny Rags' secret lair deep in the Dunwall Sewers during the mission The Flooded District only if he helped both her and Slackjaw at least once, where she is preparing to murder, cook, and eat Slackjaw. Corvo can choose to assist Granny Rags, or engage her and save Slackjaw.
Although she does not appear in person, Granny Rags is also the author of four more side objectives in The Knife of Dunwall and The Brigmore Witches DLCs.
Granny Rags' Cameo
"It's the Cameo. The secret is in the cameo. Just a piece of an old necklace. Understand?" —Slackjaw, while bound in Granny's Lair
Granny Rags conducted a ritual on a cameo of herself, enchanting it so that as long as the cameo exists, she can never truly be killed.
As a younger woman, Vera first discovered the idea when perusing the field manuals of an explorer who studied a colleague’s interpretations of Pandyssian carvings. According to his journal, the explorer noticed Vera’s interest. Unwisely, he attempted to reprimand her, thinking such interest was unseemly for a woman of her station. It is implied that the explorer met an untimely fate at her hands. Afterwards, she bound her powers to the cameo through unknown rituals.
The cameo is kept hidden beneath a pair of plush red pillows on a bed near an incinerator in Granny’s quarters at her underground lair during the mission The Flooded District.
Fate
Granny Rags is killed in the sewers by Corvo during the events of Dishonored.[11] Her marked left hand was eventually discovered by Paolo, leader of the Howlers, who uses it in Dishonored 2 to gain Vera's power of longevity and ability to cheat death. If Paolo is killed or knocked unconscious and his body looted, Vera's hand attacks the protagonist before being thrown to the ground and crushed underfoot.
Skills
If Granny is fought in the sewers, she can be observed using Blink, Devouring Swarm and Windblast. She also possesses the ability to summon a thick cloud of mist. However, unlike other characters associated with the Outsider, she is not resistant to most of Corvo's powers. Rats summoned with Devouring Swarm will not attack her, however, and she will thank Corvo for summoning more of her "little pretties".
She is able to create runes with an ability given to her by the Outsider.[12] She also fashions instructions on rituals used to create runes, and the Assassin Daud notes that each time he interacts with one of her talismans, "a tiny piece of [him] departed and settled in with her." It is uncertain what she gains from this act.[13]
Harvey Smith has stated in an AMA that Granny Rags has a power similar to Daud's and Delilah Copperspoon's Arcane Bond but she can only have one follower at a time, that being Morris Sullivan during the events of Dishonored. That power of hers is called "Apprentice",[11] but unlike the aforementioned Arcane Bond, it grants different powers to her apprentice than the powers she has.
Trivia
Granny Rags is voiced by Susan Sarandon. [14]
After Corvo completes her first task, Vera insists he leave so that she may feed her "birdies." She will exit her house to a small backyard area—Corvo can peek through the keyhole of the back door to see her "birdies," revealing them to be plague rats.
She cannot be harmed as long as her cameo, a small trinket hidden underneath her pillow, remains intact. When it is destroyed, Vera can be killed with a single hit, or rendered unconscious. If Corvo attempts to kill or render Vera unconscious before he has access to her cameo, her body will turn into a pack of plague rats, which will then attack him. She will be unharmed by the attempt and will make future appearances as normal.
The Royal Interrogator met her as a boy and through her was introduced to worship of the Outsider.
Apart from the Outsider, no characters appear to be aware of Vera's true identity, referring to her only as Granny Rags throughout the course of Dishonored. During the events of Dishonored, Corvo manages to connect Granny Rags to Vera Moray, and in Dishonored 2 recognizes "Vera Moray" as the name of his old enemy.
. If Corvo ignores Granny Rags during the High Overseer Campbell mission, the door in the sewers will already be open and the path to her lair will be blocked. This allows Corvo to complete the mission faster; however, he will miss several important items, such as books, a rune, and a Sokolov painting. The fate of Slackjaw in this circumstance is unknown.
It is stated by Billie Lurk that Granny Rags is rumored to be 100 years old. This rumor is a slight exaggeration, as Dishonored: The Dunwall Archives reveals her age as around 72 during the events of Dishonored and its DLC.
reveals her age as around 72 during the events of and its DLC. It is strongly hinted that Vera is the enemy that Crowley believes is trying to take down the Bottle Street Gang, before being killed.
Vera's maiden name, "Dubhghoill", is a combination of the two modern Irish words "dubh" meaning 'black', and "ghoill" meaning 'upset'. However, the name most likely originates from the old Irish term "Dubhghaill", meaning "dark foreigners" or "dark strangers". Many modern Scottish and Irish surnames such as Dougal, Douglas and Doyle have been derived from this name. According to Harvey Smith, the Dubhghoill family line is from Morley. [citation needed]
Granny Rags owns a hat made by Mortimer Hat's Fine Textiles. She wears it from time to when she feels "flirty". [15]
Weepers will not directly attack Granny Rags. However, she can die if she gets caught in one of their attacks.
Vera Moray, then Vera Dubhghoill, briefly appeared in Dishonored: The Veiled Terror. During her wedding, which was officiated by Emperor Alexy Olasky himself, a supernatural creature murdered her and the Emperor. This, however, happened in an alternate timeline, therefore did not impact the events in Dishonored and its DLCs.
Gallery
ReferencesWhat About Me?
“The slave lives in silence, if such a meaningless existence may be called life. He has no message to deliver. In contrast with the slave, the free man bears a message, has a good deal to tell, and is eager to convey his life story to anyone who cares to listen.” (Rabbi Joseph B. Soloveitchik, “Redemption, Prayer, Talmud Torah”)
For the past few decades, we have all examined, explored, debated, and tried to adjust the women’s role in Torah observant Judaism to work more productively with contemporary sensibilities and realities. I appreciate the need, the effort, and some of the results. However, as a man I often say to myself, as did the simple attendant to the demanding Shakespearean stage actor in the 1983 film The Dresser, “What about me?”
I have met with varying degrees of success in presenting this question to people. I said it once in so many words to a well-known rabbi who passionately promotes what some would call a feminist agenda in Orthodox Judaism. I told him that we need to start examining the man’s role in contemporary Orthodoxy for it needs some adjustment. All is not rosy. He told me that he didn’t know what I was talking about and he walked away.
As for other people, some whom I have approached seemed to feel that I had nothing to complain about since the halakha allowed me to be called up for the Torah reading. That this happens every four months or so and lasts all of 60 seconds didn’t seem to change their outlook.
However, the baal habatim I meet on the commuter train understand quite well. We all know what it’s like to spend 10 hours a day sitting in an office cubical. Men are assigned mitzvot that women are not. The world judges us negatively for the ones viewed as privileges, but not for the obligation to support one’s family. They tend to forget about this one. This overwhelming obligation, assigned by the male rabbis, defines most of our existence. It is incumbent on the male and not on the female.
We all know about the insane expenses involved in maintaining an Orthodox Jewish household in the 21st century. Some part of this is a result of our excessively high living standards as a group. For example, do you think that the average American high school graduate expects to study for a year abroad after graduation and to have his parents pay for it? Between the unavoidable costs like private school tuition for all and the frivolous ones that have become community norms, a typical frum family needs to land itself in the top 10% income bracket just to survive in the US. Question: How much income does one need to be categorized in the top 10%? Answer: $118,000 per year. It is a man’s task to get his family there. The great majority of us haven’t arrived. But we try. How we try.
This is particularly difficult in the corporate era. Gone are the days when a man could support his family with a simple hardware store. Home Depot and Lowes ended that. Gone are the days when a man could support his family with a simple clothing store, as my great uncle did, or a general store. Walmart and the like ended that. So it goes for restaurants, stationery stores, and even funeral homes. Corporate chains dominate. Thus, the man must go to work for someone else, where he tends to become something less than a man.
Corporations don’t set their wages with Orthodox Jews in mind. They set them at a level such that the typical gentile family can send their 1.9 kids to public school and barely get by living in their town far from an eruv. This means that the Orthodox Jewish male can’t just be a regular employee. He must battle his way up the corporate ladder. And it is not pleasant up the ladder. Jewish values decline with every rung to the top. However, the work load and pace increase as one nears it. (It seems to ease considerably for the few that get there.) All of this has worsened considerably since the financial crash. Terror about whether one will be employed at all is an hourly concern.
Furthermore, a man will not land himself in the top 10% with a creative writing or Judaica crafts career. Some, likely with significant family help, manage to pull it off, but this is not the normal case. Meanwhile, I recall how in my “single” days many of my dates were doing things like getting PhDs in history or studying art or journalism or social work. It was my dream to be a social worker. I would listen jealously while driving my date back to campus knowing how the next day I was going back to my cubical in the New York financial firm. On more than one occasion I told my dates of my interest in their field, how I have had a desire to be a college professor, social worker, or writer – are those not the kinds of fields to which our secular education points us? Each one stated in blunt terms that such professions would leave me unable to support my family. How privileged I was to be a man.
Now, I don’t mean to complain against the Torah and the role it has given me. My sarcasm wasn’t directed so much towards heaven as it was to the people who keep insisting that we men have it made, have it easy, to the people who don’t understand that men too need understanding and support and some tweaking of our situation.
Yes, many women work too. Some more, some less. But Jewish law does not require this technically. The pressure is not on them. (They have other pressures obviously.) Jewish law also does not require them to study Torah. This allows them more flexibility to come and go, to take hard work or not so hard work, to enter careers that they can enjoy and to prepare for them. Even the kollel wives rarely take jobs in the trenches of corporate America.
Recently I sat at a Shabbat table with some young modern Orthodox people. The young men talked desperately about how rapidly to score money to extend their Torah studies while the young women talked about fulfilling careers. Interestingly, the young men did not talk about earning a living in order to start a family. I considered the incredible irony to the tenor of the discussion. In the end, the young men would spend the rest of their lives working in jobs for which they are not prepared (if they could find jobs) while the women likely would abandon their careers to raise families. There was something incredibly wrong with the expectations and preparation for life that we are giving our young people.
I have been sitting in cubicles for 25 years. Like many of the men on the commuter train, I expect to continue until I die because these corporations do not offer pensions, and 401k savings amounts to just a few thousand dollars a year. The work is painfully dull even as it is high-pressure and thankless. Frequently, I and my commuter comrades endure abuse at the hands of bosses, colleagues, and customers. Each day is a battle in the long war to put kosher food on the table.
We are expected to log in at night. We get emails on the weekend. Our jobs take from us some 60 hours per week.
The commute from my town to Manhattan is an hour plus each way, if one makes the train. On the trip home I often miss the train due to the difficulties of extricating myself from the office. I try to read on the train, to study Torah, but it’s not easy. People push and shove. They come and go. Half-dressed women sit next to me. I’m not allowed to look at them, of course - another decree of Torah that falls on men. The world actually blames us for this one, as if I asked to be born with male urges and strict rules about their usage. Again, I’m not complaining against the Torah (well not mostly anyway) but am trying to show a little bit of what we men endure and how the rabbis by no means gave us the easy life as compared to our sisters.
Trees fly by my eyes, distracting me. I tried listening to recordings of shiurim, but the train noise makes it very difficult to hear. Mostly, I wait for the time to go, all the while feeling guilty that I’m not studying Torah. This plus work is half of a 24 hour day – 12 hours.
What do we baal habatim do for the rest of the day. Well, there’s sleep of about 7 hours. The Rambam suggests 8 and we likely need it, in part to recover from the stress of the day. We catch some sleep on the train. Running total: 19 hours.
Davening takes close to 2 hours if you count travel to and from shul and waiting for minyanim to begin and end. Some days more, some days less. Running total: 21 hours.
We each spend 1.5 hours each day taking care of the lowly creature, the body: preparing food, eating, dressing, taking care of hygiene. Note that I only allocated 1 hour for the eating of three meals and bentching. Only in America. A French-Lebanese man once told me a joke as follows: What two species of animals eat and walk at the same time? Answer: donkeys and Americans. I generally eat while working. For those who cannot afford takeout for lunch or who don’t work near kosher food joints, this may include food preparation as well. I gave a half hour to all personal grooming, dressing, and taking care of clothes. Americans expect one another to smell like a rose at all times. Gone are the days when a person could bathe once a week or once a year or get away with a stain on his shirt. Running total: 22.5 hours.
That leaves 1.5 hours a day for errands. I won’t bore you with the details as you certainly know all about your own errands. Much of this is neither fun nor fulfilling without extensive utilization of the philosophy of purpose in Torah, that even the mundane is holy and all that stuff. I utilize that material often.
Many of us have to go to night school because we spent our formative years in yeshiva totally ignoring the concept of parnassah – not that colleges are actually geared towards parnassah, but that’s another story. Oh yes, then there’s all the Torah study we are expected to do. All of the examination into women and Torah study fails to mention what comes with men and Torah study: lots and lots of guilt and pressure. This has the effect of taking an already pressurized American day where there’s barely a minute to spare and raising the pressure up a few notches.
In addition to all that Torah study are the shalom bayit classes where we hear that women are wonderful and men are terrible. I do not count this as Torah study because I do not think that the Torah presents such a view.
I once approached a rabbi with the following inquiry: why do we daven so much if Torah study is greater than davening and our schedules don’t allow for much Torah study. He told me that my question wasn’t really why do we daven so much but why don’t I study Torah more. (Evidently, I don’t even understand my own questions.) He told me that I should study Torah 4 hours a day. Then he stood up and walked away.
I concluded that either he couldn’t do simple math or he just didn’t understand the life of the baal habayit.
The latter conclusion is more probable. I was quite moved by Rabbi Marc Angel’s depiction of a Sephardic rav who while walking home stopped by each fruit stand to buy a piece of fruit from different Jewish peddlers. His goal, he explained, was to let the baal habatim know that the local rabbi is involved with their lives and understands their day to day existence.
Some community leaders appear to understand baal habatim only through the wealthy ones that host parlor meetings. I sometimes go to parlor meetings and am shocked to see how well some people live. One can get a warped view of baal habatim from these parlor meetings. They think we all live like that, have money to burn, and plenty of time on our hands. We are all big-time lawyers, doctors or diamond dealers who are lavished with cash and cavod.
A recent frum newspaper article on bar mitzvah expenses contained the following interesting quotation from a rabbi in Lakewood, “The fact that some people live simpler lives, while others maintain a more baalebatish standard, used to be an accepted reality in Lakewood.” I know wealthy baal habatim, and I know ones who struggle. I know rabbis who live in big houses and I know ones who struggle. From where did this gentleman get his rather simplistic notion of the “baalebatish standard”? Perhaps it is a throwback to the days of pensions, rising wages, and housing booms. However, since 1980 real wages for the typical male worker have fallen even as the GNP has grown 69%. (Source: IRS statistics and Money Magazine) Some in our community have prospered (somebody is grabbing that 69%) and perhaps this gentleman has benefited from their largess in his visits to their stately homes. However, the typical person is worse off since expenses for education, healthcare, and housing, particularly housing in frum communities, have gone off the charts. Remember also that baalei batim are much more likely to pay full tuition which at $10,000 a child or more easily can amount to the majority of their earnings.
I was at a fund raising presentation for a hesed organization recently where the organization’s rabbi set $500 as the amount of money we each should donate as a minimum to his organization. I was thinking, does he think I have $500 to spare, just like that? I’d be bouncing checks all over town if I drained my account with a $500 check to him. Frankly, I found it irresponsible of him to use his authority to pressure us into it.
As for cavod, the average baal habayit enjoys very little cavod. After all, we are but lowly baal habatim. Tell me, when you hear the term “baal habayit” do you hear “not a rav,” ie second class citizen? When was the last time that you as a baal habyit got any real honor or hizuk to help you deal with your life? I’m not talking about guilt and pressure to study more Torah. Every time I go to an evening of hizuk for men it amounts to the call for more Torah study and donations to the speaker’s organization. That’s not hizuk; it’s pressure. When I say hizuk I’m talking about appreciation for all that you do and all that you endure. I’m talking about praise. Can you imagine somebody actually praising the baal habayit? Well, I did once read something by Rav Joseph B. Soloveitchik zt’l where he did exactly that. As usual, this unique gadol hador led the way, but how many followed? What his essay got me thinking was how rarely this happens. I have seen shul dinners honor individuals, but that’s for their contributions to the shul, not for being a plain old baal habayit. Moreover, the fund raising aspect to it undermines the message somewhat. You wonder, what’s the real motive here? Perhaps, you hear it stam from time to time even though I don’t. I believe that you should hear it all the time because you need it and you deserve it. I have heard recordings of women’s evening of hizuk and I heard real hizuk.
I have laid out a bevy of gripes here and lest you deem me a miserable grumbler, let me say that I’m not speaking necessarily for myself with every point here. Moreover, I have my happiness. As Rav Avigdor Miller zt’l might say, just having eyeballs that function is a happiness. Complaining is a poor substitute for living and there’s no end to it. However, I have set aside a little time here for some concentrated complaining in order to highlight a particular set of issues. Rabbi Joseph Soloveitchik said the following:
Judaism, in contradistinction to mystical quietism, which recommended toleration of pain, wants man to cry out aloud against any kind of pain, to react indignantly to all kinds of injustice or unfairness. For Judaism held that the individual who displays indifference to pain and suffering, who meekly reconciles himself to the ugly, disproportionate and unjust in life, is not capable of appreciating beauty and goodness. Whoever permits his legitimate needs to go unsatisfied will never be sympathetic to the crying needs of others. (“Redemption, Prayer, Talmud Torah”)
Society does not allow men to protest on their own behalf. We must be silent. We must take it. As one sees from the words of Rabbi Soloveitchik, this posture is problematic not just for the men themselves. I’ll repeat the last line: “Whoever permits his legitimate needs to go unsatisfied will never be sympathetic to the crying needs of others.” Now that I have your attention, I am writing to let you know that all is not rosy with the male role in contemporary Judaism, particularly for baal habatim. I realize that we get the occasional opportunity to be called up for the Torah reading. But there’s a whole world of other things to look at: pressures, pressures, and more pressures. Many of them are imposed not by Torah but by society, by community, and even unnecessarily by family. We need to see what we can do about that. (Of course, this does not apply to all families, for example, not mine.)
I’ll say for the third time, I’m not coming to complain about the tasks imposed by the Torah. Having duties is a major part of our task as Jews, perhaps the major part of our accomplishment and happiness. I understand that. I think I do. But it is important for all to know that these alone are all consuming and frequently at odds with modern life. We need everyone to know this because we need your appreciation and your assistance.
I have seen gallons of ink spilled on the topic of women and tefillah, whether they can be called up for aliyot or have their own prayer groups. (I wonder what percentage of women really desires these.) I understand the frustration with the rules. I don’t want to shut down conversation there. But I would like to see some conversation on men and tefillah. After all, we all are required to spend nearly two hours a day doing it. Can it be made shorter? Can I skip some pieces if I am utterly exhausted? For all the halakhic gymnastics that go on around agunah, pre-nuptial agreements, and women’s prayer, there is no attempt to help make davening a bit more manageable for men. Yet, adjustments even slight ones to davening, I have never heard mentioned, considered, or discussed ever.
I feel bad complaining |
of the foremost responsible German leaders forbids me to lose even a single word in a dispute of world-historical importance on the disgraceful lowliness of the methods employed by the victors as far as these proceedings concern my own person.
However, as it is the obvious and announced intention of their administration of the law to throw the very German people into the abyss of illegality and to rob them once and for all of a future possibility to defend themselves by the removal of the responsible men of the National Socialist state, I have to add a few words to the historic subject of the verdict, premeditated by you and your allies.
I direct these remarks to you, since you are one of the best informed ones regarding the true underlying reasons for this war and the possibility of avoiding the same; in at least a manner bearable to the European future; and yet refused your testimony and your oath to your own high court of justice.
Therefore, I shall not fail, while there is still time, to call you before the tribunal of history and direct my statements to you, because I know that this tribunal will expose you some day as that man, who with ambition, intelligence and energy has thrown the fate of the European nations under the heels of foreign world powers.
In you I identify before history the man who had the ability to bring Adolf Hitler down and his political accomplishments; the man who will, however, be unable to raise the shield protectively against the invasion of Europe by the Asiatics.
It was your ambition to justify the Versailles Treaty regarding Germany. It will prove fatal to you that you succeeded. You personified the hardened obstinacy of your old gentry; and you also personified the stubbornness of its old age, opposing the last gigantic effort of the rejuvenated German power to decide the fate of Europe in the steppes of Asia in order to safeguard the same in the future.
Long after my responsibility in the future development of events has found its objective judge, it will be put to your account that the past bloody war has not been the final one which had to be fought on the Continent for the very possibility of the existence of its nations.
You will have to answer for the fact that the bloody war of yesterday will be followed by a still greater one and that the European nations will not rule at the Volga, but at the Pyrenees mountains.
It is my fervent wish that you may at least live to see the day on which the world, and the western nations in particular, will become aware of the bitter truth that it was you and your friend Roosevelt who sold the future to Bolshevism for a cheap personal triumph over nationalistic Germany. This day may come sooner than you like, and you in spite of your advanced age, will be vigorous enough to see it dawn bloody red over the British Isles.
I am convinced that it will bring you all those unimaginable terrors which you escaped this time through the good luck of war; or through the abhorrence of the German conduct of war to a complete degeneration of the methods of fighting of peoples of the same Race. My knowledge regarding the kind and amount of arms and of projects from us, which - thanks to your military assistance to the Red Army - have fallen into their hands, enable me to form this supposition.
There is no doubt that you - according to your habit - soon will write good memoirs and you will write them the better, as there is nobody to hinder you to tell and suppress what you like.
You believe it very clever to have submitted this historic truth to the craftiness to a handful of ambitious junior lawyers in order to have it changed into an expedient dialectic treatise, in spite of your awareness as a Briton as well as a statesmen, that with such means the problems of existence of peoples could not be solved and judged; neither in the past nor in the future.
I have an only too well grounded opinion of your power and the cunning of your intelligence to credit you with believing the vulgar propaganda with which you motivated the war against us and with which you have had your victory over us glorified in a fantastic show.
I state here with great emphasis as one of the highest military, political and economic leaders of the Great German Empire the following: This war could not be avoided because the politics of Great Britain - under the influence of your person and of your friends of like opinions in all fields - persisted constantly to hinder the life interests and the most natural development of the German people; and - filled with the senile ambition to uphold the British hegemony - preferred the Second World War to an understanding, as we on our side had tried time and again to bring about, beneficial to both of the most prominent nations of Europe.
I declare herewith once more and most emphatically that the guilt of the German people in this war - into which they were forced by you - consists solely in trying to end the eternal difficulties to their national existence, which you artfully instigated and continued.
It would be useless to go with you into any dispute over the causes, the conditions of restraint and the motives which led during the course of the war to the political and military complications and which your lawyers knew so well to use in a one-sided manner at the cost of the National Socialist regime.
The devastated regions of the European culture and robbed treasures give still today testimony of your embittered despair with which a great and proud people yesterday, with unparalleled readiness to make sacrifices fought for its existence. Tomorrow they will testify that alone the overpowering might, led by you in the field, was able to cause the subjection and deprivation of their rights. The day after tomorrow the Russians will bear witness to the betrayal which surrendered Europe to the red Asiatics.
The Germany which you conquered will take revenge on you through its downfall. You have neither produced a better politic nor shown a greater courage than we. You have not won the victory due to better qualities or superiority of your strength or strategy, but merely after six years with the predominance of your allies.
Do not believe your victory to be all that which you tell the world. You and your hand will soon harvest the fruits of your political art. What you as an experienced Cynic will not admit toward us - namely that our fight in the East was an at of urgent self-defence, and not alone for Germany but for all of Europe; and that the Germans fighting this war; which you constantly condemned, therefore was justified.
This, your ally and friend of today, Stalin, will soon prove to you and the British Empire.
Then you will experience what it means to fight this enemy and you will learn that necessity knows no law; also that you can neither fight him successfully with treaties in law nor with the weight of Great Britain and her European dwarfs.
You have stated to the German people that you were primarily concerned with the restoration of their democratic mode of life. But you have not said a single word that you want to restore to them the sensible foundations of living, which have been denied to them these past 25 years.
Your name stands under all essential documents of this epoch of British want of comprehension and jealousy towards Germany. Your name will also stand under the result with which this epoch of Germany's liquidation has challenged history in lieu of Europe's existence.
My belief in the vitality of my people cannot be shaken. They will be stronger and live longer than you. However, it distresses me to know that defenseless in your power, they now also belong to the luckless victims, who thanks to your success, do not approach a future of progressive work for the realization of their common aim, set forth by intelligence for the western peoples, but are driven towards the greatest catastrophe in their common history.
I do not wish to argue about outrages, which you rightly or wrongly ascribe to us and which neither agree with nor the German peoples comprehension; neither do I wish to talk about those atrocities which have been committed on your part and on the part of your allies towards millions of Germans; for I know that you have made under this pretext the entire German people the object of a collective outrage of a proportion never known in history.
I also know that you would not have acted differently regarding your treatment of Germany without this pretence, because since 1914 you have striven for nothing less than the destruction of the German empire.
This, your historic goal denies you the office of a judge over the avoidable and unavoidable consequences caused by your unremitting intentions and which were welcome to you as subsequent proof for the justification of your actions. Today I regret my and the National Socialist Government's greatest mistake, the fateful error to believe in your discernment as a statesman.
I regret to have trusted you with justiciability recognizing the world-political necessity of a peaceful and progressive (prosperous) Germany for the existence of a flourishing England. I regret that our means did not suffice to convince you at the last moment that the liquidation of Germany would also be the beginning of the liquidation of Britain's world power.
We began to act - each one according to his own law, I in line with the new one, for which this Europe was already too old - you holding on to the old one, for which this Europe is no longer anymore important enough in the world.
I shall know how to approach my end in the absolute conviction as a German National Socialist and considering everything else, to have been a better European than you. I leave the judgement of this with an easy mind to posterity. I hope sincerely that you will belong to this world for a long time to come as fate might grant you - as it has to me - when you decline to leave the posterity also a truth.
Sincerely, Herman Goering.
Within a few hours of penning these words, Hitler's heir was dead by his own hand.
Next -- Chapter 26 -- HITLER - THE GREATEST SPENGLERIANPhoto credit: Nicole Fara Silver
The Bright Light Social Hour will spend much of the coming weeks on the road, including an extended stretch of dates opening for Galactic. The group recently recorded a cover of The Beach Boys’ “All I Want To Do” for a special compilation album called All Across the Moontower: Austin Gets Psychedelic. Today, on the eve of their latest tour, we premiere that song. The group’s Jack O’Brien explains, “We read somewhere that all shoegaze and chillwave could be traced back to this one Beach Boys song, All I Wanna Do, so we looked up and became totally obsessed. We tried covering it a few different ways but couldn’t get the verses fitting right on us. We went for a smoke down by the lake and when we came back Shredd was just playing the chorus chords on the synth through the leslie, and without even realizing we were playing the same song we started jamming on it and eventually developed our whole version just from the chorus.” The Bright Light Social Hour’s tour itinerary appears below the stream.
The Bright Light Social Hour Tour Dates:
*Supporting Galactic
3/15 Asheville, NC @ Mothlight
3/16 Roanoke, VA @ Martin’s Downtown
3/17 Charlottesville, VA @ The Jefferson Theater*
3/18 Washington DC @ 9:30 Club*
3/19 Washington DC @ 9:30 Club*
3/20 Fairfield, CT @ The Warehouse*
3/22 Cleveland, OH @ Beachland Ballroom*
3/23 Pittsburgh, PA @ Rex Theater*
3/24 Philadelphia, PA @ Electric Factory*
3/25 Boston, MA @ House of Blues*
3/26 New York, NY @ Terminal 5*
3/29 Cincinnati, OH @ Woodward Theatre
3/30 Bloomington, IN @ The Bishop
3/31 Nashville, TN @ High Watt
4/2 Norman, OK @ Opolis
4/8 San Antonio, TX @ Maverick Music Festival
4/24 Atlanta, GA @ SweetWater 420 Festival
4/27 Greenville, SC @ Independent Public Alehouse
4/28 Charleston, SC @ Charleston Pour House
4/29 West Palm Beach, FL @ SunFest
4/30 Ybor City, FL @ WMNF Tropical heatwave
5/4 Louisville, KY @ Kentucky Derby Festival
5/14 Dallas, TX @ Homegrown Festival
6/24 Rothbury, MI @ Electric Forest Festival
7/16 Birmingham, AL @ Sloss Music FestivalMagic Morse is a mathematical algorithm that [Ray Burnette] wrote a few years ago to make it easy to send and receive Morse code. When he first wrote it, he designed it for a PIC, but since then he has re-written it to use as a training program for the Arduino platform.
It can run on the Uno, Nano, Pro Micro, or even home-brew Arduino boards. He’s demonstrating the program with a Nokia 5110 LCD, but has also included code for the typical 2×16 LCD displays. The Magic Morse algorithm is copyrighted, but he has released the Arduino code as open source in an effort to get people using Morse code once again — it is pretty awesome.
So how does it work? The algorithm assigns weights to the “dits” and “dahs” as received — when there is a longer pause, the algorithm creates a pointer which calls the character out of an array stored in the EEPROM. He’s included an example of this in Excel on his page.
Now you have no excuses about learning Morse code! Oh and if you don’t have a fancy telegraph key (the switch), [Ray’s] also published a handy method of making your own Morse code key out of popsicle sticks and magnets.Well....time for the first Filly Derpy/Spitfire comic of the off-season.Love this pun btw for the title. Honestly I get a personal kick out of the good bit of people who seem to dread this series now but to me....I could care absolutely less.I love this series and Derpy....well she's my favorite pony and what is better than putting her in the stupid situations I like putting her in with off-season comics. It's kind of funny though just how many Derpy comics I do once a season is over but that's where my personal fun begins cause Derpy is so much fun to make and filly comics with her and the other ponies just is so much fun to put the backstory and weird stuff.I hid a muffin in this but it's a little obvious.So this was a little interesting comic in a way cause it's been a while since I did the Apple Family Kitchen. I think the last time I did it was back in a comic called 'Sugarcube'. It's a long time ago and I think was one of the first comics I did in 2012. I think it's around that time but I know it's a 2012 comic for sure.I will say that the kitchen is a little simple but I like to add more stuff in it cause....I can.I will say that it was a little tricky for how many angles this comic had that I under-estimated how long it was gonna take to do this comic. It was definitely a challenge especially the last 2 panels I in a sense winged it since there's nothing for the angle Derpy is on for the kitchen except a bare table and I had to customize a re-modeled oven for Spitfire to fit in.I am REALLY tempted to clean up a couple of these panels....probably the bottom 2 and make them into prints or pins. I think it would be amusing but we'll see. Too far to look that far down the road. The last AJ I did in this seems a little off....IDK how it happened but I think I wasn't paying attention as much as I should and the nose is a little long......but whatever...it's the comic that counts.Anyway another Derpy/Spitfire comic in the books. Kind of on a run with Derpy/AJ comics too. Oh and on the Derpy/Spitfire ones....I ain't stopping this series anytime soon...hell I've done a lot now since 2012 and there's just an insane amount of ideas and stuff I have written down for more comics of these.I like to space these comics out here and there with other stuff but man these comics are always just a lot of fun for me.....even if 20% of people hate them now. But like I said...I could care less cause I am having fun. Anime pic next. Derpy. Applejack, Spitfire © HasbroArt © MeSir Hugh de Cressingham (died 11 September 1297[1]) was the treasurer of the English administration in Scotland from 1296 to 1297. He was hated by the Scots and did not seem well liked even by the English.[2] He was an advisor to John de Warenne, 6th Earl of Surrey at the Battle of Stirling Bridge. He suggested a full-scale attack across the bridge, which cost the English the battle and led to his death.
Life [ edit ]
Cressingham was a son of William de Cressingham. Hugh was a clerk and one of the officers of the English exchequer, was employed in a matter arising from some wrongs done to the abbot of Ramsey in 1282; he was attached to the household of Eleanor of Castile, queen of Edward I, was her steward, and one of her bailiffs for the barony of Haverford. In 1292 the king employed him to audit the debts due to his late father, Henry III, and in that and during the next three years he was the head of the justices itinerant for the northern counties. He was presented to the parsonage of Chalk, Kent, by the prior and convent of Norwich, and held the rectory of Doddington in the same county (Hasted); he was also rector of ‘Ruddeby’ (Rudby in Cleveland), and held prebends in several churches (Hemingburgh).
In 1296 Edward appointed Cressingham treasurer of the kingdom, charging him to spare no expense necessary for the complete reduction of Scotland.
Cressingham was killed during the Battle of Stirling Bridge on 11 September 1297. According to legend, his body was flayed by the Scots as he had flayed Scottish war prisoners, and William Wallace made a sword belt out of his skin. The Lanercost Chronicle states the Scots dried and cured his hide and
“ of his skin William Wallace caused a broad strip to be taken from the head to the heel, to make therewith a baldrick for his sword. ”
The Scalacronica merely states that
“ the Scots caused him to be flayed, and in token of their hatred made thongs of his skin. ”
Walter of Hemingburgh recorded,
“ The Scots flayed him and divided his skin among themselves in moderate-sized pieces, certainly not as relics, but for hatred of him. ”
Family and issue [ edit ]
He is known to have left a daughter Alice, who married Robert de Aspale and had issue.[3]
In popular culture [ edit ]
In the 1995 film Braveheart he is portrayed by the actor Gerard McSorley, and dies of beheading by William Wallace, although the name in the film was 'Cheltham' and he was ordered to lead by a superior.
Citations [ edit ]
^ William Wallace & Andrew Moray defeat English ^ William Wallace & Andrew Moray defeat English ^ Gage, p.45.Image copyright BBC news grab Image caption Lord Tebbit met students from Merthyr Tydfil College who made a film about welfare reform
An ex-minister who once advised the jobless to get on their bikes says Merthyr Tydfil's unemployed should consider moving to find work.
Lord Tebbit was being interviewed by Merthyr Tydfil College students who made a film about the potential effects of the UK government's welfare reform.
The former Conservative party chairman said people in the UK should follow the example of those in Poland and Hungary.
The UK government says its reforms will encourage the jobless back to work.
When asked whether people in Merthyr should get on their bikes and look for work, Lord Tebbit replied: "Yes people do have to get up and go.
"People do it in Poland, people do it in Hungary, people do it in Lithuania. Why are they more willing to do it than we are?"
In 1981, when more than 3m people were unemployed, Lord Tebbit, then Margaret Thatcher's secretary of state for employment, famously caused controversy when he told the jobless to get on their bikes to find work.
The students' encounter with him is shown on BBC Wales' Week In Week Out programme on Tuesday.
Merthyr currently has the second highest percentage of people seeking jobs in Wales, and regularly features in surveys of areas with the highest rates of people claiming incapacity benefit.
The once thriving industrial town has also been hit by job cuts in manufacturing, including the loss of production at the Hoover factory in 2008.
Student Gemma Griffiths, 23, and her sister Donna, 21, who grew up in a family on benefits in Merthyr, made the 15-minute film shown to Lord Tebbit.
Image copyright BBC news grab Image caption The Griffiths sisters say they were raised in a family hit by poverty
Last week the UK coalition government unveiled plans to reform the welfare system and promised to make work worthwhile.
Prime Minister David Cameron promised "to make work pay for some of the poorest people in our society".
A "universal credit", sanctions for those turning down jobs, and a cap on benefits paid to a single family were among the changes outlined.
But Gemma Griffiths said: "I made this film because I grew up in a family in poverty and I think the benefit reform is a bad idea because it will push Merthyr into deeper poverty than it already is."
The sisters spoke to a number of benefit claimants who face losing out because of changes to the rules, and they both believe cutting benefits in the current economic climate will make poor people in Merthyr poorer.
Why have we got today fathers who have never worked? Lord Tebbit, Former Conservative minister
But Lord Tebbit told them: "It is an interesting film which shows up some very longstanding deep-rooted problems.
"When I was a kid at school we'd all had fathers who had been unemployed but I don't think any of us had a father who had never been employed.
"Why have we got today fathers who have never worked? In that sense we are worse off than we were before the war, before the welfare state.
"I think some people may get less well off, may get poorer.
"But the question is whether we can help the majority of people to get out of that hole."
Last year, Work and Pensions Secretary Iain Duncan Smith sparked debate when he said people in Merthyr had become "static" and suggested they "get on a bus" to find work in Cardiff.
Week In Week Out, Message from Merthyr, is on BBC One Wales at 2235 GMT on Tuesday, 22 February.Christopher Pledger/Associated Press
Imagine the cultural reverberations that would have been set off if John Lennon, Paul McCartney and Ringo Starr had simultaneously informed George Harrison that he alone was left to run the Beatles; or if Agnetha, Benny and Björn turned to Anni-Frid and told her that ABBA was now her responsibility.
Now picture a similarly significant occurrence taking place in the Southern Hemisphere, within a pop act aimed at a somewhat younger audience, and you will understand the seismic waves and anguished cries emanating from Australia, where Jeff Fatt, Murray Cook and Greg Page — better known as the Purple, Red and Yellow Wiggles — have said they will depart the popular children’s music group the Wiggles at the end of their current tour.
This changing of the guard within the Wiggles, a band known for enduring songs like “Toot Toot, Chugga Chugga, Big Red Car,” will take place at the end of the year after the group completes its current tour, The Associated Press reported.
Mr. Page, who previously left the Wiggles in 2006 due to his declining health but made a surprise return to the band at the start of this year, said in a statement, “With Murray and Jeff’s decision to stop performing at the end of the year it’s a nice sense of closure to also end my time onstage during the final tour with all the original members of the group.”
This move will leave Anthony Field, the original Blue Wiggle, as the only founding member to remain with the group, though Mr. Cook, Mr. Fatt and Mr. Page will remain involved behind the scenes, they said. Emma Watkins, Lachlan Gillespie, and Simon Pryce will take over as the Yellow, Purple and Red Wiggles.
The membership of popular onstage supporting characters like Wags the Dog and Henry the Octopus is believed to be secure.Newly-selected President Halimah Yacob was greeted with cheers by a crowd down by the void deck of her Yishun Avenue 4 block as she left her humble Yistana compound to go to work.
Advertisement
A video of the rousing reception was shared on Facebook on Sept. 18, 2017.
From the video, a uniformed escort, who would have looked less out of place in the Istana, can be seen to be on hand to usher the president to her vehicle.
President Halimah appeared like she was not expecting such a reception.
Minutiae of President Halimah’s life
Interest in Singapore’s HDB flat-dwelling eighth president is obviously high, as a lot of what she has done in the last four days have been watched, recorded and commented on.
After President Halimah’s swearing-in ceremony on Thursday, Sept. 14, a video of her official motorcade making its way from the Istana to her Yishun flat, by stopping traffic along the way, was shared online.
Her escorted departure from her flat was also documented within a day of her becoming president.
The Yishun Avenue 4 estate has experienced slight physical changes with the erection of a personal shelter at the base of the block for the president’s use, to keep her safe from the elements as she walks to her official designated car just several feet away at the car park.
But that did not stop weird things from happening in Yishun, like a couple within 50 metres of President Halimah’s block making sexy time in the wee hours of the morning.
Here are some totally unrelated but equally interesting stories:
These stories of the people from the Tampines Round Market will warm your heart
Deadly office-related sins everyone would have encountered at least once
This app lets you read nostalgic books from your youth for freeBy Rhonda Swan
Palm Beach Post
The statistic is glaring.
Florida has nearly 60 percent of the nation's juvenile offenders serving life sentences with no parole for crimes that did not involve taking a life. Of the 129 nationwide, 77 are in Florida prisons. This is the only state to sentence youths to life without parole for burglary, battery, and carjacking. All other juveniles serving life without parole for non-homicides committed kidnapping and rape.
These facts were omitted from many of this week's reports about the Supreme Court's ruling to end life without parole sentences for juveniles who don't kill. As was the fact that 84 percent of the juveniles so sentenced in Florida are black.
The decision was prompted by the case of Terrance Graham. He was 16 when Duval County Circuit Court Judge Lance Day sentenced him to life without parole for an armed burglary in which no one was hurt. Graham had a record, so Judge Day thought that he should lock him up and throw away the key. "Given your escalating pattern of criminal conduct," he told Graham, "it is apparent to the court that you have decided that this is the way you are going to live your life and that the only thing I can do now is to try and protect the community from your actions."
The Supreme Court ruled that Graham's sentence was cruel and unusual punishment because it gave the young man no hope of gaining freedom. That hope, wrote Justice Anthony Kennedy, should be afforded to all juveniles convicted of non-homicide crimes. They should not have a guarantee of release, but they at least should have the possibility of another chance.
Florida, however, is not big on giving chances. Since the state must now decide how to comply with the court's ruling, it's a good time to reexamine its system of justice.
The state's get-tough response to crime with minimum mandatory and harsh sentences hasn't worked. Florida has the third-highest prison population with more than 101,000 inmates, a 20 percent increase from 2005. The Pew Center on the States reported last month that while the country overall saw a decline in the number of state prisoners for the first time in 37 years, Florida was one of 24 states that saw an increase.
One reason is the state's failure to invest in educational, vocational and substance-abuse treatment programs that have proven to reduce recidivism and help inmates turn around their lives.
For this fiscal year, the Legislature appropriated $2.2 billion to the Department of Corrections. Only 1.2 percent went to inmate programs. If prisons lack the resources to do nothing more than breed better criminals, they help inmates to reenter prison, not society. Business groups in Florida agree, and support a different approach.
In the Supreme Court's ruling, Justice Kennedy wrote that rehabilitation is "a penological goal that forms the basis of parole systems." For juveniles, those most likely to learn from their mistakes and change, life imprisonment without parole "forswears altogether the rehabilitative ideal," he wrote. "By denying the defendant the right to reenter the community, the state makes an irrevocable judgment about that person's value and place in society."
Some juveniles are beyond help. Justice Kennedy, however, pointed out that judges and juries can not determine beforehand which youngsters those are.
The court ruled that states must give juvenile offenders the chance to prove they have been rehabilitated, thus candidates for release. It follows that states also must provide the resources for those offenders to become rehabilitated.
Ironically, Florida lawmakers had the chance this year to implement a parole system for inmates serving life who committed crimes as juveniles. The Second Chance for Children in Prison Act died last month in committee. Because of the Supreme Court ruling, maybe some of those juvenile offenders who deserve a second chance won't have to die in prison.
Please read the opinions here:
The ruling in Graham v. Florida
The order in Sullivan v. FloridaIn the late 90's, Michael J. Fox starred in a television comedy called Spin City. As its name implies, the job of Fox's character was to "spin" the truth to make his boss (the mayor of New York City) look good.
We've come to expect this sort of behavior from politicians and their sycophants on cable news, but we don't expect it from scientists. Yet, a new paper published in PLoS Biology suggests that some scientists do just that.
Sensationalizing Science
The biggest purveyors of sensationalism are university press offices and the scientifically ignorant dupes in the media who eagerly reprint press releases, sometimes nearly verbatim. Environmentalists and other activists have also perfected the art of spin.
But this paper isn't about them; instead, it focuses on the research literature itself. And the authors found that scientists are not above hyping the data to make themselves look good.
The researchers, based at the University of Sydney, performed a systematic review of 35 papers, seven of which were of sufficient quality to perform a quantitative meta-analysis. (The 35 papers, which themselves examined the prevalence of spin in the literature, had to fit certain criteria to be included.) In general, "spin" is defined as conclusions that are not supported by the data, particularly if those conclusions are favorable to the authors. Also, papers that improperly imply causation are considered to contain spin.
The authors found that every category of study analyzed contained spin: Diagnostic accuracy studies, observational studies, and clinical trials. Even systematic reviews and meta-analyses themselves contained spin, despite the fact that these studies are designed (in part) to eliminate spin. Prevalence of spin was roughly 30% to 60%. (The authors note that all 10 papers examined on a defibrilator clinical trial showed spin, for a prevalence in this small sample of 100%.)
Interestingly, the authors found that studies that were funded by industry were no likelier to have spin than studies that were not funded by industry. (See figure. The "1" on the X-axis signifies no statistical significance. The diamond represents the combination of all the data from the seven studies.)
Limitations
There are at least two major limitations to the study. First, "spin" was defined differently in the papers included in the systematic review and meta-analysis and, therefore, the concept is subjective rather than objective.
Second, the authors are not in a position to identify the root causes of spin. Instead of a willful intent to deceive or exaggerate, spin could be the result of a simple misunderstanding of statistics. Indeed, scientists are not statisticians, and it is not uncommon for scientists to draw unwarranted conclusions from their experiments, simply because they fail to appreciate the nuances of the statistical tests they employ.
Thus, intellectually honest people may come to different conclusions about whether a scientist is spinning his results. What might appear as spin to one scientist simply may be a sincerely held but mistaken belief to another.
Still, the authors' data remind us of something that is all too often forgotten: Scientists are human, too, and they are flawed, just like everybody else. Just because a paper got published does not mean it is entirely accurate.
Source: Chiu K, Grundy Q, Bero L. "'Spin' in published biomedical literature: A methodological systematic review." PLoS Biol 15(9): e2002173. Published: 11-Sept-2017. DOI: 10.1371/journal.pbio.2002173Scientists from Rice University and the University of Bremen's Center for Marine Environmental Sciences (MARUM) in Germany have combined cutting-edge experimental techniques and computer simulations to find a new way of predicting how water dissolves crystalline structures like those found in natural stone and cement.
In a new study featured on the cover of the Nov. 28 issue of the Journal of Physical Chemistry C, the team found their method was more efficient at predicting the dissolution rates of crystalline structures in water than previous methods. The research could have wide-ranging impacts in diverse areas, including water quality and planning, environmental sustainability, corrosion resistance and cement construction.
"We need to gain a better understanding of dissolution mechanisms to better predict the fate of certain materials, both in nature and in man-made systems," said lead investigator Andreas Lüttge, a professor of mineralogy at MARUM and professor emeritus and research professor in Earth science at Rice. His team specializes in studying the thin boundary layer that forms between minerals and fluids.
Boundary layers are ubiquitous in nature; they occur when raindrops fall on stone, water seeps through soil and the ocean meets the sea floor. Scientists and engineers have long been interested in accurately explaining how crystalline materials, including many minerals and stones, interact with and are dissolved by water. Calculations about the rate of these dissolution processes are critical in many fields of science and engineering.
In the new study, Lüttge and lead author Inna Kurganskaya, a research associate in Earth science at Rice, studied dissolution processes using quartz, one of the most common minerals found in nature. Quartz, or silicon dioxide, is a type of silicate, the most abundant group of minerals in Earth's crust.
At the boundary layer where quartz and water meet, multiple chemical reactions occur. Some of these happen simultaneously and others take place in succession. In the new study, the researchers sought to create a computerized model that could accurately simulate the complex chemistry at the boundary layer.
"The new model simulates the dissolution kinetics at the boundary layer with greater precision than earlier stochastic models operating at the same scale," Kurganskaya said. "Existing simulations rely on rate constants assigned to a wide range of possible reactions, and as a result, the total material flux from the surface have an inherent variance range -- a plus or minus factor that is always there."
One reason the team's simulations more accurately represent real processes is that its models incorporate actual measurements from cutting-edge instruments and from high-tech materials, including glass ceramics and nanomaterials. With a special imaging technique called "vertical scanning interferometry," which the group at MARUM and Rice helped to develop, the team scanned the crystal surfaces of both minerals and manufactured materials to generate topographic maps with a resolution of a just a few nanometers, or billionths of a meter.
"We found that dissolution rates that were predicted using rate constants were sometimes off by as much as two orders of magnitude," Lüttge said.
The new method for more precisely predicting dissolution processes could revolutionize the way engineers and scientists make many calculations related to a myriad of things, including the stability of building materials, the longevity of materials used for radioactive waste storage and more, he said.
"Further work is needed to prove the broad utility of the method," he said. "In the next phase of research, we plan to test our simulations on larger systems and over longer periods."
The research was supported by the Global Climate and Energy Project at Stanford University.Event Links: [ MiniLD 50 | Warmup Weekend | Real World Gatherings | Ludum Deals | Wallpaper ]
IMPORTANT NOTE: If you want to place in the final results, you NEED votes. The easiest way to get votes is by rating other games. Judging lasts for 3 weeks following the end of Ludum Dare. For best effect, rate 20 games as soon as possible. Rating more games is encouraged.
MORE TIPS AND DETAILS AT THE BOTTOM OF THIS PAGE
TEAMS: Teams entering the Jam should pick a single representative to submit your game, or create a team specific account you can share. We currently do not support Team Voting, but sharing an account and together playing and rating games is acceptable.
NOT LOGGED IN?: If you get a message about not being logged in, even though you are, it’s because your web browser cached the non-logged in page. You can fix this by either refreshing your cache or clearing your cache. CTRL+F5 in many browsers. Chrome is a bit more work. Press F12 to enable Developer Mode, then you can right click on the refresh button and select “Empty Cache and Hard Reload”. This option is unavailable if you are not in Developer Mode.
PORTS: Ports to other platforms can be done after the deadline. That said, the sooner you finish your port, the sooner people can play your game, improving your chances of placing in the final results. For best results, provide a Web version of your game, or a Windows version with no dependencies. Also be sure to rate about 20 games to improve your visibility.
MY GAME DOESN’T SHOW UP: If you can’t find your game, it’s usually because the URL to your downloads are missing ‘http://‘. Fix your URLs (http://mysite.com/mygame.zip) and you will show |
embedded. The left side of the specimen was prepared, exposing a broken, but otherwise complete pelvis. No sutures are identifiable. This specimen was illustrated in Sulej et al. (2012). Here we assign it to Proterochersis porebensis sp. nov. ZPAL V.39/48 Previously undescribed and never illustrated specimen. Found in Poręba, Poland. A complete shell with only a small fragment of the second vertebral scute area, most of the right dorsal process of epiplastron, and some small elements from the bridge area, with the second pair of the sacral ribs missing (Figs 3A–D, G, H, I, 4A–D, H, I). The shell was prepared from the outside and from the inside, revealing the pelvis, the somewhat broken and misplaced but complete row of the thoracic vertebrae, both sacral vertebrae, left scapulocoracoid, and right, slightly damaged femur. Unfortunately, the shell is slightly distorted and broken, which obscures its geometry. The state of preservation is good, but the bone surface is marked with numerous small cracks and fissures. Therefore it is difficult to trace any sutures. It appears, however, that there are some definite sutures visible between the costals and in the posterior part of the plastron. Here we assign it to Proterochersis porebensis sp. nov. ZPAL V.39/49 Previously undescribed and never illustrated specimen. Found in Poręba, Poland. Another nearly complete, yet vertically cracked shell. It lacks some small fragments of the carapace, but unsymmetrically, so every element of the shell is represented entirely at least once. Almost the whole thoracic vertebral column (most likely vertebrals I–VII and X) is preserved, but most of it is broken off from the carapace and moved from the original position. Dorsal processes of epiplastra are broken, with only the bases preserved. This shell was also prepared from the outside and from the inside, and the state of preservation is identical as in ZPAL V.39/48. Here we assign it to Proterochersis porebensis sp. nov. ZPAL V.39/72 Previously undescribed and never illustrated specimen. Found in Poręba, Poland. A mostly complete carapace with parts of the fourth and fifth vertebral scute areas missing. On the ventral surface the last cervical and the first, the second and the anterior part of the third thoracic vertebra, as well as the left ilium, are preserved. The carapace was associated with one proximal caudal vertebra. ZPAL V.39/370 Previously undescribed and never illustrated specimen. Found in Poręba, Poland. A part of the posterior left section of a carapace with most of the dorsal part of the left ilium, the posterior part of the first and the complete second sacral vertebra, short fragment of the first sacral rib and complete second sacral rib preserved. The first sacral vertebra is broken and the contact between its neural process and the carapace is clearly visible. Phylogenetic analysis A phylogenetic analysis was performed using TNT 1.1 (Goloboff, Farris & Nixon, 2008). The matrix created by Gaffney et al. (2007) was used, with updates by Joyce et al. (2013; for the full character list and matrix, see Appendix S1). Proterochersis porebensis sp. nov. and Keuperotesta limendorsa gen. et sp. nov. were added, and characters for Proterochersis robusta were updated based on personal observations of German and Polish specimens. Modifications were introduced to characters 83 (coracoid columnar: 0, no, flat rectangular; 1, yes, at least at the base; 2, no, flat bee wing‐shaped), 87 (first thoracic rib: 0, extends, nearly to peripherals but does not form a costal; 1, extends less than halfway across costal; 2, well developed, forms a costal plate), 99 (dorsal process on epiplastron: 0, large, reaches carapace; 1, smaller than length of epiplastron; 2, absent; 3, larger than length of epiplastron, does not reach the carapace), 103 (mesoplastra: 0, two pairs present; 1, one pair present; 2, absent; 3, one pair present, but without contact at the midline), and 108 (abdominal scutes relative to midline: 0, one pair present, meets on midline; 1, one pair present, withdrawn from midline; 2, two pairs present, meet on midline). Ten new characters were introduced, covering caudal notch (112: 0, absent; 1, large, inverted, U–shaped; 2, large, inverted, V–shaped; 3, small, with sinuous edge), thoracic rib number (113: 0, more than ten; 1, nine pairs; 2, ten pairs), number of costals (114: 0, eight pairs; 1, ten pairs; 2, nine pairs), fusion of ribs into carapace (115: 0, ribs not fused; 1, ribs fused), presence of peripheral bones (116: 0, absent; 1, present), presence of marginal teeth (117: 0, present; 1, absent), angle between coracoid and acromion (118: 0, ≤130°; 1, >130°), shape of the articular surface of femoral head in dorsal view (119: 0, ancestral amniotic condition, articular surface of femoral head poorly differentiated dorsally; 1, articular surface triangular in dorsal view; 2, articular surface rectangular or oval in dorsal view), and contact of the neural spines of sacral vertebrae with carapace (120: 0, ossified; 1, chondral, ligamentous, or none). Each taxon, excluding Proterochersis spp., Keuperotesta limendorsa gen. et sp. nov., and Proganochelys quenstedti, which were personally studied by the first author, was scored based on the literature: Australochelys (Gaffney & Kitching, 1994, 1995); Dracochelys (Gaffney & Ye, 1992; Brinkman, 2001); Kayentachelys (Gaffney et al., 1987; Sterli & Joyce, 2007; Gaffney & Jenkins, 2010); Meiolania (Gaffney, 1983, 1985, 1996); Odontochelys semitestacea (Li et al., 2008; Lyson et al., 2014); Ordosemys (Brinkman & Wu, 1999; Tong, Ji & Ji, 2004); Palaeochersis (Rougier et al., 1995; Sterli et al., 2007); Solnhofia (Gaffney, 1975a; Joyce, 2000); Xinjiangchelys (Kaznyshkin, Nalbandyan & Nesov, 1990; Peng & Brinkman, 1993; Matzke et al., 2004; Brinkman et al., 2013); Platychelys (Wagner, 1853; Bräm, 1965; Cadena & Joyce, 2015); Ninjemys (Gaffney, 1992); Pleurodira (Gaffney et al., 2006, 2011); Kallokibotion (Nopcsa, 1923b; Gaffney & Meylan, 1992); Otwayemys (Gaffney et al., 1998); Judithemys (Parham & Hutchison, 2003); Chubutemys (Gaffney et al., 2007; Sterli, de la Fuente & Umazano, 2013a); Sinemys (Brinkman, 1993; Tong & Brinkman, 2013); Niolamia (Sterli & de la Fuente, 2011); Mongolochelys (Khosatzky, 1997; Suzuki & Chinzorig, 2010); Pleurosternidae (Hay, 1908; Evans & Kemp, 1975; Gaffney, 1979; Milner, 2004); Baenidae (Gaffney & Hiatt, 1971; Gaffney, 1972, 1982; Archibald & Hutchison, 1979; Brinkman & Nicholls, 1993; Brinkman, 2003; Lyson & Joyce, 2009, 2010; Lyson et al., 2011); Plesiochelyidae (Bräm, 1965; Gaffney, 1975b, 1976; Lapparent de Broin, 1996; Anquetin, Deschamps & Claude, 2014; Pérez‐García, 2014). Hangaiemys (Sukhanov & Narmandakh, 1974); Chelydridae (Whetstone, 1978; Hutchison, 2004); Chelonioidea (Zangerl, 1953, 1958); Testudinoidea (Joyce & Bell, 2004; Danilov, Claude & Sukhanov, 2012); Trionychoidea (Meylan, 1987; Meylan & Gaffney, 1989; Tong, Li & Ouyang, 2014). Additionally, we also referred to Młynarski (1969, 1976), Sukhanov (2000), and Danilov (2005). The suprageneric taxa were scored with the most common (and most likely plesiomorphic) character states. Scorings for some taxa were corrected (see Appendix S1). A traditional search was performed (default settings with 100 000 replications, and with 1000 trees saved per replication) and a majority rule (50%) consensus cladogram was created. Jacknife frequency difference values and bootstrap frequency difference values were calculated for 10 000 replicates.
Reassesment of Controversial Taxa Proterochersis intermedia Both Proterochersis robusta and Proterochersis intermedia were named in the same paper by Fraas (1913) on the basis of turtle material from the same strata (Norian, Löwenstein Formation) and region (area around Stuttgart) of Germany. According to Fraas (1913), Proterochersis intermedia differs from Proterochersis robusta in shell curvature and plastron thickness. Such discrimination is problematic for two reasons. Firstly, Fraas (1913) had only two specimens at his disposal, thus having no insight into ontogenetic and intraspecific variability. Secondly, the holotype of Proterochersis intermedia is fragmentary, possibly compacted, and its overall shape most likely changed during restoration (see description of SMNS 11396 in Material and methods). Additionally, our studies on turtle material from the lower Löwenstein Formation demonstrate that the height and curvature of the shells may vary, possibly ontogenetically, taphonomically, or diagenetically, not only between several otherwise morphologically identical specimens, but also between two sides of the same specimen (SMNS 17757). The putative fontanelles between rib endings of Proterochersis intermedia were considered by Fraas to be juvenile characteristics and specific at the same time, whereas we consider them to be artefacts of preservation. The rib tips, which seem to protrude from the distal ends of the first two preserved costal plates (thus bordering ‘fontanelles’) are in fact painted plaster, as shown by the fracture in one of them. No actual bone material indicates their existence. Even if any real bone fragments are embedded in this part, the interpretation of their nature is impossible, but most likely they originated from breakage or weathering. Although the internal mould might have been informative in that case, the condition cannot be inferred from it because the corresponding part is also entirely reconstructed. The only comparable diagnostic part, the fragment of plastron, is structurally identical, with the exception of thickness. Changes in thickness of plastron may be attributed to intraspecific diversity, age of the specimens, or sexual dimorphism. Bearing this in mind, the validity of Proterochersis intermedia is doubtful. Therefore, there is no basis to distinguish between Proterochersis robusta and Proterochersis intermedia, and the latter should be synonymized with the former. Murrhardtia staeschei Murrhardtia staeschei, described in 2000 by Karl & Tichy, is another ambiguous taxon. Karl & Tichy (2000: 66) summarized all of the similarities and differences between the seven Triassic and Jurassic turtle taxa (including Proterochersis and Murhardtia) by listing 17 statements (characters) in a table. Eight of the nine characters proposed by the authors as diagnosing Murrhardtia staeschei from Proterochersis robusta are actually absent in the type Proterochersis robusta (and Proterochersis intermedia, herein treated as synonymous) material (Fig. 1), so the comparison is not meaningful. As correctly noted by Gaffney et al. (2006), most of these characters seem to be taken from the illustration created by Fraas (1913). In that drawing Fraas (purely hypothetically) reconstructed the parts that were absent in the fossil material available to him (i.e. the anterior lobe of the plastron and the carapacial rim) as a generalized turtle, and did not indicate which areas of his reconstruction are actually based on fossils. Even though in the text it was clearly stated which fragments were missing, and the holotypes of both Proterochersis robusta and Proterochersis intermedia are in the SMNS collection, which was studied by Karl & Tichy, the autors appear to have treated Fraas’ reconstruction as the only base for comparisons. The characters used by Karl & Tichy (2000: 66) are listed as follows. A pair of mesoplastra present (character 3) In the third column of their table, Karl & Tichy (2000) stated that Murrhardtia is diagnosed by a pair of mesoplastra (unlike Proterochersis), but in the eighth column (‘two pairs of mesoplastra present’) both Proterochersis and Murrhardtia are listed as having two pairs of mesoplastra. In fact, it is impossible to infer the number of the mesoplastra in any of the three specimens referred to in that paper, and although Karl & Tichy indicate that they analysed more material from SMNS, they fail to refer to it using catalogue numbers. Complete separation of epiplastra by entoplastron (character 4) Karl and Tichy stated that epiplastra in Murrhardtia are completely separated by entoplastron, and that in Proterochersis they are not separated. Fraas illustrated the epiplastra of Proterochersis contacting each other in front of the entoplastron (a common condition in modern turtles), but this part is missing from the original fossil material. Distinct caudal notch present (character 5) A distinct caudal notch was reported to be present in Murrhardtia and absent in Proterochersis by Karl and Tichy. That part is missing in the original material for Proterochersis. Inframarginals present (character 9) Karl and Tichy stated that inframarginals are present in Murrhardtia and absent in Proterochersis. It is the only character that can actually be compared in Proterochersis and Murrhardtia material. Unfortunately, it is wrongly interpreted – in the holotype of Proterochersis robusta the outline of the last inframarginal is visible, albeit with surface damage (Fig. 10G, J). Infraplastrals present (character 10) Karl and Tichy stated that infraplastrals are present in Murrhardtia but absent in Proterochersis. In fact they refer to abdominals, as they incorrectly interpret the gulars (not present in the original material; note that Karl & Tichy does not follow the scute terminology proposed by Hutchison & Bramble, 1981; so their intergulars and gulars are gulars and extragulars of Hutchison & Bramble, 1981; respectively) portrayed by Fraas (1913) as humerals. Nonetheless, type specimens of Proterochersis robusta and Proterochersis intermedia have abdominals as discussed for Murrhardtia material. Gulars separated by two intergulars (character 11) Karl and Tichy state that gulars (extragulars sensu Hutchison & Bramble, 1981) of Murrhardtia are separated by paired intergulars (gulars sensu Hutchison & Bramble, 1981), and that this is not the case in Proterochersis. Once again this character is not applicable to Proterochersis because of the absence of that part in the fossil material, and is only based on the hypothetical reconstruction by Fraas. Nuchalzack may be formed (character 12) The nuchalzack is stated as present in Murrhardtia and absent in Proterochersis. An enigmatic character, not appropriately explained in the text. Illustrated as a triangular process on the cervical scute, it is actually absent in any of the shells. A similar structure is visible in the CSMM specimen of Murrhardtia, but the anterior margin of its cervical scute is clearly broken off, so the protruding prickle is just a rough edge of the break (but this specimen is rather unique in having its cervical scute bowed dorsally). Karl & Tichy pinpoint SMNS 16442 as having the strongest ‘nuchalzack’, but its cervical scute is virtually the same as that of SMNS 17561, which is supposed to be weakly expressed. Nonetheless, this character is not applicable to Proterochersis. Only one unpaired gular present (character 14) Karl and Tichy state that only one unpaired gular is present in Proterochersis, whereas two are present in Murrhardtia. As already mentioned, characters concerning that part are not applicable to Proterochersis. Nuchal bone no wider than peripherals (character 15) Nuchal bone being no wider than peripherals was stated as present in Proterochersis, and a wider nuchal was suggested for Murrhardtia. There is no trace of nuchal or peripheral sutures on the Proterochersis robusta or the Proterochersis intermedia holotypes, and therefore this character is not applicable. Unlike the other characters this was not taken from the illustration made by Fraas, and no source is given. In sum, none of the characters used by Karl and Tichy to discriminate between Proterochersis and Murrhardtia is valid, and therefore we agree with the conclusion of Gaffney et al. (2006) that Murrhardtia staeschei should be considered a younger synonym of Proterochersis robusta.
Systematic Palaeontology Order Testudinata Klein, 1760 1923a Proterochersis Fraas, 1913 Occurrence and distribution Norian of Germany and Poland. Diagnosis Five vertebrals wider than long, the first semicircular anteriorly, with rounded posterior process invading the medial anterior area of the second vertebral; supramarginals and inframarginals present; dorsal process of epiplastra large, not contacting the carapace; pelvis sutured to carapace and plastron; posterior process of ilium flattened dorsoventrally, fully attached to carapace; epipubic process long. More advanced than Odontochelys semitestacea in having fully developed carapace with carapacial rim elements (peripherals, nuchal bone) and well‐developed costals contacting each other suturally. Less advanced than Proganochelys quenstedti in having two pairs of mesoplastra contacting at the midline, two pairs of abdominal scutes contacting at the midline and, a bee wing‐shaped coracoid. Included genera Proterochersis Fraas, 1913; Keuperotesta gen. nov. Proterochersis Fraas, 1913 Proterochersys Fraas (nomen nudum): Zittel, 1911
Fraas (nomen nudum): Zittel, Proterochersis Fraas, 1913
Fraas, Proterochersis Fraas, 1913 1987
Fraas, Murrhardtia Karl & Tichy, 2000
Karl & Tichy, Murrhardtia Karl & Tichy, 2005: Danilov, 2005
Karl & Tichy, 2005: Danilov, Murrhardtia Karl & Tichy, 2000 2012 Occurrence and distribution Norian of Germany and Poland. Diagnosis Three pairs of supramarginals present; caudal notch present; paired extragular scutes divided by paired gulars; paired caudal scutes and the anal scute present in the posterior part of the plastron; sacral vertebra fused or sutured to carapace. Less advanced than Proganochelys quenstedti in having the first pair of ribs forming fully developed costals. Differing from Keuperotesta in: dorsal surface of the carapace almost even; the last cervical vertebra co‐ossified to the carapace and thoracic vertebrae; anterior margin of the carapace, at most, moderately serrated; marginal series starting anterolaterally in relation to the cervical scute, contacting it widely; first vertebral scute contacting the first pleural anteromedially, rather than posteromedially. Type species Proterochersis robusta Fraas, 1913. Included species Proterochersis porebensis sp. nov. Proterochersis robusta Fraas, 1913 1, 10A–H, J, K, N) Proterochersys nov. spec. Fraas (nomen nudum): Stromer, 1912
nov. spec. Fraas (nomen nudum): Stromer, Proterochersis robusta Fraas, 1913
Fraas, Proterochersis intermedia Fraas, 1913
Fraas, Proterochersis intermedia Fraas, 1913 1969 1976
Fraas, Proterochersis intermedia Fraas, 1913 1976
Fraas, Proterochersis sp. Fraas, 1913 1984
sp. Fraas, Proterochersis robustum Fraas, 1913 1986
Fraas, Proterochersis robusta Fraas, 1913 1987
Fraas, Proterochersis robustum Fraas, 1913 1991
Fraas, Murrhardtia staeschei Karl & Tichy, 2000
Karl & Tichy, Murrhardtia staeschei Karl & Tichy, 2000 2012 Occurrence and distribution Lower Löwenstein Formation (?lower or middle Norian) around Stuttgart, Baden‐Württemberg, Germany. Diagnosis Differs from Proterochersis porebensis sp. nov. in caudal notch semicircular, anterior margin of the carapace slightly serrated or undulated, shell high. Holotype SMNS 12777. Carapace Proterochersis robusta was a middle‐sized and high‐domed turtle. Its carapace was covered by a wide but short cervical scute, five vertebrals, four pairs of pleurals, three pairs of supramarginals, and 14 pairs of marginals. The first vertebral is semi‐oval, wider than long, and mediocaudally forms a rounded projection, invading the area of the second vertebral. Vertebrals III and IV are wide, roughly trapezoid, and have straight posterior and anterior margins. The fifth vertebral forms the posterior edge of the carapace, and posteromedially has a semicircular embayment (caudal or pygal notch). Three supramarginals lie in a row between pleurals II–IV) and marginals V–IX. The pleurals and supramarginals are slightly domed, but the remaining scutes are rather flat. Most of the sulci are sinuous and slight radial ridges can be seen on the scutes, similarly as in Proganochelys quenstedti. Some specimens have additional characteristics to the carapace (medial grooves or ridges, growth lines, wavy surface), but the individual variations and scute pathologies will be discussed in future papers. Plastron The plastron was covered by ten sets of scutes, nine of which are paired: extragulars, gulars, humerals, pectorals, two sets of abdominals (infraplastralia of Karl & Tichy, 2000), femorals (erroneously called abdominalia by Karl & Tichy, 2000), anals (erroneously called femoralia by Karl & Tichy, 2000), and caudals (erroneously called analia by Karl & Tichy, 2000). The unpaired element, the intercaudal (interanale of Karl & Tichy, 2000), is pentagonal, positioned between the caudals, and slightly protrudes, with its anterior tip between the anals. With the exception of the caudals (and the first abdominal set of SMNS 17561, which appears to be an abnormality of that particular specimen), each of the paired elements contacts its counterpart at the midline. Additionally, there are four pairs of small inframarginals and a pair of axillary scutes (visible on SMNS 17561). The entoplastron lies between the epiplastra, and it projects a long posterior process along the visceral surface of the plastron. Each epiplastron forms a dorsal process. Their exact shape and length are unknown, but unlike in Palaeochersis talampayensis Sterli et al., 2007 and Proganochelys quenstedti, they did not contact the carapace. The central part of the plastron is concave, similarly as in males of some modern turtles (Leuteritz & Gantz, 2013). There are two pairs of mesoplastra. The bridge region is built by the hyoplastra and mesoplastra, and the visceral surface of each of these elements is slightly convex, such that the corresponding sutures lie in shallow depressions. This allows for the identification of these bones even if the sutures themselves are not visible. Proterochersis porebensis sp. nov.(Figs 2, 3A–I, 4–8-4–8, 11B) Figure 7 Open in figure viewerPowerPoint Proterochersis porebensis sp. nov., reconstruction of pelvis, based on ZPAL V.39/48 (holotype) and ZPAL V.39/49: A, dorsal view; B, outline of the contact between the pelvis and plastron (dotted) in dorsal view; C, lateral left view; D, lateral left view with lateral pubic process removed, showing the ventral pubic process contacting the plastron; E, dorsoposterior view; F, anterior view. Dorsal part of ilium and carapace removed for clarity in all except (C). Scale bar: 10 cm. Figure 8 Open in figure viewerPowerPoint Proterochersis porebensis sp. nov., ZPAL V.39/48, right femur: A, G, ventral view; B, H, posterior view; C, I, dorsal view; D, J, anterior view; E, K, proximal view; F, L, distal view. Post‐mortem breakage of the specimen and relative relocation of bone fragments resulted in torsion, increasing the angle at which the proximal head is set in relation to the shaft. Scale bar: 5 cm. cf. Proterochersis Fraas, 1913 et al., 2012
Fraas,., cf. Proterochersis robusta Fraas, 1913 et al., 2014 Occurrence and distribution Zbąszynek Beds (subzone IVb of the Corollina meyeriana zone, middle–upper Norian) in Poręba, Silesian Voivodeship, Poland. Etymology From Poręba, the place of discovery. Diagnosis Articular surface of femoral head triangular in dorsal view. Differing from Proterochersis robusta in caudal notch triangular, anterior margin of the carapace nearly straight, anterior edge of the third marginal only slightly rounded, and lower shell. Differing from Keuperotesta limendorsa gen. et sp. nov. in acromion and coracoid forming an angle of ~120°. Holotype ZPAL V.39/48. Paratypes ZPAL V.39/34, ZPAL V.39/49, ZPAL V.39/72, ZPAL V.39/370. There are two shell morphotypes known to date from Poręba (Fig. 2). One of them, represented by ZPAL V.39/34, was preliminarily described and reconstructed by Sulej et al. (2012). Despite its overall similarity to Proterochersis robusta, and because of its somewhat different morphology (especially when it comes to peripheral elements of the carapace and plastron), the exact taxonomical status of this specimen was left undecided. The second morphotype, represented by previously undescribed specimens (among others ZPAL V.39/48, the holotype of Proterochersis porebensis sp. nov., ZPAL V.39/49, and ZPAL V.39/72, all described herein), is much more similar to Proterochersis robusta. Carapace and vertebrae The composition of the shell is almost identical to that of Proterochersis robusta (SMNS 17561 and others). There are five vertebrals, four pairs of pleurals, and three pairs of supramarginals; the marginal count is 14 for ZPAL V.39/49 (the same as in SMNS 17561) and 15 for ZPAL V.39/48 (Fig. 2A, B). The anterior marginals have nearly straight outer borders (with the exception of the third one, which is gently rounded), so the anterior rim of the carapace is smooth, in contrast with the slightly serrated condition found in Proterochersis robusta. Sulci are usually sinuous and radial ridges are present. There is some variability between ZPAL V.39/48 and ZPAL V.39/49 (as well as the other specimens from Poland and Germany) in the shape and position of some scutes, but this will be discussed in future papers. The last cervical vertebra is fused with (or sutured to) the first thoracic vertebra, and with the carapace (Fig. 3E, F). There are ten pairs of thoracic ribs, with each apparently forming ten fully developed costals (Figs 2F, 4A, B). The first pair of ribs is different from the others because it forms a distinct ridge on the visceral side of the costal (similar to that of Proganochelys quenstedti, but less pronounced; its prominence differs between specimens), but (unlike Proganochelys quenstedti) it is roughly parallel with the second pair, and there is what appears to be a clear suture between the corresponding costals. The intercostal sutures, similarly as in Proganochelys quenstedti, form long, shallow, and narrow grooves; Gaffney (1990) interpreted them instead as being vascular or nerve imprints, because of their lack of interdigitation. Numerous isolated, disarticulated costals found in Poręba indicate, however, that the intercostal sutures in most cases are indeed straight and longitudinal, and not interdigitated. On some costals there is a second groove, lying along the suture, possibly where the nerves or vessels were. In any case, even if the grooves seen on the articulated carapaces are not sutures themselves, both of these structures are close to each other and, as concluded by Gaffney (1990), the grooves are at least a good approximation of the sutural positions. The distal tip of the first thoracic rib is visible, yet it is not entirely free, but articulates the carapace with its anterior surface, and is probably sutured. The sutures between bones forming the posterior part of the carapace are not visible, but each of the three last ribs independently reaches the carapace and they do not meet with each other, so, similarly as in other Late Triassic turtles, each one of them probably forms its own costal as well. Plastron The plastron composition does not differ from that of Proterochersis robusta, with two pairs of abdominal scutes and an additional three scutes at the caudal end (Figs 2D, E, 3C, D). The dorsal processes of epiplastra (Fig. 4C, D, H, I) are relatively large (the preserved broken process of ZPAL V.39/48 is at least 6 cm long), very thin dorsally (dorsal end of the preserved part has a circumference of 2 mm and is circular in cross section), and lacks a sutural contact with the carapace. No sutures or any signs of discreteness are visible at the base of the processes in any of the specimens, which favours their interpretation as parts of the epiplastra (Gaffney, 1990; Lyson et al., 2013b) and not the cleithra (Jaekel, 1918; Joyce, Jenkins & Rowe, 2006). The posterior process of the entoplastron is large, reaching as far as the middle portion of the bridge (Figs 2G, 4C, D). Its point of contact with the mesoplastra is peculiar, as it splits into two lateral projections (forming a bow, with ends turning anteriorly and nearly reaching the level of the inframarginals, most likely along the suture) and one posterior projection, disappearing halfway towards the point of contact with the epipubic process. In the middle part of this split and along the bases of the lateral arms there is a slight depression with rough surface (Fig. 4E). This structure is visible as an imprint in Proterochersis robusta (SMNS 12777 and SMNS 16603) too, but is absent in Proganochelys quenstedti (the posterior process of entoplastron ends blindly instead), possibly because only one pair of mesoplastra is present in that taxon. The hypoplastron–mesoplastron suture in Proganochelys quenstedti is most probably bowed also, however, as seen in SMNS 17203. Scapulocoracoid The scapular process (Fig. 5) is rod‐like, almost straight, and set at around 100° to the acromion. In its dorsal part it is tear‐shaped in cross section, with a rounded ridge turned lateroposteriorly, and gradually changes to oval in the middle part. At approximately one‐third of its height a ridge spans from the scapular process to the acromion. The acromion is relatively long and triangular at its base, projecting three distinct ridges: one towards the scapular process, one towards the glenoid, and one linking it with the medial edge of the coracoid. The glenoid is N–shaped. The coracoid is bee wing‐shaped (with the lateral edge straight or slightly concave, the posterior tip rounded, and the medial edge markedly convex), plate‐like, thicker near the glenoid, and forms an angle with the acromion of around 120°. Its dorsal surface is wavy, unlike any other Triassic turtle, possibly being imprinted by some soft tissues. A small part of its posteromedial rim is broken, but a comparison with SMNS 17757 and IVPP V15653 as well as the waves on the dorsal surface of the coracoid itself (seemingly parallel with the edge) show that less than 0.5 cm is missing. The coracoid foramen is oval. The dorsal end of the dorsal process of scapula bears a circular pit similar to that in Proganochelys quenstedti specimen SMNS 16980. We agree with the statement of Gaffney (1990) that in vivo it might have been filled with cartilage, possibly indicating a subadult age |
commodity money, gold and silver coins. Then we had bank notes that were claims to gold and silver. It was an IOU (I Owe You)--you could go to the bank and they would give you coins that you had coming. Then we introduced paper money that you couldn't redeem. So that's an IOU-nothing. Russ: Right. Guest: That can serve as money if people accept it. Bitcoin is an electronic IOU-nothing. But it's not issued by the government. It's produced by a computer program. And there's a system of people whose computers are involved in the payment processing network. But that's a kind of metaphysical definition of what a bitcoin is. Russ: Well, what's special about it--there are a few things that are special about it. One of them is, how many exist and how many come into existence. Guest: Right. So the really interesting thing about it from the point of view of a monetary constitution is that there is literally a program written down that governs the quantity of bitcoins, the quantity of bitcoins. The path is pre-determined. And there is nobody in a position to change that. There isn't any Central Bitcoin Authority that has the power to introduce more bitcoins. The whole system of production is according to this program. So that has, sort of, interesting implications or sort of makes us think about other ways we might write a program to produce a money that instead of having a predetermined quantity path, might have a predetermined or stable purchasing power. Or might be defined to have stable nominal spending in terms of that currency. So that's it's interest from the point of view of a constitution. But you are right: the value of bitcoin is it's part of this payment system. Russ: Well that's its value now. Guest: Right. Russ: Potentially. Guest: Right. The blockchain could be used for other purposes, too. Russ: And I guess, to me the fascinating thing is, when you tell noneconomists about it, who are not cyber-sophisticated, they say, 'Well, why would anybody take it?' And the answer of course is because they can spend it somewhere. 'But then why would that person take it?' And the answer is, I think fundamentally: There are people in the world who would like there to be an alternative to the dollar, or a government-run currency, and they are willing to take the risk. They are not taking a risk of inflation, because of if this program is correct. What they are taking a risk of is that they may accumulate the equivalent of the Russian ruble after 1917, when the Czarist ruble was--we have friends who said, 'Well, we used them as wallpaper.' Because they were not legal tender any more. So there's a risk if you-- Guest: You know, if you hung onto your Confederate currency after 1860, it's actually performed better in purchasing power than the Federal Reserve Note. Russ: Is that true? Guest: Yes. Russ: As a collector's item now, you are saying? Guest: Yes. Because the quantity is-- Russ: Not too many people use them as wallpaper. That's the problem. Those people who have held them got lucky. So, I think there is, among renegade folks, there is a desire to have an alternative. And they are therefore willing to take a chance. They might not put their life savings into it. But eventually if enough people started to feel that way, we could get to a world of an alternative currency. Is there any chance of that? Guest: I was going to agree with you, that I think the bedrock of the demand for bitcoins is from people who are enthusiastic about the project of a non-government currency. It does have a problem, which is in getting more widely accepted as a medium of exchange, for people to want to hold their checking account balances in bitcoin. Which is that the value is, right now, rather unstable. Russ: Yes, it is. Despite the claim that there's this smooth path of expansion. Guest: That's the quantity. That's not the purchasing power. So, if demand goes down there's no place for it to be felt other than the price. Because it's not going to be felt in the quantity. So that's a problem. Maybe if somebody introduces a cryptocurrency that has a more stable purchasing power, they can get that more widely accepted. As long as bitcoin's purchasing power was appreciating, it wasn't a problem that it was bouncing around the path. But now that it's down, I think that it's been a blow to trying to get it more widely accepted. Because there are a lot of entrepreneurs who are trying to introduce payment systems or consumer front ends to make it easy for merchants to take payments by bitcoin. Russ: So you write, Bitcoin is something else again, a transferable private unit with a positive value, unbacked by redeemability. Unlike Hayek's proposed unbacked private currencies, bitcoin is guaranteed by private programming to expand in nominal quantity only gradually along a known path. It is produced by decentralized mining rather than by any central issuer who could issue more at will --and here's the key part I want you to talk about because its volume cannot be unexpectedly expanded. I want to read that again, because I butchered it.... because its volume cannot be unexpectedly expanded. Bitcoin is free of the time-consistency problem that haunts Hayek's proposal--the temptation of a profit-maximizing issuer, when nominal expansion has no cost, to take the one shot seignorage profit from hyperinflationary overissue. Explain that briefly. Guest: So, one of the most interesting proposals in monetary regimes over the last 50 years was Friedrich Hayek's "Denationalization of Money," where Hayek started by saying, well, we shouldn't put any legal barriers in the way of people using a currency from another country. Or gold or silver if they want to. So, don't try to stop people from fleeing a bad currency into a good currency, and maybe that will discipline the issuers of bad currency to stop being so bad. And then he revised it to say, Why not let private firms enter this competition? And if we think about it, maybe the reason we've never seen private firms issuing an unbacked money is that it's been illegal. Now, I'm a little skeptical of that part. I think there's a reason why people would prefer a commodity money to an unbacked private money. And that's what I referred to in that last sentence. Which is, if you can, as a private issuer, get people to accept the money which you have no obligation to buy back, in terms of any underlying commodity or bundle of goods, you have no contractual commitment to keep its purchasing power stable. You are just promising that that is what you are going to do. Once people start to accept that, you make a profit with every additional unit you can issue, whether it's in note form or bank balance form. And so there's a temptation to hyperinflate. Russ: Your brand name-- Guest: Yeah, it's true, it's a one-shot profit. Russ: Right. Guest: And you destroy your brand name. But if that profit is big enough-- Russ: Right-- Guest: and if you write down a model of it, it looks like the profit is basically infinite. Until people react and stop accepting it. So I think maybe that's why we've never seen unbacked private money. Not the absence of legal restrictions against it. I'm all in favor of letting people issue an unbacked private money. But there is this problem of how the users of it are going to trust you not to hyperinflate it. That's the problem that Bitcoin has solved by making the quantity written down into a program that's publicly observable. Russ: At least we think that's true. It's hard to-- Guest: That's true. Russ: I trust that. Right. It seems true. But we don't 100% know.If the advocates of Ron Paul often seem like they're paranoid about the way he's overlooked in the mainstream media, there's good reason for it.
Check this piece in the Sunday New York Times Magazine on how potential Republican presidential nominees line up against President Obama.
The text claims that "Nate Silver models the likelihood of each candidate winning the popular vote based on 2012 G.D.P. growth, President Obama’s current approval rating and the ideology of the candidate."
Each candidate? The candidate who has been running third in many polls is conspicuously absent from the article.
Included instead are Michele Bachmann and Jon Huntsman, who are running at the very bottom of the polls at 3.5 and 1.5 percent respectively.
You might be able to make an argument that Huntsman could eventually emerge as the pick of the mainstream party leaders if Mitt Romney crashes. And it is indeed interesting to see how he lines up against Obama in Silver's analysis.
But Bachmann? She just a ditz who can't get utter a paragraph without the second sentence contradicting the first.
I suspect that the sole reason the Times and other liberal media outlets love to cite her as some sort of accepted leader among conservatives is to make fun of conservatives.
In fact few conservatives ever took Bachmann seriously even when she was doing well. She had a bit of a run as a populist, but that's over. So why is she among the five candidates arrayed against Obama?
And why isn't Paul?
I imagine this writer would say he left Paul out because Paul would have no chance against Obama in the general election because "his ideas are too extreme" or some such liberal mantra.
The polling data say otherwise. Go to this page at RealClear Politics and you will see that only Romney polls better against Obama than Paul.
This is not just biased journalism; it's bad journalism. The five candidates cited by Silver vary little in their beliefs. The reader learns nothing from assessing the prospects of five virtual clones.
Put Paul in there and some real differences might emerge. I'd expect he polls much better among the young, for example, and that's a key demographic the Republicans have to penetrate if they expect to have a future as a national party.
In the article that accompanies the poll, we learn more about Silver's reasons for picking those five.
Amazingly, when you get to Page 3 of the online version, you'll see he links to the exact same RealClear politics page to which I linked above. That's the one that shows Paul running second to only Romney in a potential race against Obama.
He notes how Romney fares but completely ignores the fact that Paul is running ahead of all of the candidates on which he focuses his piece.
On the following page, Silver then says something I agree with. Paul is the most conservative candidate in the race by a long shot. Silver's analysis of voting records and other data show Paul scoring an amazing 96 points on a 100-point scale of conservative values. Romney scores 49 and Hunstman is the most liberal at 40.
So Silver got that right. Paul is indeed the most conservative by any measure of conservative values.
But again that's even more evidence Paul should be among the five candidates considered. He included Huntsman, who barely registered in the polls, because he wanted to show how the most liberal candidate would fare against Obama. Yet he excludes the most conservative candidate in the field, even though he runs high in the polls. It's as if he wants to avoid dealing with the question of how a true conservative would fare against Obama.
And the answer is: Quite well compared to any of the more liberal candidates except Romney.
To sum it up, this is just further evidence of why liberals should not be analyzing races among conservatives.Miyajima (or Itsukushima) is an island that is considered sacred and pure in the Shinto religion. The strict rules applied to the island to maintain its purity throughout history have also preserved its wealth of native plants and animals. Miyajima's Itsukushima Shrine, which was built to worship the island, is known worldwide for their beauty. The view of the shrine with its vermillion gate in front and Mt. Misen towering behind is considered one of Japan's three best views.
Miyajima must be the most photographed spot in Hiroshima Prefecture. Ferries leaving from directly across the water at Miyajimaguchi and other ports carry over 3 million passengers per year. It makes a great day trip from Hiroshima City.
Tourism
Itsukushima Shrine The shrine was first established in 593 and was built by Saeki Kuramoto. Built to worship the island as a goddess, the temple quickly became known through out Japan. Its first known written record from 881 includes it among other famous Japanese shrines. The precursor to the current Itsukushima Shrine and its gate were built in 1168 with funds from the governor of Aki Province, Kiyomori Taira, and his clan. Changes to the shrine's layout occurred after fires in 1207, 1223 and a typhoon in 1325. After this time, the shrine is thought to have retained the same basic layout but its influence waned and it fell into ruin. In 1555, the battle of Itsukushima occurred and the victorious Mori Motonari set out to restore the shrine to its former glory and did so in 1571. The current gate was built in 1875. Building the shrine on piers in the harbor allowed commoners to approach through the gates and worship close to the sacred island without actually setting foot on it. At high tide, water rises almost to the shrine's deck and it appears to float on the water. When the tide is out, it looks more like it's about to drop into the mud. For the best experience and photos, be sure to check when high tide occurs so you can arrive during high tide. Various charms for things like good grades, safe driving and health can be bought at the shrine. You can also try your luck and buy a Omikuji or personal fortune paper. Itsukushima Shrine and the surrounding forest of Mount Misen was declared an UNESCO World Heritage Site on December 7, 1996. Miyajima Public Aquarium The Miyajima Public Aquarium has around 13,000 sea animals (350 different species). Amongst the aquariums in Japan, that ends up being fairly small. Adult admission is 1,400 yen. Mount Misen Mount Misen is located behind Itsukushima Shrine on Miyajima. It rises majestically from the shrine at sea level to 529.8 meters. Its interesting geology, virgin forests and unique wildlife make it popular hiking destination. You can also cheat and take the ropeway to a peak near the summit from the town. There is a fairly decent restaurant at the ropeway station where you can enjoy a meal while looking out at the Seto Inland Sea. It takes about 15 minutes to hike from the ropeway station and over 90 minutes to hike from the town to the summit of Mount Misen.
Accommodation and Food
Accommodation and food on Miyajima are generally more expensive than off-island. If you stay on the island overnight, you can enjoy the sights without the crowds of people. Depending on your disposition, the premium charged may not be worth it. The island can easily be toured in 4 hours and explored fully in a day. Those on a budget can stay in Miyajimaguchi or elsewhere off the island.
The owners of vending machines in prime spots (like closest to the Mount Misen trail heads) have been known to inflate their prices.
The Town of Miyajima
Miyajima (宮島町 - Miyajima-cho) is the only village on the island (Itsukushima-cho until Nov. 3, 1950). The town amalgamated with Hatsukaichi City in 2005. In that year, it was home to just 1,942 people.
There are strict development rules on the island in order to maintain the character of it. The town built up many unique customs because of its position on a holy island. Some of the rules are still loosely adhered to. For example, there is not a single grave. There are also no maternity services.
The Rules of Itsukushima
The island has been considered by Shintoists as holy since before recorded time. For most of that time, it was considered too holy to even step upon for fear they would defile the island. Obviously, the situation has changed a bit as hordes of day tripping tourists descend on Itsukushima everyday. During the Kamakura period, the absolute prohibition was broken by priests that began to live on the island. Still, the fear that blood or death would defile the island continued to modern times and this led to some interesting customs.
Hide your period Women having their period were expected to seclude themselves in a hut. No giving birth Mothers close to the due date were taken off the island. After a cleansing period of 100 days, the mother was permitted to return. No dying If you should be unfortunate enough to kick the bucket on the island, you will be quickly ferried off to Miyajimaguchi. No mourning Relatives of a deceased individual left for Miyajimaguchi and were unable to return until mourning was completed. No cultivating crops The use of farming equipment to sully the soil (the body of the goddess) was prohibited. As a result, the town of Hatsukaichi became the marketplace for the island. No weaving This was a taboo. It was considered a symbol of women's work. Doing women's work in the presence of a goddess was considered a problem.
Until the second world war, many of these customs continued to be kept.
Miyajima or Itsukushima
The island has, confusingly, two names that are widely used. Itsukushima (厳島) is the official name. Miyajima (宮島) is a contraction of "The palace (miya) having island (jima)". The palace in the phrase (お宮のある島) is the shrine. Miyajima began to be used in the Edo period. The popularity of Miyajima appears to be driven primarily because, even for Japanese people, it is simpler to say and write. So, tourism materials usually use Miyajima. An exception is sometimes made to emphasize the island's distinguished status and historical significance. Scientific or administrative papers shun the mass-market name and use Itsukushima.
Adding island to the name is acceptable in English, but sounds redundant to native speakers. Shima or Jima means island.
Annual Festivals and Events
Miyajima Oyster Festival - Second Saturday and Sunday in February Locally farmed oysters are served. The best part? They're free!
- Second Saturday and Sunday in February Hiwatari-Shinji - April 15 Famous firewalking ceremony for junrei (pilgrims) held at the Diasho-in Temple.
- April 15 Jin-Noh - April 16 - 18 Jin-Noh (sacred Noh) at Miyajima has been performed since 1568. Part of the Peach Blossom Festival.
- April 16 - 18 Kangensai - mid June (By lunar calendar; August 1, 2015) Highly decorated boats carry orchestras playing old Japanese court music in Miyajima's largest festival.
- mid June (By lunar calendar; August 1, 2015) Fireworks Display - August 11, 2015 The largest fireworks display in western Japan is launched in front of Itsukushima Shrine.
- August 11, 2015 Hiwatari-Shinji - November 15
- November 15 Chinkasai - December 31 Large pine wood bundles are set alight as part of a festival to welcome the new year.
- December 31
Full Screen Matthew Bystedt
Getting there
There is a regular ferry service from Miyajimaguchi and from Hiroshima's Ujina Port. The JR service from Miyajimaguchi (360 yen return) takes under 15 minutes to get there and there are several sailings an hour during peak daytime hours. You can reach Miyajimaguchi by train on JR's trains or the Hiroden's city trams. Direct direct high speed sailings from Hiroshima (Ujina Port) cost 1,850 yen.a lot of prescriptive linguists (the fancy term for snotty english majors, faux-talgic baby boomers, racist gatekeepers, and other subdivisions of the language police) like to shame The Youth for lazy capitalization and punctuation, but the interesting thing is that most young ppl i know who build their lives around texting are actually pretty damn deliberate about their language choices
“u” and “you” show degrees of closeness w/ your partner; using punctuation at the end of a reply text indicates tone; capitalizing certain words in the middle of the sentence is for Emphasis; sometimes we’re sloppy and sometimes we make mistakes but there is a real grammar to internet communication because by “grammar” i mean a “code of language rules that society agrees upon in order to create meaning”, and that is the opposite of being lazy
(tumblr absolutely has such a grammar and you can tell when someone’s not fluent)
the old guard is passionately defending a pure linguistic territory that we don’t want anymore, it’s not useful enough for 21st century relationships dependent on the subtleties of textsSome fantastic news today folks as Reinhard Pollice from Nordic Games has let it slip that Darksiders 2 will join Darksiders in gaining a Linux version!
Quote Last year we explored who Nordic Games was following its $4.9 million acquisition of THQ assets during the company's liquidation auction; this year we wanted to know where it was going with all that loot. Regarding former THQ properties, the company is currently producing Darksiders for Linux and Mac, with plans to release Darksiders 2 on the platforms in the future.
Source
While it doesn't include a direct quote about Darksiders 2 in the above sourced article it is backed up by the developer porting Darksiders who tweeted it out:
Official Trailer
About Darksiders 2
Awakened by the End of Days, Death, the most feared of the legendary Four Horsemen, embarks upon a quest to restore mankind, and redeem his brother’s name. Along the way, the Horseman discovers that there are far worse things than an earthly Apocalypse, and that an ancient grudge may threaten all of Creation...
What do you make to this news? Looks like Nordic really do love Linux!
Also when asking when Darksiders will come to Linux the developer replied with:
@gamingonlinux Can't talk specific dates, but really, really soon! — Leszek Godlewski (@TheIneQuation) August 14, 2014
Get your wallets ready Linux gamers.Advertisement
Hidden deep inside the Indonesian jungle lies an enchanted 'church' which looks like a giant chicken.
The long-abandoned structure known locally as Gereja Ayam - or Chicken Church - attracts hundreds of curious travelers and photographers to the hills of Magelang, Central Java, every year.
But according to the its eccentric creator, the majestic building is neither a chicken nor a church.
Daniel Alamsjah was working in Jakarta - 342 miles away - when he suddenly got a divine message from God to build a 'prayer house' in the form of a dove.
Scroll down for video
Majestic: The giant building known locally as Gereja Ayam - or Chicken Church - stands over the trees in a densely wooded area in Indonesia
Epiphany: Daniel Alamsjah was working in Jakarta - 342 miles away from where the prayer house stands - when he suddenly got a divine message from God to build a 'prayer house' in the form of a dove (pictured)
Magical: Now hundreds of travelers, tourists and worshipers visit the abandoned and unfinished building (pictured) every year
Hazard: Visitors need to take caution once they are inside because the long-abandoned building is very unstable
Therapy: Underneath the giant Chicken Church are 12 unfinished chambers which have been used as secluded rooms to rehabilitate 'children and drug addicts'
Comfortable: One traveler described how there are as many as 15 rooms inside the crumbling prayer house and some of them even have beds
'Perhaps because of my Christian faith, people thought I was building a church. But it’s not a church. I was building a prayer house... a place for people who believe in God,' the 67-year-old told Jakarta Globe.
In 1989, he was walking through the Magelang, where his wife's family live, when he caught sight of the exact same landscape he had seen in his dreams.
'I prayed all night there and I got a revelation that I must build the prayer house in that spot,' he said.
One year later, local land owners offered him the 3,000 square metres of land on Rhema Hill for just two million rupees - or £110 - which he paid off over four years.
Now people of many different religions - including Buddhists, Muslims and Christians - travel to the remote 'prayer house' to worship in their own way.
Colourful: The light dances off the side of the giant Chicken Church, which was built in the 1990s on the hills of Magelang, Central Java
Worship: On the upper floor of the church is an eerie and dark room (pictured) that was once used as the prayer room
Vandalised: On the walls inside, youngsters have graffittid 'bad words' or drawn pictures of 'naked women'
One of the several rumours surrounding the mystical building was that it was used as a rehabilitation centre. Alamsjah confirmed this to be true, saying: 'The rehabilitation that happened at this prayer house was for therapy for disabled children, drug addicts, crazy people and disturbed youth who wanted to fight.'
The prayer house shut its doors in 2000 because the construction costs were too high, but many continue to visit the beautiful site in Indonesia.
The head of the nearby Dese Gombong village was one of the 30 locals who helped Alamsjah build the prayer house. Today, Wasno is one of the people who directly benefits from tourists' curiosity about the famous Chicken Church.
He allows visitors to park outside his house - which is located at the bottom of the hill - for around 9p a day.
Through the magic of social media, Gereja Ayam has become a hotspot for travel bloggers like Putri Normalita who capture beautiful images of the other-worldly building and share them online.
She says: 'There is very little history about the building, still a lot of tourists want to visit it and even have their weddings there. Perhaps it's precisely because of the mystery that lots of people want to come see it first hand.
Old: A travel blogger who visited the church say some of the pillars (pictured) holding up the church are either crumbling or broken
Tourism: Around 30 local villages helped Alamsjah build the Chicken Church (pictured) and they now benefit from the increased tourism it has created
Naughty: Putri Normalita, the travel blogger who took these beautiful images, suggests the building hidden inside the dense woodland has become a hotspot for couples to commit 'immoral acts' away from prying eyes
Bargain: Alamsjah bought the 3,000 square metres of land where the church is built for two million rupees - or £110 - which he paid off over four years
'There are many names for this building, for example: Church Chicken, Bird Church, Church Dove, Pigeon Hill and many other names.
Putri also hints that it has become a safe haven for couples from the nearby villages of Flower Limus and Krangrejo to commit 'immoral acts' away from prying eyes.
Another traveler describes how five of the eight pillars holding the building up are now crumbling. Alek Kurniawan said: 'This is most strange, it turns out this rooms are terraced. The upstairs room was used as a church hall.
'While in the basement, there are rooms such as bedrooms and bathrooms. The rooms had no light so we used a flashlight to search for it. There are also bats that might be living there.If everything goes to plan, David Price's tenure in Detroit may be shorter than we thought. BYB has learned through a source that the Tigers "may be shopping David Price" to other teams this offseason. A potential deal, in theory, would clear up room for the Tigers to sign Max Scherzer to a long-term contract.
A Scherzer deal seemed like a longshot at the beginning of the offseason considering he and the Tigers were unable to work out a contract extension last February. However, both our source and Tony Paul of the Detroit News have hinted that negotiations are ongoing.
@DarkoStateNews I didn't, until three days ago. Now I think they might actually be -- gulp -- the favorite. — Tony Paul (@TonyPaul1984) November 18, 2014
What does all of this mean? Not much, at the moment. Dave Dombrowski said at Friday's press conference that the Tigers did not expect to be in the running for Scherzer. The Tigers were likely listening to any offers for Price anyway, and tossing his name around to other GMs could potentially land a return that shores up the roster for years to come. Dave Dombrowski has made similar deals in the past to clear payroll and reshuffle the roster.
But it's something. It tells us that the Tigers are not standing pat. Agent Scott Boras, who represents Scherzer and many other big-time clients, is under the impression that the Tigers are still in the mix.
"I’ve never heard anything from anyone to suggest they’re not," Boras said. "You have to remember that over the past 3-4 years, when you go back and look at the Detroit Tigers, as good as they are with all the offensive weaponry and pitching they have, when Max Scherzer pitches, they win 70% of their games. In all other games, the Tigers play at about 54%. So Max Scherzer has a huge impact on the success of the Detroit Tigers."
If the right deal comes along on either front, the Tigers won't hesitate to pull the trigger. Dombrowski has earned this reputation throughout his career, particularly when dealing fan favorites like Curtis Granderson, Doug Fister, and Austin Jackson. Just about no one is untouchable, and that includes their star left-hander.LW TW Platform Weekly Sales Last Week 1 1 3DS 70,159 58,837 2 2 PS3 39,452 36,061 3 3 PSP 28,548 25,129 4 4 Wii 14,034 15,406 5 5 DS 5,428 5,181 7 6 360 3,897 1,295 6 7 PS2 1,517 1,317
LW TW Platform Weekly Sales Last Week 1 1 3DS 70,159 58,837 2 2 PS3 39,452 36,061 3 3 PSP 28,533 25,122 4 4 Wii 14,034 15,406 8 5 360 3,897 1,295 5 6 DSi LL 2,991 2,869 6 7 DSi 2,351 2,234 7 8 PS2 1,517 1,317 9 9 DS Lite 86 78 10 10 PSP Go 15 7
The Nintendo 3DS once again topped the weekly Japanese hardware charts last week, outselling the PlayStation 3 and the PSP combined.For the week ended September 25, data from tracking firm Media Create, and as reported by NeoGAF, shows that the 3DS sold a total of 70,159 units, up more than 10,000 compared to the previous week.Sales of both the PlayStation 3 and the PSP were up around 3,000 each, while sales of the Nintendo Wii declined to 14,034, down over 1,000 week-on-week.The Xbox 360 saw a surge in sales, up to 3,897 sales compared to the previous week's 1,295 -- no doubt due to the release ofElsewhere, the DSi LL, DSi and PS2 saw little change in sales figures compared to the previous week. The PSP Go continued to hold on for dear life, with a total of 15 sales for the entire week.Below are the full sales rankings from Media Create for the week ended September 25, 2011. (The second chart lumps together sales of all models in a given line of hardware.)Washington (CNN) Russian President Vladimir Putin is turning to an old enemy -- the Taliban -- to share intelligence as the number of ISIS fighters grow in regional neighbor Afghanistan.
Russian Foreign Ministry spokeswoman Maria Zakharova said the contact between Moscow and the Afghan Taliban only involves intelligence-sharing and information exchange regarding the fight against ISIS.
Why would Putin put himself in a risky spot by working with the Taliban? He's aligning himself with the enemy of his enemy.
A U.S. commander last month told Congress that ISIS has gained strength in Afghanistan in recent months, with as many as 3,000 fighters there.
Putin has long worried about thousands of jihadists from Russia's Caucasus region and the former Soviet republics going to fight with ISIS in Syria.
He may be trying to cut off the pipeline of fighters closer to home, in Afghanistan, one expert told CNN.
JUST WATCHED Analyst: Afghan forces can't match Taliban tactics Replay More Videos... MUST WATCH Analyst: Afghan forces can't match Taliban tactics 03:40
"The ties between ISIS and the insurgency in the north Caucasus, the fact that there are people from the north Caucasus fighting in Syria -- maybe not as many as the Russian government says, but certainly a good number, including in leadership roles -- means that Russia does see ISIS and a lot of the other Islamist groups as a particular threat, in a way that maybe the Taliban isn't," said Olga Oliker of the Center for Strategic and International Studies in Washington. "So the Russians may think they (the Taliban) are the lesser of the available evils."
Lt. Gen. Mark Hertling, a CNN military analyst, said a map shows the situation, with Afghanistan bordered on the north by former Soviet republics Turkmenistan, Uzbekistan and Tajikistan and Kazakhstan between those nations and Russia.
"Russia and Mr. Putin are very concerned about the passage of terrorists, insurgents, Islamists between those borders," Hertling said.
Working with the Taliban presents some risk for Putin, who has been boldly extending his reach with aggressive moves in Syria, Ukraine and with North Korea.
For their part, the Taliban issued a statement Friday denying any contact with the Russian government. The Taliban denied needing any help in the fight against ISIS but maintained they had the right to request assistance from other nations.
Analysts said Putin's moves are all about projecting relevance and strength.
JUST WATCHED The state of the Taliban in Afghanistan Replay More Videos... MUST WATCH The state of the Taliban in Afghanistan 01:31
"He wants to go back to the 1970s, when the Soviet Union and the United States were equals as geopolitical leaders, as Cold War rivals, but they still sat down and they did deals," said Matthew Rojansky of the Woodrow Wilson Center
Former CIA counterterrorism official Philip Mudd concurs, calling Putin's a "pretty serious power grab." Putin is seeking to enhance his relationships with those former Soviet republics.
"What Putin is doing now is telling those states, 'I will work with the Taliban to ensure that we have an agreement to collect intelligence about ISIS before they come across the border,' " Mudd said. " 'When I collect that intelligence, I will pass it back to you.' This is as much about restoring those relationships and trust with the central Asian republics and competing with the United States as it is about countering ISIS in Afghanistan."
The emergence of ISIS in Afghanistan is another major worry -- not only to Russia but also to the United States. Much of the violence in the country wracked by war and an insurgency has involved the Taliban. But al Qaeda -- which, led by the late Osama bin Laden, called Afghanistan home before the September 11, 2001, terrorist attacks -- continues to be a threat.
JUST WATCHED Our World in 2015: The role of Russia Replay More Videos... MUST WATCH Our World in 2015: The role of Russia 02:53
A U.S. State Department official told CNN when asked for comment on the Russian-Taliban agreement: "Russia and other regional actors all have a shared interest in supporting the continued security and increased stability of Afghanistan. We hope that we can continue to find ways to work with Russia to promote Afghanistan's security and stability."
Another U.S. official told CNN that Washington doesn't see this action as undermining the stability it is working with the Afghan government to achieve. But what would be destabilizing, the official said, is any contact with the Taliban that would legitimize the group with international recognition.
Moscow addressed Russian media reports about Russia supplying weapons to fighters in Afghanistan.
The only weapons that would be transferred on a commercial basis would go directly to the Afghan government and would not involve the Taliban because of sanctions against the group, said Zakharova, the Russian Foreign Ministry spokeswoman. Russia "strictly follows the sanctions regime against the Taliban," she said.On a sweltering May afternoon this year, Francesco’s Pizzeria, a Mumbai-based pizza outlet, used an unmanned drone to deliver pizza to a flat in a high-rise apartment in Worli, central Mumbai. Twelve days later, the Mumbai police wrote to the outlet demanding an explanation for why they hadn’t taken prior police permission. The police also wrote to the Air Traffic Control at the Mumbai International Airport asking whether the pizza outlet had sought permission to conduct the experiment.
The Mumbai police’s wariness had its roots in earlier reports, that aerial attacks on Indian cities were being planned. According to a story in The Hindu, Zabiuddin Ansari, also known as Abu Jundal, one of the alleged handlers in the 26/11 terror attack case, had told investigators that “Pakistan was planning an aerial attack on the city and had trained paragliders, after which [the] Mumbai police had tightened its rules, even requesting building societies to not allow access to strangers to the terraces of the buildings.”
Despite these concerns, drones or Unmanned Aerial Vehicles (UAVs) have caught the fancy of enthusiasts and entrepreneurs, who foresee great potential in their use in all kinds of businesses. Anam Aggarwal, the CEO of Funaster, a Delhi-based company that sells drones, told me that earlier, drones cost between five and seven lakh rupees for even the basic models, which discouraged people from buying them. Over the past two years, however, prices have fallen to between one and two lakh rupees for some advanced drones.
“ |
by PayScale in 2011, Duke alumni rank seventh in mid-career median salary among all U.S. colleges and universities.[250] A number of alumni have made significant contributions in the fields of government, law, science, academia, business, arts, journalism, and athletics, among others.
Government [ edit ]
Richard Nixon, 37th President of the United States graduated with a law degree in 1937.[251] Former U.S. Senator and Secretary of Transportation Elizabeth Dole,[252] 33rd President of Chile Ricardo Lagos,[253] former U.S. Secretary of Commerce Juanita M. Kreps,[254] congressman and three-time presidential candidate Ron Paul,[255] U.S. Secretary of Veterans Affairs and former Chief of Staff of the United States Army Eric Shinseki,[256] and the first United States Chief Performance Officer Jeffrey Zients[257] and Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff Martin Dempsey are among the most notable alumni with involvement in politics and government. Sheikha Al-Mayassa bint Hamad bin Khalifa Al-Thani Chairperson of Qatar Museum Authority.[258] Kevin Martin was Chairman of the FCC.[259] Rex Adams serves as the Chairman of PBS.[260]
Academia and research [ edit ]
Duke graduates who have won the Nobel Prize in Physics include Hans Dehmelt for his development of the ion trap technique,[261] Robert Richardson for his discovery of superfluidity in helium-3,[262] and Charles Townes for his work on quantum electronics.[263] Other alumni in research and academia include Turing Award winners Fred Brooks,[264] Edmund M. Clarke[265] and John Cocke,[266] Templeton Prize winning physicist and religion scholar Ian Barbour,[267] MacArthur Award recipient Paul Farmer,[268] and former Dean of the Graduate School at Princeton Theodore Ziolkowski.[269] Duke professor Robert J. Lefkowitz shared the 2012 Nobel Prize in Chemistry and Ingrid Daubechies, currently a James B. Duke professor of mathematics, served as the first woman president of the International Mathematical Union and is known for pioneering work on Wavelets.
Journalism [ edit ]
Prominent journalists include talk show host Charlie Rose,[270] The Washington Post sports writer John Feinstein,[271] Chief Washington Correspondent for CNBC and The Wall Street Journal writer John Harwood,[272] CBS News President Sean McManus,[273] chief legal correspondent for Good Morning America Dan Abrams,[274][275] and CNN anchor and senior correspondent for The NewsHour with Jim Lehrer Judy Woodruff.[276] Basketball analysts and commentators include Jay Bilas,[277][278] Mike Gminski,[279] Jim Spanarkel,[280] and Jay Williams.[281] Magazine editors include Rik Kirkland of Fortune[282] and Clay Felker, founder of New York Magazine.[283]
Literature [ edit ]
In the area of literature, William Styron won the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction in 1968 for his novel The Confessions of Nat Turner and is well known for his 1979 novel Sophie's Choice.[284] Anne Tyler also received the Pulitzer Prize for her 1988 novel Breathing Lessons.[285] Additionally, Elizabeth A. Fenn won the Pulitzer Prize for History in 2015. Other acclaimed writers include John W. Campbell and Reynolds Price.
In the visual arts realm, Annabeth Gish[286] (actress in the X-Files and The West Wing), Ken Jeong[287] (actor in The Hangover and Community), Retta[288] (actress and comedian), Jared Harris (actor in Mad Men), Randall Wallace[289] (screenwriter, producer, and director, Braveheart, Pearl Harbor, We Were Soldiers), Mike Posner[290] (singer, songwriter, and producer, "Cooler Than Me", "Please Don't Go", "I Took A Pill in Ibiza"), David Hudgins[291] (television writer and producer, Everwood, Friday Night Lights) and Robert Yeoman (cinematographer, The Grand Budapest Hotel) headline the list.
Business [ edit ]
The current or recent president, CEO, or chairman of each of the following Fortune 500 companies is a Duke alumnus: Apple (Tim Cook),[292] Bear Stearns (Alan Schwartz), BB&T (John A. Allison IV),[293] Chesapeake Energy (Aubrey McClendon),[294] Cisco Systems (John Chambers), General Motors (Rick Wagoner),[295] Ingersoll Rand (Michael Lamach), JPMorgan Chase (Steven Black),[296] Kaplan (Andrew S. Rosen), Medtronic (William A. Hawkins),[297] Morgan Stanley and Credit Suisse First Boston (John J. Mack),[298] Norfolk Southern (David R. Goode),[299] Northwest Airlines (Gary L. Wilson),[300] Panda Restaurant Group (Tom Davin), PepsiCo (Karl von der Heyden),[301] Procter & Gamble (David S. Taylor),[302] Pfizer (Edmund T. Pratt, Jr.),[303] The Bank of New York Mellon (Gerald Hassell),[304] Wachovia (Robert K. Steel),[305] Volkswagen (Jonathan Browning).
Companies founded by Duke alumni include, the nation's wealthiest charitable foundation[306] at $31.9 billion:[307] Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation (Melinda Gates),[308] The Carlyle Group (David Rubenstein), Boston Scientific (Peter Nicholas),[309] The Pritzker Group, principal owner of Hyatt Hotels and TransUnion (J. B. Pritzker), PIMCO (William Gross), and 1-800-Flowers (Granville Semmes).
Recent notable startups founded by Duke alumni include Box (Dylan Smith), Yext (Howard Lerman), Mint (Aaron Patzer), Coinbase (Fred Ehrsam), Plaid (Zach Perret), Duolingo (Luis Von Ahn), Airtable (Howie Liu), Transcriptic and Neuralink (Max Hodak).
Athletics [ edit ]
Management and ownership of professional athletic franchises include Adam Silver (NBA commissioner), John P. Angelos[310] (Executive Vice President of the Baltimore Orioles), Aubrey McClendon[311] (former part owner of the Oklahoma City Thunder), John Canning, Jr.[312] (co-owner of Milwaukee Brewers), Danny Ferry[313] (former general manager of the Cleveland Cavaliers), Stephen Pagliuca[314] (co-owner of Boston Celtics), and Jeffrey Vinik[315] (owner of the Tampa Bay Lightning).
Several athletes have become stars at the professional level, especially in basketball's NBA. Art Heyman, Shane Battier, Corey Maggette, Elton Brand, Carlos Boozer, Luol Deng, Christian Laettner, Bobby Hurley, Grant Hill, Kyrie Irving and J. J. Redick are among the most famous.[316] Offensive linesman Lennie Friedman played for four National Football League teams, and Ed Newman was an All-Pro offensive lineman.[317][318]
Men's basketball coach Mike Krzyzewski led the US men's team to three gold medals[319] (2008, 2012, 2016), and Abigail Johnston won a silver medal in synchronized diving at the 2012 Olympic Games while an undergraduate at Duke and competed in the 2016 Olympic Games while attending Duke Medical School.[320]
See also [ edit ]Looking for news you can trust?
Subscribe to our free newsletters.
The Bush administration is pushing its bailout plan by claiming the only way to save the economy is by having the federal government buy $700 billion worth of bad paper from big financial firms that screwed up. Conservatives should hate this because it is a massive federal intervention in the market. Liberals should hate this because it’s a handout to the richest people and companies in America. But the Bush administration and Wall Street are insisting it’s the end of the world and this is the only choice. Well, is it this or nothing? Many on Capitol Hill—especially Democrats—are buying the general premise of the White House plan but insisting on lipstick-on-a-pig modifications involving CEO compensation, taxpayer protection, and oversight and transparency. But are there other approaches to the problem besides putting the Treasury in charge of a $700 billion fire sale? Yup. Here’s a quick roundup.
(1) The Planners: The Republican Study Committee, a group of some of the most conservative Republicans in Congress. The Plan: Two-year suspension of the capital gains and dividend taxes to “encourag[e] corporations to sell unwanted assets.” The Problem: It won’t work. Over at Time, Justin Fox says the RSC plan “seems to be a joke,” and explains that it would just make matters worse by actually discouraging banks from unloading bad mortgage-backed securities.
(2) The Planners: Eric Cantor (R-Va.) and some House Republicans. The Plan: Instead of having the Treasury buy mortgage-backed securities outright, insure them and charge premiums, paid to the government. The Problem: It almost certainly won’t work. Marc Ambinder has a great explanation of why, but a commenter at Time sums most of it up in a sentence: “Writing insurance requires either a long history of past events or, at a minimum, knowledge of present market prices.” There is neither a long history of past events nor a knowledge of present market prices in this case. In fact, as Ambinder points out, there’s not even a market for the products that would be insured. That’s the fundamental problem, and insuring them wouldn’t fix it.
(3) The Planner: Our own James K. Galbraith, an economist. The Plan: Prop up the FDIC. Eliminate the “pointless” $100,000 cap on deposit insurance, put a half-trillion dollars in the FDIC fund, give it extra funding for more employees, and keep another $200 billion in reserve. (There’s more in Jamie’s article, but the FDIC part is the heart of the plan.) The Problem: It may good policy, but so far, there are few takers in Washington. And there’s no major political constituency advocating for it in the way that Wall Street is calling for a buy-me-out bailout.
(4) The Planner: Senator Bernie Sanders (I-Ver.). The Plan: Make the rich pay for the bailout. Impose a temporary surtax on incomes over $1 million. Pass an economic recovery package that puts people back to work. Then re-regulate and break up any companies that are “too big to fail.” The Problem: See #3.
(5) The Planner: Hedge Fund Gazillionaire John Paulson. The Plan: Buy Wall Street. No, seriously: Paulson thinks taxpayers (or, more specifically, the Treasury) should buy huge amounts of senior preferred stock in banks. Kevin has more on this, which he points out essentially means nationalizing troubled banks. The Problem: This plan essentially means nationalizing troubled banks. Conservatives will be queasy about it; even Kevin Drum, a liberal, is queasy about it.
Have you come across any other alternative plans? Do you have any suggestions of your own? Leave them in the comments.Flowers grow in front of Swiss agrochemicals maker Syngenta's logo at the company's headquarters in Basel August 19, 2015. REUTERS/Arnd Wiegmann -
(Reuters) - The world's largest agrichemicals company, Syngenta AG (SYNN.VX), has rejected a $42 billion takeover offer by state-owned China National Chemical Corp, Bloomberg reported on Thursday, lifting Syngenta's shares.
Syngenta is under pressure to boost shareholder returns after turning down a $47 billion takeover offer from Monsanto Co (MON.N) this year. Its chief executive stepped down two months later.
Citing unidentified sources, Bloomberg said the Swiss-based company was still in talks with ChemChina as well as other suitors, and that a deal could be reached within weeks.(http://bloom.bg/1HL1GRF)
Syngenta's Swiss-listed shares opened more than 11 percent higher and were trading up 7.2 percent at 370.90 Swiss francs by 0521 ET on Friday on news of the takeover approach.
Bloomberg said Syngenta turned down the offer on regulatory concerns, without elaborating.
Asked about the report, a ChemChina spokeswoman said the company had nothing to announce. Syngenta declined to comment.
ChemChina has a 5 percent share of the global crop chemicals through its ownership of Israeli generic pesticides maker Adama. Syngenta's 19 percent market share would catapult it to the industry leader position.
Acquiring Syngenta would help ChemChina further its international expansion ambitions and help to enhance the technological know-how of China, industry experts said.
The company has a history of acquiring interests in Western specialty chemicals businesses.
These include Norwegian silicon business Elkem, French feed additives maker Adisseo, Australian plastics maker Qenos and most recently Italian tyremaker Pirelli.
"Future demand for pesticides globally will stay strong, particularly for a country like China, which is trying to boost grains production," Duan Yousheng, an analyst with China Pesticides Industry Association, said.
"Syngenta has sales channels in over 120 countries and it is a world leader in research, and pesticide sales volume. Only (a)state-owned firm is able to make such offer," he added.
ChemChina's initial offer valued the agricultural chemicals group at 449 Swiss francs per share, or 41.7 billion Swiss francs ($41.72 billion), according to Bloomberg.
Monsanto had proposed the same price in talks with Syngenta's management earlier this year but wanted to pay 55 percent of that in shares of the combined group.
Monsanto in August abandoned a revised cash-and-stock deal proposal that was worth 470 Swiss francs per share.
The value of the bid declined to 433 francs during August as Monsanto's stock price fell amid a slump in global commodity demand that is putting pressure on companies for more economies of scale. Before Friday, Syngenta shares were down more than 8 percent since Monsanto walked away in late August.
Syngenta spurned Monsanto's approaches as "significantly undervaluing the company".
Some shareholders have chided the Swiss group's management for its defensive stance and questioned the company's ability to improve its financial fortunes as demand for agricultural commodities remains weak.
To appease shareholders, Syngenta announced plans in September to buy back more than $2 billion of stock, funding the measure by selling its vegetable seeds business.
($1 = 1.0035 Swiss francs)
(Reporting by Ismail Shakil in BENGALURU; Colin Packham in SYDNEY and Niu Shuping in BEIJING, Ludwig Burger in Frankfurt; Editing by Miral Fahmy and Jane Merriman)As President Trump announced his plans for the U.S. to exit the Paris climate change accord, the Weather Channel used its website to prove what an extremely bad idea that is.
Weather.com is currently awash in stories detailing the effects of climate change on the planet. They’re appropriately apocalyptic. Headlines include “So What Happens to Earth Now?,” “Still Don’t Care? Proof You Should,” “…And More Proof,” “…And Even More Proof.”
It’s clear the site is calling out Trump and his supporters for the president’s long-standing claims climate change is a hoax — specifically perpetrated by the Chinese to put the U.S. at an economic disadvantage.
Also Read: 11 Times Fox News Hosts Criticized Donald Trump (Photos)
The Paris agreement seeks to engage countries around the world to reduce greenhouse gas emissions to try to reverse climate change. Its purpose is to reduce greenhouse gas emissions with the goal of keeping global temperatures from continuing to climb. Negotiated in 2015 and enacted in 2016, the agreement’s goal is long-term: to work to prevent global temperatures from rising to 2 degrees Celsius or more above the average seen during the pre-industrial age by 2100.
Also Read: All 18 Movies and Shows Steve Bannon Wrote, Directed or Produced (Photos)
The Associated Press reports pulling out of the agreement could mean an additional 3 billion tons of carbon added to the atmosphere each year.
The Weather Channel is trying desperately on its website to convince people in the U.S. that climate change should be taken seriously. One story focuses on the disappearing California coast line due to rising sea levels. Another details how a collapsing ice shelf in Antarctica is about to create an iceberg the size of Wales, U.K.
Other stories detail how climate change is killing the Pine Barrens of New Jersey, and how while the lobster population on the coast of Maine is currently booming, baby lobster populations are cratering.
Also Read: 12 Times Merriam-Webster Dictionary's Twitter Trolled Trump Team - With English (Photos)
During his announcement, Trump claimed the world was laughing at the U.S. for its involvement in the agreement. It should be noted that 195 countries are taking part in the Paris accord — including China, alleged environmental hoax perpetrator.South African Jazz legend Thandi Klaasen dies share this
-TheJuice
Cape Town - Nelson Mandela's favourite singer and legendary local Jazz icon, Thandi Klaasen, 86, has died.
The news was announced on Sunday morning on Twitter by Arts and Culture Minister Nathi Mthethwa.
He tweeted; "We are saddened to learn that Jazz Legend Thandi Klaasen has passed on. Our thoughts are with her daughter Lorraine, her loved ones, & fans.
He added; "uMama Thandi Klaasen will be remembered for her indomitable spirit, who succeeded against all odds....
"…and her silky smooth voice which serenaded audiences the world over. How much richer we are having heard her sing.
"How much she touched our spirits and made us complete beings in a world in which things were falling apart."
Lost her battle with pancreatic cancer
Klaasen’s daughter, Lorraine, earlier this week revealed on her personal Facebook page that her mother was fighting pancreatic cancer.
She thanked friends and fans for all the support that she and the family have received at this tough time.
Her legendary career
According to sahistory.org.za Thandi Klaasen, the daughter of a shoemaker and a domestic worker, grew up in the historical Sophiatown.
As a teenager, Thandi was attacked with acid, which resulted in a permanent scars on her face. She spent almost an entire year in hospital recovering. She refused to let the incident get her down and went on to become both a local and international icon.
"She earned respect as a singer and dancer in various churches around Sophiatown. Her musical career started in the mid-1950s when she used to perform for ten shillings.
"She then started performing with groups such as the Gaieties and the Harlem Swingsters, but her career took off when she performed with Dolly Rathebe, Miriam Makeba, Dorothy Masuku and Sophie Mgcina," SA History reports.
In the 1960s she starred in the internationally acclaimed musical, King Kong, by composer Todd Matshikiza, reports SouthAfrica.net.
She has received numerous awards including The Woman of Distinction Award received in Canada (1999) and more recently the Lifetime Achievement Award at the ceremony of 12th-MTN South African Music Awards.
Thandi ranks as a symbol that defines the golden age of music in South Africa.
WATCH: THANDI PERFORMS SOPHIATOWNThere were more people playing hockey in the United States than ever before during the 2013-14 season according to USA Hockey. The national governing body’s membership report released in early June indicates that 519,417 people registered as players last season, which bested the previous year’s total by more than 9,000 and the previous record set in 2011-12 by 7,000. It should go without saying that this is a spectacular sign for the direction of hockey in the United States.
USA Hockey enjoyed a 1.79 percent bump in membership from 2012-13, which helped offset a minimal decline in playing membership that season. Looking at the 10-year growth, USA Hockey has enjoyed a 16.6 percent bump from 2004-05.
The organization also reached record highs in total membership, which includes coaches and on-ice officials. USA Hockey now includes 598,841 Americans directly involved with hockey as players, coaches or officials, with an estimated 1 million-plus involved as volunteers, team managers and parents. That’s pretty good news for the game.
Coming up after the jump, a deeper dive into the 2013-14 numbers as well as a state-by-state breakdown of growth and where each state ranked in total membership last season.
Getting back to the year-to-year, which is where we’ll focus most of this post on, USA Hockey saw significant bumps in adult hockey membership, which has been the organization’s fastest-rising segment over the last decade. Those 19 and older registered in the United States increased by 6,909 players for a stunning 4.30 percent spike from 2012-13.
Perhaps even more encouraging, the 6 & Under age group grew by 4 percent also. There was a drop at the 7-8 age range, which is a disappointment as that is an area where USA Hockey is focusing its efforts on growth, but it was a rather small loss of 970 players. That very well could and should bounce back next year with the rising 6 & Under numbers.
The most pleasing numbers in my opinion come at the other youth levels. From ages 9-14, there was growth across the board. At the Squirt level (9-10), there was small growth at 1.29 percent. Pee Wees (11-12) grew by just 69 total players, but here’s the best number yet: the Bantam age level, which includes those at age 13-14 which is where you’ll commonly see a drop off, saw growth of 2.06 percent. The positive numbers may be low, but to have positive numbers at 11-14 at all is huge.
The recent changes body checking rules, which raised the age to 13-14 from 11-12, may already be paying dividends. The positive numbers best reflect retention more than growth as the larger numbers of kids playing hockey are staying with it longer. There were frequent losses at the 11-12 age group when body checking was previously introduced. That’s delayed two years now, meaning it very well may be helping keep players in the game longer. Based on a quick look, this 2.06 percent growth at the Bantam level is the best since at least 2008-09, but could go back even further. It is rare it stays in the black at all year-to-year.
The 13-14 ages is actually where most sports start seeing decline across the board as kids’ interests change into their adolescence. I have no way of knowing if this kind of growth is sustainable, but it’s extremely encouraging.
Another area that is definitely encouraging is the growth in female players nationwide. According to USA Hockey’s figures, 67,230 women and girls were playing hockey last season, which would appear to be an all-time high. That number is up by 2.33 percent from the previous season. This was an Olympic year, which almost always brings growth to women’s hockey and I’d venture a guess that it will be just a bit higher next year as well as more young girls sign up for their first season of hockey the year following the Olympics.
State-By-State Hockey Participation for 2013-14
******Each state listed in alphabetical order. Rank is where total membership ranks among 50 states plus the District of Columbia. Percentage of growth is relative to 2012-13 and listed in parenthesis next to total membership, which includes only players (does not include coaches or officials). It is also important to note that not every hockey player and league in the country are registered with USA Hockey, but most are. So these numbers are not all-encompassing, but the best representation we have.*******
Alabama
Total Players: 1,236 (+2.74%)
National Rank: 43
Alaska
Total Players: 8,469 (+0.17%)
National Rank: 17
Arizona
Total Players: 4,860 (+17.8%)
National Rank: 25
Notes: Arizona was one of the most pleasant surprises of the most recent season. The gains were made primarily through a boost in adult hockey registration, but most of the youth levels also saw some gains. With Coyotes ownership stabilized for the first time in some years, more focus could be brought to building a youth hockey base (or at least they should be doing that as an organization). If the team becomes competitive soon, this number could be headed up as enthusiasm for the local team often brings better numbers. Arizona is still chasing record highs it set for hockey participation in the early 2000s, but it’s as close as it’s ever been now.
Arkansas
Total Players: 359 (+13.2%)
National Rank: 49
California
Total Players: 25,288 (+4.8%)
National Rank: 7
Notes: California’s hockey participation is at its highest ever and climbing as it has for the last several years. Expect it to continue headed in this direction with the three California NHL teams among the best in the league. Think the Kings-Sharks and Kings-Ducks series this year will help? You bet. Two Cups in three years won’t help in one of the largest media markets in the country. California’s hockey growth is well out-pacing the national averages and has been for a few years now.
Colorado
Total Players: 13,570 (+1.86)
National Rank: 11
Notes: Colorado is rebounding after a surprise steep decline last year that appeared to be primarily out of the adult hockey numbers, which can be volatile in a fluctuating economy. The enthusiasm surrounding the Avalanche and strong infrastructure to help support growth should get things moving positively again in short order.
Connecticut
Total Players: 13,275 (-0.37%)
National Rank: 12
Delaware
Total Players: 915 (+0.2%)
National Rank: 46
Florida
Total Players: 11,982 (+0.4%)
National Rank: 14
Georgia
Total Player: 2,095 (-1.1%)
National Rank: 35
Notes: Since the Thrashers left Atlanta, Georgia hockey participation has been in slow decline and it is unlikely to see the trend stopping as a result.
Hawaii
Total Players: 19 (+58.3%)
National Rank: 51
Idaho
Total Players: 3,396 (+1.4%)
National Rank: 30
Illinois
Total Players: 29,977 (+8.4%)
National Rank: 6
Notes: It warms my heart to see my home state moving forward in such a meaningful way when it comes to hockey participation. Illinois is getting very close to overtaking Pennsylvania in the U.S. top five after a stunning 8.4 percent increase coming out of the Blackhawks’ second Stanley Cup. I have a theory that the Blackhawks second Cup will end up being the more impactful of the two in recent years as the first Cup hooked people, while the second one had more fans invested in it. Since 2008-09, Illinois has picked up more than 8,000 total players, which is pretty much unheard of for a state with an already large hockey population. That’s 36.6 percent growth in six years. Illinois should top 30,000 for the first time ever next year and I don’t know that it will slow down anytime soon if the economy’s recovery continues. Plans for new rinks are being made to help support this overwhelming and rapid growth. The most encouraging thing about Illinois’ growth is that it’s being driven at the youth level, which suggests this growth is more likely to be sustainable.
Indiana
Total Players: 5,922 (+2.1%)
National Rank: 23
Iowa
Total Players: 3,378 (+2.7%)
National Rank: 31
Kansas
Total Players: 1,648 (+4.7%)
National Rank: 38
Kentucky
Total Players: 1,625 (+1.3%)
National Rank: 39
Louisiana
Total Players: 425 (+4.4%)
National Rank: 48
Maine
Total Players: 6,526 (+10.9%)
National Rank: 20
Notes: A huge spike in adult hockey registration helped lead to such a large bump.
Maryland
Total Players: 9,122 (-0.4%)
National Rank: 16
Massachusetts
Total Players: 48,074 (+2.9%)
National Rank: 4
Notes: I believe this is a record high for Massachusetts, and the Bay State is as close as it’s been in years to New York for the No. 3 spot for hockey population. There was a boost in adult hockey, but also at the youth levels with multiple segments seeing increases. This is extremely encouraging for a state that had seen a slight decline last year.
Michigan
Total Players: 50,585 (-2.5%)
National Rank: 2
Notes: Not terribly long ago, Michigan was the No. 1 state in terms of USA Hockey membership, but over the last decade, it has been in a virtual free fall. Economic woes have taken their toll as has an increasing segment of youth hockey league breaking off from USA Hockey and going under the AAU instead. That may be skewing the numbers, but only slightly. With one of the more significant drops from year-to-year in 2013-14, this could be a continuing trend unfortunately.
Minnesota
Total Players: 54,507 (1%)
National Rank: 1
Notes: The State of Hockey is aptly named as its hockey playing population is the largest in the country. Additionally, Minnesota’s high school ranks are not affiliated with USA Hockey meaning some of those players aren’t registered, so that puts this number a little lower than the actual playing population. That said, to continually see growth year after year is a testament to the sports popularity in Minnesota.
Mississippi
Total Players: 223 (-10.8%)
National Rank: 50
Missouri
Total Players: 7,162 (-2.2%)
National Rank: 19
Montana
Total Players: 4,253 (+6.6%)
National Rank: 29
Nebraska
Total Players: 1,693 (+5.8%)
National Rank: 37
Nevada
Total Players: 1,244 (+1.1%)
National Rank: 42
New Hampshire
Total Players: 6,211 (-1.4%)
National Rank: 21
New Jersey
Total Players: 18,438 (+0.95%)
National Rank: 8
New Mexico
Total Players: 1,298 (1.4%)
National Rank: 41
New York
Total Players: 48,354 (-0.39%)
National Rank: 3
Notes: After a minimal, almost negligible loss from 2012-13 in players, I’d expect a rather large bounce-back in 2014-15 for New York. With the Rangers’ deep run to the Stanley Cup Final, high TV ratings locally and a potential landmark hockey facility (HARBORCenter) in Buffalo opening next year, the best is yet to come. And in three years when the Kingsbridge rink in New York City opens up, there will be even more infrastructure support for a huge boom in the Empire State.
North Carolina
Total Players: 6,180 (-0.46)
National Rank: 22
North Dakota
Total Players: 5,5387 (5.1%)
National Rank: 24
Ohio
Total Players: 14,387 (-0.29%)
National Rank: 10
Notes: With the Blue Jackets making only their second appearance in the playoffs and including a couple of budding league stars, there could be a boost after a minimal decline last season. Ohio is underrated for its general affinity for hockey. It’s bigger there than people think and it is one of the few states includes every level of the sport right it from NHL to AHL to NCAA to junior to high-level youth hockey.
Oklahoma
Total Players: 738 (-32.2%)
National Rank: 47
Notes: This was a bit disappointing to see as Oklahoma hasn’t been under 1,000 players in some time. I was wondering if the Oklahoma City Oil Barons would have much impact on growth in the state, but as this shows, the answer is no. OKC is near the bottom in attendance in the AHL as well.
Oregon
Total Players: 2,148 (+60.2%)
National Rank: 34
Notes: I think part of Oregon’s rapid growth is aided by adult leagues coming under USA Hockey registration that were not previously, skewing the numbers. That said, youth hockey is also up across the board. I think the WHL’s Portland Winterhawks and their recent stretch of excellent teams and ability to connect the greater Portland area to hockey has really made an impact here in some meaningful ways.
Pennsylvania
Total Players: 30,529 (+0.7%)
National Rank: 5
Notes: USA Hockey breaks Pennsylvania into two states when it counts their numbers as half the state is in one district and the other half in a different one. Eastern PA actually saw growth last year, while Western PA saw a drop (I believe) for the first time since Sidney Crosby arrived in Pittsburgh. It was minimal, but it goes against the previous trend. Either way, the minimal drop in WPA was offset by the slight growth in EPA and keeps Pennsylvania as a whole ahead of Illinois by 552 players.
Rhode Island
Total Players: 4,621 (-2.6%)
National Rank: 27
South Carolina
Total Players: 1,619 (11.4%)
National Rank: 40
South Dakota
Total Players: 2,788 (+4.7%)
National Rank: 33
Tennessee
Total Players: 2,938 (+0.68%)
National Rank: 32
Texas
Total Players: 12,909 (+8.8%)
National Rank: 13
Notes: Texas’ growth is driven by the adult ranks with many northern transplants, but the youth hockey is looking solid as well. In fact, there was huge growth at the youngest levels of youth hockey this past year and with the Stars looking like a playoff contender with some exciting talent, that trend should continue. This was a record year for participation this year in the Lone Star State.
Utah
Total Players: 4,421 (-0.8%)
National Rank: 28
Vermont
Total Players: 4,756 (-2.1%)
National Rank: 26
Virginia
Total Players: 9,351 (+2.2%)
National Rank: 15
Notes: Virginia hit another record high as its rapid growth trend continues in the wake of Alexander Ovechkin’s arrival with the Washington Capitals. The state has experience better than 60 percent growth over the last six years as Ovechkin continues piling up goals.
Washington
Total Players: 8,369 (+5.7%)
National Rank: 18
Note: If the NHL ever does drop a team in Seattle, I think there will be more than enough interest to support it. I don’t have much of a theory on how this is happening, but Washington state has been trending up in hockey participation for years now. Four WHL teams and a strong NAHL club definitely have to be helping in some ways here.
Washington, D.C.
Total Players: 1,113 (+11.3%)
National Rank: 45
Notes: SEE: Ovechkin, Alexander. Twelve years ago there was 150 players in the District.
West Virginia
Total Players: 1,147 (-0.17%)
National Rank: 44
Wisconsin
Total Players: 17,762 (+1.2%)
National Rank: 9
Notes: Wisconsin has the highest hockey-playing population of any state without an NHL team.
Wyoming
Total Players: 1,925 (-2.7%)
National Rank: 36
Other Notes
– Only 16 states saw a decline in hockey participation last season, with seven of those seeing a decline of 1 percent or less. Oklahoma had the greatest percentage of decline (-32.2%), while Michigan lost the most players in total (1,344).
– Seven states had double-digit percentage of increase led by Oregon (60.2%). The state of Illinois gained the most total players (2,339).
– The following states out-paced average national growth percentages this year (listed from lowest to highest): Colorado, Indiana, Virginia, Iowa, Alabama, Massachusetts, Louisiana, South Dakota, Kansas, California, North Dakota, Washington, Nebraska, Montana, Illinois, Texas, Maine, Washington, D.C., South Carolina, Arkansas, Arizona, Hawaii and Oregon.
All numbers via USA Hockey’s annual membership report. Archives of each annual report can be found here. For a look at last year’s detailed review of hockey participation growth over between 2003-2013, click here.These days, with broadband connections the norm, we don't need to worry as much about internet speeds or the filesize of our pages. However, that's not to say that we still shouldn't do so. If you wish to reduce the load times on your server, decrease the number of HTTP requests, and go that extra bit for your visitors, there are a few techniques that you can use. This tutorial covers a number of PHP tricks, including caching and compression.
1. CSS Amalgamation with PHP
As web developers, we often split up our CSS between several separate files to keep a logical separation and to make modifications easier. However, this increases the number of requests to the server, resulting in a slower page load. Using some PHP we can have the best of both worlds; keeping multiple files on our end, and using one request to retrieve all of them.
Preparation
Before we can optimize CSS files, we will need some CSS to work with! So let's make three files and put some CSS in them.
The PHP
We need to get the contents of these files and append them to each other in a specified order. So our script has to receive the names of the CSS files via URL parameters, open all the files and put them together. An explanation of the code follows.
Breaking it Down
It looks quite complicated, but stick with me, it's really pretty simple.
This chunk of code sets the path for the CSS folder and checks that we have been sent some files to work with. The CSS path needs to have trailing slashes otherwise we will find ourselves with bucket-loads of errors. If we wanted, we could check automatically for a slash and add it if required. However, for the sake of simplicity I omitted that behavior.
Next we check each filename and remove any full stops and/or |
BUSINESS & LABOR?
Would favor the pro-business positions of the U.S. Chamber of Commerce and similar groups.
Would favor the pro-labor positions of the AFL-CIO and similar groups.
Neither What priority do you place on your selection above?
Low High
12. What would be your ideal candidate's position on ABORTION?
Would support the pro-choice positions of organizations like NARAL.
Would support the pro-life positions of organizations like National Right to Life Committee.
Neither What priority do you place on your selection above?
Low High
13. What would be your ideal candidate's position on CAPITAL PUNISHMENT?
Would support the death penalty.
Would oppose the death penalty.
Neither What priority do you place on your selection above?
Low High
14. What would be your ideal candidate's position on MARIJUANA laws?
Would not advocate any sort of legalization of marijuana.
Would support legalization for doctor prescribed medical use of marijuana.
Would support a general decriminalization of marijuana. What priority do you place on your selection above?
Low High
15. What would be your ideal candidate's position on GUN CONTROL?
Would support gun control legislation recommended by groups such as the Brady Campaign to Prevent Gun Violence
Would oppose gun control legislation. Supports positions of groups such as the NRA and the Gun Owners of America.
Neither What priority do you place on your selection above?
Low High
16. What would be your ideal candidate's position on the MINIMUM WAGE?
Would have a history of supporting increases in the minimum wage.
Would have a history of opposing increases in the minimum wage.
Neither What priority do you place on your selection above?
Low High
17. What would be your ideal candidate's position on HEALTH CARE?
Would oppose a government-provided, universal health care program for Americans.
Would favor a government-provided, universal health care program for Americans.
Neither What priority do you place on your selection above?
Low High
18. What would be your ideal candidate's position on PRESCRIPTION DRUGS?
Would favor allowing citizens to purchase drugs from Canada and elsewhere abroad.
Would favor the federal government negotiating with drug manufacturers to get the best possible price.
Both the above.
None of the above. What priority do you place on your selection above?
Low High
19. What would be your ideal candidate's position on ENVIRONMENTAL ISSUES?
Would favor positions of environmental groups like the League of Conservation Voters.
Would oppose positions of environmental groups like the League of Conservation Voters.
Neither What priority do you place on your selection above?
Low High
20. What would be your ideal candidate's position on LEGAL IMMIGRATION?
Would support the interests of groups such as the Federation for American Immigration Reform which seeks to reduce legal immigration levels.
Would favor a more open immigration policy, holding the opinion that foreign workers are a valuable and necessary addition to our labor pool.
Neither What priority do you place on your selection above?
Low High
21. What would be your ideal candidate's position on ILLEGAL IMMIGRATION?
Would support both amnesty/permanent legalization AND temporary legalization (guest worker programs) for illegal aliens
Would oppose both amnesty/permanent legalization AND temporary legalization (guest worker programs) for illegal aliens
Would support temporary legalization (guest worker programs) for illegal aliens, but oppose permanent amnesty
Would support permanent amnesty for illegal aliens, but oppose temporary legalization (guest worker programs)
None of the above What priority do you place on your selection above?
Low High
22. What would be your ideal candidate's position on SLAVERY REPARATIONS? (The specific actions regarding reparations for slavery include the government apologizing to slave descendants for their hardships, and awarding them financial and/or other compensation.)
Would advocate reparations for slavery.
Would not advocate reparations for slavery.
Neither What priority do you place on your selection above?
Low High
23. What would be your ideal candidate's political or PROFESSIONAL QUALIFICATIONS? (Select none, any or all)
A national level elected representative, i.e. a member of Congress
An elected executive, i.e. a governor or mayor
Military leader
Business owner or executive
Lawyer
Journalist, broadcast commentator or author (authorship of campaign books which are frequently ghostwritten have been ignored).
Professor, teacher or lecturer
Doctor
24. What would be your ideal candidate's presidential CAMPAIGN EXPERIENCE?
My ideal candidate will be a "fresh face" who has not campaigned for the presidency before.
My ideal candidate will have the experience of campaigning for president
Not important
25. What is the PREFERABLE AGE for your ideal candidate upon assuming office? (Select none, any or all)
35-44 years old
45-54 years old
55-64 years old
65-74 years old
75 and older
26. Which of these are PREFERABLE MARITAL STATUSES for your ideal candidate? (Select none, any or all)
Single, never married
Single, divorced
Currently married to first spouse
Currently married to second spouse
Currently married to third spouse
Widowed, remarried
Widowed, unmarriedSexual Harrasment
A formal probe can be launched only after the Chief Secy sends the complaint to Assembly Speaker B Koliwad who has to order an inquiry.
Karnataka Assembly Secretary (in-charge) S Murthy may soon be probed on charges of sexual harassment.
This after the Secretary of Department of Personnel and Administrative Reforms (DPAR) Pallavi Akurathi, sought an inquiry from Chief Secretary Subhash Chandra Khuntia on Friday, taking cognisance of a complaint by Murthy’s junior.
However, a formal investigation can be launched only after the Chief Secretary forwards the complaint to Assembly Speaker B Koliwad, who has to then order an inquiry.
Pallavi Akurathi had written to the Chief Secretary after Murthy’s junior had made a formal complaint with the DPAR. Along with the complaint, sources say that a petition signed by 49 other women officers was submitted. Pallavi had also forwarded the same to Subhash Khuntia, sources said.
In her letter to the chief secretary, Pallavi has said that it is not only the complainant but at least 20 other female officers, who have been allegedly sexually harassed by Murthy.
“There has been a hostile atmosphere in the Secretariat for the past one year,” she reportedly wrote.
The complainant said Murthy had passed “lewd comments” on her clothes and looks after calling her to his cabin on the pretext of work.
He had also allegedly asked the officer to accompany him to Belagavi for the recently concluded winter session and also to visit Goa with him for a “pleasure trip”.
Meanwhile, the Karnataka State Commission for Women will write to Chief Minister Siddaramaiah on the matter after it received a complaint from 20 women working in the secretariat, Deccan Herald reported.
"I will write to the Chief Minister and the Speaker tomorrow itself and ask for their immediate intervention. I will also get a report from the Assembly secretariat and enquire into the accusations. The matter has to be set right as the women have been enduring harassment and humiliation for the last two years. Many of them have 20 to 30 years of experience, and it is important that there is a safe and conducive work environment," Commission Chairperson Nagalakshmi Bai was quoted as saying on Friday.
The complainant had also approached the Expert Committee on Safety of Women and Children after she felt that her complaint was not looked into.
“We have asked her to furnish the details so that we can probe the matter,” a media report published on November 22 quoted Chairman of the Committee Ugrappa, as saying.Does NYC really need a one seat ride to its airports?
Continuing on his infrastructure grand tour Governor Andrew Cuomo announced last month that he was proposing a $10 billion overhaul of JFK Airport. Included in the proposal are plans for expanding the Van Wyck Expressway (how “green” of him) and finding ways to expand and improve the AirTrain. From the report’s website:
Increase the capacity from two to four cars per train and increase its frequency – These changes would allow the AirTrain to roughly double its capacity and handle more than 40 million passengers annually.
Improve the east of connection from the Subway or LIRR by top-to-bottom rebuild of interconnections at Jamaica and Sutphin Blvd – Completely overhaul the subway and Long Island Railroad connection to the JFK AirTrain. These improvements would include essential modern amenities such as high-performance elevators and escalators, charging stations and expanded walkways. A modernized mezzanine will create simpler navigation and smoother transfers to the AirTrain including improved wayfinding and LED flight status screens. Images of the transformed Jamaica Station and AirTrain connection can be found here.
That sounds affordable and effective. But the next line is what really grabbed transit activists:
Explore the feasibility of one seat ride to JFK – JFK is one of the only major airports in the world that does not offer travelers a one seat ride from its city center. Therefore, the panel recommends that the MTA and its partners jointly explore the feasibility of a one-seat ride to JFK.
A one seat ride from an airport to a city center is considered best practices for developed countries. Transit access in general is considered a basic necessity for airports but this is something that American cities leave as an afterthought. LAX is famously impossible to get to via the Metro even though the Green Line terminates relatively close. NYC had subway plans in the works for connections to Floyd Bennett Field (before LaGuardia built his own airport) and when the IND Queens Blvd subway was built provisions were added for a line down Van Wyck Blvd which could have easily been extended to then Idlewild Airport (today JFK Airport) until Robert Moses chose to build an expressway instead. In the 1990s plans were floated to extend the N train to LaGuardia but were shot down by local politicians. The MTA once ran the Train-to-the-Plane but this proved unpopular given the need to transfer to a bus at Howard Beach. The Port Authority built the AirTrain, which opened in 2003, and has proved much more successful even though it still requires a transfer from the subway or LIRR.
In the late 1960s and early 1970s the newly formed MTA proposed sending the LIRR to JFK via the abandoned Rockaway Branch and even a branch of the LIRR through Baisley Pond Park in South Jamaica. Even as the Port Authority was designing the AirTrain there were proposals to extend it to lower Manhattan via the LIRR Atlantic Branch and then over the Manhattan Bridge or via a new tunnel. These proposals had high price tags and would have had a negative impact on existing subway service.
Right after the Governor made this announcement the Regional Plan Association put out a colorful breakdown of various one seat ride options which Alon Levy did a very good job of ripping apart. I’m not here to repeat everything he said but rather throw a couple ideas out.
JFK
As New York has bounced back from 9/11 the growth of subway and LIRR ridership has meant that more and more commuters are coming up against more and more tourists (with their luggage) in ever packed train cars. There is no doubt that better transit is needed but the idea that we need to invest billions of dollars to give tourists a smoother trip into the city seems completely misplaced. I also question the very idea that we need to have a one seat ride to JFK Airport considering the size of NYC. Governor Cuomo has received many donations from the hotel industry in the city which is why he has supported legislation clamping down on AirBNB. No doubt it is the hotel lobby which is also pushing for a one seat ride to ferry tourists and business travelers directly from the airport into their hotel rooms as seamlessly as possible. In essence a one seat ride to the airport is a give away to the hotel industry while citizens of the city see only packed trains with increasing fares. And a one seat ride in this case means a one seat ride to midtown Manhattan which completely overlooks the needs of travelers coming or going ANYWHERE ELSE IN THE CITY OR REGION. AirBNB isn’t going anywhere which means travelers have more options for lodging and therefore will always need to have a multiple seat ride to/from the airport.
I like the idea of the AirTrain as it serves its purpose very well. Getting to the AirTrain via the A, E, or LIRR can difficult for locals as well as travelers and segregating travelers (and their luggage) from everyday commuters would free up space on trains which can be packed at all hours of the day. But getting the AirTrain into Manhattan would prove to be far more costly than it’s worth. The AirTrain was supposedly designed to allow it to run on the LIRR tracks with the same rail gauge and third rail power. This means that sending the AirTrain to Manhattan via the LIRR would be the most obvious answer except that LIRR runs 10 car trains at high speeds while AirTrains run at 60mph max and usually have only 2 cars per train. Connecting the AirTrain to the LIRR and sending it to Penn Station would be a logistical nightmare for LIRR trains. The alternative option of having full length LIRR cars serve JFK Airport wouldn’t be worth the cost as most trains would be empty and the track curves along the existing AirTrain are far too tight. Platform slots at Penn Station are already full and it won’t be until at least 2022 when the massive East Side Access project opens a new LIRR at Grand Central would there even be space for airport trains.
But East Side Access will do something else; Since LIRR will now have more flexibility to terminate trains in midtown the need for the downtown Brooklyn Atlantic Terminal will be almost eliminated, save for the passengers who actually use it. While no exact plans have been put in place yet it has been speculated that the LIRR will, once East Side Access is open, reduce the Atlantic Branch to a shuttle service between Atlantic Terminal and Jamaica. If this does come to pass then this would be a perfect fit for the AirTrain which is already a glorified shuttle. While Atlantic Terminal does not reach Manhattan it is served by 11 subway lines. AirTrain riders now are forced to catch the A or the E, already packed express trains, but if it terminated at Atlantic Terminal travelers would have a buffet of subway options from which to chose. Additionally the service would still act as a shuttle to Jamaica for existing commuters. The LIRR ticketing space would be converted into a check-in facility. The existing Nostrand Ave and East New York stations would be closed to speed up the trip. All that would be needed is a new ramp connecting the existing AirTrain to the LIRR Atlantic Branch at Jamaica. Atlantic Terminal would give the city the most bang for its buck: offer a fast ride directly to the airport with connections to the most number of subway lines, offer Jamaica bound commuters an equal service replacement, and frees up space on packed A and E trains in Queens.
Politicians and the RPA would argue that the AirTrain would then need to be extended into Manhattan but I still disagree. Lower Manhattan has changed considerably in the last 15 years and is much more residential. AirBNB as well as the rise of low cost hotels around the city means that travelers have more options than ever before. Midtown transit centers like Penn Station, Times Sq, and Grand Central are already overflowing with commuters and tourists alike and Atlantic Terminal offers a place to transfer trains which is far less crowded. Express subway trains serve Atlantic Terminal which can bring travelers to midtown, east and west side, quickly. If the AirTrain went to Penn Station it would still require a complicated crosstown journey (the less confused, lost travelers at Penn Station the better). According to Google Maps it takes 48 min to get form Terminal 4 at JFK to Atlantic Terminal via the AirTrain and LIRR, by subway it takes 20 min longer. This, however, requires transferring at Atlantic Terminal and then Jamaica Station, and by subway means transferring multiple times in stations which can be hard to navigate with luggage, which all adds additional time and confusion. Extending the AirTrain to Atlantic Terminal may not save much time in terms of train speed but it would remove the burdensome transfer at Jamaica. A one seat ride would be nice, no doubt, but the cost can’t be justified so a two seat ride is still far better than a three seat ride.
LaGuardia
The Request For Proposal for the design of the proposed LaGuardia AirTrain was just announced which means the state and Port Authority is looking for an engineering firm to design the new structure. It’s too early to tell yet what the new AirTrain will look like but many transit activists have come out against the AirTrain. Two years ago I wrote a post which tentatively supported the AirTrain but the most obvious choice in the matter would be to extend the N/W trains to LaGuardia via 19 Av in northern Astoria. Politics being what they are the local NIMBYs won’t even get to shoot the proposal down since Gov Cuomo is picking the Port Authority to built their own line via the Grand Central Parkway. The reasoning, I assume, is that since the PA owns LaGuardia they should also provide the service to the airport and collect any revenue that goes along with it.
New York is littered with bad planning decisions that were built because a particular politician got their way. I have no doubt that the LaGuardia AirTrain will be built as an elevated shuttle between the airport and Willets Point for a transfer to the 7 and LIRR. The service will be popular enough, though I’m sure the M60 and Q70 buses will still transport just as many travelers. But I see a future for the little shuttle which may seem odd at first until you look back at the subways which were planned and never built. In 1929 the city, as part of the infamous IND Second System, proposed extending the BMT Astoria Line (today’s N/W trains) down Ditmars Blvd and Asotira Av to 112th St where it would jog south until it reached what is today the Long Island Expressway, continuing east to what today is Francis Lewis Blvd. What I am proposing is that after the AirTrain is built the MTA could buy the line and incorporate it into a larger extension of the N/W trains which would follow a similar route.
When the original BMT Astoria Line extension was proposed in 1929 most of this area of Queens was still developing and was farmland; Flushing Park wouldn’t exist for another decade. The modern extension would extend the N/W from Ditmars Blvd up to 19 Av where it would veer east to 45th St where it would dive underground to a new station under LaGuardia Airport. Trains would continue east to a new portal that would connect to the AirTrain. Assuming the AirTrain is built to a location between the 7 and LIRR stations at Willets Point the new line could easily be extended east along the ROW of the long defunct Central RR of LI which was converted into the Kissena Park corridor by Robert Moses. The AirTrain terminal at Willets Point would then be expanded to be a terminal for W trains while N trains would continue east; N trains would run peak express using the third track between Queensboro Plaza and Astoria Blvd.
There are many different route and construction options available, whether built along an elevated viaduct through the park or as a cut and cover tunnel, but ideally the line would make it’s way southeast until the Long Island Expressway where it would continue until Springfield Blvd. As there is precious little land left for new train yards the park space would be perfect for a new underground yard somewhere along the route. Incorporating the LaGuardia AirTrain into a larger subway expansion would be a boon for locals and travelers alike and would actually reduce crowding on the 7 train rather than adding more travelers with their luggage onto already packed subway cars. This, however, would take the state, city and MTA all working together for a common goal, something that sadly is impossible under our current circumstances.
A second subway option would be to use the abandoned (i.e. never used) terminal at Roosevelt Ave to extend the M train through Jackson Heights and East Elmhurst to the airport. The Roosevelt Terminal was built for a future line to the Rockaways and was never used. The terminal itself is on the eastern end of the mezzanine at Roosevelt Ave and is an island station with tiles but no tracks. The trackway leading east connects to the Queens Blvd Line bellow and turns south at 78th St. Instead the new branch would use the trackway connections to the existing subway and turn east down 41 Av, then northeast down Baxter Ave and finally north under 83 St finally turning towards LaGuardia Central Terminal at 23 St. While this extension would be the most expensive of the lot it would also serve as a local subway line for the undeserved areas of East Elmhurst and Jackson Heights north of Roosevelt Ave. The line would be more politically acceptable as it would be a subway the whole route and do more for local residents than the other options.[Originally broadcast on Nov.19, 2015]
Barbara Killarney, a Victoria, B.C., resident and self-proclaimed Canada Day celebration watchdog, appeared on This is That denouncing night-time fireworks.
Fireworks happen far too late! - Barbara Killarney, Canada Day watchdog
"I think most Canadians would agree that fireworks happen too late in the evening and are very disruptive," said Killarney. "Our group is trying to move them to the afternoon...that way we can all enjoy them without having to stay up past dark."
When asked if she thought there might be some issues with visibility, Killarney responded by saying: "You don't have to see all fireworks to enjoy them, the sound of the booming is the exciting part, that should be enough for people."
This is That is an award winning satirical current affairs show that doesn't just talk about the issues, it fabricates them.Secretary of State Rex Tillerson on Thursday reiterated that tensions are “running a bit high right now” with North Korea but said the Trump administration has a “very deliberate strategy” that they are employing that involves amped up global participation.
“We’re asking a lot of the Chinese,” Tillerson said on “Special Report with Bret Baier.” “We are going to test China’s willingness to help address this serious threat.”
Tillerson added that the Trump administration is not seeking a regime change or a collapse of the North Korean government but instead demanding Pyongyang denuclearize.
Tillerson was among the top Trump officials on hand Thursday during a rare meeting with all 100 U.S. senators for a closed-door briefing on North Korea.
“Past efforts have failed to halt North Korea's unlawful weapons programs and nuclear and ballistic missile tests,” Tillerson said in a statement following the meeting. “With each provocation, North Korea jeopardizes stability in Northeast Asia and poses a growing threat to our allies and the U.S. homeland.”
Tillerson is preparing to speak Friday morning on the growing threat of a nuclear North Korea when he addresses a special meeting of the United Nations Security Council.
The former Exxon official also took aim at Iran during the Fox interview.
“Iran is a serious threat to the U.S. today and to the stability of the region” he told Fox. “It is not OK between Iran and us.”The family of a man who died in his wheelchair after waiting 34 hours for help in a Winnipeg hospital's emergency room is pulling out of an inquest looking into his death.
Brian Sinclair's family members say they have lost confidence the inquest will result in meaningful changes to prevent future tragedies to vulnerable people.
An inquest resumes Tuesday into the death of Brian Sinclair, who died after waiting about 34 hours in a Winnipeg emergency room without receiving care. (Family photo) The family and aboriginal groups announced in court on Tuesday they are pulling out of the second phase of the inquest, just as it is set to begin.
That leaves the Winnipeg Regional Health Authority and the Manitoba Nurses’ Union as the only parties participating.
Phase two is set to examine ways to prevent similar deaths from happening in the future. But the Sinclair family, as well as some lawyers and aboriginal groups taking part in the inquest say Judge Timothy Preston is setting parameters that narrow the scope too much.
"We came here for the truth. It's obvious that we're not going to get the whole truth," Robert Sinclair, Brian's cousin and the family spokesperson, said on Tuesday.
"It's like the government is sugarcoating things … serious problems that exist in Manitoba hospitals for aboriginal people."
On Jan. 10, Preston announced that the inquest would look at overcrowding at Winnipeg emergency departments and delays in treating patients, as well as aboriginal health issues.
But aboriginal groups also want it to look at systemic racism issues in the health system.
Brian Sinclair's 34-hour ER wait Watch a video chronology of Sinclair's final hours.
"It appears to the Sinclair family that phase two will no longer allow the biases and attitudes that were at the root of Mr. Sinclair’s death to be fully understood, and will instead entrench the marginalization of aboriginal voices," states a letter written to Preston, announcing their intention to withdraw from the inquest.
“Last October, I heard Judge Preston say that ‘this court is alive to the issue of inequality and marginalization.’ He noted ‘the estrangement of aboriginal people from the halls of justice,’" Robert Sinclair said.
"But right now, this family feels very marginalized, and very estranged from the justice system.”
The inquest, which began in August 2013, has been examining the circumstances surrounding the death of Sinclair, a 45-year-old double-amputee.
Sinclair went to the Health Sciences Centre's emergency room on the afternoon of Sept. 19, 2008. He was sent there by a community clinic because he had not urinated in 24 hours.
It wasn't until 34 hours after he arrived at the hospital that he was found dead in his wheelchair after midnight on Sept. 21. He had not been triaged and he did not receive any care during his time there.
His death was later attributed to a treatable bladder infection caused by a blocked catheter.
'You walk in my shoes, as an aboriginal person for 50 years, you will know that there’s hidden racism and discrimination in this country' - Robert Sinclair, cousin of Brian Sinclair
In February 2010, Attorney General Andrew Swan rejected a call for a public inquiry into aboriginal health issues, stating that the inquest would be broad enough to deal with the issues raised by the aboriginal interveners in the inquest, according to the news release issued by the Sinclair family on Tuesday.
Because the inquest judge has decided to sideline those broad systemic issues, the Sinclair family will be renewing its call for a public inquiry.
“If we don’t fix the root problems, we are afraid there could be another Brian Sinclair. We cannot accept that," Robert Sinclair said.
"That is why we will continue to fight for fundamental systemic changes. We will therefore be renewing our call to the attorney general for a full public inquiry, and we will be asking every person and organization in Manitoba who is concerned about this human rights injustice to do the same.”
But on Tuesday, Swan echoed his previous sentiments, saying there were no plans to call a full public inquiry into Sinclair’s death.
“I think it’s important we let the inquest run its course, and I can tell you, there is no plan to call an inquiry,” he said.
Aboriginal groups withdraw
Aboriginal Legal Services and Ka Ni Kanichihk (an aboriginal support services agency) are the groups that have asked to be removed as parties with standing.
Emily Hill, a senior lawyer with the Toronto-based Aboriginal Legal Services, has said the inquest's narrowed scope will ignore the systemic issues facing aboriginal patients in the health-care system, such as discrimination.
We believe that the legitimate concerns of many people in Winnipeg, in Manitoba, and across the country about Mr. Sinclair’s death will not be addressed - Emily Hill, Aboriginal Legal Services
"We believe that the legitimate concerns of many people in Winnipeg, in Manitoba, and across the country about Mr. Sinclair’s death will not be addressed,” she said.
"A number of witnesses have testified that staff at the Health Sciences Center made assumptions about Brian Sinclair – that he was intoxicated, that he was homeless, that he had nowhere else to go," stated a press release from ALST.
"Nurse witnesses have also testified that they did not see Mr. Sinclair, even though video footage showed many of them walking right by him and looking directly into the waiting room where he was seated in his wheelchair."
Aboriginal Legal Services did not make this decision lightly, said Christa Big Canoe, legal advocacy director for the organization.
"ALST got involved in this case because we thought it was important to provide an aboriginal perspective and to share expertise about the experiences of aboriginal patients to address best practices for providing care to our community," she said.
"Unfortunately the inquest is now focused on patient flow. Because the issues which brought ALST into this process are no longer central to the inquest, ALST can no longer justify expending its limited resources participating in the inquest."
The Sinclair family still wants to make closing submissions at the end of the inquest regarding evidence heard in phase one.
Robert Sinclair said the family will continue to fight not only for Brian but for others who may have experienced similar treatment.
“It’s about all the other people that are mistreated there that we don’t hear about, and I know there’s lots because you walk in my shoes, as an aboriginal person for 50 years, you will know that there’s hidden racism and discrimination in this country," he said.
Sinclair family letter to judgeA CONSCIENCE vote on same sex marriage in Federal Parliament is unlikely to sway the views of WA Liberals who vehemently oppose the idea.
Even openly gay WA Liberal Senator Dean Smith yesterday opposed same sex marriage, despite federal Opposition leader Tony Abbott opening the door to allowing Liberal MP's a conscience vote on recognising the union in Australia.
The move would be a shift from the Coalition leader's previous ruling that all federal Liberal MP's vote against same marriage.
"I have not yet been convinced that we should move away from the traditional and well understood meaning of marriage,'' Senator Smith said.
(But) I strongly believe to be consistent with our party traditions a conscience vote is the most appropriate defensible course of action on the issue of same sex marriage.''
Mr Abbott last year year denied his MPs a conscience vote in parliament to amend the commonwealth Marriage Act to include same sex couples.
Prime Minister Julia Gillard, who is also opposed to same sex marriage, did give Labor MPs a vote on the issue according to their conscience - but the amendments were voted down.
While Labor federal MP's Louise Pratt, Chris Evans, Gary Gray, Stephen Smith and Melissa Parke were amongst those who supported same sex marriage when the vote was taken in federal parliament last September, Liberal MPs voted against it.
This week, Labor MPs contacted by The Sunday Times continued their support for same sex marriage, while a number of Liberals continued their opposition.
In a survey of WA federal MPs and senators by The Sunday Times this week Labor's Louise Pratt, Melissa Parke, Stephen Smith and Gary Gray continued their support for same sex marriage.
Green senators Scott Ludlam and Rachel Siewart also supported same sex marriage.
But WA Labor senator Mark Bishop opposed same sex marriage.
Liberal politicians Julie Bishop, Ken Wyatt, Mathias Cormann, Dean Smith, Steve Irons, Michael Keenan and Dennis Jensen opposed the move as did National Party MHR Tony Crook.
Liberal politicians Nola Marino, Barry Haase, David Johnston, Michaelia Cash, Alan Eggleston, David Johnston, Judi Moylan, Luke Simkins, and Dr Mal Washer declined to comment.
"This is a matter that I have consulted extensively with residents in my electorate about,'' Hasluck MHR Ken Wyatt said.
"It is a deeply personal matter for those on both sides of politics.
"The Coalition's position, which I support, is that marriage is defined by the Marriage Act is between a man and a woman.''
WA Liberal Senator Mathias Cormann said "marriage is an institution with a special status''.
"I support the view that children deserve to have the opportunity, all other things being equal, to grow up with both a mother and father.''
But lesbian WA Labor senator Louise Pratt said the vast majority of Australians supported her pro-same sex marriage stance.
"Marriage quality won't go away as an issue until it is won,'' she said.THE world voice of cycling Phil Liggett yesterday launched a withering attack on changes to the London track cycling program, saying BMX and mountain biking should never be Olympic sports.
Cycling's track cycling has seen popular events the individual pursuit, the madison, the points race, the women's 500m time trial and the traditional Games opener, the 1km time trial, dumped with only five track events remaining for both men and women.
Liggett said if anything should go, it was BMX and mountain biking.
Known the world over as the sport's foremost commentator, he said yesterday the track program would be diminished because of the changes.
"It is absolutely disgraceful what they have done. They have devastated the track with the new events and taking out the iconic events of the Olympics," Liggett said.
"They have taken out the exciting and interesting events - the individual pursuit, the 1km time trial and the women's 500m time trial, and put in an omnium that no one will ever understand.
"There is only one rider from each country in the omnium and they are a jack of all trades and master of none."
He said disciplines like BMX and mountain biking simply should never be in the Olympics, given they were not the pinnacle of their sport.
"Nations and riders complained, but the UCI (International Cycling Union) wanted equality," he said.
"They got that but they also took out women's events. They introduced BMX. Great, but I am sure (Olympics founder) Pierre de Coubertin would have laughed his head off if he found out it was an Olympic discipline.
"It might be exciting but we are talking the Olympic Games.
"We have never had a good mountain biking event. Thousands will watch them but they are not Olympic gold medal events.
"They weren't meant to be in the Olympic Games."
The five track cycling events - contested by both sexes - are the individual sprint, the team sprint, the keirin, the team pursuit, and the omnium.
Australia has world no.1 Sam Willoughby and world no.2 Caroline Buchanan in the BMX, meaning Australia is a strong chance of dual gold medals.
It also has reigning world champion Glenn O'Shea competing in the omnium, which consists of five separate races that include a 5k scratch race, a 3km individual pursuit, a 15km points race, a 1km time trial and a 200m flying start time trial.
The changes, announced two years ago by the UCI, mean reigning Tour de France winner Bradley Wiggins cannot defend his Beijing individual pursuit title.
Instead he will try to help set up the road race sprint for Mark Cavendish, then win gold in the road time trial.
Liggett, who will commentate for Foxtel at the Olympics, said many people in track and road cycling share his views.
He said Australia could still make a resounding comeback at the Velodrome after just one silver medal in Beijing to the UK'S seven golds.
"These Olympics, especially at the track, is Great Britain versus Australia. The Aussies are back. They had the hiccup in Beijing and they are back.
"The Brits are afraid of them. A blink of the eye either way in the team pursuit and the gold goes (Australia's) way."
Originally published as Olympics no place for BMX: LiggettImage courtesy of Samia El-Moslimany
In an historic royal decree on Tuesday, the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia (KSA) announced that women will be allowed to drive beginning in June of 2018. The news—which put an end to a nearly 40-year-long unofficial ban on women driving—has understandably received a lot of attention. Due in large part to the Iranian Revolution, which greatly influenced much of the Middle East, Saudi women have had to rely on male chauffeurs and guardians for transportation since 1979.
Since then, groups of Saudi women across generations have been involved in forms of protest against the ban. Most notable was a 1990 demonstration involving 47 women who drove through the streets of Riyadh defying Saudi law. This week, Saudi women—some who've never lived in a KSA where women could drive, and some who can recall a time when they were allowed behind the wheel like activist Aziza al-Yousaf—are celebrating a long-awaited victory.
Samia El-Moslimany, a 54 year-old Saudi-American woman who grew up between the US, KSA, and Kuwait, was detained in Saudi Arabia just four years ago for driving. On October 26, 2013, El-Moslimany and over 60 other women got behind the wheel and drove through the streets of Saudi Arabia in an act of defiance. She and a woman named Nahid Batarfi were the only two people detained for being female and driving during the protest.
Read More: The Saudi Women Fighting Their Country's Sexist 'Guardian' System
"I'm happy, it's an achievement, it's a step," El-Moslimany told Broadly. "But I guess the euphoria didn't come as soon as I heard it. The euphoria has come as I've started to digest it and think about all the different people that have sacrificed and participated and lost greatly because they stood for this."
El-Moslimany said that the latest ruling allowing women to drive has been a long time coming. "When I first moved back to Saudi Arabia at 20, everyone said that within five years women would be driving," she said. "That would've been 1990."
Christina Frasi Zahid, who lived in Saudi Arabia from 1966 until her husband passed away in 2001, can remember a time when driving in Saudi Arabia as a woman was no big deal. "I remember driving in the sixties and seventies without a problem," she said. "It wasn't a question of whether women were allowed to drive. When necessary, we just did, like coming home from parties or driving back from the beach."
"Today our country took a stand for us."
While many Saudi women and much of the world consider the new law a step in the right direction, El-Moslimany is sure that there are still "a lot of women who think that it's not a good thing." But she added that because the ruling came with the weight of a royal decree (a very respected document in Saudi society), perhaps reluctant Saudis will be more inclined to come around to the idea of women driving. "Once there's a royal decree, it's completely acceptable for you to now support [women driving]. In a way it becomes unacceptable to be against it," she explained.
This news has also made waves in the US, where reactions range from genuine enthusiasm to sarcasm. Hillary Clinton tweeted, "It's about time. Ladies, start your engines!" Comedian Chelsea Handler suggested that women now "drive the fuck out of there," but Representative Ilhan Omar of Minnesota |
. As long as you have the will to thoroughly explore a country, you can be a backpacker. In fact, one backpacker bus company even claims they have had a 92-year-old passenger!
2. You’ll have to carry a huge bag everywhere This is partly true, partly not. If you tackle a multi day hike, you may have to carry a pack along the way, but you can leave most of your stuff in hostel storage. For the rest of the time, there is never more than a few minutes of carrying your bag between bus, train, plane, shuttle or ferry to a hostel.
3. Backpacking is not safe As explained in our article, Is New Zealand Safe? Yes it is!
4. Nobody will understand you If you are a native English speaker, your accent will be understood by everybody here. If you are not a native English speaker, a year abroad will make you fluent! People are kind in New Zealand and will make the effort to understand you. Plus, there are plenty of opportunities to learn and improve your English.
5. It is too expensive… Travelling through New Zealand is cheaper than you’d expect. Bus networks are cheap, flights are cheap, and with a working holiday visa, you even have the opportunity to earn some cash to keep on travelling.
6. … and you won’t save any money With the opportunity to work in New Zealand to pay for more travelling, it is up to you to manage your budget properly. Many backpackers end up saving enough to travel the whole country and stop over in Pacific Islands or Asia on their way back home.
7. Everything will change back home No it won’t. Think how much your friends’ lives have changed in the last 12 months… Exactly! Life at home will remain the same and you’ll be back in no time and fit right back in. Besides, that’s what friendship is all about. You’ll just have more stories to tell.
8. University is better for your future With life experience becoming an increasingly popular critieria for universities and employers alike, a gap year is not just fun anymore, it is valuable! Here’s a bunch of valuable stuff you can put on your CV.
9. You won’t meet other backpackers… Backpackers live in herds and move in herds. In hostels or on buses, you will meet like minded people from all sides of the planet that, every year, gather in New Zealand for the greatest migration of its kind…
10. … or you won’t meet any locals Unlike the “meet local women near you” ads on the Internet, locals in New Zealand really want to meet you! You will meet many friendly and approachable people, especially if you choose to work – Kiwi coworkers like to socialise!
11. Planning a gap year is a b*tch… … said no backpacker ever! Pick a country (New Zealand, duh!) and go with the flow. Over-planners usually regret over-planning so read a few articles on our website, book yourself a hostel for your first few nights and you’ll be alright!
12. It will be hard to maintain good hygiene Every hostel in New Zealand has laundry, kitchen, bathrooms and showers. Even if some showers are hard to set on a “warm and soothing temperature”, keeping good personal hygiene and a healthy lifestyle is as easy as it is at home.
13. You can’t go backpacking alone Most backpackers actually arrive “alone”. But as any backpacker will tell you, you are NEVER alone. If anything, you will not have enough “me” time. In hostels or during a hike, in a city or on a farm, there will always be somebody keen to join you for the activity or trip that you are planning. Learn more in 10 Reasons to Travel Alone in New Zealand.
14. Free accommodation is impossible to find A massive amount of farms in New Zealand are offering free accommodation in exchange of a few hours work, through WWOOF or HelpX. Every hostel in the country does the same thing and locals are incredibly welcoming. Free accommodation will be a core part of your trip if you are willing to look for it. Let this list be a good starting point for free accommodation."Why are you going to Russia in November?"
I was having a bit of a mid-life crisis so I decided to run away. I didn't know if I wanted to continue being a lawyer. And if I wasn't going to be a lawyer, what was I going to do? These questions were dominating my every waking moment. And they had paralyzed me. Lawyering, for me, had become an ever-deepening abyss of sorrow. I practice immigration law in Arizona, and had seen family after family torn apart by deportation. I'd heard shockingly vivid personal stories of torture and brutality; I witnessed fear and desperation, hopelessness and grief. But the worst part was that I was beginning to feel hopeless. Even when I scored major victories, like saving a survivor of sex trafficking from deportation, all I could see was the sea of despair before me.
I was burnt out.
My hope was that a roam around the motherland would be just what the doctor ordered.
Russia wasn't a random choice, no matter how odd it might seem for this sort of voluntary escape. It's no Tahiti, for example. But going to Russia is always comforting to me. It is that perfect mix of the familiar and unfamiliar. This all started in 1990, back in high school. Some unclear set of circumstances led one of my teachers to take a group of students to the Soviet Union and I got to go. I found the country to be delightfully weird (I say this now: my postcard home from that trip describes Russia as "creepy."). Afterwards, it sort of took over my life. Graduate school merely exacerbated the problem since that's when I started to take groups of students over there myself. After I got my PhD, I basically said to myself, "OK! Enough is enough!" and became a lawyer. But there's no denying that Russia still holds major sway over my traveling life.
The nominal excuse for this trip was a conference at the Russian Academy of Sciences called, "Migration Bridges in Eurasia." I was presenting a paper on the US-Mexico border, which, in case you don't know, is not in Eurasia. But the idea was to describe an immigration-policy-gone-wrong and tell a cautionary tale. Russian policies towards the influx of migrants from Eurasia are just now taking shape; after all, many of these Eurasian countries used to be part of the Soviet Union, i.e., the same country as Russia.
After arriving in Moscow, I got up early and put on my best professional costume: suit, jewelry, pumps, the works. I walked out into the cool air feeling excited and mildly triumphant. I was then crushed within an inch of my life in the metro at rush hour. Nevertheless, I emerged, rumpled but undefeated, at the Russian Academy of Sciences building, where I was immediately dwarfed by its imposing magnificence. As soon as you walk in the courtyard, you feel it. THIS IS WHERE SERIOUS PEOPLE DO SCIENCE. I felt very, very small and very, very nervous. This was my first time presenting a paper in Russian.
I didn't know anyone at the conference except the organizer, a demographer I met over the Internet. He was very kind and introduced me as "our American colleague." The conference opened with a grand ceremony as we stood for the Russian national anthem. Representatives from 26 countries were at the conference, including the ambassadors to Tajikistan and Kyrgyzstan. As I listened to the presentations, the problems of Eurasian migration all sounded so achingly familiar: people on the move fleeing poverty, hunger and instability. I was reminded, once again, that migration is a global issue. As Americans, we have a tendency to view our struggles with immigration as unique. America is the greatest country in the world, we believe, so of course the entire world wants to come here. But Tajiks and Kyrgyz are moving to Russia, Sudanese and Syrians are moving to Italy, Iranians and Sri Lankans are moving to Australia. What's happening in our backyard is part of a worldwide—and unstoppable—phenomenon. Uzbek construction workers in Moscow have an awful lot in common with my house-painting Mexican clients.
These thoughts swam around in my head while I hurried to the train station. The "work" portion of my trip completed, now I was headed for a train journey along the Volga River to deal with this mid-life crisis thing. I dawdled too long drinking beer so I had to run with all my bags to the train car. This meant that I was thoroughly sweaty. In fact, I was drenched with sweat nearly the entire time I was in Russia. It was November, but everywhere I went it was so warm inside. And when I was outside and moving around my coat made me sweat. I lost my scarf and I missed it so much because it had become my sweat rag. I sweated more in Russia in the winter than I do in Tucson in the summer, no lie.
I tumbled into the train and there was a stout man in a striped tank top with a giant, unrecognizable arm tattoo sitting on my bed. It looked like a sailor's top and later I find out that the man was, in fact, in the Navy. The other two occupants were a middle-aged woman and her daughter, who was maybe 10 years old. The man moved out into the hallway while I jostled everyone with my enormous coat and heavy suitcase. The man came in and sat down next to me on my bed.
I've always been grateful to get the lower berths on trains. But they are a double-edged sword. If you have the upper bunk, you're constantly climbing up and down the little ladder to get up there and once you're up you don't really have room to sit up straight. But when you have the lower bunk the person from the upper bunk is kind of always hanging out on your bed. Whenever the upper-bunk person needs to use the table they really have no choice. So, if you're the upper-bunk person your best strategy is to just constantly eat or drink something. And that's what this man did.
First, it was some kind of sauce-heavy chicken and watching him eat it was a little gross. I moved out into the hall to get away from it but, like a car wreck, I couldn't help but stare at him in the reflection in the window. He carefully pulled back the skin on each piece, picked off the meat with his fingers, gnawed the bone, and then ate the skin. He had one tiny napkin and this he used to wipe his hands and also, somehow, wipe down the tablecloth. I don't know how he did it but he managed to completely avoid staining my white sheet.
I went back into the compartment and it turns out they've all been talking about me. The girl noticed I was reading a book in English and they all began to speculate. I fessed up and told them I was an American. Outing myself is another double-edged sword: it saves people from thinking I'm an oaf when I breach some cultural norm, but it also draws attention to me and makes me talk about myself and my relationship to Russia. This makes me uncomfortable because everyone asks me the same question: Why Russia? And then I launch into some long, barely-understandable self-analysis about obsessions and curiosity and perestroika. Looking at their confused and bored faces, I wonder, "When will I learn to just say I love Tolstoy like everyone else?" (For the record I can't stand Tolstoy.)
The woman and her daughter were on their way home from a sanatorium in Zheleznovodsk where they have been on vacation for three weeks. Zheleznovodsk is famous for its healing mud and the woman joked that after three weeks of treatments they are now undoing all of it by eating junk food on the train.
The man was on a four-day journey from Rostov to Chayanda to work on the new gas line known as the "Power of Siberia." It's one of Putin's signature projects. The work sounds terrible, though, because each month the man has to travel four days by train to the worksite. He's not a young man, either—probably in his late 50s. At least he gets to fly home afterwards... and then return three weeks later.
As part of his ongoing strategy to sit on the lower bunk the man pulled out some fruit and shared it with all of us. It's kind of like an apple but it's also kind of like a pear. It's a little dry, but really sweet. He called it "aiva." Later I looked it up and realize it's a quince.
Then, my seatmates get into a heated discussion about fat. They're talking about salo, which is salted pork fatback. They both heartily agree that eating salo is incredibly good for you. But they disagree on rendered salo. You can use salo for frying potatoes, said the man, but never mushrooms. Not so, said the woman, who insisted that there is a special dual-action property of mushrooms plus salo. The man wasn't having any of it. From there the discussion morphs into alcohol, the woman claiming that berries will keep you from getting drunk on champagne. She said she once drank three bottles of champagne and had no hangover because of the frozen strawberries she put in the bottom of each glass. The man disagreed on this point as well, but then realized that he wasn't going to win any points with anybody in our compartment if he got into a detailed discussion of exactly how much he can drink.
Listening to their conversation I thought about how much I love listening to people tell their stories. It's one of the things that has brought me back to Russia time and again and also one of the reasons why I practice immigration law. It allows me this unique window into people's lives and a way to help them create new, and hopefully happier, stories.
The next morning I woke up to something called inyei—frost that barely clings to the trees. The delicate glitter was so fragile, so fleeting, that it made time stop. This quiet calm lasted into the afternoon, which is a miracle. Calm isn't usually in my repertoire of psychological states. Then, as I sat drinking tea it came to me: I am an immigration lawyer, but that doesn't mean that I have to confine my work to the US-Mexico border. Why don't I open a branch of my law office in Russia? There are plenty of people in Russia who want to immigrate to the U.S. I can serve them and spend more time in this country that, for better or worse, has a firm grip on me.
So that's what I'm doing right now—trying to get my Russian office off the ground. It's brought me back to life, this unusual project of mine. At work, English, Russian and Spanish all mix together in a constant brain-teaser that keeps me on my toes.
The forces at work here are bigger than me and my clients, bigger than the Border Patrol, and even bigger than Joe Arpaio's nose. People move. It's what we do.
(Editor's Note: Rachel Wilson continues to practice law in both Tucson and Moscow. You can read about her ongoing adventures at http://eleventimezones.com)There are few albums I was looking forward to more this year than Opeth’s new release, Sorceress. As some of you loyal readers may know, I am a huge fan of their transition the past few years away from death metal towards prog nirvana. This album, like Pale Communion and Heritage before it, is not a “metal” album in the vein of some of their old work. They did not bring back the growl, which is fine by me but some of you “the new Opeth stuff sucks” fans may still disapprove of this direction. Hang on tight, though, because this album is still heavy, both thematically and instrumentally. You want deep riffs? Check out the track Chrysalis. You want an almost folksy acoustic guitar track with flutes? Will O the Wisp is what you need. You want prog jazz that dramatically shifts into a powerhouse? Give The Wilde Flowers a listen. You want the heaviest track on the album mixed with some unique melodies? Strange Brew is right for you. They have it all, including a little lifeline between the albums to lightly connect Pale Communion with Sorceress.
Before I talk about the title track, which will be posted below, I want to mention the opener, Persephone. It’s a simple two minute track that immediately gave me the feeling of the beginning of Heart’s Crazy on You. A sudden and nice guitar prelude leads into something that will most certainly be big. About 80 seconds into the track, a woman’s voice emerges from the mist. Her voice sounds like she was reading an incantation or possibly an entry from her journal. She reads a few lines, and then the flute takes us straight into Sorceress.
Unfortunately, the two tracks off this album I have to offer do not sufficiently embody the album as a whole. Sorceress starts off with a very deep bassline, and something that sounds like it would have come off their previous album, Pale Communion. In a way, that’s smart, as the band can show where they were then and where they are now with a track that almost feels like it’s being lined up to compare with the rest. It’s dark, moody, and almost apocalyptic (much like Alessio Sakara). Don’t worry about it if you don’t get that reference.
The track opens with a funky distorted guitar matched perfectly with a very loud bass. The bass is the heart and soul of the track, plain and simple. Most of the time, the percussion or guitar carry Opeth songs, but this time, the bass is the one that really makes it move. After the ~75 second intro, the dugga dugga riffs of old kick in loud and tuned very low pull the song along. Outside of Primus, I can’t think of too many tracks that have the bass tuned up like this for this one particular song. I feel that this is a gift to Martin Mendez for all of his hard work and dedication with the band for this long. Hell, other than Mikael, Martin has been with the band for the longest, with his presence first known on Still Life (and you can tell, if you’ve heard it). The lyrics in this track made me feel that this album was a concept album, but the most important piece on this whole track for me was the organ. It really shined. I love that organ.
9/23 edit: Since posting this review, Opeth has officially released the track The Wilde Flowers, so maybe you can see what I imagined.
We move on to The Wilde Flowers, which diverts from the darker bass-driven work of Sorceress into something that would fit in a 70’s art prog album. What intrigued me the most about this track is that it’s fairly proggy, shifting tempo and tone for the span of about six minutes, and then it flips a switch and goes into high gear for the remaining 50 seconds. In total prog fashion, this song transformed before my ears. We hear the light guitar coupled with the vocal effects of Akerfeldt drifting away, and then soft drums start up. In a few seconds, those mild drums morph into something massively complicated and explosive, and then the bottom falls out. It may sound strange, but when I visualized this track in my head, I pictured a flower growing, and then at 6 minutes the flower opens and spreads its seeds into the air in a violent and explosive fashion. The Wilde Flowers, eh? Nailed it.
That sudden burst of heaviness gives away to Will O the Wisp, which is a more of a folk-y track with an acoustic guitar and some guitar noodling as the track goes on. It’s not too complicated and gives some of us a breather for what’s to come next. For brief moments, I get vibes of the earlier soft Opeth from an album like Damnation that made devout Opeth fans froth at the mouth because it was devoid of the intensity lovingly given in Deliverance and Blackwater Park. It’s not an interlude, but you may be able to think of it as such when you compare it to the next track.
Chrysalis put its foot on the gas immediately, in one of the stronger tracks on the album. This one and one I’ll discuss later don’t mean that the previous tracks are weak, but there are some standout tracks that especially clicked with me. It takes the warmth and exploration of 70’s prog rock (synthesizer, anyone) with the confidence of the prog rock (that guitar riff is a thing of beauty) of today. Stick with me for a second, but does the riff in this track remind anyone else of Kiss’s Love Gun? Between that or something by Black Sabbath or Deep Purple, this particular riff invokes a lot of musical memories. It’s one of the heaviest tracks on the album, as well, but it’s not heavy in terms of screamy or something you may think when you imagine Opeth with “heavy” as a descriptor. The guitar and the keyboard are the main attraction in this track, and they go back and forth very well. One takes over for a bit, plays a solo, and then hands it off.
I’d like to point out that Joakin Svalberg, the keyboardist and newest member of the band with his second album with them, really shines in this album especially on tracks like this. As for the intensity of this track, it’s heavy as far as old prog goes, and if that doesn’t make sense, give this track a listen and you be the judge. I do wish I had a better sample of tracks than the two above to share with you to get a better picture, but this album will come out next week and then you can dive in on Spotify or whatever. You can find it, you’re industrious. I believe in you.
The intensity subsides for a bit to go back to the dark realm again with Sorceress 2, which is a solid part 2 of the Sorceress story. I prefer that it stands apart as a very different track, back with the acoustic guitar and calming melodies. When we get hit in the face with a track like Chrysalis, sometimes we need a minute to regroup. Sorceress 2 does that, as Mikael keeps his voice higher and soft, joined by some background vocals provided by the boys. As much as Sorceress may have put me on edge because of its mystical and almost creepy feel to it, Sorceress 2 felt like I was under a spell and being calmed by the music.
We wake up from that spell into The Seventh Sojourn, and it doesn’t try to jump start us and instead gives us some light acoustic guitar and percussion (read: bongos!) The thing that grabs me about this track is that it’s completely unique from any other track on the album. I give it to the band, they decided to make an album with no two track sounding the same, but when it comes to The Seventh Sojourn, this one really stands alone. Is that a sitar? It sure sounds like it. Bring it on, let’s get weird with this track.
I guess it makes sense that they really try to spread their wings before going to what many fans would consider to be the bread and butter of the album, in Strange Brew. This is the track of the album, period. If you disagree, that’s fine by me, but this one stands above and beyond the rest. It’s the longest track on the album, clocking in around 8 minutes 45 seconds, and it uses every second to the fullest. Sure, it had a slow lead-in from the end of The Seventh Sojourn, but it started with a slow, powerful, and echoing introduction to this track. To visualize this track, I imagine the slow beginning of the universe. For the first two minutes of this track, matter gathers from wherever. I’m not getting too scientific with this so I’m aware my mock theory of the beginning of the universe is nonsense, but imagine the center of the universe being a big black hole that swallows up all of the matter in the universe. Then, like blowing up a balloon filled with glitter, it gets too full and starts to rupture. Imagine this happening in slow motion, and not as one instant, because obvious in music these things need time to set up.
As the melodic and lovely intro drops away into an uneasy and spacey synthesizer, the chaos mounts. The balloon/universe explodes, and everything goes in every direction. It spreads far and wide, and seems to get on everything. You may end up coughing up glitter for a week after that, but it’s worth it. It’s worth it because the explosion is so majestic, so beautiful, that you can’t take your eyes off it unless you get some in your eyes and then it’s the sharpest pain you’ve ever felt. Anyways, that’s what I get when I listen to Strange Brew with my eyes closed. The beginning of the universe.
How do you follow up something like that? Well, you take on a sound that takes it down several notches, and you wrap up this beast of a review. A Fleeting Glance injects a more serene feeling into what has largely been a dark album, and though it’s not out of place, it is a light shining in the darkness. Is it weird that I get a Beatles vibe from some of this track? I don’t know if it’s the keyboard or the monotone vocals, but it just has that feel to it. Yes, I know it has its Opeth vibe as it should, but I feel a strong pull to the Beatles discography with this one.
Finally, we move on to Era, which is practically the final track on the album because Persephone (Slight Return) is more of an outro than anything else. The track starts with just the piano for a solid minute, and then the organ soars louder and prouder than ever. That’s the key instrument for this final track, and it sends this album out in style. I’ve said it before and I’ll say it again, this album thrives on its diversity. It dares to be different, and that’s why Opeth is right at the top of the Prog Rock/Metal food chain. This album wraps up with a short and simple one minute piano piece that could have easily been blended in with the previous album. As Era started with a piano, it could have gone out with that same piano. As I said in this paragraph, it’s really just an outro, but as far as album outros go, this one is fine by me. I may personally think that Era would have been a better ending if they blended this track into the end of Era, but that’s why Mikael Akerfeldt makes the big bucks.
Overall, and at long last, this album is a beast. It’s incredibly diverse, and I can’t find much that I dislike about it. It blends some of their sounds of the past with some new things they’re coming up with as they develop. When I raise other bands or songs that sound like this band, it is never to take away from Opeth or any other band’s sound but instead as a point of comparison for the listener who isn’t necessarily as well versed with a band like Opeth and is opening their ears to new horizons. People like comparisons (and ratings too), and I have always found it easier to introduce people to music they would not otherwise listen to when I present them a general sense of what a particular band sounds like by using other bands.
I learned my lesson to say that X album is the best album since Y album in 20XX, but this has to be one of their strongest works in years. That’s saying something, because I felt Pale Communion was the best album of 2014. This year, there is such strong competition that despite this album possibly (it will need many more listens to digest) being one of Opeth’s best albums in recent memory, it will still have to contend with giants like Haken, Dream Theater, Devin Townsend, Deftones and more. This album gets an amazingly solid 14.5/15 Ratings Units from me, and it feels like Opeth can just do no wrong these days. I see that recent albums I’ve reviewed have also hit 14 RUs, so this deserves a little bump above because it is just a bit above them. Most likely I’ll dive back into this discussion in three months, so get equipped.
As a final note, and if you get this far thanks for putting up with the wall of text, but I have a question for you few survivors. Are these reviews far too long? How long would you prefer them to be? Before this paragraph, this review clocked in at under 2300 words, which may feel like a homework assignment to those of you kind enough to read through this whole monstrosity. I want to paint you a picture, but I can get sucked into digressions at times. I feel those digressions are more charming and give these reviews some character, but seriously, I welcome practically all feedback. Even if I don’t respond directly, I do read what you have to say and I appreciate it. I don’t mind if you think I’m wrong. You’re not going to hurt my feelings. It’s just music, albeit lovely and wonderful music.
Advertisements“A teenager who died after a shooting at a Florida gun rangeon Sunday was killed accidentally by his father,” cbsnews.com reports. “The Sarasota County Sheriff’s Office said in a statement that they concluded the shooting at the High Noon Gun Shop was not intentional based on witness statements and video.”
According to police, Stephen J. Brumby, 14, and his dad, William C. Brumby, 64, were practicing in a shooting lane against a wall when the accident took place. “After firing a round, the spent shell casing struck the wall causing it to deflect and fall into the back of (the elder) Mr. Brumby’s shirt. Brumby then used his right hand, which was holding the handgun, in an attempt to remove the casing. While doing so, he inadvertently pointed the firearm directly behind him and accidently [sic] fired,” a police statement reads.
I’ve seen shooters do the “hot casing dance” with a loaded firearm — especially females shooting with low-cut tops. But I never once thought a gun owner would be distracted enough to use his gun hand to reach for red-hot shell casing.
Assuming that’s what happened. Any way you look at it, the man’s son paid the price for not one but two violations of the four rules of gun safety. Which is how these things go down. And why those rules have to be burned into a shooter’s subconscious to the point where nothing overrides them. I can’t recommend force-on-force training enough. Otherwise and in any case, early education and constant repetition are the key to four rule dominance.
The mainstream media is all over this story, as part of their anti-gun rights jihad. Before the facts were known, they “promoted” as an example of the danger of kids shooting guns. Re-posting the Tweet above, repeating High Noon’s claim to be “the world’s safest gun range” and highlighting the fact that kids under 18 shoot free (ironically enough, when accompanied by a parent).
Now that we know what happened, look for the anti-gun narrative to change. But not disappear. Meanwhile, our condolences to the young man’s family (including his father), friends and colleagues; and the owners, employees and customers of the High Noon Gun Shop.Getty Washington And The World Can Trump Cut a Deal With North Korea? The odds of success are extremely low. But all the other options are worse.
George Perkovich is the Olivier and Nomellini chair and vice president for studies at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace.
On November 29, I was in Tokyo standing in front of a room full of students and professors at Waseda University giving a lecture on the challenges of nuclear disarmament. Outside the lecture hall, the sky was blue. The leaves on the trees were peak yellow and red. When the question-and-answer session following my lecture reached a lull, I said, “Let me ask you a question.” My host, seated on the stage, chuckled at my forwardness.
“I woke up at four this morning because of jet lag,” I began. “I looked at the news on my phone and saw that North Korea launched another missile that could carry a nuclear weapon all the way to the United States. The missile landed in the Sea of Japan. At first I tried to avoid thinking about what it means and what I could do about it. Then I realized I was not in Washington, but in Hiroshima. This made the situation much more disturbing. My question is: You live near North Korea and your country is the only one that’s been bombed with nuclear weapons. So how do you think about what North Korea is doing?”
Story Continued Below
Silence. The professor smiled. “Japanese reticence,” he said, encouraging both the students and me. After maybe 20 seconds, a young man with an early Paul McCartney haircut raised his hand.
“We think about whether we should get the iPhone X.” The students laughed awkwardly, as did I.
That night, flying to Beijing, I wondered about the different ways we all cope with profoundly scary prospects beyond our control. Cool gadgets and video games are nice diversions to have. Hoping that someone will sort it all out is another natural escape. Avoiding the reality that the safest solution sometimes requires accommodating an adversary is another.
But leaders have obligations not to avoid reality. They actually control whether there will be nuclear war or peace with North Korea. Kim Jong Un is one such leader, along with his top military officers. President Donald Trump is another, along with the chain of command under him. Xi Jinping is also relevant, though the Chinese leader will neither start nor join a war over North Korea, nor, despite U.S. hopes, make or break a diplomatic deal to create a modus vivendi between North Korea and the rest of the world.
We have little evidence to judge whether Kim has a desire and a strategy to stabilize the decades-old confrontation between his country and the United States, South Korea and Japan. We do have some evidence that President Trump is avoiding the realities of the situation and the hard-to-swallow fact that there is no glorious way out of it. After the latest missile test, he tweeted: “This situation will be handled.” This sounds like phone-playing avoidance more than it does a leader with a viable strategy.
There are three options, none of them winners. Military strikes and war are one. Without giving away secrets, civilians and military officers in the enormous U.S. defense establishment tell friends that unprecedented intensive planning is underway for military operations against North Korea. This noise could be meant to scare Kim Jong Un into backing down; it’s also an inevitable consequence of the size and advanced preparation required for a war with North Korea.
Unfortunately, there is no “surgical” way to eliminate North Korea’s nuclear weapons without invading and occupying the country. Key elements of the nuclear weapons program, and perhaps the biological weapon program too, are deeply underground. The U.S. would not know whether it destroyed all the material and people that matter unless American forces were on the ground to search. United States and South Korean forces ultimately could destroy the North Korean regime and military. But, in the process South Korea could suffer major casualties and destruction, as would North Korea, and that’s assuming no nuclear weapons are used. If the United States undertook such a military campaign before North Korea had attacked, the rest of the world would turn against Washington as never before.
The U.S. could pursue vigorously enforced comprehensive sanctions to somehow force disarmament or regime change. The Trump administration is trying this now. But there is little evidence that China and other key players will enforce total sanctions, or that such sanctions would force Kim to give up his nuclear weapons, or the North Korean military to give up Kim. Kim feels that his regime can’t survive without nuclear weapons. Whatever costs sanctions pose to him are not as dangerous as giving up nuclear weapons would be. From his perspective, what’s to stop Washington from re-imposing sanctions the minute he disarmed? Better to keep the nukes.
China and others know this. They believe that sanctions will increase the suffering of the North Korean people without satisfying American demands. Moreover, as with Iraq in 2003, the United States has neither the will nor the capability to manage a transformation to a more humane and functional government in North Korea, if somehow Kim were toppled. China and Russia joined tough sanctions on Iran because American leaders demonstrated they would take a realistic deal in which Iran would keep its uranium enrichment capability but limit it under strict verification protocols.
Similar negotiations are the third option with North Korea, paired with sanctions. Trump, in his November 7 speech to the South Korean National Assembly, hinted at a diplomatic “path to a much better future.” But he seemed to precondition it on Kim agreeing to stop “development of ballistic missiles” and to accept “complete, verifiable, and total denuclearization.”
All evidence and logic suggest that this is totally unrealistic. The North Korean regime will reject any outcome that does not allow it to retain a basic nuclear deterrent. Without the capacity to deter the United States, North Korean leaders have no leverage to prevent future efforts to sanction, subvert or overthrow them. Trump’s starting point, then, is not even an acceptable end point for the North Koreans. Secretary of State Rex Tillerson’s comment Tuesday that the U.S. “is ready” to meet with North Korean counterparts “without precondition” suggests that he recognizes this. But when President Trump treats Tillerson like a loser, why would Pyongyang take the secretary seriously?
There is no winning to be had here. Short of a potentially catastrophic war, the only feasible option is to negotiate limits on the size and operation of North Korea’s nuclear arsenal and establish a modus vivendi in which each side deters the other from aggression. This worked with murderous communist regimes in the Soviet Union and China—Mao Zedong and Josef Stalin were responsible for deaths of tens of millions of their citizens—and there is no evidence it would be less effective with North Korea.
The odds of President Trump achieving the glory he might desire through a quick and relatively clean military strike are lower than the odds of a debacle that would be much deadlier than the Iraq war that he decried during the campaign. A negotiation that bought an end to more nuclear and missile testing, and some measure of stability on the Korean peninsula, in return for acknowledging the reality that North Korea will for a time retain nuclear weapons, would not bring glory to the president. But it would shock and awe other leaders around the world who do not believe this president actually has the temperament to make the kind of deal that nuclear statesmanship requires. If Tillerson is willing to try, give |
,000 contract for paint used in the renovation of the home of golf’s famed Blue Monster two years ago.
Back in 2014, The Paint Spot put a lien on Trump’s property after he tried to say that, despite a contract, his golf course had paid enough. Amazing. This turned into more and more legal fees for The Paint Spot and led to the ballooning amount owed by our orange president. Last week an appeals court ruled that Trump still owes this money even though he and his team of fraudsters would rather continue to shirk their responsibilities by wasting more of everyone’s money.
Trump National Doral Miami must pay The Paint Spot more than $32,000 plus attorney’s fees of about $390,000, meaning the total Trump must hand over is almost triple the original paint bill of $142,530. The ruling was issued Wednesday by Florida’s Third District Court of Appeal in Miami. “The case should never have reached this stage,” Daniel Vega, attorney for The Paint Spot, said in an interview. The property’s owner "refused to ever consider any type of reasonable settlement," he said.
Yup. Trump’s a real winner. The reason he files for bankruptcy every few years is because he has to.Published: Friday, May 06, 2016 @ 1:48 PM
Updated: Friday, June 03, 2016 @ 10:13 AM
— A reward is being offered to anyone who provides information that leads to the arrest of the man accused of stabbing a 7-year-old girl on the playground at World of Wonder school.
Surveillance video released of stabbing incident
School board mulls fencing at school, a reward for arrest
Search continues for male suspect
If you have info, call 333-COPS or 222-STOP
UPDATE @ 10:06 a.m. (June 3):
Dayton police Lt. Andrew Booher offered some updates in the case of a 7-year-old stabbed on a school playground May 6.
“At this point in investigation we’re at a stone wall,” Booher said, who added initially lots of tips from the public came in. “We need more information coming in now.”
A light-skinned black male in his early 20s approached the World of Wonder school playground from the tree line, pushed the small girl off the swing and stabbed her, Booher said. The man was wearing a beige hooded sweatshirt, orange T-shirt and blue shorts.
“The man was either dropped off or walked up,” Booher said.
UPDATE @ 12:06 p.m. (June 1):
A reward for information leading to an arrest in this stabbing has increased to $7,000 by management of Dayton Airport Hampton Inn in Englewood and Meadowbrook Crossing Shopping Center in Clayton, said Brad Smith, a lawyer representing the two businesses.
“They were terribly troubled by heinous acts of violence against an innocent child,” Smith said.
Information regarding reward should still be inquired through Dayton Public Schools.
UPDATE @ 1:41 p.m. (May 27):
The reward for information that leads to the conviction of the individual who attacked a second-grade student on the playground of World of Wonder school May 6 has exceeded its goal, according to school officials.
The Dayton Airport Hampton Inn donated $5,000 to the fund, the district said.
Dayton Public Schools is working with Crime Stoppers and anyone with information can contact Crime Stoppers anonymously at 222-STOP.
UPDATE @ 4:37 p.m. (May 20):
Dayton police released surveillance footage today from outside the World of Wonder School that shows the assailant approaching the swing set area; then after the stabbing occurs, the video resumes and shows folks running from the area. The video also shows people tending to the 7-year-old stabbing victim.
UPDATE @ 12:27 p.m. (May 17):
Dayton Public Schools is offering a minimum of a $5,000 reward for information that leads to the conviction of the individual who attacked a second-grade student on the playground at World of Wonder PreK-8 School on May 6.
Jyllian Guerriero, legal counsel for Dayton Public Schools, said the reward money is all privately-raised funds, donated by district employees and community members.
The reward amount could go up as more money is donated.
“The board believes a crime against one of our students in the city of Dayton is a crime against the Dayton community at large,” Guerriero said. “They won’t rest until this person is found. This child was innocent. We care for her. We want everyone to know this is very, very important to us.”
Crime Stoppers is offering an additional $1,000 to anyone who provides information that will help lead to the arrest. The suspect is believed to be in the range of 18 to 30 years old, a black male with light complexion, medium build and short hair.
“We need help from the public,” said Detective Elmer Querubin with Crime Stoppers. “No child should ever have to go through that situation. We’re doing our best to find the suspect.”
UPDATE @ 1:56 p.m. (May 13):
Cruiser camera video released Friday shows an adult male approach the an officer arriving at World of Wonder school following a stabbing on the playground.
The adult male directs the officer to the playground as several other people are seen leaving the area.
UPDATE @ 10:20 p.m.: The school board for Dayton Public Schools, at their meeting, said they will consider upgrading surveillance cameras and are looking into installing a fence at World of Wonder, a pre-K through 8 school on Oakridge Drive.
Board President Adil Baguirov also asked the board to consider offering a reward for the arrest and prosecution of the assailant. That suggestion was met by applause from the audience.
Board member John McManus: “I hope you find whoever did this and hunt him down like a dog.”
Baguirov said those safety measures listed at the meeting by DPS security — along with adding a safety whistle and an evacuation plan to outdoor protocols as well as enforcing that only school personnel may be on playgrounds during school hours — are “in advanced stages of study” and most, if not all will be implemented.
Assistant Chief of Police Mark Ecton reiterated that police have no known suspect.
“Someone saw something. Someone knows something,” he said. “We’re looking under every rock, we’re shaking the bushes trying to find that person.”
Matt Carper, chief of patrol operations, said the surveillance tape of the incident would be released “in the near future.”
UPDATE @ 2:40 p.m.: The father of the 7-year-old girl stabbed in the back on a Dayton Public Schools’ playground on Friday wants answers from the district.
Vernon Nored, who said his daughter is home recovering from a collapsed lung, hired attorney Michael Wright to investigate the World of Wonder’s role in the attack.
“The school, for me, has not been involved. They haven’t called,” Nored said, adding that he knows his daughter’s teacher and the principal personally. “I don’t know if it’s school funding that you can’t have a gate around the school? They say they have people walking through that area all the time.”
The school has told the girl’s parents that she doesn’t have to return for the last few days of school. Nored said his daughter will be attending a different school next year.
He said police told him the unknown attacker asked the girl and her friends what their names were, pushed the girl down and stabbed her in the back. Nored added he hadn’t seen the surveillance video, but that it was recorded from a long distance from where the incident happened.
“The family contacted me to investigate the circumstances of their daughter being stabbed at school,” Wright said. “No one expects to send a child to school and for them to get stabbed.”
Wright said that if the school security officer called in sick that day, why didn’t the children have recess in the school gym instead? Wright also said maybe there are policy changes needed to prevent this happening again. Nored speculated that he thought perhaps gang initiation was a possibility or that a “crazy” was just walking through the playground. He was in Cincinnati when a family member called him to tell him what happened.
He said the school wanted to verify who he was when he called them from a phone number that had recently changed and that the school also didn’t call the girl’s mother.
Nored said it was horrible to see his usually fun-loving, outgoing daughter in a hospital bed. Wright said the girl may need some counseling. “I want to go through the pain,” the dad said. “Let me go through it.”
The father said his daughter has always wanted to be a doctor and that “she wants to take care of kids now.”
UPDATE @ 2 p.m. (May 10):
The 7-year-old girl stabbed at school last week will most likely not return to school this year, her father told our reporters. The child’s father said the family will consider a new school for next year.
UPDATE @ 2:38 p.m. (May 9):
Sgt. Richard Blommel of Dayton police said during an afternoon press conference, a K-9 unit track of the suspect on Friday did not turn up any leads.
Blommel said there’s no suspect or motive yet. He said the initial indication is this was a total stranger, and the suspect was only on school property for a matter of seconds.
“This was an unprovoked attack,” Blommel said. “The person who would do this to a child is an animal and we need to get this animal off the street.”
The girl’s condition has “vastly improved” and she’s expected to be released from the hospital today. Blommel said the child was on a swing when she was stabbed.
A handful of young students as well as several adults have been interviewed in the case. The victim was stabbed once.
“We need the help of the citizens of Dayton to help catch this heinous criminal,” Blommel said.
UPDATE @ 11:54 a.m. (May 9):
Dayton school board member John McManus praised the work of the district’s crisis team Monday morning in the wake of Friday’s stabbing at World of Wonder school.
McManus, who was at the school greeting families, said extra counselors and nurses worked with regular school staff “to help care for the whole person,” whether students and families were fearful or confused.
McManus said the extra effort was needed, citing fear among young students.
“I spoke with several kids, probably 8 years old, this morning who were scared to go out on the playground,” McManus said. “There was one child who was clinging to his father’s leg who didn’t want to go to the classroom unless his father walked him to the classroom. The kids know what’s going on.”
RELATED: Board member after school stabbing: Make sure ‘this never happens again’
Dayton Public Schools made plans for extra security this week while children are outside, but McManus said the forecast of rain for much of the week may be a bit of a blessing.
“We really want to be cognizant of the feelings of some of these kids who may not want to go out on the playground,” he said. “The rain gives everybody some time to try to soothe some feelings and make everyone feel safe again.”
UPDATE @ 10:47 a.m. (May 9):
Dayton Children’s Hospital officials said they are unable to release any information about the child who was brought to the medical facility following a stabbing at World of Wonder school Friday.
This news organization is selecting not to release the victim’s identity at this time.
UPDATE @ 7:58 a.m. (May 9):
Dayton Public Schools Superintendent Lori Ward had a message prior to students arriving to school today after a 2nd grader was stabbed on the playground Friday “It is safe. It is safe at World of Wonder.”
Extra security is at the school, Dayton police have been driving around the neighborhood and a crisis team is at the school for students and staff, Ward said.
“This is a very senseless, cowardly act that happened on Friday and it’s really our priority that our students and our families and our staff are safe,” she said.
While students won’t be outside much today due to the rain, Ward said they are making assessments for the rest of the school year.
A condition update on the girl who was stabbed was not available.
FIRST REPORT
Click WHIO to download our free apps.
A second-grader at World of Wonder school was stabbed Friday by a male who entered the playground while she and other students were at recess.
Dayton police are continuing their search for the male, believed to be 18 to 20 years old, who stabbed a 7-year-old second-grade student during recess on the playground at World of Wonder PreK-8 school, 4411 Oakridge Drive.
As police continue their search, students and staff will return to school today. Dayton school officials will increase security at the school for the “foreseeable future,” especially when students are outside, a school spokesperson said this weekend.
The student, whose name has not been released, suffered serious injuries and remains at Dayton Children’s Hospital, according to Dayton police.
The preliminary investigation suggests that a male walked onto the playground about 1:30 p.m. Friday and stabbed the girl, then left the area headed toward Kammer Avenue.
“A man stabbed somebody,” a school secretary told 9-1-1 dispatchers. “They stabbed them on the playground.”
During the same call, another employee is heard telling the secretary how the victim was doing.
“She’s laying face down and the police are here,” the employee said.
The school was placed on lockdown. Students were dismissed just before 4 p.m.
Principal LaDawn Mims-Morrow, in a letter sent to families of World of Wonder students, said, “a trespasser entered our playground during recess today and assaulted one of our students. The incident is being actively investigated by Dayton police, who are pursuing a lead.
“The quick action of district security, administrators and our staff and students allowed us to clear the area and enter the building in an orderly manner following the incident. The building was then placed on lockdown as authorities conducted their search through the neighborhood.”
Mims-Morrow said counselors will be at the school on Monday if students need them. She also said there will be additional security at the school in the days ahead “whenever our students are outdoors.”
David Lawrence, Dayton Public Schools chief of school innovation, echoed Mims-Morrow’s comment that police “have a very clear and strong lead and are working on apprehending the suspect.”
He said, “We can’t predict some of these types of things. Most of our schools have security resource officers as part of their regular operations.”
Lawrence said he was at the school, located in a neighborhood that struggles with crime issues, within 2 or 3 minutes after the attack and brought extra security personnel with him.
Lawrence said he would like to tell parents “We will have lots of additional adults here [on Monday]. This is an anomaly, something that just doesn’t happen every day.”
District spokeswoman Jill Moberley said World of Wonder school usually has one DPS security guard in the building, but the individual wasn’t there Friday. Moberley said she wasn’t sure if that was because of illness or some other issue.
Two security guards responded from Thurgood Marshall High School, two blocks away.
“The two guards who responded from Thurgood were there in an instant,” Moberley said.
Late Friday afternoon, police released a description of the suspect:
* Black male, light complexion
* Medium build, 5-foot-8 to 5-foot-10
* 18 to 20 years old
* Short hair
* Blue or beige gym shorts
* Tan or green hooded sweatshirt
* Orange undershirt.
If you have any information about the suspect or this crime, you are asked to call Dayton Police at 333-COPS or Crime Stoppers at 222-STOP.Designed in a small shop in NYC with the goal of combining class, convenience and comfort. The Maverick presents itself in a super slim profile that offers quick access to your essential items to keep your life streamlined. Your wallet should hold more than just your cash.
Suitable wallet for the best dressed man in the room
Subtle and Elegant, the Maverick is a multifaceted wallet that fits in any of your pockets:
Easily fits in your back pocket
Perfectly fits in your breast pocket
Comfortably slides into your front pocket
For ultimate convenience, place it in your jacket's inside pocket
The Maverick is constructed of luxurious vegetable-tanned leather, ensuring that the wallet will develop a rich patina over time. The front two card slots along with the quick draw can hold up to 8 cards all major currencies while still retaining its sleek profile. We used printed nylon for the quick draw, thus providing strength and smooth retrieval of your cards. The handcrafted top pouch is designed to hold a handkerchief or provide storage for small items. The Maverick is as agile as you, always ready for the draw.
The rounded notches are designed to allow you to wrap your earbuds around the Maverick tangle free, while keeping your earbuds recessed from the edge of the wallet. This avoids interference from your earbuds when taking the Maverick out of your pocket.
Anyone who has ever used a pocket handkerchief knows that it stays in place for about as long as it takes to fold it. So the Maverick was designed to keep your handkerchief in place. Use the top pouch or the elastic band to secure your handkerchief and then adjust your handkerchief to the desired height. Displaying as much or as little of the handkerchief as fits your style.
Use your wallet's elastic band or the top pouch
With the Maverick, you won’t have to fumble for your keys or loose change. Simply place them in the top pouch and keep your pockets clear.
De-clutter your pockets by storing your loose change, keys or medicine in the pouch
Slate with Charcoal Houndstooth
Cognac with Goldenrod Houndstooth
Chocolate with Charcoal Houndstooth
Slate with Goldenrod Houndstooth
The “Wipe Away” is where fashion meets function. Made with proprietary fiber specifically designed to remove smudges from your phone or tablet. Now your handkerchief will double as a screen cleaner.
Keep your phone or your glasses free of fingerprints
The Joey can be placed in the pouch of the Maverick, thus securing the Wipe Away in place. The structure provided by the Joey makes inserting or removing the Wipe Away effortless, while never having to remove the Maverick from your pocket. There are five height rungs on the Joey to ensure that no matter the depth of your jacket pocket you can display as much or as little of the wipe away as desired.
The Joey and the Wipe Away can be used with or without the Maverick
The Joey and Wipe Away together with the Maverick
The beginning stages of the Maverick
Our finalized product
The late musician Louis Armstrong once remarked "What we play is life". Here at Sebastien Grey we play with love, hard work and innovation to create perfectly fitted garments. We would like to parlay our passion for craftsmanship into a line of everyday accessories, so we are starting with this wallet. We are perfectionists, and we were moved to execute the most elegant and intelligent wallet that we would want to own. And without doubt we now have it in our pocket!
From Left to Right: Stephanie, Mr. Leo, Donnie, Yany
We humbly thank you for visiting our project and hope you enjoyed our campaign!Share. Get your Bolts ready for spending. Get your Bolts ready for spending.
Galactic Rangers looking for more Ratchet and Clank gear can prepare to suit up with new merchandise courtesy of iam8bit.
Two new T-shirts and a glow-in-the-dark poster will be available for pre-order beginning June 9 at 10 am PDT. Andrew Kolb's Constellations of the Solana Galaxy screenprint features a number of characters and weapons from the Ratchet and Clank series and will only be available for a limited 350-print run. Check out the poster's glow-in-the-dark feature below.
Via iam8bit
Additionally, Captain Qwark and Big Al shirts will also be available for pre-order. Swipe through the gallery below to check out both shirts, as well as a more detailed look at Kolb's original artwork.
Ratchet & Clank iam8bit Merchandise 8 IMAGES Fullscreen Image Artboard 3 Copy Artboard 3 ESC 01 OF 08 Andrew Kolb's Constellations of the Solana Galaxy 01 OF 08 Andrew Kolb's Constellations of the Solana Galaxy Ratchet & Clank iam8bit Merchandise iam8bit Download Image Captions ESC
Pre-orders will begin on June 9. iam8bit previously released the first wave of official merchandise for Ratchet and Clank, including a vinyl print of the soundtrack, pins, and other items. For more on Ratchet and Clank, check out IGN's review of the PS4 game.
Exit Theatre Mode
Jonathon Dornbush is practicing his Captain Qwark impersonation to go along with the new shirt. Find him talking about Ratchet and more on twitter @jmdornbush.SEATTLE - A painting mixup left drivers in West Seattle doing a double take.
Seattle Department of Transportation employees applied new speed limit markings to a section of Fairmont Avenue Southwest Sunday, neighbors and a department spokesman said.
But in two locations, the crew accidentally applied the markings in the wrong order.
Instead of reading 20 MPH, the markings read "20 HPM."
"My first reaction was that it was a protest, honestly. They were working on Sunday. It was hot. Just thought, 'Oh, let's just do this. And let the boss know that working on a Sunday maybe isn't a good idea.'" said Breck Dillard, who lives nearby.
Crews were back Monday and had the problem fixed by late morning.
A SDOT spokesman said the mishap was an honest mistake.
"The department will reinforce with its markings crew members and supervisors the need for accuracy in completing this and other work," the spokesman stated in an email response to KOMO 4.
The department hasn't yet come up with an estimate for how much it cost to repair the mistake, the spokesman said.
"I wonder if they noticed and drove off knowing," said Robyn Baker, who is staying with some friends at a home nearby. "Or just totally unaware. Kind of."
Dillard said he and his dog Bailey were a little sad to see the mistake get fixed.
"He was doing some barking, so it may be that he noticed the problem before anyone else," Dillard said. "He is pretty smart and he just leaves the interview with a no comment."The IPUMS National Historical Geographic Information System (NHGIS) provides free online access to summary statistics and GIS files for U.S. censuses and other nationwide surveys from 1790 through the present.
Through the NHGIS Data Finder, users may:
Filter and sort through thousands of available tables and GIS files
Select and download multiple tables and boundary files, for different geographic levels and from different years, all in one request
NHGIS does not provide tools for data analysis, mapping, or reporting. Rather, NHGIS supplies data files designed for use in spreadsheet applications (e.g., Microsoft Excel), statistical software (e.g., R, Stata, SPSS, SAS), or GIS applications (e.g., Esri ArcGIS, QGIS).
Most NHGIS data files cover all areas in the United States. Data files for census blocks and block groups are available for individual states.
NHGIS is one of several IPUMS data integration projects housed with the Minnesota Population Center at the Institute for Social Research & Data Innovation at the University of Minnesota. The NHGIS project is funded by grants from the National Science Foundation and the Eunice Kennedy Shriver National Institute of Child Health and Human Development.
NHGIS highlights...
GIS files
Counties and state boundaries since 1790
Census tract boundaries since 1910
Metropolitan area boundaries since 1950
Place and county subdivision boundaries since 1980
Boundaries for all standard census reporting areas, down to blocks, since 1990
Place points, 1900-2015
Centers of population for states, counties, tracts, and block groups, 2000 & 2010
SABINS school attendance areas (2009-10, 2010-11, & 2011-12 school years)
Summary tables
Statistics from all decennial censuses and the American Community Survey County and state tables since 1790 Census tract tables since 1910 Tables for all original census summary levels, down to census blocks, since 1970
County Business Patterns data (annual, 1970-2002)
Vital statistics for counties and states (annual, 1915-2007)
Agricultural census data (1840-1950)
Religious bodies data (1850-1952)
Manufacturing census data (1840-1940)
2010 Census data for SABINS school attendance areas
Time series tablesEdinburgh Rugby’s players are in open revolt against their managing director, David Davies, after he sacked the long-serving team manager. Lynsey Dingwall was a popular and efficient member of the backroom staff at Edinburgh Rugby yet she was given an hour to clear her desk after working at the club for 14 years.
The players sent an email to the board and the council of the Scottish Rugby Union (SRU) which Scotland on Sunday has seen. In the missive, sent on 23 March, the players offer their full support to Dingwall.
“We feel the dismissal of Lynsey Dingwall was unfair and unjustified,” the e-mail reads. “Lynsey was part of Edinburgh Rugby for 14 years. Over that period she worked tirelessly with and for the players and was hugely respected within the organisation. Numerous past coaches and players have commented that she was the best team manager that they have ever worked with. We feel she has been the victim of a personal attack.”
The email goes on to state that the players’ views were not sought at the time the decision was made and furthermore that Davies had refused to meet his own players since showing Dingwall the door. In a damning attack on their own managing director, the players state: “We feel he doesn’t have Edinburgh’s best interests at heart and the players don’t trust him.”
Scotland on Sunday offered Davies the right of reply but an SRU spokesman declined on his behalf and instead offered this statement: “Edinburgh Rugby has been restructuring its back-office functions over recent months and as a result two members of staff have left the business. Edinburgh Rugby thanks them for their contribution to the team’s progress and wishes them well in the future. Everyone connected with Edinburgh Rugby is committed to developing a winning culture on, and off, the pitch and taking the club forward.”
According to one source, on the very same day that the players sent the email to the board and council, they were called into a meeting by SRU boss Mark Dodson, who laid down the law about who ran Scottish Rugby.
The players’ email also mentioned a previous missive from former club physio Dan Moore, who has since returned to his native New Zealand of his own volition. On his final day of work, Moore had also sent a scathing email to the board and council, branding Dingwall’s dismissal “a disgrace” and pointing out that since Davies, pictured, had adopted some of the roles previously filled by the manager there had been a comical waste of money. Davies had booked a bus for Murrayfield when the players had arranged to meet at the airport and on another occasion he booked umpteen bags into the aircraft hold when a man was already driving gear to the away game. In the final paragraph Moore comes to the same damning conclusion regarding Edinburgh’s managing director.
“There is a lack of trust in David Davies amongst staff and players, and people are afraid to speak up due to their job security,” he said.
A culture of fear pervades Murrayfield and until a good reason is given for the sacking of a popular and efficient member of the Edinburgh management team, the lack of trust will only continue.It should not be surprising that aBlogtoWatch not only favors being able to purchase watches online, but is attempting to actively be part of the force that helps the traditional watch industry transition to more modern ways of doing business – many of which involve internet shopping. Part of the context of this conversation is the fact that traditional watch retailers are mostly suffering in terms of perceived low consumer demand, but at the same time, the data seems to indicate that we are experiencing a time when demand for watches is higher than it has been in the last 30 years. So what’s the deal?
The often unspoken reality of 2016 is that people are buying mostly gray-market and pre-owned watches, and they are doing so mostly via internet means. Of course, there are people buying new watches in traditional brick and mortar stores, but few of them are paying retail prices. Simple capitalism mixed with a globalized economy has laid utter ruin to the traditional watch industry’s core way of doing business that tends to be about selling wholesale directly to a retailer or using various distributors. I’ve been talking about this since 2010 when I first asked if there is a “doomsday coming for third party watch retailers.” That is all happening now.
Thick margins designed to pad the actually difficult task of traditional watch stores have made it possible for a massive discount economy to take place just outside the walls of the narrow system of “authorized dealer” sales. Many if not all people reading this who have purchased a watch in the last five years have likely either used a gray market dealer or negotiated a discount. The old way of doing business can’t exist anymore.
Please do not feel that I am somehow talking down to consumers for their buying preferences. The consumer is not to be blamed for seeking the most efficient (economical) solution to getting the item that they want. This is basic consumer behavior and it would be odd if consumers did not follow the path of least resistance. What is a problem, however, is how consumer behavior clashes with the expectations of the watch industry itself. Things need to change, things will change, and I think the consumer should have a voice in how the industry adapts. This “ask the audience question” seeks to understand how your online buying preferences meet those of fellow watch buyers.
The point of this article isn’t to talk about the background of the watch industry’s current tough situation more, but I say all this to explain why we are asking the question about how you as consumers prefer to shop for watches. It will be interesting not just for one another, but also for the industry itself to see how the timepiece buying community self-reports on how they prefer to buy watches in this day and age. Also, in the comments below please feel free to clarify, or offer your own suggestions on how the traditional watch industry can best adapt to the fact that consumers want quick, efficient, and easy ways to buy watches.
Last, if the conversation gets interesting, then we can proceed to also talk about people’s retail store shopping preferences in a different article.AG2R La Mondiale (France)
2014 has been a big step up for the AG2R squad, who have won Paris-Nice and best team at the Giro d’Italia. Instead of just animating national races they’ve been competitive at WorldTour level. Their talent has finally matched their ambitions, so now they just need to find some style in the presentation department and stop lingering at the back of the bunch when they’re supposed to be paying attention.
Team leader – Christophe Riblon
Carlos Betancur of Columbia went awol at a key moment, so it’s back to plan B – Riblon is a decent climber who won last year’s stage at l’Alpe d’Huez, but may not get the same latitude this time round.
Astana (Kazakhstan)
Look past the baby-blue and yellow outfits that could be straight from the Teletubbies and the Kazakh squad are actually one of the strongest teams in this year’s race. It might be the glorious republic providing the euros but nobody will be laughing when they hit the front. Their sprinter Andrea Guardini will be surfing on other teams’ lead-outs if he’s allowed to because everyone will be at the disposition of his Nibs.
Team leader –Vincenzo Nibali
The Italian won the Giro in 2013 but gave up the chance to defend his title this year in order to be better prepared for the Tour. He starts with serious intentions of taking the race to Chris Froome whenever and wherever and, with possibly a stronger core of climbers around him than Froome, we can expect to see fireworks from the Sicilian. Third in 2012, he took note of what he needed to improve and has been working meticulously to ensure it happens. Gloriously aggressive.
Key stats for Vincenzo Nibali.
Belkin Procycling (Holland)
Promises, promises. Holland’s big team was omnipresent last season but so far this year things haven’t been all that they might be. They often show at the front but they’ve been coming up short with the victories and it’s not as if they are a disorganised rabble. They can put together a good lead-out for their sprinter Theo Bos, they’ll ride solidly and position their general classification (GC) contenders well but there’s a bit of sparkle missing in the final execution.
Team leader – Bauke Mollema
Finished sixth in 2013 and all of Holland would love him to be that high up again. Like a Tonka toy he’s tough and doesn’t break when dropped but Mollema just hasn’t been fast enough when it matters.
BMC Racing Team (USA)
Big ambitions, big spending and some of the biggest names and yet there’s the feeling of underachievement. Philippe Gilbert is missing and the other stars are looking past their prime. Add to that predicament the fact that the young guns need a bit more time to develop fully and too often they’ve delivered barely enough.
Team leader –Tejay van Garderen
The young American keeps promising that he’ll step up to grand tour greatness and now it’s his chance to prove what he can do without any internal politics. In previous years he’s shared the responsibilities of leadership with Cadel Evans but the Australian has been on Italian duties so it’s time to deliver on the faith invested in him. Not far from the top three but still not robust enough to survive three weeks without a bad day or two. Between fifth and 10th is more realistic.
Bretagne-Seche Environment (France)
It’s admirable the way ASO, the Tour organisers, support French cycling by inviting the smaller teams, and this is the smallest of their chosen victims for 2014.
As a second-division team they’ll be happy just to be in with the big boys until the realisation hits them, probably by the time they step back on to home soil, that it’ll be this hard every day.
Team leader – Brice Feillu
If you’re not an established cycling watcher and have come to the sport in the past four years, you might not have heard of the Feillu brothers. Brice and Romain used to do quite well. The clue is in the tense.
Cannondale (Italy)
Points classification winners for the past couple of years, the Greenies come back with one aim, to make it three out of three. The Italians do dedication to the cause like no one else so there’s no general classification rider to protect, no going in the breaks and no arguing over who the No1 in their team is. When Sagan sneezes it’s their job to be there with the tissues.
Team leader – Peter Sagan
The 24-year-old Slovak is a man of many talents. He can climb, he can sprint and he can do a wheelie on demand. He might even do a Superman impression if he forgets that he’s meant to be more sensible now. Stage win? At least one. Spell in yellow? Quite possibly. Entertaining? Always, even if sometimes there’s a cringe involved.
Key stats for Peter Sagan.
Cofidis (France)
A team without a cause, no big riders, no big budget and no big results to justify why they’ve lent themselves the money to compete at ProTour level. Actually, by using “compete” I’m crediting them with more kudos than they’ve earned lately. Average at best and any success will be as much a shock to them as anyone else.
Team leader – Rein Taaramae
One of those riders who survives the first decision on a mountain stage when the lead group still contains 30 riders, then when it gets harder 15 of them leave him behind. But I’m sure he’s a nice guy.
fdj.fr (France)
“Sacré bleu, les Français devant!” And not by luck either. It’s been a while since the home crowd enjoyed seeing their compatriots involved at the pointy end of racing but FDJ have progressed to being a serious outfit and not only inside their borders. Arnaud Démare will be their main sprinter and though he’s not one of the very top guys, one slip from Cavendish and Kittel and he’ll be nipping through.
Team leader – Thibaut Pinot
After a stellar performance in 2012 when he won a mountain stage and finished in the top 10 the young Frenchman had a dreadful time last year. Since then he’s been quietly working away, trying to smooth out his weakness – descending – and rebuilding his confidence. He and all of France will expect great things. Definitely white jersey material if he can hold it all together.
Key stats for Thibaut Pinot.
Garmin-Sharp (USA)
Trend-setting looks can’t hide the fact that this year there’s been a changing of the guard for the likable American team. Out with some of the old characters and in with youngsters who are equally quirky but for the moment keep falling off and hurting themselves. Candidates for best facial hair and worst helmets and sunglasses, they challenge many cliches of what a pro bike rider is, but hey, it’s fashion, darling. They have a core of riders, such as Ramunas Navardauskas, capable of getting in any escape and outlasting the opposition for a stage win – though they would give all that up just to win another team time trial.
Team leader – Andrew Talansky
Seems to get stronger as a grand tour goes on and for a climber he time-trials well so this year’s route will suit him. To make another top GC place, he just needs to stay out of trouble and reach that last week without being covered in plasters.
Key stats for Andrew Talansky.
Iam Cycling (Switzerland)
Switzerland’s leading team may only be two years old and living in the shadow of BMC – an American team sponsored by a Swiss-based manufacturer – |
bunking By Trap
I grew up watching esteemed paranormal sleuth Fred Jones set traps to expose spooky characters every day after school. But the idea of exposing Old Man Jenkins’ real world counterparts through means of conceptual snares is much older and more realistic than cartoons suggest. Indeed, the history of debunking traps extends so far back into antiquity that their origin is lost in myth.
One such trap is described, for example, in the Bible’s Book of Daniel. In the story (canonical in some Christian traditions, apocryphal in others) Daniel is presented with a paranormal mystery: a statue of the god Bel is believed to perform the nightly miracle of consuming a vast feast of offerings (“twelve bushels of the finest flour, forty sheep and six measures of wine”). Daniel laughs at this claim. “Do not be taken in,” Daniel tells the king in a bit of busy-body skeptical activism, for the statue is “clay inside, and bronze outside, and has never eaten or drunk anything.” The king decrees that the claim be put to the test. Bel’s priests suggest a seemingly definitive trial: the king will personally lock and seal the doors of the temple after the feast is set out. If the feast is consumed as usual within its locked room, the king will surely have his answer. But Daniel is not willing to rely upon the conditions proposed by the claimants. He conceives a second, secret test—the real test, a trap deceitfully laid in order to capture the truth. Before the doors are sealed, and unknown to the priests, Daniel secretly scatters ashes across the floor. When examined the next morning, these ashes tell the true story of Bel’s miracles: they record the footprints of the deceitful, free-loading priests and reveal the location of their concealed entrance. Gotcha. (This story ends poorly for the scammers.)
It is worth emphasizing that while the story of Daniel and Bel may be legendary, it describes a practical investigative approach. Daniel’s trick with the ashes is fundamentally identical to “a little harmless test” described in 1887 by one of the investigators for the University of Pennsylvania’s Seybert Commission into mediumistic phenomena. Testing a medium whose spirits typically played musical instruments, the investigator secretly applied “a dab of printer’s ink on one of the drumsticks at the very last moment before the séance began.” Through this subterfuge, the medium was caught ink-handed, indelibly marked with the evidence of his deception.
Fifteen Hundred Husbands
The tactic of feeding fictional information to psychics also goes back to antiquity. Second century Roman satirist and debunker Lucian of Samosata, for example, fed misleading clues to the psychic cult-leader Alexander of Abonoteichus in the hopes that Alexander would incorporate these into his readings. “Many such traps, in fact, were set for him by me and by others,” Lucian wrote—and these deceptions worked. Alexander took the bait, just as so many psychics have done since. (See Junior Skeptic #45.)
Assuming a fictional identity with fictional personal and relationship details was private investigator Rose Mackenberg’s standard first step when investigating psychics from the 1920s to the 1950s. But she did not stop with that modest deception. As an activist skeptic, her understanding and attitudes were much the same as activist skeptics today; as a professional detective working in another time, however, her techniques and sense of ethical boundaries were quite different.
Here is how she described one case in 1939. When a wealthy industrialist identified pseudonymously as “Mr. Todhunter” lost thousands gambling on tips from a “psychic” named Mr. Charles, Mackenberg was hired to get to the bottom of it (emphasis added):
I arrived the next day. My first step was to attend one of Mr. Charles’ seances myself. Sure enough, this time an elderly woman was waiting in the ante-room and, as Wilson had done to Todhunter, she engaged me in conversation, told me how Mr. Charles’ advice had helped her straighten out a difficulty with her husband, and helped her marry off her daughter to a rich man. In turn I told her that my husband had died recently and that I was worried about the health of our child—incidentally I have never been married, but in my career as a spook detective I have received messages from about 1,500 husbands and 3,000 children. When I finally got in to see Mr. Charles I was not surprised to hear he was in touch with my dear, departed husband, or to be told that my child was passing through a dangerous period. As a lure for more $25 fees, Charles had my husband’s spirit urge me to keep in touch so that our child could get the benefit of advice from the other world. However, my visit was not wasted. I confirmed the fact that Mr. Charles’ technique included the use of stooges in his ante-room. And I located a good place in his inner sanctum to install a dictograph. My assistant put it in that night. Meanwhile, another associate of mine had shadowed Wilson all day. He learned, without surprise that Wilson was also a steerer for a local gambling joint, the very same in which Todhunter bad lost his $8,000. The conversations we recorded between Wilson and Charles during the next three days proved all we needed to know about the conspiracy.
Mackenberg went on, “I shall never forget the beet-red of Todhunter’s face when Charles’ voice squeaked from the horn: ‘He doesn’t suspect a thing. I wonder how that sucker manages to come in when it rains, let alone run a business. He’s as innocent as a baby, and twice as stupid.’”
Make no mistake: some psychic readings are neither paranormal phenomena nor entertainment, but crime. When law enforcement agencies investigate criminal fraud on that level—intentional, callous, and sometimes very organized—they may deploy tools that modern skeptics do not have, such as warrants to search, seize, or surveil. The tools left to modern skeptics, journalists, and paranormal researchers are weaker. Scholarship is of course the biggest, most important, and morally cleanest tool we have, whether that scholarship involves the sleuthing of the reporter, the plausibility assessment of the scientist, or the perspective of the historian. But the most potent investigative tool available to civilians, at least in applicable cases, is the undercover sting. Nothing demonstrates like a demonstration.
Ethical Implications
Stings, traps, and undercover investigation have always played an important role in skeptical paranormal research—in my view, an indispensable role. Without these tactics, we would never have learned the things we know about paranormal fraud.
But shouldn’t skeptics—ostensibly activist truth-tellers—feel ethically troubled by this business of investigating by deception?
Yes. Hell yes. Of course we should. The very existence of the skeptical movement is based upon the sentiment that deception is a big deal.
And look—the organized project of scientific skepticism may be decades old (and the debunking genre much older), but, by and large, the practice of skepticism remains an amateur, fledgling affair. We lack the kinds of institutions, regulations, legal precedents, and social norms that allow other fields to attempt responsible use of deception for the public good.
“Every undercover operation involves ‘deception,’ which has long been a critical tool in fighting crime,” said Federal Bureau of Investigation Director James Comey in 2014. But, he went on, “The F.B.I.’s use of such techniques is subject to close oversight, both internally and by the courts that review our work.”
Lay skeptics are sure as hell not the FBI. So what are we? Are we scholars? Reputable investigators? Vigilantes? How can we even tell the difference? And if we’re not sure, can we really blame our counterparts in the paranormal community if they can’t tell either?
Law enforcement officers have oversight. Psychologists have to navigate ethics review committees before they mislead subjects. Undercover reporters have editors, institutional standards, case law, and the massive weight of journalistic tradition. Even private investigators have professional organizations with codes of conduct (and in most US States, they must also be licensed). What do skeptics have? What standards guide us when we get it into our heads as artists, bloggers, magicians, or grassroots activists to catch someone at something? We go in naked and unsupported, armed with our conscience and whatever the audience will accept in the mood of the moment—and very little else. Skeptics have no established code of ethics, no overarching professional organizations, no mechanisms for censure or oversight or review. We have a sense of righteous cause, and sometimes a sense of wicked enemies. And that, my friends, is a recipe for trouble.
So what do we do about it? How do we get at truths that are intentionally and cleverly hidden, sometimes literally by criminals, while also hashing out and working within some sort of reasonable ethical boundaries? I don’t know the answer. I do know that this is the hard part. This is where trickery gets trickier.New Pokémon For Switch On The Horizon? Game Freak Recruiting For Console Project
By Sato. March 20, 2017. 2:30am
Game Freak is recruiting for a new console development project and they’re in need of 3D CG designers with experience on Wii U and PS Vita level character models using animation and modeling software Maya.
In the staff recruitment ad, Game Freak is looking for someone that can consult with the programmers and work on assisting with data. It starts out with “Here’s a chance to work on the development of a globally popular RPG!” The work requires using material to create cartoon-like super deformed characters, monsters, and item models. In addition to work as a modeler, they’ll also be expected to do work on debugging, data work, and more. Experience using animation and modeling software Maya is required.
And if that doesn’t say new Pokémon game, here’s another bit that’s in the ad’s details:
We’ll have you work on the production an RPG game that is popular on a global scale. Platform will be console. It’s a title that just about anyone knows, a proposal that could be your future career.
In another ad they’re looking for character modelers for a new title. This one has a similar job description to the 3D CG designer, except it specifically mentions under Maya’s part that they should have experience working on models at the level of Wii U and PS Vita.
Both positions will be done in contract fashion and will last until May 2018 at the longest.Tuesday night was a dinner sponsored by the Cherie Blair Foundation for women as part of the Clinton Global Initiative on a related subject: "Women + Technology: the 21st Century Solution." Again, it was a distinctly "tri-sector" event, including guests from the private sector, the public sector, and the civic sector; from former Secretary of State Madeleine Albright to the young and compelling Kiva president Premal Shah to various entrepreneurs working on a sustainable business plan to sell (and have local distributors sell) pumps, drip irrigation, solar lamps, and various other development technologies to poor families. Some of the most compelling presentations focused on how mobile phones could help women make money, improve their health and that of their family, feel more secure and independent, and even connect to fellow victims of trafficking and other abuse in a way that affirmed their dignity and common humanity.
Wednesday morning was a breakfast hosted by the World Economic Forum (WEF), which now has 72 Global Agenda Councils on issues ranging from aging to rebuilding fragile states. What was most interesting here was Klaus Schwab's articulation of his overall vision for WEF, which is of a grand multi-stakeholder coalition. WEF is of course best known for Davos, but it now also holds annual meetings in the Middle East and in China, as well as sponsoring all sorts of smaller meetings and projects in between. Time will tell as to the actual results, although as befits the world's leading business conference, Schwab is very focused on metrics. But what he sees most clearly is WEF's ability to connect the business leaders who pay to hob knob in the Swiss Alps with NGO leaders, philanthropists and foundation heads, spiritual and cultural leaders, young economic and social entrepreneurs, national and international government officials, academics, policy experts, journalists -- whoever it takes to get good ideas and implement them.
Several themes cut across these events. One was the tension between firms and funds operating on a "double bottom line" of social as well as economic value versus those simply seeing a profit to be made in large, untapped markets. Strikingly, a representative of Developing World Markets, which describes itself as "an asset manager and investment bank dedicated to making socially positive investments" to "promote sustainable economic and social investment on a global scale," said he had $1 billion under management, which is real money by anyone's count. But other ventures still need a lot of philanthropic funding to survive; still others will only engage if the traditional single bottom line adds up. A second theme was a shift from a "culture of owning and earning to a culture of feeling and belonging," suggesting that many people are willing to pay for and invest in the value of connection itself and the sense of purpose and collective enterprise it provides (although plenty of people, rich and poor, are still keenly interested in owning and earning). Third, even very poor people will only pay for technology if it works reliably and is tailored to their needs. The top concern of consumers of mobile money transfer and banking services, for instance, is not price but security of transactions. If security can't be guaranteed, they will stick with trusted methods. Fourth, all of this is hard. For every example that works, a myriad more do not, and the devil is still in the details.In early March, Major League Soccer and Univision Deportes announced that alongside it’s traditional TV Broadcast, they would also stream it’s full slate of regular season matches on Facebook Live. This weekend, Orlando City will have their first match in the social spotlight.
The move was a groundbreaking one for Major League Soccer and has seen incredible success early in the season. Atlanta vs. Chicago during week two pulled in 469,000 viewers. New York Red Bulls vs. Real Salt Lake this past weekend drew 280,000.
While you may have seen other leagues mirror their traditional broadcast onto social networks, Univision has created an entirely different feel for their Facebook Live stream. Mark Rogondino and former MLS player Heath Pearce (Orlando City still holds his rights, by the way) head up the specialty broadcast and tie in social media throughout the entire match. The two pose questions to the viewers and even read fan commentary live on air. It has created a dynamic not often seen in professional sports.
While the stream will be a first for Orlando City, the Orlando Pride became the first professional team to stream a full regular season match on Facebook Live in 2016. The fans responded with 400,000 tuning in for the stream.
You can tune in on Saturday at 4 p.m. ET on Univision Deportes’ Facebook page. You can also watch via traditional means on your television. The match will be available in English on Univision Deportes via the SAP feature.Those are the basic contours, but getting a fuller understanding requires a walk deeper into the woods.
This fight is many years old. There have been lawsuits and there have been letters to the editor pro and con. There have been protests and postcard campaigns and blog posts and newsletters and lots and lots of official public comment on management plans for various eucalyptus forests and groves. It is a classic Bay Area dispute: greens vs. greens, experts vs. experts, and committed amateurs vs. committed amateurs. And it has gotten very hot.
One recent summary of the dispute was this feature in Bay Nature by Zach St. George. The piece seemed pretty even-handed to me, but McAllister sent me a four-page memo with counter arguments against a hypothetical fire scenario described in the article. And that’s not surprising. McAllister, a retired university administrator, is very much engaged in the eucalyptus debate and always ready to rumble. And she and her allies can chalk up some recent wins. The Hills Conservation Network recently settled with the Federal Emergency Management Agency, who, as a result of the settlement, cancelled grants to remove eucalypts in the East Bay.
* * *
I became interested in the Great Eucalyptus Debate several years ago. In 2011, I wrote a book, Rambunctious Garden, that reported on new exciting directions in conservation. Among these was a reassessment of non-native species. Maybe not all of them were terrible. In fact, maybe we had been spending too much time and money removing non-natives in a quest for an unobtainable purity, money we could have spent on something else, like land acquisition or climate change mitigation. McAllister read my work and got in touch. People were trying to cut down all the eucalyptus trees just because they were non-native, she said. All the talk about fire risk was just “a cover story.” Recently we spoke on the phone. “They learned that the public is not interested in killing trees or eradicating plants just so it can look like it did 250 years ago,” she says. “They learned that they have to use fear tactics, and their main response is fire.”
McAllister has “reams” of studies that she says shows that the trees aren’t a fire hazard—or any more of one than the native shrubs and trees. She points in particular to the “fog drip” that these large, lanceolate-leaved trees collect and retain making them, in her opinion, a lovely defense against fire.
Sigg actually agrees that fire isn’t the main reason to remove eucalyptus. His central motivation has always been “the importance of saving natural ecosystems”—in this case the oak woodland-grassland that predated the eucalyptus at many sites around the Bay.
Sigg and McAllister have tried to remain cordial over the many years that they and their allies have disagreed about the blue gums. They haven’t always managed to stay on speaking terms. And both sides naturally see science as supporting their own position.A proposed class action against the Attorney General of Canada has been launched by Wagners Law Firm over allegations of systemic gender and sexual-orientation-based discrimination, harassment, bullying and sexual assault of women in the Canadian Armed Forces.
READ MORE: New military team aims to end sexual misconduct
The statement of claim, filed Monday at Nova Scotia Supreme Court by Halifax-based lawyer Ray Wagner, alleges the Attorney General is “vicariously liable for the systemic sexual misconduct.”
“Sexual misconduct and harassment is a deep-rooted problem in Canadian military culture,” Wagner said in a release.
Ray Wagner talks about proposed class-action lawsuit alleging discrimination against women within @CanadianForces: https://t.co/4536hx6rwb pic.twitter.com/Jaz4rJ8QRI — Steve Silva (@SteveCSilva) November 21, 2016
In an interview with Global News, he said the lawsuit aims to address a wider problem.
“This is a case about a system, the whole system, and we’re saying that in the Canadian Armed Forces, there’s a pervasive system which allows this abuse to take place.”
Glynis Rogers is the plaintiff in the case and joined the Armed Forces in 2006 at the age of 18.
In her statement of claim, she alleges that in addition to the persistent and systemic discrimination, she overheard and received offensive comments from male members meant to demean or belittle women, and experienced objectification.
In her claim, she also alleges she was sexually assaulted in 2012 by a male member while at CFB Borden in Borden, Ont., but was reluctant to tell her peers or superiors of the incident.
In an interview with Global News, she said the lawsuit is about more than just her story.
“My story is just one of many,” Rogers said. “This lawsuit is more focused on the systemic issues in the military.”
Rogers said she hopes her involvement in the class action can help create change.
“I feel like it will shed some light on these systemic issues and hopefully incite the necessary changes to eradicate gender-based discrimination from the Canadian Armed Forces.”
Wagner noted that a 2015 external review of sexual misconduct and sexual harassment in the Armed Force by former Supreme Court of Canada Justice Marie Deschamps found a “sexualized environment” within the Forces “conducive to serious incidents of sexual harassment and assault.”
READ MORE: RCMP earmarks $100M in compensation for sexual harassment against female Mounties
The report, according to the release, found the processes used by the Armed Forces to report and resolve sexual harassment incidents were “too complex to be effective, and do not yield appropriate outcomes.”
“The accounts of rampant, routine sexual discrimination, bullying and unwanted sexual advances against female members are astonishing,” said Wagner in the release.
“This frequent misconduct is part of a troubling and deeply embedded culture that female members have been forced to endure. It’s time to step back, acknowledge how wrong it is, and take a stand against it.”
Once the class-action lawsuit is certified, Wagner told Global News his firm expects to represent anyone impacted who “fits within the definition.” He also encouraged people to come forward so they can be informed as the process continues.
An interview request to the Attorney General of Canada was referred to the Department of National Defence, who had not yet responded by 9 p.m. AST.
– With files from Steve Silva, Global NewsAt last I am able to tell my story in my own words. When I was born in 2006 my parents were told I had cerebral palsy and renal failure; the MRI scan of my brain was one of the worst the technician had seen. My early years were a blur of hospital stays, sickness and prayer combined with my family’s love, which carried me through those long days of pain and uncertainty.
Growing up in Lechlade, a small town in Gloucestershire, enabled me to be part of the community, and I joined my peers at the local preschool, despite being in a wheelchair and having no speech. There were never any questions raised about my ability to participate in activities, and I have fond, fun memories of those days. Like most children, I started school aged four, although I attended a special school.
At first I enjoyed my time, making new friends and having fun with my lovely teacher – who made lessons engaging, varied and entertaining. Once a week I attended my local primary school, where I joined in with my able-bodied peers for the afternoon. That first academic year laid the foundations of friendship for me with children in both schools, boosting my self-esteem.
Can you imagine being constantly stuck in a reception class? I turned five, then six, then seven; my learning was squeezed into one afternoon at my primary school, while the rest of the time my brain was slowly shutting down at special school, where the syllabus never progressed. On top of this, the sensory curriculum I was subjected to became increasingly degrading: nursery rhymes, baby toys, and teachers talking to us like we were deaf toddlers. On and on this “education” continued, shutting off my ability to reason and forcing me to retreat in on myself. Outwardly, I looked vacantly stupid (giving credence to the idea that academically there was very little going on); inwardly, I was amusing myself, lost in my own thoughts. But I had no way to communicate.
Experience: I had a stroke while I was pregnant Read more
When my peers were seven and starting year three, my mother took me out of special school for an hour a day to be taught to read, write and do basic maths. The previous summer I had done some work on phonics at home using an eye gaze computer. It was frustrating because the computer couldn’t read my eyes very well, but my mother and carers could – and so I found a way to learn. Looking at letters, words or numbers Blu-Tacked on to a Perspex board, I sat opposite my communication partner, who watched my eyes and pointed to the square I was looking at. Initially, progress was slow and during the third week of term I was getting bored and beginning to switch off. Thankfully, my mother was given advice to make the lessons more challenging; for example, increasing the written vocabulary I worked with and quickening the pace.
I haven’t looked back since. We moved through the early curriculum, and ended in the summer doing year-one work. September brought a renewed pace – with home education filling every morning and visits to mainstream school increasing to two afternoons a week. By February I was using a spelling board for all my communication. By year five, two years after I started literacy and numeracy lessons, I had caught up with my peers and joined my local primary school full-time.
Being able to communicate has transformed my life. I can now hold conversations with family and friends. Reading and being read to bring me great pleasure, and it was my immense privilege to meet my literary hero, Michael Morpurgo, who has kindly written the foreword to the book I’m writing. I have a blog, Eye Can Talk, and have entered literary competitions. And I can now share my faith, which is the most important part of my life.
I am keen to make a difference for children like me. I have started a campaign for non-verbal children to be taught literacy, and have met the minister in charge of special education, Edward Timpson. Never judge a book by its cover; never look at a child like me and assume we are not worth teaching.
• Do you have an experience to share? Email experience@theguardian.comCredit: Marvel Comics
Credit: Marvel Comics
Carol Danvers, like Captain America, is a soldier as well as a superhero - something Mighty Captain Marvel writer Margaret Stohl will key into as she and artist Michele Bandini take the title into Secret Empire.
Trapped outside Earth's atmosphere and facing off against a seemingly unending Chitauri horde, Carol and her crew will form what Stohl calls a "band of sisters" to survive the onslaught, harkening back to the most heroic stories of World War II. Stohl and Bandini will also introduce a trio of young Alpha Flight recruits in May 24's Mighty Captain Marvel #5, who will be instrumental in helping Carol and her team save the day.
Newsarama spoke to Stohl about Captain Marvel's legacy, her quest for redemption, and how Generations - and Carol's post-Secret Empire adventures - will delve into her origin and her past with Captain Mar-Vell, her predecessor.
Newsarama: Margaret, you’re into the second arc of Mighty Captain Marvel, and to say Secret Empire has changed things is an understatement. Did you know this part of the mission was coming when you took the job?
Margaret Stohl: I’ve been to two or three Marvel creative summits now, so I’ve known where things were headed before I ever wrote a word. The creators in that room are all geniuses - and all completely nuts - and if I thought it was going to be easy I would have never taken the job.
Credit: Michele Bandini/Michael Garland/Erick Arcinieaga/Joe Caramagna (Marvel Comics)
It was actually much harder to reconcile the emotional fallout from Civil War II than it was to send Carol off into combat during Secret Empire. (Brian Michael Bendis: see genius, see nuts!) But I had a super strong team at Marvel to help with that: my boss and idol-in-all-things Sana Amanat, my assistant editor Charles Beacham, and even Steve Wacker (who now works in Marvel Television but who edited the original Captain Marvel reboot.) It took all three of them to help me think through the roadblocks to launching Carol’s first arc…I sweat blood over my zero and one!
Going into the second arc was much simpler - probably because putting Carol into space and surrounding her with intergalactic hostiles is about the greatest use of her character, backstory and powers that I could ever ask for. When Nick asked me if I wanted in, I just leaped at it. (Nick Spencer: see genius, see nuts!) It’s just been a joyride, honestly.
Nrama: With Secret Empire, Carol has now clashed with two of her strongest, oldest allies - Captain America and Iron Man. Where has that left her as a hero?
Stohl: Carol is left with herself, with her fellow space heroes - the Guardians of the Galaxy and the Ultimates - and of course, with Alpha Flight. But at the end of the day, Carol knows she has to be her own ally. She is tough as nails, so she can handle it—and I’m guessing she will. (No spoilers!) That said, I think sometimes people forget there is more than one Captain at Marvel. The fall of one Cap necessitates the rise of the other. Carol now has no choice but to step up as a hero and as a leader. We get to see her doing what she does best - standing up for humanity, defending the defenseless, and (hopefully!) defeating insurmountable odds.
Credit: Michele Bandini/Michael Garland/Erick Arcinieaga/Joe Caramagna (Marvel Comics)
Nrama: Carol’s got a whole host of heroes out in space with her as you said, including Alpha Flight, the Ultimates, and the Guardians of the Galaxy. We already saw some heavy hitters from Carol’s ranks fall during Secret Empire #0. What are the chances everyone is walking away from this?
Stohl: Not everyone will walk away. That’s how it is in comics, and in life. It’s heartbreaking.
Nrama: You’ve put an emphasis on the idea of Captain Marvel as a soldier, even previously comparing the Chitauri assault to the invasion of Normandy and Omaha Beach. Is that legacy on Carol’s mind as she’s leading this veritable army of heroes?
Stohl: Absolutely. It’s on Carol’s mind and on my mine. As I’ve mentioned, I sometimes listen to documentary footage from WWII when I’m writing. I could listen to old recordings of Winston Churchill’s radio speeches forever, and I love to watch the propaganda movies Frank Capra made. (Check out Five Came Back on Netflix and then watch all the footage it links to.) I hate war, but I love soldiers, and leaders, and the way the darkest times in our history can shine a light on the most heroic human traits. I have so much respect for military veterans throughout the world, and I love how many of them read Captain Marvel.
Nrama: So who are these new recruits to the Alpha Flight program? How are they dealing with Secret Empire?
Stohl: Dante, Glory, and A’di are the first three Alpha Flight Cadets, which is Carol’s new training initiative. They had no idea they would see actual combat; they’re in a Chitauri attack simulation when the Chitauri attack in reality. As the innocents of the crew, they’re at the most risk, and Carol will do anything to defend them.
As for the teens themselves, Dante is a character who first appears in one of my Black Widow YA prose novels, a Latino épée fencer from New Jersey, the son of a cop. Glory is a gay Filipina teen, a techie genius who built her own cybernetic legs after losing them in an accident. A’Di is a Wakandan girl who idolizes the Dora Milaje, and whose best friend is a neurotic drone named Itz who she carries around like a backpack, using his robotic tentacles as straps.
Nrama: You’re working with Michele Bandini for the Secret Empire arc. How have you adjusted to a new creative partner? What’s your favorite thing he’s drawn so far?
Credit: Michele Bandini/Michael Garland/Erick Arcinieaga/Joe Caramagna (Marvel Comics)
Stohl: Michele is incredible. He can do all the fine line work, the sci-fi precision that makes Alpha Flight seem real - while letting Carol’s beautiful face really shine on the page. He also gets the emotionality and the humor that are such a big part of her personality. I love everything Michele does, but I think my favorite collaboration so far has been the development of the Alpha Flight Cadets, our three new teen characters. I just handed him three character descriptions for these wacky teens, each with very different backgrounds, and he ran with it. Michele went to amazing lengths to get their faces to reflect their unique identities. I love his Alpha Flight cadet uniforms, too. It was really something to watch.
Nrama: If Carol Danvers could break through the planetary defense system right now, what would she do to Steve Rogers?
Stohl: Probably smash that vibranium shield over his head and tell him to wake up. It’s a good thing she’s trapped in space…at least for Steve.
Nrama: Considering the events of Civil War II, is Secret Empire a chance for Carol to redeem herself? Does she need redemption?
Stohl: We all need redemption. Carol will be redeeming herself - and giving herself new things to redeem - for the rest of her life. You can be strong without being perfect. Perfect characters are the worst. Perfection is so boring! That said, I love Carol for who she is, at any point in that journey to right herself. I like my heroes a little broken. How do those song lyrics go? "There is a crack in everything, that’s how the light gets in…?" I forget, but we wrote it into one of the Beautiful Creatures books. But that’s Carol, and I wouldn’t have her any other way.
I don’t want to deal with Carol needing to be redeemed. Whether or not people have that perception of her, I think it’s unfair to put that on her.
Nrama: Does Carol believe she could have prevented Steve’s betrayal if she had been allowed to use Ulysses’ powers more freely?
Credit: Marvel Comics
Stohl: She’s probably thought about it in passing, but nothing will change what has happened, and hindsight can’t change what Steve has done any more than it can undo what happened to Tony or Kamala or Bruce or Rhodey. Carol’s eyes are on the future, and on Earth.
Nrama: After Secret Empire, what’s next for Carol Danvers and Mighty Captain Marvel?
Stohl: I’m working on Carol’s Generations issue, where Carol gets to team up with Captain Mar-Vell. My editors and I are having so much fun playing with some classic comics tropes and the ideas of gender and heroics. After that, I hop right into our third arc, which takes Carol to all kinds of places she’s never been - both emotionally and physically - and gives us a whole new look at her origin story. It’s something I hatched at our last Marvel retreat, and the guys were really supportive, so we’ll see where it goes. It’s so fun to explore the universe with Carol; I’m a lucky girl, and I love my job!(CNN) -- Things are looking up in Dubai. Way, way up.
The Arab emirate's colossal, multibillion-dollar skyscraper, Burj Dubai, opened for business Monday, stretching 168 stories and 2,684 feet into the desert sky.
The "At the Top" observation deck, at the 123rd floor, isn't really at the top, but it's plenty high enough.
"No question, the tower is going to be a huge draw for people who want to get up there," said George Efstathiou, Burj Dubai's lead architect and managing partner for the Chicago, Illinois, architecture firm Skidmore, Owings & Merrill.
Burj Dubai boasts a towering list of superlatives:
• World's tallest building
• World's tallest free-standing structure
• World's highest occupied floor
• World's highest outdoor observation deck
• World's longest-traveling elevator (1,640 feet, traveled in two minutes)
Burj Dubai is so tall, according to SOM, that the outside air temperature at the top can be as much as 15 degrees cooler than at ground level. So, if you're uncomfortable in Dubai's 120-degree summer heat and can't get a ticket to the emirate's famous indoor ski resort, just head up to the top of Burj Dubai, where you can cool off at a relatively chilly 105 degrees.
See the view from the top of the Burj Dubai
Counting the spire and its podium together, Burj Dubai contains 5 million square feet of floor space, which Efstathiou points out is actually less than Chicago's Willis (formerly Sears) Tower, the former champion that now ranks No. 5 in the world.
(The other tallest buildings, in order, are Taipei 101 in Taiwan, Shanghai World Financial Center in China and Petronas Towers 1 and 2 in Malaysia, according to the Council on Tall Buildings and Urban Habitat, the world's arbiter of building height.)
Its design inspired by a desert flower, Burj Dubai is built in a "Y" footprint with three wings; each buttresses the others. At the center is a six-sided concrete hub tying it all together.
Tall buildings move when the wind hits them, but SOM -- led by Efstathiou, former consulting design partner Adrian Smith and engineer William F. Baker -- designed Burj Dubai to shrug off desert winds.
"The building is tuned to sway slowly so your middle ear doesn't pick it up," Efstathiou explained. "They tune it just like a musical instrument so that the harmonics of the building don't coincide with the harmonics caused by the wind.... We tune it so that on the floors where people are going to be, you don't feel it that much."
iReport: Share your photos of the world's tallest buildings
That will be welcome news to guests at the tower's seven-star Armani Hotel, with its 160 guest rooms and suites across 10 stories. The 430,000-square-foot hotel, designed and furnished by Italian fashion designer Giorgio Armani, features eight restaurants, a spa, swimming pool, library, fitness center and business center, as well as 30,000 square feet of conference and banquet space on "mirror-smooth marble floors," according to the Armani corporate Web site.
Armani also has 160 permanent residence suites in the tower, along with a number of high-end shops and boutiques.
Burj Dubai is the extremely tall centerpiece of a massive development that includes five hotels, a huge shopping mall, at least 150 restaurants and 1,200 shops. Entertainment options include the ski resort, an Olympic-size ice skating rink, a 4.6 million-gallon walk-through aquarium, a SEGA game theme park and KidZania, an 80,000-square-foot play village for children.
Set in a 30-acre lake that seems incongruous if not impossible in the Arabian desert is the 900-foot-long Dubai Fountain, with nozzles that shoot 22,000 gallons of water as high as a 50-story building. It was designed by the same company that built the fountains |
new definition will mean that, at long last, we will begin to see the full scope of this horrific violence, and that understanding will carry through to increased attention and resources for prevention and action."
Although Tuesday's vote was "a very big deal," according to Tracy, the official definition is not yet changed. The recommendation -- along with all the others agreed upon by the policy board at its meeting -- now goes to FBI Director Robert Mueller for final sign-off, most likely in the new year.
The FBI's current narrow definition of rape has created complications for law enforcement agencies, which can't report all of the rapes they prosecute for inclusion in federal statistics if their state or locality has a broader definition.
For example, in 2010, the Chicago Police Department reported nearly 1,400 sexual assaults. None of them, however, appeared in the federal crime report because they didn't fit the federal government's definition of rape.
"We prosecute by one criteria, but we report by another criteria," Steve Anderson, chief of the Metropolitan Nashville Police Department, told The New York Times. "The only people who have a true picture of what's going on are the people in the sex-crimes unit."
According to the federal 2010 Uniform Crime Report, there were 84,767 sexual assaults reported in 2010, a 5 percent drop from the previous year.
In a recent survey by the Police Executive Research Forum, nearly 80 percent of the 306 police departments that participated said the federal definition of rape was outdated.
On Monday, Rep. Lucille Roybal-Allard (D-Calif.) wrote an op-ed in The Hill stating that changing the FBI's definition could critically affect her work on the House Appropriations Committee.1 of 15
For a manager that is best known for a high attacking philosophy, Chelsea's defense was truly the story of the preseason.
In all seven games, they gave up a grand total of one goal, to Rangers in the last game. No other top tier team in the world is able to make such a claim.
What is even more is how it was done. Opponents had very few opportunities to score at all. They dominated possession, and even when they turned the ball over, strong tackles from the backs kept threats to a minimal. Hilario and Turnbull often found themselves doing nothing more than directing traffic in most games.
An argument can definitely be made that the competition was not of the highest quality, but you can only beat the team that you play. Even with that said it is still quite a feat to keep meaningful scoring opportunities against any professional team to less than two a game. Ranger's goal even went against the run of play on a counter attack.
John Terry, Slobodan Rajkovic, Branislav Ivanovic, Ryan Bertrand, Patrick Van Aanholt, Alex, Kalas, Ashley Cole, Jose Bonsingwa and Paulo Ferreira all rotated in and out of games and all played well defensively. This group had the best defensive record in the league last season and have already looked as if they have improved.
Not to mention, David Luiz has yet to play under Villa-Boas.When I first started training clients full-time, I assumed that I’d specialize in training athletes. I bought all sorts of equipment from Elitefts including a huge power rack/platform with all the accessories (box squat box, step up attachment, monkey chin bar, dip bars, band peg attachments), a 45 degree hyper, glute ham raise, reverse hyper, competition bench press, incline press, deadlift lever, chalk bin, bands, chains, specialty barbells, etc. I situated the equipment in my garage and was in awe at how manly my gym appeared! I was well on my way to be the next Joe DeFranco.
What happened next was unexpected. A bunch of female friends and relatives of mine started requesting that I train them. At first, I told them, “I’m not sure, my equipment is more geared toward training athletes.” They’d say, “Cool, when can I start?” I quickly realized that women like this type of training and all of a sudden I’m training tons of women.
Next thing you know, I open up my own studio and within three months I have 55 clients; probably 45 of them were women. If you train a few women well, out of nowhere you’ll have tons of female clients through word-of-mouth advertisement as they love to tell their friends about their trainer. I’ve really grown to love training women over the past five years, and here are some things I’ve learned along the way:
1. Women Can Tolerate More Training Frequency than Men
A very recent study showed that following a bench press training session, men took 48 hours to return to their previous levels of strength, whereas women took only 4 hours (Judge & Burke, 2010). Women are simply not as physically strong as men (especially in upper body strength) and don’t tax their muscular and nervous systems to the extent of males. For this reason, they should not be trained the same way as men and should be prescribed higher training frequencies. One of the primary reasons why my female clients get extremely strong and dramatically improve their shape is due to the fact that I train their entire bodies very frequently to take advantage of their superior recovery abilities.
2. Total Body Training is Best for the Majority of Women
In my experience, women do best with total body workouts. This is closely related to topic number one above. They can recover quicker and therefore probably detrain quicker as well. Men will swing a sledgehammer at a nail and whack it down in one attempt, and then take a nap. Women will take a hammer and continue to tap on the nail until it’s all the way in, and then move onto the next nail. What I’m getting at is that women should not perform bodypart splits or even lower/upper splits. It doesn’t matter how many times a woman trains with me per week (once, twice, three times, four times, or even five times), each session I’m going to hit her entire body. The trick is to give them a great workout without creating too much fatigue or soreness the following day.
3. Women are Often Intimidated, Self-Conscious, and Insecure
Women initially fear weight training and don’t want to be surrounded by a bunch of libidinous men leering over them, grunting, and throwing around heavy weights. Many like to train with fellow females so they don’t feel threatened, and they need reassurance and guidance. Women appreciate a confident trainer so make sure you exude confidence in your methods and in their ability to succeed. Most important, they thrive off of compliments! Notice the little things and compliment good effort and you’ll have a client for life.
4. Women Have Anatomical and Physiological Differences
Women are anatomically and physiologically different than males. They have wider q-angles which predisposes them to knee injuries, they are taught to “sit like a lady” which probably reinforces valgus-collapse over the years, they produce on average a tenth of the testosterone of males, and their estrogen, progesterone, FSH, and LH fluctuate throughout the month according to their menstrual cycles. They have different strength balances than men (less hamstring:quadricep strength ratio, greater lower body:upper body strength ratio) and their muscles fire differently than men as well (glute and hamstring timing often fires earlier due to a perception of weakness).
For these reasons, it’s important to teach proper mechanics, strengthen the posterior chain, and be understanding of mood-swings when training women because often it’s not their fault.
5. Women Can Ditch Flexibility/Mobility Work in Favor of Stability/Strength Work
Women are much more flexible on average than men. In fact, many are hypermobile. For this reason, they often do not need to do any stretching or mobility drills. They already possess good flexibility and many have laxity in certain joints. For this reason, it’s wiser to focus on stability and activation exercises in addition to some basic strength movements during the general dynamic warm-up rather than static stretches or mobility drills. If you have 50 minutes to train a female, most of that 50 minutes should be used for strengthening and conditioning. If strength exercises are taken through full ranges of motion then they’ll retain joint mobility while adding stability and strength to the joint which is exactly what they need.
One drawback of hypermobility is that many women over-extend their lumbar spine when they lift. It’s common to see women excessively arching (hyperextending) their low backs when they squat, deadlift, do push ups, hip thrusts, back extensions, and ab wheel rollouts. You need to teach them how to control their cores and maintain neutral spines.
*too much lower back arching
6. Fun and Variety Never Did a Woman No Harm
Women like to have fun during their workouts and they appreciate variety. Make them laugh from time to time; you don’t have to act like a drill-sergeant. Conversely, don’t be afraid to lay down the law when necessary. There are so many great exercises and women like learning little tweaks from time to time. Here are some of the main exercises I employ when I train women:
Quad Dominant: full squat, front squat, goblet squat, elevated dumbbell squat between benches, high box squat, low box squat, lever squat, Zercher squat, step up, Bulgarian split squat, walking lunge, reverse lunge, single leg box squat
Horizontal Press: torso-elevated push up, push up, dumbbell incline press, dumbbell bench press, barbell incline press, barbell bench press, close grip bench press
Standing Hip Dominant: conventional deadlift, trap bar deadlift, sumo deadlift, rack pull, Romanian deadlift, single leg RDL, good morning, pull through, kettlebell swing
Vertical Pull: close grip lat pulldown, wide grip lat pulldown, negative chin up, chin up, parallel grip pull up
Prone, Supine, or Quadruped Hip Dominant: back extension, single leg back extension, 45 degree hyper, single leg 45 degree hyper, reverse hyper, hip thrust, barbell glute bridge, single leg hip thrust, pendulum quadruped hip extension, pendulum quadruped donkey kick, Russian leg curl, glute ham raise, gliding leg curl, slideboard leg curl, stability ball leg curl
Vertical Press: dumbbell seated military press, dumbbell military press, barbell military press, dumbbell push press, barbell push press
Sagittal Plane Core: plank, bodysaw, stability ball rollout, ab wheel rollout, straight leg sit up, hanging leg raise, Turkish get up
Horizontal Pull: one arm row, inverted row, feet elevated inverted row, seated row, band seated row, face pull, chest supported row
Frontal/Transverse Plane Core: side plank, 45 degree side bend, Pallof press, cable hip rotation, cable woodchop, landmine
I throw in the following for variety as well:
Conditioning: complexes, tabatas, airdyne intervals, sled work, slideboard intervals, car pushes, jump rope, burpees, mountain climbers
Power: plyometrics, sprints, agility drills, jump squats, one arm snatches, med ball tosses
You don’t have to do all of this every single session, but try to plan well-balanced programs.
Utilize paired-supersets and you’ll be able to squeeze in more work and density in your sessions.
7. Women Love Athletic and “Manly” Training
Most women don’t know this, but deep-down they love feeling athletic and “hard-core.” Over time they will love it if you get them to be able to perform a chin up or a proper push up (without hips sagging). They love pushing cars around as they never realized that they could do it. They will learn to love deadlifting if you teach them well. Women love getting strong; it empowers them. When they realize that heavy lifting won’t automatically make them overly muscular and that if often causes them to lean out and improve in shape, they’ll be setting records left and right. It’s your job to get them to realize this.
Here’s my friend Joe Sansalone’s girlfriend Neghar Fanooni doing Romanian deadlifts with 1.5 times her bodyweight. Weight training obviously did her body good!
8. Women are Competitive…With Thine Own Selves
Many women do not like competing with men or with other women, but they love competing against themselves. Start off slow and know how to regress and progress exercises. Bump them up slowly but surely and pretty soon they’ll start getting strong. Keep a journal and log every workout. Tell the female client what she did last time she did the exercise and she will try her best to beat it. Often women will beat their records every week for months on end when they first start training.
9. Often Women Won’t Pony Up Any Feedback
Women are often too intimidated to offer feedback. Sometimes they’ll tell you something and you’ll ask them why they didn’t tell you sooner. They’ll reply with, “You never asked.” This is why you need to ask a ton of questions. Before every session ask them if they’re sore anywhere. If their low backs are sore skip the deadlifts. If their adductors are sore don’t go into deep ranges of hip flexion and opt for high box squats and rack pulls. Ask them if the exercise “feels right” and where they feel it working. Ask them if they like their program, ask them if there is anything they’d like to be doing that they haven’t been doing. The placebo effect is well-documented and very effective; if a client believes in the program then they will achieve better results.
10. The Glutes Make a Woman
Women can buy breast implants, but getting a nice butt takes hard work. The glutes get activated best from high-load or high-velocity movement. Research shows that the glutes don’t get activated much from simple activities like standing up from a chair and walking; the body chooses instead to rely on the quads or leave the job for the more economical and elastic-storing hamstrings. Most women will come to you with poor glute activation and development due to the fact that many stop being active after high school. If you can make a woman’s butt look nicer, everyone around her will notice and she’ll start getting compliments left and right. Now she’ll be hooked on fitness for life because she won’t want to lose her nice booty. It sometimes takes time for the glutes to come around; if it took ten years for the glutes to atrophy away and sag they’re not going to come back in one week. If you’re a good trainer, for the most part every client will feel their glutes working very well within two months. Hammer the glutes every single session and they’ll respond best.
AdvertisementsThe British people fed-up with Brussels dictates voted on June 23, to exit the European Union. Boris Johnson, former Mayor of London and a leading voice for Brexit, argued (Economist June18-24 issue) that “Napoleon, Hitler, and other various people tried this out (forcefully unifying Europe-JP), and it ended tragically. The EU is an attempt to do this by different methods.” One of those coercive methods has been to limit, if not forbid, anti-immigration speech.
The elitist of the European Union (EU) have seen a rise in nativist protest movements throughout the European continent. The voiceless people of the states of the European Union have been forced to adopt multiculturalism and political correctness as their new civil religion, and their dissenting voices are now being squashed by a series of measures that amount to the curtailment of free speech.
Earlier this month, the European Commission, a powerful and unelected European Union’s executive branch, announced plans to combat “illegal online hate speech.” The same European Commission unveiled a code of conduct that will ensure that online platforms do not offer opportunities for “illegal online hate speech to spread virally.” Unsurprisingly, it is the European Commission that will determine what constitutes “illegal online hate speech” and not the people’s elected representatives in the individual European countries that make up the European Union (EU).
A press release headline issued by the European Commission (EC) in Brussels on May 31, 2016, read “The European Commission and IT companies announce Code of Conduct on illegal online hate speech.” The EC explanatory paragraphs read: “In order to prevent the spread of illegal hate speech, it is essential to ensure that relevant national laws transposing the Council Framework Decision on combating racism and xenophobia are fully enforced by Member States in the online as well as the offline environment. While the effective application of provisions criminalizing hate speech is dependent on a robust system of enforcement of criminal law sanctions against the individual perpetrators of hate speech, this work must be complemented with actions geared at ensuring that illegal hate speech online is expeditiously reviewed by online intermediaries and social media platforms, upon receipt of a valid notification, in an appropriate time-frame. To be considered valid in this respect, a notification should not be insufficiently precise or inadequately substantiated.”
These provisions of the EC against hate speech have done little to prevent the rise of anti-Semitism in the EU countries, nor has it criminalized the anti-Semitic nature of the Boycott, Divestment and Sanction (BDS) movement, which singles out the Jewish state. It does, however, seek to stifle the anti-immigrant movement, which is trying to alert Europeans of the coming Islamization of Europe. In addition, the EC decision will adversely impact on the civil liberties of over 500 million Europeans.
The net impact of recent “speech” laws enacted by western governments has been magnified by even greater forms of private censorship on (predominantly Muslim) anti-immigrants. For example, most news organizations have stopped showing images of Mohammad, although no such self-censorship has been made regarding caricatures of other religious figures. In September, 2012, French actress and animal rights activist Brigitte Bardot was fined several times for comments she made about how Muslims are undermining French culture. In Britain, a 15-year old girl was arrested for “burning a Koran at school and posting footage on Facebook.”
The Wall Street Journal reported on September 14, 2015 that, “Facebook Inc. said that it would work with the German government Justice Ministry to fight xenophobic and racist messages on the social network’s platform, bending to German government pressure to clamp down on hate messages against migrants online.” While (Muslim) anti-immigrant expression is verboten in Germany, anti-Jewish hate is excused. A German judge convicted two German-Palestinian men of attempted arson against a synagogue in the city of Wuppertal, along with a juvenile accomplice. In his ruling however, the judge declared that the crime was motivated by the desire to “bring attention to the Gaza conflict” and not by anti-Semitism, which was the obvious case. For the German judiciary, it seems, protesting against the Islamization of Europe in general, and of Germany in particular, is a hate speech, if not a hate crime. Yet, arson against a synagogue is not…this perversion of logic has become widespread throughout the EU states.
While Germany is on its way to commit demographic and cultural suicide with the admission of millions of poor and uneducated Middle Eastern and African migrants, Sweden is already lost. The people of Sweden are allowing its radical leftist governing parties and its equally pandering press to expedite the process. The Gatestone Institute reported (December 22, 2014) that before the scheduled March, 2015 elections, the current Social-Democrat and Greens party had enacted “a measure far less publicized, and would come into effect that Christmas (2014). The new measure is designed to make it easier to prosecute those who offend immigrants, immigration policies, LGBT people and politicians online.” According to Gatestone “even immigrants themselves do not seem to be allowed to challenge immigration policy or immigrant culture. Last year a Somali-born female journalist, critical of immigrant culture, was intimidated to such an extent by the Swedish journalistic establishment that she decided Mogadishu (Somalia) was a safer place for her than Sweden.”
Only in Sweden does the government take out loans to make welfare payments to migrant Muslim gang-rapists. Also in Sweden “the fear of being labeled ‘politically incorrect’ keeps Sweden’s main political parties from engaging in an honest debate about integration.” And, while the government and its compliant leftist press blew out of proportion an attack on migrants, it had been silent on the rapes by mainly Arab and African Muslim migrants on Swedish women. The U.K. Daily Mail reported (March 4th, 2016) that “What is worrying is that if the Stockholm Station story has been blown out of proportion, it could have artificially fueled pro-migrant sentiment and made ordinary Swedes less ready to voice their worries about mass migration. Fears of a cover-up have been fueled by an investigation published by a flourishing online Swedish news outlet Nyherer Idag, showing that Swedish authorities hid from the public sexual assaults by immigrant gangs on scores of teenage girls at a popular Stockholm music festival booth last year and in 2014.”
Needless to say that in Belgium, France, The Netherlands, and in the rest of the EU states, anti-immigrant voices are stifled by archaic laws that are undemocratic to say the least. The West has traded Christianity and pride in its civilizational accomplishment for the falsehood of multiculturalism. Alexander Solzhenitsyn, the Soviet dissident, author and Nobel Laureate summed it up as early as 1978, when he was given the Harvard University Laureate Award. Solzhenitsyn used the occasion to give a politically incorrect speech, which President Carter and the mainstream press criticized. Nevertheless, Solzhenitsyn spoke truth to the western powers.
Solzhenitsyn didn’t mince words while he told America and the West that they were spiritually bankrupt. The West, he said, abandoned its moral and civil courage. “The Western system in its present state of spiritual exhaustion does not look attractive.” Had Solzhenitsyn lived today, he would also witness how freedom of speech is dying in Europe.
Share or comment on this article
Via: frontpagemag.com
Read More:
https://www.savemysweden.com/danish-police-use-infamous-jewellery-law/As I reported in The Economic Philosopher's Outcast: Mises, the great Austrian economist Ludwig von Mises narrowly escaped capture by the Gestapo after the Nazis occupied Vienna in March 1938. What I didn't mention is that he was forced to leave his voluminous papers behind -- a painful experience for any writer!
Although the Gestapo failed to nab Mises, who had escaped to Switzerland, they ransacked his apartment at 24 Wollseile, confiscating his manuscripts, articles, university lectures and extensive correspondence with many of the greatest thinkers of his time.
The Nazis were after Mises not only because he was Jewish, but because he was a brilliant, outspoken opponent of social engineering and central planning. Mises championed a free-market economy as the best way to protect individual liberties, spur innovation and raise living standards. He argued that Germany's spiraling inflation was a result of government mismanagement of monetary and banking systems. As a result, Ebeling notes, "both fascists and communists hated him."
Mises founded the Austrian Institute for Business Cycle Research in 1926, with a young Friedrich A. Hayek as its first director. As a senior economic analyst for Vienna's Chamber of Commerce, Mises railed against waves of interventionist and socialist legislation implemented by the Austrian parliament. Mises held salons at his home that brought together the best young minds in Vienna to discuss the dangers of socialism for European economies and for human liberty. Mises was an advocate of entrepreneurship who argued that entrepreneurs created much of society's wealth. No wonder Hitler was threatened by him!
In 1940, Professor Mises emigrated to the United States, where he taught at New York University until age 87 and wrote many influential articles and books, including his masterpiece Human Action: A Treatise on Economics. Sadly, Mises died believing his papers had been destroyed by the Nazis.
Miraculously, though, his long-lost papers were discovered in a secret Moscow archive in 1996 by American economist and Mises scholar Richard Ebeling -- who has been my friend for 30 years.
During World War II, the Nazis stored literally tons of art, musical scores, manuscripts and other intellectual property on boxcars. According to Ebeling, 24 boxcars packed with documents were moved to Bohemia in western Czechoslovakia. When Bohemia was "liberated" by the Soviets in 1945, soldiers who came across the boxcars contacted Stalin's secret service.
The agents quickly grasped the incredible value of what they'd found and informed Stalin, who ordered the boxcars brought to Moscow. Over "20 million pages of captured documents, from 20 Nazi-occupied countries" were stored in a nondescript building called the Center for the Preservation of Historical Documentary Collections that Stalin had built on the outskirts of town. For decades, only the KGB and Soviet Ministry of Foreign Affairs had access to this top-secret archive, which included papers by Mises, Albert Einstein and Immanuel Kant -- even original scores by Wolfgang Mozart.
After hearing rumors that Mises's papers might have survived the war, Ebeling made inquiries at the Holocaust Museum in D.C. The museum researchers found no mention of Mises in their database, but on a hunch Ebeling asked if there could possibly be anything related to Mises in Moscow.
Museum staff member Karl Modek came over to talk to Ebeling. Modek was looking into a Soviet archive of documents that had recently been declassified, and had just received an index of the archive. In the index, Ebeling and Modek found the name "Ludwig Mises," with "Fund #623" printed next to it.
Thrilled by this discovery, Ebeling returned to Hillsdale College, where he was Ludwig von Mises Professor of Economics, and raised funds from the school to travel to Moscow to explore mysterious Fund #623.
At the Center for the Preservation of Historical Documentary Collections, Ebeling and his Russian-born wife, Anna, found Fund #623. It contained over 10,000 pages that took them 10 days to go through and photocopy. They wore out the Center's copier!
The papers prove, Ebeling says, that "Ludwig von Mises was one of the most important free-market economists and philosophers of freedom in our time."
According to Ebeling:
These thousands of pages of archival material bring to light a new side of Ludwig von Mises. Here we see Mises as more than just the brilliant economic theorist demonstrating the unworkability of socialist central planning and the inherent contradictions of the interventionist state, or as the grand expositor of a universal theory of human action and the market process. We see Mises as serious and methodical policy analyst in the twenty years between the two World Wars -- one who explains how to save a society facing a hyperinflation by introducing an alternative currency in place of the debased government money; how to bring an economy out of a great depression; how to rein in an interventionist bureaucracy that is strangling a market
economy; how to end foreign exchange controls that are distorting and hindering international trade; or how to construct a fiscal policy so it no longer stifles investment and capital formation.
Ebeling supervised and edited the translations of Mises papers, which have been published in the three-volume Selected Writings of Ludwig von Mises (Liberty Fund). He is currently a professor of economics at Northwood University in Midland, Michigan.Renate Smallegange is something of a connoisseur of smelly feet – and she goes to surprising lengths to study their odours. Sometimes she’ll collect worn nylon socks that have become imbued with the fragrance. If that’s not good enough, she asks people to rub their feet on glass beads and wipe their sweaty skin on the surface. When she’s being really picky, she’ll trap the feet in a plastic bag, allowing her to draw up the aroma in gusts of air.
Of all the jobs in the world, it’s certainly not the most pleasant, but Smallegange is mostly unperturbed by the occasional whiff of cheese. “It’s not a big deal,” she tells me. “Of course some people do smell nicer than others – from my personal point of view.”
Not everyone finds the stink so discomforting. While a strong stench may cause Smallegange to politely hold her nose, however, it happens to be a real turn-on for the other objects of her study: malaria-carrying mosquitoes. For this reason, Smallegange has been trying to find the unique recipe that gives our feet their odour, in a quest to help stem the spread of that deadly disease.
No matter how clean you are, a slight odour is almost inevitable, given the anatomy of our feet. The average foot contains 600 sweat glands per square centimetre – hundreds more than the armpits. They secrete a nutritious soup of salts, glucose, vitamins, and amino acids that provides the perfect diet for a colony of bacteria. In return for the free lunch, the bacteria leave us with a cocktail of fatty acids that together give rise to the signature musk.
There are so many bacteria living on our feet that microbiologists have had a hard time finding exactly which species cause the stench, and where they live on the foot. Showing remarkably little vanity, James Reynolds at Loughborough University and colleagues recently attempted to answer this question by mapping out the populations on their own feet.
Five groups stood out: Corynebacteria, Micrococci, Propionibacteria, Betaproteobacteria and Brevibacteria – but the biggest offender appeared to be Staphylococci. Tellingly, it always seemed to coincide with a particularly potent chemical, called isovaleric acid. “If you imagine a well-aged stilton – that’s the smell you get if you open a bottle of the stuff,” Reynolds says. “If you spill a drop in the lab you’ll smell it all afternoon – it’s horrible.” What’s more, they were most common on the sole, rather than the top – with particular high numbers around the ball of the foot – perhaps explaining why these are the smelliest areas. The comparison to cheese is appropriate. Many cheeses contain a similar mix of volatile chemicals, with Limburger cheese apparently offering the closest comparison.
Eventually, these findings may pave the road to a more fragrant future. “If we know what these compounds are and the species that produce them, we could make clothing that absorbs the smell or neutralises it,” says Reynolds. It could also lead to better deodorants. The task will be tricky – alongside the smelly bacteria, our feet harbour some potentially friendly organisms that act as gatekeepers against infection. But nature may already have some answers. A recent Japanese study found that three chemicals commonly found in citrus fruits can help target the Staphylococcus bacteria without harming its neighbours.
In some situations, foot odour is much more serious than slight embarrassment, however – it might be a matter of life or death. Dutch scientist Bart Knols was one of the first to notice that certain species of malaria-carrying mosquitoes are attracted to the smells wafting from our feet. His work has since inspired many of Smallegange’s latest studies at Wageningen University in the Netherlands.
She has found, for instance, that the malaria parasite seems to alter the mosquitoes’ sense of smell so that they are even more attracted to smellier feet, swarming to worn socks like bees to a flower bed. “There is some evidence that some proteins in the head of the mosquito change somehow, and they have a role in the olfactory response of mosquitoes,” says Smallegange. It’s a devious mechanism that leads the malaria’s host to home in on potential victims, so that it can continue its life cycle in a human body. “It’s why the mosquito is such a good vector of malaria.”
There are many ways this knowledge could help the fight against malaria. Smallegange has also examined whether the particular combination of smell-producing bacteria on feet can alter your chances of being bitten; as you might expect, those hosting more Staphylococcus tend to be more attractive. Attempts to combat those bacteria could therefore offer some protection against the deadly disease.
Alternatively, the siren call of the odour could be used to bait mosquito traps. One idea has been to bait traps with used socks; they seem to maintain their allure for at least 8 days after wear. If that seems like a waste of good underwear, Knols has also found that Limburger cheese seems to do the trick. Smallegange, meanwhile, is hoping to bottle the smell – using isovaleric acid and other components to produce her own, synthetic odour. (You could call it “eau de pied”.) “The combination is very important,” she says. “In general, a blend is more attractive than a single component.” It’s possible that you will need to use different recipes for different species of mosquito, though – each may have their own particular tastes.
It’s unclear exactly how effective these measures will be for protection. A small trial in Rusinga Island, Kenya is currently investigating whether the traps can kill or distract enough mosquitoes to reduce the overall number of bites and infections. At the very least, they could be used for an early warning – to detect whether malaria-carrying mosquitoes are already breeding nearby.
For most of us, cheesy feet are no more than an inconvenience which can be temporarily fixed with a shower. But Smallegange’s pursuits are worth bearing in mind, whenever you catch a whiff of your under-soles. With her collection of smelly socks, skin swabs and “eau de pied”, she is doing a job that few of us could stomach, all in the hope of saving lives. And that’s a mission that’s not to be sniffed at.
David Robson is BBC Future’s feature writer. He is @d_a_robson on Twitter.
Follow us on Facebook, Twitter, Google+ and LinkedIn.This comprehensive Google+ SEO guide covers every aspect and angle of Google+ and how it impacts search. My normal TL;DR has been replaced with a Google+ SEO Best Practices section located at the bottom of this post.
I will be periodically updating this post (updated January 23, 2012) as things inevitably change. Please don’t hesitate to comment or contact me with observations or when certain features change. I also thank the many people (on Google+) who helped in the research phase of this guide.
Google+ Search
Most of the attention is on the integration of Google+ in Google search results. However, internal search on Google+ is a fascinating product and lays the groundwork for search integration.
Google+ Search Facets
Google+ search queries return results with a standard selection of facets.
Sometimes Google selects these facets for you. Specifically, it will default to People and pages for many queries. These are generally category or head terms like SEO, Photography, Chef, CEO, Gardening etc. But a query for something like ‘banana bread’ will not return a preselected People and pages facet but just provide an Everything feed of content.
You can select certain types of content using what I call the content facet.
This is all pretty self explanatory. I’m still not certain why Sparks has survived though. Next is what I call the universe facet.
Here you can select what universe of results you want to search. The ‘From you’ option is extremely handy in finding your own Google+ content. And finally there is what I call the location facet.
At present you can search for Google Check-ins in certain cities. This facet does not get trigged when you use a location modifier. This isn’t super useful right now but it does point to future local search opportunities.
Google+ Search Results
The actual results are a live stream of Google+ content.
Most recent is just what it sounds like. So the real-time search everyone thought was going to transform the world is a small feature in Google+ search.
You can switch to Best of which delivers results based on a combination of who is in your Circles and engagement (+1s, comments and shares) on those items with some Sparks content thrown in for good measure. There’s some sort of time component at work here as well that skews results to more recent content.
I see this in action when I search for ‘I did not wake up in‘ which returns a number of posts from my personal travel meme, the first few of which are from this week. (Please note that your results may look vastly different than mine.)
Google+ People and Pages Results
The content results are, therefore, pretty straightforward from and SEO perspective. It’s the People and pages that are far more interesting and potentially valuable. The question is how these People and pages are selected.
Google+ search results are personalized but through some crowdsourcing I’ve been able to determine the search signals.
The most important signal is whether the query term appears in the Introduction, Employment, Education or Places lived section of your profile. Danny Sullivan rarely shows up in a search for SEO because he doesn’t have the term in any of those fields. He does in his tagline but that’s not used in the internal search algorithm. Or if it is, it’s not heavily weighted.
After the query match it’s all about who you have in your Circles. If you have more than six people in your Circles who also match the query then it comes down to a mixture of Circle count (heavily weighted), name verification (moderately weighted) and engagement (lightly weighted).
Occupation is not used. How do I know this? I’ve had Purple Jellyfish Farmer as my occupation for months. A search on this phrase returns no results.
Bragging Rights is also not used for People and pages search.
At present results also seem to favor People over Pages. But if you don’t have enough People to fill out these results Google backfills with Pages that have that query term in the name and a high Circle count.
Circle count is clearly important but some sort of engagement metric might be at play when the set of people returned is low. It’s difficult to say if or to what degree engagement plays a part right now.
Using a new Google+ account I was able to see ‘unbiased’ results.
While Jonathon has SEO in both Introduction and Employment (having it both places seems to help a lot) and enjoys a solid Circle count I find his inclusion here over others to be curious. These results point to a slight added weight on those who are verified. How you get verified is still a mystery to me. I’m hoping to figure this out in the very near future.
Google+ search results can change quickly. Here’s my search for SEO the day after my initial research.
Danny Sullivan is now appearing instead of Bill Slawski. Why?
Yup. Including |
seemingly endless number of damaging sound bites being released by what appears to be every finance minister on the continent. If press release sound bites were bullets, this would be called an active shooting war. The airing of dirty internal politics and national priorities is going to undermine any attempt at building an economic coalition.
It is economic warfare in Europe again. This time, like past times, the groups are dividing up along economic self interests. There is no sign of “Union” in European politics.
What is clear, however, is that the Icelandic solution is the elephant sitting quietly in the corner of the room. If nations with low national debts, write off their own banking system, organic growth is possible. It just takes the will of the people to speak.
As Claus Vistesen pointed out in his article today at Fist Full of Euros,
“Finally, I crucially assume that you can’t have both austerity and growth at the same time. If you want growth it will cost a higher fiscal deficit and if you to run down the fiscal deficit you must endure deflation (negative nominal GDP growth in essence) and it is this latter which the ECB and EU are pushing. Especially this last assumption is absolutely crucial to understand since it is this situation the periphery faces with an internal devaluation in the euro zone.”
The Slovakian finance minister has broken new ground this weekend by pointing out that the Greek government is naked. What happens next concerning the continued funding of the Greek Bailout will be interesting.
Everyone knows the Greek government cannot service the old debts, let alone the new debts being heaped upon it by the EU & IMF rescues. Slovakia, at least, is not shy about asking why it must help pay for the Greek hangover.
The only question is when is it acceptable for the Greeks to acknowledge what Slovakia has pointed out. Greece is going to be unable to service the debt it already has. So why continue to throw good money after bad? or said another way. Do you want Austerity or do you want Growth? You can not have both.
Confessions of a Macro Contrarian www.JackHBarnes.comThe original World Trade Center PATH (Port Authority Trans-Hudson) Station, opened in 1971, was destroyed in the 9/11 attacks when the WTC towers collapsed on top of it. Its replacement, the World Trade Center Transportation Hub, is a mega-terminal on the scale of Grand Central Station—under the new WTC complex.
The Bathtub
"The Financial District used to be, at some point, part of the Hudson. We are in a lot of landfill area; Battery Park Station and the World Financial Center are built on landfill," Eduardo DelValle, Director of Design Management for 1 World Trade Center told us. "This whole 16 acres is walled in by slurry walls, and they're designed to keep the Hudson from coming in because the water table here is very, very high. Within two feet [of digging down from street level] we're hitting water."
Advertisement
The slurry wall or "bathtub" method involves digging a trench and filling the resulting space with a mixture of bentonite and water, which temporarily plugs holes and keeps groundwater from penetrating. When the trench is completed, workers insert a steel cage into the trench and pump in concrete, which forces the slurry mix out, resulting in a water-tight retaining wall.
When the WTC towers fell, many of the floor slabs that supported the original slurry wall were knocked out, leaving just the debris pile itself to keep the wall from collapsing. As excavations of "The Pile" commenced, the wall's support structure was removed and, over time, due to the intense water pressure exerted by the Hudson, sections of the wall ended up shifting as much as a foot inward and caused a massive crack to form in one section of the slurry wall—leaking of anywhere from 100-200 gallons per minute in places.
Advertisement
Work crews immediately back-filled huge amounts of soil to bolster the wall. They then plugged the leaks by pushing rope treated with an expanding chemical into the holes and stopped the wall from further cracking by pumping in a strong sealing paste. Workers also excavated a series of wells outside the wall to lower the groundwater level, thereby reducing pressure outside of the wall. Intruding water was summarily pumped out.
The new slurry wall being built around the 16-acre WTC complex not only provides protection from the Hudson's waters but also acts as a foundation for the new transportation hub's lower floors. Its three-foot thick walls extend 70—100 feet into the Earth, pass within six feet of the new train tunnels and are anchored into the bedrock with approximately 1,000 cable tie-backs.
It did, however, suffer similar water intrusion damage with Hurricane Irene. "Water was just gushing in," said DelValle. Since the original wall's structural integrity had been repeatedly compromised, the WTC design team determined that a second layer of protection was necessary, "so what we're doing is putting in liner walls," DelValle continued, "which is a another slurry wall in front of the old, providing another layer of protection."
Advertisement
The Canopy
When you think of an underground transportation facility, the image of a child's hands releasing a bird into flight shouldn't be the first think you think of—third, maybe, after Mole Men and Crab People—but that is exactly what famed Spanish architect Santiago Calatrava based the new canopy cover of the Transportation Hub on.
Advertisement
The Hub entrance—aka the Oculus—is comprised of 300 pieces of steel erected in a rare, Vierendeel Truss design that features a pair of 150-foot-high "wings" suspended over a glass and steel "body"—built from two sets of specially-designed arches, each weighing between 10-25 tons and standing over 30 feet tall—that allows natural light to penetrate to the rail platforms more than 60 feet below street level. The steel beams were manufactured numerous locations including New Jersey, Pennsylvania, South Carolina, Canada and Spain.
"The building is built with steel, glass, and light. They will all be equal building materials," says Calatrava in a press release. "The light will arrive at the platform, and visitors will feel like they are arriving in a great place, a welcoming place."
The deck-over construction method was employed to ensure that the Memorial Plaza would be ready for the upcoming 10th anniversary of the attacks and 9/11 Memorial opening. The station itself is expected to open by mid-2014, according to the Port Authority.
Advertisement
The Hub
Lower Manhattan is set to become the third-largest transportation center in New York when the World Trade Center Transportation Hub is completed.
It will house the PATH lines, 13 subway lines via the Fulton Street Transit Center through the Dey Street Corridor, and link visitors and locals alike to the World Financial Center through the most integrated network of underground pedestrian connections in all of New York City. In total, pedestrians will be able to access the Battery Park City Ferry Terminal to the WTC Memorial, Towers 1, 2, 3, and 4 as well as the Hudson River ferry terminals, the World Financial Center, and the proposed rail link to JFK Airport from the same central hub.
Advertisement
Located near the northeast corner of the WTC site between Towers 2 and 3, the Hub itself will be 300,000 sq. ft. and include a multi-story central hall that includes a lower concourse with balcony walkway above it (a la Grand Central Station) as well as a public waiting area and 500,000 sq. ft. of retail and dining space. It will be able to accommodate many as 250,000 riders a day—compared to the paltry 50,000 the temporary station currently can handle—as well as the millions of annual visitors to the new World Trade Center complex and 9/11 Memorial and Museum.
The entire Transportation Hub interior will be generally free of vertical columns, on account of the two massive plate girders—each 7 feet high and 143 feet long—that sit atop four super-columns, resulting in a greater sense of openness through the concourse. It will also feature three full-service, climate-controlled, 10-car platforms with five tracks, in addition to an additional platform to accommodate any future service lines.
In all, the Hub will consume over 22,000 tons of steel—roughly as much as the USS New York—in its construction. It's being financed via $1.92 billion from the Federal Transportation Agency with the Port Authority picking up the rest of the bill. The Hub promises to revolutionize how New Yorkers access Lower Manhattan and the greater NYC area.
Advertisement
Oculus image courtesy of NY/NJ Port Authority
Monster Machines is all about the most exceptional machines in the world, from massive gadgets of destruction to tiny machines of precision, and everything in between.
A civilization can distinguish itself by how well it responds to disaster, and 10 years later, 9/11 is as much a story about recovery and rebuilding as it a story of terrible loss and tragedy. As a nation, our political and economic response has been imperfect—possibly even dead wrong—but we're focusing on the mechanical marvels that have helped us bounce back.
Advertisement
You can keep up with Andrew Tarantola, the author of this post, on Twitter, Facebook, or Google+.RACE INFORMATION
SUNDAY, SEPTEMBER 16, 2018
HALF MARATHON
The race course is certified and is an out and back course, marked with mile markers at every mile and with kilometer markings at 5, 10 and 15 KM marks. From the start line near the Duck Pond Shelter at St. Vital Park, beginning at 8am, runners will run on Parameter Road to the exit gate of the park, turn south on River Road to just before Bishop Grandin, turn right and follow the bike path to the Red River leading to south side of Bishop Grandin. Make the loop to follow the path over the bridge to the west side of the Red River to Darcy Drive and to Thatcher Drive leading to University Crescent, turn left on University Crescent and left again on Sifton Road. Follow Sifton to Saunders, Freedman and turn left on Kings Drive and right to Kilkenny Drive to the Perimeter Highway. At this point cross over to the bike path going west along Cloutier Drive to the turnaround point, make a slight left from the bike path to the left lane of Cloutier Drive and retrace the course back to the park. There are also racecourse marshals and volunteers (in yellow T-shirts) all along the course for guidance.
5K FUN RUN
The Fun Run will start shortly after the Half Marathon and is 2 Laps (5 Km) around St. Vital Park (Perimeter Road). The Fun Run is open to all ages and we encourage families, friends or groups to participate and join the fun!Purpose
To ensure that prisoners who are to be released from a prison receive all their entitlements, property and information, and to ensure that all person(s) of interest have been advised of the upcoming scheduled release, but only after the rigorous checks have been completed confirming the prisoner is to be released.
Standard release criteria
These procedures apply to all prisoners who are being released from prisons on: parole, or their statutory release date, or compassionate grounds, or Christmas early release.
R.07.01 Two month prior to release check
Two months prior, or when notified of a prisoner's upcoming release the case officer must review the prisoner's file to check: the identity of prisoner the release date is accurate Complete the R.07.Form.01 Release planning checklist with names of the person(s) or organisations that are to be notified of the prisoner's up coming release. The Controlling Officer at the Community Probation Service Centre (closest to where the prisoner will reside) must be advised at least one week beforehand, of the prisoner's date of release, and the details and duration of release conditions The Police must be advised (electronically) on the release of all prisoners. Prisoners subject to victims notification request (through the VNR Co-ordinator) CP - as per the HRHP procedures. The case officer also completes Section A of the R.07.Form.02 Address, travel on release, and provides a copy to the prisoner to complete Section B of this form. Forward to unit PCO the completed R.07.Form.01 Release planning checklist and R.07.Form.02 Address, travel on release.
R.07.02 Check discharge diary
The following staff / business units must access the "Discharge Diary" at least once a week to identify all prisoners with an upcoming release date within the next four week period: unit PCO(s) trust account clerks Offender Employment VNR coordinator property staff.
R.07.03 Resources for release
The following booklets / resources are to be provided to the prisoner on release if applicable: Keep safe pamphlet Electoral pack You are now smoke free pamphlet Steps to Freedom (No. 1) (Prisoner is custody for 31 days or more) Steps to Freedom (No. 2) (Sentenced Prisoner served less than 31 days) CSO Register Information Booklet (to be provided to all Registered CSOs at every release).
R.07.04 Calculate actual release date / day
One month from the prisoners scheduled release the unit PCO checks to see whether the schedule release / discharge date falls on any of the following non-release days. Non release include:
i. Thursday vi. Boxing Day xi. ANZAC Day ii. Friday vii. New Years Day xii. Sovereign's Birthday iii. Saturday viii. January 2nd xiii. Labour Day iv. Sunday ix. Waitangi Day xiv. Anniversary Day * v. Christmas Day x. Easter Monday
* Based on location of prison e.g. Wellington Anniversary day applies only to Arohata, Wellington, Manawatu, Whanganui and Rimutaka Prisons. If the scheduled release / discharge date falls on a non-release day the actual release date will be the nearest preceding Wednesday, Tuesday or Monday. However, a prisoner must be released on their statutory release date regardless of whether it is a non-release day if they: are serving a sentence of fourteen days or less, or imprisoned for non-payment of fines and the fine(s) for which the warrant of commitment was issued have been paid, or the prisoner is not physically in the prison. If a prisoner is being released on parole they must be released on the date specified by the Parole Board. The Parole Board must not specify a non-release day for release. A prisoner must be released between 7.00am and 8.00pm except under an arrangement between the prison director and the Police, a Court Registrar or a security contractor or in exceptional circumstances.
R.07.05 Preparing Release Licence
A release licence must be prepared for all prisoners serving a determinate sentence of imprisonment, or a sentence of imprisonment for life or preventive detention, except prisoners released from a short-term sentence, if on release, the offender is not subject to any release conditions. The unit PCO must identify and prepare the appropriate release licence which is dependant on the prisoner’s type and / or length of sentence and any conditions imposed.
Release Licence Use / Criteria Form a. Short-term Sentence Sentence of imprisonment of 12 months or less.
Sentence of imprisonment of more than 12 months but not more than 24 months. R.07.Form.03 b. Long-term Sentence Sentence of imprisonment of more 24 months, or
Sentence of imprisonment for life, or
Sentence of preventive detention. R.07.Form.04 c. Compassionate Grounds Parole Board has directed early release on compassionate grounds. R.07.Form.05 d. Statutory Release Date Prisoner is being released at the Statutory Release Date. R.07.Form.06
R.07.06 Checking Conditions of Release
The unit PCO must check: Prisoners subject to a long term determinate sentence to be released on parole must have standard release conditions. Prisoners subject to an indeterminate sentence, the parole board must impose the standard release conditions on the offender for the rest of the offender’s life. The duration of any imposed special conditions must not exceed the duration of the standard conditions imposed. For any sentences of 24 months or less, where the Court has imposed standard and / or special conditions the period cannot exceed the sentence expiry date by more than six months. For sentences of more than 24 months both the standard and special parole conditions imposed can exceed the sentence expiry date by six months. For any sentence over twelve months and up to 24 months where the Court does not impose conditions, the prisoner is subject to standard release conditions up to the sentence expiry date.
Note: If the release conditions include a condition that the prisoner is not to possess or use an electronic communication device or a device capable of accessing the internet, the PCO must check the prisoner’s property to determine whether there are any devices that if handed to a prisoner on release, would be in breach of the condition.
If the prisoner has an electronic device in their property they must be advised in advance (using the P.10.01 Removal of prisoner property procedures) to arrange for the device to be removed from the prison as failure to do so could result in a breach of their release conditions. Prisoners who are released early (e.g. Christmas early release) are subject to the conditions up to their SRD, the prisoner continues to be subject to these conditions for the period specified by the parole board beginning from the SRD. Staff will need to manually modify IOMS so the start date of the conditions coincides with the SRD. Prisoners who are paroled but are detained in a hospital or in a secure facility under a compulsory care order, the conditions of release will not take effect until the prisoner has been discharged from that facility. Once the unit PCO has completed the release licence, (and after confirming the release date and code is correct) they must print three copies of the release warrant and, if applicable, attach copies of: the warrants summary of facts, and Judge’s sentencing notes. Update IOMS and forward completed file to the Receiving Office.
R.07.07 One week prior to release– Receiving Office Check
On receipt of the file from the unit PCO the receiving office staff must: prepare three copies of the advice to Service Manager CP Notification of Release On Licence (R.07.Form.08 Notification on release on licence). Prepare 3 copies of the R.07.Form.10 Receipt for release licence. For all Registered CSOs prepare the R.08.Form.01 Notice of Reporting Obligations (NORO) via the Release Details screen (IOMS). For planned releases the National CSO Registry will e-mail a letter to your site Receiving Office e-mail (or your CSO Register outlook e-mail in-box which some sites have set up). Place this letter for the registered CSO on the prisoner’s file along with the other documentation. If no contact has been made by the National CSO Registry you should e-mail them requesting the letter (CSORegistry@police.govt.nz). Attach all documents to the prisoner’s file and forward to the prison director.
R.07.08 Prison director approval
The prison director on receipt of the file from the receiving office must: confirm the prisoner's identity check release date and code is correct on IOMS approve release on IOMS sign front cover of the prisoner’s file sign all copies of the release licence (R.07.Form.03 Release licence for offender subject to short-term sentence released from prison on court-imposed conditions, R.07.Form.04 Release licence for offender subject to long-term sentence released on parole from prison, R.07.Form.05 Release licence for offender released on compassionate release, R.07.Form.06 Release licence for offender subject to long-term sentence released from prison at statutory release date) and Notification of release on licence (R.07.Form.08 Notification of release on licence), and return file to receiving office.
R.07.09 Prior to release – Receiving Office
On receipt of the file from the prison director, receiving office staff must: scan and email a copy of the release licence (with attachments) and the copy of the Notification of release on licence to the Community Corrections Service Manager and the generic PAC email address for the Service Centre. The generic PAC email address for each Service Centre is obtained by typing 'PAC' into the global email address box and selecting / confirming the correct address (e.g. PAC Ashburton SC). arrange the travel and confirm bookings obtain the prisoner’s trust / earnings monies and steps to freedom from the trust account clerk all property checked (stored and issued).
R.07.10 Release day
The prisoner must be provided copies and explained the purpose of the: release licence (R.07.Form.03 Release licence for offenders subject to short-term sentence released from prison on court-imposed conditions, R.07.Form.04 Release licence for offender subject to long-term sentence released on parole from prison, R.07.Form.05 Release licence for offender released on compassionate release, R.07.Form.06 Release licence for offender subject to long-term sentence released from prison at statutory release date) notification to CP (R.07.Form.08 Notification of release on licence) Electoral pack Keep safe pamphlet You are now smoke free pamphlet If subject to the CSO Register the prisoner should be provided with a CSO Register Information Booklet, an IOMS generated R.08.Form.01 Notice of Reporting Obligations (NORO), and (for planned releases) a letter from the National CSO Registry (which would have been e-mailed to the Receiving Office). A copy of the signed R.08.Form.01 Notice of Reporting Obligations (NORO) should be scanned and e-mailed to the National CSO Registry, along with a confirmation that the information booklet and the letter were issued to the prisoner (CSORegister@police.govt.nz). Prisoner is to sign for: release licence (sign the R.07.Form.10 Receipt for release licence) steps to freedom trust / earnings monies property schedule (IOMS printed) R.08.Form.01 Notice of Reporting Obligations (NORO) - if the prisoner is subject to the SCO Register.
R.07.11 Post releaseVIENNA (Reuters) - Swiss police detained 32 Tibetans and Swiss nationals protesting against a visit by Chinese President Xi Jinping on Sunday, a spokesman said.
Swiss authorities had limited the duration of the protest in the center of Bern to two hours before noon (1100 GMT) to avoid the kind of confrontation that marked the last visit by a Chinese president 18 years ago.
Several people near a security zone set up for the state visit failed to comply with police instructions, Bern cantonal police said in a statement.
“Thirty-two people were detained to secure safety,” a spokesman said.
At noon, police prevented a man from setting himself on fire, according to the statement. The man was taken care of by doctors.
Fourteen activists were detained near the Swiss parliament building in the afternoon as they continued to protest past the time restriction, waving posters saying “Free Tibet” and “Don’t Deal With Killers”, the association of Tibetan Youth in Europe said.
“The situation inside Tibet is getting worse day by day. Our people are being oppressed, our people are being imprisoned,” the association’s spokeswoman Migmar Dhakyel said.
“We are really concerned (about) how our government, our own government treats us, doesn’t permit us to demonstrate.”
Between 700 and 800 Tibetans and Swiss had gathered in the city center and protested peacefully against the Tibet policies of China, Tenzin Nyingbu, President of the Tibetan Community in Switzerland & Liechtenstein, told Reuters.
Most of them left before noon as agreed with Bern municipal security, Nyingbu said.
The Chinese leader arrived in the Swiss capital for a gala dinner on Sunday afternoon. After holding talks with Swiss officials on Monday, he will attend the annual meeting of the World Economic Forum in Davos on Tuesday, a first for a Chinese president.
In 1999, demonstrators took to roofs overlooking the Swiss parliament with banners demanding “Free Tibet” during a visit by China’s then-president Jiang Zemin.
Slideshow (3 Images)
Police intervened when people tried to throw eggs at the Chinese delegation. Jiang questioned Swiss leaders’ control over their country and remarked that they risked “losing a good friend”.
China and Switzerland forged a free trade agreement in 2014 and Swiss companies count China among their most important markets.
(This story corrects name of spokeswoman of the association of Tibetan Youth in Europe to Migmar Dhakyel, not Mimpara Dhakyel, in paragraph 7)After years of silence, the revered and reclusive cartoonist has been relatively busy this year, a happy surprise for his legions of fans
Reclusive comic artist alert! Calvin and Hobbes creator Bill Watterson has popped up again. Well, his art has anyway. On Wednesday, he revealed a new 15-panel comic strip poster promoting the Angoulême International Comics Festival, held from 29 January through 1 February 2015 in Angoulême, France. In typical fashion, the publicity-shy artist won’t be attending the event.
Steve Silberman (@stevesilberman) 1st new comic in 20 years from creator of Calvin and Hobbes. Delightful and needs no caption. http://t.co/qE0xiBTS3R pic.twitter.com/nWpcwdmygN
For many fans, it’s enough that Watterson created the strip, which follows a balding, bath-robed newspaper subscriber – yes, they still exist – who just wants to read the funny pages. Naturally, hijinks ensue. The dialogue-free artwork doesn’t look like an extension of Calvin and Hobbes’ world. Rather, the man’s sausage-like nose and the way he stalks through the action recalls one of Watterson’s biggest influences: George Herriman’s character Krazy Kat.
This poster caps off a relatively busy year for the once MIA cartoonist. Watterson drew a poster for the comic strip documentary Stripped – he also granted producers an audio interview – and he served as a guest artist on Stephan Pastis’ strip, Pearls Before Swine. In March, an exhibition of his work, Exploring Calvin and Hobbes, went on display at the Billy Ireland Cartoon Library and Museum at Ohio State University.
All this activity is somewhat startling for most longtime fans, since Watterson became the JD Salinger of cartooning after he ended Calvin and Hobbes in 1995. For years, there was zip, zilch, nada. Not a peep. These recent non-public appearances – and a few others that preceded it – have been a happy surprise for me. When I was writing my 2009 biography-detective-story-love-letter, Looking for Calvin and Hobbes: The Unconventional Story of Bill Watterson and His Revolutionary Comic Strip, I tried to procure an interview with Watterson. Not to give away the ending, but I never got the chance to speak with him. Luckily, I did manage to interview well over 100 of his colleagues, friends and family members, who were more than happy to talk in his stead.
After the book was published, I sent Watterson a copy, along with a letter. I’m not sure he ever read either. However, in my note I suggested he should embrace the considerable love and respect people have for him, which would in no way compromise his desire for privacy or his unwillingness to sell out. No matter the motivation, it is clear that Watterson is now more comfortable accepting praise for his artistic contributions and wants to be a vibrant part of the cartooning community again. Like Calvin and Hobbes, he clearly still has more exploring to do.San Antonio Texas Population Charts According to the most recent demographics data available from the Census Bureau released in December of 2018, Figure 1 Figure 3 compares the population change from 2010 to 2017 and we can see San Antonio shows an increase of 134,213 (10%).
The population percent change for all areas for 2010 to 2017 is shown in Figure 4 and for San Antonio shows it has 10.1% Population Change which is the 2nd most of all the places in the area. Comparing Population Change to the
Looking at population density in Figure 5 San Antonio shows it has 3,171 population density which is the 2nd smallest population density of all the other places in the area. The next higher population density is Figure 6 shows the median age of the people and San Antonio illustrates it has 33.2 overall median age of all people which is the 4th smallest overall median age of all people of all the other places in the area. The city with the highest overall median age of all people in the area is Figure 7 we find that San Antonio indicates median age of men is about 8.5% smaller than median age of women.
Looking at the breakdown of age groups in the generation analysis in Figure 8 San Antonio has the largest proportion of people 20 to 29 year olds at 16.5% of the total and is ranked #1. Figure 10 shows the Hispanic or Latino population of the area with San Antonio shows it has 64.0% people who are Hispanic or Latino which is the 3d most of all other places in the area. Figure 11 is the ratio of the population of men to women and shows total male population is only about 3.1% smaller than total female population. According to the most recent demographics data available from the Census Bureau released in December of 2018, San Antonio indicates it has 1,461,620 population which is the largest of all placesin the area.compares the population change from 2010 to 2017 and we can see San Antonio shows an increase of 134,213 (10%).The population percent change for all areas for 2010 to 2017 is shown inand for San Antonio shows it has 10.1% Population Change which is the 2nd most of all the places in the area. Comparing Population Change to the United States average of 5.6%, San Antonio is about twice as large. Also, compared with the state of Texas, Population Change of 9.0%, San Antonio is 11.8% larger.Looking at population density inSan Antonio shows it has 3,171 population density which is the 2nd smallest population density of all the other places in the area. The next higher population density is Olmos Park measures about the same size with population density of 3,187. The city with the highest population density in the area is Balcones Heights with a population density of 4,921 is 55.2% larger.shows the median age of the people and San Antonio illustrates it has 33.2 overall median age of all people which is the 4th smallest overall median age of all people of all the other places in the area. The city with the highest overall median age of all people in the area is Castle Hills with an age of 45.2 is 36.1% larger. Comparing the median age of men versus women inwe find that San Antonio indicates median age of men is about 8.5% smaller than median age of women.Looking at the breakdown of age groups in the generation analysis inSan Antonio has the largest proportion of people 20 to 29 year olds at 16.5% of the total and is ranked #1.shows the Hispanic or Latino population of the area with San Antonio shows it has 64.0% people who are Hispanic or Latino which is the 3d most of all other places in the area.is the ratio of the population of men to women and shows total male population is only about 3.1% smaller than total female population.
San Antonio Texas Marriage and Families Charts Figure 14 is the average size of a typical family. San Antonio illustrates it has 3.8 average family size which is the 2nd most of all the places in the area. The city with the highest average family size in the area is
Figure 15 shows the ratio of families to total households and that San Antonio shows it has 65% percent of people who are in a family which is the 4th in percent of people who are in a family out of 10 total in the area. The city with the highest percent of people who are in a family in the area is
Looking at husband and wife headed families as a percent of all families in Figure 16, San Antonio indicates it has 65% percent of people in a husband and wife family which is the 5th in percent of people in a husband and wife family out of 10 total in the area. The city with the highest percent of people in a husband and wife family in the area is is the average size of a typical family. San Antonio illustrates it has 3.8 average family size which is the 2nd most of all the places in the area. The city with the highest average family size in the area is San Antonio Central with a size of 4.0 is only about 5.6% larger.shows the ratio of families to total households and that San Antonio shows it has 65% percent of people who are in a family which is the 4th in percent of people who are in a family out of 10 total in the area. The city with the highest percent of people who are in a family in the area is Terrell Hills with a percent of 77% is 17.6% larger.Looking at husband and wife headed families as a percent of all families in, San Antonio indicates it has 65% percent of people in a husband and wife family which is the 5th in percent of people in a husband and wife family out of 10 total in the area. The city with the highest percent of people in a husband and wife family in the area is Terrell Hills with a percent of 89% is 36.0% larger.
San Antonio Texas Mothers and Babies Charts The next section of charts look at mothers and baby births over the last 12 months. Figure 18 shows the rate of women aged 15 to 50 years old who have given birth. Figure 19 shows the breakdown of the mothers age for all births and it has the largest proportion of percent of births to mothers aged 45 to 50 at 2% of the total and is ranked #1. In Figure 20, the teenager birth rate is shown (women between the ages of 15 and 19.) San Antonio illustrates it has 6% teenager birth rate which is the 3d most of all other places in the area. The city with the highest teenager birth rate in the area is Figure 21 the percentage is shown of all births in the last 12 months were the mothers were unmarried. Figure 22 shows the percent of unwed mothers who are on public assistance. The next section of charts look at mothers and baby births over the last 12 months.shows the rate of women aged 15 to 50 years old who have given birth. San Antonio illustrates it has 5.8% percent of women who gave birth which is the 5th in percent of women who gave birth out of 10 total in the area. The city with the highest percent of women who gave birth in the area is Balcones Heights with a birth rate of 8.0% is 37.4% larger.shows the breakdown of the mothers age for all births and it has the largest proportion of percent of births to mothers aged 45 to 50 at 2% of the total and is ranked #1. In, the teenager birth rate is shown (women between the ages of 15 and 19.) San Antonio illustrates it has 6% teenager birth rate which is the 3d most of all other places in the area. The city with the highest teenager birth rate in the area is Castle Hills with a percent of births to teen ager of 8% is 35.6% larger. Inthe percentage is shown of all births in the last 12 months were the mothers were unmarried. San Antonio indicates it has 42% percent of unwed women who have given birth which is the 2nd most of all the places in the area. The city with the highest percent of unwed women who have given birth in the area is San Antonio Central with an unwed mother birth rate of 51% measures 21.8% larger. The nextshows the percent of unwed mothers who are on public assistance. San Antonio shows it has 1.7% percent of unwed women who have given birth and are on public assistance which is the 3d most of all other places in the area. The city with the highest percent of unwed women who have given birth and are on public assistance in the area is Balcones Heights with a percent of unwed women who have gave birth and are on public assistance of 10.6% is very much bigger.
San Antonio Texas Citizenship Charts
In Figure 37, the percentage of the population who was not born in the United States is shown (i.e. Percent Foreign Born.) Figure 40 shows the median age of non citizens and it has 38.6 median age of non citizens which is the 5th in median age of non citizens out of 10 total in the area. The city with the highest median age of non citizens in the area is In, the percentage of the population who was not born in the United States is shown (i.e. Percent Foreign Born.) San Antonio illustrates it has 14.2% percent of population who was born in another country which is the 3d most of all other places in the area. The city with the highest percent of population who was born in another country in the area is Balcones Heights with a percent born outside United States of 16.6% measures 17.4% larger. Comparing percent of population who was born in another country to the United States average of 13.4%, San Antonio is only about 5.7% larger. Also, benchmarked against the state of Texas, percent of population who was born in another country of 16.9%, San Antonio is about 18.9% smaller.shows the median age of non citizens and it has 38.6 median age of non citizens which is the 5th in median age of non citizens out of 10 total in the area. The city with the highest median age of non citizens in the area is Alamo Heights with a median age of 47.3 is 22.5% larger.by Greg Heller, The Holy Cause
“Obama Moves to Let States Set Own Rules on Emissions”
So says The Wall Street Journal:
President Barack Obama plans to call on the Environmental Protection Agency on Monday to consider allowing states including California to regulate automobile greenhouse-gas emissions, said people familiar with the administration’s thinking. The move will signal a major policy break from his predecessor on an issue that has divided key Democratic Party constituencies … … Mr. Obama’s plans were described to The Wall Street Journal by three people familiar with the administration’s thinking, including one administration official. Mr. Obama was expected to outline his plans in directives to the agencies to be released at a |
features. The packaging is a standard blu amaray style case. All in all, just a shade better than run of the mill. Just a note: I believe the previous release came with a CD featuring part of the score and the Banana Boat song. Might be worth keeping your eye out for that release if that strikes your fancy.
Packaging & Special Features: 3/5
OVERALL
While this one is not a favorite of mine and is a movie I didn’t really gain a respect for until more recent years, I do think it is a very good movie. It is quirky and sets a great atmosphere very effectively. The acting is on point throughout and the score works effectively. The humor still holds up very well to this day. The technical aspects are not perfect, but very solid and upgrade worthy. The special features are somewhat lacking for a film of its quality, but not truly disappointing. Until they come out with a disc with interviews or commentary, then this is certainly the disc to have. I recommend it without hesitation even as a blind buy.
Final Score: 4/5× Milwaukee County Board okays plan to increase minimum wage to $15 by 2022
MILWAUKEE COUNTY — The Milwaukee County Board on Thursday, November 3rd voted 12-6 in favor of increasing the minimum wage within the county to $15 by 2022.
Milwaukee County Supervisor Marcelia Nicholson’s proposed change to Chapter 111 of the Milwaukee County Code of General Ordinances would raise the living wage to $12.25 on January 1, 2017, then to $13 on January 1, 2018, and increase it by $.50 every year until it reaches $15 on January 1, 2022.
“The ‘Fight for 15’ movement is so powerful that even Chris Abele, who vetoed our living wage ordinance in 2014, has joined us,” Supervisor Nicholson said on Thursday.
Monitor FOX6 News and FOX6Now.com for updates on this developing story.NEW YORK—The field of psychology was brought to an immediate halt this week as disillusioned and weary practitioners of the discipline reportedly concluded that the mind could never possibly hope to study itself.
Abandoning more than a century of clinical research, theoretical developments, and observational studies, psychologists worldwide announced that their entire professional lives had been utterly worthless, as the human brain could never comprehend its own workings, let alone understand its own understanding.
Advertisement
“We’ve spent years trying to discern how the mind functions, but today I am forced to admit that this so-called research was nothing more than a fool’s errand—and that we people of learning were the greatest fools of all,” said American Psychological Association president Nadine Kaslow at a press conference Thursday, flanked by leading figures from all major psychology subfields. “Can the eye watch itself? Can a book read its own pages? No. It’s now clear to us that despite all the painstakingly conducted studies and all the data we have meticulously gathered since the late 19th century, we have, in essence, been nothing more than the snake that devours its own tail.”
“All that we thought we understood was merely a mirage crafted by the very unfathomable minds we once so stubbornly insisted we could know,” added Kaslow, before declaring the APA, with its 134,000 members and 54 academic divisions, forever disbanded.
In the wake of the development, sources confirmed that thousands of researchers at top academic institutions had resigned from their posts effective immediately and had been seen packing decades’ worth of academic journals—as well as seminal works such as Sigmund Freud’s The Interpretation Of Dreams, Jean Piaget’s The Psychology Of Intelligence, and Alfred Adler’s Understanding Human Nature—into boxes that will be placed in storage indefinitely or disposed of at nearby landfills.
Advertisement
According to reports from one prominent university, visitors to the psychology department found the chair’s office locked, but with a note on the door that simply read, “It was all an illusion.”
Over the past few days, researchers across the psychology spectrum have reportedly discontinued their experiments and returned their funding to its original sources, stating that further investigations had been rendered irrelevant by the completely unreliable and fatally subjective nature of the human mind.
“If only we could step outside these imperfect intellects for but one moment and observe our mental functions as they truly are,” said clinical psychologist Deborah Yamada, who explained that the discipline was inherently and fatally corrupted by the inescapable reality that the examiner and the examined are one and the same. “And yet, when we honestly appraise the human condition, what can the mind truly know that is not a mere waking dream?”
Advertisement
“And even that dream, can it genuinely be said to exist? For is not the moment I grasp the limits of my consciousness the very moment it becomes unknowable?” Yamada continued. “More to the point: What is this ‘I’ that supposedly speaks in the first place? And why do I—whatever that may be—so childishly cling to it?”
Reached for comment, many from the now-dissolved psychology community told reporters that they hoped to redirect their efforts toward other sciences such as physics, chemistry, and geology, fields they hoped would be untainted by the “inescapable enigma” of consciousness.
“If I can no longer study myself, then so be it: I will pursue that which is concrete and measurable,” said Harvard University experimental psychologist Steven Pinker, holding up a quartz crystal before his eyes. “Look at it: Irrefutable. Solid. So unlike the elusive mind.”
Advertisement
“Only this I can truly know,” Pinker added. “That is, if I can know anything at all.”Republican nominee 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 summit Manafort's attorneys say he should get less than 10 years in prison MORE on Monday raised the prospect of the presidential election being “rigged” against him.
"I'm afraid the election is going to be rigged, I'm going to be honest," Trump told a crowd at an event in Columbus, Ohio.
"I think my side was rigged. If I didn't win by massive landslides — think about what we won in New York, Indiana, California, 78 percent; that's with other people in the race."
Trump made similar complaints about a “rigged” process during the Republican primaries.
Over the weekend, the businessman criticized the schedule for the presidential debates. He has complained that two of the three debates are being held at the same time as NFL games and in a tweet suggested the schedule was being set by Democratic nominee Hillary Clinton Hillary Diane Rodham ClintonSanders: 'I fully expect' fair treatment by DNC in 2020 after 'not quite even handed' 2016 primary Sanders: 'Damn right' I'll make the large corporations pay 'fair share of taxes' Former Sanders campaign spokesman: Clinton staff are 'biggest a--holes in American politics' MORE and her allies to distract attention from them.
As usual, Hillary & the Dems are trying to rig the debates so 2 are up against major NFL games. Same as last time w/ Bernie. Unacceptable! — Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) July 30, 2016
The schedule for the debates was set last year by the Commission on Presidential Debates. That group, which is nonpartisan, said in a statement Sunday that the debate schedule will '"serve the American public well."
Republican National Committee Chairman Reince Priebus on Sunday backed Trump's criticism of the schedule.
"We're not going to be having debates on Saturday and Sunday night," he said.Visit msnbc.com for breaking news, world news, and news about the economy
In the wake of a succession of adultery-related scandals by GOP “family values” Christian politicians, including Gov. Mark Sanford of South Carolina and Sens. John Ensign of Nevada and David Vitter of Louisiana, a few years ago, Washington Republicans spoke with one voice: We should pray for their families, but these politicians should not resign — their fates should be decided by the voters in their states.
Now, hot on the heels of revelations that Rep. Anthony Weiner exchanged lewd Twitter photos with women he did not otherwise know, Republicans are again speaking with one voice: Screw Weiner’s family and his constituents, he should resign immediately.
Neither Gov. Sanford nor Sen. Ensign resigned when their adulteries were revealed — Ensign finally left the Senate this year after the Ethics Committee referred his case to the Department of Justice.
But what Weiner did pales in comparison with the criminal behavior by Sen. Vitter, who repeatedly paid prostitutes for sex, and who is still serving in the United States Senate. In case you have forgotten the details of Vitter’s prostitution scandals, here’s a five-minute video retelling, titled “Forgotten Crimes,” that was produced by the Democratic Party:
Here’s the recap from Vitter’s Wikipedia page:
Prostitution scandals D.C. Madam In early July 2007, Vitter’s phone number was included in a published list of phone records of Pamela Martin and Associates, a company owned and run by Deborah Jeane Palfrey, also known as the “D.C. Madam”, convicted by the U.S. government for running a prostitution service. Hustler identified the phone number and contacted Vitter’s office to ask about his connection to Palfrey. The following day, Vitter issued a written statement: This was a very serious sin in my past for which I am, of course, completely responsible. Several years ago, I asked for and received forgiveness from God and my wife in confession and marriage counseling. Out of respect for my family, I will keep my discussion of the matter there — with God and them. But I certainly offer my deep and sincere apologies to all I have disappointed and let down in any way. The statement containing Vitter’s apology said his telephone number was included in phone records dating from his days as a member of the House of Representatives. Phone records show that Vitter’s number was called by Palfrey’s service five times, the first on October 12, 1999, and the last on February 27, 2001. Two calls were placed while House roll call votes were in progress. On July 16, 2007, after a week of self-imposed seclusion, Vitter emerged and called a news conference. Standing next to his wife, Vitter asked the public for forgiveness. Following Vitter’s remarks, Wendy Vitter, his wife, spoke. Both refused to answer any questions. As background, several news outlets reported that in May 1999, Vitter replaced Congressman Bob Livingston after Livingston resigned due to an adultery scandal. Vitter said about Livingston’s decision to resign, “It’s obviously a tremendous loss for the state. I think Livingston’s stepping down makes a very powerful argument that Clinton should resign as well and move beyond this mess”, referring to Bill Clinton’s Monica Lewinsky scandal. Vitter will not face criminal charges due to the statute of limitations. Vitter incurred significant legal and public relations expenses in his efforts to avoid giving testimony in the Palfrey trial and to respond to the ethics complaint. Consequently, his attorneys sought permission from the Federal Election Commission to use campaign funds to pay for these expenses. The Commission, along partisan lines, couldn’t agree whether funds could be used for reimbursing costs related to the Palfrey trial but did allow them to pay for expenses connected to the Ethics Committee complaint. Canal Street Madam On July 10, 2007, Jeanette Maier, the “Canal Street Madam”, alleged that Vitter was a customer on more than one occasion in the 1990s, when Maier was identified by federal prosecutors as operating a $300 per hour brothel. The Times-Picayune reported that “Maier offered no evidence or documents to support her claim.” A polygraph (lie detector) test was arranged for a New Orleans prostitute who claimed Vitter hired her and had sexual intercourse with her. The prostitute passed the test.
Vitter was not called to testify against the DC Madam, and the Senate Ethics Committee dropped its investigation into his scandalous and criminal behavior. In 2010, (mostly Republican) voters in Louisiana endorsed his whoremongering ways by reelecting him to the Senate in a 57-38 percent landslide.A convicted killer and registered sex offender whose sexual assault of his former partner was likened to a rape with a machete has been jailed for 13 years.
A convicted killer and registered sex offender whose sexual assault of his former partner was likened to a rape with a machete has been jailed for 13 years.
Walter Morrissey (70) of Upper Bridge Street, Callan in Kilkenny was found guilty of leaving his former partner with life threatening injuries following an aggravated sexual assault at his home.
The Central Criminal Court heard medical evidence that Morrissey had used his fist to tear a six centimetre rip in the woman's vagina. When she was brought to hospital a doctor remarked that he didn’t know how she was still alive.
Gynaecologist Dr Ray O’Sullivan said it was an injury more likely to be seen in a woman raped with machetes in Sub-Saharan Africa.
Mr Justice George Birmingham called Morrissey a cunning, devious and manipulative man who represents a significant threat to public.
He said he was particularly concerned by his previous conviction for a double manslaughter and his conviction for seven counts of indecent assault of a woman.
Detective Garda Frank McKenna told Vincent Heneghan BL, prosecuting, that the indecent assaults in 1999 were of a similar nature to this assault and involved penetration of the vagina with fists or an object.
Morrissey had pleaded not guilty at the Central Criminal Court to aggravated sexual assault and intentionally or recklessly causing the woman serious harm in a Kilkenny town on dates between December 1 and December 8, 2011.
Mr Heneghan told the court that the victim has no objection to Morrissey being publicly named.
Morrissey had previously fired his legal team. Today, he made his own brief plea of mitigation before sentencing in which he said he was trained in IUI (intrauterine insemination).
He also said he was very pleased that the victim was healthy and that he tried to help her in every way.
He smiled and waved at reporters as prison officers led him from the court room.
The victim told the trial that she woke up in the early hours of the morning to find a man putting his fist up her vagina and twisting it around.
“He put his whole fist inside me. It was the worst pain I ever felt in my life. I could feel his hand twist inside me. I pulled his hand out of me,” she said.
She said there was blood rushing from her and she thought she was haemorrhaging. Morrissey called a GP but the woman refused to go to hospital when an ambulance crew came.
Morrissey called the GP again the next day when the woman was semi-conscious. Mr Justice Birmingham said that these calls were perhaps self motivated.
The victim spent four months in hospital recovering.
The woman told the trial that the accused offered her €10,000 to have a child for him.
“He offered me €10,000 if I had a kid for him. He said I could have a child for him and go away,” she said.
Morrissey told her if she didn't have sex with him, “she knew where the door was”.
“He said if I didn't do those things he'd show me the door and I'd have nowhere to live,” she told the court.
“Sometimes I'd have to drink to do some of the things he'd want me to do,” she told the trial.
The victim told a doctor that she was regularly sexually assaulted with fists and plastic objects, including a turkey baster.
The trial heard graphic medical evidence in relation to the life threatening injuries sustained by the victim.
Dr Ray O’Sullivan told Paddy McCarthy SC, prosecuting, “It was such an unusual injury, one that I had rarely seen in my 20 years working.”
The surgeon told the jury that the woman had a large 6-8cm tear in her vagina close to her bladder which was gaping by about 2-3cm.
“It is something you would more likely see in Sub-Saharan Africa where woman have been raped with machetes,” the witness said.
He told the jury that his colleague had opened the woman’s abdomen during surgery in order to treat an infection in her stomach, while he examined her vagina to see if he might find an infection there.
“We could physically make contact with each other while examining the woman,” Dr O’ Sullivan said which he confirmed meant that he and his colleague could touch fingers through a hole in the woman’s abdominal cavity.
“This should not be able to happen, normally the uterus, bladder and bowel would be in the way,” Dr O’Sullivan said. He regularly referred to the woman as “this poor lady” during testimony.
He added that he and his colleague wondered: “How is this woman alive? And that is not exaggerating.”
Dr O'Sullivan said that said that the victim's sodium levels were very low and effectively this meant that her blood had been diluted, possibly with water.
Detective Garda McKenna said that after his arrest, Morrissey denied he had caused the injuries but admitted he had an interest in “amateur gynaecology”.
Online EditorsLONDON (AFP) – Police said Wednesday they have warned an airport worker who reportedly made a crude remark about a colleague’s breasts as a newly-installed security scanner took a full body X-ray of her.
Jo Margetson, 29, walked into an X-ray machine at London’s Heathrow Airport by mistake before the incident allegedly took place — and told The Sun newspaper she is now “totally traumatised”.
The reported incident, the first such complaint since the machines were introduced earlier this year, has highlighted privacy concerns about the use of full body scanners at British airports.
Heathrow and Manchester airports have been using them since an alleged bid to blow up a US-bound jet on Christmas Day was foiled, while the US and The Netherlands are among other countries where they are being installed.
When asked about the story, a spokesman for London’s Metropolitan Police said: “Police received an allegation regarding an incident that happened at Heathrow Terminal 5 on March 10.
“A first instance harassment warning has been issued to a 25-year-old male.”
Airports operator BAA, which runs Heathrow, added that it was investigating the allegations.
“If these claims are found to be substantiated, we will take appropriate action,” a spokesman added.
The Equality and Human Rights Commission has warned the government that the scanners could run counter to the right to privacy enshrined in the European Convention on Human Rights.
“When privacy-invading machines like these are installed at our airports, abuses like this are inevitable,” said Alex Deane of campaign group Big Brother Watch.Dosa sandwich recipe with step by step photos. Learn how to make grilled dosa sandwich recipe with stuffed vegetables at home with this easy recipe.
Dosa sandwich is a very popular snack that we find in streets of Chennai. There are many types of sandwiches found in street shops like murukku sandwich, dosa sandwich etc. I saw this dosa sandwich in the menu of a makeshift stall in front of a mall and was very curious to know about it.
Dosa sandwich recipe is basically some veggies sandwiched between 2 small uthappam and grilled until crispy. Here I have made dosa sandwich recipe in Bombay sandwich style minus butter. I did not have butter in hand so just used olive oil. Grilled dosa sandwich turned out to be yum and filling. Addition of green chutney and veggies added a very nice flavor and taste to this dosa sandwich and we enjoyed it with strong coffee.
To make dosa sandwich recipe at home we need dosa batter, potatoes, cucumber, tomatoes, capsicum, green chutney and chaat masala powder. I have used my electric sandwich maker to grill the dosa sandwich. You can just toast on tava with some oil if you wish. Instead of Bombay sandwich filling you can add mayonnaise sandwich filling, spinach corn sandwich filling, paneer sandwich filling too.
Serve dosa sandwich hot with coffee or tea or juice.
Here is how to make dosa sandwich recipe with step by step photos. Also check dosa piz za recipe.
Step by step dosa sandwich recipe
1. Keep dosa batter, boiled and sliced potatoes, sliced cucumber, sliced tomatoes, caspsicum and chaat masala powder ready.
2. Make two small uthappams using dosa batter on a hot tava. Make sure that the uthappam fits in your sandwich maker if using one.
3. Take one uthappam on a plate. Apply some olive oil and spread well. Add some green chutney and spread well too.Now arrange the veggies and sprinkle chaat masala powder. Close with another uthappam.
4. Grill this dosa sandwich in a preheated sandwich maker as per instructions. Serve dosa sandwich hot.
Dosa batter recipe and green chutney recipe here:
Dosa sandwich recipe card below:
5 from 1 vote Print Dosa sandwich recipe | How to make grilled dosa sandwich recipe Prep Time 15 mins Cook Time 20 mins Total Time 35 mins Dosa sandwich recipe. Healthy grilled dosa sandwich recipe with simple ingredients! Course: Snack Cuisine: Indian Servings : 4 -6 small sandwich Calories : 115 kcal Author : Harini Ingredients (1 cup=250 ml) 1 cup dosa batter
1 medium potato boiled, peeled and sliced
1/4 cucumber peeled and sliced
6 capsicum rings or 1/2 capsicum sliced
1/2 to mato sliced
2 teaspoons olive oil
3-4 tablespoons green chutney
Chaat masala
Salt Instructions Keep dosa batter, boiled and sliced potatoes, sliced cucumber, sliced tomatoes, caspsicum and chaat masala powder ready. Make two small uthappams using dosa batter on a hot tava. Make sure that the uthappam fits in your sandwich maker if using one. Take one uthappam on a plate. Apply some olive oil and spread well. Add some green chutney and spread well too.Now arrange the veggies and sprinkle chaat masala powder. Close with another uthappam. Grill this dosa sandwich in a preheated sandwich maker as per instructions. Serve dosa sandwich hot. Recipe Notes 1. You can use any filling of your choice.
2. Do not make thin dosas, it will be difficult to grill.
Sharing is caring!NEW DELHI (Thomson Reuters Foundation) - A top United Nations climate official, Rajendra Pachauri, has pulled out of a high-level meeting in Kenya next week, a spokesman said on Saturday, as Indian police investigate a sexual harassment complaint against him.
IPCC Working Group III Chairman Rajendra Pachauri attends a news conference to present Working Group III's summary for policymakers at The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) in Berlin April 13, 2014. REUTERS/Steffi Loos/Files
Delhi police said Pachauri, 74, chairman of the U.N.’s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), is accused of sexually harassing a 29-year-old female researcher from his Delhi-based thinktank The Energy and Resources Institute (TERI).
The woman claims the Indian scientist began harassing her soon after she joined the non-profit TERI in September 2013.
Pachauri, one of the world’s leading voices on the issue of global warming, has denied the charges, according to a court order.
The case comes at a difficult time as Pachauri is playing a key role in the run-up to a crucial climate change summit in Paris in December where world leaders are expected to agree a new deal to curb global warming.
Pachauri had been scheduled to lead a major IPCC meeting in Kenya next week, to discuss how the panel will organise the production of its scientific reports in future.
“The Chairman of the IPCC, Rajendra K. Pachauri, PhD, has informed the IPCC that he will be unable to chair the plenary session of the IPCC in Nairobi next week because of issues demanding his attention in India,” a spokesman for Pachauri said in a statement on Saturday.
“Dr Pachauri is committed to provide all assistance and cooperation to the authorities in their ongoing investigations.”
Pachauri’s office has said he was unavailable to comment and his lawyers have refused to comment.
The IPCC said in a statement it would have no further comment on “the issues demanding Pachauri’s attention”.
The lawyers for the woman, who cannot be named, said the harassment by Pachauri included unwanted emails, text and WhatsApp messages.
In a court order, Pachauri’s lawyers claim his emails, mobile phone and WhatsApp messages were hacked and that cyber criminals accessed his computer and phone to send the messages in an attempt to malign him.
The IPCC will elect a new chair at a session planned for October and it was already known that Pachauri, who was first elected as the panel’s chair in 2002, would not stand for a third term.
In 2007, the IPCC was jointly awarded the Nobel Peace Prize with former U.S. Vice President Al Gore for their part in galvanising international action against climate change.Poverty Point: Revealing the Forgotten City by Jenny Ellerbe and Diana Greenlee (2015, Louisiana State University Press) contains a set of photographs and essays on the 3500 year old prehistoric earthwork complex in northeast Louisiana, U.S., a recently designated World Heritage Site of the United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization (UNESCO). The book is a model for how to engage multiple audiences with information about an archaeological site.
Here is what you get in the 132 page volume:
About 100 photographs of the earthworks and artifacts taken over the last three years by northeast Louisiana native Jenny Ellerbe. As a fine art photographer, her images are creative, technically superb, and convey a strong sense of place. The total corpus of photographs provides a striking and comprehensive presentation of the physical site. Ms. Ellerbe is an accomplished artist.
Nearly 20 maps and figures that both contextualize the Ellerbe photographs and provide LIDAR, topographic, and other locational information for the site complex. These images include site location, intra-site organization, mound form, and prehistoric raw material resources.
In addition to images, each of the nearly 20 chapters contains essays by Ellerbe and Greenlee. Ms. Ellerbe writes from the perspective of a local resident fascinated with the prehistory of the region. As a lifelong resident of the region, she provides a critically important narrative about the place of Poverty Point that cannot be told and is simply not known by the archaeological community. Her perspective reflects a cultural heritage value that if adopted by Louisiana’s elected officials will lead to investing the necessary resources to preserve and present the Poverty Point earthworks in a manner appropriate to a UNESCO World Heritage Site.
The essays by Diana Greenlee complete the presentation in a rather unique way. Dr. Greenlee is the Station Archaeologist at Poverty Point who has accomplished considerable scholarly research at the site over the past decade, including the World Heritage Site designation. For this book, her writing style is not that of a peer-reviewed journal, but is precisely the tone and content appropriate for a broader audience. Dr. Greenlee provides an ideal model for engaging the public in the science of her discipline. For example, she gives a complete and understandable account of the remote sensing investigations of the large circular features in the plaza of the earthwork. She details the physical difference between a posthole and a postmold and explains the interpretive significance of the distinction. A two-page glossary includes entries for artifact, LIDAR, radiocarbon dating, pump drill and more. Perhaps most refreshing is that Dr. Greenlee speaks with the authority of her position, but also leaves room for speculation and further questions. For example, she notes that many refer to the large Mound A as the Bird Mound, though she sees a mushroom (which I agree) but concludes “There is no way to know, though, if that’s what the builders of Mound A intended. We can only speculate” (p. 59). Or consider her reporting on recent research that suggests Mound A was built in 90 days. She fairly presents the researchers’ claims, but notes she remains skeptical. She writes “I think that additional research, looking at more or different samples, could shed light on the issue. This is how science works and knowledge advances. You have a question, you collect the data necessary to answer the question... Often, answering one question raises other questions” (p. 60). How incredibly refreshing and such an instructive and inviting representation of archaeological research!
I thoroughly enjoyed Poverty Point: Revealing the Forgotten City. The photos are beautiful and instructive. The text illustrates the value of the earthwork from multiple perspectives in a manner that will be enjoyed and appreciated by the general public and the archaeological community. Jenny Ellerbe and Diana Greenlee do not talk to separate audiences but to all audiences – an impressive accomplishment and a true model for how archaeological research can be presented to maximize its value.
The $39.95 LSU Press price ($28.45 at amazon.com) is the only drawback from a wide distribution of the volume. Hopefully, a less expensive paperback will be forthcoming.
Also, as full disclosure, I served as the Station Archaeologist at Poverty Point from 1996 – 2003, but I don’t get anything from the sale of the books. 🙂By Carrie Levine / Center for Public Integrity
Donald Trump declared last year in his populist presidential nomination acceptance speech that he’s “not able to look the other way” when the nation’s political system “has sold out to some corporate lobbyist for cash.”
But behind the scenes, several major corporations and trade groups secretly bankrolled a plush hideaway for lawmakers at the same Republican National Convention in Cleveland where Trump gave the speech, records obtained by the Center for Public Integrity show.
Comcast Corp., Microsoft, Koch Companies Public Sector, the National Retail Federation, Health Care Service Corp., the American Petroleum Institute, Chevron and AT&T are among the companies, associations and lobbying powerhouses that funded a limited liability company called “Friends of the House 2016 LLC,” according to bank records.
Friends of the House 2016 LLC, in turn, paid for the design and outfitting of an exclusive office, lounge and gathering space for Republican lawmakers—including House Speaker Paul Ryan—and controlled access to the so-called “cloakroom.”
The limited liability company effectively hid the corporations’ contributions from public view at a time when activist groups were pressuring companies to scale back giving to the Republican convention, and a few of the companies had publicly minimized their participation.
“ The immediate effect is it looks like it hid certain donors to the convention,” said Lawrence Noble, senior director and general counsel for the Campaign Legal Center, a nonpartisan nonprofit that advocates for campaign finance reform.
The “cloakroom” was constructed on the Cleveland Cavaliers practice court inside the Quicken Loans Arena in Cleveland.
One company that helped pay for the “cloakroom” confirmed its contribution bought it entry to the space.
“As a sponsor of the hospitality venue, we were invited to use it, as well,” said Jori Fine, a spokeswoman for Health Care Service Corp. The company paid Friends of the House 2016 LLC $100,000, according to bank records, a payment that Fine said “supported hospitality and other events during the 2016 GOP Convention in Cleveland.”
The Center for Public Integrity obtained the bank records from a lawsuit filed in Cuyahoga County Court of Common Pleas in Ohio. To confirm the payments shown in the bank records and to determine the purpose of them, the Center for Public Integrity attempted to reach representatives of the 20 corporations and trade associations named in the records. Of the 20 companies, 15 either declined to comment or did not respond to questions.
Except for Health Care Service Corp., the companies that responded did not offer specific responses about the purpose of the payments to Friends of the House 2016 LLC or detail what they expected to receive in exchange for the payment.
The Cleveland 2016 Host Committee, which oversaw logistics for the Republican National Convention, received $923,100 from the Friends of the House 2016 LLC. The host committee facilitated construction of the “cloakroom” space, said Emily Lauer, a spokeswoman for the Cleveland 2016 Host Committee.
“This type of secure space for dignitaries has been provided at most recent conventions but is not under the control of the Host Committee,” Lauer said in an email. She directed questions about the use of the space, and who had access to it, to Friends of the House 2016 LLC.
But Jeffrey Livingston of Friends of the House 2016 LLC didn’t respond to multiple inquiries from the Center for Public Integrity.
Livingston, a political fundraising consultant whose clients include Ryan, was Friends of the House 2016 LLC’s registered agent, according to Virginia corporate records. A court filing by Livingston’s lawyer said that Friends of the House 2016 LLC was “established to manage and raise funds for hospitality activities and events during the 2016 Republican National Convention.”
A marketing booklet featuring photographs of the “cloakroom” space, credited to contractors Master Plan Design and Joe Mineo Creative, said Ryan’s representatives helped design the space and supervise construction.
Kevin Seifert, a spokesman for Ryan’s congressional campaign committee, said the description wasn’t accurate and that Ryan’s office “was not involved in supervising construction or consulted about the design of the cloakroom.”
Friends of the House 2016 LLC wasn’t created on Ryan’s behalf, and Ryan did not raise money for it, Seifert said.
Seifert did not respond to a request to confirm Ryan had access to and used the “cloakroom” space.
Seifert did say the only relationship between Friends of the House 2016 LLC and Ryan for Congress was a single $100 payment to purchase “a decorative item … after the convention had concluded. ” He did not respond to a question about what the “decorative item” was.
‘One Big Loophole’
Corporate donors last year faced pressure from activists to scale back their giving to the political conventions, especially the Republican convention. A prime example: Color of Change, an online group that describes itself as a “racial justice organization,” said giving to the convention was tantamount to endorsing Trump.
But national political conventions are legendary opportunities for access to lawmakers, despite ethics reforms Congress passed in the wake of influence peddling scandals. Complex rules govern even the details of events, such as food menus, but often turn on technical points, forcing lawyers to double-check legal advice every four years.
For example, although individual congressional members can’t be honored by special interests, certain delegations of lawmakers can be—and frequently are. The rules for U.S. House members and U.S. senators aren’t identical. And companies have many routes to court those in power, like sponsoring delegations or events that raise money for charity.
“The convention is one big loophole to the limits of corrupting money on politics,” said Paul S. Ryan, vice president for policy and litigation at Common Cause, a nonpartisan nonprofit that advocates for limits on money in politics. He is not related to House Speaker Paul Ryan.
Friends of the House 2016 LLC appears to have provided companies an especially discreet opportunity to support the GOP convention.
For several of the companies that didn’t otherwise donate cash directly to the Cleveland 2016 Host Committee—a list that includes 12 of the entities listed in the bank records—there was little or no public evidence of their use of corporate dollars to support of the 2016 Republican convention.
For example, Comcast Corp., which wrote a $200,000 check to Friends of the House 2016 LLC, isn’t listed as a donor by the Cleveland 2016 Host Committee.
Neither is Koch Companies Public Sector, which wrote a $100,000 check to Friends of the House 2016 LLC. In fact, a Koch Industries spokesman in June said the billionaire brothers Charles and David Koch, well-known Republican megadonors, weren’t planning to contribute to the convention at all.
Neither firm responded to a request for comment about the payments to Friends of the House 2016 LLC.
Microsoft gave a $1.8 million in-kind contribution of software to the Cleveland 2016 Host Committee, records show, but no cash.
Microsoft explained its decision in an April 2016 blog post by Fred Humphries, corporate vice president of U.S. government affairs for Microsoft. Humphries wrote: “ We decided last fall to provide a variety of Microsoft technology products and services instead of making a cash donation” to the Cleveland 2016 Host Committee. Microsoft did contribute cash to the Democratic convention host committee.
Microsoft did, however, pay $100,000 to Friends of the House 2016 LLC, according to bank records. Friends of the House 2016 LLC then donated money to the Cleveland 2016 Host Committee.
In response to questions, Microsoft sent a statement through a spokeswoman saying, “We were unaware of any payments made by Friends of the House LLC to the convention committees.”
Other entities contributing to Friends of the House 2016 LLC, such as the American Petroleum Institute, Anthem Inc. and AT&T, also made separate contributions directly to the Cleveland 2016 Host Committee that appeared in public disclosure filings. Those companies did not respond to requests for comment.
In response to questions about its $100,000 payment to Friends of the House 2016 LLC, Melissa Ritchie, a Chevron spokeswoman, said, “We are committed to supporting policies and candidates that promote an economic environment where business can thrive. We follow policies and processes so that our political contributions comply with applicable laws.”
Ritchie did not respond when reminded that Friends of the House 2016 LLC is not a political committee. She also did not respond to questions about what specific policy or candidate Chevron was supporting by making the contribution to Friends of the House 2016 LLC.
Chevron contributed $250,000 directly to the Cleveland 2016 Host Committee, records show.
Diane Zappas, a spokeswoman for PNC bank, said, “Given our large presence in Cleveland and Philadelphia, which both hosted political party conventions in 2016, PNC contributed to the host committees for these cities in 2016.”
Asked to specifically address PNC’s $15,000 payment to Friends of the House 2016 LLC, she declined to comment.
PNC Foundation contributed $250,000 to the Cleveland 2016 Host Committee, records show, and also made a $1,980 payment labeled “hotel rooms.”
Luis Sahagun, a spokesman for insurer Farmers Group, which bank records show paid Friends of the House LLC $25,000, responded to detailed questions with a one-line statement: “Farmers Insurance has a long, proud history of bipartisan participation in the democratic process at both the state and federal level.”
‘Not Seeing Who Really Gave the Money’
During Friends of the House 2016 LLC’s life—it material |
Germany to deal with reports about content that breaks the NetzDG and to do a better job of monitoring what people post.
The law has been controversial in Germany with some saying it could lead to inadvertent censorship or curtail free speech.
The German law is the most extreme example of efforts by governments and regulators to rein in social media firms. Many of them have come under much greater scrutiny this year as information about how they are used to spread propaganda and other sensitive material has come to light.
In the UK, politicians have been sharply critical of social sites, calling them a "disgrace" and saying they were "shamefully far" from doing a good job of policing hate speech and other offensive content.
The European Commission also published guidelines calling on social media sites to act faster to spot and remove hateful content.Hi there! We’re Baying Hound Aleworks and we’re the first and, to date, only manufacturing and distribution brewery in Montgomery County, Maryland. Started as a tiny brewery on a shoestring budget in 2010, the demand for our unique beers has quickly surpassed our brewing capacity. We need your help to make some upgrades pronto, so we can ramp up our efforts to share our beers with the people who love them.
The Baying Hound brewery is located in Rockville (1108 Taft Street) and is run by a full-time brewery and a committed team of volunteers- mostly locals and their beer-loving friends. We offer three stock brews- an IPA, our signature pale ale, and a stout- as well as a rotating selection of pilots and experimental brews. Our beers are unique in many ways:
We brew only real ales- unfiltered, unpasteurized, and naturally carbonated. We are the only brewery in the area, if not the country,that specializes exclusively in this type of brewing. In fact, we recently joined CAMRA (Campaign for Real Ales), a UK-based organization of certified real ale brewers.
Many of our beers are inspired by our favorite food pairings. We use all-natural ingredients: Including grains, herbs, honey, and fruit. We use real cocoa, marshmallows and graham crackers in our s'mores stout. Why? Because our brewers are creative people who love to cook and eat and our customers are adventurous folks who like to try new things.
The brewery was named for founder Paul Rinehart's faithful companion Marmalade, a bloodhound who kept him company while he brewed. In homage to that hound, we donate a portion of our sales to the Montgomery County Humane Society, and we welcome pups of all shapes and sizes at the brewery.
With your help, we'll be able to expand in three critical ways:
A BIG PRODUCTION! We currently produce 120 barrels annually on a 1-barrel system, which puts out 14-16 cases per batch. With your support, we’d get a 2-barrel system which means we'd be able to keep up a steady production of our three stock brews even as we continue to produce new pilots and seasonals for our customers to enjoy.
WHAT'S ON TAP? We currently serve our pilots from a 3-tap kegerator that our founder built himself (we're a real DIY outfit). With your help, we’d build a 6-tap system and put our three stock brews on tap in addition to three rotating pilots. Then we could relegate the current setup to much-needed hop storage.
MERRRRCH. After people try our beer, they often want to spread the word about Baying Hound. We need to invest in more merchandise (our newly-designed t-shirts, pint glasses, and openers) to meet demand. To thank you for your generous support, we’d like to give you some of these great items as a reward for your general awesomeness.
If you love our beer, craft beer in general, or you have a soft spot for local business, please help us out. We’d love to keep supplying our ales to local stores and adventurous sippers while we work on our plan of world domination.
Tell your friends, tell your family, and remember- if we reach our goal, you get yummies! No funding, no yummies, and it’s the doghouse for us.
Our website: http://bayinghoundales.com/
Our Facebook: http://www.facebook.com/bayinghoundales?fref=ts
Our Youtube: http://www.youtube.com/user/bayinghoundales
One of the many fine gifts used to thank our supporters:
An interview with Paul Rineheart:
Our mascot and the doggy friends who have inspired some of our brews:The bondholders who backed former Major League Baseball (MLB) pitcher Curt Schilling's video game production company, 38 Studios, never bothered to examine the company's financial health, because they knew they'd be bailed out by Rhode Island taxpayers if the company became insolvent, according to documents released as part of a U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) investigation.
WPRI-TV's Ted Nesi, who has been covering the 38 Studios fallout for years and was featured in the Reason TV documentary "38 Studios: Curt Schilling's Crony Capitalism Debacle," reports:
The notes from SEC officials’ November 2014 interviews with 38 Studios bondholders show the lenders paid little attention to the underlying financial condition of Curt Schilling’s company, instead seeing the bond offering as a routine round of taxpayer-backed borrowing that posed little risk of nonpayment. Jon Spear, a senior executive at USAA, the largest 38 Studios bondholder, told the SEC his company "only looked at the state’s credit" and "did not look at 38 Studios' credit," nor did USAA examine the game company’s financials, according to notes from his interview. Spear said 38 Studios’ financial condition was not important to USAA "because Rhode Island would be paying us back," the notes say. Rhode Island’s economic-development agency floated $75 million in bonds in 2010 to lure 38 Studios to Rhode Island, only to see the company run out of cash and declare bankruptcy within two years. The political fallout from its demise included a fierce public backlash against paying off the bonds, though the state’s Democratic leaders have continued to make the payments.
Nesi also reports that Spear considered the risk of his company's investment "very, very low" because he "never assumed that Rhode Island would ever violate the moral obligation" of repaying its debts. Last September, WPRI came into a trove of documents relating to the company's short life, which include evidence of all kinds of unsavory backroom dealing.
Curt Schilling claims to have lost his entire personal fortune of about $50 million after investing in 38 Studios. He was recently fired from his job as a commentator at ESPN over posting transphobic memes on Facebook, after having been previously suspended from the sports network over tweeting a meme which compared Muslims to Nazis.
You can watch Reason TV's 2012 doc, detailing how star-struck state politicians threw a fortune in taxpayer dollars at a fledgling start-up with no track record to speak of, only to see it blow up in their faces.Image caption Ferrybridge is one of five power stations affected
The boss of the energy firm SSE has warned that "there is a very real risk of the lights going out" in Britain.
Ian Marchant said the government was significantly underestimating the scale of the capacity crunch facing the country.
He was commenting on the company's decision to cut back on power generation at five sites.
The energy regulator, Ofgem, has also warned of an increased risk of a blackout.
In February it predicted power station closures could mean a 10% fall in capacity by April alone.
SSE points out that the regulator did not take into account its plans to cut power generation when the warning was issued and that therefore, makes the warning even more stark.
Ofgem's chief executive Alistair Buchanan told the BBC that Britain "would be very tight on power station capacity in three to five years' time".
SSE's Mr Marchant added that the government "can reduce this risk significantly by taking swift action to provide much greater clarity on its electricity market reforms and bringing forward capacity payments for existing plants from 2018 to 2014".
The kind of decisions SSE is taking... is likely to be reflected across the industry in the coming months Paul Smith, SSE
'Unprecedented challenge'
Energy minister John Hayes denied the government was being complacent, saying he was confident that its approach, combined with the responsiveness of the market, would provide secure supplies.
"We're alive to the challenge facing us. The Bill before Parliament will set the conditions for the investment needed to keep Britain's lights on in the long term," he said.
"The amount of spare power available today is currently comfortable, " he added. "We will make sure it stays manageable.
"We have an insurance policy - the capacity market. We're considering how and when this can best be used to bring about any necessary increase in supply or reduction in demand."
SSE is reducing its energy generation by 2,000MW over the next year. The power stations affected are Ferrybridge, Keadby, Slough, Uskmouth and Peterhead. It is also postponing further investment in gas-fired electricity generation until at least 2015.
Scotland's Energy Minister Fergus Ewing expressed concern about the decision.
"We are facing an unprecedented challenge in ensuring security of future supply while making the transition to a low carbon generating mix," he said.
"We can deliver a significant amount of that secure low carbon energy from Scotland. But the UK Government must deliver its Electricity Market Reform programme quickly and effectively to give confidence in the future market and allow companies to plan and invest for a future secure, stable and broad based electricity generating mix."
More warnings?
About 150 jobs are affected by the news, but the company is confident that most employees will be redeployed.
Peterhead has been named as one of two preferred bidders in the £1bn competition to encourage the development of carbon capture and storage technology. The announcement will have no impact on these plans.
SSE is one of the UK's six big power companies.
It says despite efforts to cut costs in generating power, costs have increased over the past year, meaning that they are in some cases losing money. SSE thinks it is unlikely to be the last energy company to warn about the tight capacity situation.
"The kind of decisions SSE is taking, to close existing generation plant on the one hand and delay investing in new plant on the other, is likely to be reflected across the industry in the coming months," said Paul Smith, managing director of SSE.
Cold snap?
Separately, a study by the Reuters news agency shows that, if the current cold snap continues as forecast, the country could run out of stored gas supplies as soon as 8 April. In that case supplies to big industrial customers may be cut, as in 2010 when there were severe gas shortages.
The Department of Energy and Climate Change said it was monitoring the situation closely.
Britain's biggest gas supplier, Centrica, has already implemented some withdrawal restrictionsStory highlights Several inches of rain fell during the day but forecasters were concerned about the potential precipitation overnight
The storm is expected to dump 4 to 8 inches of rain in eastern Texas and Oklahoma
Harris County, Texas, warning: "Bayous and rivers could go out of banks quickly"
(CNN) Tropical Storm Bill hasn't been quite the storm meteorologists anticipated, but it was still bringing significant rain to areas of Texas that have dealt with significant flooding.
Some areas near Houston had nearly 2 1/2 inches of rain Tuesday, the National Weather Service said. Forecasters were concerned that the storm would dump much more rain overnight.
"North side of TS #Bill has strong storms to contend with tonight," the Weather Service's office in Houston tweeted.
There were flash flood warnings for southeastern counties, the last of which was due to end at midnight local time.
The storm system is expected to dump 4 to 8 inches in eastern Texas and Oklahoma, with up to 12 inches in isolated spots in Texas. Western Louisiana and Arkansas are expected to see up to 4 inches of rain.Some local women are smashing stereotypes one emphatic syllable and pom pom shake at a time. The Science Cheerleaders, professional NFL and NBA cheerleaders-turned-scientists, seek to promote literacy and public interest in science, as well as a sexism-banishing view of today’s cheerleaders.
The group has close roots: Darlene Cavalier, a former 76ers cheerleader and science advocate with a Master’s degree from UPenn, founded her Science Cheerleader blog in 2006 as a way to share her passion for science and combat public apathy about the subject.
There, the longtime Philly resident blogged about science policy, shared examples of citizen science projects (like observing the night sky or setting up a NestCam to view hatchlings), and along the way found others who shared her ideals: professionals who studied and worked in scientific industries and just so happened to cheer for national football or basketball teams.
Through the years, her group of Science Cheerleaders grew, and now includes brilliant and motivated women from across the country, representing at least 18 professional teams (including Eagles cheerleader Allison, who holds degrees in Biology and Chemistry). And they’re capable of way more than just high kicks and waving pom-poms. These women are also mathematicians, engineers, doctors, chemists, biologists, teachers and researchers, showing young kids everywhere that science is cool.
The Science Cheerleader last year appeared at the first-ever Philadelphia Science Festival, pairing up with NBC Sports and the National Science Foundation to produce the Emmy-winning series, The Science of NFL Football. The group recently broke the Guinness World Record for Biggest Cheerleading Cheer, packing 1,200 people into a stadium to cheer for science!
Why is this necessary? Says the blog:
Scientific innovations have produced roughly half of all economic growth in the last 50 years. We do not have enough people in the pipeline to supply a science and technology workforce capable of meeting the global, scientific challenges we will face in this century. The U.S. needs to find nontraditional approaches to tap new sources of talent. The Science Cheerleaders have demonstrated an ability to connect to groups traditionally underrepresented in science and technology fields, potentially broadening educational and workforce funnel.
For more info, head to the Science Cheerleader website for news, profiles of the 100+ members and info on upcoming events.We've seen them leaked to death, we've seen months of rumors and speculation. Now we have verified info on the real deal: Samsung's double flagship for 2015. The Galaxy S6 will probably be the best-selling Android device this year no matter what any other manufacturer does, and the Galaxy S6 Edge is Samsung's attempt to one-up themselves with an interesting take on the standard slate design. The company has made both of them official at the Unpacked off-floor event at Mobile World Congress.
The Galaxy S6 is a mild evolution on the S5, taking some of the more premium elements of the Note line into a smaller and more refined form. The biggest change in comparison with the earlier iterations of the S series is the phone's metal frame... finally. After stiffer competition from Android manufacturers and, not least, bigger and more popular iPhones, Samsung seems like it's finally ready to make the shift to more premium materials.
The screen is 5.1 inches, the same as the S5 - Samsung has little reason to go bigger with its flagship thanks to the adjacent Note series, unlike in-country rival LG. Resolution on the Super AMOLED panel has been bumped to 2560x1440 (QHD), matching the Note 4 and other recent high-end devices. In terms of design, the S6's metal sides curve gently outward. Samsung claims that its metal (presumably an alloy) is 50% stronger than that used in other phones. Samsung's standard home button and capacitive back/recents buttons (switched from Android standard) are present.
There's no nice way to say this: it looks a lot like the iPhone 6 (which, admittedly, is not the first device ever to use this aesthetic). The speaker has been moved to the bottom of the phone, which is now somewhat crowded with a charging port, headphone port, and microphone. The curve looks like it makes for a device that's much easier to grip, but we'll wait for our hands-on to pass judgment. The S6 is just 6.8mm thin.
The battery is 2550mAh, which is more or less standard for a phone of this size. But long-time Samsung fans might be horrified to find that it is non-removable, unlike any of the previous Galaxy S-series phones. Wireless charging is included, and Samsung claims its fast-charging solution can get 4 hours of use on just 10 minutes of charging (with the proprietary charger, of course). The storage is also non-expandable - say goodbye to MicroSD cards. Samsung is softening that blow with a 32GB standard model (up from 16GB), and larger 64GB and 128GB(!) options.
Samsung made a splash when it announced that it would use its own Exynos chipsets in the next Galaxy phone, rather than the mix of Samsung and Qualcomm hardware seen previously. Rumors of overheating in Qualcomm's Snapdragon 810 haven't helped. The S6 uses a 64-bit Exynos octa-core processor and a generous 3GB of RAM (on the newer DDR4 standard), which should be enough to handle just about anything that current Android apps can throw at it. Samsung didn't say exactly which processor it was using, but its 14nm architecture means it's likely the Exynos 7 Octa. The company claims it's 20% faster and 35% more efficient than the chipset on the Exynos version of the Note 4.
The rear camera is 16MP, a modest bump on last year's model, plus optical image stabilization. Samsung tends to be at or near the top of the pack when it comes to Android camera hardware, and I don't see any reason for that to change this year. The lens on the camera is F/1.9, making it an excellent contender for quality low-light shots. The front-facing camera is a wide-angle 5MP shooter, more or less standard for this generation. Samsung has maintained its pulse oximiter (heart rate monitor) and fingerprint scanner add-ins from the Galaxy S5, but there's no mention of water resistance. The camera also has object-tracking auto focus, a feature of DSLRs and similar cameras. The camera module has a noticeable bulge on the rear of the phone.
Software is, naturally, Android 5.0. Samsung has thrown in its usual assortment of bells and whistles, which we'll dive into in our hands-on posts later during Mobile World Congress. This version of TouchWiz seems a little less heavy than in previous years, though it's nowhere near the "clean" experience that was rumored. Samsung is betting big on Samsung Pay, a rival to Google Wallet and Apple Pay, and a partnership with Microsoft will get users bonus OneDrive storage.
Samsung Pay works with NFC and "anywhere that accepts debit or credit cards" using a proprietary MST magstripe feature. Mastercard and Visa are supported at launch, along with a few huge banks. Samsung Pay will launch in the summer in the US and South Korea.
The Galaxy S6 Edge is Samsung's interesting gamble, a bid to split its flagship series between a standard and alternate design. The S6 Edge takes the Galaxy Note Edge's curved screen and extends it to both the right and the left, albeit in a slightly less dramatic curve. Exactly what Samsung hopes to achieve with this is hard to tell: while there are a few software gimmicks you can explore with the unique form factor, the pure "wow" of the unique screen is surely its top selling point. The question is, will consumers be willing to pay a premium for the novelty, and deal with the compromises it requires? "Above all, your friends will think it's very cool!" says a Samsung representative. That seems to be the point.
The screen on the S6 Edge is more aesthetic than functional, contrasting with the Note Edge. While there are a few links accessible from Samsung's TouchWiz version of Lollipop, there aren't really any tools. The purpose is to make the display look seamless with the hardware - sort of a mobile phone version of an infinity pool. Visual elements in Samsung's software layer will accentuate the curve, and a few widget-like tools in the TouchWiz stable (like Contacts) will focus on it, but it's not nearly as dramatic as it could have been.
The S6 Edge's screen hits the technical notes as the mainstream model: 5.1 inches, Super AMOLED, 2560x1440. Underneath is an Exynos octacore processor and 3GB of RAM. Once again, you'll have to make do with 32GB, 64GB, or 128GB of internal storage. The camera is the same as the one on the S6, including bulge. The IR port, fingerprint sensor, and heart rate monitor are intact, while the battery is actually bumped up to 2600mAh. Remarkably, the S6 Edge is only a little thicker than the normal model at 7mm.
Both phones will be available on April 10th in 20 countries. Prices were not discussed, of course, though you can expect the Galaxy S6 Edge to carry a premium over the standard model. Colors shown on stage include blue, white/silver, gold, and more exotic tints like teal or emerald green, though more should be made available through the life of the phones.
This post will be updated as more information becomes available. Hands-on impressions will be posted to Android Police soon.Mario Kart 8: A huge serving of steaming new info and videos from Nintendo
More new playable characters? Mario Kart TV?! and thats just the tip of the iceberg... It's exactly one month until our new karts arrive and we can finally destroy the guy who has led the race all game with a rather lame blue shell just in time to stop him crossing the line and allow a good 3 or 4 people to overtake..... I'm not bitter.. much, but I sure am glad to see the introduction of the Super Horn - a fantastic idea!!
Nintendo has revealed lots of cool new stuff including Mario Kart TV, the all important 12 player online races and more. Check out the full release from Nintendo below.
Also click here anyone who missed our post about the special edition Mario Kart 8 Wii U Hardware Bundle
30th April 2014 – One month from today, Mario Kart 8 will be driving players wild with anti-gravity racing action. To get people revved up for its release exclusively on Wii U, Nintendo has released a new Nintendo Direct video that announces additional Mario Kart 8 news, including a free downloadable game offer for fans, details about its online features, new characters and devastating new items.
To view the Nintendo Direct in its entirety, visit http://nintendo.co.uk/nintendodirect. Today’s announcements include:
Mario Kart 8 Bonus Game Promotion : th May 2014 (10:00 CEST) and 31 st July 2014 (23:59 CEST), you will be eligible to receive a st August 2014 (23:59 CEST). This offer also applies to Club Nintendo PIN codes included in the Mario Kart 8 Limited Edition software offering and Mario Kart 8 Premium Pack – Special Edition hardware bundle. More details of this promotion will follow at a later date Whether Mario Kart 8 is purchased at retail or via Nintendo eShop, if you register an accompanying Club Nintendo PIN code of the game with Club Nintendo between 30May 2014 (10:00 CEST) and 31July 2014 (23:59 CEST), you will be eligible to receive a free download code for one of 10 selected Wii U games * by 31August 2014 (23:59 CEST). This offer also applies to Club Nintendo PIN codes included in the Mario Kart 8 Limited Edition software offering and Mario Kart 8 Premium Pack – Special Edition hardware bundle. More details of this promotion will follow at a later date here.
Online multiplayer : In Mario Kart 8, up to 12 players can race together online, with four main ways to find opponents (Global, Regional, Friends and Rivals, Tournament)**. Like to banter with your friends while you’re preparing for a race? Mario Kart 8 lets players chat with one another in the lobby area using the GamePad microphone as they wait for their friends to join. Players can also create public or private tournaments for which they specify the day of the week, the time and the rules. As is Mario Kart tradition, players will be able to race against ghost data from friends, or even the top 10 worldwide racers. Players can try to beat them or just pick up a few tips and tricks from studying the best. If you beat the Mario Kart 8 development team’s ghosts, you’ll get a cool Miiverse stamp.
Mario Kart TV : On this in-game channel, players can view Highlight Reels from their races and tournaments they take part in - with rewind and slow motion replay features to boot - while racers eager to learn from others can watch the world’s most popular Highlight Reels via Mario Kart TV and comment on them. Players with Google accounts can also upload their reels directly to YouTube from within Mario Kart TV, and post these videos directly to Miiverse.
New Items : No matter how skilled some racers are, they’re just a blue Spiny Shell away from peril. A well-timed item turning defeat into victory in an instant. The new Super Horn blows away all other items – literally. Sounding the Super Horn issues forth a sonic shock wave that blasts away everything in the vicinity, including other drivers, Red Shells and even Spiny Shells. It’s a potent asset, especially for drivers trying to maintain their lead. Mario Kart 8 also introduces the Crazy Eight, a swirl of eight different items that lucky players can use one by one.
New Racers: Two new playable female characters make their debut appearances in Mario Kart 8. New heavyweight driver Pink Gold Peach glows with a golden light and makes a shiny counterpart to Metal Mario, while the new Baby Rosalina shows up for a play date with other Baby characters. As in past Mario Kart games, players can again choose to play as their Mii characters, rounding out the field of racers to a total of 30.
* click here to view the list of free game downloads you can choose from
You can pre-order the Mario Kart 8 Wii U Hardware bundle today from Amazon
Mario Kart 8 - More new features trailer
Mario Kart 8 Direct PresentationScott Moffitt, the Executive Vice President of Sales and Marketing at Nintendo of America, has confessed that the company still hasn’t solved the problem of creating a unified digital account for gamers. Both Sony and Microsoft’s consoles have user accounts which are tied to customers purchases. It’s something Nintendo fans have long been clamouring for. Here’s what Moffitt had to say about the situation.
Q: As someone who’s made a pretty significant investment in digital purchases for 3DS, I feel there may be some games that work better on 2DS than on 3DS — Virtual Console, for instance. But the 3DS games that have 3D functionality, I’d rather keep them on the 3DS. It’s not really possible to do that…
Scott Moffitt: It’s not tied to an account. Yeah. We haven’t solved that yet.
Q: Are you working on solving it? It sounds like, to date, Nintendo has been pretty content to keep things as they are.
Scott Moffitt: If you look at the account system, the network ID system that exists now on Wii U, that’s an effort for us to move beyond a device-centric approach to an account-centric approach. But we haven’t done it on the handheld side of the business at this point. We hear that feedback. We hear that criticism, or whatever you want to call it, from time to time. We’re not blind to it. But it’s not something we’ve solved.80 % 80 Triangular Fancy a concoction of grandiose orchestral beauty, boisterous horns with a fair dose of bite, and assertive commentary on the Radiohead-shaped comings and goings at a sex hotel? alt-J's third record may be their least coherent but it's certainly their sharpest.
On the eve of first seeing alt-J live in a sold-out O2 Arena, the song I played most frequently was ‘Taro,’ the bhangra-flavoured account of the death of war photographer Robert Capa in 1950s Vietnam that closed An Awesome Wave. Of course, it took me a while to realise this was the case – as a band named by Fine Art students after a keyboard shortcut, it’s only natural for things to be a little bit cryptic in the lyrical structure and delivery alike. With RELAXER, a record named after a “cool”-sounding hair product before you fall into the trap of expecting a soothing experience, this formula is very much accentuated: no ‘Intro,’ no fleuron-titled interludes; over its eight tracks, they’re far too busy telling tales of seaside Yorkshire threesomes, stabby pool parties, and ogle-prone Tasmanian devils.
Those three songs in question – ‘3WW,’ ‘In Cold Blood,’ and ‘Adeline’ – are revealing choices as the pre-album cuts, each showcasing a different facet of the somewhat disparate record. A foil to the abstract cries of Joe Newman and top-and-tail choral work from regular keyboardist Gus Unger-Hamilton, Wolf Alice’s Ellie Rowsell on the former adds a delicate flair to what is otherwise a beautiful, carefully unravelling opener snapped vigorously into action as ‘In Cold Blood,’ the shortest track, surges in with Abbey Road brass and a £1.05 Casiotone keyboard from eBay. In RELAXER’s first eight-ish minutes it covers both extremes in its non sequiturs: almost haunting intimacy and a feral swagger with a grand cast.
For its next five-and-a-half, foothills get significantly warmer as London’s entire supply of classical guitarists bring a heritage folk version of that ‘House Of The Rising Sun’ a rather grand treatment as shown to Bill Withers on This Is All Yours. As ever, Newman’s lyrics are downright peculiar and at times indecipherable – on first listen, you may well come away with little else but the four-fold sneer of “Fuck you, I’ll do what I wanna do” that ends your brief fly-on-the-wall stay in the leather-clad sex hotel of ‘Hit Me Like That Snare.’ He does even work in a brief voyage to the earnestly personal, lacing a morose, slumbering diary recital through the opening stanzas of ‘Last Year’ before the vista and hope becomes clear through the astonishingly pure Marika Hackman feature and a divine passage of bassoon-shaped wholesomeness.
Before you have a chance to think about how peculiar the whole flow is, you may well find yourself booking conducting lessons waltzing around to a fifty-strong ensemble of strings, Ely choristers, an organ, and a dulcimer on ‘Pleader.’ As a finale, its orchestral swell of archaically pompous religious glee is suitably stunning. As a song that sits on the same disc as a breathy, nasal grimace of a pop record like ‘Deadcrush,’ it also makes no sense whatsoever, yet herein lies its charm. Treating the album as an anthology of discrete, interchangeable tales is to appreciate it most, as RELAXER simply needed some sort of structured tracklist just to be printed on its cover. What sits inside is an enthralling storybook, however you choose to take it.
RELAXER is released on June 2nd via Infectious and BMGI realize that this is little more than a ploy for attention from Pizza Hut, but with an idea this ridiculous, I'll go ahead and give them what they want. The restaurant has just created a new pizza box that doubles as a movie projector — with a little help from you and your smart phone. Here's how it works: remove the perforated circle in the side of the box, attach the provided lens (which doubles as a pizza table), scan a QR code, and place your phone inside the box pointing at the lens. Since the image is being blown up from a projection from your phone, the quality is almost certainly going to be total crap, so I can't imagine anyone actually setting out to do this for anything other than sheer curiosity's sake – especially considering how affordable real projectors are becoming and the proliferation of high quality flat-screen TVs.
As of right now, the "Blockbuster Box" is only being rolled out in Hong Kong. Take a look at the video below to see it in action:A new study suggests that symptoms of depression and insomnia are the strongest predictors of having frequent nightmares.
Results show that 3.9 percent of participants reported having frequent nightmares during the previous 30 days, including 4.8 percent of women and 2.9 percent of men. Frequent nightmares were reported by 28.4 percent of participants with severe depressive symptoms and 17.1 percent of those with frequent insomnia. Further analysis that adjusted for potential confounders found that the strongest independent risk factors for nightmares were insomnia, exhaustion and the depressive symptom of “negative attitude toward self.”
“Our study shows a clear connection between well-being and nightmares,” said lead author Nils Sandman, a researcher in the Centre for Cognitive Neuroscience at the University of Turku in Finland. “This is most evident in the connection between nightmares and depression, but also apparent in many other analyses involving nightmares and questions measuring life satisfaction and health.”
Study results are published in the April issue of the journal Sleep.
The American Academy of Sleep Medicine reports that nightmares are vivid, realistic and disturbing dreams typically involving threats to survival or security, which often evoke emotions of anxiety, fear or terror. A nightmare disorder may occur when repeated nightmares cause distress or impairment in social or occupational functioning.
The study was a joint effort of the University of Turku and the Finnish National Institute of Health and Welfare. Sandman and the research team analyzed data from two independent cross-sectional surveys of the Finnish general adult population conducted in 2007 and 2012. Participants were 13,922 adults between 25 and 74 years of age. Fifty-three percent were women. The surveys involved a questionnaire that was mailed to the participants and a health examination at the local primary health care center, where the completed questionnaire was returned and checked by a nurse. Occasional nightmares in the past 30 days were reported by more than 45 percent of participants, and 50.6 percent reported no nightmares at all.
Sandman noted that the cross-sectional study did not allow for an examination of causality. However, he suggested that the results do raise intriguing possibilities worth investigating in the future.
“It might be possible that nightmares could function as early indicators of onset of depression and therefore have previously untapped diagnostic value,” he said. “Also, because nightmares, insomnia and depression often appear together, would it be possible to treat all of these problems with an intervention directed solely toward nightmares?”The Boston Red Sox are reportedly shopping around All-Star center fielder Jacoby Ellsbury. Should the Philadelphia Phillies make a play for the 29-year-old?
Philly.com's Bob Brookover wrote Wednesday that Ellsbury would be an "interesting option" for the Phillies:
What would the Phillies have to surrender in a trade for Ellsbury? The deal could get done for righthander Vance Worley because the Red Sox need another starting pitcher. Worley, 25, should be attractive to a lot of teams even though he is coming off a frustrating season caused by a bone spur that was surgically removed in September. Worley is not eligible for salary arbitratrion until after the 2013 season and cannot be a free agent until after the 2017 season. The Red Sox, after spending big in the free-agent market this offseason, should like that kind of low-cost option for the back of their starting rotation.
The Red Sox signed Shane Victorino to a three-year, $39 million deal on Tuesday, meaning they already have a center field replacement should Ellsbury get traded. As of now, Victorino is slated to be the team's starting right fielder in April.
Ellsbury is under team control for 2013, but then he is likely to become a free agent. His agent is Scott Boras, so the likelyhood that Ellsbury tests the market -- instead of negotiating a long-term deal with the Red Sox or wherever he may be traded -- is great.
Worley would be a useful piece for the Red Sox, who had one of the worst starting rotations in baseball last season. The team has Jon Lester and Clay Buchholz returning to anchor the rotation, but both were inconsistent last year. John Lackey is expected back from Tommy John surgery, while Felix Doubront is young starter who impressed the organization with his work last season.A group of skilled baristas from all over the country gather in a tasteful coffee shop in Los Angeles for a coffee competition. They’ve worked hard to get here, hand-crafted their costumes, and fine-tuned the ingredients to make their signature beverages. They’ve trimmed the velvet on their Prince outfits and spent hours buffing the leather brim of their witch hats. A trio of judges sit uncomfortably close to the competitors, rubrics in hand, their palates cringing. Audience anticipation is high—what will the next competitor bring to the table? Will the aftertaste of their coffee concoction linger in the throats of the judges? Will anybody barf?
And then Erik Staack, a Blue Bottle Wholesale Trainer, steps out on to the stage dressed as “Pocket” the Homeless Cat-Villain, ready to prepare his signature drink—a combination of mouth-ground coffee and catnip. This is the 1st annual World’s Worst Coffee Competition.
Held in early March at Dinosaur Coffee in Los Angeles, the competition seeks to be a “fun counter” to the tight-lipped seriousness of traditional coffee competitions. Ben and Michelle Hantoot, owners of Dinosaur Coffee, always wanted the cafe to be a place for “weird and offbeat events.” When a customer and coffee super-friend suggested the idea, the Hantoots knew they had found just such a contest.
Judged by Tony Konecny (formerly of Intelligentsia, Victrola, and his own eponymous Tonx Coffee brand), Lizz Hudson (formerly of Stumptown), and celebrity judge David Pinsof of Cards Against Humanity, contestants from some of the top specialty coffee cafes in the greater Los Angeles area competed to create the most disgusting cup of coffee possible. Based on a loose approximation of actual coffee competition judging, contestants were rated on aroma, mouthfeel, flavor, and “aftertaste” as well as performance, “service vessel”, and |
translate those newly acquired high ideals into constructive influence. Harold Meyerson recently suggested a few possibilities: they might join efforts to continue enacting progressive legislation at the state and municipal levels, or join continuing campaigns for national police, criminal justice, and environmental justice reform.
A large constituency of voters who are impatient with the structural constraints embedded in our politics — reasonably or not — may also turn to making their influence felt by prodding a President Hillary Clinton to prioritize campaign finance and voting access reform. Meanwhile, Jonathan Cohn has also suggested that, by raising his national profile, Sanders may have placed himself in a position where he — and his national constituency — can positively influence the policy debates in Congress in coming years, and perhaps keep Clinton more progressive on the minimum wage, trade, and on her fiscal and safety net priorities.
All this is to say that the question of whether the Sanders movement will show meaningful staying power is to no small degree up to Bernie Sanders — and his supporters. Perhaps the movement will dissipate; perhaps his supporters will scatter in disillusionment and despair. But it’s also easy to envision it having a largely positive influence, perhaps for years to come.More than 1,000 jobs at a Verizon Wireless call center in Rancho Cordova will be affected by the closure of the center at the end of the year, according to Verizon officials.The Verizon Wireless customer service and telesales call center is scheduled to close on Jan. 27.The 700 customer service and about 300 telesales positions will be given the opportunity to transfer to other Verizon call center locations."To tell 1,000 people that this office will be closed in less than four months, that’s a pretty dramatic change to have to process in what is the big family time of the year,“ Assemblymember Ken Cooley, D-Rancho Cordova, said.Employees who visit the other center will be offered a $500 stipend to offset the travel cost. The company is offering $10,000 in relocation assistance for those who decide to transfer."If you have a home that's your principal asset, and one rule is don't sell your home in the winter if you can avoid it, “ Cooley said.Eligible employees unable to relocate or who do not secure other assignments with the company will be offered individualized separation packages and outplacement help, Verizon officials said."They're sort of shocked with the turn of events to get that news, and I would say they're still trying to process it,” Cooley said.The Rancho Cordova call center is the only one located in California.No additional details have been released.
More than 1,000 jobs at a Verizon Wireless call center in Rancho Cordova will be affected by the closure of the center at the end of the year, according to Verizon officials.
The Verizon Wireless customer service and telesales call center is scheduled to close on Jan. 27.
Advertisement
The 700 customer service and about 300 telesales positions will be given the opportunity to transfer to other Verizon call center locations.
"To tell 1,000 people that this office will be closed in less than four months, that’s a pretty dramatic change to have to process in what is the big family time of the year,“ Assemblymember Ken Cooley, D-Rancho Cordova, said.
Employees who visit the other center will be offered a $500 stipend to offset the travel cost. The company is offering $10,000 in relocation assistance for those who decide to transfer.
"If you have a home that's your principal asset, and one rule is don't sell your home in the winter if you can avoid it, “ Cooley said.
Eligible employees unable to relocate or who do not secure other assignments with the company will be offered individualized separation packages and outplacement help, Verizon officials said.
"They're sort of shocked with the turn of events to get that news, and I would say they're still trying to process it,” Cooley said.
The Rancho Cordova call center is the only one located in California.
No additional details have been released.
AlertMeOn Tuesday, Wells Fargo CEO John Stumpf released a statement promising that the bank would eliminate product sales goals for its employees after thousands of employees were found to have opened fake accounts using real customer names and identification in order to boost internal sales numbers. Stump did not go so far as to say that the practice of cross-selling financial products would end at Wells Fargo, but The Wall Street Journal reported that the company would put a temporary hold on the practice.
Last week, three regulators fined Wells Fargo $185 million, including a $100 million fine from the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau (CFPB). Wells Fargo fired 5,300 employees who allegedly created about 2 million fake accounts. In some cases, consumers were charged low balance and overdraft fees when Wells Fargo employees temporarily moved money from customers’ approved accounts to accounts they had not approved.
In his statement, Stumpf said, “We are eliminating product sales goals because we want to make certain our customers have full confidence that our retail bankers are always focused on the best interests of customers.” The sales goals will be eliminated effective January 1.
According to the WSJ, Wells Fargo CFO John Shrewsberry said last week that 10 percent of the 5,300 employees fired were branch managers or higher in rank, but he stopped short of naming any top-ranking managers who may have been laid off or disciplined in response to the revelations. According to USA Today, Shrewsberry told an audience at a financial services conference today that "unauthorized customer account activity peaked in 2013 and two-thirds were concentrated in the southwest US."
The third-party consulting firm that Wells Fargo hired to do its internal investigation only looked at unauthorized account creation from 2011 and later.
The Senate Banking Committee will hold a hearing on September 20 to investigate how such widespread fraud occurred within the company.Washington, D.C. is infamous for having some of the nation’s strictest gun control laws. It is also incredibly violent, and there has been a recent surge in murders that the district’s Democrat leadership has been unable to slow, much less stop.
In a desperate attempt to appear that they are “doing something,” Mayor Muriel Bowser and Police Chief Cathy Lanier are now upping rewards for those willing to turn in some criminals:
The District of Columbia on Wednesday sharply hiked rewards for seized illegal guns amid an upsurge in killings in the U.S. capital, part of a rise in homicides in many big cities. Washington will pay a $2,500 reward for a tip leading to gun seizures, up from $1,000. Information leading to an arrest and conviction in a shooting earns a reward of $10,000, up from $1,000, Mayor Muriel Bowser and Police Chief Cathy Lanier said in a statement. “Our actions are clear: we need to get illegal guns off the street so people aren’t put in harm’s way,” Lanier said. Washington, a city of about 660,000 people, has had 98 homicides so far this year, up 36 percent from the same time in 2014. Police have seized 944 illegal guns this year, the statement said. Lanier and Bowser have blamed the rise in killings on factors including illegal firearms in the wrong hands, greater use of synthetic drugs, more guns and repeat violent offenders on the street.
Yes, Bowser and Lanier are tacitly admitting that their leadership and policing polices are so ineffective that they need to bribe criminals in the District to turn one another in if there is to be any hope of stopping the out-of-control violence.
Lanier—nothing more or less than a politician with a badge—went so far as to make unsupported claims attacking standard-capacity magazines:
“We have added a reward of $10,000 for shootings because we are seeing too many of these shootings now with high-capacity magazines, and the potential for them to be lethal is much, much greater,” Lanier said at a news conference.
When asked to support her claim that “high capacity magazines” were to blame, Lanier had no answers… probably because the data doesn’t support her claims.
Most criminal shootings are comprised of three shots or less, and Lanier has provided no evidence whatsoever to support her assertion that they have suddenly and inexplicably more than tripled (anti-gun liberals tend to feel that the arbitrary figure of more than 10 rounds is “high capacity,” even if that is less than the standard capacity of a given firearm).
Bower and Lanier refuse to face the reality that the District’s incredibly strict gun control laws ensure that law-abiding citizens are easy prey for the city’s criminal class. The police are understaffed and incompetently utilized by Lanier. The citizenry are utterly stripped, as a practical matter, of their right to bear arms.
As a result, criminals (the un-elected kind) lord over the streets of Washington, with little fear of being apprehended after the fact, and with the near-absolute certainty that they will not run across one of the district’s very few and highly restricted concealed carriers.
Strict gun control has left Washington, D.C. as a paradise of violent criminals. It remains to be seen how many more good people must be murdered before the District’s leaders admit that their policies are costing lives.Twice we’ve examined the fakery from George Will about the danger of wildfire in the U.S. and its relation to global warming. It’s hard to imagine being more ignorant about this issue than George Will. Or, is he simply willing to mislead people deliberately, to expose our nation and our people to extreme danger, just to push a political agenda? Or … both?
This much is certain: George Will is completely wrong about wildfire risk in the U.S. But he is oh so right about propaganda! To create doubt about the scientific truth of increased wildfire risk, all you need to do is say whatever you want. No matter how wrong, it will be repeated by those who push your same political agenda. Doubt is their product.
Case in point: Fox “news” is repeating Will’s claim as though it had any relevance at all to the issue. Media Matters reports the whole thing, including video.
This is how denial works. Create doubt, either based on a fact which is irrelevant to the truth of the matter, or based on an outright lie. Push that doubt along, by repeating what you’ve heard from uninformed, ignorant, biased sources again and again. Whether or not it’s relevant at all, whether or not it’s even true at all, makes no difference. Just make sure the doubt spreads — like wildfire.
What I noticed of interest in the report from Media Matters was this graph, showing that acres burned per fire by wildfire in the U.S. increased from 1983 through 2008:
I tested this data for statistically significant trend, using both least-squares and non-parametric (Theil) regression:
Solid blue shows a least-squares regression fit. Dashed blue shows a Theil regression fit. Both are statistically significant. The red line is a lowess smooth.
But, the graph shown in the Media Matters report is out of date, only going as far as 2008. We’ve witnessed four more years since then. And what have those years brought? This:
Although 2012 didn’t have as many wildfires as 2006 (or many other years for that matter), it still brought tremendous wildfire damage because in 2012 the acres burned per wildfire was far more than any previous year. In fact, by any trend you care to use, a least-squares regression line, or a Theil regression line, or the lowess smooth, the trend has more than doubled acres burned per fire since 1980.
Of course, in 2012 the acres burned per fire was extra high because it also showed an upward fluctuation. But that upward fluctuation was on top of an upward trend — and when that happens we’re in real trouble.
If we give any credence to the climate science fakery constantly spewing forth from George Will and from Fox “news,” then we’re in even worse trouble.
AdvertisementsSpread the love
“All three of them started beating me on the head, it was unbelievable, I couldn’t believe it was happening to me.”
Mike Sawyer
July 25, 2014
Roger Carlos was taking pictures of a building in the 10600 block of Westover Hills Boulevard in San Antonio, TX, when his life changed forever.
Carlos was photographing a building of what was soon to be home to his wife’s medical practice when all of the sudden he was ransacked by an undercover drug task force officer and two SAPD SWAT members.
The officers were looking for Josue Gonzalez, who fled from police after they tried to arrest him for possessing a controlled substance.
Gonzalez had ditched his car in the parking lot of a restaurant that happened to be a few hundred feet from where this father of three was excitedly taking pictures of his wife’s new venture.
Officers approached Carlos and before he could comply with their demands, they began to pummel him, striking him over 50 times.
“All three of them started beating me on the head,” said Carlos, “It was unbelievable. I couldn’t believe it was happening to me.”
Bleeding and in handcuffs he wasn’t released until a fourth officer approached and said that the suspect was in custody nearby.
Carlos meanwhile, was hospitalized after the beating. He was treated for a large gash above his eye and a broken tooth.
Swelling of his head was so severe, doctors performed a CT scan of Carlos’ head as well.
“I could understand taking somebody down hard. I can understand the need for that and securing them, but that’s not what happened. I got on the ground, I was no threat to anybody, I was fully compliant,” said Carlos, who has no criminal history.
The three officers who beat him, claim that Carlos had his hands underneath his body during the beating.
When KENS 5 news interviewed SAPD police chief William McManus, he stated that “Clearly it was a case of mistaken identity. From the report that I’ve read, from the photo that I saw and from your description, I’ve not seen anything at this point that would indicate to me that anything out of order happened.”
Just to recap, the chief of police thinks that an innocent man being beaten to the point of hospitalization by incompetent police officers mistaking him for another man, indicates that nothing “out of order happened.”
And this is the scenario that so many American citizens find themselves in today; an unapologetic brutal gang of uniformed thugs operating with almost zero accountability, laying waste to those who they’ve sworn to protect.
Carlos has filed a complaint against these officers with the FBI. We won’t be holding our breathe for the results of that investigation.
One thing is for certain, if any civil suit is brought forth, the monetary consequences from the negligent behavior of these cops will passed on to the tax-payer.The judge hearing the case against Hosni Mubarak on Wednesday summoned the head of Egypt's ruling military council and other top-ranking army officials to testify over the ousted leader's role in suppressing the country's uprising.
ADVERTISING Read more
AP - The judge in the trial of Hosni Mubarak on Wednesday summoned the top brass in Egypt’s new ruling military council and his former vice president to testify in closed sessions on the ousted leader’s role in putting down protests against his rule.
Both the defense and prosecution in the case against Mubarak and six of his top security chiefs sought the testimony of Field Marshal Mohammed Tantawi, who was Mubarak’s defense minister and is now the military ruler.
Also summoned were the military chief of staff Sami Anan and Omar Suleiman, who Mubarak appointed as his vice president during the uprising and was his powerful intelligence chief for nearly two decades.
Many Egyptians believe that their testimony is key in determining whether Mubarak ordered the use of lethal force against the uprising. Mubarak himself has said in his statements that his top military and security chiefs attended meetings with him during the 18-day uprising. Nearly 850 protesters were killed in the early days of the protests that forced Mubarak to step down in February.
But the judge’s order that the sessions, which will run Sunday through Thursday, be closed to the media and public ensures that key details of those meetings will remain secret.
Mubarak, his former Interior Minister Habib el-Adly and six other top security officials are charged with complicity in the killing of protesters, a charge that carries a potential death penalty.
The judge’s decision came in a stormy session during which a prosecution witness was detained on suspicion of perjury - but then quickly acquitted by the court.
The witness, Capt. Mohammed Abdel-Hakim was the latest in a string of police officers that the prosecution has called to testify, expecting they would confirm that orders were issued for security forces to use live ammunition against the anti-Mubarak crowds in the streets.
But Abdel-Hakim denied in the court Wednesday that any live ammunition was provided to riot police or that he knew of any orders to shoot at protesters.
Lawyers for families of slain protesters accused Abdel-Hakim, who was in charge of ammunition for a Cairo security regiment,of changing his earlier testimony to investigators - that he issued hundreds of bullets to each member of his force during the protests. Prosecutors immediately charged Abdel-Hakim with perjury and the judge ordered him detained, but then several hours later it was announced that he had been acquitted and freed, with no explanation.
In a session Monday, lawyers said four other officers of similarly changing their earlier affidavits to investigators once they testified in court.
Several of the family lawyers accused security officials and other Mubarak supporters of pressuring the witnesses to deny the existence of any shoot-to-kill orders for police. But there has been so far been no court investigation into the suspicions or the reasons for the changes in testimony, raising complaints that the prosecution is not being aggressive or organized enough in its case.
Omar Haggag, one of the family lawyers, said the judge summoned Tantawi and the other top leadership figures to avoid dragging on with testimonies from junior officials.
“He clearly aims to end the controversy on whether Mubarak ordered the shooting or not...it aims to save more time and effort in determining this,” Haggag said.
The public has widely anticipated the testimony of Tantawi, who was a longtime loyalist and close associate of Mubarak _ not only because they wanted to see him implicate Mubarak, but they also wanted to finally answer the question about how close the two still are, and whether Tantawi is ready to officially break with his former boss. Mubarak handed over power to Tantawi when he resigned on Feb. 11.
Many protesters have grown increasingly critical of the military rulers’ management of the transition after Mubarak stepped down, first by prolonging their stay at the helm. But also many are increasingly vocal about Tantawi and the ruling military council’s failure, and often reluctance, to cut ties with the Mubarak regime.
Tantawi is to testify on Sunday, followed by other members of the military council and Suleiman, who has already given an affidavit to the investigators. The judge also summoned the current interior minister and another interior minister who replaced el-Adly during the heat of the uprising.The Salt Lake Tribune reports:
A woman has sued LDS Family Services for not taking action against a therapist she said convinced her that having sex with him would help her overcome a history of sexual abuse and the demons inside her.
Holbrook told [Jacobsen] that he had prayed in the van of his garage whether or not it was appropriate to have sex with her, according to the suit. Holbrook told Plaintiff that he received an answer from God that they should have a sexual relationship. He further explained that being intimate would help her with her emotional problems. The two began the sexual relationship in March 2004, the lawsuit states. The first sexual encounter took place in Holbrooks house and they later had sex in motels in Logan, Salt Lake City and Clearfield, at an Ogden campground and at Holbrooks mothers house, the lawsuit states.
“… the Prophet Joseph unbosomed his heart, and described the trying mental ordeal he experienced in overcoming the repugnance of his feelings, the natural result of the force of education and social custom, relative to the introduction of plural marriage. He knew the voice of God he knew the commandment of the Almighty to him was to go forward to set the example, and establish Celestial plural marriage. He knew that he had not only his own prejudices and prepossessions to combat and to overcome, but those of the whole Christian world stared him in the face; but God, who is above all, had given the commandment, and He must be obeyed. Yet the Prophet hesitated and deferred from time to time, until an angel of God stood by him with a drawn sword, and told him that, unless he moved forward and established plural marriage, his Priesthood would be taken from him and he should be destroyed! This testimony he not only bore to my brother, but also to others a testimony that cannot be gainsayed.”
P.S.: “Joseph claimed an angel had to threaten him with his life before he would practice polygamy, but the fact that he professed love for Fanny shows that he did not need that much persuasion.”
One of Mormonism’s founding whoppers strikes again.
Mormon leader Boyd K. Packer has famously said, “Some things that are true are not very useful.” I think this latest criminal abuse of authority demonstrates that some things that are false are downright pernicious:
“You never understood that touching …
… can be a part of the treatment.”
We’ve gotten confirmed that there is a secret group, a conspiracy … in a particularly sensitive part of the official administration.
And is it just me or isn’t Noomi Rapace the millennials’ answer to Franka Potente?Those seat-back screens that have long been part of in-flight entertainment systems are preparing to depart from many airplanes, experts say, and will gradually be replaced by content streamed to passengers’ electronic devices through improved wireless service.
But as with a delayed flight, don’t expect the changes to take off in a hurry.
For airlines, the switch would save money and cater to customers’ changing viewing habits, which rely increasingly on tablets and smartphones, William Hoppe, the leader of travel, logistics and hospitality at Intelenet Global Services, said in an email.
Jon Cobin, the chief commercial officer at Gogo, which provides Wi-Fi service on more than 2,900 commercial planes, said in an email that “virtually everyone is connected at all times on the ground today.”
“That behavior doesn’t change when you get in the air,” he added.
With built-in screens, airliners provide passengers with a set menu of content through boxes that power the in-flight entertainment system. The screens appeared in their most primitive form in the late 1980s with a few movies played on a loop. By the early 2000s, they had advanced to allow passengers to make choices on demand.As we enter the holiday season, Republicans are excited about the prospect of passing the first fundamental tax reform in a generation. As President Trump said this week, “We’re going to give the American people a huge tax cut for Christmas. Hopefully that will be a great, big, beautiful Christmas present.” But even as Republicans in Congress prepare for a celebration on tax cuts, they should be watchful on the spending front, or they’re going to end up putting a big lump of coal in everyone’s stockings.
At issue is the upcoming year-end omnibus spending package, and whether or not it will hold true to the principles Republicans campaigned on. This year’s spending package will be the first in 10 years to be constructed under unified GOP control of House, Senate, and the White House, so it should prioritize Republican principles. That’s what elections are for, after all.
ADVERTISEMENT
But if media reports are accurate, the spending bill that emerges from Congress to be sent to President Trump will contain more items that Democrats want than items that Republicans want. That would be wrong. It would make a mockery of voter choice as expressed by their votes at the polls last year. What’s the point of voting, if those who win elections don’t follow through on their promises?
Let’s be clear. Voters express their policy choices through their votes. When a group of voters who want policy outcome A outvote the group of voters who want policy outcome B, it is assumed that policy choice A will be enacted. That’s how our government maintains fidelity to the understanding of the Framers of “the consent of the governed.”
But when there are more voters who want policy outcome A, and policy outcome B is enacted instead, that’s perversion of “consent.” Such an outcome explicitly rejects “consent.” It is injurious to the relationship between the governed and those who govern in their name under the Constitution. Thus, it is to be avoided.
There are at least three major areas of contention to be decided on the spending package, and if history is any guide, Democrats will win, and Republicans will lose – and that means the voters who outnumbered Democrats, and who voted to give Republicans the majorities in both houses of Congress and the White House, will lose.
First, there will be a “DACA fix” included in the package. Despite recent denials, including as recently as Speaker Paul Ryan Paul Davis RyanBrexit and exit: A transatlantic comparison Five takeaways from McCabe’s allegations against Trump The Hill's 12:30 Report: Sanders set to shake up 2020 race MORE’s appearance at a Fox News televised town hall meeting last week, House and Senate Republican leaders will likely allow the inclusion of an amnesty for up to 800,000 illegal immigrants in the spending bill.
Why? Because Democrats will insist on it and threaten to vote against the spending package unless the provision is included. Our spineless Republican leaders will fold their hands and give the Democrats what they want, rather than let the Democrats take the blame for shutting down the government unless they get their desired amnesty. Apparently, the thought of taking a dispute to the people doesn’t occur to GOP leaders.
But that’s not the only issue on which Republicans will cave. The second issue will be inclusion of the Alexander-Murray legislation to bail out the health insurance companies to the tune of billions of dollars every year. Years ago, House Republicans were so upset that the Obama administration was making these payments without a proper congressional appropriation that they sued in federal court and won.
Apparently, it turns out that House Republicans weren’t opposed to paying the insurance companies. They were just opposed to paying them without a proper appropriation. What else could one reasonably conclude after watching leading Republicans in both House and Senate prepare to pass a bill appropriating such funds for not one year, but two?
But we’re not done yet. Republicans want to increase spending for defense beyond the levels set by the 2011 Budget Control Act. Democrats, being Democrats, are happy to spend taxpayer money. But they’re also insisting that any increase in defense spending be matched by similar increases in domestic discretionary spending.
Just last week, both House and Senate passed and sent to President Trump the National Defense Authorization Act, which includes a $77.4 billion increase in defense spending over the budget cap for fiscal 2018. Democrats demand that increase be matched on the domestic side. Congressional GOP leaders will, no doubt, give them what they want.
So as conservatives prepare for “what’s next?” after passage of tax reform, they need a strategy for dealing with their own weak congressional leadership, which has shown itself far more willing to cave in to Democratic spending demands than Democrats have any right to expect after their drubbing at the polls last year. A lump of coal, indeed.
Jenny Beth Martin is chairman of Tea Party Patriots Citizens Fund.Midland Memorial Hospital announced Friday it would not bill any of the victims of the Nov. 15 train crash into a veterans parade float.
An anonymous local philanthropist “decided to give a generous donation to the hospital in an effort to cover some of the costs,” Midland Memorial announced in a news release.
The hospital did not disclose the size of the donation. But the hospital said it received $100,000 for mass casualty medical services from donors through the Permian Basin Area Foundation.
Veterans that day rode on multiple floats across the train crossing at South Garfield Street and West Industrial Avenue. There, a Union Pacific train struck a rear parade float at 62 mph, killing 47-year-old Army Sgt. Maj. Lawrence Boivin, 34-year-old Army Sgt. Joshua Michael, 37-year-old Marin Chief Warrant Officer Gary Stouffer and 43-year-old Sgt. Maj. William Lubbers. Another 16 riders were hospitalized with injuries.
The crash happened during the “Hunt for Heroes” event, organized by the local group Show of Support, which never sought a permit.
Show of Support announced Tuesday it would distribute a second round of donations worth more than $185,000 to victims and their families. The group distributed $400,000 in donations in December.Human bedbugs, Cimex lectularius, are “true bugs,” that is, insects in the order Hemiptera. They are an infernal pest, sucking the blood out of people and leaving a nasty, itchy rash. (I was bitten only once, but it was in a fleabag hotel in Peru, and there were many bites all over me, with the rash persisting for about three weeks.) Fortunately, bedbugs aren’t known to carry any diseases.
Still, they’re annoying, as you’ll know if you’ve followed the news over the past couple of years. Having been nearly eradicated by 1940 following applications of DDT, bedbugs started making a comeback when we declared a DDT moratorium, and the bugs are now common in American cities and a devil to eliminate.
Here’s a human bedbug sucking blood from the arm of a volunteer (photo from Wikipedia)
But where did bedbugs come from? Well, it’s long been known that their closest relative seems to be the bat bug, a similar insect that lives on bats, sucking their blood in the caves. The batbug also happens to be classified as the same species as the human bedbug, Cimex lectularius. The morphological differences between the two forms are trivial, but you can still tell them apart with a microscope. Below is a diagram and some text from Bad Bed Bugs highlighting the diagnostic differences:
The trick to identifying a bat bug is by looking at the length of hairs on the upper covering of the thorax. The picture above is the joining of one half bat bug (left side) and one half bed bug (right side). You’ll notice that the length of the bat bugs hairs is longer than the width of its eye. The bed bug however, has hairs that are smaller than the width of its eye.
There are other differences, too: as Carl Zimmer notes in a new piece in the New York Times, the human variety has longer and thinner legs than the bat variety, perhaps because the bat variety needs a firm grip on their cave-hanging hosts.
There also appear to be physiological differences. As a new paper in Molecular Ecology by Warren Booth and colleagues (reference and free link below) notes, each type does better in terms of longevity and reproduction when it feeds on its own host. A batbug forced to ingest human blood does okay, but not as well as on a bat, and vice versa. Finally, the daily rhythm (“diurnal cycle”) differs between the two forms: batbugs feed during the day, when bats are asleep in their caves, while human bedbugs feed at night, when humans are asleep in their beds.
One problem with these data, which are used by both Zimmer and Booth et al. to imply genetic differentiation, is that we don’t know whether these differences are evolved genetic differences between the forms, or are only developmental/physiological responses to feeding on different species. It’s possible that if you transferred a batbug to humans, it will develop longer legs, change its feeding cycle, and get physiologically acclimated to human blood in a generation or so, and that this is not due to evolutionary (genetic) change, but could be a purely developmental (“plastic”) response.
That’s not a far-fetched interpretation. Human head and body lice, which are not different species, also transform their physiology and morphology as a result of acclimation and not genetics, and even Anolis lizards change the shape of their legs if they’re forced to climb on thin branches rather than clamber on tree trunks or the ground. The only way to determine if the morphological differences between bedbugs and batbugs are due to genetic/evolutionary change is to rear them over several generations on a common diet, and see if the differences persist. If they do, they’re genetic.
The reason Zimmer and Booth et al. dwell on this is because bats have been suggested to be the vector that gave us human bedbugs. Bats, so the theory goes, were originally afflicted with batbugs, and early humans lived in caves alongside the infested bats. Batbugs then found a juicy new source of food nearby, a few individuals colonized humans, and the rest is history: the human bedbug.
Booth et al. wanted to see how much genetic differentiation there really is between human bedbugs and batbugs, and so their paper reports an extensive genetic analysis of several hundred of individuals from both forms of the bug. The researchers looked at mitochondrial DNA, nuclear DNA (in the form of microsatellites), and at genes that had evolved in human bedbugs to resist DDT.
What they found was that batbugs and human bedbugs do indeed show significant genetic differentiation—in all three types of genes investigated. Bedbugs and batbugs clearly form two distinct genetic lineages. This is shown by statistical analysis of bugs taken from the two hosts; the figure below shows the genetic differentiation for nuclear DNA among samples of both forms taken in Europe. Brown dots are individual human bedbugs, blue are batbugs, and you can see how well separated they are (see the caption below the figure).
There is, however, still some evidence of gene flow between the two forms, perhaps occurring when a batbug finds itself on a human and mates with bedbugs, or vice versa. Although most human bedbugs show the DDT-resistant form of “pesticide genes”, a few don’t, and those “susceptible” genes may have come from the batbugs, which never experienced DDT. Still, what we have here are two closely-related but genetically distinct lineages, and that is the big lesson from the paper of Booth et al. But they want to say more, and that is what Carl Zimmer highlighted in his NYT piece (see question #2 below).
Two questions remain:
1. Were batbugs the ancestors of the human bedbug? It seems likely, although neither Zimmer nor Booth et al. explicitly give the information that is be crucial for ansering this question: Are the batbug and bedbug more genetically similar to each other than either is to any other species in the genus? If the batbug is the ancestor of the bedbug, then the two forms have to be “sister taxa,” that is, each other’s closest relatives. Now this may indeed be the case, and may be cited in one of Booth et al.’s references, but I didn’t look them all up. I’ll take it for granted that both Zimmer and Booth et al. know that these are in fact sister taxa.
But one problem remains: do they only look like sister taxa because there has been gene flow between batbugs and human bedbugs, making them look as if they evolved recently when in fact they didn’t? This is a problem with trying to suss out the evolutionary history for any pair of species that live in the same place and occasionally hybridize. Fortunately, it can be taken care of. For example, if bedbugs and batbugs had distinct forms of genes (as they do), but those forms are still more similar to each other than to the gene forms of other species or populations in the genus, then that would imply that they are indeed sister taxa. Neither the authors nor Zimmer discuss this, but it may be such a well-known result that neither thought it necessary to mention it explicitly.
Also, the human bedbug is genetically depauperate compared to the batbug, and that’s what one would expect if only a few individual batbugs originally colonized humans, going through what we call a “population bottleneck.” The genetically depauperate nature of the human bedbug compared to the batbug also implies that if there was a colonization from bats to humans, it happened only once or a very, very few times. If colonization was frequent, human bedbugs would be much more genetically variable among populations than we see. If the bat transfer theory is correct, the colonization of humans by batbugs must have occurred in the distant past when humans lived in caves along with bats, and that would probably be about 50,000 years ago in Eurasia. (No molecular dating of the divergence was reported.)
But what the authors and Zimmer find most exciting about the study is encapsulated in the second question:
2. Are these forms on the road to becoming different species? Are we seeing, in the form of batbugs and human bedbugs, two groups that descended from a common ancestor (on bats), and are now in the process of becoming different biological species? Indeed, Zimmer calls his piece, “In bedbugs, scientists see a model of evolution.” What he means by that is “a model of how new species form.”
We evolutionists, by and large, conceive of species as being different groups that cannot exchange genes because of biologically-produced “isolating barriers” that prevent the formation of fertile hybrids. Bedbugs and batbugs do appear to have such barriers: they don’t do well on each other’s hosts, they are active at different times of day, they seem to maintain differences in appearance, and, of course, the DNA data show a lack of genetic exchange. Now, as I said, we don’t know whether the differences in activity period, ability to thrive on the host, or morphology are based on differences in genes (we can’t assume blithely that they are), but the DNA data clearly show that these lineages don’t exchange genes very often. Could it be that we have a case of speciation in action due to host shift by the batbugs?
The answer is that we don’t know for sure. What we see are two diverged lineages, but we can’t know whether they will continue their evolutionary divergence and go on to form two “full species”, totally incapable of exchanging genes, that deserve different Latin names. It’s possible that they will maintain their status as somewhat distinct lineages, but that gene flow will be enough to keep them from achieving full reproductive isolation.
There are in fact many known cases of groups that are similar to these bedbugs in having achieved partial but not full reproductive isolation, so to imply that these bugs are unique, or that we have here a rare model of speciation in statu nascendi, is incorrect. In the book Speciation that I co-wrote with Allen Orr, we discuss many cases of “host races” in insects that show significant genetic divergence of forms living on |
review policy).Tamil Nadu chief minister J Jayalalithaa has come to the aid of dhoti patrons, making sure no club or establishment dare deny them entry.
The flutter over dhoti was triggered on July 11 after Madras high court judge justice D Hariparanthaman was barred from entering the Tamil Nadu Cricket Association (TNCA) for wearing one.
A furious Jayalalithaa had then termed it an insult to Tamil culture.
On Wednesday, the Tamil Nadu assembly passed a bill seeking to remove the ban imposed by recreational clubs and others on wearing dhoti and other Indian traditional attire.
Introduced by Jayalalithaa, the bill provides for cancellation of licence, punishment of one-year imprisonment and an additional penalty of Rs 25,000 for any violation of the legislation.
The Tamil Nadu Entry into Public Places (Removal of restriction of dress) Act, 2014, was declared passed by voice vote by speaker P Dhanapal. It came into force immediately.
The bill states no recreation club, association, trust, company or society shall make any rule, regulation or bye-law, imposing restriction on entry to any person wearing a ‘veshti’ (dhoti) reflecting Indian culture or any other Indian traditional dress into any public place under its control or management.
According to the statement of reasons and objects of the bill, it was brought to the notice of the government that some clubs were denying entry to persons wearing dhoti reflecting Tamil culture into public places under their control on the ground that they are not wearing dress in keeping with Western culture and it was imperative in that context to introduce and pass the bill in the current session.
Jayalalithaa had earlier assured the House that an act to remove the dhoti ban would be brought in the current session.
First Published: Aug 06, 2014 18:24 ISTPreviously in our strand on statistical analysis of Roller Derby, we’ve applied various toolsets from statistics to ranking tournaments and regions. To date, however, all of these approaches have been drawn from a single philosophy, the “frequentist” approach to statistics. We’re going to apply a different approach in this article, to examine what we can say about the relative strengths of London Rollergirls, Gotham Girls Roller Derby, Rose City Rollers and Victorian Roller Derby League in the aftermath of an incredibly closely contested WFTDA Championships.
Briefly, there are essentially two main philosophies, diametrically opposite in approach, to statistical inference. “Frequentist” approaches attempt to determine how likely your observations are for a given reality, while Bayesian approaches are concerned with how likely a given reality is, given the observations you’ve made. (To put it another way: Bayesian statistics is all about determining the range of certainty you can have about reality.)
We’ve mostly been using frequentist approaches to our modelling here, because Bayesian techniques often require a lot more computational effort to produce results. In order to determine the range of possible true values, you have to examine a large number of possibilities – and the size of the space to explore grows rapidly with the number of options. For the 1200 or so Women’s Teams in the Flat Track Stats database, each possibility we’d have to compare would be a list of 1200 values, each a possible strength for an individual team. It’s fairly clear that this gives a huge space of possibilities, which would be exceptionally hard to properly search and characterise.
For the WFTDA Championships, however, there’s a much smaller space to explore – only the possible strengths of the 12 attending teams need to be explored. While this is still a 12 dimensional space, it’s definitely a tractable problem, with a few hours of computer time, and a few gigabytes of memory.
We used the python package emcee to perform the relevant Bayesian inference. Taking the results of all of the games at WFTDA Champs, we assumed that the performance of any team would vary in a “Gaussian” manner around their true strength. As we don’t strictly know how much variation a team would have in their performance, we explored the possible values of this variation (the standard deviation, usually represented by σ) along with the strengths of the teams*.
In order to provide a more constrained search space, we also assumed that teams wouldn’t vary in performance by more than a factor of two, and that the best teams would be less than about 8 times better than the worst, and that no team would be more than about 1.6 times better than Victorian Roller Derby League.**
We ran approximately 5 million samples of possible strengths and σs against the results of WFTDA Champs.
We also ran another 5 million samples of possible strengths, with σ fixed to the most likely value (0.2, roughly corresponding to a natural variation of about 14% in team performance from game to game***).
From these results, we can plot so-called “corner plots”, which project the full 12 dimensional space of possible team strengths into nice 2-d contour plots and 1-d histograms so we can visualise them easily.
Because we have only 12 games as input data, there’s quite a bit of statistical uncertainty in the true strengths of the teams involved. What we’re mostly concerned about is what we can say about the possible “true” strengths of London, Gotham and Rose, relative to Victorian, so we’re only going to reproduce the corner of the full plot which shows this.
In this plot, values greater than 0 indicate “stronger than Victorian” and values less than 0 indicate “weaker than Victorian”. We’ve coloured the 2d contour plots so that the region corresponding to both teams being stronger than VRDL is light blue, and the region corresponding to both teams being weaker than VRDL is pink. The 1-d histograms are coloured light blue in the regions where the team would be stronger than VRDL.
Firstly, it’s clear from all graphs that the data strongly supports realities (“model parameters”) where London Rollergirls are weaker than VRDL. The suggested most likely model parameters have London with log(strength) equal to -0.16, which corresponds to them being about 85% as strong as Victorian, but the error bars allow some variation around that, potentially as high as 1% stronger than Victorian, at the highest.
What’s more interesting, and exciting for roller derby as a high end competitive sport, is that the statistics are much less definitive for Gotham and Rose. While both have most likely strengths very slightly below that of Victorian (95% and 96% respectively), the error bars actually cover almost as many cases where each is stronger than Victorian as those where they are weaker.
What this means is that, within the constraints of the statistics, and the model used, all three teams are indistinguishable in strength. If we got all three teams back onto a track to play, right now, it would be almost impossible to predict who would win each contest.
And, after 4 consecutive years where only one team had a seemingly unassailable lead over all others, this is a very positive sign.
The code used to generate these plots is available in the github repository for our statistical Derby code, as emcee-bayes.py. As with all code in this repository, it is licensed Creative Commons: Attribution, NonCommercial, ShareAlike. The code requires a data file of bout records, and is written in Python, using the emcee and numpy Python modules.
*Strictly, we actually fix the strength of VRDL to 1, as what we’re interested in is the relative strengths of the teams involved. Setting a single team strength to a reference value does not compromise the generality of the solution, and gives us a free variable to use to optimise σ.
**Specifically, σ is constrained to be positive and less than 1, and the log(strength) of teams is constrained to be between -2 and 0.5 (relative to VRDL).
***σ is strictly modelled as the variation in performance for any game, not any team – if we assume that both teams vary to the same degree, then the teams will each vary by √2 of that, or 14%.
AdvertisementsWe get A LOT of cookbooks at Delish headquarters, and it's nearly impossible to get through all of them—let alone get excited. But you can't even imagine the squeals of delight that occurred when we opened the envelope that contained the new Bob's Burgers cookbook.
The Bob's Burgers Burger Book: Real Recipes For Joke Burgers (Rizzoli) is full of recipes for all the amazing pun-ny burgers that appear in the background of every Bob's Burgers episode. If you're not familiar with the show, we're not exactly sure what you're waiting for—new episodes air on Sunday nights on Fox, and all previous seasons are available on Netflix. The show is about a family that runs a burger joint and the hijinks that ensue. Bob, Linda and their children—Tina, Gene and Louise—are one of our absolute favorite TV families (they're also voiced by super-famous comedians, so you get major cool points for watching). So when we got the chance to turn a few of these burgers into snappy food videos, we couldn't resist getting the characters in on some of the fun. Not only are the names of these burgers hilarious, they are seriously delicious. Don't believe us? Just watch.
"Sit And Spinach" Burger
Get the recipe.
"Pickle My Funny Bone" Burger
Get the recipe.
"Do The Brussel" Burger
Get the recipe.
"Cheeses Is Born" Burger
Get the recipe.
"I Created A Muenster" Burger
Get the recipe.
Buy The Bob's Burgers Burger Book: Real Recipes For Joke Burgers here.
Follow Delish on Instagram.NEW DELHI: Rahul Gandhi may have decided to lie low for a while after the Congress debacle in UP, but on Wednesday foreign minister S M Krishna implored the Gandhi scion to join the Cabinet to help UPA government solve the problems being faced by the country.Krishna said, "I am one of those who feel that it is necessary for Rahul Gandhi to come into the government and help the government in solving the problems that we face as a country."He was replying to queries if it was the right time for the Congress general secretary to join the government after the resignation of Pranab Mukherjee. While the suggestion comes ahead of Cabinet expansion, it is unlikely to change Rahul's thinking who has decided to stay out of the government.Krishna himself acknowledged Rahul's reluctance. "We have always wanted Rahul Gandhi's involvement in the government. The prime minister's invitation is there to join the government but he himself seems to be not inclined at the moment," he said.However, it shows the kind of pressure that Congress is going to face in the run-up to 2014 Lok Sabha elections. There is a strong sentiment in the Congress that the young leader should be given bigger responsibility in the party and be made the face for next general elections.Krishna noted that PM Manmohan Singh had already asked Rahul to join the government and his "invitation" stands.Barclays has come under fire for promoting the use of offshore tax havens as a route for companies investing in Africa.
In a report published on Wednesday, the NGO ActionAid says Barclays' marketing of offshore tax jurisdictions undermines the bank's stated ambition to be a "force for good" as these places can be used by companies to reduce the tax paid in the African countries where they work. The report does not directly accuse Barclays, or the companies it works with, of tax avoidance, or suggest any illegal activity.
"If people want to put their money offshore, they'll find a way to do it, but Barclays should stop promoting this. It is inappropriate for a bank looking to be a force for good, and aiming to expand its operations in Africa, to do this," said Toby Quantrill, tax justice adviser at ActionAid.
He said Barclays should do more to help companies invest directly in African countries. "If you're going to be a big player in Africa, you should promote and support the development of infrastructure for direct investment in these countries."
Estimates suggest African countries lose billions of dollars in unpaid taxes each year – and far more than they receive in foreign aid. Tax has risen up the global development agenda in light of such figures, with NGOs and high-level officials condemning tax avoidance as putting at risk poor countries' prospects for development and self-sufficiency.
Barclays said it does not encourage businesses to set up in any particular jurisdiction.
Earlier this year, Kofi Annan, the former UN secretary general, said it was "unconscionable" for companies to use unethical tax avoidance to maximise their profits "while millions of Africans go without adequate nutrition, health and education".
ActionAid estimates suggest that almost one in every $2 of reported corporate investment in developing countries is routed from or via a tax haven, with Mauritius the largest player.
In a corporate brochure published on Barclays' website, Mauritius is promoted as "the offshore financial centre of choice for India and the sub-Saharan region" and "the experienced and established gateway for investment into Africa and Asia".
Mauritius is known for its secrecy, negligible corporate tax rates, and for being a favoured conduit for wealthy individuals and multinationals wishing to avoid tax on African and Asian profits.
The Barclays brochure adds that Mauritius offers double taxation treaties with dozens of countries including several in Africa. "There are no exchange controls thus allowing free repatriation of profits and capital with no withholding tax. There are no capital gains, death, wealth or gift taxes," it says.
A previous version of the brochure, seen by the Guardian, also said the bank's offshore corporate team could help companies "make the most of every tax advantage available" in the offshore jurisdictions where the bank operates. The text has since been revised to clarify that Barclays does not itself provide tax advice, and that companies should talk to independent tax advisers.
Quantrill said it was inappropriate for Barclays to be marketing the use of offshore tax jurisdictions given their role of these places in helping companies reduce their tax paid in African countries.
A Barclays spokesman said: "Barclays shares ActionAid's objective that companies and individuals pay the right amount of tax in each country where they do business. While we appreciate ActionAid's concern in this matter, we do not believe that their interpretation of some of the facts is correct. Barclays does not encourage businesses to set up in any particular jurisdiction and we also ensure that tax planning undertaken by Barclays, including that undertaken for clients, complies with our published Tax Principles. As such, tax planning must support genuine commercial activity and be of a type that the tax authorities would expect, amongst other requirements. This applies equally to activity in Mauritius as it does to the remainder of Barclays' operations."
Barclays is the largest UK bank in Africa, with operations in 17 countries. It also has 140 subsidiaries in Africa, compared with Standard Chartered (37), HSBC (15), and RBS (1). Barclays has said it aimed to further expand its operations and reach on the continent to become the "go-to bank in Africa".
ActionAid is calling on the bank to close its offshore corporate department, publish detailed information about its tax strategy and provide evidence that its activities in tax havens are not linked to tax avoidance.
Rather than encouraging companies to use offshore tax jurisdictions, Barclays should be supporting revenue authorities in Africa to strengthen their systems and help build their knowledge and capacity, the NGO says.
"Barclays needs to do far more to show that it is living up to the standards and principles that it sets for itself and that it is able and willing to act responsibly and to become a positive force for good in Africa," says the report. "Promoting the use of tax havens as a way of channelling investment into Africa cannot be considered as supporting responsible investment and sustainable development for all."
The ActionAid report, Time to clean up: how Barclays bank promotes the use of tax havens in Africa, follows criticism of the global consultancy firm Deloitte, which has been accused of advising big business, including UK firms, on how to avoid paying tax in some of Africa's poorest countries.
It also follows a six-month campaign by academics, NGOs, and MPs to stop Barclays' from closing the accounts of major money-transfer companies operating in Somalia.
Barclays announced in May that it planned to shut the accounts of hundreds of money-transfer businesses, citing the lack of adequate money-laundering controls. Critics said the move would particularly damage poor communities in Somalia that often depend on money sent home by friends and family members abroad.
Dahabshiil, which won a temporary injunction at the UK high court this month to stop Barclays from cutting its services, claimed the British bank was abusing its dominant position. Barclays said it would appeal against the verdict.Just as the Jacksonville Jaguars seem to be finally returning to relevance on the football field — fingers crossed, wait-til-next-week, you never know — is a significant chunk of the team’s long-suffering fan base really going to ditch the Jags because of the team’s silent protest during the playing of the national anthem in London?
Will the fuss subside or will it fester or grow?
Even after a rousing blowout victory Sunday against the Baltimore Ravens, people wanted to talk about the protest, said Ryan Green, who hosts a post-game show, “The 5th Quarter,” on the Jacksonville sports radio network 1010XL AM/92.5 FM.
“You can tell very quickly when you open the phone lines the level of anger about this,” he said. “We tried to keep it on the game, but it was very apparent though that people wanted to talk about the anthem.”
Calls after the game ran about half and half on the issue, he said. Those upset about the anthem protests, which were seen across the NFL, were by far the more angry group.
Green said it’s difficult, though, to tell how fans will react until Oct. 15, when the Jaguars return home after a two-game road trip.
“If they come home 4-1, I think we’ll see a packed stadium against the Rams,” he said.
Photos: Scenes from Jaguars win in London
Perhaps one clue to the longterm reaction could be found on the Jaguars’ Facebook page and Twitter account, which on Sunday posted a photo of owner Shad Khan standing, arms linked with players Marcedes Lewis and Telvin Smith, during the anthem.
It’s a striking image, made more significant by the fact the Jaguars played early that day, on London time, and what they did helped set the tone for the games to come.
The post’s title was simple: “Unity.”
Unity pic.twitter.com/wSNsc4BSEV
— Jacksonville Jaguars (@Jaguars) September 24, 2017
The photograph quickly drew many angry responses, including calls for boycotts and cries of disrespect for a military town.
But many supported the players’ actions, and some enjoyed the chance to call complainers “snowflakes” — a term that some on the right have used to tweak what they perceive as easily offended liberals.
More telling, perhaps, were the 13,000 Facebook reactions below the team’s post.
By Monday afternoon, it had drawn 10,000-some “likes” and 2,300 “loves,” versus just 1,300 angry-face logos and 67 crying faces.
“I admired the unity (players) showed,” said Bob Moore, a Jacksonville composer and Army veteran. “Most of them stood up for something they actually believe in. It wasn’t just grandstanding. And for those of us who are veterans, that’s why the military’s there, to protect the right to do that.”
To be sure, many feel angry and dismayed by the protests.
Robert Germano quickly started a “Boycott Jacksonville Jaguars” page on Facebook, on which he features the Jaguars logo on a giant stadium scoreboard: “Jacksonville’s Symbol of Humiliation.”
RELATED
Jaguars, Khan take lead in protesting Trump’s criticism of NFL
After President Trump’s comments, several Jaguars take knee for anthem
Mayor Lenny Curry: It’s ‘stupid’ not to stand for the anthem, but Constitution protects such things
Germano, who lives in Orlando, is a Jacksonville native and Jaguar fan from the beginning. On Sunday, he said, he turned the game on late and was relishing the team’s lead until a friend told him about the protests. At that, he switched his TV off and called it quits with the team.
“I absolutely will not support them in any way, shape or form,” he said. “They want to make a statement? We’ll make a statement.”
Germano said he was a U.S. Marine for 18 years and did four tours in Iraq, one during Desert Storm and then again in 2003, 2005 and 2006. Protesting while “The Star-Spangled Banner” is played is simply wrong, he believes.
“There are so many ways I’m offended by it. It’s the symbol of our country. I pledge allegiance to the flag. I’ve buried many Marines over the years draped under the flag, and one of the most important things to me is, when serving in Iraq and a Marine is killed, they come home with a flag draped over the body,” he said.
The NFL, Germano said, is simply insulting its target audience of Americans: “My question is, can’t we have just one thing that’s sacred in this country? One thing? Is that asking too much?”
The anthem protests grew Sunday after President Donald Trump, during a Friday rally in Alabama, said: “Wouldn’t you love to see one of these NFL owners when somebody disrespects our flag to say get that son of a bitch off the field right now, out, he’s fired, he’s fired.”
Eating lunch Monday near food trucks lined up along Hogan Street, Veleta Esco said Trump should respect players’ freedom of speech and shouldn’t have insulted them. “That was very disrespectful,” she said.
Nearby, David Cole was eating lunch with his wife, Catie. He said he doesn’t like the kneeling during the anthem; it’s an insult to veterans. But he remains a Jaguars fan — he was wearing a cap with the team logo on it — and enjoyed the team’s thrashing of the Ravens.
“I’m not burning my tickets,” he said.
At VFW and American Legion posts around Jacksonville, the protests were a hot topic.
After the morning Jaguars game, some at American Legion Florida Post 9 on New Kings Road asked why they even bothered to show afternoon games on the bar’s four televisions, said Lena Heredia-Perez, commander of the post.
“It’s not just the flag,” Heredia-Perez said of the Jaguars’ protest. “You are representing Jacksonville as a whole, and for them to be ignorant like that is like a thorn in my side.”
Hank Morris, commander of American Legion Florida Post 137 on San Juan Avenue, said the flag is sacred and something that should be respected. But he said it also stands for freedom, so the players are entirely within their rights if they want to continue in a peaceful way.
“We are really not happy with the forum that they are using to use the American flag to protest,” Morris said. “I believe it is a little off base, but we do support their right to a non-violent protest.”
Alvin Farmer, manager at a financial company, was once a big Jaguars fan until he grew tired of scandals in the NFL, in particular the Michael Vick animal-cruelty case.
Then came the anthem flap. To be sure, Farmer said, Sunday’s protests were in reaction to comments from “a president who can’t keep his mouth shut,” but that’s still no reason to kneel for the anthem.
“Two wrongs never made a right,” he said. “I fervently believe in everyone’s freedom of speech, but if you or I walk into our jobs and do the same things, HR’s going to walk us out the door. We don’t have the rights that the overpaid millionaires playing a children’s game do. There’s a time and place to express your opinions, and when people are paying you millions of dollars to do a job it’s not the time or the place.”
On a strictly sports business level, it may be too early to tell what, if any, impact the anthem flap will have on the team. But Sunday’s move may fire up some local businesses opposed to the protests.
C7 Creative, a digital development firm in Jacksonville and Jacksonville Beach, took to Twitter Monday and lobbed a text salvo at the Jaguars.
“They have a right to kneel? WE HAVE THE RIGHT to point out that the Jags and NFL are ungrateful WHINERS,” said a C7 Creative Twitter post dated at 3:09 a.m. Monday.
Calvin Bryant, president and owner of C7, said he made the post himself. Though it was removed from the C7 Twitter account Monday afternoon, he said he’s not backing down.
“Obviously, it’s shock value to get people’s attention,” Bryant said.
He said he doesn’t disagree that social justice needs to be advanced in Jacksonville, and he takes no umbrage with Colin Kaepernick, the former San Francisco 49ers quarterback who started the movement last year on behalf of African-Americans who have been shot by police.
But Bryant said using the national anthem as a protest is offensive to him and the military. He called for a local boycott of the Jacksonville Jaguars and wants Khan to apologize.
“It’s wrong,” said Bryant, who has no business association with the Jaguars other than he goes to games often. “I’m responding to my disgust with Mr. Khan.”
Don Capener, dean of the Davis College of Business at Jacksonville University and professor of sport business, noted the rift between President Trump and the NFL is entering new territory when it comes to politics and sports.
Still, it’s difficult, he said, to picture Khan making a marketing misstep.
“Shad Khan is an extremely astute business person. Although I think that his political intentions are what they are, he’s the only non-white or non-Caucasian owner that I’m aware of in the NFL. He’s one who’s also been an entrepreneur and found opportunity where others found nothing,” Capener said. “He’s firing up his players and organization in a way that he sees best.”
Kristi Sweeney, program director of Sport Management at University of North Florida, said that — despite some initial negative response — Khan and other owners were almost duty-bound to stand by their players during Sunday’s actions at stadiums across the NFL.
“I think there’s more of a negative impact, potentially, from a business perspective if the owners don’t stand with their players,” Sweeney said. “If Shad Khan doesn’t stand with his players … he’s not standing behind his product and there’s potential that he’s devaluing it in terms of how it’s perceived from sponsors.”
Sweeney noted the NFL is the most valued professional sport in America. The league is constantly looking to expand its audience, and that will only come from targeting the millennial age group, those generally younger than 35 years old.
If it’s a wager on new audiences, the hoopla over protest during the national anthem for the NFL may prove to be a business winner.
“Look at the role of millennials. They’re the largest living generation right now, they’re the next consumers,” Sweeney said. “The majority of players are millennials. And millennials are known as a generation who want to see social change.”
Capener said that while he’s reasonably sure the NFL will survive the controversy, there could be some short-term blow-back from fans.
Fans refusing to buy tickets to games is an immediate impact. But with the Jaguars actually in contention for the first time in years, fans are likely to go to EverBank Field for home games, he said.
The big hit could come if big business starts backing out of advertising and partnership deals with the Jaguars and other teams. Lower TV viewership would also mean less broadcast revenue for the league.
Daily’s, a major sponsor of the Jaguars and the namesake for the amphitheater opened this year known as Daily’s Place, waded carefully into the controversy.
“We believe that freedom of expression is a fundamental right of all Americans; yet, we believe this right should be exercised with deference to our nation’s flag, the greatest symbol of our hard-fought and deeply treasured rights and privileges as American citizens,” Daily’s CEO Aubrey Edge said in a prepared statement.
Attempts to reach EverBank were unsuccessful.
Dan Edwards, a Jaguars spokesman, said the team was in the process of returning to Jacksonville from London on Monday and had no further comment.
Capener notes that during Khan’s ownership, the value of the Jaguars has grown nearly threefold. Forbes magazine, in its annual ranking of National Football League franchise values, recently put the value of the club at over $2 billion.
“Shad Khan has gone into very deep water before and been able to tread and even succeed. I would not bet against him despite all the criticism that he’s received,” Capener said.
Times-Union writer Joe Dareskevich contributed to this report.
matt.soergel@jacksonville.com
drew.dixon@jacksonville.com7 Responsibilities You Have As An American
You hear a lot about “rights” in America. You have a right to an attorney. You have a right to remain silent. You have a right to free speech, a right to “keep and bear arms,” a right to “due process,” and a right to have “equal protection under the law.”
Cruel and unusual punishment? Unreasonable search and seizure? Being tried twice for the same crime? Those would be violations of your rights. We’re told that we have a right to privacy, a right to have an education, and a right to worship as we choose.
We hear about individual rights, civil rights, human rights, and constitutional rights. Stop somebody from doing something he wants to do and as likely as not, he’ll tell you, “I have a right to do that and you have no right to stop me. After all, it’s a free country and I have my rights!”
All that’s well and good, but know what you don’t hear a lot about anymore?
Trending: The 15 Best Conservative News Sites On The Internet
Responsibilities.
Responsibilities are the flip side of rights. In fact, the only reason we have rights at all is because there are people who fulfill their responsibilities. Yet, if you ask people what their responsibilities as Americans are, you’ll usually get vacant expressions and maybe a mumbled statement about jury duty or paying taxes.
With that in mind, here are a few basic responsibilities that you, I, and all of us have as Americans.
1) It’s your responsibility to pay your own way. Nobody owes you a living and that includes other taxpayers. You have a responsibility to pay your own bills and not be a leech. That means, over the course of your lifetime, paying as much in taxes as you take out in services and direct payments from the government. If, by some horrible set of circumstances you feel compelled to go on the dole, you should at least be ashamed to take hand-outs from your fellow citizens.
2) It’s your responsibility to take care of your children. If you have kids, you have a duty to take care of them. That means paying money to feed, clothe, and house them. It means being a part of their life and doing your best to raise them, teach them right from wrong, and help them have a better life than you’ve had. This seems to be so simple that it’s practically instinctive to most people, but apparently, a lot of people don’t get it.
3) It’s your responsibility to look out for future generations of Americans. Whether you think of America as “the land of opportunity, “a shining city on a hill,” “the land of the free and the home of the brave,” or the “last, best hope of mankind,” we all have a duty to preserve what’s great about this nation so that future generations of Americans can experience it just as we have. How careless, how irresponsible, how unforgivable it would be if our children and our children’s children have to grow up in an America that is no longer extraordinary.
4) You have a responsibility to be an informed voter. In recent years there has been a big push to get all Americans to vote. That’s sort of like giving everyone a gun and encouraging them to immediately squeeze off a few rounds. If they don’t know anything about what they’re doing, they’re as likely to hurt themselves or someone else as they are to do good. The same goes for voting. Not everyone has to be a political junky, but it would be nice if people took the time to become well-informed about the ins-and-outs of the basic political issues we have to deal with in this country instead of voting on who has the best attack ads. Being an informed voter is a responsibility. Being an uninformed voter is flipping a coin — heads, America wins and tails, it loses.
5) You have a responsibility to support and defend the Constitution. The Constitution is the “set of rules” that we go by as a people and most of the “rights” are guaranteed by the Constitution. Yet, the Constitution is under daily attack in this country by activists and politicians who feel the ends justify the means along with judges who claim to believe in a “living Constitution,” which is functionally no different than not having a Constitution at all. You may not win every fight to adhere to the Constitution, but it’s a battle worth fighting because no document does more to safeguard the rights of all Americans.
6) You have a responsibility to put America first. The UN, other nations, and “the world” don’t really care very much whether you live or die. Not that Americans in Boston are going to shed tears if an American in LA passes on either, but we at least have a certain small, but meaningful level of kinship with each other by virtue of being Americans.
9/11 was a good example of that. Most other nations around the world said a few kind words for us and seemed to have a few days to a few weeks’ worth of goodwill towards us over it. But nearly 10 years later, it was other Americans who got revenge for the fallen by putting a bullet in Bin Laden’s forehead. You should always look out for your own country because it’s the biggest group of people on the planet who might actually care whether you live or die.
7) You have a responsibility to be a good person. As Samuel Adams noted way back in 1779,
A general dissolution of principles and manners will more surely overthrow the liberties of America than the whole force of the common enemy. While the people are virtuous they cannot be subdued; but when once they lose their virtue then will be ready to surrender their liberties to the first external or internal invader.
Honesty, honor, godliness, industry, respect for the law, morality, and truthfulness are the wheels on which our entire republic rides. If the American people are no [email protected] good, then no matter how well the Constitution is written, how well we’re governed, or how much good fortune comes our way, we are doomed as a nation.You have a great idea for an awesome Amstrad CPC game? You want to use a cross-compiler and all your powerful tools on your PC? You don’t know where to start to develop for the Amstrad CPC? Then you should definitively have a look at CPCtelera, a new game engine for the Amstrad CPC, which is based on the SDCC C compiler. It has a very good documentation, a lot of examples and is available for Windows, Linux and OS-X.
You can get the latest version from the official homepage or download it from GitHub.
Features
A low-level library with support for: graphics, audio, keyboard, firmware, strings, video hardware manipulation and memory management.
An API for developing games and software in C and Assembler.
A complete multi-platform building system with support for building CDTs and DSKs automatically.
Tools for content authoring (audio, graphics and level editing)
Aims of CPCteleraWeb browsers all have one thing in common: almost without exception they allow us to scroll through content. Scrolling gets us from the top of a document, to the bottom. But it allows much more than that–and for better or worse, web designers have been challenging the scrollbar for some time now, seeing how else it can be used to interact with the web.
As usual in these inspiration posts; we’re going to look at some examples in the wild, examine some of the techniques used, point to some tutorials and courses to help you learn what we find, and list some inspiring examples on Envato Market.
Inspiration
We’ll kick off with forbetter.coffee (ten points for the URL, but sadly no longer online) which begins with a coffee bean, then follows its progress down the page as it gets ground, percolated, and poured into a coffee cup.
Start here, then scroll..
This is in the spirit of the classic scrolling example lostworldsfairs.com. The coffee bean’s position is fixed throughout, so it stays fixed in the browser as the background scrolls past. Eventually it meets certain waypoints, whereupon its position is changed to relative and it scrolls off the top of the screen, only to be replaced by different elements. All this is done with scrollmagic.io.
Susan Lin uses a similar effect (though a completely different aesthetic) on her personal homepage. Get ready to feel nostalgic for 8bit role-play games as Susan’s sprite waddles downward through the pixelated landscape:
Prepare yourself for a detailed tutorial on how this is achieved very soon!
www.voog.com uses scrolling to different effect. Its split layout combines bright colours and interchanging background images, fixed in their masked positions.
This is all done with JavaScript, though you can achieve a very similar masked background effect, as shown by Kezz Bracey, with nothing but CSS.
Parallax
How have we come this far without mentioning parallax?! Let’s fix that now, with help from @claudioguglieri. Check out his homepage, which starts with a beautifully presented open letter. Scroll down and experience the depth suggested by leaves and rose petals as they float past:
More subtle parallax can be found on sublime.fyi (again, no longer active); a curated aggregation of design talks and interviews by some very recognisable figures. Scroll down and watch layers of duotone graphics and images drift past:
Firewatch is stunning. Stunning in the game’s painted graphics, in the concept, in its marketing. And its website follows suit. Scroll downwards to gain a sense of depth and environment, and also scale, as you shrink in relation to the landscape.
This next example is a little different, in that the window’s scroll position is used to influence quite a tiny detail. frankbody.com has a menu panel which sticks to the top left of the viewport, then, as you scroll, its background pattern changes subtly.
The JavaScript (or rather jQuery) behind it is as follows:
Feel free to |
or whatever, and I would say if you are not happy with how much you’re spending in one thing, look to cut it out for 30-60 days because in that time every time you think of buying it you’ll ask yourself, what’s going on? Is it the store you walked into? Is it because you had a bad day? Is it just a habit when you’re bored you open Amazon AMZN, +0.21%? Figure out what your habits are and not necessarily ban yourself from everything but challenge one of your spending habits.
Get a daily roundup of the top reads in personal finance delivered to your inbox. Subscribe to MarketWatch's free Personal Finance Daily newsletter. Sign up here.The man in the wheelchair needed help from his friends to go up three steps to get near Kevin Durant in the VIP section. The timing wasn’t the greatest, as it was nearly 1 a.m. at a San Francisco nightclub just weeks after the stunning news of the NBA star’s plans to join the Golden State Warriors. And security guards were making sure he had his space and privacy.
However, something told Durant to let Arthur Renowitzky and his wheelchair through. And once Renowitzky spoke to Durant, the two formed a relationship that remains bonded with a bracelet.
“He just wanted to tell me how he got to that point and how encouraged he still was even through his circumstances,” Durant told The Undefeated. “I thought it was inspiring. He handed me a bracelet and I’ve been wearing it ever since …
“You never know when you’re going to be in contact with angels. I feel like he is one of those guys at just the right time, the perfect time, he was put in my life. Hopefully, he feels the same way.”
In 2007, as a sophomore cornerback at Chabot College, Renowitzky appeared to have a bright future. He had just earned his real estate license, and the then-20-year-old had no history of juvenile detention or major mischief. But after leaving an under-21 nightclub in San Francisco with some teammates on Dec. 2, 2007, Renowitzky was robbed and shot in the chest. The shooter ran away and was never found.
“Everything happened so fast,” Renowitzky, 29, said. “The kid had to be no older than me. I’ve never seen him before in my life. The squeeze of the trigger happened so fast. I ended up on the ground fighting for my life. My first reaction was to get up and run away. I’ve been playing sports my entire life. I’m an athlete.
“For the first time to not be able to use my legs, it was just shock. I never thought in a million years that I would end up paralyzed.”
Renowitzky was rushed to San Francisco General Hospital, where he was placed in a medically induced coma that lasted 21 days. He woke up on Christmas Eve 2007 in a hospital bed. His doctor told him that he was paralyzed from the chest down, he would never walk again and perhaps never talk again.
“The bullet goes through my chest, both of my lungs, shatters my spine around the T3 vertebrae. It was a complete spinal cord injury. The bullet is still lodged in my spine to this day,” Renowitzky said.
Durant learned a lot from Renowitzky’s tragic story nine years later at the club.
“It’s really heartbreaking for anybody to go through something like that,” Durant said. “It really tests your resiliency. It tests your heart, strength and courage. We talk about mental toughness a lot throughout sports. But imagine having to go through that where you feel like you don’t have any more hope.
“He puts things in perspective. His smile was contagious. His energy just filled the room. He’s a great guy to meet. Every time I see him it’s all love.”
Renowitzky said he was yearning for inspiration after being paralyzed. He was praying to get his voice back to use it for something positive. He worked hard and eventually got his voice back in 2008 and then began thinking of ideas to live up to his promise in his prayers.
“’What am I going to do from now on?’ I wanted to start a movement. One night lying in bed and going through all this pain, I decided I wanted to start a foundation to stop gun violence, make sure this doesn’t happen to another youth and to start a movement of positive impact on the world using my voice for it,” he said.
Renowitzky founded the nonprofit Life Goes on Foundation (LGO) in 2009 with a mission to help victims of gun violence and people living with spinal-cord injury and any other disabilities. LGO gives financial support to spinal cord injury victims with the goal of advancing the personal independence and wellness of individuals living with disabilities.
Renowitzky says he has spoken to numerous California high schools and middle schools, juvenile halls, disciplinary camps, Boys & Girls Clubs, YMCAs, churches, hospitals, rehabilitation facilities and colleges. He has traveled to London and Dubai to speak and has addressed more than 100,000 young people.
“I don’t want to touch 100,000 lives. I want to touch a million lives at the end of the day,” Renowitzky said. “My message is to never give up and keep pushing, because life goes on. I do that by sharing my story. No matter how hard it gets, you got to keep pushing forward …
“I didn’t understand why this happened to me. But coming full circle, this happened for a reason. This is my calling card.”
The bracelet Renowitzky gave Durant says, “Life Goes On,” and has the Life Goes on Foundation logo and website on it. The sight of it actually helped Durant move forward from his major life changes last summer. The 2014 NBA Most Valuable Player still wears the black bracelet on his left wrist during Warriors games.
“He wanted me to represent him on the court,” Durant said. “A lot of people don’t know his story. I’ve only seen him twice, but we have a connection. At the same time, I was trying to move on with my life. To see the ‘Life Goes On,’ on my wrist, I didn’t even realize it until a few days that it was pretty powerful.”
After choosing Golden State, Durant instantly received criticism for departing to a Western Conference rival that defeated his former team the Oklahoma City Thunder in the conference finals. As if adapting to a new city and team weren’t stressful enough, he was also playing in the Rio de Janeiro Games.
“I was trying to move on with my life and my decision. Move in to a new city, play for a new team. Sometimes you feel like you’re stuck a bit. Once I got that message, you keep moving. The train never stops no matter what. Just keep going forward.”
Renowitzky says that people regularly tell him they see Durant wearing the bracelet. He is flattered and happy about the public awareness Durant’s support has brought to his foundation.
“He could have just thrown it away,” Renowitzky said. “But he rocks it every single game. It really inspires me to keep pushing because I know it has some type of effect on people. That is the reason I wanted to start this organization, to have a positive impact on youth by using my voice for something powerful …
“Just for the fact that people see KD rocking the bracelet on TV, it really motivates and inspires people to do the same and pass on the message. People tag me on Warriors photos and on Instagram when they see him rocking it. It’s crazy the response we’ve gotten since he’s worn it.”
Renowitzky describes himself as “a huge Warriors fan” and he is a regular at Warriors home games. He also previously built a bond with the Warriors All-Star guard Stephen Curry and Klay Thompson.
Curry was one of the first celebrities whom Renowitzky connected with after they met in 2010 following a Warriors game. Curry also supported Renowitzky by wearing his Life Goes On bracelet and beanie and gave the foundation tickets to games for children.
“Just the way he’s turned his story into a positive and taken control of the situation is pretty amazing,” Curry told The Undefeated. “You can see how much basketball means to him … And obviously, the message of Life Goes On, I wear some of his gear, that is the most optimistic, positive way you can handle a situation like his.
“He still has a life left to live and he’s going to live it his way. That’s pretty special.”
Renowitzky plays point guard for the Sacramento Rollin Kings wheelchair basketball team. He also plays on a semipro team and coaches a Boys & Girls Club team. When Thompson and Renowitzky met in 2012, they ended up playing wheelchair basketball together.
“The first game [Thompson] played wheelchair basketball, he was just chucking up air balls,” Renowitzky said. “Once he understood how to use the chair and how to square up to the basket and shoot, he was knocking down NBA 3s like it was nothing. The next two games he was balling.”
Last year, Renowitzky was able to walk for the first time since being shot, with the aid of some robotic legs. He still dreams of the day when he will walk again on his own power. Until then, life goes on.
“I will walk again one day. I truly believe that,” Renowitzky said. “God has that in store for me. But right now being in the chair, this is my message to the world.”The NASA spacecraft New Horizons is fast approaching Pluto, and the probe is providing never before seen photographs of the dwarf planet’s surface. Though an early photograph taken 2 million miles away reveals intriguing geological details never before seen, mission scientists could not identify anything that hints towards a second season of Shirobako.
“As the probe draws closer and closer to Pluto, we are seeing more and more detail of the surface including circular structures and strange black and white patterns,” NASA scientist Jordan Conway tells Anime Maru. “These could revolutionize our understanding of planetary geology and the formation of the Solar System, but unfortunately they do not appear to indicate the existence of another season of Shirobako.”
After a nine year voyage, New Horizons has traveled almost 3 billion miles in its search for a sequel to Shirobako, but scientists will have to settle for pictures of the last remaining planet to never be visited by a probe at resolutions millions of times higher than what is possible from Earth. Later this week, New Horizons will make its closes approach to Pluto, where it will photograph the surface, scan the atmosphere, and conduct one last check to see if P.A. Works is at all thinking about making another season of Shirobako.
“How are we supposed to get excited about understanding the formation and composition of Kuiper Belt objects if I can’t even look forward to more Shirobako?” one scientist lamented. “I knew I picked the wrong career path.”A Lake Ozark, Mo., bar owner is under scrutiny after a passerby called out his makeshift doormat as racist.
The doormat in question is made out of the jerseys of NFL players Marshawn Lynch and Colin Kaepernick and is taped down on the bar’s front step, where customers can take the pleasure of scrubbing their feet. Fair enough. However, it’s the order in which the jerseys are arranged that has raised some eyebrows.
Of course, the owner of the S.N.A.F.U. Bar, Jason Burle, swears that his choice of doormat is not about race but, instead, is about standing up for himself and his family, many of whom, he says, served in the military (and, which, once again, has nothing to do with the protest against racial injustice for which Kaepernick is known, but I digress).
“It’s not a race thing,” Burle told KOMU-TV. “A lot of people want to twist it around to be a race thing.
“We pulled them out of the box, taped them down. There was no ill intent,” he added. “If someone thinks that I mean personal harm to someone, they don’t know me.”
Advertisement
It was Taylor Sloan who saw the jerseys and started an online conversation about the matter.
“That’s not the Missouri I know,” Sloan told the news station. “It just kind of upset me really bad. Put a bad taste in my mouth.”
Sloan posted to the bar’s Facebook page, prompting a heated back-and-forth between him and Burle.
Advertisement
“You are also expressing hate, violence and continuing American racism under the faux guise of patriotism,” Sloan insisted.
“It’s funny to me that someone would look that far deeply into it just to find a racist link,” Burle responded.
Burle, who served six years in the Air Force, said that seeing NFL players kneel during the playing of the national anthem did not sit well with him.
Advertisement
“A lot of us military folks take that personal to heart,” he said, pointing out that he started the bar to honor veterans.
“It was kind of our way to give back, I guess,” he said. “We give discounts to veterans, we have a hall of heroes inside. We have flags that have flown overseas mounted inside.”
Burle said that if Sloan had come inside and told him or the bar’s manager, the issue would have been rectified immediately. And Burle actually did take the time to rearrange his makeshift doormat, which now reads “Kaepernick Lynch.”
Advertisement
“I commend them for what they’re doing, as far as the right goes. I fought for that right,” Burle said of the protesting athletes. “The same thing that gives them that right gives me the right to place these out here.”
Read more at KOMU-TV.In this landmark exploration of the origins of nationalism and cultural identity in China, Pamela Kyle Crossley traces the ways in which a large, early modern empire of Eurasia, the Qing (1636-1912), incorporated neighboring, but disparate, political traditions into a new style of emperorship. Drawing on a wide variety of primary sources, including Manchu, Korean, and Chinese archival materials, Crossley argues that distortions introduced in seventeenth- and eighteenth-century historical records have blinded scholars to the actual course of events in the early years of the dynasty. This groundbreaking study examines the relationship between the increasingly abstract ideology of the centralizing emperorship of the Qing and the establishment of concepts of identity in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, before the advent of nationalism in China.
Concluding with a broad-ranging postscript on the implications of her research for studies of nationalism and nation-building throughout modern Chinese history, A Translucent Mirror combines a readable narrative with a sophisticated, revisionary look at China's history. Crossley's book will alter current understandings of the Qing emperorship, the evolution of concepts of ethnicity, and the legacy of Qing rule for modern Chinese nationalism.A court order prohibiting a Hunterdon County woman from writing about her family on Facebook and elsewhere was deemed constitutional last week by an appeals court.
The woman, identified in court papers only as H.L.M., was ordered as a condition of her probation to stop posting about her children and ex-husband. Her online writings, which mentioned the Book of Revelations, Jeffrey Dahmer, Satan and Adolph Hitler, were called “rambling, irrational, disturbing, bizarre” by a judge.
But the woman argued that the ban was overly vague and restrictive of her First Amendment liberties.
In the appellate ruling, issued on May 13 by judges John Kennedy and Michael Guadagno, the court disagreed, saying the decision did not restrict H.L.M. from writing about anything other than her family, and was directed at protecting her children, whom she abducted three years ago.
H.L.M. ran away with her two young children one morning in 2011 after she had lost custody of them, prompting authorities to issue missing persons alerts. She was later caught trying to take them over the border into Canada.
She accepted a plea deal, and the state agreed to drop the kidnapping charges as long as she agreed to get a psychiatric evaluation and undergo therapy.
In December 2011, a judge learned that she didn't receive therapy and had posted “clearly disturbing” online writings. A psychiatric evaluation determined H.L.M. suffered from bipolar disorder, but was not a danger to herself or others.
An attorney for the state asked that she be banned from blogging about her ex-husband and children, out of concern that her children would someday read it. The judge agreed and enforced the ban, ordered her to have no contact with her children, and gave her five years probation.
“Any blogging shall not reference the husband or the children. You can talk about what you want to talk about, but don't reference the husband or the children. That's off limits," the judge said.
But she continued to write about her family, referring to them now as “Camelot” — a replacement she readily admitted to her probation officer, according to testimony from a hearing in August 2012. She referenced “Camelot” 161 times on her blog between the gag order and that hearing.
She was charged again in November for continuing to blog about her family, and a week later she entered her appeal.Legislators and victims’ advocates in Connecticut called on Tuesday for changes in how the state investigates police shootings, after a video revealed contradictions between the way a teenager was killed last week and what the police initially reported.
Jayson Negron, 15, was killed on May 9, when officers in Bridgeport, Conn., tried to stop a stolen vehicle after a very brief chase, according to a May 10 statement from the Connecticut State Police, who are investigating the shooting.
The Bridgeport officers approached the vehicle, which was being driven by Jayson, when it began to move, the statement said.
“As the Bridgeport officers approached, the operator of the stolen vehicle accelerated in reverse and struck at least one Bridgeport Police officer,” it said. “As a result, a second Bridgeport Police officer fired at least one round from their duty weapon, striking both the operator and front seat passenger.” The passenger, identified as Julian Fyffe, 21, of Bridgeport, was taken to a hospital and survived.Hello readers, my name is Shadyrush, your average Dutch university student who lucks out by having access to a database filled with awesome reports and documents. While I have been lurking around TAP for a while, this will be the first article I’ll be writing for you guys. And hopefully, many more will come.
This article will be about (you guessed it) the Future Combat System or FCS for short. The FCS project is currently suspended, but after looking into it, it can be said that the US MBT philosophy was shifting to the one Germany had in the 1950’s. To explain what I mean by this, I’ll take you into the project itself.
The FCS was the U.S. army’s multiyear, multibillion-dollar program that had the intention of replacing current systems like the M1 Abrams tank and the M2 Bradley AFV. The project was brought to life by observing the role of armored vehicles in the more recent conflicts. Notable events were the destruction of over 200 Russian tanks by Chechen Guerillas and the slow mobilization of the US M1 Abrams in the Kosovo conflict.
Because of these examples the U.S. Army demanded a lighter MBT with superior mobility while still retaining adequate armor. “Power is increasingly defined not by mass or size but by mobility and swiftness,” then-presidential candidate George W. Bush said at the Citadel military academy in September 1999.
The project was formally launched in 2003 and with it development started on a universal chassis for Infantry Carrier vehicles, Command vehicles, a Mounted Combat System, A Recon vehicle, non LoS mortars, artillery and a medevac vehicle. In this aspect it could be considered the US Armata.
While I could write an essay about all of these vehicles, today I’ll focus on the Mounted Combat System.
The MCS is the “MBT” of the bunch, while not nearly as armored or heavy as current MBT’s it does have some redeeming qualities. While the exact weight is unknown, it should be about 24 to 26 tons. The light weight is a gift for the mobility and as you’d expect, this baby can shift.(in theory anyway) There are no exact figures concerning mobility, but my sources state 60 to 70 km/h. Fortunately the MCS has more qualities, it was planned to pack a whopping 120mm smoothbore. This gun was allegedly able to penetrate the Russian T-90 at ranges up to 8 km.
So, it scores good in the mobility and firepower categories, there must be a downside now right?
Well, yes and no. While the armor isn’t very good for a MBT it isn’t nearly as bad as you’d expect for 26 tons.
The MCS can provide all-around protection against mines, which is a big plus for the crews. It’s also able to stop even the newest types of RPG’s and it can stop quick-firing cannon shells up to a caliber of 30 mm. In fact, The front protection is better than the sides of the Abrams. The tank won’t bounce the Russian big boy 125 mm, but it’ll do fine against aged tanks and most standard AT equipment.
But what advantages does such a light MBT have? Well, these tanks were planned to be transported to the battlefield using C-130 transports. The weight allowed one tank per plane. The plan was to pick them up, fly them to a dirt strip near the battlefield and let them drive to the fight. This proved to be highly impractical, it would take all C-130’s in service to lift a single armored brigade. Why? Because parts had to be removed and flown to the battle separately on the heavier variants like the MCS.
In 2009 this project was indefinitely suspended. While the U.S. saw potential in these vehicles, they proved too impractical and expensive for mobilization. I type mobilization and not production, because the production would have been quite cheap. The reason it was so expensive was because one transport plane was needed for every produced tank. So, if the U.S. decided not to produce extra transport planes, they would be left with the problems they wanted to fight.
So, in the end the project failed and only one prototype lived to see testing. While I doubt the possibility of this project seeing any further development in real life, it might be interesting enough to be put in games like WoT 2.0 in the future. Only time will tell…
Thanks for reading,
ShadyRush
AdvertisementsInsurance-company lawyers argue Highway 99 tunnel builders concocted the theory that a leftover pipe damaged tunnel machine Bertha.
Insurance lawyers claim Seattle Tunnel Partners and Hitachi Zosen knew their tunnel boring machine Bertha was inherently flawed in 2013, but arranged to blame a buried groundwater-monitoring pipe for causing severe damage.
“STP settled on the steel pipe theory as a means of maximizing its recovery from WSDOT and Insurers as part of a larger plan to evade responsibility for the TBM [tunnel boring machine] failure,” insurance lawyers contend, in papers filed last weekat King County Superior Court.
Insurers are trying to avoid paying tens of millions of dollars in cost overruns on the Highway 99 tunnel project.
Bertha overheated and stalled Dec. 6, 2013, three days after a eight-inch diameter pipe tangled in the machine’s cutting teeth, some 48 feet below the surface near Pioneer Square.
Machine repairs caused a two-year tunneling delay, but the companies persevered until Bertha broke into daylight near South Lake Union on April 4 this year.
Arguments over the giant machine’s fitness when it arrived here in mid-2013 are nothing new.
What changed is insurance companies unearthed internal emails, notes and deposition testimony, through legal discovery.
And they’re amping up the rhetoric, by alleging contractors misled insurers and violated Washington consumer-protection law.
One excerpt says machine-builder Hitachi Zosen’s internal notes from April 2, 2014, showed Jack Frost, chief operating officer for STP partner Tutor-Perini, discussed the need to present a “rational explanation” about external causes for the breakdown, to the state, city, news media and insurance companies.
At the time, STP claimed the state owed it at least $125 million in damage-related cost overruns, a figure that ultimately rose to $480 million.
“STP and Hitz [Hitachi Zosen] must present a solid front to third parties in providing the rational explanation. Externally it will probably end up along the line [sic] of ‘due to an unforeseen outside factor (the pipe), the bearing and bearing seal were damaged …” Frost purportedly said.
The filing also alleges Juan Luis Magro, a STP executive from Spanish tunnel-specialist Dragados, told Hitachi Zosen’s project manager, Shinji Ogaki, “I think we are considering applying insurance, but in that case, we should emphasize the existence of the steel casing. Damage to the machine due to external causes.”
To be sure, such excerpts suggest one version of events. Various parties may turn against or align with each other, as the legal case unfolds.
Hitach Zosen replied Friday in a statement to The Seattle Times:
“The Insurers have isolated statements from a few documents dated very early in Hitachi Zosen’s investigation, taken those statements out of context, and fabricated a baseless ‘conspiracy’ theory.’”
Hitachi Zosen managers have said in interviews that without the pipe hit, Bertha would have drilled flawlessly from Sodo to South Lake Union.
But a Berlin-based engineering firm hired by insurers concluded Bertha was “underdimensioned” for its extreme Seattle soil loads when first built in Osaka, Japan.
The King County case originated with STP’s complaint that Great Lakes Reinsurance and eight other insurers breached their policy contract by refusing to cover losses and repairs. STP says it tried to collect monthly payments from insurers, to total $64 million by Aug. 31, 2015.
Despite lacking that cash flow, STP subcontractors and Hitachi Zosen excavated a deep circular vault, hoisted Bertha’s 4 million pound front end to the surface, replaced a damaged bearing seal, and made retrofits including 86 tons of new steel near the refurbished drive parts.
At no time did contractors hesitate to finish the 571/3 -foot diameter tube, nor try to collect extra money from the state as a condition for restarting in early 2016.
Besides the value of professional reputations to win future tunnel contracts, Tutor-Perini and Dragados are compelled by a $500 million performance bond to finish the tunnel.
Ron Tutor, CEO of Tutor-Perini, consistently predicts victory. In a call with stock analysts Aug. 7 he mentioned the “multi hundred million claim against an insurance carrier,” which he accused of stalling the case another year. The tentative trial date in King County is May 2018.
“So that means as insurance companies do, they don’t pay until you are on the courthouse steps, or if their heart is with them, let them try the case,” Tutor said, according to a transcript from seekingalpha.com.
Insurance companies cite policy language in which they’re not required to cover damage to Bertha “by its own explosion, mechanical or electrical breakdown, failure, breakage or derangement.”
They also quote an early 2014 email by Edward Kennedy, a state consultant and career tunnel-machine designer, that the “well casing they hit initially has nothing to do with the machine becoming stalled … this casing is little more than a piece of tin foil or a gum wrapper to this machine.”
Another state adviser, Rick Lovat, said in a deposition that among the fraternity of TBM experts, “every person I spoke to wouldn’t attribute the machine stoppage to a steel pipe.”
Meanwhile in a related Thurston County case, attorneys are squabbling about whether the state and its geotechnical consultant, Seattle-based Shannon & Wilson, fulfilled a duty to disclose the pipe to STP in official reports.
That file includes a joke the day after impact, when about half the 110-foot pipe was pushed out of the soil, by Juan Luis Magro, a Dragados construction manager: “Bertha, the largest TBM ever built, ‘raising the bar.’ [Smiley face] Isn’t that power or what?” He was answering an email where a colleague couldn’t immediately find historic records about the pipe.
Dragados continued drilling and Bertha overheated a couple of days later.
New court documents in Thurston County showed tunnel contractors looked at the steel pipe in 2011, then apparently forgot about it.
What does this mean for taxpayers?
The Washington State Department of Transportation has long insisted the pipe couldn’t possibly ruin Bertha’s bearing seals and force a major repair — and therefore the public shouldn’t pay.
On the other hand, the state is named in the same insurance policy as STP. So it’s unclear whether insurance will wind up paying some of WSDOT’s own costs of administration, rent and engineering due to delay, which might range between $80 million and $120 million.
Meanwhile, crews at the tunnel’s north portal are almost finished dismantling Bertha, the state’s pit-cam shows.Look Beyond – a photovoice research exhibition, will visit Farmleigh Cowshed Theatre from 19- 29 July 2018 where it will be open daily from 10am– 5pm.
Look Beyond is the work of 16 people with lived experience of mental health difficulties. The exhibition is currently on a national tour.
Look Beyond gives people who experience mental health difficulties a space to speak for themselves and by doing so, helps others to gain insight into what living with mental health difficulties feels like, and how relief, recovery and resilience can be found and nurtured.
The exhibition is an output of a photovoice research project commissioned by See Change, the national mental health stigma reduction partnership. The research was conducted by Dr. Maria Quinlan and Dr. Etáin Quigley from University College Dublin and Maynooth University.
See Change’s aim for ‘Look Beyond’ is to challenge people’s perceptions of mental health difficulties and to encourage positive conversation.
Entry to the exhibition is free of charge.Toorpakai Saindi, who has seven children, has been granted an estimated £400 a week in child and local tax benefits, while her landlord receives £12,458 a month because there is no other suitable property available.
Mrs Saindi, who has four sons and three daughters aged eight to 22, approached Ealing Council in west London in July after being made homeless. The authority has a legal obligation to find her a seven-bedroom home.
The mother, who came to the UK from Afghanistan seven years ago, said: "I always thought the housing benefit was a lot, but I'm told that is what it is for homes like this here."
She added: "It's a lot of money, but the council pay it. This is their problem. I don't know why they pay so much."
The council says both the benefit and rent payouts are set by central government.
Her son Jawad Saindi, 20, said although it felt like they had won the lottery, his mother complains that the house is too big to clean.
"If someone gave you a lottery ticket would you leave it? No. You take what you get given," he said.
"It's not that we wanted this big house - my mum is not happy because she has to clean all of it. The first day we moved in here we got lost because it was so big."
The Local Housing Allowance, introduced across England on April 7, enables landlords to find out the maximum amount of money available before a price is agreed.
Estate agents Foxtons said similar properties command rents of only about £6,000 a month.
Landlord Ajit Panesar, who is acting within his rights, fixed a value for his Acton property so that the Rent Service – an executive agency of the Department for Work and Pensions - could advise the council what it should pay. It came up with a figure of £12,458 a month.
Mr Panesar said: "I can't help it if the law says I should get paid that amount of money."
The Saindis were first housed in a three bedroom property in Enfield. Four years later they moved to a five-bedroom house in Ealing and three months ago were placed at their current address which they are entitled to have by law given the size of their family.
Councillor Will Brooks, Cabinet Member for Housing at Ealing Council, said the case highlighted "some of the absurdities of the housing and benefit system".
"In cases such as this, where there are very few seven-bedroom properties, landlords will obviously seek the absolute maximum as set down by the government. This clearly puts the council, the government and taxpayers at a significant disadvantage," he said.
"The Council believes that urgent changes are needed to the LHA and in particular for the publication of maximum rent levels to be ended" he said.
Mark Wallace, campaign director of the TaxPayers' Alliance, said: "The people running the welfare system seem to have forgotten money doesn't grow on trees. This family could be helped without the need for such a huge bill."An African-American man approaching what’s typically thought of as retirement age told of decades working in fast food and hovering near minimum wage, while a young Urban Outfitters worker said a raise would “make the difference between living and surviving.” When explaining what a raise to $15 per hour would mean to her, Trish Kahle, a Whole Foods worker, stated simply, “I could have heat all winter.”
Hundreds of Chicago fast food and retail workers walked out for a one-day strike Wednesday, following similar one-day strikes among New York City fast food workers earlier in April and in November. As in New York, the Chicago workers are calling for a wage of $15 an hour rather than the near-minimum wages most of them make, and the right to join together in unions. The Illinois minimum wage is $8.25, a dollar higher than the federal minimum wage that applies in New York, but the stories the workers tell are similar. At an organizing meeting, Micah Uetricht reports Dunkin Donuts worker Esly Hernandez, who is paid $8.25 an hour, told Ned Resnikoff that he's striking for his four-year-old son, both to set an example for him and to be able to afford medically recommended nutrition for the anemic child.
Wednesday's action in Chicago should be viewed not just in the context of the New York City fast food strikes, but of the wave of low-wage worker organizing over the past year more generally, as Josh Eidelson explains:
The strike wave’s spread to Chicago offers a hopeful sign for the New York City fast food campaign. While individual fast food stores are managed by franchisees, national CEOs are the real decision-makers in both fast food and retail. Given the financial cost and, more important, the risk of setting a precedent and emboldening a wider workforce, it’s hard to imagine executives for McDonald’s or Macy’s making any significant concessions to workers in any city unless faced with a bona fide national uprising. For that to happen, the strikes would have to go viral, big-time. The strikes aren’t spreading by accident. November New York fast food strikers told Salon that they drew inspiration from workers who walked out of Wal-Mart stores, who in turn cited the example of their Wal-Mart warehouse counterparts. Interviewed while on strike April 4, New York fast food workers said that November’s smaller walkout had made that day’s work stoppage possible. “I was waiting” during the first strike, said Brooklyn Burger King worker Christelle Lumen. “I wanted to know, would they be OK with it? Would they fire the people that went on strike?”
According to the Fight for 15 campaign, a Subway, a Sally's Beauty Supply, and a Land's End were shut down by the strike and a march of and in support of the strikers stretched for two city blocks.BRUSSELS (Reuters) - Greece is doing well with reforms required to receive the next tranche of emergency loans but is not there yet, international lenders said on Thursday.
People walk at Monastiraki square in central Athens January 3, 2013. REUTERS/John Kolesidis
Representatives of the International Monetary Fund, the European Commission and the European Central Bank were commenting after a visit to Athens. They said they would return to Greece in early April to continue their review.
“Significant progress has been made but a few issues remain outstanding,” the statement said.
“As additional technical work will be necessary to settle these issues, the mission will take a short break to allow this work to be completed.”
Greece is getting its first review after lenders agreed to unlock almost 50 billion euros in aid in December, staving off bankruptcy and keeping it in the euro. In return, Athens passed a new round of austerity measures to prop up its finances.
At the end of the troika’s 10-day visit, Finance Minister Yannis Stournaras said he was confident that Athens would get a 2.8 billion euro aid tranche it is waiting on this month, despite the interruption in talks.
Kept afloat solely by foreign aid, Greece has received more than 200 billion euros in loans since May 2010 but questions remain about whether it can continue implementing the ambitious reform program in the face of public anger against the measures.
In addition to unpopular wage cuts and tax rises it has already agreed, Athens also needs to sack “a large part” of 27,000 civil servants it must earmark for possible dismissal.
To secure the March tranche, Athens needs to present a detailed staffing plan spelling out which ministries the workers will come from and how many of those will be laid off.
A deeply sensitive issue in a country where six years of recession have sent unemployment to the highest level in generations, Athens is keen to avoid public sector layoffs but has denied speculation that cutting its bloated public sector were a sticking point in talks with the troika.
Another contentious issue concerns terms and deadlines for a 50-billion-euro recapitalization of banks, which risk being nationalized if they fail to complete the process in time and seek a softening of terms.Tom Steyer, the fossil-fuel-powered hedge funder, has suffered a series of setbacks in his $100 million campaign to save the planet from ‘global warming’ by destroying the U.S. economy.
Earlier this year, Steyer announced that he wanted to make climate change a key issue in the 2014 US midterm elections by funding a $100 million action campaign. Half was going to come out of his own pocket – via his San-Francisco-based NextGen Climate Action group; half from fellow liberal billionaires.
However – possibly discouraged by Steyer’s murky past as a financial beneficiary of Big Coal, possibly by the world’s stubborn ongoing failure to show any sign of global warming since 1997 – those liberal billionaires have proved disappointingly reluctant to stump up the greenbacks.
Politico reports:
His super PAC, NextGen Climate Action, has raised just $1.2 million from other donors toward that |
kHz bandwidth drive signal. A relatively underdamped resonance with a peak amplitude of around 15mV can be seen ringing for about 80ms. (This response was actually obtained with the accelerometer taped to the top panel of the Monitor Audio Studio 15 that I review this month.) In a sense, this is but an objective version of the traditional "knuckle-rap" test, but it does enable the MLSSA system's diagnostic post-processing power to be brought to bear.
Fig.1 Typical impulse response calculated from accelerometer output (100ms time window, 2kHz bandwidth, 20dB gain).
It must be remembered that there is no easy way of calibrating the PVDF transducer—it not being possible to easily calculate the actual acoustic excitation energy applied to the cabinet wall. Nevertheless, it at least allows cabinet problems to be diagnosed on a relative basis.
Tom Norton's and my speaker reviews in this issue show the kind of cabinet behavior typical of conventional designs. But to give some kind of baseline, I used the PVDF transducer to look at two loudspeakers widely regarded as being successful attempts to minimize cabinet resonant problems. Fig.2 shows the resultant waterfall plot obtained with the accelerometer taped horizontally halfway up the side of a Wilson WATT 3. Designer David Wilson used an heroic combination of intensive bracing and massive wall materials to try to make this minimonitor's cabinet as acoustically inert as possible. To a large extent he has succeeded, particularly in the bass, but it can be seen from fig.2 that there is one quite powerful mode remaining, at 360Hz.
Fig.2 Wilson WATT 3, cumulative spectral-decay plot calculated from the output of an accelerometer fastened to the center of the cabinet sidewall.
The question is begged as to how important this will be subjectively with normal musical material, not test tones or pink noise. This high-Q resonance will need to be hit with sustained tones lasting for a good few milliseconds before it is fully excited. 360Hz is midway between the notes F and F# above Middle C in the second space of the treble staff (frequencies 349.23Hz and 370.0Hz, respectively); it is possible, therefore, that this resonant mode might add a degree of clouding on just these notes, which a very sensitive listener would pick up. If it were lower in frequency, however, where the notes are closer together, it would probably be excited more often, which is why resonances in the tenor region—approximately 120-240Hz—often add a "wooden" coloration to a speaker's sound.
The second example (fig.3) was taken with the PVDF strip taped centrally, vertically halfway up the sidewall of a Celestion SL600si. Here, an ultra-lightweight material (Aerolam aluminum honeycomb) has been used for the enclosure, not to damp resonances out of existence but both to move them higher in frequency and to significantly reduce the mass-stored energy. The level of the sidewall vibration is much lower compared with the WATT, but, more important, though a residual mode can be seen at 215Hz, the cabinet actually is initially quite lively across the 2kHz bandwidth used to generate this graph. Note, however, how quickly the vibrations decay, except at the aforementioned 215Hz, the woofer-tuning frequency of 55Hz, and in the upper midrange, where there is some hashiness noticeable.
Fig.3 Celestion SL600, cumulative spectral-decay plot calculated from the output of an accelerometer fastened to the center of the cabinet sidewall.
To judge from these two examples, loudspeakers that are subjectively "good" when it comes to cabinet resonant problems are either excited equally across the band or at just one frequency—if the former, the decay must be quick; if the latter, not only must the decay be quick, but it helps for the mode to be high in frequency, above the critical midband. And in general, the lower the level of all such resonant vibrations, the better. Similarly, if the offending panel is small or on the speaker's back rather than its front or sides, it will have less effect on the sound. We welcome feedback from other users of this PVDF film transducer, and comments from speaker builders, on this whole vexed subject.
Footnote 1: The monthlyis available for $50/year from P.O. Box 176, Peterborough, NH 03458-0176. Tel: (603) 924-9464. Fax: (603) 924-9467.—
Footnote 2: For further details on this low-cost, $35-plus-S&H, PVDF strip accelerometer, see "High Polymer Piezo Film in Electroacoustical Transducer Applications," AES Preprint 2308, presented at the 79th Audio Engineering Society Convention in New York in October 1985 by Jesse Klapholz. Mr. Klapholz can be contacted at PVDF Transducers, P.O. Box 31718, Philadelphia, PA 19147. Tel: (215) 465-1975. Fax: (215) 336-7743.—John AtkinsonMULTAN: A female patient was allegedly gang raped at a hospital in Burewala by staffers on Wednesday night.
According to media reports, the victim reached at the hospital to visit a doctor and was asked to wait as no doctor was available at the time.
Later she was injected with intoxicating drugs before being reportedly gang raped by five employees of the hospital.
Know more: Silence of the haunted
The alleged rapists fled away when her husband reached the hospital where her condition had begun to deteriorate.
Subsequently, a case was registered in this regard at the Model Town police station in Burewala.
Also read: Girl ‘raped’, dies of excessive bleeding
Police began conducting raids to carry out arrests but have remained unsuccessful so far.
Abdul Rehman, husband of the victim, said Punjab Chief Minister Mian Shahbaz Sharif should ensure the arrest of culprits and bring them to justice.
Rehman said he had left his wife at the hospital to bring his children from home and by the time he returned, she had been subjected to rape.(01-23) 10:49 PST San Francisco -- When Coit Tower reopens in April after a six-month face-lift, the Telegraph Hill icon will have a new look and a new operator.
After nearly a decade of often rancorous discussions, a nasty 2012 election scrap and plenty of grudging compromises, the San Francisco Recreation and Park Commission is set Thursday to recommend a five-year lease agreement with Terry Grimm, owner of the Anchor Oyster Bar in the Castro and the upscale Kenwood Inn and Spa in Sonoma County.
Grimm's job will be to spiff up the look and operation of the city landmark, which has fallen on hard times in recent years.
"One of our goals is to enhance the visitor experience," said Sarah Ballard, a spokeswoman for the Recreation and Park Department.
That's a kind way of saying the city has been eager to dump the mom-and-pop operating style of Fashion House Inc., which has run the Coit Tower concession since 1992, and replace it with a more professional operation, including a uniformed elevator operator and docents who will greet visitors and conduct guided tours.
Gift-shop improvements
Grimm also has agreed to upgrade the gift shop, which has been little more than a candy and souvenir stand jammed into the tower's ground floor, into a shop that the lease says will be "attractive, dignified and uncluttered," focusing on books and souvenirs that are locally produced and highlight Coit Tower, its history and the city around it.
"Certainly we want to provide the opportunity to get a souvenir or two," said Nick Kinsey, director of property for the park department. "But we thought visitors needed a bookstore with items to interpret the experience, rather than a license plate with their name on it."
Professionalism is a priority in the new lease, he added.
The previous workers "were not always knowledgeable about Coit Tower, the importance of the murals and the need to protect them," he said.
While the 210-foot-tall tower, built in 1933 with a bequest from Lillie Hitchcock Coit, is a fixture of the city's skyline, the Depression Era-murals that cover the inside walls are the structure's artistic highlight. They have also been the flash point for many of the recent arguments about the best use for the facility.
It was concern over the deterioration of the murals that sparked Proposition B, a June 2012 advisory measure that called for strict limits on private events at Coit Tower.
The city's 2011 proposal for a new concessionaire called for an increase in private events and commercial activity at the tower to raise more money for the park department and its various programs and facilities, said Jon Golinger, one of the founders of Protect Coit Tower, the nonprofit group behind the ballot measure.
Public access key
"We wanted to make sure that the emphasis at Coit Tower was on public accessibility, not as simply a cash cow," especially when those private events, many taking place after regular hours, could endanger the murals, he said.
Prop. B passed with 53 percent of the vote, but that didn't end the dispute. Arguing that the measure was advisory only, the park department later in 2012 proposed an agreement that allowed one private event a month at Coit Tower.
The new concession agreement dumps the plan allowing any private events. What didn't go away, though, is the city's effort to pull more money out of the tower.
Over the past five years, the city has collected an average of $748,362 from the Coit Tower lease, almost all of it coming from the city's 90 percent share of the $7 cost of an elevator ride to the observation deck.
The new agreement calls for a minimum rent of $662,400 a year, but the city is expecting more than that. With no plans to boost the elevator charge, the city expects to collect $1.5 million from Coit Tower by 2019.
The bulk of the new money comes from the projected growth of those elevator fees, which means the park department is banking on a steady rise in the number of visitors to Coit Tower and the surrounding 4.8 acres of Pioneer Park.
"Coit Tower is pretty packed as it is, and I don't know how they're going to get more bodies in there," said Golinger, who is also an officer of the Telegraph Hill Dwellers, the politically influential local neighborhood association.
Disputes continue
Not all the disputes are settled. Grimm, with his restaurant background, originally talked about providing chowders, seafood cocktails and possibly sandwiches and other food at the site. But concerns from the Department of Public Health about providing restaurant-style food from a small cart that's allowed on site and neighborhood worries that food service would persuade people to linger and tie up traffic threatened to delay the new agreement.
The question of food will be "part of the continuing conversation" about the agreement, Ballard said, with any final decision coming after the facility reopens.
Plans now call for Grimm's contract to be approved by late February, so his crews can complete the gift store makeover by the time the tower is reopened in April.
If the Rec and Park Commission recommends approval of the agreement, as expected, the pact goes to the Board of Supervisors for the final OK.
John Wildermuth is a San Francisco Chronicle staff writer. E-mail: jwildermuth@sfchronicle.comBurnley Football Club can now confirm their pre-season plans, including trips to Accrington Stanley and a first ever visit to Fleetwood Town, managed by former claret Graham Alexander.
Michael Duff’s testimonial game is also scheduled at Turf Moor for Saturday, August 1, when Bradford City will be the opponents.
The Clarets first team squad will also be embarking on two pre-season training trips to France and Scotland, with games still to be confirmed.
Pre-season will kick off with a six-day trip to Évian-les-Bains in south eastern France, on the border with Switzerland, between Monday, July 6 and Saturday, July 11.
There, the Clarets aim to play one fixture against local opposition on Friday, July 10.
After the short trip to Accrington on Saturday, July 18, the first team will travel to Glasgow in the week commencing Monday, July 20.
The club proposes to play two games during this trip, with dates and opposition to be confirmed.
Burnley will then return south to face Fleetwood on Tuesday, July 28 and complete their pre-season schedule at Turf Moor on Saturday, August 1 in Michael Duff’s benefit game.
First team fixtures (confirmed) are as follows:
Saturday, July 18: Accrington Stanley at the Store First Stadium (3pm)
Ticket prices will be confirmed as soon as possible.
Tuesday, July 28 Fleetwood Town at the Highbury Stadium (7.45pm).
Pay on the gate: Adults £12.50, Over 65 and U18 £7.50, U16 £2.50, U5s free.
Saturday, August 1: Bradford City at Turf Moor in the Michael Duff Testimonial game (3pm).
Ticket prices will be confirmed as soon as possible.Smart electricity meters on homes provide ample hacking opportunities, expert warns
Updated
Smart electricity meters carry vulnerabilities that could assist burglars and compromise privacy, but Australian households are not being warned of the risks, a leading cyber-security expert has warned.
Key points: Hackers can exploit device monitor movements, report says
Expert says consumers are not made aware of vulnerabilities of the technology
German research finds it is even possible to determine what TV program is playing
Nigel Phair from the University of Canberra's Centre for Internet Safety compiled a report on the risks of smart meters, which send data on a home's utility use back to providers remotely rather than being read manually by an inspector.
The report said some smart meters, mostly used for gas and water, only sent information one way and were safe.
However, risks were particularly evident when a connection between the meter and provider sent information both ways — as is generally the case with smart electricity meters.
"Most of the devices are being built without any inbuilt security around them — and by that I mean password protection and no ability to update what we call the firmware as time goes on so they become safe devices," Mr Phair said.
The report said that weakness left an opening for hackers, who could exploit the device once it was cracked.
"It can mean anything from malicious software being pushed to that device, and amongst a smart-connected house, pushed to other devices," Mr Phair said.
"It can also mean privacy infringing and also anti-competitiveness."
Once a device had been cracked, the report found hackers monitoring real-time electricity usage could learn anything from when the refrigerator was last opened, to what program occupants were watching on television.
Mr Phair said that information would be valuable to burglars looking to monitor when a house was unoccupied.
"When a home has a number of internet-connected devices such as alarms or garage doors, the risk is heightened," he said.
Risks present for providers too
A mandatory rollout means smart electricity meters are the standard in Victoria, and while they are available in other jurisdictions not all providers offer them.
The report cited research in Germany that found it was possible to determine what program was playing on the television by monitoring the specific electricity required to display each scene on screen.
Mr Phair said there would be an incentive for advertisers to obtain that information.
"Particularly when you match that to the types of other activities you do when you do when you're at home," he said.
"You really get a good picture of the demographic, the size and the type of household."
Among the report's other concerns was an incident in Puerto Rico in which businesses and members of the general public would pay hackers to slash their electricity meter readings by as much as 75 per cent.
Mr Phair said while smart meters offered undeniable benefits to both providers and customers, the risks were not being communicated well to the public.
"One-way meters are great when you're just pushing data to the network," he said.
"But when it becomes a two-way meter, people aren't fully informed of what's happening to their data."
Topics: internet-technology, computers-and-technology, science-and-technology, university-of-canberra-2617, canberra-2600, act, vic, australia
First postedYes, you read that correctly.
Former Washington Wizards star, Gilbert Arenas, may be getting another shot in the NBA with the Los Angeles Clippers. Arenas hasn’t played in an NBA game since the conclusion of the 2011-2012 season, but from the looks of it, he’ll probably be getting a training camp invite from the revamped Clippers.
I'm hearing that Gilbert Arenas has looked good in workouts this summer. The Clippers may invite him to training camp, according to sources. — Alex Kennedy (@AlexKennedyNBA) September 17, 2013
Even though Gilbert Arenas’ antics set the Wizards franchise back in negative form, he certainly helped put the team back in the national spotlight. He’s best remembered for the gun incident which ultimately led to his demise, but to me, Gilbert Arenas will always be remembered for his time in Washington. Prior to the locker room situation, Arenas was one of the most beloved players in the league. Arenas’ game winning shots, ability to score an unlimited amount of points, combined with his hilarious stunts in DC, are far more pleasing than focusing on the negative side of the spectrum. Of course, getting a training camp invite doesn’t mean he’ll return to playing the same way as he did when he earned All-NBA second team honors in 2007, but hey, it’s a step forward from the Chinese Basketball Association.
There probably isn’t a bigger Gilbert Arenas fan out there than myself, so I’m definitely glad Agent 0 might be getting another shot.
Give me your thoughts in the comment section. What are your fondest memories of Hibachi in Washington?Concern over teenagers doing bombs into filthy floodwater at Porirua Railway Station saw the police called to cordon the area.
Mass rainfall on Thursday created a mucky pool from the platform down into the subway tunnel, with the ramp railing being used as a diving area for the night-time jumpers.
After seeing a video on Facebook of the bombers, Porirua mayor Nick Leggett said he initially thought it was just a bit of fun, but ended up calling the police.
Leggett posted on Facebook to say he had shared the video himself, thinking it was "harmless", but after seeing copy-cat videos asked police to patrol the area to put a stop to it.
"Clearly it had given some other kids some ideas."
He was concerned about the contamination of the floodwater. "If there is sewage in that water then there would be a health risk," he said.
Civil Defence warned people on Thursday to stay out of floodwaters because of potential sewage contamination.
Leggett said he was also worried about electrical currents in the water because of subway lights and wiring, as well as the risk of kids getting sucked under the subway.
"I saw the video, and a hundred thousand other people saw it, and you sort of think 'oh yep that's a bit of a laugh,'" he said.
But late at night when there was no one around, the risk in jumping in was not worth it, he said.
Police were called in to cordon-off the area and no jumpers were hurt, he said.
In the future, Leggett said the area would be better monitored.
"Next time if that was an issue we'd know very quickly and we'd cordon that off far more quickly."
READ MORE:
* LIVE: North Island weather chaos
* Wellington: After the floods
* From Chch quake to Raumati flood
* Top readers' flooding pictures
* Tornado strikes Mt Maunganui
* Plane flips at Tauranga airport
* Downpour 'one-in-100-year' event
* Body found in floodwaters
* Cleaning up after wild weather: Videos
* More rain to come for the North IslandStorage industry veteran NetApp today announced it has entered a definitive agreement to acquire scale-out all-flash storage maker SolidFire, for $870 million in cash.
Founded in 2010, SolidFire has focused on the service provider market, building a high-performance, multi-tenancy system with strong quality-of-service features. The company has enjoyed significant success, and is well regarded in the industry.
SolidFire has taken in just over $150 million in funding, with the latest round in October 2014, according to Crunchbase.com. A purchase price of $870 million values the company at just over a quarter of all-flash competitor Pure Storage that publicly listed in October.
NetApp has struggled with flash to date, having decided to build its own all-flash solutions. An all-flash array, the EF540, based on the SANtricity software acquired from Ingenio, was announced in late 2013. An all-flash version of their flagship DataONTAP based FAS arrays was released in 2014, while the much-delayed FlashRay product finally made it to market in late 2014 as well.
The FlashRay product reportedly struggled before being significantly refreshed in June 2015 to become more price competitive.
Analysis
The SolidFire product is strong with service providers, and cloud style infrastructure buyers, a market NetApp is keen to appeal to. NetApp's existing flash portfolio doesn't really match the workloads for these customers all that well, so the SolidFire acquisition fills a hole in NetApp's portfolio.
NetApp's George Kurian is quoted in the SolidFire press release as saying "SolidFire combines the performance and economics of all-flash storage with a webscale architecture that radically simplifies data center operations and enables rapid deployments of new applications."
High end enterprise customers that run a multi-tenant, service provider style IT team internally are likely to find the SolidFire offering attractive, and combined with NetApp's sales and distribution scale, it should sell well.
The trick now will be to integrate the SolidFire offerings into the wider NetApp ecosystem without losing the aspects of SolidFire that existing customers have come to know and love.During today's Nintendo Direct, the Japanese gamemaker announced several upcoming games in the long-running tactical RPG series.
Fire Emblem on 3DS
The first Fire Emblem announced during today's announcement was Fire Emblem Echoes: Shadows Of Velentia. Surprisingly, the game is coming out on May 19th, but not for the Nintendo Switch. It's yet another 3DS Fire Emblem game. It's also a'reimagining' of Fire Emblem Gaiden. It looks good---I'm just surprised we're getting a new core game on the 3DS this soon after 2016's Fates.
Nintendo is also releasing new amiibo figures alongside Echoes.
Fire Emblem on Switch
After the announcement of Echoes, Nintendo announced a new core Fire Emblem for the Nintendo Switch game scheduled for 2018. There was no gameplay footage or really any details beyond the fact that it's in the works and marks the first time a game in the franchise has come to a home system since 2007.
Despite the lack of information, it's pretty exciting that the Switch is getting more than just the Fire Emblem Warriors spinoff. That should be a fun diversion, but nothing like the tactical joy of the core series.
Fire Emblem on Mobile
Finally, Nintendo showed off another Fire Emblem game coming to mobile devices called Fire Emblem: Heroes. The game is a tactical RPG similar to 3DS Fire Emblem games. Each map is confined to the size of your smartphone screen, however, making each fight pretty bite-sized. That seems...too small, though I can understand why Nintendo would want to make the game simple and easy for phone users.
The game is coming to Android first on February 2nd, and is free-to-play. Read more about the game here.
You can watch the entire announcement below:
Four new Fire Emblem games coming to three different platforms is really great news for fans of the franchise. I'm most excited for the Switch game, even though it's the furthest away and has the fewest details. But it should be fun to have this on mobile as well. Stay tuned as more details surface.
What do you think?On Views of Race and Inequality, Blacks and Whites Are Worlds Apart
2. Views of race relations
There’s no consensus among American adults about the state of race relations in the U.S.: 48% say race relations are generally bad, and 44% say they are generally good. Similarly, when asked about the amount of attention paid to race and racial issues in the country these days, about as many say there is too much (36%) as say there is too little (35%) attention, while 26% say there is about the right amount of attention paid to these issues.
Overall, relatively few Americans think race relations are headed in a positive direction. Only 19% say race relations are improving, while about four-in-ten say they are getting worse (38%), and a similar share say things are staying about the same (41%). Those who already think race relations are bad are particularly likely to say things are getting even worse.
And there is no widespread agreement on how to make things better. When asked about the best approach to improving race relations, 55% of Americans say it’s more important for people to focus on what different racial and ethnic groups have in common, while fewer (31%) say the focus should be on what makes each group unique.
Opinions on these fundamental questions about race relations– where we are, how they can be improved, and how much attention the issue warrants – are sharply divided along racial lines. Blacks and whites are also divided in their views of Obama’s handling of race relations. Among whites, about as many say the president has made progress toward improving race relations (28%) as say he has made things worse (32%). In contrast, 51% of blacks say Obama has made progress on this issue; just 5% believe he has made race relations worse.
Blacks and Hispanics more likely to say race relations are bad
Views about the current state of race relations vary considerably across racial and ethnic lines. While whites are about equally likely to say race relations are good (46%) as to say they are bad (45%), the assessments of blacks and Hispanics are decidedly negative. About six-in-ten (61%) blacks say race relations in this country are bad, while 34% say they are good. Similarly, far more Hispanics say race relations are bad (58%) than say they are good (37%).
Roughly half or more of black adults across demographic groups express negative views about the current state of race relations. Among whites, views are also fairly consistent across gender, age, education and income groups, but opinions divide along political lines. About six-in-ten (59%) white Democrats say race relations in the U.S. are generally bad, while about a third (34%) say they’re good. In contrast, white Republicans are about evenly divided between those who say race relations are bad (46%) and those who say they’re good (48%). Among white independents, 49% offer positive assessments, while 39% say race relations are bad.
Overall, views of race relations are more positive now than they were a year ago. In May 2015, following unrest in Baltimore over the death of Freddie Gray, a black man who died while in police custody, far more Americans said race relations were bad (61%) than said they were good (34%), according to a CBS News/New York Times poll. At that time, whites (62%) were about as likely as blacks (65%) to say race relations were generally bad.
Even so, the public’s views of race relations are more negative now than they have been for much of the 2000s. Between February 2000 and May 2014, by double-digit margins, more said race relations were good than said they were bad. By August 2014, after the death of Michael Brown, an unarmed black 18-year-old shot and killed by a white police officer in Ferguson, Missouri, opinions had changed significantly: 47% described race relations in the U.S. as generally good and
44% as generally bad.
Views of the state of race relations were particularly negative after the Los Angeles riots in 1992. In May 1992, about seven-in-ten (68%) Americans, including 67% of whites and 75% of blacks, said race relations were generally bad.
Few say race relations are improving
About one-in-five (19%) Americans say race relations in the U.S. are getting better, while about four-in-ten (38%) say they are getting worse and about as many (41%) say they are staying about the same.
Those who say race relations are currently bad are particularly pessimistic: 54% say race relations are getting even worse, and 35% don’t see much change. Only one-in-ten of those who say race relations are bad believe they are improving. These views are shared about equally by whites, blacks and Hispanics who offer negative assessments of the current state of race relations.
Among those who say race relations are good, three-in-ten say they are getting better and roughly half (48%) say they are staying about the same; 21% say race relations are getting worse. Whites who say race relations are currently good offer a somewhat more negative assessment of where the country is headed on this issue than do blacks and Hispanics who say race relations are good. About a quarter (24%) of whites who say race relations are good believe they are getting worse, compared with 15% of blacks and Hispanics who feel that way.
More say focus should be on what different groups have in common
Far more Americans say that when it comes to improving race relations, it’s more important for people to focus on what different racial and ethnic groups have in common (55%) than say it’s more important to focus on the unique experiences of different racial and ethnic groups (31%).
This is particularly the case among whites, who are about twice as likely to say the focus should be on what different groups have in common (57%) rather than what makes different groups unique (26%). Hispanics also share this view by a margin of 54% to 37%.
Blacks are more evenly divided: 44% say it’s more important for people to focus on what makes different racial and ethnic groups unique, while roughly the same share (45%) say the focus should be on what different groups have in common.
For the most part, the views of blacks and whites about the best approach to improving race relations do not vary considerably across demographic groups. For example, across educational groups – from those with a high school diploma or less to those with a bachelor’s degree – blacks divide in roughly the same way on this question, and the same is true across educational groupings for whites.
There are significant age gaps, however, when it comes to opinions about focusing on differences vs. similarities. Among white adults, those younger than 30 are more likely than older whites to say that, when it comes to improving race relations, it’s more important for people to focus on the unique characteristics of each group; about four-in-ten (41%) whites ages 18 to 29 say this, compared with 27% of whites ages 30 to 49 and about one-in-five of those ages 50 and older (21%).
Age is also linked to black adults’ views about the best approach to improving race relations, although, among this group, the divide is between those younger than 50 and those who are 50 or older. Among blacks ages 18 to 49, more say the focus should be on what makes each racial and ethnic group unique (54% among those ages 18 to 29 and 50% among those ages 30 to 49). Among older blacks, particularly those ages 65 and older, more say the focus should be on what different racial and ethnic groups have in common.
Blacks and whites differ over the amount of attention paid to race and racial issues
When asked if they think the amount of attention paid to race and racial issues in our country today is too much, too little or about right, Americans are divided: 36% say there is too much and about as many (35%) say there is too little. Roughly a quarter (26%) say the amount of attention paid to these issues is about right.
Blacks’ and whites’ views on this issue are in sharp contrast. Blacks are about twice as likely as whites to say too little attention is paid to race and racial issues (58% vs. 27%). And while only 22% of blacks say there is too much focus on race, 41% of whites say this is the case. Among Hispanics, half think too little attention is paid to race and racial issues, while 25% say too much attention is paid to those issues and 23% say it is about the right amount.
For whites, views about the amount of attention given to race and racial issues are strongly linked to partisanship. About six-in-ten (59%) white Republicans say too much attention is paid to these issues these days; just 11% say there is too little attention, and 26% say the amount of attention is about right. In contrast, about half of white Democrats (49%) say not enough attention is being paid to race and racial issues, while 21% say the amount is too much and 28% say it is about right. Still, white Democrats are far less likely than black Democrats (62%) to say too little attention is being paid to these issues.
Whites’ opinions about how much focus there is on race and racial issues in the country today are also linked to age. Whites who are younger than 30 are far less likely than older whites to say there is too much focus on race; about a quarter (23%) of whites ages 18 to 29 say this, compared with at least four-in-ten whites ages 30 to 49 (42%), 50 to 64 (44%) and 65 or older (48%). There are no significant demographic differences among blacks on this question.
Most say Obama at least tried to improve race relations
In the days following Barack Obama’s election in 2008, voters were somewhat optimistic that the election of the nation’s first black president would lead to better race relations. Today, as Obama finishes his second term, about a third (34%) of Americans say Obama has made progress toward improving race relations, and about three-in-ten (28%) say the president has tried but failed to make progress in this area. A sizable share (25%) say he has made race relations worse, while 8% say Obama has not addressed race relations.
Assessments of Obama’s performance on race relations vary considerably along racial and ethnic lines. About half (51%) of black Americans think the president has made progress toward improving race relations; 34% say he tried but failed to make progress. Very few blacks say Obama made race relations worse (5%) or that he didn’t address the issue (9%).
Among whites, however, about a third (32%) say the president has made things worse when it comes to race relations; 28% say Obama has made progress toward improving race relations and 24% say he tried but failed. Hispanics’ assessments of Obama’s performance on race relations are not as negative as those of whites, but are also not as positive as those offered by blacks. Roughly four-in-ten (38%) Hispanics say the president made progress toward improving race relations, and about as many (36%) say he has tried but failed to make progress; 13% of Hispanics say he has made things worse. About one-in-ten (9%) blacks and 7% of Hispanics say Obama has not addressed race relations.
Among blacks, opinions about Obama’s handling of race relations vary primarily along educational lines. While about half of black Americans with some college (52%) or with a high school education or less (54%) say the president has made progress toward improving race relations, fewer among those with a bachelor’s degree (40%) say Obama has had success in this area. Still, at least eight-in-ten black Americans across educational attainment say the president has at least tried to make progress toward improving race relations, even if he hasn’t necessarily succeeded.
Assessments of Obama among whites are strongly linked to partisanship and ideology. About six-in-ten (63%) white Republicans say the president has made race relations worse, a view that is shared far more widely by white Republicans who describe their political views as conservative (71%) than among Republicans who say they are politically moderate or liberal (44%). In contrast, about half (52%) of white – and black (55%) – Democrats, including somewhat similar shares of those who are liberal and moderate or conservative, say the president has made progress toward improving race relations.
Far more blacks than whites say they talk about race-related topics with family, friends
For blacks, far more than for whites, conversations about race are fairly commonplace. Overall, about a quarter of Americans say they often talk about race relations or racial inequality with friends and family, far less than the share saying they talk about the presidential election campaign (59%) or the economy (45%) with the same frequency. About a quarter (27%) say immigration is often a topic of conversation with friends and family.
Blacks are about twice as likely as whites to say the topics of racial inequality and race relations often come up in conversations with friends and family. About four-in-ten black adults say racial inequality (41%) and race relations (38%) are frequent topics of conversation, compared with about one-in-five whites. Among Hispanics, about three-in-ten (31%) say they often talk about racial inequality and about a quarter (26%) say they often talk about race relations.
In contrast, about the same shares of whites (46%), blacks (46%) and Hispanics (42%) say they often talk to friends and family about the economy, while Hispanics are more likely than the other two groups to say immigration is a frequent topic of conversation for them (37% vs. 27% of whites and 16% of blacks).
Blacks and whites offer different assessments of their interactions with people of the other race
Most whites who have some daily contact with people who are black describe their interactions as mainly positive. Blacks give a somewhat less positive assessment of their contact with whites. Fully 70% of whites who have a least a little bit of contact with blacks characterize their interactions as very friendly. Black adults are 20 percentage points less likely to describe interactions with whites that way: half of those who have at least a little contact with whites in their daily life describe these interactions as very friendly, while about four-in-ten (41%) would call them “somewhat friendly.” Relatively few in either group would go so far as to call their interactions “unfriendly” (2% among whites and 7% among blacks).
The survey also asked Hispanics about their interactions with people who are black. Among the |
online. Presently, there are only a limited number of platforms accepting bitcoin or bitcoin debit cards, but companies like ZebPay tend to make digital currency payments possible for most consumers in the area.
The analyst also explains that remittances are a particularly big deal in India, and are likely to further bitcoin’s presence even further:
“Remittance industry is another sector where Bitcoin is soon going to play a huge role in the country. India is known to have the largest remittance market, receiving about $70 billion each year. The Indian diaspora spread across the world is known to send money to their immediate families and relatives back home. The remittance volumes also show a significant increase during festivals. While some people already use Bitcoin for cross-border transactions, the Indian Bitcoin companies are gradually moving to capture their share of the market as well.”
As we’ve seen in the past, activity in Asia can have massive effects on the bitcoin price. Granted usage increases in India, the second most populous country in the world, activity is likely to bear positive results, and with continued help from China, bitcoin may truly be on its way to becoming a global currency.
Do you foresee the bitcoin price rising heavily in the coming weeks? Post your comments below!
Images courtesy of Trade Block, indiabitcoin.comCenarius is designed to be a support that really wants to be in a "Battlecruiser" comp - where you want to really make one character, like Illidan, become an unstoppable and unbeatable force.If the holder of Horn of Cenarius dies, his team is in trouble because most of his power comes from the Horn, so when that Hero dies, it's like losing 1.5 Heroes.Cenarius's shield is much more powerful than his straight up healing - and because of that, he cannot sustain really long team 5v5 teamfights since the shield won't last forever, his healing isn't strong, and he'll run out of mana quicker than most supports; this is specifically true before he gets to level 10, where his ultimates greatly increase his capacity for healing.His team should focus on letting the holder of the Horn gang up on stranded enemies - the Horn will make a strong 1v1 fighter out of any character... except maybe Abathur. But a Symbioted and Horned character is one unkillable fighting machine.Cenarius is very mobile but outside of being quick, he has no escapes. He can't teleport, slide, or jump anywhere. If he becomes trapped, he can be in trouble.He is also a strong solo laner. His abilities all can target minions, so he can Tree Guard one to summon a Treant that will destroy opposing waves or Healing Touch a catapult to make it survive longer and deal more damage. And if he holder of the Horn is another lane, it's like Cenarius is there the entire time healing them.Cenarius is a melee hero with pretty high health for a support Hero, has a fairly low mana pool, high cool downs, and one of the lowest damaging autoattacks in the game. You have to be less careful about his positioning and more careful of what you're doing with him - you need to be frugal with when and who you target your spells with and be very aware of who has your Horn. Cenarius requires a lot of planning and teamwork to get the most out of him., all the numbers all obviously need to be tweaked. If something is too powerful, it probably is. If something is too weak, it probably is. I haven't played with him, so I don't know exactly what everything should be - I just know how I want him to be played.The numbers are in and Marvel's Spider-Man: Homecoming has just posted the third largest opening for a superhero movie ever in China with a spectacular $70.8M, which means it's now surpassed Wonder Woman!
Following an outstanding start in China on Friday, Spider-Man: Homecoming has swung its way to a spectacular $70.8 million weekend, which is the third-biggest opening weekend for a superhero movie ever in the Middle Kingdom. Only Avengers: Age of Ultron ($115.8M) and
The studios are hoping the picture can clear $100 million in the coming weeks, but that may prove to be easier said than done as heavy competition is on the way in the form of 20th Century Fox's War for the Planet of the Apes, which hits theaters next weekend. The Amazing Spider-Man 2 collected in 2014. Well, with great power comes great responsibility and it looks like this iteration of Peter Parker is more than up to the task.Following anin China on Friday,has swung its way to a spectacular $70.8 million weekend, which is the third-biggest opening weekend for a superhero movie ever in the Middle Kingdom. Only($115.8M) and Captain America: Civil War ($93.6M) have performed better in their first frames.The studios are hoping the picture can clear $100 million in the coming weeks, but that may prove to be easier said than done as heavy competition is on the way in the form of 20th Century Fox's, which hits theaters next weekend. The Hollywood Reporter predicts that despite the new releases, the Jon Watts-directed feature should easily clear that number, which would also put it past the $94.4 million total its predecessorcollected in 2014.
Wonder Woman ($816.3M) to become the sixth-highest grossing movie of the year. The Tom Holland-led blockbuster can now set its sights on Guardians of the Galaxy Vol. 2 ($863.3M) to become the highest-grossing superhero movie of the year as well as the fourth-highest grossing film overall. Certainly not a bad haul for a kid from Queens.
Amongst Spider-Man films, Spider-Man ($821.7M) and 2004's Spider-Man 2 ($783.8M). Domestically, it ranks fourth overall, behind all three films in the beloved Raimi trilogy, but ahead of the divisive Webb duology. It's unclear whether it will surpass Spider-Man 3 ($890.9M) as it is currently projected for a final tally in the $880 million range, but it's certainly within the realm of possibility - as is $900 million - if it continues to hold strong in China.
In other box office news, New Line and Warner Bros.' It is one of the biggest success stories of the year. The Andy Muschietti-helmed horror remake had a monstrous debut, grossing over $117 million stateside (a figure that could possibly go up past $120 million when the actuals come in tomorrow) and $62 million internationally, which brings its global sum to well past $179.1 million.
So, what do you guys think? Sound off with your thoughts below! Overall, the Marvel/Sony co-production has earned over $823 million worldwide ($327.7M domestic, $495.3M international) and has surpassed Warner Bros.'($816.3M) to become the sixth-highest grossing movie of the year. The Tom Holland-led blockbuster can now set its sights on($863.3M) to become the highest-grossing superhero movie of the year as well as the fourth-highest grossing film overall. Certainly not a bad haul for a kid from Queens.Amongst Spider-Man films, Homecoming is currently the second-highest grossing Spidey film ever worldwide (not accounting for inflation), finally passing both 2002's($821.7M) and 2004's($783.8M). Domestically, it ranks fourth overall, behind all three films in the beloved Raimi trilogy, but ahead of the divisive Webb duology. It's unclear whether it will surpass($890.9M) as it is currently projected for a final tally in the $880 million range, but it's certainly within the realm of possibility - as is $900 million - if it continues to hold strong in China.In other box office news, New Line and Warner Bros.'is one of the biggest success stories of the year. The Andy Muschietti-helmed horror remake had a monstrous debut, grossing over $117 million stateside (a figure that could possibly go up past $120 million when the actuals come in tomorrow) and $62 million internationally, which brings its global sum to well past $179.1 million.So, what do you guys think? Sound off with your thoughts below!
A young Peter Parker/Spider-Man (Tom Holland), who made his sensational debut in Captain America: Civil War, begins to navigate his newfound identity as the web-slinging super hero in Spider-Man: Homecoming. Thrilled by his experience with the Avengers, Peter returns home, where he lives with his Aunt May (Marisa Tomei), under the watchful eye of his new mentor Tony Stark (Robert Downey, Jr.). Peter tries to fall back into his normal daily routine – distracted by thoughts of proving himself to be more than just your friendly neighborhood Spider-Man – but when the Vulture (Michael Keaton) emerges as a new villain, everything that Peter holds most important will be threatened.Photo: Dan Carney
A steering wheel is for guiding a car wherever it needs to go. Plus it has the always-handy control for the horn. Over the years it has gained an airbag and a few extras like volume control for the radio and cruise control buttons depending on the model.
Formula One drivers aren't everyday commuters. They contend with a dozen buttons, five rotary switches, four scroll wheels and eight back-of-the-wheel paddles.
Photo: Dan Carney
ADVERTISEMENT Thanks for watching! Visit Website
Renault Sport Infiniti test driver Nicholas Latifi walked us through some of the functions of this $60,000 carbon fiber wonder at this weekend's U.S. Grand Prix in Austin, Texas.
The primary control is the central rotary knob, which the team calls the "cooker" knob because it reminds them of an oven timer. It lets the driver switch among menu items on the wheel's built-in display screen.
ADVERTISEMENT Thanks for watching! Visit Website
ADVERTISEMENT Thanks for watching! Visit Website
Photo: Dan Carney
It includes the necessary "fail" modes for resetting the car's computers when things go awry. Another position sets the car's systems for times when it is driving behind the safety car.
There is a button to provide the driver with water to drink, an "overtake" button for a boost of extra oomph from the car's Infiniti hybrid-electric assist motor, a "recharge" button to top off that system's batteries during less critical times, and one to limit the car's speed during pit stops.
Drivers can adjust the bias of the brakes, front to rear, and can adjust the differential to optimize traction for corner entry, corner exit and for high-speed corners.
Photo: Dan Carney
The paddles not only change gears, but also operate the clutch on race starts and pit stops. They also trigger the car's low-aerodynamic drag mode for passing.
The most crucial button of all on this remarkable piece of equipment may be the purple one. That sets the car to the best settings for post-victory burn outs! We hope it gets a good workout.IT’S one of Scotland’s finest glens, the gateway to some of the best hills in the Central Highlands and a place that was close to the heart of a Celtic princess.
Glen Etive has been one of my favourite Scottish glens, ever since I discovered the story of Deirdre of the Sorrows, a first century Pictish princess who was betrothed to the High King of Ulster before fleeing to Scotland and Etive-side with her lover, Naoise, one of the Three Sons of Uisneach.
Celtic tales tell of her love of these hills, and of her heartbreak at having to leave them behind to eventually return to Ulster and her fate.
My fondness for the tale is stems from the possibility that Naoise (neesha) forms the Celtic original of my own surname. Yes, I know, it’s all a bit pathetic but there you go…
Despite my interest in Deirdre’s lover, it’s easy to understand her passion for Glen Etive. Steep-sided hills rise on either side of it, a single-track road runs from its high point on the Rannoch Moor for some 14 miles/23 k to the head of Loch Etive, a sea-loch that bites its way greedily into the jumbled landscape of Argyll.
The River Etive is a cascading, tumbling watercourse that has been described as the finest canoeing river in Scotland and it commands cult status among Scotland’s paddlers.
Two hundred and sixty years ago the glen was considerably more inhabited than it is today, and a track made its way down the south side of Loch Etive as far as Taynuilt.
From 1847 a steamer service from Oban sailed up Loch Etive to the now derelict pier where the modern road ends. It’s certainly a quieter place today but old jetty at the head of the loch is still a magnificent spot, a place to linger and consider the scene before you.
Savagely steep slopes lead to the Munro of Ben Starav on one side and the Corbett of Beinn Trilleachean on the other while ahead of you rise the equally steep slopes of another Corbett, Stob Dubh.
Further up the glen the classic view of the two Buachailles, the twin herdsmen of Etive, with the Lairig Gartain separating them, dominates everything else, while the big hills of the Blackmount Deer Forest spread out on your right.
On the other side of the glen the Stob Coire Sgreamhach edge of the Bidean nam Bian massif gives way to the long ridge of Beinn Maol Chalum and the Munros of Glen Creran, Beinn Sgulaird and Beinn Fhionnlaidh.
Few glens in Scotland offer such a phenomenal wealth of hillwalking opportunities in a hugely inspiring landscape. Deirdre’s passion is easy to understand, her love of a land that would have made her weep with longing.
But today many people who love Glen Etive are weeping with frustration. Some residents of the glen are suggesting the glen is being “destroyed” by wild campers and partygoers.
Mark and Phillipa Shone, who live in the glen, have taken pictures showing the mess left behind by campers. They have also set up a Facebook page, ‘Glen Etive – The Dirty Truth’, to expose the crass behaviour.
Anyone who is familiar with Glen Etive, or any number of other highland glens and lochsides, will be aware of the current problem. Groups of people setting up large camps close to the roadside, building fires and barbeques, and then leaving sackfuls of rubbish behind them. Quite often they will also abandon the cheap camping gear (so-called “festival camping’ gear) too.
We live in a throwaway society, as was witnessed by the thousands of tents that were left behind after T in the Park, and it would appear that disposable attitude has now spread to Scotland’s wilder areas.
Several years ago the Loch Lomond & Trossachs National Park created byelaws to deal with such unruly campers. Such draconian action appears to have worked – for the eastern shores of Loch Lomond that is. The downside is that the original perpetrators appear to have moved on to other areas.
I wasn’t in favour of those byelaws, arguing that existing legislation should have been used to prosecute the perpetrators, but it would appear that the police couldn’t, or wouldn’t, find the resources to deal with the problem.
And this also appears to be part of the problem in Glen Etive, and many other ‘wild camping’ hotspots around the highlands where litter-lout campers park their car on the verge of the road, hump their camping gear out of the boot, and then light bonfires to ward off the cold and the midges.
They then leave their rubbish behind, including drink cans and bottles, and make no attempt to cover up the blackened firepits they have created.
Forgetting for the moment the problem of the litter, I’m not sure this type of so-called ‘wild camping’ is strictly legal under the provisions of the Land Reform (Scotland) Act 2003.
The Scottish Outdoor Access Code, is particularly woolly in this respect. It tells us that access rights are for people on foot, on bike or on horseback, but it then goes on to define what kind of behaviour is expected by wild campers without making it clear that ‘car camping’, ie taking camping gear from the boot of a car and setting up camp close by, is not covered by the access rights.
Likewise with fishing. Angling is specifically one of the activities to which access rights do not apply, but drive alongside Loch Lubnaig, Loch Tay, Loch Rannoch, Loch Arkaig and many others and see the number of large tents, bonfires, and semi-permanent camps that are set up on any summer weekend.
And before my email account is bombarded by keen anglers let me say that like hill walkers and climbers most anglers are decent people who clean up afterwards, but are let down by the irresponsible few.
During the debate on Scottish access I urged politicians not to use the term ‘wild camping’. What the legislators wanted to provide for was access for backpackers – a walker who was travelling over a number of days using a small tent for accommodation.
Wild camping, I argued, would lead people to believe it was simply camping outside official camp-sites. This is exactly what has happened and Pandora’s Box has been well and truly opened. It now seems the only recourse open to the various authorities, like the Loch Lomond National Park, is in the form of byelaws.
A similar problem existed in the Cairngorms, in Glen Clunie, and the landowner sealed off the various lay-bys with boulders. A similar action was taken by the NTS years ago along the minor road that led from the A82 to the Clachaig Inn.
Highland councillor Andrew Baxter has called for a meeting between the landowners, public bodies and police in a bid to tackle the problem of litter. He said: “I’m angered that such a beautiful glen might as well be renamed ‘Glen Midden’ because of the lazy and selfish actions of those who think it acceptable to simply drive away, leaving their mess behind.
“It has got even worse since the ban on camping around Loch Lomond was introduced.
“This isn’t real wild camping. What is wild about leaving your car blocking a passing place, emptying the contents of its boot and carrying it less than a hundred metres from the roadside?
“The only thing that’s wild about this camping is how it leaves me and many others when we see how the glen is being destroyed.”
So what’s the answer?
Andrew Baxter has been in touch with councilors in Perth and Kinross, who have experienced similar problems around Loch Rannoch. “They solved the problem with a proactive approach, which included police patrols, the recording of number plates and the direct threat of prosecution,” he said.
“We also need to consider what would happen if camping was banned within a set distance from the road.”
The northern half of Glen Etive is owned by the National Trust for Scotland, and the Trust’s rangers regularly organize litter collections. A Trust spokesperson told me: “This is undoubtedly an issue for us. We share concerns about the mess left behind by irresponsible campers in Glen Etive.
“The Trust takes responsibility for tidying up our land – every year we remove hundreds of bags of rubbish. This work, while clearly vital, diverts staff from important conservation work in the area. It also leaves our charity with the costs for disposing of this rubbish.”
She added: “Over the years, we have tried various approaches to tackle the issue and to try to encourage responsible behaviour and, of course, we talk regularly to our neighbours and relevant agencies about how best to tackle this. However, there are no straightforward solutions.”
There certainly are not. Whatever happens it would appear that innocent law-abiding wild campers, backpackers and anglers will lose out, as they have done on Loch Lomondside where the wild camping ban has been put in place.
Perhaps it’s up to us, as users, to point out to the perpetrators what they’re doing wrong, but are you going to risk a smack on the jaw?
I know of one frustrated camper who noted the car registration numbers of some people who had obviously left behind a mass of rubbish and passed them on to the police but he has no idea if the police acted on it.
I wish Councillor Baxter the best of luck with his meetings and I sincerely hope a reasonable compromise can be found. If not we might all face the possibility of mass camping bans in some of the most delightful areas of Scotland.Top think tank: Reverse Brexit with a second referendum to save the UK's economy
Chancellor Philip Hammond shakes hands with the Secretary-General of the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD), Angel Gurria $image.copyright
A second referendum that reverses Brexit would have a "positive" and "significant" impact on the UK economy, which is on track to be crippled by its EU divorce, an influential think tank claimed today.
Email this article to a friend To send a link to this page you must be logged in.
The latest UK economic survey by the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD) projects economic growth of just 1% next year and warns that the uncertainty caused by the Brexit negotiations is likely to leave the UK without a free-trade agreement with the EU by its official 2019 exit date.
And it said that Britain's economic prospects could be further hit by a "disorderly Brexit" if negotiations are cut short, triggering a sharp reaction by fmarkets, sending the exchange rate to new lows and leading to a downgrade in the UK's sovereign rating.
"Business investment would seize up, and heightened price pressures would choke off private consumption. The current account deficit could be harder to finance, although its size would likely be reduced," the report warned.
There are also risks that Scotland and Northern Ireland could vote to stay in the EU, which would have a "major" impact on the national economy.
But the Paris-based OECD said the UK could dodge those risks through reversing Brexit.
"In case Brexit gets reversed by political decision (change of majority, new referendum, etc), the positive impact on growth would be significant," the report said.
The OECD admitted that Brexit negotiations were difficult to forecast, and could "prove more favourable" than assumed in its report - boosting trade, investment and growth - but stressed that this would require "an ambitious EU-UK agreement and a transition period to allow for adjustment to the new agreement".
"Meantime, however, uncertainty could hamper domestic and foreign investment more than projected and hurt consumption even more were the exchange rate to depreciate further," it added.
Brexit has increased the challenge of reviving labour productivity growth, which the OECD said had come to a "standstill" and made "no meaningful contribution" to UK output since 2007.
The report highlighted that labour productivity was also weakest outside of Greater London and the south-east of England.
This kind of disparity between regions and workers "may lead to, or be the result of, important differences among people in terms of income and wealth, jobs and earnings, and education and skills".
"Well-being inequalities may have been one of the causes of Brexit, as less-educated workers in remote regions might have perceived to benefit less from the European project," it added.
The report put forward a number of recommendations to address productivity and job quality of low-skilled workers, including investment in transport links within and between cities, continued devolution measures, additional training, restricting self-employment to independent entrepreneurs and granting zero-hours contract workers increased job security after three months.
Responding to the OECD report, a Treasury spokesman said: "Increasing productivity is a key priority for this Government, so that we can build on our record employment levels and improve people's quality of life.
"Today, the OECD has recognised the importance of our £23bn National Productivity Investment Fund which will improve our country's infrastructure, increase research and development and build more houses.
"In addition, our reforms to technical education and our ambitious Industrial Strategy will also help to deliver an economy that works for everyone."Busan is a dreamy coastal city in the southeastern end of South Korea, about 200 miles from Seoul. It’s a lovely place that feels slightly less cosmopolitan than Seoul but is filled with beautiful beaches, fresh seafood restaurants, modern art museums and galleries, and of course, plenty of specialty coffee shops. What struck me most about the cafes in South Korea is that so many of them were brand new; many of them had barely been open a few months, or even a few weeks, when I visited this past fall. The scene appears to be growing rapidly, and I can only imagine how many more places there will be to add to this list in a year’s time. Here are just a handful of shops worthy of visiting in Busan.
Matin Coffee Roasters
Cat people and design enthusiasts will appreciate Matin Coffee Roasters, a stunning new cafe and roastery in Busan’s hip Seomyeon neighborhood. The large space is outfitted with beautiful vintage Scandinavian furniture, and the company’s branding and coffee bags star an illustrated cat. “I’ve always liked cats, and I guess I just wanted to add a unique and playful element to the cafe,” owner Jihyun Oh explained.
“Specifically I have a deep interest in caring for street cats, and I wanted to tie that into the cafe somehow, so we donate a portion of our sales each month to a local animal shelter.” Although the concept is a bit sweet and gimmicky (even for me), it’s executed tastefully enough. In addition to house-roasted coffee, there is an impressive offering of homemade sweet treats (Jihyun Oh also owns a bakery, located around the corner from Matin), and the courtyard and garden area outside is ideal for the stylish young clientele to see and be seen.
Cafe Dennis
Hidden in a quiet alleyway in the middle of Busan’s hectic Seomyeon neighborhood, you’d never encounter this modest coffee shop unless you were looking for it. Dennis Oh, the soft-spoken fellow who runs it, intended the cafe to serve as a gathering place for creative people in the neighborhood. Guests can choose espresso drinks or filter coffees from a selection of beans from Seoul’s Felt, and there’s always something pleasant and upbeat playing on the record player. Oh himself seems to be behind the bar most days, and if you feel like striking up a conversation with him, he’ll happily chat with you about coffee, design, and Sydney, where he once lived working as a barista.
Motto Coffee
Motto Coffee is a gem of a shop in busy Mangmi-dong. It’s housed in a brick building with a large parking lot, giving the exterior a strip mall-like vibe that feels somewhat incongruous to its cute, plant-filled interior. The menu is pretty limited, and while they don’t offer filter coffee, the almost extreme simplicity of this shop is what gives it its charm. The open, airy space gets incredible natural light, and it’s a really lovely spot for getting some work done or reading a book.
RBH Coffee
RBH Coffee is one of Busan’s slightly more established roasting companies. With a roastery in Haeundae and a coffee bar in Oncheonjang, RBH plays an active role in Busan’s growing coffee community, offering barista classes and coffee seminars, and providing wholesale coffee to many cafes around the city. Although there has always been an abundance of cafes in Oncheonjang, owner Kyunghun Park wanted to open a true neighborhood cafe serving high-quality coffee catering to younger people in their 20s and 30s. The shop is clean, simple, and modern, with lots of seating and a nice array of design magazines to flip through. Oncheon Stream Park, a lovely place to visit in the spring and summer, is located nearby.
Joanna Han (@joannakarenina) is a Sprudge.com contributor based in New York City. Read more Joanna Han on Sprudge.The Clintons' taxes
Long-awaited, they arrive — when else — at 4:00 p.m. Friday.
The Clintons' joint returns show them earning more than $109 million over a period of seven years.
The biggest source of income is Bill Clinton's speeches — source of $51 million. He made another $30 million from books; Hillary made about $10 million from her book.
Spokesman Jay Carson says, in a statement:
The Clintons have now made public thirty years of tax returns, a record matched by few people in public service. None of Hillary Clinton's presidential opponents have revealed anything close to this amount of personal financial information. What the Clintons' tax returns show is that they paid more than $33,000,000 in federal taxes and donated more than $10,000,000 to charities over the past eight years. They paid taxes and made charitable contributions at a higher rate than taxpayers at their income level.
You can download them, and see a summary, here. They include detailed returns for 2000 through 2006, and the request for an extension for last year.
If you're poring over them, let me know what you find.
ALSO: The returns went early to Drudge — who has been extremely hard on Hillary for months — as good proof as any since the time of Machiavelli that it's better to be feared than loved.
UPDATE: The interesting part, of course, is the roughly $18 million that the summary doesn't account for -- (though it is accounted for in the returns).
See AlsoI was using a bit more Dynamat than you did and initially I had the impression that it cleaned up the bass a bit, but after a while I had to admit that this was just something I 'wanted' to hear. So, as far as I am concerned I would say it does not seem to be really effective.
Something like that happens quite often to me. Right after a mod I am happy with the result, only to realize a day or so and some prolonged listening later that the mod wasn't that much of an achievement after all and only then my brain gets really sensitive to the weaknesses again. And this is also the reason why I like to'see' the effects of mods reflected in my measurements.
Click to expand...Hi, I’m Senior Product Manager for BBC iPlayer on TV.
As of today, BBC iPlayer is available on the Xbox One console. As announced, we have been working closely with Microsoft to bring our new version of iPlayer to this device and I am very excited for Xbox One users to get access to BBC iPlayer.
As Marcus Parnwell blogged in August, we have a standard HTML 5 based application that we are looking to roll-out across all platforms. Whilst we have had to make some device specific customisations (more on that below), we have been able to provide the same experience for Xbox One users as all other users of this new version of BBC iPlayer. This has a number of benefits:
- The look and feel is the same, so our users have a similar experience as other TVs, YouView, TV streamers (like Now TV) and on Blu-ray players.
- The ongoing maintenance is more streamlined and easier to manage.
- We can bring new features and channels (like BBC Radio 1) to the platform in an easier way.
Voice control
Users who saw iPlayer running on the Xbox 360 and who use Kinect will know that we made use of voice and gesture in that version.Zamp: ‘Juve in pole for Dybala’
By Football Italia staff
Palermo President Maurizio Zamparini says Juventus are in pole position for Paulo Dybala, but haven’t offered enough.
It was reported this morning that the Old Lady were being outbid for the player by Arsenal, and the Rosanero patron hints that could be the case.
“Right now, Juve are in pole position,” Zamparini told France Football.
“They want to close the deal in a week. But, of course, I want the best possible deal. Dybala is being auctioned.
“The Bianconeri have offered me €35m, put I want €40m or more. I’m also dealing with Arsenal.
“PSG [Paris Saint-Germain] have requested information from Dybala’s agent, they know the player is on the market.
“They’re interested in Paris, just as they are at Arsenal, Manchester City, Juventus, Inter, Roma and Napoli.”“What a piece of junk!” Luke Skywalker might not appreciate things past their prime, but for open-minded film studios, recycling old props and costumes helps to cut back on production costs, or, when the muses impart their blessing, creates something entirely new. The resourceful folks behind Star Wars definitely tapped into their inner Jawa when they rummaged through the storage closet, pulling up all sorts of used odds-and-ends that gave sharp-eyed audiences a sense of déjà vu.
1) Triple Your Greedo, Triple Your Fun
Star Wars’ $11 million budget — in the 1970s, at least — was enough to make 20th Century Fox’s executives break out into nervous sweats when loosening the studio purse strings, yet despite having so much money at one’s disposal, the magnitude of director George Lucas’ grand design required some painstaking penny-pinching. In screenwriter and film critic David Pirie’s 1981 book, Anatomy of the Movies, a mere $300,000 was allocated toward costumes (compared to nearly one-third of the budget spent on special effects and spaceship miniatures). It was clear where the film’s priorities lay, and nowhere else was this more apparent than Han Solo’s confrontation with Jabba the Hutt in Docking Bay 94.
Among the crime lord’s cronies lurking in the shadows of the Millennium Falcon are three Rodians all resembling Greedo — of whom was shot dead in the cantina only a few short scenes before. This might have been confusing for many of us watching Star Wars for the first time, but a little behind-the-scenes trivia reveals that more than one actor (Paul Blake and Maria De Aragon) portrayed the ill-fated bounty hunter, meaning there were duplicates of the costume on hand. So when the Jabba scene called for some alien thugs, it was no doubt more cost-effective to recycle the Greedo suits rather than create entirely new ones.
2) Who Gave Bossk That Spacesuit?
It isn’t uncommon for studios to raid each other’s prop and costume departments for secondhand goods, and in The Empire Strikes Back, a small handful of viewers were quick to spot some sci-fi duds borrowed from another popular series. The Trandoshan bounty hunter Bossk’s yellow jumpsuit was worn by a spaceman in the Doctor Who fourth season serial “The Tenth Planet.” In fact, variations of it have appeared in both A New Hope and Return of the Jedi, donned by various spacers (most notably fan-favorite smuggler BoShek) and Rebel A-Wing pilots, respectively. The suits aren’t unique creations, however — they’re all High-Altitude Windak Pressure Suits that were utilized in Britain’s Royal Air Force during the 1960s. How’s that for pop culture and military history?
3) IG-88 Walked into a Cantina…
Among fans, there’s no denying IG-88’s status as the second most-feared bounty hunter next to Boba Fett: he’s intimidatingly tall, ruthlessly efficient in his line of work, and bears an unnerving resemblance to a skeleton. With qualities like these you’d assume the design was intentional, but his production origin actually stems from a simple background prop. IG-88’s cylindrical head was originally a part of the distillery setup seen in the cantina in A New Hope. This, in addition to numerous recycled bric-a-brac, were pieced together to form his industrial, rigid appearance (a complete departure from concept artist Ralph McQuarrie’s streamlined, if not elegant, design). Though if you really want to get technical, any aerospace engineering aficionado would happily point out that IG-88’s noggin is a component of the combustion assembly in a Rolls-Royce Derwent jet engine.
4) Hoth Couture
If there’s anything a Rodian seemingly loves more than the thrill of the hunt, it’s a snazzy vest. The Greedo doppelgangers hanging out at Jabba’s Palace in Return of the Jedi share their species’ fashion proclivity, but closer, pause-button scrutiny shows that we’ve seen these vests before. Brought from Hoth all the way to Tatooine, the Rodians sport the same vests worn by Princess Leia and other Echo Base staffers in The Empire Strikes Back, although in this instance colored a muted orange. It’s that trademark diamond pattern — you can’t miss it!
5) CZ’s Tops
As fleeting as his appearance was in A New Hope, there’s no missing the addled, cross-eyed droid CZ-3 (portrayed by C-3PO performer Anthony Daniels) aimlessly wandering a Mos Eisley street as Luke and Obi-Wan Kenobi make their way toward Docking Bay 94. Six years later in Return of the Jedi, the same costume would be used again, renamed CZ-4 and now one of Jabba’s overworked — and perpetually terrified — droid servants. This time he could be seen more prominently than before, first lying in a heap in the droid torture chamber and then right before the Hutt’s entourage sets off for the Great Pit of Carkoon.
Steven Romano is a writer, a geek culture enthusiast and, above all, a longtime fan of the galaxy far, far away. Landspeeder, don’t bantha, over to his blog and Twitter at @Steven_Romano.Hard times have befallen Scott Stapp, the frontman for Creed. Today, he revealed that he is completely broke and has even had to live in his truck for a stretch.
Stapp posted a video (which you can watch below) to Creed's Facebook page where, over the course of nearly 16 minutes, he hopes to clear up some rumors that have been circulating and set the record straight. The problems, he said, started about eight weeks ago when he discovered that a large amount of money was missing.
"I'm under some kind of pretty vicious attack," he said. "There are people who have taken advantage and stolen money from me, and they're trying to discredit me, slander me... Someone had used my information and changed my online passwords to my bank accounts and transferred all the money out my bank accounts so I had nothing."
He also said that the IRS has frozen his bank accounts "two or three times" due to a clerical error, and that it will take approximately 10 months to clear up the issue. |
TKTK, but it comes out the other side with feathers intact. Never a bomb, but frequently a solid roll player, the giant bird twins did work all weekend as an efficiently costed clock that often required more than one answer to escape. Expect the gains towards $15 to solidify through the early part of the week.
ADVERTISEMENT:
Despite being objectively less powerful than Sarkhan or Nissa, Sorin’s ability to slot neatly into the dominant Abzan decks and to help grind out games through life link bonuses or double bat activations was frequently a key strategy in pushing past the last few removal spells and on to victory. Now proudly uttered in the same breath as Elspeth, and often found boosting her soldiers, Sorin, Solemn Visitor should have little trouble heading towards $30 this week.
Speaking of Elspeth, Sun’s Champion, she’s not going anywhere quite yet. The format isn’t quite as aggro as expected in the early weeks, and she’s still doing good work even without Sphinx’s Revelation backup.
ADVERTISEMENT:
Mantis Rider drew blood over and over again at PTKTK and should easily hold $7-8 as a central soldier for the variety of Jeskai brews.
THE INCUMBANTS
Any uncertain about the dominance of the best cards from Theros block must now be put aside, or at least for this group of powerful staples that made up 4 of the top 6 most popular cards in the Top 8. All of these cards clearly deserve their current price tags and should be neutral to rising heading out of the weekend:
Thoughtseize might have been bad had dedicated aggro decks made a stronger showing, but paying 2 life to get rid of key draw spells, planewalkers and heavy hitting mid-range creatures was good all weekend long.
Though green decks were less dominant than many feared coming into the event, Sylvan Caryatid still did a ton of work all weekend fixing mana problems and setting the stage for victory in the hands of both Green Devotion and Jeskai Combo players.
With so many powerful mid-range creatures and planeswalkers on display, Hero’s Downfall stood strong as the de facto kill spell of standard this weekend.
Siege Rhino might have won the tournament, but Goblin Rabblemaster still scored thousands of points of damage across the event hall this weekend. With Jeskai blends emerging as a powerful and flexibility cluster of archetypes across the top tables, we can expect the best Goblin printed in years to hold his role as a $15+ staple.
THE CHALLENGERS
These cards made their presence felt all weekend and are on deck to be a big part of the evolving metagame despite not having the full spotlight this weekend:
Sarkhan, Dragonspeaker was all over the top 64, despite now showing up in vast quantities in the top 8. His power now confirmed, we can expect Sarkhan to maintain a $40+ price point as Jeskai Wins, Jeskai Control and G/R players all find ways to put him to use at various levels of standard play.
Coming at ya straight out of Theros Block events, Prognostic Sphinx shared on camera time with Pearl Lake Ancient as the control finishers of choice in a world without Aetherling and a cadre of top pros who refused to go Esper to make use of Elspeth.
Pearl Lake Ancient: Despite UB Control’s inability to close out key games on camera this weekend, it will surprise few if PLA manages to find a home in a retooled control build at some other prominent tournament this fall. It’s no Aetherling or Elspeth, but the big body, resistance to point removal and potential for life gain shenanigans has proven the mythic is likely worth closer to $5 than $1.50.
It may have fizzled out in Top 8 but Jeskai Ascendancy based combo decks actually performed reasonably well across the tournament. Though the deck is clearly more fragile in Standard than it is in Modern, enough turn 4 kills were still thrown down by the likes of Lee Shi Tian, Dave Williams and other top pros to ensure this deck’s centrepiece holds value in the $5-8 unless the metagame shifts away.
Coming out the other end of the Pro Tour tunnel, we’re facing a diverse and grindy metagame that rewards careful deck construction, flexibility and well considered play. In short, this is a skill testing format, and the stage is set for further innovation as the season progresses. Think you’ve got what it takes to crack the secret formula? First you need to get past my Super Villain (Villainous Wealth Ramp) deck…..bwahahahahah!
James Chillcott is the CEO of ShelfLife.net, The Future of Collecting, Senior Partner at Advoca, a designer, adventurer, toy fanatic and an avid Magic player and collector since 1994.
ADVERTISEMENT:Diagnosing the Blackhawks' defensive issues has never been an easy thing to do. Even after a disastrous effort against Vancouver on Wednesday night, the team's overall numbers are quite strong, yet that performance was full of the things that have built up angst in the fan base: sloppy passes, poor positioning, a general inability to clear the zone.
So we've been hearing a lot about trades lately, even though the team's issues go far beyond one or two spots on the roster. Johnny Oduya and Michal Rozsival get the brunt of our frustration these days, but it would be naive to assume that removing them from the equation would magically solve what ails the team. When spacing and organization are issues, that's not something one guy -- or at least one attainable guy -- can address. Chris Chelios ain't walking through that door.
So when we talk about the Blackhawks making a deal before the March 2 deadline, it's important to keep that in mind. Whoever the team acquires won't be a Shea Weber-type superstar, and that means the biggest issues with the team's zone-clearing execution will need to be addressed from within. I don't think it's any coincidence that Chicago's biggest issue is consistency -- go look at the tape from the Anaheim game, or the ending of the St. Louis game -- the 'Hawks have top-level defense in them.
Executing consistently has been an issue, though, particularly since the calendar turned to 2015. We can attribute some of that to the usual malaise that seemingly comes over the franchise each year, but things have felt a bit more dire in recent weeks. So while the team could potentially stand pat and hope to figure things out -- it's still a top-3 defense overall this season -- it's getting harder to believe that a pivotal year in the Toews/Kane era will be wasted by an unwillingness to deal.
That means a trade seems possible, if not likely, even as the 'Hawks stare at some major cap limitations. While such a deal, presumably for a veteran defenseman, wouldn't solve everything wrong in Chicago, it could be the extra ingredient the team needs to get its zone-clearing efforts back on track.
Money is obviously the big issue, as the team realistically can't coax more than $1.5-1.6 million in cap space out of the current roster. That would be enough to acquire a decent player, but any significant addition would likely require the team to free up further cap space. If moving players off the NHL roster is a deal-breaker, the 'Hawks don't have as many options for serious improvement.
The most obvious option to shed salary off the roster seems to be Andrew Shaw, who's falling out of favor around these parts and could presumably fetch a decent draft pick or two. That could free up as much as $2 million in extra space, which brings you to between $3-4 million available and creates a lot more possibilities, like the ones you'll see below.
So with an extremely important caveat that someone like Shaw would need to traded to make these guys feasible, here are five defensemen rumored to be available who would be in the Blackhawks' potential price range:
Contract: $3.3 million cap hit through 2014-15
Stats: 36 points (6G, 26A) in 53 games; +1.5 percent Corsi relative
This is probably the ideal scenario for the 'Hawks, who could use a talented veteran without a significant financial commitment. Franson is just that, an upcoming unrestricted free agent with a $3.3 million salary who's played quite well for the Maple Leafs this season. His right-handed shot would be welcomed on the blue line, he's among the league leaders in hits and his possession stats aren't terrible despite playing for Toronto.
The biggest problem with Franson is that he's also the ideal scenario for several other teams. If the 'Hawks get tugged into a bidding war with the likes of Detroit, Los Angeles and other prospective suitors, the asking price on one of the top available (affordable) defensemen could go through the roof.
Contract: $2.75 million through 2014-15
Stats: 18 points (2G, 16A) in 50 games; +2.0 percent Corsi relative
Another solid veteran on an expiring deal, Sekera seems like one of the prominent names most likely to be dealt. The Hurricanes probably don't want to let him walk for nothing in the offseason, and will get a chance to recoup some value now by shipping out the 28-year-old.
Sekera's numbers this season aren't spectacular, but he's only a year removed from a 44-point season and has done a solid job driving possession in a pairing with Justin Faulk this season. He's not playing quite as well as he did last season and he lacks postseason experience (eight games in 2010-11), but Sekera is one of the most attainable guys who could make a discernible difference.
Contract: $3 million through 2014-15
Stats: 5 points (0G, 5A) in 15 games; +5.0 percent Corsi relative
The Senators are trying to re-sign Methot to maintain the pairing with superstar Erik Karlsson, but it seems increasingly likely the team will field calls on the 29-year-old. "I’d be lying to you if I said I wasn’t thinking about it every single day. This kind of stuff is hard to ignore, the potential of being moved is obviously real at this point," Methot told the Ottawa Citizen earlier in the week.
Methot missed the beginning of the season due to a back injury, but has since settled back in as one of Ottawa's top blue liners. The team's possession numbers are way up when he's on the ice, and he's already totaling over 21 minutes per game despite those health issues. If Methot comes significantly cheaper than Franson, which seems possible, then this might be a better route for the 'Hawks.
Contract: $2.7 million through 2014-15
Stats: 22 points (7G, 15A) in 54 games; +3.6 percent Corsi relative
Hahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahaahahahahahahahahahahahahaha
**deep breath **
Hahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahaha
Sigh. Miss you.
Contract: $3.075 million through 2014-15
Stats: 12 points (4G, 8A) in 54 games; +1.5 percent Corsi relative
This could be an opportunity for the 'Hawks to get a somewhat undervalued asset if the Oilers decide to deal Petry, whose underlying numbers are more impressive than the 12 points in 54 games. When the 27-year-old is on the ice, Edmonton's possession numbers go up a couple percent, and that's despite playing over 56 percent of zone starts in the defensive end.
A low shooting percentage has been the primary culprit behind Petry's lack of raw production, and as we've seen recently with Marian Hossa, regression can come hard and fast on that end. The Oilers, as a team, have shot just 5.2 percent when Petry is on the ice, and even if they're not a particularly good offensive team, that's still well below even his career levels in Edmonton (7.4 percent).
So Petry will surely come cheaper than someone like Franson, who has three times as many points, and that could be a chance for the 'Hawks to save some value depending on Edmonton's asking price.
Contract: $3 million through 2014-15
Stats: 22 points (4G, 18A) in 54 games; +2.8 percent Corsi relative
There are a couple problems with bringing Zidlicky to Chicago. (a) His base salary is $3 million, but there's reportedly $1 million in incentives on the deal. If he reaches some of those incentives -- I couldn't find the details online -- then it could really complicate how the team fits him into their payroll. The Devils have the available cap space to swallow whatever incentives Zidlicky might reach, but obviously that's not the case for the 'Hawks. (b) The guy is 38 years old.
However, despite those things, Zidlicky could still make sense for the 'Hawks if the money can be figured out. I know the idea of adding another old guy sounds awful, but Zidlicky's maintained his production well into his 30s and even reached a Stanley Cup Final with New Jersey a few years back. So he could be another experienced option -- which we knows Q likes -- albeit somewhat of a long shot given the aforementioned road blocks.
Bonus: The Nuclear Option
I'm just gonna put it out there, and then immediately bury it because nah that's crazy talk. But you know, the 'Hawks have incredible forward depth these days, and would it really be that crazy to consider dealing a bigger salary like Patrick Sharp or Bryan Bickell to free up even more options this month? Yeah, it's probably crazy. Just thought I'd mention it anyway, since that could open up possibilities like Keith Yandle and Mike Green.Media playback is unsupported on your device Media caption Irish President Michael Higgins: "Without 1916 and the events that surrounded it we would not have achieved our independence"
The Irish president has said he hopes people in Northern Ireland will approach the Easter Rising commemorations "generously".
Events are taking place in Dublin to mark the centenary of the 1916 rebellion against British rule, a seminal moment in Ireland's past.
Some unionists have been reluctant to take part in or support the events.
Michael D Higgins also said the commemorations are an example to the UK of how to reflect on its own history.
The Easter Rising, a brief and militarily unsuccessful republican revolt, is seen by many historians as a significant stepping-stone in the eventual creation of the Republic of Ireland and the partition of the island.
A greater depth of knowledge, President Higgins said, meant the Easter Rising was now being put "in context of what was happening in Europe" 100 years ago.
Sensitivity
"I do think that without 1916, and the events that surrounded it, we would not have achieved our independence," he said in a wide-ranging interview for the BBC.
"It is one of the founding events, without a doubt, and it is of immense significance in terms of where it occurs historically but also symbolically."
President Higgins said the Republic of Ireland's approach to the rising's centenary was one of "ethical sensitivity".
Image caption The Irish president gave a wide-ranging interview to the BBC's Nick Robinson in Dublin
And he added that "it is responsible not to be seeing fears where there are none".
"My great hope, as head of state, is that we will put ourselves into each other's history," he said.
"We must be able to take your version, my version, move into the shoes of the other, and we must be open to changing our versions as new facts, information and analysis become available to us.
"I would hope that people in Northern Ireland will approach these commemorations, and as we commemorate the [Battle of the] Somme, that we'd be able to do so generously."
Challenge
President Higgins said people must not "become a prisoner of the past" and "mustn't allow any distortions of history".
He said everyone's take on history must be open to critique, and that Britain, like Ireland, had to closely examine its past.
"When we decide to address the issue of violence, let us speak of the violence of empire, the violence of state, the violence of insurrection," he said.
"Let's do it all - this is the challenge that people are not rising to.
"Having spent decades revising nationalism, where is the evidence that there is as much energy put into addressing the issue of empire?
"As empires came to establishing their stamp on neighbouring countries, what was the consequences of that?"
Image copyright EPA Image caption Re-enactments of parts of the rising have taken place in the run up to the centenary, with more planned for Sunday
He described the Northern Ireland peace process as "fragile" and an "ongoing project", but added it would be "pessimistic and wrong" to say significant reconciliation had not been achieved.
"There is real reconciliation going on," he said.
"You don't keep picking at the sources of division to undermine what progress you're making in the present in terms of reconciliation."
Earlier this week, the Inniskillings Museum in Enniskillen, County Fermanagh, presented President Higgins with a green harp flag that had been taken by a soldier from Dublin's Liberty Hall during the rising.I’ve been a bit remiss about posting here but as it turns out writing a dissertation is a bit time consuming…and so are world travels :) As a treat to myself for finishing up my dissertation, I spent the month of March traveling in New Zealand. I swam with dolphins, took a helicopter ride over Mount Cook, did tons of hikes, met incredible people, and much to my excitement found tons of mushrooms! On my first day in New Zealand I was lucky enough to be taken around by my friend and fellow mycology PhD student, Renee Johansen, who interestingly enough I met while doing field work in Canada. Renee lives in Auckland and drove me around to some amazing sites where we saw giant Kauri trees, waterfalls, beautiful beaches, and you guessed it… tons of mushrooms!
Of course seeing the Kauri trees and the black sand beach and my first of many waterfalls in New Zealand was amazing, but then I noticed these yellow mushrooms carpeting the moss..
I thought they looked awfully familiar … very similar to the yellow foot chanterelles I know and love from Mendocino. I saw those diagnostic blunt ridges and I knew that they must be some New Zealand species of chanterelles!
I checked with Renee’s advisor Dr. Peter Johnston and he confirmed that it’s a New Zealand species called Cantharellus wellingtonensis. I saw them everywhere around Auckland! Unfortunately I was not able to try them but if anyone has tried them please let me know what they taste like! The other extremely exciting find was I found a stinkhorn in the wild!
I also saw these gorgeous orange mushrooms everywhere in New Zealand. Apparently they are invasive but they sure are pretty :)
On my second day in New Zealand I went north to the Bay of Islands and took a hike to the Haruru Falls.
The waterfalls were beautiful but it was a two hour hike to get there and on the way we found tons of mushrooms!
I was pretty excited to see some ectomycorrhizal fungi all over New Zealand – I found a Thelephora, Rhizopogon, Tapinella, and some sort of pretty Bolete.
Stay tuned to see all the other beautiful mushrooms I found in New Zealand!Engine Bore vs. Stroke
Bore refers to the diameter of a single cylinder and defines the projected surface area of the face of the piston. As bore increases, so does the volume of the cylinder and therefore the amount of air that the cylinder can hold at any given time.
Stroke refers to the length the piston travels from TDC (top dead center) to BDC (bottom dead center). As stroke length increases, volume of the cylinder also increases in reference to the amount of air that can be drawn/forced during the intake stroke.
The ratio of bore diameter to stroke length is known as the bore/stroke ratio. A “square” engine will have a bore/stroke ratio of 1, meaning the bore diameter is equal to the stroke length. An “under square” engine has a bore/stroke ratio less than 1, meaning the stroke length is larger than the bore diameter. And an “over square” engine has a bore/stroke ratio greater than 1, meaning the bore is larger than the stroke.
Keeping in mind that there are exceptions, most diesel engines are under square, meaning they've been designed with a stroke that is longer than the engine bore diameter. This is because a relatively long stroke promotes torque production, especially at low engine speeds. As stroke length increases, the lever arm created between the connecting rod and crankshaft also increases (called the crank throw). The additional leverage creates a greater moment (engineering equivalent of torque) on the crankshaft and this translates into more torque at the flywheel.
The downside of a long stroke is increased piston velocities at any given engine speed. The best way to visualize this is to compare two engines. Imagine engine A has a 3.5” stroke, while engine B has a 4.5” stroke. At 2,000 rpm, the crankshafts are rotating at exactly the same speed. However, engine B's piston must travel 4.5 inches in the same amount of time that engine A's has to travel 3.5”. Therefore, engine B's piston will be traveling faster as it approaches BDC. The increased piston velocities limit the maximum engine speed that can be safely achieved repeatedly without compromising longevity.
Engine Balance - I6 vs. V8
The internal balance of an engine is divided into two categories - primary balance and secondary balance. Primary balance refers to the balance of the forces created by the piston/rod mass as it changes direction from up to down (and visa versa). An engine that has primary balance will therefore have equal changes in inertia; as one piston changes direction from upwards to downwards, an opposing piston is changing direction from downwards to upwards on the same relative path, but in the opposite direction. The forces then theoretically cancel out if the component masses are identical from cylinder to cylinder. For most engines, this means that manufacturing tolerances and control of component mass are the main factors of primary balance.
Secondary balance is more complex and is dependent on the configuration of the engine. To fully grasp the concept of secondary balance in a rotating engine, it's necessary to first understand the relationship between piston speed and crankshaft angle.
1) The velocity of a piston is fastest for the 180 degrees of crankshaft rotation that it is traveling upwards or downwards in the cylinder. 2) The velocity of a piston is slowest for the 180 degrees of crankshaft rotation where the piston changes direction. During this time, the piston must momentarily stop in order to change direction, then it proceeds to accelerate in the opposite direction.
In a V-8 engine, the combined forces of the pistons on a fast approach are not canceled out by the forces of other pistons changing direction (slow approach). This is inherent to the fact that a V-8 has crank throws 90 degrees apart (with rare exceptions) and 8 pistons. Therefore, there is a positive net force creating a vibration in the vertical plane whose frequency is equal to twice the engine speed (a 90 degree crank throw multiplied by 8 cylinders is 720 degrees, or twice that of one complete engine rotation). Counterweights in the crankshaft (balance shafts) are used to minimize the effects of secondary imbalance.
For the purpose of comparison, an inline 6 engine can be thought of as two 3 cylinder engines. Both configurations utilize crank throws 120 degrees apart. In this arrangement, the combined inertial force of two pistons moving downwards is equal to, and therefore cancels out the inertial force of a third piston traveling upwards. The inertial forces are relative to the position and therefore velocity of each piston, but the net inertial force of the three pistons will always be zero. Therefore, the system inherent experiences secondary balance.
Inline 6, V-8 Advantages & Disadvantages
It is often thought that the architecture of an inline 6 engine favors torque production over a V engine design, when in fact the arrangement of cylinders has little, if anything to do with performance characteristics. However, most inline engines employ longer strokes to compensate for smaller bore diameters since the engines total length (longitudinally) is relatively long. It also often thought that inline engines produce torque at lower engine speeds than V engines, when in fact low engine speed torque is inherent of the diesel cycle and also a benefit of a long piston stroke. The combustion process in a diesel engine yields a long duration "push" on a piston, as opposed to the explosive "punch" a gasoline engine enacts on a piston. The engine speed at which peak torque is produced depends on much more than the configuration of the engine.
Inline 6 engines are used overwhelmingly by medium and heavy duty truck manufacturers for a variety of reasons. First, the configuration frequently allows for plenty of access to perform overhauls and repairs without requiring removal of the engine from the chassis. Secondly, the I-6 is naturally balanced, which produces smooth power generation and minimal internal vibration. Finally, to the benefit of engine manufacturers, an I-6 (being naturally balanced) can be scaled up or down in size with relative ease, reducing costs in design and manufacturing processes.
The I-6 does have a inherent downfalls, the most profound of which is typically low operating speeds. If you've ever been around a tractor-trailer, you may have noticed that the red line is typically in the 1,800 – 2,000 rpm range. The two factors that limit engine speed in inline engines are the long crankshaft and piston stroke. A long crankshaft is subjected to considerably larger torsional deflection than a shorter shaft, and this deflection becomes greater as engine speed increases. Additionally, long strokes translate into faster piston speeds, which can cause excessive wear and reliability concerns at higher engine speeds.
I-6 Diesel Advantages & Disadvantages
Advantages Disadvantages Longer stroke promotes torque output at low engine speeds. Lower operating speeds. Ease of maintenance and/or repair in most applications. Larger torsional stresses applied to the crankshaft. Naturally balanced, contributes to smooth power generation. Maximum bore size limited by engine length (as the bore size increases, so does the length of the engine).
A "V" engine configuration also exhibits inherent advantages and disadvantages. A V engine is significantly shorter than an inline 6 engine of comparable bore and stroke dimensions. As such, V-8 engines tend to fit in space limited applications. Earth moving dump trucks, for example, typically employ large displacement V-12 and greater diesel engines - to meet the power and torque requirements of such vehicles would require a tremendously long inline engine. Pickups and passenger cars are also situations where V engines are favored, the Cummins powered Ram topping the list of exceptions.
The shortened nature of a V-8 engine always requires a shorter crankshaft, which yields favorable results with respect to wear caused by high torsional forces and engine speeds. Higher operating speeds translate into a broader range of usable power and a V-8 is therefore inherently versatile.
V-8 Diesel Advantages & Disadvantages
Advantages Disadvantages Shorter dimensions for a given displacement Natural secondary imbalance Lower torsional forces on crankshaft due to shorter crankshaft length Overall engine width may increase difficulty of maintenance and/or repair due to limited access Higher operating speeds, broader range of usable power
There are obvious exceptions to the principles discussed herein, which warrants the fact that the performance characteristics of an engine design depends on a number of important factors. However, engine configuration alone is only one variable and does not necessarily dictate specific performance characteristics.I’ve had a new experience, one that I had been fortunate enough to avoid since outing myself as transsexual and beginning my transition 15 months ago. For the first time, I felt as if there was something wrong with me. I felt ashamed of who I was; I was embarrassed of my identity as a transsexual and needed to hide it.
The fact that I made it 15 months without feeling this has been made possible by the multitude of accepting, loving, and amazing friends and family members in my life. I recognize this as extraordinary, given the accounts I’ve heard from my trans friends. There are many who experience shame on a daily basis, and it’s one of the reasons 41% of trans individuals have attempted suicide, with even more who consider it an option.
So, what happened… Dating happened.
Dating is a nightmare, and is second only to public restrooms on the list of things that scare me.
I’m not the most proactive OKCupid user, so when a message arrived in my inbox from a well-adjusted woman I found attractive, I was delighted. Several messages and texts later, a date was scheduled over coffee (hot chocolate in my case). We met, we talked, we laughed, and overall the date was a success — save for one comment in the middle that left me confused, upset, and uncertain.
After exhausting the subjects of work and hobbies, she asked me about my general experience with OKCupid. I expressed mixed feelings, as I’ve received numerous messages that I consider creepy, offensive, and rude. Seemingly happy to express a shared experience, she told me ‘I was creeped out by a transvestite that messaged me, he sent me five messages even though I didn’t reply.’ This is where she lost me. The instant this left her mouth I was searching for meaning in her words, and wondering if she understood what she had just said.
My mind got to the “f” in “fuck this,” after which I would begin flipping tables. It stopped at the “f” though, because at face value, I couldn’t refute the creepiness in her statement, for two reasons.
I would also be a bit put off by anyone who messaged me five times without a reply.
I identify as a lesbian, have it clearly indicated that I’m only interested in women (her profile has the same), and am less than pleased when men decide that they would like to message me.
So yes, in this situation, being messaged five times by a male-identified individual is creepy.
However, these things don’t excuse the statement she made or make it any less offensive or questionable. The way the word “transvestite” left her mouth made it clear that this was a strong negative to her, as if they were unpleasant and not to be trusted. Her tone, phrasing, and the fact that she used the word “transvestite” instead of “cross-dresser” left me with the distinct impression that she was uneducated about trans issues, and that the person who had messaged her was likely a trans woman, not a cross-dresser. As we had not yet discussed my identity, this was distressing.
Everyone has an opinion on when a trans individual should out themselves to a potential partner, anywhere from “never” to “the first sentence out of your mouth.” My personal approach to this is being open and proactive about it, so it used to be front and center on my OKCupid profile. This approach, however, resulted in enough creepy, rude, ignorant, and hurtful messages that I removed it. I now vet a person via a first date, and if I think a second date will result, we have a conversation about it. While I don’t believe that being transsexual is a necessary disclosure for friendship, I do believe it’s necessary for a potential romantic partner.
I choose not to live my life hiding away my identity as a transsexual. I’m not ashamed of who I am. This is not something that I need to hide; this does not make me less than. I’m vocal about being transsexual and will not deny it. However, I’m also not blind to the acts of violence and discrimination that happen to trans individuals entirely too frequently. I’m able to minimize these occurrences in my life by being indistinguishable from any other woman you see in your daily life; in other words, I have “passing privilege,” meaning that I am not recognizable as a particular group; in this case, transsexual.
Even though I have the option of disappearing into the crowd and going “stealth,” I want to be an advocate. I write publicly about my experiences and thoughts, correct people when I hear ignorant comments, speak freely about my identity on social media, and openly converse on the subject in public places. There’s an upsetting amount of misinformation floating around, and I want to fix it.
I am privileged, but please don’t misunderstand; I’ve still experienced discrimination because of my identity. I’m constantly scared because of the choices I make and the situations I place myself in. I willingly out myself in unknown situations and it isn’t always fun and supportive. A pretty face doesn’t negate the hate others can have towards a group of people; it just means they didn’t want to punch you in the face prior to outing yourself. I have the privilege of being able to choose my battles: I can decide when I out myself, or if I out myself; if I fear for my safety, I can choose to remain in the closet. This has allowed me to be prepared for every difficult situation I’ve placed myself in; I have my defenses up when I walk into the fray.
This time was different; I wasn’t expecting it. This was the first time it had really shaken me. Experiencing discrimination can easily make me angry, sad, or frustrated, but rarely will it make me doubt my value as a person. I was starting to doubt.
It was clear that she was unaware of my transsexual identity, or that it was even a possibility I might be a trans woman. The privilege of passing often places you in the awkward situation of being insulted to your face. I couldn’t help but think the negative stereotypes I imagined she had in her head about the trans community would be shattered when we discussed my identity.
At that moment, I was faced with a decision: do I use this as a springboard to out myself as transsexual and clear up her statement, or do I continue the date as if nothing was wrong? One thing I did know is that I wanted to have this conversation with her. I needed to know if she understood what the words she said meant. Did she know the difference between a transvestite and a transsexual? Did she mean transsexual? What were her thoughts on the subject? How would this change the positivity that she’d been flooding me with so far?
I don’t expect everyone to be knowledgeable on the subject, or to have the most accurate information. Given the amount of disagreement and misinformation out there, unless you’re actively engaged in the topic (and sometimes even if you are), you may be working with false, out of date, or made up information. I can’t fault someone for being ignorant on a subject, unless they’ve been given an opportunity to be correct. If they’ve been presented with accurate information and persist in hurtful speech, then they’re a jerk (don’t be a jerk).
My decision was not to burn the house down; this didn’t seem like the best time to clarify her statement, and I was sure I would have the opportunity to talk about it later. The remainder of the date was pleasant, but I was semi-checked out, analyzing her statement and trying to find the intent behind her words. My identity didn’t come up as we left the coffee shop and walked towards the parking lot, where we hugged and parted ways. She expressed interested in continued conversation and a second date.
Up until this point, I was confused and a little bit offended, but not embarrassed or ashamed (I think). I wasn’t sure when I was going to have the conversation with her about my identity, but it was going to happen, and we were going to have a chat about her earlier comment.
Later that afternoon, a few friendly texts were exchanged; she asked my plans for the evening. An innocent enough question, but one that left me unsure how to respond. I was planning on going to the second meeting of the trans youth support group that I had helped start. Do I tell her that I’m getting together with friends and avoid the subject? Do I skirt the truth to keep the possibility of a second date, so that I can have the conversation I want to have? Or do I out myself by telling her where I’m going? It was while contemplating this decision that I felt the beginnings of embarrassment and shame. Why did I so badly want to hide my identity? Why did I want to lock it away and never have to speak about it again, to disappear into the crowd? This was my first experience with wanting to withhold this information out of embarrassment. What had happened that I was now ashamed of who I was?
Upset with myself for beginning to feel this way, and trying to shake it off, I told her exactly where I was going. Her response? “That’s cool… See, you do volunteering work and you didn’t even know it.”
This absolutely shocked me. I had thought my association with this support group was the same as outing myself. Was I so far from the idea of trans in her head that there was no way I could be “one of them?” Or did she refuse to make the association because there was something so wrong with trans women that she could never be attracted to one?
The earlier embarrassment I had just walked away from decided that we should be reacquainted. What was so wrong with being transsexual that she didn’t want to associate me with it? What was wrong with me? I wanted to correct her, to tell her that I was transsexual, but her words had left me so unsure of myself that I couldn’t respond. I was angry, scared, and frustrated. I hated what I was feeling; it was so against everything I believe. I love who I am, I am confident in who I am, I believe in who I am. Emotions are hard, and I couldn’t walk away from those negative feelings.
*bing* “What drove you to get started with the group?”
With a flood of emotion I answered her follow-up question by outing myself as transsexual.
I have not heard back from her, and don’t expect to. She’s now added “trangender” to the list of things she’s not interested in. If you’re going to discriminate against a general population, please be educated enough to use the correct terms (and spell them correctly). Also, be specific enough that you don’t hit innocent bystanders… There are many identities under the transgender umbrella, some of which you’re probably ok with.
When it comes to dating and transsexuals, I understand that it can be complicated and difficult. Pre-op or non-op trans women just don’t |
’s Business Daily poll said that 55 percent of the public had grown “weary from the media’s persistently negative coverage of President Trump.” Another 54 percent said the media “has assumed the role of the opposition party, constantly opposing the president and his policies at every turn.”
Pollsters themselves attracted criticism: “Just one-out-of-three voters believe most pollsters are interested in reporting the attitudes of Americans in an unbiased manner when they poll on President Trump,” a Rasmussen Reports survey noted in May.
“Voters are still critical of the news coverage Trump is getting and continue to believe most reporters are out to get him,” Rasmussen noted earlier this week. “Just four percent think most reporters are biased in Trump’s favor.”
STILL A GRAND OLD FLAG
Timely hints from the federal government? Yes, very much so as July Fourth looms. USA.gov — a wide-ranging compendium of information about the government and its workings — offers a page dedicated to the American flag and its protocol.
“The U.S. flag stands for our nation and the shared history, pride, principles and commitment of its people. When we properly display this powerful symbol, we signal our respect for everything it represents,” advises a helpful infographic based on the U.S. Flag Code.
There are historic details which should be revisited from time to time. “The colors on the flag represent: Red: valor and bravery; White: purity and innocence; Blue: vigilance, perseverance, and justice,” the site says. Find it all at USA.gov/flag.
SOLVING THE ‘IRRITANTS’
President Trump and Russian President Vladimir Putin soon will meet face-to-face, which certainly will add a new dimension and maybe some hysteria to the media’s preoccupation with “Russia collusion” and other matters. The place will be Hamburg, Germany, late next week; the occasion will be the “sidelines” of the G-20 summit.
“There’s no specific agenda. It’s really going to be whatever the president wants to talk about,” White House National Security Adviser H.R. McMaster said during an off-camera briefing with the press on Thursday, also noting that Mr. Trump plans to address certain unnamed “irritants.”
It will be a busy time, and a truly global occasion that could suit Mr. Trump just fine. According to press reports, he also will meet with Chinese President Xi Jinping, British Prime Minister Theresa May, Japanese Prime Minister Shinzo Abe, German Chancellor Angela Merkel and Mexican President Enrique Pena Nieto, among others.
FRANKEN’S CALL TO ARMS
“There’s no wrong way to stand up to Donald Trump and stand up for our shared values — as long as you do as much of it as you can, as often as you can. It’s gotta be part of your everyday routine: eat, sleep, resist, repeat.”
— Sen. Al Franken in a fundraising plea for the Democratic National Committee.
WEEKEND REAL ESTATE
For sale: The Andrew Barnes House, a Colonial-era country cottage built in 1790 in Sherman, Connecticut. Three bedrooms, two baths; 1,607 square feet. Includes dining and living rooms, three fireplaces, center chimney, wide-plank floors, original built-ins, architectural details and “cubbies.” Covered porch, vaulted studio space. One-acre manicured lawn includes in-ground pool, stone terrace and landscaping. Priced at $375,000 through 12route39north.com.
POLL DU JOUR
• 26 percent of registered U.S. voters blame congressional Democrats for preventing passage of legislation on health care, taxes and other issues; 55 percent of Republicans, 22 percent of independents and 6 percent of Democrats agree.
• 25 percent blame Democrats, Republicans and the Trump administration for gridlock; 20 percent of Republicans, 32 percent of independents and 21 percent of Democrats agree.
• 24 percent blame congressional Republicans; 8 percent of Republicans, 21 percent of independents and 40 percent of Democrats agree.
• 16 percent blame the Trump administration; 5 percent of Republicans, 14 percent of independents and 28 percent of Democrats agree.
• 9 percent are undecided; 11 percent of Republicans, 10 percent of independents and 5 percent of Democrats agree.
Source: A Suffolk University/USA Today poll of 1,000 registered U.S. voters conducted June 24-27.
• Ballyhoo and casual chatter to [email protected]
Copyright © 2019 The Washington Times, LLC. Click here for reprint permission.Image copyright facebook Image caption Ghita the shepherd
Shepherds have a special place in Romania's history and in its culture, and their lifestyle has not changed much in centuries - until now. Social media has turned at least one of them into a celebrity, writes Caroline Juler.
On a dank Monday evening some weeks ago, a Romanian shepherd called Ghita left home with his sheep. He wasn't in a lorry but on foot, accompanied by several angajati, or hired men, some shaggy dogs, and seven donkeys loaded with gear. Ghita was off on his autumn transhumance, heading north for his winter pastures. It would take him six weeks.
For a country whose defining myth revolves around shepherds, Romania isn't all that keen on its pastoralists. The Ballad of the Little Sheep (Miorita) tells of a herdsman who lets himself be murdered by two rival shepherds even though one of his lambs, who has miraculously acquired the power of speech, warns him in advance. Miorita is sometimes taken as a metaphor for Christianity, another way of showing Christ's courage in turning the other cheek. It's also said to mirror the experience of the Romanian people who have endured numerous invasions, occupations and humiliations without, it is claimed, ever losing their identity.
When Romanians were agitating for independence in the 19th Century, Transylvanian shepherds were seen as the rugged pioneers of the nationalist movement. Long before then, they had established shortcuts over the Carpathian Mountains to seasonal grazing in what is now Hungary, Serbia, Bulgaria, the Caucasus, southern Russia, Ukraine, Moldova, Poland and the Czech Republic. Having crossed from Hungarian and Habsburg lands into Ottoman Turkey and Russia, they returned home to their more isolated communities with information, ideas and ambitions fired by the world outside.
A shepherd's CV has to offer some crucial USPs: caringness, self-reliance and dedication. He - and it's almost always a he, although in real life women did the same job - is synonymous with the kindly ideals of Christianity and for that matter Islam - but for all that, he is a humble, often solitary, sometimes rootless figure.
From Our Own Correspondent Insight and analysis from BBC correspondents, journalists and writers from around the world Broadcast on Radio 4 and BBC World Service Listen to the programme Download the programme
During Communism, certain Romanian sheep farmers did rather well. People still talk about Mr B from Poiana Sibiului who asked Ceausescu's permission to buy a helicopter. Mr B's flocks were hefted over several mountains, and he argued that being able to fly would let him keep track of them more easily. His request was refused, but Poiana is famous for other reasons - many of its shepherds built luxurious mansions at a time when most people had to stand in queues to buy food and lit their homes with 40 watt bulbs. Inaccessible to big machinery, many mountain farms escaped collectivisation, and the men and women who commuted there from the less exclusive plains, spoke of "going to America".
Like farmers worldwide, Romanian flock masters enjoy a good grumble. But things have got tough for them since 1989. Once guaranteed, prices for wool have plummeted. Although there is an international market for Romanian lamb, and sheep's cheese sells well, "slow food" has not made enough of a difference to the shepherds who find it healthier - and cheaper - to walk their sheep to far away winter pastures rather than keep their animals inside.
With its origins in the Bronze Age, if not earlier, transhumance is a form of semi-nomadism. It sounds romantic but in the past, Romanian shepherds occasionally resorted to transporting their animals by train, something they could never afford to do now.
Romanian shepherds still look archaic. They wear a long sheepskin cloak called a cojoc or sarica. With the shaggy fleece on the outside, it's also their bed, so when shepherds call the cloak their house, they aren't joking. When they sleep at all, it's outside, in all weathers. The hired men earn between 200 or 300 euros a month. They also receive daily meals, work clothing, and a cigarette allowance.
Romanians are generally learning more about their shepherds thanks to television.
In August this year, a well-known phone company began an advertising campaign that highlighted real people doing real jobs. One of them was Ghita.
Dressed in his cojoc and rimless pot hat (another must-have piece of shepherding rig), sitting by a campfire and dancing with sheep, Ghita Ciobanul, or Ghita the Shepherd, has taken Romania by storm. Ten days after the phone company put him on Facebook, his page had clocked more than 200,000 likes. A month later, they had doubled.
In the past, Ghita has had to move his sheep illegally, during the night. Given the hazards of crossing Romania's rapidly urbanising, motorised countryside, it's the only way. Accidents and shootings have cost him scores of sheep and many dogs. Maybe this year, thanks to his new-found celebrity, Ghita will be luckier.
From Our Own Correspondent: Listen online or download the podcast.
BBC Radio 4: Saturdays at 11:30 and some Thursdays at 11:00
BBC World Service: Short editions Monday-Friday - see World Service programme schedule.
Follow @BBCNewsMagazine on Twitter and on FacebookGold futures have been among the best performers this year. But that hasn’t stopped Goldman Sachs’ head of commodities, Jeff Currie, from recommending that investors bet against the yellow metal.
“Short gold! Sell gold!” That was Currie’s unabashed advice during a CNBC interview Tuesday after discussing the outlook for crude-oil futures CLM6, +0.00%
Currie’s rationale is fairly straightforward: The closely followed Goldman strategist sees the Federal Reserve raising benchmark interest rates at some point in 2016 and believes the result of higher rates will be a drag on the dollar-denominated precious metal. A combination of flight-to-safety demand, driven by concerns about economic growth overseas, and mixed messages from the Fed have helped lift gold by more than 16% so far this year.
Gold futures US:GCM6 have boasted their best return in the first three months of a calendar year in nearly 30 years. But by ending a cycle of ultraloose monetary policy, the U.S. central bank would deliver a one-two punch for gold, lifting the dollar and making the commodity more expensive to those purchasing it in other currencies, while decreasing its appeal to investors seeking yield-bearing assets.
Gold ended Tuesday’s session $10.20, or 0.8%, higher at $1,229.50 an ounce, ending two sessions of losses.
“The Fed has signaled two [rate hikes]. Data is signaling three and what do higher interest rates do to gold? Send it down,” said Currie.
As for crude, Currie believes that oil will continue to see choppy trading until some of the excess gets worked out of the system and the U.S. curbs production levels. He believes until capital expenditures at major oil-and-gas producers reduce output, investors will continue to experience a bumpy ride. The outcome of a meeting of major oil producers in Doha, Qatar, set for April 17 to discuss an output freeze, is still uncertain.
Currie expects a genuine recovery in oil to occur “deep into the third quarter,” if producers start to scale back. On Tuesday, West Texas Intermediate oil futures ended modestly higher at $35.89 a barrel in rocky trading.
Currie’s full interview with CNBC is below:
Want news about Europe delivered to your inbox? Subscribe to MarketWatch's free Europe Daily newsletter. Sign up here.There won't be any false pretense about what Teddy Bridgewater's initial role will be in Minnesota.
Vikings coach Mike Zimmer told NFL Media's Albert Breer in an interview for Friday's edition of "NFL Total Access" that the team's first-round pick will take first-team reps on Day 1 and compete for the starting quarterback job.
"Teddy's been great," Zimmer said. "He's had a good command of the offense. I like his leadership. I like his determination. He's throwing the ball well. He's got good, quick feet. I think he's a good athlete. So he's progressing at a good pace."
It makes sense for the Vikings to throw Bridgewater right into the fire. The Louisville product is the most pro-ready of the rookie QBs, and the Vikings don't have any signal-callers in place that should prove to start over him (we're looking at you, Matt Cassel and Christian Ponder).
With one of the best running backs of all time toting the ball, all the Vikings need is some solid QB play.
The latest "Around The League Podcast" plays the post-draft version of the game "What's More Likely" and breaks down all the latest news.March 17th, 2012 is arguably the biggest day in the history of the Montreal Impact franchise to date. The third Canadian soccer club to join Major League Soccer, the Impact were playing their first ever home game against the Chicago Fire. The Impact were looking to recover in their return home after losing their first ever MLS game 2-0 to Canadian, and former USL-1 rivals, the Vancouver Whitecaps. However,in some ways the Impact were not truly returning “home”.
Saputo Stadium, the home of the Impact, was being updated to host the new MLS squad and wouldn’t be ready in time for the first few games. Therefore, the Impact had to turn to the next available option, which in this case was located directly next door.
The Olympic Stadium hasn’t had a full time tenant since the Montreal Expos of Major League Baseball left for Washington in 2004. March 17th wasn’t the first time that the Impact had played at the Stadium though.
In 2008 the Impact won the first ever Canadian Championship and were rewarded with a berth in the 2008-09 CONCACAF Champions League, originally the CONCACAF Champions Cup. Being from USL-1, the now defunct second division of North American soccer, Les Impact were not given much of a chance by most who thought they would be content just taking part. However, by the 25th of February, Montreal was playing the first of a two-legged quarter-final against regional giants, Santos Leguna, at the Olympic Stadium.
The match was not only memorable for the result, a 2-0 victory, but for the fact that 55,000-plus packed the Stadium to watch a second division Canadian soccer club.
On March 17th, 2012, three years later, the Impact had taken things a step further playing in front of 58,912 at that very same venue. The result was rather forgettable, a 1-1 draw, although it did see club captain Davy Arnaud score the first goal in the club’s MLS history. But it was the fact that the Impact were able to draw record crowds, the third biggest for a soccer event worldwide that weekend, which made it seem that Montreal may be the most rapidly successful Major League Soccer club in terms of fanbase of all time.
While the numbers dropped after the first game (which is very common) they remained respectable. A 2-1 victory over Toronto FC in their second MLS home game saw 23,192 supporters come out to support the team – an admirable turnout. From then on the normal attendance at an Olympic Stadium Impact game averaged around 20,000, which is very good for an MLS team. Off course when David Beckham and the LA Galaxy came to town fans returned in massive numbers and set a record in the process – 60,860.
Shifting to Saputo Stadium the attendance looked like it would be near perfect. The average Montreal crowd was about 20,000, which would be a near sellout at the field located in the shadow of Olympic Stadium.
The first MLS game at the official stadium of the Montreal Impact took place on June 16th against the Seattle Sounders. The match was fantastic for the Impact, a 4-1 win that remains to this day the best they have ever achieved in their short history in the league. However, looking up into the stands the Impact players had to feel a bit discouraged. Up until that point attendance for the Impact had always been over 19,000. But against Seattle, in the debut of the newly renovated Saputo Stadium, the lowest crowd in Montreal’s short MLS history, a crowd of 17,112, turned up.
It would only get worse from there. Montreal would continue their run of good form on the pitch in their next home game, beating Houston Dynamo 4-2, but their run of excellent form wasn’t enough to fill the seats as a piddly 12,375 fans showed up to take in the action.
Four days later against a team supposedly considered the Impact’s rivals, Toronto FC, they drew only 14,412 to watch their team lose 3-0 to the team at the bottom of the table. Some rivalry.
Attendance fell to an all time low during the next match, a 3-1 loss to Sporting Kansas City in which only 12,085 supporters turned up. This was a 500% decrease from the crowd that witnessed the Impact take on he Galaxy and was a very disheartening sign for the future of the club, however short lived the clubs time in MLS has already been.
It is difficult to tell where the club and its attendance will go from here. The fact that it is so early in the club’s MLS history and they are already experiencing rapidly decreasing fan support. It could also get a whole lot worse if the team can’t start winning and the Montreal Alouettes of the CFL begin to play more meaningful games taking more of the media spotlight. Not to mention the Montreal Canadiens, by far the biggest ticket event in the city, who will resume their season in October if the current CBA negotiations don’t translate into a lockout.
However, not only has the attendance dwindled as they have gone deeper into their first Major League Soccer campaign, but a large part of the rapid decrease in live support can be attributed to the change of venue. At the Olympic Stadium the lowest turnout for an MLS game was over 19,000. At Saputo the record turnout is 2,000 less then that.
As for why this is happening it certainly isn’t entirely location. Saputo is directly next to the Olympic stadium. Both are located fairly far from where the majority of the Montreal population live and therefore some people are less likely to make the trip out to the stadium. But this problem is somewhat common for MLS teams. It may be because the team has not been winning. Even the crowds rapidly decreased near the end of the Montreal Canadiens’ season when it became clear they would not make the playoffs, and that could be what is happening with the Montreal soccer club. Though it is still relatively early in the season, so the likelihood of fans giving up this early is rather unlikely. It may be that it doesn’t make a big difference to the general public in Montreal whether the team is in the first division (MLS) or the second division (NASL).
Another explanation, and one that seems most likely, is ticket pricing. The ticket pricing at Saputo Stadium versus the Olympic Stadium increased greatly, which only makes sense because there are less seats to fill in Saputo Stadium and it seemed to be plenty of demand. But this increase in price has discouraged fans from making the trip to see a team who win less then half of the time even if this is their first season in the league. It does depend on the opponent and the day of the week as well, as it does with every other team in the league. Wednesdays will never bring the same type of crowds to the Stadium that show up when the club is playing a weekend game. The same can be said for opposition. Every time Beckham and the LA Galaxy come to town stadiums fill up to watch the most famous footballer in North American history. When the Portland Timbers come to town fans become far less likely to buy tickets and watch a game with relatively no internationally acclaimed soccer stars.
So the question becomes, “How can Montreal fix the attendance issues at Saputo Stadium?” Joey Saputo, the stadium’s namesake, and the rest of the Montreal Impact management team have been hard at work trying to answer this very question. One of the categories that has been already highlighted is ticket pricing. Reports are that prices are starting to decrease and it is very possible that this will see an increase in attendance. Star power has also become a big factor in Montreal’s plan to draw crowds to watch their games live. They made their first big move by acquiring world famous Italian defender Alessandro Nesta, a player who will not only anchor their backline but draw possibly thousands of Italian and AC Milan supporters to the Stadium. Furthermore, it doesn’t appear that the Impact are done either. Reports that they are close to acquiring the services of equally famous Juventus and Italian national striker Alessandro Del Piero have been re-occurring.
If attendance issues persist even with decreased ticket prices and the acquisition of Alessandro Nesta, at what point does this become a major issue? It appears certain that Montreal can draw at least 12,000, but that was very similar to the crowds they had in the NASL. Also 12,000 is a pretty poor consistent crowd considering the advances that Major League Soccer has made in recent years in terms of attendance. It is also very poor attendance for an expansion team as all of the teams so far have come into the league to decent crowds, as Montreal did early on in the campaign. The current average attendance still sits at 25,357, widely inflated by the two games with crowds over 50,000. The average will drop to at least 21,000 later in the season, as that is the capacity of Saputo Stadium. A second question to consider is, “How much further will the Montreal Impact’s attendance slide?”.
Follow me on twitter – @lastwordmitchRumours continue to circulate regarding Fernando Alonso’s future plans, and the consensus is that in the next few days we will learn a bit more about how the 2015 entry list will look.
Alonso has been linked with McLaren and Honda for months, and his name has obvious appeal to the Japanese manufacturer, which sells a lot of motorbikes in Spain.
It’s absolutely imperative that McLaren has a star on board, and with due respect to Jenson Button, the paddock acknowledges that Honda is working from a very short list, headed by Fernando, Lewis Hamilton, and Sebastian Vettel.
Of course the big questions over the weeks have been a) who might be able to make themselves available to join McLaren for 2015, and b) who has faith in the potential of Honda to be competitive from the off. One thing that is not in doubt is the funding available to pay for a big name, which would certainly cushion the blow should Honda not quite be on the pace immediately.
If Alonso is indeed on his way to McLaren, then obviously Ferrari needs to find a superstar with which to replace him – and for the past couple of years Sebastian Vettel has been the name in the frame as the next Ferrari signing.
However a source close to the Italian team tells me that none other than Lewis Hamilton now figures high on Maranello’s wish list, and indeed the Briton might be more easily able to walk away from Mercedes in 2015 than some might believe. He’s certainly less tied down than Vettel.
Of course for Lewis the issue is complicated by the ongoing title battle, but Ferrari would have obvious appeal to Hamilton, perhaps moreso if he secures his second title with Mercedes and can perhaps lose a year or two being a key part of a Maranello revival, thus following in the footsteps of Niki Lauda and Michael Schumacher.
Those who think the idea unlikely should remember that exactly two years ago this week the world didn’t believe that Lewis would quit McLaren for Mercedes…Floods on the Aisne which impeded the French offensive around Soissons, depicted a month later in the Illustrated London News.
January 11, Soissons—Despite the general stalemate in the West, the French were not content to remain on the defensive. In part, this was due to the larger strategic picture; Germany was beginning to move troops to the East, where they judged they would have greater success against the Russians. Hoping to prevent this and relieve pressure on their increasingly-isolated ally, in late December Joffre ordered an offensive, to mainly occur in Champagne. Mostly, this quickly became an exercise in positional warfare—fighting smartly over limited tactical objectives, rather than mass offensives across a wide front. Attacks were not limited to Champagne, but occurred to a lesser extent along the rest of the French front. One such attack took place on the Aisne near Soissons, where Maunoury’s Sixth Army successfully secured two hills two miles north of the city after an artillery bombardment on January 8.
Over the next several days, the Germans attempted to retake the hills, but with no success at first. They began to bring up additional artillery and reinforcements, and then received some help from Mother Nature on January 11th. The weather over the last several weeks had been dreary and rainy all along the Western Front; we have seen the trouble that caused for the British in Flanders. Here, the rain caused the Aisne to flood, sweeping away all but one of the makeshift bridges built across the Aisne in September around Soissons (the Germans having destroyed the prewar bridges during their retreat). This made it difficult to get supplies and reinforcements to the French troops on the newly captured hills, which had to be evacuated (over the one remaining bridge) over the next few days.
Sources include: Randal Grey, Chronicle of the First World War (Volume I).Miami Sex Offenders Form Community in Makeshift Tent Neighborhood Facebook -
Twitter -
More shares reddit email -
Miami Sex Offenders Form Community in Makeshift Tent Neighborhood Twenty-eight camping tents sit pitched along both sides of the road in a stretch of Northwest Miami-Dade. In them live scores of registered sex offenders. The encampment is the result of a 2005 county law — much stricter than a similar measure passed by the state ten years earlier — that imposes restrictions on where sexual offenders and predators may live. No one argues that their crimes, which include everything from sexting with minors on dating apps to raping children, are serious. But critics of the camp consider it an outrage that human beings are forced to live in such horrendous conditions — in some cases, for several years.
Up Next: Guns N' Roses Rocks Miami at Marlins ParkEmms 4.0 released
From: Yoni Rabkin Subject: Emms 4.0 released Date: Sun, 27 Jul 2014 12:41:03 -0400 User-agent: Gnus/5.13 (Gnus v5.13) Emacs/24.3.92 (gnu/linux)
I'm happy to announce the release of Emms 4.0. The release tarball is available here: ftp://ftp.gnu.org/gnu/emms/emms-4.0.tar.gz For more information, please see: https://savannah.gnu.org/projects/emms/ 4.0 highlights --------------- * Add GNU FM support * Added mp4, m4a to the extensions handled by emms-info-libtag * (optionally) play tracks randomly * Extend MPD player support * Add pause-resume support for lyrics display * New implementation of emms-print-metadata * Support both XEmacs and Emacs to highlight playing lyrics * Add support for disc-number sorting of FLAC files * New function to allow custom browser track-formats to display track duration * depreciate emms-player-gstreamer, Last.fm support * emms-player-mplayer: Remove code for loading movie subtitles automatically by emms, since mplayer has an option (`sub-fuzziness') controlling that * Support displaying lyrics in a dedicated buffer, to highlight playing lyric * Fix make install on Cygwin * Compilation errors cleanup -- "Cut your own wood and it will warm you twice"
reply via email to
[Prev in Thread] Current Thread [Next in Thread]Invenergy had been planning to build a large capacity wind farm in Wisconsin, but now that is dead after the company pulled out of the development of the proposed Ledge Wind Energy project. The reason? The desire of the Wisconsin governor and state legislature members to suspend a rule around how wind farms are permitted.
Wisconsin governor Scott Walker, according to Solve Climate News, had proposed suspending previously passed rules by the state Public Service Commission that would reportedly balance the needs of wind farm placement with that of property owners’ concerns over issues around items like property values and noise. Walker’s decision, much like when he objected to federal funding for high speed rail in his state, put him at odds with many in Wisconsin, though the GOP controlled state legislature was apparently quite happy to oblige him.
Invenergy, in a letter to the Wisconsin Public State Commission, withdrew its application for the project after the previously passed rules were suspended. It stated that “after careful review of the continuing uncertainty generation by the current legislative and regulatory climate, and after intensive evaluation of the resulting investment considerations, Invenergy has determined that it will no longer pursue development of the Ledge Wind Energy Center…with the recent suspension of Chapter PSC 128 and the unpredictability of the course of the ensuing legislative and administrative process, Invenergy cannot justify continuing to make significant investments regarding the Ledge Wind Energy Center while substantial uncertainty persists regarding relevant project regulations.”
Also, again according to Solve Climate News, while Invenergy will consider doing “less risky” wind projects in Wisconsin, it would be looking for the time being to do more wind energy development in states that “offer more regulatory certainty.”
Clean Wisconsin, a state level environmental group, was quite disappointed in the resulting action, noting that “Governor Walker’s war on wind energy is killing good Wisconsin jobs” and that “eighty percent of Wisconsin residents support wind energy, yet the Governor and Republican legislative leaders seem determined to keep wind farms from being built in our state.”
There’s a lot more to this story being talked about over at Solve Climate News, so make sure to check out their full coverage on this breaking issue.
We hope you are enjoying the green technology news and insight provided by our dedicated editorial staff. If you do, please take a moment to help us spread the word by voting for us as Best Environmental Sci-Tech blog in the annual Best of Green 2011 TreeHugger awards. Voting ends on April 1, 2011. Thank you!As Donald Trump continues to campaign on a platform of restoring American jobs, companies he owns or that bear his name continue to apply for permission to import foreign workers for positions at resorts and golf courses from New York to Florida.
On Friday, the Department of Labor posted a petition from the Trump International Beach Resort, in Sunny Isles Beach near Miami, Florida, to import temporary workers. The resort, which licenses Trump’s name but is owned by the International Resorts Management Group, asked for permission to bring in 20 waiters and waitresses, claiming no Americans wanted the jobs. The positions pay $10.36 an hour plus tips.
In addition to this latest request, companies owned by Trump or bearing his name have already sought permission from the Department of Labor to hire at least 227 foreign guest workers since he launched his presidential campaign.
Trump’s campaign did not immediately respond to a request for comment, nor did officials at the beach resort. In the past, Trump has said it is “almost impossible” to find Americans who want such jobs.
“You can’t get help,” Trump told MSNBC last year when asked about his use of the program.
Officials at a career services agency in South Florida, which helps place Americans in jobs in the resort industry, have not always seen the same employment picture. Tom Veenstra, a senior director at CareerSource Palm Beach County, a workforce development agency chartered by the state of Florida, has said in the past that his office has hundreds of U.S. workers in a database who would qualify for hospitality jobs. He also told BuzzFeed News last month that other Trump properties have failed to avail themselves of free recruitment efforts that might help them find qualified American workers who want the jobs.
H-2 visas allow employers to bring people from other countries into the US as “guest workers” to fill temporary positions. One of the strictest rules of the H-2 program is that American workers be given preference in hiring. Companies seeking these visas are also required by law to show that they already tried, but failed, to find Americans for the job.
Previous BuzzFeed News investigations have found that many US companies go to extraordinary lengths to avoid hiring Americans so they can bring in foreign workers on H-2 visas instead.
Trump companies appear to have followed recruitment rules when seeking guest workers, posting those positions in the state online job board and placing ads, as required, with local newspapers such as the Palm Beach Post.Speakers are like musical instruments, with the largest instruments giving the lowest notes. Now, a new miniaturized device can emit deep, powerful sounds using subwavelength technology. © aldegonde le compte / Alamy Stock Photo
In any orchestra, the lowest notes are made by the largest instruments; for example, in the string family, the double bass resonates much lower notes than the violin because it is four to five times larger. The same is true for loudspeakers. Large speakers, known as woofers, are required to produce clear bass notes while small speakers, like those in mobile phones, produce high tinny noises that don’t do justice to recorded music.
Jiajun Zhao and Ying Wu from KAUST, with coworker Likun Zhang at the University of Mississippi, have proposed a new miniaturized device that can emit deep, powerful sounds using so-called subwavelength technology.
“A traditional audio setup combines small loudspeakers for high frequencies and large woofers for low frequencies, which is bulky and clumsy,” says Zhao. “We use structural resonances to build a miniaturized loudspeaker system that works as well as traditional ones.”
Schematic of the enclosure designed to change the environment around a sound source. The enclosure greatly enhances the power of low-frequency sounds. © 2017 KAUST
The structural resonances proposed by the researchers involve putting a sound source in a ring-shaped enclosure made from high-density brass with coiled air-filled channels. The air channels reduce the overall speed of the sound, which enhances low-frequency sounds and suppresses higher sounds.
“Through the resonance of the air inside the channels, a lot more of the electric power of the source is converted to sound power than would otherwise be the case,” explains Wu.
Computer simulations of this design showed that the enclosure not only enhanced low sounds but also emitted powerful sound in all directions around it. This overcomes another limitation of traditional loudspeakers, which tend to emit sound in only one direction.
The next step was for Zhao and coworkers to build and test a real version of their enclosure design. “When a cell phone source is enclosed by the structure, more than 200 times the sound power is emitted than when the structure isn’t there,” says Zhao. “We are happy to see that our design doesn't just work on paper but also in reality.”
Now finished his postdoctorate at KAUST, Zhao will soon move to work in the energy industry in Houston, but he is very grateful for his time at the university.
“Being at KAUST is a unique experience,” he says. “I learned a lot from my supervisor Dr. Wu, who provided valuable advice not only on my research but also my career development. Furthermore, the experts that are invited each year to KAUST to give seminars helped me to establish wide connections within the research community of my interest.”The World of Today
Chris Deerin Blocked Unblock Follow Following Sep 16, 2016
Stefan Zweig was dead by the time The World of Yesterday came out. He posted the manuscript to his publisher and the next day he and his wife took their own lives in the Brazilian city of Petropolis.
It was then February 1942, and the Austrian writer, who had counted among his friends Sigmund Freud, Richard Strauss, HG Wells, James Joyce, Arturo Toscanini, Maxim Gorky and many other cultural and intellectual behemoths of the first half of the 20th century, felt he ‘belonged nowhere’.
The World of Yesterday is one of the great autobiographies. It is the kind of book that changes you, or at least how you look out of yourself. It is a throbbing lament for a lost world — a lament for two lost worlds, in fact, and a raging indictment of a third. The author was born into a wealthy Jewish family in Vienna in 1881, during what he calls ‘The Golden Age of Security’. Society, he writes, was structured in a way that was ‘built to last’: life was orderly and predictable, and if there was one existence for the rich and a harsher model for the rest, there was nevertheless slow evolution towards fairer rights and the potential for self-advancement. Stability itself was revered: ‘This sense of security was an asset owned by millions, something desirable, an ideal of life held in common by all.’
All of it was swept away by the tragedy of the First World War, in the aftermath of which came the Weimar era: giddy with relief, hedonistic, optimistic and doomed. This second life saw Zweig travel freely across Europe, become a celebrated author and luxuriate in the extraordinary renewal of human creativity that marked the age. He collected fragments of genius: a page from Leonardo Da Vinci’s sketchbook, Napoleon’s orders to his army at Rivoli, a Bach cantata, a poem by Goethe, scores by Mozart and Schubert, and the furniture from the room in which Beethoven died. It gave physical form to his unshakeable belief in a humane continent that treasured the upper air of peace, progress, culture and co-operation.
Then, in 1933, came Hitler, and the beginning of the end. Zweig’s third and final act saw him flee, like many of his fellow Jews, from the world he had made and loved: his home, his incredible collection, his thousands of books, his friends and family, his sense of how things should be. First to the UK, then, as the Nazis marched westwards, to the US, then on to Petropolis and last, his faith in humanity and its future exploded, into the embrace of oblivion.
Zweig |
where size_t or unsigned int would be better. int size() in Qts Container classes and using int as index in models isn't really nice afaik.
Qt Core
The core module provides the basic classes of qt, and it also can be used in non UI environments. Writing servers or services in Qt is done by many of its users. A lot of classes in Qt are based on QObject, the base class of Qts Meta Object System. QObject provides an object tree capable of holding other QObject classes as children. Also having such a central base class might be seen today as an anti pattern, QObject provides its uses to Qt, and isn't really overused. Its main purpose IMHO is to the useful ness of SIGNAL/SLOT (which could be done without a baseclass, see boost::signals2), and the Object tree functionality. Plus the Q_OBJECT Macro, which the Moc will turn in a to a few lines of special code and methods. Such as letting the Class know its name and methods at runtime.
In this first part, I will mostly stay within Qt Core, and just handle its classes. First I'd like to handle memory allocation and such in Qt and C++. A very important topic in C++ have smart pointers become, Qt provides a set of smartpointers. As its hopefully known to you, you should allocate memory (e.g. variables) either on the stack or with new. The first one is preferred, as its faster, and automatically destroyed with the end of the stacks/scopes lifetime. When ever an object is either to big for the stack, or needs to live longer, one should allocate it with new, and carefully guard the pointer to this new object. Later, to free the object, you'll need to call delete of course. And you don't see a lot of deletes in Qt, so whats happening? QObjects need to be created with new, IF they have a parent, which makes them part of an object tree in Qt. This is used to put widgets and layouts together. In such an object tree, the children are deleted, when the parent is deleted. So, the root of the tree can be on the stack, while all its children need to be on the heap. Also, as QObjects can receive signals, one might now want to delete them, as some signals might get lost. With QObject::deleteLater it is ensured, that the deletion happens after the handling of still pending signals. But, how to deal with pointers, if they are not part of an object tree in Qt?
Qt has for this QSharedData, a class that is a base class for classes handled in QSharedDataPointer, so you can implement the value data in a QSharedData class, f.e. name or number of an Employee Class. The EmployeeData Class will manage the value data, while Employee is the identity. Employee then holds a QSharedDataPointer to EmployeeData. Fortunately this is not the only way Qt can deal with Smart Pointers, the classes QSharedPointer/QWeakPointer and QScopedPointer also exist. QSharedPointer has the semantics of sharing a Pointer to a resource through instance counting. QScopedPointer will selfdestruct and free the pointer, once its scope ends. Also, as Qt plays quite well with boost or the C++ Standard, you could use the smart pointer classes from boost or std::shared_ptr/weak_ptr/unique_ptr.
And there is QPointer<T>, which requires T to be derived from QObject (std::is_base_of<T, QObject>::value == true). QPointer is a bit like a weak_ptr for QObject, but without the need to convert it to a fully functional shared_ptr. Instead, you simply test with if(mypointer) for its validness, and then can access the object beneith it. If in the mean time that object gets destroyed, you might be out of luck...
Qt basic types
Qt core also provides a bunch of basic types used in Qt. QString is Qts string class, and its a quite useful implementation for strings imho. It provides far more convinience methods then std::string, and is convertible to a lot of other formats, such as UTF8, std::string or const char*. Then there is a set of date and time classes in Qt, QTime and QDate have quite easy interfaces, and QDateTime provides you with time and date in one class. QDateTime::currentDateTime() will give you now(). I'd like to have a now() method in QDateTime. Qt also has a variant class, QVariant is often used when working with Qts Database support or using its model/view concepts.
Another important part of Qt core are its containers, which are implemented as templates. QList<T> is not a linked list class, its implementation is more std::vector like. There is QLinkedList for linked list fans. A short comparison of Qt Containers to the STL ones:
Qt class STL type QList<T> std::vector<T> QStringList (derived from QList<QString> std::vector<QString/std::string> QVector<T> std::vector<T> QLinkedList<T> std::list<T> / std::slist<T> QStack<T> std::stack<T> QQueue<T> std::queue<T> QSet<T> std::set<T> QMap<Key,Value> std::map<Key,Value> QMultiMap<Key,Value> std::multimap<Key,Value> QHash<Key,Value> std::unordered_map<Key,Value> QMultiHash<Key,Value> std::unordered_multimap<Key,Value>
Both, STL and Qt Containers opt for non virtual constructors, still QStringList is a prime example of deriving a class of such a base class. There is an interesting discussion why this is, and why its not fixed with Qt5. Still, there is an important difference between Qt containers and STL containers: Qt containers have value semantics, and will only perform copy on write, while a std container will copy its full contents when copied. This behavoir accounts for most of Qt base classes, that they will only create a new instance for data, when needed. This implicit sharing of resources is a very important concept to understand when dealing with Qt and its containers.
I often use the STL containers(and I do prefer them), just as I try to keep some of my code to be 100% standard C++, STL Containers mix well with Qt, but have of course a different copy semantic. The Qt Containers also do offer two different interfaces, one Javalike, and one STL like. One pitfall is, that the Qt Container function returns int instead of size_t. Actually this is another major difference, that all sizes for containers in Qt are int and not size_t or unsigned int. So when dealing with large datasets, that exceed std::numeric_max<int>, STL containers are your only option. Also this leads to funny code like QVector::resize(-1220), well, don't do this ;)
Then, Qt provides QOIDevice classes such as QFile or QSerialPort (Qt5.1) for accessing io, reading a csv file can be quite easy:
QString path = QFileDialog::getOpenFileName(this,tr("Select file")); QFile file(path); if(!file.open(QFile::ReadOnly|QIODevice::Text)) return; QTextStream stream(&file); QString line = stream.readLine(); QString del(","); if(line.contains(";")) del = ";"; else if(line.contains("\t")) del = "\t"; while(!stream.atEnd()) { line = stream.readLine(); QStringList items = line.split(del); handle_items(line); }
Reading the contents of a file via a QTextStream has some advantages, instead of using QFile directly, in this case, QTextStream will handle german umlauts in a csv correctly, while QFile will not deal nicely with them. The code also assumes that the first line is a header line, also containing the correct delimeter. It handles ',' by default, but also will deal with ';' and tabulators. Of course it will not deal with quoted strings (e.g. "this is one;datablock".
Qt Core also provides Threading classes, and contains Qts atomic classes. Qt has a QThreadPool class, which executes its tasks QRunnable derived classes, so when dealing with multithreading in Qt, you can implement either your own Thread by letting a function or Method run inside a QThread. Qt has also Mutexes, Futures or Semaphores in its Threading part. With QMutexLocker it offers support for locking Mutexes in Stack Objects, and guaranteeing in this way, that the unlock method is called. Also there is a Qt Concurrent Add-on, which is worth a look, if you have more extensive Multithreading needs with Qt.
But Qt Core offers more, there is JSON Support. With Qt5, JSON is supported in Qt, and QJsonDocument will offer you access to data stored in JSON files. Earlier, with Qt 4.x already Qt did get a few other frameworks, of which are the Animation Framework and the Statemachine Framework part of Qt core. Regarding the Statemachines, you also could use boost::msm with Qt. Also Qt core contains the Plugin System for Qt, and its QEvents Event System.
And before we warp into the TL;DR lands, I will close Part I here. Its covering most of Qt core, the next part will take a look at QGUI, QWidgets and Model/View.
Join the Meeting C++ patreon community!
This and other posts on Meeting C++ are enabled by my supporters on patreon!It’s about that time of year again, when hordes of cinephiles begin to crowd the entrances of the Brattle and Coolidge Corner theaters, and some of the best indie filmmakers make their way to Boston. That’s right, the Independent Film Festival of Boston is back and has set the lineup for their 2014 edition — running April 23-30. This year’s festival will feature 89 buzzed-about indies and documentaries alongside Q&A sessions, panel discussions, local-up-an-comers, and the usual shmoozing at after parties and events. Voted “The best film festival in Boston” in past years, IFFBoston always assembles world-class movies and talent with an eye on community access at affordable prices.
This year’s event proves no less anticipatory with featured screenings of LA-based, mumblegore filmmaker, Ti West’s “The Sacrament,” and Gia Coppola’s acclaimed feature film, “Palo Alto.” Passes will go on sale April 3rd; individual tickets for members April 8th; and to the General Public April 10th. You can find the full list of IFFBoston 2014’s films here.
To help you navigate the 8-day festival, here’s a list of movies you definitely shouldn’t miss!How to contribute to an open source project on GitHub
A step by step guide that will show you how to contribute to an open source project on GitHub, one of the most popular and used git repository hosting services.
GitHub is the home of many popular open source projects like Ruby on Rails, jQuery, Docker, Go and many others.
The way people (usually) contribute to an open source project on GitHub is using pull requests. A pull request is basically a patch which includes more information and allows members to discuss it on the website.
This tutorial will guide you through the whole process to generate a pull request for a project.
1. Choose the project you want to contribute to
If you decided to contribute to an open source project on GitHub it’s probably because you’ve been using that project and you found a bug or had an idea for a new feature.
You can also explore featured and trending projects on GitHub or use the website search to find something in particular. When deciding to contribute to an open source project make sure to check it’s still active otherwise your work might remain a pull request forever.
If you don’t have a feature or bugfix in mind you can check out the issues section of a project to find open tasks. It’s often useful to filter them using the labels created by the mantainers to find out available tasks not assigned to anyone yet.
Sometimes mantainers highlight easy tasks to encourage new contributors to join the project, like for example the one tagged “easy fix” in libgit2.
Before proceeding with the contribution you might want to check the (software) license of the project, just to make sure you are happy with its requirements.
2. Check out how to contribute
This is a very important step as it will avoid you (and the project mantainers) to waste a lot of time trying to help a project in a wrong way.
For example some popular projects like the Linux kernel and git use GitHub as a mirror, but they don’t consider any contribution received on GitHub.
Once you are on the main page of the project you want to contribute to look for notes and files that explain how the mantainers expect you contribute to the project.
Often there’s a dedicated file with detailed instruction called CONTRIBUTING.md, but sometimes you’ll find notes in the README.md file which is displayed at the bottom of the page as well.
Before starting to work on your contribution, It’s a good idea to check out existing issues and pull requests to be sure you’re not going to do something which is already being done by someone else.
At this stage you might also open an issue to check if mantainers are interested in what you’re going to work on.
3. Fork the project
Once you have established that the project accepts pull requests and that your feature/bugfix has not already been taken, it’s time to fork the project.
Forking the project creates a personal copy which will appear in your GitHub profile. to fork a project on GitHub simply click the Fork button on the top-right corner of a project page.
4. Clone the forked project
After you forked a project you need to clone it to have a copy on your machine you can work on.
To clone a forked project go to the repositories section of your GitHub profile and open it. There you can click on the “clone or download” button to get the address to clone.
GitHub gives you 2 protocols to clone a project: HTTPS and SSH. For more details about which one to use check out their detailed guide on the topic. From now on let’s assume you decided to use HTTPS.
Once you have copied an URL you can clone the project using a git client or git in your shell:
$ git clone https://github.com/YOUR_USERNAME/PROJECT.git
Cloning a project will create a directory on your disk which contains the project and all the files used by git to keep track of it.
5. Set up your cloned fork
Enter the cloned directory and add the URL of the original project to your local repository so that you will be able to pull changes from it:
$ git remote add upstream https://github.com/PROJECT_USERNAME/PROJECT.git
I used upstream as remote repository name because it’s a convention for GitHub projects, but you can use any name you want.
Now listing the remote repositories will show something like:
$ git remote -v origin https://github.com/YOUR_USERNAME/PROJECT.git (fetch) origin https://github.com/YOUR_USERNAME/PROJECT.git (push) upstream https://github.com/PROJECT_USERNAME/PROJECT.git (fetch) upstream https://github.com/PROJECT_USERNAME/PROJECT.git (push)
6. Create a branch
Before starting to work on your feature or bugfix you need to create a local branch where to keep all your work. You can do that with the following git command:
$ git checkout -b BRANCH_NAME
This will create a new branch and will make it the active one in your local repository. Be sure to use a descriptive name for the branch name.
You can check you are in the right branch using git:
$ git branch master * BRANCH_NAME
The current active branch is the one with a * on the left.
7. Work on your contribution
Now it’s time to work on the project. It’s very important you keep this very specific and focused on a single feature or bugfix. Trying to squeeze multiple contributions in a single pull request means chaos because it makes it impossible to handle them separately.
While working on your contribution make sure to pull changes from upstream (the original project) frequently or at least before pushing your changes to origin (your fork). That will force you to fix any possible conflict before submitting your pull request to the project.
8. Create a pull request
Once you finished to work on your contribution it’s time to push it to your forked repository on GitHub:
$ git push origin BRANCH_NAME
Now go back to your forked project on GitHub in your browser and you will find a new button at the top of the page to create a pull request:
Click the button and you will get a new page which contains all the information on your pull request and where you can submit it to the original project.
Before finalising the pull request make sure to have checked everything is fine and to include as much information as possible to help the mantainers of the project understand what you have done and why.
9. Follow up
Hopefully some of the project mantainers will check your pull request and will give you feedback or notify you they decided to merge your changes soon. They might also ask you to change something or decide not to use your contribution. Anyway everything will be discussed on GitHub and you will receive notifications via email every time someone comments your pull request.
10. Clean up
After your contribution has been merged to the main project (or rejected) you can delete the branch you used for it.
To delete the branch in your local repository:
git branch -D BRANCH_NAME
To delete the branch on GitHub:
git push origin --delete BRANCH_NAME
Conclusion
I hope you enjoyed this tutorial explaining how to contribute to an open source project on GitHub. If you have any question feel free to leave a comment.
If you found it useful feel free to share it on social media using the social buttons below.
Subscribe
Don’t forget to subscribe to the blog newsletter to get notified of future posts.
You can also get updates following me on Google+, LinkedIn and Twitter.Data Visuals
dc.js - Mayweather vs. Pacquiao dashboard
A fight of the century that did not live up to its hype. Overwhelming majority of viewers exclaimed that boxing is dead as Mayweather emerged victorious over Pacquiao. Mayweather's 'boring' defensive style did not please the crowd, but earned him another win. Below is the fight broken down to every punch. One important and deciding insight is that Mayweather landed 148 pucnhes out of 435 whereas Manny only landed 81 out of 429. Floyd is one win away from reaching Rocky Marciano's untouched record of 49-0. Unfortunately, I was not able to find info about miles ran and hugs given. The modern computing power would not be enough to manage the data of this size anyway (yes, Mayeather did it a lot). Here is a list of fight related information:
I used the javascript charting library dc.js for data visualization, crossfilter for data manipulation, and D3 Tooltip for dc.js chart customization. The data source was provided by reddit user WillieLee.
Punches thrown per Round Round: | reset
Punches by Boxer | reset Jab vs. Power punches | reset Floyd Mayweather vs. Manny Pacquiao 47–0 (26 KO) W-L
(KO) 57–5–2 (38 KO) 5'8" Ht. 5'6" 147 Wt. 147 38 Age 36 72" Reach 67" Orthodox Stance Southpaw 363 Rds.
fought 407 Mayweather
Landed vs. Missed | reset Pacquiao
Landed vs. Missed | resetThis is supposed to be an actual photograph taken of a moving van that was stopped by NYC police on the evening of September 11, 2001, on King Street. It was sent in to viewzone by a reader with the following information:
Reports of vans packed with explosives were confirmed at the World Trade Center on September 11th, 2001 as well as sub level explosions, among many other explosions. These vans were also discovered around the area, one had been exploded, another had been stopped for having a picture on the side of it with a plane flying into the World Trade Center and found with explosives in it, and many others. The FBI actually had confirmed that a device was found in the complex and the building had begun to evacuate. It was this evidence that made the Federal Agency to speculate that a van packed with explosives was parked in the garage which was detonated to help weaken the structure.
The vans belonged to a moving company owned by an Israeli who fled to Israel before he could be questioned. The same company employed several other Israeli citizens, here without valid visas, who were reported photographing and viedo-tapine the actual attacks on the World Trade Center, dancing happily and giving eachother the "high-five" hand slap. These are known as the "dancing Israelis" and have been much written about, however the reports were never investigated in the official 911 report. Residents of an apartment who witnessed this called police who detained the men and noted that the van also had the suspicious mural. The men were later freed and returned back to Israel with no further comment by investigating authorities.
The New York City Authorities released the recordings of the radios from that day where one officer reports a van actually exploding and him needing assistance ASAP. Another series of radio communication confirms that a van was pulled over for having a mural on the side of it depicting a plane flying into the World Trade Center. Reference to the mural van was also made in the February 2006 Norman Y. Mineta International Institute for Surface Transportation Policy Studies (MTI) report entitled: "Saving City Lifelines: Lessons Learned in the 9-11 Terrorist Attacks".
The first, and most mysterious, piece of evidence to highlight comes from an actual transmission from audio from Channel 30 NYC, one of the emergency communications channels, on the morning of September 11 which makes reference to the discovery of a van full of explosives and two suspects located between 6th and 7th on King Street, some blocks away from the World Trade Center.
The bizarre thing about the transmission is that the responder makes reference to a mural painted on the side of the van depicting a "remote controlled plane" diving into New York City.
A full transcript follows the audio:
Begin Transcript:
officer: [inaudible]
officer: 5 the message about the plane
officer: Sergeant [inaudible] seven five (Miller?)
officer: 5 [inaudible] about the, 10-5 the message about the plane
officer: 9414 hold up
officer: 5 the message about the remote-control plane
officer: [inaudible] on the air
officer: [inaudible]
officer: [inaudible]
officer: [inaudible] Trinity and Liberty? all city wide task force units are to respond to Liberty Trinity Place
officer: 10-4 the message is the plane [inaudible]
officer: [inaudible] task forces c/o: [inaudible] and [inaudible] will be the mobilization point at this time [inaudible]
officer: 10-4 c/o central who is [inaudible]
officer: didn't find any mention about the plane (alt: didn't find any admission about the plane)
officer: central, we need the bomb squad and EAQ over at King and??background noise?.click
officer: [inaudible]
officer: [inaudible] units
officer: [inaudible] on the air
officer: 9415 you on?
officer: 85[inaudible] this is uhh operator
officer: [inaudible]
officer: negat[inaudible]
officer: [inaudible] giving up these [inaudible] (planes?)
officer: [inaudible] I got a message on that uh plane, it's a big truck with a mural painted of a of a airplane diving into New York City and exploding [inaudible] know what's in the truck, the truck is in between 6th and 7th on King Street
officer: [inaudible]
officer: [inaudible]
officer: [inaudible]
officer: [inaudible] 10-5 10-5
officer: with a mural painted uh airplane diving into New York blowing up. Two men got outta the truck ran away from it, we got those two [inaudible] under.
officer: kay great.
officer: [inaudible]
officer: [inaudible] are you holding those to guys [inaudible] (kay?)
multiple voices/commotion: [inaudible] f**king beat the shit out of him.
officer: [gasps]
multiple voices/commotion: [inaudible] f**king shit out of him [inaudible]
officer: all right listen you need any [inaudible] on those two guys over there? you all right over there kay?
officer: we got both suspects under kay, we have the suspects who drive?drove in the van and that exploded we have both of them under kay let's get some help over here
officer: now I'm sending you [inaudible] I just want to make sure you and your guys all right over there kay, that's all.
officer: what's the location [inaudible]
officer: put em up, put em up
officer: you know we have both the [inaudible] driven that exploded. Is that correct?
officer: what location?
officer: location [inaudible]
officer: [inaudible]
officer: [inaudible] location [inaudible]
officer: King Street between 6th and 7th
officer: King Street and 6th and 7th avenue, King Street and 6th and 7th avenue
officer: [inaudible] on the scene King 6 and 7, which unit are you kay?
officer: [inaudible]
officer: [inaudible]
officer: [inaudible] explosion
officer: which unit is on the scene at king street?
officer: truck to Manhattan
officer: [inaudible] 10 truck
officer: [inaudible] 10 truck is heading a team toward 14 Trinity Place
officer: all right you take care of that for me and get back to me multiple voices: [inaudible]
officer: all right just check out that location let me know what you got
officer: [inaudible]4
officer: [inaudible] on the air
officer: on the air
officer: [inaudible]
officer: that fine with you?
officer: CIT Units on the air, CIT
officer: [inaudible] always available [inaudible] we're talkin
The indication is that the suspects ran away when the van was stopped and were then apprehended following some sort of struggle. It is then stated that the van has actually exploded.
What do you think?
COMMENTS:
Doesn't pass the giggle test. This is obviously not a real photo. I lived in NY for 25 years, and there is no median strip on King Street. Furthermore, there is no 7th Ave south of Houston. 7th Ave turns into Varick at Houston. Any New Yorker knows this. Especially a cop. But you have several cops who don't know this. Why is no one discussing the fact that Lyndon Johnson drove in a limo on November 22, 1963, with a painting on the side depicting him shooting a rifle from the grassy knoll? I have a friend who has a cousin who personally saw Johnson high-five Lee Harvey Oswald when Kennedy was shot.
LFQuebec’s Human Rights Tribunal ruled Wednesday that the popular bilingual comedian Mike Ward violated the right to equality of Jérémy Gabriel and ordered the comic to pay $35,000 for mocking the 19-year old singer who has a condition that causes facial disfigurement.
The tribunal said the comedian’s jokes discriminated against Gabriel, who came to fame when he travelled to Rome to sing for Pope Benedict XVI in 2006.
In a recurring bit that Ward used in his stand-up act between 2010 and 2013, he would tell his audience that he was pleased to see Gabriel achieve fame and attention after his papal visit. “Everyone said he sucked, but I defended him,” Ward would repeat to the crowd. “They would say he is terrible, but I was like, ‘He’s dying but he’s living a dream, leave him alone.’ ”
Ward would then pivot into a feigned realization that Gabriel isn’t dying: while Treacher Collins syndrome, which he has, can sometimes cause serious, life-threatening respiratory complications, that is not the case in this instance.
“But now, five years later, and he’s still not dead. Me, I defended him, like an idiot, and he won’t die,” Ward would exclaim.
“He’s unkillable. I saw him at the water park. I tried to drown him, but I couldn’t. Then I went on the Internet to figure out what was wrong with him, and you know what it was? He’s ugly, goddammit.”
Justice Scott Hughes said in his decision that Ward’s jokes were “discriminatory” and “clearly prohibited by the Charter.”
Hughes added that, while Gabriel’s public profile explains why he could be subject to comments and jokes, Ward’s material “infringed his right to the safeguard of his dignity, honour and reputation, without discrimination.”
The tribunal also ruled that the comic must pay $7,000 to Gabriel’s mother for moral and punitive damages. During the hearings, Sylvie Gabriel testified of social and psychological impacts suffered by her son after Ward made the jokes in more than 200 performances. Gabriel was not yet a teenager when Ward incorporated the bit into his act.
“He was making money off of laughing at a disabled child,” she testified.
Ward told CBC Radio’s q on Wednesday that the profile afforded by the controversy had actually benefited him.
“I’ve gotten millions in exposure, and it’s only cost me $93,000,” he said, noting the cost of his legal fees.
Ward’s lawyer, the noted constitutionalist and human rights expert Julius Grey, said the ruling will be appealed.
“This is an unsound judgment and we are in complete disagreement with the decision,” said Grey.
At a press conference on Thursday, Gabriel said Ward “used me to make jokes about my death. I would say everything in his jokes was discriminatory. I don’t think I have to give examples, I think you just have to watch the sketch to understand that.” Gabriel went on to challenge the notion that the case is a threat to freedom of expression, saying the ruling determined Ward was discriminatory and that “there was a lack of judgment in his jokes.”
Ward’s manager told the National Post the comic will release a statement on his website in response to the ruling, and that he wouldn’t give comment immediately to this newspaper because “if I commented to the anglophone press first the Quebec press would go f—ing crazy.”
The comedian then joked about the affair Wednesday night during a set at the Just For Laughs festival in Montreal, saying he’d never heard of the Human Rights Tribunal until it showed up on his caller ID one day: “When I answered the woman said, ‘Mr. Ward, we’re calling you about one of your jokes. We think you know the one.”
And in the early hours of Thursday morning, Ward wrote “même Rocky a perdu le premier”— or “even Rocky lost the first one” — on his Facebook page and pledged his intent to appeal the tribunal’s ruling.The Iranian men’s national footvolley A team has ended its campaign at the Praputt Kamlang-ek FC 4th Asian Footvolley Championships in Thailand, and finished in the second place overall in the continental tournament.
On Saturday evening, Iran A outfit, comprised of Othman Sensebili and Jamil Kor, sustained a bitter 2-0 (18-11 and 18-13) defeat at the hands of strong Thailand national footvolley A team on Tha Lo Beach in Tha Muang district of the central Thai province of Kanchanaburi.
Meanwhile, Thailand’s national footvolley B team beat Iran B squad of Vahid Shadan and Vahid Imeri in the third-place play-off.
Shadan was named the most spectacular player of the Asian footvolley championships.
The Praputt Kamlang-ek FC 4th Asian Footvolley Championships kicked off in Thailand on April 26, and wrapped up on April 29, 2017.
Footvolley was created by Octavio de Moraes on Rio de Janeiro’s Copacabana Beach, Brazil, in 1965. It is a sport that combines aspects of beach volleyball and association football.
Footvolley is essentially beach volleyball, except for the fact that players are not allowed to use their hands, and a football replaces the volleyball.
A number of professional football players, including Romário, Edmundo, Ronaldo, Ronaldinho Gaúcho, Júnior, and Edinho, have taken up footvolley in both promotional events and celebrity matches in recent years.All charges against Kenya’s president have been dropped by the international criminal court (ICC), highlighting the tribunal’s difficulties in bringing to justice the high-ranking officials it has accused of atrocities.
With a show of reluctance, the chief prosecutor, Fatou Bensouda,on Friday filed a notice withdrawing allegations against the president, Uhuru Kenyatta. She accused the Kenyan government of harassing and intimidating potential witnesses.
“Given the state of the evidence in this case, I have no alternative but to withdraw the charges against Mr Kenyatta,” the Gambian lawyer explained. “I am doing so without prejudice to the possibility of bringing a new case should additional evidence become available.”
He added: “This is a painful moment for the men, women and children who have suffered tremendously from the horrors of the post-election violence, and who have waited, patiently, for almost seven years to see justice done.”
Kenyatta had been charged with crimes against humanity including murder, rape, persecution and deportation as an “indirect co-perpetrator” in violence that flared after Kenya’s 2007 elections, leaving more than 1,000 people dead.
The collapse of the case is a new blow to the credibility of the court’s prosecution office. The office has begun nine full investigations since it was established in 2002, all of them in Africa, and has just seven suspects in custody.
Reacting to the news on Friday, Kenyatta said he was excited and called for a case against his deputy, William Ruto, and another Kenyan to be dropped as well. “One down, two to go,” he said.
Kenyatta’s British lawyer, Steven Kay, said the court and its prosecutors “owe [Kenyatta] an apology for bringing proceedings based upon false witnesses and impugning his integrity”.
Kenyatta’s trial was postponed twice this year while prosecutors attempted to shore up their case after one of their key witnesses refused to testify and another admitted giving false evidence.
Kenyatta was indicted in 2011 but went on to become president in the 2013 election, using his indictment at The Hague-based court as an election issue. His government lobbied hard to have the case against him deferred by the UN security council, arguing that the delay was essential because Kenya needed its leader to help fight al-Shabaab terrorists in neighbouring Somalia and at home.
The court’s mission is to prosecute perpetrators of atrocities when a country is unwilling or unable to prosecute them itself. It has no police force and must rely on help from governments that may only wish to cooperate when it suits their political purposes.
In her statement, Bensouda blamed the Kenyan government for obstructing her investigations. “Contrary to the government of Kenya’s public pronouncements that it has fully complied with its legal obligations in this case, the ruling has confirmed that in fact it has breached its treaty obligations under the Rome statute by failing to cooperate with my investigation,” she said.
“I have persistently sought to secure the cooperation that my office required from the government of Kenya in this case in order to execute my mandate. Crucial documentary evidence regarding the 2007-08 post-election violence, including concerning the conduct of the accused, can only be found in Kenya and is only accessible to the prosecution through the assistance of the government of Kenya. This crucial assistance was ultimately not provided, as confirmed by the recent decision of the trial chamber.”
Bensouda said prosecutors had also endured a “steady and relentless stream of false media reports about the Kenya cases, an unprecedented campaign on social media to expose the identity of protected witnesses in the Kenya cases [and] concerted and wide-ranging efforts to harass, intimidate and threaten individuals who would wish to be witnesses.”
In October, Kenyatta became the first head of state to appear before the ICC. He temporarily handed over power to his deputy, William Ruto, before flying to The Hague. The international statute that established the ICC removed the principle that serving heads of state or governments should be granted immunity from prosecution under international law. He had previously appeared before being elected president.
The African Union, which represents countries across the continent, has accused the court of focusing its hearings excessively on African countries. Kenya has cooperated with the ICC while Sudan’s president, Omar Hassan al-Bashir, has defied repeated summons to appear.
Bensouda last month requested an indefinite postponement, saying Nairobi had refused to cooperate with a request for financial statements and other statements leaving her without enough evidence for a trial.
On Wednesday, however, the ICC rejected the prosecutors’ request for a further adjournment, directing instead that they either withdraw charges or proceed to trial. The court also dismissed a prosecution request for a finding of “non-cooperation” against Kenya.
“The decision to drop charges against President Kenyatta is devastating to the thousands of survivors who saw the court as their last hope for holding one of Africa’s most powerful leaders accountable,” said Karen Naimer, director of the Program on Sexual Violence in Conflict Zones at Physicians for Human Rights (PHR). “The collapse of this case is a serious blow to the international criminal court and international justice, where gathering evidence against political leaders protected by their state remains an enormous challenge. We hope the court can use the evidence it has gathered to support its case against the remaining perpetrators.”
Earlier this week, the UK charity Redress, which supports survivors of torture, criticised the court for failing to ensure Kenya cooperated. “Effectively, the court is saying: our powers to compel a state to cooperate with the ICC are limited so we will not even try,” said Carla Ferstman, director of Redress. “There should be real consequences for states who fail to cooperate with the court.I got this wrap cloth from Tanzania. It’s a khanga |
the right sort of policies and consistent effort there.
On the specific cases, I think I should say no more, and particularly in view of the latest incident, which was tragic. There is a good U.S. attorney in New York and I have confidence that whatever decision is appropriate will be made as all the facts come out and that's what's being done here....
Russian Elections
Q. Mr. President, when you spoke with Russia's president-elect Putin the other day, what did he tell you to indicate how he might run the country, particularly in the areas of the economy and foreign policy? And do you think it would be a good idea for you or your successor to try to build the same sort of personal relationship with Putin that you had with Boris Yeltsin, in view of criticisms that U.S. policy was too focused on one individual?
A. Well, first, he has expressed a genuine commitment to economic reform and the Russian economy is growing again. And the desire to put together a first-rate team. And that was encouraging. In foreign policy, he expressed an interest in working with us to pursue matters of mutual concern, particularly in the area of arms control and in some other areas. And I'm looking forward to working with him on that.
Advertisement Continue reading the main story
With regard to the personal relations, I think that President Yeltsin, keep in mind, was the first democratically elected president of Russia. And he had the sort of personality that it was difficult to remain neutral in dealing with him. And I did like him very much but I also thought he was committed to democracy. And I think the fact that he stepped down and that we had a genuine democratic transition in Russia is some evidence of that. So I think that regardless of personal chemistry, and I hope that mine with President Putin will be good and I hope that my successor's will be good with him, the United States and Russia have vast national interests that require them to work together on the things with which we agree and to manage the difficulties between us where we have honest disagreements. And so it is the relationship that is important. And the personal chemistry will come and go depending on the personalities. But the point is the fact that I liked Boris Yeltsin didn't stop me from differing with him when we were differing and it certainly never stopped him from differing with me in his classic style. And I don't expect that to change with President Putin. But I think that the relationship is very important to the United States and to Russia. And it must be worked on constantly....
Elian Gonzalez Case
Q. A possible confrontation is looming between the relatives of Elian Gonzalez and federal authorities. As a last resort, would you permit federal authorities or some kind of federal agents to go in there to forcibly take the boy so that he could be sent back to Cuba?
A. Well I think that we're surely some distance from that because doubtless, if they do not prevail in court, they will clearly appeal. And I would just hope that the law would be followed by everyone, including them. I think that there is a legal process here. I have done my best to avoid politicizing it, and I think that the appropriate authorities, and in this case the judges, will make a decision and when that is, when that is done, I think that people on all sides should accept the rule of the court...
Q. The mayor of Miami said today that he would withhold any assistance from the city, including police, if federal authorities decide to return Elian Gonzalez to Cuba, and that if there were any violence in the streets he would hold you and Attorney General Reno personally responsible for that. That seems to sound like an invitation for the community to block federal authorities and an assurance to them that the Miami police will stand aside.
A. Well, I like the mayor very much, but I still believe in the rule of law here. We all have to, whatever the law is, whatever the decision is ultimately made, the rest of us ought to obey it.
Newsletter Sign Up Continue reading the main story Please verify you're not a robot by clicking the box. Invalid email address. Please re-enter. You must select a newsletter to subscribe to. Sign Up You will receive emails containing news content, updates and promotions from The New York Times. You may opt-out at any time. You agree to receive occasional updates and special offers for The New York Times's products and services. Thank you for subscribing. An error has occurred. Please try again later. View all New York Times newsletters.
Gun Control
Q. Mr. President, Charlton Heston is on the college speaking circuit and he said last night it amazes me that the president is so stubborn when it comes to guns. And he notes that there are already 22,000 gun laws on the books by his count, which he says that the administration does not enforce. Could you do more to enforce existing gun laws? And how do you feel about the attack that the N.R.A. has mounted on you and your administration?
A. Well, let me answer the question on the merits. Gun prosecutions are up under our administration and I have asked in this budget for a significant increase to enforce the laws, including more prosecutors, more A.T.F. agents. But, again, I would make the main point, the N.R.A.'s position is that if somebody does something wrong, throw the book at them, but do not have any preventive measures when it comes to guns. They believe that unlike every other area of our life, there should be no prevention. So they say, they didn't want us to have the Brady bill. They said it was too burdensome, but it hasn't been burdensome. They don't want us to close the gun-show loophole, they say it's too burdensome. They're not even for the research into smart-gun technology or for banning large-ammunition clips. There's a case where we have a law on the books, it can't be effectively enforced. These assault weapons are illegal, but the big ammunition clips can be imported because of a loophole in the law, so a law we have can't be effectively enforced. You know, I think that it's just wrong to say that because of the Second Amendment and because there are a lot of people that like to hunt and sport shoot, that prevention plays no role in this. How would you feel if I said, for example, the following: you know, all these people that go through airport metal detectors, 99.999 percent of them are law-abiding, good people, and it is really a pain to go through those metal detectors if you got a money clip in your pocket or a rodeo belt buckle on or something else, and you have to go through two or three times and take your belt off or whatever. It's just too burdensome and I'm just sick and tired of it and I'm going to take these metal detectors down in the airports. And the next time a plane blows up, we're going to throw the book at them.
Now, you're laughing, but what if I said, you know, most people who drive are good, honest, responsible people. And we should just, we ought to repeal the laws, the driver's license laws and repeal the speed limits, and the next time somebody does something wrong and has a 25-car pile-up, we'll just throw the book at them. I mean, a sensible society has a balance between prevention and punishment.... And in terms of their attacks on me, you know, that's what I get hired to do, that's part of the president's job description, being attacked by people who disagree with him. That doesn't matter. I still think Charlton Heston is a great actor and I love his movies and I still watch him every time I get a chance. And I loved having him here at the White House not very long ago when he got one of the Kennedy Center Awards. But that's irrelevant to me. The only question is, what is best for the safety of the American people? And guns are no different than any other area of our life. We need a balance between prevention and punishment.
Q. A federal judge with whom you have disagreed in the past today said it was his opinion that you had committed a criminal violation of the Privacy Act by releasing those Kathleen Willey letters during the independent counsel investigation. What do you think of that ruling and do you agree with the take of one of your legal advisers earlier today who called this judge ''a loose cannon''?
Advertisement Continue reading the main story
A. Did one of my legal advisers do that? Well, he does seem to have somehow acquired a significant percentage of the cases involving the White House. That's an interesting story, but anyway. You know, obviously we don't agree with the ruling and I can say that when the decision was made to release those letters, I didn't even have any conversation with anybody about the Privacy Act. I never thought about it, never thought about whether it applied or not, and decided to do it reluctantly only because it was the only way I knew to refute allegations that were made against me that were untrue. And I think they plainly did that, and I would not have done it otherwise. But, I think in terms of the law, there are other reasons that I disagree with the law, with the idea that the Privacy Act, which was generally designed to protect people who had business with the federal government or were complaining about something that the government was doing or had reasons for confidentiality and having to give the government records. There are all kinds of reasons for the Privacy Act. And so I just don't believe that. I think that the opinion of our counsel's office and many other judges who've ruled on this is that act does not apply to this kind of correspondence in the White House. And so we disagree and we'll proceed accordingly.
Q. Mr. President, in light of the fact that OPEC has decided to increase production, do you see it as a mistake for the Senate to proceed with a bill that would suspend the gas tax? And if it reached your desk, would you veto it?
A. Well, I don't expect it to reach my desk because there seems to be bipartisan opposition to it in the House, including among the leadership. But the problem I have with it, apart from what it might do to the Highway Trust Fund and the spending obligations that have already been incurred by the acts of Congress, the budgets, is that I'm not sure that the savings would be passed along to the consumers in addition to that. So I think there are a lot of questions about it. But I don't expect it to pass. I do think, however, we shouldn't minimize the real bind that some Americans have already faced by these high fuel costs. For most people who don't have to drive a long way to work, it may seem an irritant but not a burden. But there are a lot of Americans who do have to drive a long way to work, who work for not very much money. And there are a lot of Americans who are in the trucking business who've been really really hurt by this. So I think we have to just keep our powder dry, keep our options open. But right now I think the prudent thing is to see how quickly these prices can come down with the increase in production and for the House to reauthorize the strategic petroleum reserve. We've got to have that reauthorization of the strategic petroleum reserve. My authority even to use that, even as a possible option, expires on Friday. And it's very very important for that to pass....
Q. Mr. President, I wonder if you've got any thoughts or advice for your friend, British Prime Minister Tony Blair, and the dilemma that he faces on whether he should take parental leave, as his wife has suggested, when their next child is born? And if you don't want to share your advice with us, what would you do in that situation?
A. I would like to have been a fly on the wall when they first talked about that after it appeared in public. Well, you know, I feel very close to both Tony and Cherie. I don't want to get in the middle of that. But as I think Mrs. Blair said that there must be a third way to handle this challenge. That's what she said, although I thought it was a good line. First of all, I envy him very much. I think it's a great thing for them. It'll keep them young. And it's a wonderful thing. You know, for me, even though presidents have a very hard schedule, you know, and we keep very long hours, you have some more flexibility with your time because we live above the store, so to speak. So I wouldn't have the same burdens if we were having a baby. I could spend a lot of time with the baby and still work and work it out. But I think that that's something they ought to work with. I do think that the prime minister's government did a good thing to try to provide fathers as well as mothers family leave, though. I think it's a good policy.
Trade With China
Q. Mr. President, you are lobbying Congress to pass permanent trade relations for China. You're having a difficult time getting your own Democrats to vote for it. Vice President Gore has said even though he is for this agreement, if he was president, he wouldn't negotiate trade deals like this. He would only negotiate trade deals that included labor and environmental standards. How is that stand of his complicating your efforts to convince Democrats to vote for this?
A. If we were having a trade agreement with China, instead of an agreement on their accession to the W.T.O., we could do that. But keep in mind this -- oh, you know, I favor, I believe I was the first person in a national campaign to ever to advocate the inclusion of labor and environmental provisions in trade agreements. And we put some in NAFTA. And we've gotten some good environmental improvements as a result of it. Even though there are still environmental problems along the Rio Grande River there, a lot has been done. And there've been some labor standards improvements as a result of it in some places. So I know a lot of the people who wanted it aren't satisfied that we've done as much. But it was a really ground-breaking effort. I went to the International Labor Organization in Switzerland and to the W.T.O. and to Davos, Switzerland to argue for a different approach to trade. I don't think you can take economics in a global economy that is becoming increasingly globalized and act as if it's totally separate from child labor or other abusive labor practices or what the impact of economic activity on the environment is.
That is not what this this agreement is. I still believe if we can just get everybody to read what this agreement does, it will pass handily because this agreement will create jobs for America. It will create jobs for labor union members. It will grow the economy. I will say again, this is a agreement about the conditions under which China enters the W.T.O.
Advertisement Continue reading the main story
The United States doesn't lower any tariffs. We don't change any trade laws. We do nothing. They have to lower tariffs. They open up telecommunications for investment. They allow us to sell cars made in America and China at much lower tariffs. They allow us to put our own distributorships over there. They allow us to put our own parts over there. We don't have to transfer technology or do joint manufacturing in China anymore. This is a hundred-to-nothing deal for America when it comes to the economic consequences.
And most of what we have negotiated we will absolutely lose the benefit of. If they go into the W.T.O. and we don't approve normal trading -- permanent trade relations with them -- what will happen is all the work that Charlene Barshefsky and Gene Sperling did to get those concessions will go to Europe and Japan and all the people who didn't negotiate. They'll get all the benefits and we won't.
So the economic consequences are quite clear and unambiguous for the United States. And under the rules of the W.T.O. we couldn't impose different standards on their membership that weren't imposed on us or anyone else....
Campaign Finance
Q. Could you comment on the vice president's plan for a $7 billion democracy endowment to pay for Congressional and perhaps presidential campaigns?
A. I thought it was a good idea. I kind of wish I'd thought of it myself. I'll tell you why I think it's a good idea, very briefly. I think you can't ever really solve the problem in campaign finance reform unless you have -- because what is the problem? The problem is that it costs so much money to communicate with people over the mass media.
So if you want to solve the problem, you either have to have a different source of funding or there have to be requirements for free or drastically reduced media time. Otherwise, you're just kind of rearranging where the money comes from or how you do it. I think McCain-Feingold is important and let me reiterate what the vice president said. His proposal should not be interpreted in any way as a reduction of the administration's support for McCain-Feingold.
The Shays-Meehan bill, which is the partner bill, has already passed the House. Again, if we could bring it up to a vote in the Senate, it would pass the Senate. A minority is blocking it in the Senate. We can pass it in the Senate. And we ought to pass it because it will do some real good.
But the thing I like about it is the American people have reservations about public financing of campaigns. We even have some trouble with the dollar check-off for the presidential campaigns. This proposes to give incentives to people to try to raise the money in a more voluntary fashion from private, nontax sources. So if it could be done and if the trust fund could be filled up, I think it's actually quite a good idea....
Advertisement Continue reading the main story
Q. I'd like to return to campaign finance reform if I could. Vice President Gore, in announcing his proposal, called himself an imperfect messenger on that subject. Isn't that an acknowledgment, sir, of something you and he have long denied, that there was an attempt to bend, if not break, the spirit, if not the letter, of campaign finance laws during your re-election campaign?
A. No, I disagree with that. He never said that he knew that any of the money that he raised was not lawfully raised, and I don't believe he did, and I can certainly tell you look at the difference in the way we reacted in 1996, and the way the other party reacted, to allegations of illegal foreign money, for example. What did we do? We spent $4 million that we had to go out and raise, to put all these records on computer discs, to give it all to the Justice Department, to make sure that everything was there, there was no slow walking, no stonewalling, no nothing. I was outraged when I found out that the system for checking the backgrounds of contributors, and things like that, had been dismantled without my knowledge or approval. And I did not do all that work, and, and keep in mind that -- you mentioned '96. We raised the funds we needed for my presidential re-election in seven months, and I believe you can go check this but I have been told that ever since the campaign finance laws came in in the 70's, that we had the smallest number of violations and fines of any presidential campaign; the Clinton-Gore '96 campaign did. So I know those funds were raised for the party, but I was as appalled as the next person when I found out that we had taken funds that people had given us, money that wasn't legal. We didn't need it to win. It was wrong, and we did everything we could to try to correct it and set it right, and we spent a lot of money doing it. And, so, I think what he meant is that he had been involved in one incident which he felt was unfortunate, and we raised soft money, and we had done it aggressively because we don't believe in unilateral disarmament. But I would just point out that 100 percent of our caucus, the Democratic Caucus in the Senate and the House, 100 percent of us, in the White House, the whole Democratic Party in Washington, D.C., support the McCain-Feingold Bill. So if it had been up to us, it would have been law years ago. And I think that's worth something. So I think he's a good messenger....
White House E-Mail
Q. It was reported today that the White House had a computer disk with Monica Lewinsky's e-mails. Sir, what do you think about the notion that it wasn't turned over sooner? And how would you assess your administration's overall handling of e-mail problems at the White House?
A. Well, I don't know, but I believe that was known years ago. I don't, I don't handle the e-mail things. I can tell you this, my counsel, Beth Nolan is going up to the Hill, I think, tomorrow, to talk about this. I believe that it is accurate to say that we had turned over everything that had been found and from what I understand, some things were not found because they were in a different system. And so now we're working out how to cooperate with the Congress.... I'm confident that whatever's the right thing to do, we'll do.The current wages for animators in Japan are dismal, something groups like Animator Dormitory and Young Animators NPO attempt to lessen with help from donations. In 2014, the average Japanese animator started at US$10,000 a year salary compared to the average US$40,000 salary. Animators are usually freelance, work long hours, and are saddled with high-cost of living expenses due to the areas where most animation studios are located. Death from overwork is a real risk, as the unfortunate passing of Kazunori Mizuno makes all too evident.
Animator Katsunori Shibata is hoping to help ease the burden through his own crowdfunding campaign, not to support himself, but his colleagues. His initial goal was to raise 110,000 yen (US$1,002) to split among three animators and cover the campaign site costs. The awardees receive the money via lottery; after contacting Shibata via Twitter, he will select them at random.
Since the campaign launched, it has raised well over the goal with a total of 638,000 yen (US$5,811). There are still 28 days left in the campaign.
Shibata is a key animator that previously worked on Yuri Kuma Arashi, 91 Days, Flip Flappers, and A Certain Magical Index. In the campaign text he notes that there are many freelance animators who are making less than 1,060,000 yen (US$9,657) a year despite working 11 hours a day, six days a week and that no corrective actions have been taken to improve the conditions for freelance animators.
Shibata states that the current environment is devastating and there is no room to nurture talent. That said, he adds that if the top staff keep going up and the lower staff become weak, they will all fall together. He also hopes that the project will open communication on how to better the industry.
The turnaround for animators is pretty high due to the workload and low pay, as stated by art director Thomas Romain.
Meanwhile, other companies, like Dwango, are developing technology that could render in-between animators a thing of the past.
[Via Nijipoi]Two INSERM research teams led by Pier Vincenzo Piazza and Giovanni Marsicano (INSERM Unit 862 "Neurocentre Magendie" in Bordeaux) recently discovered that pregnenolone, a molecule produced by the brain, acts as a natural defence mechanism against the harmful effects of cannabis in animals. Pregnenolone prevents THC, the main active principle in cannabis, from fully activating its brain receptor, the CB1 receptor, that when overstimulated by THC causes the intoxicating effects of cannabis. By identifying this mechanism, the INSERM teams are already developing new approaches for the treatment of cannabis addiction.
These results are to be published in Science on 3 January.
Over 20 million people around the world are addicted to cannabis, including a little more than a half million people in France. In the last few years, cannabis addiction has become one of the main reasons for seeking treatment in addiction clinics. Cannabis consumption is particularly high (30%) in individuals between 16 to 24 years old, a population that is especially susceptible to the harmful effects of the drug.
While cannabis consumers are seeking a state of relaxation, well-being and altered perception, there are many dangers associated to a regular consumption of cannabis. Two major behavioural problems are associated with regular cannabis use in humans: cognitive deficits and a general loss of motivation. Thus, in addition to being extremely dependent on the drug, regular users of cannabis show signs of memory loss and a lack of motivation that make quite hard their social insertion.
The main active ingredient in cannabis, THC, acts on the brain through CB1 cannabinoid receptors located in the neurons. THC binds to these receptors diverting them from their physiological roles, such as regulating food intake, metabolism, cognitive processes and pleasure. When THC overstimulates CB1 receptors, it triggers a reduction in memory abilities, motivation and gradually leads to dependence.
Traduction d'image: Effects of cannabis related to the development of addiction
Reduced inhibition of the activity of dopaminergic neurons
Increase of dopamine release
Developing an efficient treatment for cannabis addiction is becoming a priority of research in the fiend of drug addiction.
In this context, the INSERM teams led by Pier Vincenzo Piazza and Giovanni Marsicano have investigated the potential role of pregnenolone a brain produced steroid hormone. Up to now, pregnenolone was considered the inactive precursor used to synthesize all the other steroid hormones (progesterone, estrogens, testosterone, etc.). The INSERM researchers have now discovered that pregnenolone has quite an important functional role: it provide a natural defence mechanism that can protect the brain from the harmful effects of cannabis.
Essentially, when high doses of THC (well above those inhaled by regular users) activate the CB1 cannabinoid receptor they also trigger the synthesis of pregnenolone. Pregnenole then binds to a specific site on the same CB1 receptors (see figure) and reducing the effects of THC.
The administration of pregnenolone at doses that increase the brain's level of this hormone even more, antagonize the behavioral effects of cannabis.
At the neurobiological level, pregnenolone greatly reduces the release of dopamine triggered by THC. This is an important effect, since the addictive effects of drugs involve an excessive release of dopamine.
This negative feedback mediated by pregnenolone (THC is what triggers the production of pregnenolone, which then inhibits the effects of THC) reveal a previously unknown endogenous mechanism that protects the brain from an over-activation of CB1 receptor.
A protective mechanism that opens the doors to a new therapeutic approach.
The role of pregnenolone was discovered when, rats were given equivalent doses of cocaine, morphine, nicotine, alcohol and cannabis and the levels of several brain steroids (pregnenolone, testosterone, allopregnenolone, DHEA etc..) were measured. It was then found that only one drug, THC, increased brain steroids and more specifically selectively one steroid, pregnenolone, that went up3000% for a period of two hours.
The effect of administering THC on the pregnenolone synthesis (PREG) and other brain steroids
This increase in pregnenolone is a built-in mechanism that moderates the effects of THC. Thus, the effects of THC increase when pregnenolone synthesis is blocked. Conversely, when pregnenolone is administered to rats or mice at doses (2-6 mg/kg) that induce even greater concentrations of the hormone in the brain, the negative behavioural effects of THC are blocked. For example, the animals that were given pregnenolone recover their normal memory abilities, are less sedated and less incline to self-administer cannabinoids.
Experiments conducted in cell cultures that express the human CB1 receptor confirm that pregnenolone can also counteract the molecular action of THC in humans.
Pier Vincenzo Piazza explains that pregnenolone itself cannot be used as a treatment "Pregnenolone cannot be used as a treatment because it is badly absorbed when administerd orally and once in the blood stream it is rapidly transformed in other steroids".
However, the researcher says that there is strong hope of seeing a new addiction therapy emerge from this discovery. "We have now developed derivatives of pregnenolone that are well absorbed and stable. They then present the characteristics of compounds that can be used as new class of therapeutic drugs. We should be able to begin clinical trials soon and verify whether we have indeed discovered the first pharmacological treatment for cannabis dependence."
###
This work was made possible with support from: MILDT, Conseil Régional d'Aquitaine, ERC and INSERM.Fox News president Roger Ailes used the platform provided for him while accepting a prize from a right-wing foundation to repeat discredited claims that the Affordable Care Act will create 16,000 armed IRS agents and that President Obama was absent on the night of the Benghazi attacks.
Ailes was honored during the 2013 Bradley Prizes, awards given by the Lynde and Harry Bradley Foundation, which gives tens of millions of dollars annually to a "Who's Who" of right-wing movement organizations. The prize, which recognizes "individuals of extraordinary talent and dedication," includes a stipend of $250,000, which Ailes said he was donating to a charity for senior citizens.
According to remarks posted on the Fox News website, Ailes said that "The federal government is about to hire 16,000 more IRS agents to enforce healthcare." He also said, "I have come to the conclusion that even I don't care what the president of the United States was doing that night. However, I would like to know what the commander in chief was doing that night."
Both of Ailes' attacks have been pushed by Fox News -- and both are based on falsehoods.
On the April 16, 2010, edition of Fox & Friends, then-Fox News contributor Newt Gingrich attacked reports that approval for health care reform was growing by claiming the law would hire "16,000 IRS agents as health police":
GINGRICH: But my general experience is that, you know, you don't have people walk up to you in an airplane and start attacking you very often, or you're in really deep trouble. I think what [Sen.] Harry [Reid] ought to do is get in a car and drive around Nevada, where people are overwhelmingly opposed to hiring 16,000 IRS agents as health police.
The figure, which was based on a report by Republicans on the House Ways and Means Committee, was described as "wildly inaccurate" by FactCheck.org which described the claim as coming "from a partisan analysis based on guesswork and false assumptions, and compounded by outright misrepresentation":
The GOP analysts assume that the $10 billion would not be spread evenly over the decade, but would reach $1.5 billion annually in later years. That's reasonable, given that major provisions of the new law don't take effect until 2014. But even accepting that, the peak figure could just as easily be $750 million a year, if the CBO's lower guess proves to be correct. So the number of new IRS workers implied by the GOP's own logic could be closer to 5,000 than to 16,500, after adjusting for overhead costs and inflation.
Ailes' second attack -- that Obama was missing on September 11, 2012, during the attack on a diplomatic facility in Benghazi, Libya -- also appeared regularly on Fox News, where Fox figures repeatedly demanded to know where Obama was during the attacks. In addition to reports by Gen. Martin Dempsey, chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, that White House staff was "engaged with the National Military Command Center pretty constantly" throughout the attack and testimony by Defense Secretary Leon Panetta that Obama gave orders to deploy forces immediately after learning about the attack, the White House Flickr page shows Obama meeting with aides in the Oval Office on the night of the attack:
Ailes also said during his remarks: "Traditional American culture influenced me greatly as I created the Fox News Channel for Rupert Murdoch. We knew that a fair and balanced news channel could succeed, as long as no views were rejected and conservative views were allowed to be heard."Reddit on Wednesday started banning pages for neo-Nazis and their sympathizers on the platform.
Reddit announced the change on its own r/modnews subreddit.
ADVERTISEMENT
“We found that the policy regarding ‘inciting' violence was too vague, and so we have made an effort to adjust it to be more clear and comprehensive,” the company wrote.
“Going forward, we will take action against any content that encourages, glorifies, incites, or calls for violence or physical harm against an individual or a group of people; likewise, we will also take action against content that glorifies or encourages the abuse of animals.”
At least seven subreddits have been kicked off Reddit as a result, including the r/Nazi, r/EuropeanNationalism and r/pol subreddits. The last subreddit is an offshoot of the infamous 4Chan and 8Chan message boards that share the "pol" name.
Asked for comment, a Reddit spokesperson said the company strives "to be a welcoming, open platform for all by trusting our users to maintain an environment that cultivates genuine conversation."
The spokesperson did not confirm or deny that the bans of r/nazi and the others mentioned were the direct result of the policy change.
Reddit had been previously criticized for being slow to remove certain types of problematic content from its platform. The company has said its aim is to be more flexible to the desires of its various communities. Barring certain rules in its user agreement and content policy, acceptable content on Reddit is up to the self-established rules of the site’s different subreddits.A Gwinnett County boy who was born without kidneys got the news Tuesday night that he would receive a deceased donor kidney.
AJ Burgess has been fighting for his life for nearly three years and his family had been working with the transplant team to allow AJ’s father, Anthony Dickerson, to donate a kidney, The Atlanta Journal Constitution previously reported.
The dad was a perfect match, but concerns about his criminal history and recent arrest prevented the team from moving forward with a surgery planned for early October. After almost two months, AJ finally got the news that a deceased donor kidney was available.
Mother Carmellia Burgess rushed AJ to Children’s Healthcare of Atlanta at Egleston Tuesday night, attorney Mawuli Davis told the AJC.
The boy went into surgery at 7:30 a.m.
Please visit MyAJC.com for more details.
In other news:My father was born in 1912 Dublin, 46 years before I was born in Brooklyn. Though the youngest of his Catholic family, six siblings survived his 1984 death. I would look in on the eldest, Uncle Andy, who also lived in the New York area. While old enough to be my great-grandfather, we greatly enjoyed each other's company.Uncle Andy would talk of family and Irish history in a fascinating and witty way. While one brother was a priest and one sister a nun, Uncle Andy could be highly critical of Catholicism and Irish nationalism, setting him at odds with all of his siblings. In retrospect, so much of Uncle Andy's criticisms seem to have been reactions to events he witnessed in his late teens: “‘Easter 1916’ by William Butler Yeats....commemorates the doomed Irish rebellion that occurred at Easter a century ago….One of the Irish leaders was Patrick Pearse, who was obsessed with ideas of redemption through blood….Following the logic of his teaching, on Easter Monday 1916, Pearse joined other nationalists, both Catholic and secular, in a suicidal rising against British power” (Phillip Jenkins, Aletia, 3/28/16).Ireland is soon commemorating the 100th anniversary of the “Easter Rebellion.” It was after Uncle Andy’s death that I came across “ Rebels: The Irish Rising of 1916 ” and gained a better understanding of how Uncle Andy had given me an eyewitness account of momentous events in Irish history (I recently bought this book for a third time, as those to whom earlier copies were loaned apparently found it engrossing!).Six and a half decades before the " Easter Rebellion,” there is strong belief that the "Great Hunger" was a case of genocide: “Back in Famine time, the same potato crop disease occurred most heavily in Scotland, outside Ireland, yet there were relatively few casualties as the landowners and government ensured, for their own sakes as much as anything, that there was no mass death. That was not the case in Ireland, where a very different mentality prevailed. The damned Irish were going to get what they deserved because of their attachment to Catholicism and Irish ways when they were refusing to toe the British line…. every possible effort by local organizations to feed the starving were [sic] thwarted and frustrated by a British government intent on teaching the Irish a lesson and forcing market forces on them” (Niall O’Dowd, Irish Central, 3/8/16).While Ireland undoubtedly suffered much, suicidal undertakings do not stand up to a “just war” analysis:“The strict conditions for legitimate defense by military force require rigorous consideration. The gravity of such a decision makes it subject to rigorous conditions of moral legitimacy. At one and the same time:- the damage inflicted by the aggressor on the nation or community of nations must be lasting, grave, and certain;- all other means of putting an end to it must have been shown to be impractical or ineffective;- there must be serious prospects of success;- the use of arms must not produce evils and disorders graver than the evil to be eliminated. The power of modern means of destruction weighs very heavily in evaluating this condition.These are the traditional elements enumerated in what is called the ‘just war’ doctrine.The evaluation of these conditions for moral legitimacy belongs to the prudential judgment of those who have responsibility for the common good” ( Catechism of the Catholic Church, #2309 ).The revelation that the new tuition fees system – introduced in 2010 in the face of massive student protest – will in fact cost more to run than the old one, should come as a surprise to almost no one who paid attention to the debate over its introduction. A host of organisations and campaign groups warned from the outset that the increase in fees would save the government no money, largely as a result of the large costs of upfront borrowing and the fact that so many students would never earn enough to pay back their debt.
The motivation behind the coalition's policies in education and the broader public sector has |
Leviticus 5:1–10 and 19:12, Numbers 30:2–17, and Deuteronomy 23:24.[40]
The Mishnah taught that saying any substitute for the formulas of a vow has the validity of a vow. If one says to another, "I am barred from you by a vow," or, "I am separated from you," or, "I am removed from you, in respect of anything that I might eat of yours or that I might taste of yours," the one vowing is prohibited. Rabbi Akiva was inclined to give a stringent ruling when a person says, "I am banned to you."[41] The Gemara taught that a vow ( נֶדֶר, neder) makes a thing forbidden to a person, while an oath ( שְׁבֻעָה, shevuah) binds a person to a relationship to a thing.[42]
The Sifre asked why Numbers 6:1–4 set forth the effectiveness of nazirite vows, when the general rule of Numbers 30:2 would suffice to teach that all vows — including nazirite vows — are binding. The Sifre explained that Numbers 6:1–4 warned that a person making a nazirite vow would be bound to at least a 30-day nazirite period.[43]
Rabbi Akiva taught that vows are a fence to self-restraint.[44] But the Jerusalem Talmud asked whether it was not enough that the Torah had forbidden us things that we should seek to forbid yet other things to ourselves.[45] The Gemara discouraged vows. Rabbi Nathan taught that one who vows is as if he built a high place, and he who fulfils a vow is as if he sacrificed on that high place. And the Gemara deduced from Rabbi Nathan's teaching that it is meritorious to seek absolution from vows.[46] And a Midrash told the tale of King Jannai, who owned two thousand towns, all of which were destroyed because of true oaths. A man would swear to his friend that he would eat such-and-such a food at such-and-such a place and drink such-and-such a drink at such-and-such a place. And they would go and fulfill their oaths and would be destroyed (for swearing to trifles). The Midrash concluded that if this was the fate of people who swore truthfully, how much more would swearing to a falsehood lead to destruction.[47]
The Mishnah taught that the law of the dissolution of vows hovers in the air and has nothing on which to rest in the Biblical text.[48] Rav Judah said that Samuel found the Scriptural basis for the law of the dissolution of vows in the words of Numbers 30:3, "he shall not break his word," which teaches that "he" — the vower — may not break the vow, but others might dissolve it for him.[49] The Rabbis taught in a Baraita that a Sage could annul a vow retroactively.[50]
Rabbah bar bar Hana told of how an Arab merchant took him to see Mount Sinai, where he saw scorpions surround it, and they stood like white donkeys. Rabbah bar bar Hana heard a Heavenly Voice expressing regret about making an oath and asking who would annul the oath. When Rabbah bar bar Hana came before the Rabbis, they told him that he should have annulled the oath. But Rabbah bar bar Hana thought that perhaps it was the oath in connection with the Flood, where in Genesis 8:21, God promised never to destroy the world again with another flood. The Rabbis replied that if that had been the oath, the Heavenly Voice would not have expressed regret.[51]
Worshiping the Golden Calf (illustration from a Bible card published 1901 by the Providence Lithograph Company)
Rava employed Numbers 30:3 to interpret Exodus 32:11, which says: "And Moses besought ( וַיְחַל, va-yechal) the Lord his God" in connection with the incident of the Golden Calf. Rava noted that Exodus 32:11 uses the term "besought" ( וַיְחַל, va-yechal), while Numbers 30:3 uses the similar term "break" ( יַחֵל, yacheil) in connection with vows. Transferring the use of Numbers 30:3 to Exodus 32:11, Rava reasoned that Exodus 32:11 meant that Moses stood in prayer before God until Moses annulled for God God's vow to destroy Israel, for a master had taught that while people cannot break their vows, others may annul their vows for them.[52] Similarly, Rabbi Berekiah taught in the name of Rabbi Helbo in the name of Rabbi Isaac that Moses absolved God of God's vow. When the Israelites made the Golden Calf, Moses began to persuade God to forgive them, but God explained to Moses that God had already taken an oath in Exodus 22:19 that "he who sacrifices to the gods... shall be utterly destroyed," and God could not retract an oath. Moses responded by asking whether God had not granted Moses the power to annul oaths in Numbers 30:3 by saying, "When a man vows a vow to the Lord, or swears an oath to bind his soul with a bond, he shall not break his word," implying that while he himself could not break his word, a scholar could absolve his vow. So Moses wrapped himself in his cloak and adopted the posture of a sage, and God stood before Moses as one asking for the annulment of a vow.[53]
Rabbi Simeon ben Yohai taught that just as the texts "He shall not break his word" in Numbers 30:3 and "Defer not to pay it" in Ecclesiastes 5:3 apply to vows, so they also apply to valuations, and thus Moses exhorts the Israelites in Leviticus 27:2: "When a man shall clearly utter a vow of persons to the Lord, according to your valuation...."[54]
Nebuchadnezzar II
Zedekiah
Rabbi Eleazar interpreted Lamentations 2:10 to teach that one should not treat Numbers 30 lightly, because on account of it were the members of the Great Sanhedrin of Zedekiah slain. When King Jeconiah of Judah was exiled, King Nebuchadnezzar of Babylon appointed Zedekiah King of Judah (as reported in 2 Kings 24:17). Zedekiah stood so high in King Nebuchadnezzar’s favor that he could enter and leave King Nebuchadnezzar’s presence without permission. One day, Zedekiah entered Nebuchadnezzar’s presence and found him tearing the flesh of a hare and eating it while it was still alive. Nebuchadnezzar asked Zedekiah to swear that he would not disclose this, and Zedekiah swore. Subsequently, the five kings over whom Nebuchadnezzar had appointed Zedekiah were sitting and sneering at Nebuchadnezzar in Zedekiah’s presence, and they told Zedekiah that the kingship did not belong to Nebuchadnezzar but to Zedekiah, as Zedekiah descended from David. So Zedekiah too sneered at Nebuchadnezzar and disclosed that once he saw him tear the flesh of a live hare and eat it. The five kings immediately told Nebuchadnezzar, who forthwith came to Antioch, where the members of the Great Sanhedrin went to meet him. Nebuchadnezzar asked them to expound the Torah to him, and they began to read it chapter by chapter. When they reached Numbers 30:3, “When a man vows a vow... he shall not break his word,” Nebuchadnezzar asked them whether a person could retract a vow. They replied that such a person must go to a Sage to absolve the person of the vow. Nebuchadnezzar told them that they must have absolved Zedekiah of the oath that he swore to him, and he immediately ordered them to be placed on the ground, as Lamentations 2:10 reports, “They sit upon the ground, and keep silence, the elders of the daughter of Zion.” To avail them in their peril, they then began to recount the merit of Abraham, who in Genesis 18:27 said, “I am but dust and ashes”; thus Lamentations 2:10 continues, “They have girded themselves with sackcloth.” They began to recount the merit of Jacob, of whom Genesis 37:34 says, “He put sackcloth upon his loins.” But Nebuchadnezzar caused the members of the Great Sanhedrin to have their hair bound to the tails of their horses as the horses were driven from Jerusalem to Lydda, killing the members of the Great Sanhedrin in the process. Thus Lamentations 2:10 continues, “the virgins of Jerusalem [referring to the members of the Great Sanhedrin] hang down their heads to the ground.”[55]
Interpreting the law of vows in Numbers 30:3–6, the Mishnah taught that a young child's vows were not binding. When a girl turned 11 years old and throughout the year thereafter, they examined to determine whether she was aware of the significance of her vows. The vows of a girl 12 years old or older stood without examination. When a boy turned 12 years old and throughout the year thereafter, they examined to determine whether he was aware of the significance of his vows. The vows of a boy 13 years old or older stood without examination. For girls below age 11 or boys below age 12, even if they said that they knew in honor of Whose Name they vowed, their vows and dedications were not valid. After girls turned 12 or boys turned 13, even though they said that they did not know in the honor of Whose Name they vowed, their vows and dedications stood.[56] The Sifri Zutta told that once a youth told Rabbi Akiva that the youth had dedicated a shovel. Rabbi Akiva asked the youth whether perhaps he had sanctified his shovel to the sun or the moon. The youth replied that Rabbi Akiva did not need to worry, as the youth had sanctified it to the One Who had created them. Rabbi Akiva told the youth that his vows were valid.[57]
The Mishnah taught that a father who did not say anything to annul his daughter's vow because he did not know that he had the power to do so could release the vow when he learned that he did have that power. Similarly, the Sages taught that a father who did not know that a statement was a vow could release that vow when he learned that it was a vow (although Rabbi Meir said that he could not).[58]
The Sifri Zutta taught that if a father annulled his daughter's vow without her knowing that he had done so, and she deliberately transgressed the vow, she was nonetheless not liable to penalty, because Numbers 30:6 says, “the Lord will forgive her.”[59]
The Mishnah taught that a father or husband could annul vows of self-denial (which, in the words of Numbers 30:14, "afflict the soul"), such as bathing and adorning oneself. But Rabbi Jose said that these were not vows of self-denial.[60] Rabbi Jose taught that vows of self-denial that a father or husband could annul include if she said, "konam (that is, prohibited) be the produce of the whole world to me." Rabbi Jose taught that if she said, "konam be the produce of this country to me," he could not annul, as he could bring her to a different country. And if she said, "konam be the fruits of this shopkeeper to me," he could not annul, unless that shopkeeper was his only source of sustenance, in which case he could annul.[61]
The Gemara deduced from the words "between a man and his wife, between a father and his daughter" in Numbers 30:17 that in addition to vows of self-denial, a husband could also annul vows that affected the relationship between husband and wife.[62]
A Midrash taught that just as a husband could annul only vows that would cause personal affliction between the spouses, so too, a father could annul only vows that would cause personal affliction between him and his daughter.[63]
The Mishnah taught that in the case of a betrothed young woman, her father and her fiancé could annul her vows, if they both did so. If her father but not her fiancé attempted to annul her vow, or if her fiancé but not her father attempted to annul her vow, it was not annulled. And the Mishnah taught that it went without saying that her vow was not annulled if one of them confirmed it.[64]
The Mishnah taught that one could annul vows on the Sabbath.[65]
Numbers chapter 31 [ edit ]
A Midrash deduced from the proximity of the report in Numbers 31:9 that "the children of Israel took captive the women of Midian... and all their cattle" with the report of Numbers 32:1 that "the children of Reuben and the children of Gad had a very great multitude of cattle" that God cast the Midianites down before Israel so that the Reubenites and Gadites might grow rich. The Midrash cited this turn of events as proof of the words of Psalm 32:1 that "God is judge; He puts down one, and lifts up another."[66]
Noting that in Joshua 1:5, God told Joshua, "As I was with Moses, so I will be with you," the Rabbis asked why Joshua lived only 110 years (as reported in Joshua 24:29 and Judges 2:8) and not 120 years, as Moses did (as reported in Deuteronomy 34:7). The Rabbis explained that when God told Moses in Numbers 31:2 to "avenge the children of Israel of the Midianites; afterward shall you be gathered to your people," Moses did not delay carrying out the order, even though God told Moses that he would die thereafter. Rather, Moses acted promptly, as Numbers 31:6 reports: "And Moses sent them." When God directed Joshua to fight against the 31 kings, however, Joshua thought that if he killed them all at once, he would die immediately thereafter, as Moses had. So Joshua dallied in the wars against the Canaanites, as Joshua 11:18 reports: "Joshua made war a long time with all those kings." In response, God shortened his life by ten years.[67]
The Rabbis differed about the meaning of "the holy vessels" in Numbers 31:6. Rabbi Johanan deduced from the reference of Exodus 29:29 to "the holy garments of Aaron" that Numbers 31:6 refers to the priestly garments containing the Urim and Thummim when it reports that "Moses sent... Phinehas the son of Eleazar the priest, to the war, with the holy vessels." But the Midrash concluded that Numbers 31:6 refers to the Ark of the Covenant, to which Numbers 7:9 refers when it says, "the service of the holy things."[68]
Assyrian Deportations of the Israelites
Numbers chapter 32 [ edit ]
A Midrash deduced from Numbers 32:1 that the Reubenites and Gadites were rich, possessing large amounts of cattle, but they loved their possessions so much that they separated themselves from their fellow Israelites and settled outside the Land of Israel. As a result, they became the first tribes to be taken away into exile, as 1 Chronicles 5:26 reports, "Tillegath-pilneser king of Assyria... carried... away... the Reubenites, and the Gadites, and the half-tribe of Manasseh."[69]
The Tanna Devei Eliyahu taught that if you live by the commandment establishing the Sabbath (in Exodus 20:7 (20:8 in the NJPS) and Deuteronomy 5:11 (5:12 in the NJPS)), then (in the words of Isaiah 62:8) “The Lord has sworn by His right hand, and by the arm of His strength: ‘Surely I will no more give your corn to be food for your enemies.” If, however, you transgress the commandment, then it will be as in Numbers 32:10–11, when “the Lord’s anger was kindled in that day, and He swore, saying: ‘Surely none of the men... shall see the land.’”[70]
Similarly, a Midrash taught that the Reubenites and the Gadites cherished their property more than human life, putting their cattle before their children when they told Moses in Numbers 32:16, "We will build sheepfolds here for our cattle, and cities for our little ones." Moses told them that their priorities were wrong and that they should rather do the more important things first, when Moses told them in Numbers 32:24, "Build you cities for your little ones, and folds for your sheep." The Midrash saw in their different priorities application of the words of Ecclesiastes 10:2, "A wise man's understanding is at his right hand" — applying to Moses — and "A fool's understanding at his left" — applying to the Reubenites and the Gadites. God told the Reubenites and the Gadites that as they showed greater love for their cattle than for human souls, there would be no blessing in it for them. The Midrash thus saw in their fate application of the words of Proverbs 20:21, "An estate may be gotten hastily at the beginning; but the end thereof shall not be blessed," and the words of Proverbs 23:4, "Do not weary yourself to be rich; cease from your own wisdom."[71]
In the Mishnah, Rabbi Meir noted that Numbers 32:20 and 29 stated the same condition in both positive and negative formulations. Numbers 32:29 states the condition in the positive: "And Moses said to them, if the children of Gad and the children of Reuben will pass with you over the Jordan,... then you shall give them the land of Gilead for a possession." And Numbers 32:20 states the same condition in the negative: "But if they will not pass over with you armed, then they shall have possessions among you in the land of Canaan." Rabbi Meir deduced that every stipulation must be stated in both the negative and positive formulations, like the condition of the children of Gad and the children of Reuben in Numbers 32:20 and 29, or it is not a binding stipulation. Rabbi Hanina ben Gamaliel II maintained, however, that Moses stated the matter both ways because he needed to do so to be understood; otherwise one might have concluded that the Gadites and Reubenites would receive no inheritance even in the land of Canaan.[72]
The Tosefta cited Numbers 32:22, “You shall be clear before the Lord, and before Israel,” to support the proposition that while out collecting charity, charity collectors were not permitted to separate their own money from that which they collected for charity by placing their own money in a separate purse, lest it appear that they were stealing for themselves some of the money that they gathered for charity. While collecting for charity, a charity collector could not take for personal use money from a friend who owed the charity collector money, and a charity collector could not take for personal use money that the charity collector found on the road.[73]
The Sages taught in a Baraita that they honored the memory of the family that baked the Temple showbread, for they never allowed fine bread to be found in their children's hands. And the Sages honored the memory of the family that made the Temple incense, for they never allowed a bride of their house to go about perfumed. In both cases, the families did so to fulfill the command of Numbers 32:22 that "you shall be clear before the Lord and before Israel" — meaning that people should act so as to avoid even the appearance of transgression.[74]
Moses Maimonides
Commandments [ edit ]
According to Maimonides [ edit ]
Maimonides cited a verse in the parashah for one negative commandment:[75]
Not to transgress in matters that one has forbidden oneself[6]
According to Sefer ha-Chinuch [ edit ]
According to Sefer ha-Chinuch, there is 1 positive and 1 negative commandment in the parashah.[76]
The precept of the law of nullifying vows [6]
That we should not break our word in vows that we make[6]
Rembrandt, Jeremiah Lamenting the Destruction of Jerusalem, c. 1630, c. 1630
Haftarah [ edit ]
The haftarah for parashah Matot is Jeremiah 1:1–2:3. The haftarah is the first of three readings of admonition leading up to Tisha B'Av.
When parashah Matot is combined with parashah Masei (as it is in 2018, 2019, 2020, 2021, 2022, 2023, 2024, 2025, 2026, 2027, 2028, and 2029), the haftarah is the haftarah for parashah Masei:
Summary [ edit ]
The haftarah in Jeremiah 1:1–2:3 begins by identifying its words as those of Jeremiah the son of Hilkiah, a priest in Anathoth in the land of Benjamin, to whom God's word came in the thirteenth year of the reign of Josiah the son of Amon as king of Judah, in the reign of Josiah's son Jehoiakim, and through the eleventh year of the reign of Josiah's son Zedekiah, when Jerusalem was carried away captive.[77]
God's word came to Jeremiah to say that before God formed him in the womb, God knew him, sanctified him, and appointed him a prophet to the nations.[78] Jeremiah protested that he could not speak, for he was a child, but God told him not to fear, for he would go wherever God would send him, say whatever God would command him to say, and God would be with him to deliver him.[79] Then God touched Jeremiah's mouth and said that God had put words in his mouth and set him over the nations to root out and to pull down, to destroy and to overthrow, to build and to plant.[80] God asked Jeremiah what he saw, he replied that he saw the rod of an almond tree, and God said that he had seen well, for God watches over God's word to perform it.[81]
God's word came to Jeremiah a second time to ask what he saw, he replied that he saw a seething pot tipping from the north, and God said that out of the north evil would break forth upon all Israel.[82] For God would call all the kingdoms of the north to come, and they would set their thrones at Jerusalem's gate, against its walls, and against the cities of Judah.[83] God would utter God's judgments against Judah, as its people had forsaken God and worshipped the work of their own hands.[84] God thus directed Jeremiah to gird his loins, arise, and speak to the Judean people all that God commanded, for God had made Jeremiah a fortified city, an iron pillar, and brazen walls against the land of Judah, its rulers, its priests, and its people.[85] They would fight against him, but they would not prevail, for God would be with him to deliver him.[86]
God's word came to Jeremiah to tell him to go and cry in the ears of Jerusalem that God remembered the affection of her youth, her love as a bride, how she followed God in the wilderness.[87] Israel was God's hallowed portion and God's first-fruits, and all that devoured Israel would be held guilty and evil would come upon them.[88]
Connection to the special Sabbath [ edit ]
The first of three readings of admonition leading up to Tisha B'Av, the haftarah admonishes Judah and Israel in Jeremiah 1:13–19. And then in Jeremiah 2:1–3, the haftarah concludes with consolation. The Gemara taught that Jeremiah wrote the book of Lamentations,[89] and as Jews read Lamentations on Tisha B'Av, this probably accounts for why a selection from Jeremiah begins the series of haftarot of admonition.[90]
Further reading [ edit ]
The parashah has parallels or is discussed in these sources:
Biblical [ edit ]
Josephus
Early nonrabbinic [ edit ]
Classical rabbinic [ edit ]
Talmud
Medieval [ edit ]
Rashi
Rashi. Commentary. Numbers 30–32. Troyes, France, late 11th Century. Reprinted in, e.g., Rashi. The Torah: With Rashi's Commentary Translated, Annotated, and Elucidated. Translated and annotated by Yisrael Isser Zvi Herczeg, volume 4, pages 369–401. Brooklyn: Mesorah Publications, 1997. ISBN 0-89906-029-3.
. Numbers 30–32. Troyes, France, late 11th Century. Reprinted in, e.g., Rashi.. Translated and annotated by Yisrael Isser Zvi Herczeg, volume 4, pages 369–401. Brooklyn: Mesorah Publications, 1997. ISBN 0-89906-029-3. Rashbam. Commentary on the Torah. Troyes, early 12th century. Reprinted in, e.g., Rashbam's Commentary on Leviticus and Numbers: An Annotated Translation. Edited and translated by Martin I. Lockshin, pages 285–92. Providence: Brown Judaic Studies, 2001. ISBN 1-930675-07-0.
. Troyes, early 12th century. Reprinted in, e.g.,. Edited and translated by Martin I. Lockshin, pages 285–92. Providence: Brown Judaic Studies, 2001. ISBN 1-930675-07-0. Numbers Rabbah 22:1–9. 12th Century. Reprinted in, e.g., Midrash Rabbah: Numbers. Translated by Judah J. Slotki. London: Soncino Press, 1939. ISBN 0-900689-38-2.
. Translated by Judah J. Slotki. London: Soncino Press, 1939. ISBN 0-900689-38-2. Abraham ibn Ezra. Commentary on the Torah. Mid-12th century. Reprinted in, e.g., Ibn Ezra's Commentary on the Pentateuch: Numbers (Ba-Midbar). Translated and annotated by H. Norman Strickman and Arthur M. Silver, pages 238–55. New York: Menorah Publishing Company, 1999. ISBN 0-932232-09-4.
Maimonides
Nachmanides
Hezekiah ben Manoah. Hizkuni. France, circa 1240. Reprinted in, e.g., Chizkiyahu ben Manoach. Chizkuni: Torah Commentary. Translated and annotated by Eliyahu Munk, volume 4, pages 1021–35. Jerusalem: Ktav Publishers, 2013. ISBN 978-1-60280-261-2.
. France, circa 1240. Reprinted in, e.g., Chizkiyahu ben Manoach.. Translated and annotated by Eliyahu Munk, volume 4, pages 1021–35. Jerusalem: Ktav Publishers, 2013. ISBN 978-1-60280-261-2. Nachmanides. Commentary on the Torah. Jerusalem, circa 1270. Reprinted in, e.g., Ramban (Nachmanides): Commentary on the Torah: Numbers. Translated by Charles B. Chavel, volume 4, pages 344–81. New York: Shilo Publishing House, 1975. ISBN 0-88328-009-4.
The Zohar
Zohar part 3, page 241b. Spain, late 13th Century. Reprinted in, e.g., The Zohar. Translated by Harry Sperling and Maurice Simon. 5 volumes. London: Soncino Press, 1934.
. Translated by Harry Sperling and Maurice Simon. 5 volumes. London: Soncino Press, 1934. Jacob ben Asher (Baal Ha-Turim). Rimze Ba'al ha-Turim. Early 14th century. Reprinted in, e.g., Baal Haturim Chumash: Bamidbar/Numbers. Translated by Eliyahu Touger; edited and annotated by Avie Gold, volume 4, pages 1711–43. Brooklyn: Mesorah Publications, 2003. ISBN 1-57819-131-9.
. Early 14th century. Reprinted in, e.g.,. Translated by Eliyahu Touger; edited and annotated by Avie Gold, volume 4, pages 1711–43. Brooklyn: Mesorah Publications, 2003. ISBN 1-57819-131-9. Jacob ben Asher. Perush Al ha-Torah. Early 14th century. Reprinted in, e.g., Yaakov ben Asher. Tur on the Torah. Translated and annotated by Eliyahu Munk, volume 3, pages 1202–15. Jerusalem: Lambda Publishers, 2005. ISBN 978-9657108765.
. Early 14th century. Reprinted in, e.g., Yaakov ben Asher.. Translated and annotated by Eliyahu Munk, volume 3, pages 1202–15. Jerusalem: Lambda Publishers, 2005. ISBN 978-9657108765. Isaac ben Moses Arama. Akedat Yizhak (The Binding of Isaac). Late 15th century. Reprinted in, e.g., Yitzchak Arama. Akeydat Yitzchak: Commentary of Rabbi Yitzchak Arama on the Torah. Translated and condensed by Eliyahu Munk, volume 2, pages 791–95. New York, Lambda Publishers, 2001. ISBN 965-7108-30-6.
Abravanel
Modern [ edit ]
Isaac Abravanel. Commentary on the Torah. Italy, between 1492–1509. Reprinted in, e.g., Abarbanel: Selected Commentaries on the Torah: Volume 4: Bamidbar/Numbers. Translated and annotated by Israel Lazar, pages 318–24. Brooklyn: CreateSpace, 2015. ISBN 978-1508721437.
. Italy, between 1492–1509. Reprinted in, e.g.,. Translated and annotated by Israel Lazar, pages 318–24. Brooklyn: CreateSpace, 2015. ISBN 978-1508721437. Obadiah ben Jacob Sforno. Commentary on the Torah. Venice, 1567. Reprinted in, e.g., Sforno: Commentary on the Torah. Translation and explanatory notes by Raphael Pelcovitz, pages 802–13. Brooklyn: Mesorah Publications, 1997. ISBN 0-89906-268-7.
Saul Levi Morteira
Hirsch
Chaim ibn Attar. Ohr ha-Chaim. Venice, 1742. Reprinted in Chayim ben Attar. Or Hachayim: Commentary on the Torah. Translated by Eliyahu Munk, volume 4, pages 1700–39. Brooklyn: Lambda Publishers, 1999. ISBN 965-7108-12-8.
. Venice, 1742. Reprinted in Chayim ben Attar.. Translated by Eliyahu Munk, volume 4, pages 1700–39. Brooklyn: Lambda Publishers, 1999. ISBN 965-7108-12-8. Samson Raphael Hirsch. Horeb: A Philosophy of Jewish Laws and Observances. Translated by Isidore Grunfeld, pages 276, 314–52. London: Soncino Press, 1962. Reprinted 2002 ISBN 0-900689-40-4. Originally published as Horeb, Versuche über Jissroel's Pflichten in der Zerstreuung. Germany, 1837.
Luzzatto
Schiffman
Plaut
Kugel
Herzfeld
Riskin
Sacks
Jonathan Sacks. Lessons in Leadership: A Weekly Reading of the Jewish Bible, pages 227–31. New Milford, Connecticut: Maggid Books, 2015. ISBN 978-1-59264-432-2.
, pages 227–31. New Milford, Connecticut: Maggid Books, 2015. ISBN 978-1-59264-432-2. Jonathan Sacks. Essays on Ethics: A Weekly Reading of the Jewish Bible, pages 263–67. New Milford, Connecticut: Maggid Books, 2016. ISBN 978-1-59264-449-0.
, pages 263–67. New Milford, Connecticut: Maggid Books, 2016. ISBN 978-1-59264-449-0. Shai Held. The Heart of Torah, Volume 2: Essays on the Weekly Torah Portion: Leviticus, Numbers, and Deuteronomy, pages 179–90. Philadelphia: Jewish Publication Society, 2017. ISBN 978-0827612716.
, pages 179–90. Philadelphia: Jewish Publication Society, 2017. ISBN 978-0827612716. Steven Levy and Sarah Levy. The JPS Rashi Discussion Torah Commentary, pages 141–43. Philadelphia: Jewish Publication Society, 2017. ISBN 978-0827612693.
, pages 141–43. Philadelphia: Jewish Publication Society, 2017. ISBN 978-0827612693. Jonathan Sacks. Numbers: The Wilderness Years: Covenant & Conversation: A Weekly Reading of the Jewish Bible, pages 361–89. New Milford, Connecticut: Maggid Books, 2017. ISBN 978-1-59264-023-2.
Texts [ edit ]We’re now just past the halfway point of Broadchurch 2. What do you think of it so far?
Are you one of the 140-character critics who hopped aboard the #Boredchurch bandwagon after Episode 1? Or do you love the show – and the way David Tennant’s DI Hardy emphatically says ‘Miller’ as ‘Millarrrrggh!’ – enough to see it through to the end?
7.6 million UK heads watched the opening of Broadchurch 2 (aka ‘From Sandbrook with Love’), a show that was so wrapped in secrecy we were lucky we knew the date and time it was being transmitted. By the second week that figure dropped to 6.1 million, while last night’s Episode 4 was seen by 5.17m.
I’m loathe to get bogged down in numbers – judging a show solely by its viewing figures is like appreciating a painting only by looking at how much people think it’s worth (undervalued past masterpieces Utopia and In the Flesh being good examples) – but where Season 1 united the audience in mystery, Season 2 has divided it in apathy.
Time (and the remaining four episodes) will tell how Broadchurch! Part Deux will hold up against its predecessor, but the immediate reaction in numbers and letters suggests it will be a shadow to the first, instead of an accomplice.
Still, we’re nothing if not fair here at CultBox, and as many viewers (myself included) haven’t yet made up their minds, I thought we’d have a courtroom-style defence and prosecution.
You can play the judge and jury. I’ll be Charlotte Rampling and Marianne Jean-Baptiste. Broadchurch 2 is on trial. The charge: that Broadchurch isn’t as good this time round. You may be seated. Order in the court! (Bangs homemade gavel thrice.)
The prosecution
Cast your mind back to 2013. The first season of Broadchurch was not only appointment viewing, it was practically interactive, as the audience would piece together their own evidence and discuss who they thought was the killer. It was the talk of bus rides and dinner parties and Monday nights on the sofa. Broadchurch made water-cooler detectives of us all.
What is there to discuss this time? How crazy good James D’Arcy looks in a t-shirt? (Seriously though, that is something worth discussing at a later date.) What else besides? The Sandbrook case hasn’t exactly got the Internet a-buzzin’ and the bookies aren’t taking bets on the outcome of Joe’s court case.
It’s indicative of the second season’s general stagnation. A stagnation best illustrated by the use of Eve Myles, who is a terrific actress but feels utterly wasted. Her character Claire Ripley is caught between Hardy grumbling at her, and her ex, Lee (James D’Arcy) staring sexily at her, and has nothing to do but be all wide-eyed and breathy in response.
It’s disappointing to see Myles stuck like that, given that she’s an actress who can make holding a baby and shooting at a helicopter look effortlessly cool.
And while no one expects the finale to be a helicopter smashing into the Jurassic coast in a plume of deckchairs |
out.”
Some significant differences exist between Warren and Clinton. In an old book, Warren attacked Clinton for changing her vote on a bankruptcy bill when she was a senator from New York, accusing her of siding with the financial services industry over consumers in order to get campaign contributions.
Warren has been Wall Street’s most outspoken antagonist in Congress. Sanders has benefited enormously from criticizing Clinton’s ties to the big banks and for getting hefty fees to speak at Goldman Sachs. The Vermonter has spent several months pushing Clinton to release the transcripts of her speeches to Goldman.
Warren ducked when The Boston Globe, her hometown paper, asked her Thursday night whether the woman she had just endorsed should release the transcripts. “That’s for her to decide,” she said. “There will be a whole lot of issues to talk about over the next several months.”
1 of 46 Full Screen Autoplay Close Skip Ad × Hillary Clinton on the campaign trail View Photos The former secretary of state, senator and first lady is the Democratic nominee for president. Caption The former secretary of state, senator and first lady is the Democratic nominee for president. July 31, 2016 Hillary Clinton is seen aboard the campaign bus in Cleveland on the third day of a bus tour through Pennsylvania and Ohio. Melina Mara/The Washington Post Buy Photo Wait 1 second to continue.
Karen Tumulty and Anne Gearan contributed to this report.Dry weather in the South Island is pushing up the price of electricity on the wholesale market.
Photo: RNZ / Claire Eastham-Farrelly
The problem stems from low levels of late autumn rainfall which caused South Island hydro storage lakes to run short of water.
Transpower said total New Zealand storage was 75 percent of average storage for this time of the year.
North Island hydro and thermal stations were compensating by sending power south across the Cook Strait link.
Thermal power stations, also in the north, were burning more coal and gas than they usually did to make up the difference.
Electricity has been rising from $100 to $140 a megawatt hour over the past week and has been peaking at $200 a megawatt hour at times.
A year ago, prices were averaging around the $50 mark.
Photo: 123rf
No one is predicting the sort of power crises that plagued New Zealand in the early 2000s but energy analyst, Greg Size, said the shortage had still had an impact on the wholesale electricity market.
"The spot prices have risen signficantly and the main reason for that is that inflows into the South Island have been low for several weeks now.
"And some of the South Island hydro storage lakes are significantly below where we would expect them to be for this time of year," he said.
However, Mr Size did not expect there to be a power crisis.
Commercial power users were more likely to be affected than households.
But Mr Size said companies often safeguarded their business by arranging long-term deals known as 'hedge contracts' which smoothed over their risk.
Corporate lobbyist, the Major Electricity Users Group, said New Zealand would get through the winter without too many problems.
"While we can never rule out the potential for multiple unexpected events, such as failure of large thermal stations and failure of the HVDC line, the probability of such events coinciding together and rain not returning to near average weather patterns over the next four months is very low," the group said in a statement.FREMONT – A new study commissioned by Tesla workers found that the electric vehicle maker’s factory in the last two years had about one-third more worker accidents and twice the rate of serious injuries as other auto manufacturers.
The report released Wednesday is the latest salvo in an ongoing dispute between the rapidly growing automaker and workers seeking to unionize the factory. Tesla hopes to jump production from 84,000 electric vehicles last year to a half-million next year, including its lower-cost Model 3 sedan.
Related Articles Tesla workers raise concerns as production set to jump
Tesla responds to its critics over workplace safety
Elon Musk, business execs urge Trump to keep U.S. climate promises The study, conducted by the non-profit worker advocacy group Worksafe, found that recorded incidents in 2015 were 31 percent higher than the average auto plant. The rate of serious injury, measured by days away from work, job transfers and restricted duty, was about twice the industry average.
Tesla acknowledged that long work hours and pressure to deliver vehicles have led to taxing factory conditions. But it said it has made broad changes and has improved worker safety.
“We may have had some challenges in the past as we were learning how to become a car company, but what matters is the future and with the changes we’ve made, we now have the lowest injury rate in the industry by far,” a company spokesman said on Wednesday. “Our goal is to have as close to zero injuries as humanly possible and to become the safest factory in the auto industry.”
The company pointed out that safety has improved this year, with recorded accidents one-third less than the industry average. Tesla credits the improvement to adding a third shift, reducing worker hours and placing more emphasis on ergonomics.
The Worksafe report disputes the company’s assertion that the factory floor is getting safer.
“One quarter is not a sufficient length of time to accurately identify a meaningful and lasting trend in injury reduction,” the report said.
Doug Parker, executive director of Worksafe, said the company updated its injury numbers this month, adding significantly more incidents to its 2016 totals.
“We’re just not that confident about Tesla’s numbers,” he said.
He said increased demands on workers making a new vehicle, the Model 3, could mean significant changes to the factory in the months and years ahead.
“There’s going to be a whole new health and safety environment,” Parker said. “We hope that Tesla is making strides.”
Parker said the reported injuries, which did not include any fatalities, came mostly from poor ergonomic planning and stress caused by repetitive work.
Factory employees have coordinated with the United Automobile Workers and are seeking to unionize the plant.
In the midst of the labor unrest, Tesla announced a shake-up Tuesday in its human resources department. Arnnon Geshuri, who led the Human Resources department at Tesla for more than eight years, is leaving. Gaby Toledano,a former executive at Electronic Arts, was named chief people officer, reporting to CEO Elon Musk and leading Human Resources and Facilities departments.
Tesla employs about 10,000 workers at its Fremont factory and 30,000 around the globe.
The company is facing a lawsuit from a factory worker who claimed he was subjected to racists taunts by co-workers, and also injured on the job. The company settled a lawsuit last year involving a seriously injured Slovenian man working at the plant for a subcontractor.
Two Tesla employees spoke Wednesday on the need for better training and safety for production workers. They pointed to the need for more regular hours, better training and ergonomics.
One of the workers, Alan Ochoa, began on the factory floor in 2014, installing speakers and weatherstripping. He eventually learned several other jobs along the production line.
But the long hours, sometimes 12-hour shifts for six days a week, took a toll. Ochoa had two surgeries, he said, and might need a third for repetitive stress injuries.
Other workers are hurting too, he said, but “they’re afraid to say anything.”This just in from a member of TTAG’s Armed Intelligentsia:
“As I begin to write this, not 20 minutes beforehand, I pulled my gun in self defense. For the second time in 4 months. In the gun free city of Chicago. I already know what you’re thinking, I’m not allowed to carry a gun in Chicago. Let’s get this out of the way, I have made the decision to conceal carry in Chicago. Yes this is stupid, but it has already been beneficial for me. Not once but twice.
A little background, I’m a FF/Paramedic that lives in the downtown Chicago area and works in the near suburbs. I work for a municipality on a paid department that I commute to using the CTA. I am a transplant from South Florida that is only here temporarily while my wife finishes school.
I’m not a large guy, but I’m not what would be considered a soft target. I participate in Crossfit and swim for health and strength. I’ve taken some force on force training and have taken self defense classes with my wife.
As most emergency service providers, I’ve learned to always be aware of my surroundings and situations that I’m entering. I’ve been first on scene for shootings, highway accidents, domestic disputes, drug overdoses and other terrible incidents. My main focus is the safety of myself and my partner first, above and before everyone else. We are trained this way.
All this being said, I have been part of many situations that have been defused with nothing more than words.
This morning I was running late to the “L” and ran the 1/4 mile to the station. Just as I made the platform, the train left. No big deal, I give myself leeway for this very reason. As I’m waiting for the next train, three men step on to the platform on the opposite side of the tracks. They say some words to each other that I’m way too far away to hear and step off the platform and out of sight.
Not a minute later these three same men step onto my side of the platform from the near by staircase. They quickly look around and start walking toward me with fists clenched, I scan around me and I’m the only one on the platform except them. I’m standing about half way down the platform, with both staircases behind these guys.
The man closest to me asked me for a smoke, he was standing still about 5 feet from me. I told him I don’t smoke with a firm voice well above normal volume but not a yell while making eye contact with him.
He then said, “I’ll take your fucking wallet then dick” while reaching out to me.
I smacked his forearm away with my left hand as I took 3 steps farther down the platform and drew my gun from its five o’clock spot on the right side of my body. As I drew I yelled ‘back off’ very loudly. They all turned tail and ran while cursing their lungs off after giving me saucer eyed unbelieving looks. I thank God that they had the sense to not even move in my direction.
If they had, there’s no question I wouldn’t be typing this right now. It felt like I stood there for a solid 10 minutes before the train arrived but it couldn’t have been more than 2-3. I re-holstered just before the train pulled into the station.
I boarded and spent the ride attempting to calm down. I’m writing this as a way to vent and direct my anger in a positive way. I’m hoping for some sort of an assessment or some feedback from someone. I hope I can get it from you guys here, as I will not be telling anyone around Chicago about this for obvious reasons.
Thanks for taking the time to read this.”
[Click here to read an off-the-record response from a Chicago cop]Before The Legend of Zelda: Breath of the Wild is even out, series producer Eiji Aonuma has been dropping hints about what could be next for Link.
Aonuma spoke to IGN at E3 2016 saying: "I would like to take what I learned from Breath of the Wild and see if we can somehow fuse those learning points into another multiplayer Zelda."
Multiplayer Zelda games have been done in the past for 3DS with Tri-Force Heroes, but it's not something that's been seen on home console before.
"That's definitely a possibility and we will continue to [experiment] throughout the Zelda franchise," he added.
He did emphasise that, despite saying that Breath of the Wild will be completely single-player. The open world game is being launched on the Wii U and NX (you can read our hands-on preview here), but it's still exciting to think what could be in store next.Clinton Township, MI - A 13-year-old boy is in custody after leading deputies on a wild police chase through Clinton Township with his 8-year-old sister as the passenger, according to the Macomb County Sheriff's Office.The deputies tried to pull over a black Nissan Altima after reports of erratic driving on Metropolitan Parkway near Harper on Saturday around 11:30 p.m. The driver of the Nissan apparently stopped on the road shoulder, but before the deputy could approach, he took off at a high-rate of speed. The deputies were unaware of the occupants' ages.After a short pursuit, the 13-year-old lost control, crossed a grassy median and ended up in the eastbound lanes of Metropolitan Parkway where they tried to flee on foot. The driver and his sister were eventually caught. The girl, deputies say, was turned over to her mother.The 13-year-old is expected to have a juvenile detention hearing later today.IT'S probably the last thing you’d expect to see during Showdown week.
But as they say, in times of need, people come together - and that’s exactly what Indigenous players from the Power and the Crows did on Monday.
The boys cast their usual pre-showdown rivalry aside for a night, coming together with their cross-town competition at the Birkenhead Tavern for a ‘brotherhood dinner’.
Great to have dinner with all the brothers #weflyasone #ripwalshy #brothers #crows #pafc A photo posted by wings (@chadwingard) on Jul 13, 2015 at 3:40am PDT
Port’s Aboriginal Programs Manager Paul Vandenbergh explained the Power players wanted to lend an ear to their Crows brothers, to help them get through a tough time following the tragic passing of their senior coach, Phil Walsh.
“After going through something similar a few years ago and remembering how difficult it was, we saw it as an opportunity to give our support to the boys over at the Crows who are doing it a bit tough at the moment,” Vandenbergh said.
“Obviously some of our brothers knew Walshy too, so they can relate to what the boys are going through.”
Vandenbergh explained the ‘brotherhood dinner’ originated in the Burgoyne era, and the Power have proudly carried on the tradition since.
“This seemed like the perfect time to get the Crows boys involved,” he said.
“We reached out to Eddie [Betts] early last week to see if they wanted to join us, and he said ‘absolutely’.”
“That’s what the brotherhood is all about – being there for each other, regardless of which colours you wear.”(Image: Testing students via Shutterstock)
The following speech was written by Dr. Curry Malott, assistant professor in the College of Education at West Chester University of Pennsylvania, as a response to Pennsylvania Gov. Tom Wolf’s historic June 30 veto of the GOP-dominated State Senate’s $11 million education budget, which was a counter to Wolf’s proposed $45 million education budget, which was part of his plan to restore 90 percent of the education budget cuts of 2011 under Gov. Tom Corbett.
The following statement is, in a way, part two of a speech I wrote, presented and published at the “Rally in West Chester for a State Budget Chester County Kids Deserve,” which was part of a state-wide summer tour organized under The Alliance to Reclaim Our Schools (AROS). Beginning on June 15 and running to June 28, AROS has been holding a rally in a different city everyday, co-organized by local unions and organizations. In all, AROS is comprised of more than 100 different groups. On June 29, AROS ended their tour with nearly a weeklong occupation of the state capital, Harrisburg, demanding the State Senate support the aforementioned proposed education budget.
The premise of the “Reclaiming the Promise of Pennsylvania’s Public Education” campaign was that the old Republican governor, Tom Corbett, recently left office after having followed the national trend of defunding public education. The AROS-PA tour was designed to put pressure on the State Senate to support Governor Wolf’s education budget.
The Alliance to Reclaim Our Schools, aware of the connections between schooling and who the government intervenes on behalf of, argues, within their call, to “fund our public schools fully and fairly,” for ending “corporate tax loopholes,” taxing “gas drillers” and “halting any new prison construction.” Many local activist educators, union leaders, school leaders, social workers and others have joined this important movement.
AROS-PA activists are now organizing rallies to put pressure on state senators to support Governor Wolf’s veto. Again, the following response is a reflection of the current state of education reform and the need for a Marxist analysis intervening in that debate and movement.
***
Here we are, across the state of Pennsylvania and across the US, working people and our unions and organizations, feeling like we have to politely ask, and even beg, for a properly funded system of education so our kids can hope one day of selling their labor for a decent price, to be able to live a dignified existence. And in Pennsylvania, we aren’t even asking for more than what we had in the recent past. We are only asking for about 90 percent of what has been cut since 2011. That is all Governor Wolf is asking for, and he is being blocked by the State Senate. Before Governor Wolf took office, we heard Corbett time and again remind us that difficult cuts, cuts to education and other social services, had to be made; after all, we are in a recession. Sorry, no more Spanish teachers, no more bilingual education, even though all the research points to bilingual education as the best approach for meeting student language and learning needs.
Bilingual education programs do cost more than ESL equivalents. But why? From an economic point of view, they are loaded with more value. Bilingual education is loaded with the results of science. Science takes labor hours. The techniques themselves require more labor hours to execute for obvious reasons. Where ESL is designed to replace one’s home language with the dominant language, bilingual education, at its best, is focused on educating all students with at least two languages. Education programs are products of labor, and a major factor in determining their value is therefore the amount of useful labor they embody and require. Education programs, in this respect, are no different than other products of labor.
For example, take a pile of sticks. Take them as raw material and nail them together haphazardly into a chair. That chair will have little value beyond the value of the raw material because it embodies few labor hours. That is, the crude chair took very little labor hours and virtually no specialized skills to fashion. And it would be remarkable if that primitive chair were able to support a person, should they be forced, perhaps due to a lack of alternative, to sit on it, for even a very short time. However, take those same sticks, the same value in raw materials, and put them in the hands of a skilled craftsman, himself loaded with the value of hundreds of hours of training and experience, who in turn, puts them to the lath, to the planer, to the joiner, to all the tools and machines of the woodshop, all loaded with a tremendous amount of value (i.e. labor hours), fit them together with wood glue, clamps and a level, and, if aesthetically appealing, you will have a beautiful product able to support a person for a lifetime, perhaps many. This is the difference between bilingual education and ESL. So why would any reasonable society provide their children with an education that is not likely to support them, even for a short time? If the worth of a human life is only measured through the usefulness of its labor capacity to capital and biased with deep institutional racism and all manner of prejudice, then we can see how such decisions could be made. Why put value into a community capital has no current use for and is deeply criminalized and demonized from centuries of white supremacy?
We therefore need a logic for putting value into children through education programs that are loaded with the most useful labor power that rejects the logic of capital that supports putting value into children only when it makes economic sense to the capitalist.
Thinking beyond capitalism, we must demand the best education, so workers are better equipped to fight oppression, exploitation and the system that is really only capable of seeking ever-greater profit, or returns off of investments in labor power. In other words, workers need the best education so we can create a movement with highly trained and qualified leaders who know the best education is the education for a society where people and our ability to labor are not reduced to commodities purchased in order to expand the capitalists’ value or to facilitate that process (i.e. necessary but unproductive labor).
This rethinking of why education is important, in turn, provides us with tools to critique bourgeois rhetoric. Remember, at the same time we were told we have to settle for a substandard education in Pennsylvania because of an economic crisis, oil frackers and gas drillers were handed millions of dollars in tax breaks, no recession for them apparently (and this pattern is repeated globally). Governor Wolf seems to be on the right side here, at least when it comes to properly funding public education and increasing fracking taxes, even if it’s only 5 percent, which the frackers of course scream bloody ruin because they do not want to let one penny of potential profit go. The State Senate must be made to feel compelled to support Wolf’s proposed budget, and there is a bill for a more equitable distribution of education dollars throughout the state. AROS-PA is doing a commendable job here, and it has been an honor and a privilege to join and support their efforts.
For now, we can ask, one last time, yet again, for more money to restore old levels of funding. We can even tell the state it will be good for capital to have more efficient and obedient workers, the product of a well-funded public education system. Through our campaigning and grassroots messaging we might say:
So come on, old buddy, old pal, let’s go ahead and do the right thing, and not let a few greedy education capitalists ruin the quality of workers for the rest of the honest capitalists just trying to do what is right.
And if we are successful and we get the funding, we can’t forget this was just a battle; the war rages on. We will have to turn around and continue to struggle to ensure that that education is put to use not to increase test scores that tend to encourage a low cognitive level of development, but to train, through a critical and rigorous education, a generation of radical leaders who understand:
How capitalism will always lead to the premature exhaustion and death of the laborer unless it is regulated or slowed down by working-class resistance.
A generation who understands the role of productivity and the changing composition of capital in the historical quest to accumulate surplus value, and that one of the first steps in abolishing exploitation is the abolition of surplus labor time, and that can only happen internationally, and thus the true rallying cry of all workers continues to be, workers of the world unite.
A generation who understands fully that the complete emancipation of all workers can only happen with the abolition of capitalism. No levels of exploitation are acceptable, and even the kind capitalists, when the going gets tough, will be either reined in by the internal laws of capital that act as an external coercive force on individual capitalists, or they will be swept aside as more disciplined capitalists seize the moment.
In short, we need an education that trains a generation to be under no illusions about the nature and intent of capital, and that real justice is not possible within its structural limits. This generation is the generation that will create the world the world deserves. This generation is you. The time is now. The place is everywhere.Respected and experienced Rugby League administrator, Andrew Hill, has been appointed Chief Executive Officer of the Rugby League World Cup 2017 (RLWC2017) Organising Committee.
The RLWC2017 Chairman, Dr George Peponis, announced the appointment today following the recent resignation of former Chief Executive Officer Michael Brown.
“We are delighted Andrew has accepted the role of Chief Executive Officer for the Rugby League World Cup 2017,” Dr Peponis said.
“Andrew has a great connection with the game from the grassroots through to the international stage. He brings with him a technical understanding as well as vision for the strategic direction of the game not just in Australia, New Zealand and the region but around the world.
“Andrew’s experience in working at the club level, as a senior executive with the NRL and the international federation brings a unique outlook to the game. It’s this all-of-game perspective that we think is important in leading the Rugby League World Cup and will complement the skills of those already serving on the organising committee.
“I’d like to thank Maria Sykes for standing in as interim Chief Executive Officer while the Board finalised its position and am pleased she will continue in her role as Chief Operating Officer.”
Hill has agreed to terms with the NRL that will allow him to stand aside from his position as General Manager League Integration and Game Development.
“Rugby League is well placed both domestically and internationally to experience growth in participation and popularity in the coming years and I see the Rugby League World Cup in 2017 as the ideal platform for us achieving this,” Hill said.
“I am extremely honoured and proud to be involved in the tournament and am keen to build on the strong foundation that is in place.
“We will take next year’s tournament to more fans than ever before and deliver the greatest Rugby League World Cup that will inspire communities and create a lasting legacy for the sport.”
Andrew Hill will officially start his role with the RLWC2017 on 29 August 2016.Catalan midfielder disappointed his team could not take advantage of Raul Albiol's dismissal and also complains about the state of the Bernabeu pitch
''It is clear that when they only had 10 men we could have won and wrapped up the league,'' the World Cup winner admitted to Spanish publication AS.
Busquets was also not happy with the state of the pitch in Madrid either as Barcelona's passing game failed to materialise in its usual swashbuckling fashion.
"The grass was not as fast as we would like to implement the football we like to do," he complained.
"We had to play many more passes than if the grass was faster."
However Busquets reflected on the positive aspects of the result in spite of conceding late on:
"We're happy with the points earned and we stay at the same distance with one game less to play. We'll prepare for the [Copa del Rey] final now.''
Ourprovides the best breaking news online and ourfootball fan community is unmatched worldwide. Never miss a thing again!When people watch videos and TV footage of college students screaming at professors and blocking doors to lecture halls, they wonder where the rancor and intolerance come from. A story recently in The New York Times identifies one origin.
It’s called “Children’s Primers Court the Littlest Radicals,” and it covers a new trend in children’s books. Not volumes for 9- and 12-year-olds–we’re looking at 2-, 3-, and 4-year-old audiences.
The topics, plots, and characters in these books are all hardline leftist and heavy on identity politics. “Toddler-tomes,” the reporter calls them, “are meant to resonate most ringingly with progressive millennials and their tiniest charges.” Some of the lessons in “A Is for Anarchist,” a popular alphabet book, exemplify the indoctrination.
‘F’ is for feminist, For fairness in our pay.
‘J’ is for Justice! Justicia for all.
L-G-B-T-Q! Love who [sic] you choose.
Don’t laugh. “A Is for Activist” has sold 125,000 print units since its release in 2013. And whenever a book takes off like that, it inspires dozens of imitations.
We have “My Night in the Planetarium,” which spends pages “speaking out against oppression.” And the self-explanatory “A Rule Is to Break: A Child’s Guide to Anarchy (Wee Rebels)”; “V Is for Vegan”; and “Emma and the While,” which emphasizes “empathy and wildlife preservation.”
The trend is long overdue, say people interviewed in the story. “For every book about social justice, I’d like to see 50 published,” says the head of We Need Diversity books. A blogger who writes about “political and child-rearing issues” praises books that “respect people with disabilities, people that don’t necessarily look like [her own kids], people of all gender identities.”
It all sounds warm and welcoming. Progressivism trades quite skillfully in dreamy positivity. but anyone who has ever had to debate or contend with a progressive knows that a dark side lies just beneath the inclusivity talk. This story displays it well.
It isn’t sufficient for the blogger to envision a wonderful world of diversity. She must preface her loving concerns with a livid premise:
When racist, misogynistic and hateful rhetoric has become mainstream, offering affirming and respectful messages to my children seems more urgent than ever.
“A Is for Activist,” too, denigrates anything outside its progressive vision. It characterizes people who oppose the development of alternative energy sources as this: “Silly Selfish Scoundrels Sucking on Dinosaur Sludge.” Heads of corporations are “Vultures.”
This is the flip side of progressive benignity. It demonizes the opposition. And when it reaches kids at the age of three, they accept it as real and true. Toddlers don’t have the mental equipment to place such characters and ideas into a dramatic context. They don’t have what is called aesthetic distance.
This isn’t reading. It’s catechism, indoctrination, proselytizing. We see here the beginnings of an intolerance that results in the Middlebury-Murray episode. The only thing more irritating than the books themselves is the solemn confidence of the advocates. They believe they are improving an unjust society. The implantation of progressive propaganda into little minds is a noble moral mission in their eyes. Children are like
The implantation of progressive propaganda into little minds is a noble moral mission in their eyes. Children are like clay and must be molded right. If progressives don’t do it, children will assimilate the values and biases of a racist, sexist, homophobic, nationalistic world. It is out of this early learning that the disputation, resentful, arrogant social justice warrior-undergraduate emerges.NEW YORK (Reuters) - In the race to find a faster cure for hepatitis C, Bristol-Myers Squibb Co said it will test its experimental antiviral drug combination with Gilead Sciences Inc’s blockbuster drug Sovaldi, hoping to cut treatment time to four weeks.
Bristol-Myers disclosed plans for the exploratory 30-patient trial testing its three-drug combination with Sovaldi in an interview with Reuters. Eric Hughes, the leader of Bristol’s global hepatitis program, said the details were due to be posted on the clinicaltrials.gov website next week.
Sovaldi’s $84,000 price tag for a 12-week treatment has spurred outrage among insurers, state health officials and lawmakers who fear the cost of treating millions of Americans with the progressive liver disease will top $250 billion. Insurers are pushing Gilead’s rivals to offer lower prices when their hepatitis C medicines reach the market.
Using the drug for a shorter course of treatment could, in theory, lower the cost, even when combined with Bristol’s therapies. Rivals Merck & Co and AbbVie are also racing to develop next-generation hepatitis C treatments that cure most people of the virus in a shorter time frame.
But drug pricing experts expect Gilead and its rivals may still argue that the quicker cure represents a value to patients, buffering any steep price reductions.
“The position and concept of pharma is not ingredient costs or duration of treatment cost. Pharma is looking at it as cost per cure,” said John Whang, co-president of Reimbursement Intelligence, which works with pharmaceutical companies and payers to help determine prices for medicines.
The cost could come down, he said, “but it’s not going to be proportionate to the degree that the duration of treatment shortens.”
The new generation of oral drugs being developed by several companies has raised hepatitis C cure rates to well above 90 percent from about 75 percent without the need for interferon or ribavirin, which caused miserable side effects that led many patients to delay or drop treatment. The drugs in clinical trials have already cut treatment time to 12 weeks from 24 to 48 weeks.
“We got rid of the tolerability problem. We got rid of the efficacy problem. Now there is a tremendous drive to get down to shorter treatment durations,” Bristol-Myers’ Hughes said in a telephone interview.
REVIVING A SOVALDI COMBO
Bristol’s plan essentially revives an effort to test its drugs in combination with Sovaldi. It previously tested a single compound with Sovaldi, achieving cure rates close to 100 percent in 12 weeks. But Gilead scrapped further testing in 2012, as it preferred to develop its own combination without a partner.
Gilead’s pill that combines Sovaldi with its ledipasvir is expected to gain U.S. approval this year for therapies of eight or 12 weeks, depending on the patient. The company is also testing the combination as a six-week treatment.
The go-it-alone strategy has already paid off as Gilead was first to market with Sovaldi, breaking pharmaceutical industry sales records with $2.3 billion in sales within a few months.
The new study, set to begin in late July, will test a trio of Bristol drugs with Sovaldi in previously untreated patients with the most common Genotype 1 form of the virus. It will involve two groups of 15 patients each - one getting four weeks of treatment and the other six.
If Bristol can demonstrate cure rates in excess of 90 percent in four weeks, it plans to conduct larger trials with a more diverse patient population.
“We’ll see what the data says,” Hughes said. “Taking this forward will be a very exciting thing.”
With Gilead not involved in the effort, Bristol will pay full price for Sovaldi to conduct the trial.
Bristol would not discuss potential pricing of its regimen, since its drugs are not approved. But if treatment can be cut to four weeks from 12, the Sovaldi portion would be closer to $28,000.
Other rivals are also advancing efforts to compete in what is expected to be a huge market.
Merck this month agreed to pay $3.85 billion to acquire Idenix Pharmaceuticals Inc with the hope that combining the two companies’ most promising drugs will produce cures in four to six weeks across the full spectrum of genotypes.
U.S. and European health regulators in the last week said they would accelerate their reviews of AbbVie’s four-drug regimen, meaning it could be vying for market share by early next year.Story highlights Michael Zehaf-Bibeau was "driven by ideological and political motives"
He opened fire at Canada's National War Memorial and Parliament Hill, killing one
Authorities are investigating whether anyone helped him
The gunman responsible for the terrorist attack in Ottawa last week was "driven by ideological and political motives" and made a video of himself, police said Sunday.
Authorities have previously identified the gunman as Michael Zehaf-Bibeau. He opened fire Wednesday at Canada's National War Memorial and Parliament Hill, killing army reservist Cpl. Nathan Cirillo.
The gunman was then shot and killed by security.
The video was recorded just prior to the attack, the Royal Canadian Mounted Police said in a statement. Authorities are conducting an analysis of that video and said they would not be releasing it at this time.
They also provided a handful of other updates on their investigation:
JUST WATCHED Guards return to National War Memorial Replay More Videos... MUST WATCH Guards return to National War Memorial 01:22
JUST WATCHED Remembering Canada's fallen soldier Replay More Videos... MUST WATCH Remembering Canada's fallen soldier 02:10
-- Zehaf-Bibeau used a gun that was old and uncommon;
-- He carried a knife, which authorities believe was retrieved from his aunt's property;
-- Zehaf-Bibeau had worked in the oil fields in Alberta and saved his money;
-- Officials are looking into whether anyone else could have contributed to the attack.
Zehaf-Bibeau had ties to jihadists in Canada who shared a radical Islamist ideology, including at least one who went overseas to fight in Syria, multiple U.S. sources said last week.
He was a Canadian citizen who may have had dual Libyan-Canadian citizenship, according to RCMP Commissioner Bob Paulson. The gunman had criminal records indicating infractions related to drugs and violence.
Zehaf-Bibeau was applying for a passport -- an application that was under investigation -- at the time of the attack, Paulson said.
"I think the passport figured prominently in his motives," said the police commissioner. "However, we have not come to ground completely on his motivations for this attack. But clearly, it's linked to his radicalization. Clearly, it's linked to his difficult circumstances."Pressing the button on your key fob to unlock your car is so last millennium. This nifty modification will have your car unlocking itself as you walk up to it.
Advertisement
The modification is built by chaining together several components, all of them relatively inexpensive. The iPod dongle and Nike+ shoe sensor are the great communicators in the arrangement. The iPod dongle is attached to a special serial board that can translate the signal from the dongle. All of that in turn is hooked into an Arduino board, the tiny open-source hardware hub loved by electronics tinkerers.
Once tested and packaged up, the whole affair is hooked up to the wires controlling the locking and unlocking of your car doors. When you get close to the car with the Nike+ sensor in your pocket, your car door unlocks. Of course, you'll still need to have the actual key for the ignition, but you get a pile of geek street cred if you turn yours into a proximity-based ignition system.
For more information and photos, as well as a dose of caution about diving into the electronic innards of your car, check out the link below. No way you're playing a round of splice-o-matic with your electrical system? Fair enough—check out our top 10 car hacks, where the only razor you'll be using is for getting stubborn bugs off your wind shield.
Advertisement
Top 10 DIY Car Hacks Click to viewTake a look at all the devices in your life, and which one seems the most resistant to … Read more Read
iFob [via Gizmodo]Baltimore Ravens coach John Harbaugh suggested last month that teams were bound to bid "very high" on defensive end Arthur Jones when free agency launches Tuesday.
"If you put the tape on, they're going to like him a lot," said Harbaugh, who acknowledged that the Ravens might not be able to match what teams plan to offer the talented young lineman.
One of those clubs might be the Tennessee Titans. Aaron Wilson of The Baltimore Sun reported Saturday that Jones is "expected to be in |
said, would have flattered the singer.
Mercury’s first cats were Tom and Jerry, who he and then-girlfriend Mary Austin brought in during the early days of the band. She kept them when their relationship ended in the late ‘70s, yet he still considered them his, as the album dedication for “Mr. Bad Guy” proves. Austin, who remained his closest friend, gave him a lovely longhaired bluepoint he named Tiffany.
Oscar was an orange-and-white tom who came to live with him via a boyfriend. Oscar was more of a loner, though, and went to visit other homes around the neighborhood when Garden Lodge, the two-story mansion surrounded by gardens and walls, got too crowded by new arrivals.
The most famous feline of the Mercury clan is Delilah, a large, tri-colored tabby who was adopted in late 1987. As the lyrics to her song state, and Freestone’s book confirms, she took over the house and pretty much did whatever she pleased. “She was a real character, that lady!” agreed Smith. “Delilah was just kind of funny. She was a bit of a bully to the others, but was always first on his lap, first for food.” In turn, Mercury favored her as well, picking her up more than the others. She would also fun to him for safety when the other cats would gang up on her. She loved sleeping at the foot of his bed, or in the laundry baskets.
A black cat that arrived the same day as Delilah was named Goliath. The tiny cat had a habit of disappearing, especially when company came. Once, when it was noticed that he was gone for a long time, Mercury and his staff frantically searched the house only to find him sleeping in the marble sink in the bathroom. Freestone also wrote that he was “incredibly loving and dribbled his adoration at the slightest excuse.” Miko, another tabby, came just after a trip to Japan thus inspiration for her name. A white-faced tabby called Romeo was found by his boyfriend Jim Hutton and turned out to be quite a fighter. Finally, Lilly came home – Mercury had mentioned that he always wanted a white cat.
While Mercury had homes across the world, all the cats lived in London. He spent most of his time at Garden Lodge, for, as Freestone wrote, Mercury “knew home was where his cats were.”
“They were all well-loved and cared for and mostly ‘normal’ pussycats,” Smith said. But as Mercury would spoil the people he loved with gifts, did he spoil his cats as well? “Completely!” she replied. “They did get ordinary cat food at times, but mostly it was fresh chicken and fish prepared for them. I also remember he used to talk to them on the phone if he was away for a long time.”
Freestone also wrote that each cat got its own Christmas stocking filled with treats and toys. They had full run of the house and were permitted outside during the day to roam the gardens. There were the occasional territorial markings on the soft furnishings for his staff to clean up, and the quick trips to the vet if a cat showed the slightest hint of illness.
No one except for his closest friends knows how long Mercury was aware he was HIV-positive, although both Freestone and Smith believe that his cats knew. Their unconditional love gave him great comfort and company in his final days, and Mercury would never deny them admittance to his bedroom. Said Smith, “Cats have that fantastic sixth sense… I imagine that they knew he wasn’t well and spent more time with him. It’s just the thing cats would do.”
Before Mercury passed away on Nov. 24, 1991, he made sure all of his loved ones would be taken care of. “They all stayed at Garden Lodge with Mary, which is where they still are today,” said Smith. “I have heard reports of Delilah being spotted on top of the wall occasionally.”
It’s clear she still rules the house. Freddie wouldn’t have wanted it any other way.But in Ivory Coast (officially known as Côte d'Ivoire), the delivery of post-conflict justice appears to be at odds with the restoration of peace and economic development. While investors and creditors praise the government’s performance, human-rights groups warn of “winner’s justice”—of the ICC and Ivorian courts prosecuting only Gbagbo’s camp while leaving warlords and militia leaders who supported Ouattara unpunished. And now, even this one-sided justice may be in jeopardy. In the last few months, the government has cut a series of political deals, freeing key Gbagbo aides and luring others back from exile. Instead of bolstering the norms of post-conflict justice that institutions like the ICC were set up to enforce, the still-fragile revival of this crucial West African nation may do just the opposite. And that’s not necessarily a bad thing.
***
The need for post-conflict justice in Ivory Coast was identified as soon as the crisis ended, not only by groups such as Amnesty International and Human Rights Watch, but also by the new government, which requested an ICC investigation as early as May 2011. The purpose of the ICC, which was set up in 2002 under a treaty that now counts 122 members, is to prosecute war crimes and crimes against humanity when local prosecution is unlikely or difficult. In October 2011, the ICC determined that the post-election events met its standard for prosecution, in a report that detailed numerous atrocities—the majority by pro-Gbagbo forces, but many by pro-Ouattara forces as well—that had occurred in Abidjan and a volatile region of western Ivory Coast. The prosecution indicted Gbagbo soon after—as an “indirect co-perpetrator” responsible for murder, rape and sexual violence, “persecution,” and “other inhuman acts”—and he was transferred to The Hague in November 2011. The court later issued indictments on similar charges for Gbagbo’s wife, Simone Ehivet Gbagbo, and the militia leader Charles Blé Goudé. The ICC has left open the possibility of prosecuting atrocities committed during and after the country’s 2002 civil war, but for now it is limiting itself to the 2010-11 post-election events, which it says may yield additional indictments.
The Gbagbo case is one of the most high-profile the ICC has ever undertaken: He is the first former head of state to appear before the court, and the only one it has ever held in custody. (The detention facility in The Hague has also hosted Serbia’s Slobodan Milosevic and Liberia’s Charles Taylor, but separate international tribunals tried their cases.) And the proceedings against the former Ivorian leaders have moved relatively quickly. Most recently, the prosecutor, Gambian jurist Fatou Bensouda, submitted a hefty file of additional evidence that the judges had requested, and this week, the defense submitted confidential counter-arguments for dismissing the case. The judges will now either set a date for Gbagbo’s trial or dismiss the charges if they deem the prosecutor’s case insufficient.
Evaluated on its own merits, the Gbagbo case thus far encapsulates the ICC’s mission. First, it holds a leader responsible for atrocities committed down the chain of command. Second, it affords the defense a meticulous and smooth process to respond to the charges that in principle should assure a fair trial. In these ways, it upholds standards of post-conflict justice that have their roots in the Nuremberg trials after World War II and have become more defined over the last two decades with the formation of special international tribunals after the conflicts in Yugoslavia, Rwanda, and Sierra Leone, ultimately producing a permanent body in the form of the ICC. Indeed, even though some major powers (notably the U.S., China, Russia, and India) refuse to join the ICC because they do not want to expose their nationals to prosecution, the court’s broad membership—including most of Europe and Latin America, and much of Africa—testifies to the spread of these standards. The core idea that justifies the existence of the tribunal is that acts of violence against civilians during conflicts are crimes, and warrant prosecution and punishment.need to know Price: Free-to-play
Release Date: Out now
Publisher/Developer: Gaijin Entertainment
Multiplayer: 32-player competitive and cooperative multiplayer
Link: Official Site
The problem with War Thunder is it's a game that constantly swings from "amazing" to "outrageously frustrating,” often within the same session. It's a game I love, except for all those times I'm ready to nuke it from my hard drive.
Every few sessions, something technical goes annoyingly wrong. A lot of times, I get an authentication error and can't log into my account. A few minutes later, it works again. Sometimes, my controls mysteriously go haywire. All my settings are lost, and I have to remap everything, which is the most boring and painstaking task in flight sims. Don't even bother wasting time on the Controller Wizard. It's the least effective wizard this side of Oz.
Or there's that weird texture bug I only get in the cockpit view, when the world turns into a blurry, jagged mess, but looks perfect if I simply switch to a different camera.
War Thunder often seems like a ramshackle construction. There are too many places where it seems unfinished or buggy. It'd be unbearable, except for all those times it's actually sublime.
At its best, War Thunder is a game of rare beauty and grace. The game is breathtaking when you're in the air, soaring over mountain valleys or Pacific atolls. Just taking a plane up through the clouds, where the world beyond your wingtips vanishes into fog while condensation whips over the canopy, gives way to the most extraordinary joy and elation when you burst into the clear blue sky. It feels like I'm really up there at the controls of a plane, playing among the peaks and valleys of a cloud formation. That's doubly true when I'm using special flight-sim gear like a TrackIR head-head tracker and a flight stick.
More important, War Thunder's air combat is simply some of the best and most intense I've ever experienced. World of Warplanes doesn't come close; its planes are too confined by the game's simple physics. It's a shooter where your avatar is a plane. In War Thunder, I always feel like I'm actually in the cockpit, and every kill is a story to tell.
Even on the arcade settings, where the planes are extremely forgiving and every battle is basically an aerial melee, War Thunder forces players to learn and use basic flight maneuvers and aerial tactics. Bringing all the pieces together is very difficult but also very satisfying. It's not a stretch to say that War Thunder is the Red Orchestra of air combat.
You can also crank up the realism, which does away with respawns and puts you into more varied tactical situations. Instead of just racing to shoot up all the other team's tanks or airbases, you might be waging a carrier battle in the Pacific, or trying to escort bombers to a target. The aircraft are a lot harder to handle and the stakes are a lot higher, but that only serves to heighten the authenticity.
Gear-Grinding
If only War Thunder stayed at high-altitude. But unfortunately, it comes crashing to earth with the introduction of tank combat.
Where air combat is fast and graceful, the tanks are plodding and fussy. The gestures toward realism only serve to drag things out. Early tanks grind to a halt over the gentlest grades, and War Thunder consistently overestimates my interest in managing a tank's manual transmission. It's like coaxing a slug.
The slow pace is exacerbated by a combat system where the person who spots the target first is probably going to get the kill. So battlefields too often devolve into careful camping grounds, and by the time you maneuver to a good position, your glacial pace has eaten up a quarter of the battle time.
Then there's the progression system. This is where War Thunder badly lags behind World of Warplanes and World of Tanks. Its upgrade tree is a byzantine mess.
Rather than having everything laid-out in a simple step-by-step progression, the War Thunder tech tree is jammed full of weird side-branches and a few too many marginal upgrades. Plus, the currency and research required to progress in the second and third tier of the game lead to some real doldrums. Premium currency helps alleviate this somewhat, but unless you're willing to drop some real cash on buying aircraft, you should brace yourself for some slogging.
Still, as frustrated as I get with War Thunder's limitations, there nothing else out there that so readily puts you at the center of a dogfight. When I swoop in behind an enemy fighter, drop the crosshairs just above the cockpit, and watch the bullets slope into the fuselage until it comes apart like a broken kite, I feel transported. I'm an ace, a master of the skies.
War Thunder drives me crazy. I'm not sure how I can ever leave.Motivation
At its core, the purpose of adjusting the current monetary policy of the ETC network, to a policy which places an upper bound on the number of tokens issued and decreases the rate at which ETC is introduced into the system over time, is to "bootstrap" the network’s security. By increasing the security of the network, a proper monetary policy indirectly nurtures the network, providing a secure platform for which smart contract development will be more likely to occur.
If we accept that speculation, a demand function, is the main economic driver of any new system, that the Ethereum Classic Network is a new system, and that speculation will drive the value of the Ethereum Classic token until the utility value of the Ethereum Classic token exceeds its speculative value, it is reasonable to assume that rewarding speculation will help to secure and nurture the network:
Large scale, high risk, and/or high profile applications will be less likely to be developed on a blockchain with weak security ie. a low hashrate. Increasing demand for the Ethereum Classic token will, all else being equal, increase the price of the Ethereum Classic token. An increase in the price of the token incentivizes mining operations to direct their efforts on the Ethereum Classic Network or to begin operations on the Ethereum Classic Network. The additional mining power that is directed towards the network, because of this incentive, further secures the network. An increase in the security of the network assists in building trust between the network and both current and potential users and developers of the network. This increase of trust in the network provides an incentive for large scale, high risk, and/or high profile applications to be developed on the network. Thus, rewarding speculation helps to secure and nurture the Ethereum Classic network.
Especially important to early stage cryptocurrencies, assuming all other variables are equal, a network with a decreasing rate of production and an upper bound on the number of tokens that will be issued will provide more incentive for high risk speculation to occur than one without a known rate of production or an upper bound.
Above all, it is important to recognize that a monetary policy does not directly create value for the network. A stable platform with useful applications and a vibrant community are the variables that drive value. The purpose of a properly structured monetary policy is to create an incentive for people to take a risk on a system that has not yet reached its full potential, providing an additional reason for those who may not otherwise be interested, who cannot or have not developed anything on the platform (yet), or who remain skeptical, to involve themselves in an otherwise nascent platform.JOHANNESBURG - The fraud charges against Independent Police Investigative Directorate head, Robert McBride were dropped on Tuesday by the National Prosecuting Authority (NPA).
McBride and two investigators faced charges of fraud and defeating the ends of justice.
The charges stemmed from claims that McBride altered a report on the rendition of six Zimbabweans in 2010.
McBride admitted that his lead investigator in the case amended the draft report as his inquiry progressed, but denied there was anything untoward about that.
Understood that state says some witnesses reluctant to testify in #RobertMcBride case, and some evidence is hearsay. — Karyn Maughan (@karynmaughan) November 1, 2016
In court documents, Police Minister Nathi Nhleko stated that McBride deliberately tried to exclude evidence that implicated former Hawks boss Anwa Dramat and former head of the Gauteng Hawks, General Shadrack Sibiya.When a new medical drug comes on the market patients want to be given immediate access to it, especially if their condition threatens their lives. However, healthcare systems around the world are coming under increasing pressure due to rising costs. There is a difficult balance to strike: with a finite budget, the NHS cannot afford everything, but every decision to fund a treatment for one patient group may come at the expense of others. It could mean a baby's life in an area with high infant mortality, no decent palliative care for other terminally ill patients, or no new diagnostic equipment for a hospital.
Making these difficult decisions is one of the roles of the National Institute for Health and Clinical Excellence (NICE). NICE aims to ensure that the NHS's scarce budget is spent on care that delivers the greatest possible health benefits. In order to decide whether something represents value for money, NICE has to compare it to existing care in the NHS. NICE asks the question "how much extra health is this new treatment giving us compared to standard NHS care and how much extra are we being asked to pay for those additional benefits?". It does this using health economics.
Comparing like with like
When a new treatment or pathway of care becomes available, and it does more or less the same thing and produces similar results as the existing NHS care, the choice is straightforward. All things being equal it makes sense to choose the cheapest alternative — the economists call this type of analysis cost–minimisation analysis.
See the Plus article How to measure life for an example of health economics in action, involving the cancer drug revlimid.
However, more often than not, the cost of treatments, as well as the health benefits they provide will differ. If the treatments you're comparing treat the same condition, you can compare the cost of producing the same outcome for each treatment (the health gain as health economists like to put it). For example, if the treatments are designed to lower blood pressure, you compare the cost per reduction in unit of blood pressure. You also need to take into account things like side-effects, which may reduce benefits and can be costly to treat, and nursing time to administer treatments. This process of comparison is called cost-effectiveness analysis.
Comparing like with unlike
Condition treatment Cost-effectiveness measure Short stature in children treated with growth hormone Cost (£) per increase in unit of height (cm) High blood pressure treated with a blood pressure lowering drug Cost (£) per reduction in units of blood pressure (mm mercury) High blood cholesterol treated with a cholesterol-lowering drug Cost (£) per reduction in units of blood cholesterol (mmols or mg/l) Depression treated with a drug that improves mood Cost (£) per reduction in units of a rating scale that scores depression Heart failure treated with a drug that improves cardiac performance Cost (£) per unit increase in the output of the heart Breast cancer treated with a drug that prevents recurrence Cost (£) per additional life year gained as a result of effective treatment Table 1: Examples of cost effectiveness analysis.
Things get more complicated if you are trying to get the best possible value for money in healthcare across all different treatments. You need a way of comparing a treatment for, say, high blood pressure with a treatment that prevents recurrence of breast cancer. In this instance the measurements of value for money are expressed in different ways. Not only can they not be compared; they can't even be used to decide which represents the better value for money and is therefore the "better buy".
To compare treatments for different conditions, you need a common measuring instrument, a yardstick. The yardstick used by NICE is the quality adjusted life year (the QALY).
The QALY takes into account both the increase in life expectancy from an intervention and any change in quality of life. This reflects the value judgment that living longer, in itself, is an insufficient measure of success; and that the quality of life also needs to be considered. Of course many treatments (such as hip replacement surgery) may not directly increase longevity but give a better quality of life during a person's remaining years. Therefore, it is important to take both into account.
One QALY is equivalent to one year of life in perfect health. If a new treatment on offer gives you an additional QALY, then this could correspond to one year of life in perfect health, two years of life in 50% health, or any other combination. In the health economic approach used by NICE, you compare how many extra QALYs the new treatment provides compared to the old treatment, and also how much those QALYs cost to provide. In other words you are comparing the cost per QALY for these treatments. This process of comparison is called cost-utility analysis.
Measuring the extra length of life provided by a treatment is easy, but it is more difficult to measure quality of life.
How is quality of life measured?
Traditional methods of evaluating disease and response to treatment examined the process of health care from the point of the physician, focusing on symptoms, cure and whether or not the patient died. In the past few decades, however, the focus has moved more towards the point of view of the patient and the impact a treatment has on their life and how they live it, in other words the impact on the patient's quality of life (QoL).
QoL assessments are made based on the attitudes of the general public, as well as people suffering a condition.
QoL can be affected by many factors and is referred to using many terms. To look at healthcare, we have to focus on the aspects of people's lives that are affected by their health. There are a large number of different potential aspects and illness will affect each person differently. You cannot measure all of them, therefore in order to get some consistency in measurement of quality of life, scientists have tried to identify those aspects (or dimensions) that are affected most often and have the most impact on someone's overall quality of life.
Several large surveys of different people across Europe, including those who were well and those who suffered from a wide variety of diseases, found five aspects people consistently identified as having the biggest impact on health-related quality of life: whether a patient was mobile, whether they could look after themselves, to what extent they could do the things they usually did, how much pain or discomfort they were in, and how much anxiety or depression they were suffering from.
Based on these results, scientists then devised a questionnaire, known as the EuroQol–5D (or EQ–5D), giving people the choice of whether they had (1) no problem, (2) some problems, and (3) major problems. It has now been widely tested in many different patient populations.
Mobility
I have no problems in walking about I have some problems in walking about I am confined to bed Self-care
I have no problems with self-care I have some problems washing or dressing myself I am unable to wash or dress myself Usual activities (e.g. work, study, housework, family or leisure activities)
I have no problems with performing my usual activities I have some problems with performing my usual activities I am unable to perform my usual activities Pain/Discomfort
I have no pain or discomfort I have moderate pain or discomfort I have extreme pain or discomfort Anxiety/Depression
I am not anxious or depressed I am moderately anxious or depressed I am extremely anxious or depressed Table2: The EQ-5D
There are a total of 35=243 possible different combinations of the five responses to the questionnaire. Each different combination of options is termed a health state (see table 3). There are an additional two possible health states, unconscious and dead, so we get a total of 245 health states.
In order to use the results of the questionnaire in QALY calculations, you have to convert each combination of options into a number which reflects overall QoL. The numbers between 0 to 1 (see table 3) were chosen and they are called health utilities. The value 0 is equivalent to being dead and 1 represents the best possible health state. However, some health states are regarded as being worse than 0 and are given a negative value. For example, some people may consider being in a permanent vegetative state worse than death and so would give such a health state a negative utility.
Health state Description Utility 11111 No problems 1.000 11221 No problems walking about; no problems with self-care; some problems with performing usual activities; some pain or discomfort; not anxious or depressed. 0.76 22222 Some problems walking about; some problems washing or dressing self; some problems with performing usual activities; moderate pain or discomfort; moderately anxious or depressed 0.516 12321 No problems walking about; some problems washing or dressing self; unable to perform usual activities; some pain or discomfort; not anxious or depressed. 0.329 21123 Some problems walking about; no problems with self-care; no problems with performing usual activities; moderate pain or discomfort; extremely anxious or depressed. 0.222 23322 Some problems walking about; unable to wash or dress self, unable to perform usual activities, moderate pain or discomfort, moderately anxious or depressed 0.079 33332 Confined to bed; unable to wash or dress self; unable to perform usual activities; extreme pain or discomfort; moderately anxious or depressed. -0.429 Table 3: EQ–5D health state valuations (utilities)
But how do we know which of the 243 combinations of the different health states (in the left hand column of table 3) result in a particular utility (in the right hand column of table 3). For example, how do we know that that 22222 (Some problems walking about; some problems washing or dressing self; some problems with performing usual activities; moderate pain or discomfort; moderately anxious or depressed) corresponds to a utility of around 0.5 or 50% quality of life? To find out, the scientists undertook a survey of the views, attitudes and preferences of 3,000 members of the UK general public, asking them detailed questions about how much length of life they would hypothetically sacrifice to gain greater quality of life. This allowed them to mathematically "value" a sample of the different combinations of health states.
Tell us what you think! We'd like to find out which of the five quality of life dimensions you personally value the most. You can also leave a comment on our blog to voice your thoughts. <a href="http://answers.polldaddy.com/poll/2816130/" mce_href="http://answers.polldaddy.com/poll/2816130/">Which of the five quality of life dimensions do you value most?</a><span style="font-size:9px;" mce_style="font-size:9px;"><a href="http://www.polldaddy.com" mce_href="http://www.polldaddy.com">poll</a></span>
The results also indicated that the five dimensions are not considered equal. The British public considers being confined to bed a much greater negative impact on their QoL than being unable to perform their usual activities, and would be willing to trade off more years to improve this aspect of their quality of life. As a result of this survey, the scientists were able to create a formula that converts each health state into a utility value between 0 and 1.
It has been suggested that this formula should have been derived from surveys of people with different diseases rather than surveys of the general public. However, this would be impractical. For every conceivable disease, the experiment would need to be repeated in a large sample of patients. Moreover, there is also the argument that in a publicly funded health care system — such as the NHS — it is right that the public should determine the values given to individual elements of QoL. Because the NHS has a fixed budget, each decision impacts on all NHS users, not just those with a given condition. Finally there is also the argument that patients adapt to their condition; people get used to their circumstances — after one year things might not seem so bad as they did at the start of the year.
The EQ5D is the simplest of many different QoL questionnaires. Most other questionnaires contain more than five aspects. They are therefore more time consuming to fill in and there are many more combinations of answers. As a result, the experiments to derive the necessary formulas have not been carried out. For these reasons, the other questionnaires are more difficult to use in health economic studies.
NICE is often unfairly criticised because people think that its calculations are based on responses from the public, rather than from people suffering a condition. Because the calculations are quite complicated and rarely explained, people don't realise that there are two steps involved in the process of calculating QALYs. The first is to capture the actual health states associated to a treatment, which are assessed using the responses to the EQ-5D questionnaire from people who actually suffer the relevant condition and have been given the treatment. Secondly, there is the conversion of health states to numerical utility values, which is based on the preferences of members of the public, who do not necessarily suffer from that condition.
So we now have a way of "weighting" each year a patient is in a particular health state by the quality of life experienced in that year: the number of QALYs of the health state is defined as the utility of that state multiplied by the number of years an average patient is in that state. So one year in the best possible health state is 1 year × 1 QoL, which equals 1 QALY. Whereas if it's only 50% of perfect health, it's 1 year × 0.5 QoL, which equals 0.5 QALYs.
What dimension do you value most?
To compare two different treatments, you carry out a randomised controlled trial of the treatments and include a measurement of QoL to find out how many QALYs each produces. You ask the groups of people receiving the different treatments to each fill out the EQ5D prior to treatment and then after they have had the treatment. You then convert the EQ5D health states to utilities and use them to calculate the QALYs. This gives a comparison of how many QALYs individuals in each group gained on average as a result of the treatment, and you can statistically compare them to see if there are any differences. Since the treatments are commonly undertaken in a randomised controlled trial, any change in either quality or length of life is assumed to be a direct result of that treatment.
When health economists calculate QALYs they do not take any account of how many QALYs a person has already had in the past. For example, if a woman is successfully treated for breast cancer and gains 30 QALYs, it makes no difference to the calculation of the number of QALYs she gets when her hip is replaced 15 years later.
Cost per QALY
The final step of the cost-utility analysis is to compare the cost of the QALY gains in each treatment group. You can either add up the costs associated with each step of the trials in which the treatments have been tested, or estimate them based on agreed average national cost tables.
Using the hip replacement example, if the total cost of a hip replacement with artificial hip of type A is £5,000, then the cost per QALY is
5,000/1.5=£3,333 per QALY.
If the cost for the initial operation for a hip of type B is also £5,000, then type B costs £5,000/0.5=£10,000 per QALY: over three times the cost per QALY even without the costs and loss of quality of life associated with further hip replacements.
Is it cost-effective? The ICER
Because the NHS has a fixed budget, any money spent on a new intervention is not available to spend on other things. As a result, something (an opportunity) will have to be given up either for this patient group or other patient groups. This opportunity that has been forgone is termed the opportunity cost and it can be valued in both monetary terms (the money that has been spent) and in health benefit terms (the health measured in QALYs that you have given up because you didn't choose that option).
Is the treatment worth the extra cost?
Bearing this in mind, it makes sense that a new intervention, as a minimum, should have the equivalent benefits (in QALY terms) as the things you are going to be giving up. This could then be considered an efficient (cost-effective) use of NHS resources. Ideally, the new intervention should have greater benefits than what you are giving up. However, as is often the case, the new intervention will have greater benefits, but at a greater cost.
To assess this extra cost of a new intervention compared to existing treatments, NICE uses the incremental cost-effectiveness ratio, or ICER, which is worked out as follows. First, compute the difference between the cost c 1 per patient of the new intervention and the cost c 2 per patient of the standard existing intervention. Then work out the difference between the new intervention's gain in QALYs q 1 and the existing intervention's gain in QALYs q 2. Now compute the ratio between the two differences:
(c 1 -c 2 )/(q 1 -q 2 ).
This measures the additional cost per QALY of the new intervention compared to the existing intervention.
For example, suppose that a new intervention A provides a gain of 0.8 QALYs while existing intervention B provides a gain of 0.25 QALYs. If intervention A costs £10,000 per patient and intervention B costs £2,000 per patient, then the cost per QALY is £10,000/0.8=£12,500 for intervention A and £2,000/0.25=£8,000 for intervention B. The ICER of the new treatment compared to the existing is
(10,000-2,000)/(0.8-0.25)=14,545.45.
The threshold
We obviously cannot measure the cost-effectiveness of every alternative use of the same money. Also we often don't know what will be given up in favour of a new treatment because decisions are made locally and NICE does not directly substitute new interventions for old. We have to decide how much extra money we're maximally willing to spend per QALY for a new intervention, and therefore whether it can be deemed to be cost-effective or not. Economists call this maximum a threshold, and NICE's lies between £20,000 and £30,000 per QALY. NICE uses the threshold as a comparison tool: an intervention with an ICER below the threshold is generally regarded as cost-effective. If its ICER lies above the threshold, then the intervention may be deemed not cost-effective for the benefits it offers compared to existing treatments, and it may not be made available on the NHS. In addition to economics, NICE's independent advisory bodies consider many other factors when they are making decisions, and have input from all stakeholders including patients. The factors include ethical principles, legal requirements, the need to avoid discrimination, and the promotion of equality.
On the face of it, cost-effectiveness may seem like a very mathematical way of dealing with issues of personal health. But the fact of the matter is that the health care pie is finite and decisions for one and decisions or one patient group affect other patients with different diseases. The health economical approach used by NICE is an attempt to divide it up as fairly as possible. It's not a matter of mechanically plugging made-up numbers into equations, but of carefully assessing the effects of treatments and comparing them using measures that are as objective as possible.
About this article
Dr Sarah Garner is Associate Director for Research and Development at NICE.It’s time once again for another MiniLD! And for this one, let’s take a step back… in time!
The theme this time is the RETRO CHALLENGE! Write a software for some classic/retro hardware… Don’t have any old hardware around? No problem! Emulated systems are fine! Don’t know how to code in ASM? No problem! Use any of the old development or game making tools from that machine’s time. You can use any hardware emulation or simulation platform… basically anything that can be emulated/simulated on reasonably recent hardware, but not including modern system VMs. that’d be cheating. (Let’s say, try to stick to previous generation of home computer technology (pre-windows) if you’re going for Intel based stuff. So, MS-DOS based games would be okay if you wanted to go that route.)
So, if you want to make a Commodore 64 game in pure asm? Great!
You want to make a BBC Micro Basic program? Great!
You want to use Deluxe Construction Set on an Amiga? Awesome!
You feel completely insane and want to write for a barebones Atari 2600 VCS? Go for it!
You feel like making a Hypercard Stack for a Mac Plus? Huzzah!
Are you up for the challenge?
I should note that you don’t need to write a game for this. If you want to make a tool, a toy, a demo, a particle accelerator simulator? That’s awesome too!
This Mini LD will start on June 13th and run to June 23rd.. give or take ;). Things can get a bit dicey and cumbersome working with these old platforms, so squeezing it on two weekends is probably worthwhile. You don’t need to provide web-based emulators for your platform. Just use whatever packaging is appropriate for your device, and we’ll work out best practices for emulation in the comment thread here…CLOSE A woman who identified herself as the mother of the man accused of driving his car into a crowd of peaceful protesters says he told her he was going to the rally. (Aug. 12) AP
Rep. John Dingell (D-MI) waits to be interviewed on Capitol Hill on Nov. 7, 2009, in Washington, DC. (Photo: Brendan Smialowski, Getty Images)
Plenty of emotion was shared on social media Saturday as white supremacists and counter protesters clashed in the streets of Charlottesville.
Among those tweeting was former Michigan Congressman John Dingell - and he went viral with what he had to say.
As one of Twitter's well-known "power users," the 91-year-old Dingell is usually known for making comedic remarks about things, from death rumors to Detroit sports. But he had something profound to say about what was taking place Charlottesville.
"I signed up to fight Nazis 73 years ago and I'll do it again if I have to," he tweeted. "Hatred, bigotry, |
, 2 hours 10 mins 12 secs, (23.077 mph)
100 miles, 4hrs, 40 mins, 6 secs, (21.428 mph)
12 hours – 231 5/8 miles. (19.25 mph)[2]
Professional career [ edit ]
Godwin left his amateur status at Potteries CC to join Rickmansworth Cycling Club as a professional. After more than 200 road and time trial wins, the mileage record beckoned.[1]
World endurance records [ edit ]
In 1911 the weekly magazine Cycling began a competition for the highest number of 100-mile rides or "centuries" in a single year.[3] The winner was Marcel Planes with 332 centuries in which he covered 34,366 miles (55,307 km).[3] The inspiration for the competition was said to be the efforts of Harry Long, a commercial traveller who rode a bicycle on his rounds covering every part of England and Scotland and who covered 25,376 miles (40,839 km) in 1910.[3] The world record for distance cycled in a year began in an era when bicycle companies competed to show their machines were the most reliable. The record was officially established nine times up to 1939.[4] A tenth claim in 1972, by the English rider Ken Webb, was later disallowed.[n 1]
In January 2016 Godwin's very long-standing record was broken. The American Kurt Searvogel completed 76,076 miles (122,432 km) in one year, confirmed by the Ultramarathon Cycling Association, and this was later also recognised by the Guinness Book of Records.[5][6]
In 1937 the Australian Ossie Nicholson had regained his record from Briton Walter Greaves by covering 62,657.6 mi (100,837.6 km). At 5 am on 1 January 1939 Godwin set out to bring the record home. He wasn't alone; two other British riders started that day, Edward Swann and Bernard Bennett. Swann crashed after 939.6 mi (1,512.1 km), but Bennett fought it out with Godwin for the rest of the year. In sportsmanship their support teams, which included pace-makers, stopped at 50,000 mi (80,000 km) to let the riders complete the attempt on personal merit. Godwin was sponsored by the Raleigh Bicycle Company and Sturmey-Archer.[15]
Godwin's bike weighed more than 30 pounds (14 kg). As war came, he rode through blackouts, his lights taped to a glow. Silk knickers were substituted for chamois inserts and Godwin maintained his vegetarian diet. For the first two months, Godwin's mileage lagged 922 mi (1,484 km) behind Nicholson's schedule. Godwin increased his daily average beyond 200 mi (320 km) a day, and on 21 June 1939 completed 361 mi (581 km) in 18 hours, his longest ride of the record.
On 26 October 1939, Godwin rode into Trafalgar Square having completed 62,658 mi (100,838 km), gaining the record with two months to spare. He rode through the winter to complete 75,065 mi (120,805 km) in the year.
In May 1940 after 500 days' riding he secured the 100,000-mile (160,000 km) record as well. Godwin dismounted and spent weeks learning how to walk before going to war in the RAF.
Later career [ edit ]
Godwin returned to cycling in 1945, keen to race as an amateur. However, despite a petition by fellow cyclists, the governing bodies ruled that having ridden as a professional he was barred from amateur status. Godwin became trainer and mentor to the Stone Wheelers. Godwin died aged 63, returning from a ride to Tutbury Castle with friends.
Commemoration [ edit ]
Godwin is commemorated by a plaque at Fenton Manor Sports Centre in Stoke on Trent that was unveiled on March 2005 by Edie Hemmings, the culmination of a 30-year campaign by her late husband, George. [16]
Citation in the Golden Book [ edit ]
Godwin entered the Golden Book of Cycling on 31 December 1939. This recognised his record-breaking exploits for averaging over 200 miles a day for a year.[2]
Notes [ edit ]
^ Ken Webb's claim was for 80,647 miles (129,789 km) in 1972. Webb insisted he had completed the distance but others said he hadn't and he was removed from the Guinness Book of Records.
References [ edit ]BOSTON (CBS) — The Patriots have entered the portion of their schedule where they just want to win games and avoid injuries. On Sunday, they accomplished just one of those tasks.
Nate Ebner went down on the fourth play of the game and is likely out for the season. Trevor Reilly got knocked out in as grisly a collision as you’ll ever see. The Patriots made NFL history by having two players named Flowers injured on the same play. The Patriots ended up with a third-string right tackle in the game after LaAdrian Waddle — starting in place of the injured Marcus Cannon — suffered an injury himself. Kyle Van Noy — the Patriots’ most dependable linebacker this year — suffered an injury while sacking Matt Moore.
The severity of most of those injuries remain unclear at the moment, but when you consider the team has already lost Julian Edelman, Dont’a Hightower, Shea McClellin and top pick Derek Rivers, and when you see that Chris Hogan has missed three straight games and that David Andrews has missed two in a row, it’s becoming clear that this year’s team is not quite as blessed in the injury department as they have been in some of their Super Bowl years.
That’s not to say they’re doomed — boy, that’d be a mean story to lead with after a blowout win over a divisional opponent — but the bodies lost on Sunday are indeed concerning in the big picture of the season.
Now let’s move on to all of the leftover thoughts from the Patriots’ 35-17 necessary but not altogether inspiring victory over the Dolphins.
–I’m always flattered and appreciative whenever anybody tells me they enjoy this weekly column. It’s very nice! But boy, one thing I didn’t know is that the Miami Dolphins are big fans of the leftover thoughts. That was at least the conclusion I drew after they tried so hard to make appearances this week for their employment of the Zero Humans Defense.
And really, what kind of guy would I be if I didn’t indulge them in their obvious attempts to shine in the spotlight? So without further ado, I present to you some excellent defense by the Miami Dolphins.
Here’s Phillip Dorsett, who entered the game with 101 receiving yards on the entire season, being left wide open for a gain of 39 yards.
Way to go, guys.
That was just the beginning. Here’s the Dolphins learning about this guy named Brandin Cooks:
It looks even better from space:
To use some technical football jargon, that is literally the zeroest humans ever. Seriously though, someone should be fired for that.
You might think that the Dolphins were done employing this brilliant football strategy. You’d be wrong!
You see, the Patriots have this tight end. He’s very good! His name is Bob. He warrants coverage from the defense at all times, but particularly when he’s close to that area on the field where the team name and logo is painted.
All around a great day for the Miami defense. Again, I’m flattered. Thank you so much for reading. I hope I’ve fulfilled your expectations.
–The Dolphins defense did beat the doo-doo out of Brady, though, which was equal parts impressive and dirty. But the hardest hit of all — when Ndamukong Suh came speeding into the backfield like a freight train — was perfectly clean. It looked like a cartoon.
Here’s the point of contact at the 27-yard line:
Here’s the result of the impact:
And here’s where Brady ended up, back at the 22-yard line:
Yikes.
Ndamukong Suh, for the record, has played against Tom Brady seven times. His teams are 1-6. That’s despite playing on some very good defenses and having a real quarterback for a while in Detroit. In the seven games, he has 1.5 sacks. That’s got to be frustrating.
–The hit from Suh probably didn’t hurt as much as this hit from Cameron Wake. I can’t be cerrrrtain, but it appears as though Wake may have delivered a closed fist directly to Thomas and the Bradys:
Hmm. Hard to tell. ENHANCE!
ADVANCE THE FRAME!
Wait is this getting weird? No? OK. Moving on.
–The Nate Ebner fake punt play was brilliant and fun … but can you imagine if it didn’t work? People in New England still sneer about the infamous mortar kick from 2015, even though it only cost the Patriots about 20 yards of field position and even though the Patriots have won a Super Bowl since then. Another flub on special teams involving Ebner? The talk radio outrage would have written itself.
Anyway, it’s a bummer that Ebner got hurt, but you had to appreciate seeing the injured Matthew Slater lose his dang mind while celebrating on the sideline during the play:
He legitimately looks possessed. That’s what a well-executed special teams trick play will do to Matthew Slater, even when he’s not involved.
–Dion Lewis was an absolute monster, setting a new career high with 112 rushing yards. But the timing of a couple of his runs really proved to be devastating for Miami. He was handed the ball immediately after that fake punt, and he gashed the middle of the Miami defense for 13 yards. On the opening drive of the second half, after the Patriots “recovered” a muffed Danny Amendola punt return, Lewis got the ball and ran once again up the middle, this time for 25 yards.
It’s just not helpful for a team’s frustration level when that little fellow immediately makes things go from bad to worse with a silly run. And both of those plays were part of touchdown drives, while the second helped to inspire Bobby McCain to punch a helmet a few plays later and get himself ejected.
Dion Lewis: The Little Deliverer Of Devastation.
–Speaking of the McCain ejection, I was surprised that Andre Branch was able to get away with not only a quick jab to Lewis’ throat but also a clear case of taunting.
Here’s the throat punch:
Here’s the taunting:
This being a Patriots-Dolphins game, the dirtiness occurred of course following a Patriots run for a first down, and the Patriots scored a touchdown two plays later.
–It was also a bang-up jub by Ronald Torbert and his crew to miss Ndamukong Suh (6-foot-4, 300 pounds) ripping the ball carrier down by his facemask, out in the open field for all to see ON THE VERY NEXT PLAY:
The grab of the facemask literally stopped Lewis dead in his tracks, and Suh spun him to the ground:
How do you miss that? The world may never know. (Because the NFL never admits to any mistakes and is always correct about everything, according to the NFL.) And how are you not looking for something dirty from Suh when roughly 11 seconds have elapsed since a Dolphin got ejected for throwing a punch and another Dolphin got away with throwing another punch?
–Dion Lewis authored a #FerociousJuke or two. One in particular was impressive because it led to some Fin-on-Fin violence:
–Did you enjoy The Gronkowski Drive? It involved Brady tip-toeing around the pocket like a ballet dancer:
Which allowed Gronkowski to take as much time as he needed to get really open for a 21-yard gain:
On the very next play, Gronkowski got behind three very confused Dolphins defenders for another 20 yards:
And then two plays later, Gronkowski just beat safety Reshad Jones on a little out route, gaining plenty of separation and catching a touchdown on the goal line. It was nifty because, even though Gronkowski got himself open by a full step, Brady still threw the pass as if he had to needle it into the tiniest of windows. It was perfect:
Thus concluded The Gronkowski Drive. With his performance on Sunday, ol’ Bobby Gronk moved into the top 10 all time for receiving yards by a tight end and set a franchise record for most games with two or more receiving touchdowns (16). He and Brady also moved into fifth place all time in NFL history in QB-receiver touchdown connections with 74. BUT IS HE HAPPY ABOUT HIS CONTRACT? ARE THERE TENSIONS BREWING BETWEEN GRONKOWSKI AND BELICHICK? IT’S NOT A QUESTION OF IF THEY’LL TRADE GRONKOWSKI BUT A QUESTION OF WHEN THEY’LL TRADE GRONKOWSKI!
–We talk a lot about #FerociousJukes here in this space, but we may need a new description for whatever it is that Brandin Cooks does. He was, essentially, dead to rights in the backfield on a jet sweep in the second quarter. But with a slight hesitation and the quickest first step you’ll ever see, he managed to turn it from a no-gain to an 11-yard run:
–Here’s my brief non-Patriots thought of the week: What the heck are the 49ers doing with Jimmy Garoppolo? They traded a second-round pick to acquire him, and they’re now five weeks away from having to decide how many millions they want to commit to him in order to have him as their potential franchise quarterback. Instead of seeing what he can actually do, they’re leaving him on the bench. And when he comes in during garbage time and throws a pick, they still say he’s not the starting QB. Nope, C.J. Beathard with his four touchdowns and six interceptions and 69.4 passer rating needs to start. Garoppolo? NOT READY.
It’s just insane. What if they decide to slap the franchise tag on him in the offseason and he can’t ever function in their system? I mean, I suppose it’s possible that they intend to franchise him and then trade him, so they don’t want to potentially hurt his value in these final games of the year. But whatever they’re doing, it seems highly questionable. Certainly, if the plan is to sign him to a long-term deal, they might want to maybe get an idea of how he looks in their offensive system. Just an idea from 3,000 miles away.
–Rex Burkhead had himself a contest, to the point where Brady made it a point to force a touchdown pass to him in the second quarter as a reward. I believe the message from Brady was “If you take contact at the 11 and force your way to the 1, I’m going to make sure you get the touchdown.”
–I think we believe in the Patriots defense now, right? Nobody would confuse them for a top five defensive unit, but with an average of 13 points allowed over the last seven games, there’s plenty to feel good about with the unit.
And now, thanks to the Dolphins’ offensive ineptitude, they have some stats to help boost their overall appearance. They picked off two Matt Moore passes, bringing their season total to 10 and leaving them knocking on the door of the top 10 in the league. They sacked Moore seven times, increasing their season total by more than 40 percent. And at long last, they no longer rank dead last in yards allowed per game. In fact, they’re down to just being third-worst.
With an offense as potent as theirs, they need only to be pretty good on defense. They’re already there.
–The defense should have had another forced fumble and recovery when Trey Flowers stripped the ball from Kenyan Drake and rolled to the carpet all in one fluid motion. And they could have had another one, thanks to this marvelous attack of the football by Malcolm Butler:
–This was a perfect comment:
Kenny Stills was telling Pats players "you're afraid of us" and the Fins would beat NE if they were more disciplined — Michael Giardi (@MikeGiardi) November 26, 2017
Stills and Jarvis Landry were particularly fired up in this game, and I particularly appreciated when Landry did a dance after spinning the ball in celebration while his team was trailing by 11:
It was funny, though I guess you do have to manufacture your own fun when your quarterback is Matt Moore. (Moore threw a godawful interception in the end zone two snaps later.)
–Who’s up for some Brett Favre-at-40 and Tom Brady-at-40 comparisons through 11 games??!!
Brady, 2017, through 11 games:
279-for-408 (68.4%)
3,374 yards
26 TDs, 3 INTs
111.7 rating
9-2 record Favre, 2009, through 11 games:
248-for-358 (69.3%)
2,874 yards
24 TDs, 3 INTs
112.1 rating
10-1 record
Again, it’s relevant because Favre in 2009 authored the best season ever by a 40-year-old QB. Considering how much attention I’ve paid to this potentially imaginary quest, I was taken aback — flabbergasted, even — to discover the Patriots are only counting the portion of the season after Favre turned 40 on Oct. 10 of that year.
Tom Brady has 26 TDs this season, the most by a QB in a single season after turning 40 in @NFL history (Favre, 25, 2009 & Moon, 25, 1997). #GoPats — New England Patriots (@Patriots) November 26, 2017
Hey, Patriots — no! No, I say. We’re counting the whole year. Let’s not pick too many nits. The man was 40, and considering the type of life he led and the hits he took, he was more like 45.
–Brady really did take a beating in this game. Some of it was self-inflicted, like when he dropped a shotgun snap and then got almost quite literally ripped in half by Cameron Wake. But overall it was just another chapter in the story of how stupid tough Brady
Long story short, Tom kept the football after this one:
–I can’t be sure, but I believe Bill Belichick and Joe Judge told the punt team to pull that play clock chicanery just to send Dolphins special teams coach Darren Rizzi into a state of absolute pandemonium. That poor fella was losing it:
I just wish we got to see his reaction after Ryan Allen threw up the fake as if he was going to pass the ball. That might have actually killed this man.
–“I Don’t Know What To Do: The Rob Gronkowski Story” will be a great title for a book.
Gronk quote of the day on his TD celebration: “We got yelled at. We’re not allowed to talk about celebrations. That’s what we got told. But I kind of want to talk about it. But I kinda don't because I will get in trouble. So I don't know what to do.” #Patriots #wbz pic.twitter.com/F9rT3MfFUS — Dan Roche (@RochieWBZ) November 26, 2017
On a real note, though, I don’t recommend having a grown man hopping on the back of the man who’s had numerous back surgeries over the past 10 years. Let’s try to limit the load that Gronkowski bears on a regular basis. Other than that, fun celebration.
All aboard the victory bus pic.twitter.com/GTp8KHoBi3 — Pete Blackburn (@PeteBlackburn) November 26, 2017
–I don’t know how — really, I don’t — but somehow, it’s become somewhat of a story that Tom Brady was still in the game in the waning moments of a big win. I mean, is this your first time watching the Patriots, people? The man plays no matter what. It’s his life. He’s a football player. And if he’d be in there in a tie game, then he figures he should be in there in a three-score game. That’s Tom Brady. He’s the quarterback of the Patriots. Familiarize yourself with his customs.
(Also this wasn’t really a blowout. The Dolphins cut it to 11 in the fourth quarter, and in an imaginary world, a non-Matt Moore-led offense could storm back to tie the game. The Patriots needed another score to really put it away. Brady delivered it.)
(When Brady was actually in during the blowout portion, he handed the ball off three times. Relax, worry warts. He’s going to be OK.)
The most telling sign from Brady came after the New England defense made a third-down stop with just over five minutes left in the game. Brady grabbed his helmet and looked like a kid on Christmas.
You’re not going to get that helmet out of his hands. You shouldn’t even bother trying.
You can email Michael Hurley or find him on Twitter @michaelFhurley.Can writing improve mental and emotional stability? Does it help people to deal with traumatic situations? The answer to both of these questions is a resounding yes. Writing absolutely has mental health benefits. In fact, there are many therapists and counselors who include writing therapy as part of their treatment regimen for people who are dealing with stress, trauma, anxiety, major life change, addiction, and other difficulties. On a personal level, you may have used writing as therapeutic tool yourself. If you’ve ever used a journal to pour your heart out or vent your frustrations, you have used writing as a tool to cope with those frustrations. Likewise, if you’ve ever written a letter or sent an email letting somebody know how you really feel about a situation, positive or negative, and then felt better, you know the benefits of writing as a mental and emotional release.
Have you ever wondered how or why that works? When you write, how does that influence your brain and thought processes? Why are certain people more compelled to write on a regular basis? Are there groups of people who would benefit from writing therapy more than others? How does somebody get started with a journal or diary? Keep reading!
How And Why Does Writing For Mental Health Work?
Patients undergoing writing therapy are asked to write about their lives as part of a therapeutic process. People undergoing writing therapy may write about specific experiences, memories, their emotions, and their goals. People who see counselors or therapists that use writing therapy may be asked to keep a journal of their emotions, write letters, create fictional stories based on their feelings, or even write poetry. Writing as therapy isn’t something that is simply faddish. These techniques are more than 50 years old.
From a physical standpoint, many scientists believe that writing therapy works, because the release that is felt by patients relieve stress. It can also positively impact blood pressure. When stress is reduced, or it is relieved altogether, the person who is using writing to improve their mental and emotional health has more reserves to create strategies to make any life changes that they need to make for themselves. This is a very common phenomenon for anybody who is in crisis, whether that crisis is financial, physical, or emotional. They are too mentally emotionally taxed to find ways to fix their situation.
Why Are Certain Populations More Drawn to Writing as a Form of Therapy or Self Help?
Teenagers, prisoners, the mentally ill, people with chronic illnesses, and crime victims, among others all have the tendency to use writing to express themselves and sort out their feelings. This is true whether or not writing is part of a formal therapy plan or simply something that is taken on by the individual under their own accord. There is a lot of truth behind the stereotype of the teenager venting in his or her diary or writing love letters to a lost loved one. Of course, this is just one example, lots of at risk populations use writing as a way to communicate, cope, and process what is happening to them.
Writing Therapy And at Risk Youth And Others
Many teenagers enjoy using writing to express themselves and to work through their emotions. This is why creative writing is often a popular class among high school and college students. The act of writing provides emotional release and gives young people a healthy option for working through traumatic experiences, negative emotions, and common adolescent crises. However, as beneficial as writing can be to the average adolescent, it can be even more beneficial to at risk youth.
At risk youth are children and teenagers who are at risk for any one or more of the following:
Dropping out of school
Becoming involved in the criminal justice system
Using drugs or alcohol
Running away from home or becoming homeless
Struggling with mental health issues
Being victims of abuse or exploitation
Of course, before they are identified as needing services, many youth have already been directly impacted by at least one of these risk factors.
Many organizations that are dedicated to helping at risk youth use writing as one of many treatment protocols. Youths may be asked to write poetry, short stories, and even their own autobiographies. They may also be encouraged to keep journals. Even storytelling can be a part of an effective writing therapy program. There have even been programs where at risk youth write plays about their experiences that are acted out by themselves and their peers.
Writing therapy for at risk youth has a place in juvenile detention facilities, mental hospitals, schools that are located in troubled areas, group homes, and camps or other private facilities that have been created specifically to help troubled youth. These programs are also well-suited for boys and girls clubs and community centers, especially ones that are located in areas where the average youth is at higher risk of social, emotional, educational, or legal problems.
The benefits that at risk children receive through writing include the following:
Improved literacy
Increased coping schools
Improved emotional and mental maturity
A greater understanding of self
Greater empathy
Improved self esteem
Learning to use writing to replace unhealthy or antisocial coping strategies
Similar writing therapy programs have also been used in prisons and in other institutions to help adults who struggle with mental disorders, antisocial behaviors, and a criminal history. Just as writing helps teenagers, these adults are able to process past trauma, modify behavior patterns, and learn more about themselves by writing about their experiences. Some, are even able to improve their ability to feel empathy and relate to others.
Clearly, writing is an activity that has major mental health benefits. This applies to people who are undergoing life changes, simply struggling to grow up, or who are truly at risk. People who are struggling emotionally should be encouraged to use writing as a healthy means of expression and self discovery.
—–
I’m a writer, formerly an athlete in past and that has influenced on my outlook greatly. I’m an extremely active person and pet lover. I give great writing advice over at GhostProfessors.SAN ANTONIO -- There's an increasing trend where high school students are choosing alternative routes to traditional post-graduate education, and they are making money right after high school.
The manufacturing field offers alternative options where people can make a decent amount of money in a short amount of time.
The average salary in San Antonio is $33,000. However, there are jobs where you can make a lot more without a college education, and they are hiring now.
"The old image was that it was shoveling coal in a furnace and dreary, but now it's not," said Rey Chavez, president of the San Antonio Manufacturers Association.
"I needed not only a job, but I needed a career," said Sean Althaus. He has been working for Cox Manufacturing for the past six years.
"We specialize in making small precision parts," said Bill Cox, CEO of Cox Manufacturing.
With no college experience, Althaus felt this was the right fit.
"I started off back in 2010 running machines," he said. Now, he's making more than $50,000 a year.
"We look for people that have the right attitude to be successful," said Cox.
David Thompson is one of those people. He graduated with a history degree, but said he didn't want to teach.
"I was looking for something completely different," said Thompson. Right now, he's learning how to work the machines. He wants to learn to program them, too.
"[I want to] figure out mentally how the tools are going to interact with each other, what parts are they going to take in the machines and how all that flows together," Thompson said.
First year employees at Cox Manufacturing can earn $30,000. After three years, they can make close to $45,000 and salaries climb well over $70,000 with overtime.
The Toyota plant also said it welcomes people just out of high school like Sarah Escobar.
"I worked part-time at the plant and went through schooling, two days at St. Philip's College and three days at the plant," said Escobar, who is a maintenance technician at the plant.
She is also a graduate of Alamo Academy's Aerospace program, which launched her into Toyota.
"I have zero dollars in college debt. I'm 21 years old, but I make more than my parents," she said.
Many starting out here make between $30,000 and $50,000 a year. After a few years, they could make up to $80,000, with overtime, many make $100,000 a year or more.
You can check out both of these businesses by following the links below.Digital currency exchange platform GDAX has revealed its contingency plans in the event a controversial bitcoin scaling proposal is activated.
As reported earlier today by CoinDesk, BIP 148, which triggers a so-called user-activated soft fork, or UASF, to activate the Segregated Witness (SegWit) scaling solution, are pushing ahead with their plans despite the popularity of another scaling proposal, Segwit2x, which pairs the activation of SegWit with an increase to the size of the network’s transaction blocks three months later.
Yet if SegWit2x doesn’t get enough support by August 1st and BIP 148 takes hold without enough of the bitcoin ecosystem support of its particular transaction chain, bitcoin could split into two competing assets. It’s a prospect that led GDAX, which is operated by startup Coinbase, to announce last night that, in the event the UASF happens, it will temporarily halt deposits and withdrawals and could take further action.
GDAX general manager Adam White wrote that the exchange could take action in the event that either one chain emerges as the stronger one or the two co-exist as separate chains, explaining:
“In either scenario we will implement safeguards to ensure the safety of our customers’ funds. For example, we will temporarily suspend the deposit and withdrawal of bitcoin on GDAX and may pause the trading of bitcoin as well. This decision will be based on our assessment of the technical risks posed by the fork, such as replay attacks and other factors that could create network instability.”
Coinbase was a signatory of an agreement struck in May between startups and miners in the industry, which led to the development of the Segwit2x proposal. A second beta version of that software is expected to be released today.
Want to stay up to date on the latest bitcoin scaling developments? Follow the latest news and stay informed with our guides and explainers by clicking here.
Disclosure: CoinDesk is a subsidiary of Digital Currency Group, which acted as organizer for the SegWit2x proposal and has an ownership stake in Coinbase.
Turnstile image via ShutterstockAt least for most us suburbanites, the steady march of chain-store America has overwhelmed whatever defense small business could mount. Businesswise, at least, if you’ve seen one town, you’ve seen them all.
In my ‘burb, city officials approve one chain after another, then fret that the place doesn’t seem to have a “there” there. That it is indistinguishable from any other suburb, as if their actions didn’t have something to do with it.
Even in cities, it’s getting more difficult for small business to hold on when the chains move in or the developers offer money that no business owner can turn down for their property.
We lost a jewel in St. Paul a few years ago, for example, when Seven Corners Hardware closed so that a developer could get down to the business of putting a wrecking ball to the neighborhood charm of the Seventh Street area near Xcel Energy Center.
Smaller hardware stores, like the independent pharmacies before them, are a dying institution. So today’s Duluth News Tribune article on the fight hardware stores are putting up in northern Minnesota is somewhat comforting.
Menard’s, Fleet Farm, and a host of bigger companies have destroyed some of them already, however.
“I haven’t noticed anything,” owner Mark Moran at Denny’s Ace Hardware in Duluth told the paper about the threat posed by the new Fleet Farm. “We just provide the best service we can. We try to put in products not available at the big box stores.”
“If they were sitting in our backyard it would be different,” the store’s co-owner Roger Lundquist said of Fleet Farm. “I like their wide range of their products, but it doesn’t affect our business at all. We are a community hardware store and our community generally stays with us. There has been no impact or even any discussion about it from our customers.” Still, Lundquist knows first-hand how damaging big box competition can be. He also was part-owner of Bingham Hardware on Banks Avenue in Superior. The store closed in 2006, after nearly 120 years in business, after Menards opened on nearby Tower Avenue.
One store owner said the big chains send people his way for nuts and bolts, so he’s able to survive. Maybe someday, however, the chain will figure out there’s money in nuts and bolts and that will be that.
For the most part, the hardware store owners interviewed seemed to be taking a page from the famous showdown in Brattleboro, Vt., where a local guy ran Home Depot out of town with kindness and courtesy to his customers, something the big fellas can’t or won’t supply that the so-called “mom and pops” can.
Faced with competition from big-box retailers, the mom-and-pops go out of business for one reason alone: People who shop choose the bigger store. We vote on what kind of community we want every time we spend money, then lament the lost character of a neighborhood or town that we caused.
Maybe today would be a fine day to buy some nuts and bolts.For the fair held in Scarborough, Ontario, see Scarboro Fair
During the late Middle Ages the seaside town of Scarborough, in Yorkshire, was an important venue for tradesmen from all over England. It was host to a huge 45-day trading event, starting on August 15th which was exceptionally long for a fair in those times. Merchants came to it from all areas of England, Norway, Denmark, the Baltic states and the Byzantine Empire. Scarborough Fair originated from a charter granted by King Henry III of England on 22 January 1253. The charter, which gave Scarborough many privileges, stated "The Burgesses and their heirs forever may have a yearly fair in the Borough, to continue from the Feast of the Assumption of the Blessed Virgin Mary until the Feast of St Michael next following". (On the modern Roman Catholic calendar, the equivalent dates are August 15 to September 29.) Naturally, such a large occasion attracted a lot more than just tradesmen; they needed to be entertained and fed, therefore large crowds of buyers, sellers and pleasure-seekers attended the fair. Prices were determined by supply and demand, with goods often being exchanged through the barter system. Records show that from 1383 due to another fair in neighbouring Seamer Scarborough's prosperity slumped.[1]
In the early 17th century, competition from other towns' markets and fairs and increasing taxation saw further collapse of the Fair until it eventually became financially untenable. The market was revived again in the 18th century, but due to intense competition Scarborough Fair finally ended in 1788.
The traditional "Scarborough Fair" no longer exists, but a number of low-key celebrations take place every September to mark the original event. Scarborough Fair in July 2006, which has colloquially become known in the community as "Scabz Faz", witnessed medieval jousting competitions hosted by English Heritage in addition to the usual attractions.
The fair features in the traditional English ballad "Scarborough Fair".With today’s unstable climate, the weather is changing rapidly and can hit with a surprising power, leaving destruction in its wake. Some countries and continents are more prone to disastrous events, storms, hurricanes, flash floods, etc. and people in these areas should be much more concerned with their family’s (and their own) safety. Many people in the USA build their own home shelters and this trend has been on the rise within the last couple of years.
There are basically two types of shelters – above ground (or ground level) and underground. For either of these there are some specific conditions. For example, you should not build an underground shelter in a flood area. On the other hand, if the area is safe from floods or ocean tides (including tsunamis), then you’re good to build underground.
Of course, the best idea is to consult a professional builder or architect who knows the area, the soil, etc. Otherwise, we’ll give you some basic advice, tips and guides on how to proceed and build your own storm shelter, both above and below the ground level.
Build your own underground storm shelter
As we mentioned above, your first steps are to evaluate the area where you plan to build the underground shelter. Again, if you live in a coastal area, prone to flooding or tsunamis, you shouldn’t build a shelter underground, because it may easily be flooded. Thus, the shelter would actually be even more dangerous if you rely on it to take cover during a hurricane or other disaster.
When you’ve evaluated the area, next you need to see if the soil is good for building a shelter. If you don’t have a basement (where to build it), you will have to dig an entirely new area underground. This means you have to build the walls, ground floor of the shelter, and make sure they are strong and durable enough to sustain the soil’s pressure. This procedure may be more expensive since you will have to retrofit the entire house to the new building.
On the other hand, if you have already a basement room under your house, that would be a great way to start building your own storm shelter. You can build the shelter’s own walls and cement it to the basement’s ground floor.
Once you have determined what type of underground shelter you will build you can start making more plans.
Let’s begin by explaining how to build an underground shelter within the ground (no basement required). First of all, you need to make some plans and draw some blueprints on how large – wide and tall – the shelter will be. Depending |
Flanders, NJ DATE: April 30, 1992
HEIGHT: 6’0” WEIGHT: 210 lbs.
SHOOTS: Left
DRAFTED: PIT - 5th round, 140th overall, in the 2010 Entry Draft
HOW ACQUIRED: In a trade with Pittsburgh along with Ben Hanowski and Pittsburgh’s first round pick in the 2013 NHL Draft in exchange for Jarome Iginla on March 27, 2013.Get the biggest Liverpool FC stories by email Subscribe Thank you for subscribing We have more newsletters Show me See our privacy notice Could not subscribe, try again later Invalid Email
Brendan Rodgers has told his Liverpool FC players to ignore their critics and toughen up ahead of tomorrow night’s “high stakes” Champions League showdown with Ludogorets.
The Reds boss is set to ring the changes in the wake of Sunday’s league defeat to Crystal Palace with Kolo Toure and Lucas Leiva both expected to earn starts.
Rodgers’ men have come in for some stinging criticism on the back of a wretched run of four straight defeats with Kop legend Jamie Carragher branding them “mentally and physically weak”.
The Northern Irishman is adamant his squad possess sufficient quality and character to stop the rot and he expects them to show it against the Bulgarian champions.
“It’s a comment that was made and people will assess the team when you lose games,” Rodgers said.
“What I’ve learned is that people will say what they want and that’s what comes. However, the criticism comes, whether it is deserved or not, you won’t like it as a player. But you just have to ignore it, not listen to it.
“We have got resilience. Okay, we will sometimes concede more than we would like but I don’t think you can doubt the characterisation of this team. It can’t be criticised. We have got players here who have shown they have got courage and spirit.
“I’ve got a team full of characters, a team of courageous players, a team that is very committed, but is just low on confidence. That is something that we hope will improve.
“Whatever line of work you are in, if you don’t do it with confidence, you won’t do it quite as well as you would like. The job is to restore the confidence of the team and get results.”
Rodgers has always insisted the damage done so far this season is repairable as their targets remain achievable - but that won’t be the case if Liverpool slip up again in Sofia.
Victory would guarantee them European football after Christmas and would also keep qualification for the knockout stages in their own hands ahead of their final Group B game with Basel at Anfield.
Anything less than maximum points could see them dumped out of the competition depending on the outcome of Basel’s home clash with leaders Real Madrid.
Having waited five years to return to Europe’s elite, being eliminated at such an early stage would be a devastating setback for the five-times winners.
“It does raise the stakes because we want to qualify - that has always been the aim from the outset,” Rodgers said.
“We always felt this game and the Basel game would always be the critical ones, and nothing has changed for us.
“If we want to qualify for the knockout stages – which was the objective at beginning of the season – then this is a critical game for us with the stakes high of course.
“Obviously whenever you haven’t been on a great run it can be even more important. but we’ll embrace that. We have to go and stand up and show that we can get a result and tough it out, and that’s what we will definitely do.”
Toure, who hasn’t featured since his gutsy performance in the Bernabeu, is likely to replace the struggling Dejan Lovren.
Lucas’ inclusion in the midfield holding role is likely to see Steven Gerrard played further forward in a 4-1-4-1 formation.
Mario Balotelli (groin) and Mamadou Sakho (thigh) didn’t travel but vice-captain Jordan Henderson could return after missing the Palace defeat due to a virus.
Asked whether he would move Gerrard from a deep-lying position in order to help trigger a change in the Reds’ fortunes, Rodgers said: “It is something I am looking at.
“We are looking at all the players and we are trying to find a structure.
“We can’t underestimate the loss of the players that we have had. I don’t want to keep going on about it but I have to defend the group. We are missing two world class players (in Luis Suarez and Daniel Sturridge).
“You throw into that young Raheem (Sterling) and (Philippe) Coutinho… we had a real quartet there. They were a dynamic force.
“But you take two world class players out of that – you take it out of any team – and it is going to have an affect.”
Liverpool have suffered nine defeats in all competitions already this season and are currently enduring the club’s worst run for five years.
However, Rodgers, who retains the unswerving support of owners Fenway Sports Group, has no doubts that he will arrest the Reds’ decline.
And he believes in the long-term both he and Liverpool will benefit from his period.
“If we didn’t feel that we could turn it around, we may as well just pack up and go home,” Rodgers said.
“We all work tirelessly at our jobs. I am a better manager than I was 12 months ago because of all the experiences. The players are working so hard and are fully committed.
“But of course we need to improve, we need to be better. It’s one of the traits you need to have in top level sport – you need to have persistence, you need to have resilience.
“That persistence gets you through. Losing can be the making of you. You find out a lot about players. You find out about people off the field.
“When the tide turns, which it will do, we will be in a better place to move on.”
Ludogorets, who play their European games 330km away from their Razgrad home due to their ground’s failure to satisfy UEFA regulations, will be no pushovers at Sofia’s Vasil Levski Stadium.
Georgi Dermendzhiev’s side were unfortunate to lose 2-1 at Anfield back in September when Gerrard netted a stoppage-time winner from the penalty spot.
In their two previous home matches in the group Ludogorets lost 2-1 to Real Madrid and beat Basel 1-0. They sit second in their league after coming from behind to draw 1-1 with leaders CSKA Sofia on Saturday.
Rodgers isn’t expecting a classic and admits he’s currently more concerned about points than the style he has always prided himself on.
“I think that has been the case now for a number of weeks,” he added.
“The philosophy is important and how we want to work but you need to get results.
“We would take a scrappy win. Listen, you can’t play perfect football. It won’t be easy here but we want that result to restore confidence levels.”Egyptian cartoonists have marked their condemnation of Wednesday's deadly attack on the French satirical magazine, Charlie Hebdo by inking more cartoons.
Young cartoonist Makhlouf, drew a caricature of himself holding up his hand in what looks like a military salute, but with an oversized pen in the place of the gun expected to be on his shoulder.
He also drew a portrait of himself holding up a pencil in the face of an assailant wearing a balaclava, with almost alien-like eyes, as he points a gun at him.
In another powerful cartoon, artist Anwar depicts a French cartoonist, smiling, as he draws a smile with a red-stained brush, on the balaclava of an assailant holding up a gun.
Similarly, Makhlouf drew a third cartoon showing a fighter with a gun running away from a large smiling face that appears to be coming after him.
Together Makhlouf and Anwar also wrote short profiles in the privately-owned daily Al-Masry Al-Youm on the French cartoonists killed in the attack.
Artist Hicham Rahma, meanwhile, drew three fighters, with "ISIS" labeled on their turbans, and one of them saying "this was a hard day,” while another has a CIA official hidden inside his turban.
Cartoonists signed their fresh drawings with the French words "Je suis Charlie" [I am Charlie] which has become a global statement of support for the magazine.
Makhlouf and other cartoonists including Doaa El-Adl and Abdallah have written statements of support on their public Facebook pages.
On his Facebook page, Makhlouf wrote a "Letter to the Masked" where he addressed the assailants saying cartoonists shall continue their work.
"We do not need more deaths to know that you are coward. After you killed cartoonist Naji Al-Ali [influential Palestinian cartoonist killed in 1987], and your bullet settled in his head… his head that frustrated and threatened you… we knew that our weapon is stronger than yours," he wrote.
Makhlouf also pointed out that Charlie Hebdo has been critical of their French government and other religions, not just Islam. He closed off by bidding farewell to the dead cartoonists describing them as "great, brave and strong".
At least 12 people, mostly journalists, were killed in Paris on Wednesday when gunmen opened fire on them inside the Charlie Hebdo office.
The incident has sparked worldwide fury and sparked debates on freedom of expression.
The satirical magazine is known for its controversial cartoons on political and religious leaders and has published numerous drawings lampooning the Islamic Prophet Mohamed.
Egypt's journalists syndicate has said the assailants who staged the attack "can not belong to any religion, especially Islam. They are only savage killers".
Egyptian President Abdel-Fattah El-Sisi and Al-Azhar, the country's highest Islamic institution, also condemned the attack.
Short link:Kevin Davies celebrates scoring a goal Bayern Munich's Allianz Arena - but is it his favourite football stadium?
We asked our football expert, former England international Kevin Davies, to select his favourite football grounds that he's played in around the world, but do you agree?
10. BMO Field, Toronto
We played against Toronto FC about three or four years ago in a Bolton pre-season. We had been touring North America but really enjoyed the time we spent in this Canadian city. The stadium is not huge but fans feel close and it was different to what we'd been used to playing in this country. The fans go to the matches in a very relaxed fashion, there's even tables and chairs by the side of the pitch with people drinking beer. It's a real family day out with lots of whooping! I was even close to moving there last year on loan for a few months. It's a great family day out there and I really enjoyed the experience of playing there.
9. Goodison Park, Liverpool
Everton's stadium is a good old-fashioned ground. I loved playing there in night games especially. A lot of players enjoy the evening games - it brings a different kind of atmosphere under the floodlights. The Everton fans also really appreciate good football. I remember scoring 'Goal of the Month' there once for Southampton and got applause from the home fans which is great to see.
8. Old Trafford, Manchester
I went there as a young player for Chesterfield in an FA Cup semi-final against Middlesbrough which is one of my career highlights. I'll never forget going out there and seeing the sea of blue-and-red from the 40-50,000 fans it held at the time. There's not many better places to play a cup semi-final than Old Trafford and it has brilliant memories. I then got the chance to play there in the Premier League - there are stadiums with a better atmosphere and a lot has been said about the more corporate fanbase there, but there are not many better places to walk out at.
7. The Old Dell, Southampton
Close to the fans: Marian Pahars of Southampton celebrates at the Dell
Opposition never really fancied coming to play us at The Dell. It always felt like the crowd were right on top of you and it was literally only two or three steps to the fans. It was an intimidating place but I've got great memories of playing there. A lot of these old stadiums are dying out now, which is a shame because they're so great to play at and you don't get the close proximity to the crowd any more.
6. Allianz Arena, Munich
Bolton played Bayern Munich in the UEFA Cup back in 2007. It was a massive game for me and I remember going to the stadium ahead of the game and thinking how tight it looked but at the same time it was huge - the fans felt close but then you also knew how many were in there. The game itself was sensational for me, the club and the fans. When you look back on that 2-2 draw you realise what an achievement it was against such a successful club. Unfortunately it might be quite a few years before Bolton get to experience something similar again.
5. Anfield, Liverpool
It's got so much history and it means so much to the fans. When the Kop is in full swing it's incredible to listen to when you're in the middle of the pitch. I've suffered some big defeats and Anfield but also got a few good results as well and I think all players you speak to will say they dream of playing at Anfield.
4. Bramall Lane, Sheffield
I'm a Sheffield United fan and was born less than a mile from the ground. I remember going down there with my brother as a junior Blade and that brilliant atmosphere before games as you'd walk through all the fans. My brother is about 10 years older than me and I recall being in The Kop - which was standing at the time - and my brother trying to keep hold of me because the fans were swaying around singing songs. Seeing that badge with two blades on it has always meant a great deal to me.
3. St James' Park, Newcastle
I've always loved going up to the North East and St James' Park has changed and developed over the years. I love the way the people are up there; they're fanatical about their football. They've even applauded some of my goals up there which shows how much they appreciate seeing good football - not many home fans are willing to clap an opposition goal. It's so loud in there and the fans really get behind their team in a passionate way.
2. The Velodrome, Marseille
We played there with Bolton in the knock-out stages of the UEFA Cup back in 2006. We lost 2-1, but they had the likes of Samir Nasri, Franck Ribery and Fabian Barthez playing for them. The atmosphere was just amazing and the stadium sensational - I've got some great pictures from that game.
1. The Old Wembley, London
I'd been there as a young kid and remember driving past those famous old twin towers. The place just had this massive aura around it. I played there as well with Chesterfield in a Play-Off final back in 1995 and I remember walking up the steps and looking through the little gap where I could see the pitch - it made the hairs on the back of my neck stand up. The pitch was always manicured to perfection and the atmosphere something to behold.These are disorienting times for American democracy. Key features of a democratic nation — that the candidate who wins the majority has the right to rule, that elections are free from outside influence, and that political actions reflect the views of the majority of citizens — are all in question.
The newly elected president has historically low approval levels, as does the newly convened Republican-led Congress. And key features of their political agenda — repealing the Affordable Care Act, reducing taxes for the rich, restricting access to abortion, inaction on climate change, opposing minimum wage increases — are all opposed by majorities of the American public.
Our second president, John Adams, coined the phrase the “tyranny of the majority” to express his concern that majority-rule politics could trample the interests and rights of minority groups. Today we face a different challenge. Even though the majority of Americans do not support their agenda, Republicans will soon control all three branches of the federal government while also holding tremendous power at the state level.
What can politicians and citizens do to resist this powerful but unpopular regime, to ensure majority sentiment is represented? Social science research on the dynamics of social norms, by myself and others, provides a variety of insights.
This research fills an important gap, because while many post-election analyses have highlighted the causes of our undemocratic moment — the Electoral College, gerrymandering, and the diffusion of "fake news," among them — it is much less clear what action the majority of Americans should take, as they find themselves governed by politicians pushing an agenda they do not support.
The strange case of “unpopular norms”
Social scientists say that an “unpopular norm” exists when people perceive a view or behavior to have popular support when it is actually opposed by the majority. An unpopular norm is on view in the Hans Christian Anderson fable in which an entire village pretends to see a naked emperor’s nonexistent new clothes, falsely believing that everyone else can see them.
Though you might assume unpopular norms are unusual, studies show they are actually quite common. Examples range from undergraduates overestimating the popularity of binge drinking on college campuses to citizens within repressive regimes underestimating the dissatisfaction of their peers.
In a situation where the ruling minority asserts, falsely, that it represents the desires of the majority, what can politicians and citizens do to ensure that the true majority sentiment is represented?
Most critically, the majority position must consistently broadcast that theirs is the more popular view. The key factor driving unpopular norms is the misperception of public opinion. Wherever possible, reliable data on the true majority sentiment should be brought to the table and emphasized relentlessly.
Journalists have a role to play in making sure that false impressions of the public’s political views do not take root. Since the election, a view has emerged of Donald Trump as a clever and evasive politician who is able to upend existing policies and standards of decorum without consequence. But this narrative is false. Trump has taken a significant hit in the polls for pursuing an unpopular agenda.
Broadcast the facts: Trump and his policies do not have popular support
Where incoming presidents typically gain support following the election, Trump has lost support. Amazingly, he entered office with roughly half the favorability that Barack Obama did in 2008 — 40 percent versus 79 percent. Trump often asserts that he is overwhelmingly popular, claiming that he lost the popular vote only because millions of votes for Hillary Clinton were cast illegally. But there is no evidence for this claim. In fact, he squeaked into office based on the quirkiness of the Electoral College. The true story of the public’s perception of Donald Trump is not one featuring an easily distracted nation accepting outrageous behavior, but instead of widespread rejection of an incoming president and his agenda.
Second, the majority must be deeply committed. Norms don’t just exist; they are made. And making them requires commitment. In my own research, my co-authors and I find that a minority of "true believers" who not only express their views but also seek to convert others can be critical to the emergence of an unpopular norm. Thus, an inequality of political will can be a critical factor driving the emergence of an unpopular regime (a dynamic captured by the W.B. Yeats line, “The best lack all conviction, while the worst are full of passionate intensity”).
But this can be undone where the minority's will is met with equal or greater determination from the majority. In practical terms, this means not just maintaining one's views but also working to spread them through grassroots campaigns, contacting legislators, organizing for candidates and ballot initiatives, and engaging in effective protests and persuasive conversations with other citizens.
Additionally, the majority must never “move on” by assimilating to the reigning minority, thereby losing sight of the political injustice inherent in minority rule. Democratic institutions tend to be “self-justifying”: Because they are the result of elections, we assume they must represent the will of the people. Viewing officeholders as unpopular and, in President Trump’s case, possibly elected illegitimately produces cognitive dissonance, more than most can comfortably maintain.
There is a tendency to reduce this dissonance through cognitive distortion, by simply concluding that these figures and their policies are in fact popular, legitimate, and acceptable. Instead, the injustice of the situation should be seen for what it is. The majority should resolve the dissonance by changing the facts on the ground, not in their minds.
People will change their opinions to align with what they perceive, rightly or wrongly, as the majority view
Resisting such cognitive distortion is particularly critical since the misperception of majority sentiment can easily become self-fulfilling. For example, the research on undergraduates' perceptions of drinking norms noted above found that the majority of students initially found themselves uncomfortable with campus binge drinking. Falsely assuming that they were in the minority, however, they gradually adjusted their views to put them more closely in line with what they assumed most of their peers thought. An imagined norm can easily become real.
Finally, voice matters. The Vietnam War was not as unpopular as we assume it was. But those protesting the war were easier to see — whether on the streets or on the evening news — leading people to draw inaccurate inferences about the scope of disapproval of the war. Indeed, one of the strategic goals of social activism is to shape the public's perception of how widespread a view is. It's little surprise that the size of public protests is a significant predictor of their political influence.
It's hard to stand up to an apparent majority. An unpopular regime that nonetheless attains power develops a persuasiveness that is outsize. People feel a strong pull to agree with what they believe most people think, and people fear speaking out against views they assume are held by a powerful majority.
But unpopularity is the Trump regime's — indeed every unpopular regime's — greatest weakness. While the alienation many feel now can breed hopelessness and apathy, these feelings are misplaced. Recall the end of the Anderson fable, in which a child laughs at the naked emperor, triggering a cascade of nonconformity that undoes the spell. Unpopular regimes rest on a fragile foundation. Their legitimacy can be undermined if the true majority reveals itself. Above all else, in order to resist the tyranny of the minority, the majority must remember the strength of its numbers.
Robb Willer is a professor of sociology, psychology, and organizational behavior at Stanford University. His recent talk on effective political communication can be viewed on the TED website. Find him on Twitter @GhostfaceWiller.
The Big Idea is Vox’s home for smart, often scholarly excursions into the most important issues and ideas in politics, science, and culture — typically written by outside contributors. If you have an idea for a piece, pitch us at thebigidea@vox.com.Young Political Majors is a GOP-linked consulting firm that has been accused of tricking California voters in to registering as Republicans under the guise of signing a petition to get tough on child molesters. Maybe YPM signature gatherers are just doing what ACORN reps probably did–artificially inflating their registration totals in order to get paid.
However, some observers speculate that the goal of YPM’s alleged trickery is to disrupt Democratic GOTV efforts. If a voter is no longer registered as a Democrat, they are less likely to be targeted for reminders and voting assistance on election day. I discovered that YPM is also advertising for signature-gatherers to register voters for Ralph Nader in Arizona. (See the ad from simply hired above, click to see a larger image.) Republicans have previously attempted to bolster the Green party in other races in order to siphon votes away from Democratic candidates.
Update: It’s not clear what YPM’s task was in Arizona. Were they trying to register folks as Independents to disrupt Democratic GOTV, a la California? Were they trying to get Ralph Nader on the ballot earlier in the election cycle? Was the task described in the ad just a cover story for some other objective?Say you have a massive pile of cash earmarked for a big, comfortable convertible, but you’re not feeling what Bentley or Rolls-Royce are putting down. Other than the aging BMW 6-series convertible—which, let’s face it, is a little too plebeian—the Mercedes-Benz S-class cabriolet is the only choice.
Advertisement - Continue Reading Below
More Nautical than Nimble
But what a good choice it is. Appropriate to its nameplate, the S-class convertible is the biggest and most luxurious among Mercedes’ 12-deep lineup across five model lines of cabriolets. S63 and S65 AMG variants are on offer, each with more than 500 horsepower, but the standard S550 cabriolet tested here, with a 449-hp twin-turbo V-8 and rear-wheel drive, is the best expression of the S-class ethos. Its lack of sporting pretensions is obvious, even when equipped, as was our test car, with a $5900 Sport package with AMG wheels and a body kit. Instead, the S cabriolet’s flowing lines, larger-than-life proportions, and elegant presence conjure images of a luxury yacht.
View Photos ALEX CONLEY
Not to put too fine a point on it, but there are boatlike elements to the driving experience as well. Weighing 4786 pounds, the S-class cabriolet dives and pitches and rolls a fair amount with its suspension in the default Comfort mode. In this setting, the air-sprung ride is almost too cushy, and the body motions seem at odds with the firmer impacts delivered through the large, 20-inch wheels and their low-profile tires. Somewhat paradoxically, we actually felt more comfortable cruising with the suspension set in Sport mode, which tightens up body motions without making the ride at all objectionable. The S-class isn’t among the stiffest convertibles extant—blame losing such a huge roof—with some body flex and a few unseemly vibrations cropping up on rougher roads, but neither is it some sort of bourgeois Buick Cascada. But it’s still best to keep the pace calm and stick to smooth byways.
Advertisement - Continue Reading Below
Who Needs AMG Power?
Even if the S-class cabriolet’s preference isn’t to hustle, it’s certainly able to do so. The sweet-sounding, twin-turbocharged 4.7-liter engine forcefully motors the S550 from a standstill to 60 mph in a brisk 4.4 seconds, with the quarter-mile breezing by in 13.0 seconds at 110 mph. That’s quicker than the rear-drive S550 sedan (4.9 seconds) and the all-wheel-drive S550 coupe (4.5 seconds) we tested, which we attribute largely to the new nine-speed automatic that all S550 variants have adopted for 2017. Shifts are sublimely smooth, although, as in other Mercedes models, we aren’t huge fans of how the transmission always starts in second gear in its default Efficiency mode. Selecting the Sport setting makes for less sluggish takeoffs, but that setting deactivates the engine stop/start function and avoids eighth and ninth gears, even at higher speeds. A more middle-of-the-road transmission program would be appreciated.
View Photos ALEX CONLEY
A skidpad grip threshold of 0.88 g and a 70-mph-to-zero braking distance of 164 feet are impressive for such a heavy car, but remember, this S550’s game isn’t performance. That’s reinforced by the brake pedal, which has a soft action, and the light, numb steering that’s perfect for wafting around a beach town.
Advertisement - Continue Reading Below
Advertisement - Continue Reading Below
True Luxury
Beyond its dynamic attributes, the real beauty of the S-class is its aesthetics. Inside and out, it’s a truly special piece that looks and feels worthy of its six-figure price. Our test example, finished in gorgeously subtle Emerald Green Metallic paint, was particularly delectable with its Saddle Brown leather interior ($3250) and Piano Black wood accents that feature stylish pinstriping ($1300). Lowering the top is a remarkably silent affair, as the expansive cloth roof effortlessly motors beneath the decklid in 20 seconds when the car is traveling at speeds up to 37 mph. Another useful feature is the ability to raise and lower the top by holding down the lock or unlock buttons on the key fob.
View Photos ALEX CONLEY
Mercedes-Benz isn’t being deceptive in calling the S-class a four-place convertible; the rear seats are snug but comfortable enough for adults as long as the front seats aren’t moved too far back. All positions are upholstered in sumptuous leather, and the back seats also are well padded; there’s even just enough headroom in the rear for average-size adults with the roof raised.
Several princely options lifted our test car to its $161,675 sticker, including a $6400 Burmester audio system; a $2260 night-vision system; the aforementioned $5900 Sport package; a $3500 Premium package with massaging seats, a surround-view camera, and a head-up display; and a $2250 Driver Assistance package with all sorts of active driving aids.
Advertisement - Continue Reading Below
The outlay is undeniably high, and it may seem even more so when the new C-class cabriolet features equally stunning styling—albeit on a smaller scale—for about one-third the price. But the upstart C can’t match the presence and prestige of the real deal. This S550 is just as luxurious and stately as anything on the road, sitting proudly among the titans at the top of Mercedes-Benz’s lineup and upholding the gravitas of the S-class name.Huckabee: Democrats Have Become the Party of Pro-Abortion
Maxine Waters Applauds Anti-Trump Leaks on 'The View'
Author Mark Steyn reminded that when Democrats were in power in Congress under President Obama they did not waste time moving forward with their agenda, something the Republican Congress has struggled to do this year.
"Whatever you feel, [Democrats] get into power and they deliver, boom, right from the first day," Steyn told "Fox & Friends" on Saturday.
Steyn listed some Democrat projects from the Obama era: governmentalized health care, transgenders in the military, gay marriage, open borders, and climate change initiatives.
The party caters to key niche demographics of their base, Steyn said.
Republicans take years longer than Democrats to get the same things done, he continued, reminding that "slick parliamentarians" like Paul Ryan and Mitch McConnell have been unable to pass any major legislation.
Maxine Waters Applauds Anti-Trump Leaks on 'The View'
Dinesh D'Souza: Antifa Protesters Are Closest Thing Today to Nazi BrownshirtsSome of the best games for each console come out just as the systems are on their deathbed, cursed to be overlooked as people abandon the old to embrace new systems. Such was the case with Devil Survivor 2, a wonderful Nintendo DS strategic role-playing game that released in early 2012, just in time for shiny new 3DS offerings to overshadow its release. It’s taken its sweet time, but Devil Survivor 2 has now come to 3DS with a host of enhancements in tow. And by “enhancements,” I mean a lot more than just some 3D retroactively applied to an old game--Devil Survivor 2 Record Breaker is essentially two games in a single package, both of which are terrific games in their own right.
The Devil Survivor games are strategy RPGs with a twist. Like many games of this sort, you move characters around a grid-based map, carefully utilizing turns and positioning to gain a tactical advantage over your foes. However, Devil Survivor adds another layer to this. Instead of just controlling a squad of individual units, each unit represents a team of three characters. When combat is initiated, the view switches to a battle screen where you choose commands for all of your characters. By cleverly exploiting enemy weaknesses and targeting vital parts of teams, you can earn extra combat turns to perform additional actions. But the enemies can also do the same to you, which can be devastating when you encounter hordes of fiercer foes.
Careful decision-making is a must at all times. Do you target the weaknesses of the flanking troops to get extra turns or go for the tougher leader to take down the whole squad at once? Will attacking an easy mark put you in range of something more dangerous? Should you substitute in weaker demon companions to earn bonuses like added range and movement? There’s a tremendous amount of depth to the combat, and it’s put to the test in some of the best boss fights of the genre. In these battles, you’re faced with terrifying, all-powerful beings who possess attacks that can absolutely decimate you--fierce long-range fire cannons, repeated multi-hitting strikes, multiple parts that regenerate after a set amount of turns--and you truly have to use your wits to figure out just how to take them down. Fortunately, you can use an infinite number of free battles to strengthen your team, along with access to an auction site for demon contracts and a function to fuse demons into even stronger forms. You need to make heavy use of these to succeed.
The game is split into two scenarios: the Septentriones and the Triangulum. You choose the scenario you want when you start the game. The Septentriones scenario is essentially the entire original game, tasking you and your friends in Tokyo with surviving and quelling a world-rending disaster with the aid of a mysterious demon-summoning phone app. The Triangulum scenario picks up after the end of the Septentriones story, restarting the cycle of destruction, despair, and chaos with a new set of cosmic invaders in a world that’s been transformed in some very significant ways. What is the meaning of the almighty beings and the all-consuming forces attacking mankind? Can the seemingly endless cycle of destruction ever be halted? You must answer those questions during these two quests.
Because the original game is more than three years old at this point, you’ll probably want to jump into the Septentriones scenario first if you haven’t played it for a while--or at all. Veterans will immediately see some significant changes here. The first is the difficulty selection, which offers you both easy (“Blessed”) and hard (“Apocalypse”) settings. (The original game only had a single difficulty setting, which roughly corresponds with Record Breaker’s Apocalypse setting.) You can switch difficulty levels on the fly, which is a nice touch--this allows you to do things like grind easy optional battles to build up your demon army’s skills while saving the big challenges for the crucial story fights. The other major addition is full voice-over for nearly every line in the game that’s not spoken by the lead (whose words you always control via a menu during conversations). Devil Survivor 2 may have the most voicework I’ve yet heard in a 3DS game, and it’s very impressive, with some standout performances for characters like the hero’s awkward, uneasy BFF Daichi and egalitarian organizer Ronaldo.
The Septentriones scenario itself is lengthy, taking around 50 hours to complete--and that doesn’t take into account the four different endings you can acquire by making different choices and taking sides with certain characters. It’s familiar territory if you’ve played Devil Survivor before, but the big draw in Record Breaker--the Triangulum scenario--is not just a tacked-on afterstory. Taking place after the “true ending” of Devil Survivor 2, it’s both a direct follow-up and an alternate universe story to the Septentriones plotline (given what happens at the end of that particular scenario). The cast of heroes reunites to face an all-new threat in a world that is both the same and very different: characters have different backgrounds, someone very important is missing, and a strange new person has taken their place. On top of that, your companions have recurring nightmares about pasts they don’t quite remember and visions of strange things happening to the hero’s body. While it’s not quite as long as the original quest, it’s still quite lengthy--I clocked in at about 35 hours on my Triangulum playthrough. Much like the Septentriones quest, there are also three possible endings, so you’ll be playing for a while if you want to see everything.
There’s a tremendous amount of depth to the combat, and it’s put to the test in some of the best boss fights of the genre.
The addition of the Triangulum story elevates Record Breaker from the rest of the intergeneration re-releases that have become popular in the market as of late. While most games are content to offer just an HD (or, in this case, a 3D) upscale, the developers of Record Breaker created what’s essentially an entire second game for this package. While that’s impressive and commendable, it’s brought down a bit by the fact that there’s not really much new in terms of gameplay in the second half--you’re controlling (mostly) the same cast with the same traits, fusing similar demons to what you had before, and fighting similar enemies. There are a few new bosses, which offer some exceptionally challenging and satisfying fights, but for the most part, it’s just more Devil Survivor 2. That’s not a terrible thing, given that the core game is so solid, but it’s still a smidge disappointing given just how much went into creating a whole new story for the game.
The other major issue is that the requirements for getting the “true endings” are too obtuse in both scenarios. While a few very clear paths lead to obvious conclusions, just getting the option to see the “best” endings requires you to make a lot of correct choices and talk to the right people at the right times. If you mess up just once, sorry buddy, better luck next time. The presence of only five save slots doesn’t really help either, especially if you want to run both scenarios. By the time I understood the requirements for getting the true ending in the Triangulum story, every save I had was at a point where it was impossible to go back.
When it comes down to it, though, these complaints seem relatively minor. Devil Survivor 2, in both the original and Record Breaker incarnations, is a great strategy RPG, delivering a potent mix of intense, brilliantly designed combat and a fantastic, endearing cast of fellow survivors. If you missed out the first time around, you should absolutely hop on board for this extended trip to the Apocalypse. If you’re coming back for seconds, you’ll have a terrific time welcoming our new Triangulum overlords with Megido blasts right to their stupid geometric faces.THE MIDFIELDER KNOWS THE IMPORTANCE OF GAME AGAINST ESPANYOL Raul Garcia: "We know that Saturday's game is important against a team that is doing |
156 billion today).
Science and engineering are binary that way; there’s no splitting the difference, no spinning the results. Want to go to Mars? Then do the work it’ll take to get you there. Here—in no particular order—is what that work will involve:
Stop the bad ideas: The Obama Administration has spent seven years talking a good Mars game, but it’s kept NASA distracted by ordering it to focus first on the Asteroid Redirect Mission (ARM), a plan that—not to put too fine a point on it—does not make a shred of sense, never has and never will. The idea is to make a crewed landing on an asteroid as a sort of dress rehearsal for Mars, never mind that the two destinations are radically different bodies that would necessitate radically different mission profiles. The asteroid belt is actually farther away than Mars is, but that’s OK, because we’ll send a robot ship out to snag a small asteroid—one plan calls for putting it in a giant bag—and tow it back to the vicinity of the moon where we can visit it at our leisure. Really.
ARM may have passed the laugh test—barely—but it has failed at every other turn to justify why it shouldn’t be dumped on the scrap heap of Very Bad Ideas That Sound Like They Were Dreamed Up at 2 AM in Somebody’s Dorm Room. That, at last, appears to be where it’s heading. On March 8, NASA and the White House announced that the 2025 target date for the ARM mission has slipped by at least a year, which is widely being seen as the first step in the slow kabuki process of junking the plan altogether. Bet on the current President talking about ARM less and less in the year he has left, and the next President—from either party—summarily canceling it.
Build the machines: Want to see the coolest rocket ship that has never existed and at this rate never will? Go to NASA’s Space Launch System (SLS) site and have a look. The prosaically named SLS is supposed to be the 21st century version of the great Saturn V and if the artist’s renderings and computer animations on the site are any indication, it’s a honey of a machine. But you can’t fly to Mars on an artist’s rendering.
SLS has been in development in one form or another since 2004, and the anticipated date for a crewed launch has gotten pushed back again and again, with 2023 as the current projection. Something similar is true of the Orion crew vehicle—the 21st century’s Apollo—which has been limping along at the same go-slow pace as SLS. The Saturn V went from blueprint to moon in just eight years—from 1961 to 1969—and by the time the rocket was retired in 1973, eleven of them had successfully flown. But SLS and Orion have a problem Saturn and Apollo didn’t: funding.
Pony up: If science and engineering are binary, so are economics, and the fact is, you can’t build spacecraft on the cheap. The budget deal the White House and Congress recently struck includes a $19.3 billion outlay for NASA in fiscal 2016. That counts as a raise, which is nice, and it sounds like a lot—which it isn’t. The high water mark for NASA funding occurred in 1967, when the agency was allocated $5.9 billion ($41.8 billion in today’s money). That represented 4.41% of the federal budget at the time. NASA’s current budget represents a tiny 0.52% of the entire federal pie. This doesn’t mean SLS and Orion aren’t getting built. They are—but only a little bit at a time, with every small step forward followed by long delays, while NASA waits for the next cash infusion. That won’t get you to Mars but it might, someday, get your great-grandchildren there.
Stick to the plan: Say this for the ugly, fractious politics of the 1960s: when it came to the moon, everyone was pretty much in accord. It was President Eisenhower who created NASA, and it was Presidents Kennedy, Johnson and Nixon who presided over the growth of the Agency and its steady march to the moon. If that seems like an admirable kind of bipartisan constancy, consider that the same 15 year period also spanned the 85th, 86th, 87th, 88th, 89th, 90th, 91st and 92nd Congresses—and all of them stayed the lunar course. Imagine the Capitol Hill of the present day managing that kind of focus. You can’t, right? That’s the problem.
More Scott Kellys: This one NASA has well in hand. Current plans call for the space station to remain in service until 2025, and with 16 international partners involved in the project, this is not the kind of deal on which Washington can renege. NASA plans to make good use of that time, flying as many as ten more one-year astronauts to learn not just how a fifty-something male like Kelly responds to long-term stays in zero-g, but also how older astronauts, younger astronauts and women do. It’s important too to determine if first- or second-timers in space react differently from a veteran like Kelly, who has four missions to his credit.
Going to Mars, ultimately, will be a simple matter of choosing to go to Mars—of doing whatever it takes to get there. We made that choice when we went to the moon; Mars, despite all our talk, will remain forever out of reach until we make it again.
Write to Jeffrey Kluger at jeffrey.kluger@time.com.Massive ancient underground city discovered in Turkey's Nevşehir
Erdinç Çelikkan ANKARA
An underground city newly discovered in Turkey’s Central Anatolian province of Nevşehir, which is located under the Nevşehir fortress and the surrounding area, may be the biggest archeological finding of 2014, which is soon to end. AA Photo
With 2014 soon coming to an end, potentially the year’s biggest archeological discovery of an underground city has come from Turkey’s Central Anatolian province of Nevşehir, which is known world-wide for its Fairy Chimneys rock formation.The city was discovered by means of Turkey’s Housing Development Administration’s (TOKİ) urban transformation project. Some 1,500 buildings were destructed located in and around the Nevşehir fortress, and the underground city was discovered when the earthmoving to construct new buildings had started.TOKİ Head Mehmet Ergün Turan said the area where the discovery was made was announced as an archeological area to be preserved.“It is not a known underground city. Tunnel passages of seven kilometers are being discussed. We stopped the construction we were planning to do on these areas when an underground city was discovered,” said Turan.The city is thought to date back 5,000 years and is located around the Nevşehir fortress. Escape galleries and hidden churches were discovered inside the underground city.Stating that they were going to move the urban transformation project to the outskirts of the city, Turan said they had paid 90 million Turkish Liras for the project already, but did not see this as a loss, as this discovery may be the world’s largest underground city.Hasan Ünver, mayor of Nevşehir, said other underground cities in Nevşehir’s various districts do not even amount to the “kitchen” of this new underground city.“The underground city [was found] in the 45 hectares of the total 75 hectare area that is within the [urban] transformation project. We started working in 2012 with the project. We have taken 44 historical objects under preservation. The underground city was discovered when we began the destruction in line with the protocol. The first galleries were spotted in 2013. We applied to the [Cultural and Natural Heritage] Preservation Board and the area was officially registered,” said Ünver.The newly discovered underground city will be the biggest among the other underground cities in Nevşehir that have been discovered so far.U.S. soldiers reportedly raided communal cellblocks at Guantanamo Prison in Cuba and hustled hunger striking inmates at gunpoint into single, maximum security cells on Saturday. According to the Miami Herald, prison authorities conducted the maneuver only hours after International Commitee of the Red Cross personnel left the island and under a complete media blackout.
Prisoners reportedly tried to fight back with improvised weapons, but submitted to guards after four “less-than-lethal” shots were fired. A statement from the prison camp at the U.S. Navy base in Cuba said that there were no serious injuries among guards or detainees.
The action by U.S. forces was an attempt to end a hunger strike by a majority of the camp’s 166 inmates that began after a “particularly aggressive” cell search on February 6, said lawyers for the detainees. Reported mistreatment of the Quran prompted inmates to cover security cameras in some areas and block access to food carts for weeks at a time.
The military denied any Quran mistreatment, and said that systematic disobedience of prison rules prompted the raid.
“In order to reestablish proper observation, the guards entered the Camp 6 communal living spaces to transition detainees into single cells, remove obstructions to cameras, windows and partitions, and to assess the medical condition of each detainee,” the prison said.
Simon Schorno of the International Red Cross said that his organization was in no way connected to the raid, and therefore “will not comment on its objectives, the way it was conducted or the detainees’ response to it.”
[image via Lilac Mountain / Shutterstock.com]Chris Dixon isn’t known as a game investor. But as both an angel investor and a partner at Netscape pioneer Marc Andreessen’s venture capital firm Andreessen Horowitz, he has made some very early and smart investments in game companies. That gives him a perspective on the disruption that is happening in games, but it also means he isn’t a cheerleader for everything happening in the industry.
Image Credit: Dean Takahashi
The roster of investments includes Oculus VR, where Andreessen Horowitz led a $75 million round in the hot virtual reality goggles startup. He also personally invested in Kickstarter, which has remade the landscape for game finance. And other game-related investments include TrialPay and Omgpop (acquired by Zynga for $180 million-plus). Andreessen Horowitz has also invested in Anki, Zynga, Tiny Speck, and TinyCo.
Outside of games, Dixon also founded Hunch and sold it to eBay. And he invested in Hipmunk, Pinterest, Foursquare, Codecademy, Optimizely, Skype, and MakerBot. He’s also excited about Bitcoin. We caught up with him recently to talk about investing in games in the broader context of tech investing.
GamesBeat: I wanted to pick your brain about the gaming angles that are interesting to you. You seem to have one foot in the game business and one foot in the tech business. What’s your perspective on games as a result of that?
Chris Dixon: I’m personally interested in video games. I’ve played a lot of them over my life. I don’t see myself as a game investor, but I’ve made some investments that are related to games. In the case of Oculus, for example, part of why we’ve invested is because it’s not only valuable for gaming, but because it’s something that can go far beyond games. I like gaming a lot, but I consider it more of something adjacent to my main professional focus.
I first got into computers trying to program video games, and I’ve enjoyed all the consoles. I’m into it, and I think it’s important. To me, I think there are two opposing trends in gaming right now. You have the consoles and the high-end games versus the Angry Birds, mobile stuff. I play iOS games and I think they’re fun, but to me it feels like they’re mostly time-wasters. Sometimes they get coercive in the way they do in-app purchases and things.
I’m personally more interested in the richer game experiences that interact almost with artistic sensibilities. Something like Oculus fits right into that. It’ll hopefully be a new avenue of creativity for game developers.
GamesBeat: Does gaming relate to some things that you cover very closely?
Dixon: I generally do consumer, internet, a bit of hardware. Certainly to some extent I’ve worked with games in the past. I was a personal investor in Omgpop. I’m not saying it’s not interesting. But there are some VCs that are video-game-focused, and that’s not me.
Image Credit: Dean Takahashi
GamesBeat: A lot of the triple-A game developers seem worried that their craft is going away, that it’s going to be subsumed by mobile games. But it seems like Oculus is something that’s coming in almost orthogonally to that.
Dixon: Yeah, I don’t think that’s going away. With the consoles, you have a small number of titles that consume the vast majority of game development budgets. I’d be curious about your perspective, but with this generation of consoles, they’re technical improvements, but I don’t see them being nearly as dramatic as the last console transitions. I do think something new has to come along. Obviously we think and hope that something will be Oculus.
In a lot of ways, mobile games have simply grown the market, and not necessarily taken away from triple-A. They’ve brought gaming to a larger set of people. Meanwhile, triple-A, because of the dynamics of the consoles and the huge budgets involved, has condensed to this relatively limited number of games that appeal to hardcore gamers. Something fresh has to come along for the triple-A guys.
When you try Oculus, you really get a sense that it’s a new medium, in the same way that film was a new medium at one point. We don’t know what will work and what won’t. It’s clear that just taking a first-person shooter and porting it over isn’t going to be the best experience. It’s very emotionally intense, to the extent that a game like a shooter might be overwhelming for a lot of people. We might have games that are more dramatic, or more about the environment and the atmosphere.
But the exciting part is, like I say, we don’t really know. If you’re a creative developer, it’s great to have a new medium like that. That’s a lot of why it’s touched people’s imaginations. It’s a whole new fresh set of things to develop.
GamesBeat: What do you think about the hurdles they face? There’s definitely challenges in building a new ecosystem here, something that’s so different from what’s already established.
Dixon: That’s true. As you know, the budgets for console games are massive. I’d think that only when it’s such a leap forward into a new experience would it make sense to try something like this. Certainly for us, an important investing signal was the excitement level among developers. Because it’s captured their imaginations, we think that will make it significantly easier to get people to build great stuff for the Oculus.
Image Credit: CCP Games
GamesBeat: Is there some way you can help people understand how you go about valuing a company like Oculus? It was a very large funding from a gaming point of view.
Dixon: In our business, we look for companies that can be new franchises, new multibillion-dollar technology companies. That’s the way our fund is structured and our business model is structured. We’re looking for companies that wouldn’t be acquired by other companies, but that instead would be large, stand-alone, independent companies with significant revenues and profits.
These are speculative investments, so there’s no science to figuring out how much it’s worth. It’s more about, “Do we have a compelling story where this is an important franchise technology company? Can we invest early enough that if it is, we can make significant profit from our investment?” We work backwards like that.
GamesBeat: “Disruption” is the word that’s been thrown around by every single game startup in the last five years. Clearly you guys haven’t invested every time you’ve heard that.
Dixon: There are different areas of investment. There’s game technology, game platforms. There are games themselves. A lot of games, as you know, it tends to be hit-driven. It’s harder to create sustained franchises. The other challenge for us is that a lot of the publishers have been the investors there, historically. They have specific expertise around seeing what games will be successful and what won’t. For us it’s just not our focus.
On the tech and platform side, there have been very few really ambitious game platforms, at least that I’ve seen come to us.
GamesBeat: Kickstarter was one of your investments. That’s brought a lot of disruption into the way games get funded.
Dixon: I love Kickstarter. I think it’s a great investment, but it’s also brought a lot of positive movement to a bunch of different areas. The most interesting to me, probably, is the independent games side. That crowdfunding model really works well there. Most of the people who support these game projects tend to be game enthusiasts who follow the creators and the people they’re backing. They’re excited to be part of the development process and get updates. The model works especially well for games.
GamesBeat: It seems like the community-building and the feedback on an idea are just as important.
Dixon: Yeah. They feel like they’re actually becoming part of it, as opposed to simply purchasing it. Also, an important economic effect of Kickstarter — with games, a little bit like movies, you’re getting this bifurcation, where you have $100 million games budget and then you have independent Flappy Bird stuff. Kickstarter is one of the few things that’s propping up the middle, where you might have just a couple million dollars in your budget. It’s not triple-A, but it’s not Flappy Bird. That’s an important part of the development world.
GamesBeat: I don’t think you guys have stepped into the microconsoles yet, but does that appeal to you in any way — that Android in the living room might also be disruptive for games?
Dixon: It’s interesting, that experience. I don’t know if we’ve seen a company come to us. A lot of our relationships, we don’t start them. We invest or not when they come to us.
GamesBeat: They don’t seem to have set the world on fire just yet.
Dixon: I understand what they’re doing. I think what might happen there — one theory is that it’ll just be your phone kind of clone-casting or AirPlaying onto the screen. You won’t need a separate device. Or maybe it’ll be a Steam Box. But for one reason or another we haven’t gotten involved there.As the Beatles evolved as musicians, they gradually increased their experimentation in the studio and released some of their most iconic music. Here are just a few of the amazing tricks the Fab Four used to get their signature sounds.
1. “Eleanor Rigby”: As the story goes, the haunting string melody heard throughout “Eleanor Rigby” only came to be after John Lennon hired a classical ensemble and asked them to play “something that sounds like ‘The Flintstones’ song but sad.”
Advertisement
2. “Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band”: To get the applause on the opening track of their seminal album, the band just recorded Ringo clapping with delight every one of the hundreds of times another band member lied to him about there being free ice cream, and then looped them all together.
3. “Ob-La-Di, Ob-La-Da”: Craving to find a new sound, John Lennon famously suggested that the band swallow a bundle of grapes and hope that whatever air made it past their swollen windpipes would be their next big hit. Sure enough, “Ob-La-Di, Ob-La-Da” was a smash success.
4. “She Loves You”: Because this hit was released in 1963, three years before the invention of the guitar, the Beatles had to create the “guitar sound” with plucked violins.
Advertisement
5. “Day Tripper”: According to legend, while George Harrison was sleeping one night, he began suddenly screaming the opening guitar riff over and over again. After hearing it, the band quickly rushed him to the studio, careful not to wake him up until they could get it on tape.
6. “Blackbird”: In many of their songs, and most notably in “Blackbird,” the Beatles used a recording technique called “Backwards Driving,” where they sang a song while driving a car backwards at 100 miles per hour and placed the microphone on a second car driving forwards. They eventually abandoned this method after crashing into an Italian restaurant.
7. “Yesterday”: The reason that Paul McCartney sounds so sad during his performance on this song is that, just before recording, John Lennon had taken him aside and told him that James Bond wasn’t a real person.
Advertisement
8. “Love Me Do”: Performing this song required each Beatles member to stand at one vertex of a pentagram. John faced north toward Polaris, Paul toward Easter Island, George toward Jerusalem, and Ringo stared straight down toward the chthonic depths of the Earth. When the ritual was complete, the Fifth Beatle appeared on the unoccupied point of the pentagram and played the harmonica riff.March 27, 2017
Since its inception, Counterparty has functioned as a “metalayer” on Bitcoin, enabling functionality that Bitcoin could not perform on its own. Until recently, Counterparty and Bitcoin technology worked well together to provide this valuable functionality quickly, simply and at a low cost to a growing user base. The recent strife in the Bitcoin space — beyond being frustrating to us at Counterparty as longtime Bitcoin enthusiasts — has led us to make certain plans and take certain actions that will ensure Counterparty continues as a viable platform well into the future.
On Bitcoin Core vs Unlimited/Classic
For the time being, Counterparty currently plans to continue running Bitcoin Core. If an economic and/or hashpower majority decides another path for Bitcoin, we are open to switching to that different implementation. We want to emphasize that our biggest priority with Counterparty is that it is as usable and reliable as possible. To us, this means relatively cheap transactions, relatively fast confirmation times, and usage of a Bitcoin client that doesn’t crash or have showstopping bugs. With the current situation, there is not a perfect answer due to the number of factors that one must take into account both of a technical nature and otherwise.
It is disappointing to us to see the increasing levels of toxicity in the Bitcoin ecosystem, however we still believe in Bitcoin and feel that it will live on even if it is as two separate networks. With whatever happens, we will not be maintaining two separate Counterparty networks, ever, but we keep the option open to switch from one to another if we can form a rough consensus in our community and we believe it is in the best interests of Counterparty users and developers.
If, after consulting the community, developers and others, Counterparty does decide to move off of Bitcoin Core, our primary technological approach (known as “embedded consensus”) gives us the ability to work with virtually any Bitcoin-derived blockchain:
If we decide to move before a fork happens, the process is rather simple. We will release a new version of Counterparty utilizing the new Bitcoin client, and users must switch to this new Bitcoin client as well as the updated Counterparty version before the specific Bitcoin fork occurs.
If, however, we make this move after a Bitcoin fork has already happened, we would essentially “freeze” balances at a certain specific block and transition to the new chain as of another specific block. There would be some downtime, but the process would be announced well in advance with clear instructions provided for everyone.
Note that we currently do not forecast either of these to be necessary given the scaling plans we detail below.
On fees and scaling
As of late, Bitcoin users have been increasingly experiencing higher transaction fees and longer confirmation times. As Counterparty is an on-chain protocol and all Counterparty transactions are Bitcoin transactions, these issues have also affected Counterparty. The Counterparty team is currently working on the following improvements that will go far to mitigate the impact of these issues:
CIP9: Enhanced send
The draft of Counterparty Improvement Proposal (CIP) 9 is nearing completion. Once the CIP is implemented in code, the Counterparty send operation will be upgraded to be smaller and more efficient. As a result, fees for most types of asset sending operations should be reduced by 40-45%. We are calling this “enhanced send”.
We currently anticipate CIP9 to be implemented and released near the end of June. Stay tuned for a possible bounty announcement that will allow community members to donate to the implementation effort.
CIP9 multi-destination support
After the basic enhanced send implementation is released, we will begin planning and work on a further enhancement that will allow for a single enhanced send operation to specify multiple destinations (and possibly even multiple assets). Thus, instead of requiring a separate Bitcoin transaction for each send, a single send transaction can send to tens, hundreds, or even thousands of destinations at once.
We hope to see multi-destination send support coming to Counterparty in July or August.
Enhanced data encoding with CIP6
CIP6 is another future enhancement we are looking to implement this year that will complement our current multisig encoding method, and allow a different (and oftentimes cheaper) approach to encoding data into the blockchain.
For the technically inclined, Counterparty contributor Devon Weller has created a nice document that outlines these various methods, and looks at how transaction costs are affected with each one.
Picopayments
Picopayments is full fledged payment channels solution for Counterparty. It not only includes enhancements in the core counterparty-lib code, but a full fledged multi-asset payment hub implementation and command line interface. Picopayments will allow fast and very cheap off-chain sending of any Counterparty asset. This allows for numerous exciting use cases.
Storj team member Fabian Barkhau has authored picopayments, and we are pleased to announce that Fabian will be joining the Counterparty team as the Picopayments maintainer shortly. Despite the news that Storj will be moving to Ethereum for their token (largely due to issues with Bitcoin), Fabian will continue working on Picopayments to allow it to be useful for all Counterparty users. Check out a video detailing how picopayments works here.
Wallet improvements
Counterwallet will soon be enhanced to give users more fine-grained control over the setting of transaction priority/fees. Segwit support in Counterwallet is also on the roadmap, with an implementation coming if Counterparty is clearly to remain on Core.
Future technology
To summarize, CIP6 and CIP9 allow for more optimized on-chain transactions, while Picopayments allows for fast, cheap off-chain send transactions of any asset. Beyond this, we are looking into:
Enhancing our Picopayments solution with Lightning Network functionality to allow flexible payment routing across payment hubs.
Possibly moving Counterparty to a sidechain, which will have quicker block times, cheaper fees, and be pegged to the Bitcoin blockchain.
As both Lightning Networks and sidechains are still under development, these are mid to long term goals. (And also note that any change to a non-Core blockchain could yield improvements with the speed and cost of Counterparty transactions as well, if that route is ever taken.)
Conclusion
While the recent changes with Bitcoin have negatively affected Counterparty, we hope the above helps to show what we are doing to address these issues. Counterparty is both the original and most popular asset creation platform, and our goal is to keep it that way. We thank the Counterparty community for their continued support!Pretty cool interview of BurNIng from a few days ago, part of a “Players Pantheon” series from UUU9.com…
BurNIng at a glance:
Name: Xu Zhilei
ID: BurNIng
Birthdate: Feb 16, 1988
Horoscope: Aquarius
Hometown: Tongling, Anhui Province
Nicknames: B-god, Xu-lardar, Xu-Nessaj, Prof Xu
Past teams: 7L, KS.cn, CH, EHOME
Fav heroes: Weaver, Anti-mage
Fav actor: Wentworth Earl Miller
Fav band: Linkin Park
Fav movie: Batman
UUU9: Hello, today we have the honor of interviewing DK’s BurNIng. Say hi to everyone first.
DK.BurNIng: Hello everyone, I am DK’s captain BurNIng.
UUU9: For WPC this time, DK has come from Yunnan all the way to Shanghai. Anything that has needed getting used to for your team?
BurNIng: Only a little bit when we first arrived in Shanghai. We first just checked into a random convenience hotel. And then the training facilities provided here had limits on time, we could only train until 9pm whereas our normal routine would be until 2-3am. But now all these things have been resolved.
UUU9: Oh. Regarding the recently concluded Starladder season, NaVi won 3-2 over Alliance. Did you guys follow this tournament at all, what did you think of the two teams?
BurNIng: I watched the entire tournament live via streams. The two teams felt very close in terms of ability, NaVi gave me the feeling that they spent a lot of time in analyzing Alliance. Their playstyle and drafts were very focused on countering Alliance, so they were able to take the win.
UUU9: If you guys were to face them in a match, what chances do DK have to win?
BurNIng: At the moment I think maybe 30-40% chance. But with further improvements from practice, our chances will rise.
UUU9: Let’s talk about your new teammates. Iceiceice always gives people the feeling of a jokester, does he have a serious side in real life?
BurNIng: When he first came to DK, my impression from him was that he is a player that truly loves Dota. He’s very hard working, we started off when he first came by playing lots of pubs and watching lots of replays.
UUU9: How do you guys normally address him? Cousin (iceiceice once joked that it was his cousin playing for him in a particularly feed-worthy game)? iceiceice?
BurNIng: Usually either ‘cousin’ or ‘ice’.
UUU9: LaNm and iceiceice often show off their affection for each other publicly, what is their relationship?
BurNIng: They are just normal teammates O_O… It’s just iceiceice’s love for being flamboyant on camera, I think.
UUU9: In your eyes, what kind of player is Mushi?
BurNIng: The impression that Mushi gives me is dedicated and humble, and has a great thirst for winning. I think he’s a very good person.
UUU9: DK’s recent form has been excellent, and we’ve heard that you guys have been hard at work training daily. Some fans have suggested that you guys reaching such heights right now might mean that you peak too early and drop in bigger engagements, what do you think?
BurNIng: I feel that form is something that you maintain, you don’t really suddently lose all your form in one day. Form is the result of training and practice, so as long as we can continue on with our effectiveness in training, form is not a problem.
UUU9: All of DK can be considered veteran players, what is your secret to keeping your performances going?
BurNIng: There isn’t really a secret, it’s just staying interested and dedicated.
UUU9: In recent matches, Elder Titan has been either picked or banned almost always. Can B-god share with us some thoughts on this hero’s strengths and weaknesses?
BurNIng: This hero can be said to be the hottest hero in this version (6.78). His main feature his powerful teamfights, as well as his ability to defend towers. He’s good offlane as well as solo mid, has strong laning, doesn’t lose 1v1, and can get a lot of farm for himself in a 1v3 as well. I feel he’s just a very strong hero.
UUU9: Foreign players like to alternate second and third skills, while Chinese players prefer alternating the first and second skills, which do you think is better?
BurNIng: Originally the Chinese style was first and second skills alternating, but recently under a European influence, Chinese players have been going for the second and third skills as well. I feel it’s not bad, but requires more crowd-control from teammates. The aura is really very imba.
UUU9: In the recent DK vs HGT WPC-ACE match, iceiceice’s level 5 ET never got a level of Stomp, and he ended up getting killed over and over, what did you think of this?
BurNIng: I think he was a bit careless. Leveling Stomp or not makes no difference, getting caught meant death regardless.
UUU9: Apart from WPC-ACE, we have G-League, D2L, MLG all starting or about to come, does DK have any big goals set for winning these?
BurNIng: Our goal is of course to win these titles, and we will continue working in training to keep our form going.
UUU9: What do you think of the two newcomer teams in WPC-ACE League — HGT and TongFu 2nd team? What advice would you share with them?
BurNIng: Their ability is quite decent, but there’s still some space between them and professional teams. I’ve watched a few of their replays, and HGT has even taken a win over a pro team. They do pretty well in early game, but towards mid and late game they have a lack of experience. Every professional player undergoes a similar process. Without experience in these situations, they don’t know what to do with an advantage and end up losing. So they need more practice and experience before they’ll be able to see some results.
UUU9: In DK’s games, you guys sometimes move your farm priority down a bit. Has this taken some adjusting to for you?
BurNIng: In forming this team, I’d already established this for myself, if I took this new team and tried to play the same way as before then the results might be even worse than before, so I decided that I should play a bit more aggressively and offensively. Share farm and resources a bit more evenly, not just focus everything on my own hero. This was the way to making the breakthrough, and from current results it would seem that it’s going decently.
UUU9: In the past it was always BurNIng plus 4 protectors. Ever since Mushi and iceiceice joined, your team’s style has changed, so how would you describe your current system?
BurNIng: Our system now is basically: Attack, overwhelm, multi-core.
UUU9: Watching you in the past there was always the feeling that your play was very steady and reliable. Nowadays, it would seem that you’ve gotten more ‘floaty’, what do you think?
BurNIng: I think this has a lot to do with the hero I’m on, and I’ve also been trying to make adjustments myself. I don’t think it’s ‘floaty’, more that it’s type of change.
UUU9: How do you think resources should be shared to supports?
BurNIng: Usually it would depend on the hero. If I don’t need farm or levels that much at a certain time, then I let supports get some to catch up on core items and levels, and then I return to lane afterwards.
UUU9: In WPC-ACE, DK has yet to taste defeat. Many people are guessing at which team will be the one to break your streak, so who do you think is the hardest team for you to face?
BurNIng: Many teams are very strong. VG fought us very hard and it was very close before we made a comeback, iG against us was also a comeback for us. There isn’t as large of a gap between Chinese team as some may think, a lot of things are down to form and execution.
UUU9: Outside of training, what things do you like to do?
BurNIng: Watch some movies, listen to music. I still prefer to stay at home more.
UUU9: When was the last time you visited back home?
BurNIng: After TI3 I went home for a half month break.
UUU9: Now with training and competitions all packed in your schedule, it must be pretty tiring, how many days each month do you have to spend with your girlfriend?
BurNIng: It’s hard to even get a few games of pubs with her every week, much less have time to meet up. Sometimes I feel sorry to her.
UUU9: We saw on weibo your profession of love towards her, so surely she can understand you. Alright, thank you to BurNIng for this interview with us, and we hope DK can continue achieving good results in the future. Anything to say to fans?
BurNIng: Hi UUU9 fans, I am DK’s BurNIng, I want to thank all our fans for their support of DK, and for following DK’s matches. We will strive to continue working hard, and play well in every game and bring exciting performances to repay you all.
Source: http://dota.uuu9.com/zsd/burning/
AdvertisementsPORTLAND, Ore. -- The last company providing container shipping service from the Port of Portland will leave the market later this month.
Puyallup, Wash.-based Westwood Shipping's last call to Portland will be Saturday, further exacerbating the state of the marine container cargo service at the port's Terminal 6.
That news is especially daunting as the port's Executive Director Bill Wyatt recently told the Business Journal he doesn't expect any new container service providers at the port any time soon.
Westwood had been making just one call to the port each month. In a letter to customers, the shipping company said the low numbers did not justify continuing its Rose City service.
"While we are disappointed with this news, we also understand that underlying economics of the carrier industry are at play like over-capacity and exceptionally low rates," the Port of Portland said in a prepared statement. "We are hopeful that Westwood will return to (Terminal 6) when market dynamics improve. Our marketing team will continue to focus on recruitment of new carrier service and assist shippers with access to markets."
Sign up for the daily 3 Things to Know Newsletter Thank You Something went wrong. This email will be delivered to your inbox once a day in the morning. Thank you for signing up for the 3 things to Know Newsletter Please try again later.
Submit
At the end of 2014, workers at T6 handled nearly 165,000 containers from ocean-going vessels — a decline from 2003's peak of around 330,000, but consistent with its |
5) was based on the cross validated standard error of prediction (0.66 for five components). Carrying out the final PLS analysis with five components yielded a regression coefficient r2 of 0.824 (predicted as actual pEC 50 ). The steric field contribution to the model was 61% with the balance (39%) contributed by the electrostatic field. Actual values of StdDev*Coeff of the final five-component model were contoured at 0.01 and −0.01 for both steric and electrostatic fields; these are shown in (steric) and (electrostatic).
Acknowledgements Support for this research from the NIDA (R01-DA-19327-01) is gratefully acknowledged. The authors thank Dr. Bruce Blough for compounds from his collection in support of NIDA grant R01-DA12970, and D. Zhong, L. D. Mayer, M. Porter, and K. Warner for their technical assistance. The authors would also like to express their appreciation to the manuscript reviewers for their constructive suggestions.
Footnotes Publisher's Disclaimer: This is a PDF file of an unedited manuscript that has been accepted for publication. As a service to our customers we are providing this early version of the manuscript. The manuscript will undergo copyediting, typesetting, and review of the resulting proof before it is published in its final citable form. Please note that during the production process errors may be discovered which could affect the content, and all legal disclaimers that apply to the journal pertain.Do you use an electric kettle to make tea? Then you’re using way too much water and too much power heating an overfilled vessel. But! We found this cool new Kickstarter project that saves energy and looks sleek in a kitchen.
It kinda looks like a thick, chic Frisbee, and it’s a pretty ingenious idea. Instead of heating a big kettle, you plop your mug on the device, and heat only the amount of liquid you’ll drink right then and there. This saves water and energy, since smaller amounts of water (or whatever) is heated at a time.
It’s called Miito, and it describes itself as “the sustainable alternative to the electric kettle.” It’s already raised over $340,000—more than double its goal.
Advertisement
The Kickstarter page quotes sustainability strategist Leyla Acaroglu’s TED Talk: “One day of extra energy use [from overfilling electric kettles] is enough to light all the streetlights in England for a night.”
You can also use it to warm up bowls of soup, glasses of milk, mugs of hot chocolate, whatever. Here’s how it works: Put your filled tea cup on the small induction patch on the “kettle,” which is entirely cool to the touch. Slip in an induction rod. The induction patch heats the rod, boiling the liquid from within.
It sounds like the device won’t be wireless, at least at first, which is kind of a bummer. But if it means nuking stale coffee won’t involve a loud microwave caked with sauce stains, we’re all for it. Take my money and start heating my single serving of English breakfast, please.
Advertisement
Your browser does not support HTML5 video tag.Click here to view original GIF
Image credits: Miito Kickstarter pageLike this article? Chip in to keep stories like these coming.
It's the first of its kind: a human rights guide to ending poverty in Canada. A guide that clearly outlines what human rights mean concretely for policymakers, activists, community-makers and all other anti-poverty stakeholders.
Last week, Canada Without Poverty released our Human Rights and Poverty Strategies, A Guide to International Human Rights Law and its Domestic Application in Poverty Reduction Strategies. This step-by-step guide breaks down international human rights obligations for all levels of government and stakeholders, and brings a human rights focus to poverty reduction work in local communities across Canada.
The thing is, at Canada Without Poverty, we truly believe that we can end poverty.
There are over 4.8 million people in Canada living in poverty, struggling to put food on the table, heat their homes and find secure jobs that pay enough to make ends meet. When you look at the statistics, ending poverty seems daunting -- for some it can be easier to shift this priority further down the list, to another day. But poverty in Canada is a crisis. Homelessness is a national emergency. Coordinated, comprehensive action is long overdue.
Local policymakers have an important role to play in taking action to end poverty. Canada Without Poverty's human rights guide is a tool to make ending poverty more accessible for local policy makers -- moving the priority up the list. The guide complements, strengthens and gives greater meaning to the poverty reduction work that is already being done in communities.
The pivotal idea behind human rights is that regardless of who we are or where we've come from, we are entitled to certain rights because we are part of the human family. Practically, to embrace human rights, policy makers need to: meaningfully include people in poverty in the development of law and policy, incorporate human rights standards, promote substantive equality, set goals and timelines in anti-poverty strategies, monitor their progress and remain accountable.
We're not saying that communities should take all these pieces and miraculously implement them in a day. Human rights are about progressive realization -- the idea that you can take small steps, using one piece of the framework at a time -- but we always need to be moving forward toward a larger vision.
In some communities, these pieces of human rights are already in place and appear to be working. For example, in Hamilton, Ontario there has been an increased focus on the meaningful inclusion of people in poverty. Success is due to the Hamilton Roundtable for Poverty Reduction which brings together people from various sectors with a special focus on people with lived experience of poverty. Together, these key stakeholders identify which poverty related issues are important to them and their well-being.
The incorporation of human rights standards is another element of human rights that has appeared in local policies. In June 2015, Calgary unveiled the Homeless Charter of Rights. This document recognizes that to address the problem we need to understand discrimination, the loss of dignity that comes hand-in-hand with poverty.
Through the realization of human rights, we can end poverty in this country. Human rights empower people living in poverty. They're effective. And for all levels of government in Canada, the realization of human rights are a legal obligation. Some may shrug off human rights as lofty and idealistic. But the reality is that these rights don't just exist in theory, they are guaranteed by several international human rights laws which have been ratified by Canada.
As a community, we need to recognize that poverty is not inevitable. If every level of government -- provincial, territorial, local and federal -- were to take our international human rights obligations seriously, imagine the country that we could become.
We could end poverty in Canada. And the human right guide is the place to start.
Michèle Biss is the Legal Education and Outreach Coordinator at Canada Without Poverty.
Photo: flickr/ Still_life88_secondHi everyone, and welcome for another SSF2 dev blog!
I am Chernabogue, a developer from the Audio team and a musician from OverClocked ReMix. You may remember hearing some of my work a few weeks ago in the first Audio blog. Speaking of which, on behalf of the whole Music team, I’d like thank you for the positive reception on the first tracks we presented. But enough talk, let’s dive into what you clicked on the link for!
Today’s blog is a little special, because I won’t be the only one to write it. Every developer from the Music team will present a totally new track they worked on. Yes, you read that right, you’re going to get a big preview of 5 new tracks from the game! Exciting, isn’t it? Let’s start right now and see what our first member has to say!
“Skyloft” by Garrett Williamson
“A funk remix of a track from the latest Zelda game. In the Smash Bros. series, some tracks are remixed in ways you wouldn’t expect, and this one is no exception. Even the hero of time can groove from time to time! And so will you when you play SSF2 on this particular stage!”
As you can hear, you’re in for a treat! The Audio team worked (and is still working) very hard to arrange new music for the game, and I must confess it’s quite a ride to remix tracks from a lot of different games. Now, let’s get another preview, shall we? This time it’s from the Audio chief himself, Mr. 194!
“Mega Man X Medley” by Carlos ‘194’ Alvarado
“Robots, shooting, and great music, Mega Man X is an excellent example of a cohesive soundtrack. It also possesses an strong electronic/rock component, which was a detour from my usual work, and made me work to keep the intensity, and power the stages had. With so many good tracks to pick on, I couldn’t just set on one, so I worked on this Medley with 4 of the 8 Mavericks. Can you name them all?“
Once the Beta is out, you won’t be able to stop dancing to this Robot groove! While the Audio team usually works on 1-track arrangements, some SSF2 songs will feature several music pieces from a game or anime. You just can’t resist a good medley once in a while! Speaking of which, here’s a new medley for you!
“Hidden Leaf Medley” by Andrew ‘ASF’ Fisher
“The Naruto series is by far one of the most unique, with beautifully rendered characters and a spiraling plot. Because the original music is so captivating and intense I wanted to fully capture the landscapes of fierce battle. For this particular medley, I primarily outsourced the material and then adjusted tempo, EQed, and added in a few transitioning percussive instruments. Otherwise, the music is the original artwork of Naruto’s world!“
As you can hear, the soundtrack really has a diverse category of genres. You will hear many different genres while playing SSF2 – rock, jazz, orchestral, electro, metal, chiptune, etc. Sometimes, you may get surprised by what you’ll be hearing next! But you’re here for more music, aren’t you? Here’s another little tease for you!
“Bowser’s Rampage” by Steve ‘ohaiguy’ Burns
“It isn’t Smash until Bowser’s ready to rumble! Bowser, his castle, and his minions have a vast array of fantastic musical themes. With so much to honor, I felt it was best to turn to some of the classics. So, for this track, I used the ‘Castle Theme’ from Mario Kart 64 and many variations of ‘Final Bowser’ from Super Mario 64. This piece features an organ, piano, choir, electronic elements, and a drum set. I hope I’ve made an experience that fans of the King Koopa can appreciate. Prepare to feel his fiery wrath!“
What a track – a fitting tribute to Mario’s Nemesis! Before we wrap up this dev blog, let’s get a final sneak peak to the SSF2 soundtrack, this time from yours truly. Like the saying goes, save the be– alright, I’m not writing that!
“Team Rocket Hideout” by Alex ‘Chernabogue’ Mourey
“This is the alternate track for the Silph Co. stage. It was kinda obvious to arrange this one for this stage, and I remember now it was speculated by some people at the SSF2 forums. I tried to make it fit the environment and the game’s events: it’s a very dangerous situation, which calls for some powered-up music. Bombastic orchestra? Check. Electro elements? Check. Epic drums? Double check! That’s how you do an epic cinematic remix!”
I hope you liked that last one – but also all the other tracks! We’re working very hard to create a lot of new music pieces for SSF2, and it’s a lot of fun. With alternative tracks, you’re guaranteed to get your music fix as we double the number of songs in the game – but you already knew that. How do they work? That’s for another dev blog!
If you liked what you heard, let us know! The Audio team loves getting opinions and tries to improve stuff when needed. And be sure to follow the Music devs on social networks if you want to discover more of their work – and good music, of course!Danny Trejo, who was immortalized in such films as Spy Kids, Heat, Con Air, and Desperado, is well on his way to opening his first fast-casual taco shack on La Brea near Olympic in a former Taco Bell building.
Designed by Kris Keith at Spacecraft, Trejos Tacos is slated to open some time in March of 2015 in Mid-City, serving cantina-style bites, beer, and wine. Word on the street was that his initial request for a full liquor license was nearly denied at the neighborhood council meeting until a group of supporters came at the last minute to support good ol' Machete.
As for design, the desert landscape will give it a real Southwestern feel (drought-friendly too), with blackened steel, blacked leather upholstery, and a pretty darn hip environment to hang out in.
Trejos Tacos
1048 S La Brea
Los Angeles, CaliforniaFCC Acting Chairwoman Mignon Clyburn. (Photo by Rebecca D'Angelo/For the Washington Post)
As phone companies retool their businesses for the Internet, they are calling on Washington to liberate them from their longtime overseer, the Federal Communications Commission.
Led by high-profile former regulators and lawmakers, telecom giants including Verizon, AT&T and Comcast have launched multiple efforts to shift regulation of their broadband businesses to other agencies that don't have nearly as much power as the FCC.
On Thursday, Jon Leibowitz, the former chairman of the Federal Trade Commission, will lobby House Republican and Democratic staff on behalf of those firms, urging lawmakers to take away some privacy powers from the FCC.
Earlier this week, Verizon Communications asked a federal appeals court to overturn FCC rules that require broadband providers to give equal treatment to all Internet services.
AT&T's head of lobbying, Jim Cicconi, on Wednesday also raised concerns about the FCC's policing of broadband providers. In a speech, Cicconi questioned the FCC's antitrust powers, saying the FTC and Justice Department have more expertise in the area of competition law.
Modernizing the FCC?
In total, the week's flurry of attacks on the FCC brings fresh attention to an agency struggling to keep up with consumers who have cut phone lines for wireless and lightning-fast Internet services.
Telecom firms and some analysts say the agency is trying to force regulations from the old telephone monopoly era onto broadband firms. They argue that those rules are not only out of date, but also aren't applied to Internet competitors such as Skype, Google, Facebook and Netflix.
"My first observation on the mission of the FCC would be to leave competition policy to the antitrust laws and antitrust enforcers," Cicconi said in a speech Wednesday at a luncheon hosted by The Media Institute, a think tank. AT&T's bid for T-Mobile was rejected by the DOJ and FCC in 2011.
"The mission of the FCC has to change. It has to be modernized," he said.
Debates over the FCC's focus on the Internet have escalated as President Obama's new pick for chairman, Tom Wheeler, prepares to take over the agency within weeks. Wheeler hasn't offered specific plans for broadband regulation, an issue he may have to address if a federal appeals court agrees with arguments by Verizon and scraps the FCC's net neutrality rules.
The FCC and FTC declined to comment on overall lobbying efforts by telecom firms. But with Leibowitz's 21st Century Privacy Coalition gearing up for a new lobbying front on telecom privacy, the FCC stressed it has permission from Congress to enforce its own telecom privacy rules.
"The FCC has decades of experience protecting the personal information of consumers who subscribe to cable, phone and satellite services. Its rules are crafted to protect the specific type of information held by communications providers, and have been tested in court," said FCC spokesman Mark Wigfield. "Elimination of the FCC's existing authority would leave a serious gap in consumer protections."
Consumer advocates agree. They argue a lack of competition among broadband providers creates a need for a strong FCC.
"The overall trend here is to strip away the authority of the FCC to prevent discriminatory practices ranging from personal privacy breeches to anticompetitive favoritism in the marketplace," said Gene Kimmelman, a director of the Internet Freedom and Human Rights project at the New America Foundation and former antitrust official for the Justice Department. "These telecom firms want as little oversight as possible."
Broad powers
The FCC has broader powers than other agencies, including the ability to create new rules that are aimed at heading off harmful behavior in the future.
An example of this was the agency's controversial "net neutrality" rules created in 2010, meant to prevent broadband providers from blocking competing Web sites. The rules also discourage allowing some firms to pay extra to have their services delivered faster to consumers.
Verizon and other critics said the rules were too constraining of business models they might pursue in the future, and that there were few examples of actual violations.
In contrast, the FTC and DOJ play more of a defensive role. As law enforcement agencies, they review mergers or bring enforcement actions against companies after investigating practices that are typically brought to their attention from complaints.
But telecom firms argue they have outgrown the FCC's original mandate, set out nearly a century ago, of doling out licenses for broadcast airwaves and regulating the telephone monopoly. They say the confusion over who should regulate broadband providers has led to too many agencies claiming oversight over their businesses.
In their meetings Thursday with House lawmakers, Leibowitz will argue for new legislation that consolidates data breach rules under the FTC. Today, telecom firms comply with privacy rules at the FCC, as well as laws enforced by the FTC and by individual states.
"Consumers would benefit when rules are consistent and businesses would rather have one clear law than a patchwork of multiple laws that sometimes conflict," Leibowitz said.SEA-GB grades: Aaron Rodgers has excellent game in Packers' blowout win
By John Kosko • Dec 11, 2016
Green Bay Packers 38, Seattle Seahawks 10
These are the highest-graded players and top takeaways from the Packers’ 38-10 win over the Seahawks in Week 14:
Quarterback grade: Aaron Rodgers, 85.8
Spectacular game from Rodgers ends in worry
It’s safe to say that Aaron Rodgers is back. He has graded as the best QB in the NFL since Week 7, which has boosted his season rank to fifth overall. Against Seattle, Rodgers was off-target on just one pass deep left, and was phenomenal under pressure, completing 6 of 8 passes for 143 yards and 2 TDs, with a passer rating of a nearly perfect 156.3. Rodgers and the Packers are poised for a postseason push, but with uncertainty around the two-time MVP’s calf injury, fans will be worried until there’s an update.
Top offensive grades:
QB Aaron Rodgers, 85.8
WR Davante Adams, 81.4
RT Bryan Bulaga, 77.9
RG T.J. Lang, 74.1
WR Jordy Nelson, 72.9
Offense hits its stride, while Adams is living up to the hype
With Rodgers clicking on all cylinders, the receivers have followed suit, with Jordy Nelson grading as the fifth-best wide receiver since Week 7, and Davante Adams playing the best football of his young career. Adams was excellent against Seattle, catching four of his six targets for 104 yards and 1 TD, while Nelson was efficient catching six of seven for 41 yards and 2 TDs. The offensive line did what it normally does, protecting Rodgers incredibly well and accounting for just six hurries.
Top defensive grades:
DI Mike Daniels, 88.8
S Morgan Burnett, 88.3
CB Damarious Randall, 87.4
CB Quinten Rollins, 81.1
ED Datone Jones, 80.2
Green Bay defensive backs turning it around
If anyone watched Week 11 of “Sunday Night Football” against Washington, the Packers’ defense was disastrous, with the top five corners (in snaps plays) all allowing a passer rating of 121.1 or worse in that game. Since then, cornerback Damarious Randall has allowed a passer rating of 89.7, which is the worst of the Packers CBs. While playing the Eagles and Texans will cure a lot of secondary issues, shutting down Russell Wilson is another story. Randall was stellar in this one, allowing 7.5 yards per target and intercepting two passes, while Quinten Rollins was also great, allowing 9.4 yards per target and recording one interception and one pass breakup. With Rodgers back in form, if the Packers defense can keep playing at a high level, Green Bay will be extremely dangerous if it makes the playoffs.
Quarterback grade: Russell Wilson, 38.9
Wilson puts together a very poor performance
A stat line that has a 56.4 completion percentage and ends with five in the interceptions column is never good, but it doesn’t tell the whole story. Sure, Wilson was not good against Green Bay, and struggled badly under pressure, but four drops and one throwaway taken into consideration puts his adjusted completion percentage at 68.4. That is not a great number, but surely better than missing almost every other pass. Coming into the game, Wilson was the NFL’s second-best QB under pressure with an adjusted completion percentage of 73.3 and a passer rating of 87.6. Against the Packers, his passer rating under pressure was a paltry 30.5, dropping his season rating to 80.7.
Top offensive grades:
RB Thomas Rawls, 73.1
TE Jimmy Graham, 72.0
RB Alex Collins, 66.5
TE Luke Willson, 61.7
WR Tyler Lockett, 55.8
Offense collapses in cold weather
With kickoff temperatures in the low- to mid-20s, the Seahawks struggled on the road in the cold weather. When a top-five player on your team grades in the mid-50s, the outcome is usually not good. The offensive line was poor as usual, with RT Bradley Sowell (43.6) allowing seven pressures, including one sack and three hits, while LT George Fant (41.9) allowed three pressures, including one devastating blindside sack. WR Doug Baldwin (48.8) had a rare poor game, grading below-average for the first time since Week 6 of 2015. He caught just six of 11 targets for 46 yards and dropped one pass.
Top defensive grades:
LB Bobby Wagner, 87.3
S Kam Chancellor, 82.9
DI Tony McDaniel, 81.8
ED Michael Bennett, 77.6
S Steven Terrell, 77.0
Defense put in tough position, can’t stop Rodgers
With 38 points put up by the opposing team, it would be easy to assume the defense was a disaster. Missing free safety Earl Thomas (out for the year due to injury) hurts, but the defense was hurt more by having to continually start with short fields. Seattle CB DeShawn Shead was picked on by Rodgers, and Jeremy Lane was torched by Davante Adams for a 66-yard touchdown. On the positive side, linebacker Bobby Wagner racked up nine tackles and three stops, and Tony McDaniel logged six stops and two hurries. Cornerback Richard Sherman was largely avoided, as he allowed just one catch for 11 yards on two targets.
PFF Game-Ball Winner: Green Bay QB Aaron Rodgers
PFF’s player grading process includes multiple reviews, which may change the grade initially published in order to increase its accuracy. Learn more about how we grade and access grades for every player through each week of the NFL season by subscribing to Player Grades.When A-Team is not improving masterpiece paintings, he makes great animations. Here's yet another one, showing the speed with which the cracked ice pack in the Beaufort Sea has been moving in past weeks:
The largest crack functions as a reference point. In the Arctic Sea Ice Forum I jokingly said Banks Island fits in there - okay, I acted as if it was a joke when it turned out I had it wrong -, but it's still pretty big. I'm very curious what will happen once the thin ice in that crack gets properly introduced to the Sun.
According to A-Team's calculations (which he probably does while painting):
The Beaufort ice pack is very much on the move. The fast-moving western tip of a recognizable central feature, traced for 41 days (23 Feb 13 to 02 Apr 13), has moved 479 km or 11.7 km per day at 0.49 km per hour. The angular velocity about the feature's Euler pole at 82.5ºN 140ºW is quite rapid, about 1.2º per day.
As evidenced by the 60-day drift track of the IABP buoys in the Beaufort area:Iran is ready to resolve all nuclear issues in the next round of talks with world powers if the West starts lifting sanctions, its foreign minister said on Monday.
In an interview with the Iranian student news agency ISNA, Ali Akbar Salehi also hinted that Iran could make concessions on its higher-grade uranium enrichment, a key concern of Western powers.
Related stories:
"If the West wants to take confidence-building measures it should start in the field of sanctions because this action can speed up the process of negotiations reaching results," Salehi was quoted as saying.
"If there is goodwill, one can pass through this process very easily and we are ready to resolve all issues very quickly and simply and even in the Baghdad meeting," he added, referring to a second round of talks with world powers scheduled to take place in the Iraqi capital on May 23.
Salehi described an initial meeting with the five permanent members of the UN Security Council and Germany in Istanbul on Saturday as positive and constructive.
The talks had been stalled for more than a year during which time the United States and the European Union tightened sanctions on Iran which they suspect is seeking nuclear weapons capability, a charge Tehran denies.
Salehi said Iran would always assert its right to process uranium for peaceful purposes but that there might be room for a compromise on higher-level enrichment.
"Enrichment is Iran's right but we can negotiate on how we obtain uranium with different enrichment levels," he said.
"Making 20% (enriched nuclear) fuel is our right as long as it provides for our reactor needs and there is no question about that," he said, but added: "If they guarantee that they will provide us with the different levels of enriched fuel that we need, then that would be another issue."
Iran says it needs uranium enriched to a purity of 20% to fuel a medical research reactor, but many countries see its enrichment to that level a dangerous step towards the 90% enrichment needed for an atomic bomb.
A deal tentatively agreed with the West in 2009 would have seen Iran exporting some of its lower enriched uranium in return for fuel for the medical reactor. The deal unraveled and diplomats on both sides have said it would need to be modified in any future agreement.
Follow Ynetnews on Facebook and TwitterYou know what I was going to sit here and whine about people who don't get game development and how Daybreak is going to probably make a better game with these changes because the previous team had all of these failures, but whatever who cares at this point there go to reddit if you want to read that. Oh and f#$* steam machines, they're lame and stupid.
I talked a bit about Ragnarok Online and how hype the game is and it got me thinking a bit about my past. This week we're going to talk about things that Xerin loves but everyone doesn't like, because they're lame and not on my level.
I love DragonBall Z and you should love it to because it's amazing. It sucks for me because see, I'm this genius who loves all the good stuff and everyone I know just sits there and is like blah blah blah DBZ is for noobs, but you know what that's ok. They can just not enjoy the beauty that Vegeta and his ripply abs and bad attitude.
Growing up, I didn't have anything, really, to latch on to and it was super depressing and lame, but I had one thing! DBZ, right after school. When I had a VCR, a luxury for me, and we're talking about the age of DVD players being a thing (I'm not that old), I would set it to auto-record Toonami. That was super hype like getting home and there was DBZ on the T.V. and Vegeta was there and he's so cool and awesome.
Anyway, as a teenager on the wild west of the Internet, when AOL was still a thing, I sat there and did nothing but obsess over DBZ because the Internet. I went so far as to make my very own DragonBall Z MUD, which included some really awesome code and alternative leveling mechanics:
You could do pushups, which were a semi-AFK, easily scripted way to level (and waste server resources). I added a limit on the number you could complete per hour, but it was a great way to chat and level at the same time without effort.
There were two areas in the game where you could make this more effective - the time capsule and the spaceship, in which you could either move further out to increase gravity (eventually reaching a no-escape you've gone too far room) or enter the spaceship and set the gravity yourself. These rooms had a bonus to all XP earned, so anything you did here gave you more XP.
These rooms worked for all XP, you could spar another player (duel) and PvP kill flag was set, on the other player's death you'd get an amount of XP modified by the gravity level. Eventually I made it where each hit gave XP in an spar, but obviously only so much per day.
Saiyans gained additional XP when their health was depleted and instead of losing XP on death, gained some once per hour.
I was/am a nerd.
Anyway, after that, I've pretty much been the biggest DBZ fanboy ever, which is why DragonBall XV is awesome because it's a DBZ fighting game and they're all literally awesome, some in a really weird way. Like DBZ Ultimate Battle 22 was complete and total crap, but people loved pulling sprites out of it. Ok, I take it back, most pre-Budokai games sucked like Final Bout but I mean, I kinda liked it? There was a following for it, just because it was DBZ.
It's funny how much negative attention DBZ games get really actually, like XV is awesome, but it sales are okay? Reviews so far are great for user reviews, bad for reviewer reviews because I mean it's not a Call of Duty or whatever so people need to get good about DBZ? Like, XV's charm is that it's sort of like fanservice, okay, not literally everything has to be some huge progressive jump in gaming to be good.
Anyway DBZ: XV is awesome because it's a really casual fighting game without a lot of combos / special controls that can be played by anyone and you don't need a controller or an arcade cabinet to nerd out about it. It also has huge fanservice too.
So like, it's not a competitive fighting game, it's not something you're going to see memes made about, but it's about letting people fight in these historic battles with characters they love. XV's roster is insane, from Majin Vegeta to Broly, you have pretty much every major DBZ character available to play or fight against, plus a long list of historic battles. Plus, even more non-historic battles that you can daydream about.
Anyway, I'm just saying I like DBZ and XV is really cool if you love DBZ too and screw the DBZ haters.
This one time, there was a local movie rental store that had copies of the original DragonBall. I was something like 12 at the time, but I got absolutely crushed when I got home with the DVD and it wouldn't play in my DVD player. The dude who ran it was a jerk about it saying it works just fine. Because of this, I have only read summaries of the original DragonBall and have not watched it on principle.
My favorite character is Vegeta because he is just way too cool and when I grow up I really hope I can be him.
My least favorite saga is probably the Cell saga because it's very depressing and Cell is a huge jerk. DBZ Kai makes this a lot more managable.
Writing about DBZ makes me smile this really stupid smile like you're quasi-laughing because it's kind of dumb and silly but at the same time it's like yay DBZ.Have you ever been caught out with a dying smartphone and you've left your smartphone charger at home, or it's not working properly? Now it's possible for you to charge your phone off someone else's phone, as long as they have differing tastes in mobile devices to yours.
Zuo Charge is a tiny cable that sits on a keychain. It consists of a short £13 ($19, €17) wire fitted with a USB connector on one end and a Lightning connector on the other end that enables you to charge your smartphone off your friend's device, as long as they have a Samsung phone and you have an iPhone, or vice versa.
The solution works as long as both smartphones support USB On-The-Go (OTG), a specification that enables devices to switch back and forth between the roles of host and client. Put simply, OTG means a mobile phone can act as a host device to access data from a removable SD card inserted into it, but if the phone is plugged into a PC, it will then act as a removable USB mass storage device and the PC would become the host.
In addition to sharing power with someone else's device, the creators of Zuo Charge, who are based in Malaga, Spain, say that the cable allows you to charge your phone the usual way via USB from a laptop or desktop PC, or from a power point using a USB plug.
The concept of using a cable to share power with your friend, whose smartphone might be dying, is quite a novel concept, but the drawback of Zuo Charge is that both parties have to own different devices, so if all your friends and family have iPhones and iPads, or they all have Android devices, the cable will not work.
However, if you are caught out without a smartphone charger or a dying phone, the option to share power with a friend could be beneficial in an emergency situation, such as needing to call a cab to get home in the middle of the night.Rooster Teeth’s RWBY is the biggest American-made anime today and the cast and crew will be joining Anime Expo 2017 talk about the end of Volume 4 and take an exclusive sneak peek at Volume 5. This panel will include an exclusive screening of the Japanese dub version. Join Barbara Dunkelman (Yang), Miles Luna, Kerry Shawcross and Gray G. Haddock for exciting RWBY news, hilarious behind-the-scenes stories, an audience Q&A and more!
Barbara Dunkelman
Barbara Dunkelman is the Director of Social & Community Marketing for Rooster Teeth, the voice of Yang in the international hit anime, RWBY, and the host of Rooster Teeth’s first women-led and produced talk show, Always Open. In 2016, Barbara launched her own lifestyle clothing brand in the Rooster Teeth store and it was an immediate best-seller. Barbara boasts an influential social following on social media and is a core cast member and personality in the majority of Rooster Teeth’s productions including podcasts, comedy shorts, dramatic series, documentaries and feature films. Barbara is originally from Canada and was a huge fan of Rooster Teeth and Red vs Blue before she started working for the company.
Gray G. Haddock
Gray is the Head of Rooster Teeth Animation, co-director on the international anime hit RWBY, and a writer on Camp Camp. Gray voices RWBY‘s Torchwick, Red vs Blue‘s Locus, DCUO’s Green Lantern Hal Jordan, and has also voiced dozens of anime characters including Rurouni Kenshin’s Sanosuke. He had hoped that giving voices to these characters would quiet the voices in his head. But alas… Who said that? Shut up!
Kerry Shawcross
Kerry Shawcross is a writer and director for Rooster Teeth Animation. Kerry has worked at Rooster Teeth for almost seven years and contributed to several projects over the years across live action, podcasts, and sponsored content. Currently, Kerry is the lead director and co-writer for the company’s most popular property, the worldwide phenomenon anime, RWBY, and its adorable spin off – RWBY Chibi. Like many other Rooster Teeth talent, Kerry also spends time in front of the camera, occasionally contributing to podcasts and talk shows, and boasts an impressive and highly engaged social following. In his free time, he does nothing because he has none. Sometimes he watches anime.
Miles Luna
As the Head Writer of Animation at Rooster Teeth, Miles Luna has helped to create stories that have grown a once humble group of animators into an entire studio of nearly 100 employees, all working to produce quality animation in the heart of Austin, Texas. The studio’s largest program, RWBY, has become one of the world’s most popular American-made anime series, managing to captivate fans from Berlin to Tokyo. Miles also participated in Rooster Teeth’s 2016 Extra Life Charity Stream, which helped to raise almost one million dollars for Dell’s Children’s Hospital.Still, the upswing in support for the government provision of health care among low-income Republicans provides a real opportunity for politicians in both parties. Trump himself once promised to implement “insurance for everybody.” Though it’s easy to view that one-time vow as fluff or a misunderstanding of his own party line, it could be a lifeline for Republicans facing revolts back home in poor districts where constituents are fearful of losing their insurance coverage. An Obamacare replacement with an expanded public-insurance system would follow through on promises to repeal the ACA. And it could also replace an unstable and weakening exchange system—dominated by reviled insurance companies—with Medicare or state-branded Medicaid programs like Kentucky’s Kynect, which tend to be widely trusted.
That route might be too far-fetched or expensive for Republicans to pursue en masse. Although their current repeal plan might bend Republican rules on passing legislation that increases the deficit, demolishing or controlling health-care markets and extending tax-funded insurance would be outright heresy against the party line. The resistance to such an idea in the health-care industry, and among its lobbyists, might threaten Republicans in Congress who rebel, thereby reinforcing the market-based status |
some clueless crazies across this country.
But, as always, the staff at Gold Cross EMS in Augusta handled it like true professionals.
Just this week, Gold Cross EMS turned its attention to helping those in Florida trying to recover from Hurricane Irma.
“We are down in Florida helping right now,” Gold Cross EMS posted. “We have put up four additional overtime trucks locally to help with the shelters as well.”
Thank you, Gold Cross EMS of Augusta, for all you do.10. Oklahoma
> Violent crimes per 100,000: 469.3
> Poverty rate: 17.2%
> Pct. of population with bachelor’s degree or higher: 23.8%
> Property crimes per 100,000: 3,401.0 (9th highest)
The number of aggravated assaults in Oklahoma grew by 3.8% in 2012, while they increased just 1.1% nationally. The rate in 2012 came to 337.3 assaults per 100,000 residents, ninth highest among the states. The largest cities, Oklahoma City and Tulsa, have struggled with poverty and gang issues. Like many of the states with high crime rates, postsecondary educational attainment is low in Oklahoma. Only 23.8% have bachelor’s degrees or higher, one of the lowest rates in the country. Oklahoma reported a sharp increase in forcible rape in 2012. FBI data show 1,588 reported rapes, up 12.6% from 2011 and the most since 1994. The incidence of rapes per 100,000 residents reached 41.6 last year, the sixth highest rate in the country.
ALSO READ: States with the Most Gun Violence
9. Maryland
> Violent crimes per 100,000: 476.8
> Poverty rate: 10.3%
> Pct. of population with bachelor’s degree or higher: 36.9%
> Property crimes per 100,000: 2,753.5 (25th lowest)
Compared to the national trend, Maryland’s violent crime ranking should be lower. It has a low poverty rate and a high percentage of people with bachelor’s degrees or more. For the most part, the situation has improved recently. The number of violent crimes in the state has fallen for seven straight years. Crime in the city of Annapolis, for example, was up slightly in 2012 but is still at low levels not seen since the mid-1970s. There were 369 homicides in the state in 2012, down 7.5% from the year before. But the homicide rate — 6.3 per 100,000 in population — is still the seventh highest in the country. A big issue for the state is the heavy concentration of violent crime in and around Baltimore, the largest city. Baltimore’s murder rate — 35 per 100,000 — is the sixth highest in the country. A total of 217 murders occurred in Baltimore in 2012, up 10.2% from 2011.
8. Florida
> Violent crimes per 100,000: 487.1
> Poverty rate: 17.1%
> Pct. of population with bachelor’s degree or higher: 26.8%
> Property crimes per 100,000: 3,276.7 (15th highest)
Supporters of the state’s controversial “stand your ground” law, passed in 2005, believe it is the reason crime in Florida has been falling. But crime rates have fallen steadily for 20 years, dropping 43% since peaking in 1993. Reported rapes have fallen 28.5% since 1993, to levels last seen in 1979. There were just over 1,000 murders in 2012, up 2.5% from 2011, but the total is down 28% from a 1989 peak. High-school graduation rates have risen sharply as crime has dropped, hitting 74.5% in the 2011/2012 school year, up from 56.5% in 2003, according to the Orlando Sentinel. But it is still a laggard nationally, ahead of only a handful of states.
7. Louisiana
> Violent crimes per 100,000: 496.9
> Poverty rate: 19.9%
> Pct. of population with bachelor’s degree or higher: 22%
> Property crimes per 100,000: 3,540.6 (5th highest)
The stark reality of crime in Louisiana is reflected in its murder rate: 10.8 per 100,000. That is the worst in the country and 45% ahead of neighboring Mississippi, which has the second-highest rate at 7.4 per 100,000. Louisiana also has among the highest rates of violent crime and property crime, and the second highest rate of larceny-theft in the nation. The high crime rates are a reflection of the state’s high poverty rate. At 19.9%, it is the third poorest state, ahead of only Mississippi and New Mexico. Of the 495 murders in Louisiana in 2012, 193, or about 40% of the total, occurred in the city of New Orleans alone. Gun violence is prevalent in the city; some 427 people in New Orleans were shot in 2012, unchanged from 2011.
6. Delaware
> Violent crimes per 100,000: 547.4
> Poverty rate: 12.0%
> Pct. of population with bachelor’s degree or higher: 29.5%
> Property crimes per 100,000: 3,340.9 (13th highest)
Delaware cannot be proud that it had the sixth worst violent crime record in 2012. Most of that ranking is due to high crime rates in the poorest neighborhoods of Wilmington, its largest city. But that is not the only problem. Its aggravated assault rate of 342 per 100,000 was the eighth worst nationwide in 2012. Its property crime rate was fifth worst. The high rate may surprise residents, as Delaware is an outlier on many of the trends seen in high crime areas. It has a relatively low poverty rate, as well as one of the highest median household incomes in the country.Fully functioning hand-tracking might be a ways off from becoming the standard form of VR input, but Leap Motion is making a big step toward that future today, taking its Interaction development engine to 1.0 and introducing some major new features.
The Interaction Engine has been available in early Beta since last year, but this full release focuses on what could be a major application for hand-tracking going forward — interfaces.
Leap Motion has built a new user interface module that allows developers to create their own accessible menus and systems that can be navigated a little like Tom Cruise navigates menus in Minority Report. Users reach out to virtual panels to press buttons and alter meters. The company is also adding support for systems like wearables and widgets, enabling wrist-mounted menus and more.
Also updated is the core physics engine, which should make using Leap Motion a much more reliable and immersive experience going forward.
Perhaps the most exciting addition to the engine, though, is Oculus Touch and Vive controller support. The combination of these two technologies is very interesting. Touch also has basic gesture recognition but imagine being able to hold a controller and still extend a finger to press a button.
The company has also launched a new Graphic Renderer that can curve the user interface and render it in one draw call. This is specifically aimed at mobile and standalone headsets.
Leap Motion’s hand-tracking technology has existed for years, but found a new lease of life in VR. We’ve seen the company’s tech integrated into Qualcomm’s reference design for standalone VR headsets though. Now that Google has partnered with Qualcomm for its WorldSense devices, we’re not sure if what role Leap Motion will play in them.
Tagged with: leap motionAmazingly still only at 23-years old, a player that seems to have been around for ages, he arrived at Arsenal on Jan 20th 2005 with the next potential superstar tag dangling from his neck like a very heavy-lead weight, To say it’s not been easy for him is an understatement.
Let’s keep this simple – he’s played some truly outstanding games, scoring goals and destroying full backs. He has admittedly struggled with consistency, and their has always been this air about him as if something was missing. A football brain, some say. Or a sheer lack of football know-how, say others. A bit of both, I think, but definitely something wasn’t clicking. Maybe we were just expecting too much too soon from a young kid at a such huge football club.
Slowly he improved every season early in his career, playing with players like Thierry Henry and Robin van Persie, and was taken under Wenger’s wing. The “Professeur” taught and guided him on the right football path. Yes it’s taken time, but patience it seems might finally be paying off in spades at a time when “results now” rules the day in modern football, both for Arsenal and England.
Everyone knows Walcott’s main asset is his splintering pace – it’s more like sprinter speed. Pep Guardiola once said, “you would need a pistol to stop him”. Sure, it’s taken a while for him to realize when it can be most productively used for the benefit of the team; going too early and being caught offside, or getting ahead of the play with no one there fast enough to keep up with him. Sure it’s taken time, but in the last few (12) months he really has developed his game, thus becoming a potent threat for club and country. Defenders are scared of him, because as we know speed kills his like a Ferrari against a Skoda. Once he goes, he’s gone, and I really believe not a defender playing can keep strides when he does so.
Arsenal manager Arsene Wenger has sometimes chosen to play him through the middle as a main striker this season, which is something Theo has vocalized for a while now. Walcott has taken this in his stride and proved himself a proper finisher with both feet. He’s a natural in front of goal, a talent you cannot teach – only the top class players have that kind of scoring ability. Another part of his game to have blossomed greatly is the assists. With already 11 this season (and many last year in setting up RvP), his crossing to players like Oliver Giroud has been a top quality service, the kind a striker loves. It’s like being put on a serving plate, making it virtually impossible to miss in some cases.
Since signing his future to Arsenal for the next 3 and half years, it’s like a weight has come off his shoulders. He is playing with newly released freedom that has definitely made him calmer and relaxed on the ball instead of in previous times in his career when he rushed or played lazy passes with little purpose. He has added extra strength and is definitely unafraid to get stuck in against tough Premiership sides, like Stoke last week for example. He seemed to enjoy the hard tackles and rough treatment, just getting back up and going back to work as per usual.
He’s clearly enjoying football and it’s a great sight to see. In life you have to give credit where it’s due, and Theo Walcott deserves a great deal of respect. He is evolving into the finished football product, the one Arsenal management and supporters have been hoping was hidden under his slender frame from the moment he burst on to the football scene. He really could turn into a high class footballer that for once (doesn’t happen often) the media hype will be backed-up by substance on the pitch.
Good luck Mr Walcott, you deserve this success.
Feel free to add comments below, or join thousands of other fans as they discuss the Beautiful Game at r/Football
Don’t forget to follow me on Twitter – @PintRunnethDry and the site – @LastWordOnSport
Check out some of my latest stories:
Gareth Bale: Top Class or Overhype?
England’s Young Lions
The Premiership’s Best 11, With a Twist!
Best Club Side in History, AC Milan 89 or Barca 11
Main photo credit: Ronnie Macdonald via photopin ccCenter Travis Swanson (Photo: Daniel Mears, Detroit News)
The Lions have ruled out center Travis Swanson for Sunday’s game against the Chicago Bears.
Swanson suffered a concussion last weekend against the Saints, although the symptoms didn’t manifest until after the 28-13 victory. The team is expected to go with rookie Graham Glasgow in Swanson’s place, with Laken Tomlinson moving back into the starting lineup at left guard.
In addition to Swanson, the Lions ruled eight players questionable — Defensive end Ziggy Ansah (ankle), safety Don Carey (hamstring), tight end Eric Ebron (knee), wide receiver Marvin Jones (quad), linebackers DeAndre Levy (knee) and Tahir Whitehead (knee) and running backs Theo Riddick (wrist) and Dwayne Washington (ankle).
Carey, Jones and Whitehead all sat out last weekend, while Levy is threatening to miss his 12th consecutive game.
The banged-up backfield opens the door for Joique Bell to potentially see some work in his return with the Lions, even though the team is uncertain what he has to offer.
“It’ll be fun to see, it’ll be fun to find out,” offensive coordinator Jim Bob Cooter said. “ Joique’s been around here for a while, we know him, you guys know him. Been a productive player in the league, excited to see how he is moving forward.”No American President Has Ever Addressed the United Nations This Way — And It’s About Time
RUSH: We go to Trump’s United Nations speech today, which was unlike any speech at the United Nations we have ever heard an American president give. John Bolton says this is the speech of Trump’s presidency. It is the speech of his political career. It was bold, and it left no doubts. He stood up for America first. And he put the United Nations in its place.
I’m sitting here, and I’m diligently doing show prep. I’m totally absorbed in what I’m doing, the Trump speech is on, and I’m listening out of the corner of my ear. And all of a sudden I hear “We will thoroughly destroy North –” I said, “Whoa,” and I rewound it there. What? What? What are we gonna do here? He said that we would thoroughly destroy North Korea if they don’t stop it, and called Kim Jong-un “Rocket Man” in the speech! I looked at the TV, I stopped my diligent show prep preparations, I looked at that, and I rewound that. If you’ve missed it, grab the audio sound bite 1 and 2 just to start.
I tell you, the United Nations has not seen anything like this. They looked like the Star Wars bar scene when the camera panned some of these delegates. Bibi Netanyahu I thought was gonna jack-in-the-box out of the seat with a standing ovation when Trump launched into Iran. It was one of the happiest I’ve ever seen an Israeli at the United Nations. Bibi Netanyahu could barely contain himself. Here is the first of the two sound bites to set this all up.
THE PRESIDENT: As president of the United States, I will always put America first, just like you as the leaders of your countries will always and should always put your countries first. (applause) The United States will forever be a great friend to the world, and especially to its allies. But we can no longer be taken advantage of or enter into a one-sided deal where the United States gets nothing in return. As long as I hold this office, I will defend America’s interests above all else.
RUSH: Nobody at the U.N. has ever been spoken to this way by an American president. They’ve all heard Trump say it on the campaign trail. They’ve all heard Trump say it, strains of it, variations of it in the White House, but no president has ever dared go to the sacred ground of the United Nations General Assembly and basically tell them they don’t matter when it comes to putting America first. That the world will not come first. This global movement, it will continue and we’ll be a part of it with our allies, but we are never not going to put America first. And Trump urged all of them to get serious, to band together and fight the bad guys, to fight the rogue regimes like the depraved Norks.
THE PRESIDENT: No one has shown more contempt for other nations and for the well-being of their own people than the depraved regime in North Korea. Now North Korea’s reckless pursuit of nuclear weapons and ballistic missiles threatens the entire world with unthinkable loss of human life. The United States has great strength and patience. But if it is forced to defend itself or its allies, we will have no choice but to totally destroy North Korea. “Rocket Man” is on a suicide mission for himself and for his regime. The United States is ready, willing, and able. But hopefully this will not be necessary.
RUSH: You don’t go to the United Nations and threaten to destroy another nation on the planet. It isn’t done. Well, I mean, in World War II, League of Nations, there might have been some allusions at some point, but in the modern era, this just doesn’t happen. I don’t care how depraved the regime is, because in the modern world depraved regimes are depraved because of the United States. We’re responsible.
As far as these eggheads at that place think, we are responsible for the problems in the world because we have an unfair amount of the world’s wealth, riches, treasure, and resources, and how do we get it? Why, we went over there and we stole everything we wanted. We have dominated, we have territorialized, and Trump even addressed that. He made the point that we have never conquered, that we have never made any military action for the purpose of seizing territory and holding it, and we have never sought to impose our way of thinking on anybody else because freedom is not an imposition. This stuff is not said. It needs to be said and it needed to have been said years ago, and it needed to be said consistently.
I’m sure I am not alone when I tell you I have long ago gotten fed up with being blamed for everything in this country, blamed for everything in the world as an American. That our wealth, that our prosperity, our superpower status is illegitimate because it’s unfairly acquired, which is a crock. We have earned what we produce. We feed the world. We technologically advance the world. We share medical discoveries and all kinds of other scientific discoveries with the rest of the world. We’re first on the scene of natural disasters all over the world.
And what do we get? We get jealousy, we get envy, and we get derision. It’s why I said long ago my foreign aid policy would be very simple: You’re not with us, you don’t get a dime. You’re with us, you thank us, you love us, you promote us, you get all the foreign aid you need. If, in the process of getting foreign aid, you start criticizing us, you get put on the excrement list. You’re on it automatically for five years. It takes five years of good behavior, adulation, love and devotion to the U.S. to get off that list and back on the foreign aid list.
Now, Trump didn’t say that, but, folks, he got pretty close to spelling out what the United States is, who we are, the goodness of our people, the greatness of our way of life, our decency, our philanthropy, our sharing. And he said it’s time that the United States stop being taken for granted and so forth. And just like the rest of you in this crowd put your places first; I and we are going to put America first.
You know the difference? Americans putting America first is how the rest of the world elevates at the same time. It’s no different than your family. When you as a breadwinner or half of the bread winning team in your family, when you engage in behavior to increase your family’s standard of living, what happens? Even the people not working, your kids, their standard of living benefits and increases. Same thing here, just in a much larger scale because the United States is the greatest force for good the world has ever seen.
The United States is the greatest force for uplift, for positive reinforcement, that the world has ever seen. And that is why we are constantly rebuked, constantly derided, constantly criticized. We are looked at as the world’s piggy bank. Every United Nations policy is, in one way or another, a scheme to get the hands of the world into our back pocket. Climate change, make the U.S. pay for it. Whatever the issue, the reality and the purpose is always to fleece the Treasury of the United States of America. And Trump said all of this in his own words today, in a 40-minute speech at the U.N.
BREAK TRANSCRIPT
RUSH: Here’s sound bite number 28. This is John Bolton on the Fox News Channel this morning after Trump’s speech to the United Nations. Bill Hemmer asked him what he thought of it.
BOLTON: This was the best speech of the Trump presidency, in my view. I think it’s as clear and direct as it’s possible to be. I think it’s safe to say in the entire history of the United Nations, there has never been a more straightforward criticism of the behavior, the unacceptable behavior of other member states. There are a lot of people in the U.N. who have never heard anything like that from an American president.
RUSH: Exactly as I tell you. You just don’t talk this way. This is not diplo-speak. It is not diplomacy, there was none of that. It was just right between the eyes. And if there are any of you out there — and I doubt that there are many — but if there are any of you out there beginning to get worried — and I confess I am over this Paris Climate Accord business; I still haven’t figured out what’s going on with that. And you know my concerns about that. But this speech goes a long way to allaying anything. This was Trump of the inauguration speech. This was the Trump from the campaign.
And, by the way, I think that’s what the media’s gonna say. “He didn’t really mean this. This was just red meat because he knows he’s losing his base. He knows he’s losing the nationalist, populist base, so he needed to throw out some red meat.” And they will totally be wrong about that. But that’s what they’re gonna say. Many of them will. “He didn’t mean it. It was risky, and it was dangerous. You don’t go to the U.N. and say things like this that you don’t mean. He was just trying to feed his base ’cause he’s aware his base is abandoning him.”
His base is not abandoning him. That’s a dream in the minds of many in the Drive-By Media. Listen to this, back to audio sound bite number three. Trump signaled pretty strongly that the Iranian deal is not gonna last.
THE PRESIDENT: The Iranian government masks a corrupt dictatorship behind the false guise of a democracy. It has turned a wealthy country with a rich history and culture into an economically depleted rogue state whose chief exports are violence, bloodshed, and chaos. We cannot let a murderous regime continue these destabilizing activities while building dangerous missiles. And we cannot abide by an agreement if it provides cover for the eventual construction of a nuclear program. The Iran deal was one of the worst and most one-sided transactions the United States has ever entered into. Frankly, that deal is an embarrassment to the United States, and I don’t think you’ve heard the last of it, believe me.
RUSH: “Believe me.” Even that speech pattern there, that’s off prompter. You don’t go off prompter at the U.N. General Assembly. You don’t even go off prompter for punctuation. If there’s a comma there, you pause. But I guarantee you there was no “believe me” on the prompter. There probably wasn’t even “and I don’t think you’ve heard the last of it” on the prompter.
Now, an obvious question: Trump renewed the deal. He has not pulled out of it. Now, the thinking on this is that the Iranians are cheating on the deal and will continue to cheat on the deal, which will then provide the legal cover, the opportunity to pull out of the deal.
So Trump came down hard on the Iranian nuclear deal, as he has been, I mean, since he got in the campaign, campaign speeches, rally speeches, even remarks that he’s made after having been inaugurated. But yet when a chance presented itself to cancel the deal and pull out of it, he didn’t. But he continues to throw down markers to suggest that he will and certainly did here.
Embarrassment to the United States? I mean, that is hello Barack Hussein Obama. You were an embarrassment to the United States. This is the worst thing, an embarrassment. That’s a direct comment aimed at the former president, Barack Hussein Obama. So we have many more sound bites from this and ongoing analysis of what happened here. I can’t wait to actually characterize the speech in more broad terms, and we’ll do that after another obscene profit break here at the bottom of the hour.
BREAK TRANSCRIPT
RUSH: The reason why this speech has caused such a reaction, and you might think, “Rush, it’s obvious.” Yeah, but it needs to be stated. Reality is much more compelling than narrative. Hard, cold truths, honest, uplifting truths, whatever kind of truths are far more valuable, far more long-lasting, and far more compelling than spin, than narratives, than the usual say-nothing diplomacy for which there is always endless plaudits.
Obama never said a thing at the United Nations other than to signal the world why he wasn’t being more authoritarian. I remember one specific Obama speech (imitating Obama), “Why didn’t we just put that man that made the video that caused Benghazi in jail? Why didn’t we do? Well, we did, but we can’t because of our laws.” I’ll never forget it. He’s explaining to these eggheads in that room why the guy that made the video that caused Benghazi, which of course was a lie itself, why we didn’t draw and quarter the guy.
He made it sound like the rest of the world thought that we were going soft on this video maker, that we should have been really harsh, and Obama said, “Well, I can’t because of our laws,” as though the world doesn’t know of our Constitution and freedom. But it was almost like Obama was explaining to fellow authoritarians why he couldn’t do what he really wanted to do. “Because of our laws.”
Anyway, from mentally stable and healthy adults, reality is always, always going to be much more magnetic and compelling than narrative. It shouldn’t be a trigger. Reality should not be a trigger, but it is. Imagine the horror when all these members of the United Nations General Assembly, leftist viewers, and the Drive-By Media, when they heard Trump say, “The USA has been among the greatest forces for good in the history of the world,” can you imagine their reaction?
They don’t think that, folks. Actually, you know, I think most world leaders fully understand why the U.S. is great, and they hate it, because they’ll never allow what has happened here to happen in their countries. They live with a delusion that they, as dictators, be they benevolent or mean-spirited and brutal, can bring about the same kind of prosperity that has happened in the U.S. They will never give up their dictatorial tyranny. They will continue to believe that socialism and communism is the elixir for the masses. They’ll go to their graves believing it.
They look at the United States, they see freedom, liberty, the spirit that is created by entrepreneurism, you name it, and they are jealous. But don’t doubt for a moment they understand it. They just don’t like it. None of the world leaders I’m talking about would ever give the people of their countries the opportunity to actually live free as we do in this country, because they would not trust elections to elect them.
The United Nations is the best illustration I can think of that the main problem in the world is the unequal distribution of freedom, the unequal distribution of capitalism, the overdistribution of socialism and communism. But the fact the United States has been among the greatest forces for good in the history of the world is self-evident. It’s as self-evident as the value of the combustion engine, internal combustion engine. And yet it is denied. It is denied by people who don’t dare allow it in their countries but yet who cling to a belief that the United States economy and overall existence can be equaled or approached, even under socialism and communism. And the American left in this country believes the same thing.
In this speech today, Trump made the American case for sovereignty at the United Nations. And he did it brilliantly. He spoke of renewal, a renewal of spirit and commitment to people, sovereign individuals, a renewal of commitment to peace and prosperity. He spoke of refugees today, and from that portion of the speech you can kind of get an idea of what he thinks also of illegal immigration. Details on that coming up. We’re still involved in the broad overview here.
Trump said: “The American story is the story of what is possible when people take ownership of their future.” You can’t take ownership of your future if you’re not free. You cannot own your future if you do not have basic liberty. And this is the true American exceptionalism. Even today as we speak, the majority of the world does not know liberty or freedom. Certainly not as we know it. And if you really want to get down to what American exceptionalism is, that’s it.
It’s not that we’re better than anybody. It’s that we have the chance to be because we have 300-plus million people who are free to pursue their ambitions, however they wish, to be the best they want. And with that many pursuing it, it doesn’t take very many to hit their goals for this to be a great country. Not everybody is gonna reach their goals. Not everybody’s gonna be the best they can be. Not everybody is gonna pursue excellence, but in a universe of 300 million people, enough people are that you’re gonna have a great place. And the rest will feed off of those exceptional people who do so.
But in nations where no such liberty is permitted, in nations where no such freedom exists, there cannot be people taking ownership of their future and making the most of it. The state controls everything and in fact limits on the upside the results that people are permitted. There were no platitudes here. Some people might think so. But this instead was a speech of blunt truths. The truth about North Korea, the truth about Iran. “Rocket Man’s” on a suicide mission. (laughing)
I did a double-take. I rewound the DVR to hear it again. Memorable, true, will be discussed, criticized. But it will be remembered as a blunt truth. And Trump laid into Obama the Iranian deal, one of the worst and most one-sided transactions the U.S. has ever entered into. The deal is an embarrassment to the United States. Bravo!
The Clintons and Obama have deliberately misled Americans about these brutal regimes, believing we can do business with ’em, believing that who are we to say they shouldn’t have what we have? Because Hillary and Obama have no concept of good guys and bad guys. And if they do, we’re in the bad guy group because of our racist, sexist, homophobic, and now transphobic past.
Trump laid into the soft war on ISIS. He said, “In fact, our country’s achieved more against ISIS in the latest eight months than it has in many, many years combined.” That’s not reported. People may not know how true that is. Trump laid into dictators. And the camera caught real-time reactions among the dictators as Trump was laying into them. They were a captive audience, and Trump took advantage.
He laid into Cuba. He laid into Venezuela, both places the Hollywood left believes are heaven. He laid into Venezuela. I did. I thought when he was laying into Venezuela, I thought I was in part listening to myself. He laid into Venezuela and Maduro by name. He said, “The problem in Venezuela is not that socialism has been poorly implemented, but that it has been faithfully implemented.”
That’s almost an echo of an Undeniable Truth of Life here at the EIB Network. The problem is not that socialism has been poorly implemented, but that socialism has been successfully and faithfully implemented. And he laid into bureaucracies. Trump laid into the United Nations while praising them at the same time. He laid into them while thanking them for some of the microscopic, great work that they have done.
He reminded them of the disproportionate share of costs, i.e., dues that the United States has incurred, and he said that that unfair burden would be a good deal if the United States served its stated purpose. But it doesn’t. It was a tour de force, ladies and gentlemen, for liberty and for freedom, ordered liberty, not dictators, not bureaucracies, and other groups of assorted elitists.
And it was delivered directly to members of the United Nations, many of whom reject every principle that Trump laid out. Slammed socialism, targeted rogue regimes, threatened to destroy “Rocket Man” and North Korea. And, by the way, there was considerable applause when he was tearing into Iran and the Iranian nuclear deal.
BREAK TRANSCRIPT
RUSH: We have one more sound bite from Trump on the speech. Remember, now, he’s speaking at the U.N. General Assembly, which is essentially a room full of socialist and communists.
THE PRESIDENT: The problem in Venezuela is not that socialism has been poorly implemented, but that socialism has been faithfully implemented. From the Soviet Union to Cuba to Venezuela, wherever true socialism or communism has been adopted, it has delivered anguish and devastation and failure. Those who preach the tenets of these discredited ideologies only contribute to the continued suffering of the people who live under these cruel systems.
RUSH: Which they know. They know people suffer. They know they have to build walls to keep people in. They have to build political prisons to deal with people who dissent from the approved way of thinking. They know all this. (interruption) You were stunned he said this to their faces about the failure of socialism? This has been done. Presidents have attacked socialism and communism at the United Nations, naming the nations.
I mean, Reagan was all over the Soviet Union. If you recall, Reagan mentioned the evil empire and the Soviet Union frequently, including at the United Nations. The Trump point here is that the suffering of the people that live under these systems, these brutal dictators know that. The idea that they really live in some fantasy world where they believe that down the road this is all gonna lead to a greater prosperity and economy than the United States, that’s just cockeyed.
Now, I think they believe in Marxism in the theory, but it’s never worked. It’s never worked anywhere. Just like American liberalism has never really worked anywhere. And American liberals on the failure of Soviet communism said, “Well, just another example of the wrong people being in charge. It is the preferred system. They didn’t have enough money and didn’t have the right people.”
That’s why I contend to you — and I did back then — I contend to you that the people that voted for Obama, the true believers, there’s a legitimate reason for them to be mad. They had eight years. They had eight years, and Obama implemented quite a lot of what they believe, and it didn’t accomplish what they all believed. They had to witness the on-site failure of socialism in so many different ways while Obama was president. You’d be mad too.
If you’re a conservative and you believe in conservatism and some conservative president comes along and implements it, doesn’t work, you’d be mad too. Except it does. It works every time it’s tried. And the world is filled with such history.
Okay we start on then phones in Washington. This is Daniel, you’re first, and welcome. Great to have you here.
CALLER: Rush, thank you so much. I’ve been listening to you since 1990 when I was only 15, and I am just elated by this speech. It is the first time since Reagan, really, that a U.S. president has quashed the fears of the American people. I will never accept that it’s part of modern society we have to live in fear of terrorists, we have to live in fear of criminals, we have to live in fear of nuclear war from North Korea.
You know, our parents, my parents grew up with that fear. They dove under their desks when there were air ride sirens going off. People don’t want to be afraid. Not when we have military superiority, and not when we have moral certitude. And President Trump addressed those fears, told the American people not to be afraid, warned our enemies. And I think this will grow his base from the average people who don’t want to be afraid. This will make President Trump more popular.
RUSH: You know, it’s an interesting take. I have been wondering about that. You know, you’re going to have people that are ambivalent about Trump that will watch this speech, and some of them, look, I have a piece Heather Mac Donald has written. In fact, I’ll lead the next hour with it, in a few short minutes. She’s a great writer, Manhattan Institute, done great, exemplary work on writing the truth both in columns and books about American policing and how all the allegations, Black Lives Matter, and the cops are racist and love shooting Africa Americans. It’s all BS, and she’s documented with scientific fact.
She has a piece in the Wall Street Journal that you will not believe. You will not believe. And the reason I point it out to you is that, you know, ambivalent people toward Trump are gonna hear this speech, and some of them, if they’re on college campus, the likelihood they’re gonna be scared to death. They’re gonna think Trump started a war today. They think this kind of talk, “That offends people, that makes people mad, oh, my God, we’re not safe, they’re gonna die.” It’s gonna have that effect on some.
On others the effect will be, as you said, “Hey, I like this. Damn right. Damn right. I’m sick and tired of having to act like we’re in defensive |
with this deck today, with some interesting and close games, so I figured I’d toss you guys an upload.
Hey Guys!
This is Midiknight again, today I am presenting the deck that I went and 5-0’d the Marksman Gauntlet to with my Cutsesy Izanami Icon!
This is a very control oriented deck where you will be defending your Summoning Stone for a few turns, but if you need instructions on how to pilot, please watch the attached video, as you will see 5 very different matches as I quest for my Icon!
There is one swap card i used in the deck, and that was Shackle/Armaments. I feel both of these cards are swappable depending on your Meta.
If you have any questions, please comment on youtube video, and if you appreciate the content please subscribe, like, and comment my youtube comment, as it is what could pay the internet bill in the future!
Thank you!
– MidiknightThe shooting has a heavy, hard-hitting feel.
There's not a lot of depth in Rage's bone-dry wasteland, but there's plenty of variety. Coming from id Software, the company that's brought you two decades' worth of first-person shooter after straight-ahead first-person shooter, that's worth noting. The core shooting in Rage isn't especially original, but it is highly entertaining, and the shooting intermingles with arcade-style racing action and a thin layer of quasi-role-playing hooks to give you plenty to do in between the main story levels. This is meat-and-potatoes action game design with a few antiquated quirks, but it does what it does well enough--and looks legitimately stunning while doing it--to deliver a satisfying experience, all told.
It's impossible not to compare Rage to Fallout 3, not least because both games share the same publisher. But either way, the premise here is awfully familiar: Just prior to a global catastrophe, humanity buries a few lucky survivors in underground capsules, to emerge some time later and rebuild society. Sound familiar? Credit at least goes to id for coming up with an original apocalypse, in this case the real-life asteroid Apophis that may actually strike the Earth in 2036. A century after the asteroid strike, you're a cybernetically enhanced member of that program who emerges to find a world that's been rebuilt out of scrap and duct tape, with various bandit clans controlling different parts of the wasteland, a few good-hearted folks trying to eke out a hard-scrabble existence in between, and a cliched, mechanized regime keeping oppressive watch over the whole thing.
There's a staggering amount of detail packed into the game's environments.
There's room even in a familiar premise like this to explore new dramatic ideas, but Rage plays it as straight as possible with its story elements. Every character wears his or her intentions on their sleeves, and there's only one minor wrinkle in the plot that seems like it might go somewhere interesting, but then only seems to set up a potential sequel. The voice cast, featuring John Goodman leading a legion of familiar-sounding voiceover pros, at least does an admirable job bringing character to the people you interact with, and even if the things they're saying are usually bare justification to get you to the next action stage, it's at least a joy to watch them say it. Every line of dialogue in the game has a unique animation routine attached to it; the characters gesticulate and emote with the kind of detail that suggests a bunch of animators poring over every dialogue recording and mimicking the final output in a mirror to get those subtle human movements just right. Oddly enough, that detail actually goes a long way toward bringing the world to life and drawing you in. It's a minor point, but it also helps that the small number of characters in each friendly town have a habit of moving around a lot between missions. You don't really notice how odd it is that most video game characters stand in the exact same spot for the duration of an entire game until you see them break free and actually go stand in a different place once in a while.
Rage's driving combat is loose and fast-paced.
Anyway, aside from the initial setup, Rage is not Fallout. In fact, it's almost Fallout's direct opposite, strong in the areas where Fallout falters--fast action, lush visuals--and weak at doing what Fallout does well, which is character customization, exploration, and storytelling. You get the first hint of this the second you step out of your capsule and into the wasteland. Remember exiting Vault 101 and slowly panning across the vast landscape, and all the potential for adventure it held? Here, you're not outside 30 seconds before John Goodman is shooting a mutant off of you and yelling at you to get in his buggy so he can whisk you away to your first proper mission. The game takes a similarly fast-paced, streamlined approach to the weapon lineup (essentially the same one you've come to expect from all id games) and the crafting and looting, which respectively have you building useful combat items out of the component parts that are useful, and selling all the junk that isn't. It's not a bad thing these systems are so simplified, it's just the focus of the game to keep things moving expediently from one action sequence to the next without leaving you bogged down in menus.
Nearly all of id's games have just been shooters--run forward, blast everything that gets in your way, repeat in next level--and that sequence of events still forms the backbone of Rage. But instead of merely presenting a linear chain of levels joined end to end with loading screens, those levels are now connected more dynamically with a wasteland hub environment that you traverse in your Mad Max-style dilapidated vehicles. In between the story levels--which still roll out in one specific order--you can do some quick circuit races to earn upgrades for your cars, pick up some mercenary jobs from a bulletin board, or play a diverse little assortment of cash-generating minigames that includes a surprisingly complex, Magic: The Gathering-style card battler that ties into cards you collect throughout the game. Out in the wasteland, there's not much to discover outside of the places the main and side missions send you, though there's satisfying combat to be done with the local bandits, and there are a few trick jumps to hit here and there. Many, though not nearly all, of the side missions yield benefits like new item recipes that help flesh out the gameplay a bit.
Would you believe the minigames are actually a lot of fun?
I'm glad these diversionary activities are there, because they're all just entertaining enough to cleanse your palate if you want a break from the shooting missions. But still, shooting stuff is your primary activity, so it's a good thing Rage's combat hits as hard as it does. Par for an id game, all the weapons have a heavy, powerful feel, made a lot more pronounced by the varied, over-the-top ways enemies react to getting hit by them. The game has some of the best ragdoll physics in recent memory; the spindly lesser mutants will flip head over heels from a squarely placed shotgun blast, while the human enemies will believably go flying over a rail or slam face first into a wall if you hit them right. It's all kind of silly, action-movie stuff that probably won't do much for you if you aren't in the mood for a traditional shooter, but if you are, it's immensely satisfying. I got a lot of entertainment value out of the combat since all the weapons have multiple ammo types that are especially effective in specific situations, and engineering items like stationary turrets, a spider robot straight out of Doom 3, and the boomerang-like bladed wingstick give you a lot of options to play with. A lot of thought clearly went into the best interface to manage all of these weapons, ammo types, and gadgets. If I told you that you use both shoulder buttons, both analog sticks, and the d-pad to do so, you'd be justified in thinking it might be unwieldy. But it's actually quick and elegant. Most of the missions ultimately boil down to you shooting your way to the end of a map to hit a switch or pick up an item, but at least getting there is a lot of fun.
It's good at what it does, but Rage isn't without flaws. It lacks a modern checkpoint system, and only creates an auto-save the last time you loaded into a level, meaning you'll replay an entire mission if you die without saving in the middle. You'll probably only get burned by that system once before you learn to start making hard saves frequently, but man is it frustrating when it happens. Some of the enemy groups are also kind of ridiculous. Each clan of bandits is composed of two or three of the exact same guy, and all of them use exactly one voice actor per group, so you get the same silly British or Russian accent coming from a big mass of enemies that all look the same. The game has the sensibilities of a comic book or, you know, a video game, so that's not really worth getting hung up on, but it stood out to me initially.
Alternate ammo types and engineering doohickeys give you a lot of combat options.
Even if Rage were the worst game to come out in a long while, it would still arguably be the best-looking one. The sheer complexity of texture and detail packed into every one of the game's environments is nothing short of staggering, especially in the two town hubs that you'll return to again and again between missions. The vast richness of the wasteland also can't be overstated. This is one of the best-looking games available on consoles, as good-looking as most any Unreal Engine game, yet it runs at double the frame rate of those games. Seeing a game on aging console hardware that looks this good and runs this smoothly is almost surreal. To be fair, in all three versions, there's a noticeable amount of detailed texture pop-in when you quickly look in different directions, but it's only something you really notice when you look for it and try to make it appear; it doesn't stand out much when you're playing the game like you normally would. Setting that one quirk aside, you really need to see this game in motion, in person, to appreciate just how good it actually looks.
All three versions of the game have some sort of technical quirk, unfortunately. The 360 version looks better than the PS3 one and runs at a rock-solid 60 frames per second, but it ships on three discs and dropped me to the dashboard with an error every time I tried to swap them, requiring me to start the new disc back up and load a save to continue. The one-disc PS3 version suffers from a slightly lower (though still fully acceptable) frame rate at times, and the texture pop-in is slower and thus more prominent there. And, mindbogglingly, the PC version launched in a miserable state that rendered it unplayable on ATI cards, though a matter of hours later an emergency set of drivers seems to have things working fine on both brands of GPU. The PC version is naturally the sharpest one (though I saw an inordinate amount of tearing on our office PC setup), and it plays fine with the good old keyboard and mouse, though it's a testament to how good the console versions look and how well they play on a gamepad that the PC version is only marginally better in general.
Seriously, just look at this game.
You'll probably spend between 10 and 15 hours on the campaign here if you try to do everything there is to do; I ended up on the high end of that range due to obsessively looking for collectibles and, honestly, gawking repeatedly at how damn pretty everything is. There's also a decent two-player co-op mode that mostly repurposes levels from the story mode but changes the enemy distribution and tries to give the missions some context by couching them in light back story from the main game. (One mission tells how three giant stuffed mutant heads came to adorn the wall of the local watering hole, for instance.) There's also a four-player driving mode with a variety of objectives that lets you rank up and unlock new weapons and better cars. Though I had a good time with the driving combat in the campaign, I didn't have much desire to keep doing it against human players, so I didn't spend much time there. The co-op is a bigger draw, at least until you play through the handful of missions available.
Over the first couple of hours, you may find yourself coming to terms with the style of game Rage actually is, rather than the type of game you may have expected it to be based on some of its peripheral design elements. A deep and sprawling experience it's not, but as a focused, directed shooter with a few other things to do between the shooting, it hits the right notes. And damn does it look good doing it.Aaron Eckhart has signed on to play Beach Boys drummer Dennis Wilson in helmer Randy Miller’s indie music biopic “The Drummer.”
Miller and Jody Savin, who were behind 2008’s “Bottle Shock,” are producing through their banner Unclaimed Freight Prods., along with music industry vet Brad Rosenberger. Savin wrote the script.
Eckhart, who recently landed the lead role in Lionsgate’s “I, Frankenstein,” had been in negotiations to play Wilson for several months. He will serve as exec producer and record his own renditions from Wil-son’s solo album “Pacific Ocean Blue,” released in 1977.
“We’d been trying to figure out who the right person would be to fill this role,” Miller told Variety. “It’s quite a demanding role so it had to be a great actor who could sing.”
Pic, which is skedded to start shooting next year during late spring-early summer, chronicles the last six years of Wilson’s life, before his death in 1983. “There’s a discovery about Dennis with this film,” Miller said. “Everybody knows Brian, but nobody really knows Dennis’ music.”
The filmmakers have secured an overall deal for rights to the music, with two of Wilson’s children, Carl and Jennifer, co-producing.
Jonathan Gardner of Cohen/Gardner negotiated the deal on behalf of the producers, as well as CAA’s Tracey Brennan and David Matlof of Hirsch/Wallerstein for Eckhart.
Thesp recently finished shooting the lead role as an ex-CIA agent in “The Expatriate” and stars with Johnny Depp in the upcoming “The Rum Diary.” He’s repped by CAA.A man reads a sign at the Revel Casino Hotel in Atlantic City notifying the public about its closure. Thomson Reuters
(Reuters) - Brookfield Asset Management BAMa.TO BAM.N won the auction for Atlantic City's bankrupt Revel Casino Hotel with a $110 million bid, said two sources familiar with the situation.
The company outbid Florida real estate developer Glenn Straub, who did not submit a superior bid by 5:00 a.m. ET, one source said.
Revel Casino, which cost $2.4 billion to build, opened in 2012 and closed on Sept. 2 after filing for its second bankruptcy in June. It was meant to be a Las Vegas-style resort, but its fine dining, striking design and entertainment did not catch on in a city that relies on bus tours and buffets.
Straub qualified as the backup bidder at $95.4 million, which would take the place of Brookfield if the Canadian company cannot close the sale.
Brookfield's spokesman, Revel's spokeswoman and Straub's attorney did not immediately respond to a request for comment.
Revel Casino had agreed to use Straub's initial $90 million cash bid to set the benchmark for other potential buyers. Straub had said he wanted to create a university at the site to attract the world's brightest minds to tackle social problems such as hunger.
Revel agreed to pay Straub a $3 million fee for acting as the initial bidder if he did not win the auction.
On Monday, Straub told Reuters he would challenge the results if he lost the auction because the process lacked transparency.
A hearing to approve the sale is scheduled for Tuesday, Oct. 7 in the U.S. Bankruptcy Court in Camden, New Jersey, where Judge Gloria Burns is overseeing the case.
Four Atlantic City casinos have closed this year as neighboring states have embraced gambling to pump up government revenue. The city had 12 casinos at the start of 2014.
Trump Entertainment Resorts Inc, which filed for bankruptcy last month, has said it could close its Taj Mahal casino in Atlantic City as soon as next month.
The case is In Re: Revel AC Inc., U.S. Bankruptcy Court, District of New Jersey, No. 14-22654.
(Reporting by Tanya Agrawal in Bangalore and Tom Hals in Delaware; Editing by Kirti Pandey)
AP Images
(Reporting by Tanya Agrawal in Bangalore and Tom Hals in Delaware; Editing by Kirti Pandey)CARSON, Calif. (Monday, Aug. 11, 2014) – The LA Galaxy have acquired forward Alan Gordon from the San Jose Earthquakes in exchange for allocation money, the club announced today. Gordon, originally drafted by the Galaxy in the 2004 MLS SuperDraft, has logged 180 appearances while scoring 39 goals and adding 26 assists during his 11 years in Major League Soccer. Per MLS and club policy, specific terms of the deal were not disclosed.
“Alan is a proven MLS player who adds another scoring threat to our roster going forward,” said LA Galaxy Head Coach and General Manager Bruce Arena. “We are pleased to welcome him back as a member of the Galaxy.”
A Southern California native, Gordon has been a member of the San Jose Earthquakes since 2011. During his time with the club, Gordon scored 23 times in MLS, including a career-high 13 goals and seven assists in 2012 that helped lead the Earthquakes to winning the Supporters’ Shield. Prior to his time in San Jose, Gordon had stints with Chivas USA and Toronto FC.
Drafted fourth overall by the Galaxy in the 2004 MLS SuperDraft, Gordon spent a majority of the year with the A-League Portland Timbers, where he earned 2004 A-League Rookie of the Year honors after helping his team capture an A-League title while leading the league with 17 goals. As a member of the Galaxy (2005-2010), Gordon scored 16 goals and added 12 assists in over 80 appearances. He was a part of the squads that captured an MLS Cup (2005), Lamar Hunt U.S. Open Cup (2005) and two Western Conference championships (2005, 2009).
On the international level, Gordon has represented the U.S. Men’s National team, earning his first call up when he was named to head coach Jürgen Klinsmann’s roster for a 2012 friendly against Mexico at Estadio Azteca in Mexico City, Mexico. He made his first appearance for the national team later that year, providing Eddie Johnson with the game-winning assist in stoppage time to earn a 2-1 victory on the road in a 2014 FIFA World Cup qualifying match against Antigua and Barbuda. Gordon was also a member of the 2013 CONCACAF Gold Cup roster.One of the casualties of the sexual revolution has been the love that is friendship.
The Greek language has several different words for love. The love between friends is phileo, and is different from eros (physical, sensual love), storge (family love), and agape (selfless, sacrificial, unconditional love of God or another). Modern English sadly lacks such distinctions. However, in the past we were pretty well able navigate the different types of love and not read inaccurate motivations into them.
But in this hypersexualized world our capacity to distinguish among them has largely been lost and “love” between two human beings is simply presumed to mean erotic attraction.
Consider the awkward moment that might well be generated if one man were to say of another “I love that guy!” Or if a man says to another as he punches him on the shoulder, “Love you, man!” Even two (blood) brothers are almost forbidden to say to each other “I love you.” These once-common expressions from men might today create an awkward moment at best, perhaps arousing suspicions of homosexuality or unwanted advances.
Women also suffer. Consider the following incident, related by Denise C. McAllister in a recent piece in The Federalist.
Bye, I love you!” I said as I hung up the phone. My 15-year-old daughter was in the car at the time and asked who I was talking to. “My friend, Leslie, from Texas.” “A woman?” she said. “That’s just weird, mom.” I laughed. “No it’s not. She’s my friend and I do love her very much. Why shouldn’t I tell her that?” My daughter just shook her head and said, “It’s kinda gay, don’t you think?”
“No, it’s not gay … I have friends who captivate me with their beauty and intelligence. I tell them so. I tell them I think they’re beautiful and amazing. It’s nothing sexual. It’s phileo.”
“What’s phileo?” she asked. “It’s friendship love,” I explained. “It’s passionate, but not like erotic love. It’s wonderful and stimulating. It’s probably the best kind of love when you really experience it, but so few of us do.” She shook her head again. “Mom, you’re weird.”
Ms. McAllister goes on to lament,
I guess I am kind of weird. I confess: I’m very passionate about my friends. But am I the abnormal one, or is there something wrong with our society? My daughter isn’t unusual, and her response was pretty typical. Many people have that reaction to women who are passionate about their friends—and even more so for men!
Instead of friendship being noble, nonromantic, and normal, it has become the exception … [Friendship love is] a kind of love we desperately need in our lives—passionate, nonsexual love.
Anthony Esolen, writing in his book Defending Marriage, expresses the same concern regarding the demise of the love of friendship, but focuses more on its impact on men. Esolen begins by recalling the love of friendship between David and Jonathan in the Bible:
Your love to me was finer than the love of women,” laments David in a public song, when he learns of the death of his friend Jonathan.
Observing that such language (quite common, normal, and non-homosexual in the past) today shocks people, Esolen then ponders,
How have we come to this pass? For corrupted language has driven out the natural. We no longer have words to describe these friendships, or even conceive of them …
Friendship and the signs upon which it most subsist are in a bad way … The sexual revolution has nearly killed male friendship … beyond drinking and watching sports. (pp. 65-66)
He goes on to describe the mechanism by which hypersexualizing and “celebrating” aberrant sexual behavior has led to a loss of innocence. Once-innocent words and behaviors are now charged with meanings that are far from innocent; suspicion is everywhere. Esolen writes,
The bad behavior condoned is [now] suspected everywhere … At the same time, the defiant promotion of homosexuality makes the natural and once powerful friendships among boys [and men] virtually impossible (p. 69).
Thus the libertine views meant to “free” a small minority of men to openly celebrate disordered sexual passions, restricts most other men and hinders their ability to even speak of the love of friendship let alone develop deep (non-sexual) male friendships. If they do develop such friendships, the result is often awkward and leads to many untoward suspicions. It is largely the same with women now as well.
Esolen proposes the following analogy:
Imagine a world where the taboo [of incest] has been broken, and is loudly and defiantly celebrated. [Now imagine] your wife’s unmarried brother [putting] his hand on your daughter shoulder … [or] a father hugging his teenaged daughter … That gesture, once innocent, now means something (p. 63).
In a hypersexualized world, nothing is innocent. Denise McAllister makes the same point in her article and also adds some other causes:
The problem with our modern culture is friendship has been corrupted. C.S Lewis says it began with the age of sentimentality and romanticism … with its return to nature and exaltation of sentiment, instinct, and the “dark gods in the blood.” … A culture riding the wave of passion abandoned phileo for eros, and the effects on society have been devastating in ways people don’t begin to understand …
Puritanism and Victorian sensibilities have also played a role in friendship’s decline. Puritanism put a damper on passions as if they are the seat of evil within the soul … This tight control on feelings seeped into our culture, worsened by Victorian aloofness … Posture, decorum, and propriety put space even in the most intimate associations …
The sexual revolution, [is] a reaction to America’s puritanical attitudes. Everything became about sex, and this sexualization of our culture has become more intense over time. Just look at advertising … Everything is about sex. We’re saturated with it.
The effect of these two warring attitudes—Puritanism and sexualization—has had a distorting effect on friendship. On the one hand, people don’t feel free to show emotions. On the other, when they do, those feelings are sexualized. The more friendship is misunderstood and ignored, the more people will identify as homosexual and bisexual.
The more we condition our perceptions in a sexual way and the more children are exposed to sex even before they develop meaningful friendships, the less likely they will be able to separate healthy nonsexual feelings from sexual ones. Sex will become the defining feature of all their feelings. Eros will have slain phileo (op. cit.).
Anthony Esolen agrees. While not excluding the issue among women his chapter focused more on men and he concludes:
On three Greek bonds of love all cultures depend: the love between man and woman in marriage; the love between a mother and her child; and the camaraderie among men, a bond that used to be strong enough to move mountains; the first two have suffered greatly; the third has almost ceased to exist (op. cit.).
The demise of friendship is serious; it has deprived many of us of one of the more essential ingredients for life. Friends are not the same as acquaintances. True friends know almost everything about each other. Friendship involves deep sharing, loyalty, honesty, and commitment.
The ancient philosophers often spoke of the love of friendship as being deeper and greater than romantic love. Romantic love (a love that our culture overemphasizes in relation to marriage) is rife with tension, elevated feelings, and quick resentments. It is complex to say the least. Friendship is often less tense, more honest, and less easily offended. Friends can often be powerfully truthful in ways that romantic lovers cannot. The ancient philosophers had some of this in mind when they spoke of the love of friendship in a very elevated way:
Seneca said, “Friendship always benefits; love sometimes injures.” Euripides said, “Life has no blessing like a prudent friend.” Plautus said, “Nothing but heaven itself is better than a friend who is really a friend.” And speaking of the piercing truth of true friendship, Plutarch said, “I don’t need a friend who changes when I change and who nods when I nod; my shadow does that much better.”
Scripture praises friendship in places too numerous to mention, but here are just a few:
Oil and perfume make the heart glad, So a man’s counsel is sweet to his friend (Prov 27:9). A friend loves at all times, And a brother is born for adversity (Prov 17:17). A man of many acquaintances may be ruined, but there is a friend who sticks closer than a brother (Prov 18:24). Let those who are acquaintances to you be many, but one in a thousand your confidant … Faithful friends are a sturdy shelter; whoever finds one finds a treasure. Faithful friends are beyond price, no amount can balance their worth. Faithful friends are life-saving medicine; those who fear God will find them. Those who fear the Lord enjoy stable friendship (Sir 6:6, 14-17).
Do not underestimate the need to reestablish in our culture a healthy notion of friendship and the love of friends. As Anthony Esolen points out, strong, healthy, loyal friendships are a pillar of culture. Yet the demise of friendship and friendship love (phileo) is well-advanced today.
Some may object, saying, “That’s not true; I have lots of friends.” Perhaps you are an exception. But be clear that an acquaintance is not the same as a friend. A friend knows almost everything about you. A friend is someone with whom you can be yourself. A friend is able to affect the very core of your life through consolation and rebuke alike.
The loss of friendship and of our ability to speak openly of loving our friends is yet another way that the sexual revolution has wreaked havoc on us. Waving the banner of freedom, the revolution has actually eclipsed our freedom. By sexualizing almost everything, the revolution has sullied the innocence necessary to pursue rich, deep, satisfying non-sexual relationships.
Love is not a word that should be equated with sex. There were once many relationships that people spoke freely of as involving deep love and appreciation that had nothing to do with sex. In fact, the thought of sex even entering the minds of such friends would have been shocking and rejected with confusion or even revulsion.
We are not more free after the sexual revolution; we are less free. Expressing tenderness between friends and speaking of love between friends were both once possible with little or no fear of misunderstanding. In today’s hypersexualized world, they are met with cynicism and suspicion.
Here’s to friendship and the love of friendship, properly understood! Oh, how we miss you!To some degree, Wall Street economists and strategists are tasked with telling the future. Predictions are often based on historical research and analysis, and their firms (and clients) hope they're on the mark.
But according to Deutsche Bank's chief international economist, Torsten Slok, forecasts for one of the economy's benchmark measurements, the rate on the 10-year Treasury note, have been "consistently wrong" and too optimistic for the last decade and a half.
In fact, according to Slok's measurement — analyzing the responses to the Federal Reserve's quarterly Survey of Professional Forecasters versus the actual 10-year rate — the average 12-month forecast error since 2003 has been 60 basis points too high.
"Trends have gone down in long-term interest rates. The 10-year rate has continuously been undershooting what predictions were from the Street. So basically, Wall Street has been too optimistic on what interest rates will do," Slok said Friday on CNBC's "Trading Nation."
The 10-year Treasury yield on Monday ticked down near its postelection low around 2.12 percent; the latest 12-month forecast (for the second quarter of this year) according to the Survey of Professional Forecasters, published by the Philadelphia Fed, is 2.9 percent.
Slok acknowledged that he is among the community magnified in these results. He offered one cause of misforecasting as the Street taking its cues from the Federal Reserve.
"Well, our excuse is that the Fed, in particular, for the last eight or nine years since the crisis has also been too optimistic. So maybe we've been taking our guidance from them. But the bottom line remains that the optimism has been there, and the whole economics profession has just not been very good at predicting what interest rates will do," he said.
One cause of declining rates continuing to fall over the years is that the models utilized by the Fed and Wall Street have "been very focused on the U.S.," Slok said, whereas over the last few years, stimulative monetary policies from the European Central Bank and the Bank of Japan have played a crucial role in holding interest rates down.
"The very critical thing to understand about rates — also where we stand today — is that they have been very critically driven by developments in the rest of the world. And, given that the rest of the world has had a weak recovery, they've had low interest rates," he said.
Slok added: "This has been a significant flow of money, a tsunami of money has been coming from the rest of the world to the U.S., in particular U.S. fixed income, and that has been suppressing U.S. yields for quite some time now."
The central bank last raised its federal funds target rate earlier this month, with an increase of one quarter of a point. The hike was the second announced this year. While the 10-year note yield has fallen, equities have risen to all-time highs this year, appearing to give mixed messages about the health of the economy.
"From a pure economic perspective, what we really are waiting for is inflation. The Fed has been saying for a while now that they want to raise rates. And, the Fed is clearly saying they want to raise rates a lot faster than what the market believes," Slok said Friday.6.7k SHARES Facebook Twitter Google Reddit Tumblr Digg Linkedin Stumbleupon Mail Print
As the Oregon standoff ended on Thursday, petty tyrants and cowards the nation over rejoiced that men and women who had the courage to take an armed stand against their own government are no longer a threat to the status quo – but that’s not entirely true is it? Perhaps now, they are a bigger threat than ever.
In the wake of the Citizens For Constitutional Freedom takeover of the Malheur National Wildlife Refuge headquarters near Burns, it seemed like the entire country was against them. Even the majority in militia circles lamented the action, failing to see the importance of such a move.
Right-wing talk-radio hosts sought to distance themselves and provided analysis as Monday morning quarterbacks that it “just wasn’t the right time,” or alluded to claims of infiltration or an impending set-up by the feds. That most likely did happen, as it will happen in any scenario where people are seeking freedom – but the point is, when the Bundy-led militia stood up for what they believed in, almost no one had their back.
The timid remained timid. Individuals that had been talking about the overreach of the federal government for decades stood down. Instead of offering support, they rationalized away their cowardice with platitudes about strategy – again, “it just wasn’t the right time.”
Ladies and gentlemen, there is never going to be a “right time” to take back our liberty and now is always as good a time as any. Also, let me just say this: If you are the type of person that cheered on the occupations of “public property” during the Occupy Wall Street movement or the rioting and protests that have ensued in the wake of Black Lives Matter, but you decried the Oregon occupiers because they didn’t align with your personal political preference, then you are a hypocrite.
The group had legitimate grievances and responded as any individual should to the repeated encroachments on their rights and the rights of their countrymen. To get into what these brave men and women were standing up to in Oregon would require too much detail here, but for the full backstory, CLICK HERE.
You can also gleam some of the dirty tricks that the FBI employed in the standoff in order to turn the local population against the occupiers HERE. Despite the mainstream media spin, many Oregonians were outraged by the reaction of the feds to the situation. This is important to consider in context when addressing the government-sanctioned assassination of Robert LaVoy Finicum.
An American Legend
Lavoy Finicum quickly became the voice of the occupiers, giving mainstream media interviews and statements live from the refuge. He even wrote a novel, entitled “Only By Blood And Suffering,” which details a family’s struggle to come together in order to survive and maintain their liberty in the midst of a national crisis.
On the day of the murder, Lavoy, Ammon Bundy and several other occupiers were traveling to the city of John Day for a community meeting set up by local residents.
They were pulled over on U.S. Highway 395 by the Oregon State Police and the FBI. Officials said that in an attempt to minimize violence, they had been waiting for an opportunity to arrest the group’s leadership away from the refuge. They said everyone obeyed orders to surrender except LaVoy and Ryan Bundy, Ammon’s brother – who were both shot.
According to the group’s Facebook page, which posted an audio interview from a witness who was present during the traffic stop, Finicum was murdered without cause as over 100 shots were unloaded during the encounter. Other witnesses have also corroborated those statements and given additional audio testimony.
In all, police arrested eight people: five in the traffic stop; two others in Burns; and one in Arizona. Those arrested at the traffic stop were Ammon Bundy, Ryan Bundy, Brian Cavalier, Shawna Cox and Ryan Waylen Payne. The two arrested in Burns were Joseph Donald O’Shaughnessy and Peter Santilli. A FBI spokesperson said protester Jon Ritzheimer turned himself in to police in Peoria, Arizona.
According to the feds, all those arrested after the killing face a federal felony charge of “conspiracy to impede officers of the United States from discharging their official duties through the use of force, intimidation or threats.”
Just what exactly transpired during the shooting will remain unclear. After video footage was released of the incident however, witness claims appeared to be vindicated as Lavoy is seen being hit with bullets before he ever “reached for a gun” like the FBI and police claimed. After the killing was over, cops were seen flipping off his lifeless body.
Watch the raw footage:
The full “unedited” – though obviously edited version of the video was released by the FBI – but interestingly enough, in places where the footage seems to skip during the initial stop of the occupiers’ vehicle, is where witnesses claimed the feds first opened fire. You can watch the footage of the shooting linked up to witness testimony here, and an in-depth analysis from a retired cop here.
The Citizens for Constitutional Freedom have steadily maintained that Lavoy was unarmed during his death and have called the shooting a “cold-blooded assassination,” and the FBI “liars.” They said that, “LaVoy’s guns were left at the compound” evidenced by the fact that his personal pistol can be seen in videos from the refuge after he was killed.
Lavoy was said to have shouted to police, “just shoot me,” before he was gunned down. This gives credence to claims made by one of the passengers that he “got out to try to keep the attention focused on him so that they would not shoot at the women in the vehicle.”
“You can see him point at the vehicle |
such that space, as a receptive (non-resistive) presence, is not assumed to be discontinuous (i.e. to stop at discrete boundary limits) (e.g. Rayner 2010a; Shakunle, Rayner, 2009). Correspondingly, we can recognize the impossibility of defining or measuring anything in absolute numerical terms anywhere, because all form has both a ‘figural’, energetic inner-outer interfacing or dynamic boundary, which makes it distinct, and a ‘transfigural’ – ‘through the figure’ – spatial reach that cannot be sliced or limited. The transfigural space throughout and beyond the figure pools it within the co-creative, influential neighbourhood of all others: ‘self’ as an ‘including middle’ finds identity in its non-local neighbourhood as neighbourhood finds identity through its local ‘self’. Without transfigural space, figures are rendered lifeless and loveless, stone-cold bodies, integral or fractional numbers and idealized geometric points, lines and solids. With transfigural space included, we escape the confinement and inconsistencies of the ‘excluded middle’, discrete boundary logic of ‘one opposed to other’ that has held our imagination to ransom for millennia. This enables us to move on to a more natural and comprehensive form of reasoning in the fluid boundary logic or fluid transfigural logic of each in the other’s mutual influence. The real meanings of ‘zero’ and ‘infinity’ as qualities of space and sources of creativity, not abstract quantities of material, are brought into our natural accounting systems, not excluded by abstract definition.
…
Here a fundamental difference between rationalistic and natural inclusional/transfigural perceptions of continuity emerges:
1. In rationalistic thought, continuity is equated with ‘connectedness’ because space is regarded as void, a source of discontinuity or disruptive gap between and around ‘things’ as discrete objects. Hence the only way of deriving continuity in this ‘whole way of thinking’, is either by totally excluding space and boundaries from form as a continuous line or network of width-less threads, or by totally conflating space with form in a seamless [boundary-less] whole. Such exclusion or conflation is neither consistent with evidence/experience nor does it make consistent sense. In a way, it is a product of holistic wishful thinking that seeks to eliminate rather than reconcile the occurrence of natural distinctions, because these are seen as a source of disharmony. It is an over-reaction to the over-definition of boundaries characteristic of analytical thought, which seeks to replace the latter with its antithesis instead of seeking the dynamic synthesis and balance that natural inclusionality/transfigurality provide (Rayner, 2004).
2. In natural inclusional and transfigural thought, space is a continuous omnipresence that cannot be cut, confined or excluded, and form is dynamically continuous through its energetic inclusion of space in figure and figure in space. Distinction and difference are hence accommodated in a natural fluid continuum, without contradiction. Local identity is recognised as a dynamic inclusion of non-local space in which all forms are pooled together (but not absolutely merged) in natural communion as flow-forms.
3. Correspondingly, the treatment of continuity by abstract rationality as the same as connectedness – as exemplified in conventional calculus, where continuity is approximated by connecting infinitesimal discontinuous units – is an idealized construct that is physically impossible. The very idea of complete ‘whole units’ existing anywhere, at any scale in Nature as an energetically open, fluid system does not make sense. Natural inclusional and transfigural connectedness arises from the coming together (attachment/inter-connectedness) and fusion (conjugation/intra-connectedness) of energetic paths, corridors or channels of included space (intra-space) in labyrinthine branching systems and networks (as in Figs. 1-4), not the ‘ties that bind all into a web of one’ (Rayner, 2004; Tesson, 2006; cf. Barabasi, 2002).
How might natural inclusional and transfigural logic contribute to the development of economic systems that encourage rather than impede sustainable, co-creative human-environmental relationships? In the long run, the hope might be at the very least radically to overhaul our current financial systems, to align with natural principles of energy availability and flow. In the shorter run, and perhaps as a prerequisite, a change in mental attitude concerning the true nature of life, love, pleasure and suffering needs to be brought about, along with a shift in values towards love, respect, care, generosity and honesty and away from avarice and xenophobia (Rayner 2010c).
A change in mental attitude could be possible through educationally enhancing awareness of the psychological, social and environmental damage arising from abstract rationality, at the same time as providing the vision of a healthier, more creatively improvisational and sustainable way of reasoning about life and evolution (Rayner 2010b). The difficulties of bringing about such change are, however, as great as they are in overcoming any serious human addiction, and considerable sensitivity and receptivity is needed from all concerned (Pryor, 2003; Pryor, Rayner 2005a,b). Indeed the roots of many human addictions may themselves be traced to attempts to remove the pain associated with living amidst the contradictions of a rationalistic culture that misguidedly divorces reason from emotion.”BioWare announced today that its science-fiction MMORPG is adding a free-to-play option this fall. The game will be going on sale in August for $14.99 (one month's subscription included) in anticipation of the change.
All existing and former subscribers will receive a lump sum of "cartel coins" to spend in the microtransaction shop as a thank-you for their loyalty, based on their previous purchases of the game box itself as well as subscription time. These coins, which will also be for sale for real-world money, can be used to purchase convenience items, cosmetic customizations, and access to new content through the new microtransaction store.
BioWare Austin general manager Matthew Bromberg says that adopting a free-to-play model will allow the developer to drop content on a much more frequent basis. "Every six weeks or so, we're going to provide a warzone, a flashpoint, an event, an operation, that sort of thing," he says. "The basic idea is that free-to-play players will pay for those content updates with cartel coins. Subscribers will get those updates free as part of their subscription."
The generally agreed-upon best part of The Old Republic – the class storylines that go from character creation to level cap – are entirely free for all players. "Our goal was to bring as many players as we can into the core experience to enjoy the game, and then to provide experiences on top of that for people to upgrade to," Bromberg says. "We're really excited about putting our best foot forward." Many of the ancillary parts of the game – space missions, group-based flashpoints, PvP warzones, and more – are only available on a limited basis to free players. The Old Republic's hardest cooperative content, raid-level operations, require a subscription to take part in.
Additionally, free accounts will use coins to purchase convenience items and customizations like bank slots as in many free-to-play MMOs. BioWare is also going to require either an active subscription or a microtransaction purchase for characters to equip certain tiers of high-level items like top-end raid-acquired gear (though the company is not selling the gear itself).
Holding an active subscription will grant access to everything – all content new and old, and no item use restrictions – for free, as well as a stipend of cartel coins to spend in the cash shop.
BioWare doesn't have any plans to change the structure of existing content to account for the addition of a free-to-play option. Executive producer Jeff Hickman says that the biggest changes aside from the implementation of a cash shop are on the technical side. "We have a large server initiative we actually put in place months ago," Hickman says. "Our populations on our servers are huge even right now and are capable of handling much, much more than we need."
Many players and commentators have been waiting for this announcement since the game came out. So has BioWare. "We've really been looking at this since the first day we launched. It really, for us, became a question of 'when.'" Bromberg says. "The market for MMOs is a free-to-play market, and so it's something we've been thinking about for a long time."
I have a hard time seeing the downside of this announcement from a player perspective. BioWare is giving away the best part of the game for free. Subscribers still get everything for free. Free accounts have to buy their way into the endgame and expanded PvP content, but that seems like a fair trade-off. The business end of things has a lot more room for interpretation and analysis, but this particular SWTOR player welcomes the news.Daily Headlines COLORADO POT WILL LURE N.M. RESIDENTS by Thomas J. Cole, (Source:Albuquerque Journal)
More News Select a State See Map Alabama Alaska Arizona Arkansas California Colorado Connecticut Delaware District of Columbia FEDERAL Florida Georgia Guam Hawaii Idaho Illinois Indiana Iowa Kansas Kentucky Louisiana Maine Maryland Massachusetts Michigan Minnesota Mississippi Missouri Montana Nebraska Nevada New Hampshire New Jersey New Mexico New York North Carolina North Dakota Ohio Oklahoma Oregon Pennsylvania Puerto Rico Rhode Island South Carolina South Dakota Tennessee Texas Utah Vermont Virgin Islands Virginia Washington West Virginia Wisconsin Wyoming Check State Laws
Share This Article
New Mexico
-------
Colorado law enforcement officials and prosecutors have expressed concern the state could become "the nation's supplier of choice for marijuana."
That seems unlikely, but Colorado certainly will become a supplier for New Mexicans.
Colorado voters in November approved a constitutional amendment to legalize limited possession and sales of marijuana for recreational purposes. Marijuana retail stores will be open as early as Jan. 1.
New Mexicans and other nonresidents won't be able to buy more than a quarter-ounce in a single transaction, but at this point, there are no limits on the number of single transactions a nonresident can conduct within a specified time period.
You'll be able to pick up some marijuana if you're in Denver for a Broncos or Rockies game. Same if you're in Pagosa Springs or Durango for a ski weekend, in Salida to whitewater raft or in the San Juans to hunt, fish or hike.
Want to just make a quick trip across the border for marijuana or some pot brownies? You'll be able to do that, too. New Mexico and Colorado share about 340 miles of border.
You can also grow your own pot ( maximum: six plants ) if you have a second home in Colorado, as long as "growing takes places in an enclosed, locked space" and "is not conducted openly or publicly." The marijuana cannot be sold.
A warning: You could be charged with a crime if you bring any marijuana back to New Mexico. State law prohibits possession of pot - except medical cannabis - whether it's from Colorado or Timbuktu. Of course, lots of New Mexicans illegally possess marijuana.
So, the question isn't whether Colorado pot is going to end up in New Mexico. The question is how much and how the state will be affected - good or bad - and how it will respond.
We may have more stoned drivers on the highways near the border. Some New Mexicans may decide to stop illicitly buying marijuana here and buy it legally in Colorado. Pot bought legally in Colorado could wind up being resold unlawfully in New Mexico. There are lots of possibilities.
Maybe the legalization of marijuana in Colorado will lead to a law in New Mexico that limits pot use by motorists. Maybe New Mexico will move to liberalize its marijuana laws. In March, the House passed a bill to eliminate the possibility of jail time for first-time possession of small amounts of marijuana, but the bill died in the Senate.
Former Gov. Gary Johnson, who has long advocated for marijuana legalization, says New Mexico might be more inclined to legalize pot given the Colorado experience.
"The sky didn't fall in Colorado. We have front seats. Why don't we do it here?" Johnson says. "The time has come."
The former governor says he hopes marijuana legalization in Colorado doesn't lead to state or federal law enforcement checking for pot in cars heading from there into New Mexico.
State Police Chief Robert Shilling says, as far as his agency goes, extra patrols or checkpoints near the border to combat pot importation aren't in the cards.
In New Mexico, for the first offense, possession of an ounce or less of marijuana is a petty misdemeanor, and Shilling says devoting the agency's limited resources to combatting a petty misdemeanor is a tough sell to taxpayers when there are more serious public safety threats.
Shilling adds, however, that New Mexico needs to monitor how the state is affected by legalized marijuana in Colorado, which could include an increase in drivers testing positive for pot in their blood.
Colorado Gov. John Hickenlooper this week signed into law a set of bills that will govern the cultivation, manufacture, distribution, sale and testing of marijuana and marijuana food products.
Regulations to implement the laws must be in place by July 1, and marijuana retailers could be open for business on Jan. 1. Local governments can ban sales, if they wish.
Hickenlooper also signed into law a bill setting a marijuana bloodlevel limit for drivers. According to The Denver Post, juries can presume drivers are too stoned to drive if their blood contains more than 5 nanograms per milliliter of THC, marijuana's psychoactive ingredient. Washington, which also has legalized marijuana, has adopted the same driving standard.
Marijuana remains unlawful under federal law, but the Justice Department hasn't yet issued its response to the legalization of marijuana in Colorado and Washington.
MAP posted-by: Matt
Share This Article Pubdate: Sat, 01 Jun 2013
Source: Albuquerque Journal (NM)
Copyright: 2013 Albuquerque Journal
Contact: opinion@abqjournal.com
Website: http://www.abqjournal.com/
Details: http://www.mapinc.org/media/10
Author: Thomas J. Cole
Page: A1Kayah Gaydish, a conservation worker with Wild South in Asheville, died in a rock climbing accident Sunday in Virginia. (Photo: Courtesy photo)
ASHEVILLE - An ardent conservationist, expert rock climber and mother of two died in a 50-foot fall Sunday while climbing near Hidden Valley Lake in southwest Virginia.
Jennifer Kendall "Kayah" Gaydish, 36, had been working as the Linville Gorge Wilderness Ranger for Asheville-based conservation group Wild South since 2013. She was promoted to North Carolina conservation coordinator in October. She was on a rock climbing trip with friends at the time of the accident.
According to a statement from Washington County Sheriff Fred Newman, the dispatch center received a call about 4:15 p.m. Sunday, of a rock climbing accident in the Hidden Valley wildlife management area.
Detectives reported that Gaydish fell approximately 50 feet from a rock cliff while rappelling, according to Elaine Smythe with the Washington County Sheriff’s Office.
Laura Boggess, one of two friends climbing with Gaydish when she died, said the accident happened on a risky part of the climb.
"She was at the top of the climb, the time when you switch from the anchor you build to the permanent anchor," said Boggess, of Burnsville. "It's always the riskiest part of the climb. We think there was some mistake with the way the rope was tied in. There was no failure with the equipment."
Though Gaydish's friends attempted to resuscitate her, she was pronounced dead at the scene. Smythe said the cause was considered "an accidental fall."
The area near Abingdon, Virginia, is remote and is popular with rock climbers, Smythe said, but she does not know of other fatalities having occurred there.
Gaydish's body will be transported to the State Medical Examiner’s Office in Roanoke for an autopsy.
"She was a selfless person. She was extraordinary," Boggess said.
That sentiment was sadly affirmed by everyone who knew Gaydish, a single mother to two teenage children, who was quiet and humble, yet a tirelessly aggressive defender of the environment.
"What made Kayah wonderful is how unassuming she was," said Pat Byington, executive director of Wild South. "She worked with so many people and pulled so many people together in a silent, and effective and beautiful way."
"She and her friends and volunteers for Wild South worked on removing acres upon acres of the invasive princess trees in Linville Gorge. They can grow 20 feet in a year. She pretty much helped save the rare habitat for plants found in Linville Gorge, found nowhere else in the world. It's not easy work. You gotta do it for love. It’s a real tribute to her – it’s her legacy – that unconditional love of the wild."
Gaydish’s mother, Ann Kendall, flew to Asheville on Monday, from her home in Tampa, Florida. Kendall said her daughter, who used to work as a doula and at that time took on the name “Kayah,” was born in Richmond, Virginia. When she was 6, the family, including her father, Roy Kendall, and older brother, Jason Kendall, moved to Tampa, where she grew up.
Kayah was married to Joe Gaydish who died a few years ago, Ann Kendall said. The couple had two children – son Caleb, 17, and daughter, River, 14. They moved to Asheville about 15 years ago.
“I’m still in denial that this happened,” Kendall said. “She was an expert climber and she did not take chances. She just went out to Moab, Utah, to climb there. The detective told me that normally that is a survivable fall, but she probably hit her head on a rocky area."
Kendall said she will be the legal guardian to her grandchildren. She wants people to remember her daughter as a smart, strong, compassionate person who survived many trials in life, but was excellent at her two favorite things – being a mom and protecting the environment.
“She’d give you the shirt off her back, and everyone who knows her knows that to be true,” Kendall said. “She was a very good mother. She loved Western North Carolina and she loved Asheville. I tried to get her to come back to Florida to live, and she wouldn’t consider it.”
Gaydish did not attend college, but was self-taught and took training in many trades, including work as a dula, as an herbalist, and as wilderness ranger, Kendall said. She was considered an expert rock climber, fastidious about safety, and had even taught others the skill.
Ben Prater, who formerly worked for Wild South, first met Gaydish several years ago when she volunteered for the regional environmental nonprofit. Prater was able to hire her on part time as the Linville Gorge Wilderness Ranger – an extremely difficult and demanding job.
“She came to the job as a rock star. She took on this daunting project of eradication of this invasive (princess tree), which was symbolic of her work on the landscape that needed every ounce of her energy, and she did it, she gave her all,” said Prater, who is now director of the Southeast Program of Defenders of Wildlife.
“I’ve hired and worked with a lot of people. She didn’t have a traditional college degree, and I remember we talked about whether that would be a roadblock, but it wasn’t. She was a self-made woman, she was self-taught, and the wisdom she gained by getting her hands dirty was all she needed.”
Gaydish was also a volunteer with the Carolina Mountain Club and with the Appalachian Trail Conservancy, where she performed trail maintenance and natural resource management work, and was an Appalachian Trail community ambassador for Hot Springs, said Julie Judkins, ATC director of education and outreach, who was also a close friend of Gaydish's.
Judkins said Gaydish worked as a part-time employee with the ATC, as well as with Wild South, until taking on the full-time position with Wild South this fall.
“I think that the community outpour of love and support shows the kind of generous person that she was. I think she was a really strong mother and was always looking for ways to provide service to others and especially to our public lands. I can’t think of anyone more humble and compassionate.”
Prater said Gaydish took her job as a wilderness ranger very seriously, and planned every trail maintenance, invasive-eradication project or rock climb down to the letter.
“She would have been the last person I would ever think would be in an accident like this,” Prater said. “She was exceptionally careful. When you think about what it takes to be a wilderness ranger, especially in a place as rugged as the Linville Gorge, she was meticulous about safety and making sure folks were prepared. She was frustrated when she had to call off trips because people were not as serious as she was about safety.”
Prater said in addition to admiring Gaydish’s work as a colleague, as a single parent himself, he was inspired by her strength in raising children on her own, and her selflessness as a human being.
“We became fast friends. She was one of the kindest and gentlest person I ever knew, wise beyond her years, always quick to give praise, but never one who needed it,” he said.
Peter Barr, a friend of Gaydish’s for about four years, said she was one of the region’s environmental heroes. He said last year Gaydish helped organize a fundraiser with the Carolina Climbers Coalition to help open climbing access in the area where she was climbing Sunday.
“Kayah was one of the most sincere people I ever knew, and cared for our mountains and trails as much as anyone. She devoted herself to stewarding our wild lands and building and maintaining our trails,” said Barr, trails and outreach coordinator for the Carolina Mountain Land Conservancy.
“She left us doing something she loved and believed in, in a place she worked hard to protect," Barr said. “She was a hero of mine. She was inspiring in everything she did in her life. I feel like the region will not be the same without her.”
Judkins said a fund has been set up to provide for Gaydish’s children. Details on a memorial service are in the works.
Want to help?
To donate to a fund set up to help support Kayah Gaydish's two young children, visit www.youcaring.com/kayahgaydish.
Read or Share this story: http://avlne.ws/1YwuSnkA woman who falsely accused two Victorian policemen of sexually assaulting her after they arrested her for being drunk outside a South Yarra nightclub has been convicted and fined $2000.
Karly Enid Jean Mitchel, 25, had formally complained after her release from custody that she had been "groped" on her breasts by the police and touched on her inner thighs and outside her crotch.
Melbourne Magistrates Court heard today Mitchel had been refused entry about 2am on August 6 last year to the Circus Nightclub and then spent 45 minutes abusing crowd controllers.
Prosecutor Peter Atkinson said when two members arrived in a divisional van to assist the bouncers about 50 minutes later they found Mitchel at the rear of the Prahran Market, approached her to establish her identity and she became abusive.
Mr Atkinson said that due to her level of intoxication, lack of co-operation and concern for her safety, she was arrested for being drunk.For most runners, simply getting across the distance is enough. Eliud Kipchoge, Lelisa Desisa and Zersenay Tadese, the athletes involved in Nike’s Breaking2 moonshot, have a more audacious aim: breaking the two-hour barrier, a holy grail for running.
Roaring engines and hustling pit crews rarely enter the marathon vision. However, grand ambition requires unconventional thinking. Thus, in service of Kipchoge, Desisa and Tadese’s attempt, the diverse Breaking2 team shifted locational focus from the traditional city-based course to an icon of speed, an auto racing track.
Determining the ideal race location necessitates a unique set of environmental characteristics, with consideration of altitude, temperature and vapor pressure at the tip of the iceberg. The goal is singular: optimize conditions.
After scouring the world to find the most suitable site, the Breaking2 team landed on a fixed 2.4km loop at the Autodromo Nazionale Monza complex outside Milan, Italy.By Terri Hansen
It wasn't long after President Trump took office that chaos took hold at the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency (EPA). Throughout his campaign, Trump had promised to get rid of the agency, leaving just "little tidbits left." He wasted little time.
Out of the gate, Trump's transition team was set to remove former President Barack Obama's Climate Action Plan and other climate data, reported InsideEPA on Jan. 17. Trump officials told EPA staff on Jan. 24 to remove the agency's climate change page from its website, according to Science. The next day, EPA staffers were told to hold off. Then, two days later, the words "climate change" were erased from the EPA site altogether. Then they were back.
Many scientists didn't wait to find out what was up, what was down or what was going which way. At risk was years of data on greenhouse gas emissions, temperature trends, sea level rise and shrinking sea ice—data essential to our understanding of the enormous environmental shifts our planet is undergoing. Worldwide, they scrambled to capture the information from the websites of the EPA, the National Aeronautics and Space Administration, the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration and the U.S. Geological Survey. Hackathons were organized to download the data to university servers and sites like DataRefuge and the Internet Archive for the fear that Scott Pruitt would be confirmed as head of the EPA; he was confirmed by the Senate on Feb 17.
Even outside of scientific circles, concerned citizens recognized a need to act. When John Rozsa, a graduate student in technology studies at Eastern Michigan University, heard about these efforts, he thought the more copies, the better. So, between classes and his full-time job, he began to download the pre-Trump version of the EPA website—28,000 files and counting.
"I used a variety of Windows and Linux-based high-tech tools that look at every corner of the website and grab every single file," he said. "I repeated the process four times and then compared the data sets. Once I confirmed my data sets were reliable, I backed them up and then sorted the files."
Now he's uploading the files to a website he calls EPA Data Dump. It's very simplistic, he said, "due to the fact that less than one week ago the website was just a small project of mine." The website is not quite ready for prime time—it's still under construction—but already it's getting a lot of attention.
EPA Data Dump has seen more than 200,000 users to date, so much traffic that its server nearly crashed. Rozsa had to start a modest online fundraiser to pay for a dedicated server, more bandwidth and increased security. The site will soon include a search engine, he said, but first the files must be organized by librarians and other volunteers.
Already many people, including an aerospace data manager, have offered their skills to further the project. And Rozsa has received messages from students and individuals in academia who said the data on his website have helped them significantly.
Rozsa has degrees in computer science and technology management. He is now studying for his master's degree in technology studies and he calls himself an activist. One audience that appreciates his type of activism is journalists who cover science and the environment.
"Journalists and the public rely on the EPA's website for accurate public information about climate change, EPA regulatory actions, greenhouse gas emissions and other pollution data," said Bobby Magill, senior science writer at Climate Central and president of the Society of Environmental Journalists. "It's among the first places members of the public may go to find information about climate change and how human carbon dioxide and methane pollution contribute to it."
Ensuring that accurate information remains available to the public is critical to understanding government efforts to keep our air and water clean and to address climate change. "The EPA greenhouse gas emissions database is valuable because it helps journalists and the public identify emissions sources and trends," Magill said. "There is an inherent public good in maintaining those databases online so that accurate environmental information is available to the public."
When Rozsa created EPA Data Dump, he did so believing that the public should have access to information about climate change, regardless of who the president was. For many scientists, whose individual decades of study are built on generations of accumulated research, open access to information is essential.
"Any climate data that has been collected and published by government scientists or as a result of government-funded or government-sponsored research, belongs in the public domain," said Michael Mann, professor and director of the Pennsylvania State University Earth System Science Center and lead-author of the now-famous "hockey stick graph" of rising global average temperatures.
"The public has a right to know that it is safe and that it will be preserved for posterity, despite the fluctuations in the prevailing political winds," he said. "The fact that scientists are fearful that climate data inconvenient to the vested interests that have funded President Trump and congressional republicans will be scrubbed from government websites is a testament to the truly chilling nature of the fossil fuel industry-funded assault on climate science."
Reposted with permission from our media associate YES! Magazine.At the end of 2015, I had this idea that I’d toss away my life. Give up my job, break my apartment lease, disconnect my phone. I’d sell my possessions, stuff what I could into a pack, and disappear into the wilderness—away from the world forever.
This, ultimately, terrified me. What would I do about money? Where would my cat go? Could greatness be felt in a place where it was not seen? I wondered whether anyone would miss me.
For a long time, perhaps an occupational hazard as a writer, I’ve felt the need to separate entirely from the city where I'd lived for almost all my life. I had this deep love for the North Country. It was a place I’d known intimately in my youth. The smell of pine needles and late-October frost, the yowl of a loon scuttling across the lake, brought for me the same fulfillment as any professional achievement in the city. It is that familiar loss felt on returning from vacation, wanting to be where we are not. Every time I returned from upstate to the city, I felt that I had left home and was lost in a blight of slate-grey, an unnatural silhouette—held against my will.
People made me feel claustrophobic and I couldn’t remember the last time I’d heard birds outside my window. I also felt like I wasn’t getting enough work done: my phone buzzed too often, I found myself aimlessly switching between browser tabs.
Perhaps, I thought to myself, I’ll buy a cabin.
The phone rang twice and Pete answered. He was on the western fringe of the Adirondack Park. He was a realtor, selling hunting lodges, cabins, land. I’d seen a listing online and said I’d like to place an offer on a cabin.
“Do you want to come see the property first?” he asked.
“Nope,” I said, “No, thank you.”
The listing and photos online were enough for me: a hunting cabin, abutting state forest, on about five acres.
“Is it secluded? I mean, really secluded?” I asked, as if there are degrees of seclusion.
“If you don’t want to see anyone for weeks,” he said, “this is the place.”
Still having never set foot on the land or seen the cabin, I closed on it in January. It would be some time before I could make it out to my land. Until the snow melted, without the use of snowshoes, the cabin was virtually unreachable.
When finally I went to inspect the cabin in spring, I came to pass a Log Homes Sales Center. The homes are set in a cleared field of manicured grass. Where the logs meet at the corners and up near the roof gables there is the distinct fit of Lincoln Logs: perfectly mated and set atop one another, the notches machine-fitted. The roofs are sometimes constructed of a lurid green, stamped metal. Some have tarpaper tiling. They are austere and inviting. But they aren't true cabins. For me, a true cabin is swaddled in romance: a wilting little structure, covered by a mossy roof, a battered tin stove pipe etching its way skyward, the whole of the home and its accouterments—the axe stuck in a chopping block, the saw hanging from a post near the front door, a lantern to light the way—made perfect by its imperfections. It's a way-station, a conduit to your old life and into the wild.
Though the origins of the cabin structure are unknown, they are believed to be the expression of American architecture, a product of Manifest Destiny and westward expansion. The designs and utilities found within the earliest, modest log cabins were adopted from Europeans—Swedes and Finns who found themselves settling along the Delaware Valley.
These were crude homes. Hacked from virgin timbers, these cabins were laid out in small squares, 15-by-15 feet, sometimes bigger, often smaller, on land cleared by families passing through. They were meant to be temporary. The notches were carved out with an axe, and logs were hoisted atop one another to form the walls of the family dwelling. There were no windows, and sometimes only a small loft for sleeping. Light came from the fireplace.
Long associated with the hermit or recluse, the ancestral roots of a solitary cabin dwelling did not “attenuate the American family,” as C.A. Weslager wrote in The Log Cabin in America in the 1960s. It instead “contributed to its vitality and integrity.” The log cabin also became a communal project: those who could help, did. And without serious plans, a cabin could rise from local hardwoods within a week or two. Then the family moved in.
On my drive, I may have passed many of these traditional cabins without knowing it, the last existing log and wood cabins obscured now by new construction, hidden in plan view. Travel through the North Country, the Finger Lakes or Tug Hill regions, and know that if you look closely enough you may discern an old log home, covered now in wood shingles and aluminum siding, obscuring a verdant history.
By all definitions, the cabin I’d bought and was driving toward wasn’t much more a "true cabin" than the shiny Lincoln Log homes for sale off exit 20. It wasn’t hewn from logs, and it wasn’t originally built by settlers. But it was remote, it had no plumbing or electricity, and, for the purpose of seclusion, it would resemble the spaces in which families, centuries before, used as stopping grounds before moving west.
When I finally reached the cabin, I surveyed the land. Toppled cedar and hemlock. Tall weeds and grass slithered up the sides of the building, which had been constructed sometime after the millennium. The tarpaper roof had holes visible from the outside. Wood splintered off the siding. The porch was all but rotted. This was no soulless Log Homes cabin, but it wasn't a frontiers cabin, either.
Then the chainsaws stared. Followed by a lawn mower. An axe splitting wood. I could not escape the world. Somehow it had followed me.
My legs hung over the porch where I sat, listening as the clamor of workers and hunters, elsewhere in the woods, simmered and died as night approached. It was only quiet for some while. Then laughter, glasses clinking, beer cans crunching. Howls and giggles came from every direction.
Damn you, Pete, I thought. I was heated. I wanted seclusion. I was set to call him the next morning, as soon as I regained cellular service. But what I didn’t know then was that the American Cabin was the essence of this familial bonding. That these people, like me, were escaping the same tired, vexing technologies and social abrasions we faced in urban living.
The log cabin had always been a product of community cooperation. As Alexis de Tocqueville once wrote of his time in a stranger’s cabin on the frontier, “The whole family comes to seek shelter of an evening in the single room which it contains. This dwelling forms as it were a little world of its own. … A hundred paces beyond it the everlasting forest stretches its shade around it and solitude begins again.”
Up here in the North Country, we call these places camps. I understood why, initially, that meant a base camp for hunting. But really, it’s much more than that, and it echoes a longstanding American tradition. First, it enables us to hunker down before we move forward—whether that be on a hunt or revitalized after a weekend before returning to work. Second, the confines and intimate space of a cabin harbor deeper connections to friends and family.
Large cities, though densely-populated, imbue anonymity. Far as I can tell, the proximity of city life is not one of intimacy but inherent distance. You can't be tuned into a place or person that shuffles past. The cabin slows everything into knotted hardwood and fosters deeper fellowship—the kind of fellowship I'd missed in the humdrum of urban life.
In the morning, I woke to the frost and cozy fog that made the forest surrounding the cabin both mythical and terrifying. I listened for others but heard none, and became excited by the notion that I could bring friends and family here. I started to see the space differently: over there, a fire pit; some Adirondack chairs for every one; a hammock for my sister; a guitar for anyone who knows how to play.
It wasn’t solitude I was seeking. Not exactly. Instead what we often want in returning to the woods, a place of unencumbered solitude and holistic melodies, is the chance to be alone, together. To share in each other’s presence, rather than juggle the distractions of workaday life. The American cabin, a remote parcel that echoes our ancestral passages, is the perfect home base on which to build those connections.
I moseyed downstairs, ascending the ladder from the loft. I made a cup of coffee, using the wood-burning stove which fiercely crackled as it awakened. I was met by several field mice, scuttling about the upstairs loft, munching leftover tortillas.
I was not displeased by the intrusion. I welcomed them and watched them play for hours.
Kenneth R. Rosen works and writes for The New York Times.The scams used by the "Wolf of Wall Street" in stock markets have found their way into cryptocurrency markets. Business Insider/Samantha Lee/Paramount Pictures
LONDON — Cryptocurrency exchanges are rife with "pump and dump" scams that would be illegal in most markets and leave unsuspecting investors at risk of large losses, a Business Insider investigation has found |
of government would help end conflict with Muslim minority in the south, which has killed more than 120,000 people and displaced 2 million.
Two Muslim rebel factions have been negotiating for an autonomous region in the south for four decades and Duterte believes a federal system, which can grant more political and economic power to the minority, can end the rebellion.
Duterte has also vowed to step down from power even before his term ends in 2022 if the two houses of Congress can set up the federal system in the next few years.
“If you can give me that document, I would urge you to call for an election,” Duterte has said. “I will go, do not worry about me, I don’t have any ambition.”
Medialde said Duterte also favored constitutional change to further open up the economy, amending restrictive provisions such as limiting foreign investment in retail and other sectors to 40 percent. Land ownership would remain in Filipino hands.
Senators, including those in the minority faction, are expected to go along with the president’s proposal.
“I think the consensus is there, after 30 years, there is need to review the constitution,” said Senator Franklin Drilon, a senior member of the rival Liberal Party.
Reporting By Manuel Mogato; Editing By Kim CoghillPolitics is a serious business. It's about people's lives, their hopes, their dreams, their futures. It's about war and peace and the fate of the planet. It's wrong to treat it as a sporting event or a form of entertainment.
But not tonight!
Tonight we are being treated to the one time in all of politics when it's perfectly acceptable, indeed required, to sit back with a cold one and just enjoy the political circus for its sheer entertainment value. Tonight begins the greatest show on earth: the Republican presidential primary debates. And this one is going to be a doozy, featuring as it does the most crowded clown car in Republican primary circus history.
Advertisement:
Four years ago, it would have been hard to imagine a more ridiculous field of debaters. The GOP started the festivities even earlier that year -- the first Fox debate was in May -- with what everyone thought at the time was an excessively crowded field. (Little did we know.) Michele Bachmann, Newt Gingrich, Rick Perry and Jon Huntsman had not even declared yet and Mitt Romney declined the invitation. Only Herman Cain, Gary Johnson(!), Tim Pawlenty, Ron Paul and Rick Santorum debated that night.
It was the first of many cheerfully inebriated progressive Twitter parties all over the country, as Republicans had 20 primary debates between May of 2011 and February of 2012. It's amazing we didn't all end up with liver damage. It's hard to believe looking back on it, but Jon Hunstman appeared in 11 of those debates. Of course America was so riveted by the antics of Bachmann and Cain, the strange behavior of Rick Perry and the unsettling notion that Newt Gingrich and Rick Santorum were actual contenders that it's not surprising he simply didn't register.
Romney was the frontrunner from the beginning and he benefited from the contrast between him and the weirdos he was running against. His awkward, stiff, dull personality turned out to be an asset. One assumes that Jeb Bush and Scott Walker are hoping for a similar dynamic this time.
The GOP leadership was acutely aware that their primary season had been an embarrassing freak show and sought to exert more control over the process this time. They only scheduled nine debates and came up with extensive rules which are supposed to keep the proceedings dignified and statesmanlike. They had no idea that every single Republican who has ever looked in the mirror and saw a president looking back at them would decide this was their big chance. And who could have ever predicted that billionaires would flood the race with enough cash to entice nearly 20 different candidates to jump in. (It's probably safe to assume that Rupert Murdoch and Roger Ailes understood that. All that money's got to go somewhere, most of itt to media.)
It's such an embarrassment of riches (or just a plain old embarrassment) that Fox News had to create a junior varsity and varsity debate. As always, the JV team is disappointed. Rick Santorum's spokesman Matt Benyon was fit to be tied:
The idea that they have left out the runner-up for the 2012 nomination (Santorum), the former 4-term Governor of Texas (Perry), the Governor of Louisiana (Jindal), the first female Fortune 50 CEO (Fiorina), and the 3-term Senator from South Carolina (Graham) due to polling 7 months before a single vote is cast is preposterous.
And what about George Pataki and Jim Gilmore? Chopped liver?
Advertisement:
Benyon's got a point, though. Just to lend some perspective to how meaningful all this early hype is, here's a little look back at the Washington Post's post-debate coverage of the June 13, 2012 debate in New Hampshire:
The strong performance by Rep. Michele Bachmann (Minn.) — the only other clear winner Monday night — complicates Tim Pawlenty’s situation in Iowa. Bachmann showed stage presence and a flair for attracting attention to herself. She lacks the experience of Pawlenty, a two-term former governor, but she could become a real force in Iowa, the state Pawlenty knows he must win to be Romney’s chief challenger next year.
As you can see, the early polling and analysis isn't exactly predictive. Nonetheless, Fox News had to do something, and rather than split the debate neatly in two and have them draw straws, the network decided to put its thumb on the scales and try to create the illusion that the polling below the top handful of candidates actually means something.
And, of course, there's Trump, the clear front runner by a mile. It turns out that he's not just leading among the hardcore right:
Trump has widespread ideological backing from Republicans - as he gets the most support of any candidate from moderate, conservative and very conservative GOP primary voters. Trump is leading in almost every major voting group within the primary electorate, but he is running particularly strong with white evangelicals (20 percent), men (24 percent), seniors (24 percent), and those with a high school education or less (26 percent).
He also leads among college grads, although, as with all the polls, it pays to remember that the rest of the votes are split among a huge group of candidates, so he's not quite the juggernaut that he appears. Still, there's a very large group of Republican voters who like his style.
Advertisement:
This whole thing must be very hard on poor Rick Perry who just can't catch a break. And there is also a lesson in his sad performance for all the other candidates. He's the one guy who went all-in as the anti-Trump, calling him a "cancer on conservatism" saying "Trumpism is a toxic mix of demagoguery and mean-spiritedness that will lead the Republican Party to perdition." There's no way of knowing if that gambit hurt him in the polls, but it's glaringly obvious that it didn't help. All the varsity players undoubtedly took note.
It's a very big team:
Donald Trump
Jeb Bush
Scott Walker
Mike Huckabee
Ben Carson
Ted Cruz
Marco Rubio
Rand Paul
Chris Christie
John Kasich
Advertisement:
These are literally the best candidates that Republican billionaire money can buy. Think about that for a minute. And then have another drink.
Republican elites are undoubtedly praying that Trump makes a fool of himself by answering questions the way he's been answering them and everyone will finally see that he simply cannot be president. Good luck with that. If you can diss John McCain's war record and gain support in a GOP primary, it's fair to assume that these voters aren't interested in old fashioned concepts like dignity and respect.
Bret Baier, one of the moderators, said that he's been waking up in a cold sweat at night worried about what to do if The Donald refuses to play by the rules. (They claim they have a "secret plan" in case he goes off the rails -- but then so did the RNC after 2012 and we can see how well that worked out.) Baier isn't the only one who's losing sleep over the idea of trump failing to play by the rules. After all, Trump has made it quite clear that if he doesn't like the way he's being treated he's prepared to run as a third party. And he's got all the money he needs to do it.
Advertisement:
The best the rest of us can hope for tonight is to see a full-blown smash-mouth confrontation between Christie and Trump and if Cruz, Kasich and Huckabee pile on it could be epic. It's hard to imagine how Walker, Bush, Paul and Rubio are going to survive in this "Lord of the Flies" test of macho will but it will be awfully fun to see them try.
Here's to the clown car's big opening night. Cheers, everybody!A combined NASA and European Space Agency (ESA)-funded study has found firm evidence that nitrogen in the atmosphere of Saturn's moon Titan originated in conditions similar to the cold birthplace of the most ancient comets from the Oort cloud. The finding rules out the possibility that Titan's building blocks formed within the warm disk of material thought to have surrounded the infant planet Saturn during its formation.
The main implication of this new research is that Titan's building blocks formed early in the solar system's history, in the cold disk of gas and dust that formed the sun. This was also the birthplace of many comets, which retain a primitive, or largely unchanged, composition today.
The research, led by Kathleen Mandt of Southwest Research Institute in San Antonio, and including an international team of researchers, was published this week in the Astrophysical Journal Letters.
Nitrogen is the main ingredient in the atmosphere of Earth, as well as on Titan. The planet-sized moon of Saturn is frequently compared to an early version of Earth, locked in a deep freeze.
The paper suggests that information about Titan's original building blocks is still present in the icy moon's atmosphere, allowing researchers to test different ideas about how the moon might have formed. Mandt and colleagues demonstrate that a particular chemical hint as to the origin of Titan's nitrogen should be essentially the same today as when this moon formed, up to 4.6 billion years ago. That hint is the ratio of one isotope, or form, of nitrogen, called nitrogen-14, to another isotope, called nitrogen-15.
The team finds that our solar system is not old enough for this nitrogen isotope ratio to have changed significantly. This is contrary to what scientists commonly have assumed.
"When we looked closely at how this ratio could evolve with time, we found that it was impossible for it to change significantly. Titan's atmosphere contains so much nitrogen that no process can significantly modify this tracer even given more than four billion years of solar system history," Mandt said.
The small amount of change in this isotope ratio over long time periods makes it possible for researchers to compare Titan's original building blocks to other solar system objects in search of connections between them.
As planetary scientists investigate the mystery of how the solar system formed, isotope ratios are one of the most valuable types of clues they are able to collect. In planetary atmospheres and surface materials, the specific amount of one form of an element, like nitrogen, relative to another form of that same element can be a powerful diagnostic tool because it is closely tied to the conditions under which materials form.
The study also has implications for Earth. It supports the emerging view that ammonia ice from comets is not likely to be the primary source of Earth's nitrogen. In the past, researchers assumed a connection between comets, Titan and Earth, and supposed the nitrogen isotope ratio in Titan's original atmosphere was the same as that ratio is on Earth today. Measurements of the nitrogen isotope ratio at Titan by several instruments of the NASA and ESA Cassini-Huygens mission showed that this is not the case -- meaning this ratio is different on Titan and Earth -- while measurements of the ratio in comets have borne out their connection to Titan. This means the sources of Earth's and Titan's nitrogen must have been different.
Other researchers previously had shown that Earth's nitrogen isotope ratio likely has not changed significantly since our planet formed.
"Some have suggested that meteorites brought nitrogen to Earth, or that nitrogen was captured directly from the disk of gas that formed the sun. This is an interesting puzzle for future investigations," Mandt said.
Mandt and colleagues are eager to see whether their findings are supported by data from ESA's Rosetta mission, when it studies comet 67P/ Churyumov-Gerasimenko beginning later this year. If their analysis is correct, the comet should have a lower ratio of two isotopes -- in this case of hydrogen in methane ice -- than the ratio on Titan. In essence, they believe this chemical ratio on Titan is more similar to Oort cloud comets than comets born in the Kuiper Belt, which begins near the orbit of Neptune (67P/ Churyumov-Gerasimenko is a Kuiper Belt comet).
"This exciting result is a key example of Cassini science informing our knowledge of the history of solar system and how the Earth formed," said Scott Edgington, Cassini deputy project scientist at NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory, Pasadena, California.
The Cassini-Huygens mission is a cooperative project of NASA, ESA and the Italian Space Agency. JPL, a division of the California Institute of Technology, Pasadena, manages the mission for NASA's Science Mission Directorate in Washington.
Rosetta is an ESA mission with contributions from its member states and NASA. JPL manages the U.S. contribution of the Rosetta mission for NASA's Science Mission Directorate in Washington.
More information about Cassini is available at the following sites:In a move characterized as an effort to prevent large pharmaceutical companies from "goug[ing] American consumers after taking billions in taxpayer money," Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.) on Monday introduced a new rule that would require drugmakers to agree to set reasonable prices before being granted exclusive rights to produce vaccines and other life-saving drugs.
"Americans should not be forced to pay the highest prices in the world for a vaccine we spent more than $1 billion to help develop."
—Sen Bernie SandersSanders was joined by Rep. Peter DeFazio (D-Ore.) in crafting and unveiling the rule, which the pair of lawmakers "first proposed two decades ago with bipartisan support." The rule currently has 21 co-sponsors.
In the face of new developments, Sanders said in a statement, a rule addressing soaring prescription drug prices is as necessary as ever.
While the new rule would have broad implications, Sanders specifically takes aim at Sanofi, a French pharmaceutical giant that the U.S. Army has offered an exclusive license to develop a vaccine for the Zika virus.
"American taxpayers have already spent more than $1 billion on Zika research and prevention efforts, including millions to develop a vaccine. The Department of Health and Human Services gave Sanofi $43 million to develop the vaccine with $130 million in federal funding still to come," Sanders' office said in a statement. "But Sanofi has refused to agree to sell the drug back to Americans at a fair price. Without a fair pricing agreement, the company can charge Americans whatever astronomical price it wants for its vaccine."
Sanders, who spent much of his 2016 presidential campaign railing against the greed of the pharmaceutical industry, called such an arrangement "simply unacceptable."
"Americans should not be forced to pay the highest prices in the world for a vaccine we spent more than $1 billion to help develop," Sanders said. "Sanofi gets more than one-third of its roughly $34 billion in revenues from the United States alone, and its CEO made nearly $5 million in salary last year. Yet they have rejected the U.S. Army's request for fair pricing."
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
Sanders continued:
Sanofi and the rest of the pharmaceutical industry cannot be allowed to make huge profits on the backs of working class Americans, many of whom cannot afford the medication they are prescribed. The days of allowing Sanofi and other drug makers to gouge American consumers after taking billions in taxpayer money must end. That is why I am introducing legislation to demand fairer, lower prices for the Zika vaccine and for every drug developed with government resources. This is a fight that we cannot afford to lose.
An analysis (PDF) of the rule by the Congressional Budget Office found that the rule would save the federal government $6 billion over the next decade.
As Sanders often points out, the United States spends far more on pharmaceutical drugs—and on healthcare more broadly—than other industrialized nations.Story highlights The Somali terrorism group al-Shabaab issued a threatening statement to Kenya Wednesday
Al-Shabaab fighters held the mall for four days
Kenyan forces say they killed five terrorists and took at least 11 into custody
We're not done yet.
That was the message terrorists of Al-Shabaab gave to Kenya on Wednesday, as officials still sorted through rubble and clues left in the wake of the recent massacre that took 67 lives at a Nairobi shopping mall.
The Somali militant group handed the threatening statement to regional media, which passed it on to CNN.
For four days, starting on September 21, Al-Shabaab fighters spread gunfire and flames through Nairobi's Westgate Shopping Mall, leaving it partially destroyed, stained in blood and littered with bodies.
Members of Kenya's government were mute about what they had seen inside after emerging from an inspection there earlier this week.
JUST WATCHED CNN goes inside Nairobi's Westgate mall Replay More Videos... MUST WATCH CNN goes inside Nairobi's Westgate mall 02:20
JUST WATCHED Kenyans still missing after mall attack Replay More Videos... MUST WATCH Kenyans still missing after mall attack 01:24
JUST WATCHED Raw footage: Go inside devastated Nairobi mall Replay More Videos... MUST WATCH Raw footage: Go inside devastated Nairobi mall 00:48
CNN learned that the Westgate mall attackers tortured some of the hostages.
Military doctors said militants severed hands, cut off noses and, in some cases, hanged hostages. CNN has seen photographic evidence of one dead victim with a hand amputated.
In the coming days and weeks, members of Parliament are expected to grill intelligence officials to find out more about how the attack occurred.
Forewarned?
A number of Kenya's Cabinet members and defense officials were warned about the possibility that Al-Shabaab was planning to carry out such an attack a year before gunman stormed the Nairobi mall, according to several police and intelligence sources.
The warnings were made by the country's National Intelligence Service as part of regular situational reports given to Cabinet members, the inspector general of police, members of the National Security Advisory Council and military intelligence officials.
CNN has seen an electronic version of those reports, which contain an extensive list of terror threats from several regions across Kenya over an extended period, but they also specify Al-Shabaab posed a threat to several targets, including Westgate Shopping Mall.
The news about the intelligence warnings comes amid revelations that the mall favored by Westerners and tourists was long considered a possible terror target.
Al-Shabaab made statements claiming responsibility, including saying on Twitter that it sent the gunmen in retaliation for Kenya's involvement in an African Union military effort against the group, which is al Qaeda's proxy in Somalia.
Kenyan forces killed five terrorists, and 11 others are in custody over possible links to the attacks, President Uhuru Kenyatta has said.
But an immense amount of work remains to learn how Al-Shabaab was able to pull off such a well-coordinated and brazen attack. The terror group was thought to be badly bruised by recent losses in its Somalian homeland.
Kenyan military intervention
Last year, the Kenyan military was part of a peacekeeping force that defeated Al-Shabaab forces to liberate the key Somali port of Kismayo.
Since Kenya launched attacks against Al-Shabaab in Somalia in 2011, the group has hurled grenades at Kenyan churches, bus stops and other public places.
The mall attack was the deadliest terror attack in Kenya since al Qaeda blew up the U.S. Embassy there in 1998, killing 213 people.
Terrorism experts say the attack bears eerie similarities to the 2008 siege of a hotel in Mumbai, India, another upscale target with Western appeal. Lashkar-e-Tayyiba, a Pakistani terrorist group, held the hotel for more than three days, killing 166 people.Ri Sol-ju and Kim Yo-jong
Pyongyang is currently waiting for a new and powerful madam.Kim Kyong-hui, the aunt of North Korean leader Kim Jong-un and a secretary in the ruling Workers’ Party, previously held that position over four decades and has all but disappeared from public life in the months following the execution of her husband Jang Song-thaek.The 68-year-old is the younger sister of late leader Kim Jong-il and the beloved daughter of the nation’s founder Kim Il Sung.Her rise as the most influential woman in the Communist state began after Kim Il Sung’s second wife, Kim Sung-ae, was alleged at a general session of the ruling party’s Pyongyang branch in June 1974 to have abused her power. The regime referred to the episode as the first lady’s “swish of her skirt,” a sexist term used in Korean to describe an overly ambitious or aggressive woman.Kim Kyong-hui maintained her power even after her brother, Kim Jong-il, died in December 2011 and her nephew, Kim Jong-un, took the helm. Before he died, Kim Jong-il reportedly named his sister the most reliable guardian for Jong-un, his youngest son.However, her fall came unexpectedly and abruptly. In December, when Jang Song-thaek was purged for treason and then killed, her downward spiral unfolded.She was a four-term representative of North Korea’s rubber-stamp parliament, but her name was not on the list of newly elected officials in the legislature in March, according to the regime’s official Korean Central News Agency.Footage of her was also edited out of some of North Korea’s documentaries, which many analysts believe is an indication that she bowed out of Pyongyang’s inner circle, or that she was ultimately dismissed, never allowed to return.But in her absence, two young women have risen to fill the void.The first, Ri Sol-ju, was a singer in Pyongyang’s Unhasu Orchestra when she captured the attention of Kim Jong-un, who at the time was the heir apparent.The young Ri made her first appearance in North Korean media in July 2012, making her debut as a sort of Cinderella. In a number of reports, she appeared walking with Kim, her arm linked with his, indulging in popcorn during his “field guidance trips.”The other, Kim Yo-jong, the younger sister of Kim Jong-un, is seen as a formidable rival to the first lady. She first came to the public’s attention when she appeared with Kim and other high-ranking officials in March on their way to cast their ballots in North Korea’s parliamentary elections.At the time, the regime’s state media called her “a core worker of the Workers’ Party’s Central Committee.”According to the North Korean dictionary, “worker” denotes an official.A South Korean official in charge of North Korean intelligence told the JoongAng Ilbo that Kim Yo-jong “previously used another name, Kim Ye-jong, and was named a manager in the party’s Propaganda and Agitation Department.”“We assume she has been promoted to a position higher than a deputy director in the party,” the source added.Since her introduction, rumors spread quickly in Pyongyang’s military and ruling party that “all roads lead to comrade Yo-jong.”She is no longer the little girl once seen whimpering at her father’s funeral. And by all accounts, she could be even more senior than a prime minister or minister in the regime.Still, there have been whispers about a few other women in the Kim line. However, those speculations crumbled before ever making headway.The influence held by Kim Sol-song, a child between Kim Jong-il and his third wife Kim Yong-suk, was apparently exaggerated by several analysts. When Kim Jong-il took a photo of party officials and others at Pyongyang Department Store No. 1, the woman spotted with him was assumed in some reports to be Sol-song. However, sources told the JoongAng Ilbo that the mystery lady was later confirmed to be the store’s manager.And when it comes to the allegation that Kim Jong-il entrusted certain roles to Sol-song in his final will, a Seoul official denied it, asserting “there was no such thing for Kim Jong-il.”Kim Ok, the fourth wife of Kim Jong-il, known as the de facto first lady who attended his funeral, was once rumored to be in Pyongyang’s elite under Kim Jong-un’s rule, but she has since vanished in the media.Ri Sol-ju and Kim Yo-jong are known to be close in age - both are around 25 years old. So it appears the choice lies between love and blood.But given the late Kim Jong-il’s reputation as a notorious womanizer, it’s possible that the power of North Korean first lady only lasts until her expiration date - when she is replaced or pushed out of favor.In the regime, the women who are loved often wield the utmost power, but when that love runs out, they are fated to be abandoned or forgotten altogether.So far, however, the young Kim’s adoration for his wife Ri seems to persist. They supposedly have two daughters between them, and recent media footage showed them wearing complementary Swiss-made watches.Yet there is no doubt that the bond between siblings, and the tie between Kim Jong-un and his sister, appears to run deep - they even studied together in Switzerland during their childhood, separate from their parents who resided in Pyongyang.It is hard to guess who will ultimately come out on top. The two ladies currently maintain a tight power balance as the first lady and the sister-in-law.Meanwhile, Pyongyang is showing signs that there may be a power reshuffle.Choe Ryong-hae, the director of the North Korean Army’s powerful General Political Bureau and a special envoy for Kim Jong-un in China, has not made a public appearance in a while, and analysts believe he may have been replaced.If that’s true, no senior figures would exist to deter the young leader. He has since killed or expelled Jang, Choe and his aunt Kim - the three most influential people around him. Taking this into account, experts are closely watching to see which roles Kim Yo-jong and Ri Sol-ju will occupy.Under the rule of North Korea’s two former leaders, women in Pyongyang’s royal family were traditionally forced behind the scenes. Ko Yong-hui, who is known as the biological mother of Kim Jong-un and the third wife of Kim Jong-il, never did appear at public events, even though she allegedly lived with the late Kim for 28 years.But that seems to be changing under Kim Jong-un’s watch. Rather than clawing their way through political games, his women are publicly rising within his elite circle.So by all accounts, the power struggle between North Korea’s female leaders has only just begun.BY LEE YOUNG-JONG [heejin@joongang.co.kr]I was raised around a lot of money—not my own, but other people’s. Granted, by any reasonable national standard my family was well-off, but growing up in New York City meant that my playmates were the children of media moguls and Wall Street titans, so my comparison group skewed upwards several tax brackets. For a while this environment created both a sense of longing and, unfortunately, entitlement. Everyone else has a summer home, why can’t we?! That feeling of financial inadequacy turned out to be a blessing in disguise however, because it taught me what those moguls and titans probably already knew, which is that the most satisfying wealth is the kind that you create for yourself, dollar by dollar by dollar.
Financial independence is certainly easier to achieve with a good income. But you can also get there, or at least come close to it, by saving and investing no matter what your salary is. (See The Millionaire Next Door.) And so at the most fundamental level, independence requires that you always live well within your means. If you are not living within your means, then you are not saving, and if you are not saving, then you are not creating wealth, you are creating the opposite: need. Financial independence means not having need.
There is no saving without delaying gratification, saying no when you want to say yes—not just every once in a while but pretty much constantly. Saying no not just to the big trips or a car, but also to the expensive haircuts and the overpriced appetizers and the ballet flats with the big logo on them when a pair from DSW will do just fine. It means being chronically cheap and enjoying it. Because every no is a yes to getting things that you really, really, really want and can truly fulfill need, no matter what stage of life you are in.
In my 20s and early 30s, my biggest need, after I had established myself on a career track, was to have a place of my own. I had bounced from illegal sublets to 4th floor walk-ups and had literally begun dreaming of “discovering” an extra room in whichever cramped apartment I was occupying, a dream that I later found out was shared in the collective unconscious of similarly space-starved young Manhattanites.
At the outset, buying my own one bedroom seemed an impossibility. But after a job switch and salary raise, I began automatically withdrawing money from my checking account into a house fund. After several years, I had saved $60,000, at which point several of my relatives generously gave me gifts to increase my down payment and create enough of a cushion to meet co-op board approval. Buying that apartment at age 32 was my first major milepost on the road to financial independence, but I didn’t do it alone.
Related: Where are you on the Road to Wealth?
They helped me, I believe, because I had shown them that I understood what building wealth entailed: being a good steward of your own money, understanding that you have to teach yourself the things you don’t know, whether that’s fixed-rate versus adjustable mortgages or the value of compound interest, and yes, delaying gratification. Granted, timing was on my side—I bought the apartment in the early stages of the real estate boom as was able to later profit not only on its sale but the sale of a subsequent, larger apartment.
But having saved for a purpose once, I know that I can do it again in the future, although not whenever I want but whenever I am able. I would love to be putting aside money to install a master bathroom in my house, but right now it’s more important that my children, with whom I currently share a bathroom, have good childcare, and that I increase my funding to my retirement accounts. The master bath will have to wait.
So here’s where I’m going to get really preachy, because there’s actually another important lesson that all this delayed gratification has taught me. There will always be more and more things to save for: sleep-away camps, college funds, maybe even someday a summer cottage. Today, as I write this on a beautiful day at the end of June, I can honestly say that the path to financial independence also means being profoundly grateful for what you already have.
Ruth Davis Konigsberg, a fortysomething journalist and consultant to Arden Asset Management, writes weekly about retirement planning.Natalia Jaresko, the American-born Ukrainian investment banker who served as Ukraine's Finance Minister between late 2014 and mid-2016, and oversaw a catastrophic decline in the country's economy, has been tasked with steering the Caribbean island of Puerto Rico out of its economic and debt crisis.
Jaresko has been appointed to the post of executive director of the federal control board overseeing the Puerto Rico's finances, the Associated Press has reported.
Board chairman Jose Carrion said that Jaresko's experience in Ukraine made her exactly the kind of person needed to rescue the US territory from its "near-catastrophic" situation. In Ukraine, he noted, Jaresko "worked with stakeholders to bring needed reforms that restored confidence, economic vitality and reinvestment in the country and its citizens."
Carrion said that Jaresko was chosen out of a group of over 300 candidates during an extensive four-month search. "She dealt with an extremely challenging economic situation that is very, very similar to the situation she's confronting in Puerto Rico," he added.
The former finance minister commented on the appointment on her Facebook page, saying that she was "honored and humbled to be taking on a new, critically important position to put Puerto Rico back on the path to fiscal stability."
Jaresko will now be tasked with ensuring a balanced budget within a four year period, and with restructuring the territory's $70 billion in public debt. She will be paid an annual salary of $625,000.
According to figures from the IMF, Ukraine's economy dropped by 9.9% in 2015, the single full year of Jaresko's term in office. In dollar terms, GDP declined from $133.5 billion in 2014 to $90.62 billion in 2015 (a 32% drop). Ukraine's State Statistical Service measured the actual 2015 drop to have been 14.6%. For the first quarter of 2016, the last of Jaresko's term, the service calculated GDP growth of 0.1%.
© AFP 2018 / TOBIAS SCHWARZ Wake-Up Call: IMF Delaying New Loan to Ukraine Signals Major Shift in West's Stance Towards Kiev
In addition to falling GDP, Jaresko's tenure also saw a sharp spike in utilities prices (mandated by the IMF), a rise in poverty, a catastrophic decline in industrial and high tech output (associated with the cut in Ukraine-Russia trade ties), the collapse of Ukraine's currency, the hryvnia, and a host of other problems.
During her time in office, Jaresko worked to restructure Ukraine's debt, including a partial write-off with a 20% haircrut on Ukraine's $18 billion in privately-held government debt. Shortly before being relieved of her post, she hinted that she would be willing to serve as the country's prime minister. After the collapse of the Yatsenyuk government in April 2016, Jaresko was not retained as finance minister by the new government, headed by Volodymyr Groysman.
A month after stepping down, in May 2016, she became chair of the Board of the Trustees of the Kiev branch of the Aspen Institute, a policy studies think tank headquartered in Washington, D.C. In October 2016, she became a member of the Atlantic Council's Dinu Patriciu Eurasia Center.
Jaresko received Ukrainian citizenship in December 2014, but remains a US citizen. Under Ukrainian law, she was expected to renounce her non-Ukrainian citizenship within a two year period.But since a different federal judge has just invoked Smith while reaching a contrary conclusion—that the Fourth Amendment does not prohibit bulk metadata collection—it's worth dwelling on what embracing the NSA's reading of Smith would really mean, and why doing so is an unsound approach to interpreting the Constitution, even if we forget about the present controversy and speak more generally.
To illustrate what I mean, indulge a hypothetical I dreamt up while trying to articulate to myself why I find the way Smith is being invoked so illegitimate and dangerous.
Like most Americans, I go with some regularity to the barber shop. I sit down in the chair, the barber goes to work with his scissors, and by the end of the cut my hair is strewn about the floor. As I pay at the register, the barber sweeps up my hair and dumps it into a trashcan. It subsequently goes out to the dumpster in back. By the logic of Smith, I have no reasonable expectation of privacy as regards this hair. I freely allow it to be clipped from my head and to fall to the floor, knowing full well that third parties will take possession of it en route to the dump.
For the sake of this hypothetical, let us imagine two technological advances that take place 10 years apart. In 2015, a shampoo is introduced that prevents any hair washed with it from revealing the DNA of the person to whom it belongs. Widely used in barber shops, it renders the fact that I have no reasonable expectation of privacy in the hair I leave on the barbershop floor completely unproblematic. There is no scenario in which authorities could perpetrate serious, widespread abuses using hair taken from the floors of barbershops. And anyone could easily protect the privacy of the DNA in their hair, as a 2016 Supreme Court opinion notes while upholding the police's ability to gather hair from dumpsters.
But in 2025, another unexpected innovation occurs. Using technology unimagined in any prior year, analysts can determine, given a strand of human hair, every memory possessed by the owner of the hair at the moment when it was cut. And this technological advance is kept secret. Deep inside the NSA's headquarters, its employees are taking delivery from the contents of barbershop and salon dumpsters all over America, extracting the memories of millions of Americans, and creating a database where all of that intensely private data can be queried.
(All in the name of stopping terrorism, of course.)
Suddenly, the real-world consequences of the earlier precedent are dramatically different. With the ability to extract memories from hair, authorities have warrantless access to virtually everything previously protected by the Fourth Amendment: contents of phone calls, visuals of what goes on inside people's bedrooms, etc. The guarantee of being secure against unreasonable searches is all but meaningless now that police can examine the full contents of virtually everyone's memory in a process not considered a search for Fourth Amendment purposes.A 2,000-page House bill unveiled late Tuesday further entrenches the suspension of certain 2013-implemented hours-of-service rules and clarifies what evidence the DOT must submit to bring the rules back into effect.
The House is expected to vote on the omnibus spending package on Friday. The Senate has not yet indicated when it might vote on the bill, but lawmakers will likely pass a short-term government funding bill this week to give themselves until Tuesday, Dec. 22, to clear the major budget and tax agreement.
The stay of enforcement applies to two HOS regs that took effect July 1, 2013: (1) The requirement that a 34-hour restart include two 1 a.m. to 5 a.m. periods and (2) the once-per-week limit applied to the restart’s use.
Before those rules can be enforced again, FMCSA would be required by the new legislation to show that drivers operating under the 2013 regulations “[demonstrate] statistically significant improvement in all outcomes related to safety, operator fatigue, driver health and longevity and work schedules” when compared to drivers who abide by pre-July 1, 2013, regulations.
Congress directed the stay of enforcement last |
This video concentrates on the two major 9/11 issues: The Unidentified Planes and The Controlled Demolitions. Nothing else. It does not mention the NORAD stand–down; the don’t-fly and don’t-go-to-work warnings or the Dancing Israelis or any of the other anomalies and suspicious happenings. The alleged amateur suicide pilots are not mentioned, either, for obvious reasons, and I do not know what happened to the allegedly hijacked planes or their alleged passengers and crews.
It is my contention that the 9/11 Truth Movement has got to concentrate on the most blatant and provable lies in the official story, and stop trying to be an amateur Police Precinct or a citizen’s District Attorney’s Office. The Movement must bring pressure to bear in the authorities for a new enquiry, so that the police, the FBI, the NTSB and all of the other law enforcement and investigative agencies can do what should have been done 10 years ago:
Find out who was responsible for the crime of the attacks on 9/11 and bring them to justice.On Friday, appeals judges at the ICC ruled that recanted statements against Kenyan Deputy President William Ruto were inadmissible. The decision is a blow to prosecutors trying to convict Ruto over his alleged involvement in violence following disputed elections in 2007.
Lawyers are now barred from using depositions recorded before the start of the trial by five witnesses because they have since changed their stories or refused to testify. Judges last year gave permission for recanted testimonies to serve as evidence against Ruto and his co-accused, radio broadcaster Joshua Sang, saying the witnesses had likely only backed out in the face of intimidation or bribes.
In a unanimous decision, "the appeals chamber has decided to reverse the decision that... prior recorded testimony can be used," Judge Piotr Hofmanski said on Friday.
He said the trial judges had committed "legal errors" by allowing the testimony in the first place, adding that the accused were at a disadvantage because they would not have an opportunity to cross-examine the witnesses.
More than half a million people were left homeless in Kenya's postelection violence
War crimes
More than 1,000 people died and half a million others were left homeless in the 2007 clashes, considered Kenya's worst wave of violence since independence from Britain in 1963.
Ruto, 49, and Sang, 40, have pleaded not guilty to three charges of crimes against humanity, including murder, forcible deportation and persecution. Ruto's lawyer, Karim Khan, welcomed Friday's decision, saying the prosecution had no evidence to support the charges brought against Ruto.
"The case has been brought against the wrong person on the basis of absolutely flawed investigations," Khan told The Associated Press.
Watch video 26:01 Share Fatou Bensouda on Conflict Zone Send Facebook google+ Whatsapp Tumblr linkedin stumble Digg reddit Newsvine Permalink https://p.dw.com/p/1HkNA DW speaks to ICC Chief Prosecutor Fatou Bensouda
Case 'on life support'
Attempts to prosecute the perpetrators behind Kenya's postelection unrest have proved difficult for the ICC. A similar case against Kenyan President Uhuru Kenyatta collapsed in December 2014, also following the loss of testimony and amid allegations of witness intimidation and bribery. The events constituted a major setback for the ICC.
Mark Kersten, a researcher with the Munk School of Global Affairs at the University of Toronto, said Friday's development meant that Ruto's case "is now on life support and may never recover."
"There is broad consensus that the case against Ruto is rather weak, with or without this ruling," Kersten told the AFP news agency.
nm/sms (Reuters, AP, AFP)Sunday, New York Magazine’s Gabriel Sherman said he has sources “in and around Fox” that say Fox News Channel host Sean Hannity and former Fox News Channel host Bill O’Reilly are “in talks” to take their shows to Sinclair Broadcast Group.
“[W]e have been talking about Sean Hannity this morning. My sources in and around Fox say that [he] and Bill O’Reilly are potentially in talks to take their shows to Sinclair,” Sherman reported Sunday on MSNBC’s “AM Joy.”
“Bill O’Reilly’s wanted to get back into the game,” he continued. “So, Sinclair really wants to build the future of a conservative media empire, and poaching Fox’s biggest names would help them do that. They already have Boris [Epshteyn], but this again is the groundwork for what I think will be the next conservative media platform in the post-Roger Ailes era.”
Follow Trent Baker on Twitter @MagnifiTrentThe most ill-advised remark of the fight to pass Obamacare arguably came from then-Speaker Nancy Pelosi. “We have to pass the bill so you can find out what is in it, away from the fog of the controversy," she said.
That “fog of controversy” bit — which is usually dropped from recitations of Pelosi’s quote — reveals what she was actually saying, which was that once the fight over the law’s passage died down, the American people would find there was quite a lot to like in it.
But Republicans correctly smelled blood. It sounded like Pelosi was admitting the Democrats had a plan to jam through passage of a bill whose contents were secret. “We have to pass the bill so you can find out what is in it” became a handy symbol of everything wrong with Obamacare and the process behind its passage. Republicans played Pelosi’s comment over and over again for years. Even though it was misleading, it was a devastating line of attack.
Which is why it’s so strange that Republicans have quite literally adopted “we have to pass the bill so you can find out what is in it” as their health reform strategy.
That is, after all, what repeal and delay is. The plan is Republicans will pass a bill repealing Obamacare, but the repeal will only trigger after a year or two or three. During that interim period, Republicans promise that they will craft and pass their Obamacare replacement — with the looming catastrophe of repeal acting as a forcing mechanism to make sure they don’t shirk their task.
Republicans are planning what Pelosi wasn’t: a legislative strategy in which the details of their health care plan will only come clear — hell, will only even exist — after their bill upending the current system passes.
The strange wrinkle to all this is that repeal and delay is driven by Republicans’ lack of faith in themselves. It’s a legislative device born out of concern that congressional Republicans and the Trump administration will not prioritize replacing Obamacare unless they put a gun to their own heads. It’s an artificial crisis that’s only necessary because Republicans don’t have, and aren’t sure they will ever have, an Obamacare replacement that could simply pass on its own terms.
They don’t want the choice to be between the health system we have and the health system they’re proposing. They want the choice to be between the system they’re proposing and the wreckage of a system they have destroyed.
Conservative health wonks versus repeal and delay
This is no way to legislate, and Republican health care wonks know it. Writing in the journal Health Affairs, Joseph Antos and James Capretta, two conservative health policy experts from the American Enterprise Institute, have published a thorough dismantling of repeal and delay. The strategy, they write, “carries too much risk of unnecessary disruption to the existing insurance arrangements upon which many people are now relying” and “is unlikely to produce a coherent reform of health care in the United States.”
Antos and Capretta worry, reasonably, that repeal and delay will become repeal and delay and delay and delay — that what will happen, in practice, is Republicans won’t craft a usable replacement plan quickly enough, and so they will simply keep adding time to the clock. Meanwhile, the underlying system will be in chaos; the existing marketplaces will likely collapse as insurers flee the uncertainty created by the GOP’s time bomb:
A process focused solely on reversing the ACA and not on putting something better in its place could easily backfire on the GOP. The political firestorm that would ensue from several million people losing their insurance could be enough to force the GOP to reverse course and take steps to provide some kind of emergency insurance for this population, which could be even more costly than the ACA. The episode could also sour the public on the whole concept of repeal and replace.
Antos and Capretta’s piece goes into much more detail on the technical problems of repeal and delay, and is worth reading in full. But they avoid the fundamental issue animating the whole strategy: Republicans don’t know how to replace Obamacare, and they don’t know how to force themselves to figure it out.
That isn’t to say that individual Republicans, or various conservative think tanks, haven’t sketched out Obamacare repeal plans. They have. But turning those plans into consensus legislation will force Republicans to own their trade-offs, to defend their weak points, to answer to the Congressional Budget Office’s score and to Donald Trump’s Twitter account and to the American Medical Association and, ultimately, to the voters.
Republicans have always been willing to own Obamacare’s repeal, but they have never wanted to own a replacement, or the health care system that will result from its passage. And that hasn’t really changed.
Failing at repeal and delay is much worse than failing at replace
Over at Bloomberg, Steven Dennis relays a conversation with an unnamed Republican senator that shows the way power is sharpening the GOP’s sense of the stakes:
A Republican senator on condition of anonymity said the details of the repeal bill remain very uncertain. Originally, Republicans were planning to simply bring back the bill they put on Obama’s desk last year for his veto. But that bill was written knowing it wouldn’t become law, and now some Republicans want to make tweaks to soften the blow of repeal. "Even people who voted for this before are, ‘Wait a minute, wait a minute, we knew that wasn’t going to happen,’" said the senator. "There were no consequences." He said there’s a growing sense among some of his colleagues that they need to have a replacement for Obamacare ready soon "because we’re going to own this."
“There were no consequences.” Now there are. But for Republicans, repeal and delay makes the consequences worse.
Consider the downside of a normal legislative process in which Republicans draft a replacement plan that fails. That’s bad. But, like George W. Bush’s doomed effort to privatize Social Security, it ends. The bill is pulled from the floor, and Republicans move on to other issues, or pass some smaller changes and declare victory.
With repeal and delay, the consequences of failing on a replacement don’t end — the system will be crumbling, and Republicans will have to keep trying to find some form of replacement until they succeed, or until they’re kicked out of office. It makes failure uncontainable, and ensures that replacing Obamacare will dominate Trump’s first term. This is something Trump himself seems increasingly aware of:
Republicans must be careful in that the Dems own the failed ObamaCare disaster, with its poor coverage and massive premium increases...... — Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) January 4, 2017
It’s also worth noting that there’s no reason to believe the Republican Party is particularly close to agreeing on the boundaries of a replacement. While all the Republican plans put forward would leave millions more people uninsured, Kellyanne Conway, one of Trump’s advisers, went on Morning Joe this week and said, “We don’t want anyone who currently has insurance not to have insurance” — a principle that wipes out every Republican repeal plan, including Trump’s own. This doesn’t sound like a party willing to own the consequences of repeal, replace, or delay.
Repeal and delay takes something Republicans already can’t seem to do — agree on an Obamacare replacement — and weaponizes it against themselves. It is a bizarre political strategy, and Democrats are starting to sound downright gleeful about it.
"I think they’re stuck," Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer told Bloomberg. "They’re going to regret the day they made this their opening issue."“Um… I’m terribly sorry, but to prove a point I had to steal your money pouch.” said Odorf while handing back the little pouch filled with a few coins. He would never do such a thing under normal circumstances; however, he knew that Scarlett was watching him. He did not yet know the extent of her abilities, but he was scared. He expected yelling and kicking, but he certainly did not expect the innkeeper to smile. The innkeepers face, decorated with scars and wrinkles, stretched into a sincere smile; Odorf was confused. “That’s alright.” said the innkeeper calmly. “I knew all along that you were trying to prove a point. I may be old, but back in my days, we used to do the same thing.” Odorf was dumbfounded; his jaw fell to the floor, and his eyes wide open. He did not know if he was out of shape or if the old innkeeper is more than meets the eyes. ‘I should definitely keep an eye on him. I might learn something useful.’ He went back to the others and sat down. “Everything alright?” Scarlett asked, seeing that Odorf looked like he saw a ghost. “Huh? Yes, yes. Everything is perfectly fine. I… just god distracted for a moment. Everything’s perfect.” he grinned while trying to behave appropriately. He got back to his ale. Scarlett turned back to Ziel and continued chatting about her past and how they could help her reach her full potential. Dylan was looking like he was ready to go under the table like Jacques. ‘How in the Nine Hells am I gonna survive this?’ pondered Odorf while drinking his ale.
A few moments later, the door to the inn opened and a flamboyant, very colorful stranger entered. Odorf noticed him immediately, although probably everyone noticed him. A tall figure, dressed in loose pants with all the colors of the rainbow depicted. His white shirt was loose, yet somehow captivating. He was protected from the elements by a simple dark-purple colored cloak. Odorf immediately noticed that the stranger was an entertainer of some sorts, he was carrying a lyre. The stranger went to the innkeeper, talked for a while, shook hands and went over next to the fireplace, readied his lyre and started playing. The melody was soothing and very sweet, Odorf was reminded of his childhood; running through lush green fields of grass. Scarlett and Ziel also stopped talking to listen to the sweet melody, they too were reminded happier days. Scarlett remembered the precious moments she has spent with Dylan and their parents. Ziel, on the other hand, remember only a strange sensation, as if she was not herself, rather cocooned into some kind of shell, surrounded by warmth; the air smelled of sulfur and felt boiling, but she felt right at home. Dylan also felt the song take over his senses, he remember the days he spent with Scarlett as kids, happy, carefree and just playing around. Suddenly, the whole inn fell silent; everyone was listening to the captivating melody of memories.
For a moment, what seemed like an eternity, everyone was happy. However, Odorf felt a sudden rush down his spine. Something was going to happen. Even Scarlett seemed distressed, as if she could feel something happening. Ziel was phased by the music but she could clearly hear a voice suddenly breaking the euphoria: “We found her!” She immediately jumped from her chair, and started breathing frantically. “What is wrong Ziel? Calm down!” Scarlett was trying to help Ziel calm down. “No, you don’t understand. They are coming for me! They found me!” Scarlett sensed danger. Odorf was already reaching for his daggers.
Ziel was frantically trying to get away from everyone, she ran for the exit, Scarlett running after her to try and calm her down, by now everyone in the inn was watching them, trying to figure out what was going on. “No! Let me go! I don’t want to die!” Ziel was yelling without letting Scarlett get to near. Dylan, still groggy from all the drinking, looked around to make sense of all the ruckus going around him. The only thing he could see was that Ziel and Scarlett were running for the door, Odorf missing and Jacques still passed out on the table; that made him feel good on the inside. The next thing Dylan remembers is that he was on the floor, and in pain.
As Ziel and Scarlett got to the door, it suddenly swung open. “There she is.” thundered a black-hooded man, and immediately started chanting something, at that moment, the table where Dylan and Jacques were, exploded. Scarlett looked around and noticed three more hooded figures around in the inn; one was standing next to the now gone table and apparently cast a spell. The other two were taking care of the commoners sitting at the other tables, one was wielding a longsword and the other was brandishing a giant war axe. Without even thinking she pushed Ziel aside and fashioned her mace aimed at the hooded figure but missed by a hair’s length. Ziel managed to keep her balance but she was still in shock to do anything. The hooded figure near Dylan finished chanting a spell and aimed his hand at Dylan, but before he could unleash a deadly barrage of magic, Odorf suddenly jumped from behind, landing on the hooded figure’s back, driving one dagger through his spinal cord and the other all the way around through the eye socket. Blood sprayed everywhere, and it seemed like Odorf was enjoying himself too much, Dylan took notice of the grin on Odorf’s face and the joy in his eyes. For the time being, Dylan thought that it must be because he is drunk and he cannot see straight. Without wasting any more time, Dylan got up, pulled out his sword and went for the nearest hooded figure.
The hooded figure with the longsword was slicing through the patrons, sparing no one, as he got to the bard singing in the corner, Jacques stood in front of him, and barely standing he managed to fend off the attack with his sword. “Get…get to safety…” he managed utter these words, visibly staggering and hardly being able to talk, let alone fight. The bard took up on his advice and ran from them. “You think you can stop me?! Foolish human…” without hesitating, Jacques managed to drive his sword through the hooded figure’s stomach, spilling his intestines all over the floor, blood and innards fell from the now dead man once Jacques pulled out his sword. “JACQUES! WATCH OUT! BEHIND YOU!” Ziel yelled.Critics say an attempt by a city council candidate to make public a closed-door transit consultation was a trip down the wrong track.
Former council watchdog and municipal election candidate Jeromy Farkas drew criticism after live-streaming an invitation-only engagement session on the controversial southwest transitway on his Facebook page.
“I felt the public deserved to be at that meeting,” Farkas said of the information session, held Saturday at the Calgary South Delta hotel.
“I tried to do something a little bit new and use technology to bring the public into the room, and ask questions on their behalf.”
Last year, Mayor Naheed Nenshi declared public consultations on the 22-kilometre bus rapid transit (BRT) project would cease after accusing opponents of verbally and physically assaulting city staff. The project, which initially came with a $40-million price tag, now could ring in as high as $65 million.
Saturday’s invitation-only meeting included groups both for and against the project, including citizen lobby group Ready to Engage — a vocal opponent of the project.
Farkas said he secured permission from city staff to broadcast the meeting and informed tablemates of his intentions. He said it wasn’t until participants began breaking into discussion groups that he was asked to discontinue the broadcast.
Not everybody shared Farkas’ enthusiasm for making the proceedings public, including attendee Jesse Salus, who said he wasn’t aware of the live broadcast.
“I went to the table he was at because that’s where my first discussion was,” Salus said.
“He may have asked the people sitting there during the introduction, but not once we started moving around the room for the breakout sessions — I can’t speak for his intentions, but he didn’t tell the people at the breakout session that he was doing it.”
Fellow attendee Christopher Doyle shared the sentiment, accusing Farkas of using the meeting to further his political campaign.
“He wasn’t there to help or participate in the process,” he said.
“I think it was definitely the wrong way to approach it.”
Farkas dismissed claims he sneaked into the meeting under false pretences, saying he attended as a member of Palliser’s neighbourhood community association.
Backlash prompted Farkas to temporarily take down the video Sunday to remove discussions captured during the breakout session.
Doyle said Farkas reached out and offered a personal apology.
Farkas said his broadcast was justified in light of previous allegations of bad behaviour during the process.
“There were allegations in the past of violence and bullying, but never had the city shared evidence of this,” he said.
“People asking questions about the project, they’re not ill-intentioned, and I wanted to document that.”
While Farkas accused facilitators of preventing discussion of contentious issues such as cost and routing, Salus’ impression was more of a focused discussion rather than a deliberate attempt to silence critics.
“Many of those higher-level discussions had already been decided,” he said.
“Now that the city’s narrowing down the final design phase, they’re really looking for input on specific things.”
Farkas maintains he wants the city to be more forthcoming about future input sessions.
“These meetings would be much better off if they were held in public,” he said. “When there’s no information about it, it’s so easy for people on both sides of the issue to cloud what’s being discussed.”
Area Coun. Brian Pincott was not available for comment.
bpassifiume@postmedia.com
On Twitter: @BryanPassifiumeNow that the White House and State Department have made clear that they believe movies compel terrorists to terrorize, it’s time for them to get ahead of this problem. And one thing the White House can do immediately is to pressure Sony to stop the release of director Kathryn Bigelow’s “Zero Dark Thirty,” which celebrates the killing of Osama bin Laden.
I’m only saying this because, you know, the White House and the media told me movies inflame and cause terrorism.
Think about it: if the poorly produced and laughably bad trailer for “The Innocence of Muslims” results in chaos, murder, and the burning of foreign outposts all throughout the Middle East, how much rioting and mayhem is a big-budgeted, slickly produced, Oscar-bait blockbuster celebrating the death of the leader of al-Qaeda going to cause?
Moreover, an excuse Secretary of State Hillary Clinton will not be able to use in the case of “Zero Dark Thirty” (as she did with “Innocence of Muslims”) is the cowardly and self-righteous claim that the federal government and the Obama White House had nothing to do with “Zero Dark Thirty.”
Because the federal government and the Obama White House had everything to do with “Zero Dark Thirty.”
As we now know, in an effort to get this glitzy in-kind contribution (tens of millions of dollars) up on the screen in time to affect the election, it was the Obama Administration that gave the filmmakers tons of encouragement and a troubling amount of access to all kinds of classified material.
But this very same Obama Administration has since learned that it wasn’t the Obama Doctrine of disengaging with the Middle East and embracing the Muslim Brotherhood that caused all this mayhem and murder last week. It was a movie.
This means that the only responsible thing for the Obama Administration to do is to get proactive and, in the interest of national security and to help ensure the safety of Americans overseas, put as much pressure as they can on Sony to stop the distribution of “Zero Dark Thirty.”
After all, this is what the Administration did to YouTube to stop the distribution of “The Innocence of Muslims.”
And I’m certain no one in Hollywood would be alarmed if the government were to pressure Sony not to release its film. Why would they if they won’t stand up for the “Innocence of Muslims” filmmaker being persecuted by our government and media overlords today?
You know, because movies create terrorism.
Follow John Nolte on Twitter @NolteNCThere will never be a replacement for hiring the ears and experience of a professional mastering engineer. Having said that, many people do successfully master their own music at home. It certainly can be done, but you do need to have a foundation of knowledge to help make those masters translatable. You may even be at the beginning of your journey as a budding mastering engineer, in which case, this list is perfect for you.
1. Orban Loudness Meter
Orban Loudness Meter is a free offline loudness meter for Mac and Windows. This app allows you to get a reading of your printed master’s loudness levels including LUFS/LKFS and inter-sample peaks. This information is crucial to know when making translatable masters for today’s platforms. If terms such as LUFS are new to you, I suggest you start by reading this article.
2. This Infographic
One of those ‘save to desktop’ items. The below graphic from Ian Shepherd’s blog is a great way to get a grip of what the today’s platforms are doing, helping you make informed decisions when it comes to levels and loudness.
3. The Mastering Show
Another one from Ian. I listen to this show every week and there is something of value to be taken away from each episode. Via this podcast, Ian will keep you up to speed with the ever-changing landscape that is plug-ins, loudness, and best practices.
Available on iTunes Podcasts, YouTube, and Soundcloud.
4. Mastering Audio – the art and the science by Bob Katz
This is THE book on all things mastering. Written by prolific mastering engineer Bob Katz. If you don’t know who he is, then i’m glad you do now.
You likely won’t need to read it from front to back, but it will be right there next to you for when you need an answer a question. Much better to do that than rely solely on Facebook groups!
5. This Forum
The Gearslutz Mastering Forum is a gold-pot full of very knowledgeable mastering engineers. Many of these gals and guys have been building their craft for longer than i’ve been alive. Careful though, you may just find yourself reading these threads through the night. I know I certainly do!
6. Ian Shepherd’s Home Mastering Masterclass
As a graduate of this program, I can’t recommend it enough. Ian’s style of over-the-shoulder teaching makes for an excellent resource. As a member, you will also have access to his exclusive Facebook group which I find to be of very high value. Simply put, this course will teach you mastering.
Every week you get a new video where Ian shows you his mastering process for a different song using a different DAW each week. You are also left with homework for that week which you can discuss in his live Q&A sessions with him.
BONUS
Happy mastering, and as always, please feel free to send us your work and we will review it for free. Now you should be set!
Save
Sharing is caring!Chloe is believed to have taken the drug in her home (Picture: SWNS)
The father of a teenage girl who died after taking MDMA has been charged with manslaughter as police believe he gave her the drug.
Jason Wilkes is also charged with conspiracy to supply the drug, which an inquest revealed caused his daughter’s death.
Chloe Wilkes, 17, is believed to had taken the drug in her home in Ashford, Kent.
She was rushed to William Harvey Hospital after she collapsed, where she died a few hours later on Sunday June 27.
Friends have set up a Facebook group in chloe’s memory (Picture: SWNS)
Friends of the teenager paid tribute to her on the tribute Facebook page named Chloe Wilkes! Little angel who’s now in good hands! We all miss you!
A friend Luke Payne wrote on the page: ‘I miss you so much, can’t believe I won’t ever see you again. I love u so much!’
Advertisement
Advertisement
Chloe’s old head teacher at North School in Ashford, Jon Whitcombe, told Kent Online: ‘These are a desperately sad set of circumstances and our thoughts are with family and friends at this most difficult of times.’
The initial hearing ruled that Chloe died after taking MDMA, one of the key components of ecstasy pills, however a full inquest into the teenagers death will be held at a later date.Granola bars are a staple in my pantry, but between my husband, my kids, and my kids’ hungry friends, I can’t seem to keep enough of them in the house. So I figured it was time to try and make them from scratch, and maybe even sneak in some health food. After many trials, I finally cracked the code and came up with a version that puts all those store-bought bars to shame. What’s more, they’re no-bake and take only ten minutes to make.
The nice thing about these bars is that they’re versatile. If you don’t like chocolate chips, you can use raisins or cranberries. If you’re not a fan of almonds, you can throw in some unsalted sunflower seeds instead. Basically, as long as you keep the ratio of wet to dry ingredients the same, you can substitute just about anything you like. Just keep the quantities of oats and Rice Krispies the same so your bars will have a nice, chewy-crisp texture.
Also, be sure to use quick-cooking oats, which are rolled oats that have been coarsely chopped. Regular old-fashioned oats would be too chewy for this recipe and cause the bars to fall apart. Quick-cooking oats are readily available but you can also make your own by pulsing regular oatmeal in the food processor a few times.
Begin by combining the butter, brown sugar and honey in a large pan.
Bring it to a boil, then let it bubble over low heat for a few minutes to thicken slightly.
Off the heat, stir in the salt and vanilla extract.
Then add the oats, crispy rice cereal, almonds, and flax meal (or wheat germ).
Fold the mixture with a rubber spatula until evenly combined.
Transfer the granola bar mixture to a 9 x 13-inch pan lined with aluminum foil.
Press the mixture lightly with a rubber spatula to flatten, then sprinkle the chocolate chips over top. Use the spatula to press the chips firmly into place and compact the mixture into the pan as much as possible. (The reason you don’t mix the chips in is that they’ll melt.)
Place the pan in the refrigerator for 1-1/2 -2 hours, until the bars are cool. Then use the foil overhang to lift the bars out of the pan and transfer to a cutting board. Using a sharp knife, cut into rectangles.
Keep the bars in an airtight container in the refrigerator; if you have to stack them, be sure to use parchment paper or foil in between the layers, otherwise they’ll crumble and stick. Enjoy!
My Recipe Videos My Recipe VideosA torrent of lava has been gushing from Hawaii's Kilauea volcano into the Pacific Ocean over the past few days, putting on quite a show.
The "waterfall" of lava is located at the Kamokuna lava delta in Hawai'i Volcanoes National Park, and it began after several acres of land collapsed on December 31, 2016.
The National Park Service posted this to its Hawai'i Volcanoes National Park account:
Hiking and boating near the lava flow is being discouraged by the National Park Service.
Videographer Warren Fintz took the footage of the lava flow for the above video from the legal viewing area. He observed two hikers, who are highlighted in the video, as they walk dangerously close to the edge of the lava flow. The hikers then have to scramble to safety as a portion of the bottom of the cliff falls into the ocean, and seconds later an explosion from the sea shot debris onto the area of the cliff where they had been standing, Fintz says.
Fitz took the footage in late January, and he spent the night near the cliff when it first collapsed at the end of last year.To be clear: I think “Tales From the Con” is a fine webcomic, and I’ve enjoyed reading through its archives. Well drawn, and good gags. Many cosplayer-friendly strips, too.
The unfortunate strip published today, however, put a thought in my mind. Certain as I am that this particular “Tales From The Con” wasn’t meant as a slam against cosplayers, in the midst of the overall current discussion, well, it sure could be read that way. And was.
Anyway, all cartoonists have off-days. God knows I have more than most. Certainly more than these guys, who seem to be quite talented at what they do.
Look, I don’t want the above bit of photoshop tomfoolery to be taken as a rant against the creators or the strip itself, and it’s certainly not meant to slight nor slur Emerald City Comic Con, of which I hear amazing things. But here’s the more general thought it inspired:
Is there a “Beetle Bailey Test” (akin to the Bechdel test) we should use in everyday life?
“Even if you don’t think your words are sexist, nor were intended to be, if they can be photoshopped into a believable word balloon for Brigadier General Amos T. Halftrack, they most likely are.”
– JOHN
PS: It appears the strip has been removed from the Emerald City Comic Con web site.
PPS: Here are some “Tales from the Con” I think are great. Read the strip. There’s some real good stuff in it:
COMMISSION IMPOSSIBLE
TRICKED OUT COSTUMES
THE GREAT LONGBOX IN THE SKYReady or not, it's time for the annual Uni Watch College Football Season Preview, our jumbo compendium of all the FBS uniform changes for the upcoming season. Or as some of you like to call it, Christmas in August.
As usual, we've prepared a comprehensive team-by-team rundown, organized by conference. In addition to uniform changes, we've included updates to logos, equipment, field designs and anything else related to a team's visual program. If a school isn't listed here, that means it hasn't announced any changes for this year, at least that we're aware of. (Although schools will undoubtedly be unveiling additional uniforms and helmets -- blackout, whiteout, camouflage, stars and stripes, chrome and so on -- as the season progresses.)
Ready?
Deep breath -- here we go:
Jump to a conference:
ACC
• Boston College has a decent-looking new uniform set, although the pants striping -- something being worn by more and more Under Armour-outfitted schools -- feels like an unnecessary addition.
Boston College's new unis. The pants striping is a new Under Armour thing (Northwestern has something similar). pic.twitter.com/w6Txe613gh — Paul Lukas (@UniWatch) August 16, 2016
The #BCEagles are rollin' out new threads in 2016 - Ty Schwab models 'em for the masses pic.twitter.com/1mvzbuVn0T — BC Football (@BCFootball) August 3, 2016
Also, when the Eagles open the season by playing Georgia Tech in Dublin, Ireland, they'll have lots of new gear for the occasion:
Additionally, the Eagles will retire former quarterback Matt Ryan's number prior to the Nov. 19 game against UConn:
"Matty Ice" was highest #BCEagles draft pick ever, in any sport; jersey retirement set for 11/19 UConn game. pic.twitter.com/iCeSlEDGrQ — #BCEagles (@BCEagles) July 5, 2016
• There are several small changes for Clemson, the most notable of which is that the tiger paw graphic has been moved from the sleeves to the shoulders, with TV numbers now appearing on the sleeves (additional photos and info here):
Tradition. Style. Championship Swagger.
All at a @usnikefootball Mach Speed pace.
Welcome to 2016 in Tiger Town.https://t.co/pVbB2WUMSE — Clemson Football (@ClemsonFB) April 12, 2016
In addition, Clemson will once again wear purple jerseys -- symbolizing the Purple Heart -- for Military Appreciation Day on Nov. 5 against Syracuse:
Clemson will wear "Purple Heart" jerseys for Military Appreciation Day (Nov. 5, vs. Syracuse). pic.twitter.com/tHTXlLWsq7 — Paul Lukas (@UniWatch) August 16, 2016
• The arrows on Florida State's field are now shaped like spearheads:
Check it out: the arrows on the field are shaped like spears now. pic.twitter.com/fmdqXNg7iN — Tim Linafelt / FSU (@Tim_Linafelt) August 14, 2016
• Sources indicate that Miami might scrap its feather striping and go with a simpler look "as soon as can get the jerseys in" (additional info here):
Starting with Saturday's game, make sure you know what color the Canes are rockin' both home and away! pic.twitter.com/OvI86QVPjb — Canes Football (@CanesFootball) August 29, 2016
In addition, the Canes have posted their full home and road jersey schedule for the upcoming season:
• North Carolina will wear its blue jerseys on the road for the season-opening game against Georgia on Saturday, creating what should be a very good-looking color-versus-color matchup:
Although not shown in that photo, both teams will be wearing a Chick-fil-A Kickoff Game jersey patch:
.@CFAPeachBowl patches have arrived. Game just 50 days away. pic.twitter.com/6n5Iqm9cK1 — Carolina Football (@TarHeelFootball) July 15, 2016
Also, the Tar Heels have new footwear and new gloves. And in what might be the subtlest move of the year, they've added their team name to their chinstraps:
The new Nike Vapor Untouchable 2 for @TarHeelFootball this fall. pic.twitter.com/5JgLiNECQm — Jason Freeman (@UNCEquipment) July 20, 2016
.@Switz03 stopped by to get fit for his helmet and loved the new Tar Heels we added on the chinstrap for this fall. pic.twitter.com/99mf0H8rP9 — Jason Freeman (@UNCEquipment) July 25, 2016
In addition, defensive back Patrice Rene, who's Canadian, and punter Tom Sheldon, who's Australian, will be wearing their national flags |
sections worked hand in hand, without Section 4, the coverage formula, Section 5 became inoperative.
READ MORE: North Carolina voter ID law overturned for ‘racially discriminatory intent’
Georgia Rep. John Lewis said in an Washington Post op-ed on the day of the decision that the purpose of the Voting Rights Act was “not to increase the numbers of minority voters or elected officials. That is a byproduct of its effectiveness. The purpose of the act is to stop discriminatory practices from becoming law.”
Since 2013, states with a history of discrimination have been able to change voting laws without federal oversight. Since then, the U.S. has seen sweeping changes, with many states adopting stricter regulations, such as mandatory voter ID and eliminating pre-registration. Fifteen states have tougher voting laws in place for a presidential election for the first time.
Here’s a guide to the changes and what they mean for voters:
Which states, previously covered under Section 5, have passed stricter voting laws after the 2013 SCOTUS decision?
Six states have passed new voting laws after Shelby County v. Holder; those states include Alabama, Arizona, Georgia, Mississippi, Texas, and Virginia. Laws range from strict voter ID requirements to the elimination of same-day voter registration and out-of-precinct voting.
Why are states passing stricter voting laws?
Depends on whom you ask.
Supporters of these stricter voting laws say they are intended to combat voter fraud. “My view is that it should be easy to vote but hard to cheat,” said Kansas Secretary of State Kris Kobach in a Washington Post article.
Election law experts note there is no significant evidence of voter fraud. Rick Hasen, professor of Law at University of California, Irvine says the voting fraud America sees, which is rare, includes vote-counting by elected officials or issues surrounding absentee ballots.
Those who oppose stricter laws say they are a response to an increase in minority voting power. The black turnout exceeded white turnout for the first time in the 2012 election.
Restrictive voting laws were blocked in court during the 2012 election, but the large turnout inspired backlash against minority voters, according to Ari Berman, senior writer at the Nation and author of Give Us the Ballot. And since a higher percentage of minorities vote Democrat, those against restrictive laws say voting rights have been politicized. (Though Deborah Archer, professor at New York University Law contends that “the fact that it has a partisan benefit doesn’t negate the intent or impact.”)
Which states were required to have preclearance under Section 5, and what was the formula?
Section 5 covered 15 states. Congress was responsible for revising and updating the coverage formula, established in Section 4. States under the 1965 coverage formula had:
Voter turnout or registration rates lower than 50 percent in the 1964 presidential election and
laws that discouraged voters like literacy tests or poll taxes.
In 1970, Congress revised the coverage formula with data from the 1968 presidential election, and in 1975, revised data to reflect the 1972 election. That included the growing population of minority language voters, meaning that states where at least 5 percent of voting population spoke another language but had English-only ballots fell under Section 5.
Have these new voting laws been challenged?
This summer, voting laws in six states — North Carolina, North Dakota, Wisconsin, Kansas, Texas and Michigan — experienced pushback from the courts. Some courts have gone as far as to question the intent of the voting laws, reckoning that some laws are not improving democracy but are used to discriminate. A federal appeals court struck down North Carolina’s voter ID law for having discriminatory intent, whereas other courts challenging similar laws in other states said the impact disenfranchised minority voters.
It’s not enough to just look at the state’s litigation, to see what the law’s articulated reasoning is, and take that at face value, said Wendy Weiser of the Brennan School of Justice. Now courts are now looking at the justifications — the intent — behind it, she said.
Weiser predicts we will see more voting rights cases trickle through, most likely from Arizona, Kansas, Wisconsin and Alabama. Just this past Thursday, the North Carolina governor’s request to put that same voter ID ruling on hold, pending a request for the Supreme Court to review the decision, was denied by a 4th Circuit Court of Appeals.
Does preclearance in Section 5 have a chance of being reinstated?
Congress has introduced two bills to restore VRA’s preclearance — the Voting Rights Amendment Act and the Voting Rights Advancement Act — which would look at voting rights violations from the last 15 years, and the other from the last 25 years, respectively. Neither has made much headway.
How will this affect the 2016 presidential election?
It’s unclear. Likelier than not, these stricter voting laws will impact the election results but scholars can only speculate to what degree. When voting laws change, people are not always attuned to it, said Ari Berman. Some people won’t know that same-day registration has been eliminated and that they can’t register at the polls anymore, he said.(CNN) -- There's no truth to accusations by bloggers that a Palestinian camera crew staged a video showing the death of the videographer's brother after an Israeli rocket attack, said the team's employer.
In the video, camerman Ashraf Mashharawi is seen holding his brother.
"It's absolute nonsense," Paul Martin, co-owner of World News and Features, said of accusations leveled by bloggers at videographer Ashraf Mashharawi.
"He's a man of enormous integrity and would never get involved with any sort of manipulation of images, let alone when the person dying is his own brother," Martin said. "I know the whole family. I know them very well.... [Mashharawi] is upset and angry that anyone would think of him having done anything like this.... This is ridiculous. He's independent."
Raafat Hamdouna, administrative director at Shifa Hospital in Gaza City, said Friday that "Mahmoud Khalil Mashharawi, a 12-year-old, was brought to the hospital, and he was breathing, but he was hit in the head and all over his body by shrapnel. He died later in the hospital. He was treated by the Norwegian team. When he was brought in, he was breathing. The team did their best to save him. I am not really sure if they even tried to rush him to the surgery room, because he was badly hurt."
Don't Miss Conflict strikes home as cameraman finds brother dead
Mashharawi's video footage originally appeared on British television's Channel 4 and later on CNN. It showed futile attempts by doctors to resuscitate Mashharawi's 12-year-old brother, Mahmoud, after he and his 14-year-old cousin, Ahmed, had been wounded in what the family said was a rocket attack from a remote-controlled drone Sunday. Watch doctors try and save the boy »
Ahmed also was taken to the hospital, but he had been fatally struck in the head and chest by shrapnel and had lost a foot, Hamdouna said. Hamdouna said the hospital records reported Ahmed's age as 16, not 14, as the family said.
At the time of the attack, the family said, the two boys were playing on the rooftop of the family's three-story house. The video showed a blood-splattered area where an explosion had taken place and where shrapnel had pierced the roof.
Mashharawi has regularly worked with World News and Features since 2004, Martin said. His multimedia company serves television, radio and newspapers.
Martin said accusations that Mashharawi owns a company that hosts Hamas Web sites were falsely based on Mashharawi having worked at a company that created the PS suffix to allow anyone of any political persuasion to create Palestinian Web sites.
The video footage appeared on CNN television networks and on CNN.com for 24 hours before CNN removed the material in the belief that it had no further right to use it. CNN, standing by the video, has since reposted it. Some bloggers had cited its removal as evidence that CNN did not stand by its reporting.
Responding to accusations that the resuscitation efforts of Mashharawi's brother appeared inauthentic, Martin said that, based on his years of reporting from Gaza, doctors often go through such efforts even with little hope that a patient can be saved.
In the video of the incident, the boy appears lifeless when brought to into the hospital.
In a brief conversation with CNN, Mashharawi said that doctors tried everything they could to save his brother and that he rejected suggestions that any of his work was inauthentic.
Before bloggers made their accusations, Mashharawi told CNN, "I believed at that moment if I didn't record that nobody will believe what's happened to my brother. Because it is unbelievable. Until now, I can't believe what's happened."
All About Gaza • Israel • HamasI later asked Charlie Cox who plays Matt Murdock/Daredevil about the sequence during a round table interview with Rosario Dawson:
Peter Sciretta: One of our favorite parts of the five episodes we’ve seen is the end of the second episode, the fight sequence that’s like six minutes long and it looks like one take.
Charlie Cox: No one has said that.
Peter Sciretta: Really?
Charlie Cox: No, I’m kidding.
Peter Sciretta: I was gonna say, ’cause that’s incredible. I wanted to hear your experience filming that and how it went.
Charlie Cox: Yeah. Poor Rosario’s gonna be bored of hearing this. So it was–
Rosario Dawson: No, I love it so much.
Charlie Cox: It was incredible. It was as a special day as it was to as the scene has turned out. We dedicated our whole day to it. The first half of the day was just the camera movements. And then we got into, it was as you know it’s one take, so we had to get everything right. Each attempt that we had at it. And it’s incredibly tricky because it’s not like a long tracking shot with two people speaking, it’s a long tracking shot with people punching. And if one punch doesn’t land, it no longer works. It ceases to work as a scene. So I think we did it 12 times. I think three of them we made it all the way through to the end. And one of them was the one in the show, which is kind of almost flawless. I mean, it’s very hard to pick holes in that.
Peter Sciretta: So its really not stitched together at all?
Charlie Cox: No, that’s one take. And…
Rosario Dawson: The choreography though, that’s what kills me about it, ‘caus just that whole idea of when you’re seeing it and it’s not static, it’s not just looking in one direction, it moves, it goes and it looks in other places. The camera, it–
Charlie Cox: It tells a story.
Rosario Dawson: They change places and so like I’ve done enough, you know, I didn’t film anything like that, but, you know, I remember when we did the scene in Death Proof and we’re all around the table and the camera’s moving around and, you know, we choreographed this whole thing where we lean forward so we could in one shot we could get close-ups and two takes, whatever, so I knew exactly what was going on, but the fact that it wasn’t on a track, this is someone walking around. He’s dipping, like it’s seamless, you know. There’s points where he’s acting, where he’s fighting and all of a sudden–
Charlie Cox: I come in and I go in a door, I hide behind the door, Chris Brewster comes out, he does his bit. Then he goes into a room, I come back out, I do a bit and, you know.
Rosario Dawson: It’s just, it’s beautiful. And also it takes its time. There’s still, like, breathing. There are so many people. Just the reality of how much, you know, how every single person I’m sure that day was like “huh,” at the top of it. And that’s what makes shooting something like this so exciting because you’re Daredevil, but we’re all Daredevil. Like, you know, we’re all these different characters. Like it’s means so much to every single person on set to get it right. Whatever that means and there’s so many disparate ideas and views of what that is, but you know you got it when at the end of a take like that, everyone just goes yeah. There’s an immediate release that you don’t normally get on set, you know. Like people don’t normally cheer like that on dramatic film and indie films.
Charlie Cox: Yeah, it was a bonding moment.
Rosario Dawson: It’s beautiful and I love remembering everybody else who was there. You know, because from the producers down every single person is a part of that camera movement. If it doesn’t work, it’s like aw… You know? But when it does, it’s so powerful. And we’re on vampire hours. Most of the time, the whole crew, everybody, we’re working late at night. I’m very good at that. I love being up super late at night, but it’s hard. And I think what’s great about it is that it’s not supposed to be flawless and perfect. You know, it’s not supposed to be like these invincible characters fighting each other, it’s supposed to be real. It’s supposed to be real people. And I think that’s gonna get people in the room to kind of like pant with you. You know, like we were panting at the end of these takes. We’re not faking that.You may remember ANC Commissioner Frank Winstead from his chillingly subtitled youtube video "Ping Pong in Public Space" or his chillingly subtitled youtube video "When UPS Delivers in D.C., Life Suffers."
Last Tuesday, Winstead staged a live performance at the packed-full ANC meeting held to reassess Comet Ping Pong's voluntary agreement with the commission. (Marc Fisher, hot on the Winstead beat, has his roundup here. DCist, too). During the course of the meeting, Winstead accused Comet owner James Alefantis of lying, cheating, stealing, spitting in a customers food, and encouraging both murderers and rapists.
"He said rape," confirms fellow ANC3F commissioner Mital Gandhi. "R-A-P-E. Rape."
Says Alefantis, "Frank Winstead was completely and totally unprofessional, incredibly rude, and a little wacky. He was yelling and screaming and wagging his finger at everyone."
But don't take their word for it: We've plucked the highlights of the recording, after the jump!*
* Not caught on tape: "At one point, he mouthed 'fuck you' to me," says Alefantis.
[MEDIA=21] Winstead: James is trying to turn this into Adams Morgan with the murders, the rapes... [Extended booing, punctuated laugher]... the lying, the cheating!
Commission chairperson Jane Solomon: Hold on, alright, wait wait wait wait wait, wait, let me have quiet here!
[MEDIA=22]
Winstead: Have you ever spit in a customer’s food?
Solomon: Wait Frank, come on, come on. Come on! Alright please, please, everyone quiet. [Shushing] Quiet, Frank, that’s not helpful, let's please, James is speaking.
Winstead: He breaks the law
Solomon: We are not law enf—-
Winstead: [Unintelligible]... he’s filling up his fat wallet...
Solomon: Alright Frank, you're out of order, please. [Calls from crowd for Winstead to recuse himself] That's not helpful here.
Winstead: Lying, cheating, stealing!
Photos by enviziondotnetKieran Williams, nine, let the balloon go at the fete at Catcott Primary School, Somerset, on 7 July.
Two days later it turned up 240kms away at Tony Blair's holiday home, Chequers, in Buckinghamshire!
The balloon was sent to Kieran's home with a personal note from Mr Blair and his wife Cherie.
The note was signed, and included a picture of the Blairs and read: "To Catcott, look who found this balloon!"
Mike Ellis, the school's head, said that he was delighted that the balloon had turned up at Chequers.
He said: "We set the balloons off every year. Before, we've had one land at Windsor Castle so we must be quite lucky.
"Kieran was absolutely delighted when he got his balloon sent back by the Blairs, it was totally unexpected."Two floors skyward, a black woman less than a decade removed from her USC urban planning studies was running Compton. And she was waiting.
I’d come to Compton to talk to its mayor about what’s going on in this old city with a young population and an outdated reputation for all manner of blackness. I’d covered L.A. as a newspaper reporter in the ’90s, during what everybody hoped was the tail end of a dark period for a wide swath of the metropolis east of Western Avenue and south of the 10 freeway. And though, more recently, I had heard the anecdotes spun by Richard Sherman and Kendrick Lamar, I’d also heard something more complex was going on.
Behind schedule, I rushed up from the civic plaza and into the mayor’s office to shake hands with 31-year-old Aja—pronounced “Asia,” à la the Steely Dan album—Brown. In the June 2013 mayoral election, she outperformed Omar Bradley, the self-described “gangsta mayor” who ran again despite having served a three-year sentence for corruption after leaving office, by a margin of nearly 2–1. Four months into the gig, she had already made some bold policy changes. Just three years ago she and her husband were watching Brick City, a documentary series on efforts to revitalize Newark, on Netflix. Now she smiled broadly upon being described as a West Coast, female Cory Booker. Brown looks like a china doll, all cheeks and chin and big, brown eyes.
Brown moved behind her desk, her focus and affability striking in light of the city’s reputation for oxidized political machinery.
“What was the election linchpin,” I asked, “in terms of your setting off political connections? Because you’re an outsider…”
Then, at once, we completed the sentence: “…in many ways.”
“As we say it together,” Brown added. We laughed.
“It’s the elephant in the room,” she said.
One of them, I thought. We went on to discuss the policy, popular in bigger cities of late, of coming down hard on soft crimes, as well as the role of a nearby church, whose clergy includes a pastor who doubles as Compton’s sheriff, in lifting an international stain from the municipality’s name.
But Mayor Brown was more interested in discussing her plans for Compton than in boasting about her church. On NPR, in the pages of Vogue, and in other media outlets not famous for covering Compton, she’s talked up her city, even going so far as to call it “the new Brooklyn.”
“Can Compton realistically have that Brooklyn function, here in L.A.?” I asked, adopting the role of skeptical reporter. “It’s really an apples-to-oranges comparison.”
The mayor’s phone rang. She retrieved it, glanced at the device’s face, and maintained an expression of wonder while looking up to offer an answer.
“When I look at Compton and all of the great advantages we have here, the institutions in the region, it’s definitely poised for new investments and new growth and just expansion,” Brown said. “I believe that Compton is on the cusp of a great transformation.
“Most people understand Brooklyn’s history. Brooklyn was one of the worst cities in the nation. When most people thought of Brooklyn they thought of crime and blight and deterioration. But now, in just about a seven-year period of change they think of ‘new’ and ‘fresh,’ and kinda trendy and swanky.”
It’s a nice narrative, and fitting to transpose to California, because California goes in big-time for stories about itself. The Golden State likes to tell the one where its urban centers are a kind of Paradise Lost. It offers misunderstanding and the Fates as the reasons that places like Brown’s fell into dysfunction. It's something like a bald-faced lie.
(Photo: Kevork Djansezian/Getty Images)
Housing policy in Los Angeles and other California cities explicitly excluded African Americans from buying homes where they wanted to, resulting in racial segregation into the postwar era as surely as if they were in the Jim Crow South. Compton experienced white flight in the 1950s, and with income and educational attainment among the black population—much of which had arrived from Southern states in search of equality under the law and jobs in L.A.’s shipyards and factories during World War II, and was less than a century removed from enslavement—generally lower than those of whites, and the white-dominated county power structure not exactly eager to dole out services to a group of people it had already dissed once, that Compton and similar communities managed to thrive for a while is a testament to their residents’ drive, spirit, resilience, and determination.
Citing ballot measures such as 1964’s Proposition 14, by which a majority of Californians voted to preserve the exclusionary policy, University of Oregon associate professor of ethnic studies and political science Daniel HoSang explains how California's government and citizens kept at it as Washington and even much of the South were moving in the opposite direction:
“The run of racialized ballot measures across post-war California history…demonstrat[es] the ineluctable relationship between racial subordination and the broader failures of the state,” HoSang writes in Boom: A Journal of California, a quarterly published by the University of California Press. This continued at least through Proposition 209, which ended affirmative action in 1996. Outsiders such as Brown—and she’s not the first, just the most recent and most media-genic — have long sought to remedy “patterns of segregation and exclusion in housing, employment, and education [that] have exposed fundamental flaws in the state’s civic culture and public sphere: gaps between needs and resources, deficiencies in accountability, and shortcomings in state capacity to provide public goods,” HoSang writes. “These Californians envisioned an inclusive political community premised on a broadly guaranteed right to contribute to and make claims upon the opportunities and resources of the state.”
Since its early 1960s heyday as an exemplar of black bougie-ness, Compton has been in protracted decline. After the 1965 Watts riots, Los Angeles tried to forget about the sister city it geographically surrounds. The scourges of crack and its associated violence, which some attributed to part of a conspiracy to depopulate the area of African-Americans, took Compton and much of Southern California prisoner in the mid-1980s. Then came the 1987 album that birthed gangsta rap, N.W.A’s Straight Outta Compton, and it was pretty much a wrap after that. The city’s elected officials didn’t help the reputation, with corruption investigations dogging City Hall and the police department for the next 25 years.
Brown is working simultaneously to bring new investment to town, and to make Compton the kind of town people want to invest in. To overcome her city's recent history and bring about a Brooklynesque revival, though, she would do well to remember that the Barclays Center wasn't the start of what happened in Brooklyn but the result.
New Brooklyn began—two decades ago, really—with young creative-class types getting priced out of Manhattan. The early-adopters' friends held going-away parties for them as if the soon-to-be-departed were moving to Uzbekistan—only to trail them a couple of years later and wish they'd gotten in before rents and property values jumped 10 percent.
Today in Los Angeles, similarly, a recovery in the real estate market has driven home prices skyward and rental vacancy rates down. The formerly high-crime neighborhoods that first gays, then artists and the creative classes, infiltrated in the early 1990s, when Beck lived in Silver Lake, now boast million-dollar homes, just as the neighborhood in Brooklyn where Biggie Smalls used to sling crack and about which white people would tell scary stories of the time they fell asleep on the subway and woke up at the Knickerbocker Av stop is now home to young professionals in the publishing industry.
Imagine if Southern California’s creative class lived in Compton, hopping off the Metro Blue Line to do some farmers market shopping and then biking back to the crib. Imagine Compton blooming like Williamsburg with a whole lotta soul, one of those places whose retail strips get written up in Condé Nast Traveler. (OK, sure—but white folks in North Portland sounded bananas at one time, too, right?) For that to materialize, Aja Brown must decide which among various elephants in a range of rooms are worthy of her acknowledgment, and which she ought to ignore.
Imagine if Southern California’s creative class lived in Compton, hopping off the Metro Blue Line to do some farmers market shopping and then biking back to the crib. Imagine Compton blooming like Williamsburg with a whole lotta soul.
An effervescent twin daughter of a single parent, Brown grew up in Altadena, which in its early days, according to local folklore, was home to the help that worked in neighboring Pasadena’s mansions. She earned a bachelor’s degree in public policy from USC, then a master’s from the school’s urban planning program. "People have two schools of thought," she says. She may have delicate features, but she’s tangibly unfinished, her jagged syntax signaling a homegrown character. "Either you want to grow up to make lots of money, or you want to grow up and make an impact. I decided that what I wanted to leave as my legacy was making people's lives better."
Brown trained for the mayoralty in the Inglewood Planning Department before joining Compton’s Redevelopment Agency in 2009 with a vision of rebranding and rebuilding a city so many others had given up on, one to which she had complex ties: Her maternal grandmother was raped and murdered in a 1973 Compton home invasion.
Brown’s husband, Van, a petrochemical manager, was by far the biggest contributor to last spring’s campaign. In the small-ball field of Compton politics, a meager amount of money, a platform that emphasized family values, and a lack of name recognition were enough to get her in the running.
Helping her get from in-the-running to in-the-office was her church, Faith Inspirational Missionary Baptist. “I had strong support from my local church,” she said, answering my question about the key to her election victory. “My husband and I had labored and were really strong in community service. They got behind us, and we started a grassroots effort.”
In the evenings, before entering politics, Brown would attend Bible study at Faith Inspirational, two blocks from City Hall. More than a place of worship, it’s a critical partner in the revival of Compton, one that's seen such efforts before; the church’s website carries a banner that reads, “Taking Back Our City.” Aja and Van ran the church youth program, showed family-friendly movies at a local park on summer nights, and took kids on group outings to Disneyland (20 minutes east) and the California Science Center (20 minutes north).
If Brown’s ambition had stopped there, she could have made things easy for herself. But she would take on much more.
Here’s the thing, though:
The investors that Brown seeks—and the gentrifiers that could follow, precede, or come with them—have become acquainted with Compton through rap songs and videos that promote its top attributes as, in essence, cheap chicken joints, Molly-poppin’ party people emblazoned with above-the-shoulder tats, and homies who spill 40s on behalf of drive-by-shot gangbangers. Never mind Eazy-E’s prime or the heyday of The Game, take a peep at the video from au courant MC Problem, and you’ll have a sense of the ongoing PR crisis Compton’s new mayor must handle on the regular.
The city has a fighting chance—if Brown can capitalize on local assets that don’t have record deals: From the Blue Line stop (a transportation luxury in L.A., and site of the new farmers market), it’s a 28-minute electric train ride to downtown, which also has more to offer these days. Just southwest, the ramen restaurants of Torrance offer fare as delicious as anything outside Asia. And that JetBlue flight to JFK is a lot less daunting if the ride to LAX starts in Compton rather than, say, Echo Park.
Aja Brown's isn't the first effort to improve Compton's image. In 2009, a public campaign tried to build local pride. (Photo: David McNew/Getty Images)
The future of Compton, whatever happens, is often dropping in from the edge of the bowl at Wilson Park. Despite its reputation, Compton isn’t a black city anymore: Two out of every three Compton residents are Latino. The average age is 28. On any given day the park is packed with teens whose jeans are skinny, not sagging, doing grinds and ollies. They look like their smartphones might play the Mars Volta’s prog rock or the EDM stylings of Dave Nada; they probably wouldn’t know a DJ Quik track if it struck them in the earbud. Even a cursory look at Wilson Park makes clear that the most difficult aspect of making a gangsta rap video in Compton today would be editing out all the Latinos.
“Our youth still like rap, but there are other kinds of music,” observed Stephany Ortega, a 28-year-old teacher and Compton school board candidate. In a phone interview and a Facebook message exchange, the alt-rock fan described coming of age in gangsta rap’s glory days and relocating from San Pedro in 2009.
A second-generation Mexican American, she met Mayor Brown last winter at a candidate forum and was blown away by the aspiring politician’s youthful energy and a policy background that struck her as atypical of a Compton politician.
Compton’s Latino majority has been politically underserved for decades. Because many are immigrants without voting rights, for a long time the political old guard felt it could get away with ignoring their concerns. Compton’s first Latino city councilman, Isaac Galvan, only took office in the election that brought in Brown. Ortega drove Latino voters to polls in June—making sure to tell them to vote for Brown.
Mohammed Martinez, a longtime Compton resident of Palestinian and Mexican stock and former host of a talk show on a local left-progressive radio station, said he became sold on the new mayor on Sept. 15, Mexican Independence Day. Down by City Hall arch, approximately 200 people marched and celebrated.
“She was the only elected official to come out and meet us,” said Martinez. “Right there she commanded the respect of the black and brown communities. There will come a time when we will disagree with her; she doesn’t coddle our community. She is fair. She has come through for us.”
“She was the only elected official to come out and meet us. Right there she commanded the respect of the black and brown communities. There will come a time when we will disagree with her; she doesn’t coddle." Mohammed Martinez, local activist
The most pressing needs of the current majority, according to Ortega, directly affect Wilson Park skaters and their siblings. Local schools are short on certified translators—not just in the classrooms of Compton Unified School District but in administrative positions as well. Students who speak English as a second language are prone to missing out on classroom learning. Their parents struggle to parse messages sent to their Spanish-speaking homes.
Ortega believes her adopted home’s long-term goals depend on this issue being remedied, and here is where the two challenges facing Aja Brown—her agenda to infuse the city with fresh blood and the reality that will face her whether or not she succeeds—come together: As Ortega rightly noted, “people will want to move to a place where children can get a good education.”
L.A. neighborhoods that could serve as models for what Brown wants Compton to become, Los Feliz and Silver Lake, owe a lot of their resurgence to their public schools. It’s a bit of a chicken-and-egg question—did the schools get better, attracting better-educated, more-affluent residents, or did better-educated, more-affluent residents demand better schools—but what’s not up for debate is that today, property values continue to rise in those communities in part because of the high test scores at the local elementaries.
Brown looks at the language issue from a perspective that might have made the old guard’s heads explode. “We really have to make sure,” she insisted, “that we teach Spanish to African American kids.”
¿Qué? It’s tough to imagine black folks who still haven’t made peace with the clout of the Latino neighbors they compete with for jobs (or in the shadowy gangster conflicts) reacting affirmatively to this notion.
“I think five years ago there was more recalcitrance to that idea,” Brown continued. “But everyone I speak to about it today is like, ‘You’re right.’ There’s almost an unfair advantage as we teach English as a second language in our schools and don’t have the same investment for African American kids.”
Compton gentrification, pie-in-the-sky wish that it seems now, will look quite different from that of Williamsburg or Silver Lake, or even North Portland, when or if it comes about.
Over four decades, when they weren't neglecting the city's growing Latino population, Compton’s political leaders were busy ruining the city’s finances. An audit in 1977 found the city $2 million in debt. Operating from that deficit, Compton was unprepared to fight the rise of crack cocaine street sales, its attendant gang violence, and the loss of tax revenue that the tax-cutting initiative Proposition 13 would lay on all of California. The police department was disbanded. Street cleaning fell to once a month. Rappers continued to throw up gang signs in music videos.
More than $40 million in the red when she took office, Brown amortized the debt immediately—“It wasn’t really $40 million,” she said—arranging a 20-year accounting schedule that allows Compton to pay down the amount while enacting spending cuts. The move showed a political dexterity not much familiar in town. The mayor canceled contracts with vendors she saw as extraneous and put the kibosh on projects she believed the city couldn’t afford or didn’t need, such as plans for a new police station in a town now policed by county sheriffs. Brown worked with unions to develop a furlough schedule that will keep City Hall open more days than would be possible without it. And last month, Compton moved to annex the neighboring community of Rancho Dominguez in pursuit of substantial new tax revenues. The moves have been met with near-universal acclaim.
In the end, though, Brown’s success at implementing her vision will likely hinge on a most basic human concern, one that cuts crosswise with white America’s deep-seated fear of a black planet: security. Though Compton’s crime rate has dropped 60 percent over the last decade, before a puzzling spike last summer, the crime rate is still twice the national average.
“I think that safety, the sense of well-being, of community and having a sense of social responsibility is tied to the financial future of Compton,” Brown said. “In terms of individuals and businesses and even private companies and nonprofits, when they decide to invest in a certain area they are looking and the potential to, of course, reap a higher return on their investment in comparison to another area,” she said. “We’re really hoping to have a community policing model that empowers our residents to really be engaged with law enforcement, to provide the information to soft crimes that are necessary for us to reduce our crime rates.”
(Photo: Ted Soqui/APImages)
The friend I brought to Faith Inspirational, a Native American Jew, drew some stares from the 50 or so assembled for Bible study on the Thursday before Thanksgiving. Maybe their eyes bore down because of the young man’s tribal ear gauges. Or maybe it was the camera he carried—depleted news staffs have brought both Los Angeles Times and community coverage to historically low levels. It could simply be that the predominantly black church doesn’t get many Native American Jews inside these walls. Not yet, at least.
The mayor was out providing sheriffs with turkey dinners, but she was expected soon enough. Presently, 10 minutes before the study’s official start, four mic’d women onstage sang out in a raw and accomplished way. About half the crowd stood up to clap and join in:
Rejoice and sing
Bless the Lord at all times
He has done great things for me
There is little question that Aja Brown is viewed as one of those great things, and not just because she slashed their city’s debt.
“God gave us the vision of taking the city back decades ago. It seemed impossible,” said Deacon Wilbert Johnson. “We didn’t know what it would look like when she came.”
Brown allows that Compton can’t really replicate Brooklyn. Her actual model for the town’s recovery is Pasadena’s Colorado Boulevard, just south of her old Altadena stomping grounds and once riddled with prostitution and hard drugs. A team of world-class planners figured out how to make a strip of that street into a shining shopping destination; it now attracts young and old from along the Foothill Freeway exurbs in search of a city vibe on a Saturday night. The mayor watched the transformation play out while getting her master’s.
“I don’t believe any city should aspire to be like any other city,” Brown said, “because every city is so unique. It’s truly just a metaphor for revitalization.”
Here's where Mayor Brown and a host of platinum-selling rappers agree: Compton has no peer. Is there another American city of under 100,000 residents whose fame resonates as far and as loud? And if Altadena's finest does indeed manage to get her Don Quixote on, she could become more than the West Coast, female Cory Booker. As Kendrick Lamar might say if he were a political reporter from Portland, Aja Brown would then be a good mayor in a rad city.
An earlier version of this article stated that the quarterly journal Boom is "the magazine of UCLA's Institute of the Environment and Sustainability." Although published by University of California Press and edited by the director of IoES, Boom itself is not affiliated with IoES. TakePart regrets the error.In May, we published a story about how police body cams |
is to “ to avoid seeing our governments and media as free from manipulation while demonising “foreign” governments and media as full of propagandistic lies.”
Step 2, apparently is to watch RT and Press TV, from which “one can gain useful insights and information,” and consider “exploring alternative news and information sites such as Media Lens and Spinwatch.”
There’s a perverse narcissism to this. At no point in his article does Robinson actually address criticisms of RT - indeed he dismisses them out of hand before recommending the channel as useful. But that perception of “useful” is the same as Medialens’s endless deployment of the “only asking questions” line: it's useful in that it tells you what you want to hear, in the same way that Media Lens is only ever asking questions it thinks it already knows the answer to (that answer being “the Neocons”).
I was recently asked if the disregard for truth displayed by some “alternative” outlets reflected badly on Little Atoms. The truth is, we’ve never really seen Little Atoms as “alternative”, or to my recollection described it as such. We may get things wrong, or we may change our minds, but we don’t think we can invent our own realities, as RT and its ilk do.
*Robin Wilde, a graduate of University of Sheffield, contacted the author on Twitter to say that "I just graduated from UoS Journalism, highly practical course. Almost all training, never heard of this Dr. Robinson!." The article has been slightly amended to reflect his comment.NBC via Getty Images Presidential debate moderators, like NBC's Lester Holt, are under scrutiny like never before.
NEW YORK ― For Lester Holt and his TV journalist colleagues who are moderating the upcoming presidential debates, the opportunity to question the future commander in chief in front of tens of millions of viewers brings prestige ― and potential pitfalls.
The high-profile anchor selected will inevitably be part of the debate story. The fear is becoming the whole story.
This is the first time in recent memory that the moderator’s role has come under such intense scrutiny in the weeks leading up to the first presidential face-off. The pressure for network executives to make sure their marquee journalists are up to speed has only increased after the widespread criticism leveled at Matt Lauer, who moderated a presidential forum Wednesday night. (The Commander-in-Chief forum, featuring Donald Trump and Hillary Clinton, was widely seen as a dry run for the Sept. 26 main event.)
Even before the Lauer debacle, journalists were already expressing concerns that debate moderators would refrain from challenging candidates’ outright lies. Fox News anchor Chris Wallace, the moderator for the third debate, said on Sunday that he doesn’t intend to be “a truth squad” and that the candidates are responsible for rebutting one another’s claims. The other three presidential debate moderators ― NBC’s Holt, ABC’s Martha Raddatz and CNN’s Anderson Cooper ― along with vice presidential debate moderator Elaine Quijano, of CBS News, have kept silent all week as to whether or not they agree.
Wallace’s perspective prompted me to imagine Monday how, without a moderator who pushes back, Trump could get away with repeating his lie about being a staunch opponent of the Iraq War. That scenario played out 48 hours later when Lauer didn’t fact-check Trump’s false Iraq claim, along with failing to point out that the Republican nominee supported the 2011 U.S. intervention in Libya.
In response to Lauer’s poor performance, The New York Times editorial board ominously warned Friday of a “debate disaster waiting to happen.”
“If the moderators of the coming debates do not figure out a better way to get the candidates to speak accurately about their records and policies — especially Mr. Trump, who seems to feel he can skate by unchallenged with his own version of reality while Mrs. Clinton is grilled and entangled in the fine points of domestic and foreign policy — then they will have done the country a grave disservice,” the editorial board wrote.
On Wednesday night, Trump blustered his way through a primetime event without any discernible grasp of foreign policy and lied about his pre-Iraq war position. This surely isn’t the first time. In March, Trump made 71 claims deemed “inaccurate, misleading or deeply questionable” in the course of a single CNN town hall. Clinton, too, has made false or misleading statements this election season, according to fact-checkers, but with nowhere near Trump’s frequency or brazenness, such as claiming to have watched events that never happened.
The Washington Post via Getty Images The candidates may be on their own to fact-check one another on Sept. 26.
There’s nothing stopping the presidential debate moderators from fact-checking Trump or Clinton if they stray from the truth, according to the co-chairs of the Commission on Presidential Debates, the bipartisan group that’s overseen the events since 1988.
“We give our moderators full discretion,” Republican co-chair Frank Fahrenkopf told HuffPost. “They’re the ones who run the debates. We have no idea what the questions are going to be. Once the light goes on, the show is theirs.”
Fahrenkopf said his personal view is that the “the job of the moderator is not to be a fact-checker” and that the candidates should challenge each other’s claims during the debate. “If the candidate doesn’t do it, it is a very fine line the moderator has to walk down because the moderator doesn’t want to be the story,” he added.
That’s essentially what happened four years ago when former CNN anchor Candy Crowley controversially waded into a dispute between President Barack Obama and Mitt Romney as to whether the former had used the words “act of terror” on Sept. 12, 2012, to describe the Benghazi attacks.
Obama used those three words on the day after the attacks, as Crowley pointed out in backing up the president’s point. But conservative critics ― and even some nonpartisan voices like Washington Post “Fact-checker” columnist Glenn Kessler ― argued it wasn’t absolutely clear that Obama was referring to Benghazi on Sept. 12 and that the administration had dragged its feet in calling the attacks terrorist in nature, as Romney more broadly contended.
In the months after the debate, Fahrenkopf said it was a “mistake” to have Crowley moderate. Mike McCurry, the Commission’s Democratic co-chair, told HuffPost that he and Fahrenkopf “mildly disagree” about Crowley, though he also expressed reservations about moderators fact-checking during the debates.
“I thought Candy was just trying to move it along but it shows the hazard of the ‘fact check’ by the moderator,” McCurry said. “In general I think with the candidates side by side it is their responsibility to fact check each other. I have no doubt in the ability of the leading candidates this time around to do that.”
In addition to calls for the moderators to point out lies, the networks themselves could do real-time, on-screen fact-checking, as Daily Beast columnist Michael Tomasky argued on Thursday. Both CNN and MSNBC have fact-checked bogus claims on screen in recent months.
CNN MSNBC CNN and MSNBC have fact-checked Trump in real time.
Fahrenkopf said the networks carrying the debate feed are permitted to use graphics on screen as they wish. He noted that some, in the past, have run real-time focus group results during the debates.
But he generally disapproves of networks running anything potentially distracting on screen while the candidates speak.At least two stunt doubles worked with Stephen Farrelly to bring Rocksteady to life.
Days before his big win at the TLC match this past weekend, WWE fans were noting something interesting about the wrestler’s first appearance as Rocksteady in the new trailer for the Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles sequel. Yes, that was him as the human version of the character, but was that him in the mocap suit? If the cast listing is any indication, the answer is no. Although he definitely pulls off the role of the human punk that will become a mutant Rhino, it would appear that Sheamus was not the one performing all of the stunts when they shot the action scenes with Rocksteady.
This wouldn’t be the first time we’ve seen them use more than one actor to capture a character on film, as Leonardo was notably recast just months before the original film came out, with Johnny Knoxville taking over the vocal work. In addition, although Danny Woodburn was originally the only man behind Splinter, they brought in Tony Shalhoub to perform the voice. Could we be seeing a similar decision when it comes to Rocksteady in this movie? Maybe, but we don’t know enough to say for sure. All we do know is that more than one person worked to bring the character to life. Stephen Farrelly was joined by Matt Leonard and Myles Humphus.
Humphus is known for his work as a stunt double, but he also has a few acting credits to his name. In particular, he has done stunt work for Dwayne “The Rock” Johnson and John Cena, so it actually makes perfect sense that he would work with WWE superstar Sheamus in this movie. On the other hand, Matt Leonard has done work on films such as Guardians of the Galaxy, The Avengers and Iron Man. At this point, it’s fair to say that they spared no expense on getting Rocksteady just right for this film, because they called in some top notch stunt double talent for the role.
I guess it shouldn’t be too surprising that it took three people to fill the role of a gigantic mutant Rhinoceros, but it’s still somewhat impressive. Does that mean Farrelly also had his voice dubbed over? Well, we haven’t really heard him say anything in the trailer yet, so it’s difficult to say whether or not this is the case. What we can say is that it wasn’t just Stephen Farrelly making the character come to life, although his recent match would tend to suggest that he’s tough enough to get that job done. For all we know, they’ll decide to dub over more than just Rocksteady before the movie comes out, because they were working on minute details such as these just a few months prior to the release of the original film.
What do you think? Are you glad they brought on two stunt doubles to work with Sheamus in this role? Should they give Rocksteady a different voice? Let us know your thoughts in the comments below."Constitutional reform is a waste of time, pure and simple," John McTernan, the former adviser to Tony Blair, wrote in a thoughtful Daily Telegraph column last week. "It never actually achieves its avowed end of reconnecting the voters with democratic institutions." But Nick Clegg is taking no notice. Today he is publishing the government's plans for Lords reform. The Clegg announcement, and David Cameron's 90-minute appearance at the Commons liaison committee, will be the highlights in a busy day.
Here is the full list of what's coming up.
9am: The cabinet meets.
9.15am: Lord Hodgson publishes a report on how "red tape" stops people volunteering. The report was commissioned by the Cabinet Office last year.
9.30am: Inflation figures for April are published.
10.30am: Boris Johnson gives evidence to the Commons culture committee about the Olympics.
12.30pm: John Vine, independent chief inspector of the UK Border Agency, gives evidence to the Commons home affairs committee.
3.30pm: Nick Clegg unveils the government's plans for Lords reform in a statement in the Commons.
3.30pm: Jeremy Hunt, the culture secretary, and BBC presenters Sir David Attenborough and Brian Cox give evidence to a Lords committee on the BBC Trust.
4pm: David Cameron gives evidence to the Commons liaison committee. The session will last 90 minutes and focus on the economy and military intervention abroad.
Around 4.30pm: Chris Huhne, the energy secretary, is expected to make a Commons statement setting out carbon emission targets for 2025.
I'll also take a look at the review into the future of the high street being announced today, headed by Mary Portas. And there's bound to be some reaction to Liam Fox's declaration that he does not support the government's plan to enshrine overseas aid spending targets in law. Fox set out his views in a letter to Cameron which has mysteriously been leaked to the Times.
As usual, I'll be covering all the breaking political news, as well as looking at the papers and bringing you the best politics from the web. I'll post a lunchtime summary at around 1pm, and an afternoon one after Cameron has finished giving his evidence to the liaison committee.
Ministers have been heading to Number 10 this morning for cabinet. But Liam Fox chose to go in through a side door to avoid taking questions about his leaked letter about aid spending.
Mary Portas has been giving interviews this morning about the review into the future of the high street that she will be carrying out for the government. PoliticsHome has been monitoring them. Here are the main points she's been making.
• Portas claimed that up to one third of high street shops could be empty if closures continued at the current rate.
We're losing shops, we're losing retailers and what's ending up in some instances is we've got practical ghost towns. The end of 2008 we had about 6% shops vacan and by the end of 2010, that went up to about nearly 15%, doubling, and if that keeps up we'll have town centres and high streets with a third of our shops just missing.
• She said she would not use the review to attack large corporate businesses that own chains of shops.
• She said she would not just be talking to retailers. "It's not just looking at what's happening in the shops," she said. "I'll be looking at the town centre managers, talking to them, talking to the government, local councils – it is a really big issue."
Here are the headline figures from the inflation statistics.
• The consumer prices index rose to 4.5% in April from 4% in March.
• The headline rate of retail prices index (RPI) inflation fell to 5.2% in April from 5.3% in March.
• The underlying rate of RPI inflation fell to 5.3% in April from 5.4% in March.
Here is the Office for National Statistics release about the inflation figures. And here is the statistical bulletin (pdf) with more detail.
Women are suffering disproportionately as a result of the government's spending cuts, according to an academic report published today. Here's an extract from a Press Association story summarising its findings.
The study, carried out by women's groups and experts at the University of Warwick, warned that hard-won gains for equality were in danger of "unravelling" as a result of planned spending cuts, which may even trap more women in violent relationships.
Published jointly by the Centre for Human Rights in Practice at the University of Warwick and Coventry Women's Voices, the report predicts that cuts to adult social care, legal aid, benefits, and public sector pay freezes will all have a greater impact on women than men.
The eight-chapter report, billed as a snapshot of the situation in Coventry in March, concluded that planned and potential cutbacks will hit women hardest and may have a negative impact on their human rights.
Co-author James Harrison, of the University of Warwick's Centre for Human Rights in Practice, said: "This assessment is a projection of what the spending cuts might mean to women.
"It uses Coventry as a case study but the findings are relevant to the whole of the UK."
Dr Harrison added: "Public authorities, both nationally and locally, have legal obligations under the Equality Act and the Human Rights Act to promote equality and protect human rights.
"They need to take these obligations very seriously when making decisions about budget cuts."
You can read a summary of the Centre for Human Rights in Practice report here (pdf) and the full 64-page report here (pdf). Here's the key paragraph from the summary.
The report concludes that many of the spending cuts will have a disproportionate impact on women. Others will affect both women and men equally but will have a potentially damaging impact on certain groups of women (for example changes to benefits for disabled people which will affect both disabled women and disabled men). Taken together these cuts will lead to greater inequality between women and men in Coventry. For some women the combination of cuts may have a negative impact on their human rights.
In the light of Liam Fox's leaked letter to David Cameron about aid spending, Harriet Harman, the shadow international development secretary (and deputy Labour leader) has urged the government to legislate on this matter now.
Britain's overseas aid saves lives in the developing world, but it is also in our national interest to tackle the underdevelopment which can cause conflict. This Tory manifesto promise [to increase aid spending to 0.7% of national income by 2013] has been reiterated by the prime minister at international forums. He must show that Britain keeps its word. The way to show they are not going to break this manifesto commitment is to bring in the promised legislation now. The government must keep the promise.
Yvette Cooper, the shadow home secretary, is speaking at the Police Federation annual conference today. Some extracts from her speech have been released in advance and in them she suggests that the government cuts will lead to crime going up.
While Labour was in government crime fell by over 40%, and it is a tribute to communities, the police and other organisations involved in fighting crime that this is the first time since crime records began that a government has left office with lower crime than when it started. Now the Tory led government is putting that progress at risk. Most people want crime to come down further, yet ministers seem to be turning their backs. To meet a political timetable for cuts, they are taking police off the beat just when they are needed most. The first Tory home secretary and the first Tory prime minister to call for cuts in police officers rather than cuts in crime. They used to be the party of law and order once. Not now. These are the ingredients for a perfect storm. Fewer police, fewer powers, weaker prevention, weaker action once crimes are committed. The government is turning their backs on the fight against crime. And it is communities that will pay the price.
Harriet Harman has now challenged David Cameron to sack Liam Fox over his comments about aid spending. According to PoliticsHome, this is what she told BBC News.
I think what David Cameron has got to do is, he's got to say to Dr Fox that unless he supports this part of the manifesto and part of the coalition agreement, he can't stay in government. You can't have a situation where the manifesto makes a promise to the people, the coalition agreement reiterates it, and then a member of the Cabinet simply decides they don't agree with it.
(It's a good try, but not a particularly good description of the constitutional reality. Ministers are routinely expected to support government decisions that they don't personally agree with. This only becomes untenable if they start sounding off in public. Having a letter leaked to the Times doesn't quite count, although there are suspicions that Fox is pushing the boundaries of what he can get away with.)
Angela Eagle, the shadow chief secretary to the Treasury, has put out a statement about the inflation figures.
These are concerning figures, which show inflation now running at more than double the target rate. Across the country millions of people on low and middle incomes are being squeezed from every direction by rising prices made worse by the Tory VAT rise. The squeeze has been compounded from last month by cuts to tax credits, cuts to childcare support and the child benefit freeze. And to make matters worse George Osborne's decision to raise VAT at a time of rising world food and oil prices looks increasingly like an own goal as high inflation continues to threaten a rise in mortgage rates for homeowners. The Bank of England has been put in an impossible position by George Osborne. It has been left to do all the work to support a recovery that's been choked off by the Tory-led government's fiscal policy to cut deeper and faster than any other major economy in the world.
You can read all today's Guardian politics stories here. And all the politics stories filed yesterday, including some in today's paper, are here.
As for the rest of the papers, here are some stories worth noting.
• George Parker and Chris Giles in the Financial Times (subscription) say that Gordon Brown thinks he could still become head of the International Monetary Fund, despite opposition from David Cameron.
Gordon Brown believes he still has a chance of winning the top job at the International Monetary Fund, telling friends he has global backing that could trump the opposition of David Cameron, his successor in Downing Street. The former UK Labour prime minister has told colleagues that Mr Cameron does not have a veto in the decision on who should succeed Dominque Strauss-Kahn, the IMF's managing director, who is embroiled in sex crime allegations. Mr Brown had been taking soundings in Washington and Paris before Mr Strauss-Kahn's arrest in New York and believes that his candidature could win support from those who recognise his role in tackling the 2008-9 financial crisis... "He's come back from Washington and Paris and feels quite emboldened," said [one colleague of Brown's]. "He's not taking No for an answer. He's got people who will back him and will put him forward.
• Rachel Sylvester in the Times (paywall) says the Liberal Democrats are losing their enthusiasm for Lords reform.
But, having been burnt in fire by the AV referendum campaign, [Nick Clegg] is not planning to turn himself into the frontman for selling the reforms. Instead, Lord Strathclyde and Mark Harper, MP, both Conservatives, will be sent out to sell the policy to the public. "Nick's got bigger fish to fry," explains one strategist. "Clearly it's something we want to have achieved before the next election but we are also aware it doesn't blip that hard on other people's radar." A Tory Cabinet minister puts it slightly differently. "They've decided they don't want to look like constitution obsessives, which is odd given that for 100 years they've been banging on about nothing else."
• The Daily Mail says Chris Huhne's estranged wife is prepared to give evidence against him in court in relation to the allegations that he asked her to take speeding points on his behalf.
A close friend said Vicky Pryce would swear in court that she was busy all day in central London when the offence was committed 40 miles away in Essex... As political support ebbed away from the Energy Secretary at Westminster, Essex Police appointed a senior detective to look into the allegations that Mr Huhne broke the law. Sources said that if Miss Pryce co-operates and provides corroborating evidence, it is almost certain to lead to a full criminal inquiry. This could mean Mr Huhne facing charges of attempting to pervert the course of justice.
• James Kirkup in the Daily Telegraph says Steve Webb, the pensions minister, wants Britons to ditch the idea that old age begins at 59.
"The idea that 59 is old belongs in the past. We need to challenge our perceptions of what 'old age' actually means," [Webb] will say. "It is no longer the time where people are sitting back and enjoying the 'twilight' of their lives, instead it is often a time for new choices and new opportunities." The Department of Work and Pensions will today publish research from Kent University showing differing views of when youth ends and old age begins. The study, Predictors of Attitudes to Age Across Europe, shows that British people are described as "old" far earlier than their European counterparts, with the label typically being used for those of 59 and older. By contrast, the Greeks regard old age as starting at 68. In Denmark, the figure was 64, and 63 in France.
• Philip Stephens in the Financial Times (subscription) says Policy Network has come up with an explanation as to why the centre-left is doing badly all over Europe.
The think-tank's opinion surveys show that people are frightened about the power and inequalities of markets, but also lack faith in the capacity of politicians and the state to do much about it. Voters remain attached to European welfare systems, yet believe that centre-left parties are likely to raise taxes too much with too little benefit in the way of improved services. Pull together these various and sometimes tangled threads and the story that emerges is of a collapse of trust in the state – and, unsurprisingly, weakening support for parties that see government as the central agent of social and economic progress. The answer to austerity is not big government... The mistake made by politicians of the centre-left has thus been to mistake anger with the excesses of the market for public backing for the traditional state. [Dominique] Strauss-Kahn might have offered valuable proof of economic competence alongside more familiar progressive values. What is absolutely clear, though, is that the ground has shifted under the centre-left. It needs a new map.
• Mary Riddell in the Daily Telegraph says the bible of "Blue Labour" is being published today as an ebook.
Where New Labour, with the exception of Mr Blair's early flourishes, adopted the prose style of a cornflakes packet, Blue Labour supplies the party's storytellers. Mr Rutherford and other ebookers, notably Jon Cruddas, are powerful narrators drawing on sources from Wordsworth to E P Thompson. Mr Miliband, who has heeded their message, will also need their rhetoric. Otherwise critics will maintain that Adenoidal Ed, though no Worsdworth, will surely find himself wandering lonely as a cloud unless he can become more prominent and more eloquent. "He will have to grasp the nettle, or he'll be out in two years," says one Blue Labourite.
It's a big day for Anglo-Irish relations, with the Queen now just arriving in the Republic. My colleague Adam Gabbatt has all the details on his live blog.
The Labour party has launched a Refounding Labour consultation website to collect ideas on party reorganisation. Peter Hain published a consultation document (pdf) on this subject earlier this year and today he has written a piece for PoliticsHome promoting the consultation website. Neil Kinnock has also written a blog post for the new website. It's worth quoting from, because it's full of vintage Kinnockisms.
I've always sought to apply the realism of the maxim "the victory of ideals must be organised". That's what the party is for so don't miss this great opportunity to contribute directly to renewing Labour so that we are recognised as the one political movement that can properly serve the communities and the age in which we live. Since we all know that the future belongs to those who prepare for it and punishes those who don't, let's get on with achieving new strength to gain new advances - it will aid our cause and, even more vital, it will help our country and the world.
Lord Hodgson has published his report into the way "red tape" could be cut for charities. According to the press notice (pdf), it says that "a suffocating blanket of red tape and an insidious mythology about being sued are deterring millions of Britons, volunteer organisations and charities from helping out more fully in society." The 42-page report (pdf) doesn't seem to be quite as alarmist as that, although it does contain a very odd appendix listing 20 things that people are actually allowed to do, like helping at a school sports day or wearing goggles in swimming lessons. This list is supposed to "shatter a few myths" about rules allegedly banning various activities, although it is hard to believe that anyone really believes that swimming goggles are somehow illegal. The report makes various recommendations, including reforming the law to clarify the extent of volunteer liability.
Here's a lunchtime summary.
• Downing Street has reaffirmed its commitment to enshrining Britain's overseas aid spending target in law. "It is coalition policy, it is Government policy, it will be made law," the prime minister's spokesman today, after a letter from Liam Fox, the defence secretary, to David Cameron saying that making these targets statutory would be a mistake. Number 10 also condemned the fact that Fox's letter has been leaked. Harriet Harman, Labour's deputy leader and the shadow international development secretary, has challenged Cameron to sack Fox over his stance. (See 11.05am.)
• Inflation has leapt to its highest level for two and a half years. It hit 4.5% on the consumer price index last month. As Julia Kollewe reports, the increase "wrongfooted the City and intensifies the dilemma for the Bank of England over how much longer it can keep interest rates low to support the flagging economy." Labour said that the figures were "concerning" and that the Bank of England had been put in an "impossible position" because it is expected to control inflation without choking growth. (See 9.32am, 9.35am and 11.37am.)
• Boris Johnson has told a Commons committee that the Olympic games will have a "transformatory" effect on east London. "For 200 years that part of London has obviously been in a different economic, social world from other parts of London – there is no doubt about it," the London mayor said. "It has been a place where people arrive, it has been a destination for migration, it has been a destination of traditionally poverty and underachievement but what we are trying to do with the Olympic park is something, I think, very remarkable and ambitious." After the Olympics there would be "a genuine new urban environment in east London that will be completely unlike anything we have seen before."
• James Paice, the agriculture minister, has unveiled plans to cut regulations affecting farming. In a statement, he said that some of the recommendations from the independent Farming Regulation Task Force would be implemented immediately.
Nick Clegg hasn't even published his Lords reform plans yet, but the reaction has already started to come in.
Peter Facey, the director of Unlock Democracy, has put out a statement saying that the government must ensure that, after so many failed attempts in the past, this time Lords reform actually happens.
A majority of the Cabinet have voted in favour of a 100% elected House of Lords. The question now is to what percent they are committed to making it a reality? Is this another box to be ticked off in a Government business plan and then kicked in the long grass, or a piece of legislation which the Government is determined to put on the statue book, by the Parliament Act if necessary?
And Andrew Copson, chief executive of the British Humanist Association, has said that reserving some seats for Church of England bishops in the reformed Lords (as Clegg is expected to propose) would be "an affront to democracy".
The presence of unelected prelates is an anomaly within our system of government, and their retention, even in diminished numbers, would be an indefensible affront to democratic principles. In no other legislative chamber are elected or appointed representatives deemed so insufficiently qualified to deal with matters of belief and morality that they require supplementing by clergy.
Bernard Jenkin, the Tory backbencher (and a former shadow defence secretary) has said that Liam Fox was entitled to question the Conservative party's commitment to raising aid spending to 0.7% of national income. According to PoliticsHome, this is what he told the World at One.
This argument breaking out like this was absolutely inevitable because of the way various decisions of the government have been arrived at. We don't have a national strategy that unifies consideration of the aid budget with the defence budget, for example. In fact, the aid budget decisions were made quite early on in David Cameron's leadership in total isolation... and yet the defence budget is suffering very severe cuts as a result of the spending crisis. It is quite legitimate for the defence secretary to chafe at this constraint that is imposed on him by decision that is made in isolation from strategic questions a long time ago.
Almost 80% of peers think House of Lords reform is either fairly or very unlikely this parliament, according to a survey conducted by ComRes. It questioned a representative sample of 121 peers and found that 58% of them think it is fairly unlikely and 20% very unlikely. Even Lib Dem peers are sceptical about Lords reform proceeding; 55% of them think it is unlikely to happen this parliament. Amongst Tory peers the figure is 86%.
The survey also shows very little support in the upper house for having a Lords made up of 300 elected peers (which seems to be Nick Clegg's ideal option). Only 15% of peers are in favour of this, and 78% are against. Amongst Tories, only 7% are in favour.
Here's an afternoon reading list.
• Boris Johnson tells Metro in a Q&A lifestyle interview what gets him out of bed in the morning.
Sheer exuberance and joy at doing this job. I virtually erupt from bed like a rocketing pheasant. I then go for a run, because if you go for a run in the morning, nothing can get worse. You've got the bad bit out of the way.
• Paul Goodman at ConservativeHome on Liam Fox's latest maneouvres.
"A source close to Dr Fox" told the Times - on the record - that "the Defence Secretary fully supports the principle of a 0.7% target on international aid." And it can be argued that the paper's take on Fox's letter goes further than its words. The Defence Secretary doesn't say that the target should be scrapped: rather, he writes about whether it should be set it law, how quickly it should be hit, and what it should consist of. But the last point yokes Fox's concerns to the instincts of Conservative activists. The Defence Secretary indicates that some spending from the defence budget should be shifted into the aid one, which won't make him any less popular with Party members than he is already. The Conservative right has no leader. It has prominent figures on both the front and back benches - Iain Duncan Smith, David Davis, John Redwood. Whatever its source, an effect of the leak will be to remind Tory MPs and activists of Dr Fox's credentials. No wonder Downing Street, according to the Times, that "a Downing Street source said that they 'watch Dr Fox closely'."
• Max Atkinson on his blog is surprised that Sky's decision to televise supreme court hearings has not received more media attention.
The prohibition on recording (whether audio or video) court hearings originates from the much older ban on taking still photographs in courts - which was originally introduced because indoor photography used to require the use of flash powder. In those early days, it was rightly feared that this would be a major distraction to the ongoing proceedings. But the rules were never updated when photographic technology had developed to the point where fast film made it easy to take quality pictures in low light. Nor were they updated when television and video technology no longer needed elaborate and potentially distracting lighting systems.
• Bagehot on his Economist blog on Chris Huhne's difficulties.
Talking to one senior Lib Dem last week, I was taken aback when he asked me if I knew of Salmon Chase, a deeply ambitious man who served as treasury secretary to Abraham Lincoln during the Civil War. President Lincoln acknowledged Mr Chase's abilities, the MP explained, but also regarded him as an inveterate plotter. Mr Lincoln once accused Mr Chase of being "like the blue-bottle fly", laying his eggs in "every rotten spot he can find", in the hope that some might hatch, I was told. Such opportunism reminded him oddly of Mr Huhne, the Lib Dem confessed, in a way that suggested he, for one, would not be heartbroken if the energy secretary were to one day simply to buzz off.
My colleague Damian Carrington has written a post on his environment blog about Chris Huhne's announcement this afternoon about the carbon budget. In the light of what Huhne is going to say, Damian has upped the government's rating on the Guardian's green-o-meter. But the coalition is still only on 2.5 out of 5.
Nick Clegg will be making his statement on Lords reform shortly. But the prospects of full-blown Lords reform getting through parliament before 2015 must be slim. After Labour removed most of the hereditary peers in 1996, it promised a "second stage" of Lords reform. There were four white papers, as well as a royal commission, a joint committee of both Houses, two rounds of voting on the issue in the Commons and endless reports from outside bodies. But "second stage" Lords reform never happened. No wonder most peers think that Clegg's plans will never make it to the statute book. (See 2.26pm.)
Nick Clegg is delivering his statement now about Lords reform. David Cameron is sitting next to him.
He says plans for an elected Lords go back to the time of the Asquith government.
People have a right to choose their representatives, he says.
The Lords is known for its "wisdom and expertise". But its reputation is undermined by the fact that it is not elected.
Clegg says he chaired a committee drawing up plans for an elected Lords.
Today's plans represent "a genuine collective effort over time".
They will be considered by a joint comittee of MPs and peers. That committee will report early next year.
Clegg says he and Cameron want the first elections to the Lords to take place in 2015. He knows what he wants to achieve. But he will be pragmatic about how the government achieves this.
Clegg is now getting down to detail.
• There should be 300 members of the Lords. But this is only a recommended figure.
• The draft bill proposes 80% elected, 20% appointment. But the Lords could be 100% elected. Under the 20% appointed model, those 60 peers would be crossbenchers.
• The number of bishops in the Lords would be cut from 24 to 12.
• Elections would be staggered. This would prevent the Lords being a mirror of the Commons. The bill proposes election by single transferable vote, but another form of proportional representation could be used, Clegg says.
• Election using a list-based system has not been ruled out.
• The Commons would still be predominant. It would be in charge of finance. The Lords would continue to be a revising chamber.
• Reform would be introduced over three electoral cycles.
• It would be up to the parties in the Lords to decide how to reduce the number of existing peers.
Clegg says his plans are "careful" and "balanced". They represent evolution, not revolution.
The government is prepared to listen, and to adapt. But it is determined to act.
Sadiq Khan is responding now for Labour. He praises Nick Clegg for the way he chaired the cross-party committee drawing up these plans. Getting Lord Strathclyde to agree with everyone else on the committee was quite an achievement, he says.
Khan says the Tories are the obstacle to reform.
Clegg supports a fully-elected Lords. But his draft bill would create a Lords in which 20% of peers were appointed, plus 12 bishops, plus government ministers.
Khan says he has 11 questions. They include:
• Why should PR be used, after Britain has rejected AV?
• What would the cost of Lords |
a network of guideways, much like a network of streets. Travel is point-to-point, with no intermediate stops or transfers
Potential for on-demand, around-the-clock availability
Stops are designed to be off the main guideway, allowing through traffic to bypass stations unimpeded Similar to trams, buses, and monorails A public amenity (although not necessarily publicly owned), shared by multiple users
Reduced local pollution (electric powered)
Passengers embark and disembark at discrete stations, analogous to bus stops or taxi stands Similar to automated people movers Fully automated, including vehicle control, routing, and collection of fares
Usually above the street—typically elevated—reducing land usage and congestion Distinct features Vehicle movements may be coordinated, unlike the autonomous human control of cars and bikes
Small vehicle size allows infrastructure to be smaller than other transit modes
Automated vehicles can travel close together. Possibilities include dynamically combined "trains" of vehicles, separated by a few inches, to reduce drag and increase speed, energy efficiency and passenger density
The PRT acronym was introduced formally in 1978 by J. Edward Anderson.[8] The Advanced Transit Association (ATRA), a group which advocates the use of technological solutions to transit problems, compiled a definition in 1988 that can be seen here.[9]
List of operational automated transit networks (ATN) systems
Currently, five advanced transit networks (ATN) systems are operational, and several more are in the planning stage.[10]
List of ATN suppliers
The following list summarizes several well-known automated transit networks (ATN) suppliers as of 2014.[29]
History
Origins
Modern PRT concepts began around 1953 when Donn Fichter, a city transportation planner, began research on PRT and alternative transportation methods. In 1964, Fichter published a book[32] which proposed an automated public transit system for areas of medium to low population density. One of the key points made in the book was Fichter's belief that people would not leave their cars in favor of public transit unless the system offered flexibility and end-to-end transit times that were much better than existing systems – flexibility and performance he felt only a PRT system could provide. Several other urban and transit planners also wrote on the topic and some early experimentation followed, but PRT remained relatively unknown.
Around the same time, Edward Haltom was studying monorail systems. Haltom noticed that the time to start and stop a conventional large monorail train, like those of the Wuppertal Schwebebahn, meant that a single line could only support between 20 and 40 vehicles an hour. In order to get reasonable passenger movements on such a system, the trains had to be large enough to carry hundreds of passengers (see headway for a general discussion). This, in turn, demanded large guideways that could support the weight of these large vehicles, driving up capital costs to the point where he considered them unattractive.[33]
Haltom turned his attention to developing a system that could operate with shorter timings, thereby allowing the individual cars to be smaller while preserving the same overall route capacity. Smaller cars would mean less weight at any given point, which meant smaller and less expensive guideways. To eliminate the backup at stations, the system used "offline" stations that allowed the mainline traffic to bypass the stopped vehicles. He designed the Monocab system using six-passenger cars suspended on wheels from an overhead guideway. Like most suspended systems, it suffered from the problem of difficult switching arrangements. Since the car rode on a rail, switching from one path to another required the rail to be moved, a slow process that limited the possible headways.[33]
UMTA is formed
By the late 1950s the problems with urban sprawl were becoming evident in the United States. When cities improved roads and the transit times were lowered, suburbs developed at ever increasing distances from the city cores, and people moved out of the downtown areas. Lacking pollution control systems, the rapid rise in car ownership and the longer trips to and from work were causing significant air quality problems. Additionally, movement to the suburbs led to a flight of capital from the downtown areas, one cause of the rapid urban decay seen in the US.
Mass transit systems were one way to combat these problems. Yet during this period, the federal government was feeding the problems by funding the development of the Interstate Highway System, while at the same time funding for mass transit was being rapidly scaled back. Public transit ridership in most cities plummeted.[34]
In 1962, President John F. Kennedy charged Congress with the task of addressing these problems. These plans came to fruition in 1964, when President Lyndon B. Johnson signed the Urban Mass Transportation Act of 1964 into law, thereby forming the Urban Mass Transportation Administration.[35] UMTA was set up to fund mass transit developments in the same fashion that the earlier Federal Aid Highway Act of 1956 had helped create the Interstate Highways. That is, UMTA would help cover the capital costs of building out new infrastructure.
PRT research starts
However, planners who were aware of the PRT concept were worried that building more systems based on existing technologies would not help the problem, as Fitcher had earlier noted. Proponents suggested that systems would have to offer the flexibility of a car:
The reason for the sad state of public transit is a very basic one - the transit systems just do not offer a service which will attract people away from their automobiles. Consequently, their patronage comes very largely from those who cannot drive, either because they are too young, too old, or because they are too poor to own and operate an automobile. Look at it from the standpoint of a commuter who lives in a suburb and is trying to get to work in the central business district (CBD). If he is going to go by transit, a typical scenario might be the following: he must first walk to the closest bus stop, let us say a five or ten minute walk, and then he may have to wait up to another ten minutes, possibly in inclement weather, for the bus to arrive. When it arrives, he may have to stand unless he is lucky enough to find a seat. The bus will be caught up in street congestion and move slowly, and it will make many stops completely unrelated to his trip objective. The bus may then let him off at a terminal to a suburban train. Again he must wait, and, after boarding the train, again experience a number of stops on the way to the CBD, and possibly again he may have to stand in the aisle. He will get off at the station most convenient to his destination and possibly have to transfer again onto a distribution system. It is no wonder that in those cities where ample inexpensive parking is available, most of those who can drive do drive.[36]
In 1966, the United States Department of Housing and Urban Development was asked to "undertake a project to study … new systems of urban transportation that will carry people and goods … speedily, safely, without polluting the air, and in a manner that will contribute to sound city planning." The resulting report was published in 1968[37] and proposed the development of PRT, as well as other systems such as dial-a-bus and high-speed interurban links.
In the late 1960s, the Aerospace Corporation, an independent non-profit corporation set up by the US Congress, spent substantial time and money on PRT, and performed much of the early theoretical and systems analysis. However, this corporation is not allowed to sell to non-federal government customers. In 1969, members of the study team published the first widely publicized description of PRT in Scientific American.[38] In 1978 the team also published a book.[39] These publications sparked off a sort of "transit race" in the same sort of fashion as the space race, with countries around the world rushing to join what appeared to be a future market of immense size.
The oil crisis of 1973 made vehicle fuels more expensive, which naturally interested people in alternative transportation.
System developments
In 1967, aerospace giant Matra started the Aramis project in Paris. After spending about 500 million francs, the project was canceled when it failed its qualification trials in November 1987. The designers tried to make Aramis work like a "virtual train", but control software issues caused cars to bump unacceptably. The project ultimately failed.[40]
Between 1970 and 1978, Japan operated a project called "Computer-controlled Vehicle System" (CVS). In a full-scale test facility, 84 vehicles operated at speeds up to 60 kilometres per hour (37.3 mph) on a 4.8 km (3.0 mi) guideway; one-second headways were achieved during tests. Another version of CVS was in public operation for six months from 1975–1976. This system had 12 single-mode vehicles and four dual-mode vehicles on a 1.6 km (1.0 mi) track with five stations. This version carried over 800,000 passengers. CVS was cancelled when Japan's Ministry of Land, Infrastructure and Transport declared it unsafe under existing rail safety regulations, specifically in respect of braking and headway distances.
On March 23, 1973, U.S. Urban Mass Transportation Administration (UMTA) administrator Frank Herringer testified before Congress: "A DOT program leading to the development of a short, one-half to one-second headway, high-capacity PRT (HCPRT) system will be initiated in fiscal year 1974."[41] However, this HCPRT program was diverted into a modest technology program.[citation needed] According to PRT supporter J. Edward Anderson, this was "because of heavy lobbying from interests fearful of becoming irrelevant if a genuine PRT program became visible." From that time forward people interested in HCPRT were unable to obtain UMTA research funding.[42]
In 1975, the Morgantown Personal Rapid Transit project was completed. It has five off-line stations that enable non-stop, individually programmed trips along an 8.7-mile (14.0 km) track serviced by a fleet of 71 cars. This is a crucial characteristic of PRT. However, it is not considered a PRT system because its vehicles are too heavy and carry too many people. When it carries many people, it operates in a point-to-point fashion, instead of running like an automated people mover from one end of the line to the other. During periods of low usage all cars make a full circuit stopping at every station in both directions. Morgantown PRT is still in continuous operation at West Virginia University in Morgantown, West Virginia, with about 15,000 riders per day (as of 2003 ). It successfully demonstrates automated control, but was not sold to other sites because the steam-heated track has proven too expensive for a system that requires an operation and maintenance budget of $5 million annually.[43]
From 1969 to 1980, Mannesmann Demag and MBB cooperated to build the Cabinentaxi urban transportation system in Germany. Together the firms formed the Cabintaxi Joint Venture. They created an extensive PRT technology that was considered fully developed by the German government and its safety authorities. The system was to have been installed in Hamburg, but budget cuts stopped the proposed project before the start of construction. With no other potential projects on the horizon, the joint venture disbanded, and the fully developed PRT technology was never installed. Cabintaxi Corporation, a US-based company, obtained the technology in 1985, and remains active in the private-sector market for transportation systems.
In 1979 the three station Duke University Medical Center Patient Rapid Transit system was commissioned. The system was closed in 2009 to allow for expansion of the hospital.
Later developments
In the 1990s, Raytheon invested heavily in a system called PRT 2000, based on technology developed by J. Edward Anderson at the University of Minnesota. Raytheon failed to install a contracted system in Rosemont, Illinois, near Chicago, when estimated costs escalated to US$50 million per mile, allegedly due to design changes that increased the weight and cost of the system relative to Anderson's original design. In 2000, rights to the technology reverted to the University of Minnesota, and were subsequently purchased by Taxi2000.[44][45]
In 1999 the 2getthere designed ParkShuttle system was opened in the Kralingen neighbourhood of eastern Rotterdam using 12-seater driverless buses. The system was extended in 2005 and new second-generation vehicles introduced to serve five stations over 1.8 kilometres (1.1 mi) with five grade crossings over ordinary roads. Operation is scheduled in peak periods and on demand at other times.[46] In 2002, 2getthere operated twenty five 4-passenger "CyberCabs" at Holland's 2002 Floriade horticultural exhibition. These transported passengers along a track spiraling up to the summit of Big Spotters Hill. The track was approximately 600-metre (1,969 ft) long (one-way) and featured only two stations. The six-month operation was intended to research the public acceptance of PRT-like systems.
In 2010 a 10-vehicle (four seats each), two station 2getthere system was opened to connect a parking lot to the main area at Masdar City, UAE. The systems runs in an undercroft beneath the city and was supposed to be a pilot project for a much larger network, which would also have included transport of freight. Expansion of the system was cancelled just after the pilot scheme opened due to the cost of constructing the undercroft and since then other electric vehicles have been proposed.[18]
In January 2003, the prototype ULTra ("Urban Light Transport") system in Cardiff, Wales, was certified to carry passengers by the UK Railway Inspectorate on a 1 km (0.6 mi) test track. ULTra was selected in October 2005 by BAA plc for London's Heathrow Airport.[47] Since May 2011 a three-station system has been open to the public, transporting passengers from a remote parking lot to terminal 5.[22] In May 2013 Heathrow Airport Limited included in its draft five-year (2014–2019) master plan a scheme to use the PRT system to connect terminal 2 and terminal 3 to their respective business car parks. The proposal was not included in the final plan due to spending priority given to other capital projects and has been deferred.[48]
In June 2006, a Korean/Swedish consortium, Vectus Ltd, started constructing a 400 m (1,312 ft) test track in Uppsala, Sweden.[49] This test system was presented at the 2007 PodCar City conference in Uppsala.[50] A 40-vehicle, 2-station, 4.46 km (2.8 mi) system called "SkyCube" was opened in Suncheon, South Korea, in April 2014.[51]
In the 2010s the Mexican Western Institute of Technology and Higher Education began research into project LINT ("Lean Intelligent Network Transportation") and built a 1/12 operational scale model.[52]. This was further developed and became the Modutram[53] system and a full-scale test track was built in Guadalajara, which was operational by 2014.[54]
System design
Among the handful of prototype systems (and the larger number that exist on paper) there is a substantial diversity of design approaches, some of which are controversial.
Vehicle design
Vehicle weight influences the size and cost of a system's guideways, which are in turn a major part of the capital cost of the system. Larger vehicles are more expensive to produce, require larger and more expensive guideways, and use more energy to start and stop. If vehicles are too large, point-to-point routing also becomes more expensive. Against this, smaller vehicles have more surface area per passenger (thus have higher total air resistance which dominates the energy cost of keeping vehicles moving at speed), and larger motors are generally more efficient than smaller ones.
The number of riders who will share a vehicle is a key unknown. In the U.S., the average car carries 1.16 persons,[55] and most industrialized countries commonly average below two people; not having to share a vehicle with strangers is a key advantage of private transport. Based on these figures, some have suggested that two passengers per vehicle (such as with UniModal), or even a single passenger per vehicle is optimum. Other designs use a car for a model, and choose larger vehicles, making it possible to accommodate families with small children, riders with bicycles, disabled passengers with wheelchairs, or a pallet or two of freight.
Propulsion
All current designs (except for the human-powered Shweeb) are powered by electricity. In order to reduce vehicle weight, power is generally transmitted via lineside conductors rather than using on-board batteries. According to the designer of Skyweb/Taxi2000, J. Edward Anderson, the lightest system is a linear induction motor (LIM) on the car, with a stationary conductive rail for both propulsion and braking. LIMs are used in a small number of rapid transit applications, but most designs use rotary motors. Most such systems retain a small on-board battery to reach the next stop after a power failure.
ULTra uses on-board batteries, recharged at stops. This increases the safety, and reduces the complexity, cost and maintenance of the guideway. As a result, a street-level ULTRa guideway resembles a sidewalk with curbs and is very inexpensive to construct. ULTRa resembles a small automated electric car, and uses similar components.
Switching
Most designers avoid track switching, instead advocating vehicle-mounted switches or conventional steering. Those designers say that vehicle-switching permits faster switching, so vehicles can be closer together. It also simplifies the guideway, makes junctions less visually obtrusive and reduces the impact of malfunctions, because a failed switch on one vehicle is less likely to affect other vehicles. Other designers point out that track-switching simplifies the vehicles, reducing the number of small moving parts in each car. Track-switching replaces in-vehicle mechanisms with larger track-moving components, that can be designed for durability with little regard for weight or size.
Track switching greatly increases headway distance. A vehicle must wait for the previous vehicle to clear the track, for the track to switch and for the switch to be verified. If the track switching is faulty, vehicles must be able to stop before reaching the switch, and all vehicles approaching the failed junction would be affected.
Mechanical vehicle switching minimizes inter-vehicle spacing or headway distance, but it also increases the minimum distances between consecutive junctions. A mechanically switching vehicle, maneuvering between two adjacent junctions with different switch settings, cannot proceed from one junction to the next. The vehicle must adopt a new switch position, and then wait for the in-vehicle switch's locking mechanism to be verified. If the vehicle switching is faulty, that vehicle must be able to stop before reaching the next switch, and all vehicles approaching the failed vehicle would be affected.
Conventional steering allows a simpler 'track' consisting only of a road surface with some form of reference for the vehicle's steering sensors. Switching would be accomplished by the vehicle following the appropriate reference line- maintaining a set distance from the left roadway edge would cause the vehicle to diverge left at a junction, for example.
Infrastructure design
Simplified depiction of a possible PRT network. The blue rectangles indicate stations. The enlarged portion illustrates a station off-ramp.
Guideways
Several types of guideways have been proposed or implemented including beams similar to monorails, bridge-like trusses supporting internal tracks, and cables embedded in a roadway. Most designs put the vehicle on top of the track, which reduces visual intrusion and cost as well as easing ground-level installation. An overhead track is necessarily higher, but may also be narrower.[56] Most designs use the guideway to distribute power and data communications, including to the vehicles. The Morgantown PRT failed its cost targets because of its steam-heated track,[citation needed] so most proposals plan to resist snow and ice in ways that should be less expensive. Masdar's system has been limited because it attempted to dedicate ground-level to PRT guideways. This led to unrealistically expensive buildings and roads.[18]
Stations
Proposals usually have stations close together, and located on side tracks so that through traffic can bypass vehicles picking up or dropping off passengers. Each station might have multiple berths, with perhaps one-third of the vehicles in a system being stored at stations waiting for passengers. Stations are envisioned to be minimalistic, without facilities such as rest rooms. For elevated stations, an elevator may be required for accessibility.
At least one system, Metrino, provides wheelchair and freight access by using a cogway in the track, so that the vehicle itself can go from a street-level stop to an overhead track.
Some designs have included substantial extra expense for the track needed to decelerate to and accelerate from stations. In at least one system, Aramis, this nearly doubled the width and cost of the required right-of-way and caused the nonstop passenger delivery concept to be abandoned. Other designs have schemes to reduce this cost, for example merging vertically to reduce the footprint.
When user demand is low, surplus vehicles could be configured to stop at empty stations at strategically placed points around the network. This enables an empty vehicle to quickly be despatched to wherever it is required, with minimal waiting time for the passenger.
Operational characteristics
Headway distance
Spacing of vehicles on the guideway influences the maximum passenger capacity of a track, so designers prefer smaller headway distances. Computerized control and active electronic braking (of motors) theoretically permit much closer spacing than the two-second headways recommended for cars at speed. In these arrangements, multiple vehicles operate in "platoons" and can be braked simultaneously. There are prototypes for automatic guidance of private cars based on similar principles.
Very short headways are controversial. The UK Railway Inspectorate has evaluated the ULTra design and is willing to accept one-second headways, pending successful completion of initial operational tests at more than 2 seconds.[57] In other jurisdictions, preexisting rail regulations apply to PRT systems (see CVS, above); these typically calculate headways for absolute stopping distances with standing passengers. These severely restrict capacity and make PRT systems infeasible. No regulatory agency has yet endorsed headways below one second, although proponents believe that regulators may be willing to reduce headways as operational experience increases.[58]
Capacity
PRT is usually proposed as an alternative to rail systems, so comparisons tend to be with rail. PRT vehicles seat fewer passengers than trains and buses, and must offset this by combining higher average speeds, diverse routes, and shorter headways. Proponents assert that equivalent or higher overall capacity can be achieved by these means.
Single line capacity
With two-second headways and four-person vehicles, a single PRT line can achieve theoretical maximum capacity of 7,200 passengers per hour. However, most estimates assume that vehicles will not generally be filled to capacity, due to the point-to-point nature of PRT. At a more typical average vehicle occupancy of 1.5 persons per vehicle, the maximum capacity is 2,700 passengers per hour. Some researchers have suggested that rush hour capacity can be improved if operating policies support ridesharing.[59]
Capacity is inversely proportional to headway. Therefore, moving from two-second headways to one-second headways would double PRT capacity. Half-second headways would quadruple capacity. Theoretical minimum PRT headways would be based on the mechanical time to engage brakes, and these are much less than a half second. Although no regulatory agency has as yet (June 2006) approved headways shorter than two seconds, researchers suggest that high capacity PRT (HCPRT) designs could operate safely at half-second headways.[60] Using the above figures, capacities above 10,000 passengers per hour seem in reach.
In simulations of rush hour or high-traffic events, about one-third of vehicles on the guideway need to travel empty to resupply stations with vehicles in order to minimize response time. This is analogous to trains and buses travelling nearly empty on the return trip to pick up more rush hour passengers.
Grade separated light rail systems can move 15,000 passengers per hour on a fixed route, but these are usually fully grade separated systems. Street level systems typically move up to 7,500 passengers per hour. Heavy rail subways can move 50,000 passengers per hour. As with PRT, these estimates depend on having enough trains. Neither light nor heavy rail scales well for off-peak operation.
Networked PRT capacity
The above discussion compares line or corridor capacity and may therefore not be relevant for a networked PRT system, where several parallel lines (or parallel components of a grid) carry traffic. In addition, Muller estimated[61] that while PRT may need more than one guideway to match the capacity of a conventional system, the capital cost of the multiple guideways may still be less than that of the single guideway conventional system. Thus comparisons of line capacity should also consider the cost per line.
PRT systems should require much less horizontal space than existing metro systems, with individual cars being typically around 50% as wide for side-by-side seating configurations, and less than 33% as wide for single-file configurations. This is an important factor in densely populated, high-traffic areas.
Travel speed
For a given peak speed, nonstop journeys are about three times as fast as those with intermediate stops. This is not just because of the time for starting and stopping. Scheduled vehicles are also slowed by boardings and exits for multiple destinations.
Therefore, a given PRT seat transports about three times as many passenger miles per day as a seat performing scheduled stops. So PRT should also reduce the number of needed seats threefold for a given number of passenger miles.
While a few PRT designs have operating speeds of 100 km/h (60 mph), and one as high as 241 km/h (150 mph),[62] most are in the region of 40–70 km/h (25–45 mph). Rail systems generally have higher maximum speeds, typically 90–130 km/h (55–80 mph) and sometimes well in excess of 160 km/h (100 mph), but average travel speed is reduced about threefold by scheduled stops and passenger transfers.
Ridership attraction
If PRT designs deliver the claimed benefit of being substantially faster than cars in areas with heavy traffic, simulations suggest that PRT could attract many more car drivers than other public transit systems. Standard mass transit simulations accurately predict that 2% of trips (including cars) will switch to trains. Similar methods predict that 11% to 57% of trips would switch to PRT, depending on its costs and delays.[6][63][64]
Control algorithms
The typical control algorithm places vehicles in imaginary moving "slots" that go around the loops of track. Real vehicles are allocated a slot by track-side controllers. Traffic jams are prevented by placing north/south vehicles in even slots, and east/west vehicles in odd slots. At intersections, the traffic in these systems can interpenetrate without slowing.
On-board computers maintain their position by using a negative feedback loop to stay near the center of the commanded slot. Early PRT vehicles measured their position by adding up the distance using odometers, with periodic check points to compensate for cumulative errors.[39] Next-generation GPS and radio location could measure positions as well.
Another system, "pointer-following control", assigns a path and speed to a vehicle, after verifying that the path does not violate the safety margins of other vehicles. This permits system speeds and safety margins to be adjusted to design or operating conditions, and may use slightly less energy.[65] The maker of the ULTra PRT system reports that testing of its control system shows lateral (side-to-side) accuracy of 1 cm, and docking accuracy better than 2 cm.
Safety
Computer control eliminates errors from human drivers, so PRT designs in a controlled environment should be much safer than private motoring on roads. Most designs enclose the running gear in the guideway to prevent derailments. Grade-separated guideways would prevent conflict with pedestrians or manually controlled vehicles. Other public transit safety engineering approaches, such as redundancy and self-diagnosis of critical systems, are also included in designs.
The Morgantown system, more correctly described as a Group Rapid Transit (GRT) type of Automated Guideway Transit system (AGT), has completed 110 million passenger-miles without serious injury. According to the U.S. Department of Transportation, AGT systems as a group have higher injury rates than any other form of rail-based transit (subway, metro, light rail, or commuter rail) though still much better than ordinary buses or cars. More recent research by the British company ULTra PRT reported that AGT systems have a better safety than more conventional, non-automated modes.[citation needed]
As with many current transit systems, personal passenger safety concerns are likely to be addressed through CCTV monitoring,[citation needed] and communication with a central command center from which engineering or other assistance may be dispatched.
Energy efficiency
The energy efficiency advantages claimed by PRT proponents include two basic operational characteristics of PRT: an increased average load factor; and the elimination of intermediate starting and stopping.[66]
Average load factor, in transit systems, is the ratio of the total number of riders to the total theoretical capacity. A transit vehicle running at full capacity has a 100% load factor, while an empty vehicle has 0% load factor. If a transit vehicle spends half the time running at 100% and half the time running at 0%, the average load factor is 50%. Higher average load factor corresponds to lower energy consumption per passenger, so designers attempt to maximize this metric.
Scheduled mass transit (i.e. buses or trains) trades off service frequency and load factor. Buses and trains must run on a predefined schedule, even during off-peak times when demand is low and vehicles are nearly empty. So to increase load factor, transportation planners try to predict times of low demand, and run reduced schedules or smaller vehicles at these times. This increases passengers' wait times. In many cities, trains and buses do not run at all at night or on weekends.
PRT vehicles, in contrast, would only move in response to demand, which places a theoretical lower bound on their average load factor. This allows 24-hour service without many of the costs of scheduled mass transit.[67]
ULTra PRT estimates its system will consume 839 BTU per passenger mile (0.55 MJ per passenger km).[68][69] By comparison, cars consume 3,496 BTU, and personal trucks consume 4,329 BTU per passenger mile.[70]
Due to PRT's efficiency, some proponents say solar becomes a viable power source.[71] PRT elevated structures provide a ready platform for solar collectors, therefore some proposed designs include solar power as a characteristic of their networks.
For bus and rail transit, the energy per passenger-mile depends on the ridership and the frequency of service. Therefore, the energy per passenger-mile can vary significantly from peak to non-peak times. In the US, buses consume an average of 4,318 BTU/passenger-mile, transit rail 2,750 BTU/passenger-mile, and commuter rail 2,569 BTU/passenger-mile.[70]
Opposition and controversy
Opponents to PRT schemes have expressed a number of concerns:
Technical feasibility debate
Vukan R. Vuchic, professor of Transportation Engineering at the University of Pennsylvania and a proponent of traditional forms of transit, has stated his belief that the combination of small vehicles and expensive guideway makes it highly impractical in both cities (not enough capacity) and suburbs (guideway too expensive). According to Vuchic: "...the PRT concept combines two mutually incompatible elements of these two systems: very small vehicles with complicated guideways and stations. Thus, in central cities, where heavy travel volumes could justify investment in guideways, vehicles would be far too small to meet the demand. In suburbs, where small vehicles would be ideal, the extensive infrastructure would be economically unfeasible and environmentally unacceptable."[72]
PRT supporters claim that Vuchic's conclusions are based on flawed assumptions. PRT proponent J.E. Anderson wrote, in a rebuttal to Vuchic: "I have studied and debated with colleagues and antagonists every objection to PRT, including those presented in papers by Professor Vuchic, and find none of substance. Among those willing to be briefed in detail and to have all of their questions and concerns answered, I find great enthusiasm to see the system built."[72]
The manufacturers of ULTra acknowledge that current forms of their system would provide insufficient capacity in high-density areas such as central London, and that the investment costs for the tracks and stations are comparable to building new roads, making the current version of ULTra more suitable for suburbs and other moderate capacity applications, or as a supplementary system in larger cities.[citation needed]
Regulatory concerns
Possible regulatory concerns include emergency safety, headways, and accessibility for the disabled. Many jurisdictions regulate PRT systems as if they were trains. At least one successful prototype, CVS, failed deployment because it could not obtain permits from regulators.[73]
Several PRT systems have been proposed for California,[74][75] but the California Public Utilities Commission (CPUC) states that its rail regulations apply to PRT, and these require railway-sized headways.[76][76] The degree to which CPUC would hold PRT to "light rail" and "rail fixed guideway" safety standards is not clear because it can grant particular exemptions and revise regulations.[77]
Other forms of automated transit have been approved for use in California, notably the Airtrain system at SFO. CPUC decided not to require compliance with General Order 143-B (for light rail) since Airtrain has no on-board operators. They did require compliance with General Order 164-D which mandates a safety and security plan, as well as periodic on-site visits by an oversight committee.[78]
If safety or access considerations require the addition of walkways, ladders, platforms or other emergency/disabled access to or egress from PRT guideways, the size of the guideway may be increased. This may impact the feasibility of a PRT system, though the degree of impact would depend on both the PRT design and the municipality.
Concerns about PRT research
Wayne D. Cottrell of the University of Utah conducted a critical review of PRT academic literature since the 1960s. He concluded that there are several issues that would benefit from more research, including urban integration, risks of PRT investment, bad publicity, technical problems, and competing interests from other transport modes. He suggests that these issues, "while not unsolvable, are formidable," and that the literature might be improved by better introspection and criticism of PRT. He also suggests that more government funding is essential for such research to proceed, especially in the United States.[79]
New urbanist opinion
Several proponents of new urbanism, an urban design movement that advocates for walkable cities, have expressed opinions on PRT.
Peter Calthorpe and Sir Peter Hall have supported[80][81] the concept, but James Howard Kunstler disagrees.[82]
PRT vs. autonomous vehicles
As the development of self-steering technology for autonomous cars and shuttles advances[83], the guideway technology of PRT seems obsolete at first glance. Automated operation might become feasible on existing roads too. On the other hand, PRT systems can also make use of self-steering technology while there remain significant benefits from operating on an own, segregated route network.
See alsoposter="http://v.politico.com/images/1155968404/201704/606/1155968404_5410624470001_5410618593001-vs.jpg?pubId=1155968404" true Lawmakers: Flynn likely broke law in not revealing Russia payments
Former national security adviser Michael Flynn did not disclose payments for a 2015 speech in Moscow in his application to renew his security clearance in 2016, the leaders of the House Oversight Committee told reporters Tuesday.
The omission likely broke the law, the lawmakers said.
Story Continued Below
“As a former military officer, you simply cannot take money from Russia, Turkey or anybody else,” Oversight Chairman Jason Chaffetz (R-Utah) said. “And it appears as if he did take that money. It was inappropriate. And there are repercussions for the violation of law.”
Rep. Elijah Cummings of Maryland, the panel’s top Democrat, noted that knowingly falsifying or concealing information on a security clearance application form, called an SF-86, is a felony punishable by up to five years in prison.
Chaffetz and Cummings sent letters to the White House and federal agencies last month seeking Flynn’s security clearance applications and other documents. The Defense Intelligence Agency, where Flynn formerly served as director, provided the committee with Flynn’s security clearance documents. Cummings said the White House refused to comply with the committee’s request for other documents.
Flynn was forced to resign as President Donald Trump’s national security adviser in February after it became clear he had misled Vice President Mike Pence about the nature of his pre-inauguration phone calls with Russia’s ambassador.
Flynn has come under scrutiny for his lobbying on behalf of Turkey and for a paid speech he gave in 2015 at an event in Moscow celebrating the Russian propaganda outlet RT. At the event, Flynn was seated at a table with Russian President Vladimir Putin.
Flynn was paid nearly $34,000 for the Moscow speech, documents show — something Cummings has suggested could be a violation of the Constitution’s emoluments clause, which bars government officials from accepting gifts or payments from foreign governments. The Defense Department has issued guidance warning retired military officers that they are still bound by the emoluments clause because they are subject to recall.
Chaffetz said his committee would be turning over the issue to the Army and Defense Department to make a final determination, which Chaffetz said could include recovering the money he was paid.
“Gen. Flynn had a duty and an obligation to seek and obtain permission to receive money from foreign governments prior to any engagement with them,” Chaffetz said. “It does not appear to us that that was ever sought, nor did he get that permission.”
Flynn’s lawyer, Robert Kelner, said in a statement that Flynn briefed the Defense Intelligence Agency on his Moscow trip.
"As has previously been reported, General Flynn briefed the Defense Intelligence Agency, a component agency of the Department of Defense, extensively regarding the RT speaking event trip both before and after the trip, and he answered any questions that were posed by DIA concerning the trip during those briefings," Kelner said.Oct 10, 2014; Indianapolis, IN, USA; Indiana Pacers guard Rodney Stuckey (2) looks to pass the ball away from Orlando Magic guard Evan Fournier (10) in the second quarter of the game at Bankers Life Fieldhouse. The Orlando Magic beat the Indiana Pacers by the score of 96-93. Mandatory Credit: Trevor Ruszkowski-USA TODAY Sports
ESPN: Paul |
.
Students in the UAE are set to have lessons in ‘national obedience’ added to the curriculum, under controversial new measures.
The moral education classes are set to take place in every school and will be based on national obedience, tolerance, and patriotism.
Officials have attempted to paint the program as a broad ranging scheme designed to build a better society.
"Through [moral education] students will learn about themselves and the family, friends, peers. They will focus on values such as fairness, affection, tolerance, equality, appreciation, compassion, and empathy," Clive Pierrepont, director of communications at Taaleem told The Gulf News.
"They will also look at features of the government, conflict, trade, and travel, and many other areas based on the four pillars," he added.
A chart sent to schools has shown that the course aims at inspiring "solidarity", "respecting law and order" and "civic duties".
However, critics say these measures are an attempt by authorities to further control the population and quash dissent.
The move comes as the UAE desperately attempts to foster patriotism as the war rages on in Yemen and the country remains embroiled in the ongoing Gulf Crisis.
Earlier this year the UAE and Bahrain banned people from publishing expressions of sympathy towards Qatar and offenders now face a jail term of up to 15 years.
This includes users posting such opinions on social media sites.
The latest news follows attempts by other Gulf states to enforce national pride since the spat started in June.
Saudis were also urged to launch a witch hunt against their fellow citizens who posted opinions which appeared sympathetic to Qatar on Twitter.
Last month Saoud al-Qahtani, an adviser to the Saudi royal court, launched the hashtag #TheBlacklist and called on Saudis to "put any names you think should be added to #TheBlacklist hashtag".
The Egyptian regime has also headed up a long-term smear campaign against Qatar since the ouster of democratically-elected president Mohammed Morsi in 2013.
Cairo has imprisoned scores of journalists and opposition figures on charges of spying for the tiny Gulf state.
Meanwhile, in Qatar itself, the ongoing crisis has stirred up national pride with many Qataris showing their support for their country, which is under attack.
Earlier this year, mobile phone operators displayed patriotic messages in support of the kingdom. Many Qataris have also taken to social media to show solidarity with the state and voice their support for Emir Sheikh Tamim bin Hamad Al Thani.With the 25th anniversary deluxe reissue of R.E.M.’s Out Of Time due out later this week, Michael Stipe has been giving a few interviews, first with Alec Baldwin and now with The New York Times. In the latter, while talking about his flurry activity recently that included his live tributes to David Bowie, he mentions: “I’m not ready to go completely into pop stardom again, as a 56-year-old, [but] I want to work in music again.” So that’s a little unclear, but he’s already taking steps in that direction: He recently announced that he’ll be producing the new Fischerspooner album, which is called SIR, and mentions that he used to push R.E.M. to explore electronic and dance music, but that he realized “it’s not really who we were.”
In the same interview, Stipe also mentions that Adventures In Hi-Fi is his favorite R.E.M. album, and that he does a mean karaoke version of “Justify My Love.”
Read the full interview here.by FrelsAreN, DeviantART
by lelmer77, DeviantART
Jensaarai1 aka the Nerd-Rage Ranter, a video blogger on YouTube, is probably one of the greatest experts on Star Wars I have seen in some time. He appears to be well versed in all the movies, both of the Clone Wars series and the comic book series (Dark Horse). I have not heard him mention the novels in his analyses, but I wouldn’t put it passed him. Rest assured he is an expert on the Expanded Universe of Star Wars, which pretty much trumps those who only know about the movies when it comes to general Star Wars knowledge. What really impresses me is his unique knowledge on everything that is the lightsaber, which is impeccable.
He made a 10 episode series throughout 2012, called the “Versus Series” where he pits Jedi against Jedi, Sith against Sith and Jedi against Sith in “what if” scenarios, comparing them through factors like lightsaber skill, tactics, weapons, age, strength and much more. The episodes can range from 15 minutes to even over 40 minutes. His expertise makes watching them very worth while. If you’re into the arts of the lightsaber, this is all you right here, Jensaarai1 delivers.
Unfortunately only one video (below) has a force user from SWTOR. I hope he makes many more which includes more Jedi and Sith from the timeline of SWTOR, including KOTOR like Grand Master Satele Shan and Revan.
In this video, he pits Darth Malgus against Count Dooku. Below that video is the whole series, which you can watch as one long documentary on the strengths and weaknesses of the lightsaber masters. It’s truly great work, enjoy and see who can best who.
Darth Malgus Vs Count Dooku (Versus Series Episode 7)
The Entire Versus Series, Episodes 1-10
(Visited 578 times, 1 visits today)Mumbai: Royal Bank of Scotland NV (RBS), the UK’s third largest bank with $1.7 trillion in assets, will shut down operations in India and 24 other countries to cut costs and improve returns for shareholders, the bank said after announcing its 2014 annual results on Thursday.
RBS will, however, retain its back offices in India and Poland, it said in a statement that accompanied the results, without giving any details.
According to the bank’s website, RBS Business Services Pvt. Ltd, the bank’s global back office in India, employs 7,100 employees. Besides these employees, the bank also has 800 people employed in its 10 branches and institutional and corporate banking business currently operational in India.
A bank official said the RBS announcements mean the bank's operations in India will slowly be wound down or put up for sale in the coming months.
“The best case for the employees of the bank will be that they find a buyer for the business here, otherwise there will be job losses. The bottomline from this announcement is that RBS as an entity will leave India. But how and when it will be done are not clear right now. What will happen to the Indian operations, which includes corporate and investment banking and some retail banking, will all be decided by the bank’s headquarters in London," the official said on the condition of anonymity.
RBS inherited branches in India after the global acquisition of Dutch bank ABN Amro Bank NV in 2007 by a three-bank consortium that also included Fortis Banque NV and Banco Santander SA. The acquisition, however, proved costly for the UK bank, which needed a £46 billion ( ₹ 4.43 trillion) bailout by the British government after the global financial crisis in September 2008. RBS has since been winding down its operations in India, and has decided to steer away from loans to individuals and small enterprises.
The total assets of the bank in India shrank to ₹ 20,366 crore in financial year 2013-14 from ₹ 26,360 crore in 2012-13. In 2013, the bank shut 21 of its 31 branches in India and later divested its loan exposure to individuals and small and medium enterprises (SMEs) to Ratnakar Bank Ltd (RBL).
On Thursday, replying to a query from Mint, an RBS spokesperson said changes announced on Thursday will make RBS “a smaller, more focused bank". “As part of these changes, we have taken the decision to sell or run down our CIB (corporate and institutional banking) businesses in APAC (Asia Pacific), of which India is a part."
In a statement on Thursday, RBS said it will focus on “more sustainable business", mainly in the UK and western Europe “supported by trading and distribution platforms in the UK, US and Singapore."
The shutdown in India is part of the bank’s attempt to deal with larger global worries, said Adarsh Parasrampuria, vice-president at Nomura Financial Advisory and Securities (India) Pvt Ltd. “RBS is exiting 65% of the countries it operates in and India is one of them. It’s not that they are not happy with business here but the fact is that capital is an issue which has forced them out of here," Parasrampuria said.
In a post-results webcast RBS chief financial officer Ewen Stevenson said he expects 2015 to be “more challenging financially" as the bank’s costs go up mainly because of likely fines in the US. “After these changes, we will broadly have half of our products and half of our markets business," Stevenson said.
UK Financial Investments Ltd, an arm of the UK government, owns 80% of the bank’s shares. The lender is under pressure to ensure higher returns to its shareholders and cut costs.
The change in the bank’s strategy follows the bank posting a £3.4 billion loss in 2014, its seventh consecutive year without profit, mainly due to a £4 billion write-down on its US arm, Citizens Financial Group Inc., and a further £2 billion on tax charges. “CIB will reduce its geographical footprint to approximately 13 countries, compared with 38 at the end of 2014, though RBS will also retain its back office operations in Poland and India. In addition to its main distribution and trading hubs in the UK, US and Singapore, RBS will remain present in a number of Western European countries with coverage teams," RBS said.
The changes will see the bank’s CIB business pare both its balance sheet and assets globally. “RWAs (risk-weighted assets) will be reduced by 60% from £107 billion at 31 December 2014 to £35-£40 billion in 2019, with a reduction of more than £25 billion targeted in 2015. Third-party assets will be reduced from £241 billion at the end of 2014 to £75-£80 billion in 2019," RBS said. The bank’s balance sheet has already shrunk in India and other emerging markets such as China, Russia, Turkey and South Korea. RBS’s India balance sheet has shrunk to £2 billion from £3.7 billion mainly because of “reductions in corporate lending, particularly in the oil and gas, and mining and metals sectors, and in lending to banks, largely trade finance," the bank said. “The reductions in part reflected increasing capital requirements and sales of low-yielding assets."DALLAS — Dallas police are asking for the public's assistance identifying suspects who stole 70 bottles of shampoo from a Dallas Dollar General store in January.
Police released surveillance video of the suspects from the robbery of the Dollar General store located at 4627 W Kiest Boulevard.
The thefts occurred Jan. 24 around 3:48 p.m., when the suspects roamed the store before taking approximately $350 worth of shampoo.
Both suspects got away on foot.
One suspect is described as a Latin woman, approximately 20 years old, 5-foot-6 and weighing about 120 pounds.
The other suspect is described as a Latin man between 25 and 30 years old who is roughly 5-foot-8 and 185 pounds.
If you recognized these individuals or have any information regarding this crime, contact Detective Cleary with the Dallas Police Department’s Southwest Investigative Unit at 214-670-7471.
Copyright 2016 WFAADating, moving in with a guy, getting engaged, and planning a wedding are all part of what some women would call happily ever after. They're also pretty stressful. So if you scratch that whole "'til death do us part" situation, could you actually be happier? If you're one of these four women, the answer is abso-freaking-lutely. All of them say that being single has helped them look amazing, live super long lives, and be hella satisfied.
RELATED: The 12 Best Things EVER About Being Single
Bella DePaulo, Ph.D., 61
The researcher, author, and blogger turned her single-lady status into a sweet career by studying and writing about other legally independent women. Though she says she's been left out at work gatherings with her colleagues, according to the Christian Science Monitor, Bella is her happiest self when she's solo, or being "single at heart," she writes in her blog for Psychology Today. Plus, she's created some kick-ass comebacks for haters that ask "Will you ever get married?" Her response: "Maybe if I get hit on the head with a rock and turn into a different person," she writes on her blog for Huffington Post. Well played, Bella. Well played.
Emma Morano, 115
The woman, who's on a steady diet of raw eggs and steak, is currently the oldest person in Europe, according to The New York Times. And while she attributes her long life to that protein-packed diet, she also believes that ending her crappy marriage back in 1938 and being single ever since has had a lot to do with her longevity. Though she's had plenty of interested parties since, she says she decided that she never wanted to get wifed up again. “I didn’t want to be dominated by anyone," she told The New York Times. Now, she's dominating life.
RELATED: 10 Things Single Women Are SO Sick of Hearing
Jessie Gallan, 109
Another lady who attributes her super-long life to singlehood is this Scottish lass, who says her secret to longevity is "avoiding men." "They're just more trouble than they're worth," she said in an interview with the Daily Mail. #Preach
RELATED: The Anti-Aging Products You Should Be Using in Your Twenties, Thirties, and Forties
Nina Snelling, 81
The woman from the U.K. who looks at least 20 years younger than she is says that being an independent lady has helped her age so gracefully. After five marriage proposals and lots of boyfriends, Snelling says she's never been tempted to stay attached to a single dude, according to the Daily Mail. Apparently, living without the stress of planning her life around a man has kept her from getting gray hair and wrinkles, Snelling said in an interview with the Daliy Mail. "I refuse to be a slave to routine and can spend seven hours in the garden without anyone telling me I should be anywhere else," she says. "It’s blissful." Click here to see how good she looks.
All gifs courtesy of Giphy.comTwo Deeply Profound Quotes by Sister Chieko Okazaki on the Atonement and Diversity in the Church Sister Okazaki passed away two years ago today. She was one of my favorite speakers of all time. The following two quotes are great exampl...
More Thoughts on Repentance Further thoughts on "A Fresh View" of Repentance : (Please read the original post if you don't remember the basic foundationa...
Should Mormons Marry Non-Mormons? In any relationship or organization, all differences compound difficulties. One of the hardest parts of community ( "unity of more than...
Charity Vaunteth Not Itself, Is Not Puffed Up My resolution for this month is to be less "vaunting" of myself and less "puffed up" - and contemplating this resolution...
My Father Passed Away This Morning: A Tribute Almost six years ago, I wrote a post as a tribute to my father. Today, almost exactly an hour after hearing of his passing, I am reposting...
My Sunday School Lesson Recap: "Following the Counsel Given by Priesthood Leaders" Last Sunday, the lesson title was: " Why is it important to follow the counsel given by priesthood leaders?" I wrote that...
On Forgiveness: Two Important Things Two thoughts on forgiveness this Easter weekend: 1) We only can forgive those who have hurt us. We have no right to claim we forgive an...
"Bearing False Witness" Is Not the Same Thing As "Lying" The commandment is to not bear false witness. It isn't to not lie, ever. There is an important difference between the two - and an imp...
He Measures Growth, not Height 'Tis the Season for Making Amends - The Faithful DissidentOne of the suggestions I received for content from a reader was to review submitted team ideas and to review them and he volunteered his own team for the initial post. I think this is a great idea and should help you prepare for the Winter WKO!
Today’s team comes from the Reddit user zstrong24; he’s submitted information and requests before, so I’m glad to help him out here and take a look at his team. Let’s not waste lead-in time and jump right into it!
The Build
Zstrong24’s 300 Point Modern Animal Theme Team – WizKids Open
Before I jump in to reviewing this team, please note that Zstrong has commented on his build that he doesn’t own a lot of high-end meta pieces and he lacks Pandora’s Box. Keep this in mind as I go through the review.
The Players
This team is pretty solid for an animal theme team. With a +3, he’s not ensuring he wins map roll, but he’s got a better chance than someone who doesn’t have theme (like say Quinjet/Faust or undying tech). He won’t get Theme Team Probability Control, but that’s a risk you have to take when you run a generic theme, and animal is certainly a good theme.
Zstrong starts off in the best way possible with Devil Dinosaur. There’s no reason this guy should be left off of an animal theme team; the fact that he can spawn so many pogs, has three stop-clicks, and has front-loaded TK makes him a powerhouse. One of my first articles ever was about Devil Dinosaur, so I’m not going to go into detail about him since you all probably know about him. One thing is for sure; this guy dominated ROC tournaments last summer after his release, but he did fail to meet expectations when the time came and Quinjet players revealed they were just lying in wait. He’s kind of been reduced to Krang status: He’s a gatekeeper of meta that your team has to have an answer for.
Rat King is another piece that I’ve talked in detail about as he also got his own post here on Clix Fix. He’s a mobility terror and brings Prob to his team which is sorely needed. Mystics is fantastic as it’s a great way to counter enemy token teams, or pieces like Armaggon that really need to keep that first click. Mind control is also key here so that he can lure people into his token army from Devil. This guy hasn’t seen a lot of play yet, but I think he can be a real terror.
Klarion is a piece that I haven’t had the chance to talk about, and that’s because I don’t own him so I’ve never played him. However, I’ve played against him a whole heck of a lot. There’s one thing I’ve learned about Klarion; I hate fighting him. He’s got so much value rolled into that measly point cost, and Teekle has some otherworldly ability to always hit 5 or 6 on blades and is neigh-impossible to kill. Klarion also has Mystics, so if his opponent doesn’t go after Devil (which most people won’t), they have to suffer through the unavoidable damage. Klarion also has Stealth meaning that his main attackers take huge advantage of hindering terrain, which he has a good shot of getting with map roll. Probability Control round out his kit and makes him a steal for 70 points.
For his resource, he’s opted for the Round Table which is a great choice with Devil. Since the tokens are bound to get in the way, this will help him turn the resource dial and potentially call in a ton of threat. It seems he’s using the Round Table as a variable threat assessment piece that lets him handle the jobs that his animals can’t. The Round Table itself isn’t that strong of a resource, and when you have no Ultron drones to summon for you, it can be a little underwhelming, but when it’s loaded with the right cards, it can be a huge boon to your force.
Let’s talk inspirations before actual call-ins for our final segment. For inspirations, Red Tornado grants TK, She-Hulk grants +1 to attack, Falcon grants +2 movement, Thor grants an additional target and minimum range of 6, and Green Arrow grants +2 attack for range. None of these are really killer and seem to be small bumps for his values. Since both Teekl and Rat King have Perplex, the She-Hulk inspiration can ensure that he hits, or he can roll the dice and go for the +2 from Green Arrow for Rat King. Regardless, these are kind of okay inspirations.
As for the actual ID characters, that’s where things get interesting. Red Tornado is an awesome piece that sees a lot of meta play as she can drastically alter board positioning and comes complete with her own TK as well as Outwit. Very good for a token army to butcher someone. She-Hulk has Charge and Flurry, and if she’s called in next to the Drop Bears, they’ll all get +1 to attack which is great. She also gets Perplex if she’s adjacent to Rat King or Teekl. Falcon is a stealth buster, and has traited Prob for himself which is nice. With his double bolt and giving tiny characters a -1 to defense, he can easily counter enemy bystander forces. I would say Thor is used as a money alternative to Nightwing for the Jane Foster pog to heal his team up. Bringing up the caboose is Green Arrow, probably the strongest ranged call-in in the meta with his trick arrows and 12 attack. I do really like that all of his summons are under 100 points, meaning Devil Dino can become his ID summoner if he’s got pogs out and doesn’t need to TK (or Rat King with his teleporting).
Now that we know the team in detail, it’s time to actually review it.
The Review
None of Zstrong’s pieces are generally weak and I can see this team packing a lot of punch with only three figures starting on the map. He’s got TK and two sources of Prob which a lot of teams suffer from, and two sources of Perplex. It’s a solid team and I think he’s got a fair shot against some of the teams we see in the meta game.
However, this is a review, and it’s my job to pick the team apart and offer suggestions. My big issue with this team is that it’s a bit slow. What I mean is that there’s no transportation for Devil Dino’s pogs meaning they can easily get picked off by a ranged-heavy team. Devil really benefits from super-taxi’s like Overdrive, Vanisher, and Renet Tilley. Unfortunately, there aren’t any super-taxi’s with the animal keyword in modern, so it’s something we have to live with, and we can’t really call it a weakness since it comes with the keyword. I have a small solution, but we’ll get there.
The team also suffers from vulnerability to stealth-busting. Because he has no reducers on Rat King or Klarion, it’s very easy for a piece like Hawkeye to come in and snipe off one of his characters. If that’s done from an ID card (which it will be), his opponent isn’t going to care about the mystics damage. Sure, Klarion and Rat King have Super Senses, but that’s a lot of eggs in one basket since one good hit can take either of them out permanently. Luckily, since both Rat King and Devil are 100 points, Nick Fury doesn’t get +1 to attack/damage and penetrating if/when he’s called in.
There’s also a lack of response against Ultron drones. No matter what, your team has to be able to deal with Ultron’s since they are present in roughly 75% of tournament teams. This could easily be rectified by swapping an ID card for Hawkeye and using AAOU 106 Hawkeye, otherwise known as the Ultron Slayer. The real issue is that since drones have Invulnerable, Teekle has to roll a 4 on blades in order to KO one. Rat King can pick them off as well, but there’s a serious lack of penetrating damage.
I hate this next question, but it must be asked: how does this team beat a Quinjet? Time and again, the jet has shown that it is the master of the meta game, so you just cannot think competitive if you don’t take the mighty Avengers plane into account. Mind Control is a good start, and Rat King has a great kit to attempt a hit, but it’s going to be pretty tough for Dino pogs to really inflict damage, especially before the jet can dismember him.
Again, I’m not trying to be harsh, just reviewing the team. All of these issues I bring up doesn’t mean the team isn’t good. There’s simply no way to build a team that can counteract everything it plays against, and you have to build what you think will net you the most small victories. Let’s move on to changes.
Changes to the Team
I mentioned that transportation is a big issue since Zstrong doesn’t have a way to get his pogs to the enemy and that animal’s don’t have a super-taxi. That’s not entirely true. I present WKTP16-003e Turtle Van. At 60 points, this vehicle has 7 clicks with Invulnerability and can carry four people. When you have any Turtle on your force (which all of them are Animals), it doesn’t count against your theme. The best option here would be to use one of the original TMNT commons since they’re only 50 points, and I would opt for Michelangelo since he has Empower and gives out tokens. This change would also have an impact against The Quinjet since tokens are it’s natural enemy (as are they to Ultron drones). Now we have a piece that can somewhat disrupt ID call-in forces and stop off-the-board damage from sweeping his pieces.
In order to utilize this change, the team would have to undergo a major revision as there simply aren’t enough points. The van and a single turtle clock in at 110 points, 10 points more than Dino or Rat King and that’s a lot to meander onto the team. In reality, I would probably opt to drop the theme team and just use Vanisher or Overdrive over Klarion. If he went this route instead, he could add an Ultron drone of his own and really up his threat response and keeps the ‘easy points’ to a minimum with only his super taxi. Sure, he loses a Prob control, but he gains so much more damage. Map isn’t really crucial to this team since Rat King can teleport anywhere he wants (and object placement will help him there), so I think this could be a great change.
The last change I would make would be his ID cards. Granted, he stated a lack of meta pieces, but let’s talk about the weaknesses. Falcon is a pretty meh piece; the strengths he gives can easily be replaced by the same Hawkeye I mentioned earlier, and his point cost is still under 100. He also modifies Range by +2 for Inspiration meaning Zstrong would have a better chance at buffing Rat King through Inspirations.
Red Tornado is a great piece and can be a huge boon to the controlling player, but in this team comp, I don’t think she pulls her weight (of course, this could 100% be argued). I would opt for something like Shang-Chi along with WKM16-011 Shang-Chi – hear me out on this. With his special attack power, To Fight Is To Thrive, Shang-Chi can potentially be the source of insane amounts of damage. If luck is on his side, he can completely dismantle a Quinjet in a single turn. His inspiration is also terrific granting +1 to close attacks, but more importantly he grants Precision Strike for any attacks.
If the hail-mary play isn’t your bag of tea, why not opt for Black Canary? WKD-021 Black Canary has Running Shot and Pulse Wave, and can use Force Blast, meaning she can be called in for targets that absolutely need to be dealt with. With Rat King and Teekl’s perplex and two Probs, there’s a very high chance he can Pulse Wave for 5 damage. Her inspiration also grants a flat +1 to attack, which is pretty reliable for any character he picks for the Round Table each turn, and raises the total of that effect to 2 (more versions means more reliability).
A final suggestion would be to use the Superman ID card, strictly for it’s inspiration which is Invincible. That alone is HUGE and worth the ID slot. Any of the Shifting Focus Supermen would be great options to choose from and keep his costs under 100 points. Heck, the defensive version alone would be awesome with his pogs.
I think Zstrong has a really great team here, and to be fair, with a few ID card tweaks it could have a very good chance of destroying a lot of teams. Does it have what it takes to win an event? Sure, depending on what he plays against and how his rolls go. Regardless, I want to thank Zstrong for the suggestion for this new article series and offering his team as the guinea pig.
If you would like your team reviewed, feel free to submit a request to me! These take a bit longer than standard Clix Fix articles, so I might only be able to do one a month, but I can try my best! Feel free to comment below on your thoughts or any other type of content you’d like to see.
See you next week!
AdvertisementsGrant and I don’t got out to eat much,but we do have a special place in our hearts for a good burger. While living in Austin, TX we LOVED Dan’s Hamburgers, but here that is not an option. Since we are still eating KETO, we have enjoyed Five Guys Burger and Frys especially since they have a really nice set up for a bunless burger where they give you TONS of toppings and a nice dish so you can easily eat it with a fork and knife. So I had a hankering for some Five Guys but decided to make my favorite version at home since I had everything for it.
Start with one onion sliced which you can cut in whatever fashion you prefer; I wanted them a little larger so they wouldn’t slide off the burger as fast.
I cut up 4 sliced of bacon with a pair of scissors,but you can always do more.
Chop up around 4-5 ounces of mushrooms or more.
We didn’t have fresh patties, just the frozen ones, and I baked them in the oven, but if you have a grill, it would be a lot tastier like that. Don’t forget to season them!
Cook until everything is nicely done and even parts a little crispy.
Start with your burgers.
I added Mayo since I’m a sucker for condiments.
Add some cheese, we normally don’t buy shredded cheese cause of the extra carbs they add in,but we had some we needed to use up.
Top with bacon/onion/mushroom mixture.
I love tomatoes so I added a few,but you could do pickles or anything like that instead.
I then added some sugar free ketchup,but I am sure you could find a BBQ sauce or something like that instead. These were super filling, and the recipe above made enough topping for four patties. We ended up eating 1 each and a few hours later coming back for the second ones.
Enjoy!Real men don’t paint their basements in Butterscotch Tempest. They colour the walls with Beer Time.
CIL Paints has launched Canada’s first “paint colours for men” collection, Ultimate Man Caves, designed to get men more excited about painting projects. Or, judging by the chosen names, at least get the Canadian paint company some free publicity.
CIL has renamed 27 of its paint chip names including Fairytale Green (Mo Money), Monterey Cliffs (Wolfden) and Cloud Nine (Iced Vodka).
A newly launched brochure offers an array of decorating choices for every room, from the “man cave” — “Featuring new CIL paint colour names for men such as Midlife Crisis, Brute Force, and Deathstar, the walls of this bathroom have ‘masculine’ written all over them,” — to the home theatre room — “The ultimate chill colour combo for having the guys over for pizza and the game … or to watch Die Hard for the sixteenth time.”
The original names were geared toward women, just as nail polishes are marketed with witty shade names (Essie’s “Ballet Slippers,” “Not Just a Pretty Face,” and “Sole Mate,” for example).
“When it comes to paint names, it’s all about the emotional connection and our research shows that men and women tend to relate to paint names differently,” Alison Goldman, a spokeswoman for CIL Paints, says.
‘‘Studies show that while a larger percentage of women tend to choose paint colours for their home, it’s often men who give the colours a final nod.”
The original idea behind the campaign was to “do something hilarious,” she says. CIL held a Facebook contest in August asking people for manlier monikers in English and French and more than 15,000 responded. CIL’s marketing team chose their favourites (Ms. Goldman’s favourites are Old Sweat Pants and Pimpin’ the Trans-Am) to be featured in-store along with their 1,200 existing colours.
“Paint is such a, I don’t want to say dull, but it’s a less than fascinating product,” she says. “No one else in the paint industry is funny. Every competitor is about the design and the warm fuzzy feelings you get from the colours. We hoped to appeal more strongly to the millenium generation who are going to be just starting getting into painting — new homebuyers, first-time homebuyers, students.”
Ms. Goldman says since the campaign began, they’ve received maybe eight complaints, such as: “Men are more than beer; some of us like ballerina slippers.”
“We’ve had the occasional person who thought it was a little bit condescending. But I’ve yet to see a funny ad campaign that is thrilling to 100% of the world.”
National PostCrooked bank cashier tells judge 'You can't send me to prison - it will violate my baby's human rights' (before she is locked up)
Scam: Nicola Hurley arrives at the Old Bailey, where she was sentenced to 27 months for an £800,000 fraud
A crooked bank cashier who helped a fraud gang steal £800,000 has argued she cannot be sent to jail because it would breach her baby's human rights.
However, the brazen defence tactic employed by Nicola Hurley, 23, was rejected out of hand by a High Court judge and she was jailed for 27 months for her part in the scam at a London branch of Halifax.
Hurley was one of three computer operators recruited by crooks to pass on information relating to wealthy customers' accounts.
She had been working at the Oxford Street branch of Halifax for a just a few months when the fraudulent activity was discovered.
Two sisters lost nearly £400,000 in the scam, with another nine customers also losing money.
But earlier this year Hurley tried to get a High Court injunction banning an Old Bailey judge from sentencing her on the grounds it was against her 10-month old son's human rights.
Hurley claimed that sending her to prison would be unfair to her child and the only way to overcome this was for the baby to be represented by its own barrister.
Peter Ratcliffe, defending, said: 'This court has a duty to protect the child's rights under Article 8 of the Human Rights Act.'
He said the baby was still breast fed and had not reacted well to three different types of powered milk.
Mr Ratcliffe said the court did not have 'full or best information' to understand the psychological or physical impact on the baby if it were to be separated from Hurley.
However, the judge, Recorder Noel Lucas QC, told Hurley: 'I am against you.
Justice: The statue on top of the Old Bailey, where Hurley's trial was heard
'It appears leading counsel was instructed on behalf of your child and sought to injunct this court from passing sentence and thereafter an order had been sought from the High Court to entertain submissions on behalf of your child represented separately.
'The High Court disallowed the application.'
The judge said a criminal trial was between the Crown and the defendant and to allow the interests of each concerned party to become involved would cause endless problems.
'If you were to consider but for a moment the consequences to the system where the rights of children were permitted, in circumstances such as this one, you might have a situation where women with children are targeted to commit crime so that on detection they would not go to prison.'
He said the potential for 'injustice' was great.
After hearing evidence from Hurley's mum, Maxine, the judge was told the baby is now also eating solids and only'supplemented with breast feed'.
Bank job: The Halifax branch on Oxford Street where Hurley worked and committed the fraud
'She is, as are most children her age, attached to her mother.'
He added that Hurley, who managed to get a job with the Department for Work and Pensions as a single parent benefits adviser after being sacked from HBOS, was planning to go back to work soon anyway.
Recorder Lucas said in his view Hurley took the job with the bank 'to do precisely what she did'.
'You entered a deliberate and persistent campaign with others to divulge details from HBOS so those accounts could depleted.
'This was a breach of trust.'
The court heard eleven people were fleeced during the fraud, including the two sisters who had to be refunded by HBOS.
'All of the cases involve cashiers working for Halifax Bank of Scotland, Abbey and Lloyds TSB.
'The cashiers produced security details of customers with substantial cash in their accounts,' prosecutor Jennifer Knight said.
'The banking is such that all computer activity undertaken within it is captured and stored indefinitely. Staff are compelled to change their password every 28 days.
'The Halifax computer system enables cashiers such as Nicola Hurley to obtain full details of all customers. This enables withdrawal.'
The maximum amount in cash available for withdrawal per day at a branch is £1,200 and extra security questions have to be asked for transfers above £2,000.
Hurley started work |
that the quickest up-and-comer type of car was the electric car. It was 1900 and electricity was at the core of all the coolest, newest technology.
The 35 years between the mid-1860s and the turn of the century had just witnessed an electricity revolution, driven by inventors like Thomas Edison, Nikola Tesla, Alexander Graham Bell, and George Westinghouse, during which the world went from normal to positively magical. The first magic happened in the middle of the century, when the telegraph used long-range electricity to communicate with people really far away, and in 1866, the first successful cross-Atlantic telegraph message was sent, allowing Europe and the US to magically communicate with each other instantly. The magic revolution hit full force in the late 1870s. The first telephone call happened in 1876, followed by the first time in human history someone could record sound and then play it back, in 1877. Light bulbs began to light up city streets in the early 1880s, and by 1896, the first electrical grid brought widespread electricity into people’s homes. Also in 1896, the first primitive motion picture went on display in New York, and the first wireless transmission of a human voice—the birth of the radio—went through in Brazil in 1900. Meanwhile, magical horseless cars were appearing on the streets, and only a few years later, in 1903, the Wright Brothers would take humanity’s first heavier-than-air flight. It’s hard to imagine how insanely cool a time this must have been for everyone.
And if you were alive around the year 1900, you’d probably equate modern tech with electricity, much the way we today equate modern tech with computers, smart phones and the internet. Edison and Tesla were their Bill Gates and Steve Jobs. The idea of powering transportation with a fiery engine dated back to the earliest locomotives almost 100 years earlier, which would seem about as modern to a person in 1900 as black-and-white silent films seem to us today. By 1900, you weren’t supposed to have to deal with how the energy sausage is really made anymore—the burning fire happened in some remote generator now, allowing consumers to only have to interact with the silent, clean, convenient magical butler—electricity.
So if someone in the year 1900 had to bet on the outcome of the battle between external steam combustion, internal gasoline combustion, and electricity as the future standard for powering cars, they’d have probably put their money on electricity. And at the time, electricity was not only winning the battle over gasoline with far more cars on the road, but the world’s most prominent inventors, including Edison and Tesla, were pouring their efforts into an electric car future. Early in the century, the New York Times referred to the electric car as “ideal,” citing it as quieter, cleaner, and more economical than the gas car.25
But ideal wasn’t the driving force of the early auto industry—scalable was. Cars were, up until that point, fairly impractical toys for rich people. There would be time to idealize everything later—the first step was to figure out how to make the car fast, sturdy, and most importantly, affordable. Money and brains poured into car technology from all over the world, and in 1908, Henry Ford and his five-year-old company came out with the car that launched the automotive industry into the stratosphere: The Model T.26
Before the Model T, there had been big problems with both electric and gas vehicles. Electric had shorter ranges and longer refueling times. Gas cars were loud, hard to start, and spewed smoke like it was 1802.
But Ford was a masterful industrialist, and by coming up with the concept of making cars by moving assembly line instead of hand-crafting them, he dramatically brought down costs and created America’s first car for the masses. In 1912, engineer Charles Kettering invented the electric car starter, eliminating the need to laboriously and dangerously hand crank your gas car on, and the newly invented muffler significantly reduced gas engine noise. Suddenly, a lot of the things that sucked about gas cars didn’t suck anymore—and they had become much cheaper than electric cars. Ford’s Model T took over America, and by 1914, 99% of new American cars ran on gas. By 1920, electric cars dropped entirely out of commercial production.27
This was not an inevitable outcome. The future of cars had been up for grabs, and Ford had simply outsmarted his competition. Burning fuel was the way of the past and electricity was the way of the future—but Ford had created a provable, profitable business model for making cars, one that didn’t yet exist for electric cars, and it quickly became too much of an uphill battle for electric car makers to try to turn the tide. So they stopped.
___________
Now it’s a century later. The most primitive local telephone call through a wire has become a person in Delhi being able to take a slab of glass out of his pocket, tap it with his finger, and instantly be talking to, and looking at, his friend in Sao Paulo. The grainiest, choppiest black-and-white silent movies have become Pixar. Mixing chemicals in a lab has become splitting atoms in the Large Hadron Collider. The Wright Brothers’ 12 second, 120-foot flight has become routine trips 250 miles up to the International Space Station.
But instead of me finishing that paragraph with, “The primitive gas-burning car has become [something rad we can’t even imagine],” I have to finish it with, “The primitive gas-burning car has become the better gas-burning car.”
As I said, if you were alive in 1900, you’d have probably thought the idea of an AC induction electric car motor was awesome and futuristic, and the internal combustion engine, which was only an incremental advance from the early locomotive steam engines invented a century earlier, was kind of cool but not especially futuristic. But we’re not alive in 1900, we’re alive in 2015, so when we look at the modern gas engine that’s in all of our cars, and we see pistons moving back and forth because of something hot exploding inside their cylinders—28
—they should seem outrageously ancient. Quick aside:
Tim Makes Passionate Car People Even More Furious By Describing How a Car Engine Works in a Clearly-Non-Car-Person Way Blue Box Welcome to the Tim Makes Passionate Car People Even More Furious By Describing How a Car Engine Works in a Clearly-Non-Car-Person Way Blue Box. Here’s the deal: The animation above is of a four-stroke, four-cylinder engine. The four cylinders are those four tubes the pistons are moving up and down inside of. Each time a piston slides up or down, that’s called a stroke, and the fuel-burning happens in a four-stroke cycle: 1) The Intake Stroke: This is the part where the piston is moving down and there’s blue stuff above it. The blue stuff is air that’s being sucked in along with a small amount of gasoline that’s fired in at just the right time by the fuel injector. 2) The Compression Stroke: This is the stroke where the piston moves up and as it does, the blue stuff turns orange. What’s happening is that the valve that let the air in on the intake stroke has now closed and as the piston moves up, there’s nowhere for the air/gas mixture to go, so it just compresses really tightly. 3) The Power Stroke: This is the stroke I feel like passionate car men talk about with a little twinkle in their eye. In the animation, this is where the piston moves down and there’s orange above it which then turns gray by the end. The previous compression stroke has squeezed the air and gas tightly, and at the top of that stroke, the spark plug at the top of the cylinder emits a spark which ignites the compressed air and gas on fire and creates a little explosion. This explosion blows the piston back downwards. This stroke is where the power of the car engine comes from. 4) The Exhaust Stroke: This is the part where the piston pushes the gray stuff up and out of the cylinder. The gray stuff is exhaust—i.e. smoke because you just lit a campfire in that cylinder—that then makes its way out of the car’s tailpipe. This smoke consists of mostly non-toxic gases with a little carbon monoxide and other poison mixed in for fun. Also in the exhaust is the carbon dioxide that just got created during the explosion, which allows the long-buried carbon in the gasoline to happily re-enter the Earth’s atmosphere after the most boring 300 million years ever underground. The furious back-and-forth motion of the pistons work together to forcefully turn what’s called a crankshaft—that metal bar contraption they’re all connected to below—which creates the turning motion that eventually turns the car’s wheel axles. I think.11 (For more info: first two minutes of this video shows this all in action, and this is aesthetically pleasing.)
Now. I’ll admit that car engines are cool. And I can see why some people are kind of obsessed with them. But when I look at these two animations next to each other—
1815 locomotive engine:
2015 car engine:
—they look too similar to be 200 years apart.
“Hot explosions in cylinders pushing pistons back and forth to force metal bars to turn wheels and sending the resulting smoke billowing out of a pipe” sounds like an old-fashioned technology, and it’s just very odd that we’re still using it today. We get used to the world we live in, whatever that world is like, but if you examine history and take a big step back, some things suddenly make no sense. And this is one of them.
So the question we need to ask is why.
If electric motors were the more advanced technology—if they were considered ideal because they were quiet, clean, and took advantage of cutting edge technology—why did the world give up on them? In 1900, neither electric nor gas cars were viable for mass adoption—both needed a few key technological breakthroughs. The key breakthroughs needed for gas cars happened first—but why was that reason for us to just settle, permanently, for the more primitive technology and the one that, over time, would make our cities smoggy and change the chemical makeup of our atmosphere? If 20th-century human invention could go from the Wright Brothers’ 12-second flight to the moon in just 66 years, surely advancing battery technology enough to bring electric car prices and charging times down while increasing range shouldn’t have been beyond our scope. Why did innovation and progress in something as important to the world as car-powering technology just stop?
This question could be asked about other parts of the bigger story of the Fossil Fuels Era. You could just as easily puzzle over the question, “America’s first electricity power station, Edison’s Pearl Street Station in Manhattan, first lit up in 1882, powered by burning coal—how is it possible that in 2015, burning coal is still by far the primary way humanity produces electricity even though we’ve known for decades that it’s not an optimal or sustainable long-term method?”
The problem with the question “Why did X technology stop moving forward?” is that it’s misunderstanding how progress works. Instead of asking why technological progress sometimes stops, we have to ask the question:
Why does technological progress ever happen at all?
The mistake of the first question is the intuitive but incorrect notion that technology naturally moves forward on its own over time—it doesn’t. I can tell you this for sure, because my Time Warner DVR has the exact same horrible user interface it had in 2004. The way technology works is that by default, it stands still, and it moves forward only when something pushes it forward.
We often have the same intuitive misconception when we think about evolution. Natural selection doesn’t make things “better”—it just optimizes biology to best survive in whatever environmental circumstances it finds itself. When something in that environment changes—a predator mutates and becomes faster, a certain type of food becomes scarce, an ice age rolls in—it means species that were previously optimized to the environment no longer are. The environmental change alters the natural selection criteria, which applies a pressure on the species as it is, and over time, the genetics of the species will react to the pressure by changing in order to optimize to the new environment.
When it comes to technology, a totally free and open market is the natural environment. But unlike the world of species, which is the eternal Wild West, human societies have another factor in play—a god-type force called government. So if we’re trying to figure out what makes technology move and change, we have to look at two sources of pressure: natural market conditions that ebb and flow and apply continual new pressures on all the actors within, and the “god” on top who can artificially change the environment below to create manufactured pressures. Let’s examine both, starting with government:
1) Pressure From Government-Induced Environment Changes
The nature and power of a market’s government-god varies significantly throughout the world. In North Korea, it is a Biblical-style, all-knowing, all-seeing, all-powerful ruler of the universe to the point where there is no natural market environment—just the one god created and maintains. In Scandinavia, god is a wealthy power mom and the market is nestled in her warm bosom of safety and opportunity. In Central Africa, god made a lifestyle change and got a new job, working for the wealthiest families—huge step up the ladder for him.
In the US, god has an identity crisis, alternating between feelings of pride and self-loathing. It wants to have the best country, but it’s standing on the street corner alone yelling out in an argument with itself about the right way to do that. When the US government (or a government like it) wants to play god and alter the American natural market environment to apply certain pressures in certain places, it uses three main tools: funding, regulation, and taxes.
Funding: In order for government funding to lead to major progress, there has to be a lot of it, and in an open democracy, that only flies when the nation needs to do something so important that everyone agrees on it—like in the 1960s, when the fear of losing global influence kicked the US government’s adrenaline in and it put a man on the moon. Likewise, significant US military funding is something the American electorate can agree on enough that it receives tremendous funding and plays an important part in advancing technology in a number of industries. In most cases, though, a divided democracy is too paralyzed by conflicting interests and political squabbling to be the main driver of a serious tech revolution.
Regulation: Another democratic government muscle is its ability to make rules—laws, restrictions, quotas, etc. These can be effective at pushing through minor changes—the seatbelt and airbag are both products of government regulation. But at least when it comes to the car industry, I’m having a hard time thinking of instances of major technological leaps caused by government regulation.
Tax Code: The government often uses the tax code to add its own economic pressures into the free market. Again though, while this can be effective for nudging something in a certain direction, it doesn’t tend to lead to sweeping advances.
Of course, America is in a big fight about this, with fiscal liberals typically feeling a lot more optimistic about government’s ability to play a positive role in moving things forward than fiscal conservatives. But I think both would agree that major tech progress being forced forward by the government is more the way of places like the Soviet Union and modern-day China where government has a lot more power. The incredible innovation that often emerges from open democracies tends to come from pressures from below, in the bubbling cauldron of the free market—
2) Pressures From Natural Market Forces
In the natural world, to catch food and stay away from predators, animals will optimize by becoming fast and elusive runners. When food on the ground becomes scarce, species will feel the pressure of hunger and over time, their genetics will re-optimize by developing good bodies for climbing or long necks or wings. A running species that becomes a flying species hasn’t become better—just better fit for the current circumstances. In the world of species, the definition of optimization is simple because the end goals are simple: the core needs of biological creatures are always the same—to self-preserve and reproduce. So optimization in the natural world always has the same definition: to adjust in a way that makes you mostly likely to self-preserve and reproduce.
In order to understand what optimization means in the market, we need to know what the core goals are of the actors there. Of course, people are also biological creatures, and self-preservation will always be at the top of the list—if you’re hungry, cold, or sick, fixing that will be the core goal. But for people whose base needs are being met, what are the yearning desires that then lie at the core of their motivation? What does “pursuing your self-interest” mean for them?
Well, it depends on the culture. In certain cultures, the fear of failure is so strong that it outweighs desires like glory or great fortune, and the primary inner drive becomes to just make sure you’re passable. In others, the deepest drive of the people might be religious salvation, community or family service, a leisurely lifestyle, or spiritual enlightenment.
When it comes to technological advancement, those motivations aren’t likely to get you there because thinking up tech innovations isn’t a helpful step on the path to optimization for those people. So if we want tech progress, what kind of yearning do we want people to feel?
I think the ideal mix is a two-part cocktail:
First ingredient: Greed. In a perfect, fair, open market, greed works great as the core lifeblood motivation. The way capitalism theoretically works is that the more real-world value you create, the more money you’ll make. So companies in a competitive landscape will put their effort into creating better and better products and services in order to optimize, which for them means making as much money as they possibly can. Individual people are greedy as a means to all kinds of ends—a lavish lifestyle, personal freedom, security, admiration, power, sex—but what they want is irrelevant. As long as their burning desire makes them really want stuff, their drive to optimize will move technology forward. Greed is a double-edged sword though—to be beneficial, greed has to be contained inside a high-integrity, meritocratic, free market. If it’s not, greed will turn into the enemy of progress, because the more vulnerable the system is to corruption, the more the greedy on top will be able to game the system to ensure their own long-lasting victory.
Second ingredient: Raging ambition. Greed can lead to steady forward progress, but in order for progress to leap forward, a second ingredient is usually key: a burning desire to do something great. Again, the underlying reasons for this kind of ambition can vary. Sometimes it’ll be an ego-driven desire—to be famous and renowned, to leave one’s mark, to be thought of and posthumously remembered as great. Other times the ambition will be fueled by a borderline-insane level of confidence and optimism that gives someone the gall to be idealistic. These are the yearnings of the hungry underdog.
An established industry full of existing winners running on greed is like the highest layer of trees in a crowded rainforest. They’ll push upward only as needed, elbowing each other for little gains and victories as they vie for sunlight, mostly just trying to keep their spot in the canopy. Greed just wants sunlight—it doesn’t care how high up it is when it gets it.
But below, the hungry underdog burns for sunlight and will spend 100 hours a week trying to figure out how to get it. When the breakthrough comes, the underdog bursts up through the canopy into the open sky and spreads its leaves out wide. Suddenly, the trees that had been on top are blocked from the sun. Greed is then replaced by the much more powerful drive of survival, and innovation kicks into high gear as they scramble upwards for their life. The environment has changed—it’s been disrupted—and in this new world, created by the underdog disruptor, companies have to innovate in order to re-optimize. Some end up back on top, others die—and at the end of it all, technology has jolted forward. We all witnessed an example of this when Apple rocketed through the mobile phone canopy in 2007 and forced all of the other companies to make a smartphone or die. Samsung managed to get itself back into the sun. Nokia did not.
With all this in mind, let’s go back to the car industry and our original question:
Why hasn’t the car technology forest moved upward over the past century?
I see two primary reasons:
1) Insanely high barriers to entry—so no leaps forward caused by hungry underdogs
Try to think of something ickier and harder than starting a car company.
First, before you can sell one product, you’ll need to put down an absurd amount of capital to buy a factory, figure out how to design a car and all of its parts, build a prototype, use that to raise a lot more money, get a much bigger factory and hire thousands of people, and pump many millions of dollars into marketing to tell the world that your company exists. And you probably need to be incredibly rich and risk-tolerant yourself since very few people are zany enough to invest money in a startup car company.
Second, in order to be profitable, you have to sell at a high volume. Cars are too expensive to make and margins are too thin to only sell a few each year. So for this to be a good idea, you not only have to create an awesome car, but one that a ton of people will want to buy.
Third, gas cars are already well-optimized—if you want to aggressively burst through the canopy like an underdog without any brand awareness needs to, you have to create a much better type of car than what’s out there. In the case of cars, that probably means addressing the core of the car itself and the thing that’s been stressing everyone out with its billowing emissions—the engine. But since no one has really done this yet, it means you need to not only create the first successful startup car company in a long time, you need to create the first startup to ever succeed at making whatever type of car you’re creating. And since you’ll be there first to do it, you’ll have to put a huge amount of time and money into innovation research and development and bear the brunt of the invention costs for the whole industry. You’ll also have to bear the marketing costs to educate the world on why they should want this new type of car—that’s a one-time expense and once it’s done, other companies will be able to ride on the consumer demand you spent a ton of money building.
So it’s not surprising that the last successful startup car company in America was Chrysler in 1925—90 years ago. It’s basically an impossible endeavor.
And without any threat from below on the forest floor—from the wild innovation of scrappy entrepreneurs with nothing to lose—the car industry has had the luxury of calmly sunbathing in a tight canopy quilt, making only incremental advances, only when they’re needed. But there’s a problem here too—
2) A glitch in the car market separates car company optimization from what’s best for the world.
As I mentioned above, greed works nicely as an optimization criterion if the market is perfect—open, accurate, and fair.
Greedy companies will make their decisions based on whatever the best way is to optimize to their environment—i.e. How can we make the most possible money? But a company’s drive for maximum money is only beneficial to society when the company’s profit is tightly and accurately correlated with the amount of net positive value its product or service provides to society.
If I start a lemonade stand, every time I give someone a delicious cup of lemonade, they’ll be likely to recommend me to their friends and become a recurring customer. I provided positive value and my business’s success went up with it.
Success = Value Provided. Incentives are aligned.
If another customer comes to the stand and I give him a cup of lemonade with a fly in it, he won’t come back and he’ll tell his friends not to go—I caused harm and my success went down.
Success = [Value Provided] – [Harm Caused]. Incentives still aligned.
But what if I then discover a chemical I can spray on my lemonade that prevents flies from landing on it. The chemical is tasteless, but I know that drinking it regularly will cause customers immense harm a few decades down the road. Customers won’t experience the harm in the present, so it won’t affect their opinion of my lemonade or the success of my business.
Success = [Value Provided] – [Harm Caused].
The harm caused is now an unaccounted-for cost, also known as a negative externality, and my incentives are no longer aligned with the customer’s best interests. If all I care about is greed and maximizing profit, I will continue to use the chemical, because I’m economically incentivized to do so.
This kind of negative externality is how tobacco companies got away with murder for so many decades. The long-term cost to customers’ health was unaccounted for because customers were ignorant to the consequences, the negative effects were years away, and there was no regulatory penalty in place to charge for the harm. Thinking purely from a greed-optimizing perspective, cigarette companies acted completely rationally. They kicked up nicotine levels in cigarettes and added shards of glass into filters to create tiny cuts and increase nicotine absorption, which caused further harm but increased demand—but since the harm was unaccounted for, this was a pure net positive for the company. And when anti-tobacco campaigns started to educate customers on cigarette harm—which attaches the harm to the cost of scared customers and lower demand—the tobacco industry hired low-integrity scientists to discredit the negative campaigns and muddle the message. Awareness would get there eventually, but the longer they could delay and keep the harm hidden, the better off they’d be from a greed standpoint.
People call this evil, but all it really is is an industry acting in its own best interests within the parameters of its environment. Greed is a simple motivation—it takes whatever it can get, and it’ll push all available limits it can in order to fully optimize. I used tobacco companies as an example, but you could easily tell the story with fast food, radiation-emitting consumer electronics, politician behavior, the finance industry, and many others.
In the auto industry, CO 2 emissions are the negative externality. If you have a cheap and easy way to build cars that dump garbage into the atmosphere and no one makes you pay for it, why would you ever change anything?
It’s the same story as cigarettes. Instead of the tobacco industry and the cigarette companies who support it, you have the oil industry and the car companies who support it. Instead of short-term emphysema, you have short term city smog. Instead of long-term harm to people’s health like lung cancer, you have long-term harm to the human way of life like underwater coastal cities.
A lot of people have written about the hidden cost of carbon emissions, and many of them, on both sides of the political spectrum, have proposed a logical solution: a revenue-neutral carbon tax.
A revenue-neutral carbon tax is revenue-neutral because any increase in government revenue as a result of the tax would be offset by an equal decrease in something else like income taxes. This makes it a politically moot proposal.
The tax could be applied at any point along the supply chain from oil extraction to the gas pump and the effect would be the same—it would either become more expensive to drive a gas car, less profitable to be in the business of gas, or both. With a carbon tax in place, when you’re contributing to the carbon problem, you’re also paying for it—which incentivizes consumers and companies to explore alternatives. This wouldn’t be the government meddling in the market—it would be the government fixing a glitch in the market.
Instead, the government offers tax breaks to people for buying an electric vehicle and subsidies for the renewable energy industry, which is like a town full of businesses who throw their trash in the street, and the government reacting by paying businesses to stop doing that, instead of just charging businesses for doing it. Other times, the government tries to force emissions downwards by forcing car companies to create a minimum number of zero-emissions cars—with limited effect. Jimmy Carter and Bill Clinton both tried this, to some extent, and both times the next president (Reagan and Bush) removed the regulations upon taking office (ironically, the Clinton mandate for more hybrid cars accomplished nothing in the US, but it scared the shit out of Toyota, who began furiously innovating and created the Prius). Another time, in 1990, the California government tried to institute its own zero-emissions regulations, which the car and oil companies fought until they finally bullied California out of it and the regulations were removed in 2003.12 The problem is, giant companies have enough influence that any government attempt at making changes through regulation ends up being watered down to the point where it’s ineffective.
When it comes to a carbon tax, the only explanation for not having one seems to be the power big oil has over the US government—because to me, it seems like every politician in either party should be in favor of a revenue-neutral carbon tax. Right?
Without any negative consequence of emitting carbon, optimizing for greed pushes certain car technologies forward, like safety, comfort, and drive quality, because getting high safety and quality ratings is tied to demand—but it doesn’t change anything about carbon emissions, because the greed equation doesn’t currently include that cost.
So the reason why, 112 years after Ford Motor Company’s founding, we’re still using harmful, old-fashioned engines is simple: none of the pressures on the car industry are pushing it to change. The car industry still needs to work hard to optimize in certain areas—that’s why cars have become safer, smoother, more comfortable, and more efficient over the years. But the most glaring flaw of the modern car—that it constantly dumps garbage into the atmosphere—remains untouched, because doing so is free, because big oil’s influence means government keeps allowing it, and because there’s no one from underneath to burst through the canopy and show customers that there’s a better way.
It’s scary. Something really, terribly bad might be happening that could make our actual lives legitimately worse in the future, but we have a prisoner’s dilemma on our hands—it’s much, much better for all of us collectively to make a change, but for each individual CEO, lobbyist, or politician, there’s more to personally gain from maintaining the status quo. People like to say, “this is the world our children will live in and we’re botching it for them,” but for the people with the power to change something, their particular children will be best off if they make the most money possible. The situation is stuck.
A deeply-set, stagnant industry is like a country led by a deeply-entrenched dynasty—it’s hard to penetrate the status quo. But even in the case of the most powerful caste systems, sometimes the right person comes along at the right time and starts the right movement, and a revolution can ignite.
Part 3: The Story of Tesla
Christie Nicholson remembers meeting Elon Musk for the first time at a party back in 1989.
“I believe the second sentence out of his mouth was ‘I think a lot about electric cars,’” Christie said. “And then he turned to me and said, ‘Do you think about electric cars?’”13
Electric cars seems like an odd thing to spend your time thinking about in 1989. To understand why Musk felt so strongly about them, let’s start by understanding what electric cars are and how they work.
There are a handful of common modern types of cars considered greener than traditional gas cars—namely hybrid cars, plug-in hybrid cars, and electric cars (which we’ll call EVs for “electric vehicles”). There’s also a lot of talk about another type—hydrogen fuel cell cars, which we’ll just call hydrogen cars. The one thing these cars all have in common is an electric motor.
There are two types of electric motors—the AC induction motor and the brushless DC electric motor. Since 98% of people reading this aren’t licking their lips to read a three-paragraph description of the difference, let it suffice to say that they’re the same basic idea:
An electric motor is a pig in a blanket where electricity is sent into the outer bread part (called the stator), which is always stationary, and that electric current causes the hot dog part (called the rotor) to rotate. The rotor is attached to the wheel axle which turns the wheels. Like this:29
How an AC Induction Motor Works Blue Box One of the two common types of electric motor is the AC induction motor (that’s what Tesla cars use). AC stands for alternating current,14 and induction means there’s no physical contact between the rotor and the stator—electricity in the stator generates a rotating magnetic field which enters the rotor through electrical induction and causes it to spin. The stator generates a rotating magnetic field by sending electricity through it in a three phase system:30 So there are three different wires each with an alternating back-and-forth pull—just look at any one color and you’ll see it’s just going back and forth. But the three wires’ currents are staggered in just the right way that the point of “pull” in the stator rotates in a smooth circle. When the rotor is added in, this rotating magnetic field causes it to spin: The idea is that the rotor can never quite catch up to where it wants to be—it’s always “chasing” the rotating field, and that chase is what powers the car. The AC induction motor was invented by Nikola Tesla, and that’s why Tesla Motors is named after him.15
Here are the types of cars that use an electric motor:
Hybrids (also called HEVs for hybrid electric vehicles), like the Toyota Prius, have both an electric motor and an internal combustion engine. You don’t plug a hybrid car in—the gas charges the battery. The battery also gets charge from an electric motor trick called regenerative braking. Normally, all the joules of kinetic energy a car is harnessing when it’s moving are lost when the car brakes and they’re just converted into heat. With regenerative braking, electric cars send some of that kinetic energy back into the battery, holding onto those joules to be used again later. The electric component of a hybrid replaces some of the need to burn gas, increasing the miles per gallon, decreasing the car’s emissions, and saving the driver gas money. Hybrids are a big step up in technology from normal gas cars.
But they still kind of suck. Why? Because they’re only kind of helping the emissions problem, not solving it, and they still need to burn gas to work. As I’ve heard people say, a world 100% full of Prius drivers is still a world 100% addicted to oil.
Plug-in hybrids (also called PHEVs) are a better option. Plug-in hybrid cars, like the Chevy Volt, the Honda Accord Plug-In Hybrid, and the Ford Fusion Energi, allow you to charge the battery at home and typically drive 10-40 miles just on battery power before the gas kicks in. That’s often enough to get most people through most of their day, meaning they may rarely need to use gas.
But if we’re gonna get so close, why not just go all the way?
Hydrogen cars are entirely electric—but they don’t use a battery. Instead, they fill up with fuel at a station just like a gas car—except they fill up with compressed hydrogen, not gas. The hydrogen mixes with oxygen in the air to produce electricity, which it sends to the motor to power the car. They produce no tailpipe emissions because the only byproduct is clean water. Sounds great, right?
Musk, for the life of him, cannot understand how anyone could make an argument in favor of hydrogen cars,16 but it’s confusing because lots of car companies, like Toyota, Honda, and General Motors, are currently pouring big investments into making hydrogen cars. I wanted to understand the disagreement, so I read like 12 articles in favor and opposed to the technology. At the end of it, I’m having a hard time seeing why hydrogen cars would have a more promising future than electric vehicles. For those who want details, here’s a footnote.17
Finally, there are electric cars, or EVs, like the Nissan Leaf, the BMW i3, the Ford Focus Electric, and the Tesla Model S. These are simple—there’s a big battery, which you charge, and it powers the electric motor. No liquid involved.
Now, in theory, EVs make a lot of sense. Forgetting the rest of the car for a second, let’s look at some of the advantages of the electric motor over the internal combustion gas engine:
Electric motors are more convenient than gas engines most of the time. Gas cars have to go to the gas station; EV owners plug their car in every night the same way they charge their phone—no stopping for gas. A gas engine is a lot more complicated than an electric motor, with over 200 parts; an electric motor has fewer than 10. A gas engine requires a transmission, a tailpipe, gears, and a bunch of other grease-covered shit; an EV has none of those things—when you open the hood, it’s more storage space, like the trunk. Gas engines need oil, which means they need oil changes; EVs don’t. The extra complexity means gas cars end up needing a lot more maintenance than EVs.
It costs a lot less to power an electric motor than a gas engine. The extra costs gas car owners incur for oil changes and car repairs aside, the gas engine’s fuel—gas—is much more expensive than the electric motor’s fuel—electricity. Let’s look at the math:
The average electric car gets about 3 miles per kWh18 of electricity, and the US national average electricity rate is 12 cents per kWh. That means that driving a mile in an electric car costs about 4 cents.
The cost of driving a gas car is harder, because gas prices and car fuel efficiency widely vary. The best case scenario for a gas car is unusually cheap gas (let’s say $1.40/gallon) coupled with unusually high fuel efficiency (let’s say it’s a rare gas car that gets 35 mpg). That would produce the same 4 cents/mile that electric cars get. But very few gas car owners ever pay 4 cents/mile. Without being crazy extreme, for the worse case scenario, let’s say a high $4.00/gallon gas and a below-average 15 mpg—in that case, a mile in a gas car costs 27 cents per mile. At a pretty typical 12,000 miles/year, that means at absolute best, gas is tied with electric for cost, and at worst, it costs over $3,000/year more to drive on gas.
The gas engine |
congressmen who feel the need to sacrifice love and sex for basic rights?2. When was the last time you read a book that centered on women’s desires, where those desires were explored and celebrated and ultimately rewarded with a stable, loving relationship? What about for people in the LGBTQ community? For people with disabilities?...
Q&As Powell's Q&A: Sophia Shalmiyev, Author of 'Mother Winter' by Sophia Shalmiyev, February 12, 2019 9:21 AM
Describe your latest book.
Mother Winter is a hybrid that is billed as a memoir. I began the book after my second child was born and I was brought low, corporeally, spiritually, and creatively, by the tugs and pulls on my body, time, and brain. I decided that I would get militant about my writing, as militant as I had always wished to be about my feminism, à la Silvia Federici. It had been sitting in me as a lyrical, autofiction novel in the French tradition, and eventually all the disparate parts of the characters and dialogue I was hearing in my head started to find solid ground. I write about a missing mother, one I barely knew, and had left behind in the crumbling Soviet Union of 1989. The collapse of my country and the collapse of my alcoholic mother and my exile all lined up as a chasm for a chorus of new mothers...
Read More » is a hybrid that is billed as a memoir. I began the book after my second child was born and I was brought low, corporeally, spiritually, and creatively, by the tugs and pulls on my body, time, and brain. I decided that I would get militant about my writing, as militant as I had always wished to be about my feminism, à la Silvia Federici. It had been sitting in me as a lyrical, autofiction novel in the French tradition, and eventually all the disparate parts of the characters and dialogue I was hearing in my head started to find solid ground. I write about a missing mother, one I barely knew, and had left behind in the crumbling Soviet Union of 1989. The collapse of my country and the collapse of my alcoholic mother and my exile all lined up as a chasm for a chorus of new mothers...
Lists Five Reasons to Plant and Grow Berries by Tara Austen Weaver, February 11, 2019 11:07 AM Photo credit: Tara Weaver
I’ve been an avid gardener for more than a decade, but doing the research for Growing Berries and Fruit Trees in the Pacific Northwest turned me into a bona fide berry pusher. I’m now the one giving blueberry bushes as housewarming gifts to friends who have recently bought homes, convincing parents of young children to invest in a few Alpine strawberry plants (trust me, you’ll be glad you did), or extolling the many benefits of kiwi berry vines.
There are dozens of reasons to grow a bit of food in your backyard or on a balcony (yes, there are varieties that will do well in containers). When it comes to berries, however, here are some excellent and perhaps not so obvious ones...
Read More » I’ve been an avid gardener for more than a decade, but doing the research forturned me into a bona fide berry pusher. I’m now the one giving blueberry bushes as housewarming gifts to friends who have recently bought homes, convincing parents of young children to invest in a few Alpine strawberry plants (trust me, you’ll be glad you did), or extolling the many benefits of kiwi berry vines.There are dozens of reasons to grow a bit of food in your backyard or on a balcony (yes, there are varieties that will do well in containers). When it comes to berries, however, here are some excellent and perhaps not so obvious ones...A new Civil Nuclear Cyber Security Strategy has been issued by the Department for Business, Energy and Industrial Strategy in the UK.
BEIS says the strategy helps ensure the UK has a secure and resilient energy system “by ensuring that the civil nuclear sector is able to defend against, recover from, and is resilient to evolving cyber threats”.
The 25-page document addresses the threat posed by a range of potential attackers including terrorists, hacktivists, criminals and foreign intelligence services. BEIS fears disruption through the interruption of power generation or the compromise of sensitive information.
A blended attack is another scenario that it is concerned about, in which an adversary uses a cyber-attack to enable or reinforce a physical attack.
And SCADA legacy equipment – that is, computers and electronics that play a part in running nuclear plants but were developed prior to the advent of the internet – are widely regarded as dangerous because they lack robust online security systems.
The civilian nuclear industry generates about 18 percent of the UK's power and is seen as a way of helping the government meet its obligations to reduce carbon emissions.
The UK is about to embark on a programme of building new nuclear power plants and concerns have been raised about the threat to systems from both conventional cyber-criminals and nation-state actors.
The 2015 National Security Strategy and Strategic Defence and Security Review highlighted cyber-threats as one of the four most serious dangers facing the UK.
Last year, concerns were raised about the involvement of Chinese companies in the construction of the new Hinkley Point nuclear power plant, with the US government accusing an advisor to the China General Nuclear Power company of attempting to export nuclear technology from the US in violation of federal law.
However, other experts dismissed concerns about the Chinese, claiming that such concerns were misdirected and could be a distraction from more pressing concerns such as the general state of security in SCADA controllers.
The strategy calls on all sectors involved in civilian nuclear power to improve cyber-security, including licensed nuclear facilities, suppliers, the government, the nuclear regulator and the Information Commissioner.
The strategy document says that while all nuclear sites have cyber-security programmes in place, it usually only accounts for a small part of the budget, so it says that the industry must ensure that cyber-security is “considered as part of decisions to improve physical security and safety. This will potentially identify cost savings where the desired outcomes can be achieved by a more optimal mix of the three areas.”
Its says industry must also identify a clear career path for cyber-security professionals within the nuclear industry.
Government will assist by eliminating barriers to cyber-security resource allocation and helping to raise cyber-security capabilities among staff.
In addition to addressing the security of live plants, the strategy also tasks the Nuclear Decommissioning Authority with enhancing its cyber-incident response plan.March and takeover sponsored by SEIU 775
Seattle mayor's wife among dozens arrested at protest – http://t.co/00fBgi06zB pic.twitter.com/68jGt5799C — KOMO News (@komonews) November 7, 2013
WA GOP Responds …
A statement released by WA State GOP Party chairwoman Susan Hutchison about immigration reform protest #Bellevue pic.twitter.com/7ShjKnQVBP — Brandon Macz (@BrandonMacz) November 7, 2013
Peggy Lynch, c, wife of @mayormcginn, arrested at immigration reform protest Thurs. at WA State GOP HQ in Bellevue. pic.twitter.com/7Gtc97vUDL — Ken Lambert (@SeaTimesFotoKen) November 7, 2013
Chopper 7 is still over an immigration protest at GOP HQ in Bellevue. WATCH: http://t.co/xVCm30OqFJ PHOTO: pic.twitter.com/Kd3JuqWQ7t — KIRO 7 (@KIRO7Seattle) November 7, 2013
Chopper 7 is still over an immigration protest at GOP HQ in Bellevue. WATCH: http://t.co/xVCm30OqFJ PHOTO: pic.twitter.com/Kd3JuqWQ7t — KIRO 7 (@KIRO7Seattle) November 7, 2013
Right now-40 women arrested @WaGOP in support of immigration reform that works for women #WAwomentogether pic.twitter.com/1JPoLTGcya — Washington CAN! (@WashingtonCAN) November 7, 2013
Protesters demanding immigration reform have stormed the WA State Republican HQ in Bellevue. Refuse to move. pic.twitter.com/P0oU78HbWJ — Ken Lambert (@SeaTimesFotoKen) November 7, 2013
Protesters demanding immigration reform are asked to leave or be arrested at WA State Republican HQ in Bellevue. pic.twitter.com/k8pcLahWkj — Ken Lambert (@SeaTimesFotoKen) November 7, 2013
Immigration reform protest arrests have started in Bellevue. Woman led out of WA State GOP HQ building. One of many. pic.twitter.com/AH1ut7ycwY — Ken Lambert (@SeaTimesFotoKen) November 7, 2013Everyday there are more than 2 million blog posts published, 294 Billion emails sent, 250 million photos uploaded, and 860,000 hours of YouTube videos uploaded. Think of these godlike statistics of interactions happening in the Web everyday as you write down your own blog or upload a picture and video, probably you’ll start wondering how people will ever notice your web contents.
How to make people click? This question is perhaps buzzing in your head. In a congested E-market where everyone has the equal ability to create their own content, it is extremely difficult to get an edge in lead generation and conversion. Here are some tips to make people click:
Be yourself
Don’t write because someone else told you to do so. Write because it interests you, not because you think it’s going to be interesting for others. The content becomes even more effective if the writer knows what he is talking about.
Be concise
On the average, readers take 45 seconds or less before they give up reading certain content. They will not read more than two paragraphs unless they will find it really interesting. Establish the focal point of the content and don’t go beyond it. Keep it short but direct.
Give exclusive scoop
People will always want to be the first in every exclusive scoop.Give people information they can’t get anywhere else.
Connect to the reader
No one will ever want to read an article they can’t relate to, even it’s very informative. Yield with an idea that will connect the article to the needs of the reader. Make the context of the connection broad so that it can cater more diverse readers.
Avoid industry jargon
In marketing, it is very important to understand your target audience. Never try to use words or phrases the readers might not recognize. Take the perspective of the content where the reader can immediately understand the idea imposed by the content.
Add pictures and illustrations
Pictures will not only make the content attractive, it can also help tell the story to the reader. It adds credibility to articles and retains interest of the readers.
Give the convenience of contacting you
Add contact information everywhere so it’s easy to find. It should be just a click away otherwise, they might not bother to contact you anymore.
The Web is information-saturated making users impatient. They are skeptical about web contents that are focused too much on advertising. Use this not as a disadvantage but as an opportunity by making your web content relatively interesting and striking.
Source:
7 Easy Ways to Make Your Content More Interesting
15 Tips to Create Killer Website Content
Top 10 Tips to a Great Web PageThe country's largest Catholic diocese has confirmed it will not be sending any of its trainee priests to study at the national seminary in Maynooth this autumn.
The country's largest Catholic diocese has confirmed it will not be sending any of its trainee priests to study at the national seminary in Maynooth this autumn.
Martin removes priests from Maynooth amid allegations some seminarians were using gay dating app Grindr
Amid reports of a crisis at the Co Kildare seminary, Archbishop Diarmuid Martin of Dublin has now opted to send his student priests to the Irish College in Rome.
The seminary is headed up by Dubliner Monsignor Ciaran O'Carroll, who has worked closely with Dr Martin in the past.
Three trainee priests from the archdiocese of Dublin will move to the Rome this autumn to further their studies and training.
The seminarians are all at various stages in their training.
There are roughly 60 resident seminarians studying at Maynooth.
Archbishop Martin is a trustee of Maynooth along with the three other catholic archbishops in the Irish Church and a number of bishops.
"I have my own reasons for doing this," the Archbishop said.
His decision comes amid growing unease over accusations of inappropriate behaviour among some of the seminarians in Maynooth after it was claimed that some of them have, until recently, been using the gay dating app Grindr.
Maynooth has insisted that robust procedures are in place to handle such complaints against seminarians.
Playing down any link between his decision and the current crisis engulfing Maynooth, Archbishop Diarmuid Martin added that he had made his decision before allegations about inappropriate behaviour at the Co Kildare seminary had arisen.
According to the current issue of the international Catholic journal, 'The Tablet', Dr Martin said he had made the decision "some months ago" and informed the other bishops of his intention at the summer general meeting of the Irish hierarchy in June.
A second bishop is also reported to have decided to send his seminarians to Rome this autumn.
However, the Catholic Communications Office in Maynooth was unable to confirm this to the Irish Independent as the bishop is attending World Youth Day in Poland and was unavailable for comment.
The suggestion that a gay subculture exists in Maynooth first emerged in May of this year after an anonymous letter suggested seminarians and staff members at Maynooth had been using the gay dating app Grindr.
Msgr Hugh Connolly told 'The Irish Catholic' the church intended to "thoroughly deal" with any concerns regarding such behaviour.
A spokeswoman for the archdiocese of Dublin confirmed that three Dublin seminarians are Rome-bound this autumn.
Acknowledging that the number of seminarians for Dublin is down, the Archbishop stated: "What is more important for me is the quality of the men who come forward and the training that they receive."
Meanwhile, a new group called VAMA - Voices Against Maynooth Abuse - has been formed by controversial cleric, Bishop Pat Buckley, who is in a long-term gay civil partnership.
VAMA has invited current and past seminarians to reveal any 'unorthodox' behaviour they have experienced or witnessed in Maynooth.
Read more: Pope Francis urges the young to abandon gadgets for life of activism
Irish IndependentIn the last twenty years, the craft of safe cracking has tragically declined. It is no longer the glamorous activity featured in every other detective film, and the number of real criminal attacks on safes has fallen dramatically. So Im delighted to see so many children in the audience as its time to start training up a new generation of safe crackers or it will become a lost art. I suspect this decline is linked to the general loss of practical mechanical skills children today are no longer taught metalwork, just DT. A sound knowledge of metalwork would be very useful in breaking into a safe, but DT is no help at all.
At first glance a modern safe does look totally impregnable. The two locks, (one key and one combination) do not themselves open the door, they merely release the elaborate bolt mechanism. This pushes 50mm steel bolts out in all directions, securing every side of the safe door, even the hinge side. It is no use chopping the hinges off a safe, the bolts will still hold it as firmly shut as ever. If it looks virtually impossible to get in through the door, getting in through the walls or the back is no easier. They are about four inches thick, an inner and outer skin of steel, with the cavity between filled with extra strong concrete. The enormous weight of a safe makes it very difficult for thieves to carry it off, whole it also makes the door very dangerous. Its extreme weight gives it such momentum when closing that it becomes a guillotine, chopping any fingers caught between door and frame.
Larger bank vault doors are often circular, with bolts that shoot out all round the edge. The reason for circular doors is simply that they are easier to make. Both door and frame can be cut accurately round on a large lathe to make them a snug fit. Getting a rectangular door to fit closely at every point is more difficult, particularly with its enormous weight, which can cause distortion.
Behind the door, bank vaults are massive, built in concrete structures. Criminals have had some success tunnelling their ways in. Adam Worth, a cerebrated Victorian criminal, made his initial fortune tunnelling into a bank in Boston. He then moved to England with his accomplice Piano Charlie where they both fell for an irish barmaid prostitute called Kitty Flynn. She eventually married Piano Charlie, but continued to sleep with both. Worth masterminded a huge variety of crimes in Britain, including stealing an entire diamond shipment from the Kimberley mines, and was not caught until 40 years later. He then, with his exploits publicised, became the inspiration for Sherlock Holmes adversary Moriarty. Both Worth and Piano Charlie died in poverty, but Kitty became a rich and litigious widow in New York.
Anyway, to counter the threat of tunnelling bank vaults started to incorporate patrol passages round the outside to check no one is attempting to tunnel their way in. The invincibility of bank safes is so convincing that they are quite often left on open display (less so in Britain than most other parts of the world) as proof of the security of your money. Mies Van Der Rohe designed a particularly elegant bank in Torronto called the Transparent Bank.
The need to keep precious and valuable possessions safe is nothing new. The modern safe is directly descended from the medieval chests, now often found in museums and churches, used as collecting boxes. These chests were beautifully decorated, at first mainly made of wood, with iron hinges, locks and strappings. Later ones were entirely made of iron. The lids often had elaborate bolt work, like a modern safe. For extra security the keyhole would often be hidden under a secret flap, or disguised as part of the decoration. A few even had knives which shot out if the lock was tampered with. Ive always admired these chests, they were obviously such important objects, so when my sister, who lived in Brixton, got burgled some years ago, I decided to make one for her. Large locks are great things to make, turning the key makes a wonderfully satisfying clunk, much better than any modern mass produced lock. To surprise the burglar, I incorporated a device that released a small explosive charge inside the lock when the key was turned, unless one of the side handles was first lifted. My hope was that this would be so unnerving that he would then run away. Unfortunately I never found whether it worked, my sister moved out of Brixton and hasnt been burgled since.
Building elaborate chests continued well into the 19th century. The price dropped dramatically as they started to be made of cast iron, an idea which dates from 1780, following the craze for cast iron coffins. There are some records of complaints as wrought iron was replaced by cast iron, the artistry of the blacksmith replaced by crude mass production, but thats progress. Early in the 19th century one key idea was introduced, the double skin. It was realised that 100mm of insulation between the outer wall and the inner wall would provide great thermal insulation and protect the contents if caught in a fire. The most common insulation used was sawdust, though even greater protection came from filling the gap with water, an idea patented by Thomas Milner in 1830 (Milner is to this day one of the main British safe companies). The name safe came from these new fireproof cabinets. At the time it was seen as astonishing that the contents of these safes could survive the heat of a fire (they were sometimes called Salamanders) and safe companies often staged public demonstrations, mounting their safes on large bonfires. Strauss was actually commissioned to write some music for one of these events, he called it the Feufest Polka. In fact, sitting on top of a bonfire is not a particularly severe test for a safe, real fires in buildings are often much larger and leave the safe buried under hot rubble for hours. Most modern safes will protect the contents against almost any fire there is a famous example of a safe 300 metres from the centre of the atomic blast at Hiroshima, whose contents survived intact.
Cast iron was not the ideal material to use for victorian fireproof safes, it was too brittle. If a safe fell any distance in a fire it would certainly shatter. For this reason most safes came to be made of flat iron plates, riveted together into a box. This was a very strong form of construction, practically all large Victorian engineering feats used rivets bridges, steam engines, ships etc. Even boilers with high pressure steam inside, were riveted together. Used in safes though, rivets had a fatal flaw. In the 1860s there were a series of robberies, particularly one in the city of London from the Cornhill Insurance Company, in which the thieves simply broke the rivets and peeled open the top of the safe. Breaking the heads off rivets is surprisingly quick and easy you simply insert a cold chisel under the head and hit it with a large hammer. Fortunately the quality of steel was gradually improving, (it was becoming more ductile), and by 1900 a method of bending the outside walls of a safe from a single sheet of steel had been perfected. This bending process, which could be done with up to 12mm thick steel, produced the rounded edges and corners that have characterised safes ever since, even though safes today are square boxes again, made of flat plates welded together.
With the structure of the safe improved, attention turned to the locks. The medieval chests had very impressive looking locks, and even more impressive looking keys. Inside the lock, the key passes through a ward, a plate cut to a negative of the profile of the key. The top edge of the key then pulls the locks bolt back, opening it up. Although it would be very difficult to make an exact copy of the real key, anything the right height that will fit through the ward will open the lock. Minimal fake keys like this came to be called skeleton keys. Because of this weakness more secure lever locks were introduced in the 18th century, culminating in the unpickable lock invented by Joseph Bramah in 1784. Bramah was a prolific inventor, he invented the hydraullic press and the WC amongst other things. Amazingly, his lock is still manufactured today, virtually unchanged, in the UK, I recently bought one for about £100. The key is a cylinder with tiny grooves cut in it. No skeleton key could open his lock and it remained infallible for 67 years, until it was finally opened at the 1851 Great Exhibition by an American locksmith called Hobbs. Instead of a skeleton key Hobbs used a selection of picks. The principle of picking a lock is to insert two thin springy strips of metal into the keyhole, one applies a small turning force, while the other feels the various pins or levers, lifting them inside the lock. When one reaches the right height, a small give can be felt in the turning pick. With luck, as long as the turning force is maintained, the pin will stay raised while the feeler pick works on the next pin. This is not easy to do the process has been described as being like Sysiphus; you just get to the last pin and then something slips and they all fall back and you have to start all over again. I have never managed to do it.
It took Hobbs 51 hours to pick Bramahs lock. The reason for Hobbs perseverance was to convince people of the superiority of his own Champion Parautoptic Bank Lock (Paraupoptic means preventing internal inspection). In fact Hobbs lock did less well than Bramahs, it was picked within 5 years by another American locksmith called Linus Yale, simply using a wooden key. One distressed bank manager wrote; Mr Yale picked my ten tumbler (Hobbs) lock, the finest of its kind, for which I paid $300. He cut a wooden key solely from inspection of the lock through the keyhole, which turned the bolt back as readily as my own key would have done. And then, to complete my discomforture, he cut away one bit of his wooden key and locked it so I could have never again unlocked it with my own key. Like Hobbs, Yale had his own design of Champion bank lock. (This game, revealling the lack of security of the rivals products is very similar to todays game, cracking computer encryption software). Yales son, another Linus Yale, wanted to become a portrait painter, but eventually followed his father, inventing the standard Yale lock used on front doors ever since.
Though Yale seniors champion bank lock was never picked, he later decided that it was in theory pickable, as is any lock which leaves its pins or levers exposed through sight or feeling through the keyhole. For this reason, he changed tack and invented a combination lock with no keyhole. Perhaps because it was an American invention, combination locks are to this day more popular in America than in Europe.
A combination lock is elegantly simple inside, I made a crude model of one in a couple of hours. Theres no way of picking a lock like this without any keyhole. It also obvious that theres no click or other noise as the tumblers reach their correct position, the only noise is when the lever finally descends into the slot, once the right combination has been dialled in. I used to think the use of stethoscopes was a big myth of safe cracking, until a couple of years ago when a real safe cracker introduced himself at the end of my lecture. He told me the stethoscope is only useful when used in conjunction with a large dial and pointer fixed to the safe (something I've certainly never seen in the movies) Its a slow process which takes hours, listening to the slight noise of the lever touching the tumblers and marking where the pointer is on the dial, then moving the tumblers a bit between each reading. With hundreds of readings, its possible to'map' the very slight eccentricity of the tumblers - the lever is unlikely to touch all three simultaneously. Once you know which of the tumblers the lever is touching, its relatively simple to find the exact combination. The safecracker I met was an electronics engineer who had been automating the process for a gang.
However, there are other less elaborate ways to crack a combination lock. The nobel prize winning physicist, Richard Feynman, became very interested in combination locks while working on the atomic bomb in Los Alomos during the second world war. The scientists were rarely allowed to leave the site, so there wasnt much to do when he wasnt working, and safe cracking became a sort of hobby. As the project was all top secret, every office had combination locks on its filing cabinets. Feynman first discovered, playing with the locks on his own filing cabinet, that the numbers did not have to be that precise, each one could be up to two digits either side of the true number and the lock would still open. This enormously reduced the number of possible combinations (from 1,000,000 down to 8,000). With practice he found he could try 400 different combinations in half an hour, so trying every single combination it would take on average 4 hours to open the lock. A modern version of this, advertised on the internet, is a motorised German device that turns the dial, trying every combination in turn, for use by locksmiths trying to get into a safe whoes combination has been lost.
Feynmans next technique depended on his visiting an office during the day, while the lock was open. While chatting to the occupant of the office he would idly fiddle with the lock. He turned the simply turned the dial back and forth, going one number further each time. After each number he would turn the dial back to see if the lock would still open. The number he reached when the lock first refused to open again was the first number of the combination. With a slightly more lengthy version of this he could find the second number as well.
Feynmans final approach was to use psychology. Surprisingly often combination locks are left on their factory settings, (usually 100, 50, 100). However, when a new combination i s chosen the person entrusted with it lives in fear of forgetting it. So, people tend to use numbers they know, like their birthday, or their phone number. At Los Alamos the scientists often used mathematical constants like pi. If anyone does choose random numbers, they are almost certain to write them down somewhere, often thinly disguised in address books. By the end of the war Feynman had a record of almost everyones combination and a fearsome reputation as a safecracker.
Although it is possible to crack a combination lock, its rarely a method used by criminals, or even by safe manufacturers called to open a safe whose combination has been lost. Many safes have time locks, so even if the combination is cracked, the safe will not open outside office hours. All post offices have time locks on their safes. Many safes also have a simple microswitch inside the combination lock connected to the alarm system to trigger it whenever the dial is turned. For these reasons, most attempts to break into safes by-pass the lock altogether. One method is to drill the door. With engineering drawings of the bolt mechanism, it is possible to find a point on the safe door to drill through. A screwdriver can then be pushed through and manipulated to release the bolt mechanism by-passing the combination lock altogether. Without precise knowledge of the mechanism, it is almost impossible to find the right place to drill, particularly because special extra hard, drill resistant materials are used around the vulnerable lock area. These extra hard materials include Tungsten carbide and ceramics the materials used as cutters in modern machine tools. Theres also sometimes a layer of ordinary steel washers or ball bearings. These arent particularly hard, but they spin round when a drill bit touches them, so are almost impossible to cut through. Theres one story of a bungled attack on a safe in which the thieves kept having to fetch cans of coke from a nearby drinks machines to pour over the drill bits in an attempt to keep them cool. The safe was discovered, unopened, the next day, surrounded by empty cans and broken drill bits embedded in the door.
The extra hard layers could quite easily be incorporated over the entire lock area, making drilling completely impossible. However,drilling is the normal method used by safe manufacturers when called to open up their safes, so I suspect manufacturers must deliberately leave a gap somewhere.
A popular alternative to drilling safes is to use explosives. Gunpowder was used with some success in 19th century America, simply pouring it in through the keyhole. The shock burst the front plate of the door open, making the bolt mechanism accessible. There was a simple solution to this form of attack, the powderproof lock. This was a close fitting tin box round the lock which simply limited the amount of gunpowder that could be poured in. With only a small amount of gunpowder, the force of the explosion was not great enough to burst open the door. The introduction of much more powerful high explosives presented more of a challenge, particularly after the first world war, when many soldiers with first-hand experience of using them returned to civilian life. It was during the 20s and thirties that safecracking gained its notoriety. Perhaps the star safecracker of this golden age was a man called Chapman. He started simply prising the back off an old riveted safe in the Fyffes banana factory, but soon progressed after robbing a welsh quarry of gelignite and detonators. Gelignite was a commercial high explosive of the same family as nitroglycerine and trinitrotoluene. It was a plastic explosive (mouldable), with the consistency and smell of oily marzipan. (All the older high explosives smelt similar, semtex was the first to have no smell).
Chapmans technique was ingeniously simple. He kept to relatively basic safes, (particularly keen on robbing those in those in Odeon cinemas). He first tied the office typewriter to the boltwork handle. He then wrapped a tiny amount of Gelignite with a detonator inside a condom, pushed it through the keyhole, and held everything in place with chewing gum. A few grams was all that was needed, he said his most common mistake was to use too much. Retreating to a safe distance, the small explosion, pushing everything momentarily outwards, was enough to lift the levers restraining the bolt mechanism. The weight of the typewriter would then simply turn the mechanism, opening the safe. Chapman robbed about 40 safes up and down the country through the thirties and was finally caught in Jersey in 39, just before the outbreak of war. Jersey was invaded by the Germans before he had been brought back to Britain and he was recruited as an agent, but he told the British authorities of his new role and became a double agent. After the war he was pardoned, for services to his country, and started a successful health farm (he eventually bought a castle in Ireland on the proceeds).
By the 1950s safe manufacturers had started fitting devices to counter high explosives. A steel cable running round the inside of the door was connected to the lever that released the boltwork. Along this cable were several small plates of toughened glass. Any explosion would shatter the glass, releasing the cable and jamming the lever in the closed position. All high quality safes have been fitted with anti-explosive devices like this ever since and explosives are no longer a practical method of getting into a safe.
If opening a safe door by drilling or explosives is impractical, perhaps a better technique is to ignore the door and to and break straight through the walls. When the rounded one-piece steel casing was introduced at the turn of the century, it was virtually impregnable, but many new cutting tools have since been invented. The latest weapon of the 1920s was the oxyacetylene cutter. The oxyacetylene flame itself was the hottest flame ever achieved, but the extra jet of oxygen blown through the cutter onto preheated steel caused the steel itself to ignite, enabling plates of any thickness to be effortlessly sliced through. The hardness of the steel makes no difference to the ease of cutting. Safe manufacturers increasingly relied on the concrete in between the inner and outer steel skin for security, though it wasnt long before the introduction of a device that could even burn through concrete. This was the thermic lance, which is simply a long tube filled with steel rods, connected to an oxygen supply. Once preheated, the steel at the end of the tube can be ignited (just as in oxyacetylene cutting) and will gradually burn away, producing extremely high temperatures, enough to melt concrete.
.On high security safes manufacturers today usually incorporate a layer of cast aluminium. This conducts heat very well, dissipating the heat of the lance, and slowing down the cutting process. (A twelve inch thick plate of copper dissipates heat so effectively it is impossible to cut through, but would cost so much the safe would probably be worth more than its contents). Some safe manufacturers incorporate a material that gives off lots of smoke when heated, at least making working conditions uncomfortable
Fortunately for safe manufacturers there is a more serious snag about using thermic lances. A few years ago, there was a rash of crimes in which thieves removed entire safes to open them at leisure without fear of being disturbed. The safes were found, abandoned, having been attacked with thermic lances, but the theives had obviously not got away with anything, because the contents were still inside, completely incinerated. Paper burns at quite a low temperature, 180c or more famously 451f of Ray Bradburys novel. (Incidentally, its no use trying to use a thermic lance on a safe door, the steel cable, in addition to its glass plates, also has fusible links, (low melting point alloys) so any heat inside the door jams the opening mechanism.)
It probably is a good idea to try and remove the whole safe however you try to break into it, but it isnt easy. Safes are very heavy, partly for this reason. With older safes it was possible to put a car jack under the hinges. With wedges and levers it was then possible to it onto a pallet truck. Today, the hinges are made with sloping bottoms, so theres no jacking point.
Another useful tool, introduced in the 1950s, is the angle grinder. Hard particles, embedded in the disk, will cut through any steel, however hard, and also concrete. Angle grinders can cut through any padlock in seconds. Safes are more secure, simply because theres more material to cut through, but also because manufacturers have been relatively successful in finding materials that take a long time to cut. The concrete used in safes is extra hard, made with extra finely ground sand and cement, incorporating fine high tensile steel wires to give it tensile strength and bonded to the concrete by the addition of a wetting agent. High security safes also include lumps of a mineral called aloxite (a form of Aluminium oxide) that is particularly difficult to cut through.
Despite the difficulties, a considerable number of criminal attacks on safes have been successful. Many of the skills of safebreaking were handed on from one generation to the next (a sort of informal apprenticeship system). However, there was also a published American Commission report (from the 1890s) on the best methods of safe construction, which went into great detail has to how each model of safe could be tackled. In the twenties the Los Angeles Wayne Strong school of Safework ran courses in safe repairing and opening. More recently in the 60s, Canadian police found a classroom in a Toronto garage full of safecracking equipment and a home printed textbook, divided into instructional modules.
In the last ten years a brilliant new tool has appeared called the diamond core drill. This is simply a tube embedded with industrial diamonds, rotated by an ordinary electric drill. Diamonds |
they’re gonna be who they’re gonna be.”
We talk about President Obama. I ask if she has met him. “Of course, I have,” she says, surprised I’d even ask. And yes, he adores Star Trek and Uhura. “Wonderful man,” she says. “Great man. A great man.” Did she ever think there would be a black president? “I dreamed of it.”
Who will have her vote this time round – Hillary Clinton or Donald Trump? “I don’t know if I want either of them.” Perhaps it would be better, I suggest, if Barack could stay in power till Michelle is ready to take over from him? Her face lights up. “Not bad! Not a bad choice!”
Facebook Twitter Pinterest Nichelle Nichols in the Star Trek episode A Piece of the Action, 1968. Photograph: CBS via Getty Images
Last year, Nichols had a stroke, and today she travels with an assistant/therapist, who lives with her. But her speech is still as strong as her fearsome handshake. When she fails to answer a question, more often than not it seems to be because she doesn’t want to. She never says a word more than she needs – or wants – to. Nichols says she has always been tough, that she’s needed to be to get by in her world.
There are so many wonderful scenes with her in Star Trek. One of my favourites is when an entranced Spock explains her name (Uhura, adapted from the Swahili uhuru, meaning “freedom”, was chosen by Nichols herself.) He then quotes Byron at her for good measure: “She walks in beauty like the night.” Even better is when she serenades the harp-playing Spock with a jazz-infused song (“On the Starship Enterprise … his alien love could victimise, and rip your heart from you.”)
But the scene she gets asked about most is the kiss she shared with Captain Kirk, played by William Shatner. It is said to be the first interracial kiss in an American TV series. It has also been suggested that she was supposed to kiss Spock, but the producers thought the public would regarded it as a step too far to have an inter-species kiss.
The funny thing, she says, is she didn’t regard it as remarkable in ther slightest. It might have been rare in the American media of the 1960s, but there was nothing unusual about it in her family. After all, her grandfather was white and her grandmother black. As far as she was concerned, this was just everyday life.
I ask if it is true that Shatner, who became a notorious egomaniac as Star Trek progressed, insisted that he rather than Spock be the beneficiary of the kiss because he was the captain. “Hehehehehe! I think that was a joke between them. And they carried it through thick and thin, but it wasn’t so.” Who would she have rather kissed? “Hahahha! We’ll never know!”
You are too discreet, I say. “I’ll never tell,” she replies, and she giggles coquettishly.
Facebook Twitter Pinterest Nichelle Nichols and William Shatner in the Star Trek episode Plato’s Stepchildren, 1968. Photograph: CBS via Getty Images
While we’re on the subject, I say, what happened to that red mini dress. She taps a finger on her nose. That’s for me to know, she says. “All I will say is it’s hanging up in a closet in a bag where it will remain.” At home? I ask, shocked: she stole it? “I didn’t say that!”
You stole the dress? She taps her finger on her nose again. The subject is closed.
By 1969 the original television version was done and dusted, and Nichols went on to star as Uhura in the first six Star Trek films up to 1991, by which time she was in her mid-50s. In the 80s she worked for Nasa as an ambassador, with a brief to help recruit minority and women astronauts. She has been up into space herself, flying aboard Nasa’s C-141 Astronomy Observatory, which analysed the atmospheres of Mars and Saturn on an eight-hour, high-altitude mission.
Star Trek’s 50-year mission: to shine a light on the best of humankind Read more
Today, Nichols is still acting – earlier this year she was praised for her role as the ageing mother of Neil Winters on the longstanding American soap The Young and the Restless.
I ask Nichols, who has been married twice, if there is there any work she has made that has meant as much to her as Star Trek. “Yes,” she says instantly. “My son!” That’s lovely, I say – what does he do? “I don’t talk about him. All I can say is he’s just great.” Nichols is old-school. She doesn’t tell tales or do gossip. What’s private remains private.
She’s a little tired now. She suggests it’s time to turn down the questions. Then, rather sweetly, she adds that I’m welcome to stay and share the crisps and nuts. Her assistant takes our photo. I’m in raptures as Uhura places her head on my shoulder, and smiles into the camera.
“I think you two have got something going,” her assistant says.
On my way out, I ask her if she ever thinks about retiring. She stares at me, as if I’ve lost the plot. “Would I retire? Retire? When I’m dead.” So she’s never for a moment thought she’s had enough, that it’s time to stop work and take it easy? She shakes her head vigorously. “That’s like saying I’m tired of breathing.”
Star Trek can be seen on CBS Action on weekdays at 6pm.
• The subheading on this article was amended on 21 October 2016. An earlier version referred to the “the first interracial kiss on TV”. To clarify: there were earlier ones on British TV.Qualcomm Incorporated (NASDAQ: QCOM) and Xiaomi, a leading Chinese smartphone and Internet company, today announced that they have entered into a new 3G and 4G China patent license agreement. Under the terms of the agreement, Qualcomm has granted Xiaomi a royalty-bearing patent license to develop, manufacture and sell 3G (WCDMA and CDMA2000) and 4G, including 3-mode (LTE-TDD, TD-SCDMA and GSM), complete devices. The royalties payable by Xiaomi are consistent with the terms of the rectification plan submitted by Qualcomm to China’s National Development and Reform Commission.
“Xiaomi prides itself on embracing and leading smartphone innovation through its popular line of Mi devices,” said Lei Jun, CEO of Xiaomi. “A license from Qualcomm will play an important role in helping us bring the newest and most innovative products to our growing customer base.”
“Qualcomm is committed to the success of its partners in China as they continue to grow their businesses and we are pleased to reach this new agreement with Xiaomi,” said Derek Aberle, President of Qualcomm Incorporated. “We work closely with our partners, such as Xiaomi, to push the boundaries of what’s possible and drive the advancement of the mobile industry.”
About Xiaomi
Xiaomi was founded in 2010 by serial entrepreneur Lei Jun, who believes that high-quality technology doesn't need to cost a fortune. We create remarkable hardware, software, and internet services for and with the help of our Mi fans. We incorporate their feedback into our product range, which currently includes the Mi Note Pro, Mi Note, Mi 4, Redmi 2, Mi TV, Mi Band and other accessories. With more than 61 million handsets sold in 2014, and products launched in Taiwan, Hong Kong, Singapore, Malaysia, Philippines, India, Indonesia and Brazil, Xiaomi is expanding its footprint across the world to become a global brand.
About Qualcomm
Qualcomm Incorporated (NASDAQ: QCOM) is a world leader in 3G, 4G and next-generation wireless technologies. Qualcomm Incorporated includes Qualcomm’s licensing business, QTL, and the vast majority of its patent portfolio. Qualcomm Technologies, Inc., a wholly-owned subsidiary of Qualcomm Incorporated, operates, along with its subsidiaries, substantially all of Qualcomm’s engineering, research and development functions, and substantially all of its products and services businesses, including its semiconductor business, QCT. For more than 30 years, Qualcomm ideas and inventions have driven the evolution of digital communications, linking people everywhere more closely to information, entertainment and each other. For more information, visit Qualcomm’s website, OnQ blog, Twitter and Facebook pages.Members of a black student protest group at the University of Missouri raise their arms on Nov. 9, 2015, while addressing a crowd following the announcement that the university system president would resign. (AP Photo/Jeff Roberson)
Most college students embrace the ideal of an open learning environment on campus that exposes them to all types of speech and viewpoints, but a large majority also believes that schools should be allowed to restrict slurs and other intentionally offensive language, according to a new national survey.
The survey — released Monday and sponsored by the Knight Foundation and Newseum Institute in partnership with Gallup — sheds light on the complexities of student viewpoints on free speech and other First Amendment issues in a year of significant tumult on campuses nationwide.
Protests last fall at the University of Missouri, Yale University and elsewhere raised questions about whether schools can simultaneously rein in hate speech while protecting free speech and the open flow of ideas in an academic environment.
[Can colleges protect free speech while curbing voices of hate?]
The survey suggests that students want to strike a balance.
Seventy-eight percent said that it’s more important for colleges to create an “open learning environment,” even if that means allowing speech that is offensive or biased against certain groups of people, than to create a “positive learning environment” for all by prohibiting certain types of speech or expression that are offensive or biased. Large majorities of various subgroups — including 70 percent of black students — endorsed the primacy of an open learning environment.
But the survey also found that students draw a distinction between speech that is politically offensive and expressions that are slurs or promote racial stereotypes:
Asked whether colleges should be allowed to restrict political views that are offensive or upsetting to certain groups, 72 percent said no. Seventy-six percent of white students and 59 percent of black students held this view.
Overall, 69 percent said colleges should be able to limit the use of slurs and other language that is intentionally offensive to certain groups. Seventy-nine percent of black students and 67 percent of white students endorsed this view.
Overall, 63 percent said colleges should be able to restrict wearing of costumes that stereotype certain racial or ethnic groups. A larger share of black students — 77 percent — agreed with this statement, compared to 62 percent of white students.
The telephone survey of 3,072 students, age 18 to 24, at four-year colleges was conducted from Feb. 29 to March 15. The overall sampling error was plus or minus 3 percentage points; for white students it was 4 points, and for black students 9 points. The questions sought to gauge student attitudes about the media and First Amendment freedoms in a year in which questions have been raised about whether reporters should be restricted from covering protests and what the appropriate response should be when the last name of a presidential candidate — “Trump” — is scrawled with chalk on campus walkways.
“We thought it was really important to have a much better understanding of how college students think about these issues,” said Sam Gill, a vice president at the Miami-based Knight Foundation.
The survey found college students are confident in the security of the five First Amendment rights — freedom of the press, freedom to petition the government, freedom of speech, freedom of religion and freedom of assembly. Eighty-one percent said they were confident that freedom of the press is secure, for instance. By contrast, 64 percent of U.S. adults as a whole expressed confidence in the security of freedom of the press.
But there was a sharp racial divide on freedom of assembly — a key issue for student protesters. Thirty-nine percent of black students said they believe the right of people to assemble peacefully is secure, compared to 70 percent of white students.
Among other findings:
Fifty-four percent said the climate on campus prevents some people from saying what they believe because others might find it offensive.
Seventy percent said students should not be able to prevent the press from covering protests on college campuses.
Nearly half saw legitimate reasons to curtail the press. For example, if the people at a protest believe press coverage will be unfair to them, 49 percent of students said that is a legitimate reason to deny press access. Nearly the same share — 48 percent — said it could be legitimate to deny press access if protesters say they have a right to be left alone.
In addition, 59 percent of those surveyed said they have little or no trust in the press to report the news accurately and fairly.
Read more
University of Oklahoma president expels students who led racist chant
U-Md, students shocked to find president defending free speech when they say it’s hate speech
U-Md. president: ‘We fight speech with speech’
At Yale, on the front lines of the fight for free speech
Staff writer Susan Svrluga contributed to this report.At the heart of every young entrepreneur is a dissatisfaction with the current situation. It always starts with a problem, or a void in the market, followed by an idea how to fix it. For Christine Short and Hannah Levenkron, the two Gen-Y founders of newly launched Suit and Sweet, it started with a series of high-profile business trips to Europe.
Despite having successful careers in the financial world, the pair could not afford to spend hundreds of dollars on high-end, designer work attire. It’s a predicament all young or struggling professionals find themselves in; we complain about wasting money on dowdy office ensembles, but also the inability to find more chic looking pencil skirts from the less-expensive department stores.
And at a time when more women are entering the workforce, with the number of female professionals earning more than their male counterparts continually increasing, there is a real surge in a women’s need for office appropriate clothing.
And of course, this isn't problem with quantity, but rather the quality of outfits that can sustain the level of self-presentation each woman desires.
Enter Suit and Sweet, the Rent-the-Runway-esque business model and brain-child of finance fashionistas, Christine and Hannah. Suit and Sweet is a rental start-up company for professional women that aims to make designer workwear available at a fraction of the retail cost.
“We are our customer,” Hannah explains. “Girls in their twenties who can’t afford that expensive suit – that is us, and that is our friends. We connect well with our customers.”
Indeed, this idea of "women championing women" remains at the core of Suit and Sweet’s mission and values. The entrepreneurs, however, also recognize that clothing alone won’t help a woman land an interview, which is why the site is much more than a wardrobe booster.
Suit and Sweet is a full service that starts with an outfit, but also provides career counseling and relevant tips to bring the level of assistance to a more complete picture.
“We’re not just about clothing and fashion,” says Christine. “Although it’s an important factor, our site pairs it with a stylist that gives you recommendations on how to style the suit and do your makeup and hair.
We also offer career tips. We’ve partnered with career specialists to give advice on preparing for an interview, the things you should focus on, and how to follow-up afterwards.”
Sounds like they've got everything covered-- But, the do-good attitude of women helping women doesn’t stop there! Once the girls receive new shipments, or the lifetime of one of the styles has past, the out-of-season pieces are donated to Bottomless Closet.
This organization helps empower disadvantaged women by providing career apparel, bags, makeup, interview advice, resume improvements and, most of all, support in their new jobs.
“When each customer rents an item from Suit and Sweet, she knows this will help other women who want to secure jobs as well,” explains Hannah. This is why Suit and Sweet is a strictly rentals-only company, without the option to buy your wardrobe (even though we know you’ll want to!).
So how does it all work? Visit Suit and Sweet’s website and browse through their extensive collection of blazers, trousers, pencil skirts and blouses. You can rent each piece separately if you need to fillers to polish of a look, or you can create an entire ensemble – the amount of apparel available to rent is unlimited, but there is a five day maximum to hang on to the items.
For example, you can rent a classic pair of Theory dress pants for $30 for up to five days. The clothes you pick out are then shipped directly to your door.
And forget about having to make a trip to the dry cleaners before returning the goods. Suit and Sweet takes care of all the cleaning, including tightening any loose buttons, making light alterations, and steaming out the wrinkles.
According to Christine, “We are taking care of all the cleaning. We’re sending the clothes to the customer in a box supplied with a return label. All they have to do is mail the items back.” Renting made simple.
Suit and Sweet combines style, affordability and efficiency to make a working woman’s life easier and better.
“Certainly, you are more confident when you look your best,” chimes Hannah.
Agreed: when you look good, you feel good, no matter what setting you're in. So get out there and work it, ladies!
Be sure to check out Suit and Sweet's new site, now up and running.
Photos Courtesy: Suit And SweetNew York State Assemblywoman Sandy Galef - April 2013 Questionnaire Results
I received 695 responses to the Constituent Questionnaire on the back of my January Newsletter and I thank those of you who submitted these responses. I value your input, as it allows me to better address the pressing issues of today during the legislative process. Here are the percentage results for both yes and no responses:
Question In Favor Opposed 1. Many states in the U.S. have early voting opportunities to encourage greater voter participation. How would you feel about New York State allowing voters to cast a ballot up to a week or two before election day, which would include a Saturday and a Sunday? 425
64% 237
36% 2. Other states allow voters not registered with specific parties to participate in primary elections. Do you think New York should allow this? 331
49% 347
51% 3. Should we adopt a program which would impose a 5 cent fee for single use carry out bags at supermarkets and stores, revenue from which we would use to fund state parks and historic sites? 280
42% 380
58% 4. Many medical personnel, such as doctors and nurses, are afraid to apologize for an error or bad outcome regarding a patient because it can be used in lawsuits as an admission of guilt. Would you support a law that excludes such apologies as admissions of liability in medical malpractice lawsuits? 409
65% 220
35% 5. Should we extend the statute of limitations from five to ten years for victims of child sexual abuse to file claims against their abusers? 593
88% 82
12% 6. Some states maintain an automobile driver next-of-kin registry so that the next of kin are contacted if the driver is injured or killed in an automobile accident. Would you support legislation that would allow those obtaining a driver's license to provide the New York State Department of Motor Vehicles with emergency contact information in case he or she is injured in an automobile accident? 599
89% 71
11% 7. In light of the tragedy of Newtown, CT, do you believe the state needs to put in place additional measures regulating guns and ammunition? 457
69% 205
31%
The following are some of the comments on my survey that I received from constituents in relation to various issues:
Gun Control Comments
Ban private ownership of assault weapons
Ban large magazines/limit number of rounds
Enforce current laws
Go after criminals, not law abiding citizens
Tougher restrictions should be applied to hand guns
More extensive background checks
Ban or Tax assault weapons
Ban pistols
Ban ammunition for banned weapons
Longer wait periods for purchasing firearms
Strengthen registration procedures
All weapons must be kept in vault
Tougher sentences for gun related crimes
Station employee at school entrance, possibly with use of a buzzer system
Hunt down unregistered gun owners
Enforce registration/background checks at gun shows
No sales at gun shows
Strict licensing
Re-registration every year/periodically
Make purchase of guns public knowledge
Hunters cannot own more than 3 rifles or shotguns
Ban handguns
No more than 1 box of bullets per month per costumer
Ammunition should be registered when bought
Ammunition should be limited, and taxed
Register all firearms
Don't need more laws
New tax on buying guns
Alert police if gun owner has more than 1 gun
Restrict concealed weapons
More money and effort into mental health issues
Close gun show and private sale loopholes
Require higher level license for assault weapons and high-capacity magazines
Ban gun ownership for people with mental health issues
Institute background checks for purchases of ammunition
Ban individuals under 19 from purchasing guns
Limit number of guns private households can own
Improve databases of guns/gun owners across state agencies
Require fingerprinting of all gun buyers
Limit gun and ammunition purchases as much as possible
Restrict sale of ammunition to specifically licensed entities (NOT sporting goods stores)
Limit gun purchases to 1 per year
Stricter punishment for gun trafficking
Restrict hunting within one mile of public space, including in the Adirondacks
Early Voting Constituent Comments
Only when necessary to alleviate long lines
Could possibly offer more flexibility
Easier process encourages more participation
Must push online voting
Mail-Use the L.A. Model
Voting opportunities should be made possible to the aged and home-bound
Crucial in obtaining votes from isolated groups
Could create more voter fraud
Don't trust ability to "warehouse" ballot
It's the voter's obligation to make the effort on Election Day
Voters should vote on only Election Day
If people want to vote they find the time
It is hard enough now to keep track of who has already voted
More room for voter fraud
Increases cost for poll workers
Might need significant clerical oversight to control
Plastic Bag Tax Constituent Comments
No plastic bags at all
Use paper bags for packing
Should be $0.25
If the money actually went where it should go
Food expenses are already enough
Statute of Limitations for Victims of Child Sexual Abuse Constituent CommentsWell the Bundesliga has always been a football league where things are done a bit differently and their fans are no different. Check out this very interesting manner which these fans express their displeasure.
Borussia Dortmund fans are certainly among the most passionate sports fans in the world. For many years, these fans have ardently supported their German soccer club with high levels of passion and never shy away from airing their opinions on their team’s performance. Whether it requires them to engage rival fans or to air their disgust at what they feel is discrimination against them or their team, they are always ready to protest, and always do it in a sensational way. This time round, they took their protestation levels to another unforeseen height.
A photo posted by Copa90 (@copa90) on Feb 9, 2016 at 1:27pm PST
#Dortmund fans disrupted tonight’s fixture in protest against ticket prices… By throwing tennis balls. pic.twitter.com/iylyx76i93 — Twentys Plenty (@twentys_plenty) February 9, 2016
It was not about their team’s performance, in fact, they won the comfortably won game. However, that would not sooth them from airing their disgust in what they felt was fleecing their pockets dry. Borussia was playing away at VFB Stuttgart’s Mercedes-Benz Arena in the quarter finals of the DFB Pokal Cup, but their fans furiously protested high ticket prices by throwing tennis balls onto the pitch.Even before throwing the tennis balls onto the pitch, Borussia fans had boycotted the first 20 minutes of the match to show their disgust at being charged on the upwards of $36 for the game. During the 20 minutes boycott, they had erected a banner reading: “Soccer should be affordable” at the away end of the stadium.
In throwing the tennis balls into the field to halt the game, which their team comfortably emerged winners, the famous yellow and black fans were thought to pass a message that soccer fans should not be forced to pay as much as tennis fans. They wanted to show their displeasure and ensure that their action would bar other teams from holding them at ransom. Many teams across Europe are known to charges Borussia fan over the roof as they are known to follow their beloved team in throngs wherever the team play.
This headline-capturing incident took place just a few days after Liverpool fans in the English Premier League staged their own protest by walking out of their Anfield Stadium on the 77th minute. This was during their team’s match against Sunderland to show their displeasure for having to pay more than $92 to watch their team play at home.
Despite these protests from Borussia Dortmund fans, Stuggart officials maintained that their ticket charges were fair enough and affordable. It remains to be seen whether football clubs will reduce their ticket prices or continue charging what fans perceive as unethically over-the-top prices.Squash newsletter is a comprehensive summary of the day's most important blog posts and news articles from the best Squash websites on the web, and delivered to your email inbox each morning. To subscribe, simply provide us with your email address.
Hastings, UK About Blog The WSF is recognised by the International Olympic Committee as the International Federation for squash. It is a member of the General Association of International Sports Federations & the Association of the IOC Recognised International Sports Federation. Follow to get up-to-the-minute world squash news.
Frequency about 2 posts per week.
Website worldsquash.org
Facebook fans 82,602. Twitter followers 9,914.
San Francisco, CA About Blog The ultimate guide on Squash - how-to, tips and tricks, events, tournaments, news, disscussions, lifestyle, accessories and more from Reddit.
Frequency about 14 posts per week.
Website reddit.com/r/squash
Facebook fans 1,073,593. Twitter followers 461,646.
UK About Blog keeps an eye out for all the latest competition updates, news from around the world, tournament details and photographs
Frequency about 4 posts per week.
Since Jul 2011
Also in Squash Youtube Channels
Website youtube.com/user/psasquashtv
Facebook fans 201,911. Twitter followers 30,151.
Based in the UK About Blog Squash news and everything about squash from around the world by Squash Site.
Frequency about 14 posts per week.
Website squashsite.today
Facebook fans 27,706. Twitter followers 16,499.
Mountain View, CA About Blog Comprehensive up-to-date news coverage on Squash, aggregated from sources all over the world by Google News.
Frequency about 17 posts per week.
Website news.google.com/news/section..
Facebook fans 21,760,915. Twitter followers 212,753.
United States About Blog US Squash is the national governing body and membership organization for the sport of squash in the United States. US Squash's vision is for all people to have the opportunity to enhance their health and well being through the sport of squash.
Frequency about 5 posts per week.
Website ussquash.com
Facebook fans 12,667. Twitter followers 5,024.
Ontario, Canada About Blog Squash blog, news, articles and tips from Control the''T'Sports - The Squash Source
Frequency about 1 post per month.
Website blog.controlthet.com
Facebook fans 114. Twitter followers 481.
Grand Central, New York City About Blog The Tournament of Champions in Grand Central Terminal is the largest and most famous squash tournament in the world.
Frequency about 1 post per month.
Website tocsquash.com
Facebook fans 2,369. Twitter followers 3,111.
Munich, Bavaria About Blog Interactive Squash is bringing the game of Squash to the 21st century. The fully interactive court can be used to enhance skills and attract new audiences. iSquash is a project created, developed and owned by FUN WITH BALLS GmbH. This Munich-based firm develops software and hardware for augmented reality sports applications.
Frequency about 1 post per month.
Website interactivesquash.com
Facebook fans 10,709. Twitter followers 257.
Ontario, Canada About Blog Squash Canada provides a high performance system for athletes, coaches and officials, and sets standards for squash in Canada. Squash Canada sets and maintains standards for the training and certification of coaches and officials in the sport of squash.
Frequency about 1 post per month.
Website squash.ca/en/news
Facebook fans 2,087. Twitter followers 3,326.
Victoria About Blog SeriousSquash by Chris Hanebury is all about tips on how to improve the squash game and cover many topics of squash, including articles for parents and coaches. Serious Squash is also about his journey on becoming the best, he possibly can and not settling for the status quo.
Frequency about 1 post per week.
Website serioussquash.com
Facebook fans 2,051. Twitter followers 237.
4925 Lacross Road North Charleston 29406 SC About Blog Squash Rackets by Brian Moreno, provides you with all the information, reviews and related links in a form of website blogs to share updates about Squash Rackets, related Services and other related concerns.
Frequency about 1 post per week.
Website squashrackets.net
Facebook fans n/a. Twitter followers n/a.
About Blog Squash Mad is the number one resource for exclusive interviews, breaking news and hard-hitting opinions. Their mission is to grow the game and help squash on its path to a deserved place in the Olympic Games.
Frequency about 4 posts per week.
Website squashmad.com
Facebook fans 1,270. Twitter followers 3,619.
Nederland About Blog Squash Life encourages and inspires the Dutch squash through news, background, interviews, blogs, tips and tricks, videos columns, rules, training advice and more.
Frequency about 2 posts per week.
Website squashlife.nl
Facebook fans 943. Twitter followers 2,006.
Northumbria About Blog All about Northumbria Squash.
Frequency about 2 posts per month.
Website northumbriasquash.co.uk
Facebook fans 215. Twitter followers 117.
About Blog The best and hand-selected squash videos from around the world.
Frequency about 1 post per month.
Website freesquashvideos.com
Facebook fans n/a. Twitter followers n/a.
Chennai About Blog Cyrus Poncha National Coach at Squash Rackets Federation of India writes all about Squash & sports news.
Frequency about 1 post per month.
Website coachcyrus.wordpress.com
Facebook fans n/a. Twitter followers 993.
Bukit Jalil, Kuala Lumpur About Blog The Squash Racquets Association of Malaysia, is the official Malaysian Squash association featuring all about Squash in Malaysia.
Frequency about 2 posts per month.
Website malaysia-squash.org
Facebook fans 3,600. Twitter followers 922.
London About Blog Peter Heywood a licensed squash coach in London shares his Squash stories for life on The Squash Life Blog. It is a place where squash, people and stories connect. A global space which you can use to help feed your passion and share your passion for squash with others.
Frequency about 1 post per month.
Website squashbloglife.com
Facebook fans 32. Twitter followers 422.
Fairfax, OH About Blog The T Squash Academy is dedicated to developing the character and leadership of young men and women through the game of squash.
Frequency about 1 post per month.
Website tsquashacademy.org/blog
Facebook fans 541. Twitter followers 91.
Nairobi Kenya About Blog Kenya Squash Rackets Association (KSRA) governs and administers all matters pertaining to squash in Kenya and oversees all sanctioned competitions.Its mission to promote and encourage the game of squash in Kenya and govern all matters pertaining to the organization and playing of the game of squash including rules, championships, coaching, discipline, disputes and any other matters thereof.
Frequency about 2 posts per month.
Website kenyasquash.org
Facebook fans 98. Twitter followers 52.
Toronto About Blog The Toronto and District Women’s Squash Association (TDWSA) is the premier singles league serving T&D’s vibrant and diverse women’s squash community. It offers a competitive team-based singles squash league experience with weekly play and a social component for women of all ages and levels of play.
Frequency about 1 post per week.
Website tdwsa.com
Facebook fans 63. Twitter followers n/a.
Princeton, NJ About Blog MSquash is a High Performance Squash Academy based in New York. Shaun Moxham and Katline Cauwels offer top level squash camps, squash clinics, squash lessons.
Frequency about 1 post per month.
Website msquash.com/blog
Facebook fans 1,286. Twitter followers 8.
About Blog Follow Squash Stream for Squash tips and drills, tournaments and championships video.
Frequency about 1 post per month.
Since Oct 2014
Website youtube.com/channel/UCawl..
Facebook fans n/a. Twitter followers n/a.
About Blog Everything you need to know about squash in general and French squash in particular and-even more.
Frequency about 4 posts per week.
Website youtube.com/user/nicobarbeau
Facebook fans n/a. Twitter followers n/a.
Taiwan About Blog Long-term goal is to provide a more professional squash Taiwan video player platform, in addition to the traceability miss event can also be viewed directly through the live game, while commenting on a professional and high-definition video, player interviews and even other neighboring content.
Frequency about 56 posts per week.
Website youtube.com/channel/UC7Mz..
Facebook fans 679. Twitter followers n/a.
New York About Blog The primary goal of the series is to serve as a marketing umbrella for US professional tournaments and to increase the awareness of squash through the professional game.
Frequency about 1 post per week.
Website youtube.com/channel/UCuzO..
Facebook fans n/a. Twitter followers n/a.
About Blog Squash matches videos from Dr. Luis Enrique Moncada Bautista.
Frequency about 84 posts per week.
Website youtube.com/channel/UCiEF..
Facebook fans n/a. Twitter followers n/a.
Cambridge, MA About Blog The Official Blog of Harvard Men’s and Women’s Squash
Frequency about 1 post per month.
Website harvardsquash.blogspot.com
Facebook fans 1,179. Twitter followers 1,570.
Auckland, NZ About Blog Double Dot Squash provides enjoyment and athletic and life skills through squash to help you achieve your squash goals and enhance your overall lifestyle. It deliver an enjoyable and comprehensive squash programme and services for all. It have a progress plan and pathway in place for every squash player, whether you want to compete at the highest level, or play squash as a social sport.
Frequency about 1 post per month.
Website doubledotsquash.com
Facebook fans 607. Twitter followers n/a.
Northern California About Blog Northern California Squash Association is an organization committed to providing support and organization for squash players in Northern California. It is owned by the entity known as the ‘San Francisco International Squash Federation’, SFISF. SFISF is a registered charitable corporation with 501 C(3) designation.
Frequency about 1 post per month.
Website norcalsquash.org
Facebook fans 247. Twitter followers 92.
Australia About Blog Squash Mechanics are an innovative consulting team equipped with proven solutions to Sports Business Management.
Frequency about 1 post per month.
Website squashmechanics.com/#blog
Facebook fans 174. Twitter followers n/a.
Ontario About Blog The aim of the program is to introduce as many young people to the game of squash as possible.
Frequency about 3 posts per month.
Website wsfsquash.blogspot.com
Facebook fans 75. Twitter followers 115.
Natick, MA About Blog Cross Courts Squash the premier squash club in Metro-West Boston. Whatever your aspirations are, or whatever level of squash you play, our World Class Squash Professionals will help you reach your goals.
Frequency about 1 post per month.
Website crosscourtsquash.com/blog
Facebook fans 70. Twitter followers 24.
Alphen aan den Rijn, Nederland About Blog A Squash blog authored by Kim Killingberg sharing his Squash life, Performences and achievements.
Frequency about 1 post per month.
Website killingbergsquash.blogspot.com
Facebook fans n/a. Twitter followers 294.
Delhi, India About Blog Latest updated news on International Squash from Indian Sports News.
Frequency about 1 post per month.
Website indiansportsnews.com/other-s..
Facebook fans 31,539. Twitter followers 19,359.
Denver, CO About Blog Harrow Sports manufactures Lacrosse, Hockey, Field Hockey, Squash, Racquet Sports, Custom Gear and Apparel. Harrow's goal is to provide superior customer service, fast turnaround time, and unique solutions for the specific needs of each athlete. It constantly exploring innovative options to provide athletes with equipment that will allow them to perform at the highest level.
Frequency about 1 post per month.
Website harrowsports.com/blog/catego..
Facebook fans 6,296. Twitter followers 4,029.
West of Scotland! About Blog West Squash and Racketball is an association of Squash Clubs in Glasgow and the West of Scotland. It is the Affiliated Regional Association of Scottish Squash representing these clubs. The Association’s purpose is to encourage the game of squash in the west of Scotland through as many different means as possible.
Frequency about 1 post per month.
Website west-squash.org/category/news
Facebook fans 178. Twitter followers 358.
Sydney, New South Wales About Blog Give athletes the opportunity to reach their full potential, turn junior squash players into professional squash players and give the pathway to become international players. Gives opportunities to children to represent at regional, state, national and international level.
Frequency about 1 post per month.
Website eastcoastsquashacademy.com.a..
Facebook fans 759. Twitter followers 333.
Singapore About Blog Singapore Squash's mission is to popularise the sport among all ages from junior to veteran, maintaining a steady growth of playing numbers and working towards raising the standard of squash so as to achieve podium standings at international competitions.
Frequency about 1 post per month.
Website singaporesquash.com
Facebook fans 791. Twitter followers n/a.Zery |
It isn’t about outright speed – and what was ever going to be as fast as the Huracan I’ve just said goodbye to, anyway? It’s about a sweet, responsive engine paired with one of the nicest, tightest six-speed manual gearboxes currently on sale and a chassis that’s built to balance and inform, not turn every corner into a simple twirl of the wheel. It’s about compact, distilled driving that actually gives the chump behind that wheel the opportunity to get involved. And it’s about a manual convertible roof that folds flat in under three seconds. Winter is coming, and I know I’m still going to be able to make the most of it.
By CJ Hubbard
How we specced our MX-5:
Paint it red
Soul Red Metallic is the most expensive paint choice at £660 – but it’s also the only option fitted, so we don’t feel too bad about it
Shiny things
LED headlights – standard across the range, and quite brilliant given they look so tiny
Less is more
1.5-litre engine means 29bhp less but 1000rpm more – shut up and cane it
What a wand!
Six-speed manual gearbox – the magic wand of happiness
Case closed
Who needs a folding hard top or power assistance when this simple, lightweight fabric roof can be opened or closed in under three seconds – brilliant
Hot seats
Heated leather seats – help make every clear moment a drop-top opportunity
Spot the diff
1.5-litre cars make do with an open diff, 2.0-litre cars get an LSD – so far, so what?
CAR's first drive of the 1.5-litre Mazda MX-5 Mk4
Watch the 2.0-litre MX-5 on track with Toyota's GT-86 in CAR's video review
Mazda MX-5 vs Audi TT Roadster vs Toyota GT-86 Giant Test on CAR+Wind blows roof off of Whitefield home and onto 2 cars
High winds the night of Monday blew the metal roof off a mobile home and onto two cars at 45 Townhouse Road in Whitefield. George Bowden Jr. owns the property, according to town tax records. Whitefield Fire Chief Scott Higgins said three or four people were in the home at the time.
NH man convicted of murder as teenager has his sentenced reduced
A New Hampshire man previously sentenced to life in prison as a teenager has been resentenced to serve at least 25 years in prison. Michael Soto was 17 when he was convicted of the 2007 murder of Aaron Kar. WMUR-TV reports the 29-year-old was resentenced Tuesday, with the judge also including a chance for one year to be suspended in Soto’s new 25-year sentence. Soto has already served 11 years in prison. The U.
Prospect of a referendum creates incentive for a deal on Maine paid sick leave bill
Want to get the Daily Brief by email? Sign up here. There’s an air of inevitability surrounding legislative Democrats’ push to require paid sick leave, which could be a signature achievement from Maine progressives whose lawmaking hopes have mostly been bottled up for the last eight years. Any deal will likely be the product of a large bargain.
Man arrested after bringing loaded handgun to Boston airport
BOSTON — Police have arrested a New Hampshire man they say brought a loaded handgun to Boston’s Logan International Airport. The Transportation Security Administration said the Salem, New Hampshire, man was found with a loaded 9 mm handgun in one of his carry-on bags on Monday. The gun was spotted by the checkpoint X-ray machine.
Mount Washington sets new February wind speed record
Mount Washington is known for having the “world’s worst weather,” and New England’s highest peak set a new wind speed record for February when gusts blew at 171 mph Monday evening. That broke the previous record for February set in 1972, when weather observers measured 166 mph winds, according to Krissy Fraser, events and marketing manager for the Mount Washington Observatory. The summit on Monday also experienced an average wind speed of 110 mph over a 24-hour period. “It was an incredible, slightly frightening experience to witness the power of this storm,” Tom Padham, a weather observer and education specialist at the observatory, said.Sid, a Leonberger belonging to Jamie and Marian Harris relaxes at home, April 26, 2014l, in Aledo, Texas. He was reunited with the family after being allegedly kept for a year at Fort Worth veterinary clinic. (Richard W. Rodriguez/Fort Worth Star-Telegram/MCT via Getty Images)
Sid the dog is said to be "doing pretty well" after having recently been discovered in a filthy cage at a Texas veterinarian's office -- a half-year after the veterinarian told Sid's owners their 170-pound Leonberger had been euthanized.
"He's got one surgery left to go. Some rehab," says Jim Eggleston, an attorney who represents Sid's owners, Jamie and Marian Harris, in a $1 million lawsuit against the veterinarian and his practice, the now-closed Camp Bowie Animal Clinic in Fort Worth.
"Thank God he didn't have room," says Eggleston.
The Harris family, including Jamie, from left, Cole, Case and Marian, pose with their dog Sid at their home in Aledo, Texas, April 26, 2014. Photo credit: Richard W. Rodriguez/Fort Worth Star-Telegram/MCT via Getty Images
In their petition filed in state court, the Harrises say that Tierce -- their trusted, longtime veterinarian -- kept Sid at the clinic for several months over the summer of 2013 while treating the dog for a "minor, anal-gland issue."
That fall, when the family went to collect their pet, they found him unable to walk. "He could not lift his hind quarters at all and simply slid himself across the floor to get to Mr. Harris," reads the complaint.
Tierce allegedly first told the Harrises that Sid was having a reaction to some medicine, then said X-rays had revealed a congenital spinal defect that was "degenerative and incurable." (The family now believes that Sid was injured when a clinic employee flipped the dog onto his back.)
The Harrises say the veterinarian advised them to euthanize Sid. They agreed, after being told the procedure would be painless and Sid would be buried on the Tierce family farm.
On April 22, 2014, Mary Brewer, a veterinary technician formerly with the clinic, contacted the Harrises to tell them that Sid "(a) was still alive; (b) was being confined in a cage almost 24 hours a day in unsanitary conditions (typically being removed from his cage only once each day and for not more than 15 minutes); and (c) was being used for blood extraction," according to the complaint.
Brewer has also said that Sid and other animals had been used for medical experimentation, though no details have emerged, Eggleston tells HuffPost.
“We trusted the vet. We said our goodbyes,” Marian Harris told ABC News. “We had even talked about burial arrangements, and then six months later I get a call that he’s still alive.”
The family went to the clinic and recovered their dog. Another vet examined Sid, and concluded he'd been "abusively kenneled," resulting in various ailments -- mange and muscle atrophy among them. The new vet said it also appeared Sid had been used as a "regular blood donor" and determined the dog "definitively had no congenital spine defect," according to the Harris' complaint.
Tierce was arrested at the end of April and charged with animal cruelty.
The arrest warrant didn't mention Sid. Instead, it detailed Tierce's alleged cruelty to his own dog -- a border collie police found in obvious pain with a missing foot, a dislocated leg and two dislocated shoulders. The dog was lying in a box on the floor of Camp Bowie, in what was described in the warrant as a "deplorable" environment, with animal organs in jars "throughout the clinic," as well as "stacks of drugs, trash, laundry, paperwork" and insects in exam rooms.
The border collie was euthanized after being taken away from Tierce, as were two other dogs. One of those dogs had been caged for as many as three years after the dog's owners were told their pet was put down, Tierce reportedly said in a statement to the veterinary board.
"The only criminal charges so far," says Eggleston, "have been about his own dog."
Fort Worth veterinarian Dr. Millard Tierce. Photo credit: AP Photo/Tarrant County Sheriff's Office
The Fort Worth Star Telegram reports that Tierce's attorney, in his opening statement at the veterinary board hearing last week, claimed his client had been wrongly characterized as a "vampire running a shop of horror":
He asked Tierce why he kept jars of animal organs throughout the clinic. Tierce said he kept them around in case he needed more biopsies from them, but he knew he kept them too long. “I’m a hoarder,” he said. His parents survived the Great Depression and never threw anything out, and “it’s my nature,” he said. Tierce said he knew he needed to purge the clinic of clutter. “Truth is, I don’t particularly care to manage,” he said. “I’d much rather do surgery and care for my patients.”
“If I’m not M.L. Tierce, veterinarian, I am nothing,” he reportedly said. “I’m asking for the opportunity to continue to be a veterinarian."
The hearing ended with Tierce's temporary suspension still in effect. A full board will review Tierce's license again, possibly in October, a spokesperson told the Star-Telegram.
HuffPost couldn't reach Tierce's lawyer for further comment.
Despite the shocking details that Tierce has admitted to, the veterinarian still has supporters. Some 50 of them came to his hearing, and more than 100 have been sharing strategies on the "Support Dr. Lou Tierce, Camp Bowie Animal Clinic" Facebook page to help the man they say has done so much for them and their animals.AT least one person died and 400 homes and businesses were destroyed after a wildfire devastated several Northern California towns.
Firefighters continue to battle the out-of-control blaze north of San Francisco in Lake County.
California department of forestry and fire protection spokeswoman Lynn Valentine said the fire has destroyed 400 homes, two apartment complexes and 10 businesses.
Most of the destruction occurred in the communities of Middletown and Hidden Valley Lake, as well as homes along a highway.
The fire has burned 78 square miles since it broke out on Saturday afternoon.
The devastation comes after a separate wildfire to the south-east destroyed at least 81 homes.
Jerry Brown, the governor of California, declared a state of emergency in two counties on Sunday after thousands of people were forced to flee their homes.
The fires across northern California are being blamed on high temperatures and years of drought.
The Red Cross is opening emergency shelters for evacuated residents.After my last photo study, I realized I was lacking some understanding of Form and Lighting, that the photo studies were not really helping me learn, and a positive critique on Reddit suggested I watch some of Istebrak's videos on Form Study and Painting from a Light Source, which I did, and they were VERY helpful in helping me alter the way I think and see the painting in progress.
I had not originally planned on painting the person in, I was just going to fill the page with different blocky shapes, but I was so excited with what I had learned, I wanted to paint a person completely from scratch with as little reference as possible, I just checked some random google images to help with certain shadows and highlights and basic shapes.
I really focused on making it look like there was a skull under than skin and muscle, and I think it turned out alright. =]Morning, it’s another quiet day in a quiet week, the only things going on are Theo Walcott calling for more consistency (I know, right!), and Aaron Ramsey hailing Arsene Wenger’s influence on his career. I like the Welshman, I have to say, I think there’s something lurking under the surface. Whether we ever get to see it is unclear, but in recent months he’s certainly added some consistency to his game, and has played his way through a difficult patch.
I don’t think we should underestimate the difficulty of doing that, especially when there was a section of fans who blamed him for everything that went wrong. Were he still playing poorly I suspect he’d be at fault for the North Korean nuclear crisis, bank crashes, political corruption and the fact that Community just isn’t funny without Dan Harmon. It does take some character to do that.
I can clearly remember posting a team line-up on Twitter and the reaction to Ramsey’s inclusion was for some people to reply to me wishing he would die. Genuinely. I know it’s a tiny minority, but still. Those are not sentiments expressed by any real fan, I realise that, but they were also expressed directly at him during his brief sojourn on Twitter. Rightly enough he decided it wasn’t a place he should be spending much time and knocked it on the head, but it’d certainly colour your view of your club’s supporters if they were wishing you death.
I don’t think he was done any real favours when thrust into the gaping chasm left by Cesc last season. It was too much, too soon, and a player, as we know, can become a lightning rod for criticism which should be better directed elsewhere. I believe that was the case with him, it badly affected his confidence and form, and lest we forget it was his first full season after being Shawcrossed.
I’m glad he’s got his head down, worked hard and showed that he can be a valuable squad player. And while you can make the argument that he’s not the new Fabregas, I’d posit that he’s a decent squad player with the potential to become a bit more than that. He’s versatile, works his arse off, technically very good (although I’d like to see a few fewer flicks and back-heels), and I think he’ll get better.
Even if he doesn’t become the greatest midfielder in the world, every squad needs players like him. Guys who are consistent, who’ll give you 100%, and who can do a job when starting or coming on as a sub. Decent, honest professionals who add depth to the panel the manager has to choose from. He’s one of those, and he’s got the chance to progress further, let’s hope he takes it. It can only be good for Arsenal if he does.
—
As an aside, and vaguely related to nasty comments above, I was chatting on Twitter yesterday with @7amkickoff about odd commentators on the blog. He was dealing with a chap who copied and pasted anti-Wenger comments from other blogs and posted them on his, and while you have to question the motivation of people who do things like that, little is a surprise when you’re on the Internet for any great period of time.
For the most part people are decent and the commonality we have with regard to Arsenal FC is enough to keep things relatively civil. Of course there are disagreements and debates, which can lead to arguments and increased tensions, shall we say, but there are people out there who believe they have a divine right to say whatever they want in a blog’s comments section. If you prevent them from doing that, you are accused of censorship which quickly leads to accusations of fascism and worse.
Like most others we have a set of rules here and on Arseblog News. They’re pretty simple, no using text speak, for example, and we encourage people to discuss the topic at hand without resorting to the kind of name calling you find in a primary school playground. Differences of opinion are welcome, it would be a very boring place if everyone agreed (hence the reason there are fewer comments after a win than a loss), but accept the fact that someone can hold a different opinion to you. It’s just manners, speak to people online like you would off.
But then there are the lunatics and the trolls. The latter are commonplace, every comment section has them, whether it’s an Arseblog or a national newspaper, people whose sole aim is to wind people up and get into fights. I do wonder why they don’t have anything better to do but hey-ho, to each their own. Sometimes, though, there are some whose brainlessness makes you despair for the human race.
Like the people who would send messages to a player of the team they say they support wishing him death, or the bloke who was so outraged that I banned him from commenting on Arseblog News that he sent me a series of emails, each more descriptive than the last about ways I should be killed. It’s water off a ducks back at this stage, but the worst part was that his anger was fueled by a genuine sense of outrage.
He claimed that his comments weren’t provocative or contrary to the rules, which, in fairness, they weren’t. I challenged him to think about why he had been banned, and the best he could come up with was the suggestion that I liked to perform oral sex on Arsene Wenger. I can assure you that’s not the case, but he got angrier and angrier and I had visions of him sitting at his jizz covered keyboard with smoke coming out of his ears.
He never did figure it out. The emails continued for quite some time, before he found someone else to bother. I still maintain that ‘IBURNN*GGERS’ (with no*) was not a suitable username for any website, let alone one I’m in charge of, but he never saw that as the problem.
It takes all sorts, eh? Back tomorrow with an Arsecast.
Until then.The National Mall has often drawn massive crowds for presidential inaugurations and rallies and other celebrations. But estimating large crowds on the National Mall is a notoriously tricky business. See photos of large crowds on the National Mall.
Spectators fill the National Mall in front of the U.S. Capitol on Jan. 20, 2017 in Washington, DC. In today’s inauguration ceremony Donald J. Trump becomes the 45th president of the United States. (Photo by Alex Wong/Getty Images)
The National Mall has often drawn massive crowds for presidential inaugurations and rallies and other celebrations. But estimating large crowds on the National Mall is a notoriously tricky business. See photos of large crowds on the National Mall.
WASHINGTON — President Donald Trump promised “massive crowds” for his inauguration Friday. Did they show up?
It’s still too early for any official estimates of the number of inauguration revelers. Visitors reported large crowds on the National Mall, although aerial photos showed far fewer people than the enormous number of attendees for President Barack Obama’s first inauguration in 2009.
Before the inauguration, officials said they were expecting between 800,000 and 900,000 people in D.C.
One indicator of crowd size — although it doesn’t tell the whole story — is the number of trips taken on D.C.’s Metro system.
As of 11 a.m. on Inauguration Day, Metro said it had recorded 193,000 trips. That’s about on par with the number of trips taken for President George W. Bush’s second inauguration in 2005. In 2013 during Obama’s second inauguration, the system had recorded about 317,000 trips. During Obama’s record-setting 2009 inauguration, the system had recorded 513,000 Metro trips by 11 a.m.
Obama’s first inauguration in 2009 still holds the record for the highest attended presidential inauguration — 1.8 million packed the National Mall, the Capitol Grounds and crammed D.C. streets.
That bested Lyndon Johnson’s previous record of 1.2 million people for his 1965 inaugural.
Estimating large crowds is a notoriously tricky business, however. In fact, the National Park Service 20 years ago stopped estimating crowd sizes after a dispute about its estimate of the number of people at the 1995 Million Man March led to the threat of a lawsuit. (The agency said 400,000 people showed up, but Metro trips recorded that day far surpassed that number and an independent analysis indicated the number of participants may have been twice as high.)
The estimate for the record-shattering crowds for Obama’s 2009 inauguration came from the D.C. mayor’s office and a slew of local and federal agencies responsible for managing traffic and security for the event, and the park service did not dispute it.
Presidential inaugurations aren’t the only big events to draw crowds to the mall. Protests and holiday celebrations have also drawn throngs.
The largest demonstration in D.C. (back when the National Park Service was still keeping head counts) came in November 1969 when a crowd of between 600,000 anti-war protesters gathered on the National Mall.
A fireworks display on the National Mall in 1976 to mark the U.S. Bicentennial was estimated to have drawn about 1 million celebrants.
Scroll through the gallery above to get a bird’s-eye view of crowds on the National Mall. Another view of inaugurations through the years is below.
Like WTOP on Facebook and follow @WTOP on Twitter to engage in conversation about this article and others.
© 2017 WTOP. All Rights Reserved.Hold on to your seats, this story will blow you away. Kill me if you can is a docu-drama, which follows two boys (John and Mark), addicted to an Internet chat room.
There, they develop a close friendship, meet in real life, and hit it off. But what happens next is more shocking and extraordinary than anything you could ever imagine.
On the afternoon of July 16 2003, police arrest John for the attempted murder of his best friend Mark. What drove him to do it?
An incredible story emerges of how Mark has been recruited over the web to be a secret service agent by a spy mistress called Janet Dobinson. She promises him sex and riches if he passes an initiation test: to kill his friend John. The schoolboy is propelled into a world of espionage; his bland suburban surroundings become a landscape of mystery and intrigue.
But in court, facing charges of attempted murder, Mark finally learns the truth – Janet and a host of other people he met on the Internet are all fictitious characters invented by someone bent on manipulating his every move. But who would know enough to trick him into attempting murder?SPRINGFIELD –The Turkish community of the Springfield area will host two events to educate and help people.
The first event is a Turkish Bazaar, which will take place on Saturday, May 16, from 10:30 a.m. to 8 p.m. at the Turkish Cultural Center of Western Massachusetts, 540 Meadow Street Extension, Agawam. All profits from this event will be distributed to the "Raise an Orphan" in Haiti charity in conjunction with Embrace Relief, non-profit organization that brings together teams of volunteers to collaborate on humanitarian aid and disaster relief efforts.
At the bazaar there will be a selection of food, gifts and household items for sale, mostly home- and handmade by the Turkish community members.
Foods will include both beef and chicken "doner" sandwiches (the meat is specially marinated); "sarma," rice wrapped in grape leaves, usually served on special occasions; and "borek," a pastry filled with feta cheese or ground beef.
The bazaar will provide "a glimpse of Turkey," said Ahmet Gunay, a member of the Turkish Cultural Center of Western Massachusetts.
For more information, call (302) 489-9733.
The second event is the third International Ahiska Conference, which this year will focus on "Unlocking the Treasure within Us: Integrating our Strength Together for a Better Future." It will take place Sunday, May 24, from 10 a.m. to 3 p.m. at Western New England University's Rivers Memorial Hall in Springfield.
The conference aims to raise awareness about Ahiska Turks, an ethnic minority group that was forced to flee violent pogroms in 1989 in Uzbekistan; they were exiled from Russia several years ago "where they had a ton of troubles," Gunay said.
Many were resettled in the United States and live throughout the country. The conference is the third national gathering at which Ahiska Turks can remember their history and support one another, Gunay said.
This will be the first such conference in Western Massachusetts; previous ones were in Dayton, Ohio, and St. Louis.
Speakers will include Muharrem Aydin, Ramazan Yilmaz, Necdet Incedayi, Gulumser Incedayi, Hacer Yilmaz, Yalcin Gungor, Rukiye Aydin, Yasar Akkaya, Ilhan Keles, Deniz Ekinci, Mehtap Ekinci and Murat Tasogul.
For more information about the conference, call (646) 639-7104.
Both events are organized and sponsored by the Turkish Cultural Center of Western Massachusetts.During a briefing, White House press secretary Sean Spicer accused members of the press on Saturday of "deliberately false" inaugural coverage. (Thomas Johnson/The Washington Post)
President Trump’s press secretary, Sean Spicer, on Saturday used his first media briefing to angrily lambaste the press for its coverage of the new administration, claiming reporters had deliberately sought to minimize the “enormous” crowd at Trump’s swearing-in on Friday.
“This was the largest audience to ever witness an inauguration, period — both in person and around the globe,” Spicer said. “These attempts to lessen the enthusiasm of the inauguration are shameful and wrong.”
Channeling Trump’s frequently voiced disdain for the media, Spicer said that there has been a lot of talk about holding the new president accountable for his actions. But Spicer said that “goes both ways.”
“We’re going to hold the press accountable as well,” Spicer said. “The American people deserve better.”
[Trump, in CIA visit, attacks media for coverage of his inaugural crowds]
In a highly unusual move, Spicer left the briefing without taking questions, ignoring reporters who shouted questions at him about the massive crowd in town for the Women’s March on Washington, which was designed to protest Trump’s presidency.
Spicer’s comments on crowd size echoed those of his boss a couple of hours earlier, when Trump appeared at the CIA headquarters in Virginia. Trump said that the “dishonest” media had underreported a crowd that, from the dais, he said “looked like a million, a million and a half people.”
Spicer walked through numbers of people that various sections of the area in front of Trump were believed to hold in making a case that media estimates were too low.
The area between the platform where Trump spoke and 4th Street held 250,000 people, Spicer said. The area between 4th Street and a media tent held another 220,000, he said. And the area between the tent and the Washington Monument could hold 250,000.
“All of this space was full when the president took the oath of office,” Spicer asserted.
He also noted that for the first time there was a white covering on the Mall to protect it, which Spicer said accentuated empty spaces in photos of the crowd.
And he said that more people used the Metro system in Washington for Trump’s inaugural than for Obama’s 2013 swearing-in. That conflicted with information released Saturday by Metro.
[Metro Inauguration Day trips top 500,000, but still lowest since 2005]
The agency said people took 570,557 trips in the system between its early 4 a.m. Friday opening through midnight closing. That compared with 1.1 million trips for Obama’s 2009 inaugural and 782,000 in 2013, according to Metro.
Spicer also took a reporter to task for having said on Twitter on Friday that Trump had removed a bust of Martin Luther King Jr. from his office. The reporter later acknowledged he was mistaken and apologized.
Spicer called the episode “irresponsible and reckless.”
Spicer also criticized Democrats in the Senate, saying they were “playing politics with national security” by not allowing Trump’s nominee to lead the CIA, Rep. Mike Pompeo (R-Kan.), to be confirmed on Friday afternoon after Trump took office.
Spicer said it was “a shame” that a CIA director was not in place when Trump visited on Saturday.It was widely suggested, ahead of Benjamin Netanyahu’s spectacularly controversial address to Congress on Tuesday, that the prime minister would have to deliver the speech of his life in order to justify the damage he would inevitably be causing to relations between his government and the Obama Administration. In the event, Netanyahu did deliver the speech of his life… and caused devastating, presumably irrevocable damage to his relationship with President Barack Obama.
On CNN, former administration official Martin Indyk called ties between the two leaders “toxic.” And that was moments before Netanyahu began his address. It’s hard to imagine the adjective that would best describe feelings in the Oval Office once the prime minister was done.
The next meeting between the two men will be fascinating to contemplate. And while Obama will hope even more fervently now that there will be no next meeting — that Netanyahu will fail to win reelection — the prime minister will not have done his electoral prospects any harm at all with this address. Many undecided Israelis will be asking themselves whether, in a moment of crisis, they can envisage Isaac Herzog holding the American parliament similarly mesmerized in support of a cause of passionate concern for Israel, and the answer will be no.
Get The Times of Israel's Daily Edition by email and never miss our top stories Free Sign Up
Although diplomatic in tone — and complete with deliberate Churchillian flourishes — “some change, some moderation,” he intoned of Iran under Hassan Rouhani — Netanyahu’s speech was in essence a devastating assault on Obama. He began, dutifully, with expressions of appreciation for the president, and for everything the president has done for Israel. But he continued, for the vast majority of his address, to explain the profound misjudgment of Iran — its ideology, its goals, and the immense danger it constitutes to Israel, the region, the United States, and the world — that lies at the heart of the “very bad deal” emerging from the US-led P5+1 negotiations. And thus, by extension, he was explaining the profound misjudgment of Iran at the core of Obama’s worldview and policies.
While Israelis broadly oppose the deal they see taking shape, and mistrust Obama when it comes to stopping a nuclear Iran, there was no consensus in Israel about the tactic of addressing Congress at this juncture, no little criticism of the move as an electoral gambit, two weeks before Israeli election day. And Netanyahu is indeed an ultra-sophisticated politician whose only regret about the timing of the speech was that it didn’t start two hours later — when it would have gone out live, albeit with the court-mandated five-minute delay, on the main 8 p.m. Israeli news broadcasts.
But Netanyahu’s address had a clear practical goal as well. He was lobbying Congress, and lobbying the American public watching at home to pressure Congress, to assert its maximal capacity to thwart the progress of the deal that Obama has cooked up. While 50 or 60 legislators elected to absent themselves, the vast majority of Republicans and Democrats were there to nod sagely at Netanyahu’s elaboration of Iran’s rapacious, religiously driven ideology and territorial ambitions, to applaud, to jump to their feet, to be won over.
For all the cynicism and the political filtering over Netanyahu’s motivations, furthermore, the prime minister is convinced, in his heart of hearts, that Iran is determined to advance its benighted ideology across the region and beyond. The prime minister is convinced, in his heart of hearts, that the deal taking shape will immunize the ayatollahs from any prospect of revolution from within or effective challenge from without. The deal “doesn’t block Iran’s path to the bomb,” he warned. “It paves Iran’s path to the bomb.”
And the cardinal fact is that the prime minister is convinced, in his heart of hearts, that the Islamist regime in Tehran is bent on the destruction of Israel. Ayatollah Khamenei “tweets that Israel must be annihilated,” Netanyahu wailed, repeating: “He tweets! You know, in Iran, there isn’t exactly free Internet. But he tweets in English that Israel must be destroyed.”
Although a first response to his speech from an unnamed White House official said that Netanyahu had offered “no concrete alternative” to the deal taking shape, and that his speech was “all rhetoric and no action,” and despite Obama’s subsequent elaborate defense of the US approach, the prime minister did offer an alternative. He urged the P5+1 to recalibrate, to reconsider, and then to push for a better deal. And “if Iran threatens to walk away from the table — and this often happens in a Persian bazaar — call their bluff,” he advised, the wise, wary Middle Easterner lecturing Obama and the other Western naifs. “They’ll be back, because they need the deal a lot more than you do.”
When “my long-time friend, John Kerry,” had confirmed to Netanyahu that “Iran could legitimately possess” 190,000 centrifuges enriching uranium when the deal expires; when the terms taking shape would leave Iran a year or less from a break out to the bomb; when Iran could be relied upon to play “hide and cheat” with the inspectors; when Iran would be free under the deal to continue development of the missiles with which it could deliver nuclear weapons — when these and other dangers were being built into an Obama-pushed agreement, then, yes, the price of alienating the current US administration is quite clearly one that Netanyahu is willing to pay.
Of course it is. For Obama will be gone in two years. But the way Netanyahu sees it, the way Netanyahu spelled it out with such compelling detail and passion on Tuesday, if this kind of deal is finalized with Iran, the ayatollahs will be threatening us all, and will be capable of doing far more than just threaten, for the foreseeable future.NEW DELHI: A fast-track court has ordered prosecution of a woman for filing a false rape case and making a “mockery” of the judicial system.“I deem it proper to prosecute the prosecutrix (woman) for the above mentioned criminal offence in the interest of justice and for making mockery of the judicial system by which precious time of the court has been wasted in conducting the trial of admitted false case, where accused persons have suffered humiliation and distress…,” said additional sessions judge Shail Jain.The woman had filed a rape case against a man who she married during the pendency of the case, but backtracked from her statement in court prompting the court to take a serious view. The complaint said that on January 18, 2014, the accused along with two other men got into a conspiracy to abduct and rape the woman. The man drugged her before raping her, it was alleged. Details of the case also revealed that the complainant and the accused married in court on February 21, 2014.The woman had met the man in April, 2013, and she admitted that due to temperamental differences between the couple, she filed a false rape case. The court noted that though she was cross examined by the public prosecutor, she did not support the case and turned hostile.There was no incriminating evidence on record against the accused, and therefore, the prosecution evidence was closed. There were no material witnesses who could be examined as they were either police officers or doctors and were part of the investigation.With the complainant denying that the incident even took place, in court’s view, no fruitful purpose would have been served by examining the formal witnesses. “It is clear from the testimony of the prosecutrix that she has made false complaint of rape.... knowing fully well that accused persons have not committed any offence against her,” the court noted.The facts made it clear that the woman had implicated the accused in a serious case of rape with the chargesheet being filed against them by the police. Accordingly, the court directed that a complaint against the woman be filed with the chief metropolitan magistrate for lodging a false case with police.I went into West Elm the other day and saw this super cute mid-century plant stand, and immediately thought to myself – I can make that! I was even more convinced of myself after I took a peek at the price tag.
Check out the video below for the step-by-step making process or read on!
Click here to SUBSCRIBE to my YouTube channel for more DIY videos!
Materials
MATERIALS USED
TOOLS USED
Now available for order on my Etsy shop! Click here for listing.
Measure your Planter
I started by measuring the size of my DIY concrete planter in order to figure out the size of the plant stand:
top diameter = 11-1/4″
bottom diameter = 10-1/4″
height = 10″
I wanted my legs to go half way up the sides, i.e. 5 inches
So the inner diameter of my plant stand will be (11-1/4+10-1/4)/2 = 10-3/4″
I also want the legs to be 5 inches below the stand, so 5″ above + 5″ below + 1-1/2″ (width of the supports) = 11-1/2″
Therefore my dowels will be 11-1/2″ and my cross supports 10-3/4″
Mark Your Cuts
I first cut my poplar board into 2 equal lengths, which I laid side by side and clamped together.
I roughly found the center point and marked across both pieces using a combination square. I then measured 3/8” on each side and marked again with my combination square. Finally I marked 3/4 inch deep. When I was done, each piece was marked with a 3/4 by 3/4 notch (this is equal to the thickness of the poplar board I used).
Don’t unclamp just yet! The last measurements you need to make are for the overall length of the support beams. Mine needed to measure 10-3/4 so I measured and marked 5-3/8 from center on each end. I then transferred this mark onto the 3/4″ edge. Ok, now you can remove the clamps!
Cut the Support Beams
I started by cutting out the notch using my band saw, but you can use a small hand saw just as well.
I wanted to make this stand as professional looking as the one at West Elm, so I thought it was important to cut the support beams so that they hugged the rounded shape of the dowels where they connected. I used my drill press with a 7/8” Forstner bit that matched the size of my dowels. I lined up the outer edge of the bit with the line I had marked and plunged it all the way through.
Cut the Dowels
For the legs, I decided they should go half way up the sides of my planter (5 inches) and I wanted equal length below |
had nothing but Alex Smith and a bag of old onions left. Cyrus Gray could have stopped the bleeding by catching a sure touchdown, but he dropped it because that is what happens when you put the Chiefs in the playoffs. It was sad and shocking and yet somehow predictable and 100% preventable because…
Your coach: Andy Reid. OH YEAH!
Your browser does not support HTML5 video tag.Click here to view original GIF
The Chiefs passed the ball TWENTY-FIVE times in the second half in that game against the Colts. Whyyyyyyyyy??? Why would you do that? This team was averaging 4.7 yards per carry that game. Knile Davis was DESTROYING the Colts. And yet here is Andy Reid, who can never help himself, calling eight million passes and extending the game by 50 hours. Jesus. It's like the polar inverse of Martyball. Every year, fans scream at Andy Reid to run the ball more when his team is running well and he never listens. Why does he hate running the ball? Does it remind him of exercise? By the way, Jamaal Charles got a new contract this offseason. Which means it will be twice as infuriating when Andy Reid doesn't run him enough.
Advertisement
Your quarterback: Alex Smith, who wants $17 million a year from the Chiefs because he has deemed himself ELITE. Watching Alex Smith play quarterback is like playing the penny slots: not much risk, not much reward, you're obviously the broke dude just trying to get through the rest of the night without incurring serious financial harm. Football Outsiders ranked Smith as the 20th most effective QB in football last season, behind even Sam Bradford, who is dead. Smith threw for just over 3,000 yards and was only picked off seven times last season. You know had a better season than that for Kansas City a few years back? Matt Cassel. So yes, let's pony up Fuck You money for the guy whose ceiling is somewhere south of Prime Matt Cassel.
I bet they extend him within the next two weeks.
What's new that sucks: Dexter McCluster is gone! OH NO! Now the Chiefs are left with just six fragile, undersized hybrid backs. Left tackle Branden Albert is gone, and now #1 pick and TMQ wet dream Eric Fisher will have to protect Smith's blind side, despite being fucking terrible last season. The secondary that allowed Andrew Luck to come back from 28 points down despite throwing a billion interceptions is somehow worse than a year ago. There is no one at corner. And the team failed to provide Smith with any additional weapons to throw too many short passes to.
Advertisement
That Colts comeback wasn't even the end of last season's misery. Turns out the Chiefs now know how to concuss each other in exhibition games, so look forward to more of that. Also, they tased the one black Chiefs fan in the stands this preseason. MISSOURI.
By the way, given all the shit with Ray Rice and Greg Hardy this offseason, it's amazing that the Chiefs could sever ties with Romeo Crennel and Scott Pioli and effectively render the Jovan Belcher murder/suicide all but forgotten. That all happened less than two years ago. And it happened mid-season. And only NOW is the NFL starting to talk about domestic violence and what not. The League still really doesn't talk about mental health issues with players (Belcher, Junior Seau) at all. It's just, "Welp, that happened! Let's wait for it to happen again!" Trauma doesn't just magically erase itself.
What has always sucked: God, Dwayne Bowe is still here. He'll never be as good as he was in 2010. At least Josh Gordon had the courtesy to be suspended and literally be absent from games. With Bowe, you go into every Chiefs game knowing he could catch three touchdowns but will choose to draw penises on the playsheet instead. I look forward to Andy Reid scheming six fourth quarter drops for him with a two-touchdown lead on a capable opponent.
Advertisement
All of this will be in service of a KC fanbase whose loudness is vastly overrated (the Chiefs have nine home wins in the past three years). It's the Chiefs who began the decibel-scale arms race between fans that has led to the Seahawks having the most obnoxious fanbase in the universe. So thanks for that, Kansas City. Assholes. The only way Kansas City makes anything good is by burning it. The best song about Kansas City is about the fear that someone from Kansas City is about to visit.
Worst of all, Kansas City is the city that allowed Jason Whitlock to have a career. I blame hip hop. Also, someone made this:
What is this? This is shit.
What might not suck: This is an Andy Reid team, so they will always be competitive. The front seven is great. Charles is a beast. Like, they'll tie the game 20-20 and then elect to punt from the opposing 35 with 10 seconds left. They will always manage to underachieve in a telegenic manner.
Advertisement
Hear it from Chiefs fans!
James:
Can't even talk about that playoff loss. Fuck you Andy.
Jeff:
Instead of making BOLD MOVES, the organization's preferred philosophy is to draft seemingly "safe" picks who nonetheless fail to materialize—studs like Victor Reilly, John Tait (two middling tackles in consecutive years!), and Ryan Sims—or to chronically overrate LSU products (Dwayne Bowe, Glenn Dorsey, and Tyson Jackson). There will be some bright spots along the way, primarily on the defensive side: DT, Neil Smith, Tony Gonzalez, Derrick Johnson, and Tamba Hali. Their careers will be overshadowed by the front office's failure to surround them with replacement-plus level players. This philosophy, combined with a real taste for retread 49er QBs, produces serviceable but not truly competitive teams. That keeps dumbass fans like me hanging on; it's not like there's much else to root for in KC given the Royals perpetual shittiness. I hate that the Chiefs are my favorite team.
Advertisement
Nick:
Our quarterback may get the largest contract in NFL history simply for not being Matt Cassel. Our old star OLB is probably on his way out and the new star OLB wants to get paid, meaning that we used our first-round pick on a backup OLB and ignored the fact that our entire WR corps was tragically born with no hands. To afford these contracts, we released our best cornerback, who signed with our division rivals and openly boasts of wanting to send us a message twice a year. There are now legal-to-drink adults in Kansas City that were not alive the last time the Chiefs won a playoff game. Oh...fuck Andrew Luck, fuck Fivehead Manning, and triple fuck the city of Indianapolis.
Advertisement
X:
Alex Smith wants $18 million to not shit the bed.
Scott:
The last year the Chiefs were in the Super Bowl was the same year that we landed on the Moon.
Advertisement
Ghost of Joe Delaney:
There are still plenty of deluded fans looking at this schedule and believing we can "really build on last season's success." "We get Seattle at home! That's a winnable game!" "The Patriots aren't so scary! And Arrowhead always gets up for Monday Night Football!" Please. The last time Kansas City won a Monday Night Football game in Arrowhead, it needed Marmalard to fumble a snap when he was just trying to take a knee to kick the game-winning field goal. There is simply no way this team gets the insanely lucky breaks they got last year to ride a 9-0 wave to even a first round playoff loss. The fans will be packing it in by the end of October, only to re-emerge with the same sad, misplaced optimism around this time next year.
Donnie:
My friends from Denver drive out to KC every year, and we go to the Chiefs/Broncos game. Last year, was the first year KC has been any good and boy did KC fans talk a lot of shit. Before the game a guy was walking around selling "KANSAS-FUCKING-CITY" t shirts in the parking lot, I probably saw a hundred people wearing them in our section of the parking lot. One of the guys next to us had a personalized Chiefs jersey with the name "DAVINATOR" on the back. Who the fuck would pay $200 for that? Then when we get in the stadium, a couple of my buddies nearly got in a fist fight in the bathroom, when a Chiefs fan pushed my buddy while he was at the urinal. We were hounded the whole second half by a drunk soccer mom who kept saying in a slurred voice "All you guysss can do is hold, you hold on every play", "If you didn't have Petyon Manning, you would fucking suck". Which was all you heard after the game was the only reason "The greatest defense ever" didn't get a single sack, or pressue was because the Broncos were holding. After the game we found out a Chiefs fan was beaten to death by some other Chiefs fans when he mistakenly passed out in the wrong car. That is the second year in a row someone died at the stadium....what the fuck?
Advertisement
Colin:
I really thought we were going to win. I thought it was going to be a magical season. I was going to write a five-thousand word Thought Catalog article to my 10 year old self about sticking with the Chiefs, that it gets better. It doesn't.
Aaron:
I was super excited about Andy Reid and Alex Smith coming to the team. That shouldn't be possible.
Advertisement
Brock:
The last quarterback drafted by the Chiefs to win a game for Kansas City was Todd Blackledge.
Jeremy:
Last year, I made it up to KC for the Chiefs/Browns game where Jason Campbell almost beat the Chiefs at Arrowhead because the Chiefs sucked and only made the playoffs because they played the kind of schedule Nick Saban likes to play in the non-con. I made a list of all the dumb-ass and outdated Chiefs jerseys I saw around me at that game. You ready? Mike Maslowski Dante Hall Tony Moiaki Rick (Just Rick) Mikay-Kay Tech N9NE Matt Cassel This is a fan base who hasn't seen the team win a playoff game since I was in 3rd grade and yet every Sunday, they still clog interstate 70 with shitty old short buses that have been spray painted red and had AstroTurf installed as carpet. But damnit it's the tailgate capital of America, they know how to party in that shitty parking lot! This is the NFL's equivalent of Ole Miss. If I had a nickel for every time the Chiefs lost a playoff game to the Colts, I'd have a handful of nickels to throw over the upper deck like I've seen drunken fans do with their empty beer bottles. Fuck Herm Edwards and Carl Peterson forever.
Matt:
May Matt Cassel freeze solid playing outdoors in Minnesota and then shattered into a million pieces by Clay Matthews.
Advertisement
Jason:
We give up 45 points in the playoffs and decide "Nope, we don't need cornerbacks"
Andrew:
This franchise has fucked me so many times that it should at least make me a mix-tape. Lin Elliot can suck an extra crispy bag of dicks.
Jeremy:
I wish the Chiefs had the Redskins' problem. I wish the team had a growing call from Native American groups to change our name, logo and uniforms. Because clearly, this team has angered some ancient Indian spirit with its stadium full of Type 2 Diabetics shoving their fat ass ham glazed heads into faux feather warbonnets and all that dumbassed tomahawk chopping. There is no other explanation for the nearly 30 years of playoff fucksplosion after fucksplosion.
Advertisement
Matt:
Our best pro team is the Kansas Jayhawks. We really enjoy hiring fat football coaches. Not just fat, like fucking FAT.
Advertisement
Jack:
1) They finished the season 2-6. So everyone can shut the hell up about how we're good again. 2) Alex Smith is a garbage QB. He ranked 21st in passing DVOA and tucks the ball for a 1 yard scramble anytime he feels a breeze. 3) Their GM isn't going to save them either. His first big move was to extend Dwayne Bowe to a huge deal. His second big move was to extend Jamaal Charles. The two death sentence transactions of the NFL are overpaying for an overrated wide receiver and going long-term with an aging running back. We should just give up now.
Advertisement
Zach:
The funniest thing is when other fans came up to me after the Indy playoff game and said "I bet you were devastated by that one, huh?" Devastated? How could I be devastated when I've seen the same fucking script play out over and over again? I know it's coming and I accept it.
Advertisement
Brett:
Kansas City's weather is the worst in the world (100 degrees with 100% humidity in the summer, cold as balls in the winter), all BBQ outside of Oklahoma Joe's is overrated, and the conversation on KC sports talk surrounding the Chiefs makes Colts fans seem positively educated.
Evan:
FUCK SCOTT PIOLI
Jeff:
My wife can throw the ball as far as our quarterback. We rave about the tailgating experience in KC more than we rave about our football team, and even that is bullshit. This year, they have outlawed glass (yes, GLASS) in the parking lot. I guess Wyandotte County residents are going to have to go back to stabbing each other the old fashioned way.
Advertisement
Ryan:
* The Chiefs have more player-committed murder-suicides than playoff victories in the past two decades. * During last year's meltdown against the Colts in the post season, it looked like the injuries slider was turned up to 100% and they were carting bodies off the field like they were filming B-roll for "The Strain". * Brodie Croyle (!) is the only quarterback drafted by the team to start a game for them since the mid-80's...and he barely beat out Damon Huard in the process. Croyle then promptly lost all six of his starts. He couldn't even beat out Tyler Thigpen once he returned from injury.
Advertisement
Tim:
The Chiefs' entire offseason was spent letting guys go to save cap space, which would be all well and good if they actually spent the money toward other players to replace them. Nope… instead they're going to become the most cost efficient 8-8 team in football. It's the classic bullshit "addition by subtraction", "good teams build from the draft!" rhetoric. It's as if they've conned the fans into thinking their cheap tactics are actually saving THEM money. You can get away with this when your other professional team is the Royals.
Dennis:
At no point in the playoff game against the Colts and their mongoloid ogre of a QB did I or anyone I know feel like the Chiefs would win. They were up 35 in the 3rd quarter and I texted my friend "We're going to blow this." Last week I watched the Todd Blackledge segments of the Elway to Marino 30 for 30, just to emotionally prepare for this season.
Advertisement
Ryan:
Sporting Kansas City games sell out more often than Chiefs games, and it isn't just because Arrowhead happens to be in the meth capital of the USA. SKC is run in a competent, fan-friendly manner while also offering more excitement than Chiefs games, which shouldn't be possible considering that it is a fucking soccer team. All our fans are delusional and think the fact that we had 8 pro bowlers last year (I know! 8! Can you fucking believe that?!) means we are a shoo-in for the playoffs. All these guys made the pro-bowl because they are the 3rd best player at their position in a shitty conference and everyone better is still in the playoffs. And, of course they are getting signed to cap crippling extensions that make 10-6 our ceiling for the next 3 years. Brad Childress is on payroll as "Spread Game Analyst".
Chris:
I grew up in Nebraska where there's no pro team, so I could have picked any team to root for. I picked the Chiefs. They made the AFC Championship that year (yay!). It was the last year they won a playoff game. I was 7 at the time and am now 28 fucking years old. I sent a text to two other idiot Chiefs fans when the Colts cut the lead to 38-17 last year saying 'I guarantee we piss this away', they agreed, and the next roughly hour and a half summed up our 21 years of fandom nicely. Our secondary was fucking abysmal by the end of last year (see: Colts, Indianapolis game), so we decided to upgrade in the offseason. Just kidding, we let our best corner walk, and didn't sign jackshit to replace him. Our #1 corner this year is a 2013 7 th rounder who the 49ers cut before last season started. Our O-line is garbage. Poor Jamaal Charles. I feel terrible for good players and good guys like him and Tony Gonzalez that get stuck playing for this bunkass franchise.
Advertisement
Brian:
KC traded draft picks for Herm Edwards.
Tim:
The Chiefs last won a playoff game when I was less than a year old. I can now legally drink the pain away.
Advertisement
Noah:
The owner Clark Hunt lives in Dallas and has never even lived in Kansas City. His father and ex-owner Lamar Hunt never lived here either, but that didn't stop him from spending his last few months of life engineering a county tax initiative so shady and complex that it took nearly six years for residents to realize how badly they had been suckered. I remember watching that last playoff game against the Oilers with my step-brother when I was in seventh grade. Shit, a few years ago I spent a drunken night scouring the internet to buy some bootleg DVD of the game burned from a warped VHS tape. I've spent countless drunken nights watching this grainy fucking DVD too. It's like a divorced guy rewatching his wedding video over and over again to the point that he's lost touch with present day because he's stuck in a past that wasn't even all that great to begin with. I mean, the Beatles still hadn't released "Let it Be" the last time the Chiefs were even in the Super Bowl. You'd never know of this 44 year drought from talking to a Chiefs fan though. These people, myself included, honestly believe we're on the same level of "storied" franchises as the Packers, Steelers, 49ers, or even the fucking Oakland Raiders. The delusion us Chiefs fans have about our success is on par with Kim Jong-Un's imagined basketball skills. It's a shame too, because Arrowhead is probably the best gameday environment in the NFL. There's very little corporate tents and booths compared to the rest of the league, and shit, the stadium's still called Arrowhead, not #BigMayo Field or something. Yes, 31 teams end the season on a bad note, but the Chiefs take that extra step to numb your heart and soul into non-existence and you slowly lose the ability to not just love, but to not even trust people at a basic human level. I have such great memories of watching the 1990s Chiefs in middle and high school. There's only a handful of games I've missed over the last 20 years, and those were all due to extreme circumstances. They only lost 17 home games in during the 90s, so they were good, right? I don't know anymore. It all seems like a dream, and now that I'm old enough to have a job I hate everyday, the memories of the Chiefs glory days (once again, the glory days weren't even that great) seems all the more cruel.
Advertisement
William:
The last time I went to a Chiefs game a single 50ish man in a 25 year old rusted out pickup parked next to us. I watched him for the next 30 minutes down a fifth of Jack and polish of 2 joints without getting out of the drivers seat. He proceeded to stumble out of his car and just kept yelling CHIEEEFFFFS as he stumbled toward the stadium. No one even batted an eye and just yelled it right back to him. The fans in Kansas City still think its 1993 and Marty-ball and Derrick "The Original Travis Henry" Thomas are gonna run out of that tunnel to ground and pound em towards another playoff loss to Buffalo. We act like Arrowhead is the goddamn Taj Mahal because 20 years ago they went 8-0 at home. I can't wait til Blaine Gabbert becomes the next San Fransisco backup qb to be the savior. Also, we've lost our last 7 playoff games.
Beau:
I've been watching this team since 1991. That's 2 owners, 3 GMs, 7 Head Coaches and I don't know how many starting QBs (but at least 5 of them were backups on loan from the 49ers). Yet within every single one of those "regime changes" this team STILL can't stop the big play. Whenever theChiefs defense is on the field, I don't care if the opposing QB is Tom Brady or Ryan Fitzpatrick. As soon as he winds up to throw the long bomb - before it's even caught - I've already thrown my hands up in the air and said "Ah shit, here we go..." because it doesn't matter who the team leader, captain, Head Coach, General Manager or President/CEO of the Chiefs is, we're about to get burned…by Jason fucking Campbell, etc... You'll get at least 12 letters from other Chiefs fans about the Kickers (likely more, but that's the only amount of fans I can personally confirm), and they'll all be 100% correct. And yet it's only myself and literally any of the 31 other Head Coaches in the league who seem to notice you could put Stephen Hawking in a Buick and drop him in the middle of the field and he'd probably breakup more completions that anyone in our secondary over the last 15 years.
Advertisement
Nick:
Fuck Scott Pioli.
Mike:
I root for a team where I have better hands than the #2 WR, a better leg than the kicker, and a stronger arm than the quarterback. And if all that wasn't enough, our head coach consumes more calories in one meal than I do in a whole week. And if THAT wasn't enough, I ordered a Dwayne Bowe jersey from a shady online jersey dealer and the 2 fell off leaving me with just an 8, which will probably represent how many "that couldn't be any worse timing" drops Bowe has in 2014.
Advertisement
Ryan:
Lost to the Colts 3 times in the playoffs. Once by 7 in a game when nobody EVER punted. Also F Lin Elliot
Ryan:
Arrowhead Stadium is always full of the most white trash, stuck in the 90s, I'm-probably-gonna-beat-my-kids-if-the-Chiefs-lose-this-game people from the shitty parts of the KC metro (basically the Missouri side). These assholes wear Zubaz pants because they think it's still socially acceptable. It was never socially acceptable. On top of that, the Chiefs will actually get your hopes up (like their professional baseball brethren from across the parking lot), just to blow an 87-point lead to the fucking Colts and their Amish quarterback. God hates Kansas City.
Trevor:
The only alcohol I had after the wild card game was gin. I poured it into some Pepsi. It was disgusting.
Advertisement
Gavin:
This is currently hanging in the Kansas City International Airport.
Advertisement
AFC South: Titans | Jaguars | Texans | Colts
Advertisement
NFC South: Falcons | Buccaneers | Panthers | Saints
AFC West: Chargers | Chiefs | Raiders | Broncos
Advertisement
NFC West: Rams |Cardinals | 49ers | Seahawks
AFC North: Steelers | Bengals | Browns | Ravens
Advertisement
Wanna be part of the Deadspin NFL previews? It's simple. Just email me and give me ample evidence of why your team sucks: personal anecdotes, encounters with fans, etc. I'll throw any good material into the post and give you proper credit. Next team up: THE RAIDERS.Hellenistic Judaism was a form of Judaism in classical antiquity that combined Jewish religious tradition with elements of Greek culture. Until the fall of the Western Roman Empire and the early Muslim conquests of the eastern Mediterranean, the main centers of Hellenistic Judaism were Alexandria, Egypt and Antioch (now in southern Turkey), the two main Greek urban settlements of the Middle East and North Africa area, both founded at the end of the fourth century BCE in the wake of the conquests of Alexander the Great. Hellenistic Judaism also existed in Jerusalem during the Second Temple Period, where there was conflict between Hellenizers and traditionalists (sometimes called Judaizers).
The major literary product of the contact of Second Temple Judaism and Hellenistic culture is the Septuagint translation of the Hebrew Bible from Biblical Hebrew and Biblical Aramaic to Koine Greek, specifically, Jewish Koiné Greek. Mentionable are also the philosophic and ethical treatises of Philo and the historiographical works of the other Hellenistic Jewish authors.[1][2]
The decline of Hellenistic Judaism started in the second century and its causes are still not fully understood. It may be that it was eventually marginalized by, partially absorbed into or became progressively the Koine-speaking core of Early Christianity centered on Antioch and its traditions, such as the Melkite Greek Catholic Church and the Greek Orthodox Church of Antioch.
Hellenism [ edit ]
Map of Alexander's empire, extending east and south of ancient Macedonia
The conquests of Alexander in the late fourth century BCE spread Greek culture and colonization—a process of cultural change called Hellenization—over non-Greek lands, including the Levant. This gave rise to the Hellenistic period, which sought to create a common or universal culture in the Alexandrian empire based on that of fifth-century Athens, along with a fusion of Near Eastern cultures.[3] The period is characterized by a new wave of Greek colonization which established Greek cities and kingdoms in Asia and Africa,[4] the most famous being Alexandria in Egypt. New cities were established composed of colonists who came from different parts of the Greek world, and not from a specific metropolis ("mother city") as before.[4]
Mosaic floor of a Jewish Synagogue Aegina (300 BCE).
These Jews living in countries west of the Levant formed the Hellenistic diaspora. The Egyptian diaspora is the most well-known of these.[5] It witnessed close ties, indeed the firm economic integration, of Judea with the Ptolemaic Kingdom ruled from Alexandria, and the friendly relations which existed between the royal court and the leaders of the Jewish community. This was a diaspora of choice, not of imposition. Information is less robust regarding diasporas in other territories. It suggests that the situation was by and large the same as it was in Egypt.[6]
Jewish life in both Judea and the diaspora was influenced by the culture and language of Hellenism. The Greeks viewed Jewish culture favorably, while vice versa, Hellenism gained adherents among the Jews. While Hellenism has sometimes been presented (under the influence of 2 Maccabees, itself notably a work in Koine Greek), as a threat of assimilation diametrically opposed to Jewish tradition,
Adaptation to Hellenic culture did not require compromise of Jewish precepts or conscience. When a Greek gymnasium was introduced into Jerusalem, it was installed by a Jewish High Priest. And other priests soon engaged in wrestling matches in the palaestra. They plainly did not reckon such activities as undermining their priestly duties. Erich S. Gruen[7]: 73–74
The main religious issue dividing Hellenized Jews from traditional Jews was the application of biblical laws in a Hellenistic (or Roman or other non-Jewish) empire.[8]
Hellenistic rulers of Judea [ edit ]
Under the suzerainty of the Ptolemaic Kingdom and later the Seleucid Empire, Judea witnessed a period of peace and protection of its institutions.[9] For their aid against his Ptolemaic enemies, Antiochus III the Great promised his Jewish subjects a reduction in taxes and funds to repair the city of Jerusalem and the Second Temple.[9]
Relations deteriorated under Antiochus's successor Seleucus IV Philopator, and then, for reasons not fully understood, his successor Antiochus IV Epiphanes drastically overturned the previous policy of respect and protection, banning key Jewish religious rites and traditions in Judea (though not among the diaspora) and sparking a traditionalist revolt against Greek rule.[9] Out of this revolt was formed an independent Jewish kingdom known as the Hasmonean dynasty, which lasted from 165 BCE to 63 BCE. The Hasmonean Dynasty eventually disintegrated due to civil war, which coincided with civil wars in Rome.
Hasmonean civil war [ edit ]
The Hasmonean civil war began when the High Priest Hyrcanus II (a supporter of the Pharisees) was overthrown by his younger brother, Aristobulus II (a supporter of the Sadducees). A third faction, consisting primarily of Idumeans from Maresha, led by Antipater and his son Herod, re-installed Hyrcanus, who, according to Josephus, was merely Antipater's puppet. In 47 BCE, Antigonus, a nephew of Hyrcanus II and son of Aristobulus II, asked Julius Caesar for permission to overthrow Antipater. Caesar ignored him, and in 42 BCE Antigonus, with the aid of the Parthians defeated Herod. Antigonus ruled for only three years, until Herod, with the aid of Rome, overthrew him and had him executed. Antigonus was the last Hasmonean ruler.
Influence [ edit ]
The major literary product of the contact of Judaism and Hellenistic culture is the Septuagint, as well as the apocrypha and pseudepigraphic apocalyptic literature (such as the Assumption of Moses, the Testaments of the Twelve Patriarchs, the Book of Baruch, the Greek Apocalypse of Baruch, etc.) dating to the period. Important sources are Philo of Alexandria and Flavius Josephus. Some scholars[10] consider Paul of Tarsus to be a Hellenist as well, even though he himself claimed to be a Pharisee (Acts 23:6).
Philo of Alexandria was an important apologist of Judaism, presenting it as a tradition of venerable antiquity that, far from being a barbarian cult of an oriental nomadic tribe, with its doctrine of monotheism had anticipated tenets of Hellenistic philosophy. Philo could draw on Jewish tradition to use customs which Greeks thought as primitive or exotic as the basis for metaphors: such as "circumcision of the heart" in the pursuit of virtue.[11] Consequently, Hellenistic Judaism emphasized monotheistic doctrine (heis theos), and represented reason (logos) and wisdom (sophia) as emanations from God.
Beyond Tarsus, Alexandretta, Antioch and Northwestern Syria (the main "Cilician and Asiatic" centers of Hellenistic Judaism in the Levant), the second half of the Second Temple period witnessed an acceleration of Hellenization in Israel itself, with Jewish high priests and aristocrats alike adopting Greek names:
'Ḥoni' became 'Menelaus'; 'Joshua' became 'Jason' or 'Jesus' [Ἰησοῦς]. The Hellenic influence pervaded everything, and even in the very strongholds of Judaism it modified the organization of the state, the laws, and public affairs, art, science, and industry, affecting even the ordinary things of life and the common associations of the people […] The inscription forbidding strangers to advance beyond a certain point in the Temple was in Greek; and was probably made necessary by the presence of numerous Jews from Greek-speaking countries at the time of the festivals (comp. the "murmuring of the Grecians against the Hebrews," Acts vi. 1). The coffers in the Temple which contained the shekel contributions were marked with Greek letters (Sheḳ. iii. 2). It is therefore no wonder that there were synagogues of the Libertines, Cyrenians, Alexandrians, Cilicians, and Asiatics in the Holy City itself (Acts vi. 9).[12]
'There is neither Jew nor Greek' [ edit ]
Ethnic, cultural, and social tensions within the Hellenistic Jewish world were partly overcome by the emergence of a new, typically Antiochian, Middle-Eastern Greek doctrine (doxa), either by
established, autochthonous Hellenized Cilician-Western Syrian Jews (themselves descendants of Babylonian Jewish migrants who had long adopted various elements of Greek culture and civilization while retaining a generally conservative, strict attachment to Halakha), heathen, 'Classical' Greeks, Macedonian Greeks and Greco-Syrian gentiles, or the local, autochthonous descendants of Greek or Greco-Syrian converts to mainstream Judaism – known as proselytes (Greek: προσήλυτος/proselytes) and Greek-speaking Jews born of mixed marriages.
Their efforts were probably facilitated by the arrival of a fourth wave of Greek-speaking newcomers to Cilicia/Southern Turkey and Northwestern Syria: Cypriot Jews and 'Cyrenian' (Libyan) Jewish migrants of non-Egyptian North African Jewish origin, as well as gentile Roman settlers from Italy—many of whom already spoke fluent Koine Greek and/or sent their children to Greek schools. Some scholars believe that, at the time, these Cypriot and Cyrenian North African Jewish migrants, such as Simon of Cyrene, were generally less affluent than the autochthonous Cilician-Syrian Jews and practiced a more 'liberal' form of Judaism, more propitious for the formation of a new canon:
[North African] Cyrenian Jews were of sufficient importance in those days to have their name associated with a synagogue at Jerusalem (Acts 6:9). And when the persecution arose about Stephen [a Hellenized Syrian-Cilician Jew], some of these Jews of Cyrene who had been converted at Jerusalem, were scattered abroad and came with others to Antioch and [initially] preached the word "unto the Jews only" (Acts 11:19, 20 the King James Version), and one of them, Lucius, became a prophet in the early church there [the nascent Greek 'Orthodox' community of Antioch]. International Standard Bible Encyclopedia[13][ excessive quote ]
But Paul, himself a relatively 'liberal' Hellenist convert to Christianity, was later threatened by more religiously conservative Jewish Hellenists as seen in the New Testament Acts 9 verse 29: "And he spoke boldly in the name of the Lord Jesus and disputed against the Hellenists, but they attempted to kill him."
These subtle, progressive socio-cultural shifts and tensions are somehow summarized succinctly in Chapter 3 of the Epistle of Paul to the Galatians:
There is neither Jew nor Greek, there is neither bond nor free, there is neither male nor female: for ye are all one in Christ Jesus. And if ye be Christ's, then are ye Abraham's seed, and heirs according to the promise.[14]
Decline of the Hellenistai and partial conversion to Christianity [ edit ]
The reasons for the decline of Hellenistic Judaism are obscure. It may be that it was marginalized by, absorbed into, or became Early Christianity (see the Gospel according to the Hebrews). The Epistles of Paul and the Acts of the Apostles report that, after his initial focus on the conversion of Hellenized Jews across Anatolia, Macedonia, Thrace and Northern Syria without criticizing their laws and traditions,[15][16] Paul the Apostle eventually preferred to evangelize communities of Greek and Macedonian proselytes and Godfearers, or Greek circles sympathetic to Judaism: the Apostolic Decree allowing converts to forego circumcision made Christianity a more attractive option for interested pagans than Rabbinic Judaism, which required ritual circumcision for converts (see Brit milah). See also Circumcision controversy in early Christianity[17][18] and the Abrogation of Old Covenant laws.
The attractiveness of Christianity may, however, have suffered a setback with its being explicitly outlawed in the 80s CE by Domitian as a "Jewish superstition", while Judaism retained its privileges as long as members paid the fiscus Judaicus.
The opening verse of Acts 6 points to the problematic cultural divisions between Hellenized Jews and Aramaic-speaking Israelites in Jerusalem, a disunion that reverberated within the emerging Christian community itself:
it speaks of "Hellenists" and "Hebrews." The existence of these two distinct groups characterizes the earliest Christian community in Jerusalem. The Hebrews were Jewish Christians who spoke almost exclusively Aramaic, and the Hellenists were also Jewish Christians whose mother tongue was Greek. They were Greek-speaking Jews of the Diaspora, who returned to settle in Jerusalem. To identify them, Luke uses the term Hellenistai. When he had in mind Greeks, gentiles, non-Jews who spoke Greek and lived according to the Greek fashion, then he used the word Hellenes (Acts 21.28). As the very context of Acts 6 makes clear, the Hellenistai are not Hellenes.[19]
Some historians believe that a sizeable proportion of the Hellenized Jewish communities of Southern Turkey (Antioch, Alexandretta and neighboring cities) and Syria/Lebanon converted progressively to the Greco-Roman branch of Christianity that eventually constituted the "Melkite" (or "Imperial") Hellenistic churches of the MENA area:
As Jewish Christianity originated at Jerusalem, so Gentile Christianity started at Antioch, then the leading center of the Hellenistic East, with Peter and Paul as its apostles. From Antioch it spread to the various cities and provinces of Syria, among the Hellenistic Syrians as well as among the Hellenistic Jews who, as a result of the great rebellions against the Romans in A.D. 70 and 130, were driven out from Jerusalem and Palestine into Syria.[20]
Cultural legacy [ edit ]
Widespread influence beyond Second Temple Judaism [ edit ]
Both Early Christianity and Early Rabbinical Judaism |
day since Sunday.
Turtles opens tonight in late nights at 7 p.m. tonight. It’s another Michael Bay production, by the way, but this installment is directed by Jonathan Liebesman (Wrath Of The Titans, Battle Los Angeles). The Turtles also opens in 17 international markets which will represent about 25% of its international run. The key territories are Mexico and Russia.
There are three other pictures opening and there will likely be a big gap between the No. 1 and No. 2 spots and the No. 3 Into The Storm from Warner Bros. The studio is spending money on marketing but it doesn’t seem to be sticking. This disaster pic, reminiscent of its highly successful Twister, could take in maybe $15M to $17M. It goes into theaters tonight at 8 PM.
Under that, we should have another significant gap again as Step Up: All In from Lionsgate (yes, there’s a 3-D version for this dance movie) bows tonight at 8 PM. Not much of an audience for this but the teen girls who might go for the romance factor. It will bow in 2,072 theaters this weekend.
Both that and the The Best Exotic Marigold Hotel-reminiscent The Hundred-Foot Journey, despite getting a boost in the marketing from using the names Oprah Winfrey and Steven Spielberg (who produced the film along with Juliet Blake), is not expected to pull in more than around $8M to $9M. And the reviews haven’t been as strong as Disney would have liked. This DreamWorks/Participant Films’ offering is appealing to older females, so maybe it could have a better multiple. It’s directed by the wonderful Lasse Hallstrom. Also bows at 7 PM.BOSTON - Mayor Marty Walsh on Monday proposed hiking the mayoral salary to $199,000 a year and increasing the annual salary of city councilors by $12,000.
The proposal comes as some members of the 13-member City Council push for higher pay and the council president calls the body "undervalued."
While Walsh is proposing an increase to the salary that comes with holding the mayor's office, a Walsh spokeswoman said in an email that Walsh will not accept an increase "at this time." The mayor currently earns $175,000 a year, and Walsh's offices says the mayor's salary historically has been double what the City Council receives.
Walsh vetoed a proposal last year that would have hiked city councilors' salaries by $20,000, to $107,500.
Since the veto, Boston City Council President Bill Linehan has expressed interest in the salary going up to $105,000.
The current annual salary for Boston city councilors is $87,500. There are four at-large councilors, who are elected city-wide, and nine district councilors.
After vetoing last year's proposed hike to City Council salaries, Walsh restarted a compensation advisory board.
The board recommended that the mayor's salary increase to $194,000 and councilors' salaries increase by $9,500 to $97,000. Some councilors, including Linehan, appeared insulted by the $97,000 figure.
Earlier on Monday, The Boston Globe published a tabulation of how many hearings councilors have attended since January 2014. The review showed Linehan appearing at 15 percent of the hearings, with Linehan telling the newspaper that City Council presidents have focused on "the responsibilities of the president" and allowed committee chairs to steer the hearings.
The attendance figures outlined in the Globe drew a rebuke from Annissa Essaibi George, a candidate for one of the four at-large seats.
"It is appalling that some members of the Boston City Council are unable to attend merely 1/4 of Council hearings and meetings, yet they have spent months advocating for an unsustainable pay raise," she said in a statement.
"It is especially concerning that zero public safety hearings have addressed recent increases in violent crime, and that attendance at BPS budget hearings -- the largest line item in the City's budget -- is anything but acceptable," she added.
Essaibi George missed out on a spot on the Boston City Council during the 2013 election, coming in fifth place out of 19 candidates.
The founder of the Stitch House, a fabric and knitting store in Boston's Dorchester neighborhood, Essaibi George is the only non-incumbent running for one of the four at-large seats.
This post was updated at 4:16 p.m. with a note on the history between mayoral and City Council salaries.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
Alan Pardew is set to be Crystal Palace's new manager after a compensation deal was agreed with Newcastle.
The 53-year-old was the Eagles' number one choice to replace Neil Warnock and
, but the move hinged on Palace agreeing compensation for the former West Ham, Charlton and Reading boss.
Magpies owner Mike Ashley has now agreed to a package believed to be worth £2.25million to release Pardew from his contract, which was due to run until 2020.
The Crystal Palace co-owners will now search for a final agreement with Pardew on personal terms before confirming the appointment. His new deal will include a significant bonus for keeping the club up.
Analysis:
(Image: Serena Taylor)
Pardew is expected to be in charge by the New Year, when he will be handed significant sums to strengthen the south London club. Palace currently have a few deals on ice that were well in motion before Warnock's dismissal, and Pardew will be given the option of re-igniting those.
The relegation battlers are desperately in need of a new striker and a left-back.
Live updates from our colleagues at the Chronicle in Newcastle:News Crypto Charity Event for Covenant House Toronto Raises $70,000
A cryptocurrency charity event organized for Covenant House Toronto raised three times their goal, netting $70,000 in Ethereum.
It’s always amazing what can happen when people have control over their economic decisions. No red tape, no dealing with bank regulations, or dealing with bureaucratic nonsense. People tend to be able to accomplish far more on their own when left unfettered, and this is definitely seen when it comes to charity. Case in point is the recent crypto charity event for Covenant House Toronto that far exceeded expectations.
Over $61,000 raised at #merrymerkle so far! Thanks to Robbie & Andreas for making tonight possible pic.twitter.com/NDdan6HkIX — Covenant House TO (@CovenantHouseTO) December 22, 2017
Gather Around the Merkle Tree
The event in question is the Merry Merkle Tree event that was held on December 21st. More than 200 people attended the event, which was organized by Robbie Bent, the CEO of Truebit. Instead of a traditional Christmas tree, the event featured a Merkle tree that was connected to the blockchain.
The goal was to raise $25,000 for Covenant House Toronto, a charity that feeds and shelters homeless youth. Of the idea for the tree and event, Bent says:
We thought it was a funny pun. What if we had a Christmas Tree that lit up based on events happening on the ethereum blockchain? It’s the first hardware Christmas tree that was connected to the blockchain.
Word quickly spread beyond those at the event itself, and donations came pouring in, mostly in Ether. Overall, $3,000 was raised in cash, with the remainder of the initial $70,000 in Ethereum. Donations came from companies and individuals from all across the world.
Tis the Season for Giving
For the event itself, a total of 86 Ether was raised. The charity hopes to raise an eventual total of $200,000, which would be enough to feed everyone at their shelter for an entire year. To date, the charity drive has raised 100.5 Ether. The charity drive is ongoing, and you can donate here. The cryptocurrency will be converted into fiat in early January.
Needless to say, Bent is very happy with the amount of money raised and the response by the crypto community. He says:
There’s a real community here. You have 3,000 people who are super obsessed with this new technology and the way it’s going to change the world, and I think those are the type of people who are really willing to give back.
The surge in cryptocurrency prices is allowing a number of people to give heavily to charity. A couple who bought bitcoins back in 2013 are now donating all of their profits to the MUSC Hollings Cancer Center in South Carolina. The big daddy of crypto charity this year is Pine, the man behind the Pineapple Fund. He mined bitcoins when the cryptocurrency was still new, and the results have paid off. He realized that he had more money than he would ever need, so he created the fund to give away a whopping $86 million in Bitcoin to worthy charities.
In the end, good things happen when people are unencumbered by regulations from governments and financial institutions. The Merry Merkle Tree event is just the latest example of people using cryptocurrency for something incredibly worthwhile. A lot of youths are going to have a safe place to sleep and something to eat due to the generosity of crypto enthusiasts.
How much do you think the Merry Merkle Tree event will eventually raise? Have you ever used cryptocurrency for charitable reasons? Let us know in the comments below.
Images courtesy of Twitter/@CovenantHouseTO, YouTube/Truebit, and Pixabay.A new year at the Nürburgring has begun for Matias Henkola. On his return to the Walkenhorst Motorsport BMW M6 GT3, the Finnish racer from Porvoo completed the VLN season opener gathering important set-up data for the upcoming season. The beautiful bright sunny day ended with a top 25 finish in the 63. ADAC Westfalenfahrt.
Morning qualifying saw the number 35 BMW M6 GT3 slot into 30th position on the grid.
“We had a tough qualifying. The car wasn’t very fast, so we had to start from 30th place. All the other BMWs were struggling a bit for speed as well and when sitting on the starting grid, I could only see BMWs around me. It almost reminded me of when I ran in the BMW Cup some years ago,” Henkola laughs.
With all eyes of the many thousands of fans that had flocked to the Eifel race track focused on the big field of cars, the lights went green for the 4-hour endurance race.
“I kinda went into the race with silk gloves on because I was surrounded by BMWs and knew that all cars should gather as much info as possible from the race. I didn’t want to push too hard with my fellow competitors from BMW. The focus was just on my main goal, which was to get the laps needed with a consistent and fast race pace.
“We tried out a new set-up for the race and needed the information on how the car would change over a stint. The overall balance of the car was good. Considering this was a baseline set-up made with the new aerodynamic regulations in mind and without any real running on the track before this weekend, I have to give a lot of credit to our engineers.”
Henkola controlled the pace to the runners in front of him for a couple of laps before placing an attack on two fellow BMW M6 GT3 pilots he had in his sights since the start.
“The Schubert BMW and Dunlop-branded BMW from Walkenhorst were in front of me. They were pushing quite hard and were rough on their tyres, so I just controlled the situation and hung back a couple of car lengths for a few laps, waiting for a spot to overtake. They had a bad exit onto the Döttinger Höhe and I used the slipstream to pass both in one go.
“On my second stint I raced together with the Rowe BMWs. They were a couple of car lengths in front of me and the gap remained the same. Using them as a reference, the pace of the car was as good as it could be and stayed consistent over the stint. BMW obviously doesn’t have the pace to compete for top positions in the field right now, but I think we are going in the right direction.”
After two stints Henkola came into the pits from tenth place to hand the PlayStation-sponsored BMW over to team owner and driver Henry Walkenhorst. The GT Academy winner from 2010, Jordan Tresson, was tasked with the final stint. The Frenchman took the chequered flag in 22nd place before disqualification took the car out of the final results.
Despite this setback, Henkola looks back satisfied as the focus was on preparing for the 24 Hours of Nürburgring in May, which he will compete in with the team’s other car, the Dunlop BMW M6 GT3.
“I think the pace of our cars was as good as all the other BMWs. The setup and the tyres were working nicely. Our engineers and Dunlop have obviously done a lot of work during the winter and I’m super happy that we are on such a good path already from the first proper outing on the Nordschleife this year.”
This article was originally published by GTXM.media/GT REPORT as a press release for Matias Henkola. Subscribe to the mailing list to receive yours directly in your inbox.The National Organization for Marriage president Brian Brown and Focus on the Family vice president Tim Goeglein were the guests on a webinar last week hosted by the Lutheran Church-Missouri Synod, in which they discussed the need for young “heroes” to bring the anti-marriage equality cause to younger generations.
The two also discussed the supposed threat to religious liberty put forward by what Goeglein called “the political agenda of organized homosexuals.”
“One of the things that perhaps Christians and Jews and others have not fully internalized is that the political agenda of organized homosexuals in America is one of the great threats to our religious liberty,” Goeglein said.
He added that gay rights are bringing about “a new era of intolerance against those of us who are men and women of faith.”
“I think that’s exactly right,” agreed BrownLions Seahawks Football
Officials talk things over after Calvin Johnson fumbled the ball at the goal line in the fourth quarter of Monday night's game against Seattle.
(AP Photo)
SEATTLE -- The Detroit Lions have heard the apologies before, and they're expecting another this week after officials botched an intentional batting call late in a 13-10 loss Monday night against the Seahawks. But at some point, safety James Ihedigbo says, enough is enough. "It's costing wins and losses," he said. "A simple, 'Sorry, we made a mistake' doesn't suffice." The Lions have been on the short end of several controversial ruling in the past five years. That includes the infamous "Calvin Johnson Rule" game against Chicago in 2010, when Johnson was ruled to have not completed the process of a catch on a go-ahead touchdown against the Bears. And that of course includes last year's playoff against Dallas, when officials botched the process of a pass interference call on a third-and-1. The Lions were forced to punt, and the Cowboys scored the game-winner on the subsequent series. The league later apologized for screwing up the pass interference call, and also a missed holding call. Now four games later, the Lions were on the short end of yet another call. This time the back judge somehow ruled that Seattle's K.J. Wright did not intentionally bat the ball out of the end zone, when he clearly batted the ball out of the end zone and later admitted to it. "I wanted to just knock it out of bounds and not try to catch it and fumble it," Wright said. Ihedigbo is tired of being on the wrong end of those calls, and ripped the NFL for not holding officials to a high enough standard. He wants to see real reform. "They have to do something," he said. "They have to be able to call in (from New York) and say, 'Hey, you guys did not get that play right. Stop the game, let's get this call correct.' Because it's costing wins and losses." Ihedigbo said he's tired of hearing excuses and apologies from the league. "It's not going to change it to a win," he said. "I mean, it's just unfortunate. I mean, they got to be held accountable, just as players are in terms of equipment violations, whatever it might be. There's a standard that players are held to on the field, there's a standard that coaches are held to on the field, there's a standard that teams are held to on the field and there has to be a standard that officials are held to as well. You can't just apologize." Asked whether he thought officials are held to a high enough standard, Ihedigbo said, "No." "That's enough I can say," Ihedigbo said. "I'm not trying to get fined."
Lions at Seahawks on Monday Night Football - 10-5-2015 38 Gallery: Lions at Seahawks on Monday Night Football - 10-5-2015
-- Download the Detroit Lions MLive app for iPhone and Android
-- Follow MLive Sports on Facebook, Twitter and InstagramBreaking News Emails Get breaking news alerts and special reports. The news and stories that matter, delivered weekday mornings.
May 30, 2017, 10:24 PM GMT / Updated May 30, 2017, 10:24 PM GMT By Pete Williams
The Trump administration's decision to deport a coffee farmer in Hawaii who came to the U.S. illegally 28 years ago prompted a harsh rebuke Tuesday from a federal appeals court judge who called it inhumane.
"President Trump has claimed that his immigration policies would target the 'bad hombres,'" said Judge Stephen Reinhardt of the Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals in San Francisco. The government decision in the immigration case "shows that even the 'good hombres' are not safe."
Reinhardt's comments came as the appeals court turned down a request from Andres Magana Ortiz to delay his deportation. The judge said the court was compelled to deny the request "because we do not have the authority to grant it. We are not, however, compelled to find the government's action in this case fair or just."
Magana Ortiz, now 43, came illegally to the U.S. when he was 15 and became a coffee farmer in Hawaii's Kona region. He has three children, all of them U.S. citizens because they were born in Hawaii, and he married his current wife last year.
Related: Trump Enforcement Plan Has Immigrants Bracing for Raids, Deportations
Immigration authorities began removal proceedings in 2011, but he was granted permission to stay. In the mean time, his wife and one of his daughters, who will soon turn 21, filed for permission to allow him to remain as the relative of a U.S. citizen.
FILE - In this Dec. 6, 2010 pool file photo, Circuit Judge Stephen Reinhardt listens to arguments during a hearing in the Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals on December 6, 2010 in San Francisco. File Eric Risberg / AP
In March, while those applications were pending, the government ordered Magana Ortiz to report for removal. He has spent the past several weeks fighting the order in court, without success. Under immigration law, he will be forbidden to return to the U.S. for ten years.
Related: Donald Trump’s Border Wall: A ‘Progress’ Report
"He will be returned to Mexico, having spent 28 years successfully building a life and family in this country," Reinhardt said. "The government forces us to participate in ripping apart a family.
"I concur as a judge, but as a citizen I do not," Reinhardt concluded.motorcycles get a lot of bad press for their environmental footprint. that’s why, when dutch designer ritsert mans has teamed up with scientist peter mooij, the duo wanted to create a ride that both looked and drove in a way that was harmonious with nature. their unconventional wooden motorbike gets all its power naturally—from algae oil—a fuel source that’s long been of interest to peter mooij.
all images courtesy of ritsert mans/ photography by jesse kraal
‘peter developed a method for growing algae in a natural way, in salt water,’ explains ritsert mans. in order to demonstrate the power of this little-known fuel source, mans decided to create a bike powered by the stuff and designed in a way that was equally environmentally friendly. the idea behind the algae power and the design of the bike are underpinned by the same philosophy that the power of nature should be harnessed without being invaded or manipulated.
‘for every part of the bike, I looked to what nature could provide me with,’ explains mans, who built the frame and springs with wood, using cork for the for the dampeners, and hemp for reinforcement. ‘even though the single-sided swingarm seems to a big contrast with the “prehistoric” material it is made of, it’s actually a full composite, with all sorts of directional fibers provided by nature.’
when it comes to the design process, mans’ organic approach still pervades. although he was educated as a designer, the wholistic bike-builder expains coyly that he does not even have a working computer, besides his smartphone. ‘5 years ago, I decided that for me, designing meant following my intuition,’ he elaborates, ‘instead of simulating my way through the design process.’
the idea underpinning the project was to showcase how algae oil could be potentially used in the future. ‘people don’t know what the world will look like in 30 years from now in terms of transportation and energy,’ mans continues. ‘but that uncertainty allows people to develop and build there own ideas.’ the duo have also written a book on the idea of algae as a natural power source, titled ‘die dikke alg’ meaning ‘the thick algae’ in english.Abstract
Knowing the patterns of distribution of sediments in the global ocean is critical for understanding biogeochemical cycles and how deep-sea deposits respond to environmental change at the sea surface. We present the first digital map of seafloor lithologies based on descriptions of nearly 14,500 samples from original cruise reports, interpolated using a support vector machine algorithm. We show that sediment distribution is more complex, with significant deviations from earlier hand-drawn maps, and that major lithologies occur in drastically different proportions globally. By coupling our digital map to oceanographic data sets, we find that the global occurrence of biogenic oozes is strongly linked to specific ranges in sea-surface parameters. In particular, by using recent computations of diatom distributions from pigment-calibrated chlorophyll-a satellite data, we show that, contrary to a widely held view, diatom oozes are not a reliable proxy for surface productivity. Their global accumulation is instead strongly dependent on low surface temperature (0.9–5.7 °C) and salinity (33.8–34.0 PSS, Practical Salinity Scale 1978) and high concentrations of nutrients. Under these conditions, diatom oozes will accumulate on the seafloor regardless of surface productivity as long as there is limited competition from biogenous and detrital components, and diatom frustules are not significantly dissolved prior to preservation. Quantifying the link between the seafloor and the sea surface through the use of large digital data sets will ultimately lead to more robust reconstructions and predictions of climate change and its impact on the ocean environment.
INTRODUCTION
Modern oceanic sediments cover 70% of the planet’s surface, forming the substrate for the largest ecosystem on Earth and its largest carbon reservoir. The composition and distribution of sediments in the world’s oceans underpins our understanding of global biogeochemical cycles, the occurrence of metal deposits, sediment transport mechanisms, the behavior of deep-ocean currents, reconstruction of past environments, and the response of the deep ocean to global warming. A comprehensive map of ocean sediments can help greatly in planning oceanographic expeditions, submarine search and recovery operations, and the assessment of geohazards and potential sites for the disposal of nuclear waste.
Virtually every marine geology and oceanography textbook contains a global map of five or six dominant sediment types in the ocean basins. Although there are many versions of this map (Barron and Whitman, 1981; Berger, 1976; Davies and Gorsline, 1976; Hüneke and Mulder, 2011; Trujillo and Thurman, 2014), they all show strikingly similar distributions of clays and calcareous and siliceous oozes, with large areas of the ocean basins draped in either pelagic red clay or lithogenous sediments (Fig. DR1 in the GSA Data Repository1). Despite the vast acquisition of new data, this hand-drawn map has changed very little since its inception (Berger, 1974). Here we present the first digital map of recent sediments of the oceans based on carefully selected descriptions of surface sediment samples contained in cruise reports from recent expeditions and as long ago as the 1950s. The coupling of the sediment map to key oceanographic parameters provides new insights into the processes governing the distribution of sediments in the world’s oceans and highlights several key discrepancies in the earlier maps.
METHODOLOGY
Our map was created mostly using surface sample locations and descriptions obtained through the Index to Marine and Lacustrine Geological Samples (IMLGS) (Curators of Marine and Lacustrine Geological Samples Consortium, 2014). The IMLGS contains data on more than 200,000 marine sediment samples, the vast bulk of which postdates creation of the commonly used Deck41 data set (Bershad and Weiss, 1976) and the year (1983) of the last incarnation of the global map of oceanic sediments (Trujillo and Thurman, 2014). We selected 14,399 data points (Fig. 1) using strict quality control criteria (see the Data Repository).
There are many marine sediment classification schemes (Kennett, 1982) resulting in at least 80 different sediment types. The classification scheme that we use here is deliberately generalized in order to successfully depict the main types of sediments found in global oceans and to overcome the shortcomings of inconsistent, poorly defined, and obsolete classification schemes and terminologies that are detailed in the majority of cruise reports. Our goal is to adhere to the classification scheme currently used by the International Ocean Discovery Program (Mazzullo et al., 1990), focusing on the descriptive aspect of the sediment rather than its genetic implications. As a result, we identify the following major classes of marine sediment (Fig. 1): gravel, sand, silt, clay, calcareous ooze, radiolarian ooze, diatom ooze, sponge spicules, mixed calcareous-siliceous ooze, shells and coral fragments, fine-grained calcareous sediment (not ooze), siliceous mud, and volcaniclastics (see the Data Repository).
The map is created using a support vector machine (SVM) (Cortes and Vapnik, 1995) classifier to predict the lithology in unobserved regions (see the Data Repository). The SVM is a nonparametric model that adapts in complexity as new data are added. To reduce the risk of overfitting to the measurements at the expense of the model’s ability to generalize into areas outside of the sampled regions, a cross-validation approach was employed to train the classifier. This approach maximizes the model’s accuracy on observations that are withheld from the training set. For prediction, a one-against-one method (Bishop, 2006) was used to address the problem of modeling multiple classes with a bilinear classifier. Classes were weighted inversely proportional to their number of recorded instances to account for the unbalanced nature of the data. Deep-sea lithologies that collectively compose >70% of seafloor sediment have been predicted with very high accuracy (to 80%) (Figs. DR2–DR4).
RESULTS
Our digital map (Fig. 2) reveals that the pattern of distribution of different lithologies is more complex, with significant regional deviations from earlier maps (Barron and Whitman, 1981; Berger, 1976; Davies and Gorsline, 1976; Hüneke and Mulder, 2011; Trujillo and Thurman, 2014) (Fig. DR1). The lithologies occur in drastically different proportions globally (Table DR1); coverage by calcareous sediment and clay each increased by ∼30%, and that of diatom and radiolarian oozes decreased by ∼25% and 60%, respectively. Rather than forming a belt in the equatorial Pacific extending to 30°S along the west coast of South America (Fig. DR1), radiolarian oozes occur as isolated pockets around the equatorial Pacific in association with patches of mixed oozes and as a component of diatom ooze within the Peru Basin (Fig. 2). This is also the case in the Atlantic and Indian Oceans, where radiolarian oozes are mixed with calcareous and diatom oozes. Patches of radiolarian ooze are, however, common in the Southern Ocean; this is not apparent on preexisting maps. There are numerous large areas of diatom ooze within predominant clay lithology in the northern Pacific and central Indian Oceans. The circum-Antarctic belt of diatom ooze is discontinuous on our map, with a major interruption in the Drake Passage, where sedimentation is dominated by a large body of sand (Fig. 2). Sponge spicules form a significant component of seafloor sediment in parts of the Australian-Antarctic Basin where they co-occur with diatom and radiolarian oozes. Compared to earlier maps clay occupies a considerably larger area around eastern and western South America and is significantly more abundant in the Indian Ocean, where its southern extent from the Bengal Fan is interrupted only by the Ninetyeast and Broken ridges. Clay is dominant within the South Australia Basin (Fig. 2) but does not spread into the Southern Ocean, as shown on older maps (Fig. DR1).
DISCUSSION
Marine planktonic organisms play a critical role in the global cycling of silica and carbon and in the biological pump of CO 2 (Ragueneau et al., 2000). However, many of the mechanisms that are thought to control the geologic accumulation of biogenic carbonate and silica are very difficult to quantify, even on a local scale (e.g., Broecker, 2008; Ragueneau et al., 2000). Our digital map of seafloor sediments provides a missing link for constraining global relationships between the source (sea surface), for which comprehensive data sets exist (see the Data Repository), and the sink (seafloor). Here we focus on diatoms, because their predominance in the Southern Ocean, where they are estimated to contribute as much as 75% of the total primary productivity (Crosta et al., 2005), and their subsequent preservation on the seafloor have been particularly controversial (e.g., Nelson et al., 2002, 1995; Pondaven et al., 2000). We find that the bulk of diatom oozes occurs at seafloor depths of 3300–4800 m, below surface water that has very restricted and low temperatures (0.9–5.7 °C), consistent with, but slightly narrower than, the 0.8–8 °C range required for optimal diatom growth in the Southern Ocean (Neori and Holm-Hansen, 1982). The salinity range of these surface waters is low and narrow (33.8–34.0 PSS, Practical Salinity Scale 1978), which according to experiments reduces dissolution of biogenic SiO 2 relative to typical seawater salinity (Roubeix et al., 2008). The summer productivity is modest (230–840 mgC/m2/day in the Northern Hemisphere and 175–260 mgC/m2/day in the Southern Hemisphere), based on satellite-derived surface chlorophyll-a concentrations, and in the Southern Ocean may be limited by iron and light (e.g., Claquin et al., 2002). Diatom oozes are associated with the highest and narrowest ranges of surface nutrients, especially growth-limiting silicate (Martin-Jézéquel et al., 2000), of all lithology classes including siliceous radiolarian oozes (Figs. DR4–DR6; Table DR2).
Recent computations of global distributions of phytoplankton species from chlorophyll-a satellite data calibrated with in situ measurements of diagnostic pigments (Hirata et al., 2011) show that diatoms are a major contributor to primary productivity in the Southern Ocean, and peak in numbers in the austral summer (Soppa et al., 2014). However, even with these vastly improved maps of diatom abundances that capture seasonal blooms, we fail to find a strong link between diatom chlorophyll concentration and diatom ooze occurrence (Fig. 3; Fig. DR7). Diatom ooze association with high diatom chlorophyll concentrations in the north Weddell Sea and around Prydz Bay is an exception, not the rule. Diatom ooze is most common below waters with very low diatom chlorophyll concentration, forming prominent zones between 50°S and 60°S in the Australian-Antarctic and the Bellinghausen basins (Fig. 3). These large-scale patterns cannot be easily explained by postdepositional sediment redistribution (Dezileau et al., 2000) and contradict the widely held view, based on hydrographic and sediment trap data, that biogenic opal accumulation in the Southern Ocean is linked to high surface productivity (e.g., Nelson et al., 2002; Pondaven et al., 2000). As biogenic silica preservation efficiency, estimated to be a mere 1.2%–5.5% (Nelson et al., 2002), is no longer considered critical for diatom accumulation in the Southern Ocean (Nelson et al., 2002, 1995; Pondaven et al., 2000), we propose that the accumulation of diatom oozes is strongly dependent on limited competition from biogenous and lithogenous components. Diatoms are conspicuously absent below the prominent 40°S diatom chlorophyll concentration belt (Fig. 3). The belt coincides with a marked northward increase in salinity and temperature and a decrease in dissolved silicate (Fig. DR8) conducive for the proliferation of biocalcareous organisms and the subsequent accumulation of calcareous oozes on the seafloor above the carbonate compensation depth (Broecker, 2008) (Fig. 3; Fig. DR7). Likewise, diatom oozes are absent below high diatom chlorophyll areas near continents, where their presence in the sediment is diluted by terrigenous input. This suggests that the occurrence of diatom oozes is not a reliable indicator of diatom paleoproductivity and that it is strongly dependent on sea-surface parameters that collectively inhibit the growth and overpopulation by competing organisms such as calcifying plankton.
CONCLUSIONS
Our digital map of recent ocean sediments reveals that the seafloor is draped in a complex patchwork of lithologies where previously large continuous regions or belts were mapped. By coupling the map to existing oceanographic data sets we are able to quantify the relationship between various sea-surface parameters and directly underlying seafloor sediment type on a global scale. We conclude that diatom ooze is not a reliable proxy for surface productivity, but it is a good indicator of sea-surface oceanographic variables (Cunningham and Leventer, 1998), especially temperature (Romero et al., 2005; Zielinski and Gersonde, 1997) and nutrients (Chisholm, 1992; Martin-Jézéquel et al., 2000). Diatom ooze will accumulate under restricted conditions even when surface productivity is low, provided that there are no dominant competing components such as nanoplankton (Hirata et al., 2011) and diatom-grazing radiolarians (Hüneke and Mulder, 2011), and provided that diatom frustules are not significantly dissolved in the water column or on the seafloor (Nelson et al., 1995; Ragueneau et al., 2000; Tréguer and De La Rocha, 2013). Our seafloor lithology map is a new digital, open-access resource that provides a basis for elucidating global relationships between the sedimentary record and a variety of oceanographic parameters, providing additional constraints for models of paleoproductivity and global biogeochemical cycles.
We are grateful to cruise participants and the curators of the Index to Marine and Lacustrine Geological Samples at the U.S. National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration. We thank Mariana Soppa for the diatom chlorophyll data set, and Clark Alexander and Charlotte Sjunneskog for access to additional sample descriptions. We thank Maria Seton, Paul Wessel, Alan P. Trujillo, an anonymous reviewer, and editor Ellen Thomas for their thorough reviews. This research was supported by the Australian Science Industry Endowment Fund (RP 04-174) Big Data Knowledge Discovery project.
© 2015 Geological Society of AmericaPISCATAWAY, NJ – In a moment of salute and honor, more than 1,000 members from the law enforcement community from departments around Northern and Central New Jersey led family and friends in a processional motorcade along Hoes Lane in Piscataway and into Resurrection Cemetery for a graveside service where Summit police officer Matthew Tarentino, who was tragically killed in a three-car accident on Route 78 last Tuesday, May 30, was laid to rest.
Tarentino, a long time resident of Somerville where a funeral mass at that town's Immaculate Conception Church preceded Monday's procession, was a Summit D.A.R.E. officer on his way to speak to a group of fifth graders about the dangers of drug use when the early morning accident occurred.
Another driver crossed the median on Route 78 in Bernards Township, striking Tarentino's vehicle which then struck another car, according to State Police. The driver who crossed the median later died at Morristown Medical Center, where the third driver was treated for non-life threatening injuries.
Sign Up for E-News
"It's a sad situation when something like this happens, not just to this officer, but anybody within the law enforcement community," said Piscataway Mayor Brian Wahler. "From what I understand from a lot of |
clivity for making clumsy comments is far greater. So while LePage didn’t win reelection by Christie’s china-rattling 22-point margin, he did produce enough voters who wanted to be governed by someone who was brash, forthright, even a little different. Throw in a genuinely improving state economy and you’ve got yourself a political brand. As one Maine politico observed: “LePage had coattails. You have to give it to the guy.”
Advertisement
So your inner GOP consultant might not think a whole lot of Paul LePage. But LePage’s response to that would almost certainly be something like: “I don’t give a damn. You Washington types are ruining the country, buzz off.” And he has a point...
— Matt Purple is an editor at Rare.us.How to address inner-city problems like unemployment, drugs, and violence? President Obama says he thinks books are part of the solution.
In a visit to Anacostia Library in Southeast Washington, D.C. Thursday, Mr. Obama announced a plan to give low-income children access to 10,000 e-books, part of a larger strategy to lift inner city communities by improving educational opportunities for kids.
The announcement comes just two days after Obama said the country has to do "some soul searching" following the deaths of a number of black men in police custody and the racial unrest that has followed, most recently in Baltimore.
“If we’re serious about living up to what our country is about, then we have to consider what we can do to provide opportunities in every community, not just when they’re on the front page, but every day,” Jeff Zients, Obama’s top economic adviser, told reporters in a briefing Thursday.
Obama's plan brings together a diverse group – from publishing houses to libraries to Apple – to provide kids in lower-income neighborhoods greater access to e-books and library cards.
Publishing houses have agreed to donate digital access to some 10,000 books to low-income students, worth about $250 million.
And as part of a plan to get library cards for all students, some 30 towns and cities said they would work on programs to connect students to libraries and get them library cards. Not only does this provide students access to thousands of books, it also gives them access to the Internet and to digital books, access they may not have at home.
And according to the announcement, the New York Public Library is playing a key role in the White House's plan. It is developing an app to connect low-income kids with books.
Finally, the White House is working with technology companies to get devices in the hands of low-income students. Apple has pledged $100 million in devices to low-income schools, and others may follow suit.
Get the Monitor Stories you care about delivered to your inbox. By signing up, you agree to our Privacy Policy
Countless studies have pointed to a correlation between access to books and reading level and income: For example, 80 percent of low-income children lag below their grade level in reading skills, according to research Zients cited in his briefing. He also said that there are 13 books per child in middle-income neighborhoods but only one book for every 300 children in poor neighborhoods.
Which is exactly why Obama is looking to books to help improve the odds for kids in poor communities.White House press secretary Sarah Huckabee Sanders. AP Photo/Carolyn Kaster The White House press secretary, Sarah Huckabee Sanders, on Thursday repeatedly dodged questions about President Donald Trump's threat to shut down the government over funding for his proposed wall along the US-Mexico border.
Though Trump often promised during the campaign that Mexico would pay for a wall, he has since turned his attention to the Republican-controlled Congress to fund the project, which Senate Democrats contend would cost $70 billion to build and $150 million a year to maintain.
At a rally in Arizona on Tuesday, Trump said, "If we have to close down our government, we're building that wall."
During her first press conference in three weeks, Sanders refused to answer four questions about whether Trump would refuse to sign a bill funding the federal government if money for a border wall were not included.
"The president promised over and over again during the campaign that Mexico would pay for the wall," ABC News' Jon Karl said. "Why is he now threatening a government shutdown if Congress won't pay for it?"
Sanders was unclear in her response.
"The president is committed to making sure this gets done," she said. "We know that the wall and other security measures at the border work, we've seen that take place over the last decade, and we're committed to making sure the American people are protected."
Sanders praised job-creation statistics when American Urban Radio Networks' April Ryan asked how the administration felt about the possibility that federal workers would go without paychecks if the government shut down. Sanders dodged another question when pressed on the subject again.
"How is that not a concession from this White House that Mexico isn't actually going to pay for this wall and American taxpayers will?" ABC News' Cecilia Vega asked minutes later.
Sanders responded: "This is something the president's committed to — he's committed to protecting American lives, and doing that through the border wall is something that's important. It's a priority, and we're moving forward with it."
"But he's not saying that Mexico is going to pay for it," Vega said.
"He hasn't said they're not either," Sanders replied. When a reporter pointed out that Mexican President Enrique Pena Nieto has refused to pay for the wall, she added: "Thank you. I think we've had enough outbursts in the past."
When Congress reconvenes in September, it must pass a funding bill by the end of the month to avoid a shutdown. Many Republican leaders, like House Speaker Paul Ryan and Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell, have said that avoiding a government shutdown is a top priority.
A bill to continue to fund the government would require 60 votes in the Senate to pass; Republicans hold 52 seats, and Democrats have said they would universally oppose a bill with funding for Trump's proposed wall.Just like her colleague Morgan Freeman, Oscar-winning actress Susan Sarandon has doubled down on her support for legalization over the weekend, reportedly telling High Times in their August 2015 issue, “the world would be a better place” if we ended cannabis prohibition, which results in about 750,000 arrests annually — comprising the largest volume of American police “work”.
“It’s absurd that more states haven’t legalized it. … It’s an important source of income.
While millions use cannabis medicinally, long-time supporter Sarandon uses cannabis as part of a wellness regimen. “You also see the reports on kids who have seizures that are prevented by medical marijuana. You see the relief it gives to vets. It’s also a lovely way to socialize and be with people — and to be with yourself and de-stress.”
“That’s the great thing about smoking weed: if you lead a very, very busy life, for me, it really makes the most of your weekend. It like, triples, your weekends. If you only have certain windows to get high, it allows you to slow down and really be there. “It’s really important, because technology has made everybody multitask: We get so distracted and so crazy… Smoking helps you to connect again — to be present and conscious.”
The star of Thelma and Louise and Dead Man Walking said she never worked under the influence, or filmed high. “But I’ve read scripts high and gotten a different perspective.”
The 68 year-old actress has a 30 year-old daughter Eva and two sons 25 and 22.
“As I’ve explained to my kids, weed helps you take a break from a very busy life. But you’ll never have a really full life if you are stoned constantly from a young age.”
Sarandon is raising her voice amid a growing chorus that includes the majority of Americans who are demanding peace with the long-demonized, healing botanical.
On the other hand, this weekend, Beatle and grandfather Sir Paul McCartney said he had given up cannabis to set a positive example for his grandchildren.
RELATED: Marijuana Policy Project’s Mason Tvert talks legalization 2016 with our podcast The Hash at minute 4:03.News > Originals
A Twitter user recently kicked up a row by alleging that in Uttar Pradesh's Aligarh Muslim University, hostel mess do not serve food from sunrise to sunset during the Muslim holy month of Ramzan.
In Aligarh muslim university hostels, Lunch,Breakfast is not being served to Hindu students due to #Ramadan.... https://t.co/ghUntAGj2p — Prashant Patel Umrao (@ippatel) May 29, 2017
The tweet prompted many on social media to question why the Central university administration is allowing the changes in its hostel mess to cater to a specific religion and how this practice is "not secular".
No breakfast/lunch for Hindu students in AMU in Ramzan. Canteen opens at 3 am & Hindu students/faculty forced to observe compulsory fast. — Seshadri Chari (@seshadrichari) May 30, 2017
Is there no Fundamental rights of non Muslim students in AMU to have breakfast no lunch on time? Why no discussion in media? — Prof Rakesh Sinha (@RakeshSinha01) May 30, 2017
Therefore the minority Hindu students studying at AMU shouldn't have a problem with them not being offered food. Secularism on steroids pic.twitter.com/QcoIo5AqRP — The Masakadzas (@Nesenag) May 30, 2017
That something like this may indeed be happening at the University shouldn't come as a surprise as AMU's official website carries an announcement that the office timings of all academic and non-academic departments of the university stand changed during Ramzan, on the approval of the Vice-Chancellor. The announcement also mentions that no refreshment will be served at any meeting or function in the premises in order to "maintain the sanctity of the Ramadan."
Students confirm that hostel mess indeed do not provide food during Ramzan in the fasting hours
Nadeem Ansari, vice-president of the AMU students' union, confirmed to ScoopWhoop News that this indeed is the tradition for "more than 50 years". Asked how do non-fasting students manage during this time, Ansari said that they "arrange for their food" and it has never been an issue.
Ansari claimed that the union has raised the issue with the Dean Students' Welfare in the past, though never in writing. Ansari said that the sudden outrage on social media about the issue is new for the union and they will be making a formal request now.
Ansari, in fact, rubbished the outrage as a fabricated one and alleged that "it is only because of the BJP government in power in state that this "non-issue" is being turned into an unnecessary controversy".
ScoopWhoop News talked in detail to a non-fasting student at the university - a Hindu and a hosteller - who explained how the arrangement is. Speaking on the condition of anonymity, the student said that the University has around 16 hostel mess operated in different "halls" of residential hostels. During Ramzan, the food is served at dawn for Sehri (around 2.30 am) and is followed by another meal after 7 for Iftar.
" Today, I ate my first meal around 2.30 am. All I had in the day was a packet of Maggi and some lime water. I'll next eat at Iftar, " he said. "It's almost like I am forced to observe the fast too. It's forced starvation."
In yet another confirmation of the changed hostel mess rules, Hindi daily Hindustan has quoted AMU's Dean Dean Students' Welfare member Prof Jamshed Siddiqui as saying that the tradition of not serving breakfast and lunch in hostel mess has been in place for years and that there are "standing orders" that no food will be served in any function in the campus.
A report by ABP news further confirms the change in meal timings. The report quotes incharge of one Sir Syed Hall, Shamshuddin, disclosing that on other days, breakfast is served from 7.30 am and 9 am and lunch between 12 pm and 2.30 pm but during Ramzan, only Sehri and dinner is served. The report further quotes the university's public relations officer, Omar S Peerzada, defending the "tradition", saying that this practice started years ago by non-Muslims as a sign of "mutual respect".
What seems to be an exercise in damage control, Peerzada said the university will now provide food "as per demand".
Both Ansari and the non-fasting student ScoopWhoop News talked to, dismissed social media posts by some students, especially women, who deny the change in meal timings.
What they will circulate and what they won't pic.twitter.com/x5h5FssQy8 — Harridan (@brawling_virago) May 30, 2017
"The girls' hostels are usually managed by private mess that do serve food but the same can't be said for other residential hostel mess," the student who spoke on anonymity said.
This student further talked about the problems in Ramzan: "Most non-fasting students are forced to starve at this time because even if they go out, no food is available as it's a largely Muslim residential area. The nearest dhaba is some four kilometres away. But not everyone has a vehicle to go there. So we end up feeling hungry all day."
The student added that some non-fasting students, especially those close to the students' union, do "make arrangements" with the mess and manage to get the staff to prepare something, "like a parantha", in the day.
But why is this issue suddenly being raised when the practice has been in place for years now?
Even as the student union is slamming "BJP propaganda" for the controversy, Prashant Patel Umrao, a Delhi-based lawyer who was one of the first to raise it on social media, told ScoopWhoop News, "Just because something has been going on for years now is no justification of it."
"Our problem is, that when a ban on illegal slaughter houses stops the supply of meat in a campus, they cry 'food fascism'. When a place stops selling 'tunday kababs' for a week, a section of Indians beat their chests and cry end of democracy. We want them to react similarly to the issue now."
"And we want this unfair tradition to end," he said.0 Court rules prayer before Rowan Co. commissioner meetings violates Constitution
WINSTON-SALEM, N.C. - A federal court ruled Monday that the Rowan County Board of Commissioners violated the Constitution by having prayers before public meetings.
The ruling stated the prayers advanced beliefs specific to one religion and that between 2007 and 2013 more than 97 percent of prayers were specific to Christianity.
PDF: Decision on prayer at Rowan County meetings
The American Civil Liberties Union of North Carolina Legal Foundation and national ACLU Program on the Freedom of Religion and Belief filed a lawsuit challenging the commissioners’ prayer practice in March 2013 on behalf of Rowan County residents Nan Lund, Robert Voelker and Liesa Montag-Siegel.
"I felt we were vindicated," Voelker said.
After a two-year court battle, Voelker and Lund are celebrating a judge's ruling in their favor and against Rowan County commissioners pushing to pray at the start of their meetings.
"This is a first amendment issue to us. We think anyone who gets elected should be able to pray no matter what faith they are," said Commissioner Mike Caskey.
Lund, Voelker and a third plaintiff filed a lawsuit because all of the commissioners happened to be Christian and their prayers followed their faith.
.
"It made me uncomfortable, partly for myself and also for other people in the community," said Lund.
Since their filing, hundreds in the community have rallied around the commissioners.
Monday district judge James Beaty sided with the plaintiffs and the ACLU, stating since the commissioners are the only people praying at meetings "The prayers are thus effectively being delivered by the government itself” and "The board's practice fails to be nondiscriminatory and entangles government with religion."
For now though, commissioners can still pray, they just have to exclude key Christian terms, like Jesus.
"I would not want to compromise. If I believe in Jesus, I want to be able to pray to Jesus," said professor and county resident Troy Russell.
So do the commissioners who say they may appeal.
"I hope it’s over, it's been going on for a long time," Lund said.
Read our past coverage:Image caption Several opposition supporters were arrested for trying to enter the stadium
Troops in the Democratic Republic of Congo blocked entry to a stadium where the main opposition leader planned to inaugurate himself as president.
Etienne Tshisekedi has rejected the official victory of incumbent President Joseph Kabila in November's elections.
A BBC reporter says police used stun grenades to disperse people attempting to get to the stadium in the capital.
So Mr Tshisekedi's conducted the unofficial inauguration at his home residence instead.
President Kabila was sworn in for a second term on Tuesday after being declared the official winner with 49% of the vote, compared to Mr Tshisekedi's 32%.
Western observers denounced the presidential results as seriously flawed, but the election commission - backed by the African Union - hailed the polls a success.
The US-based campaign group Human Rights Watch (HRW) says police have killed at least 24 people since the disputed polls.
Tanks
On Thursday, Mr Tshisekedi's Union for Democracy and Social Progress (UDPS) party sent out what appeared to be official invitations on presidential letterheads, urging journalists and diplomats to attend the swearing-in ceremony at the Martyrs Stadium in the capital, Kinshasa, on Friday morning.
But the BBC's Thomas Hubert in Kinshasa says he was refused entry to the stadium and all the roads around Mr Tshisekedi's residence have been cordoned off.
Etienne Tshisekedi Aged 79
Leader of Union for Democracy and Social Progress party
Studied law under Belgian colonial rule
Led secessionist movement in central Kasai region after independence in 1960s
Led campaign for democracy since 1980s
Briefly served as prime minister in 1990s under Mobutu Sese Seko
Boycotted first democratic election in 2006
Rejected defeat in 2011 election Profiles of Tshisekedi and Kabila
According to the AFP news agency, police used tear gas to disperse opposition supporters gathered around the house, where Mr Tshisekedi later held his swearing-in ceremony.
Troops from the police, military and Mr Kabila's elite Republican Guard have all been deployed around stadium in Kinshasa, which is an opposition stronghold, our correspondent says.
Tanks, water cannon and soldiers armed with machine guns and rocket-propelled grenades could also be seen.
The police fired stun grenades and made some arrests as people walked towards the stadium and the Republican Guard confiscated the BBC's recording equipment, our reporter said.
Diplomats have been encouraging dialogue over the disputed poll, but dozens of people have died in clashes in Kinshasa and other opposition strongholds since election day.
November's polls were the second in DR Congo since the 1998-2003 war, which claimed an estimated four million lives.
On Thursday, the election commission halted the counting of votes from the parliamentary poll, saying it needed international help to complete counting following allegations of rigging.
Mr Tshisekedi, who is popular in the west of the country, led the campaign for democracy under former leader Mobutu Sese Seko but these were the first elections he has contested.
He boycotted the last poll in 2006, organised under the auspices of the United Nations, after claiming they had been rigged in advance.
They were marred by weeks of street battles led by supporters of the losing candidate, Jean-Pierre Bemba.
He is now on trial at the International Criminal Court for alleged war crimes in neighbouring Central African Republic.
DR Congo is two-thirds the size of Western Europe but hardly has any infrastructure, such as roads and electricity.This week in Hawaii, AMD flew dozens of journalists from around the world to the island of Oahu where they're set to make an announcement that they believe will revolutionize the world of game development.
Before getting started, AMD was pleased to introduce their own prodigal son, Raja Koduri, as the new corporate vice president of visual computing. Koduri has recently returned to AMD after spending four years at Apple where he was the director of graphics and architecture.
Sampling Apple's'secret sauce' at AMD
In a short, casual talk from the crater at Diamond Head, Koduri spoke about his belief in software and his ultimate goal to bring software and hardware development under one umbrella.
Having spent the past four years at the most valuable company in the world, one who's specialty is the very thing that Koduri spoke about, "bringing software and hardware development under one umbrella," he seems poised to bring some of that Cupertino-based "secret sauce" back to AMD.
While hardware has historically been the bread and butter for a company like AMD, according to Koduri, the ratio of software engineers to hardware engineers has increased over the years. Something that highlights the importance of software, according to Korduri.
"The key to my coming back to AMD is to bring hardware and software together under one umbrella," Kordori said.
What's more, Koduri contends that he and AMD are committed to making both Crossfire and Eyefinity "much better," as well as "making Linux users much happier."
AMD is scheduled to spill the beans tomorrow in an event that they will live stream, and Koduri has hinted at new tools that should greatly simplify game development on consoles and PCs that use AMD hardware - specifically their next generation graphics architecture.
Be sure to return to TechRadar tomorrow for the full story.Set 1 Promised Land, Mississippi Half Step, Looks Like Rain, Deal, El Paso, Tennessee Jed, Estimated Prophet, Peggy-O, Playin' In The Band
Set 2 Scarlet Begonias-> Fire On The Mountain, Samson & Delilah, It Must Have Been The Roses, Dancin' In The Streets-> I Got My Mojo Workin-> Dancin' In The Streets-> The Wheel-> Terrapin Station
flac16; SBD (7 inch Master Reels @ 7.5ips 1/2trk)> Dat> Dat (44.1k), plus patches from FOB Sony ECM99A> Cassette; Transfer: Dat (Sony D8)> RME Hammerfall Digiface> Sony Vaio C1VP> Samplitude v7.02 Professional> FLAC; Transferred and Edited By Charlie Miller
plus-circle Add Review
comment Reviews
Reviewer: PFflyerkid - - August 16, 2018
Subject: 2ed Scarlet Fire First one for the east coast after Winterland pairing debut - August 16, 20182ed Scarlet Fire
Reviewer: GratefulFloyd1972 - favorite favorite favorite favorite favorite - August 6, 2017
Subject: ON+
gooey and mellow, also Keith shines stay for the playin atleast o.o gooey and mellow, also Keith shines - August 6, 2017ON+
Reviewer: Haiku Andy - favorite favorite favorite favorite - August 6, 2015
Subject: Incredible Half Step, Tenn Jed They take some time getting each song started but these are some of the best first set jams I've heard in a LONG time.
These 1977 shows (Englishtown was my first) are not to be missed. - August 6, 2015Incredible Half Step, Tenn Jed
Reviewer: jason parillo - favorite favorite favorite favorite favorite - June 29, 2015
Subject: Classic Core Show I love the way this recording starts. It's like your walking into the show and the the crowd is going berzerk!!!! - June 29, 2015Classic Core Show
Reviewer: chris phillips - favorite favorite favorite favorite - October 25, 2013
Subject: best 5 weeks post hiatus The Estimated Prophet is very tight and the Playing In The Band is engaging and never ponderous. I did a double take that it ends the first set in '77.
The tape and the mix are impressive. Do not overlook this show. - October 25, 2013best 5 weeks post hiatus
Reviewer: ElijahD - favorite favorite favorite favorite - August 25, 2012
Subject: Whoo! Disco Juicy, Extra Gloopy, hand me a bruski, Napalm Infused, Donovan Approved, Pop Up (tm) Fiery Mountains! - August 25, 2012Whoo!
Reviewer: Rock'nChuck - favorite favorite favorite favorite - June 24, 2011
Subject: My First Dead Show This show was the first time I saw the Dead. Terrapin Station came out in June of 77 I think. I was unfamiliar with the new tunes. Bobby and Jerry and Phil were still experimenting with those TS tunes. They tore down the house with Begonias and Fire. A real good show even though there was no encore. Rock'nChuck -- June 24, 2011My First Dead Show
Reviewer: guit30 - favorite favorite favorite favorite favorite - September 25, 2009
Subject: Grate stuff Can't believe I found this site, this is great soundin material, The Spectrum was where I saw the Dead the most. "Samson and Delilah" is excellent. Great mix and recording. Jerry sounds on, Sounds like he is playin' the Wolf.
Jim - September 25, 2009Grate stuff
Reviewer: mellotone - favorite favorite favorite favorite - September 24, 2009
Subject: Lady Madonna??? Is that a Lady Madonna riff I hear Keith noodling as Dancin' dissolves into Wheel???
Seriuosly, do not sleep on these pre May shows, they are not to be missed! The next night in Springfield is a smoker as well.
Also, love to hear Keith sprinkling in blips, bleeps, and atmospheric drones from the Moog throughout the evening.
Quality stuff!
-mellotone - September 24, 2009Lady Madonna???
Reviewer: BIG_R - favorite favorite favorite favorite - August 5, 2009
Subject: 4-22-77 Grate remaster by C Miller. I thought during Halfstep maybe this show was going to be a little lazy but it just kept getting better. Somewhere about ten or eleven minutes into Playing In the Band it got plain cosmic. - August 5, 20094-22-77
Reviewer: Philly80Dead - favorite favorite favorite favorite favorite - February 20, 2009
Subject: Was there an encore They ended the show with Terrapin. Where's the encore? friggin amazing show! - February 20, 2009Was there an encore
Reviewer: WolfmansBrother - favorite favorite favorite favorite - February 4, 2008
Subject: and they're off! fabled spring '77 tour launches solidly. the closing trio of songs in the first set are noteworthy, with a very cool estimated, a peggy-o where you can actually hear what bobby is playing/adding, and then an absolutely sick playing, one where the two drummers sound like an octopus and everyone is really listening to each other. as good as they come, imo.
the fire is excellent, particularly keith, and as is often the case, it's the recording that makes it so. the samson is cool for the very long silence between the penultimate and final tearing down of the proverbial building. the terrapin is sweet, too.
the best thing about the archive: i can go on tour while i'm working! i've heard about a third of these, but not in order. so, here goes... - February 4, 2008and they're off!
Reviewer: 600PoundsOfSin - favorite favorite favorite favorite favorite - December 14, 2007
Subject: When everything's feeling just right... If you ever find a moment to escape all your worries, plans, fears, doubts, hopes, desires, and whatever else preoccupies you, and can just sit down contentedly with headphones on and a feeling that everything is feeling just right, that the past and future have a way of working themselves out, and that to steal this moment for your own pleasure is something you deserve...listen to this Playin'. - December 14, 2007When everything's feeling just right...
Reviewer: jakester76 - favorite favorite favorite favorite favorite - November 25, 2007
Subject: awesome fire!! I think this show magical!! And this FIRE is probably one of the BEST ive heard!!!!! It isnt very often that i find a show that brings tears of joy to me - November 25, 2007awesome fire!!
Reviewer: capn doubledose - favorite favorite favorite favorite - November 9, 2005
Subject: Sound crap at first gets crystal - listen for the 31.5 min playin Not going to be long winded here, great great stuff on this including of course a monster playin and wonderful ***** Scarlet>Fire which was still a pretty new commodity and not the show anchor it was later... Whole first set is flawless. Listen closely to Playin and see if it does not remind you of 4/17/83 Byrne with Steven Stills crap version on this site - need a low gen D5 audience.
After Sampson the show falters a bit. - November 9, 2005Sound crap at first gets crystal - listen for the 31.5 min playin
Reviewer: L. Rosley - favorite favorite favorite favorite - October 26, 2005
Subject: Good first set Great sound throughout. Hot version of Deal, a tight Tennessee Jet, and nice Estimated Prophet. But the first set is better than the second. Dancing/Mojo is a bit repetative.
Many reviewers are saying that there are better '77 shows, which is true, but there are also many better shows from previous years as well, including 1976. - October 26, 2005Good first set
Reviewer: Street Pig - favorite favorite favorite favorite favorite - August 21, 2005
Subject: Betty Boards Rock! As with countless other shows, having the SBD is a 180 degree releif. Yes there is an occassional patch, but who cares, tuning and taking an inordinate amount of time between songs was a norm for 77'. I remember Peggy-o as it was yesterday, great Jerry voice with conviction!. The heads were repeating the Mojo jam in the lot after the show. The Playin enhanced our psychedllic brains furhter than you can imagine. It was a purple barrell experiment that was rewarding to say the least. 5 for the show, 5 for the recording, do not pass this one up, I like these (23rd too) over the May run. - August 21, 2005Betty Boards Rock!
Reviewer: dr. flashback - favorite favorite favorite favorite - August 21, 2005
Subject: don't miss this! Since the prior 3 shows at Winterland were at "home base", this show is properly the beginning of their 1977 tour - and they roar out of the starting gate like a rocket. The Spectrum - did they EVER play a bad show there? Here's a little box set idea - 9/21/72, 3/24/73 and this show. Call it "Trippin at the Spectrum".
I had initially overlooked April 77 entirely before LAMA came along. All that seemed to circulate were
AUD tapes, and I was more interested in MAY 77 for
obvious reasons. But let me tell you - this show blew
me away!! And I thought I'd heard all the good 1977.
Except for a couple of AUD patches, the sound is
A+ as only 77 can be. Some of the songs have long
periods of tuning and chatter at the end - this might annoy some folks, it doesn't me. The balance is good throughout, and Donna behaves herself.
Again, one of those like 3/19/77 where the first set almosts eclipses the second. Hot versions of Deal and Tenn Jed. A rare first set Estimated that's
right out of Jamaica, with an extra funky wah-wah from Jerry that sounds like whales singing at the bottom of the sea. And nice (rare) organ playing from Keith. If this version doesn't get your butt moving, check your pulse! A great Peggy O follows
that's as sweet as a summer breeze, where Jerry's voice gives you goose bumps.
The Playin is noteworthy in that it's the last time they would close Set One with this song in 1977, Bobby preferring to close with Music or Dancin after this, or in the fall of 77, Let it Grow. Although Playin moves to Set Two where it embarks on other adventures through the year, this version leaves nothing to be desired. Mellow and spacey with lots of
amazing finger runs from Garcia and some rare synth work from Keith. This is about as close to Dark Star as you'll hear in 1977, and deserves repeated listenings.
The Scarlet>Fire gets a bit shaky in the transition, since they've only done it once before at this point, but the playing is excellent, and it succeeds in getting the set off to a good start. The Dancin is tight and well jammed, with a surprise Mojo thrown in for good measure. The Mojo features some hot "Cumberland" style licks from Jerry. And then a tasteful Terrapin builds to a blazing ending that brings the house down. I'm done, flip me over!
Not one of my top ten, but still well worth 4 stars.
Can they top this performance on 4/23? I'll let you know as soon as I get it!!
cheers,
Dr. Flashback :-) - August 21, 2005don't miss this!
Reviewer: phildarkside - favorite favorite favorite favorite favorite - July 22, 2005
Subject: Betty Cantor Betty Boards are the BEST!
So many fine recordings from the great Mrs. Cantor-Jackson.
5 for sound and 5 for show (pretty much every 77 show for that matter).
Got MY Mojo WOrkin was a nice rare treat. - July 22, 2005Betty Cantor
Reviewer: StrawRider - favorite favorite favorite favorite - July 19, 2005
Subject: Killer SB June 21, 2005:
Let me tell you, for comparison sake, this download is just about as clear and well-mixed as the 4-30-77 show which I recently downloaded at the GD Store. Sound is five skull material. No question. The show...it's another great 1977 show but I haven't listened to it all yet, sorry, but I do that. I do know that the Playin' just might be the best I've heard from '77. Very drippy and trippy. I'm giving this download a FOUR until further notice.
07-19-05 UPDATE: I've listened to this show a few times now and I'm sticking to my 4 skullstar rating. Highlights would be another great '77 rendition of Peggy-O, the excellent Playin', a worthy Scarlet/Fire and the Wheel>Terrapin ending. A very solid outing here, maybe not one of my favorites of '77 but it's a keeper nonetheless. - July 19, 2005Killer SBSome fascinating new findings from Pew Research suggest deep divisions among Republicans over whether global warming is happening:
Two-thirds of Americans (67%) say there is solid evidence that the earth has been getting warmer over the last few decades, a figure that has changed little in the past few years. While partisan differences over climate change remain substantial, Republicans face greater internal divisions over this issue than do Democrats. Just 25% of Tea Party Republicans say there is solid evidence of global warming, compared with 61%of non-Tea Party Republicans.
Republican voters overall are evenly divided, 46-46, over whether global warming is happening, but this divide is driven by the lopsided difference between Tea Party and non-Tea Party Republicans on the question, with a solid majority of the latter in the global warming camp. “It’s not Democrat versus Republican, it’s Democrat and Republican versus the Tea Party,” Jeff Gohringer, spokesman for the League of Conservation Voters, tells me.
Ron Brownstein has suggested that climate change — along with social issues — is one of a handful of priorities that is increasingly important to the very voter groups that could well give the Democratic Party a demographic edge over the GOP into the future. That “coalition of the ascendant” includes young voters, minorities, and college educated whites, especially women. I asked Pew for the percentages among these groups who believe there is solid evidence of global warming, and the theory is borne out:
* 73% of those aged 18-29 believe it’s happening.
* 76 percent of nonwhites believe it’s happening.
* 67 percent of college educated whites believe its happening.
It’s hard to know what all of this means, in part because — as even environmentalists concede — there is just no sign yet that there is any political or electoral price to be paid for climate denialism. (The League of Conservation Voters has run ads against climate-denying Republicans to test if there’s a way to change this.) But these numbers suggest — as Brownstein also has — that talking about climate change is a good way for Democrats to continue to signal to these core and growing voter groups that the Democratic Party better represents their priorities and vision for the future, while the GOP continues to refuse to evolve.
Indeed, this could be another issue where the Tea Party continues to constrain the GOP from expanding its appeal among groups it needs to win over and evolving the party’s image into the 21st century, though it’s very possible the electoral consequences of this will remain limited to non-existent for some time to come.
GOP attitudes are even more stark on the question of whether human activity is causing global warming. On that question, only 24 percent of Republicans say Yes (versus 54 percent of Americans overall). According to Pew, an astonishingly low nine percent of Tea Partyers agree. But this may be the most dispiriting finding of all:
Most Democrats say there is scientific consensus on global warming (71%). Only 41% of Republicans say that scientists generally agree, while 48% say they do not.
This only concerns whether respondents even know what the scientific consensus dictates, whether or not they agree with it. A plurality of Republicans do not.Get the |
Help identify behaviour on PayPal websites in order to guide decision about targeted marketing and personalized advertising. Anonymous ID generated by cookies, pixel tags or similar technologies embedded in webpages, ads, apps and emails delivered to users. Information about device, browser, visited PayPal websites.
Adjust GmbH (Germany) Help identify behaviour in the mobile app in order to guide decision about targeted marketing; to help efficiently handling and optimising mobile campaigns on social networks and elsewhere in the web. Anonymous cookie ID, Advertising ID, encrypted customer ID, and Device ID used by a specific person, events in the mobile app about the use of the mobile app by a specific user (including, without limitation, login, successful completion of the transaction), but no payment and financial information details. Content of advertisements to be delivered to specific users and, as appropriate, segmentation group to which such person belongs to for advertisement purposes.
Quiller Consultants (UK) Support UK Government Relations work. PayPal marketing materials and product overviews. Occasional merchant case study. All other data shared will be public record e.g. consultation response. No customer or merchant specific data will be shared.
iProspect Search engine optimization to support PayPal marketing teams and provide feedback on web-design and site issues. Cookie ID, Customer ID, Country, account type, IP address.
Mozoo UK LTD, LoopMe Ltd., 4th Screen Advertising Ltd To execute and measure retargeting campaigns, to segment users for marketing campaigns, to deliver personalized advertising. Anonymous cookie IDs, Advertising ID’s, Aggregated data on installs, signups, and conversions
Crispin Porter Bogusky CP+B (UK) To execute and measure advertising campaigns Transaction Value (Donate only), Merchant ID
Altares D&B (EMEA), Informa (EMEA), Cerved (EMEA), Cribis D&B (EMEA),Coface (EMEA), Dun & Bradstreet (EMEA). Marketing and business information for sales purposes, acquire and enrich business info of new and existing clients. External leads (prospect business information).
Fiksu Inc (USA) To execute and measure retargeting campaigns in order to segment users for marketing campaigns involving PayPal mobile applications. Device ID used for Apple’s iOS operating system when a user installs an application, signs up for the PayPal services, logs in, checks in, or sets a profile picture.
Market Bridge (USA) To segment customers to enable improved servicing Account ID, address, post code, account history, growth data including product utilisation and all transaction data.
Select Media Ltd (UK), AdCompass Ltd (UK), Cheetah Mobile Inc. (China), Fyber GmbH (Germany) To execute and measure retargeting campaigns in order to segment users for marketing campaigns. Anonymous cookie ID, advertising ID, and/or device ID to segment user groups for marketing purposes.
Debby and Ron digital LTD (IL) LLC Havas Digital (Havas Russia) Online media agency to buy digital media to advertise PayPal services and products. These agencies often process anonymous cookie, device ID’s, targeting lists, hashed email lists to reach our consumers via media networks.
Ogury Ltd (UK), Adara, Inc (USA), RadiumOne, Inc (USA), Microsoft Online Inc, Commission Junction (USA) To execute and measure retargeting campaigns in order to segment users for marketing campaigns, deliver personalized advertising. Anonymous cookie ID generated by cookies, pixel tags or similar technologies embedded in webpages and emails delivered to users, Advertising ID, and/or device ID.
Integral Ad Science, Inc. (USA), Moat, Inc (USA) Third party ad verification services Non-PII Behavioral signals with regards to online advertising activity
Hypothesis Inc. To conduct customer service and marketing surveys. Name, email address, telephone number, country of residence/business, encrypted ID, transaction frequency, recency and volume, type of account, exposure to marketing materials, exposure to product flows, type and nature of the PayPal products/services offered or used, customer service contact, merchant/consumer classification, number of merchant transactions, number of months active, other relevant account/transaction information, and all information obtained from surveys
Borek media GmbH (Germany) To assist in the execution of offline direct mail and marketing campaigns. Name, customer ID, email address, postal address, business name, domain name, account status, account preferences, type and nature of PayPal services offered or used.
LookBookHQ (Canada) To deliver services related to LookbookHQ content experience products Customer and prospect IP address, customer email address
Purestone TFM Limited (UK) To perform customer and prospect interviews and research as input to the creation of marketing communication assets like testimonials and success stories Customer business name, contact name, contact telephone number
Snap Inc. (USA) To execute retargeting campaigns in order to deliver personalised advertising. Advertising ID and device ID used by a specific person, install and in-app data based on those IDs
Mobext (UK) To execute retargeting campaigns in order to deliver personalised advertising. Advertising ID and device ID used by a specific person
Teads SA (France) To execute retargeting campaigns in order to deliver personalised advertising. Advertising ID and device ID used by a specific person, install and in-app data based on those IDs
Spotify AB (Sweden) To execute retargeting campaigns in order to deliver personalised advertising. Advertising ID and device ID used by a specific person, install and in-app data based on those IDs
Apple Search Ads (USA) (UK) To set up, execute and measure advertising campaigns on Apple Search Ads platform. Apple will deliver advertising content to users of Apple software applications and Apple devices. Advertising ID and device ID used by a specific person, install and in-app data based on those IDs
Batch Media GmbH (Germany) For ad verification and viewability measurement Campaign based data (time, campaign information, location, geo information, browser information) as well as javascript readable creative data and IP address.
Qualtrics (U.S.) Collect user’s feedback on paypal.com website to get their satisfaction scores and specific site improvement recommendations, report site issues directly from the site visitors IP Address; User Agent; Browser; Device Type; Screen Resolution; Browser Size, Page URL; Page Referrer; Site Referrer; Page count; Time spent on site; time focused on site, date; day; time, Survey status (rendered, started, completed) and content filled if completed, Encrypted Cust_ID, Page name
RadiumOne (US) To execute and measure user behaviors (signups and transactions) and retargeting campaigns in order to identify visitors and redirect them through personalised advertising campaigns. Anonymous ID generated by cookies, pixel tags or similar technologies embedded in webpages, ads and emails delivered to users. Advertising ID and Device ID, encrypted e-mail address, Customer ID, Merchant ID, Transaction Value, Transaction ID, loan approval amount.
XING AG (Germany) To execute retargeting campaigns in order to deliver personalised advertising. Company names of existing merchants for matching them with the platform’s user base
Cosine (UK) Marketing of PayPal Here Name, surname, business name, TPV, number of transactions, address, email address
Blueshift (US) To enable marketing automation and personalization Name, surname, e-mail, phone number, gender, birth date, member ID, city, country, page visited and purchase history
Smartly (SE) To enable advertising on specific segments and find new potential customers E-mail address
Precis Digital (SE) To enable personalized advertising through AdWords Email address
Pipedrive (SE) To enable direct sales Customer ID, company name, company e-mail address
Wunderman (Germany) Data analyses and CRM strategy. Contact and account information including, but not limited to; name, address, email, telephone number, customer ID, DOB, anonymous cookie ID, advertising ID, segmentation group to which such person belongs to, transaction ID, number of PayPal transactions, domestic/ international transaction volume split, transaction frequency, recency and volume, type of account, exposure to marketing materials, exposure to product flows, type and nature of the PayPal products/services offered or used, customer service contact, merchant/consumer classification, number of merchant transactions, number of months active, other relevant account/transaction information.
Marketbridge Corporation (US) To conduct customer service and marketing surveys Country/city of residence/business, encrypted ID, transaction frequency, recency and volume, type of account, exposure to marketing materials, exposure to product flows, type and nature of the PayPal products/services offered or used, customer service contact, merchant/consumer classification, number of merchant transactions, number of months active, other relevant account/transaction information, and all information obtained from surveys.
Comscore (US) To conduct customer service and marketing surveys Country/city of residence/business, encrypted ID, transaction frequency, recency and volume, type of account, exposure to marketing materials, exposure to product flows, type and nature of the PayPal products/services offered or used, customer service contact, merchant/consumer classification, number of merchant transactions, number of months active, other relevant account/transaction information, and all information obtained from surveys.
Decipher Inc. (US) To conduct customer service and marketing surveys Country/city of residence/business, encrypted ID, transaction frequency, recency and volume, type of account, exposure to marketing materials, exposure to product flows, type and nature of the PayPal products/services offered or used, customer service contact, merchant/consumer classification, number of merchant transactions, number of months active, other relevant account/transaction information, and all information obtained from surveys.
Maru Group Llc (US) To conduct customer service and marketing surveys Country/city of residence/business, encrypted ID, transaction frequency, recency and volume, type of account, exposure to marketing materials, exposure to product flows, type and nature of the PayPal products/services offered or used, customer service contact, merchant/consumer classification, number of merchant transactions, number of months active, other relevant account/transaction information, and all information obtained from surveys.
The Nielsen Company (US) To conduct customer service and marketing surveys Primary Research: No PII is shared. Country/city of residence/business, encrypted ID, transaction frequency, recency and volume, type of account, exposure to marketing materials, exposure to product flows, type and nature of the PayPal products/services offered or used, customer service contact, merchant/consumer classification, number of merchant transactions, number of months active, other relevant account/transaction information, and all information obtained from surveys.
Factsworks (US) To conduct customer service and marketing surveys Primary Research: No PII is shared. Country/city of residence/business, encrypted ID, transaction frequency, recency and volume, type of account, exposure to marketing materials, exposure to product flows, type and nature of the PayPal products/services offered or used, customer service contact, merchant/consumer classification, number of merchant transactions, number of months active, other relevant account/transaction information, and all information obtained from surveys.
Tw Lrw Holdings, Llc (US) To conduct customer service and marketing surveys Primary Research: No PII is shared. Country/city of residence/business, encrypted ID, transaction frequency, recency and volume, type of account, exposure to marketing materials, exposure to product flows, type and nature of the PayPal products/services offered or used, customer service contact, merchant/consumer classification, number of merchant transactions, number of months active, other relevant account/transaction information, and all information obtained from surveys.
Galileo Kaleidoscope Pty Ltd (US) To conduct customer service and marketing surveys Primary Research: No PII is shared. Country/city of residence/business, encrypted ID, transaction frequency, recency and volume, type of account, exposure to marketing materials, exposure to product flows, type and nature of the PayPal products/services offered or used, customer service contact, merchant/consumer classification, number of merchant transactions, number of months active, other relevant account/transaction information, and all information obtained from surveys.
Business Insider (US) To conduct customer service and marketing surveys Country/city of residence/business, encrypted ID, transaction frequency, recency and volume, type of account, exposure to marketing materials, exposure to product flows, type and nature of the PayPal products/services offered or used, customer service contact, merchant/consumer classification, number of merchant transactions, number of months active, other relevant account/transaction information, and all information obtained from surveys.
Aite Group, Llc (US) To conduct customer service and marketing surveys Country/city of residence/business, encrypted ID, transaction frequency, recency and volume, type of account, exposure to marketing materials, exposure to product flows, type and nature of the PayPal products/services offered or used, customer service contact, merchant/consumer classification, number of merchant transactions, number of months active, other relevant account/transaction information, and all information obtained from surveys.
Meadowlands Consumer Center Inc (US) To conduct customer service and marketing surveys Country/city of residence/business, encrypted ID, transaction frequency, recency and volume, type of account, exposure to marketing materials, exposure to product flows, type and nature of the PayPal products/services offered or used, customer service contact, merchant/consumer classification, number of merchant transactions, number of months active, other relevant account/transaction information, and all information obtained from surveys.
Chadwick Martin Bailey (US) To conduct customer service and marketing surveys Country/city of residence/business, encrypted ID, transaction frequency, recency and volume, type of account, exposure to marketing materials, exposure to product flows, type and nature of the PayPal products/services offered or used, customer service contact, merchant/consumer classification, number of merchant transactions, number of months active, other relevant account/transaction information, and all information obtained from surveys.
360I Llc (US) To conduct customer service and marketing surveys Country/city of residence/business, encrypted ID, transaction frequency, recency and volume, type of account, exposure to marketing materials, exposure to product flows, type and nature of the PayPal products/services offered or used, customer service contact, merchant/consumer classification, number of merchant transactions, number of months active, other relevant account/transaction information, and all information obtained from surveys.
Mmr Research Associates (US) To conduct customer service and marketing surveys Primary Research: No PII is shared. Country/city of residence/business, encrypted ID, transaction frequency, recency and volume, type of account, exposure to marketing materials, exposure to product flows, type and nature of the PayPal products/services offered or used, customer service contact, merchant/consumer classification, number of merchant transactions, number of months active, other relevant account/transaction information, and all information obtained from surveys.
Euromonitor International (US) To conduct customer service and marketing surveys Primary Research: No PII is shared. Country/city of residence/business, encrypted ID, transaction frequency, recency and volume, type of account, exposure to marketing materials, exposure to product flows, type and nature of the PayPal products/services offered or used, customer service contact, merchant/consumer classification, number of merchant transactions, number of months active, other relevant account/transaction information, and all information obtained from surveys.
Statista (US) To conduct customer service and marketing surveys Country/city of residence/business, encrypted ID, transaction frequency, recency and volume, type of account, exposure to marketing materials, exposure to product flows, type and nature of the PayPal products/services offered or used, customer service contact, merchant/consumer classification, number of merchant transactions, number of months active, other relevant account/transaction information, and all information obtained from surveys.
Zpo_Ac Nielson (US) To conduct customer service and marketing surveys Country/city of residence/business, encrypted ID, transaction frequency, recency and volume, type of account, exposure to marketing materials, exposure to product flows, type and nature of the PayPal products/services offered or used, customer service contact, merchant/consumer classification, number of merchant transactions, number of months active, other relevant account/transaction information, and all information obtained from surveys.
Idc (US) To conduct customer service and marketing surveys Country/city of residence/business, encrypted ID, transaction frequency, recency and volume, type of account, exposure to marketing materials, exposure to product flows, type and nature of the PayPal products/services offered or used, customer service contact, merchant/consumer classification, number of merchant transactions, number of months active, other relevant account/transaction information, and all information obtained from surveys.
Aditi Consulting (US) To conduct customer service and marketing surveys Country/city of residence/business, encrypted ID, transaction frequency, recency and volume, type of account, exposure to marketing materials, exposure to product flows, type and nature of the PayPal products/services offered or used, customer service contact, merchant/consumer classification, number of merchant transactions, number of months active, other relevant account/transaction information, and all information obtained from surveys.
The Tryst Market Research Limited (US) To conduct customer service and marketing surveys Primary Research: No PII is shared. Country/city of residence/business, encrypted ID, transaction frequency, recency and volume, type of account, exposure to marketing materials, exposure to product flows, type and nature of the PayPal products/services offered or used, customer service contact, merchant/consumer classification, number of merchant transactions, number of months active, other relevant account/transaction information, and all information obtained from surveys.
Mercator Advisory Group (US) To conduct customer service and marketing surveys Primary Research: No PII is shared. Country/city of residence/business, encrypted ID, transaction frequency, recency and volume, type of account, exposure to marketing materials, exposure to product flows, type and nature of the PayPal products/services offered or used, customer service contact, merchant/consumer classification, number of merchant transactions, number of months active, other relevant account/transaction information, and all information obtained from surveys.
Decision Point Research Inc (US) To conduct customer service and marketing surveys Primary Research: No PII is shared. Country/city of residence/business, encrypted ID, transaction frequency, recency and volume, type of account, exposure to marketing materials, exposure to product flows, type and nature of the PayPal products/services offered or used, customer service contact, merchant/consumer classification, number of merchant transactions, number of months active, other relevant account/transaction information, and all information obtained from surveys.
Highgate Research Ltd (US) To conduct customer service and marketing surveys Primary Research: No PII is shared. Country/city of residence/business, encrypted ID, transaction frequency, recency and volume, type of account, exposure to marketing materials, exposure to product flows, type and nature of the PayPal products/services offered or used, customer service contact, merchant/consumer classification, number of merchant transactions, number of months active, other relevant account/transaction information, and all information obtained from surveys.
Nepa Ab (US) To conduct customer service and marketing surveys Primary Research: No PII is shared. Country/city of residence/business, encrypted ID, transaction frequency, recency and volume, type of account, exposure to marketing materials, exposure to product flows, type and nature of the PayPal products/services offered or used, customer service contact, merchant/consumer classification, number of merchant transactions, number of months active, other relevant account/transaction information, and all information obtained from surveys.
Siriusdecisions Inc. (US) To conduct customer service and marketing surveys Primary Research: No PII is shared. Country/city of residence/business, encrypted ID, transaction frequency, recency and volume, type of account, exposure to marketing materials, exposure to product flows, type and nature of the PayPal products/services offered or used, customer service contact, merchant/consumer classification, number of merchant transactions, number of months active, other relevant account/transaction information, and all information obtained from surveys.
Pr Uk Ltd (US) To conduct customer service and marketing surveys Country/city of residence/business, encrypted ID, transaction frequency, recency and volume, type of account, exposure to marketing materials, exposure to product flows, type and nature of the PayPal products/services offered or used, customer service contact, merchant/consumer classification, number of merchant transactions, number of months active, other relevant account/transaction information, and all information obtained from surveys.
Consumer Search Hong Kong Ltd. (US) To conduct customer service and marketing surveys Country/city of residence/business, encrypted ID, transaction frequency, recency and volume, type of account, exposure to marketing materials, exposure to product flows, type and nature of the PayPal products/services offered or used, customer service contact, merchant/consumer classification, number of merchant transactions, number of months active, other relevant account/transaction information, and all information obtained from surveys.
Launchbox, Llc. (US) To conduct customer service and marketing surveys Country/city of residence/business, encrypted ID, transaction frequency, recency and volume, type of account, exposure to marketing materials, exposure to product flows, type and nature of the PayPal products/services offered or used, customer service contact, merchant/consumer classification, number of merchant transactions, number of months active, other relevant account/transaction information, and all information obtained from surveys.
Wire Stone (US) To conduct customer service and marketing surveys Country/city of residence/business, encrypted ID, transaction frequency, recency and volume, type of account, exposure to marketing materials, exposure to product flows, type and nature of the PayPal products/services offered or used, customer service contact, merchant/consumer classification, number of merchant transactions, number of months active, other relevant account/transaction information, and all information obtained from surveys.
Kae:Marketing Intelligence Ltd (US) To conduct customer service and marketing surveys Country/city of residence/business, encrypted ID, transaction frequency, recency and volume, type of account, exposure to marketing materials, exposure to product flows, type and nature of the PayPal products/services offered or used, customer service contact, merchant/consumer classification, number of merchant transactions, number of months active, oHouse Republicans are setting up the biggest sham in the history of this nation. Faced with the prospect of breaking their own rules in their attempt to kill health care reform, they were ignoring that to do so will cost well over $100 billion in the first ten years and billions in the next ten. How were they going to pay for it? The method they are choosing is the most disingenuous I have seen. They are killing the CBO and replacing it with one proven liar.
Congressional Democrats, removed from their rhetorical shackles by the coming Republican control of the House, are accusing the GOP of resorting to "Enron-type accounting" in their efforts to push legislation in the next Congress.
Rep. Chris Van Hollen (D-Md.), the incoming ranking member of the House Budget Committee, warned on Tuesday that Republican leadership is set to implement new rules that would effectively do away with the Congressional Budget Office. The CBO is often regarded as a nonpartisan, independent scorekeeper for Congress. And by taking away its input in legislative matters, Van Hollen said, Republicans were ushering in an era of make-your-own-reality-based budgeting.
"This is a huge loophole for Enron-type accounting … In the rule they pass tomorrow they are going to reiterate that the chair of the budget committee has the authority to come up with his own estimate of the budget impact of various pieces of legislation," Van Hollen told the Huffington Post. "And a week from now, when they get around to repealing health care reform I think you will see they will go down and say this has zero cost impact."
"It is a wholesale disregard of CBO estimates," Van Hollen added. "After all, CBO is the one referee we have around here when it comes to the budget. So again, we are watching this unfold. But it does seem that they are putting in place the pieces to allow the Chairman of the Budget committee to literally make up the numbers as they go."… [emphasis added]A general view of atmosphere onstage at the NOVA 'Ultimate Mars Challenge' panel during day 2 of the PBS portion of the 2012 Summer TCA Tour held at the Beverly Hilton Hotel on July 22, 2012 in Los Angeles, California. (Frederick M. Brown/Getty Images)
‘The Martian’ Author Andy Weir Separates Fact From Fiction in Reddit AMA
“The Martian,” both the book and the film, has always been generously praised for its realism. The Wall Street Journal noted that the novel “read like a detailed survival manual,” and Jim Green, NASA’s director of planetary sciences, told CBS earlier this month that the film “is as close to science fact, as any science fiction I have seen in going to Mars.”
Scientific accuracy runs in the blood of the novel’s author, Andy Weir, who was the child of a particle physicist and an electrical engineer. Weir had no intentions of writing a best-seller at the start, and instead concentrated on getting the details right.
But for the premise of the story to work, Weir had to introduce several elements that don’t exist in reality, and laid out his workarounds in a Q&A on the popular discussion board Reddit, where earnest fans grilled him on miscellaneous details in his novel.
Weir had no intentions of writing a best-seller at the start, and instead concentrated on getting the details right.
The story of “The Martian” revolves around NASA’s Mark Watney trying to survive on the red planet after he gets cut off from the rest of his crew in the middle of a dust storm. One fan asked Weir if such withering storms were possible on Mars.
“No. Mars’s atmosphere is too thin. This was a deliberate concession to drama that I made because it’s a man-versus-nature story and I wanted nature to get the first punch in,” Weir replied.
The fastest winds on Mars reach speeds of up to 100 miles per hour, according to NASA research, the same as hurricane winds on Earth, but on Mars they’re fairly harmless because of their low mass. The atmospheric density of Mars is around 1/100 that of Earth.
“Even if you were stood right in the middle of a dust devil, you’d feel roughly the same strength of wind blowing past you that you’d feel on a gentle cycle ride on a calm day,” Robert Walker, a programmer and inventor, wrote on Quora.
Once stranded on Mars, Watney makes his way toward the Schiaparelli crater, where another manned mission will arrive in four years. Spending that much time on the planet would expose him to a dangerous, and probably fatal, amount of cosmic rays, if not for his handy (and fictional) radiation blocker.
The book has a completely fictional material that blocks radiation. — Andy Weir, author, 'The Martian'
“The book has a completely fictional material that blocks radiation. No such thin, flexible, light radiation shielding exists in the real world,” Weir told the AMA audience.
In the real world, cosmic ray radiation sets an upper limit on how long astronauts can stay in outer space. NASA’s Curiosity rover calculates that a manned mission to Mars—180 days to get there, a 500 day stay on the planet, and 180 days to get back—would cumulatively expose astronauts to 1.01 sieverts, above the 1.0 sievert lifetime limit that European Space Agency imposes on its astronauts.
NASA limits its astronauts to between.8 and 1.2 sieverts of lifetime radiation exposure, which would raise the lifetime risk of cancer by 3 percent. Because the sample size of astronauts who have spent a considerable time in space is so small, the exact health effects of cosmic ray exposure is clouded with uncertainty. A 2014 report from the Public Library of Science suggests that cancer risks were higher than previously estimated, meaning that NASA and other space agencies should lower the lifetime exposure limit.
The most effective shields against cosmic rays, like water or liquid hydrogen, tend to be heavy and not portable—meaning they’re suitable inside the walls of a space capsule, but impractical in a spacesuit. Researchers are working on plastic cosmic ray shields, but haven’t gotten there yet.
There were also inaccuracies that Weir didn’t plan on. On Mars, Watney mixes hydrazine, a toxic substance usually handled by people in hazmat suits, and oxygen to make drinking water. The admixture also produces ammonia, which as one fan points out, “isn’t very healthy either.”
“Yes, very toxic. I didn’t know that at the time. Had I known, I would have had him wear his EVA suit during the process,” Weir replied.
But Weir doesn’t mind these minor blemishes; relative to other science fiction novels, his book is as real as they come.
“I’m not worried about my work coming under the eye of experts. It’s a work of fiction, and it’s going to have inaccuracies. That’s just how it is,” Weir wrote. “Getting a thumbs up from those experts and hearing them say ‘It’s more accurate than anything else in the field’ is a good feeling.”LOS ANGELES — After eight seasons and two Stanley Cup titles as the Los Angeles Kings‘ captain, Dustin Brown thought he deserved better.
Brown doesn’t agree with the Kings’ decision to strip him of their captaincy this summer, and he aired his differences with team management Thursday in a phone interview.
“I felt like I’ve done a very good job leading this team,” he said. “The last couple of years have been really disappointing for all involved, and we all have a lot of work to do to get back where we want to be.
“But I just remember when I was named captain, where we were at as a team. It was not a pretty picture. So what I’ve been able to accomplish with the help of a lot of my teammates has been pretty great, and I felt I’m still able to do that.”
Anze Kopitar was appointed the Kings’ captain two weeks ago after a series of meetings among Brown, coach Darryl Sutter and general manager Dean Lombardi. Brown said the decision was made several weeks before that, but the team waited to announce it until well after news of the plan leaked to reporters.
“Ultimately, I understand the decision and I respect the decision,” Brown said. “Part of my problem was how it was handled. It just put me in an awkward spot.”
Brown also said he believes the Kings have tried to trade him. When asked to describe his current relationship with Kings management, he replied: “I’m not going to say it’s rosy.”
His declining offensive production and his $47 million contract through the 2021-22 season make him practically unmovable, but Brown isn’t interested in leaving, anyway.
Brown hasn’t scored 30 points in any of the Kings’ past four seasons. The U.S. Olympian is no longer widely considered one of the NHL’s top power forwards, and Lombardi said he hopes Brown will rediscover his game with the burden of leadership lifted.
Brown didn’t want to be rid of that burden, however.
“It was a tough pill to swallow,” Brown said. “There are a lot of emotions that go through it. But at the end of the day, it was really out of my control because this is a management decision, not the players voting on it or anything like that. To be quite honest, it would’ve been a lot harder had it been my teammates doing this.”
Brown acknowledged he has had differences with Sutter, who became the Kings’ coach in late 2011, more than three years after Brown became captain. Brown said their recent clear-the-air meetings “probably should have happened a year ago.”
Sutter and Brown led the Kings to two titles and 10 playoff series victories from 2012-14, but Los Angeles missed the playoffs entirely in 2015. The Kings led the Pacific Division for most of the past season, but were eliminated by San Jose in five first-round playoff games.
Los Angeles’ struggles in the past two seasons – and Brown’s shortcomings on the ice – ultimately led to the change.
“I enjoyed the responsibility, but whether I have a C on my chest or not, I’m going to put pressure on myself to be better, because I’m not OK with just being OK,” Brown said.
“If you are, then you’re out of this league pretty quickly. I think this is maybe them trying to get me to a place where I’m not worried about the young guys, or all the stuff you kind of have to worry about a little bit more when you’re the captain, and now I can just focus on my game a little bit more.”
Brown still threw his support behind Kopitar, his teammate and close friend for the past decade. Kopitar has led the Kings in scoring for nine consecutive seasons, and he won the Selke Trophy last week as the NHL’s top defensive forward.
“I think Kopi is going to be a great captain,” Brown said. “I’ve been with him since he came into this league, and he’ll be fine in this situation. I have all the faith in the world in Kopi in being the guy now, but from my perspective, I wasn’t happy with this decision.”The Business of Fashion: A New Wolf vs Goat Series
Posted: May 21 2014
Over the coming few weeks, we're going to spice up the way we're doing things with new features, segments, and the like.
One of the new series that we're introducing is: the business of fashion. What's that topic include? A whole helluva a lot. But we're going to focus on a few topics:
1) What we purchase and how much of it we purchase?
2) where we purchase items?
3) how we purchase?
4) why we purchase?
5) how everything above is changing
Also, two important items to note:
1) We're not going to just give you our random ramblings. We're going to use data.
2) Sometimes we will try to not only explain, but also, hypothesize. Again, we will use data and facts to support our thoughts, opinions, and analysis. But they will be our thoughts, opinions, and analysis. We're not claiming to be experts or the definitive voice/authority on the topics that we write about. Along those lines, we would love for readers to challenge us, share their thoughts and opinions, regardless of whether they are in agreement or in opposition to ours, and even write follow up blog posts of their own.
Oh yeah...while it goes without saying, we'll say it anyhow: please be civil, do not make personal attacks, and try to keep it clean.Atlanta United striker Josef Martinez will travel with the team for Saturday’s game at Vancouver, manager Gerardo Martino said Tuesday.
Martinez, out since late March after suffering a thigh injury while playing with the Venezuelan national team, will train with Atlanta United on Tuesday. He trained with the team for the first time since his injury Friday.
Martino said that Martinez will be eased back into playing time, making it unlikely that he will start Saturday’s game at BC Place.
The team is going to charter a flight (one of four flight segments allowed by MLS), which should reduce the time spent on an airplane for all of the players.
Martino said a decision on whether Martinez can play will be made in Vancouver.
Hector Villalba and Kenwyne Jones have filled in at striker in place of Martinez in the past nine games. Three of Villalba’s five goals have come at striker. Jones scored two in his four games at striker.
Martinez, 24, is tied for second on the team with five goals. They were scored in the season’s first three games.
Martinez was acquired on loan from Torino in Italy. The loan was announced as permanent following Atlanta United’s third game.
Martino said there’s a chance that midfielder Jacob Peterson, out since the fourth game, will travel to Vancouver.
Fullback Mark Bloom has a virus that may prevent him from being considered for the 18.Any cat owner will tell you that although they are sometimes kept as pets, felines are beholden to no one.
A new study from the University of Tokyo has confirmed this, showing that although pet cats are more than capable of recognising their owner’s voice they choose to ignore them - for reasons that are perhaps rooted in the evolutionary history of the animal.
Carried out by Atsuko Saito and Kazutaka Shinozuka, the study tested twenty housecats in their own homes; waiting until the owner was out of sight and then playing them recordings of three strangers calling their names, followed by their owner, followed by another stranger.
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.
The researchers then analysed the cats’ responses to each call by measuring a number of factors including ear, tail and head movement, vocalization, eye dilation and ‘displacement’ – shifting their paws to move.
When hearing their names’ being called the cats displayed “ orientating behaviour” (moving their heads and ears about to locate where the sound was coming from) and although they showed a greater response to their owner’s voices than strangers’, they declined to move when called by any of the volunteers.
“These results indicate that cats do not actively respond with communicative behavior to owners who are calling them from out of sight, even though they can distinguish their owners’ voices,” write Saito and Shinozuka. “This cat–owner relationship is in contrast to that with dogs.”
The study, published by Springer in the Animal Cognition journal, suggests that the reason for cats’ unresponsive behaviour might be traced back to the early domestication of the species, contrasting this with the relationship of humans to dogs.
Recent genetic analysis has revealed that the common ancestor of the modern housecat was Felis silvestris, a species of wildcat that first came into contact with humans around 9,000 years ago. As early societies developed agriculture, these cats moved in to prey on the rodents that were attracted to stores of grain. In the words of the paper’s authors, they effectively “domesticated themselves”.
Shape Created with Sketch. Aoshima: Cats Island Show all 13 left Created with Sketch. right Created with Sketch. Shape Created with Sketch. Aoshima: Cats Island 1/13 Cats Island Reuters 2/13 Cats Island Reuters 3/13 Cats Island Reuters 4/13 Cats Island Reuters 5/13 Cats Island Reuters 6/13 Cats Island Reuters 7/13 Cats Island Reuters 8/13 Cats Island Reuters 9/13 Cats Island Reuters 10/13 Cats Island Reuters 11/13 Cats Island Reuters 12/13 Cats Island Reuters 13/13 Cats Island Reuters 1/13 Cats Island Reuters 2/13 Cats Island Reuters 3/13 Cats Island Reuters 4/13 Cats Island Reuters 5/13 Cats Island Reuters 6/13 Cats Island Reuters 7/13 Cats Island Reuters 8/13 Cats Island Reuters 9/13 Cats Island Reuters 10/13 Cats Island Reuters 11/13 Cats Island Reuters 12/13 Cats Island Reuters 13/13 Cats Island Reuters
“Historically speaking, cats, unlike dogs, have not been domesticated to obey humans’ orders. Rather, they seem to take the initiative in human–cat interaction.” This is in contrast to the history of dogs and humans, where the |
literature. The average human being breathes about 10 meters a day of air, cubic meters of air. And the air out in the Seattle area are detecting, when they pull 10 cubic meters through them, this is in April now, so we are in the end of May so it is a better situation now. That air filter will have 10 hot particles on it. And that was before the Unit Four issue. Clearly we all can't run south of the equator to our second homes in Rio or something like that. But it will stay north of the equator for anyone who has a Leer jet and can get out. But I guess what I am advising at that point is keep your windows closed. I would definitely wear some sort of a filter if I was outside. I certainly wouldn't run and exercise until I was sure the plume had dissipated. This isn't now. This is, as you were saying, this is worst case. If Unit Four were to topple, I would close my windows, turn the air conditioner on, replace the filters frequently, damp mop, put a HEPA filter in the house and try to avoid as much of the hot particles as possible. You are not going to walk out with a Geiger counter and be in a plume that is going to tell you the meter. The issue will be on the West Coast, hot particles. And the solution there is HEPA filters and avoiding them. There is also potentially some medical issues Maggie and I have been working with a couple of doctors to look at ways to mitigate to help your body cleanse particles if you know you have been exposed to them. But that is a little bit premature to go into much more detail on that. Gunderson Feels Bottom Of Reactor 3 (MOX) Could Fall Out...
Now, Unit 3 has another problem and the NRC mentioned it yesterday for the first time and it gets back to that saltwater and the effect on iron. They are afraid that the reactor bottom will break, literally just break right out and dump everything. Because it's now hot and it's got salt on it and it's got the ideal conditions for corrosion. So the big fear on Unit 3 is that it will break at the bottom and whatever else remains in it, which could be the entire core, could fall out suddenly. Gunderson Sees West Coast Fish, Water Contamination By 2013... So eventually though we are going to see top of the food chain animals like tuna and salmon and things like that that have this process bio accumulates. The bigger fish gradually get higher and higher concentrations. And I am concerned that the FDA is not monitoring fish entering the United States because sooner or later a tuna is going to set off a radiation alarm at some part and people are going to think it's a dirty bomb or something like that. So that's not here yet because the tuna haven't migrated across the Pacific. But I am thinking by 2013 we might see contamination of the water and of the top of the food chain fishes on the West Coast. Gunderson Advises People Leave Tokyo If Reactor 4 Building Falls... The winds have turned, so they are heading to the south toward Tokyo and now my concern and my advice to friends that if there is a severe aftershock and the Unit 4 building collapses, leave. We are well beyond where any science has ever gone at that point and nuclear fuel lying on the ground and getting hot is not a condition that anyone has ever analyzed.....mainly, cesium and strontium those are going to head south, whether or not there is a tropical hurricane. The wind is going to push it south this time and so the issue is not the total radiation you might measure with a Geiger counter in your hand, but hot particles. Gundersen thinks the melted fuel is at the bottom of the containment vessels in Reactors 1 and 2, and that there are ongoing nuclear reactions in what's left of Reactor 3... Arnie Gundersen: Yes, once the uranium melts into a blob at these low enrichments, four and five percent, it can't make a new criticality. If criticality is occurring on the site - and there might be, because there is still iodine 131, which is a good indication - it is not coming from the Unit 1 core and it's not coming from the Unit 2 core, because those are both blobs at the bottom of the containment. Chris Martenson: All right, so we have these blobs, they've somehow escaped the primary reactor pressure vessel, which is that big steel thing and now they are on the relatively flat floor of the containment they concrete piece and you say Unit 2 is roughly the same story as Unit 1 where's Unit 3 in this story? Arnie Gundersen: Unit 3 may not have melted through and that means that some of the fuel certainly is lying on the bottom, but it may not have melted through and some of the fuel may still look like fuel, although it is certainly brittle. And it's possible that when the fuel is in that configuration that you can get a re-criticality. It's also possible in any of the fuel pools, one, two, three, and four pools, that you could get a criticality, as well. So there's been frequent enough high iodine indications to lead me to believe that either one of the four fuel pools or the Unit 3 reactor is in fact, every once in a while starting itself up and then it gets to a point where it gets so hot that it shuts itself down and it kind of cycles. It kind of breathes, if you will. Gunderson says flatly that Fukushima is worse than Chernobil... Arnie Gundersen: Well, this event is I have said it's worse than Chernobyl and I'll stand by that. There was an enormous amount of radiation given out in the first two to three weeks of the event. And add the wind and blowing in-land. This could be it could very well have brought the nation of Japan to its knees, I mean there is so much contamination that luckily wound up in the Pacific Ocean as compared to across the nation of Japan. It could have cut Japan in half. But now the winds have turned, so they are heading to the south toward Tokyo and now my concern and my advice to friends that if there is a severe aftershock and the Unit 4 building collapses, leave. We are well beyond where any science has ever gone at that point and nuclear fuel lying on the ground and getting hot is not a condition that anyone has ever analyzed. So the plants, you will see them steaming and as summer goes on, you will see them steaming less, because the air is warmer, but it's not because they are not steaming, you just don't see it. Because this event occurred in March and it was cool there, so you will see the steam a lot easier. Those plants are still omitting a lot of radiation. Nowhere near as much as on the first two weeks, but a lot of radiation: cesium, strontium, and mainly cesium and strontium those are going to head south, whether or not there is a tropical hurricane. The wind is going to push it south this time and so the issue is not the total radiation you might measure with a Geiger counter in your hand, but hGunderson states concrete cannot be used to cover Fukushima... Chris Martenson: So talk about -- realistically I mean this is going to be months, years, whatever, it's going to take a long time. What do they do at this point, are they going to entomb these things, are they required to just keep dumping water on these things until they finally cool down, capturing water all the way through? Or is there some way that they can maybe just throw up their hands and just pour a bunch of concrete on it and call it a day? Arnie Gundersen: I think eventually they may get to the point of throwing up their hands and pouring the concrete on. They can't do that yet, because the cores are still too hot. So we are going to see the dance we're in for another year or so, until the cores cool down. At that point, there's not anywhere near as much decay heat and you probably could consider filling them with concrete and just letting sit there, like we have it at Chernobyl, as a giant mausoleum. That would work for units 1, 2, and 3. Unit 4 is still a problem, because again all the fuel is at the top and you can't put the concrete at the top because you will collapse the building and it's so radioactive, you can't lift the nuclear fuel out. I used to do this as a living and Unit 4 has me stumped. For more, go to... Interview Part 1 http://www.chrismartenson.com/blog/exclusive-arnie-gundersen-interview-dangers-
fukushima-are-worse-and-longer-lived-we-think/58689 Interview Part 2 http://www.chrismartenson.com/martensonreport/part-2-
arnie-gundersen-interview-protecting-yourself-if-situation-worsensJim Burroway
TODAY IN HISTORY:
Premiere of “Making Love”: 1982. Starring Michael Ontkean, Charlie’s Angels star Kate Jackson, and Harry Hamlin, Making Love opened in theaters as the first mainstream film to tackle homosexuality in a nonjudgemental way. That’s not to say that the story wasn’t without drama when Zach (Ontkean) and Claire (Jackson) dealt with a crumbling marriage as Zach struggled to deal with his attractions to other men. When he meets gay novelist Bart McGuire (Hamlin), their professional relationship (Zach was a doctor, Bart a patient who was in for a check-up) turned into a lunch date, then a dinner date, and then a full-fledged relationship, which over time, ends in a divorce for Zach and Claire. Claire handles the news badly, but over time comes to understand that gay people can live happy lives. The film’s happily-ever-after ending had the feel of a made-for-TV movie which critics hated. Gay critics, however, were overjoyed that the film was a positive portrayal where the gay characters didn’t all die in the end.
In real life however, the film demonstrated one significant difficulty in making mainstream movies about gay men: it seemed to confirm the fear that taking such a role would be career killers. Tom Berenger, Michael Douglas, Harrison Ford, William Hurt and Peter Strauss were all approached to play Zach; they all turned the role down. After the film’s release Ontkean and Hamlin had trouble living the film down. Hamlin’s promising career stalled for the next four years until he landed a role in NBC’s L.A. Law. Ontkean tried to prevent clips of his role from appearing in Vito Russo’s 1996 documentary The Celluloid Closet.
SF Mayor Grants Same-Sex Marriages: 2004. It was a stunning announcement, when San Francisco Mayor Gavin Newsom declared that the California Constitution’s equal protection clause gave him the authority to issue marriage licenses to same-sex couples. Between February 12 and March 11, 2004, an estimated 4,000 joyous couples lined up at City Hall to take part in what was quickly dubbed “The Winter of Love.” But the weddings came to an abrupt halt when the California Supreme Court declared that the mayor lacked the authority to bypass state law. All of those marriage licenses were voided, and same-sex marriage would remain unavailable until 2008 when the state Supreme Court found that “equal respect and dignity” of marriage is a “basic civil right” for all couples in California, gay or straight. That finding was overturned by Prop 8 in 2008, which itself was ruled unconstitutional in 2010. That ruling was upheld by a three-judge panel of the Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals last week. But a stay against the resumption of marriages remains while the case continues is long journey to an expected U.S. Supreme Court ruling in June.
If you know of something that belongs on the agenda, please send it here. Don’t forget to include the basics: who, what, when, where, and URL (if available).
And feel free to consider this your open thread for the day. What’s happening in your world?Duke Paoa Kahinu Mokoe Hulikohola Kahanamoku (August 24, 1890 ® January 22, 1968), was born in Hawaii on August 24, 1890. He is generally regarded as the father of modern surfing, Olympic champion and legendary waterman. The name "Duke" is not a title, but a given name. He was named after his father, Halapu Kahanamoku, who was christened "Duke" by Bernice Pauahi Bishop in honor of Prince Alfred, Duke of Edinburgh, who was visiting Hawaii at the time of the elder man's birth in 1869. The younger "Duke," as eldest son, inherited the name. Growing up on the outskirts of Waikiki (near the present site of the Hilton Hawaiian Village), Kahanamoku spent his youth as a bronzed beach boy. It was at Waikiki Beach where he developed his surfing and swimming skills. Duke along with his teenage surfer friends formed one of the first surf clubs known as Hui Nalu or 'Club Of The Waves'. They were also known as the 'Beach Boys of Waikiki'. At that time in Hawaii the missionaries had stamped out all native traditions, through fear of the unknown, surfing or wave-sliding as it was known at the time was one of these. Duke and his friends are credited with the rebirth of surfing in Hawaii. In his youth, Kahanamoku preferred an old-school (traditional) surf board, which he called his "papa nui", constructed after the fashion of ancient Hawaiian "olo" boards. Made from the wood of a koa tree, it was sixteen feet (4.8 m) long and weighed 114 pounds (52 kg). The board was without a skeg, which had yet to be invented. In his later career, he would often use smaller boards, but always preferred those made of wood. On August 11, 1911, in an amateur swim meet, Kahanamoku was timed at 55.4 seconds in the 100 yard (91 m) freestyle, beating the existing world record by 4.6 seconds, in the salt water of Honolulu Harbor. He also broke the record in the 220 yd (201 m) and equaled it in the 50 yd (46 m), but the Amateur Athletic Union, in disbelief, would not recognize these feats until many years later. They initially claimed that the judges must have been using alarm clocks rather than stopwatches, and later claimed that ocean currents aided Kahanamoku. Kahanamoku easily qualified for the U.S. Olympic swimming team in 1912, breaking the record for the 200 meter freestyle in his trial heat for the 4x200 relay. He went on to win a gold medal in the 100 meter freestyle in the 1912 Olympics in Stockholm, and a silver with the relay team, catapulting him into international stardom. Eight years later he repeated this, during the 1920 Olympics in Antwerp, he won gold medals both in the 100 meters, bettering fellow Hawaiian Pua Kealoha, and in the relay. He finished the 100 meters with a silver medal during the 1924 Olympics in Paris, the gold going to Johnny Weissmuller and the bronze to Duke's brother, Samuel Kahanamoku. He also showed up on the U.S. Water Polo team at the 1932 Summer Olympics. All told, Duke won three gold and two silver medals in four Olympic games. Between Olympic competitions, and after retiring from the Olympics, Kahanamoku traveled internationally, particularly Australia and the United States, to give swimming exhibitions. It was during this period that he popularized the sport of surfing, previously known only in Hawaii, by incorporating surfing exhibitions into these visits as well. His surfing exhibition at Sydney's Freshwater Beach on December 23, 1914 is widely regarded as the most significant day in the development of surfing in Australia. The board Kahanamoku used is retained by the Freshwater Surf Club and can be viewed if the caretaker is approached respectfully. There is a statue of Kahanamoku on the headland at Freshwater. He also made surfing popular in mainland America first in Santa Cruz, California. This is where surfing first started in California. During his time living in Southern California, Kahanamoku also performed in Hollywood as an extra and a character actor in several films, in which he usually played a native chief or a Hawaiian king. In this way, he made connections with people who could further publicity for the sport of surfing. Kahanamoku was also involved with the Los Angeles Athletic Club, acting as lifeguard and competing on both swimming and water polo teams. While living in Newport Beach, California on June 14, 1925, Kahanamoku rescued eight men from a fishing vessel that capsized in heavy surf while attempting to enter the city's harbor. Twenty-nine fishermen went into the water and seventeen perished. Using his surfboard, he was able to make quick trips back and forth to shore to increase the number of sailors rescued. Two other surfers saved four more fishermen. Newport's police chief at the time called Duke's efforts "the most superhuman surfboard rescue act the world
has ever seen." Thus was born the tradition of lifeguards having rescue surfboards
at the ready. In 1940, he married the love of his life, Nadine Alexander. She accompanied him when he traveled all over the world. He also served as sheriff of Honolulu, Hawaii from 1932 to 1961, serving 13 consecutive terms. Hawaii music promoter Kimo Wilder McVay capitalized on Duke's popularity by naming his Waikiki showroom Duke Kahanamoku's, and giving Duke a piece of the financial action in exchange for the use of his name. Duke's was a major Waikiki showroom in the 1960s and is best remembered as the home of Don Ho & The Aliis from 1964 through 1969. Duke's name is currently being used by another business establishment, Duke's Canoe Club & Barefoot Bar, a beachfront bar and restaurant in the Outrigger Waikiki On The Beach Hotel. The decor includes many poster-size photos of Duke ã with his brothers in Waikiki, and on his travels in other parts of the world. There is a chain of restaurants named after him in California and Hawaii called Duke's. A monument at Waikiki beach in Honolulu also honors his memory. It shows Duke Kahanamoku standing in front of his surfboard with his arms outstretched. Many honor him by placing leis on his statue. Do not miss visiting this Waikiki landmark! In 2002, Kahanamoku was featured on a first class letter rate postage stamp of the United States Postal Service. Pictured on a USA 37¢ commemorative postage stamp issued 24 August 2002 (112th anniversary of his birth). He was elected to the International Swimming Hall of Fame & Museum in Fort Lauderdale, Florida, in 1965. Duke Kahanamoku was the first person to be inducted into both the Swimming Hall of Fame and the Surfing Hall of Fame. He was inducted into the U.S. Olympic Hall of Fame in 1984. The Duke Kahanamoku Invitational Surfing Championships are named in his honor. The Duke died aged 78 and to this day remains a symbol of Hawaii, one of the greatest surfers and most important men in surfing history. "The father of modern surfing," was Hawaii's first ambassador of goodwill.After agreeing to a contract buyout with the Utah Jazz, veteran guard Raja Bell will officially become an unrestricted free agent.
At 36-years-old, Bell believes he still has something left in the tank and will consider his options in free agency.
Reportedly, Bell wants an opportunity to win a title with the next team he signs with.
That being said, there are a short list of teams in which he’s willing to join before next season, with the Los Angeles Lakers near the top according to Adrian Wojnarowski of Yahoo Sports via Twitter:
Another possibility for Raja Bell: The Lakers. Kobe Bryant recruited Bell hard a year ago, and still fits as defensive-minded guard w/ Nash. — Adrian Wojnarowski (@WojYahooNBA) July 8, 2012
With Steve Nash now running the show in the backcourt for the Lakers, Los Angeles will presumably be a much better team offensively. The addition of Nash will pick up the pace and increase the team’s chances of lighting up the scoreboard on a nightly basis.
Unfortunately, the defense may suffer and the bench still needs some upgrading. The signing of Bell, a good friend of Nash, would greatly improve the Lakers defensively and from beyond the arc. Bell may no longer be the player he once was with the Phoenix Suns, but he can definitely help the Lakers off the bench.
The left knee injury Bell suffered last season may be a concern for the Lakers. With the Lakers not getting any younger, GM Mitch Kupchak and company may stay away from adding players with questionable health at an advanced age.
Regardless of the potential health issues, signing Bell at the veteran’s minimum isn’t a bad play for the Lakers as it will improve the bench and give the team another great defender. Bell’s ability to guard multiple positions will definitely be put to use in Los Angeles.
With Kobe Bryant and Bell no longer mortal enemies after heated battles in the NBA playoffs, the five-time champion will most likely reach out to his former nemesis along with Nash to convince him to sign with the Lakers. Nash and Bell are reportedly very close, which may increase the team’s chances of landing the defensive-minded veteran.
Even though Bell has expressed interest in signing with the Lakers, two other teams are also in the running with Boston Celtics and Miami Heat on his short list. The Heat are currently the frontrunners to sign the veteran guard with Bell being a Miami native.
Last season, Bell averaged 6.4 points per game while shooting an impressive 39% from three-point range.Travis Stevens (USA) reacts after loosing to Khasan Khalmurzaev (RUS) during the men's judo 81-kilogram gold medal match in the Rio 2016 Summer Olympic Games on Aug. 9. (Photo11: John David Mercer-USA TODAY Spor)
RIO DE JANEIRO — Antipathy over the Russian doping scandal has been pervasive at the Olympics, from some Russians drawing negative crowd reactions to 19-year old American swimmer Lilly King trash-talking her competitor before beating her for a gold medal.
But when Travis Stevens lost his bid Tuesday to become the first American man to win a gold medal in judo to Russian Khasan Khalmurzaev, there was a genuine, warm embrace. At this level of Judo, they are competitors for sure. But they are also offseason training partners and consider themselves brothers, regardless of country. Stevens has even traveled to Russia several times, he said, to train with their national team.
“Judo is a different sport,” Stevens said. “The Russian team has been kind to me. We bleed together. It’s more of a brotherhood. We want to make sure we’re in the best shape we can be, so who better to train against than the best in the world? Whether he won or I won, I’m happy for him.”
As Stevens accepted his silver medal after being defeated by ippon, a decisive move that ended the match with 2:42 remaining, the emotion showed on his face. Twice he was nearly derailed from making these Olympics, first by a concussion that took him out of training for two months and then by a severe infection in his knee a little more than a year ago.
Despite a swollen leg that doctors overseas could not properly diagnose, he tried to compete anyway at the world championships in Kazakhstan before coming home to learn he had MRSA, cellulitis and staph in his right knee and was probably two days away from having to endure a leg amputation.
Stevens contemplated retiring from the sport right then. Instead, he recovered and trained for his third trip to the Olympics in the 81 kg weight class. In the semifinals — the round he lost in London — he beat world No. 1 ranked Avtandil Tchrikishvili of Georgia to give himself a shot at the gold.
While he came up short, it was the first medal in men’s judo for the U.S. of any kind since 2004.
“It’s hard not to just break down in tears after everything I’ve been through,” he said. “You question, what is this moment worth? It was everything.”
BEST IMAGES FROM AUG. 9 AT THE OLYMPICSVoters in Venezuela on Sunday handed opposition parties a historic landslide victory over President Nicolás Maduro’s Socialists in hotly contested National Assembly legislative elections that ended 17 years of parliamentary rule by backers of the regime of the late president Hugo Chávez.
The Democratic Unity Roundtable (MUD) coalition took 99 seats compared to the 46 won by Maduro’s United Socialist Party of Venezuela (PSUV), Tibisay Lucena, president of the National Electoral Council (CNE), announced late Sunday.
Maduro blamed the defeat on the “economic war” waged by political interests inside his country and abroad
Votes to decide the remaining 22 seats, which will determine exactly how much legislative power each side will have, were still being counted and will not be known until later Monday.
Maduro accepted the “adverse results” and blamed the defeat on the “economic war” waged by political interests both inside his country and abroad. Venezuela is struggling with severe food shortages and crippling inflation as well as soaring crime.
A defiant Maduro said that “a counter-revolution” was taking place in Venezuela following the MUD’s landslide win and promised to carry on the revolution that had been initiated by his predecessor Chávez, who died in March 2013.
Venezuelans came out in droves on Sunday to vote in these decisive elections. Voter participation was listed at 74.25 percent.
Opposition leaders, such as Lilian Tintori, whose husband Leopoldo López has been held at a military jail since February 2014, had made a series of speeches encouraging people to vote for change.
One of the first measures the opposition has said it will draw up is a resolution calling for the release of all political prisoners in the country.
The new deputies in the 167-member assembly will be sworn in next month.
Although voting intention polls had pointed to a close race between the opposition and the PSUV, the results show a large gap between the presidency, which retains control of the powers of the state, and lawmakers whose majority will be represented by the string of parties that make up the MUD coalition.
Even though the CNE was late in releasing the first official results, it did not stop major opposition leaders such as Tintori from already celebrating what they called an “irreversible victory.”
Tintori’s husband López was sentenced to more than 13 years in prison earlier this year for rebellion and fomenting violence during a nationwide protest in February 2014.
Sunday’s victory for MUD was also viewed as a strong display of unity by the opposition parties, which had remained divided for much of the past 17 years, hampering their efforts to win any major election since Chávez came to power.
The opposition protested when it was announced that the ballot boxes would stay open an hour later
The MUD coalition is made up of a large group of parties from both sides of the political spectrum, which together share the common goals of steering the country’s course away from Chavismo, repairing diplomatic relations with the United States, and opening Venezuela to foreign investment.
Although no major incidents were reported at polling stations on Sunday, the opposition did protest when the CNE chief announced that ballot boxes would stay open an hour later than previously scheduled.
Maduro took the opportunity to call for “a people’s offensive” so that his supporters would converge at the ballot boxes during the final hour.
Under Venezuelan law, polling stations can remain open for an additional hour if there are people still standing in line. But Maduro actively tried to mobilize his supporters to go to the ballot boxes at the last minute.
Similar situations have occurred in the past. During Chávez’s last presidential election three years ago, the late president garnered an estimated 800,000 votes at the end of the day, which gave him a decisive victory over Miranda state governor and opposition candidate Henrique Capriles.
The same happened again after Chávez’s death in 2013 when Maduro narrowly won the presidential race over his opponent, Capriles, who was running for a second time.
English version by Martin Delfín.Obama makes clear that America’s war against Russia is more important than America’s war against ISIS.
Eric Zuesse
On October 14th, Russia’s Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov said that the U.S. government had turned down the proposal from Russia’s President Vladimir Putin for the U.S. and Russia to cooperate together to eliminate ISIS and other jihadists in Syria and in Iraq. Lavrov said:
We’ve made Americans the proposal announced by President Vladimir Putin yesterday. We suggested that they send a [US] military delegation to Moscow to coordinate a number of joint steps, and after that we could have sent to Washington a top-level delegation led by Prime Minister Dmitry Medvedev, [but] … It is sad that our American colleagues in this case in fact do not side with those who fight against terrorism.
Then, on Tuesday October 20th, as CBS News online reported the following day, “The U.S. has told Iraq’s leaders they must choose between ongoing American support in the battle against militants of the Islamic State of Iraq and Syria (ISIS) and asking the Russians to intervene instead. Marine Gen. Joseph Dunford, chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, said Tuesday that the Iraqis had promised they would not request any Russian airstrikes or support for the fight against ISIS.”
However, Iraq already had done precisely that — and had even said that Russia seemed more committed to defeating ISIS than America is. As I summed up on October 10th:
Wednesday, October 7th, Reuters headlined, “Iraq Leans Toward Russia in War on Islamic State,” and reported, from Baghdad, that, “Iraq … wants Moscow to have a bigger role than the United States in the war against the militant group, the head of parliament’s defense and security committee said on Wednesday.”
Earlier, in an interview in English, with Iraqi Prime Minister Haider al-Abadi, telecast on October 2nd, France24 TV asked him how he would view an extension of Russia’s anti-ISIS bombing campaign into Iraq, and he said (7:54), “I would welcome it.”
So, at some time between October 7th and October 20th, the U.S. convinced Iraq’s leaders to, in essence, dis-invite the Russians, instead of to ally with them against ISIS in Iraq.
Two alternative explanations are possible. Either the U.S. had promised the Iraqis that the U.S. will now really get serious about defeating ISIS in Iraq, or else the U.S. had promised the Iraqis that Iraq would be punished — at the IMF or elsewhere — if Iraq followed through on their announced intention to replace the U.S. with Russia. (Or, of course, the U.S. could have done both — the carrot, and the stick.)
In either case (or both), the U.S. has made clear, to the Iraqis, that America will do anything to defeat Russia — even abandon the fight against ISIS in Iraq, if need be — and that the U.S. will absolutely not ally with Russia against ISIS, under any circumstances.
This makes abundantly clear, to the whole world, that the current American government considers its main enemy to be not jihadists, but Russians.
However, already, U.S. President Barack Obama had made this clear when, in his National Security Strategy 2015, he named Russia on 17 of the 18 occasions in which he charged “aggression.” The 18th instance was not Saudi Arabia, the main funder of jihadists, but instead North Korea, which poses little real threat to any U.S. ally except South Korea, and none at all to the United States. (And, of course, the U.S. President didn’t cite the U.S., which in a 2013 WIN/Gallup International poll was overwhelmingly named the most throughout the world as “the country that represents the greatest threat to peace in the world today.”)
—————
Investigative historian Eric Zuesse is the author, most recently, of They’re Not Even Close: The Democratic vs. Republican Economic Records, 1910-2010, and of CHRIST’S VENTRILOQUISTS: The Event that Created Christianity.Christian Petersen/Getty Images
Cleveland Cavaliers guard Isaiah Thomas turned heads when he said "I don't think the Boston Celtics got better by making this trade" in a Wednesday article for the Players' Tribune, and his former head coach responded.
The Celtics on CSN shared Boston coach Brad Stevens' response, where he praised Thomas' ability to capture the emotional cost of the trade as well as his skills on the court and the time they had to work together:
Thomas was part of the package the Celtics sent the Cleveland Cavaliers for Kyrie Irving, along with Jae Crowder, Ante Zizic, the Brooklyn Nets' 2018 first-round pick and a 2020 second-round pick.
Thomas highlighted how sudden the trade was and the discrepancies between the way players are viewed "the handful of times" they have control compared to the ease with which many are moved by front offices in a striking paragraph:
"But that’s what I think my trade can show people. I want them to see how my getting traded—just like that, without any warning—by the franchise that I scratched and clawed for, and bled for, and put my everything on the line for? That’s why people need to fix their perspective. It’s like, man—with a few exceptions, unless we’re free agents, 99 times out of 100, it’s the owners with the power. So when players are getting moved left and right, and having their lives changed without any say-so, and it’s no big deal … but then the handful of times it flips, and the player has control … then it’s some scandal? Just being honest, but—to me, that says a lot about where we are as a league, and even as a society. And it says a lot about how far we still have to go."
It is particularly notable because Thomas is set to be an unrestricted free agent in 2018 and theoretically will have control over his destination. Chris Haynes of ESPN.com reported the guard is going through a change in representation before his 2018 free agency.
The two-time All-Star is coming off a career season for which he earned All-NBA (second team) honors for the first time. He averaged 28.9 points and 5.9 assists per game for the Celtics while shooting 37.9 percent from three-point range.
Despite his recent accolades, health is a question after a hip injury cut his Eastern Conference Finals short. If he recovers and is healthy heading into the playoffs, the three-time defending Eastern Conference champion Cavaliers figure to challenge for a title once again with Thomas and LeBron James leading the way.For a list of television episodes titled "Pilot", see Pilot (television episode)
A television pilot (also known as a pilot or a pilot episode and sometimes marketed as a tele-movie) is a standalone episode of a television series that is used to sell the show to a television network. At the time of its creation, the pilot is meant to be the testing ground to gauge whether a series will be successful; it is therefore a test episode for the intended television series, an early step in the series development, much like pilot studies serve as precursors to the start of larger activity. In the case of a successful television series, the pilot is commonly the very first episode that is aired of the particular series under its own name; the episode that gets the series "off the ground". A "back door pilot" is an episode of an existing successful series, featuring future tie-in characters of an up-and-coming television series or film. Its purpose is to introduce the characters to an audience before the creators decide on whether or not they intend to pursue a spin-off series with those characters.
Television networks use pilots to discover whether an entertaining concept can be successfully realized. After seeing this sample of the proposed product, networks will then determine whether the expense of additional episodes is justified. A pilot is best thought of as a prototype of the show that is to follow, because elements often change from pilot to series. Variety estimates that only a little over a quarter of all pilots made for American television proceed to the series stage,[1] although the figure may be even lower.[2]
Most pilots are never publicly screened if they fail to sell a series. If a series eventuates, pilots are usually—but not always—broadcast as the introductory episode of the series.
Pilot season [ edit ]
Each summer, the major American broadcast television networks – including ABC, CBS, The CW, Fox, and NBC – receive about 500 brief elevator pitches each for new shows from writers and producers. That fall, each network requests scripts for about 70 pitches and, the following January, orders about 20 pilot episodes.[3] Actors come to Los Angeles from within the area or elsewhere in the United States and around the world to audition for them. By spring, actors are cast and production crews assembled to produce the pilots.[4]
Casting is a lengthy and very competitive process. For the 1994 pilot of Friends, casting director Ellie Kanner reviewed more than 1,000 actors' head shots for each of the six main roles. She summoned 75 actors for each role to audition, then chose some to audition again for the show's creators. Of this group, the creators chose some to audition again for Warner Bros. Television executives, who chose the final group of a few actors to audition for NBC executives; as they decide whether to purchase a pilot, network executives generally have ultimate authority over casting.[5] Since the networks work on the same shared schedule, directors, actors, and others must choose the best pilot to work for with the hopes that the network will choose it. If it is not chosen, they have wasted their time and money and may have missed out on better career opportunities.[6]
Once they have been produced, the pilots are presented to studio and network executives, and in some cases to test audiences; at this point, each pilot receives various degrees of feedback and is gauged on its potential to advance from one |
.
The document specifically focused on the parts of the Act dealing with the Independent Communications Authority of South Africa (Icasa), one of the key government bodies involved in the digital television migration process.
ALSO READ: #GuptaLeaks: How the Guptas paid for Zuma home
Muthambi also sent Chawla a Word document called "Responsibility for Infraco and Sentech" on July 25, adding in her email that "Sentech's signal distribution must rest with the Ministry of Communications". Apart from Icasa, Sentech is a key role-player in the digital migration process, whilst Broadband Infraco is a state-owned telecommunications company.
This document was also created by Mack, according to MultiChoice.
Perhaps the most shocking aspect of Muthambi's communications with Chawla came in the form of a document called "final proclamation 01 August", sent by the minister to the Gupta associate on the date mentioned in the document's title.
"See attached Proclamation that President must sign," Muthambi wrote Chawla, who subsequently forwarded it to Tony Gupta.
The proposed proclamation stipulated that control over section 3 of the Electronic Communications Act needed to be transferred back to Muthambi, exactly as Mack had originally pleaded in her letter.
It also included the proposed changes to the Icasa Act that Muthambi had earlier sent to Chawla.
Asked whether Mack had also created this document, MultiChoice said: "As mentioned previously, MultiChoice, like other companies in the sector, regularly engages the industry regulator and government on matters that affect the broadcasting sector. This includes making proposals that may take a specific regulatory or legislative form. Yes, this document was sent to Ms Muthambi. The proposals were inserted in a legislative template we took from previous Proclamations in the Government Gazette. Again, many of our proposals were rejected."
Muthambi uses her powers
On November 25, Zuma signed proclamation 79 of 2014. With the stroke of a pen, Zuma gave legislative effect to the transfer of some of the powers advocated for in Mack's documents.
Muthambi wasted little time to make use of her newly-won policy powers. In March 2015, she stunned the broadcasting industry by issuing an amendment to government's digital migration policy that went directly against her own party's stance on the matter.
The new set-top boxes would "not have capabilities to encrypt broadcast signals," declared a clause Muthambi inserted in the amendment.
Only two months before, at the ANC's January lekgotla, the ruling party stated that it supported Carrim's December 2013 policy, which had paved the way for encrypted set-top boxes.
In her response to News24, Muthambi admitted that she had received "submissions" from MultiChoice "sent … through Ms Mack". But Muthambi says that she had "opened the door" for such submissions after the July 2014 proclamation caused "confusion and uncertainty" over which of the two departments would be responsible for broadcasting policy.
"The minister denies having been influenced by any person in the finalisation of the digital migration policy after consideration of all submissions by all interested parties…" Muthambi's spokesperson said in a statement.
MultiChoice also said that it was one of "several stakeholders" who made submissions to the minister. Neither MultiChoice nor the minister indicated which other parties, apart from MultiChoice, made submissions to her office.
Muthambi also failed to address News24's detailed queries about the emails she had sent to Chawla.
ANN7's MultiChoice bonanza
On December 4, 2014, about a week after Zuma transferred the relevant broadcasting policy powers to Muthambi, Howa sent Tony Gupta a draft "third channel amendment agreement" for the deal between MultiChoice and Infinity.
This is the unsigned document that recently surfaced in the media.
The signed "fourth channel amendment agreement", however, reveals that MultiChoice first agreed to increase the ANN7 fee to R100m per annum, before ultimately settling on an amount of R141m.
But it is the "once off" payment of R25m that has industry insiders most concerned.
"It is unheard of. I haven't seen any once-off payments [in] any of the agreements with MultiChoice that I'd been privy to," said one of the industry insiders.
The two sources, along with a third industry expert with direct knowledge of MultiChoice's agreements with news channels, all agree that even R50m per year would constitute a bad investment for MultiChoice.
"What they pay ANN7 compared to what they get from it [the agreement] makes no commercial sense. It is such a bad channel and its viewership is so low that ANN7 actually needs to pay DStv to be on their platform," said one of the sources.
Data obtained from the Broadcasting Research Council (BRC) shows that ANN7 secured only 8.93% of DStv's news audience in 2014, and 10.98% in 2015. Its average daily viewership figures for 2014 and 2015 were 6 215 and 8 157 respectively.
SABC News held news audience shares of 19.90% (2014) and 22.46% (2015) and it drew 12 379 and 15 412 average daily viewers in those two years.
eNCA's average daily viewership was 29 481 (2014) and 32 265 (2015) and it had a news audience share of 54.28% in 2014 and 52.71% in 2015.
Despite ANN7's relatively low audience figures, MultiChoice maintains that it believed the fee increases were justified.
"We believe the fee represented fair value at the time, particularly considering that ANN7 was a start-up channel requiring significant initial investment to get off the ground – as opposed to others, who could leverage existing infrastructure and content," said MultiChoice.
"We deny that there is any relationship between our submission on the proclamation, the channel supply agreement for ANN7, and any fees or increase in fees paid for that channel."
Asked about his relationship with the Guptas, Patel said he couldn't remember when he first met the Guptas.
"I did interact with them, in particular between approximately 2007-2010, and our relationship tapered off after that. I can't recall attending any Gupta social functions after about 2010, except for the wedding in 2013," said Patel.
• Do you have information for our investigative journalists? Send an email to tips@24.com
• News24 is published by Media24. Both Media24 and MultiChoice are Naspers companies.
VIEW ALL THE RELATED DOCUMENTS:If the Cleveland Browns truly don't have any intention of keeping Brock Osweiler, now's about the time when things could start to get awkward.
The veteran quarterback, acquired from the Houston Texans in an early offseason trade that amounted to a salary dump, reported to the Browns facilities Monday for the beginning of the team's offseason workout program, according to Tony Grossi of ESPN.
Multiple reports following the shocking deal had indicated that the Browns would look to move on from Osweiler either by way of a trade or an outright release.
That may still be the plan, and perhaps draft weekend can be considered the most likely time for the trade market to heat up, but Osweiler is evidently stuck in a bit of holding pattern for the time being.
It remains to be seen whether there's anything he can do in the early stages of the offseason program that would earn him the chance to compete for a job in Cleveland.
All indications to this point have been that the Browns will move forward with Cody Kessler, Kevin Hogan, and presumably another young quarterback to be added in the draft.
Osweiler was a major disappointment after landing a four-year, $72-million deal to join the Texans, completing just 59 percent of passes for 2,957 yards, 15 touchdowns, and 16 interceptions.Biggest post-draft questions still to be answered by the Atlanta Falcons:
2017 NFL DRAFT | Philadelphia NFL draft home page » • By round: pick-by-pick analysis | By team
• Kiper: 2017 NFL draft grades
• McShay: Best pick for all 32 teams
• Nation: Best, riskiest moves for every team
• All 32 teams: Analysis for every pick
• Seifert: More prospects will skip bowls
• Where every QB was picked in '17 draft
• McShay: Top 10 undrafted prospects
• Trades: Look back at all 39 trades
• Fantasy: Day 2 reaction | Round 1
Who is on guard? The Falcons still need to figure out which player will step in as the starting right guard following Chris Chester's retirement. It's unlikely to be fourth-round draft pick Sean Harlow out of Oregon State, although not out of the question. Harlow started all 37 of his college games at tackle, with 23 on the left side and 14 on the right. He said he practiced some at guard, but that's not nearly enough experience at the position. The Falcons will give him a look at both guard spots as well as some snaps at center. So the starting right guard seems likely to come down to returning players Wes Schweitzer and Ben Garland. Schweitzer, a former tackle who struggled with the move into the interior as a rookie last season, was inactive for all 16 games in 2017. But it's easy to tell the coaches like Schweitzer's progress heading into his second season. “We're excited about where Wes is headed,” Quinn said. “... He is an all-day [player] here trying to find the one thing to do better. I use the term,'set it off.' Wes Schweitzer this year has set it off in terms of having the offseason of his life. He's battle for it in every way. I have a sense that Sean is made of the same things. That's what everybody has reported to us.” Schweitzer is working on getting stronger and improving his pass protection. Garland, with the most game experience, is no slouch at all, but his value extends beyond offense. He played his most productive snaps at defensive tackle last season while also serving as the backup to Pro Bowl center Alex Mack.
How will nickel and dime packages shake out? New defensive coordinator Marquand Manuel, formerly the secondary coach, has plenty of new toys. He has the established corners in Desmond Trufant and Robert Alford, with Trufant coming back from pectoral surgery. He has a true leader in Ricardo Allen at free safety and a hard hitter in Keanu Neal at strong safety. He has a solid nickelback, Brian Poole, playing with a chip on his shoulder after being undrafted. And Manuel has some quality depth with Jalen Collins, C.J. Goodwin, and now fifth-round draft pick Damontae Kazee, a ball hawk who also can tackle. Now it's about putting everyone in the best position to succeed. Both Alford and Trufant can move inside in the nickel, and Collins is more of an outside guy after shining in a starting role because of Trufant's absence. The Falcons need depth behind Allen, and now have it with Poole getting a free safety audition and the rookie Kazee. In a crunch, the Falcons also could move Kemal Ishmael from linebacker back to strong safety. It's actually a good problem for the Falcons to have after lacking quality depth at corner in recent years.
Can Brian Hill be productive behind established backs? Two-time Pro Bowl selection Devonta Freeman is the primary running back, the guy who is expected to get the most touches, and the one likely to secure a new lucrative contract before the start of the season. But it will be interesting to see how the Falcons incorporate fifth-round pick Brian Hill, a highly productive back from Wyoming, into the mix behind Freeman and speedster Tevin Coleman. Immediately after being drafted, Hill told Atlanta reporters that the Falcons just “got the best running back in the draft in the fifth round.” You've got to like his confidence, but Hill also said he didn't expect to be drafted by Atlanta because they already have two great running backs. Said general manager Thomas Dimitroff of Hill: “He's an angry runner. He's fun to watch him.” Quinn wants to see if on third down, Hill can step in and do some of the protection work asked of the fullback last season. “He's got the size and strength to do it,” Quinn said of Hill. “We won't really know on that until you get to training camp. You can imagine it's way easier to pass block without pads.”Largest city in Canada to commit to a living wage
"Paying a living wage is an investment in our community and economy, and I encourage other local employers to take this step so families of all incomes and backgrounds can afford to live and work in Vancouver." said Mayor Gregor Robertson.
The City, Park Board, and Vancouver Police Department have taken steps to reduce inequality by becoming living wage employers, certified by the Living Wage for Families Campaign (LWFC), a Vancouver-based organization that has certified a range of employers.
Our living wage certification includes the City of Vancouver and Park Board staff and vendors.
The Vancouver Police Department submitted a separate application that was also approved at the same time.
The City of Vancouver joins several local governments in BC who have successfully implemented living wage policies:
Ucluelet First Nation
Huu-ay-aht First Nations
City of New Westminster
City of Quesnel
City of Port Coquitlam
Living wage standards
As a certified living wage employer, the City is committed to paying employees and employees of externally contracted service providers a living wage.
Metro Vancouver's living wage rate for 2017 is $20.62 including direct wages and the value of non-mandatory benefits.
Our Procurement Policy was updated on May 1 to reflect living wage standards for services purchased in support of City and Park Board operations.
Our living wage requirements apply to vendors who provide services and meet all of the following criteria:
Estimated annual value of the contract is greater than $250,000.
Services are performed on properties owned by or leased to the City including all streets, sidewalks and other public rights of way.
Services are provided on a regular, ongoing basis.
Contractor is expected to perform the services for greater than 120 hours per year of the contract.
Living wage standards are not applicable for:
Emergency or non-recurring repairs or maintenance services where no standing contract is in place.
Services performed by organizations that lease property from the City.
Contracts with social enterprises.
The living wage standards in our Procurement Policy are applicable to new service contracts that meet the above criteria.
The living wage is the hourly rate required for two working adults to meet the basic needs of a family of four such as rent, food, transportation and childcare. It is calculated annually by LWFC and is based on the regional cost of living. It does not include pension savings, debt service, or many other routine expenses.
Learn more about how the living wage is calculated.
City employees are already compensated at the current living wage rate, as are many contracted staff.
Healthy City Strategy
In July 2015, Council approved a motion affirming its commitment to have the City of Vancouver become certified as a Living Wage Employer and directed staff to report back on the steps necessary to achieve that goal.
This initiative is part of our Healthy City Strategy which includes 19 high-priority actions for 2015 - 2018, outlining an approach to respond to the guiding principles, long term goals and indicators for achieving and measuring progress which included becoming a living wage employer.
Adopting a living wage policy demonstrates the our commitment to support Vancouver residents and families, and healthy, thriving communities.
Learn more about our committment as a living wage employer.
Quotes
Mayor Gregor Robertson
"Vancouver's economy is booming, yet too many hard working families are left behind because of Vancouver's affordability challenges," says Mayor Gregor Robertson. "As Mayor, I'm proud that Vancouver is leading by example as Canada's largest living wage employer. Paying a living wage is an investment in our community and economy, and I encourage other local employers to take this step so families of all incomes and backgrounds can afford to live and work in Vancouver."
Vancouver Park Board Chair Michael Wiebe
"I'm very pleased that the Park Board unanimously endorsed the City of Vancouver's living wage certification requirements," says Vancouver Park Board Chair Michael Wiebe. "This is a Park Board opportunity to address working poverty and invest in the long-term prosperity of our city."
Deputy Chief Constable Steve Rai with the Vancouver Police Department
"Our people are a top priority. Our members and contract staff all play a role in helping to keep Vancouver safe," says Deputy Chief Constable Steve Rai with the Vancouver Police Department. "It's important to the Vancouver Police Department that we show our support for this initiative to help ensure the people who serve this city can afford to meet basic needs."
Deanna Ogle, Campaign Organizer with the Living Wage for Families Campaign
"In implementing a living wage for all City staff and contractors, the City of Vancouver is demonstrating leadership on the issue of affordability," says Deanna Ogle, Campaign Organizer with the Living Wage for Families Campaign. "We all know that Vancouver is an expensive place to live. A living wage allows City staff and contractors to breathe a little easier at the end of the month."Apple, Google, Facebook, and other tech companies in Silicon Valley will soon be paying the San Francisco Municipal Transportation Agency (SFMTA) a small fee to use the city's bus stops. According to The Verge, the SFMTA voted unanimously on Tuesday to pass a measure that would require regional commuter busses to pay US$1 per stop during an 18-month pilot program expected to net $1.5 million.
The move comes in the wake of sometimes violent protests targeting shuttles operated by Google and Apple in San Francisco. Protesters blame the reality that the high wages paid by Silicon Valley tech giants have resulted in skyrocketing rents in San Francisco, but they were also complaining that those companies were using city bus stops without permission and without paying.
The SFMTA's pilot program would nominally rectify the last issue—though protesters were complaining ahead of the vote that a buck a stop per bus was far less than locals pay to use city busses. Indeed, the $1.5 million won't make a profit for the SFMTA, and will only cover permits, enforcement, and evaluating the program.
It also doesn't address the housing issue, but the housing issue is not only outside the SFMTA's ability to "fix," it's not really fixable at all because rising rents are an issue of supply and demand. But, the pilot program does at least address the issue of permission.
The Verge noted that the SFMTA showed data in support of the program that the commuter busses significantly reduce traffic in crowded San Francisco, and even lower car ownership.by Jesus Diaz, Gizmodo
This is the Jackling House — exactly how Steve Jobs has wanted it to look since he bought it in 1984, the year of the Macintosh launch. Demolished. Destroyed. Blown to smithereens.
Even while Jobs lived in this house for a decade — with little more than a few rugs, lamps, a bed and his Bob Dylan records — he never liked it. In his words, the Spanish Colonial Revival building was a colossal monster, an architectural abomination. It may have been the Xanadu of copper mining magnate Daniel Cowan Jackling back in 1925, but it was never going to be Citizen Jobs' ivory tower.
It took him years of legal battling and lobbying to get permission to destroy the historic building. But finally, the defenders of the copper tycoon's manor lost, and Steve received his license to kill. His crew obliterated the house in a single day.
At last, Jobs has a dream spot to build his dream house.
Plans for the house Steve Jobs hopes to build in the location of the former Jackling mansion.
Never look back —————
Jobs has never been nostalgic. One of the first things he did when he came back to Apple was to get rid of all the classic models that were stored — as in a museum — in a room on the Cupertino, California, campus. He donated them to Stanford, and freed the room from its dedication to the past. According to Jobs, you should always look forward; whoever looks back in this industry inevitably fails.
That action — just like eliminating the Jackling House from the face of the planet — has been a constant in his career. While the man has shown that he is proud of his life achievements in interviews or his now-famous 2005 Stanford Commencement Address, he doesn't have any doubts about deleting the past to create the future — no matter if he is right or wrong.
Steve's Homes ————-
1955 • Steve Jobs is adopted by Paul and Clara Jobs, who live in a humble home with room for two kids in the Sunset District of San Francisco.
1960 • The Jobs family moves to Mountain View. The house had a garage, which Paul used to tinker with cars while Steve got interested in electronics.
1969 • The Jobs family moves to Los Altos. According to Michael Moritz's Return to the Little Kingdom, they bought a house "with a gently raked roof, a large garage and three bedrooms" in Los Altos because Steve Jobs wanted to go to a better school, Homestead High School. There, he met Steve Wozniak; in 1975 the two Steves would assemble Apple I circuit boards in this same garage.
1973 • Steve Jobs goes to Reed College, where he crashes at friends' dorm rooms and apartments. After dropping out, he keeps going to class, joins Atari, disappears from time to time to a hippie communal farm, and goes on a trip to India.
1982 • Steve buys an apartment in the top two floors of the San Remo, a Neo-Renaissance apartment building in New York City. He renovated his apartment for years with the help of famed architect I.M. Pei and sold it to U2's singer Bono in 2003. He never even lived there.
1984 • Jobs buys the Jackling House, a 14,540-square-foot, 14-bedroom manor designed by George Washington Smith and located in Woodside, California. He moves in with almost no furniture.
1991 • Jobs marries Laurene Powell and moves out of the cooper manor, to a new home on Waverley Street, in Palo Alto, California. This charming, rustic brick house, with big trees and a luscious garden where Jobs cultivates his own vegetables, is his current residence.
Photographs: Tutu Lee. Camera and lens rental: borrowlenses.com. This story originally appeared on Gizmodo.
See Also:- The Plans For Steve Jobs' New HouseAfter a month of discussion on healthy, ethical food at #1book140, our Twitter book club's July pick is a dystopian fast-food space comedy with A Highly Unlikely Scenario, or a Neetsa Pizza Employee's Guide to Saving the World by Rachel Cantor.
Readers nominated over 50 books linked to the theme of Weird Fiction. In the final vote, Rachel Cantor's debut novel won a strong majority over more established books by Lovecraft, Gaiman, and Katherine Dunn. While it's not exactly Weird Fiction, I think it's going to be the perfect summer read.
In A Highly Unlikely Scenario, "a customer-service rep for a Pythagorean pizza company must save the world by time traveling and speaking to historical figures through the Neetsa Pizza support line." Writing in the New York Times, Lydia Netzer calls it "a novel about being incredulous and certain at the same time, about listening without judgment, about acting on faith."
Hear Rachel read part of the book in a Clocktower Radio interview this February.
A review in the Telegraph dismisses A Highly Unlikely Scenario for being inspired by the associative information tangle of Wikipedia, a trait that makes it perfect for our Twitter book club. Over the next month, I'm excited dive into the history of great world thinkers, mystics, and theologians who become re-appropriated into fast-food chains. I'm especially eager to browse the mysteriously gorgeous Voynich Manuscript and tweet out the most interesting pages.The longer this war goes on and the more we find out, the following scenario seems to me to be the best provisional explanation for a lot of what our secret, unaccountable, extra-legal war-government has been doing - and the countless mistakes which have been laid bare. On 9/11, Cheney immediately thought of the worst possible scenario: What if this had been done with WMDs? It has haunted him ever since - for good and even noble reasons. This panic led him immediately to think of Saddam. But it also led him to realize that our intelligence was so crappy that we simply didn't know what might be coming. That's why the decision to use torture was the first - and most significant - decision this administration made. It is integral to the intelligence behind the war on terror. And Cheney's bizarre view of executive power made it easy in his mind simply to break the law and withdraw from Geneva because torture, in his mind, was the only weapon we had.
Bush, putty in Cheney's hands, never wanted torture, but was so cowardly and lazy he never asked the hard questions of what was actually being done. He knows, of course, somewhere in his crippled fundamentalist psyche. But this is a man with clinical - Christianist and dry-drunk - levels of reality-denial, whose interaction with reality can only operate on the crudest levels of Manichean analysis. All he needs to be told is that whatever it is they're doing, it isn't torture. He won't ask any more questions. They're evil; we're good; so we can't torture. Even when they were totally busted at Abu Ghraib, his incuriosity and denial held firm. After all, what if he were to find out something he didn't want to know? His world might collapse.
But torture gives false information. And the worst scenarios that tortured detainees coughed up - many of them completely innocent, remember - may well have come to fuel US national security policy. And of course they also fueled more torture. Because once you hear of the existential plots confessed by one tortured prisoner, you need to torture more prisoners to get at the real truth. We do not know what actual intelligence they were getting, and Cheney has ensured that we will never know. But it is perfectly conceivable that the torture regime - combined with panic and paranoia - created an imaginationland of untruth and half-truth that has guided US policy for this entire war. It may well have led to the president being informed of any number of plots that never existed, and any number of threats that are pure imagination. And once torture has entered the system, you can never find out the real truth. You are lost in a vortex of lies and fears. In this vortex, the actual threats that we face may well be overlooked or ignored, as we chase false leads and pursue non-existent WMDs.It was hard for anyone to imagine new possibilities for the White House with this schism so apparent.
Those who were there—the Service Employees International Union; AFL-CIO; Center for American Progress; Leadership Council on Civil Rights; America's Voice; the National Immigration Law Center; United Farm Workers; Center for Community Change; and others—expected another dreary appeal from Jarrett and Munoz to give House Speaker John Boehner until the August recess to try to move some form of immigration legislation. The immigration groups were fed up with what they had long regarded as Obama's doughy diffidence and had no stomach for another "stay-the-course" soliloquy from Jarrett and Munoz.
What the immigration advocates couldn't help noticing were the two empty chairs at the center of the table on the Oval Office side of the Roosevelt Room, opposite the visitors' entrance.
Jarrett and Munoz sat on either side of the empty chairs and White House counsel Neil Eggleston was to Munoz's right. Jarrett and Munoz were in the opening stanza of their immigration update when Obama and Vice President Joe Biden walked in and sat down. They stayed for more than an hour, Obama doing most of the talking and never referring to notes. Biden chimed in only when, later on, the debate turned to the current border crisis over unaccompanied minors.
Obama told the group that Boehner had informed him on June 24 there would be no votes on immigration before the midterm election but that he believed there was a good chance a comprehensive bill could pass in the next Congress. The president also told the group that Boehner urged him not to press ahead with executive action because that would make legislating more difficult next year.
Obama told the group, according to those present, his response to Boehner was: "Sorry about that. I'm going to keep my promise and move forward with executive action soon."
In the room, there was something of a collective, electric gasp. The assembled immigration-rights groups had been leaning hard on Obama for months to use executive action to sidestep Congress and privately mocked what they regarded as Pollyanna hopes that House Republicans would budge. They had been burned before. Obama reversed himself in late March and slammed the brakes on Homeland Security Department studies of slowing deportations in the name of "humane" treatment, all in the name of giving House Republicans more time on immigration reform.
Ever since, immigration groups on the left despaired over Obama's credulous paralysis. Protests ensued.
Not any longer. Obama told the groups what they had been dying to hear—that he was going to condemn House Republicans for inaction and set the most expansive legal course permissible to beef up border security, slow deportations of noncriminal aliens, and provide legal status to millions of undocumented workers—all by himself.Among the many shock waves set off by the U.S. House Republicans’ proposed continuing resolution on this year’s budget is one brought on by the devastating cuts proposed for the nearly four-decades-old Community Development Block Grants.
Mayors around the country are reacting with alarm to the cuts proposed for the CDBG program. The impact the proposed cuts would have on job creation is a special concern.
Calling the grants “critical to cities,” Mayor Elizabeth Kautz of Burnsville, Minn. and president of the U.S. Conference of Mayors, told reporters last week the cuts would bring a wave of job losses to local communities.
Writing on the web site of the National League of Cities, its president, James Mitchell, called the CDBGs “especially vital for many communities across America,” and warned that cuts “will severely hamper local efforts underway to put people to work and spur local, regional and national recovery.” Mitchell called on mayors around the country to come to Washington D.C. and join in lobbying Congress later this month.
Republican mayors are also worried. Oklahoma City Mayor Mick Cornett, president of the Republican Mayors and Local Officials coalition, told National Public Radio, “There’s outrage, there’s panic, there’s a situation where we have to stop whatever it is we’re doing and be heard on this particular issues at this particular time.”
Cornett said Republicans at the local and the national level have looked at this issue differently for a long time: “They have heard me year in and year out … there’s not a single representative in the state of Oklahoma who doesn’t already know how the mayor of Oklahoma City feels.”
The CDBG program, signed into law by Republican President Gerald Ford, in 1974, provides funds for local community development activities including affordable housing, anti-poverty programs and infrastructure.
The Republican-dominated House of Representatives is seeking to slash the funding in the nearly $4 billion program by over 62 percent, leaving only $1.5 billion for the current fiscal year which ends Sept. 30. Looking ahead to next year, many Republicans are proposing to end the CDBGs altogether.
By contrast, President Obama’s budget proposal for the next fiscal year, while cutting CDBG funding by 7.5 percent, or $300 million, would also increase funds to programs aiding the homeless and providing housing for low-income tenants.
About 1,200 communities around the country are currently receiving CDBG grants.
House Democrats are vowing a fight-back. U.S. Rep. Rosa DeLauro, D-Conn., said last week she’ll wage a struggle against the Republicans’ draconian cuts to social services, and while she generally backs the president’s proposals she is against cuts to CDBG and LIHEAP, the Low Income Home Energy Assistance Program.
Also at last week’s press briefing by the U.S. Conference of Mayors, Philadelphia Mayor Michael Nutter called the Republicans’ proposal a bazooka pointed at cities. “There are cuts, and there’s insanity, and this is insanity,” he said.
Davenport, Iowa Mayor Bill Gluba threatened that if they aren’t heard, the mayors will bring people who have been helped by the CDBGs to the halls of Congress. “We are not going to let them destroy this fundamental, basic program that has served this country for over 30 years,” he said
Mesa, Ariz. Mayor Scott Smith said slashing the block grants would just shift responsibility to fund the services to the cities, which are already struggling with budget deficits from state budget cuts and declining local revenues.
Photo: Kentucky Gov. Steve Beshear, shaking hands with firefighters, announces a $500,000 Community Development Block grant to rehabilitate a currently vacant building into the new Russellville Fire Station. The 11,136-square-foot facility will be rehabbed with the latest green technologies that will meet Leadership in Energy and Environmental Design (LEED) Green Building standards. (Gov. Beshear’s Office/CC)Yes, the budget-but-awesome market is becoming crowded this year (with Motorola, OnePlus, Honor, Huawei and countless others getting involved) – but that’s still impressive.
The phones will be sold online only, from Wileyfox’s website, Amazon, Expansys, Clove and a few others. They won’t be partnering with any networks, which is talkable in itself.
2. They run Cyanogen OS out of the box
After ‘consciously uncoupling’ from OnePlus earlier this year, Cyanogen have now lent their backing to Wileyfox. (For the uninitiated: Cyanogen OS is the commercial version of CyanogenMod, a modified version of Android that’s more customisable, and enormously popular – Cyanogen CEO Kirt McMaster mentioned 50m users during his part of the presentation).
Usually, users have to download and install Cyanogen themselves, which can be tricky – especially for newbies. Wileyfox phones have the mod preinstalled, skipping all the confusion and effort. For Android experts and tech enthusiasts, this endorsement is a big deal. For mainstream customers, who are used to buying a phone with a manufacturer version of Android installed anyway – Cyano-what?
Kirt McMaster, CEO of Cyanogen, takes the stage. The @wileyfox phones will run Cyanogen 12.1 pic.twitter.com/W6Ua2UlOU9 — Gadgette (@Gadgette) August 25, 2015
The Swift and Storm are the first two phones to run the newest version of Cyanogen OS, 12.1, and it says a lot about Cyanogen’s enthusiasm for the brand that their CEO turned up in person to the launch.
He might have regretted it, though – a journalist in the audience somewhat awkwardly reminded him of his comment that he’d like to “put a bullet through Google’s head,” followed by asking if the Wileyfox partnership would help him do that. The answer, unsurprisingly, was a bit of a hedge.
3. There’ll be UK call centres and support
This is one of the things Wileyfox hopes will differentiate them from super-cheap Asia Pacific brands. They were cagey about comparisons to OnePlus, but the parallel is clear: both companies offer budget smartphones aimed at flagships, running modded versions of Android – but OnePlus has been taken firmly to task for their lack of support and infrastructure outside China. No one wants to send their phone to another country to get the screen fixed.“Heretic.” It's a favorite word that many Christians have no problem dropping on the heads of their fellow sisters and brothers.
In common parlance, the term is used to describe any person who disagrees with "orthodox Christian teaching." The problem, of course, is that there are different perspectives on what exactly constitutes “orthodox Christian teaching.”
Some claim this for Calvinism, while others claim this for Arminianism, or for Roman Catholicism, or for Eastern Orthodoxy.
And we must not forget the many Fundamentalist groups who reserve the term “orthodox” only for people who agree with every one of their distinctive beliefs and/or practices.
2,000 years down the church history pike and the body of Christ is sliced and diced into over 33,000 fragments, some of which pull the heresy lever at everyone else without blinking.
In this essay, we are definitely not going to suggest that false teaching doesn't exist. It existed at the time of Jesus and Paul, and it exists today.
What we are going to suggest is that many people are using the word “heretic” in ways that are not biblical and/or that do not align with its use in church tradition. And this, we believe, brings disrepute on the body of Christ.
Let's start by looking at the word "heresy" and "heretical" more closely and ask two key questions:
1. What does "heresy" mean in the New Testament?
2. What did "heresy" mean in early church history?
Heresy According to the New Testament Authors - Whenever we tell people how the New Testament authors understood the term “heresy,” they are shocked.
First, heresy wasn't the equivalent of false doctrine. Heresy was a specific practice, and a fleshly one at that.
According to Paul of Tarsus, to be a heretic meant that you formed a schism within a local body of believers. Thus, what qualified someone to be considered a heretic wasn't what they believed, but how they acted with their beliefs.
If a person divided a genuine church, they were guilty of heresy. Consequently, a person could be a heretic with the truth!
A Look at the Greek - According to Vine's Expository Dictionary, the Greek word hairesis denotes a choosing. The choice, says Vine, is an opinion that leads to a division or formation of a sect. "[It] properly denotes a predilection either for a particular truth or for a perversion of one,” he notes, “generally with the expectation of personal advantage."
F.F. Bruce in his commentary on 1 Corinthians points out that hairesis in 1 Corinthians 11:19 and schismata in 1 Corinthians 11:18 are synonymous. Both words simply mean "divisions" or "factions." Thus a heretic is a person who causes divisions, dissensions, or factions.
If you think that dividing an authentic church isn't serious, think again. In 1 Corinthians 1:13a, Paul used the image |
August of 2016. The fourth-year quarterback put his hands to his ears to drown out the cheers, as they had become so loud he was unable to hear Pat Shurmur’s voice in his headset.
And just like that, the noise stopped. The Vikings faithful saw on the big screen that Bridgewater was struggling to hear. They knew their role: make everything easy for their quarterback. So they ceased their adulation for a brief moment to allow their man to do his job.
Bridgewater took to the huddle, high-fived each teammate and relayed the directives from the sideline. As soon as he broke it, the crowd chimed back in with another cacophony of appreciation and chants of “Teddy! Teddy!”
Then they once again went dead silent as soon as Bridgewater crouched under center. They again resumed as he handed off to Jerick McKinnon. Two plays later, they held their breath with anticipation as Bridgewater lined up in the shotgun on third down. There was an audible gasp when he twice attempted to abandon the pocket on his first dropback. And, ever the football fans, all of U.S. Bank Stadium collectively groaned when Bridgewater’s first pass in two years fell into the hands of a Bengal defender.
Yet, they cheered their disappointed quarterback off the field as he hung his head. The rust was obvious, the on-field return flawed. But the fans knew there was plenty to celebrate in that three play drive. This was a man who was in danger of losing his leg not long ago. And now, here he was: Right back where he belonged, in purple and gold with the football in his gloved hands.
From the moment the public address announcer said the words “Teddy Bridgewater,” the fans in attendance displayed their loyalty, their compassion and their football knowledge all at once. You can pick apart Bridgewater’s pocket presence, his accuracy and his comfort on his limited dropbacks. What you cannot pick apart, however, was the moment itself.
Vikings fans made it perfect.
–Sam Smith is the Managing Editor for Full Press Coverage Vikings and Full Press Coverage NFC North. Like and Follow @samc_smith Follow @fpc_vikingsFollow @fpc_nfcn
Advertisements
Share this: Tweet
Like this: Like Loading...Essa takes place in a time fame of less than six months on a horrible, dictatorial planet. The groups of players in the story are the pre-teen Essa, mercenaries from off world called Hana, the planetary functionaries and police, and the gods who control the planets. The story told is what happens to Essa following severe trama – how she copes and fights back. The book has continuous action, that advances the story – not just busywork action. Essa becomes a bad ass girl – but she is still a little girl. What do you do with that dangerous girl? Keep reading! My summary is a weak little shadow of the story, which is really great.
The book introduces two of the underlying mysteries of the series – the Hana and the gods. Essa is a stand alone novel – no cliff hangers. Just hints of new directions to be explored.
Mr. Bird creates organic growth for his characters, revealed through situation relevant dialogue and reactions. There were no long internal diatribes or philosophizing, which is a plus for the pace and flow of the story. This is not a children's story. There are hard plots and circumstances dealt with by his characters.
The characters are revealed through the real time progress of the plot. There is not a lot of foreshadowing of good guy/bad guy, although some definitely end up on one camp, many are far more ambiguous.
The cover art – which I like – made me think the book might be a teenager book and have lots of snarky teenage dialogue. That is not the case. Although I like the art, I think the prejudices of some older readers (like me) might cause them to skip over the description of the book because it looks juvenile to us, which is too bad. I'm not into marketing. I don't have a solution to offer for that – maybe alternative covers? Is that allowed?
I don't know that my review really communicates how much I enjoyed the book and also the next book in the series, Causality.
I understand that Mr. Bird does not have proof readers and editors. He has done an amazingly perfect and professional job in that regard. Kudos to him.LONDON: India is developing the heaviest and the largest parts of the Tokamak, the machine behind the biggest scientific collaboration on the planet, to produce unlimited supplies of cheap, clean, safe and commercial energy from atomic fusion.
The international nuclear fusion project known as ITER, meaning "the way" in Latin, is based on the 'tokamak' concept of magnetic confinement, in which the plasma is contained in a doughnut-shaped vacuum vessel.
The fuel-a mixture of deuterium and tritium, two isotopes of hydrogen-is heated to temperatures in excess of 150 million degrees Celsius forming a hot plasma.
The temperature within the gigantic machine will, therefore, reach 10 times the temperature at the core of the Sun.
Strong magnetic fields will be used to keep the plasma away from the walls.
India will be one of the significant creators of the Tokamak which will weigh 23,000 tons-as heavy as three Eiffel Towers-with a plasma volume of 840 cubic metres.
The main feature of the 180 hectare ITER site in Cadarache, southern France, is a man-made level 42 hectare platform that would be 1 kilometre long and 400 metres wide, and compares in size to 60 soccer fields.
The Tokamak Building will be slightly taller than the Arc de Triomphe in Paris.
Beginning December 2015, the first of the ITER cryostat's components will arrive on site from India.
ITER project ranks as the most ambitious science endeavors of our time. Building began in 2010 in France where 34 nations are collaborating to realize the ITER project's First Plasma in November 2020.
ITER says as part of India's in-kind contribution to the project, these 54 segments are among the largest and heaviest of the whole Tokamak assembly.
They will have to be pre-assembled into four sections before being transported to the Assembly Building. The workshop will be built and operated by the Indian Domestic Agency. ITER-India is the Indian Domestic Agency responsible for the delivery of components.
As stipulated in the agreement that the ITER Organization and the Indian Domestic Agency signed on 19 April, this small "territory"-the size of a football field-will be made available to the Indian Domestic Agency.
When India joined the ITER project in 2005, the Institute for Plasma Research (IPR) at Gandhinagar was entrusted by the government of India with managing participation in ITER.The strength of ITER-India now stands at 83 permanent and 10 contracted staff.In addition, about 20 engineers hired from different engineering service companies work on the ITER-India premises.India said: "At present, the focus of ITER-India activities is the completion of the remaining design work. ITER is a unique opportunity for all of us to show that fusion can be a credible and sustainable alternate energy source for human civilization. Especially for countries like India and China, with huge population, fast-growing economies and consequently enormous energy demands and against the backdrop of depleting fossil fuel reserves and CO2 emission concerns fusion can be a lifeline."For a while now, Tom Waits has been threatening to drop a live album document of his 2008 Glitter and Doom tour on us. And today, Waits' new website announced all the details.
Glitter and Doom is due November 24 from Anti-, and it'll be two discs, on CD and vinyl. Disc one is programmed like one evening's setlist, even though it pulls together songs taped at 10 separate shows. Disc two, meanwhile, is entirely Tom Waits stage patter!
Yes, "Tom Tales" is one long track of incredibly charismatic surreal gutbucket rambling. Take that, Robert Pollard and Elvis! Time to update those Christmas lists, kids.
Waits' website is currently offering the album's first eight tracks for free download. Head here to cop those tracks. The preview is exactly as inscrutably bizarre as you'd hope a Waits live album would be, but it still makes room for the heart-wrecked ballad "Fannin Street".
Glitter and Doom:
CD1:
01 Lucinda / Ain't Goin Down (Birmingham - 07/03/08)
02 Singapore (Edinburgh - 07/28/08)
03 Get Behind the Mule (Tulsa - 06/25/08)
04 Fannin Street (Knoxville - 06/29/08)
05 Dirt in the Ground (Milan - 07/19/08)
06 Such a Scream (Milan - 07/18/08)
07 Live Circus (Jacksonville - 07/01/08)
08 Goin' Out West (Tulsa - 06/25/08)
09 Falling Down (Paris - 07/25/08)
10 The Part You Throw Away (Edinburgh - 07/28/08)
11 Trampled Rose (Dublin - 08/01/08)
12 Metropolitan Glide (Knoxville - 6/29/08)
12 I'll Shoot the Moon (Paris - 07/24/08)
13 Green Grass (Edinburgh - 07/27/08)
14 Make It Rain (Atlanta - 07/05/08)
15 Story (Columbus - 06/28/08)
16 Lucky Day (Atlanta - 07/05/08)
CD2:
01 Tom TalesJaipur: A selfie clicked by the member of Rajasthan State Commission for Women with a rape victim courted controversy prompting the chairperson of the commission to seek a written explanation.Interestingly, the Chairperson Suman Sharma is also in the selfie along with the member Somya Gurjar.The selfie was clicked by Gurjar on Tuesday when she along with chairperson had gone to meet the rape victim in Mahila police station (Jaipur North)."I was talking to the victim when the member of the commission clicked these selfies. I am not aware when she (Somya Gurjar) clicked. I do not favour such act and has sought a written explanation from her. She has been asked to submit the explanation by tomorrow," Sharma said.Interestingly, two pictures, in which Gurjar is seen clicking the selfie, got viral on WhatsApp on Wednesday.Both Gurjar and Sharma are in the frame of the selfie and the pictures of the act were clicked by someone standing near them in the chamber of the police officer.In the pictures, Gurjar is seen holding the mobile device and the Chairperson is also looking in the frame (of the selfie).In a shocking incident in Alwar district, a 30-year-old woman was allegedly raped by her husband and his two brothers who tattooed expletives on her forehead and hand for not giving Rs 51,000 as the dowry.On Monday, an FIR was registered under sections of 498-A (Protection of Women Against Domestic Violence Act), 376 (punishment for rape)and 406 (punishment for criminal breach of trust) of IPC and an investigation in the case has been initiated.This article is over 5 years old
Freedom of information request reveals numerous incidents of nuisance or intimidating behaviour by people dressed as clowns
Britain's clowns fear their good name has been tarnished after police forces around the country revealed incidents of people in costume scaring members of the public.
The copycat craze – believed to have been started by a man known on Facebook as the Northampton Clown – involves people dressing as clowns to surprise passers-by in public places.
Several police forces have issued warnings after reported sightings and now details released under the Freedom of Information Act have revealed the extent of the trend.
These include reports to Derbyshire police of a clown carrying a knife and incidents in South Yorkshire of a clown staring through the windows of people's homes. Those two forces recorded 29 and 28 clown-related incidents respectively.
Tony Eldridge, secretary of Clowns International which represents the entertainers in Britain, said the situation had escalated beyond harmless fun.
Eldridge, whose clown name is Bluebottle, said: "This is doing clowning no favours and is harming society.
"The people behind it might see it as a bit of a laugh, but for the victims it can be a horrible experience.
"The fear of clowns – coulrophobia – is a real thing and some people will react very badly to this. Not to mention people who are elderly or vulnerable.
"This has nothing to do with clowning, it's a small group of people with stupid views and it spoils the fun for everybody else."
Most legitimate entertainers followed a code of clown conduct which included not wearing their costume in public, he said.
"We have to reclaim clowning as a positive thing which brings happiness."
The trend first emerged when the Northampton Clown rose to prominence over the summer, gaining nearly 200,000 "likes" on Facebook.
The person responsible posts photos of himself in public places. He most recently uploaded a photo taken outside a brewery in the town on 13 December.
He defended his behaviour, writing on Facebook: "Yes, there have been copycats, but that's not me."
The craze has spread with police in Lancashire reassuring the public after speculation about sightings involving a Stephen King-style clown.
A force spokesman said: "We have had no first-hand reports of any incidents of violence or intimidation."
Last month Norfolk Police told members of the public to ignore clowns in the street after a number of sightings around King's Lynn.
These included a person in a "full clown outfit" with a red suit and red hair chasing members of the public.
Superintendent Carl Edwards said no one had been injured or assaulted.
Dressing as a clown was not illegal, he said, but the force would offer those behind the make-up "strong words of advice".
Sally Beadle, also known as Crazy Bananas, works as a clown in the King's Lynn area.
She knows somebody who was chased by a clown in Downham Market, Norfolk, and said they were left shaken by the experience.
"Before this happened I would pop into the petrol station in costume on my way to a job but now I can't do that," she said. "Even my own children who grew up around clowns have been scared by this.
"It's more than just a job, it's something we love, but people's reaction to us has changed – I was getting messages on Facebook asking if I was responsible for scaring people.
"This is my business and I don't like frightening people."
Responding to the freedom of information request, South Wales police confirmed it had received a report of somebody acting suspiciously while wearing a clown mask.
Derbyshire police received 29 reports of clown sightings after social media claims that a man in the Nottingham area was dressing up and carrying balloons and a knife.
One report read: "Caller scared as someone had tried to get in to their house – posted on Facebook that a clown had been going around village trying door handles."
Another said: "Caller reported having received numerous calls from concerned parents about a clown going up to the windows of houses brandishing a gun and knife frightening the residents."
South Yorkshire police recorded 28 incidents involving people dressed as clowns.
These included a clown standing in a park, jumping out at somebody in the street and staring through the window of a house.
Other police forces also recorded incidents involving people dressed as clowns, although not all were linked to the craze.
Sussex police received reports of three incidents involving the characters, including a speeding offence involving a motorcyclist in full clown costume.When I heard about the shooting, and headed to Parliament Hill, the first sign that something bad had happened was across Sussex Drive from the American embassy, where two Ottawa police officers were standing guard. One of them had an automatic rifle. A third man in green fatigues and a Kevlar vest was with them, with a police dog at his feet.
This, I thought with dismay, will now be a more common sight.
A few minutes closer to the Hill, on Wellington Street, across from the National War Memorial, I run into an ashen-faced John Ivison, of the National Post, who had arrived minutes earlier. He pointed to an older model Toyota Corolla car parked on the street and told me it was believed to be the shooter’s car.
A female police officer was walking down Wellington, putting up a line of police tape, shutting down the area.
Everyone was quiet, serious, tense.
I walked past Langevin building to the corner of Wellington and Metcalfe, across the street from the Hill. This was still minutes after the shooting, and nobody knew what was going on. Police were streaming to the Hill.
A few minutes earlier, a gunman had shot Cpl. Nathan Cirillo, 24, a member of the Argyll and Sutherland Highlanders, a reserve regiment based in Hamilton, Ont.
Bystanders gave him mouth to mouth in a vain attempt to save his life.
After that, witnesses say, the gunman got into the Corolla, drove a very short distance and parked the car on Wellington. He then appears to have somehow got into Centre Block, where he shot and injured two guards before he was shot to death by Kevin Vickers, the gentlemanly former RCMP officer in charge of security on the Hill.
For the next several hours, police streamed to the Hill, organized themselves and slowly set up an expanding security perimeter.
I watched it for hours, being politely and firmly told to move back by very professional Ottawa Police Service officers.
Their calmness and resolve was impressive, and it was impressive to listen to the calm talk of the commanders on their police radios, all of them focused on making Canadians safe.
On the street, as in the Hall of Honour, where security guards bravely rushed the shooter, the courage and resolve of our police is a source of comfort to us when we are scared.
And people were scared. Cell towers downtown were overwhelmed with people calling and texting their loved ones. There were false reports of a third shooting scene at the Rideau Centre, and a fourth, at the Chateau Laurier. Police were scanning the rooftops looking for a shooter at large. At one point, a police officer warned me to get out of the street and take cover behind a building, so that I wouldn’t be a target.
It is too early to say for sure, but it seems likely that this was the work of one disturbed individual, someone swayed by the dark propaganda of extremists on the other side of the world.
It appears to be the same thing with the death of Warrant Officer Patrice Vincent, 53, who was run down in St-Jean-sur-Richelieu, Que., on Monday.
This is a terrible business, and we must mourn the loss of Vincent and Cirillo.
But we had best guard against giving into our fears.
On Wednesday afternoon, the Canadian Forces sent out an email to some members warning them against wearing their uniforms off base, cautioning they shouldn’t be seen to be soldiers when they stop for gas, for instance.
I think we should think of our ancestors. The war memorial that Cpl. Cirillo gave his life protecting was erected in 1938 to commemorate our losses in the First World War.
We lost almost 60,000 people in that war and more than 40,000 in the Second World War. We lost 158 in Afghanistan, not to mention the thousands of Canadian Forces members and veterans who will never fully recover from their physical and psychological wounds they suffered over there.
Our ancestors would not have allowed themselves to be cowed by two or three or 10 incidents like this.
On Wednesday evening, DND told me they have decided to suspend the sentry program in front of the war memorial “until further notice.”
Over time, as our society has become safer, we have become increasingly risk-adverse and fearful.
The blood-soaked maniacs in Iraq who are inspiring these killings know that about us, and they want us to be afraid. They want us to pay attention to their demented rants, to worry about more attacks.
If we give in to our fears, we will be engaged in an impossible quest for perfect security, and our streets will be lined with police. We will spend half our lives going through metal detectors, give up our civil liberties, and we won’t be any safer.
Or we can meditate on the courage of our ancestors, mourn the loss of Warrant Officer Vincent and Cpl. Cirillo, get those sentries back in front of the memorial, and take every opportunity to thank Canadian Forces members for having the courage to wear their uniforms in the street.
smaher@postmedia.com
Twitter.com/@stphnmaherThe Gravel Metric is a 62mi gravel bike ride in DeKalb, IL.
Each year, we create a short promotional video to create energy and excitement about our event. This will be our third year, and the video we have planned calls for a larger budget, a larger cast, and a larger production.
We are asking for your donations to help us create something incredible.
Please check out our videos to see where we're coming from:
We've got some big ideas for 2012. Your donations will help us procure props, actors, licensing, and materials. We're excited to create something you'll be proud of.
Check out our incentives and please consider making a donation. We have hand-made, custom items available for most all levels of donations, including a chance to have your name featured in our video!
Thank you so much for your support.
Tobie & Seth
gravelmetric.com
www.northcentralcyclery.comTevi Troy is a presidential historian and former White House aide, and author of Shall We Wake the President? Two Centuries of Disaster Management from the Oval Office. His first book was Intellectuals and the American Presidency: Philosophers, Jesters, or Technicians?
It may not get the attention of the daily outrage cycle in the news, but one of the most striking fractures in the 2016 campaign has been the peeling away of conservative intellectuals from their own party's candidate—and, in some cases, from the party itself. As Donald Trump's ascendancy began in the summer of 2015, the thought leaders of the right were among the first Republicans to open up a direct line of attack on the celebrity real estate developer. (“He’s dead to me,” said Bill Kristol, after Trump attacked John McCain's war service early in his campaign.) And as the race evolved, many of the most resolute statements from the intellectual right have been leveled against a candidate, not for one, as writers like Kristol, Jonah Goldberg, Yuval Levin and Pete Wehner became leading figures in the NeverTrump movement.
In more recent months, however, a schism has developed. The adamant NeverTrumpers have remained so, but a number of conservative intellectuals have started to support the New York billionaire. Some do so grudgingly, some full-throatedly, but it is clear that over time the proudly anti-intellectual Trump has attracted a base of thinkers willing to lend him their support. In May, Fred Barnes documented a handful of early examples in the Weekly Standard, including the historian Victor Davis Hanson, who was willing to give Trump a chance to prove himself; since then, the universe has expanded considerably, most notably in the recent pledge signed by more than 125 conservative scholars and writers backing Trump.
Story Continued Below
The language of the pledge—“Given our choices in the presidential election, we believe that Donald Trump is the candidate most likely to restore the promise of America, and we urge you to support him as we do”—was not exactly a rousing endorsement of Trump himself, and the two dozen or so submissions by some of the endorsers made clear that the decision was in large part a rejection of Hillary Clinton. But a close examination of the names on the list also suggests that the Trump phenomenon has widened a fissure within the conservative movement that has been growing for years. The epicenter is Trump, to be sure, but the tectonic plates now separating were once covered by overarching principles that may be receding from view and exposing the cracks.
You could call it an East Coast–West Coast feud, an argument about American greatness whose roots lie decades in the past and have threaded themselves through the conservative movement's long and sometimes-rocky relationship with the Republican Party. Whatever happens on Tuesday, it's clear that the conservative movement is headed for a period of self-examination and a reckoning with whose ideas are going to drive the party forward. It remains to be seen whether conservatism will once again constitute the unified force it has been for the past three decades of American politics, but a look at this growing group of pro-Trump intellectuals could be helpful in figuring out where both the Republican Party and the conservative movement may be headed—and perhaps to detect a strain of the thinking that could animate a new version of the party.
***
The Republican Party wasn't always as intellectually unified as it became after the election of Ronald Reagan. Modern conservatism in America started as a series of disparate movements, and only as they came together did conservatism became the potent force it has been in American politics. The story begins with William F. Buckley and National Review, the influential magazine he founded in 1955 as a way to “stand athwart history, yelling stop.” NR did not stop history, nor even end it—but it did create an intellectual framework that would change the American political landscape.
Buckley got his start objecting to the atheism and collectivism he saw rampant at Yale, where he was an undergraduate, and which he saw growing throughout elite American society. To fight it, he sought to create a conservative counter-establishment, one that both respected tradition and had a legitimate place at the table in 20th-century America. This meant taking on not only the left, but also excluding parts of the right at the time: racists, anti-Semites and the conspiratorial John Birchers, who saw evidence of communist infiltration nearly everywhere in American society. Though many of those groups shared some of Buckley's concerns about communism or the rise of federal power, he rightly recognized that racists and anti-Semites had no place in a modern political movement. Included in Buckley's new conservatism were disparate movements that had common goals, namely traditionalists and libertarians. The two groups didn't necessarily agree: Libertarians opposed big government and were often but not always inclined to atheism, while traditionalists were not only religious but were willing to have government maintain religious and moral standards. But both were invited to the table.
The semi-harmonious weaving together of these different kinds of thinkers was done in large part by Buckley’s associate Frank Meyer. A former Communist turned NR senior editor, Meyer leaned toward libertarianism himself. At a deep level, though, he understood that these different strains of conservatism could peacefully coexist—especially in common cause. He laid this out in a 1962 book, In Defense of Freedom. Conservatives, he argued, should emphasize the importance of individual freedom. Those concerned about freedom could agree about the threat of communism, and have qualms about the growth of the federal government. With the so-called “liberal consensus” committed to expanding government, and with Soviet influence and power on the rise, that was enough to form some bonds of commonality. Such commonality was sufficient for putting out a weekly and then later a biweekly magazine of ideas, which allowed for disagreement within that conservative umbrella.
Buckley's vision succeeded; as the journalist John Chamberlain put it, Buckley, “more than any single figure … made conservatism a respectable force in American life.” The result was not just a set of ideas but an agreed upon way of debating them. Absent the crude, rude and simplistic (not to mention wrong) arguments of the anti-Semites and the Birchers, conservatism became a dynamic movement in which ideas (even liberal ones) were put forward in their strongest form. This laid the groundwork for future political successes, which came to fruition decades later with the 1980 election of Ronald Reagan, whose administration brought conservative intellectuals and conservative ideas into government in large numbers.
In the 1980s, it wasn't hard for the different factions of conservatism to find common ground under the Reagan umbrella. A strong stance against the Soviet Union, high taxes and out-of-control crime unified libertarians, traditionalists and anti-Communists alike. It was really in the development of the Reagan coalition that the political marriage of the Republican Party and conservative intellectuals was sealed.
By 2016, Reagan, however, has been dead for over a decade. While most everyone in the conservative world still invokes Reagan as an ideal, there are plenty of disagreements over where Reagan would stand today on immigration, on foreign policy in a world with no Soviet Union, and on taxes in an era when many lower-income Americans pay no income taxes. On all of these issues there can be healthy disagreement, which is why over a dozen GOP candidates can get on a debate stage and profess their love of Reagan, and yet disagree on a panoply of issues. Similarly, conservative intellectuals continue to admire Reagan, yet argue over what is the modern manifestation of Reaganism.
It is in this post-Reagan era that the Trump candidacy has come and divided the world of conservative intellectuals. Foreign policy intellectuals are, for the most part, against Trump. Many signed a letter stating that they will unequivocally oppose a candidate whom they view as both unstable and wrongheaded. Another group heavily represented in the NeverTrump world is the neoconservatives, who overlap to a degree with the foreign policy group. Bill Kristol and John Podhoretz, editors of the Weekly Standard and Commentary, are two of the most prominent names on the NeverTrump team; their fathers, Irving and Norman, respectively, were probably the two most prominent or the original neoconservatives. (Irving passed away in 2009, but Norman did say in an interview that he would back Trump, although he did not sign the pro-Trump letter.) Yuval Levin, who edits National Affairs, which is explicitly modeled after Irving Kristol’s late Public Interest, is also a NeverTrumper.
***
We all know who opposes Trump in the conservative world. But who is in favor of him? A close examination of the Scholars and Writers petition suggests that Trump has highlighted a cleavage little understood outside the most academic conservative circles—a feud between East Coast and the West Coast Straussians, one with origins decades ago, in a split between followers of the University of Chicago political philosopher Leo Strauss.
Strauss was devoted to studying and seeing the wisdom of the ancients—as opposed to moderns like Nietzsche and Heidegger. Although Strauss himself remained largely outside the fray, he had many important students who have become involved in political battles both on campus and in Washington. These students have sought ways to model a society on some of the deeper principles that emerged from his work, such as promoting natural right and criticizing relativism. Many of his students, including Walter Berns, Allan Bloom and Harry Jaffa, became important distillers of much modern conservative thought. They all had long careers in academia and accrued many followers. Berns and Bloom and their disciples became the East Coast school; prominent East Coasters include Bill Kristol and Harvard political philosopher Harvey Mansfield.
Jaffa moved out to Claremont and developed his own disciples, largely around the Claremont Institute, and they became known as the West Coast Straussians. The most prominent West Coasters are probably Claremont’s Charles Kesler, Hillsdale College President Larry Arnn, and Amherst’s Hadley Arkes, showing that the “West Coast” designation is not strictly a geographic delimitation.
Some of the split was simply personality. Jaffa was a brilliant but contentious fellow—William F. Buckley once said, “If you think Harry Jaffa is hard to argue with, try agreeing with him.” Buckley was correct. Although Jaffa was a man of the right, his most prominent disagreements—with Berns, Bloom, Buckley, Robert Bork and even others whose names don’t start with a B—were with people on his own side of the political spectrum. But the split was also driven by substantive disagreements. The debate between the East and West Coast schools is somewhat esoteric, and any attempt to distill it is usually met with derision from one, or both, sides. At a most basic level, however, it centers on the origins of the American founding. West Coasters tend to believe that the founding represent the Aristotelian political ideal. The founders aimed high and hit their goal. The East Coasters, for their part, believed that the founding was a worthy but imperfect attempt at the ideal—“solid but low,” in East Coast phraseology.
The West Coast belief that the American founding represented the Aristotelian ideal could be construed as a manifest belief in American Greatness, and therefore it might make some sense that the Trump slogan “Make America Great Again” might have resonance among West Coasters (though it must be noted that it was an East Coaster, Bill Kristol, who championed an “American Greatness Conservatism” in the 1990s). Another possible reason for the support of Trump may be that the West Coasters are more focused on the threat posed by the administrative state to self-governance, and yet are also more inclined to believe in the power of strong individual leaders in great moments of crisis to shape political life. East Coast Straussians tend to be more protective of the institutional architecture of the Constitution, not only as a manifestation of the general principles of the Declaration of Independence but also as hard-headed constraints on political power and will, because they are more skeptical of the potential of individual statesmen and of the mass public to transform politics. For them, Trump is a manifestation of the democratic despotism Alexis de Tocqueville warned against.
To West Coasters, Trump looks more like a pushback against the administrative state. They see Trump himself as offering, for our times, a parallel to the section of the Declaration of Independence that focuses on outlining George III’s “long train of abuses and usurpations” when Trump challenges political correctness, Obamacare and the overreaching federal bureaucracy. Furthermore, the general remove of West Coasters from East Coast power—and typically from high-profile Republican administration appointments—predisposes them to object to Washington and everyday politics in general. This distinction may also explain why West Coasters are more likely than East Coasters to see a kindred temperament in Trump.
As long as the dispute was on esoteric philosophical questions and the long-ago personality disagreements of some aging forefathers, conservatives of both schools largely got along fine. This does not mean that there were not occasional, if minor, flareups. In 2003, Jody Bottum wrote in the East-Coast Straussian-leaning The Weekly Standard that “the Claremont Institute out in California recently decided to declare war on The Weekly Standard and the rest of the doctrinally impure publications of East-coast conservatism.” He was referring to a piece by Spencer Warren criticizing the “aesthetic relativism” of the Standard’s movie reviewing. Bottum took a few shots in response to Warren’s critique, but the tone of his entire essay suggested that he did not take the dispute seriously. The Standard further diminished the seriousness of this minor disagreement, and showed it was all in good humor, by subtitling the piece “J. Bottum has fun with Spencer Warren and our friends at the Claremont Institute.”
***
The Trump disagreement, however, is more serious, and may have longer lasting impact. The ur-document of West Coast pro-Trumpism is not the pledge signed by the 125 scholars and writers but an earlier piece by Kesler in the Claremont Review of Books—a flagship West Coast publication—called “Trump and the Conservative Cause.” It appeared in the spring issue, after Trump had effectively captured the nomination, but it was just soon enough that one might wonder whether he started writing it while other GOP contenders still had a chance.
In the piece, Kesler acknowledged Trump’s imperfections—“a Johnny-come-lately Republican who never enjoyed a deep allegiance to the conservative movement”—but he also had some early praise for the emerging GOP nominee. According to Kesler, while “There is no shortage of reasons to object to Donald Trump,” he also noted that “Trump himself has formidable, late-blooming political talents.” Kesler liked Trump’s opposition to political correctness, as well as “Trump’s praise of high energy, toughness, and strength in the ideal chief executive.” In this, Kesler’s admittedly mixed praise of Trump fit in with the West Coast Straussian predisposition to believe in the great man who can influence politics in critical times.
In addition, and importantly, Kesler noted that the other strains of conservatism were presented to the voters and found wanting: “To abstain in 2016, in hopes of stimulating a recovery of full-throated conservatism in 2020, is sheer desperation, ignoring the weaknesses in the multiple forms of doctrinaire conservatism on offer in this cycle: libertarianism (Paul), social conservatism (Huckabee, Santorum, Carson, Jindal), compassionate conservatism (Bush, Kasich), ‘reform’ (Rubio), neoconservative foreign policy (Graham), self-styled ‘true’ conservatism (Cruz). None succeeded in capturing the Republican imagination.”
All in all, Kesler found, Trump was against political correctness, and merited a look if for no other reason that “It’s the spirited way Donald Trump has defied the P.C. mavens, I think, that’s been the key to his success so far.”
Kesler was early in his reassessment, but he is now not alone. Easily identifiable writers with West Coast affiliations on the recent Scholars and Writers for Trump letter included Jeffrey Anderson, Arkes, Arnn, Roger Beckett, Chris Buskirk, John Eastman, Douglas Jeffrey, Brian Kennedy, Seth Leibsohn, Ken Masugi, Steve Mosher, Daniel Palm, Ronald Pestritto, Dennis Teti, Thomas G. West and J. Eric Wise. In addition, there was a collection of individuals from the University of Dallas and from Hillsdale College—headed by Arnn, a former Claremont Institute president.
Kesler’s June essay was positively ambivalent compared with what this West Coast cohort is writing and saying now. Many of these individuals weigh in at various forums, on the radio, on Twitter, and in their writings about the mixed merits of Trump—but the decidedly unmixed demerits of Hillary Clinton. Arkes wrote that a GOP Congress needs a Republican president to sign legislation, and that “Donald Trump is the only one who can be right now that Republican President.” Radio host Chris Buskirk echoed Churchill when he wrote that “A Trump presidency would not mark the beginning of the end of what promises to be a long struggle to regain constitutional government, but it might mark the end of the beginning.” And Hudson Institute’s Jeff Anderson has looked to specific policies to praise, saying, for example, “In truth, Trump's immigration proposals are quite logical and sensible. What's more, his emphasis on those who overstay their visas is subtly shrewd.”
When the dust settles after this election |
belief that the capitals in Lansing, Michigan, and Madison, Wisconsin, ignore the problems of the "Superior Region." The same area had been referred to as a possible future state named Sylvania by Thomas Jefferson.[1] Named for Lake Superior, the idea has gained serious attention at times, though it is unlikely to ever come to fruition because of the large amount of funding that the area receives from the lower parts of the state, and because of the completion of the Mackinac Bridge in 1957, which gave the Upper Peninsula a direct highway connection to the rest of the state. Several prominent legislators, including local Upper Peninsula politician Dominic Jacobetti, attempted enacting such legislation in the 1970s, with no success.[2]
If the Upper Peninsula of Michigan were turned into a state, it would currently have a smaller population than any other state, with its 320,000 residents representing only 60 percent of Wyoming's population and less than 50 percent of Alaska's.[3][4][5] It would rank 40th in land area, larger than Maryland.[6][7] Its most-populous city, Marquette, has a smaller population than Burlington, Vermont, which has the smallest population of the 50 cities that are the most populous in their respective states.[citation needed]
History [ edit ]
Efforts to secede and form a new state date back to 1858, when a convention was held in Ontonagon, Michigan, for the purpose of forming a new state combining the Upper Peninsula of Michigan, northern Wisconsin, and northeast Minnesota.[8] The new state was to be called either Superior or Ontonagon. The New York Times editorialized:
Unless Congress should interpose objections, which cannot reasonably be apprehended, we see no cause why the new "State of Ontonagon" should not speedily take her place as an independent member of the union.[9]
In 1897, another proposal for creating a State of Superior included areas in the Upper Peninsula along with portions of Wisconsin.[10]
In 1962, an Upper Peninsula Independence Association was founded to advocate for the formation of a State of Superior. A secession bill was submitted to the Michigan Legislature, and 20,000 petition signatures were collected—36,000 short of the number needed—for a ballot referendum on separation.[11]
Efforts continued into the mid-1970s (one bumper sticker suggested naming the 51st state "North Michigan"), with residents of the Upper Peninsula and northern Wisconsin, each resentful of perceived tax drains and other slights from their downstate cousins, joining together to pursue the desired legislation.[12]
Some support for statehood still exists in the region,[13] although no organized movement is currently active.[14]
References [ edit ]
Further reading [ edit ]
Carter, James L. (1980). Superior: A State for the North Country. Marquette, MI: Pilot Press. ISBN 99947-59-02-7.
Cox, Bruce K. (2009). Ted & Superior: Ted Albert & the 51st State of Superior. Wakefield, MI: Agogeebic Press. ISBN 978-0-9822390-0-1.
Coordinates:Assyrian Christians light candles on Palm Sunday, March 29, 2015, east of Beirut, Lebanon. At least 700,000 Syrian Christians are estimated to have fled their country since the civil war began. (AP Photo/Hussein Malla, File)
(CNSNews.com) – The Obama administration’s “surge” of Syrian refugee admissions approved for resettlement in the United States jumped by 37 percent in April – to 451 from 330 the previous month.
Of those 451, 426 were Sunni Muslims and one was a Christian, according to State Department Refugee Processing Center data. The remaining 24 comprised nine Shi’a Muslims, five other Muslims and 10 Yazidis.
The first ten days of May have brought a further 99 admissions, all Sunnis.
President Obama last fall pledged to admit 10,000 Syrian refugees in fiscal year 2016. After a slow start – four months into FY2016, only 841 had been admitted – the State Department set up a special refugee “resettlement surge center” in Amman, Jordan in February.
With processing times reduced from approximately 18-24 months to just three months, the pace duly picked up – with a total of 114 Syrian refugee admissions in February climbing to 330 in March and to 451 in April.
The proportion of Christians among the admissions has not increased, however. With the exception of October, when four were admitted, each month this fiscal year has seen just one Christian included among the Syrian refugees entering the U.S.
Syrian refugees admitted into the United States in FY 2016. (Data: State Department Refugee Processing Center)
As of Monday, the total number of admissions over that period is 1,835. Of them 10 – 0.5 percent – are Christians.
Millions of Syrians of all faiths and none have fled their homeland since the civil war began in the spring of 2011, whether escaping from the Allawite Assad regime and its Shi’ite backers, the Islamic State of Iraq and Syria (ISIS/ISIL) or other Sunni Islamist groups among the opposition, or more generally from the violence and deprivation.
They include Sunnis, Shi’a, Christians, Allawites, Yazidis, Zoroastrians, Baha’i, atheists and others.
Still, the proportion of Christians among the refugees admitted into the U.S. since the conflict began (1.5 percent, or 58 of a total of 3,708 as of Monday) is significantly smaller than the proportion of Christians in the Syrian population – an estimated 10 percent in 2011, according to the CIA World Factbook.
And the proportion of Sunnis among the Syrian refugees admitted into the U.S. over that period (94.2 percent, or 3,493 of the total of 3,708) is considerably larger than the proportion of Sunnis in the total population – an estimated 74 percent in 2011.
Syrian refugees admitted into the US since conflict began. (Data: State Department Refugee Processing Center)
As reported earlier, many Christians who leave Syria do not register with the U.N. refugee agency UNHCR, for fear of their safety in U.N. refugee camps. Because UNHCR referral plays an important part in the early stage of U.S. refugee applications, Christians may therefore be inadvertently disadvantaged.
Because of this, some Republican lawmakers and governors have called for Christians and other religious minorities to be prioritized in U.S. refugee admissions. Sen. Tom Cotton (R-Ark) introduced legislation last March that would enable Syrian minorities to bypass the U.N. and apply directly to the U.S. resettlement program.
Administration officials have rejected calls for Christians to be prioritized.
In March, Secretary of State John Kerry announced in response to a legislative requirement that atrocities carried out by ISIS against Christians and other minorities in the areas it controls constitutes genocide.Starting today, we're going show off some new, some improved, and some previously unseen class skills that you'll use to slaughter your way through Diablo III's acts.
The skills we're spotlighting are drawn from a variety of classes and levels, and most of them aren't available in the Diablo III beta. We've decided to showcase only "base" skills, unaffected by runes, but their rune variants are no less explosive (there are just a few too many of them to display here).
You can find each skill video we've posted on the appropriate skill page in the Game Guide, or simply click the links below to watch them in action. Keep your eyes on the environments that these demon-slaying displays take place in, too — you'll notice a few unfamiliar, exotic locales.
In the future, we'll release more videos on this blog exhibiting different skills you'll unlock throughout Diablo III. Remain vigilant.
Barbarian
Demon Hunter
Monk
Witch Doctor
WizardHawks
Atlanta Hawks center Al Horford high-fives fans as he leaves the court after the Hawks' 106-97 win over the Cleveland Cavaliers in an NBA basketball game Friday, March 6, 2015, in Atlanta. (AP Photo/Atlanta Journal Constitution, Curtis Compton)
With a 49-12 record, the Atlanta Hawks became the first team this season to clinch a playoff berth. The Hawks, who are 29-4 at home, stay at the top spot in this week's NOLA.com | The Times-Picayune power rankings.
1. Atlanta Hawks: Have won six straight and have extended their lead in the Eastern Conference to 11 games.
2. Golden State Warriors: Leads NBA in double-digit wins with 34.
3. Portland Trail Blazers: Have won five straight, but lost starting shooting guard Wesley Matthews for the rest of the season after he ruptured his Achilles tendon Thursday against Dallas.
4. Memphis Grizzlies: Have won back-to-back games after losing three of their last four.
5. Los Angeles Clippers: Had their three-game winning streak end on Wednesday night against Trail Blazers.
6. Houston Rockets: Guard James Harden has scored at least 30 points in 27 games this season.
7. San Antonio Spurs: Have won 11 of their past 12 home games.
8. Chicago Bulls: Without injured Derrick Rose and Taj Gibson, the Bulls still have the second-best record in the Eastern Conference at 39-24.
9. Dallas Mavericks: Are 16-19 against the teams.500 or better.
10. Cleveland Cavaliers: Are 12-17 when they turn the ball over 15 times or more.
11. Washington Wizards: Have lost seven of their past nine games.
12. Toronto Raptors: Have the third-best record in the Eastern Conference at 38-24, but have lost seven of their last eight games.
13. Oklahoma City Thunder: Russell Westbrook's four consecutive triple doubles streak ended on Thursday night against the Bulls.
14. New Orleans Pelicans: Squandered an opportunity to pull even with Oklahoma City for the eighth seed in the Western Conference with Friday's loss to Boston.
15. Phoenix Suns: Have lost an NBA-high four games at the buzzer this season.
16. Milwaukee Bucks: Guard Michael Carter-Williams has averaged 11.6 points since the joining the Bucks last month. With Carter-Williams in the lineup, Bucks have fared 1-5.
17. Charlotte Hornets: Have won four straight to emerge as the seventh seed in the Eastern Conference.
18. Indiana Pacers: Have won 10 of 12 games to get back in playoff contention.
19. Utah Jazz: Has won eight of 11 games and has held opponents to an NBA-low 83 points per game since All-Star break.
20. Miami Heat: Is 5-21 when trailing after the first quarter.
21.Boston Celtics: Have won five of their last seven games.
22.Brooklyn Nets: Have lost two consecutive games and guard Joe Johnson has totaled just seven points during the stretch.
23. Denver Nuggets: Have only nine wins on the road this season.
24. Detroit Pistons: Have lost five in a row.
25. Orlando Magic: Guard Victor Oladipo has scored at least 30 points in two-straight games.
26. Sacramento Kings: Are 3-17 on the road since Nov. 26, the worst road record in the Western Conference during span.
27. Los Angeles Lakers: Have lost 14 of 15 games on the road.
28. Minnesota Timberwolves: Rookie Andrew Wiggns has averaged 20.9 points over the last seven games.
29. Philadelphia 76ers: Has the NBA's second-worst record at 13-49, having lost nine of 10 games.
30. New York Knicks: Are 3-25 when committing 15 or more turnovers.The first Digital Expansion: Rise of the Hutt Cartel features the debut of a new organization known as Galactic Solutions Industries (GSI). What is GSI, and what are their intentions? They’re a weapons research and manufacturing company that remains strictly unaligned in the galactic war. As long as you can pay for their services, they will do business with you. In fact, their company motto is “We stay neutral, so you don’t have to!”
So, how do you go about doing business with GSI? As a matter of fact, GSI has conveniently placed their mission terminals across multiple planets. Complete the independent contracts they offer, and you’ll be rewarded with reputation trophies that build up your standing with them. Get to a high enough Reputation level, and you can purchase exclusive rewards from GSI headquarters at the Upper Promenade on Nar Shaddaa. Just remember: GSI is an advanced technology company, so make sure you have the Macrobinoculars and Seeker Droid with you. Otherwise, you might just find yourself sitting on the sidelines.
Steven Chew and Michael Ammer
World DesignersThe opinions expressed by columnists are their own and do not represent the views of Townhall.com.
Violent political Islamists intentionally target irreplaceable archeological and historical sites for sensational obliteration.
Internet videos record the ISIS's calculated destruction of Syria's city of Palmyra. Prior to Palmyra, Nimrud (northern Iraq) was bulldozed before cameras. Jonah's Tomb (Jonah and the Whale), located in a mosque in the ISIS occupied city of Mosul, was blown to bits. ISIS radicals said Jonah's presence in the mosque was an apostasy.
Like beheading Arab Christians, raping Yazidi women, murdering captured Iraqi soldiers and burning alive a Sunni Muslim Jordanian Air Force officer -- all acts of heinous, premeditated cruelty -- violent Islamists see destroying prized non-Islamic and pre-Islamic cultural sites and art work is a theological-political commandment and a form of apocalyptic propaganda. In a video recording the systematic vandalism of Hatra (Iraq), an ISIS terrorist explains his actions: "We were ordered by our prophet to take down idols and destroy them, and the companions of the Prophet did this after his time, when they conquered countries."
ISIS's destruction of art and architecture does not fall to the evil depth of its mass rape, mass torture and mass murder of human beings. However, obliterating precious sculptures, mosaics and venerated tombs is also a crime against humanity.
Artists, archeologists and historians world-wide were appalled when ISIS commanders announced they would raze Palmyra. Despite the sincere and passionate appeals of said artists, archeologists and historians to spare the city, ISIS commanders proceeded to devastate it. Artists, archeologists, historians? So what. ISIS commanders have no respect for their expertise and opinions, unless, of course, the artist is that very rare sort who also happens to be an air force pilot dropping a smart bomb. Still, it isn't his opinion they respect, it's his appearance on the battlefield aiming a high explosive warhead at their headquarters bunker.
Palmyra and Nimrud were not the first time violent Islamists have targeted pre- and non-Islamic sites and shrines. In March 2001 the Taliban vandalized Afghanistan's 6th Century AD Bamiyan Buddas. The two giant buddhas, composites of stucco and sandstone in a mountain cliff, were a UNESCO World Heritage Site. The UNESCO declaration gave the Taliban and their leader, Mullah Omar, absolutely no pause. The Islamist thugs declared the buddhas idols, then dynamited and machine gunned the figures.
Taliban theologian-vandals were not only destroying idols, they were cleansing their domain of its "pagan" past. Pulverizing the Bamiyan Buddhas was a Taliban twofer, for the figures were both pre- Islamic and non-Islamic.
Violent Islamists are practicing what 19th century anarchists called propaganda by deed. "Civilizational cleansing" and "ethnic cleansing" (mass murder) connect violent Islamism with other totalitarian revolutionary movements, particularly Communist "progressive" movements. The Soviet Union's Josef Stalin, Cambodia's Pol Pot and China's Mao Tse-Tung murdered by the millions in order to start anew so they might create the Communist Man. To secure Workers Paradise, all is justified.
The Islamist version sends this message: relevant history begins with Islam's revelation of God. It may also end there. Destroying the pre-Islamic and non-Islamic past helps clear historical and theological obstructions to securing a radical Islamic present and the Islamic future.
ISIS Islamists, like corrupt Communist apparatchiks, aren't above making a few dinars or dollars or euros. Three art and antiquity preservationists, in a NY Times op-ed (Sept 2, 2014), accused ISIS of profiting from the illegal sale of antiquities.
Apostasy? Nay. The Islamists justified their gain as an "Islamic khums tax, according to which Muslims are required to pay a percentage of the value of any goods or treasure recovered from the ground."
To secure the Caliphate, all is justified.Truck Yeah The trucks are good!
General Motors has issued a stop-sale order on nearly 60,000 Chevrolet Traverses, GMC Acadias and Buick Enclaves because their fuel economy labels show inflated figures. Worse yet, the company says it has already sold tens of thousands of vehicles with the misprinted MPG figures.
Automotive News reports that on Wednesday, General Motors dealers received a memo from headquarters telling them to stop selling 2016 Acadias, Traverses and Enclaves because the MPG values advertised on their window stickers are wrong. The memo says 59,823 of the large crossovers are outfitted with labels showing a mileage figure that is “1-2 MPG higher than it should have been.”
Automotive News says the incorrect labels showed city, highway and combined ratings for the all-wheel drive models as 17/24/19, respectively, when the actual figures should be 15/22/17.
GM’s memo went on to say the company “is stopping sale of the affected models until a corrected label is printed and affixed.” A GM spokesperson told Automotive News that the problem was caused by an inadvertent “data transmission,” and that the company is “working as quickly as possible to fix the problem and get the labels shipped.”
Unfortunately, the company caught the mistake too late, as they’ve admitted to selling tens of thousands of the crossovers with erroneous fuel economy numbers stuck to their windows. GM will send corrected labels to customers who bought the affected SUVs, and is working on a plan to address customer complaints.
Advertisement
GM told dealers that engineers were the ones who discovered the error while working on next year’s labels, and that the company immediately notified the EPA as soon as they learned of their mistake.
Who knows what sorts of fines GM is going to face for this (if any), but you can bet customers who bought those cars won’t be thrilled to learn that their car won’t actually get the gas mileage promised on the official EPA fuel economy sticker.RadioShack has reached agreement with U.S. states over the sale of customer data, by consenting to limit the number of email addresses to be sold, and giving customers the opportunity to be removed from the list.
A coalition of 38 U.S. states, led by Texas, objected to the sale of personally identifiable information by the bankrupt electronics retailer, citing its online and in-store privacy policies. The customer data, which was withdrawn from an earlier sale of assets that included RadioShack stores, was included in a second auction this month.
The bulk of the consumer data will be destroyed, and no credit or debit card account numbers, social security numbers, dates of birth or phone numbers will be transferred to General Wireless Operations, the winner of both auctions, said Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton in a statement Wednesday.
RadioShack also filed in court on Wednesday the result of the mediation talks that started on May 14, in which the states, the prospective buyer and the retailer participated.
RadioShack’s databases contained about 117 million customer records, including of consumer and commercial customers. The company offered for sale what it considered to be the most relevant data, which consisted of 67 million complete customer names and physical address files, of which around 8.3 million records also included an email address, according to the filing. Some 200,000 email addresses that were not associated with a physical mailing address were also part of the offer.
Following the mediation, General Wireless agreed to only buy customer email addresses that were active for the last two years, and will overall be bound by RadioShack’s privacy policy that prohibits the further sale or transfer of the information to third parties.
Customers with emails will be given an opportunity to opt out from having their information transferred to General Wireless within one week from being served a notice. Opt-out options will also be provided to customers whose email addresses are not available.
The agreement also removes 14 data fields from the transaction information that RadioShack proposed to sell. The information on a transaction to be sold will be limited to seven fields, including store number, ticket date and time, stock keeping unit (SKU) number, description and selling price, tender type and amount.
The Federal Trade Commission in a letter over the weekend to a court-appointed privacy ombudsman had said that the agency’s concerns about the transfer of customer data, ”would be greatly diminished” if certain conditions were met, including that the data was not sold standalone, and if the buyer is engaged in substantially the same lines of business as RadioShack, and expressly agrees to be bound by and adhere to the privacy policies.
This requirement appears to have been met by General Wireless. The acquirer has obtained approval from a bankruptcy court in Delaware to purchase RadioShack’s entire e-commerce business, intellectual property and remaining assets, including the customer data under the settlement, Paxton said.
New York’s Attorney General Eric T. Schneiderman described the settlement a victory for consumers’ privacy nationwide, which could serve as a model for future bankruptcies. The RadioShack dispute brought into sharp focus the need to protect, in the event of a bankruptcy, the large troves of personal data collected by large online and offline companies.From Warren Buffett to Mark Zuckerberg: 3 Steps to Successfully Finish Anything (the universal process)
“If you do something the right way enough times, you’ll win.” – Dan Loeb
Live LYL San Francisco Event Update: as of this morning there were only 12 spots left! You can grab your free ticket here if you haven’t. I cannot wait to see you all.
Now on to finishing what we started…
*****
Once you start, how do you ensure you finish?
After talking about starting last week, I noticed an interesting trend. I heard a lot of you respond in a similar way: “I don’t start because I’m afraid I’ll lose momentum. I might not finish.”
Sure, nothing is more important than starting.
But once you start, the most import thing quickly becomes “how do we set ourselves up so we can actually finish and succeed?”
The problem is most of us have really screwed up expectations.
We write a book and think it will be an instant bestseller.
We start a blog and think it’ll become the next Zen Habits within the year.
We launch a product and think the world will buy it.
We go on a diet and think we’ll lose 50 lbs right off the bat.
We expect ridiculous outcomes (often in record time) and when we don’t get them, we lose momentum. We give up. We quit.
Believe me, when it comes to misaligned expectations, I’ve been as guilty as any.
But I’ve learned (and continue to learn).
So today I want to share a simple process that has been proven over decades and generations to get real lasting results. A process for successfully finishing what you start.
It starts with a story from Warren Buffett and Mark Zuckerberg…
Every ten years or so the finance world thinks Warren Buffett is an idiot.
It’s usually at a time when some new technology or investment vehicle is dominating news headlines, at the same time that his company, Berkshire Hathaway’s stock market returns are getting beaten by the averages. News stories start popping up everywhere talking about how “he’s lost his edge” or “how the new world is too sophisticated for his old school style.”
Buffett’s response is always the same. It might sound something like “We don’t get caught up in what’s new, shiny or different. We just stick to what’s worked.”
This happened most recently around 2000, during the tech boom. In July of 1999 Buffett took the stage in Sun Valley, Idaho to give the anchor keynote at the Allen & Company conference – arguably the most prestigious business leaders’ summit of the year.
But this year was different than others. The crowd was filled with dozens of overnight tech multimillionaires – most of which were still trying to figure out how the hell they got where they did so damn fast.
Hence, the most successful investor of the past century found himself giving a talk to a crowd that had possibly the most misaligned set of expectations of our lifetime.
His topic was pretty simple (as they typically are): The recent performance of the stock market, and the wildly-high valuations these new tech companies were being given, simply could not last.
Not exactly the message the audience was eagerly awaiting.
When he finished his talk, the newly minted experts brushed it off once again as “the old guy missed the tech boom…Sure, he was the most successful investor of our time, but whatever… This time it’s different.”
Then they flew back to Silicon Valley in their private jets.
Within about a year, the bottom fell out of the market. And most of these people went broke.
Most the world was seduced by the money being made hand over fist. Most the world didn’t stop to think if it actually made sense.
But for Buffett, it didn’t fit into his process. It didn’t match his checklist. So he passed.
Despite how poor his investing outcome of the past few years had been (especially compared to most tech stocks of the time), he stayed true to his process. Because he knew that a proven process, executed properly, over time produces results. For him, there was no other measure.
Imagine the type of conviction that takes…
For the full story, check out the second chapter of Snowball – amazing few pages!
Then we have Mark.
Mark Zuckerberg’s Process for Changing the World (and handling tough IPO’s)
A couple days after the Facebook IPO earlier this year, a good CEO friend of mine forwarded me an email that Mark Zuckerberg sent to every Facebook employee the night before their company when public. Here’s a short excerpt (I pieced a few different quotes together):
“We don’t build services in order to make money…we make money in order to build better services… Facebook was not originally created to be a company. It was built to accomplish a social mission–to make the world open and more connected. “By focusing on our mission and building great services, we believe we will create the most value for our shareholders and partners over the long term.” – Mark Zuckerberg
The gist of his message was simple: We built Facebook to help people, to connect them in new ways. We built it because we loved doing it. We did not build it to become rich. We did not build it to go public.
He reinforced their reason Why. He knew he had no control over what would happen the next morning, the moment their stock started trading on the open market. No one could control that.
But what they could control is staying true to their purpose, regardless of the uncontrollable outcomes they experience along the way.
The fact that the Facebook IPO was one of the worst performing IPO’s of the past ten years, is not Mark’s fault. It’s not Facebook’s fault. If anyone’s at fault, it’s the public for giving them such a rosy valuation.
But none of that is the point.
While I don’t know Mark personally, something tells me that there are things a lot more important to him than what the stock did in the first day, week or year of trading.
Mark cares about changing the world. He cares about executing on a process to further that mission. There is no one who can take that from him. IPO boom or IPO bust, he and his team will keep doing what they believe is consistent with making us all more connected – with making the world better.
Every single day Mark and his team build on that goal – no matter what the outside world says or does. That is what they control. And that is how they measure success.
You can read Mark Zuckerberg’s full letter here – fantastic read!
Do you measure by outcome or process?
This is the one questions that separates world-changers from the average.
Building things can be frustrating. Doing things that truly excite you can be discouraging.
It’s scary, takes massive creativity and when you get started you often feel incredibly far behind. Not to mention, most people try to convince you you’re an idiot.
This leaves us with two ways to operate:
You can either measure yourself by the short-term results you get (and the reactions of others), Or you can figure out what actions typically lead to the long-term results you want.
You can either focus on the process or the outcome.
Most the world focuses on outcome.
Most the world gets frustrated and gives up as a result.
The key is to focus on the process that is most likely to lead to the outcome you want.
“We enjoy the process far more than the proceeds.” – Warren Buffett
Most things are out of our control.
That’s a fact. So it’s on us to control the few things we can.
We cannot totally control losing 50 pounds in a year – but we can decide how we eat and exercise. We can choose to run that mile every day. Sooner or later, the weight will be gone.
We cannot control meeting the man or woman of our dreams. But we can decide to go on five dates a week.
We can’t directly control landing our dream job, but you can dedicate yourself to the self-discovery, the searching, and connecting with the right people who will likely lead you to doing work you love.
We cannot control how many products we sell in a month – but we can control our marketing message, how we treat customers and how many sales calls we make.
Last year I had no idea how to launch a product, so I asked people who had successfully done it. Then I followed their step-by-step advice, exactly, in launching How to Live Off Your Passion. The eventual results spoke for themselves. I then wrote them up in the $31k Product Launch Checklist to share with all you (btw, if you find a process that works, please share it :)).
At our investment fund we cannot control, nor predict, what the stock market will do on a daily, monthly or yearly basis – but we can control how we go about choosing the investments and keeping to a process that’s gotten results for the past 100 years.
One of the biggest causes for failure in the investment world is what’s often called “chasing returns” – altering your strategy (or “pivoting” as some like to say) to better fit today’s headlines – exactly what Buffett refused to do in 2000. We built our investment process and checklists based upon the most successful value investors of the past 100 years – Benjamin Graham and Warren Buffett, in conjunction with our team of advisors, to be sure we had confidence in a process.
You cannot control how many new subscribers you get in a month – but you can decide to show up and write your very best and most useful content for your readers. And you can decide to write 10 guest articles for other sites.
When I discovered the process that was most consistent with growing a blog (which was writing insanely useful content for this site and others), I wrote over 20 guest posts in a matter of a few months. That was my measure of success. I also have built a habit of writing 500+ words every day no matter what. I can’t control much else. But stringing sentences together – that’s all on me.
Redefine frustration – then welcome it
The problem is you may write those first five or 10 articles, and not see any results. You may invest in the investments exactly according to a proven strategy, and they may go through the floor next week. You may switch from red meat and fried foods to all veggies, and gain weight in the first two weeks.
In fact you probably will.
Making a transition is never easy.
Going against the tide is unbelievably challenging.
You get tested in more ways than you can imagine.
Most any meaningful long-term outcome requires some type of seemingly short-term sacrifice.
But it’s only a sacrifice if you measure yourself on an outward level. Mr. Buffett often talks about his “internal yardstick”. That’s how he measures his success. Not on shallow headlines and pundits’ opinions, but on how well he has stayed true to what he believes is right. That’s how he kept himself from investing in the Yahoo’s of 1999.
When process is your measure, every action consistent with that process is a success.
Don’t get on a scale every morning. Just start running.
Don’t check the stock market every second. Just do your research.
Don’t check your sales non-stop. Just create valuable things and communicate that to your customers.
Don’t refresh your subscriber and web stats every couple hours (as I used to do). Just do the work you know people need your help with.
What’s the good that can come from it anyway?
One of two things could happen:
1. Your stats are super high, which excites you, but also immediately causes you to either get a little lazy or raise your expectations to unrealistic levels. You also might attribute this short-term success to something you’re doing, when it could be due to something that has nothing to do with your actions.
or
2. Your stats are lower than expected, which kills your drive and inspiration. You stop creating. You give up. You think you’re failing – then you actually do.
Neither of which helps your situation.
We must stop measuring ourselves by the things we cannot control.
3 Steps for Creating a Process that Ensures a Successful Finish
1. Identify your long term goal and be sure it has a “Reason Why” that actually means something to you.
Making money is not an adequate reason. That’s a result. For a refresher, look back at Simon Sinek’s Start with Why work. With the right Why, you can handle most any outward objection. This is what Zuckerberg put across so strongly in his pre-IPO letter.
2. Find a simple process that has been proven to consistently get your desired long-term results.
This is why Live Your Legend puts such a huge focus on surrounding yourself with passionate people and finding the right models. Go out and find someone who has done what you want to do (or something similar). Deconstruct what they did and how they did it. Create a process based on what you learn. For a refresher, reread On Modeling the Impossible and How to Do Anything.
*Very important: You must have complete confidence that the process will yield results over time. If you don’t fully believe in it then you’ll give up at the most crucial times (i.e. sell your best stocks when the market crashes, or stop writing when visitors don’t come beating down your homepage in the first couple months of launch).
The best place to find this confidence is from people who have crushed it in the past. Our investment process came from Mr. Buffett’s work. We believe in it 110%. Having a bad quarter does not change our thinking, as long as we stayed true to the process. And I learned the importance of creating content and guest posting from Leo Babauta and Corbett Barr (and a few others). Then I worked my ass off to do the same. I deeply believe that over time, that’s the work that pays off – no matter how the “numbers” look on any given week.
Commit to a simple process you believe in. Hint: usually it’s the simple ones that actually work.
3. Execute and measure success by what you can control.
Measure every day and every action based on how well you stayed true to the process you believe in. Work your ass off to execute. Surround yourself with people who believe the same – customers and employees alike. Congratulate yourself every time you do something you know is consistent with your long-term vision. I mean every single time. I still put a note of recognition on my calendar every time I publish a blog post.
No matter how big or small the victory, celebrate them all.
Dedication to a process is what moves mountains.
If you have the confidence that your process will yield results, then how well you stick to it is the only thing that should matter or motivate.
Chase the outcome and you’ll either quit early or start acting in a way that will lead to failure.
People will tell you you’re wrong. Let them talk.
If you believe it what you’re doing, you won’t hear them anyway.
Measure what you can control. Embrace the process. The rest will follow.
Once you start, that is the only way to finish.
-Scott
For the comments: What is your process? What steps do you whole-heartedly believe will lead to results over time? Share them with us. If you don’t have a process yet, get one. Tell us one thing you’ll do today to start establishing that process.
Live San Francisco LYL meetup – 12 spots left
Just a little reminder – as of this morning there were only 12 spots left for our first ever live event in San Francisco. You can grab your free ticket here if you haven’t. I cannot wait to get so many of us in the same place at once – after all, that’s when the real magic starts to happen! Less than two weeks to go. We have some fun things in store. I’ll update the attendees soon…
P.S. Also keep an eye out next week for a fun announcement about our upcoming How to Connect with Anyone course!
—–
Image credit 1CLOSE USA TODAY Sports' Tom Pelissero recaps the Week 12 action USA TODAY Sports
Minnesota Vikings quarterback Sam Bradford (8) throws a touchdown pass to wide receiver Adam Thielen (not pictured) during the first quarter against the Arizona Cardinals at U.S. Bank Stadium. (Photo: Brace Hemmelgarn, USA TODAY Sports)
EDEN PRAIRIE, Minn. – Sam Bradford used part of his weekly media session to call for more downfield passes in the Minnesota Vikings’ offense.
The quarterback’s message was just as clear to the Vikings’ battered offensive line as preparations began for Thursday night’s showdown with the NFL’s hottest team.
“This week especially, (Bradford)’s put a lot of emphasis on us that we need to do more,” Vikings guard Alex Boone told USA TODAY Sports. “He came to us and said, ‘Hey, listen, we need you guys to sustain, and we need you guys to be tough, and you’ve got to be some bad (expletives) this week for me, because there’s some things I want to do and there’s some plays that might take longer.’
“When the big dog asks you to do something, you never say no.”
But can the NFL’s most injury-ravaged protection unit really handle that assignment starting Thursday against a |
autista. In theory, being skeptical can protect you from further disappointment, but do you really want to be a sports fan on the defensive? This is the one part of your life where you can entertain unreasonable dreams. And it feels better to hope. That’s why your brain wants you to do it.
This isn’t a situation like junk food and exercise. In those areas your brain can be cruel — it tells you to keep eating junk food, and it tells you that exercise sucks, and then it’s hard to stay in consistent shape. The downside of giving in and eating junk food without exercising is that you die soon. The downside of allowing your hopes to get up in following a sports team is that you’ll be let down a lot, but you’re likely to be let down anyway, and the upside is that you can actually enjoy your damned self. You can be aware of the analysis, you can do your own analysis, and you can still let yourself get carried away. It isn’t going to hurt you, and you get to experience more smiles and less dread.
In any given season, the odds are stacked overwhelmingly against the Mariners winning the World Series. We know that, we all know that, but we still watch to see how the story plays out. By investing ourselves at all in the first place, we’re selecting hope over reason, so why then draw lines? It’s all silly irrational nonsense, and the goal is to maximize the good, not to minimize the bad. These aren’t your savings. These aren’t even your real, important, deeply-significant feelings. These are your feelings about a hobby, and sports-depression is nothing like life-depression. Sports-depression isn’t something you need to protect yourself against, unless you’re way too wrapped up. Sports-depression makes you unhappy watching a ballgame. Life-depression makes you unhappy doing anything, and those aren’t the stakes here. You can be a dreamer because why the hell not?
I don’t know if Dustin Ackley’s figured things out. I honestly suspect nobody does. I suspect even the Mariners are taking this one day at a time, Ackley included. My guess is that Ackley hasn’t figured things out, or that he’s temporarily figured things out, and pitchers will soon make him figure other things out. That’s the rational part of my brain, responding to a request for consultation. But that’s not a part of my brain I like to consult very often when I’m watching a game where I want a team to win, because that’s the side of my brain that doesn’t have fun. That’s the side I need for important life decisions, but choosing whether to believe in Dustin Ackley again isn’t anywhere near the top of my important-life-decision list. Those decisions I leave up to the young party side, and that side has been burned a lot and recovers fast. Young people can recover from anything, and it’s the hopeful part of your brain that preserves your youth, even when you’re hoping against probability.
Maybe Dustin Ackley’s finally arriving. Maybe he’s going to quit it with his annoying little drift in the batter’s box, and maybe now he’s going to be that consistent line-drive machine he was supposed to be from the beginning. Maybe Jesus Montero’s turned himself into the answer at DH, and maybe D.J. Peterson is less than a season away. Maybe everything good. We already know that Ackley has turned himself into a pretty good defensive corner outfielder. We’re already seeing him improving. If the bat’s for real, he’s a core piece, and a vital asset down this particular stretch run. Maybe Dustin Ackley is valuable. If he’s not, I know I can take it, but I don’t see the value in bracing yourself against a pain that won’t hurt. This is sports. This isn’t even sports — this is one player out of a lot of players in sports. People seem to have more fun on roller coasters with their arms up.
CommentsBatman/Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles #5
DC Comics/IDW Publishing
Written by: James Tynion IV
Art by: Freddie E. Williams II
Color by: Jeremy Colwell
I can’t believe its almost over. The penultimate issue of Batman/Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles is here and all I can think is I don’t want it to end. James Tynion IV and Freddie E. Williams II have captivated the soul of my fandom through 4 issues, and number 5 maybe just be too much awesome for this comic book lover to handle.
The pieces are finally coming together for Batman and the Turtles but time is quickly running out. With the help of Ras Al Ghul, The Shredder has successfully taken over Arkham Aslyumn making it the new base of operations for The Foot. Unfortunately Leonardo and crew have to go back to their dimension in order to stay alive thus leaving the Dark Knight to fend for himself against The Foot and Shredder. Luckily for Batman, Damien has arrived just in time to help Batman fight this new unrelenting foe and allow the turtles to return home before they revert to their original form.
Batman/TMNT has been a fanboys dream from beginning to end. Tynion knows exactly what strings to pull and panels to highlight to make your inner child scream with uncontrollable delight. I personally shed a single tear of unbridled happiness as I reached the final page. As approach the end to this ultimate crossover, Tynion continues to show us why we need this comic in our monthly pull as almost every panel is designed to keep you smiling and full of fanboy delight.
Even after 5 issues and Tynion’s knack for knowing what I want to see its Freddie E. Williams II’s art that really keeps me coming back and wishing Batman/TMNT would never end. Williams seamlessly weaves these two worlds together in such a way that it feels as if they were never separate. Williams’ character designs and poses have always been the best part of this series for me and those amazing images continue in this penultimate issue. But its in its final page that Batman/TMNT #5 sets itself apart from all other comics as Tynion and Williams’ present a lasting image that in all my years of comic book reading maybe one of the single greatest things I have ever witnessed. I won’t spoil it here but that moment alone is worth the $3.99 price tag and let’s hope it spawns a new line of toys
I’ve said it once and I’ll say it a million more times Batman/TMNT is a must read comic for any nerd of the 90s. Hell, its a must read comic for anyone who loves these characters. Issue 5 while its mostly set up for the final battle, its an unbelievable one that gives us a cliffhanger I thought only possible in my dreams.(Photo by Ryan Budhu/Flickr)
I was somewhere around 14th Street when the train I was on sped up in a way that reminded me, joyously, of the times my parents would accelerate just before a little hill in the road, propelling our family car over it in a way that made us kids in the back cheer for more. "Again!" It was exhilarating, freeing, and left my core feeling delightfully uncentered. My stomach, I always thought, had just traveled up to my heart and back down again, but somehow in a way that left both organs functional. Our car, too, never seemed worse for the wear.
There aren't any little rolling hills in our subway system like there are in my rural hometown, but there are stretches of tracks that, barring any "train traffic" slow-downs, will nearly simulate that rollercoaster-feeling. Take the 2/3 towards Brooklyn, and you'll feel a rush after pulling away from 14th Street, flying by Christopher and Houston, before the train brakes around Canal and jerks you around all the way to Chambers (this stretch is actually the most similar to the rickety old Cyclone). That jolt is both an unwelcome shock and a relief, because at some point the speed buzz feels like it's sticking around a little too long. "Again!" turns into "IS THIS NORMAL?!"
It's normal. A subway train is designed to go 50 MPH, which is pretty fast, and feels even faster when you're flying through a century old, tight-squeeze underground tunnel. A rep for the MTA tells me the speed on their trains are capped at 50, and can reach that speed along some stretches—notably, the 3 mile stretch from Howard Beach to Broad Channel. This is likely the fastest (in MPH) subway ride you'll get in the entire system:
There is no average speed for the city's subway trains, the MTA tells us—it's not something they calculate, and speed limits vary throughout the system.
Despite nothing official on the books, however, there are some numbers out there on average subway train speeds, with NYC clocking in around 17 MPH on average. The below chart is courtesy of Matt Johnson, who "conducted an analysis of all heavy rail transit lines in the United States" and found NYC's to be the slowest on average. With station spacing being a key factor in speed, Johnson notes that the Shuttle's "average schedule speed is very high," because it has "only two stations, one at each end, [with] no intermediate stops."
(Courtesy of Matt Johnson/Flickr)
With the slowest numbers nationwide, if your train is going above 0 MPH, consider it a win. And if your train is flying through the tunnels at top speed, embrace the speed buzz.In the interest of brevity and my own personal sanity, I'm keeping this review of Minecraft encapsulated to the game itself as you would download straight from Mojang. While recreations of J.R. Tolkien's Middle-Earth and The Death Star Trench Run capture our attention and fascination, it's easy to be blinded by the grandeur and forget about the simple mechanics that make it all possible: a 16 pixel texture cube. This shape becomes the quite literal building block for vast and expansive worlds that can be constrained really only to the limit of your imagination. We have, however, collected some of our favorite builds below.
The basic mechanics of Minecraft are dead simple. You can break down material blocks and place them down wherever you like, but it's through elementary premise that the freedom emerges. You'll explore blocks of varying types representing different objects and substances. Once you discover how to create tools, you'll encounter the games crafting system; a dizzying number of items can be created based on some simple logic. For example, torches require you to place coal above a stick in the crafting window, whereas a bucket or bowl can be made by arranging iron or wood in a small V pattern. Using these basic principles, you'll be able to construct things like armor, food, tools and weapons.
Minecraft is a sandbox in almost the purest sense. You're dropped into a world and left to your own devises and musings. Want to see how deep you can tunnel? Or maybe you think that little island is begging to have a mighty fortress built atop it? You can go and do it. If that much freedom would normally cripple you with indecision there are few different modes to tailor the gameplay. Survival may involve the most elements, but it also creates some more specific objectives as you'll need to, well, survive. When the sun sets, all kinds of monsters will come out to dine on your face. When you first start out often the best you'll manage is to hole yourself up until day light, but as you progress you can begin to take on the monsters with better equipment or you can even use the resources available to you to construct traps. On the other end of the spectrum is Creative mode. In Creative mode you can't be hurt, you'll have infinite and open access to nearly every item and you'll be able to fly. This makes it easy to build in scales that would almost impossible if you had to gather all the material in Survival. Combine these two modes with Peaceful and Hardcore settings and the ability to play both on and offline, and Minecraft gives you a lot of freedom to approach the game in a way you find most fun. You could just as easily team up with other players on a creative server to make a landscape of pixel art as you could fend off monsters with just your lonesome self.
This utter and complete freedom is both Minecraft's biggest strength and also one of its weaknesses. If you're not the kind of person who can make their own fun, a lot of Minecraft's appeal is going to be lost on you. The game also suffers from being too arcane with its information. There is a system of achievements that will give you a rough idea of how to create in items and what ones you'll need, but more often than not you're going to have to defer to a wiki in order to divine the proper placement in the crafting window. It's the classic adventure puzzle game logics issue as you keep trying things to discern the one way that the developers intended it.
There are also a few technical issues, I personally encountered an problem where the game's Java client would not get along with my dual monitor set-up, but this never became so much of an issue to get me to give up on my island fortress dreams.
Bottom line:There really isn't that much on the market today that's like Minecraft, an open sandbox for you to play and build in. This simple freedom can lead to some truly complex accomplishments.
Recommendation: If you're the sort of person who prefers a more tightly crafted experience, then Minecraft might not be for you, but if you're able to lose yourself in finding your own fun, there isn't a better game than Minecraft.
Justin Clouse wonders what that hissing noise is.
What our review scores mean.
Game: Minecraft
Genre: Construction
Developer: Mojang
Publisher: Mojang
Platform(s): PC
Available for purchase here.In the latest edition of his daily video commentary, Dick Morris pleaded with Rush Limbaugh to "stop losing the elections" for Republicans by opposing efforts to reform immigration.
Morris, formerly of Fox News, backs the current bipartisan proposal to reform the immigration system, pitching it to his conservative viewers as a good way to eat into the Democratic Party's success with Latino voters.
Discussing the proposal's "path to citizenship" Morris notes, "it delays the path to citizenship by a good, long time which gives the Republican Party a long time to deal with the Latino vote."
Directly addressing Limbaugh's opposition to the proposal, Morris asks him, "What is your alternative?"
Morris goes on to implore Limbaugh to "stop losing the elections for us" by "insisting on some objective standard of purity" on the issue. Instead, Morris tells Limbaugh to focus on "what's practical" in order to "focus on the changes that are taking place in the country, and deal with them."
Limbaugh, who has become increasingly toxic to talk radio and the conservative movement, said in January that "it's up to me and Fox News" to stop immigration reform.A federal judge on Thursday refused to toss out the underlying guilty verdict in former Maricopa County Sheriff Joe Arpaio's criminal contempt case in the wake of President Trump's pardon of the sheriff.
"The pardon undoubtedly spared Defendant from any punishment that might otherwise have been imposed," US District Court Judge Susan Bolton wrote. "It did not, however,'revise the historical facts' of this case."
Arpaio had been found guilty of criminal contempt for repeatedly refusing to halt a policing tactic to catch undocumented immigrants despite court orders to do so. He had not, however, been sentenced when Trump issued the pardon in August.
After he received the pardon, Arpaio asked the court to dismiss his case and to vacate all of the earlier orders in the case — including his guilty verdict. Although the Justice Department, for the most part, sided with Arpaio in his request, other parties filed briefs detailing why they believed his request should not be granted. Bolton had let it known that she was uncertain if she could go as far as Arpaio sought, asking in September for additional briefing in the case.
Bolton earlier agreed to dismiss the case, but held off her opinion on whether the earlier orders also would be vacated. In Thursday's order, Bolton denied his request that she do more than dismiss the case.
As to the effect of a presidential pardon, Bolton explained, "It does not erase a judgment of conviction, or its underlying legal and factual findings," citing a prior case from the US Court of Appeals for the 9th Circuit — where an appeal of Arpaio's request would be heard.The next twelve months are set to be exciting times for the desktop space for Intel. While the current fifth generation mobile processors are coming to market, and the sixth generation being talked about in hushed tones, Intel demonstrated a PC that was listed as having a Broadwell desktop part (Broadwell-DT). The interesting culmination of factors surrounding this part is that it was listed as being socketed, unlocked and containing Iris Pro internal graphics.
The key elements here include the CPU being socketed (replaceable), unlocked (overclockable) and having Iris Pro, or Intel’s extended eDRAM segmentation usually under the Crystal Well name but with the much improved Generation 8 graphics architecture. While we have heard that an unlocked Iris Pro has been coming to desktop since March last year, very few details were given at the time, and the news today at least puts a TDP on such a part: 65W. Normally the high end SKUs from Intel are 77W to 85W, suggesting that this component may not in actual fact be an i7, or it could be an Iris Pro part but using one of the low power monikers such as ‘S’.
Image from Intel
The news also puts on a more firm date, so rather than ‘2015’ we get ‘mid-2015’, which puts it within the May to September timeframe. There are two important events occurring between those dates - Computex in June and the Intel Developer Forum in August, suggesting that Intel may aim for one of these events to have a formal launch.
Despite the launch of 14nm on the desktop, there has been recent talk of Intel’s next architecture, Skylake, also occurring within the year. This puts Intel in an interesting dynamic of releasing two different platforms for desktop within the same year. One could speculate and suggest that these will synergistically work in tandem, with Skylake-DT taking a segment and Broadwell-DT taking another segment. Where mobile fits into all this as well is difficult to tell, especially given the launch of Broadwell-U and Core-M within the past few months.
As much as we would like more information, it seems that the only thing we can tell is that the motherboard being used looks like an EVGA design due to the right angled power connector. Intel is also stating that the Iris Pro model will be great for all-in-ones (no argument there) which could also feature its RealSense camera, enhancing compute power and interactivity. It would be interesting if a socketed Iris Pro was truly aimed at the AIO market, but then such a SKU would not need to be unlocked. Unlocking for the purposes of overclocking is naturally aimed at the desktop market, although usually for gamers with discrete GPUs rather than Iris Pro.
Naturally we want to get our hands on a sample for review. Ryan is at GDC this week so if he gets a chance to spend a few minutes with the system it would be interesting to hear what they actually represented in the demo as well as more information about the system itself.The Triumph Scrambler has quickly become a prime target for custom motorcycle builders, it’s based on the Bonneville and because of this, there’s a huge aftermarket parts catalogue rivalled only by the likes of Harley-Davidson.
The Triumph you see here started life as a Scrambler, before being rebuilt after it was wrecked with just 900 miles on the odometer. Santiago Ares decided to take the project on and it all started with a strip down – to gauge the damage and begin the process of figuring out what could be kept and what needed to be thrown out.
Santiago is a long time fan of the classic enduro motorcycles of the ’70s and so he saw this build as an opportunity to take a Scrambler and turn it into its own arch rival. One of the first new additions to the bike was that huge Baja 1000 headlight, apparently it throws out as much illumination as a Cessna’s landing lights – meaning that drivers can see the bike coming from a very, very long way away.
He then called in the services of Mark, a former Boeing engineer with some serious fabrication capabilities. Mark hand-built the new aluminium dashboard and bash plate – Personally I much prefer it to the official Triumph part.
A new ProTaper handlebar was then added, with Joker levers and grips by British Customs. A set of lightweight scrambler pipes were bolted into place and the bike was finished off in a colour from the Porsche catalogue by the team at Perfection Auto.
The completed bike is weighs in at 25lbs less than stock and has improved off-road abilities according to Santiago – who makes a regular habit of taking it up abandoned fire roads whenever he has the chance.
If you’d like to see more from Santiago, you can visit his website here.Shaw WideOpen Internet 150 provides download speeds of 150 megabits-per second to virtually all customers in Western Canada
CALGARY, ALBERTA--(Marketwired - July 15, 2016) - Shaw Communications Inc. (TSX:SJR.B)(NYSE:SJR) today announced the launch of WideOpen Internet 150, a new Internet plan giving Shaw customers access to Shaw's fastest speeds, priced for everyone.
"Speed is up, cost is down," said Chris Kucharski, President, Consumer, Shaw Communications.
"Canadians want lower prices for Internet service, but until now they had to choose between price and speed. Shaw WideOpen Internet 150 doesn't force them to make that choice," Kucharski said. "Our customers expect to always be connected, and Shaw WideOpen Internet 150 makes top-tier speeds accessible, affordable and more broadly available than ever before."
WideOpen Internet 150 is available today for an introductory offer as low as $49.90 per month for the first 12 months on a two-year price-guaranteed value plan. Shaw's top-tier Internet plan gives customers the bandwidth they want along with the savings and cost certainty that comes with a two-year price guarantee. Because Shaw doesn't charge for data overages, customers also have the peace of mind of knowing they can use the network without penalty.
"Virtually all neighbourhoods across Western Canada have access to Shaw WideOpen Internet 150," Kucharski said. "Our competitors can't offer these speeds to even half as many homes as Shaw."
The launch of WideOpen Internet 150 builds upon the investments made by Shaw over the past several years to enhance the quality and capacity of its ultra-broadband network, already one of North America's largest. The improvements give more than 91 per cent of communities in Western Canada the ability to get top-tier speeds today without making homeowners and residents wait for major and costly network improvements. Shaw's Western Canadian competitors can only offer similar speeds to a relatively small portion of their customer base.
"We built our ultra-broadband fibre network to provide superior connectivity to customers regardless of whether they live in large cities or small towns, and we can provide these speeds now, without needing to dig up our customers' front lawns or close their streets," added Kucharski. "Shaw WideOpen Internet 150 is only the beginning. The strength and superiority of our extensive ultra-broadband fibre network enables us to offer our customers the speeds they need now and into the future."
Shaw WideOpen Internet 150 offers a variety of customer benefits, including an industry-leading in-home Advanced WiFi modem and access to download speeds of up to 30 Mbps at over 80,000 Shaw Go WiFi hotspots.
The launch of WideOpen Internet 150 follows a series of product launches and initiatives designed to enhance value and increase connectivity for Shaw customers, including the launch of FreeRange TV earlier this year.
More information about Shaw WideOpen Internet 150 can be found at shaw.ca/150.
About Shaw Communications
Shaw is an enhanced connectivity provider. Shaw serves consumers with broadband Internet, WiFi, video, digital phone and, through WIND Mobile, wireless services. Shaw Business Network Services provides business customers with Internet, data, WiFi, telephony, video and fleet tracking services. Shaw Business Infrastructure Services provides enterprises colocation, cloud and managed services through ViaWest. Shaw is traded on the Toronto and New York stock exchanges and is included in the S&P/TSX 60 Index (TSX:SJR.B)(NYSE:SJR). For more information, please visit www.shaw.caAMSTERDAM – Not wishing to leave the boys playing overseas out of the 24 Under 24 fun, we've built an annex list with the top five US internationals on the Old Continent who are 23 or younger.
As with the currently unfurling ranking for MLS players, we have scored all eligible American exports in five categories: technical, tactical, physical, personality and potential upside:
READ: Updated 24 Under 24 MLS player rankings
#5 - Terrence Boyd (Rapid Vienna)
Imagine if the US national team had a player like former AC Milan and Italy poacher extraordinaire Pippo Inzaghi. Now imagine they had one with pace.
Now, stop imagining, because Boyd is a baby goal shark in the process of cutting his teeth. The ostinato cello you hear is not coming from a John Williams orchestra.
Already a master of appearing in just the right place at just the right time with just the right touch, the 21-year-old Bremen, Germany, native has six tallies in his first 11 games with Rapid, including two Europa League strikes. Not bad for a guy who was with Borussia Dortmund II in the German fourth flight only four months ago.
It's exceedingly rare that a player earns his international debut before enjoying a single first team appearance in club ball, but Boyd did it this winter in an historic win over Italy. Since then, he's been a regular for Jurgen Klinsmann and served the late backheel assist for a historic winner in Mexico.
#4 - Timothy Chandler (FC Nürnberg)
Some folks will scoff (or worse), but facts are facts. As of now, the 22-year-old is both a wildly intriguing young player under 24 and a US international. For the sake of this exercise, let's just ignore that some personal factor has been keeping him from joining the USMNT since last fall.
The reality is that Germany hasn't called, and not only because Chandler – like his club – has struggled for form and fitness since his most recent US game last November. It's worth noting he also rejected a transfer up the Bundesliga chain to Stuttgart, so all-around confidence could currently be an issue.
Beyond the woes and controversy, Chandler still appears a diamond in the rough (otherwise known as FC Nürnberg). It probably doesn't help that the club can't ever decide whether he belongs on the wing or at right back, but no amount of turmoil can hide natural overlapping instincts and precision in the cross.
#3 - Mikkel Diskerud (Rosenborg)
Until that win over Jamaica in Columbus, cries were growing from the USMNT crowd for the Mixmaster to be utilized. This sort of observer wailing can often be unreasonable – perhaps, it can be supposed, even from this space on occasion.
This time, however, the gallery suggestion had an astute point. The US has lacked midfield time-keeping since Michael Bradley was shelved with an injury and this is precisely the bread and butter of young Mr. Diskerud, with more than a dash of final third skill in his recipe.
The 21-year-old Oslo, Norway, native is certainly not to be confused with Johan Cruyff, a flowing mane of hair to envy is not his lone similarity to the Dutch legend. Mix wants the ball, he wants to aggressively turn someone and he wants to push it forward. In his first five games with RBK, Diskerud has done all this well enough to become the league's highest-rated player by Norwegian paper VG.
#2 - Josh Gatt (Molde FK)
With all the players on our list, we could discuss certain important aspects of their development with an eye toward the future. Molde's very own roadrunner wing terror has something, though, that cannot be gradually trained into a player's toolbox.
Of course, we are talking about Gatt's crazy wheels with Honda CRX cornering and a stunt driver's mentality to match. Sure, some might say that the 21-year-old winger is having fun careening around and through Norwegian defenders in part because it's easier than in other leagues.
It says here not to underestimate either his unique physical talent or the upbringing of Molde boss Ole Gunnar Solskjær. Stateside fans will learn soon enough that this perfectly grounded bolt of lightning has it in him to make defenders of all levels run for cover.
#1 - Jozy Altidore (AZ Alkmaar)
What we have here is the USMNT's first chance at a genuine all-tools, world-class strike monster.
At 22, Ruud van Nistelrooy was winning the Eredivisie Golden Boot. So was Marco van Basten. Klaas-Jan Huntelaar did it one year older and Ronaldo a couple years younger. This season, Altidore has the early league lead and an expanding repertoire a couple months shy of his 23rd birthday.
Under the ever-watchful eye of AZ Svengali Gertjan Verbeek, Altidore is finally starting to use his bulk in the area. Add that to an improving technical game, shrewder runs and a heavily underrated passing ability, and it should be easy to see great things ahead for a US striker like none before him.Earlier this week, Google killed a beloved service of theirs, but now it looks like they might be bringing another one back from the dead in the form of a new note-taking service called "Google Keep." Remember Google Notebook? It's back!
We've got pictures! Google Keep's website went live for a short while and we took a bunch of screenshots. Google Keep's website went live for a short while and we took a bunch of screenshots. Check them out
1E100 dug through the Google Drive website's source code and discovered the unreleased app. For starters there's this icon, which was located at www.google.com/images/icons/product/keep-512.png:
It looks like it's a good match with the other Google Drive app icons. The service is codenamed "Memento" and the MIME type of a Google Keep file is "application/vnd.google-apps.note."
There are also a few revealing URLs: https://drive.google.com/keep/ gives a special (read: fake) 404 page, while something that really isn't there, like https://drive.google.com/androidpolice/ gives a real 404 error. You can also get favicons for Keep if you check out https://drive.sandbox.google.com/keep/ or https://drive.sandbox.google.com/notes/.
Do a little Googling and you'll come across this G+ post on the official Google page. In July 2012, Google was trying to use this picture to extoll the virtues of Instant Preview, but they didn't notice the "Add to Google Keep" link in the right screenshot. So apparently Keep will be able to save website snippets directly from a Google Search, and this service has been in the works for some time.
It looks like Keep will get its own Android app, which is really odd for a Drive app, but sure enough, 1E100 found that http://g.co/keep redirects to https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.google.android.keep.
That's about it. Google Keep, an unreleased note-taking app from Google. We'll let you know if we hear anything else.
Source: 1E100 via Google Operating SystemDr. H. H. Holmes, one of America’s first well-known serial killers, is hanged to death in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania. Although his criminal exploits were just as extensive and occurred during the same time period as Jack the Ripper, the Arch Fiend–as Holmes was known–has not endured in the public’s memory the way the Ripper has.
Born with the unfortunate moniker Herman Mudgett in New Hampshire, Holmes began torturing animals as a child. Still, he was a smart boy who later graduated from the University of Michigan with a medical degree. Holmes financed his education with a series of insurance scams whereby he requested coverage for nonexistent people and then presented corpses as the insured.
In 1886, Holmes moved to Chicago to work as a pharmacist. A few months later, he bought the pharmacy from the owner’s widow after his death. She thenmysteriously disappeared. With a new series of cons, Holmes raised enough money to build a giant, elaborate home across from the store.
ADVERTISEMENT Thanks for watching! Visit Website
The home, which Holmes called “The Castle,” had secret passageways, fake walls, and trapdoors. Some of the rooms were soundproof and connected by pipes to a gas tank in the basement. Hisbedroom had controls that could fill these rooms with gas. Holmes’ basement also contained a lab with equipment used for his dissections.
Young women in the area, along with tourists who had come to see the 1893 World’s Fair in Chicago, and had rented out rooms in Holmes’ castle, suddenly began disappearing. Medical schools purchased many human skeletons from Dr. Holmes during this period but never asked how he obtained the anatomy specimens.
ADVERTISEMENT Thanks for watching! Visit Website
ADVERTISEMENT Thanks for watching! Visit Website
Holmes was finally caught after attempting to use another corpse in an insurance scam. He confessed, saying, “I was born with the devil in me. I could not help the fact that I was a murderer, no more than a poet can help the inspiration to sing.”
Reportedly, authorities discovered the remains of over 200 victims on his property.
Devil in the White City, a book about Holmes’ murder spree and the World Fair by Erik Larson, was published in 2003.ABOUT
Whilst Donald Trump is campaigning to become President, the prime directive of Trump Coin is to be a campaign donation project. 200,000 Trump Coins have been set aside (Trump Fund) for this specific purpose. What this means is the higher the value Trump Coin becomes the more dollar value the Trump Campaign Fund becomes. Its really quite simple: The more Trump Coins sold the higher the coins value will increase. If we consider at one point the Ron Paul coin was valued at $10 per coin then those 200,000 Trump Coins could turn in to a substantial donation. If Donald Trump acknowledged the project then the value of a single Trump Coin could literally go ballistic. However, we cannot rely on this so therefor its up to us Trump Supporters to make sure we donate to his campaign helping to send him directly to the White House.
Example: You have allocated a $50 donation and you buy $50 of Trump Coins @ 5 cents each. A few days later the coin is valued @ 10 cents each. Your now in 100% profit. In a nutshell, not only can you donate your original intended amount to the campaign you can also profit from your original donation. What you do with your profits is up to you and of course you can donate all your proceeds to Trumps election campaign if you wished. However, we like the idea that theres something in it for you to. As Donald Trump says – he wants to make you all better off financially!Rate This
Have you been following that "Believe in Fantasy" thing that the Disney Parks Blog has been doing over on Tumblr?
If not, you may want to head on over there now and get in on the fun. You see, Gary Buchanan & Co. are using the bread crumb technique when it comes to promoting that flying dragon which will soon begin buzzing around the Magic Kingdom's New Fantasyland area.
"Which flying dragon?," you ask. Surely you remember that story which the Bakersfield Californian published back in June. You know, the one which featured a few photographs of a mechanical dragon that restaurant manager Tammy Zaninovich had observed flying around Minter Field in the early morning hours.
Photo by Tammy Zaninovich
Though Sandy Worley, the general manager of this Shafter, CA-based airfield, wasn't allowed to comment on this uniquely shaped Ultralight back then due to a nondisclosure agreement that she had signed, John Cox (i.e. the reporter who initially broke this story) eventually learned that Walt Disney Imagineering had rented a hangar at Minter Field. Reportedly to test some sort of specially designed aircraft before it was then shipped off to Florida.
Well, it didn't take long for the online Disneyana community to connect the dots here. Though -- that said -- the initial speculation was this dragon-shaped Ultralight would eventually be headed for Disney's Animal Kingdom. Where it would then be used to replicate a Mountain Banshee (i.e. those large, bird-like predators that the Na'vi rode) for that theme park's soon-to-begin-construction / half-a-billion-dollar addition, "James Cameron's World of Avatar."
But once Disney Parks launched that "Believe in Fantasy" Tumblr feed with its Cloverfield -like videos of a dragon being spotted flying over Orlando as well as those fairly-authentic-looking recreations of photos from 1971 (which showed a survey team supposedly discovering a giant, recently hatched egg in a dragon's nest at the outskirts of WDW's Magic Kingdom), the online community made a quick course correction and then began talking about how much they are now looking forward to seeing this dragon-shaped Ultralight (which -- according to what Ms. Zaninovich told the Bakersfield Californian -- "... breathes fire and the mouth opens and closes") flying above New Fantasyland.
Copyright Disney Enterprises, Inc. All rights reserved
"And when exactly might those flights over this theme park begin?," you query. As you might expect (given that Disney Parks isn't quite through teasing / promoting this exciting addition to New Fantasyland's entertainment line-up. More importantly, given that this Magic Kingdom expansion isn't due to officially be unveiled for another 10 days yet ), Mouse House managers are being fairly tight-lipped right now about when this dragon-shaped Ultralight will begin buzzing that theme park.
Mind you, given that there are a number of late night / early morning rehearsals scheduled for the official opening of the New Fantasyland between now and December 5th... If you're a Guest staying at either Disney's Contemporary Resort or the Bay Lake Tower and have a theme park view, it might be worth your while over the next week or so to get up early-early in the morning and then keep an eye on the skies over the Magic Kingdom. Because you never |
üe, Split Enz, Prince, Ultravox, Duran Duran,[35] Van Halen,[36] Bon Jovi, RATT,[37] Def Leppard,[38] The Police, and The Cars. The channel also rotated the music videos of "Weird Al" Yankovic, who made a career out of parodying other artists' videos.[39] MTV also aired several specials by "Weird Al" in the 1980s and 1990s under the title Al TV.
MTV also played classic rock acts from the 1980s and earlier decades, including David Bowie, Dire Straits (whose 1985 song and video "Money for Nothing" both referenced MTV and also included the slogan "I want my MTV" in its lyrics), Journey, Rush, Linda Ronstadt, Genesis, Billy Squier, Aerosmith, The Rolling Stones, Eric Clapton, The Moody Blues, John Mellencamp, Daryl Hall & John Oates, Billy Joel, Robert Palmer, Rod Stewart, The Who, and ZZ Top; newly solo acts such as Peter Gabriel, Robert Plant, Phil Collins, Paul McCartney, David Lee Roth, and Pete Townshend; supergroup acts such as Asia, The Power Station, Yes, The Firm, and Traveling Wilburys, as well as forgotten acts such as Michael Stanley Band, Shoes, Blotto, Ph.D., Rockpile, Bootcamp, Silicon Teens and Taxxi. The hard rock band Kiss publicly appeared without their trademark makeup for the first time on MTV in 1983. The first country-music video aired on MTV was "Angel of the Morning" by Juice Newton, which first aired on MTV's premiere date. (Newton's video was the third video by a solo female artist to air on MTV, after Pat Benatar and Carly Simon.)
During the early days of the channel, MTV occasionally let other stars take over the channel within an hour as "guest VJs". These guests included musicians such as Adam Ant, Billy Idol, Phil Collins, Simon LeBon, and Nick Rhodes of Duran Duran, Tina Turner; and comedians such as Eddie Murphy, Martin Short, Dan Aykroyd, and Steven Wright; as they chose their favorite music videos.
The 1983 film Flashdance was the first film in which its promoters excerpted musical segments from it and supplied them to MTV as music videos, which the channel then aired in regular rotation.[40]
In addition to bringing lesser-known artists into view, MTV was instrumental in adding to the booming eighties dance wave. Videos' budgets increased, and artists began to add fully choreographed dance sections. Michael Jackson's music became synonymous with dance. In addition to learning the lyrics, fans also learned his choreography so they could dance along. Madonna capitalized on dance in her videos, using classically trained jazz and break-dancers. Along with extensive costuming and make-up, Duran Duran used tribal elements, pulled from Dunham technique, in "The Wild Boys", and Kate Bush used a modern dance duet in "Running Up That Hill". MTV brought more than music into public view, it added to the ever-growing resurgence of dance in the early 1980s that has carried through to today.
In 1984, more record companies and artists began making video clips for their music than in the past, realizing the popularity of MTV and the growing medium. In keeping with the influx of videos, MTV announced changes to its playlists in the November 3, 1984, issue of Billboard magazine, that would take effect the following week. The playlist categories would be expanded to seven, from three (light, medium, heavy); including New, Light, Breakout, Medium, Active, Heavy and Power. This would ensure artists with hit records on the charts would be get the exposure they deserved, with Medium being a home for the established hits still on the climb up to the top 10; and Heavy being a home for the big hits – without the bells and whistles – just the exposure they commanded.[41]
In 1985, MTV spearheaded a safe-sex initiative as a response to the AIDS epidemic that continues to influence sexual health currently. In this light, MTV pushed teens to pay more attention to safe-sex because they were most likely more willing to hear this message from MTV than their parents. This showed that MTV was not always influencing youth negatively. Even though in other aspects, MTV was provocative, they had this campaign to showcase their positive influence on youths and safe sex – a campaign that still is alive today: "Its Your Sex Life".[42]
Breaking the "color barrier" (1981–1983) Edit
During MTV's first few years on the air, very few black artists were included in rotation on the channel. The select few who were in MTV's rotation were Michael Jackson, Prince, Eddy Grant, Donna Summer, Joan Armatrading, Musical Youth, and Herbie Hancock. The very first people of color to perform on MTV was the British band The Specials, which featured an integrated line-up of white and black musicians and vocalists. The Specials' video "Rat Race" was played as the 58th video on the station's first day of broadcasting.[43]
MTV rejected other black artists' videos, such as Rick James' "Super Freak", because they did not fit the channel's carefully selected album-oriented rock format at the time. The exclusion enraged James; he publicly advocated the addition of more black artists' videos on the channel. Rock legend David Bowie also questioned MTV's lack of black artists during an on-air interview with VJ Mark Goodman in 1983.[44] MTV's original head of talent and acquisition, Carolyn B. Baker, who was black, had questioned why the definition of music had to be so narrow, as had a few others outside the network. "The party line at MTV was that we weren't playing black music because of the'research'", said Baker years later. "But the research was based on ignorance... we were young, we were cutting edge. We didn't have to be on the cutting edge of racism." Nevertheless, it was Baker who had personally rejected Rick James' video for Super Freak "because there were half-naked women in it, and it was a piece of crap. As a black woman, I did not want that representing my people as the first black video on MTV."[45]
The network's director of music programming, Buzz Brindle, told an interviewer in 2006, "MTV was originally designed to be a rock music channel. It was difficult for MTV to find African American artists whose music fit the channel's format that leaned toward rock at the outset." Writers Craig Marks and Rob Tannenbaum noted that the channel "aired videos by plenty of white artists who didn't play rock." Andrew Goodwin later wrote, "[MTV] denied racism, on the grounds that it merely followed the rules of the rock business."[46] MTV senior executive vice president Les Garland complained decades later, "The worst thing was that 'racism' bullshit... there were hardly any videos being made by black artists. Record companies weren't funding them. They never got charged with racism." However, critics of that defense pointed out that record companies were not funding videos for black artists because they knew that they would have difficulty persuading MTV to play them.[47]
Before 1983, Michael Jackson also struggled to receive airtime on MTV.[48] To resolve the struggle and finally "break the color barrier", the president of CBS Records at the time, Walter Yetnikoff, denounced MTV in a strong, profane statement, threatening to take away MTV's ability to play any of the record label's music videos.[48][49] However, Les Garland, then acquisitions head, said he decided to air Jackson's "Billie Jean" video without pressure from CBS.[44] This was contradicted by CBS head of Business Affairs David Benjamin in Vanity Fair.[18]
According to The Austin Chronicle, Jackson's video for the song "Billie Jean" was "the video that broke the color barrier, even though the channel itself was responsible for erecting that barrier in the first place."[50] But change was not immediate. "Billie Jean" was not added to MTV's "medium rotation" playlist (two to three airings per day) until after it had already reached #1 on the Billboard Hot 100 chart. In the final week of March, it was in "heavy rotation", one week before the MTV debut of Jackson's "Beat It" video. Prince's "Little Red Corvette" joined both videos in heavy rotation at the end of April. At the beginning of June, "Electric Avenue" by Eddy Grant joined "Billie Jean", which was still in heavy rotation until mid-June. At the end of August, "She Works Hard for the Money" by Donna Summer was in heavy rotation on the channel. Herbie Hancock's "Rockit" and Lionel Richie's "All Night Long" was placed in heavy rotation at the end of October and the beginning of November respectively. In final week of November, Donna Summer's "Unconditional Love" was in heavy rotation. When Jackson's elaborate video for "Thriller" was released late in the year, which raised the ambition bar for what a video could be, the network's support for it was total; subsequently, more pop and R&B videos were played on MTV.[51]
Regardless of the timeline, many black artists had their videos played in "heavy" rotation the following year (1984). Along with Herbie Hancock, Prince, Donna Summer, other black artists such as Billy Ocean, Stevie Wonder, Tina Turner, Lionel Richie, Ray Parker Jr, Rockwell, The Pointer Sisters, The Jacksons, Sheila E and Deniece Williams all had videos played in heavy rotation on MTV.
Eventually, videos from the emerging genre of rap and hip hop also began to enter rotation on MTV. A majority of the rap artists appearing on MTV in the mid-1980s such as Run-DMC, The Fat Boys, Whodini, LL Cool J, and the Beastie Boys were from the East Coast.
Video Music Awards (1984–present) Edit
In 1984, the channel produced its first MTV Video Music Awards show, or VMAs. The first award show, in 1984, was punctuated by a live performance by Madonna of "Like A Virgin". The statuettes that are handed out at the Video Music Awards are of the MTV moonman, the channel's original image from its first broadcast in 1981. Presently, the Video Music Awards are MTV's most watched annual event.[52]
Special, annual events (1986–present) Edit
MTV began its annual Spring Break coverage in 1986, setting up temporary operations in Daytona Beach, Florida, for a week in March, broadcasting live eight hours per day. "Spring break is a youth culture event", MTV's vice president Doug Herzog said at the time. "We wanted to be part of it for that reason. It makes good sense for us to come down and go live from the center of it, because obviously the people there are the kinds of people who watch MTV."[53] The channel's coverage featured numerous live performances from artists and bands on location. The annual tradition continued into the 2000s, when it became de-emphasized and handed off to mtvU, the spin-off channel of MTV targeted at college campuses.
The channel later expanded its beach-themed events to the summer, dedicating most of each summer season to broadcasting live from a beach house at various locations away from New York City, eventually leading to channel-wide branding throughout the summer in the 1990s and early 2000s such as Motel California, Summer Share, Isle of MTV, SoCal Summer, Summer in the Keys, and Shore Thing. MTV VJs hosted blocks of music videos, interview artists and bands, and introduced live performances and other programs from the beach house location each summer.[54] In the 2000s, as the channel reduced its airtime for music videos and eliminated much of its in-house programming, its annual summer-long events came to an end.
MTV also held week-long music events that took over the presentation of the channel. Examples from the 1990s and 2000s include All Access Week, a week in the summer dedicated to live concerts and festivals; Spankin' New Music Week, a week in the fall dedicated to brand new music videos; and week-long specials that culminated in a particular live event, such as Wanna be a VJ and the Video Music Awards.[55]
At the end of each year, MTV takes advantage of its home location in New York City to broadcast live coverage on New Year's Eve in Times Square. Several live musicperformances are featured alongside interviews with artists and bands that were influential throughout the year. For many years from the 1980s to the 2000s, the channel upheld a tradition of having a band perform a cover song at midnight immediately following the beginning of the new year.[56]
Live concert broadcasts (1985–2005) Edit
Throughout its history, MTV has covered global benefit concert series live. For most of July 13, 1985, MTV showed the Live Aid concerts, held in London and Philadelphia and organized by Bob Geldof and Midge Ure to raise funds for famine relief in Ethiopia. While the ABC network showed only selected highlights during primetime, MTV broadcast 16 hours of coverage.[57]
Along with VH1, MTV broadcast the Live 8 concerts, a series of concerts set in the G8 states and South Africa, on July 2, 2005.[58] Live 8 preceded the 31st G8 summit and the 20th anniversary of Live Aid. MTV drew heavy criticism for its coverage of Live 8. The network cut to commercials, VJ commentary, or other performances during performances. Complaints surfaced on the Internet over MTV interrupting the reunion of Pink Floyd.[59] In response, MTV president Van Toeffler stated that he wanted to broadcast highlights from every venue of Live 8 on MTV and VH1, and clarified that network hosts talked over performances only in transition to commercials, informative segments or other musical performances.[60] Toeffler acknowledged that "MTV should not have placed such a high priority on showing so many acts, at the expense of airing complete sets by key artists."[59] He also blamed the Pink Floyd interruption on a mandatory cable affiliate break.[60] MTV averaged 1.4 million viewers for its original July 2 broadcast of Live 8.[59] Consequently, MTV and VH1 aired five hours of uninterrupted Live 8 coverage on July 9, with each channel airing different blocks of artists.[61]
Formatted music series (1986–2008) Edit
MTV had debuted Dial MTV in 1986, a daily top ten music video countdown show for which viewers could call the toll-free telephone number 1-800-DIAL-MTV to request a music video. The show was replaced by MTV Most Wanted in 1991, which ran until 1996, and later saw a spiritual successor in Total Request Live. The phone number remained in use for video requests until 2006.
Also in 1986, the channel introduced 120 Minutes, a show that featured low-rotation, alternative rock and other "underground" videos for the next 14 years on MTV and three additional years on sister channel MTV2. The program then became known as Subterranean on MTV2. Eight years later, on July 31, 2011, 120 Minutes was resurrected with Matt Pinfield taking over hosting duties once again and airing monthly on MTV2.
Another late night music video show was added in 1987, Headbangers Ball, which featured heavy metal music and news. Before its abrupt cancellation in 1995, it featured several hosts including Riki Rachtman and Adam Curry. A weekly block of music videos with the name Headbangers Ball aired from 2003 to 2011 on sister channel MTV2, before spending an additional two years as a web-only series on MTV2's website, until Headbangers Ball was discontinued once again in 2013.
In 1988, MTV debuted Yo! MTV Raps, a hip hop/rap formatted program. The program continued until August 1995. It was renamed to simply Yo! and aired as a one-hour program from 1995 to 1999. The concept was reintroduced as Direct Effect in 2000, which became Sucker Free in 2006 and was cancelled in 2008, after briefly celebrating the 20th anniversary of Yo! MTV Raps throughout the months of April and May 2008. Despite its cancellation on MTV, a weekly countdown of hip hop videos known as Sucker Free still airs on MTV2 through the present day.
In 1989, MTV began to premiere music-based specials such as MTV Unplugged, an acoustic performance show, which has featured dozens of acts as its guests and has remained active in numerous iterations on various platforms for over 20 years.
To further cater to the growing success of R&B, MTV introduced the weekly Fade to Black in the summer of 1991, which was hosted by Al B. Sure!. The show was reformatted into the better known MTV Jams the following year, which incorporated mainstream hip-hop into the playlist. Bill Bellamy became the new and ongoing host. The show became so successful it spawned its own Most Wanted spinoff titled Most Wanted Jams.
Rise of the directors (1990–1993) Edit
By the early 1990s, MTV was playing a combination of pop-friendly hard rock acts, chart-topping metal and hard rock acts such as Metallica, Nirvana and Guns N' Roses, pop singers such as Michael Jackson, Madonna, Janet Jackson, and New Kids on the Block, and R&B groups such as New Edition, En Vogue, Bell Biv Devoe, SWV, Tony Toni Tone, TLC and Boyz II Men, while introducing hit rappers Vanilla Ice and MC Hammer. MTV progressively increased its airing of hip hop acts, such as LL Cool J, Queen Latifah, Salt-n-Pepa, Naughty By Nature, Onyx, MC Lyte, and Sir-Mix-A-Lot, and by 1993, the channel added West Coast rappers previously associated with gangsta rap, with a less pop-friendly sound, such as Tupac Shakur, Ice Cube, Warren G, Ice-T, Dr. Dre, Tone Loc, and Snoop Doggy Dogg.
To accompany the new sounds, a new form of music videos came about: more creative, funny, artistic, experimental, and technically accomplished than those in the 1980s. Several noted film directors got their start creating music videos. After pressure from the Music Video Production Association, MTV began listing the names of the videos' directors at the bottom of the credits by December 1992. As a result, MTV's viewers became familiar with the names of Spike Jonze, Michel Gondry, David Fincher, Mary Lambert, Samuel Bayer, Matt Mahurin, Mark Romanek, Jonathan Dayton and Valerie Faris, Anton Corbijn, Mark Pellington, Tarsem, Hype Williams, Jake Scott, Jonathan Glazer, Marcus Nispel, F. Gary Gray, Jim Yukich, Russell Mulcahy, Steve Barron, Marty Callner, and Michael Bay, among others.
As the PBS series Frontline[62] explored, MTV was a driving force that catapulted music videos to a mainstream audience, turning music videos into an art form as well as a marketing machine that became beneficial to artists. Danny Goldberg, chairman and CEO of Artemis Records, said the following about the art of music videos: "I know when I worked with Nirvana, Kurt Cobain cared as much about the videos as he did about the records. He wrote the scripts for them, he was in the editing room, and they were part of his art. And I think they stand up as part of his art, and I think that's true of the great artists today. Not every artist is a great artist and not every video is a good video, but in general having it available as a tool, to me, adds to the business. And I wish there had been music videos in the heyday of The Beatles, and The Rolling Stones. I think they would've added to their creative contribution, not subtracted from it."[63]
Alternative is mainstream (1991–1997) Edit
Nirvana led a sweeping transition into the rise of alternative rock music on MTV in 1991 with their video for "Smells Like Teen Spirit". By late 1991 going into 1992, MTV began frequently airing videos from their heavily promoted "Buzz Bin", such as Nirvana, Pearl Jam, Alice in Chains, Soundgarden, Nine Inch Nails, Tori Amos, PM Dawn, Arrested Development, Björk, and Gin Blossoms. MTV increased rotation of its weekly alternative music program 120 Minutes and added the daily Alternative Nation to play videos of these and other underground music acts. Subsequently, grunge and alternative rock had a rise in mainstream tastes, while 1980s-style glam bands and traditional rockers were phased out, with some exceptions such as Aerosmith and Tom Petty. Older acts such as R.E.M. and U2 remained relevant by making their music more experimental or unexpected.
They also played lots of hard rock acts such as Pantera, Death and other heavy/death metal acts at the time period.
In 1993, more hit alternative rock acts were on heavy rotation, such as Stone Temple Pilots, Soul Asylum, Rage Against the Machine, Marilyn Manson, Tool, Beck, Therapy?, Radiohead, and The Smashing Pumpkins. Other hit acts such as Weezer, Collective Soul, Blind Melon, The Cranberries, Bush, and Silverchair followed in the next couple of years. Alternative bands that appeared on Beavis and Butt-Head included White Zombie.
By the next few years, 1994 through 1997, MTV began promoting new power pop acts, most successfully Green Day and The Offspring, and ska-rock acts such as No Doubt, The Mighty Mighty Bosstones and Sublime. Pop singers were added to the rotation with success as long as they were considered "alternative," such as Alanis Morissette, Jewel, Fiona Apple, and Sarah McLachlan.
Electronica and pop (1997–1999) Edit
By 1997, MTV focused heavily on introducing electronica acts into the mainstream, adding them to its musical rotation, including The Prodigy, The Chemical Brothers, Moby, Aphex Twin, Pendulum, Daft Punk, The Crystal Method, Butthole Surfers and Fatboy Slim. Some musicians who proceeded to experiment with electronica were still played on MTV including Madonna, U2, David Bowie, Radiohead, and Smashing Pumpkins. That year, MTV also attempted to introduce neo-swing bands, but they did not meet with much success.
However, in late 1997, MTV began shifting more progressively towards pop music, inspired by the success of the Spice Girls and the rise of boy bands in Europe. Between 1998 and 1999, MTV's musical content consisted heavily of videos of boy bands such as Backstreet Boys and NSYNC, as well as teen pop "princesses" such as Britney Spears, Christina Aguilera, Lynda Thomas, Mandy Moore, and Jessica Simpson. Airplay of rock, electronica, and alternative acts was reduced. Hip-hop music continued in heavy rotation, through the likes of Puff Daddy, Jermaine Dupri, Master P, DMX, Busta Rhymes, Lil' Kim, Jay-Z, Missy Elliott, Lauryn Hill, Eminem, Foxy Brown, Ja Rule, Nas, Timbaland, and their associates. R&B was also heavily represented with acts such as Aaliyah, Janet Jackson, Destiny's Child, 702, Monica, and Brandy.
Return of the Rock (1997–2004) Edit
Beginning in late 1997, MTV progressively reduced its airing of rock music videos, leading to the slogan among skeptics, "Rock is dead."[64] The facts that at the time rock music fans were less materialistic, and bought less music based on television suggestion, were cited as reasons that MTV abandoned its once staple music. MTV instead devoted its musical airtime mostly to pop and hip hop/R&B music. All rock-centric shows were eliminated and the rock-related categories of the Video Music Awards were pared down to one.
From this time until 2004, MTV made some periodic efforts to reintroduce pop rock music videos to the channel. By 1998 through 1999, the punk-rock band Blink-182 received regular airtime on MTV due in large part to their "All the Small Things" video that made fun of the boy bands that MTV was airing at the time. Meanwhile, some rock bands that were not receiving MTV support, such as Korn and Creed, continued to sell albums. Then, upon the release of Korn's rock/rap hybrid album Follow the Leader, MTV began playing Korn's videos "Got the Life" and "Freak on a Leash".
A band sponsored by Korn, Limp Bizkit, received airtime for its cover of George Michael's "Faith", which became a hit. Subsequently, MTV began airing more rap/rock hybrid acts, such as Limp Bizkit and Kid Rock. Some rock acts with more comical videos, such as Rob Zombie, Red Hot Chili Peppers and Foo Fighters, also received airtime.
In the fall of 1999, MTV announced a special Return of the Rock weekend,[65] in which new rock acts received airtime, after which a compilation album was released. System of a Down, Staind, Godsmack, Green Day, Incubus, Papa Roach, P.O.D., Sevendust, Powerman 5000, Slipknot, Kittie, Static X, and CKY were among the featured bands. These bands received some airtime on MTV and more so on MTV2, though both channels gave emphasis to the rock/rap acts.
By 2000, Sum 41, Linkin Park, Jimmy Eat World, Mudvayne, Cold, At the Drive-In, Alien Ant Farm, and other acts were added to the musical rotation. MTV also launched subscription channel MTVX to play rock music videos exclusively, an experiment that lasted until 2002.[66] A daily music video program on MTV that carried the name Return of the Rock ran through early 2001, replaced by a successor, All Things Rock, from 2002 until 2004.
Total Request Live (1998–2008) Edit
Also by 1997, MTV was criticized heavily for not playing as many music videos as it had in the past. In response, MTV created four shows that centered on music videos: MTV Live, Total Request, Say What?, and 12 Angry Viewers. Also at this time, MTV introduced its new studios in Times Square.
A year later, in 1998, MTV merged Total Request and MTV Live into a live daily top ten countdown show, Total Request Live, which became known as TRL (the original host being Carson Daly) and secure its place as the channel's unofficial flagship program. In the fall of 1999, a live studio audience was added to the show. By spring 2000, the countdown reached its peak. The program enjoyed success playing the top ten pop, rock, R&B, and hip hop music videos, and featuring live interviews with artists and celebrities.
From 1998 to 2001, MTV also aired several other music video programs from its studios in Times Square and on location at various beach-themed locations each summer. These programs included Say What? Karaoke, a game show hosted by Dave Holmes that evolved from Say What?, MTV's earlier program that ran the lyrics of music videos across the screen. TRL Wannabes aired from 1999 to 2000 and featured a selection of music videos that just missed the TRL top ten. VJ for a Day, hosted by Raymond Munns, continued this concept in early 2001. VJ for a Day was an extension of an annual event, Wanna be a VJ, which aired each spring from 1998 to 2000 to select a new VJ to host programs on MTV.
MTV also aired Hot Zone, hosted by Ananda Lewis, which featured pop music videos during the midday time period and was a casual alternative to TRL; it later became MTV Hits. Other programs were Direct Effect, Return of the Rock, MTV Jams, BeatSuite, MTV Soul, and blocks of music videos hosted by VJs simply called Music Television in the spirit of the channel's original purpose.
During the September 11, 2001 terror attacks on the World Trade Center and The Pentagon, MTV suspended all of its programming, along with its sister channel VH1, and it began simulcasting coverage from CBS News (the news division of CBS), which was acquired by MTV parent Viacom two years earlier) until about 11:00 PM ET that night. The channels then played a looped set of music videos without commercial interruption until an MTV News special edition of TRL aired on September 14, 2001.
In 2002, Carson Daly left MTV and TRL to pursue a late night talk show on NBC. After his departure, the relevance and impact of Total Request Live slowly diminished. TRL ultimately remained a part of MTV's regular program schedule for ten years. The series came to an end with a special finale episode, Total Finale Live, which aired November 16, 2008, and featured all the show's hosts from over the years, many special guests from the history of the show, and played its last music video, "...Baby One More Time" by Britney Spears.[67]
Milestones and specials (1999–2011) Edit
Around 1999 through 2001, as MTV aired fewer music videos throughout the day, it regularly aired compilation specials from its then 20-year history to look back on its roots. An all-encompassing special, MTV Uncensored, premiered in 1999 and was later released as a book.[68][69]
MTV celebrated its 20th anniversary on August 1, 2001, beginning with a 12-hour long retrospective called MTV20: Buggles to Bizkit, which featured over 100 classic videos played chronologically, hosted by various VJs in reproductions of MTV's old studios. The day of programming culminated in a three-hour celebratory live event called MTV20: Live and Almost Legal, which was hosted by Carson Daly and featured numerous guests from MTV's history, including the original VJs from 1981. Various other related MTV20 specials aired in the months surrounding the event.
Janet Jackson became the inaugural honoree of the "mtvICON" award, "an annual recognition of artists who have made significant contributions to music, music video and pop culture while tremendously impacting the MTV generation."[70] Subsequent recipients included Aerosmith, Metallica and The Cure.
Five years later, on August 1, 2006, MTV celebrated its 25th anniversary. On their website, MTV.com, visitors could watch the very first hour of MTV, including airing the original promos and commercials from Mountain Dew, Atari, Chewels gum, and Jovan. Videos were also shown from The Buggles, Pat Benatar, Rod Stewart, and others. The introduction of the first five VJs was also shown. Additionally, MTV.com put together a "yearbook" consisting of the greatest videos of each year from 1981 to 2006. MTV itself only mentioned the anniversary once on TRL.
Although MTV reached its 30th year of broadcasting in 2011, the channel itself passed over this milestone in favor of its current programming schedule. The channel instead aired its 30th anniversary celebrations on its sister networks MTV2 and VH1 Classic. Nathaniel Brown, senior vice president of communications for MTV, confirmed that there were no plans for an on-air MTV celebration similar to the channel's 20th anniversary. Brown explained, "MTV as a brand doesn't age with our viewers. We are really focused on our current viewers, and our feeling was that our anniversary wasn't something that would be meaningful to them, many of whom weren't even alive in 1981."[71]
Decline in music videos (1995–2008) Edit
From 1995 to 2000, MTV played 36.5% fewer music videos. MTV president Van Toeffler explained: "Clearly, the novelty of just showing music videos has worn off. It's required us to reinvent ourselves to a contemporary audience."[72] Despite targeted efforts to play certain types of music videos in limited rotation, MTV greatly reduced its overall rotation of music videos by the mid-2000s.[73] While music videos were featured on MTV up to eight hours per day in 2000, the year 2008 saw an average of just three hours of music videos per day on MTV. The rise of social media and websites like YouTube as a convenient outlet for the promotion and viewing of music videos signaled this reduction.[74]
As the decade progressed, MTV continued to play some music videos instead of relegating them exclusively to its sister channels, but around this time, the channel began to air music videos only in the early morning hours or in a condensed form on Total Request Live. As a result of these programming changes, Justin Timberlake implored MTV to "play more damn videos!" while giving an acceptance speech at the 2007 Video Music Awards.[75]
Despite the challenge from Timberlake, MTV continued to decrease its total rotation time for music videos in 2007, and the channel eliminated its long-running special tags for music videos such as "Buzzworthy" (for under-represented artists), "Breakthrough" (for visually stunning videos), and "Spankin' New" (for brand new videos). Additionally, the historic Kabel typeface, which MTV displayed at the beginning and end of all music videos since 1981, was phased out in favor of larger text and less information about the video's record label and director. The classic font can still be seen in "prechyroned" versions of old videos on sister network MTV Classic, which had their title information recorded onto the same tape as the video itself.
FNMTV and AMTV (2008–present) Edit
Prior to its finale in 2008, MTV's main source of music videos was Total Request Live, airing four times per week, featuring short clips of music videos along with VJs and guests. MTV was experimenting at the time with new ideas for music programs to replace the purpose of TRL but with a new format.[76]
In mid-2008, MTV premiered new music video programming blocks called FNMTV and a weekly special event called FNMTV Premieres, hosted from Los Angeles by Pete Wentz of the band Fall Out Boy, which was designed to premiere new music videos and have viewers provide instantaneous feedback.[77]
The FNMTV Premieres event ended before the 2008 Video Music Awards in September. With the exception of a holiday themed episode in December 2008 and an unrelated Spring Break special in March 2009 with the same title, FNMTV Premieres never returned to the channel's regular program schedule, leaving MTV without any music video programs hosted by VJs for the first time in its history.
AMTV, the name of MTV's music video programming from 2009 to 2013, the name of MTV's music video programming from 2009 to 2013
Music video programming returned to MTV in March 2009 as AMTV, an early morning block of music videos that originally aired from 3 am to 9 am on most weekdays.[78] It was renamed Music Feed in 2013 with a reduced schedule. Unlike the FNMTV block that preceded it, Music Feed features many full-length music videos, including some older videos that have been out of regular rotation for many years on MTV. It also features music news updates, interviews, and performances.[78] Music Feed is the only current program on MTV's main channel that is dedicated to music videos.
During the rest of the day, MTV also plays excerpts from music videos in split screen format during the closing credits of most programs, along with the address of a website to encourage the viewer to watch the full video online. MTV has positioned its website, MTV.com, as its primary destination for music videos.
Recent music programs (2009–present) Edit
MTV again resurrected the long-running series MTV Unplugged in 2009 with performances from acts such as Adele and Paramore.[79] However, unlike past Unplugged specials, these new recordings usually only aired in their entirety on MTV's website, MTV.com. Nevertheless, short clips of the specials are shown on MTV during the AMTV block of music videos in the early morning hours. On June 12, 2011, MTV aired a traditional television premiere of a new installment of MTV Unplugged instead of a web debut. The featured artist was rapper Lil Wayne and the show debuted both on MTV and MTV2. The channel followed up with a similar television premiere of MTV Unplugged with Florence and the Machine on April 8, 2012.[80]
MTV launched 10 on Top in May 2010, a weekly program airing on Saturdays and hosted by Lenay Dunn, that counts down the top 10 most trending and talked about topics of the week (generally focused on entertainment). Dunn also appeared in segments between MTV's shows throughout the day as a recognizable personality and face of the channel in the absence of traditional VJs aside from its MTV News correspondents.[81]
The animated series Beavis and Butt-head returned to MTV in October 2011, with new episodes. As with the original version of the series that ran from 1993 to 1997, the modern-day Beavis and Butt-head features segments in which its main characters watch and criticize music videos.[82]
Sometime in 2012, MTV debuted Clubland, which previously existed as an hour of EDM videos during the AMTV video block. The show has no host, but most editorial content is pushed online by the show's Tumblr and other social media outlets like Facebook and Twitter.
MTV launched a new talk show based on hip hop music on April 12, 2012, called Hip Hop POV, hosted by Amanda Seales, Bu Thiam, Charlamagne, Devi Dev, and Sowmya Krishnamurthy. The show featured hosted commentary on the headlines in hip hop culture, providing opinions on new music, granting insider access to major events, and including artist interviews.[83] Hip Hip POV lasted several episodes before going on hiatus. The show was supposed to return in Fall 2012, but was moved to MTV2 instead, where it was rebranded and merged with Sucker Free Countdown. The new show debuted as The Week in Jams on October 28, 2012.
Post-TRL live shows (2009–present) Edit
MTV launched a live talk show, It's On with Alexa Chung, on June |
about ECMAScript 6 (ES6, a.k.a. ES 2015) and the big changes coming to objects ( class, super(), etc.), functions (default params, etc.), and modules (import/export), but less attention is being given to variables and how they are declared. In fact, some attention is being given, but perhaps without the right focus. I recently attended the jQuery UK conference where Dave Methvin gave a nice overview of ES6, with some great attention on let and const.
In this article I wanted to cover these two new keywords for declaring variables and differentiate them from var. And possibly more importantly, I want to identify what some folks are considering the new standard for declaring variables in ES6. The basic idea here is that let should, in time, replace var as the default declaration keyword. In fact, according to some, var should simply not be used at all in new code. The const keyword should be used for any variable where the reference should never be changed, and let for anything else.
Replacing var with let
This workflow shift may seem dramatic at first, but not as much when we think about the differences between let and var. While var creates a variable scoped within its nearest parent function, let scopes the variable to the nearest block, this includes for loops, if statements, and others.
function foo () { console. log ( x ); console. log ( y ); var x = 1 ; if ( x === 1 ) { let y = 2 ; } console. log ( y ); } foo (); console. log ( x );
In the example above we create a new function (and var scope) with foo and then call the function. As expected, the last console.log() statement will produce a ReferenceError because x is only defined (scoped) inside the foo() function. The first console statement will execute just fine due to variable hoisting. In this case, x will evaluate to undefined. The second console statement, however, is more interesting. In fact, both of the log(y) calls will fail because the let keyword allows much tighter scoping than var. The y variable only exists inside of that if block, and no where else! Dave Methvin calls that area before the let declaration the “Temporal Dead Zone.”
Hopefully this example illustrates the specificity of let, but you may be saying that sometimes you actually want a function-scoped variable. No problem, simply create the variable at the top of your function!
function foo ( x ) { let y ; if ( x === 1 ) { y = 2 ; } console. log ( y ); } foo ( 1 ); console. log ( y );
The function above declares the y variable at the top of the function, thus giving it a larger scope than our first example. We can see that y is accessible anywhere inside this function, but not outside of it, that last console.log(y) statement will produce a ReferenceError. Before we move on to const, let’s reiterate our thesis: let should completely replace var in ES6. The examples above should show you that let is more powerful, while still allowing almost all of the flexibility of var. I’m not the first one to say it, but I’m a believer now.
Constant Reference, Not Value
The other new keyword for variable declaration in ES6 is const, but it is often misinterpreted as being a “constant value”. Instead, in ES6 a const represents a constant reference to a value (the same is true in most languages, in fact). In other words, the pointer that the variable name is using cannot change in memory, but the thing the variable points to might change.
Here’s a simple example. In the code below we create a new variable with a constant reference to an Array. We can then add values onto the array and since this does not change the reference, everything works:
const names = []; names. push ( "Jordan" ); console. log ( names );
However, if we try to change the variable reference to a new array — even to one with the same contents — we will get a SyntaxError (“Assignment to constant variable”):
const names = []; names = []; // Error!
Of course, if you have a const that points to a primitive such as a string or number, then there really isn’t anything to change about that value. All methods on String and Number return new values (objects).
The last note about using const is that it follows the same new scoping rules as let! This means that between let and const we should be able to complete replace var in our code. In fact, there are many folks supporting the idea of only “allowing” var to be used in legacy code that hasn’t been touched. When a developer jumps into a file to update some code, they could (and possibly should) be updating all var statements to let or const as appropriate, with proper scoping.
But that’s just for ES6…
It’s true. The new let and const keywords are not available in ES5, and thus in most execution environments. However, with good transpilers such as Babel we can compile our ES6 JavaScript into runnable ES5 code for deployment to a browser environment.
Luckily for us Node.js (and io.js) developers we don’t have to worry about what browser someone is executing our JavaScript code in! If you’re using Node v0.12 (you are, right?), you can have access to these features with two small changes. First, you have to run your code with “harmony” features enabled (the original codename for ES6 was “harmony”):
$ node -- harmony / path / to / script
The second change is that any code using let or const (or any other ES6 feature) must be in strict mode. To do so, simply place use strict; at the top of every module. Alternatively, you could use the --use-strict flag on the CLI, but that may be a bit much.
In io.js you don’t need the --harmony flag because all of those features are being rolled right into the code. However, you do still need to make your code strict. Again, this can be done by simply placing a use strict; statement at the top of your module files.
Now go forth, and create a better variable declaration workflow!
What’s NextWANDERERS coach Tony Popovic has brushed off “speculation” linking him with a return to Premier League side Crystal Palace, after the exit of Tony Pulis as manager on the eve of the season.
Popovic was a player and coach there for several years, and is highly thought of by Palace co-chairman Steve Parish, but appears to be behind candidates including Tim Sherwood and Malky Mackay to replace Pulis.
JOIN FOX SPORTS FOR A LIVE BLOG OF THE WANDERERS ACL CLASH WITH GUANGZHOU EVERGRANDE ON WEDNESDAY
“There’s been no conversations with anyone in regards to that,” Popovic said.
“It’s not for us to speak about speculation - if there was something happening, we’d talk about it.
“But I’m very fond of that club, great memories and great history there. I wish them the best in whoever they choose as manager.”Starkist Samoa, the biggest private employer in American Samoa, wants to continue the current freeze on the local minimum wage.
Photo: Supplied
Cannery workers who earn US$4.76 an hour are scheduled to get a 50 cent increase at the end of September, when a provision in federal law which has frozen wage rates since 2009 expires.
Senator Galeai Tuufuli says he supports an increase in the minimum wage, saying the costs of goods, government taxes and fees have risen, but wages remain the same.
Starkist Samoa says it supports a freeze to keep American Samoa an economically viable place to manufacture tuna products.
A spokesperson Michelle Faist says in a government report on the economic impact of wage increases that employers and workers agree that further increases would be detrimental.
She says the report finds there has been a downward trend in employment due to three previous minimum wage increases, including a 44 percent increase for cannery workers in 2007.Legendary Cubs announcer Harry Caray departed this earth 18 years ago, never having seen the team win the World Series. Fans in Chicago and around the world were surely thinking of him when the Cubs finally became champions for the first time since 1908. Budweiser did, too, as they ran one of his commercials for the beer company after the victory to honor him.
But then they stepped it up. On Thursday morning, they released a new ad where they made it sound like Harry Caray is calling the final out of Game 7. It’s really slick editing taken from audio of his past games, but they all fit perfectly with how the 10th inning ended. It’s also paired with footage of Cubs fans reacting to the win, which makes this even more special. This was an amazing gift for Cubs fans.By Rob Moseley
Editor, GoDucks.com
In promoting Don Pellum to defensive coordinator, UO coach Mark Helfrich has elevated a position coach instrumental in building one of the country’s most consistently solid units over the past several years.
But also, the long-time Oregon assistant sounded in his introductory press conference like a man honest enough to acknowledge shortcomings, and open to changes that will address them.
Pellum, 51, was officially promoted Tuesday after 14 years as the Ducks’ linebackers coach.
“I don’t think I got hired because I’m an Oregon guy, and for the love,” Pellum said. “I know coach Helfrich sees the right characteristics and right integrity and the right discipline – the right things to make this decision.
“This is not some ‘gimme, gift’ thing. This is, ‘You can do it.’”
What Pellum will be tasked with doing is taking one of the Pac-12’s best defenses of the last half-decade and, to use one of Helfrich’s preferred phrases, tweaking the margins.
Since 2009, the Ducks have finished no lower than third in the Pac-12 in yards per play allowed. That includes leading the conference in 2009, 2010 and, yes, 2013, when the Ducks finished seventh nationally by that metric.
“Obviously there’s some holes to fill,” Pellum said, noting in particular the loss of senior defensive linemen Taylor Hart, Wade Keliikipi and Ricky Havili-Heimuli. “But I think the core is pretty good, and obviously I think we have a great system.”
To that end, Pellum sounds committed to sticking with the 3-4 defensive front the Ducks have used since 2009. Under former UO coordinator Nick Aliotti, Pellum played a significant role in game-planning to that scheme as linebackers coach, focusing on run defense, blitzes and other elements of the front seven.
But the Ducks were by no means perfect in 2013. While their statistical averages suggested a strong season overall, there were breakdowns at key times, particularly in losses to Stanford and Arizona, and the dramatic Civil War win.
Stanford converted 14-of-21 third downs, a microcosm of the Ducks’ slip in that area overall in 2013. Oregon was 68th nationally in third-down percentage defense (40.09) this past season, after being 15th in 2012 (31.24).
Arizona capitalized on the Ducks’ lackluster showing overall in their game by running for better than 5.5 yards per carry. And OSU countered Oregon’s focus on pass defense by also running wild for much of the Civil War.
Pellum addressed all of those issues directly Tuesday, and spoke of fixes he hopes to implement. His interview with Helfrich, Pellum said, included an outline of what he hoped to accomplish in his first six months, and Pellum shared with media some items that probably made that list.
Against Stanford’s massive offensive line, “we probably could have put in some bigger guys,” Pellum said. Indeed, against Texas in the Alamo Bowl, the Ducks briefly unveiled a new package using four linemen and four linebackers, the type of tweak Pellum seems open to continuing against powerful running teams going forward.
Dealing with such physical play can be addressed in offseason strength and conditioning, as well. “We’ve got to push more weight,” Pellum said simply.
Pellum talked Tuesday about trying to “hone things down” from a schematic standpoint, tailoring a game-plan more specifically to each opponent so that Oregon’s defenders have less to think about, and can play faster.
“We’ve got a whole lot of stuff,” Pellum said. “To be good at it, you can’t run every defense to every offensive system. We need to dial in, tighten up what we’re doing versus what they’re doing.”
And Pellum addressed the issue of fundamentals, including missed tackles that contributed to the big rushing performances by Arizona and Oregon State.
“We’ve got to do a better job right now of bending our knees, moving our feet, rolling our hips,” Pellum said. “When you watch film and you evaluate players you see it: ‘I’m gonna make a tackle, here comes the running back, I stop my feet, his feet are still moving’ – that’s two or three yards. We’ve got to change that.”
Perhaps more than any other word, though, Pellum harped Tuesday on discipline. That, he said, is a virtue of his time playing for and coaching under Rich Brooks, who took the Ducks from perennial conference doormat in the late 1970s to the 1994 Rose Bowl season.
“We need to be better with our discipline, and that’s discipline in all aspects of your life,” Pellum said. “It’s the little things: It’s third down and you can’t jump offsides. Those are mental things, and those are things we can control. We need to do a better job of identifying those things.”
To help himself with identifying potential hurdles he’ll encounter as a defensive coordinator, Pellum said he planned to visit with colleagues in similar positions on college and NFL staffs around the country. He intends to do so both before and after Oregon’s spring practices, in April and early May.
“What else is out there?” Pellum said. “We’ve been doing the same thing forever. There might be a better way out there.”
In Pellum, the Ducks have promoted a coach integral to the way things have been done at Oregon for years, and at a high level. And also, a coach seemingly eager to find out ways they can be done even better.BITCOIN
Scandinavia-based, Malta-licensed online casino Vera&John has added Bitcoin to its list of payment options, becoming one of the more mainstream online gambling sites to allow transactions using the increasingly popular virtual currency. Starting Tuesday, the site began accepting Bitcoin deposits, which are then converted to Euros (using real-time exchange rates) for online wagering activity. Subsequent withdrawals of any Bitcoin deposits must be made in Bitcoin.
To avoid any downside from Bitcoin’s notoriously volatile valuation, Vera&John doesn’t intend to hold any Bitcoins on the site. Vera&John has teamed with Erik Voorhees’ payment processing outfit Coinapult to process its Bitcoin transactions. A Vera&John spokesman told the BitcoinTalk forum that deposits are instant, but the company’s Malta license requires it to manually review every withdrawal request, a process the company says ordinarily takes between four to 10 hours. But once the request is approved, the withdrawal takes only as long as it would for any Bitcoin transaction to be confirmed.
COINBET’S COINFUSING US STANCE
Vera&John doesn’t accept US customers, but Panama-based, Costa Rica-licensed CoinBet Interactive Gaming S.A. does. Or, at least, it appears to. The Coinbet.cc site has been using the media’s pre-Super Bowl betting hype to advertise its having “won the race to bring legal gambling back to the internet” for customers in the “underserved US market.” The company says its acceptance of US customers represents “a huge and disruptive move” and has even managed to get its logo onto the Reuters interactive billboard in New York’s Times Square.
The public assertions of Coinbet senior VP ‘John Bauer’ regarding the site’s legality appear to rest on the kind of advice famed Simpsons’ lawyer Lionel Hutz might provide. The site claims that, since Bitcoin has yet to be recognized “as a legitimate form of currency” by the US government, then “online gambling with Bitcoin is not an illegal event under the Wire Act or UIGEA.” Yet the site’s own terms and conditions states: *We do not accept deposits or wagers from the USA.” Confused yet? (Coinfused?)
Coinbet requires its customers provide only an email address in order to get the betting party started. Bitcoin deposits are converted to US dollars, euros or UK pounds, depending on the customer’s location, for wagering purposes. Coinbet’s.cc domain comes via the Cocos Islands, an Australian territory boasting a whopping 600 inhabitants. It was the domain provider of choice for UK technology martyr Richard O’Dwyer after US authorities seized the former TV Shack operator’s.net domain over charges of offering illegal downloads of US-copyrighted intellectual property.
CommentsIf you’re reading this, you’re almost certainly well aware of West Midlands Police’s Operation Close Pass (if you’re not, here’s a primer).
You may also be familiar with the photo that’s appeared on the majority of media reports concerning Operation Close Pass. It shows one of the officers who conceived the operation, a colleague on a bike, and a car—all positioned on the mat which is used as a tool when educating drivers who have been pulled over for making a close pass.
The mat wasn’t cheap at £900, but it was paid for by Birmingham Cycle Revolution (part of Birmingham City Council), whose remit is to make cycling a more popular mode of travel. (Operation Close Pass is largely founded on the principle that threatening behaviour from drivers plays a major role in discouraging people from cycling.)
Naturally, if Operation Close Pass is to spread nationwide then other forces need to be able to deliver the educational element of it, and if the mat is central to that then it is central to making this a national scheme.
Enter Cycling UK, who recently launched a Kickstarter campaign to fund a mat at £300 a pop for every police force in the UK (what a good idea). The mat is essentially a carbon copy of the original; only the styling and branding have changed.
The full view of the mat is as follows. It’s very simple: a kerb, two marked distances, and the “overtaking clearance” annotation.
Both the mat and the crowdfunding campaign attracted much criticism on the Cycling UK forum, but there are some points in there about the mat which also crop up elsewhere.
One key concern appeared numerous times on Twitter, which was that when taken out of context the mat could be taken to imply that people should stick to riding 0.75m from the kerb.
There’s plenty of evidence on social media to suggest that this concern is not unfounded. Naturally a number of individuals interpreted the image predictably, but arguably its most significant realisation was in a Telegraph article, which incorrectly stated that “the mats display the 0.75m width from the curb [sic] that cyclists are asked to keep to”.
WMP said they would put the Telegraph straight. But if they have, then the article hasn’t been corrected in the ten days since, and—let’s face it—everyone knows that newspaper corrections are rarely read anyway. Brandolini’s law is utterly compelling.
At one point, WMP made a bold claim in defence of the mat:
“The mat as an educational tool is exceptional, and couldn’t be bettered in any way.”
Now, I like the clang of gauntlets hitting the ground, so I started sketching. I dismissed the first draft myself, showed WMP the second (“looks good for teaching Bikeability; lose the markings and it’s getting there”), and then ended up with this.
I figured that it included the original measurements, allowing the same education process (and I thought that adding the wheel tracks, which WMP frequently reference, would help), but I also figured that it would stand up a little better out of context: the width of the person we’re trying to protect is accounted for, and multiple positions are illustrated. It’s a little harder to look at this in isolation and immediately assume that people are supposed to stick to riding 0.75m from the kerb.
Is it actually better, though? Arguably it helps prevent people getting the wrong end of the stick when they see it in the paper, but if it hinders the education process in any way then it’s not necessarily a wise trade-off.
Of course, WMP went through some sort of design processs themselves. The design may have started on a beer mat, but it wasn’t created completely arbitrarily.
“We did exactly what you and others have done 12 months ago. We came up with all sorts, but realised that two multi-representative distances for various scenarios and key learning triggers that would change driving behaviour were all that was needed.”
It’s important to note that the design was a product of a perspective that most of us don’t have.
“If people who are giving feedback could go through the process, they would immediately understand the mat design. It works very well with non-cyclists. Remember, you are trying to enable a driver to leave with the ability to deal with any given scenario involving a vulnerable road user in a safe manner.”
That perspective is important. None of this is designed to educate the people who are riding the bikes. Nor is it even designed to educate people who already drive safely. This is designed for just one group of people: those who drive without the competence and care that the law demands.
“Offending and incompetent drivers get it, because it’s geared towards their behaviour. Cyclists don’t, because they are already equipped with the learning and so it confuses them.”
That specificity of “offending and incompetent drivers” is important, because it defines the message that has to be conveyed. Notably, this isn’t an appeal to people’s kind-heartedness so much as it is to their selfishness: there’s a recognition that when it comes to the people who really need to heed a message, the motivating factor is one of not getting nicked.
“The overriding message to drivers is achieved: take care around cyclists or you might get prosecuted. Once drivers get that concept, whether in person or through the media, they don’t drive towards a cyclist thinking about the relevance of the cyclists position, they drive towards the cyclist planning an appropriate overtake that won’t see them prosecuted. Which, as you see, is why labelling and context don’t become an issue.”
When it comes to designing the mat, it’s crucial to consider how the education is delivered. It’s not a matter of standing in one place, looking at a static arrangement of road users, and leaving it there.
“Offenders have to do a fair bit of conceptualising on the mat and then tell the educator what they would do in given circumstances and why. They are also asked what the cyclist would do in given scenarios to keep safe, so they understand that behaviour and build it into their driving plan. “We start the education with understanding cyclist road positioning—secondary and primary—and move on from there. So the educator uses the two measurements to display that, then moves onto a standard pass of the secondary position, where the offender has to show how much room they would give. The educator positions the bike on the 0.75m line and asks the offender to show where their wing mirror should be when passing. They immediately look down at the 1.5m measurement then stand 2m away from the bike. It’s simple learning that sticks and changes behaviour. This continues throughout the input, with the driver looking at the 1.5m measurement without association and using it to aid them in their positioning in the scenarios. They then carry this experience of visualisation onto the road. Basic, I know, but it works very well.”
WMP use each of the markings for multiple purposes, as they further explain.
“The 0.75m marking is used to visualise left wheel track, average secondary position, distance given around surface hazards by cyclists, distance between cyclists riding two abreast, and so on. The 1.5m marking is used to illustrate primary position, distance taken around parked cars by cyclists, etc, as well as the all-important overtaking distance.”
So for instance, when WMP explain what cyclists do when they approach parked cars the marked measurements are used, but not in their marked location. Drivers are asked to mentally move those distances around the environment.
So we should probably be reassured that the mats do their job in the field. But let’s return to the matter of the media, and those mats taking on a highly visual role outside of that education. Are WMP concerned?
“The fact that certain pictures appear in the media and inferences drawn as a result is unavoidable in any given campaign. People see the mats as an educational campaign, but they simply aren’t: they’re a tool for creating experience-led behaviour change. Nothing more, nothing less. Cyclists and campaigners have had to endure countless poor and ineffective media-only campaigns, but this is completely different in that it’s enforcement-led. “Although it’s been mentioned occasionally over the last 12 months, that issue of context hasn’t been a problem. Our media has hit literally tens of millions internationally and everyone got it—until the Cycling UK campaign, which is bizarre.”
Whether it was a problem or not is a little subjective, but there certainly were early criticisms: a quick search of Twitter pulls up multiple conversations, involving WMP and preceding the Cycling UK campaign, which question the markings. Here are a couple of examples.
This is why it'd be better if @Trafficwmp's text was "at least" 0.75m and "at least" 1.5m (especially for larger vehicles or higher speeds). https://t.co/1WdRvdOT70 — GM Cycling Campaign (@GMcycling) November 17, 2016
@Trafficwmp Thanks for superb efforts on #OpClosePass. I just wonder why you illustrate 1.5m from the tyre not the elbow? #BikesWithBodiesOn pic.twitter.com/8agtXnjPDn — Sam Wakeling (@samwake) November 17, 2016
So, are the markings a problem? The jury may be out for a while: the prosecution would assert that vastly more people see the newspaper reports than experience the education; while the defence would point out that whatever you try to do, parts of the media will twist it—never mind the absolute inevitability of random people on the internet getting a bit heated about anything to do with those bloody cyclists.
But maybe it’s right to be at least apprehensive.
When I wrote an earlier article about Operation Close Pass, I remarked that “the crucial aspect of this will be how effectively the education can be delivered [by other forces]”.
In early February, WMP held a workshop day in Birmingham to which other forces were invited. The idea was to explain Operation Close Pass with a view to officers taking the knowledge back to their own forces to implement it.
I asked one of the roads policing officers at Surrey Police whether he felt that the workshop left him sufficiently informed as to able to get going with it; he said he was “reasonably confident of being able to run an operation as WMP do”. (Don’t read between the lines: the question was about skills transfer; resource allocation is a separate issue.)
But although Surrey have yet to deploy a close pass operation, Greater Manchester Police—who have been in contact with WMP on this matter for longer than most other forces—are out there doing it.
And what they’re doing is quite interesting.
It’s clear that GMP aren’t running anything like WMP’s model.
Judging by this set of photos from one of their tweets sent a week or so after the workshop, they appear to have sent WMP’s media photo to their office laser printer and are using that to “educate” drivers within the comfort of their own seats. With the best will in the world, it’s a little difficult to see anything of significance being achieved here—and it certainly looks like it confirms people’s fears about that PR photo being abused.
So, we seem to be back where we started: maybe that PR photo is making it too easy for things to go wrong. It would seem that GMP have confirmed the fear I expressed last year: that other forces wouldn’t be able—or willing?—to replicate the quality of WMP’s operation.
We have to ask serious questions about how effective each of these operations are. Success criteria will be hard to measure: publicly available casualty data have a lag of up to 21 months, and figures in cycling participation surveys will generally suffer from a hopelessly low signal-to-noise ratio. WMP have been tracking before-and-after figures for submissions of close pass reports from the public, which they claim have fallen significantly, but it’s doubtful that most other forces will have recorded the necessary data to allow them to do this. (Remember that Hampshire don’t even bother looking at them, even when the video shows physical contact.)
All in all, it’s probably naive of online commentators to be redesigning WMP’s mat or even criticising it without first being familiar with the way in which it’s used and the people it’s intended to be used with. Is the mat problematic? Probably not, no.
But, when what you’re familiar with is the absence of the mat’s intended context, it’s hard to look at that PR photo showing those measurements locked in place around a cyclist’s wheel and feel that it was the right image to use.The Ottawa Senators, fresh off a big momentum swinging win return home to face a team they haven’t played in a while, looking to build off the win and not have it be a one-hit wonder.
(12-9-5, 29 points) 5th Pacific Division
VS
(10-11-4, 24 points) 6th Atlantic Division
7:30 PM Canadian Tire Centre
TV: Rogers Sportsnet Sens RADIO: TSN1200
MATCHUP HISTORY
These two clubs haven’t met in almost 2 full calendar years. Their last meeting was Dec 10, 2011, where the Canucks skated away with a 4-1 win on what was then Scotiabank Place ice. In fact, Vancouver has dominated Ottawa lately, winning 8 of their last 9 encounters, with Ottawa winning once and gaining one OT point for 3 of a possible 18 points.
LAST GAMES
Ottawa had a come from behind victory Wednesday night in Washinton, erasing a 3-1 first period deficit and coming away with a 6-4 win. Vancouver has been struggling mightily, having lost 8 of their last 10 games, but coming away with 4 loser points to at least remain in contact with the last playoff spot.
PLAYERS TO WATCH
Roberto Luongo, VAN – Expected to be either 1 or 1A for the Canadian Olympic team, Luongo has had a decent start (at least by his standards) to the season. He is traditionally a slow starter who rounds into form after Christmas, so if he can continue that trend he should be in gold medal form come February.
Colin Greening, OTT – Getting the monkey off his back last night with his first goal of the season, Greening now needs to show consistency and not slump back now that he has broken the ice. He has been particularly feisty lately, probably with the frustration of not bulging the twine.
TOP 3 STORYLINES TO THE GAME
1. Hail The Swedes – This will be a game where Sweden will have a large role. With Olympic certainties such as Daniel Sedin and Henrik Sedin, Alex Edler, Erik Karlsson as well as hopefuls like Mika Zibanejad and Robin Lehner (possible starter tonight), this will be like a Tre-Kroner homecoming. Imagine if Alfredsson and Silfverberg were still here?
2. Both Teams Hungry – Each team desperately needs to get a win, on a night where there are only 2 games and you can make some traction in the standings (at least temporarily). The Canucks and Senators sit 5 and 6 points respectively out of the final wild card spot in their conference. The Senators need to put together a good streak to build on the Washington win and the Canucks need to get out of a bad one.
3. Heritage Classic Preview – These two teams will meet up in the “outdoor” heritage game, that will not have the classic snowfall, or even the real feel of outdoors as they will be in BC Place Stadium, where even though the roof retracts, still won’t have the iconic snowfall scenes that have made the series so popular.
PARTING SHOT
The Senators need to put together a streak of 5 or 6 wins to get some confidence back. The one game helps, but that will be all for naught with a stinker against a team they don’t see often and don’t traditionally play well against. Back to back is no excuse any more, and they can’t continue to fall behind and expect to come back.Buddha seems to bring tranquility to Oakland neighborhood
Vina Vo (left) and Kieu Do pray at sunrise near a Buddhist shrine at 11th Avenue and East 19th Street in Oakland. Vina Vo (left) and Kieu Do pray at sunrise near a Buddhist shrine at 11th Avenue and East 19th Street in Oakland. Photo: Paul Chinn, The Chronicle Buy photo Photo: Paul Chinn, The Chronicle Image 1 of / 10 Caption Close Buddha seems to bring tranquility to Oakland neighborhood 1 / 10 Back to Gallery
Dan Stevenson is neither a Buddhist nor a follower of any organized religion.
The 11th Avenue resident in Oakland's Eastlake neighborhood was simply feeling hopeful in 2009 when he went to an Ace hardware store, purchased a 2-foot-high stone Buddha and installed it on a median strip in a residential area at 11th Avenue and 19th Street.
He hoped that just maybe his small gesture would bring tranquillity to a neighborhood marred by crime: dumping, graffiti, drug dealing, prostitution, robberies, aggravated assault and burglaries.
What happened next was nothing short of stunning. Area residents began to leave offerings at the base of the Buddha: flowers, food, candles. A group of Vietnamese women in prayer robes began to gather at the statue to pray.
And the neighborhood changed. People stopped dumping garbage. They stopped vandalizing walls with graffiti. And the drug dealers stopped using that area to deal. The prostitutes went away.
I asked police to check their crime statistics for the block radius around the statue, and here's what they found: Since 2012, when worshipers began showing up for daily prayers, overall year-to-date crime has dropped by 82 percent. Robbery reports went from 14 to three, aggravated assaults from five to zero, burglaries from eight to four, narcotics from three to none, and prostitution from three to none.
"I can't say what to attribute it to, but these are the numbers," a police statistician told me.
Back in 2009, when word got around that Stevenson was the person who'd installed the statue, offerings began to appear on his doorstep. It was like a scene straight out of the Clint Eastwood film "Gran Torino."
"They left a ton of fruit and Vietnamese specialty foods and candy, but there's only me and my wife, Lu, here and we can't eat all that stuff - but it's so good," said Stevenson.
"I've tried to explain to them my reasons" for placing the statue, he said. "I have nothing against it, but I don't believe what you believe!"
I don't think it matters to them.
To this day, every morning at 7, worshipers ring a chime, clang a bell and play soft music as they chant morning prayers. The original statue is now part of an elaborate shrine that includes a wooden structure standing 10 feet tall and holding religious statues, portraits, food and fruit offerings surrounded by incense-scented air.
"This used to be a huge spot for dumping stuff," said Alicia Tatum, 27, on an early morning walk with her dogs Lulu and Mya. "But over time, it's blossomed with more and more and more flowers - and they are out there every morning like clockwork."
On weekends, the worshipers include more than a dozen people: black folks, white folks, all folks, said Andy Blackwood, a neighborhood resident. Two weeks ago, a group of German tourists visited the shrine.
"The dope-dealing has stopped, the ladies of the evening have stopped," Blackwood said.
The Buddha has withstood two attempts to remove him from his watch, one criminal and one governmental. Neither has worked.
Soon after its installation, a would-be thief tried to pry the statue from its perch, but Stevenson had secured him with reinforced iron bar and "$35 worth" of a powerful epoxy - and Buddha didn't budge.
In 2012, after a resident's complaint, the city's Public Works Department tried to remove the statue but received such passionate blowback from neighbors that city officials decided to table and "study" the issue. Two years later, the administrative effort is long forgotten, and Buddha is still there.
When I went to visit the shrine, four small-framed ladies who don't speak or understand English decided I looked like a convert.
The moment I started talking, one of them politely took my pen from one hand, my notepad from the other and directed me to clasp my hands together, bow and repeat after her - so I did. When in Rome, right?
Apparently, my Buddhist chants aren't half bad either because they won some approving "oohs and aahs" from the flock - and carried me to Step 2 in the conversion process. The same woman who had grabbed my gear sat me cross-legged on a prayer rug in the street and placed a stool with a book on it before me. If nothing else, Buddha and I share the same body type - short, squat and happy. I sat there for a moment thinking that I might resemble him - and maybe that's why they seemed to like me.
I thought it might be a good opportunity to get a question in, too - and this time my spiritual guide seemed to understand.
"Next week," she replied.
Thank you very much, but I think I've already found what I was looking for.Introduction “Don’t think you know better than they do, because none of us do”[1] announced Richard Stride, Head of Product Quality at Tesco PLC, in a meeting referring to customer wisdom. He directed his statement to a subsequently disheartened product pitcher who was unaware of how the industry fully worked. Any item that makes it onto their shelves has to survive a rigorous testing process, the final and most critical stage of which is a customer tasting session[2]. This consumer oriented approach to product development represents a point on a gradual transition from traditional company |
by Tim Hart)Here's a simple MBA lesson: borrow money to buy things that go up in value. Borrow money if it improves your productivity and makes you more money. Leverage multiplies the power of your business because with leverage, every dollar you make in profit is multiplied.
That's very different from the consumer version of this lesson: borrow money to buy things that go down in value. This is wrongheaded, short-term and irrational.
A few decades ago, mass marketers had a problem: American consumers had bought all they could buy. It was hard to grow because dispensable income was spoken for. The only way to grow was to steal market share, and that's difficult. Enter consumer debt.
Why fight for a bigger piece of pie when you can make the whole pie bigger, the marketers think. Charge it, they say. Put it on your card. Pay now, why not, it's like it's free, because you don't have to repay it until later. Why buy a Honda for cash when you can buy a Lexus with credit?
One argument is income shifting: you're going to make a lot of money later, so borrow now so you can have a nicer car, etc. Then, when money is worth less to you, you can pay it back. This idea is actually reasonably new–fifty years or so–and it's not borne out by what actually happens. Debt creates stress, stress creates behaviors that don't lead to happiness…
The other argument is that it's been around so long, it's like a trusted friend. Debt seems like fun for a long time, until it's not. And everyone does it. We've been sold very hard on acquisition = happiness, and consumer debt is the engine that permits this. Until it doesn't.
The thing is, debt has become a marketed product in and of itself. It's not a free service or a convenience, it's a massive industry. And that industry works with all the other players in the system to grow, because (at least for now) when they grow, other marketers benefit as well. As soon as you get into serious consumer debt, you work for them, not for you.
It's simple: when the utility of what you want (however you measure it)
is less than the cost of the debt, don't buy it.
Go read Dave Ramsey's post: The truth about debt.
Dave has spent his career teaching people a lesson that many marketers are afraid of: debt is expensive, it compounds, it punishes you. Stuff now is rarely better than stuff later, because stuff now costs you forever if you go into debt to purchase it. He's persistent and persuasive.
It takes discipline to forego pleasure now to avoid a lifetime of pain and fees. Many people, especially when confronted with a blizzard of debt marketing, can't resist.
Resist. Smart people work at keeping their monthly consumer debt burden to zero. Borrow only for things that go up in value. Easy to say, hard to do. Worth it.The recent controversy over insurance coverage for contraception has vividly made the point that feminists have argued for years. The culture wars over reproductive rights never have been primarily about fetal personhood, the right to life, or now, religious freedom: they have always been about the control of women’s bodies and sexuality.
In his comments to the Senate during President Bill Clinton’s impeachment trial, Dale Bumpers noted that “H.L. Mencken said one time, ‘When you hear somebody say, ‘This is not about money,’ it’s about money.’ And when you hear somebody say, ‘This is not about sex,’ it’s about sex.” The recent controversy over insurance coverage for contraception has vividly made the point that feminists have argued for years. The culture wars over reproductive rights never have been primarily about “fetal person-hood,” the right to life, or now, religious freedom: they have always been about the control of women’s bodies and sexuality.
In the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, when numerous states, and most western countries passed and more aggressively enforced laws against birth control and abortion, male legislators felt no need to pretend these laws were about anything other than controlling women’s sexuality, or harnessing their wombs in the service of the state.
The Comstock Act of 1873 took the issue to the federal level, and defined any information about contraception or abortion as “obscene” and “illicit”—it was this law that Margaret Sanger put to the test by disseminating information on birth control. In1920, French legislators criminalized birth control, prohibited all distribution, advertisement, and promotion of female contraceptives, and stiffened penalties for abortion. The French pro-natalist campaign had emerged in the wake of France’s defeat in the 1870-71 Franco-Prussian war. Consequently, politicians linked the issue of birth control with those of morality, national strength, economic growth, and protection of the family.
Feminists such as Nelly Roussel, who tried to decouple sexuality from maternity, could not persuade the public that “voluntary motherhood” was preferable to coerced motherhood. Historian Elinor Accampo quotes a conservative newspaper editor who denounced Roussel in tones reminiscent of Rush Limbaugh’s recent attack on Sandra Fluke, writing that “these sorts of viragos, unsexed women who saturate literature and modern politics... mount their pens like they would mount a broom to go to a midnight orgy. Sterile or scorned, they avenge their disgrace by insulting Nature.”
Get the facts, direct to your inbox. Subscribe to our daily or weekly digest. SUBSCRIBE
In the American context, until Roe vs. Wade, restrictions on both birth control and abortion were most often linked to arguments about the selfishness of women, the danger of rewarding the wages of sin, eugenics, and the need to control female sexuality. The changes in women’s status that both led to and resulted from greater reproductive freedom made it more difficult for opponents of reproductive rights to explicitly continue this line of attack. Hence a new focus in 1970s and 1980s on the fetus as an innocent being, separate from the woman carrying it.
Pro-life activists also concentrated on the sexually active teenage girl, enacting new laws that would enhance parental control over their daughters’ sexual behavior. Institutions affiliated with the Catholic and other churches fought for “conscience clauses” that permit them to deny reproductive services they find offensive, while pharmacy employees claimed the right to refuse to sell items that violate their beliefs. However, as both Rosalind Petchesky and Rickie Solinger have made clear, ideas about how “proper women” should behave, both sexually and as mothers, still shape reproductive politics in the United States. Access to contraception and abortion represent the “emancipated woman,” more focused on her education and work than on family and child rearing. Rick Santorum made this connection explicit in recent comments, although he has tried to draw back from its implications in the face of outrage from even conservative women.
In recent years, the political right has tried to separate the issues of abortion and contraception, condemning abortion loudly while at the same time working quietly to make access to birth control more difficult and expensive. At the same time, in their rhetoric, they have tried to conflate birth control and abortion in the public’s mind—for example, in the case of Plan B. The recent insurance controversy has linked those two issues, but not to the advantage of pro-life and anti-contraception forces. Suddenly, women have been forced to confront the fact that the right even to birth control, which they considered long settled, is more fragile than they realized.
Since many continue to oppose a sexually active woman’s right to choose whether she becomes or remains pregnant, this debate will continue. But those who wish to make the case against reproductive rights should not be allowed to portray themselves simply as defenders of religious freedom or person-hood, or as desirous of giving women more information, as in the case of Virginia’s recently passed and medically suspect ultrasound law. They should publicly acknowledge that they believe that church and state have more compelling rights over a woman’s body then she does herself, and that the state has the right to endanger a woman’s health in the interest of controlling her sexual behavior. I’m not sure that’s a case that most legislators would care to make openly.The Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation (FDIC) and Federal Reserve may subject five banks to more strict regulations and reserve requirements on October 1, if they fail to submit a satisfactory scheme by then. (Photo: Bee Collins / Flickr)
Federal regulators announced Wednesday morning that Dodd-Frank-mandated resolution plans of five “too big to fail” banks were “not credible,” setting in motion a process that could see them broken up in thirty months.
The Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation (FDIC) and Federal Reserve on Wednesday announced that plans outlined by the quintet — Bank of America, JP Morgan Chase, Wells Fargo, New York Mellon, and State Street — were inadequate.
Because of the joint ruling, the firms are under pressure to revise their so-called “living wills.” The FDIC and Fed may subject the five banks to more strict regulations and reserve requirements on Oct. 1, if they fail to submit a satisfactory scheme by then. And if they haven’t submitted proper living wills by October 2018, the two agencies “may jointly require the firm to divest certain assets or operations to facilitate an orderly resolution of the firm in bankruptcy,” as the Fed noted on Wednesday.
Three other Wall Street behemoths escaped a similarly bleak scenario for their shareholders. The Fed and FDIC said they disagreed about the credibility of the “living wills” hashed out by Goldman Sachs and Morgan Stanley — only the FDIC deemed Goldman’s plan “not credible,” while the Fed shot down Morgan Stanley’s proposal. Citigroup, meanwhile, had its plans almost approved, though both agencies “did identify shortcomings that the firm must address.”
In February, Sen. Elizabeth Warren (D-Mass.) explained the significance of joint Fed-FDIC “not credible” determinations on living wills, when asking Fed Chair Janet Yellen about previous rulings made in 2014.
“The Fed’s refusal to call the plans ‘not credible’ meant the agencies couldn’t use statutory rules to push these risky banks in the right direction,” Warren said in a Senate Banking Committee hearing.
When Dodd-Frank financial reform was passed in 2010, Congress created an inter-agency body called the Federal Stability Oversight Council (FSOC) and gave it the power to declare certain banks, investment firms and insurance companies “SIFI” — systemically-important financial institutions.
The law concurrently forced outfits slapped with the SIFI-label to formulate living wills; to minimize the possibility of 2008-style market failure and publicly-funded bailouts, in the event of financial instability.
“Each plan … must describe the company’s strategy for rapid and orderly resolution under bankruptcy in the event of material financial distress or failure of the company,” the Fed noted Wednesday.
The eight banks whose living wills were assessed on Monday are the only SIFIs based in the United States. The Fed and FDIC are still assessing plans being written by four foreign SIFIs: Barclays PLC, Credit Suisse Group, Deutsche Bank AG, and UBS.Media playback is not supported on this device Highlights: Celtic 3-0 Aberdeen
Celtic stretched their lead at the Scottish Premiership summit to eight points with victory over second-placed Aberdeen in Glasgow.
Mikael Lustig scored the opener in a competitive first half as his shot found the net via a wicked deflection.
Former Dons winger Jonny Hayes bagged a second - and his first for Celtic - from close range after 69 minutes.
And Olivier Ntcham latched onto a terrible Kenny McLean backpass to wrap up the three points.
This was a chance for Celtic to strengthen their grip on top spot with in-form Aberdeen snapping at their heels just five points behind.
The occasion and atmosphere was always going to dictate the tempo and as Aberdeen pressed, Celtic zipped the ball around with precision and purpose in the early stages.
There was no reward for their possession, though, and the visitors started to grow in confidence.
That confidence was converted into a fabulous chance for former Celtic winger Gary Mackay-Steven midway through the first half.
Dedryck Boyata allowed a high ball to bounce on the edge of his box and Mackay-Steven collected possession, turned the Belgian international inside out, and fired a low shot just past Craig Gordon's left-hand post. It was a warning that prompted a few dissenting groans around Celtic Park.
That was the first of three quick-fire chances in the space of 10 minutes, with the other two calling both goalkeepers into action. Joe Lewis did well to block Scott Sinclair's shot after the Englishman was one-on-one with the Aberdeen stopper, and Greg Stewart watched his fierce drive fisted away by Gordon at the other end.
Jonny Hayes scored his first Celtic goal against his former club
With five minutes to the break, Celtic took the lead thanks to some neat build-up play and a huge slice of luck. Hayes and Ntcham played a sharp one-two at the end of the Aberdeen box and when Lustig picked the ball up his shot flew off the back of Dominic Ball and high past a wrong-footed Lewis.
It was a sore one to take for the hard-working visitors but on the balance of play, deserved.
Keen to kill the contest quickly, Celtic immediately applied pressure after the interval and Moussa Dembele saw his close-range effort deflected just wide, before Kieran Tierney and Ntcham also tested Lewis.
Maybe Aberdeen's confidence went when they lost the first goal, knowing that it was going to be very, very tough for them, but they were blown away in the second half. Pat Bonner Former Celtic goalkeeper on BBC Radio Scotland
Dembele and Sinclair were beginning to cause the creaking Dons defence problems, with Ntcham, the dominant influence in midfield, spraying balls forward.
Kari Arnason and McLean gave the small band of travelling fans hope with a couple of close encounters, but it was one of their former team-mates who struck at the other end.
Sinclair showed his guile once again down the left flank and when he whipped in a fine cross, Hayes had the easiest of finishes from five yards out. It was mortal blow for Aberdeen, who had already been wounded by a mixture of a slick Celtic and their own lack of self-belief.
As if to underline the point, the third came from a horrible Dons error that was pounced on by Ntcham. McLean was short with the backpass and the Frenchman skipped in, rounded Lewis and slotted home with ease.
Olivier Ntcham slotted Celtic's third goal after a glaring error from Kenny McLean
Dembele and substitute Odsonne Edouard had good opportunities to inflict more damage in the closing stages, but their wasted chances did not take the shine off a dominant display.The United States officially confirmed its first Zika virus death on Friday. According to CDC reports, an elderly Puerto Rican man recently died of complications from a bout with Zika. While Puerto Rico is currently experiencing massive outbreaks of the virus, health officials state the man’s death occurred as a result of severe internal bleeding stemming from Zika infection.
Earlier this year, a World Health Organization spokesperson declared that in 2016, 4 million cases of Zika virus could be expected in the Americas alone. Due to potentially crippling birth defects, this mosquito-borne illness is most dreaded among pregnant women.
[Photo by Ian Waldie/Getty Images] Though in adults, Zika’s prevalent symptoms include fever, skin rash, joint pain, and conjunctivitis, the consequences of Zika upon infants can be far more devastating. Infants born with Zika virus often suffer from microcephaly. This defective condition results in abnormally small head size and brain damage.
Other severe birth defects caused by microcephaly can include seizure, developmental milestone delay, intellectual disability, problems with movement and balance, difficulty swallowing, along with hearing and vision impairment.
While 707 cases of Zika virus have been reported in the United States territory, 90 of those are attributed to pregnant women. In light of the dangers associated with Zika virus, health officials staunchly stated a warning.
“Residents of and travelers to Puerto Rico should continue to employ mosquito bite avoidance behaviors, take precautions to reduce the risk for sexual transmission, and seek medical care for any acute illness with rash or fever. Clinicians who suspect Zika virus disease in patients who reside in or have recently returned from areas with ongoing Zika virus transmission should report cases to public health officials.”
Adding to the dangers faced in Puerto Rico, experts predict a staggering 2 billion people worldwide may eventually be affected by Zika virus. Consequently, it was also concluded that upwards of 5 million newborn babies are now at risk for microcephaly. Concerning the growing number of Zika miscarriages, Dr. Oluwatosin Goje, an Infectious Disease OB/GYN at the Cleveland Clinic, told CBS News the following.
“With infections in general during pregnancy, there’s a risk of miscarriage. Other infections that can cause miscarriage include toxoplasmosis, rubella, and cytomegalovirus, and many times depending on how early the infection is contracted, some people may have a miscarriage. One of the things that researchers are studying is the suspicion that having contracted the Zika virus in the first trimester may be more detrimental compared to the second or third trimester, so that might explain the miscarriages in some people.”
Dr. Goje’s comments came after two U.S. women had miscarried from Zika infection while traveling abroad. Unfortunately, Zika virus cases are on the rise in the continental United States as well. States most likely to incur a Zika outbreak include warmer-weathered southeastern areas, including Texas, Louisiana, Mississippi, Alabama, Georgia, and Florida.
[Photo by Mario Tama/Getty Images] While chances of contracting the Zika virus are highest during spring and summer, a few universal tips people can employ to greatly reduce becoming infected include applying insect repellent often, eliminating standing water, and wearing long sleeved shirts and turtlenecks when insect repellent is not available.
[Photo by Mario Tama/Getty Images]The Hornets have agreed a deal with Ecuador full back Juan Carlos Paredes, the Watford Observer understands.
Watford have been confident of securing his signature for more than a month and we understand a move has now been agreed.
Paredes failed to report to training for Barcelona Sporting Club on Monday and the Ecuadorian club's president Francisco Hidalgo confirmed the player was likely to be fined.
Hidalgo claimed a deal has yet to be reached with Watford but we understand terms have been agreed with the player, although it is yet to be decided whether he will join the Hornets directly or via fellow Pozzo clubs Granada or Udinese.
Paredes, who turned 27 today, played every minute of his country's World Cup campaign, as they finished third in Group E.
Paredes, who can play across the backline, has spent the whole of his career in his native country, also featuring for Rocafuerte, Deportivo Cuenca and Deportivo Quito, where he won the league title in 2011.
Udinese, who like Watford are owned by the Pozzos, were keen on signing the player for more than six months and he reportedly attracted interest from clubs around Europe prior to the World Cup.Benedict Cumberbatch: Code Breaker Alan Turing Was A Puzzle Himself
Enlarge this image toggle caption Black Bear Pictures Black Bear Pictures
The Imitation Game is the story of Alan Turing: British mathematician, World War II code breaker and seminal theoretician of computer science. "It's a war thriller, it's a love story and a tragic testament to a genius wronged," the star of the film, Benedict Cumberbatch, tells NPR's Robert Siegel.
Turing, who was openly gay at a time when homosexuality was a crime in Britain, talked his way into a job helping the British crack the German code called Enigma. Cumberbatch says the film's script has a "beautifully complex unraveling through time... the unraveling of both the problem and the man, himself, trying to solve the problem."
Interview Highlights
On the audience's introduction to Turing, who was known to be awkward and eccentric
I think what's extraordinary about Graham Moore's first feature script is how you, layer by layer, sort of uncover this man at the same parallel time as the team he eventually does play a part of.... And I think, to be fair to Alan, what's beautiful about Graham's script in his introduction to him... it's utterly uncompromising. There's no vanity, you're not asked to like the character. You're introduced to him, warts and all. And he is... difficult; he's very stubborn and arrogant.
But there's a sort of naive guilelessness about the whole thing. He doesn't come in with an abrasive attitude. He just doesn't have the formal respect for authority.... And he is utterly brilliant and he knows it and he's been told that and he doesn't mind talking about it. But it's not to show off; for him, it's a statement of fact.
But there's a sort of naive guilelessness about the whole thing. He doesn't come in with an abrasive attitude. He just doesn't have the formal respect for authority.... And he is utterly brilliant and he knows it and he's been told that and he doesn't mind talking about it. But it's not to show off; for him, it's a statement of fact.
On the way the state punished Turing for being gay
It's disgusting to think that within less than 100 years [that] this was going on hundreds — thousands in fact — of men were prosecuted and given the chance to choose simply between two years' imprisonment or two years' state-sanctioned chemical castration through weekly estrogen injections. Alan chose the latter in order to continue his work. But the man was a marathon runner as well as a sexually active homosexual man, and not only did the drug ravage his body and affect his physicality but it also started slowly to impinge on his faculty, on his mind, on his ability to do that work. So he was denied the one door he still had left open to him for love, for freedom, for expressing who he was.
On bringing Turing's story to a wider audience
In comparison to his achievements and his greatness — both as a scientific mind [and] philosopher... somebody who... basically was the father of computer science, somebody who was part of an effort that saved, some estimate, 14 million lives by breaking a code that brought about a two-years-early end to World War II. That that man wasn't better-known — I mean, why isn't he on bank notes with Darwin and Newton? Why isn't he on the cover of history books as well as science books? That really was a driving motivation for me to tell this story and bring his legacy to a wider audience.
On the Turing machine
It's more than a machine. I mean, that machine takes on such a personality..... A replica is still at Bletchley Park, which I advise any of your listeners who are lucky enough to be in that part of the world to go and see it. It's the most extraordinary, chilling, amazing exhibit of all the work.... You can ask someone to give you a very patient explanation of it because it's quite complex. But basically, it was the machine that Alan adapted from a Polish machine to break the other machine, the Enigma machine — which was capable of... 159 million, million, million possible variations every single day that would change at midnight. It was beyond the human ability to crack.
On the way these machines are seen in 2014
"Where's the screen?" as one friend's child said.... Broke my heart when I heard that. But the same kid then went home and Googled — using probably an algorithm very similar in the search engines that were used by Turing, invented by Turing to break the code in the second world war — used a Google search engine in order to look up and research more about Enigma. This is an 8-year-old. I mean, it's fantastic.
On his decision to go by Benedict Cumberbatch (his father, also an actor, is named Timothy Carlton, and Cumberbatch's full name is Benedict Timothy Carlton Cumberbatch)
I started as Benedict Carlton. I think Carlton's a great name; it was my grandfather's first name and I never got to meet him, so that alone was a good reason. And I wasn't getting anywhere with my first agent and with that name and when I went to meet someone else at a new agency about six months after I graduated, she said, "Why on earth don't you use your family name? It's the most fantastically extraordinary, unforgettable name."...
Even I can't say it early on a Monday morning. It sounds like a fart in a bath. There's a whole lot of bubbles.
She rightfully said, "Look, it's pretty unforgettable once you get your head around it." And I said, "Yeah, but even I can't say it early on a Monday morning." It sounds like a fart in a bath. There's a whole lot of bubbles. But, you know, it seems to have worked out all right, doesn't it, Robert?
On whether being famous is fun
It's fun. It's got to be fun. There are moments when, like all of us, you get a bit self-conscious and you'd rather not be living any of your day in public. Those are the awkward times, but you've got to have fun with it.Genes involved in tasting sweet and savory flavors on the tongue also play a key role in properly working sperm, new research in animals finds.
These findings could lead to novel contraceptives for men, and suggest ways to help treat male infertility, the researchers said.
In this research, scientists investigated proteins known as taste receptors. These receptors help tongues detect sugars, acids, salt and other chemicals responsible for basic tastes such as sweet, sour, salty, bitter and the savory taste known as umami.
Oddly, in the past decade, research has shown taste receptors are also located in other parts of the body, including the stomach, intestines, pancreas, lungs and even the brain.
But the functions of these receptors found outside the mouth have remained unclear.
To help solve the mystery, researchers focused on receptors that help taste buds detect the sugars and amino acids responsible for sweet and savory tastes.
The scientists discovered that one of these taste receptors, called TAS1R3, and a molecule that helps the taste receptor send signals to the brain, called GNAT3, were both found in the testicles and sperm of mice.
The investigators genetically engineered mice to possess the human form of the TAS1R3 receptor (but were missing the mouse version of TAS1R3 and GNAT3). When these mice were given the drug clofibrate, which inhibits the human receptor, the males became sterile due to malformed and fewer sperm. The mice quickly became fertile again once clofibrate was removed from their diet.
The study shows that "taste proteins are very important in male reproduction. We really didn't expect that," researcher Bedrich Mosinger, a molecular biologist at the Monell Chemical Senses Center in Philadelphia, told LiveScience.
"We didn't find similar effects with female reproduction," Mosinger said. "This looks specific to males."
The drug clofibrate that belongs to a class of chemicals called fibrates, which are frequently prescribed to treat lipid disorders, such as high blood cholesterol or high levels of triglycerides. Mosinger speculated the common use of fibrates in medicine could be contributing to the decline of male fertility, a growing problem worldwide. He added that weedkillers known as phenoxy-herbicides, which are widely used globally, also block the human TAS1R3 receptor,
"If our pharmacological findings are indeed related to the global increase in the incidence of male infertility, we now have knowledge to help us devise treatments to reduce or reverse the effects of fibrates and phenoxy compounds on sperm production and quality," Mosinger said.
This research could also help design a male non-hormonal contraceptive, Mosinger added. Such a contraceptive might not disrupt hormone levels vital to normal life.
"We now need to identify the pathways and mechanisms in testes that utilize these taste genes, so we can understand how their loss leads to infertility," said researcher Robert Margolskee, a molecular neurobiologist at the Monell Chemical Senses Center.
The scientists detailed their findings online today (July 1) in the journal Proceedings of the National Academies of Sciences.
Copyright 2013 LiveScience, a TechMediaNetwork company. All rights reserved. This material may not be published, broadcast, rewritten or redistributed.Swansea v Cardiff
Venue: Liberty Stadium Date: Saturday 8 February Kick-off: 17:30 GMT Coverage: Live text commentary on the BBC Sport website
Swansea's decision to sack boss Michael Laudrup four days before facing rivals Cardiff has ensured this weekend's south Wales derby is shaping up to be an even bigger game than normal.
Under Brendan Rodgers and then Laudrup, Swansea have had two excellent seasons in the Premier League, capped by finishing ninth and winning the Capital One Cup last year. But since winning that trophy 12 months ago, Swansea have only won eight of 35 Premier League games, and lost 18.
That is relegation form.
The Dane leaves a side in 12th place, but only two points away from the bottom three. After their success last term, I never in a million years expected them to be in this type of trouble now.
So what went wrong for Laudrup?
Chairman's choice
Given where Swansea find themselves, it is not a massive shock. They have won one in 10, and football is very cut throat - it is a winning business.
My manager at Celtic Martin O'Neill said to me that even the best managers are only three or four games away from the sack. The fans get very disgruntled and start asking questions.
Laudrup's Premier League record Before cup final After cup final 27 Played 35 33% Win rate 23% 30% Loss rate 51% 1.4 Ave goals scored 1.1 1.3 Ave goals conceded 1.5
Replacements Garry Monk and Alan Curtis are Swansea through and through; they have got years of experience at the club between them and they will rally the troops.
The fans will be right behind them from day one and the derby is a perfect game in many ways. It will be a brilliant atmosphere.
Laudrup has brought great success to Swansea. Whichever club he joins next will be inheriting a very good manager.
He is part of Swansea's history and he can be proud of the job he has done.
One or two things this season have gone against him and the threat of relegation from the Premier League is so great now that clubs feel they have to act. We have seen it from Sunderland and Cardiff this season and chairman Huw Jenkins will be hoping that it will keep his club up this season.
Jenkins is very shrewd and wise. The last three or four appointments he has made have been spot on - the next one from him will be exactly the same.
Missing Michu
Michu's goals and link-up play were invaluable for Swansea last year
The obvious change to Swansea's play this season has been the loss of forward Michu through injury.
The 27-year-old was immense in his first season last year, and by early February had already scored 15 times in the league, with Swansea collecting 34 points from their first 24 games.
Michu's final total of 18 Premier League goals last season was only bettered by Robin van Persie, Gareth Bale, Luis Suarez and Christian Benteke.
Analysis "The board have been unhappy for a while. Not only for the performances but the spirit some of the players have been showing. "As I understand it, Michael Laudrup was happy to carry on with Garry Monk on the coaching staff but the board have said 'no, we have to change, we have to change now'. "He signed a contract extension to take him through to next season, but we have always thought he would leave this summer. If you look at the way he left Mallorca, it's very similar - a good first season, the second not so good."
But the Spaniard has only scored twice in the league this term, as knee and ankle injuries have restricted him to just 12 Premier League appearances.
Record signing Wilfried Bony has come in and done well, but while he has scored 16 times this season, he's only managed seven in the league and Swansea are 10 points worse off than at this stage last season.
Bony was brought in to play ahead of Michu, and not having the Spaniard available has changed Swansea's style of play. Watching them in the last 10 or 15 games you have seen Bony isolated up front on his own, and it's not his game to drop off and link with the midfield, which was Michu's strength.
Michu was great last season at drifting around between the lines and he was so hard to pick up. With Bony on his own, there was a change of shape, and their play became a bit predictable.
Swansea still have lots of possession, but it's that cutting edge that they lack. They can be easy to play against.
Losing Ki
Another man who has been sorely missed by Swansea in recent months is South Korean midfielder Ki Sung-Yueng.
Laudrup decided to let him go on loan to Sunderland last summer as he brought in Jonjo Shelvey from Liverpool, but Ki has arguably been the Black Cats' best player under Gus Poyet and that decision now looks like an error.
Ki brings real energy to the midfield and he gets the ball moving quickly. Shelvey is a goal threat - he's Swansea's second top scorer in the league - but he can also be careless in possession and Ki gives them a better shape.
He has come on leaps and bounds with another full season in the Premier League and maybe he can come back into the Swansea side next year.
Strange signings
Swansea ended January and start February with a run of four games against teams around them - Fulham, West Ham, Cardiff and Stoke.
They had the chance to strengthen the squad at the end of the transfer window and really push on.
Europa hangover? "Swansea have been outstanding in the Europa League. It's not a distraction, and you should never moan about playing in Europe. As a player, the Cup Winners' Cup final and Uefa Cup finals I played in are among the highlights of my career. I don't remember beating Motherwell or Derby in the league but you don't forget those big European nights. The bottom line is they have a big enough squad and they should relish it."
They may have beaten Fulham in the first of those games, but they made some strange signings before the defeat at Upton Park, which was as badly as I've seen them play in 18 months.
Look at Saturday's opponents, Cardiff. They signed Wilfried Zaha and Kenwyne Jones in the last week of January and both played a big part in their win against Norwich last weekend.
Zaha is a £10m winger, he has a point to prove and has aspirations of making the Manchester United and England squads, and the moment he came on he lifted the whole crowd.
A signing like that would have done Swansea the world of good and helped to replace Michu. Instead they signed Marvin Emnes from Middlesbrough and David Ngog from Bolton.
Emnes, to be fair, did well at Swansea a few years ago, and scored the winner in a derby game against Cardiff. But that was in the Championship and I doubt either player's arrival has excited the home fans.
They have scored five goals between them this season in the second tier.
Great expectations
In many ways Laudrup was a victim of his own success.
He leaves a Swansea side that are in mid-table and still in the FA Cup and Europa League. It was not a disastrous performance, and you have to remember that the club were in the fourth division and playing at Vetch Field 10 years ago.
But when you win a trophy and spend £12m on a striker - which would have been unthinkable just a few years ago - you raise expectations among the fans, the media and the boardroom.
Feeling the pressure?
Steven Caulker scored the only goal when Cardiff beat Swansea in November
You never want to lose a derby and a win for Cardiff would take them level on points with their rivals. As the away side, and with a derby win under their belts already this term, they have nothing to lose at the weekend and will thrive on the disarray at the Liberty Stadium.
Swansea did not turn up in the first game back in November, and Cardiff thoroughly deserved to win 1-0. They controlled the game.
Both sides have spent a lot of money in recent years, have players on very good wages and big contracts and relegation would be unthinkable at Swansea. Financially it would be crushing.
I said at the start of the season that Cardiff would go down and I stand by that, although they have given themselves a chance with the players they have signed.
It is possible of course that both sides will go down but I cannot see it - even if Tuesday's developments reveal the very real worry at Liberty Stadium.Thank you to all who were a part of this project! If you missed out on backing Storm the Gate, you can buy it on TinyLightbulbs:
Buy Storm the Gate on TinyLightbulbs
What Is Storm The Gate?
Storm the Gate is a high-quality tabletop dexterity game. It is handcrafted locally from solid woods.
An Ode To Unfortunate Felines
In medieval times, townsfolk enjoyed a game in which tokens were launched back and forth in a furious attempt to rid their side of all pieces. Unfortunately, no bungee cords or rubber bands existed during this period, so creative measures had to be taken to find a suitable instrument with which to launch the tokens. This suitable instrument was found in the form of...
Cat intestines.
The cat intestines, when wet, would provide the elastic spring that the townsfolk needed to propel the tokens toward their opponent.
Thankfully, Storm the Gate takes a much gentler approach. We've modified the design, dimensions, rules, and, luckily for kitties everywhere, we do not require any organs.
How Is It Played?
We suggest watching the video above first, as it demonstrates the overall concept of the gameplay nicely.
Storm the Gate is a two person game, with each player sitting at opposite ends of the board. Each player begins with 8 tokens on their side.
The object of the game is to get rid of all tokens on your side of the board (your camp) by shooting them onto your opponent's side (opponent’s camp) through the gate in the center of the board. This is accomplished by pulling the tokens against the cord in your camp and releasing.
Once a player no longer has any tokens in their |
purposes of his franchise tag value, which is now set at $7.05 million next season unless Graham and the Saints subsequently agree on a long-term deal.
The designation was released Monday after the deadline passed for NFL teams to use franchise or transition tags on players becoming free agents.
Because Graham often split out from the offensive line as a receiver would, there have been questions concerning whether the NFL's collective bargaining agreement calls for Graham to have a receiver's tag, worth $12.1 million. Graham still could file a grievance, leaving an arbitrator to decide which tag is appropriate.
As a non-exclusive franchise player, Graham is free to negotiate an offer sheet with another NFL team. The Saints could either match that deal or accept two first-round draft picks as compensation.
Similarly, the Saints used their franchise tag on quarterback Drew Brees in March 2012, then needed a little more than four months to work out the five-year, $100 million deal Brees signed shortly before training camp.
Like Brees, Graham is represented by Creative Artists Agency. They do not have the same agent. Graham is represented by Jimmy Sexton and Brees by Tom Condon.
Graham has said publicly during the Pro Bowl in February that it would be "unfortunate," if the team used the franchise tag on him, but on Friday he reacted to the move with subtle humor.
Afterward, Graham wrote on his Twitter account, "Confirming it's officially Franchisefriday... TAG... I guess I'm it."
Graham, a former college basketball who played one year of football at Miami, was drafted by the Saints in 2010. Last season, he led the Saints in catches with 86, yards with 1,215 and touchdowns with 16.
He has led the Saints in catches in each of the past three seasons, while leading the club in yards receiving and touchdowns in two of the last three seasons. During the past three regular seasons combined, he has 270 catches for 3,507 yards and 36 touchdowns.News Smarts: Steve Bannon (Trump’s Senior Strategist) Is a Proud Zionist – Link
* * *
Update 1: Don’t get caught up in the ruse that Facebook and Google are cracking down on the alternative media. It is simply part of the co-opting campaign as described in this report below. Bank on it! It is the same sect doing this, that should be easy to see for anyone with a single brain cell.
* * *
Truth Stream Media: What Happened to the Liberty Movement?
* * *
You thought it was bad already? Think again.
The following information has finally convinced me to deem Trump an enemy of the free world, no more ifs or buts (Hillary Clinton was already marked as such, don’t worry).
Even with the initial appointment of Steve Bannon (Breitbart) as Trump’s senior strategist it didn’t strike me yet what had actually been unfolding during the past 19-some months.
As the Breitbart website gained traction during the US presidential campaigns and more and more alternative media audiences were funneled into the same trap that also Breitbart was funneling into it became obvious that a major and highly weaponized co-opting campaign had been let loose on the public, internationally.
Now the zionist website Forward (un)willingly confirms that indeed the wild speculations were right and justified all along, that a Trump administration would actually mean more zionist manipulations and imperialism than one can possibly imagine. Way more than what the world would have been subjected to had Hillary Clinton won, and that says a lot. My god!
As Infowars had earlier started with co-opting its readers, followers and fans into rallying against “muslim terrorism”, THE zionist catchphrase, through false ISIS video threats and false ISIS training camp reports in Mexico for instance (just to name a few examples of the MO) so was Breitbart almost identically used to pick up there where Infowars had not delivered enough results and had not funneled enough useful units (idiots) into submission to the zionist agenda.
Breitbart deceptively became known as the notorious right-wing extremist hangout for Trump supporters, and (alleged) white supremacists, who all too eagerly wanted to oppose “the jews” with their alleged anti-semitic slurs. Even the ADL was sent out to help craft and establish the reputation of Breitbart and co. and also Alex Jones was in the same effort called an anti-semite often enough in the press to make alert activists and anti-units doubt about their own beliefs and works.
But now it has become crystal clear what the big con game was all along, and fortunately I have not fallen into the trap and for those who have I hope this information can bring you back to the side of good and truth.
Knowing that both Breitbart and Infowars are among the biggest brands in the alt media landscape (the truth is not reflected in website traffic!) today, it is a fact that these venues have successfully been weaponized and deployed, and continue to be used in this way, to co-opt hundreds of thousands, if not millions, of people in favor of the zionist world dominance and war agenda. Even Stormfronters and Daily Stormers have largely been duped into supporting Trump and that tells you something about the smoothness, slickness and perversion of this well-funded zionist co-opting campaign.
People had better been paying more attention to folks like Morris and American Everyman instead. Like I said, loads of website traffic does not mean a site is truthful or can be trusted. This information proves that beyond all doubts.
Consider the following litmus test from now on because we are in for a hellish ride unlike we have NEVER seen before. We seriously have to regroup and we must do this far away from public forums online if we actually want to have a chance to survive this.
Now that the dots have been connected here on my site and on others their websites there can no longer exist any excuse for any activist or alt media ally or operative out there to continue supporting a Trump administration, to continue publishing favorable articles and reports for that coming zionist administration.
We have to be drastic with this measure, this litmus test. No ifs or buts, no exceptions. Those alt media websites, venues and personalities that are favorable to Trump and his outfit in any way or to any extent are compromised. PERIOD! No ifs or buts, no exceptions.
I’ve waited long enough to publish my final stance and I hope others out there are willing to do the same, to apply the litmus test now too, to themselves and to the entire media spectrum basically.
We simply cannot afford to lose any more grounds at this point, the line in the sand has to be drawn and right now, right here.
If we fail to inform loads of good and honest activists about this, who may or may not have already been duped by this co-opting, then we will fail ourselves and will fail to uphold and defend our self-respect.
It is suggested that a list of alternative websites is created ASAP of who are favorable to the Trump machine, in order to help see the (duped) targets and fellow activists out there what is going on and what to be careful for. Or better yet, just a list of those who have been found to be on the side of truth, a much shorter list and less work required.
this latest co-opting campaign is, like I said earlier, highly weaponized. Expect a lot of new enemies when you are serious about putting your weight behind this call for help and rescue mission.
It doesn’t look good at all at this moment in time and if we fail, all bets are off!Editor’s note: This is the first article in a six-part series, The Coming Swarm, on military robotics and automation as a part of the joint War on the Rocks-Center for a New American Security Beyond Offset Initiative.
Department of Defense leaders have stated that robotics and autonomous systems will be a key part of a new “offset strategy” to sustain American military dominance, but what is autonomy? Uninhabited, or unmanned, systems have played important roles in Iraq and Afghanistan, from providing loitering overhead surveillance to defusing bombs. They have operated generally in a remote-controlled context, however, with only limited automation for functions like takeoff and landing. Numerous Defense Department roadmap and vision documents depict a future of uninhabited vehicles with greater autonomy, transitioning over time to true robotic systems. What that means for how militaries fight, however, is somewhat murky.
What does it mean for a robot to be “fully autonomous?” How much machine intelligence is required to reach “full autonomy,” and when can we expect it? And what is the role of the human warfighter in this proposed future with robots running loose, untethered from their human controllers?
Confusion about the term “autonomy” is a problem in envisioning the answers to these questions. The word “autonomy” is used by different people in different ways, making communicating about where we are headed with robotic systems particularly challenging. The term “autonomous robot” might mean a Roomba to one person and a Terminator to another! Writers or presenters on this topic often articulate “levels of autonomy,” but their levels rarely agree, leading a recent Defense Science Board report on autonomy to throw out the concept of “levels” of autonomy altogether.
In the interest of adding some clarity to this issue, I want to illuminate how we use the word, why it is confusing, and how we can be more precise. I can’t change the fact that “autonomy” means so many things to so many people, and I won’t try to shoehorn all of the possible uses of autonomy into yet another chart of “levels of autonomy.” But I can try to inject some much needed precision into the discussion.
What is “Autonomy?”
In its simplest form, autonomy is the ability of a machine to perform a task without human input. Thus an “autonomous system” is a machine, whether hardware or software, that, once activated, performs some task or function on its own. A robot is an uninhabited system that incorporates some degree of autonomy, generally understood to include the ability to sense the environment and react to it, at least in some crude fashion.
Autonomous systems are not limited to uninhabited vehicles, however. In fact, autonomous, or automated, functions are included on many human-inhabited systems today. Most cars today include anti-lock brakes, traction and stability control, power steering, emergency seat belt retractors, and air bags. Higher-end cars may include intelligent cruise control, automatic lane keeping, collision avoidance, and automatic parking. For military aircraft, automatic ground collision avoidance systems (auto-GCAS) can similarly take control of a human-piloted aircraft if a pilot becomes disoriented and is about to fly into terrain. And modern commercial airliners have a high degree of automation available throughout every phase of a flight. Increased automation or autonomy can have many advantages, including increased safety and reliability, improved reaction time and performance, reduced personnel burden with associated cost savings, and the ability to continue operations in communications-degraded or denied environments.
Parsing out how much autonomy a system has is important for understanding the challenges and opportunities associated with increasing autonomy. There is a wide gap, of course, between a Roomba and a Terminator. Rather than search in vain for a unified framework of “levels of autonomy,” a more fruitful direction is to think of autonomy as having three main axes, or dimensions, along which a system can vary. These dimensions are independent, and so autonomy does not exist on merely one spectrum, but three spectrums simultaneously.
The Three Dimensions of Autonomy
What makes understanding autonomy so difficult is that people tend to use the same word to refer to three completely different concepts:
The human-machine command-and-control relationship
The complexity of the machine
The type of decision being automated
These are all important features of autonomous systems, but they are different ideas.
The human-machine command-and-control relationship
Machines that perform a function for some period of time, then stop and wait for human input before continuing, are often referred to as “semiautonomous” or “human in the loop.” Machines that can perform a function entirely on their own but have a human in a monitoring role, with the ability to intervene if the machine fails or malfunctions, are often referred to as “human-supervised autonomous” or “human on the loop.” Machines that can perform a function entirely on their own and humans are unable to intervene are often referred to as “fully autonomous” or “human out of the loop.” In this sense, “autonomy” is not about the intelligence of the machine, but rather its relationship to a human controller.
The complexity of the machine
The word “autonomy” is also used in a completely different way to refer to the complexity of the system. Regardless of the human-machine command-and-control relationship, words such as “automatic,” “automated,” and “autonomous” are often used to refer to a spectrum of complexity of machines. The term “automatic” is often used to refer to systems that have very simple, mechanical responses to environmental input. Examples of such systems include trip wires, mines, toasters, and old mechanical thermostats. The term “automated” is often used to refer to more complex, rule-based systems. Self-driving cars and modern programmable thermostats are examples of such systems. Sometimes the word “autonomous” is reserved for machines that execute some kind of self-direction, self-learning, or emergent behavior that was not directly predictable from an inspection of its code. An example would be a self-learning robot that taught itself how to walk or the Nest “learning thermostat.”
Others will reserve the word “autonomous” only for entities that have intelligence and free will, but these concepts hardly add clarity. Artificial intelligence is a loaded term that can refer to a wide range of systems, anywhere from those that exhibit near-human or super-human intelligence in a narrow domain, such as playing chess (Deep Blue), playing Jeopardy (Watson), or programming subway repair schedules, to potential future systems that might have human or super-human general intelligence. But whether general intelligence leads to free will, or whether humans even have free will, is itself debated.
What is particularly challenging is that there are no clear boundaries between these degrees of complexity, from “automatic” to “automated” to “autonomous” to “intelligent,” and different people may disagree on what to call any given system.
Type of function being automated
Ultimately, it is meaningless to refer to a machine as “autonomous” or “semiautonomous” without specifying the task or function being automated. Different decisions have different levels of complexity and risk. A mine and a toaster offer radically different levels of risk, even though both have humans “out of the loop” once activated and both use very simple mechanical switches. The task being automated, however, is much different. Any given machine might have humans in complete control of some tasks and might autonomously perform others. For example, an “autonomous car” drives from point A to point B on its own, but a person is still choosing the final destination. So it is only autonomous with respect to some functions.
“Full Autonomy” is a Meaningless Term
From this perspective, the question of when we will get to “full autonomy” is meaningless. There is not a single spectrum along which autonomy moves. The paradigm of human vs. machine is a common science fiction meme, but a better framework would be to ask which tasks are done by a person and which by a machine. A recent guidance document on autonomy from a number of NATO countries came to a similar conclusion, recommending a framework of thinking about “autonomous functions” of systems, rather than characterizing an entire vehicle or system as “autonomous.”
Importantly, these three dimensions of autonomy are independent. The intelligence or complexity of the machine is a separate concept from the tasks being performed. Increased intelligence or more sophisticated machine reasoning to perform a task does not necessarily equate to transferring control over more tasks from the human to the machine. Similarly, the human-machine command-and-control relationship is a different issue from complexity or tasks performed. A thermostat functions on its own without any human supervision or intervention when you leave your house, but it still has a limited set of functions it can perform.
Instead of thinking about “full autonomy,” we should focus on operationally-relevant autonomy: sufficient autonomy to get the job done. Depending on the mission, the environment, and communications, which functions are required to achieve operationally-relevant autonomy could look very different in different scenarios. In the air domain, operationally-relevant autonomy might mean the ability for the aircraft to takeoff, land, and fly point-to-point on its own in response to human taskings, with a human overseeing operations and making mission-level decisions, but not physically piloting by stick and rudder. In that case, for highly automated aircraft like the Global Hawk or MQ-1C Gray Eagle, operationally-relevant autonomy is here today. In communications-denied environments, autonomy is sufficient today for an aircraft to perform surveillance missions, jamming, or striking pre-programmed fixed targets, although striking targets of opportunity would require a human in the loop. For ground vehicles, operationally-relevant autonomy might similarly mean the ability for the vehicle to drive itself in response to human taskings without a human operator physically driving the vehicle. Operationally-relevant autonomy for ground vehicles is here today for leader-follower convoy operations or human-supervised operations, but not quite yet for communications-denied navigation in cluttered environments with potential obstacles or people. In the undersea environment where communications are challenging but there are fewer obstacles, operationally-relevant autonomy is already here today, as uninhabited undersea vehicles can already perform missions without direct human supervision.
“Autonomy” is not some point we arrive at in the future. Autonomy is a characteristic that will be increasingly incorporated into different functions on military systems, much like increasingly autonomous functions on cars: automatic lane keeping, collision avoidance, self-parking, etc. As this occurs, humans will still be required for many military tasks, particularly those involving the use of force. No system will be “fully autonomous” in the sense of being able to perform all possible military tasks on its own. Even a system operating in a communications-denied environment will still be bounded in terms of what it is allowed to do. Humans will still set the parameters for operation and will deploy military systems, choosing the mission they are to perform.
So the next time someone tells you, “it’s autonomous,” ask for a little more precision on what, exactly, they mean.
Paul Scharre is a fellow and Director of the 20YY Warfare Initiative at the Center for a New American Security (CNAS) and author of CNAS’ recent report, Robotics on the Battlefield Part II: The Coming Swarm. He is a former infantryman in the 75th Ranger Regiment and has served multiple tours in Iraq and Afghanistan.
Photo credit: Eirik NewthSo, what new things happened to our games in GNOME 3.14?
Hitori
GNOME Hitori has actually been around for a while, but it wasn’t until this cycle that I discovered it. After chatting with Philip Withnall, we agreed that with a minor redesign, the result would be appropriate for GNOME 3. And here it is:
The gameplay is similar to Sudoku, but much faster-paced. The goal is to paint squares such that the same digit appears in each row and column no more than once, without ever painting two horizontally- or vertically-adjacent squares and without ever creating a set of unpainted squares that is disconnected both horizontally and vertically from the rest of the unpainted squares. (This sounds a lot more complicated than it is: think about it for a bit and it’s really quite intuitive.) You can usually win each game in a minute or two, depending on the selected board size.
Mines
For Mines, the screenshots speak for themselves. The new design is by Allan Day, and was implemented by Robert Roth.
There is only one gameplay change: you can no longer get a hint to help you out of a tough spot at the cost of a small time penalty. You’ll have to actually guess which squares have mines now.
Right now, the buttons on the right disappear when the game is in progress. This may have been a mistake, which we’ll revisit in 3.16. You can comment in Bug #729250 if you want to join our healthy debate on whether or not to use colored numbers.
Sudoku
Sudoku has been rewritten in Vala with the typical GNOME emphasis on simplicity and ease of use. The design is again by Allan Day. Christopher Baines started work on the port for a Google Summer of Code project in 2012, and Parin Porecha completed the work this summer for his own Google Summer of Code project.
We’re also using a new Sudoku generator, QQwing, for puzzle generation. This allows us to avoid reimplementing bugs in our old Sudoku generator (which is documented to have generated at least one impossible puzzle, and sometimes did a very poor job of determining difficulty), and instead rely on a project completely focused on correct Sudoku generation. Stephen Ostermiller is the author of QQwing, and he worked with us to make sure QQwing met our needs by implementing symmetric puzzle generation and merging changes to make it a shared library. QQwing is fairly fast at generating puzzles, so we’ve dropped the store of pregenerated puzzles that Sudoku 3.12 used and now generate puzzles on the fly instead. This means a small (1-10 second) wait if you’re printing dozens of puzzles at once, but it ensures that you no longer get the same puzzle twice, as sometimes occurred in 3.12.
If you noticed from the screenshot, QQwing often uses more interesting symmetries than our old generator did. For the most part, I think this is exciting — symmetric puzzles are intended to be artistic — but I’m interested in comments from players on whether we should disable some of the symmetry options QQwing provides if they’re too flashy. We also need feedback on whether the difficulty levels are set appropriately; I have a suspicion that QQwing’s difficulty rating may not be as refined as our old one (when it was working properly), but I could be completely wrong: we really need player feedback to be sure.
A few features from Sudoku 3.12 did not survive the redesign, or changed significantly. Highlighter mode is now always active and uses a subtle gray instead of rainbow colors. I’m considering making it a preference in 3.16 and turning it off by default, since it’s primarily helpful for keyboard users and seems to get in the way when playing with a mouse. The old notes are now restricted to digits in the top row of the cell, and you set them by right-clicking in a square. (The Ctrl+digit shortcuts will still work.) This feels a lot better, but we need to figure out how to make notes more discoverable to users. Most notably, the Track Additions feature is completely gone, the victim of our desire to actually ship this update. If you used Track Additions and want it back, we’d really appreciate comments in Bug #731640. Implementation help would be even better. We’d also like to bring back the hint feature, which we removed because the hints in 3.12 were only useful when an easy move exists, and not very helpful in a tough position. Needless to say, we’re definitely open to feedback on all of these changes.
Other Games
We received a Lights Off bug report that the seven-segment display at the bottom of the screen was difficult to read, and didn’t clearly indicate that it corresponded to the current level. With the magic of GtkHeaderBar, we were able to remove it. The result:
Robots was our final game (from the historical gnome-games package, so discounting Aisleriot) with a GNOME 2 menu bar. No longer:
It doesn’t look as slick as Mines or Sudoku, but it’s still a nice modernization.
I think that’s enough screenshots for one blog post, but I’ll also mention that Swell Foop has switched to using the dark theme (which blends in better with its background), Klotski grew a header bar (so now all of the historical gnome-games have a header bar as well), and Chess will now prompt the player at the first opportunity to claim a draw, allowing us to remove the confusing Claim Draw menu item and also the gear menu with it. (It’s been replaced by a Resign button.)
Easier Easy Modes
The computer player in Four-in-a-row used to be pratically impossible to defeat, even on level one. Nikhar Agrawal wrote a new artificial intelligence for this game as part of his Google Summer of Code project, so now it’s actually possible to win at connect four. And beginning with Iagno 3.14.1, the computer player is much easier to beat when set to level one (the default). Our games are supposed to be simple to play, and it’s not fun when the easiest difficulty level is overwhelming.
Teaser
There have also been plenty of smaller improvements to other games. In particular, Arnaud Bonatti has fixed several Iagno and Sudoku bugs, and improved the window layouts for several of our games. He also wrote a new game that will appear in GNOME 3.16. But that has nothing to do with 3.14, so I can’t show you that just yet, now can I? For now, I will just say that it will prominently feature the Internet’s favorite animal.
Happy gaming!This technique has been proven again and again and again. Here it is, explained by its originator, University of Pennsylvania professor Martin Seligman.
Via Flourish: A Visionary New Understanding of Happiness and Well-being:
Every night for the next week, set aside ten minutes before you go to sleep. Write down three things that went well today and why they went well. You may use a journal or your computer to write about the events, but it is important that you have a physical record of what you wrote. The three things need not be earthshaking in importance (“ My husband picked up my favorite ice cream for dessert on the way home from work today”), but they can be important (“ My sister just gave birth to a healthy baby boy”).
Next to each positive event, answer the question “Why did this happen?” For example, if you wrote that your husband picked up ice cream, write “because my husband is really thoughtful sometimes” or “because I remembered to call him from work and remind him to stop by the grocery store.” Or if you wrote, “My sister just gave birth to a healthy baby boy,” you might pick as the cause “God was looking out for her” or “She did everything right during her pregnancy.”
Writing about why the positive events in your life happened may seem awkward at first, but please stick with it for one week. It will get easier. The odds are that you will be less depressed, happier, and addicted to this exercise six months from now.CEDAR CITY — The popular Feminist Mormon Housewives podcast, by host and founder Lindsay Hansen-Park, released an episode in their “Year of Polygamy” series Tuesday featuring Cedar City Attorney Nadine Hansen.
“I love Lindsay’s podcasts and it was a privilege to be on it,” Nadine Hansen said.
In episode 85, titled Warren Jeffs and His Crimes, Nadine Hansen describes Jeffs, who was convicted of two felony counts of child sexual assault in 2011 and is currently serving a prison sentence of life plus 20 years. She describes how his arrest came about, what happened during his trial and Jeffs’ influence over his congregation from prison, among other things occurring in the Fundamentalist Latter-day Saint community.
Nadine Hansen serves as a guardian ad litem for children in custody disputes including children of the FLDS who have been alienated from parents after they were excommunicated by sect leaders.
A searing part of the episode is where Nadine Hansen describes the recording that was played in the trial of Jeffs as he rapes a 12-year-old girl.
“I didn’t really hold anything back, but I tried to be careful in the words I used to describe Warren’s recorded rape,” Nadine Hansen said. “I was aware that talking about it is triggering for sexual abuse survivors. And I didn’t say her name, even though it is widely available on the internet.”
“Interviewing Nadine was great,” Hansen-Park said of her interview with Nadine Hansen. “She’s been a friend for a long time and is doing incredible work as an advocate for children.”
The Feminist Mormon Housewives, referred to as FMH, has received national recognition and has been discussed by the New York Times, Newsweek, Salt Lake Tribune and Deseret News, among other publications.
The Year of Polygamy series has reached over 600,000 downloads alone and is starting to average about 50,000 downloads a month, Hansen-Park said.
“FMH has been a bright spot that readers could turn to when they felt alone in their local wards,” according to the Year of Polygamy website. “Over the course of 75 episodes (Hansen-Park) takes research hidden away in archives, brushed aside by religious authorities, left out of official histories, written professionally in abstracts and journals, and compiles it all in a narrative respected by leading historians and compelling enough to interest any casual listener.”
According to the site, the Year of Polygamy series discusses polygamy and shows how it was started in secret — a cause of Joseph Smith’s death; a factor in much persecution of the saints and violence including the Mountain Meadow Massacre; and responsible for driving the saints to Utah, then Mexico and Canada.
“For the first time, The Year of Polygamy shows how the west was settled not only to claim land and mineral rights, but in a very real way to control the bodies and sexuality of women in a way that reverberates today,” the website said.
Resources
Year of Polygamy website
Feminist Mormon Housewives website | Facebook | Twitter
Related posts
Email: nbarrett@stgnews.com
Twitter: @STGnews
Copyright St. George News, SaintGeorgeUtah.com LLC, 2015, all rights reserved.The Black Mill is a New Weird comic from Paul Di Filippo, a treasure of science fiction, drawn by Orion Zangara and colored and lettered by Derek Chase.
The team's hoping to raise $2500, and $5 gets you an ebook of the comic; $10 gets you the ebook. poster and sticker -- and up! The team have successfully produced many comics, books, etc, between them I rate them as a very good risk for finishing the project and fulfilling their obligations to backers.
The unique vision we have nurtured among us features a tasty blend of science fiction and naturalism, steampunk and gothic, humor and pathos.
Imagine Mervyn Peake’s famous GORMENGHAST—an endless castle inhabited by quasi-medieval eccentrics—altered to a more industrial setting, and you have THE BLACK MILL.
The mill/factory of the title is an immense structure of stone and brick, wood and glass, iron and plaster. Its construction of indeterminate origin, this city-as-factory/factory-as-city sprawls for an indeterminate length across a distant, human-colonized planet.
The technology that powers the Mill is pre-steam water power. A subterranean river as big as the Amazon runs through the lowest level of the Mill. Vast waterwheels power a network of shafts and belts, delivering power to the machinery of the Mill. Lighting is strictly oil lamps; heat comes from coal stoves. (And as expected, fire is an everpresent danger. Portions of the Mill are blackened ruins.)
Raw materials flow into the Mill from the outside world. But no average worker in the Mill knows these sources.
Even the end product of the Mill is a mystery to the lower-class inhabitants. Various sub-units are made and sent off to other divisions of the Mill. But how they ultimately come together is a mystery.
The inhabitants of the Mill are divided into two classes: Workers and Bosses. Above these two groups sits the legendary and omnipotent, but never-glimpsed, Owner.Submitted by Logan Albright via Mises Canada,
As the threat of the ebola virus looms large and the Center for Disease Control issues what are undoubtedly hyperbolic projections of over a million casualties to the disease by January, we owe it to ourselves as libertarians to ask a few questions about the ethics of disease control. Is it acceptable to use force to isolate a person with a contagious disease from society, and if so, under what circumstances? How far are we permitted to go in the invasion of another person’s personal liberty in order to secure a safe environment for the rest of us?
We start, as always, with the Non-Aggression Principle, which states that it is impermissible to use force against another except in self-defense against an actual or threatened attack on another’s life or property. The fundamental issue with disease control, then, becomes whether or not exposing others to a disease qualifies as such an attack.
Clearly, the intentional infection of another human being would qualify. Jamming a hypodermic needle into someone’s skin would be an attack even in the absence of any virus. So would mailing someone an envelope filled with anthrax. So would intentional sexual contact while knowingly carrying a sexually transmitted disease. In all these cases, the intent to cause harm is clear, as well as the actual harm caused, and self-defense to prevent this harm would be entirely justified.
But what about the murkier case where a person carries a disease, with no wish to spread it to anyone else, but with the knowledge that going about his day to day life may result in others becoming exposed?
Philosophers typically try to come to grips with these dilemmas by resorting to analogy. One might argue that going about with a dangerous disease is akin carrying a gun which may at any moment randomly fire. Clearly, if a person were to go about with such a gun (suppose it is strapped to his body and cannot be removed) this would constitute a threat to others, and he would be obligated to take precautions to minimize the risk. But this analogy fails because someone would have had to arrange the gun in the first place, and their agency would bear part of the responsibility. Viruses are, after all, simply very small animals that happen to be quite dangerous. There is no one at fault for the affliction, as there would be for the weapon contrived above.
Another analogy might concern a man forced to go about chained to a vicious dog. By entering into society, the man with the dog endangers others, and it would be justified to prevent him from doing so. But again, the analogy fails because keeping a dog or any pet involves an act of conscious choice. We are responsible for the actions of our pets, but not for those of wild animals. If the dog merely chose to follow the man wherever he went, it would hardly seem just to confine him to his house for the safety of others, for he has not violated anyone’s rights. It is not his fault that the wild dog has a particularly strong attraction to him.
This last analogy may come closest to the truth of the virus situation – an uncontrollable organism attaches itself to us against our will, and thereby poses a threat to others.
From a technical standpoint, the afflicted person is not, through any means of his agency, aggressing against anyone else by going out in public with a communicable disease. The disease consists of autonomous creatures who act on their own, and while they lack will in the sense that man has will, they are still capable of acting without being directed, unlike a gun or a knife, or any other traditional instrument of aggression. It is unclear how the mere action of going outside violates anyone else’s rights, or why he should bear responsibility for the organisms temporarily using his body as a host.
Does intent matter? I think it is clear that it does. To return to the sexually transmitted disease example from earlier, this was clearly a violation of a partner’s rights by taking deliberate action to cause an infection, even if the disease may technically operate on its own. Contrast this with the virus sufferer who merely wants to get on with his daily life without harming anyone. Yet in the latter case the necessity for forceful quarantine is taken as given.
Let us examine this topic from another angle. Suppose instead of a disease like ebola, against which most people have little in the way of defenses, we concern ourselves with a mostly benign virus, to which only 1 in 10,000 people have a fatal susceptibility. Now, for residents of large cities, it is difficult to go about one’s daily business without coming into contact with a great number of people, and the odds are high that at least one would exhibit this sensitivity. Does this mean that carriers of this mostly benign virus are in violation of the rights of others by going outside? Should they be compelled to stay in their homes or move to the country? And if so, should the wearers of perfumes and the eaters of peanuts to whom some percentage of citizens have serious allergies be subject to the same treatment? If we were to apply this rule as a broad principle, covering every circumstance, it would be the rare individual indeed who be permitted any sort of independent activity.
To the defenders of the quarantines, then, this question appears to be one of a degrees. It would be wrong to prevent someone with the common cold from getting on a train, but completely justified if the disease were instead smallpox. Both are contagious, and both are capable of killing, but the relative probability of death is what makes the difference. But if the unintentional spread of disease violates the Non-Aggression Principle, why should this not apply to all diseases, even if they are never lethal? After all, it is still assault to hit someone with a wiffle bat, even if there is no chance of killing them.
As one final point, I’d like to address the element of pre-crime inherent in any attempts at forcible quarantine. A person who goes about with a potentially deadly virus, yet who has not yet infected anyone, and who indeed may never do so, for infection is not certain, has violated no one’s rights. Nor is he making any active and explicit threat to do so. To use force on him, therefore, is to punish him for a crime he has not, and may never have, committed. This sort of preemptive strike is usually condemned by the advocates of liberty as unjust.
So where does all this leave us? It seems clear that a broad application of the Non-Aggression Principle to all communicable diseases would paralyze society’s function and result in the forcible and permanent internment of a great many otherwise innocent citizens not consistent with the ethics of liberty. On the other hand, permitting people to go about with extremely deadly diseases seems equally destructive, even if we cannot justify imprisoning them against their will.
I regret that I cannot provide a more definite resolution to these questions, but this remains one of those thorny areas of libertarian thought that, like the issue of children’s rights, requires more debate and discussion. At present I am inclined against the use of coercive force to implement quarantines, as I |
by NASA in 1991. It defines a heliospheric mission for ICE consisting of investigations of coronal mass ejections in coordination with ground-based observations, continued cosmic ray studies, and the Ulysses probe. By May 1995, ICE was being operated under a low duty cycle, with some data-analysis support from the Ulysses project.
End of mission [ edit ]
On May 5, 1997, NASA ended the ICE mission, leaving only a carrier signal operating. The ISEE-3/ICE downlink bit rate was nominally 2048 bits per second during the early part of the mission, and 1024 bit/s during the Giacobini-Zinner comet encounter. The bit rate then successively dropped to 512 bit/s (on December 9, 1985), 256 bit/s (on January 5, 1987), 128 bit/s (on January 24, 1989) and finally to 64 bit/s (on December 27, 1991). Though still in space, NASA donated the craft to the Smithsonian Museum.[19]
By January 1990, ICE was in a 355-day heliocentric orbit with an aphelion of 1.03 AU, a perihelion of 0.93 AU and an inclination of 0.1 degree.
In 1999, NASA made brief contact with ICE to verify its carrier signal.
On September 18, 2008, NASA, with the help of KinetX, located ICE using the NASA Deep Space Network after discovering that it had not been powered off after the 1999 contact. A status check revealed that all but one of its 13 experiments were still functioning, and it still had enough propellant for 150 m/s (490 ft/s) of Δv.
It was determined to be possible to reactivate the spacecraft in 2014,[20] when it again made a close approach to Earth, and scientists discussed reusing the probe to observe more comets in 2017 or 2018.[21]
Reboot effort [ edit ]
Sometime after NASA's interest in the ICE waned, others realized that the spacecraft might be steered to pass close to another comet. A team of engineers, programmers, and scientists began to study the feasibility and challenges involved.[9]
In April 2014, its members formally announced their intentions to "recapture" the spacecraft for use, calling the effort the ISEE-3 Reboot Project. A team webpage said, "We intend to contact the ISEE-3 (International Sun-Earth Explorer) spacecraft, command it to fire its engine and enter an orbit near Earth, and then resume its original mission... If we are successful we intend to facilitate the sharing and interpretation of all of the new data ISEE-3 sends back via crowd sourcing."[22]
On May 15, the project reached its crowdfunding goal of US$125,000 on RocketHub, which was expected to cover the costs of writing the software to communicate with the probe, searching through the NASA archives for the information needed to control the spacecraft, and buying time on the dish antennas.[23] The project then set a "stretch goal" of $150,000, which it also met with a final total of $159,502 raised.[24]
The project members were working on deadline: if they got the spacecraft to change its orbit by late May or early June 2014, or in early July by using more fuel, it could use the Moon's gravity to get back into a useful halo orbit.[25][26][27]
Replacing lost hardware [ edit ]
Earlier in 2014, officials with the Goddard Space Flight Center said the Deep Space Network equipment necessary to transmit signals to the spacecraft had been decommissioned in 1999, and was too expensive to replace.[28] However, project members were able to find documentation for the original equipment and were able to simulate the complex modulator/demodulator electronics using modern software-defined radio (SDR) techniques and open-source programs from the GNU Radio project. They obtained the needed hardware, an off-the-shelf SDR transceiver[29] and power amplifier,[30] and installed it on the 305-meter Arecibo dish antenna on May 19, 2014.[30][31] Once they gained control of the spacecraft, the capture team planned to shift the primary ground station to the 21-meter dish located at Kentucky's Morehead State University Space Science Center.[30] The 20-meter dish antenna in Bochum Observatory, Germany, would be a support station.[30]
Although NASA was not funding the project, it made advisors available and gave approval to try to establish contact. On May 21, 2014, NASA announced that it had signed a Non-Reimbursable Space Act Agreement with the ISEE-3 Reboot Project. "This is the first time NASA has worked such an agreement for use of a spacecraft the agency is no longer using or ever planned to use again," officials said.[32]
On May 29, 2014, the reboot team successfully commanded the probe to switch into Engineering Mode to begin to broadcast telemetry.[33][34]
On June 26, project members using the Goldstone Deep Space Communications Complex DSS-24 antenna achieved synchronous communication and obtained the four ranging points needed to refine the spacecraft's orbital parameters.[35] The project team received approval from NASA to continue operations through at least July 16, and made plans to attempt the orbital maneuver in early July.[26][36]
On July 2, the reboot project fired the thrusters for the first time since 1987. They spun up the spacecraft to its nominal roll rate, in preparation for the upcoming trajectory correction maneuver in mid-July.[37][38]
On July 8, a longer sequence of thrusters firings failed, apparently due to loss of the nitrogen gas needed to pressurize the fuel tanks.[10][11][12]
On July 24, the ISEE-3 Reboot Team announced that all attempts to change orbit using the ISEE-3 propulsion system had failed. Instead, the team said, the ISEE-3 Interplanetary Citizen Science Mission would gather data as the spacecraft flies by the Moon on August 10 and enters a heliocentric orbit similar to Earth's. The team began shutting down propulsion components to maximize the electrical power available for the science experiments.[39]
On July 30, the team announced that it still planned to acquire data from as much of ISEE-3's 300-day orbit as possible. With five of the 13 instruments on the spacecraft still working, the science possibilities included listening for gamma-ray bursts, where observations from additional locations in the Solar System can be valuable. The team was also recruiting additional receiving sites around the globe to improve diurnal coverage, in order to upload additional commands while the spacecraft is close to Earth and later to receive data.[40]
On August 10 at 18:16 UTC, the spacecraft passed about 15,600 km (9,700 mi) from the surface of the Moon. It will continue in its heliocentric orbit, and will return to the vicinity of Earth in 2031.[41]
On September 25, 2014, the Reboot team announced that contact with the probe was lost on September 16. It is unknown whether contact can be reestablished because the probe's exact orbit is uncertain. The spacecraft's post-lunar flyby orbit takes it further from the Sun, causing electrical power available from its solar arrays to drop, and its battery failed in 1981. Reduced power could have caused the craft to enter a safe mode, from which it may be impossible to awaken without the precise orbital location information needed to point transmissions at the craft.[13]
Spacecraft design [ edit ]
The ISEE-3 (later ICE), undergoing testing and evaluation.
The ICE spacecraft is a barrel-like cylindrical shape covered by solar panels. Four long antennas protrude equidistant around the circumference of the spacecraft, spanning 91 metres (299 ft).[42] It has a dry mass of 390 kg (860 lb) and can generate nominal power of 173 watts.
Payload [ edit ]
ICE carries 13 scientific instruments to measure plasmas, energetic particles, waves, and fields.[2][15] As of July 2014, five were known to be functional. It does not carry a camera or imaging system. Its detectors measure high energy particles such as X- and gamma-rays, solar wind, plasma and cosmic particles. A data handling system gathers the scientific and engineering data from all systems in the spacecraft and formats them into a serial stream for transmission. The transmitter output power is five watts.
Scientific payload and experiments [ edit ]
Solar Wind Plasma Experiment, failed after February 26, 1980
Vector Helium Magnetometer
Low Energy Cosmic Ray Experiment, designed to measure solar, interplanetary, and magnetospheric energetic ions
Medium Energy Cosmic Ray Experiment, 1-500 MeV/n, Z = 1-28; Electrons: 2-10 MeV
High Energy Cosmic Ray Experiment, H to Ni, 20-500 MeV/n
Plasma Wave Instrument
Low Energy Proton Experiment, also known as the Energetic Particle Anisotropy Spectrometer (EPAS), designed to study low-energy solar proton acceleration and propagation processes in interplanetary space
Cosmic Ray Electrons and Nuclei
X-Rays and Electrons Instrument, to provide continuous coverage of solar-flare X rays and transient cosmic gamma-ray bursts
Radio Mapping Experiment, 30 kHz - 2 MHz, to map the trajectories of type III solar bursts
Plasma Composition Experiment
Heavy Isotope Spectrometer Telescope
Ground Based Solar Studies Experiment
Publications [ edit ]
Birmingham, Thomas J.; Dessler, Alexander J. (1998). Comet Encounters. American Geophysical Union. Bibcode:1998coen.book.....B. ISBN 978-1-118-66875-7.
Ogilvie, K. W.; Durney, A.; von Rosenvinge, T. (July 1978). "Descriptions of Experimental Investigations and Instruments for the ISEE Spacecraft". IEEE Transactions on Geoscience Electronics. GE-16 (3): 151–153. Bibcode:1978ITGE...16..151.. doi:10.1109/TGE.1978.294535.
von Rosenvinge, Tycho T.; Brandt, John C.; Farquhar, Robert W. (April 1986). "The International Cometary Explorer Mission to Comet Giacobini-Zinner". Science. 232 (4748): 353–356. Bibcode:1986Sci...232..353V. doi:10.1126/science.232.4748.353. PMID 17792143.WASHINGTON, May 7 -- Thanks to the ability of astronomers to detect the presence of extrasolar planets orbiting distant stars, scientists today are able to examine hundreds of solar systems. Now researchers at the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics in Cambridge, Mass. have created an "astro-comb" to help astronomers detect lighter planets, more like Earth, around distant stars. The Harvard group will present their findings at the 2009 Conference on Lasers and Electro Optics/International Quantum Electronics Conference (CLEO/IQEC), which takes place May 31 to June 5 at the Baltimore Convention Center.
In most cases, extrasolar planets can't be seen directly--the glare of the nearby star is too great--but their influence can be discerned through spectroscopy, which analyzes the energy spectrum of the light coming from the star. Not only does spectroscopy reveal the identity of the atoms in the star (each element emits light at a certain characteristic frequency), it can also tell researchers how fast the star is moving away or toward Earth, courtesy of the Doppler effect, which occurs whenever a source of waves is itself in motion. By recording the change in the frequency of the waves coming from or bouncing off of an object, scientists can deduce the velocity of the object.
This process is used to judge the speed of automobiles, storm systems, fastballs, and stars. How can it be used to deduce the presence of a planet? Though the planet might weigh millions of times less than the star, the star will be jerked around a tiny amount owing to the gravity interaction between star and planet. This jerking motion causes the star to move toward or away from Earth slightly in a way that depends on the planet's mass and its nearness to the star. The better the spectroscopy used in this whole process, the better will be the identification of the planet in the first place and the better will be the determination of planetary properties.
Right now standard spectroscopy techniques can determine star movements to within a few meters per second (m/sec). In tests, the Harvard researchers are now able to calculate star velocity shifts of less than 1 m/sec, allowing them to more accurately pinpoint the planet's location.
Smithsonian researcher David Phillips says that he and his colleagues expect to reach a velocity resolution of 60 cm/sec, and maybe even 1 cm/sec, which when applied to the activities of large telescopes presently under construction, would open new possibilities in astronomy and astrophysics, including simpler detection of more Earth-like planets.
With this new approach, Harvard astronomers achieve their great improvement using a frequency comb as the basis for the astro-comb. A special laser system is used to emit light not at a single energy but a series of energies (or frequencies), evenly spaced across a wide range of values. A plot of these narrowly-confined energy components would look like the teeth of a comb, hence the name frequency comb. The energy of these comb-like laser pulses is known so well that they can be used to calibrate the energy of light coming in from the distant star. In effect, the frequency comb approach sharpens the spectroscopy process. The resultant astro-comb should enable a further expansion of extrasolar planetary detection.
The astro-comb method has been tried out on a medium-sized telescope in Arizona and will soon be installed on the much larger William Herschel Telescope, which resides on a mountaintop in the Canary Islands.
###
Presentation CMII1, "Femtosecond Laser Frequency Comb for Precision Astrophysical Spectroscopy," Chih-Hao Li et al, 3:45 p.m., Monday, June 1.
ABOUT CLEO/IQEC
With a distinguished history as one of the industry's leading events on laser science, the Conference on Lasers and Electro-Optics and the International Quantum Electronics Conference (CLEO/IQEC) is where laser technology was first introduced. CLEO/IQEC combines the strength of peer-reviewed scientific programming with an applications-focused exhibition to showcase the present and future of this technology. Sponsored by the American Physical Society's (APS) Laser Science Division, the Institute of Electronic Engineers (IEEE) Photonics Society and the Optical Society (OSA), CLEO/IQEC provides an educational forum, complete with a dynamic Plenary, short courses, tutorials, workshops and more, on topics as diverse as its attendee base whose broad spectrum of interests range from biomedicine to defense to optical communications and beyond. For more information, visit the conference's Web site at www.cleoconference.org.DARPA (the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency) announced last Tuesday that it plans to build a chip that would allow the human brain to communicate directly with computers. Our minds would essentially be speaking in binary. At least, that’s the ultimate goal. But how feasible is this, really? Can we ever truly link our brains to computers in a way that is verifiably cyborg? A Brief History of Talking to Computers It may seem like science fiction, but in many ways, the tech that allows our brains to directly “talk” with computers is already a reality. To begin with, we have been working with several types of brain chips over the years. In fact, we saw the first wireless brain-to-computer a few years back (in 2013). However, the technology did not turn out as expected. It was rather slower than what was ideal and the communication method was a little convoluted.
Then, neuroscientist Miguel Nicolelis built the brain-controlled exoskeleton that allowed a paralyzed man to kick the first ball of the 2014 World Cup. You can learn more about his development in the video below: And of course, this was only a beginning. Since this time, we have created a number of devices that allow individuals to communicate with computers in various ways. But how does this communication work? Known as brain-computer interfacing (BCI) technology, most of the tech mentioned here allows individuals to use their brainwaves to control an external device.
Since the early 1990s, for more than 2o years, Jonathan R. Wolpaw, a neurologist and chief of the Wadsworth Center Laboratory of Nervous System Disorders, has led a team of researchers in developing a BCI system to help the profoundly paralyzed communicate with the outside world. The electrodes record the user’s electrical brain waves, which the computer analyzes and translates into specific commands, such as writing e-mails, selecting computer icons, or moving robotic devices. No surgery is required and users typically master the system within an hour or two. And since Wolpaw’s early work, we have advanced at record pace. OpenBCI is just one company that’s dedicated to making it possible for everyone to track their biodata and use their brain waves to communicate with computers, like their robotic hand pictured here. Thanks to this group, researchers, students, and interested individuals around the globe can access their brain waves and use them to reach out to various technologies.
This isn’t exactly “communicating” with a computer in one sense of the word, as the computer can’t exactly speak back to you. However, it does demonstrate that we are getting closer to a true interface—a true back and forth communication. Indeed, we are actively working on this tech on the governmental level. President Obama announced the BRAIN initiative in April 2013. The goal is multifaceted. Scientists work on programs that aim to help the human body heal itself through the neuromodulation of organ functions using ultraminiaturized devices. They also work on fully implantable neural-interface microsystems that can communicate wirelessly with external modules (such as a prosthesis). They work on devices to facilitate the formation of new memories and the retrieval of existing ones in individuals who have lost these capacities as a result of traumatic brain injury or neurological disease… In short, yes, we can (and we are) using our brains to communicate with computers. We’re just going to get a lot more efficient in the coming year.
Creating a True Way to Communicate So let’s get to this new project. It has been called the Neural Engineering System Design (NESD). In a press release, the agency clarified the purpose of the work, asserting, “A new DARPA program aims to develop an implantable neural interface able to provide unprecedented signal resolution and data-transfer bandwidth between the human brain and the digital world. The interface would serve as a translator, converting between the electrochemical language used by neurons in the brain and the ones and zeros that constitute the language of information technology.” In the DARPA agency’s statement, they note that “current brain-computer interfaces are akin to two supercomputers trying to talk to each other using an old 300-baud modem.” The technology is not fast enough to truly imitate the transmission of information. However, they are trying to fix that. If DARPA is successful with this new technology, the potential is mind blowing.
Will human beings be finally be able to instruct machines what to do by simply thinking, and could this lead to tech that allows computers to respond? It is very possible. This project is definitely one to look out for.About 7 years ago we pointed to two research reports as “evidence of the growing capability of DNA scaffolds to support complex and interactive functions” (Advancing nanotechnology by organizing functional components on addressable DNA scaffolds). One of the research groups featured in that post has just published another paper using DNA cages to hold enzymes and their substrates in the proper position to make reactions more efficient. A hat tip to nanowerk for reprinting this Arizona State University news release “Chemical Cages: new technique advances synthetic biology“:
Living systems rely on a dizzying variety of chemical reactions essential to development and survival. Most of these involve a specialized class of protein molecules—the enzymes.
In a new study, Hao Yan, director of the Center for Molecular Design and Biomimetics at Arizona State University’s Biodesign Institute presents a clever means of localizing and confining enzymes and the substrate molecules they bind with, speeding up reactions essential for life processes.
The research, which appears in the current issue of the journal Nature Communications [OPEN], could have far-reaching applications in fields ranging from improving industrial efficiencies to pioneering new medical diagnostics, guiding targeted drug delivery and producing smart materials. The work also promises to shed new light on particulars of cellular organization and metabolism.
The technique involves the design of specialized, nanometer-scale cages, which self-assemble from lengths of DNA. The cages hold enzyme and substrate in close proximity, considerably accelerating the rate of reactions and shielding them from degradation.
“We have been designing programmable DNA nanostructures with increasing complexity for many years, and it is now time to ask what can we do with these structures,” Yan says. “There are numerous other applications from this emerging technology. Through our interdisciplinary collaborative effort, we here describe the use of designer DNA nanocages to compartmentalize enzymatic reactions in a confined environment. Drawing inspiration from Nature, we have uncovered interesting properties, some unexpected.”
Zhao Zhao, a researcher in the Center for Molecular Design and Biomimetics was the lead author of the paper, which was co-authored with researchers from ASU as well as the Department of Chemistry, Rutgers and the Department of Chemistry, Single Molecule Analysis Group, University of Michigan.
Enzyme world
As chemical activators for virtually every reaction in the body, enzymes are key participants in the normal activity of cells, tissues, fluids, and organs. Hundreds of thousands of metabolic enzymes are present in the human body, involved in diverse activities including DNA copying and repair and the transformation of glucose into useable energy. Elsewhere, some 22 digestive enzymes break down carbohydrates (amylases), fats (lipases ) and sugars (disaccharides), while so-called protease enzymes digest proteins.
Enzymes tend to be highly specific, not only in the useful functions they perform, but the precise substrates with which they will work. Substrate molecules of exactly the right size and shape bind with their appropriate enzymes as the correct key fits into the ridges and grooves of a lock.
Substrates latch onto enzyme molecules at a particular region known as the active site. Once enzyme and substrate have combined, a chemical product is formed and then released, returning the enzyme to its original configuration where it is ready to operate on a new molecule of substrate.
In order for such reactions to take place in an efficient manner, Nature has devised methods of compartmentalization, forming natural reactor sites where enzyme-substrate reactions unfold. The cell itself is such a compartment, as are various membrane-bound organelles found in eukaryotes, (cells containing a nucleus), including mitochondria, lysosomes and peroxisomes.
Compartmentalization of reactants helps to overcome a variety of challenges, bringing binding chemicals into cozy proximity, isolating enzyme-substrate complexes from competing reaction chemicals, improving the yield of product molecules produced and reducing the toxicity various intermediary chemicals can sometimes cause.
In order to induce or catalyze chemical reactions for a variety of purposes, synthetic biologists have copied a page from Nature’s recipe book, designing artificial compartments fabricated from proteins, lipids or the nucleic acids found in DNA, (as in the current study).
Close encounters
Yan and his colleagues designed their synthetic reactors to house enzymes and their substrates, allowing chemical conversions to take place in a controlled environment. Each minute structure, measuring just 54 nanometers across, is something like a Faberge egg whose separate halves fit together to encapsulate their chemical contents. (A nanometer is one billionth of a meter or roughly 80,000 times smaller than the width of a human hair.)
Using the base pairing properties of DNA’s four nucleotides, labeled A, T, C and G allows nanoscale architects like Yan to construct myriad forms in two- and three-dimensions. In the new study, DNA nanocages were used to encapsulate metabolic enzymes with high assembly yield and fine-tuned control over reactants and products.
The construction of the nanocages takes place in two steps. First, individual enzymes are attached into open half-cage structures. Then, the half-cages are fitted together into a full, closed nanocage. To create the half-cages, a technique known as DNA origami is used. Lengths of viral DNA are prepared to self-assemble into a honeycomb lattice, with A nucleotides pairing with C and T with G [ sic ].
The open-sided half cages of the DNA nanocages allow the access of large protein molecules into the nanocage’s internal cavity. The two half-cages are fitted together with the aid of short bridge DNA strands that bind with complementary DNA sequences extending from the edges of either half-cage, (see accompanying animation). The small gaps on each of the top and bottom surfaces of the DNA nanocage allow the diffusion of small molecules across the DNA walls.
Probing the nanoscale
To examine the resulting structures, Transmission Electron Microscopy was used, along with gel electrophoresis and single molecule fluorescence experiments which demonstrated that close to 100 percent of the DNA segments properly formed half-cage structures and more than 90 percent formed full cages.
The study examined six different enzymes, ranging in size from the smallest, which measured ~44kD (kilodaltons) to the largest, ~ 450 kD. All six enzymes were successfully encapsulated in nanocages, though the yields varied according to enzyme size. The largest enzyme examined, known as β-galactosidase, showed the lowest yield of 64 percent.
Next, the activity of enzyme-substrate pairs was evaluated. In addition to bringing the enzyme-substrate pair into closer binding proximity, encapsulation in the nanocage is also believed to facilitate activity through the unique electrical charge density conditions within the nanocage.
Subsequent experiments demonstrated that most of the effect on enzyme-substrate activity in nanocages is due to the unique charge environment within nanocages, rather than enzyme-substrate proximity. The authors suggest that encapsulated enzymes exhibit higher activity within densely packed DNA cages as a result of the highly ordered, hydrogen-bonded water environment surrounding them.
An evaluation of enzyme activity showed a 4- to 10-fold increase for enzymes encapsulated in nanocages, compared with the activity of free enzymes. Enzyme turnover rate—defined as the maximum number of chemical conversions of substrate molecules per second—was inversely correlated with the size of encapsulated enzymes, with the smallest enzyme yielding the highest turnover.
Future cages
The DNA cages demonstrated their resiliency during the experiments, retaining their structural form throughout the enzymatic reactions. They also protected encapsulated enzymes from deactivation due to digestive chemicals, while permitting the uninterrupted diffusion of small-molecule substrates and reaction products through the nanopores of the DNA cage.
Encapsulation in nanocages was shown to increase the fraction of active enzyme molecules and their individual turnover numbers. The method thus provides a new molecular tool to modify the local environment surrounding enzymes and their substrates, opening the door to new applications in smart materials and biomedical applications. Among the latter are futuristic, programmable cages that could be used as nanoscale delivery mechanisms for a wide range of therapeutic agents.This article is over 1 year old
Demonstrations against the acquittal of officer Jason Stockley over the death of Anthony Lamar Smith enter fourth night
'Militaristic and intimidating': St Louis police criticized as protests stretch on
As protests over the acquittal of the former St Louis police officer Jason Stockley moved into their fourth night, some observers said the response from law enforcement had grown heavy-handed, and that local and state authorities had learned little from their actions during the Ferguson protests.
Stockley, who is white, was accused by prosecutors of murdering Anthony Lamar Smith, who was black, following a high-speed car chase.
Police officers in St Louis chant after breaking up protests Read more
During intense demonstrations on Sunday night in downtown St Louis, police were accused of co-opting and chanting the popular protest slogan “whose streets? Our streets”. The interim police chief, Lawrence O’Toole, whose department made more than 120 arrests, said at a press conference that St Louis police “owned the night”.
Cara Spencer, alderman for the city’s 20th ward, said she was “deeply disappointed” by the rhetoric.
“The chants were disheartening and ‘we own the night’ sets a bad tone,” she said.
While acknowledging the need to protect the safety of officers, Spencer also criticized law enforcement’s response for its militarized overtones.
“Seeing troops marching down the street and in tanks or humvees is a horrifying scene to behold,” she said. “The protest leadership deserves kudos for asking everyone to disperse at a reasonable hour. The people who remain are agitators with different goals.”
Play Video 1:00 St Louis protests continue for third day – video
Marching in unison through the downtown streets and dressed in riot gear, police seemed to take a firmer approach on Sunday, after several evenings of intense protests, arrests and property damage around the city.
Downtown resident Christian Misner, who watched some of the street scenes unfold in front of his home, said he was taken aback by the tone of the police response.
“It was militaristic, coordinated, antagonistic and intimidating,” he said. “They were chanting and hitting the ground and their shin guards in unison with sticks.”
Misner said there was a disconnect between the behavior of the crowd and the response of the police officers.
“I saw no bottle-throwing, spitting or anything else,” he said. “Everyone was hanging out, talking, taking photos and video. Only two people were loudly vocalizing their frustration.”
On Friday evening, protesters surrounded the home of the St Louis mayor, Lyda Krewson, breaking windows and throwing paint.
Protest leaders, encouraging use of the chant “you kill our kids, we kill your economy”, have vowed to sustain large public demonstrations in an effort to disrupt the city’s economy. While protests after the teenager Michael Brown’s death in Ferguson were largely confined to a few blocks within that small St Louis suburb, these demonstrations have targeted areas of the city with concentrated wealth and business activity.
These tactics have already borne fruit: the rock band U2 and singer Ed Sheeran both canceled scheduled concerts in St Louis as a result of the protests. Protests have also resulted in shortened business hours, canceled hotel bookings and depressed retail and restaurant activity.
Many protesters believe economic disruption is the best option for effecting change.
“This was a bad verdict,” said one, Percy Woodbury. “Right is right and wrong is wrong, and there is no justice here.”
On Monday evening, protesters reassembled in the city’s Delmar Loop district, the scene of Saturday’s protests, hoping to continue their momentum. As the day turned to night, the protests remained peaceful, following the pattern of early demonstrations.
After a brief demonstration there, protesters moved on to downtown St Louis, where they gathered outside city hall.
A crowd of several hundred people chanted Smith’s name and held two minutes of silence in his memory.
Shortly thereafter, heavy rains began to pour, though the crowd grew louder in response and did not disperse. Protests remained peaceful.
Spencer, who said St Louis police officials in her ward had had some success at deepening community links at a neighborhood level, called for better communication between those coordinating law enforcement activity and local leaders.
“A lot of people aren’t part of the conversation,” she said. “We need to bring in people who are working to change the system.”Am I the only one who upon reading that the governor of Texas has now referred to the possibility of seceding from the union as one of "a lot of different scenarios", wondered why the good people of Texas hadn't thought of that before the 2000 election. On a more serious note, this latest GOP tactic seems, at first, more surreal than offensive. Texas, of course, will not secede from the US. The threat of secession is not a realistic one but it suggests that the fabric of our democracy may be woven far less tightly than we would like to think.
Extreme partisan rancor is never pretty, but in a democracy like ours probably far more common and unavoidable than we would like to think. Dressing up in revolutionary war costumes, calling for the overthrow of the government and waving teabags at the behest of wealthy right wing funders is, while a little pathetic and strange, well within the realm of constitutionally protected behavior and may even play a somewhat constructive role in our democracy. The notion that Obama is a socialist because he wants a minor tax increase for a tiny fraction of Americans and would prefer to spend our treasure on helping people rather than on conducting wars of dubious origin or intention is more than a little strange, but if a small minority of people want to assert it, that is again well within their rights.
Floating the idea of secession over this, even in a somewhat tongue in cheek manner, is a very different story. The history of secession in the US is not a pretty one. It was tried once and the seceding states were brought back into the union, but the cost was high as the country was torn apart by what was, at that time, one of the bloodiest wars in human history.
The issues dividing Republicans and Democrats today are relatively mild, mainstream partisan issues, obviously not at all comparable to those which divided our country on the eve of the Civil War. Democrats and Republicans are fighting over a few percentage points in the tax rate for the richest Americans, increased domestic spending, and greater environmental, financial and other regulation. This is, frankly, ordinary and not all that interesting partisan fare which, in many respects, was not too different during the administrations of Roosevelt, Reagan, Clinton or many other presidents. That is why these threats and rhetoric are so concerning. Nobody really threatens secession over a mild increase in the tax rate or over a spending plan. Nobody really calls for revolution because the government is trying to spend too much on infrastructure.
Why then are Republicans willing to talk about revolution, secession and other ideas that would destabilize our country and our democracy. One hopes that most of this can be simply chalked up to a party that is weak, defeated, directionless and out of ideas, but it may not be that simple. Perhaps the demonstrators and, more significantly their leaders, feel that for some existential, and undoubtedly irrational, reason the Obama presidency is a profound threat to their worldview, values and vision of the US. If that is the case we can only hope that these people remain on the margins. This is likely to occur as Obama's worldview, values and vision not only reflect those of a huge plurality of Americans, but will likely to continue to become more, not less, accepted over time.
The teabag protests and calls for secession and revolution followed a few days after a Homeland Security report outlined the threat posed by right wing extremists. This report, which, given that the second worst terrorist attack in our history was perpetrated by right wing extremists, may be something of an elucidation of the obvious, was met by predictable protests in many conservative corners. However, those on the far right can't have it both ways, calling for revolution and secession on the one hand, while protesting a report raising concerns about right wing extremist violence on the other.
Undoubtedly, many will argue that the words of Governor Perry should not be taken seriously because they were said in the excitement of a rally and were certainly meant to be hyperbolic. This is not convincing because public officials understand that words and statements matter. That is why elected officials are constantly making speeches, talking to reporters and sending out emails.Former WSOF two-division champion David Branch was among 11 fighters to receive an extended medical suspension in the aftermath of UFC Pittsburgh. The Pennsylvania State Athletic Commission on Monday released the event’s finalized medical suspension report.
Branch suffered a second-round submission defeat to former UFC middleweight champion Luke Rockhold in the night’s main event. As a result, Branch will be forced to sit out 45 days before returning to active competition, per PSAC officials.
The only fighter to receive a suspension stretching longer than the usual sentence was UFC heavyweight prospect Zu Anyanwu, who suffered a split decision loss to Justin Ledet on the night’s main card opener. Anyanwu will be required to seek physician clearance on a potential right eye injury or face an indefinite suspension.
UFC Fight Night: Rockhold vs. Branch took place Sept. 16 at the PPG Paints Arena in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania. The night’s main card aired live on FOX Sports 1.
A complete list of UFC Pittsburgh’s medical suspensions can be seen below.Perhaps the tensest moment in Saturday's Republican presidential debate came when Donald Trump finally said something so outrageous that the other candidates onstage and even the debate audience closed ranks against him. Here is what Trump did: He accused George W. Bush of launching the Iraq War based on a lie: You do whatever you want. You call it whatever you want. I want to tell you. They lied. They said there were weapons of mass destruction, there were none. And they knew there were none. There were no weapons of mass destruction. Trump's 10-second history of the war articulated it as many Americans, who largely consider that war a mistake, now understand it. And, indeed, Bush did justify the war as a quest for Iraqi weapons of mass destruction, which turned out not to exist. The other Republican candidates, who have had this fight with Trump before, did not defend the war as their party has in the past, but rather offered the party's standard line of the moment, which is that Bush had been innocently misled by "faulty intelligence." But neither version of history is really correct. The US primarily invaded Iraq not because of lies or because of bad intelligence, though both featured. In fact, it invaded because of an ideology. A movement of high-minded ideologues had, throughout the 1990s, become obsessed with deposing Saddam Hussein. When they assumed positions of power under Bush in 2001, they did not seek to trick America into that war, but rather tricked themselves. In 9/11, and in fragments of intelligence that more objective minds would have rejected, they could see only validation for their abstract and untested theories about the world — theories whose inevitable and obvious conclusion was an American invasion of Iraq. This is perhaps not as satisfying as the "Bush lied, people died" bumper sticker history that has since taken hold on much of the left and elements of the Tea Party right. Nor is it as convenient as the Republican establishment's polite fiction that Bush was misled by "faulty intelligence." If the problem were merely that Bush lied, then |
Subsets and Splits
No community queries yet
The top public SQL queries from the community will appear here once available.