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Bringing Science and Spirit Together by Charles Tart
Charles Tart, Ph.D. reconciles the scientific and spiritual worlds by looking at empirical evidence for the existence of paranormal phenomena that point toward our spiritual nature, including telepathy, clairvoyance, precognition, psychokinesis, and psychic healing.
Science seems to tell us that we are all meaningless products of blind biological and chemical forces, leading meaningless lives that will eventually end in death. The truth is that unseen forces such as telepathy, clairvoyance, precognition, psychokinesis, psychic healing, and other phenomena inextricably link us to the spiritual world, and while many skeptics and scientists deny the existence of these spiritual phenomena, the experiences of millions of people indicate that they do take place.
In this book, copublished with the Institute of Noetic Sciences (IONS), transpersonal psychologist Charles Tart – who was trained at M.I.T., UNC-Chapel Hill, and Stanford University – presents over fifty years of scientific research conducted at the nation's leading universities that proves humans do have natural spiritual impulses and abilities. The End of Materialism presents an elegant argument for the union of science and spirituality in light of this new evidence, and explains why a truly rational viewpoint must address the reality of a spiritual world. Tart's work marks the beginning of an evidence-based spiritual awakening that will profoundly influence your understanding of the deeper forces at work in our lives.
The Oxford Handbook of Psychology and Spirituality Edited by Lisa J. Miller
Postmaterial spiritual psychology posits that consciousness can contribute to the unfolding of material events and that the human brain can detect broad, non-material communications. In this regard, this emerging field of postmaterial psychology marks a stark departure from psychology's traditional assumptions about materialism, making this text particularly attractive to the current generation of students in psychology and related health and wellness disciplines.
The Oxford Handbook of Psychology and Spirituality, edited by Lisa Miller, Ph.D., Director of Columbia University’s Spirituality & Mind Body Institute, codifies the leading empirical evidence in the support and application of postmaterial psychological science. Sections in this volume include:
personality and social psychology factors and implications
spiritual development and culture
spiritual dialogue, prayer, and intention in Western mental health
Eastern traditions and psychology
physical health and spirituality
positive psychology
scientific advances and applications related to spiritual psychology
With chapters from leading scholars in psychology, medicine, physics, and biology, The Oxford Handbook of Psychology and Spirituality is an interdisciplinary reference for a rapidly emerging approach to contemporary science. This overarching work provides both a foundation and a roadmap for what is truly a new ideological age.Oakeshott, to run in NSW seat of Cowper, says in ‘unlikely’ event of hung parliament he would give Malcolm Turnbull first shot at forming majority
The former independent MP Rob Oakeshott has announced he will contest the 2016 federal election.
Oakeshott announced in a Facebook post on Friday he would run in Cowper in New South Wales, not his former seat of Lyne, as his home town of Port Macquarie had moved in the latest redistribution.
Explaining his reason for attempting to re-enter parliament, Oakeshott cited poor local representation and lack of progress on tax reform and constitutional recognition for Indigenous Australians.
Oakeshott said in the “unlikely” event of a hung parliament he would give the incumbent, Malcolm Turnbull, the first shot at forming a workable majority.
Australian election 2016: Rob Oakeshott will contest election – politics live Read more
Oakeshott explained he had retired in 2013 because the hung parliament was “exhausting” and the difficulty of avoiding a chaotic double dissolution had “risked my health and reputation”.
“In 2013, I didn’t think I would ever want to see politics again. I was hoping the local MPs for the area would continue building on the community work around education and health, and that they would continue to focus on the many disadvantaged communities of our region.”
But Oakeshott said pre-election promises of comprehensive tax reform and constitutional recognition of first Australians had “sadly, both... failed or ‘flat-lined’ over the past three years”.
“And I haven’t heard a peep out of the local MPs about this failure to reform, which is all the more disappointing.”
Oakeshott said: “Over time, I realised I had more to give, and the politics was still in my blood. I believe the representation of the mid-north coast is currently poor, and I strongly believe I can do better for all of us.”
Guardian Live election special event with Lenore Taylor and Katharine Murphy Read more
“Because of this, I feel an obligation to stand, and to allow voters the choice to either agree or disagree. Ultimately, I am hoping this decision creates a referendum on representation in Cowper, and whether the community deserves better. I think we do.”
Cowper is held by the National party’s Luke Hartsuyker, who won 53% of the primary vote and 59% in two-party preferred terms at the 2013 election. Oakeshott’s old seat of Lyne is held by David Gillespie for the Nationals.
Oakeshott denied his nomination was a last-minute decision.
“I have nominated as per the normal rules of the Australian Electoral Commission. In an unusually long 10-week campaign, it is understandable why some people may think this is a ‘last-minute’ decision. It is not,” he said.
“Having been through six elections, announcements are normally made in line with the AEC rules.”
Explaining why he chose to stand for Cowper, Oakeshott said: “I felt it appropriate to stand in the seat I live in. I haven’t moved, my home hasn’t moved, the boundaries of electorates have.”
In addition to Port Macquarie, Cowper takes in Coffs Harbour, Bellingen, Nambucca, Kempsey and the Macleay valley.
Oakeshott said he had learned a lot and “reflected deeply” on the “extraordinary events of 2010”. Along with independents Tony Windsor, Andrew Wilkie and the Greens, Oakeshott made a deal with Julia Gillard to guarantee confidence votes and supply in the hung parliament after the 2010 election.
“Every election is different, and the numbers and personalities always change. Lightning never strikes twice,” he said.
Oakeshott said in 17 years in state and federal parliament he had never supported a no-confidence motion or blocked supply. “It would be up to party leaders to reach out if they felt the need to formalise arrangements with a piece of paper to help form government.
“This is therefore a matter for Malcolm Turnbull. As prime minister, he would have ‘first go’ in this process of forming government in the House of Representatives. I would not block his efforts to do so, and would accept his phone call if he wanted to formalise something in more detail.”
He reminded voters the prime minister remained in office during and after an election, so “they therefore have the responsibility to lead on any process of negotiation, in the unlikely event that it may occur”.
Speaking on Sky after the announcement, Oakeshott took aim at Turnbull’s criticism of minor parties and refusal to deal with them in a hung parliament.
“It’s sad to hear the leader of our nation saying he will only talk to people in his party and nobody else. That is a problem for reform in the future,” Oakeshott said.
“The Coalition should talk to others in Senate and the House of Representatives to get things done. [Turnbull] isn’t going to control Senate – so the Coalition has got to stop pretending they can only talk to themselves and themselves alone.”
Asked about the possibility of Oakeshott running before the announcement on Friday, Labor’s Anthony Albanese said: “I think that Rob Oakeshott is a very decent man and I am certainly prepared to say that. But that is a decision for him. I frankly would be very surprised.”
Innovation minister Christopher Pyne said: “Time to hang up the boots, I think.”Apple’s steadfast refusal to outfit its MacBook line with a touchscreen option is a well-known industry holdout. We’d much sooner get a massive, 15-inch iPad Pro than the company go back on its years of anti-Microsoft marketing, and the awkward half measure of the new MacBook Pro Touch Bar.
So for those eager to swipe their fingers on the display of an Apple notebook, there is one option. AirBar, a magnetic sensor that sits below the bottom edge of a laptop’s display, will grant you all the glory of a touchscreen device for just $99.
The gadget supposedly emits an invisible light field that allows standard screens to receive input from hand gestures. It plugs into the laptop via USB to transmit those gestures into software commands like swiping between windows and pinching and zooming.
AirBar was previously available for 15.6-inch Windows laptops. Starting today, you can place a preorder for one compatible with the MacBook Air 13-inch, with shipping slated to start in March. Neonode, the maker of Airbar, says it will launch support for other Apple laptops later this year. You can of course buy an AirBar to use with a PC laptop. But then again, there’s no shortage of actual touchscreen options in the Windows world.Story highlights Hillary Clinton vowed Monday to hold people who kill cops accountable
She made her comments at the NAACP conference in Cincinnati
Cincinnati (CNN) Hillary Clinton responded to the shooting of three officers in Baton Rouge, Louisiana, on Monday, arguing that the killings not only show the need to come down hard on people who kill officers, but also how the shootings do damage to people pushing criminal justice reform.
The presumptive Democratic presidential nominee, urging people to see the world through both the eyes of officers and African American men who have been targeted by law enforcement, told the NAACP at their conference in Cincinnati that "empathy works both ways. We have to try to see the world from their eyes, too."
Clinton's comments come a day after Gavin Long, a 29-year old ex-Marine, opened fire on officers in Baton Rouge, killing officers Montrell Jackson, Matthew Gerald and Brad Garafola. The shootings come weeks after officers shot Alton Sterling on July 5, a shooting that sparked protests and outrage across the country.
"This madness has to stop," Clinton said. "Watching the news on Baton Rouge yesterday, my heart broke. Not just for those officers and their grieving families, but for all of us."
Clinton said killing officers is a "terrible crime" because those men and women "represent the rule of law itself."
Read MoreAn arsenal found in Mexico included at least five assault rifles that U.S authorities trace to a federal operation gone badly awry, according to government documents.
The discovery appears to confirm for the first time fears cited by Republican lawmakers that a Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives operation called Fast and Furious failed to stop guns from ending up with drug gangs in Mexico.
The Fast and Furious program, run by the ATF's Phoenix office, monitored weapons purchases by suspected gun traffickers who were believed to be funneling weapons to Mexican drug cartels. Some lawmakers say ATF didn't have the means to track the guns and shouldn't have used such tactics.
An ATF spokesman declined to comment, citing ongoing investigations, including one ordered by Attorney General Eric Holder that the Justice Department's inspector general is conducting.
Ricardo Alday, spokesman for the Mexican Embassy in Washington, also declined to comment.
Problems with Fast and Furious are emerging as one of the biggest controversies at the ATF since a lethal 1993 raid on the Waco, Texas, compound of a religious sect known as the Branch Davidians. Fast and Furious, which became public after ATF whistle-blowers contacted lawmakers earlier this year, is also now the subject of congressional probes.
Mexican and U.S. officials say weapons trafficked mostly from U.S. border states are fueling the cartel wars that have killed more than 40,000 people in Mexico since 2006.
The lawmakers claim the operation allowed suspected traffickers to buy more than 2,500 weapons in the U.S. and may have helped fuel the trafficking the ATF is supposed to try to prevent.
Click here to continue reading at The Wall Street Journal.Those whose sole knowledge of pirate radio stems from the 1990 film Pump Up the Volume may find the reality of Radio Free Austin a little less cinematic. The rantings of Alex Jones replace the rumble of late-Eighties punk. A pair of longtime activists replaces Christian Slater. And the adrenaline of the final chase scene is ousted in favor of something much more likely to lead to palpitations – a $15,000 fine.
In August 2013, agents from the FCC Enforcement Bureau's Houston office responded to a complaint that an unlicensed station was operating at 90.1 MHz in Austin. Tracing the source of the signal wasn't exactly difficult. The antenna was attached to an almost 50-foot tower anchored to an apartment building owned by Walter Olenick and Rae Nadler-Olenick. Outside, a car registered to Nadler-Olenick was plastered with a bumper sticker reading "Liberty 90.1FM."
After discovering the source, the FCC sent the Olenicks a warning letter in early September. The Olenicks replied shortly after, offering no denial that they owned the building or that an unlicensed radio station was operating on the premises. However, the couple shot back that the agents did not have "permission or consent to enter" the apartment building. According to the FCC filing, the Olenicks stated that the agency lacked jurisdiction in Texas. The letter "also implied that they do not consider themselves subject to the laws of the United States, because they stated they expect any future communications to come from the International Bureau only after a 'treaty' to which they are'signators' is signed."
Such contrarian views are not uncommon for the Olenicks. The pair frequently appear during Citizens Communication at City Council to rail against the dangers of fluoridation in municipal water. But the FCC had less patience than City Hall. In April 2014, the FCC blasted the pair with a $10,000 fine for operating 90.1 without authorization. An additional $5,000 was added because the Olenicks failed to cease operations after the initial warnings.
Although 90.1 broadcasts some programs with a similar ideological bent to the Olenicks, it is not clear if they have any control over the content. The 90.1FM frequency has aired New World Order warnings for more than a decade, earning it the nickname "Alex Jones Radio." In fact, the station was the locus of another FCC battle in 2010, when it was operating out of the home of Jerry and Deborah Stevens – Deborah still co-hosts the Rule of Law Radio show on the conspiracy-minded Logos Radio Network. Like the Olenicks, the Stevens argued that the FCC had no jurisdiction over the broadcasts. In 2012, the 5th Circuit Court of Appeals affirmed that the FCC had the authority to issue a Forfeiture Order.
The Olenicks were served their own Forfeiture Order in early June 2014 and were given a 30-day deadline to pay the fine before possible further Justice Department action. Nadler-Olenick declined to comment on the case while it was still in active litigation. Although the station briefly went silent in the spring, at press time, Katherine Albrecht – a syndicated commentator and frequent guest on The Alex Jones Show – could be heard loud and clear.Former surveillance investigators want Congress to create a committee to examine the controversial surveillance practices at the National Security Agency (NSA).
"Such congressional action is urgently needed to restore the faith of citizens in the intelligence community and, indeed, in our federal government," a group of former members and staff of the Church Committee — which investigated government surveillance practices in the 1970s — said in an open letter to Congress and President Obama on Monday.
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The group called on Congress to create another committee to investigate government surveillance programs — including a controversial NSA program that collects information about Americans' phone calls — which first came under public scrutiny after leaks from former NSA contractor Edward Snowden began last year.
A new Church Committee "would work in good faith with the president, hold public and private hearings and be empowered to obtain documents" to conduct "a significant and public reexamination of intelligence community practices that affect the rights of Americans and the laws governing those actions," the letter said.
The creation of such a committee would be a step toward reestablishing the current "crisis of public confidence," the group said.
"As former members and staff of the Church Committee we can authoritatively say: the erosion of public trust currently facing our intelligence community is not novel, nor is its solution."
The group noted the similarities between the surveillance revelations of the 1970s and those revelations that began to surface last year.
The Church Committee "determined that sweeping domestic surveillance programs, conducted under the guise of foreign intelligence collection, had repeatedly undermined the privacy rights of U.S. citizens," the group wrote, calling the report's findings "startling" and its conclusions "eerily prescient."
The letter highlights the committee's concerns about technological advances and the intelligence community's ability to easily collect vast amounts of information, adding that "the scale of domestic communications surveillance the NSA engages in today dwarfs the programs revealed by the Church Committee."Ken Hechler, an urbane historian who carpetbagged his way into West Virginia’s gritty politics, where he battled destructive coal-industry practices, unsafe mining conditions and felonious county officials, died Dec. 10 at his home in Romney, W.Va. He was 102.
The cause was a stroke, his wife, Carol Kitzmiller, said.
During 18 years as a Democratic congressman, 16 more as West Virginia secretary of state and a final act as a do-gooder without portfolio, Dr. Hechler never tired of crusades.
“I used to be an agitator, then an activist,” he wrote at age 94, in 2009. “Now I am a hellraiser.” This was soon after he was arrested while protesting mountaintop removal, the mining method environmentalists hate most.
It seemed an unlikely destiny for the lanky highbrow who in 1957 came to Huntington, W.Va., to teach government at Marshall College. He had taught at Columbia and Princeton, edited President Franklin D. Roosevelt’s papers, written speeches in Harry Truman’s White House and for Adlai Stevenson’s 1956 presidential campaign, and authored scholarly works.
As coal trucks lumber past, Ken Hechler, 96, with friend Larry Gibson, shows a visitor a mountaintop that has been prepared to be leveled near Kayford, W.Va. (Katherine Frey/The Washington Post)
Given to professional swerves all his life, Dr. Hechler ran for Congress in the coal-rich, cash-poor 4th District after only one year in the state. Lacking name recognition, he wrote a jingle to the tune of “Sugartime,” with the chorus: “Hechler in the morning, Hechler in the evening, Hechler at election time.”
He was helped by the 1957 publication of “The Bridge at Remagen,” his acclaimed history of the Army’s momentous Rhine River crossing during World War II; just over a decade later, it would become a Hollywood movie starring George Segal. At factory gates and mine entrances, Hechler gave away thousands of copies of the book. Running as a liberal, he narrowly beat the incumbent Republican in 1958.
Charles Peters, active in West Virginia politics at the time and later the founding editor of Washington Monthly, recalled the circumstances that enabled Dr. Hechler’s early success.
“The state was liberal then. FDR was still a god to many people,” Peters said. “There was no EPA to threaten jobs, no Rush Limbaugh to appeal to voters’ worst instincts. Besides, folks liked Ken. They were proud of his book and admired his tireless campaigning.”
Dr. Hechler emphasized mine safety and workers’ rights from his first days in office, but the 1968 Farmington underground explosion, which killed 78 coal miners, caused an epiphany. “Nothing in my life,” he said later, “ever moved me as deeply.”
He became the principal author of the Federal Coal Mine Health and Safety Act, overcoming strong opposition to its passage in 1969. It made willful violation of safety rules a federal offense, put a ceiling on the amount of respirable coal dust permissible in a mine and compelled compensation for workers disabled by black lung disease.
Farmington also steeled his opposition to Tony Boyle, head of the United Mine Workers of America. Boyle was cozy with mine companies and a defender of Consolidation Coal, owner of the Farmington mine. Dr. Hechler openly campaigned for Joseph Yablonski, Boyle’s challenger for the union presidency.
Violence infested the contest. When thugs killed Yablonski, his wife and daughter in 1969 and menaced Dr. Hechler at rallies, the congressman came out for another reformer, Arnold Miller. Ultimately, Boyle went to prison for ordering the triple murder, and Miller became the union’s president.
Risk, political or physical, speckled Dr. Hechler’s career. He angered many constituents — nearly all of them white — when he joined the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. during the final phase of the 1965 voting rights march from Selma, Ala., to Montgomery. He was the only member of Congress in King’s entourage.
Dr. Hechler later recalled that he was on a congressional junket to Cape Canaveral, Fla., when he heard about the brutal harassment of King and others by the Alabama authorities. He immediately left for Selma, he said, moved by stories about “the tear gas, cattle prods and hard times being given to civil rights supporters.”
A half-century later, he told an interviewer: “It was one of the proudest things I did in my checkered life.”
From PhD to Army service
Kenneth William Hechler was born in Roslyn, N.Y., on Sept. 20, 1914, to parents who were staunch Republicans. While attending Swarthmore College in Pennsylvania, Class of 1935, Ken Hechler became a passionate New Dealer, in large part because of the Depression.
He received a doctorate in political science from Columbia University in 1940 and met Samuel I. Rosenman, a Roosevelt adviser and justice on the New York Supreme Court, who enlisted Dr. Hechler to help annotate the president’s growing trove of public papers.
In 1942 he joined the Army, training at Fort Knox as a tank officer. He wrote the class’s satirical show. Its coda, “Praise the Lord and Pass Me My Commission,” caught his commander’s attention. He looked into then-Lt. Hechler’s background and recommended that the Army give him a more cerebral assignment.
Eventually he became a combat historian in Europe, gathering material on the ground and interviewing generals and sergeants. He came home in 1946 as a major with the Bronze Star and material for three books — on the Remagen attack; a biography of the Remagen commander, “Hero of the Rhine: The Karl Timmermann Story”; and an account of one battalion’s role at the Battle of the Bulge, “Holding the Line.”
In the late 1940s, Dr. Hechler resumed teaching, now at Princeton, but soon enlisted an aide to Truman to help him find a job in Washington. Dr. Hechler became a researcher for the White House and mostly wrote what he described as “minor whistle-stop speeches that were given at the smaller communities.”
The Democratic defeats in 1952 and 1956 meant no prospects in the executive branch for at least four years. His job as associate director of the American Political Science Association palled. So he transformed himself into a West Virginian and began a love affair with 4th District voters.
Though more liberal than they on some issues, his independence and close attention to constituent services won increasing support. By 1974, he ran for his ninth term unopposed.
Most legislators yearn for that situation. Dr. Hechler professed frustration. “I love campaigning and wanted to debate,” he reminisced later. “But no one would argue with me.”
Battle against strip mining
What he most wanted to argue about was strip mining. He was the first West Virginia official to demand total abolition and was increasingly angry when his proposals got nowhere on Capitol Hill. Twice, Congress passed bills intended to regulate the practice and ameliorate its effects. President Gerald R. Ford vetoed them. Dr. Hechler refused to vote to override the vetoes because he thought the bills were ineffective.
In 1976, he ran for the West Virginia gubernatorial nomination in a crowded field that included John D. Rockefeller IV, whose well-financed effort easily prevailed. Dr. Hechler launched a write-in campaign in a futile effort to keep his House seat.
In 1984, Dr. Hechler ran for secretary of state and promised on the hustings to clean up abuses in places like Mingo County, where, he said, “vote fraud is as old as the memory of man.” The secretary of state had no police authority but could initiate investigations.
In his first term, Dr. Hechler launched a probe of voting in one Mingo community. The effort had a domino effect as a state special prosecutor and the U.S. attorney’s office became involved.
By 1988, a platoon of county officials, along with a drug-dealing family that worked from a trailer adjacent to the courthouse, had been successfully prosecuted. Dr. Hechler, after winning his second term, said voters had just witnessed “the cleanest election in Mingo County history.”
Instead of seeking a fifth term as secretary of state in 2000, he ran unsuccessfully for a House seat. He then taught at what had become Marshall University and remained a piquant force within the environmentalist movement.
As a symbolic gesture, he entered the 2010 special election to fill the vacancy caused by U.S. Sen. Robert C. Byrd’s death, but he lost to Gov. Joe Manchin III (D). “I may be 97 years old,” Dr. Hechler said at the time, “but I still have a lot of fight left in me.”
A bachelor whose personal life had remained private, he was 98 when he married Kitzmiller, who reportedly had been his companion for years. Other survivors include a stepson, Joshua Kitzmiller of Romney.NEW DELHI: French company Dassault Rafale today bagged India's biggest-ever contract for supplying 126 combat aircraft for the air force, edging out European competitor EADS in the multi-billion dollar deal.The French firm was declared as the lowest bidder, according to which it will get the contract under India's defence procurement procedure, sources said."The French firm Dassault Rafale has emerged as the L-1 (lowest bidder) and cheaper than its european rival EADS (maker of Eurofighter) in the tender and will be offered to supply the aircraft to the IAF," the source said.They said the representatives of Dassault here were informed about the development in the morning and further negotiations on price will be held with them in the next 10-15 days.The contract will be signed only in the next fiscal. According to the Request for Proposal (RFP), the winner of the contract will have to supply 18 of the 126 aircraft to the IAF in 36 months from its facilities and the remaining would be produced at HAL facilities in Bangalore.Six companies including American F-16 and F-18, Russian MiG 35, Swedish Saab Gripen alongwith Eurofighter and Dassault Rafale were in the race in the beginning.But in April last year, the defence ministry shortlisted Dassault and EADS, evicting the American, Russian and Swedish bids.The process was started with the issuing of a global tender in 2007 after which all the six contenders were subjected to extensive field evaluation trails by the Indian Air Force at several locations across the globe.At least 10 rivers and about 150 tanks have been revived across Kerala thanks to the collective effort of the local people. Volunteers cleaned up rivers, the canals that drew water from them and the ponds that played a key role in maintaining the water table. They cleared encroachments, demolished the structures that hampered water flow, and blocked the sewage pipes that were laid up to the water bodies.
The toil has paid rich dividends to the local communities. Thousands of acres of fallow paddy fields have become arable again and the newfound beauty has lifted many locales to the league of the famed tourist destinations in the state.
Perhaps the best known success story came from the Varattar river that runs through Pathanamthitta and Alappuzha districts. The people revived the river and even conducted a ceremonial boat race through it.
The energy sparked off a similar initiative in the Kolarayar River, and the effort resulted in a thousands springs in over 1,000 hectares of paddy fields. As many as seven paddy fields across two panchayats have benefited from the revival of the Varachal River. Fish farming has also benefited from the efforts.
The clean-up drive assumed massive proportions in places such as Kannur, where about 3,000 volunteers got their hands dirty to clean the Kanampuzha River of 10 kilometers of rubbish and stench in a single day in May. The area is tipped to receive a Rs 300 crore package including a riverside tourism circuit, history museum and a convention center.
An ambitious scheme to revive the linked rivers of Meenachil, Meenantharayar and Kodoorar in Kottayam district has been on for more than a month. The people are working hard to clear the adjoining canals in the conventional irrigation system. The revival of the network is expected to make 1,000 acres of fallow paddy fields arable.
The Kuttamperoorar River in Alappuzha had been virtually dead for about 25 years before a people’s initiative gave it a fresh lease of life. The people persisted in the face of repeated failures to revive the crucial link between the Pampa River and the Achankovilar River.
The same spirit was evident in Kozhikode district, where people volunteered to clean the 58.5 kilometer Punoor River and the 23 kilometer Mambuzha River. Even political parties offered their support to the initiative.
Rising water table
Residents of Madikkai in Kasaragod district were in for a pleasant surprise after they had joined forces to clean up the temple tank that belonged to the Mundott Nandapuram Gopalakrishna Temple. The dredging of the tank resulted in a rise of water levels in the wells in the area. The area had been hit by cruel droughts every summer.
People in Malappuram fished out tons of plastic waste as they cleaned the Valiyathodu canal in the town.
More projects are waiting to take off in different parts of Kerala. The cleaning of the Kattakkada, Machel and Anappad canals has already started in Thiruvananthapuram district. The Killiyar, Neyyar and Vamanapuram rivers as well as the Thettiyar canal near Technopark will also be cleaned soon.
As many as 115 public tanks have been cleaned up in 50 days last summer in Ernakulam district. The Pulamon canal in Kollam is being rejuvenated.
Read: Latest Kerala news | Rajeev murder: lawyer Udayabhanu is in hiding, say policeNearly every state in the Union offers parents an exemption from vaccinating their children based on their religious beliefs — despite research showing that virtually no organized religion declares an opposition to vaccinations.
Religious waivers have been widely exploited by vaccine skeptics throughout the U.S. because applicants aren’t actually required to show evidence of faith-based objections to vaccinating their children. Anti-vaccine groups even go as far as to teach parents how to game the religious exemptions.
Vaccine waivers have come under increased scrutiny in recent weeks, as a major measles outbreak that began in California’s Disneyland park spread to 17 states. California is among 20 states that have laws that go beyond religious exemptions and allow parents to cite a “personal belief” or philosophical objection to vaccines.
There’s little difference between those exemptions in practice. In the case of religious waivers, the process for parents to obtain an exemption boils down to little more than stating in writing that it would violate the parent’s religious tenets to vaccinate his or her child. State officials must trust that the parent is acting on a sincere or truly held belief.
That leaves plenty of room for parents who do not want to vaccinate their children for a number of personal reasons, be it a belief that a certain vaccine is unsafe or a desire to stay away from vaccine “toxins,” to game the system where a personal belief option is not available to them.
John Grabenstein, a retired Army colonel and former director of the Military Vaccine Agency who now works for Merck Vaccines, did an extensive analysis of religion and vaccines for a 2012 study published in the journal Vaccine.
Grabenstein told TPM in a recent phone interview that based on his research, it’s clear that parents who requested religious exemptions to vaccinating their children were pursuing a waiver out of some safety concern, not because their faith prevented them from vaccinating their kids.
“When you boiled it down to what’s your objection, it was a safety concern in a cluster of people who have the same religion,” he said. “It was not a matter of theology.”
Virtually no major religion has stated opposition to vaccination. Grabenstein said that the Quran, the Bible and the Torah are consistent in saying it’s important to preserve life, and by extension vaccinate.
Christian Scientists, who avoid doctors at all costs in favor of healing through prayer, are an exception.
Grabenstein argued that two other anecdotal examples of religious opposition to vaccination, the Amish community and Catholics, don’t hold up to scrutiny.
“There’s nothing in the Amish faith that says don’t get vaccinated,” Grabenstein said, attributing Amish enclaves’ avoidance of vaccines to their reclusive behavior. “When the county health department people go talk to the Amish elders, they very frequently will get the kids vaccinated.”
Catholics do take issue with certain vaccines, including the rubella vaccine in the combination measles-mumps-rubella (MMR) shot, that are made from viruses grown in cell lines that descended from two voluntarily aborted fetuses in the 1960s.
But the Catholic Church does not compel parents to avoid those vaccines.
The Vatican’s Pontifical Academy for Life clarified in 2005 that parents should seek out alternative vaccines to the “tainted” ones made from fetal cell lines. Where there is no alternative vaccine available, the academy stated that the moral obligation to use the “tainted” vaccine outweighs concerns about its origin.
The absence of stated opposition to vaccinations in virtually all religious doctrines doesn’t prevent those skeptical of vaccines from claiming the exemption, though.
The anti-vaccine group National Vaccine Information Center, which pushes the debunked theory that vaccines are linked to autism, advises parents with “sincerely held” personal and spiritual beliefs against vaccination to claim religious exemptions. The group’s president, Barbara Loe Fisher, offered strategies for doing just that in a 2011 conversation with Dr. Joseph Mercola, who runs a controversial alternative medicine website.
“You do not have to belong to a ‘church’ or an organized religion that ‘officially opposes vaccination’ to take a religious exemption to vaccination,” Fisher said, marking air quotes with her hands around certain phrases. “States that have legal language that restrict your ability to take a religious exemption to vaccination based on the fact, for example, you don’t belong to a church — whenever that’s been challenged at the high court level it’s always been found to be unconstitutional.”
Fisher later hinted that sincerely held religious beliefs can include a fear of what may happen to the child after he or she is vaccinated.
“We must defend the religious exemption to vaccination at all costs,” she said in the video. “It’s all that stands between us and a militant, oppressive forcing of vaccination by those who have at this point in time no accountability or liability for what happens after those vaccines are given.”
It’s tough to nail down exactly how many parents request religious waivers in each state due to differences in reporting methods.
Tens of thousands of parents of kindergarten students take advantage of both personal belief and religious exemptions, according to data from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. California led the pack in total non-medical exemptions for the 2013-2014 school year with a whopping 17,253 waivers for kindergartners, followed by Michigan and Texas with over 6,000 and 5,000 waivers, respectively. Florida, which grants only religious exemptions, still reported nearly 4,000 waivers for the grade.
Just two states, Mississippi and West Virginia, restrict vaccination exemptions to parents who have a medical reason for not vaccinating their children. Last week, West Virginia legislators stripped language from a bill that would have granted a religious exemption.
States beyond California are now rushing to curtail personal belief exemptions in light of the latest measles outbreak, too. But even if they do, it’s clear that vaccine skeptics will still have a workaround to obtain a waiver.We’ve all seen the cool lighter tricks you can do with a Zippo, but most people don’t carry a Zippo around. Why? Well, how many times have you had your lighter ‘pocketed’ by someone, or left it god knows where? Now imagine if that lighter cost $20+. For this reason, most smokers carry disposable lighters. Don’t despair! There are plenty of cool disposable lighter tricks you can do with a Bic and other disposable lighters.
1. Open a beer bottle
So, you’re at a party, and a friend brings a six-pack of fancy imported beer. He passes out a brew to you and a few other friends. One friend tries to twist off the cap. It doesn’t budge, so he twists even harder. Although this is slightly amusing, you decide to save him from cutting his hand open. You kindly remind him, “These aren’t twist-offs”. He is slightly embarrassed, but these feelings fade as the group begins to realize no one has brought a bottle opener. What good is a bottle of beer if you can’t open it? No worries so long as someone in the group is carrying a disposable lighter.
Type of Lighter:
You can use virtually any disposable lighter for this one.
Steps:
1. Hold the neck of the bottle just below the cap.
2. Place the plastic side of the lighter under the bottle cap.
3. Holdtightly on the neck of the bottle while you press down on the lighter.
2. Fireball in Hand
Have you ever seen X-Men? If so, I shouldn’t have to explain why one |
will be further cast aside, as the focus will be on the "easy gains? to be made in markets.
4 - Assuming that we are in yet another liquidity fuelled rally courtesy of Bernanke and Draghi, then there are some key things to remember. First, such rallies can last days, weeks, months, perhaps we could even extend into 2013. And - to give a proxy guide - the S&P could end up in the high 1500s again if this current binge lasts into 2013. The problem with such liquidity fuelled set-ups is that they can last longer and get bigger than any reasonable logic would dictate. The issue here is not what central bankers say - it now seems clear that Bernanke and Draghi will say whatever it takes to keep the market supplied with ample liquidity - but what they can do. In this respect one either believes that central bankers can do whatever they like whenever they like, or one believes there are limits. I think there are limits to what Bernanke and Draghi can do, and once we hit those limits these bubbles will burst, with increasingly greater consequences the longer we are forced to wait. Do I know when we may hit these limits? I hope that it is sooner rather than later, but I have no real conviction.
Secondly, when looking for where the bubbles may be, realise this: in this current cycle, where central bank balance sheets are at the core, the bubble is everywhere - in stocks, in bonds, in growth expectation, in credit spreads, in currencies, in commodity prices, in most real asset prices - you name it! This is why I think that this current bubble, if it is allowed to fester and develop into 2013, will have such widespread consequences when it bursts that it will make 2008 feel, relatively speaking, like a bull market.
Third, when this bubble bursts, I don't think there is an easy way out. Who will be the bail-out provider? We already have extraordinarily weak and fragile government balance sheets, ditto banking balance sheets and consumer balance sheets. The big cap corporate balance sheet is sound, but it already worries about how bad the real economy hit will be when the next bubble bursts. As such, the corporate sector - which has a huge degree of "control? over the political classes - will keeps its powder dry until asset prices fall to clearing levels. When this happens they will be the biggest buyer of truly cheap assets in town, but not before then. The really dangerous thing about this next bubble is that it will likely ruin current central bank credibility, as their balance sheet expansion, accumulating ever more "toxic? assets, is at the centre of the current cycle. As a result, the central bank decision-making function is now (increasingly) deeply compromised, if not utterly at odds with its own raison d'être. This of course means that if/when the current cycle implodes, central banks which have seen explosive balance sheet growth will add to the problems, rather than being able to act as credible lenders of last resort. A resulting consequence is that we will, at that point, usher in a new era of central banking and policy settings, where the key will be to regain a semblance of credibility and independence. This will be good news. But we will likely have to go through the "bust? first.
5 - I am not well equipped to navigate bubbles where tactical views and secular views are all thrown into the melting pot together, where there is no visibility, where - as one client put it to me recently - we have Monetary Anarchy running riot, where the elastic band between the'real' economy and the current liquidity-fuelled markets is stretched further and further beyond credulity, and where history tells us that policymakers will happily stand by whilst bubbles are being pumped up, and hope that they are onto their next job before it all comes tumbling down. It seems that the 07/08/09 part of this crisis has resulted in zero lessons learned. In fact it is much worse than that as we are instead being asked to double up on a strategy which I fear will end in failure. As such, clearly my outlook in my last note needs to be re-assessed in terms of the latest developments. Whilst equity market levels are still within the tolerance limits set out in this previous note, my timing is clearly being "stretched?. Unfortunately for me, and as warned in the prior note, if my outlook set out therein is proven to be wrong, it is because I am overly cautious. I say "unfortunately? because the longer we have to wait for the "final? resolution to the global financial crisis, the bigger and more devastating the final leg lower will be. I have an extremely high level of conviction on this point.
6 - So, in terms of markets, be warned. My personal recommendation is to sit in Gold and non-financial high quality corporate credit and blue-chip big cap non-financial global equities. Bond and Currency markets are now so rigged by policy makers that I have no meaningful insights to offer, other than my bubble fears. Real assets are relatively attractive. But I am going to wait for this current central bank bubble to burst before going all in. I may be waiting 5 days, 5 weeks, 5 months, perhaps 5 quarters. It all depends on when and how our central bank leaders are exposed as lacking credibility and/or lacking the mandates to keep pumping liquidity into the system. The end of the bubble will be sign posted by either monetary anarchy creating major real economy inflation or by a deflationary credit collapse (if they run out of pumping "mandates?). The end game is incredibly binary in my view, but in between it is pretty much a random walk. Either way, "bonds are toast? in any secular timeframe (due either to huge inflationary pressures, or due to a deflationary credit collapse), which in turn means that asset bubbles in risky assets will get crushed on a secular basis.
My colleague Kevin Gaynor has a more nuanced view and he feels that we may well avoid the bubble outcome, as political hurdles, political changes, growth and earnings data will all very quickly undermine central bankers and their bubble vision. For all our (long term) sakes, I hope I am wrong when it comes to fearing another round of liquidity-fuelled bubbles, and that he is right that "good sense? will prevail soon.
I will continue to use the Dow/Gold charts to continue to guide me going forward. The USD price of an ounce of gold and the Dow will, I believe, converge at/around 1, at some point over the next 2 years or so. I have extremely high conviction on this. What I am not sure on is whether we converge at 7000+/-, or at 14000+/-. Because I do believe that even Bernanke and Draghi cannot do as they wish and that there are some limits to the recklessness of policymakers, I still lean towards a deflationary resolution at/about 7000 in the next year or two. Pretty vague, I know, buts it?s the best I can do right now, and what is clear is that, in the world I fear ahead, gold is a winner either way - remember, gold is a great (monetary) inflation hedge, and in a deflationary credit collapse gold works as a store of value/wealth as it carries zero credit risk.
As a "credit? guy at heart I see more likelihood in a deflationary credit (i.e., a "real?) collapse rather than a real economy inflationary (nominal) collapse. Either way however, what is clear is that if Bernanke and Draghi are allowed to continue on their current policy path for much longer, then whatever the final outcome will be, it will likely leave a deep scar on us for decades. Which on a ten-year timeframe may not be such a bad thing as it should kill off monetarism and usher in a new era of monetary and fiscal prudence? In the near term, LTRO2 at month-end is the next clear focus for markets, more so than Greece. If LTRO2 is USD1trn or more, the market will take that as a signal to load on more leverage, more risk and more 'carry'. If LTRO2 is in the order of USD250bn to USD500bn, Risk Off will be the order of the day as markets will start to fear that central bankers are having to reign back-in their current policies, and that as a result we face another period where central bankers and policymakers fall back behind the curve. LTRO1 clearly took policymakers from behind to ahead of the curve, but this is an extremely fluid situation, where doing nothing is, in reality, the same as going backwards. As the skew of expectations is to a large LTRO2, a LTRO2 take-up in between these ranges is likely to be viewed with neutrality/mild disappointment.Media playback is unsupported on your device Media caption The BBC's Mark Lowen said there were protests outside the parliament building
The Greek parliament has passed a bill which will see 15,000 state employees lose their jobs by the end of next year.
The bill passed by 168 votes to 123, and had the support of the three parties making up the ruling coalition.
It is part of continuing moves by the centre-right government to cut costs and ensure more bailout money from international creditors.
But it was vociferously opposed by protesters outside parliament.
The new law will overturn what had been a constitutional guarantee for civil servants of a job for life, says the BBC's Mark Lowen in Athens.
The sector has been seen as notoriously bloated since it expanded in the 1970s and 1980s as successive administrations employed their own people, our correspondent adds.
Some 2,000 civil servants will lose their jobs by the end of June, another 2,000 by the end of the year, and a further 11,000 by the end of 2014.
State workers who have broken rules will be targeted for dismissal, but many are expected to be replaced by younger employees in key sectors such as health.
So the law will not slim down the public sector, our correspondent says. That would be achieved by a parallel plan that would see 150,000 state jobs go by the end of 2015, by replacing only some of those who retire.
'Destroying welfare state'
The law is a condition for Greece to receive its next tranche of loans worth 8.8bn euros (£7.4bn; $11.4bn).
Eurozone officials will now meet on Monday to approve the overdue release of 2.8bn euros, said Finance Minister Yannis Stournaras, according to Reuters news agency.
The remaining 6bn euros will be paid on 13 May, he added.
As MPs debated the measures inside parliament, several hundred demonstrators outside took part in a protest called by Adedy, the civil service trade confederation, and the private sector GSEE union.
They were demonstrating against what the unions called "those politicians who are dismantling the public service and destroying the welfare state".
Critics say the law, which is part of a larger package of measures, will only add to Greece's record unemployment rate of 27%.
They say many of those who will lose their jobs are older workers already struggling to support their families and make ends meet.
But others say the measures are overdue.
Divisions
The conservative coalition, led by Prime Minister Antonis Samaras, has 167 seats in the 300-seat parliament so the measure was always expected to pass.
However, there are reports of divisions within his government on some issues and there is speculation he could reshuffle his ministerial team soon.
Eurozone finance ministers are expected to decide on the next instalment of aid for debt-ridden Greece at a meeting on 16 May.
Since 2010, the European Union and the IMF have promised more than 200bn euros in lending for Greece, the first country to be hit by the eurozone crisis.
The government has imposed tough austerity measures in return for aid, including cuts in pay and pensions leading to numerous general strikes.In order to study some of the dynamic properties of the chloride channels we have recorded calcium-activated chloride currents in Xenopus laevis oocytes, which have been evoked by serum under different external pH stimuli (pH = 0.5, pH = 0.7 and pH = 0.9). Thus, we had 21 time series in total, each one of them formed by 130,000 discrete data points. Figure 1 shows three representative experimental signals obtained by means of the patch-clamp technique, under three different pH conditions, Ringer’s solution at pH 5.0, 7.0 and 9.0 (acid, neutral and basic pH).
Figure 1: Calcium-activated chloride currents in Xenopus laevis oocyte. Three prototype experimental Cl− currents obtained from the same cell at different conditions: (a) pH 5.0 (n10), (b) pH 7.0 (n11), (c) pH 9.0 (n12). Each chloride time series has 130,000 points (sampling interval 2 milliseconds), which correspond to a period of time of 260,000 milliseconds duration. The vertical axis (Φ) corresponds to the measures of currents in nanoampers (nA). Full size image
To confirm that oscillations monitored in Xenopus oocytes by application of Fetal Bovine Serum corresponded with Ca2+-dependent Cl− currents, three different experiments were performed. First, oocytes generating oscillations were voltage-clamped at 4 different voltages (either −60, −40, −20 or at 0 mV). As it is illustrated in Fig. 2a, currents reversed near to −20 mV, in accordance with the reversal potential of Cl− in oocytes. Second, the reversal potential observed was shifted toward more positive potentials when the external Cl− concentration was reduced, this is shown in Fig. 2b. In this case, oocytes were held to either −30 mV (first column) or 0 mV (second column), while they were superfused with solutions containing 100%, 50% or 0% of Cl− (NaCl was substituted proportionally by Na2SO4 in Ringer solution and, osmolarity compensated adding sucrose). It is clear that reversal potential is close to −30 mV in 100% Cl−, while in 0% Cl− oscillations continued being in inward direction at 0 mV, indicating that reversal potential in this condition is more positive. An intermediate case occurs with 50% Cl− solution, where the shift in reversal potential by reducing external Cl− is predicted by the Nernst equation. And finally, it was demonstrated that Cl− currents were Ca2+-dependent. Intraoocyte injection of the calcium chelator ethylene glycol-bis(2-aminoethylether)N,N,N’,N’,-tetraacetic acid (EGTA) abolished completely oscillatory currents, according to Ca2+-dependent Cl− currents.
Figure 2: Ca2+-dependent Cl− current validation. (a) Xenopus oocyte held at either −60, −40, −20 or 0 mV. Reversal potential of oscillatory currents corresponded to a value close to −23 mV. (b) Oscillatory current reversal potential were dependent on external Cl− concentration, traces show currents in oocytes held at −30 mV or 0 mV in 3 different solutions containing 100%, 50% or 0% Cl−, reversal potential shifted toward more positive potentials as external Cl− concentration decreased. (c) Cytoplasmic injection of EGTA, a Ca2+ chelator, completely eliminated the oscillatory Cl− current. Full size image
First, to test for the presence of long-term correlations in the experimental chloride data we have used the root-mean square (rms) fluctuation F(l). For uncorrelated data, the exponent α for the relationship F(l) ~ lα is equal to 0.5; in contrast α > 0.5 indicates the presence of positive long-range correlations and α < 0.5 implies long-term anti-correlations. According to this method, we have divided the 130,000 data points of each time series in 6 non-overlapping windows with k = 5, performing the rms fluctuation method on every window for each of the 21 experimental chloride series and fitting F(l) within the range l = 1, …, l max (see Methods for more details). The values of l max were systematically increased in 100 points, which correspond to 1 second, and the reliability of the rms correlation exponent α was calculated by means of the R2 parameter, which measures the goodness fit (also called the coefficient of determination).
Second, in order to discern whether the experimental Cl− currents exhibit non-trivial correlations, we have fixed a threshold criterion of R2 ≥ 0.99. The obtained α values were calculated for every window on each time series, and the results ranged between 0.75 and 1, being 0.927 ± 0.048 (mean ± SD) the global mean of all the experimental chloride series. These non-trivial correlations encompassed between 1,500 and 6,500 evoked chloride values (mean of 3,809.5 ± 1,298.8), which correspond to periods of time ranging between 3 and 13 seconds (mean of 7.66 ± 2.6). Boundary times where achieved on the series n17 (experiment 6, pH = 7.0) and n2 (experiment 1, pH = 7.0) respectively. The mean rms correlation coefficients (α), as well as the number of evoked chloride values under the non-trivial correlation regimen (N), with their respective correlation times (T c ) for all the experimental series are given in Table 1. Figure 3 shows an example of rms fluctuation analysis applied to three calcium-activated chloride responses of the same oocyte (n1, n2 and n3 time series belonging to the experiment 1) for their T c times on a single window. In all three cases, the obtained α values were significantly different to 0.5, and for at least 10, 13 and 12 seconds respectively, the evoked chloride dynamics presented non-trivial long-term correlations. Alternatively, long term correlations were also observed by calculating the autocorrelation function from the time series (Supplementary Information).
Table 1: The first column shows the number of the experiment, each one corresponding to a single oocyte. Full size table
Figure 3: Root mean square fluctuation analysis applied to experiment 1 on a single window. Log-log plot of the rms fluctuation F versus l step. The red points depict the results of the original data for each value of l, while the black lines represent the regression lines. (a) α = 0.88 (n1), (b) α = 0.92 (n2) and (c) α = 0.83 (n3). Corresponding (respectively) R2 adjustment coefficients were 0.9915, 0.9921 and 0.9976. The high values of α and R2 indicate non-trivial long-term correlations for each chloride time series during 10, 13 and 12 seconds respectively. Full size image
Next, we have studied the long-range correlations for α ≥ 0.6. The analysis showed exponents ranging between 0.6008 and 0.9718, which respectively correspond to the time series n1 (pH = 5.0, l max = 2,200) and n17 (pH = 7.0, l max = 1,200). The global average was 0.774 ± 0.108. All the means of α values, R2 adjustments, and the l max are given in Table 2. It can be observed that the values of α decrease slowly as l max increases. This behavior is illustrated in Fig. 4a, where the average for the 21 time series, as a function of l max, are represented; all the corresponding values of the Fig. 4 are displayed on Table 3.
Table 2: The first column shows the number of the experiment, each one corresponding to a single oocyte. Full size table
Figure 4: Long-term correlations across different windows lengths. (a) Global average versus different values of l max (varying from 1 to 24 seconds). (b) as a function of l max (varying from 25 to 40 seconds). The error bars represent the standard deviation at each step. It can be observed that all Cl− time series change from positive to negative correlation near l max = 28 seconds. Full size image
Table 3: The first and third columns represent different values of l max, ranging from 1 to 40 seconds. Full size table
In addition, we have observed a critical transition around l max = 28 seconds, where the behavior of the Cl− currents changes from positive to negative correlations (Fig. 4b). It can be observed that as l max increases, all the α exponent values decreased, and for the maximum window length (l max = 40, corresponding to 20,000 time points), the α values were lower than 0.5 ( = −0.051 ± 0.283) indicating anti-correlations in all cases; concretely, α values ranged between −0.885 and 0.349, which belong to n2 (experiment1, pH = 7.0) and n7 time series (experiment 3, pH = 5.0) respectively.
Finally, we performed a rms fluctuation analysis without the separation of the data in shorter windows, thus considering all the points for each experimental time series, observing anti-correlations for all the cases ( = −0.01 ± 0.1).
Moreover, we have examined whether the chloride currents are described by a fractional Gaussian noise (fGn) or a fractional Brownian motion (fBm) by calculating the slope of the Power Spectral Density plot41. The signal exhibits power law scaling if the relationship between its Fourier spectrum and the frequency is approximated asymptotically by S(f) ≈ S(f 0 )/fβ, where S(f 0 ) and β are constant values. If −1 < β < 1 the signal corresponds to an fGn. In particular, when β = 0, the power spectrum is flat, as is the case for white noise in which the time series is composed of a sequence of independent random values. If 1 < β < 3 the signal corresponds to a fBm. The analysis of the Power Spectral Density plot revealed that the experimental series are characterized by a power-law scaling with β ranging within 1.507 and 2.991, which suggests that all the series are described by fBm (β values are given in Table 4).
Table 4: The first column shows the number of the experiment, each one corresponding to a single oocyte. Full size table
Additionally, an analysis of the classical descriptive statistics of the experimental data has been included in the Supplementary Information).
Next, we have checked whether the chloride time series show persistent or anti-persistent long-term memory by calculating the Hurst exponent. Although several tools exist for estimating the long-term memory from fBm time series, one of the most reliable methods is the bridge detrended Scaled Windowed Variance analysis (bdSWV) (see Methods for more details). After bdSWV analysis, the resulting Hurst exponents had a mean value of 0.191 ± 0.101, implying long-range memory and an anti-persistence effect in all the experimental data sets (Table 4). In addition, an ANOVA test revealed that Hurst exponent values were significantly different for time series corresponding to pH = 9.0 in comparison to pH = 7.0 (p-value = 10−5) and pH = 5.0 (p-value = 10−4), but no significant distinction was found between pH = 7.0 and pH = 5.0 (p-value = 0.42). Notice that the obtained values of H are very low, showing a high degree of anti-persistence (strong trend-reversing), so that an increasing trend in the experimental data values will tend markedly to be followed by a decreasing trend, or a decrease on average will be followed by a robustly increasing trend.
In order to estimate the significance of our results, we have performed a shuffling procedure that defines the null-hypothesis. If the original time series exhibits a memory structure (H ≠ 0.5), after the shuffling such structure will disappear, thus re-applying a new Hurst analysis on the shuffled data should provide values of H close to 0.5. According to this procedure, for each experimental time series (21 in total), we performed a thousand random permutations, which allowed building the null-hypothesis of no correlations. In total, we generated 21,000 random series from the original data belonging to the seven experiments with Xenopus laevis oocytes. After shuffling, the results show a mean Hurst exponent of 0.499 ± 0.01, indicating the absence of long-term memory i.e., the informational memory structures in all shuffled series was completely lost. Notice that after shuffling, the series became Gaussian white noise (fGn series with, and for this case the use of bdSWV is not justified. Instead, Dispersion Analysis is the most recommendable tool for this kind of series41,42 (for more details see Methods).
Figure 5a illustrates the regression lines of a bdSWV process applied to an example of experimental series giving H = 0.104 (experiment 5, n13, pH = 5.0), which indicates a strong anti-persistent memory. After randomly permuting all the 130,000 points contained in this time series n13, the Dispersion Analysis gave H = 0.492, which indicates a breakdown for the long-term memory (Fig. 5b). In Fig. 5c, we represent 100 Hurst exponent values corresponding to 100 shuffled series, obtained from shuffling the experimental data. It can be observed that, after shuffling, the long-term memory disappears completely in all the time series ( = 0.498 ± 0.01). For illustration purposes, Fig. 5c shows, rather than the 21,000 obtained values of Hurst exponent, only 100 of them. The informational memory structures in all shuffled series were completely broken-down, and therefore, the memory structure that characterizes the experimental data could not be found by chance. Finally, in order to calculate the values of Hurst exponent from short data periods, we used the Detrended Fluctuation Analysis (DFA), because the bdSWV is recommended for data sizes greater than 212, whilst for data sets with less than 28 points bdSWV has been shown to be unreliable43. The DFA analysis showed that for time periods ranging between 2 and 5 seconds all the experimental time series exhibit persistent behavior with H > 0.5 being the global mean of = 0.697 ± 0.11, which indicates that the properties of persistent memory dominate at short time intervals of the calcium-activated chloride currents in Xenopus laevis oocytes.Jewelry or ornaments are probably the most beloved stuff of your lady. She seems always ready to gather piles and piles of jewelry in her jewelry box and is never satisfied. She still wants to have more and more of them. I have gifted her many large vintage rhinestone earrings from my local thrift shop but she always keep craving for more. Enamel flower pins, rhinestone brooches, orphaned earrings and what not. The idea here is an inspiration for all the art loving folks to go on an old jewelry treasure hunt at your own by upcycled earring ideas with some trashed stuff that is not in use anymore.
You can use trivial stuff like beads, jewelry blanks and metallic strings and lengths of chains to turn or upcycle them into stylish vintage earrings to please your lady. If she is sick and bored from these ordinary earrings then you must give a try to upcycle earring ideas. She is definitely going to love it.
You can use simple glass bottle corks, flatten them and join them with some stylish metallic strings by piercing nicely. Or the thread made circles or even the coins pierced and joined in some stylish strings and couple of beads. You can use some sophisticated metallic rotators to make some industrial kind of stuff in earrings, or just some colorful beads along with seashells and a jute string.GOLDEN VALLEY - More than 300 law enforcement agencies across the state are stepping up patrol to crack down on distracted driving. And this week, members of the Minnesota State patrol have been tweeting what they're seeing in the road.
Troopers like Tyler Uthe says he's seen it all.
"Things that people do out there are just crazy," he said. "We even see people doing crossword puzzles and reading books while driving. They think it is safe to read a book because the traffic is moving slowly."
Between 2010 and 2014 more than 300 people lost their lives in Minnesota and more than one-thousand others now live with life -changing injuries because of distracted driving related crashes.
KARE 11 saw Uthe issue one $50 ticket to a distracted driver. That man told KARE he was using the Internet on his phone it located the nearest BMV.
Uthe hopes the fine will steer drivers from deadly decisions.
"The purpose of it is to change driving behavior. If by writing that last guy a ticket and if he changes his behavior we absolutely made a difference," Uthe said. "Who knows he could've been the next person that would've crashed and possibly kill someone."I used the CTX 5500 to keep bombs off your plane. I also go elbows deep in your underwear.
The suitcase was ticking.
It was my third week on the job as one of 55,000 new airport screeners employed by the Transportation Security Administration, and the first day of the war in Iraq. The nationwide terror alert was at orange, and a pair of National Guardsmen patrolled the sprawling departure lobby of the US Airways terminal at LaGuardia, rifles at the ready, gas masks strapped to their thighs. All this made the egg-timer click coming from the bag, a black rolling cart with a pull-up handle, a matter of some urgency.
I had picked up the suitcase after it was singled out by one of the cream-colored, SUV-sized machines that x-ray checked luggage. I put it on a metal examination table, as I had been trained to do, and swabbed the surface with a cloth-tipped wand. It tested negative in the explosive trace detector. I unzipped the bag gingerly and faced a jumble of women's clothes, mostly polyester and flowered, then stuck in a latex-gloved hand to feel for solid objects. Almost immediately I discovered an item dense enough to have been flagged as a possible explosive - it was hair cream. But no clock, no bomb, and no explanation for the ticking. The sound stopped when I lifted up the bag, then started again when I set it down.
Behind the frosted-glass partitions near the check-in counter, $5 million worth of bomb detection technology buzzed around me. None of it could help. Once the machine identified out a suitcase as suspicious, it was my job to search it by hand. The only way to determine the source of the ticking came down to a $13.21-an-hour worker: I'd need to follow my trainer's instructions and go EDU - elbows deep in underwear.
So far I had seen the machines flag plenty of deodorant sticks, toothpaste tubes, and shoe heels, which showed up on the screen outlined in red. I had handled sex toys, machetes, and pistols (legal in checked bags). But the closest thing I had seen to a bomb were manufactured images on the screen created by the Threat Image Projection System, a software package developed by the government to make sure we were paying attention. Every once in a while, I learned, police let drug dogs find contraband so they don't grow discouraged. I didn't much care for the implied comparison.
The ticking was real enough, though, and I couldn't let the suitcase through until I'd figured out the origin of the sound. A US Airways supervisor was hovering nearby, and jittery fliers were peeking at us through the breaks in the partitions. I took everything out, stacking clothes on the table. I felt around the lining. I turned the suitcase over once more, noted that the ticking stopped, and saw a bulge in a tiny pocket tucked between the rods for the extendable handle. It was an electric toothbrush that turned on when it pressed against the table but was packed too tight to vibrate.
Picking through other people's skivvies was my very small part in a very big government initiative. "You're looking for a needle in a haystack," says Larry Johnson, a former deputy director in the State Department's Office of Counterterrorism in the early 1990s. Except you're doing it through a barn wall, without knowing which day the needle will arrive or what it might look like when it does. More than 4 million checked bags pass through the nation's 429 commercial airports on any given day, and since the beginning of the year, the Transportation Security Administration has been charged with examining all of them, on the slim chance that one contains a bomb. The ultimate ideal would mean trained workers going through every piece of luggage by hand. Since that's obviously impractical, the TSA depends on technology - the same basic technology that screens passengers and carry-on bags.
The first stop for checked bags is what's called a CTX machine, which uses conventional X-ray technology as well as a CT scanner that slices beams through a piece of luggage to determine the density and volume of the contents. (The machines are made by two certified manufacturers, but the CTX 5500, built by InVision, predominates to such an extent that the brand name has become shorthand for the device.) "If you run a bomb through it, it will find it nearly 100 percent of the time," says Doug Laird, a former security chief of Northwest Airlines.
The problem is that the CTX flags a whole lot of other things with the same volume and density as some explosives. These include peanut butter, toothpaste, chocolate, golf balls, shoe heels, Blow Pops, and, believe it or not, live crabs. The device also alerts screeners to any item it can't see through: laptop computers, camera equipment, cell phones, oxygen tanks, golf club heads, and physics textbooks.
How flawed is the CTX? It stops 18 to 35 percent of all bags, depending on who's giving the numbers. False positives waste a lot of money; the machines cost millions, and more hand-searches mean more wage-earning workers, raising the total cost of airport security to $5 to $7 per passenger. More important, false positives undermine the efficacy of hand searches. A few alarms a day and screeners investigate every one thoroughly. A few dozen and they become inured to the routine.
The current system discourages screeners from thinking for themselves, says Issac Yeffet, a former security chief of El Al who's now a consultant based in Manhattan. "Let's say I'm a screener, and I open the luggage to do a search and find chocolate or peanut butter - I'm happy because I found what the machine flagged." Although the CTX highlights suspect items, screeners don't run bags back through the machine after the hand search to make sure they've correctly identified what really caused the alarm. No one's taught to think in terms of how a would-be terrorist might try to game the system. "I can assure you, from my experience and knowledge," says Yeffet, "that most of the explosives will be in a false bottom."
Yeffet's point is that screeners should be trained not as machine operators but as security personnel. If he's right, the TSA has a long way to go. Even the basic training we received was slapdash. Congress mandates that screeners spend 40 hours in the classroom, but my class spent about half that time. (We got paid for the entire 40.) For four days, we met in a hotel on the perimeter of the airport, where the instructor taught us the rudiments of what constitutes a bomb. He spent the rest of the time asking us about our experiences as New Yorkers since September 11. I touched the machines only once, on a field trip to the airport where we walked into a filthy side room in an airline terminal to find a screener slumped over asleep at a CTX unit. There was a Starbucks cup on top of one of the other devices and a pizza box on a third. I worked a regular shift for five weeks without getting any of my mandated 60 hours of on-the-job training.
The system would be better if more screeners were like one of the guys on my shift, a former military man with a buzz cut and a crease in his pants that could slice bread. A few days after I started, he asked some of us why we were there. An older man who had been in book publishing said that he had to come out of retirement because his 401(k) tanked. One of the younger guys had been a prison guard and thought this would be less demanding; another was finishing a computer science degree and needed a part-time job in his Queens neighborhood. The military man listened to the rest of us and declared, "I wanted to serve my country." When he opened a bag, he purposefully examined each item. He turned tubes of toothpaste over in his hand, shook golf balls, and unfolded clothes.
Most of my colleagues weren't so careful. One screener, a holdover from the private company that ran LaGuardia security before the TSA took over, would sometimes take bags that were supposed to be searched by hand and just leave them on the examination table until another worker, who assumed they had already been cleared, sent them to the plane. One day I was at the controls of the CTX, which ejects bags like a toaster, bouncing them against a hard backstop. Safety regulations required moving the luggage before making even a cursory check. My fellow screener, however, started searching a suitcase where it landed and was hit square in the head by the next bag. That was our interim supervisor.
Some at the Transportation Security Administration are dissatisfied with the CTX. Because the machine is expensive, slow, and has a fairly high rate of false positives, Lyle Malotky, a top scientific and technical adviser at the TSA, acknowledges that the agency is looking for a better system.
Devices that might be deployed are first brought for testing to the TSA's labs, a cluster of connected buildings at the Atlantic City airport. Behind the agency's hangar, there's a |
human FNDC5 gene, which is an ATA, rather than the more common ATG, a mutation. Indeed, these authors concluded that human FNDC5 is a non-coding “pseudogene” or that “the human species has an effective gene knockout of FNDC5” (). This claim was based on a transfection assay expressing human FNDC5 from a CMV-promoter-driven plasmid, which yielded protein levels lower than human FNDC5 expressed with an ATG instead of an ATA from the same plasmid. However, several lines of reasoning stand against that claim. First, the high degree of conservation of the irisin amino acid sequence across most mammalian species (including humans) strongly argues against FNDC5 in humans being a pseudogene. Second, the simple fact that Raschke et al. detect human FNDC5 protein made from the ATA-FNDC5 sequence proves that human FNDC5 is not a pseudogene; these are generally defined as genes that have lost their protein-coding ability (). Third, their conclusion that low protein production from CMV-promoter-driven plasmid expressed in HEK293 cells translates to inefficient FNDC5 translation in vivo is completely speculative, since this experiment did not consider endogenous regulation of human FNDC5 in its native state. Indeed, non-canonical starts of translation are often indicative of complex regulation of translation (). Fourth, as mentioned above, our detection here of equal amounts of peptide 1 and 2 in human plasma demonstrates that human irisin is, in fact, mainly translated from its non-canonical start codon and not the further downstream ATG.
Albrecht et al., 2015 Albrecht E.
Norheim F.
Thiede B.
Holen T.
Ohashi T.
Schering L.
Lee S.
Brenmoehl J.
Thomas S.
Drevon C.A.
et al. Irisin - a myth rather than an exercise-inducible myokine. Wrann et al., 2013 Wrann C.D.
White J.P.
Salogiannnis J.
Laznik-Bogoslavski D.
Wu J.
Ma D.
Lin J.D.
Greenberg M.E.
Spiegelman B.M. Exercise induces hippocampal BDNF through a PGC-1α/FNDC5 pathway. The earlier report () had several serious methodological deficiencies. First, their failure to detect irisin in human serum at 12 kDa by western blotting relied on deglycosylation by only one enzyme, namely PNGase F; however, this leads to only incomplete deglycosylation. PNGase F is an effective enzymatic method for removing almost all N-linked oligosaccharides, but not other oligosaccharides. Hence, with PNGase F, no visible band will appear at 12 kDa and the irisin signal will be diluted across the lane, leading to apparent lower levels. In our previously published method (), we used the Protein Deglycosylation Mix from NEB, which contains, in addition to PNGase F, O-glycosidase, neuraminidase, β1-4-galactosidase, and β-N-acetylglucosaminidase; this leads to complete deglycosylation and the appearance of 12 kDa bands in recombinant mammalian irisin and human plasma by immunoblot ( Figure 1 ).
Albrecht et al., 2015 Albrecht E.
Norheim F.
Thiede B.
Holen T.
Ohashi T.
Schering L.
Lee S.
Brenmoehl J.
Thomas S.
Drevon C.A.
et al. Irisin - a myth rather than an exercise-inducible myokine. Second, these authors () used a method of protein mass spectrometry called “shotgun proteomics,” which randomly samples peptides for detection from all the peptides contained in the sample. While the method has the potential to detect irisin, it would be suboptimal for detection because the peptides of interest can be missed in complex samples due to their low abundance. In these cases targeted proteomics is required. This allows the mass spectrometer to focus on the targeted peptides and ignore signal from co-eluting peptides. AQUA-based quantification concomitantly with PRM produces spectra that are highly specific because all potential product ions of a peptide and elution profile confirm the identity of the peptide.
Kraemer et al., 2014 Kraemer R.R.
Shockett P.
Webb N.D.
Shah U.
Castracane V.D. A transient elevated irisin blood concentration in response to prolonged, moderate aerobic exercise in young men and women. Kurdiova et al., 2014 Kurdiova T.
Balaz M.
Vician M.
Maderova D.
Vlcek M.
Valkovic L.
Srbecky M.
Imrich R.
Kyselovicova O.
Belan V.
et al. Effects of obesity, diabetes and exercise on Fndc5 gene expression and irisin release in human skeletal muscle and adipose tissue: in vivo and in vitro studies. Moraes et al., 2013 Moraes C.
Leal V.O.
Marinho S.M.
Barroso S.G.
Rocha G.S.
Boaventura G.T.
Mafra D. Resistance exercise training does not affect plasma irisin levels of hemodialysis patients. Wang et al., 2015 Wang H.H.
Zhang X.W.
Chen W.K.
Huang Q.X.
Chen Q.Q. Relationship between serum irisin levels and urinary albumin excretion in patients with type 2 diabetes. Zhang et al., 2014 Zhang M.
Chen P.
Chen S.
Sun Q.
Zeng Q.C.
Chen J.Y.
Liu Y.X.
Cao X.H.
Ren M.
Wang J.K. The association of new inflammatory markers with type 2 diabetes mellitus and macrovascular complications: a preliminary study. Third, and perhaps most importantly, the authors report their own detection limits for irisin at about 100 ng/ml. However, many reports of human irisin fall below this level (). Hence it is rather surprising that these authors concluded that human irisin did not exist or was a “myth.”
It is worth noting that limitations of own study include that the AQUA heavy peptides were added to the irisin preparations after the extraction of the proteins from the SDS-PAGE gel; we therefore cannot account for how much irisin protein was lost during the sample preparation (albumin/IgG removal, deglycosylation, and retrieval from the gel band, etc.); the numbers reported here must therefore be considered a slight underestimation of the irisin levels. In our experience, typical losses during sample preparation range between 10% and 30%. In addition, this assay is relatively costly and relies on available mass spectrometry instrumentation and capabilities. However, while this assay is relatively low throughput, it should prove useful for benchmarking more high-throughput assays as they are developed. Taken together, targeted mass spectrometry with the use of heavy irisin AQUA peptides settles the existence, the overall architecture of human irisin in the plasma, and its regulation by exercise.An Austrian soldier stands guard outside the OPEC headquarters in Vienna on November 29, 2016. (Joe Klamar/ AFP)
The Organization of the Petroleum Exporting Countries (OPEC) is known for its massive resources. Last week, British Petroleum (BP) said the group holds 71.5 percent of the world’s proven oil reserves. But the 14-member organization is also known for its mistakes.
It is hard to tell a group of the world’s biggest oil producers, which run state-owned companies with hundreds of analysts, that they are wrong. It is even more difficult to hear the group’s officials admitting that its policies are wrong. But behind closed doors and in private discussions, everyone knows what went wrong.
The group has made many mistakes since its inception, despite the instances when it helped to stabilize the market. So what are the mistakes it made since 2014, when oil prices started to crash amid the worst global glut since the 1980s?
First, prior to the fall in prices OPEC had assumed that high oil prices of $100 will remain for a long time and that this was the new accepted level in the market. It is true that there were times when everyone believed that prices will stay high for long and that OPEC will defend this price.
Even after OPEC decided in November 2014 not to cut production to save oil prices from falling further, many outside OPEC, like the oil tycoon, T. Boone Pickens, believed that the group would indeed cut and that prices would get back to $100.
“They did not say they would not cut but OPEC will have to cut and that is what is going to happen. The Saudis are the ones that make the cut. They can take $70 oil and take it out 10 years — they have the cash reserves that allow them to do that. But they cannot do that to the rest of OPEC,” Pickens told CNBC in December 2014.
This illustrates that it was not only OPEC that was driven by that illusion of $100 oil coming back — even people in the industry were driven by the same illusion. However, Pickens was right about one thing — that OPEC would cut. OPEC was also wrong about the demand forecast in 2014. The supply response was wrong and instead of cutting in the summer of 2014, OPEC decided to rollover the 30 million barrels per day (bpd) ceiling.
Second, OPEC’s officials assumed that the cuts in capex and the high break-even price for shale oil producers would help move prices higher. That did not happen, and the cost curve of shale oil producers went down and prices remained lower for longer, amid high levels of supply and oil inventories.
Third, instead of defending their market share of 30 million bpd, OPEC started to increase production in 2015. According to BP’s statistical review, OPEC’s average production at the end of 2015 was 38.1 million bpd on average, from 36.6 million bpd in 2014. So the year ended with an oversaturated market. The market-share strategy would have proved to be a balancing force for the market if OPEC learned how to stick to targets, an issue it is still dealing with today.
Fourth, in 2016, the group was divided and could not reach an agreement to freeze production, even as around 17 ministers from OPEC and non-OPEC countries gathered in Doha in April to sign a deal that would have restored some stability to the market. OPEC could not get its act together and the market lost faith in OPEC until it was finally able to agree in 2016 to cut production.
Fifth, OPEC is still unable to eliminate the glut in the oil market and support prices, even under the current deal with non-OPEC countries to remove 1.8 million bpd from the global market. The old issues of compliance and competition in the export market are still there. Iraq’s compliance rate was 69 percent in May, according to Bloomberg. The country has shipped more oil in recent weeks and that is offsetting cuts in exports made by Saudi Arabia and a few others.
OPEC members are surely aware of many of their mistakes but will they learn not to repeat them?
By Wael MahdiA third mysterious black space object to fall from the sky into rural Spain has caused panic among locals.
The strange-looking black orb was found in the village of Villavieja in Murcia - becoming the latest instance of an increasingly bewildering phenomenon, the Olive Press reported.
It's not yet known what the objects are, though theories range from UFOs to pieces of space debris.
The first instance of the strange phenomenon occurred one week ago, when Spanish goat farmers discovered the strange object, which bears a striking resemblance to the Star Wars torture device, the IT-O Interrogator, in Calasparra, Murcia.
The Civil Guard were called to investigate the black orb and the area was subsequently put under quarantine. Pictured is the second object to be found in the village earlier this week
A local community manager deduced that the object appears to be a composite overwrapped pressure vessel, possibly from a space station
The mysterious orbs (left) bear a resemblance to the Star Wars torture device, the IT-O Interrogator (right)
The men alerted the Civil Guard to investigate and the area was subsequently put under quarantine.
Although the mystery object was not said to be dangerously radioactive or explosive, it was taken away for further analysis.
Local news site El Pais reported that researchers have said that the object may be a pressurised gas container, which fell to earth from space.
The Civil Guard stated the object was an aerospace artefact and pointed to the possibility that it fell from a rocket or a satellite.
However, a few days later a second orb fell from the sky.
According to The Mirror, Jose Velez, the mayor of Calasparra, implored authorities to provide answers to worried residents.
'Where are these objects coming from? Why are they falling here precisely?'
Claiming it was a more concerning issue than the authorities were letting on, he added: 'Citizens have real concerns about what is happening and deserve an explanation.'
The IT-O Interrogator is a droid that made an appearance in a number of Star Wars books and films.
Purposefully intimidating, the orb was used as a device to get information from prisoners using elaborate and scientific torture methods.And so it came to pass on Monday, during the House intelligence committee’s hearings, that FBI director James Comey confirmed the veracity of the most-speculated-upon rumor in Washington: The agency is ― as numerous anonymous insiders have insisted to the press over the past few months ― investigating Russian-led efforts to “interfere with the 2016 presidential election.” And what’s more, this probe “includes investigating the nature of any links between individuals associated with the Trump campaign and the Russian government, and whether there was any coordination between the campaign and Russia’s efforts.”
Obviously, the mere existence of an investigation hardly proves something nefarious happened, and many Democratic officials have warned it would be unwise to presume a massive scandal is waiting in the wings to swoop in and capture the imagination. As Buzzfeed’s Ali Watkins reported last week, Democrats on the Senate intelligence committee are concerned about “wildly inflated” presumptions concerning what might be uncovered, and have attempted to lower expectations about “evidence of active, informed collusion between the Trump campaign and known Russian intelligence operatives” coming to light.
Nevertheless, we have a president under FBI investigation. How do you like that?
You know, not for nothing, but back in my day (2016) there was a lot of consensus opinion-having that merely being the subject of an FBI probe was a disqualification for serving as the leader of the free world.
Yep, if my dusty memories serve as any guide, then that was, at one point, a whole big thing that lots of people believed. And they especially believed it about then-presidential candidate and former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton.
People such as presidential candidates! Here’s old Jeb Bush, giving “Fox & Friends” his considered opinion on the matter: “All I’m saying is that she’s under investigation by the FBI. Just pause and think about that. That’s not, that’s a pretty uncommon thing for a presidential candidate. And each and every week it just seems like there’s more information.”
Just pause and think about Marco Rubio, talking to voters about what separated the Republican presidential candidates from their Democratic cohorts:
RUBIO: Now look, I’m not here to badmouth the other Republicans, we have a good group of people running. At a minimum I can say this: None of them is a socialist. None of our candidates is under FBI investigation.
Lest you think Rubio was treating the matter as a mere laugh line, it really was something he wanted people to think about seriously.
RUBIO: Obviously, we all understand the importance of this presidential race. I would just ask everybody this: Can this country afford to have a president under investigation by the FBI? Think of the trauma that would do to this country.
Oh, man. Marco Rubio must be pretty traumatized right now.
Presidential candidate and improv comedian Mike Huckabee had thoughts of his own, way back when:
TV news devotes 4x more time to Trump controversies than Hillary’s. Gee, you’d think the guy was under an FBI investigation! — Gov. Mike Huckabee (@GovMikeHuckabee) June 20, 2016
Hopefully the coverage ratio is now more to his liking.
Meanwhile, you just know that the people in Donald Trump’s inner circle had some thoughts on the matter!
Running for #POTUS with an FBI investigation. Who else could run for #POTUS w/ such a scandal? Nobody. https://t.co/p1Vh9cQezs — Dan Scavino Jr. (@DanScavino) October 14, 2015
@AriMelber not if @HillaryClinton becomes nominee - probably tough to get excited aboutt someone under FBI investigation — Sean Spicer (@seanspicer) February 20, 2016
#Hillary made history today:we've not nominated someone under FBI investigation whom a majority of Americans says not trustworthy not honest — Kellyanne Conway (@KellyannePolls) June 7, 2016
Most honest people I know are not under FBI investigation, let alone two. https://t.co/UcSmSA5aTj — Kellyanne Conway (@KellyannePolls) October 29, 2016
Dem voters forced to make an impossible choice between 1 candidate facing FBI investigation & another that’s a self-proclaimed socialist — Reince Priebus (@Reince) February 28, 2016
That last tweet jogs a memory loose. When the FBI announced, late in the campaign, that it was “reopening” the investigation into Clinton’s email server, then-RNC Chair Reince Priebus was very precise: “This alone should be disqualifying for anyone seeking the presidency, a job that is supposed to begin each morning with a top secret intelligence briefing.” As Trump’s White House chief of staff, he must be thinking back over all the intelligence briefings that have transpired, and feeling kind of queasy about them.
Welly well, what’s Paul Ryan going to do about this? If history is any guide, he is going to immediately send a letter to the director of national intelligence, asking for Trump’s access to classified information to be shut down until we figure out what’s going on.
BREAKING: I formally asked the Director of National Intelligence to deny Sec. Clinton access to classified info. pic.twitter.com/Kk8t00cdJn — Paul Ryan (@SpeakerRyan) July 7, 2016
He can just copy and paste from the letter he sent to DNI James Clapper: “It would send the wrong signal to all those charged with safeguarding our nation’s secrets if you choose to provide her access to this information despite the FBI’s findings... I firmly believe this is necessary to reassure the public that our nation’s secrets are secure.”
Better safe than sorry!
Unless nobody cited above actually meant any of this, that is.
The Huffington Post
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Jason Linkins edits “Eat The Press” for The Huffington Post and co-hosts the HuffPost Politics podcast “So, That Happened.” Subscribe here, and listen to the latest episode below.Last month rumors started spreading that the American Sports Network had met its demise, giving fans of Group of Five programs serious concerns about the availability of sports broadcasts moving forward. The former turned out to be true but not the latter.
This afternoon Sinclair Broadcast Group, Silver Chalice, and 120 Sports announced a gigantic merger of the three companies’ broadcasting forces into a yet-to-be-named conglomerate. The new venture will leverage Sinclair’s linear distribution through their American Sports Network assets while also providing industry-leading online streaming options through the resources of Campus Insiders. 120 Sports enters the picture by bringing “a broad array of post-game highlights, up-to-the-moment news, and original, long-form programming as well as full game archives provided by various partners.”
The merger combines the three companies and aims to create a platform that could eventually outreach that of ESPN. While WatchESPN is currently the industry leader in sports streaming it does require a cable subscription to view. Campus Insiders was completely free to view and it’s safe to assume that trend will continue with their new merger venture. As less and less consumers opt to pay for monthly cable subscriptions the appeal of subscription-less entertainment options such as this new merger increases exponentially.
Fans that prefer to watch their programs through traditional broadcasts will still be able to follow their favorite teams just as they did with the American Sports Network. The merger provides a perfect bridge between current cable consumption habits and an inevitable cordless future as the American Sports Network was broadcasting in millions of homes over the past two years.
Perhaps the most interesting aspect of the merger will be exactly how 120 Sports fits into the picture. Will they simply provide commentary and in-game coverage or could their presence be expanded to create syndicated programming such as talk shows?
The idea of an “Undisputed” or “SportsCenter” competitor that focuses on the G5 conferences is highly enticing and could do wonders to help the G5 gain much needed exposure.
I was unfamiliar with 120 Sports before this merger was announced but I took a quick look at their website and came away quite impressed. Their video offerings are of very high quality, both in terms of on-air talent as well as the technical specifications of the streams. Here’s a link to a video piece about the potential early signing period for college football as an example.
Per Chris Ripley, President and CEO of Sinclair, the merger will also bring improvements to the future network’s existing television network. "With this incomparable set of strategic partners, we are evolving ASN into a vastly improved network with access to exclusive content and a combined linear and premium OTT offering that is the model for the future of television," Ripley announced in a recent PR release.
The American Sports Network held football broadcasting rights for several conferences including Conference USA, the MAC, and the Sun Belt. Campus Insiders delivered broadcasts for over 500 live sporting events last season and made waves as being the first streaming service to gain broadcasting rights to an FBS bowl game. They have been closely partnered with the Mountain West Conference over the past few years.
Stay tuned, for the following weeks will bring announcements regarding a full programming schedule, new product offerings, network branding, distribution partners, sponsors, and studio details.
While we’ll have to wait for more details to be announced to fully gauge the transition, it’s hard to walk away from this news with anything besides overwhelming excitement for what it could mean for Underdog conferences in both the short and long terms.Related Materials The Lessons of Anwar al-Awlaki
Four years after the United States assassinated the radical cleric in a drone strike, his influence on jihadists is greater than ever. Was there a better way to stop him?
The New York Times Magazine, August 27, 2015 About the Book: "Scott Shane has done a masterful job of fleshing out the missing link in the evolution of Al Qaeda."
Lawrence Wright "The writing is riveting, the intelligence sources are impeccable and the book is quietly elegant—echoing the human story told in Lawrence Wright’s The Looming Tower."
Kai Bird "Scott Shane has written a bracing story about America's most notorious extra-judicial killing."
Mark Bowden "No one has written a better book about Obama's war against terrorists. Shane is a superb reporter and a wonderful story teller."
Peter Bergen "Scott Shane is unsurpassed in shedding clear light on America's darkest secrets, including the gripping human drama behind a drone strike that changed history."
Jane Mayer "Scott Shane’s “Objective Troy” (the title refers to the military’s code name for Awlaki) is a lucid and richly informed account of how these two men came to occupy their respective places in the history of the drone age."
Paul Pillar in the New York Times Sunday Book Review Scott Shane: American Terrorist Killed in Drone Strikes Survives on the Internet watch video on YouTube
Awlaki with the Detroit airplane bomber Abdulmutallab in a martyrdom video made before the bombing attempt (Christmas 2009) but released in 2014. Washington, D.C., September 15, 2015 - Anwar al-Awlaki was an American imam who later became the most influential English-language recruiter for the cause of violent jihad, an ideological journey illuminated by the new book Objective Troy and primary source documents gathered by the author, Scott Shane, and published today by the National Security Archive (www.nsarchive.org). Awlaki was also the first United States citizen since the Civil War to be hunted down and killed without trial by his own government. His life poses in particularly acute form a vexing question: How does an intelligent, worldly man decide to devote his last years to trying to kill civilians who are strangers to him? His death raises equally pointedly a companion question: How has the fear of terrorism changed America, prompting the government to abandon long-embraced principles in search of safety? Born in Las Cruces, New Mexico in 1971 when his father was a student at New Mexico State University, Anwar al-Awlaki spent his early years in the United States and spoke English better than Arabic. At the age of 7, he moved with his family to Yemen, where his father, Nasser al-Awlaki, began a long and distinguished public career, including terms as minister of agriculture and university chancellor. When Anwar was 19, his father sent him back to the United States to study engineering at Colorado State University. He graduated and briefly took an engineering job, but he had developed a deep interest in Islam and discovered a talent for preaching, and he soon took a part-time job as an imam in Denver. His success led to a full-time job at a mosque in San Diego, and then in early 2001 to a far larger and more prominent mosque in Falls Church, Virginia, outside Washington. After the 9/11 attacks, which he publicly and privately condemned, Awlaki quickly came to national attention as a Muslim cleric who could both articulate the grievances of Muslims about American foreign policy and explain the mysteries of Islam to Americans suddenly interested in this unfamiliar religion. But he suddenly left the United States in 2002 after learning that the FBI had followed him on regular visits to prostitutes around Washington and panicking about the possibility that he could be exposed as a hypocrite before his conservative congregation. He moved to London, where he moved in radical circles and took a steadily more intolerant line in his lectures, and then to Yemen, where he was followed by security police and imprisoned for 18 months, at least in part due to the encouragement of the United States.
Awlaki with the Al Qaeda flag calling for death to Americans, March 2010 video. Shortly after his release in late 2007, he moved to his family’s ancestral tribal territory of Shabwah governate, where he eventually joined Al Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula. He called on all Muslims to attack America and began to participate in active plotting against the United States, helping to recruit and coach a young Nigerian, Umar Farouk Abdulmutallab, who attempted to blow up an airliner on Christmas Day in 2009 over Detroit. He also appears to have played an important role in the dispatch in October 2010 of bombs hidden inside printer ink cartridges on cargo planes headed to the United States. A tip from Saudi authorities thwarted that plot. By then, after a legal review, President Obama had added Awlaki to the kill list, authorizing his capture or killing on the basis that he posed an imminent threat to the United States. He was killed in an American drone strike in Yemen in September 2011 along with an American acolyte, Samir Khan, with whom he had published the slick English-language Al Qaeda magazine Inspire. Two weeks later, in another drone strike that American officials said was a mistake, his 16-year-old son, Abdulrahman, who had left home to try to find his father, was killed. His death generated far more anti-American anger in Yemen than Anwar al-Awlaki’s death. Awlaki left behind a hugely influential collection of writings, audio recordings and videos that have surfaced again and again in terrorism cases in the West. His fluent American English, his calm eloquence, and his firsthand understanding of the peculiar pressures on Muslims in the West, seem to have given him an unusual ability to connect with young people looking to religion for a cause. The attention he drew from anxious American authorities over many years meant that many government documents shed light on his life, on the government’s view of him at different stages, and on the legal analysis that justified his extrajudicial execution. Many of the documents below were obtained under the Freedom of Information Act by J.M. Berger of Intelwire, an author and researcher on terrorism; by the conservative Washington organization Judicial Watch; and by the author in researching his book, Objective Troy: A Terrorist, A President, and the Rise of the Drone, published September 15, 2015 by Tim Duggan Books, a division of Crown. Documents 1) U.S. Agency for International Development certification with incorrect birthplace This form, dated 1990, confirms that Anwar al-Awlaki was qualified for an exchange visa and that USAID was providing “full funding” for his studies at Colorado State University. The document lists Anwar’s birthplace incorrectly as Sanaa, Yemen’s capital, which he later said was a deliberate falsehood offered at the urging of American officials who knew his father so that he could qualify for a scholarship reserved for foreign citizens. In 2002, the inaccuracy would briefly become the basis for an arrest warrant on fraud charges, which prosecutors withdrew. 2a) and 2b) – Awlaki’s San Diego prostitution arrest doc At least twice, in August 1996 and April 1997, Awlaki was arrested for soliciting policewomen posing as prostitutes in areas of San Diego known for streetwalking. He was married and working in his first full-time job as an imam, leading a conservative congregation. It was a habit that he would resume after moving to a bigger mosque in Falls Church, Virginia, in early 2001. 3) Excerpt from the FBI’s 1999 investigation of Awlaki Concerned about Awlaki’s contacts with some people under investigation for terrorist ties, the FBI opened a terrorism investigation of him in June 1999, collecting public records such as these from the California Department of Motor Vehicles. But they found nothing alarming and closed the investigation the next year.
The cover of Inspire, Awlaki's magazine in 2010, with a headline "Make a Bomb in the Kitchen of Your Mom." 4) Awlaki’s application to a Ph.D. program in educational leadership at George Washington University In the summer of 2000, partly in response to pressure from his father, Anwar al-Awlaki left his job at the San Diego mosque and applied for the doctoral program in educational leadership at George Washington University in Washington, D.C. At the same time he was hired as imam at a far larger and more prestigious mosque, Dar al-Hijrah, in Falls Church, Va. His Ph.D. application included his transcripts from undergraduate and graduate studies at Colorado State and San Diego State, as well as references from American and Yemeni professors whose names are redacted. What is notable is that Awlaki omits any mention of his work as a highly successful preacher from his curriculum vita and his personal essay. His Yemeni reference refers to an agreement to hire Awlaki on completion of his doctorate to run a new department of technical education at the University of Sanaa. So the documents suggest that at the age of 29, despite his success as an imam, Awlaki was seriously considering leaving his religious work for an academic job. 5) FBI first interview with Awlaki, September 15, 2001. 6a) and 6b) FBI follow up interviews with Awlaki, September 17 and 19, 2001. Shortly after the Sept. 11, 2001 terrorist attacks, FBI agents learned that two of the hijackers had prayed regularly in Awlaki’s mosque in San Diego, and that one of those hijackers and a third hijacker had turned up at his new mosque outside Washington. Worried that he might have some connection to the plotters, F.B.I, agents interviewed Awlaki at least three times in the weeks after 9/11, once with a lawyer present. He recalled a slight acquaintance with one of the hijackers, Nawaz al-Hazmi, from San Diego, who some others in the congregation thought they remembered seeing visiting the imam in his office. Awlaki condemned the attacks but behaved warily, declining to retrieve his passport or to discuss whether he preached about jihad. The FBI would later conclude there was no evidence Awlaki was in on the 9/11 plot, but the decision to put the imam under 24-hour surveillance would have major unintended consequences. 7a), 7b), 7c) -- FBI surveillance logs of Awlaki in DC area Beginning in late September 2001, the FBI placed Awlaki under 24-hour surveillance in an attempt to understand whether he had connections to terrorism. These are a few samples of hundreds of pages of surveillance logs, showing the FBI watchers trailing him and his wife and children to the Natural History Museum and dinner at Phillips Seafood; following Awlaki to the Pentagon, where he was an invited luncheon speaker; and tracking him to George Washington University, where he lectured on Thursday evenings to “UMEMs” – FBI jargon for Unknown Middle Eastern Males – on the life of the Prophet Muhammad, part of his part-time job as the university’s Muslim chaplain. 8) January 2002 notes on FBI agents’ videotaped interview with a prostitute about Awlaki Worried about Awlaki’s contacts with three 9/11 hijackers, the FBI followed him day and night, looking for evidence that he was a terrorist. Instead, agents found that he regularly visited prostitutes in hotels and motels in and around Washington. This paperwork accompanies the videotape of an interview with one prostitute, including an agent’s handwritten notes. The woman reported that Awlaki was a repeat customer who said he was from India and was “very nice.” 9) June 4, 2002 FBI memo about the possibility of a prostitution-related prosecution of Anwar al-Awlaki Awlaki had left the United States more than two months earlier. But the FBI was exploring whether to charge him in connection with the voluminous evidence agents had accumulated of his patronage of prostitutes, summarized here. This lengthy memo from Pasquale D'Amuro, FBI assistant director for the Counterterrorism Division, to James Baker, Department of Justice Office of Intelligence Policy and Review, requests permission to use evidence gathered under the rules governing intelligence-gathering for a different purpose – to criminally prosecute him. Though prostitution is ordinarily charged under state and local laws, this memo argues that Awlaki had violated the Travel Act, 18 USC 1952, by crossing from Virginia into Washington, D.C. and paying for the services of prostitutes. In the end, authorities chose not to pursue charges. 10) May 6, 2003 FBI memo closing terror investigation of Awlaki The bureau Washington Field Office, of WFO, found no evidence that Awlaki was involved in terrorism, so it closed the investigation. But the memo again summarized Awlaki’s patronage of prostitutes and argued that he had violated the Travel Act. 11a) and 11b) -- FBI 2003 email exchange with Awlaki On October 2, 2003, FBI Special Agent Icey Jenkins, whose name is redacted here, was astonished to get a telephone message from Awlaki. She appears to have passed the message to other agents, including Wade Ammerman, who began a months-long exchange of messages with the imam. Awlaki had seen news reports linking him to the 9/11 hijackers and wanted to meet with agents to persuade them he had no knowledge of the plot or other ties to terrorism. An agent, probably Ammerman, responded that the bureau had been looking for him and wanted to talk because “there are a lot of questions and matters that need to be straightened out.” They discussed the possibility of meeting in London in early 2004, but eventually Awlaki stopped replying to emails and the agent and the cleric never met. At the same time, the 9/11 Commission repeatedly sought the FBI’s help in arranging an interview with Awlaki. But no interview took place.
An Al Qaeda video homage "Martyr of Dawaah" to Awlaki after he and (two weeks later in 2011) his son were killed by U.S. drones. 12) Memorandum for the Record, October 16, 2003, interview by 9/11 Commission staff members of FBI Special Agent Wade Ammerman Ammerman had spent months pursuing the Awlaki investigation, and five months after it was closed, he was interviewed by 9/11 Commission staff members. Most significantly, Ammerman revealed the reason Awlaki had suddenly left the United States the previous year. The manager of an escort service used by Awlaki had tipped the cleric off to the FBI’s inquiries about his visits to prostitutes. Afraid that he might be exposed before his conservative congregation as a hypocrite, Awlaki suddenly left his job as an imam and flew to London, to return to the U.S. only one more time, for a visit in October 2002. Ammerman also mentioned that Awlaki had called the FBI in the fall of 2003, asking for a meeting because he “may want to return to the U.S.” The meeting never took place and Awlaki remained overseas, where years later he joined Al Qaeda. Together, documents 11 and 12 suggest that Awlaki, if he had been assured he would not face a prostitution prosecution, might have remained in the United States as a preacher, hinting at a path never taken. 13) December 1, 2006 FBI memo about seeking to interview Awlaki in prison in Yemen Despite closing its terrorism investigation of Awlaki in 2003 for lack of incriminating evidence, the bureau decided it wanted to question him again about the 9/11 hijackers who had worshipped in his mosques and other matters. Awlaki had been arrested in Yemen the previous August, reportedly in connection with a local kidnapping case. But there was also evidence that he might be involved with some foreign militants who knew him as “Abu Atiq.” Eventually two agents visited him in mid-2007 in a prison in |
the economy is still down almost 9 million jobs from its trend growth path.
With the supply of labor continuing along its trend path and the demand for labor having fallen sharply, wages will be pushed downward. That is exactly what we have seen over the last five years as real wages have been flat or declining since 2007. This means that the gains from productivity growth over this period have gone overwhelmingly to corporate profits.
The downturn has also been the main factor behind a surge in disability rates. Prior to the downturn, disability rates were actually somewhat below the projections from the mid 90s. This changed radically when the economy collapsed in 2008. Workers who may have been able to hold jobs despite disabilities in the years before the downturn suddenly found themselves unemployed.
When there are three or four unemployed workers for every person looking for a job, anyone with a serious disability would be at a major disadvantage. As a result, the cost of the disability program increased by more than 30 percent relative to the size of taxable payroll over the years 2007 to 2012.
In short, the downturn caused by the collapse of the housing bubble was the key factor behind both soaring profits and rising disability rates. In terms of their relative importance to the economy, soaring profits swamp rising disability payments.
The difference between the after-tax profit share in 2012 and the average share in the Reagan years is 4.7 percentage points of the income generated in the corporate sector, or roughly $330 billion last year. If we applied this to a ten-year budget window, as is the fashion in Washington, this growth in the profit share would be equivalent to a $5 trillion tax on the nation’s workers.
By comparison, the whole disability program cost $142 billion last year. If we pull out the recession-related portion, the cost would have been just over $105 billion. If we assume that 20 percent of the remaining cost was due to people gaming the system (surely a high estimate since more than half of all applications are turned down), then we are looking at $21 billion a year in wrongful claims, less than one-fifteenth of the redistribution from wages to profits. And this is what has the VSP in Washington very excited.
The VSP may argue that we can do something to crack down on abuses in disability, but there is not much we can do about corporate profits. Certainly we can have stricter eligibility rules which will prevent some of the undeserving types from getting their $1,100 monthly checks. The cost of this greater scrutiny will be denying benefits to more genuinely disabled people or delaying checks further, possibly until after the applicant dies from their disability, as is already often the case.
Of course, it’s not true that we can’t do anything about the surge in corporate profits. For example, we could break up the too-big-to-fail banks and end a government subsidy that Bloomberg estimated at $83 billion a year, four times the cost of workers freeloading on disability. We could drastically cut back or eliminate patent monopolies for prescription drugs, eating into the $250 billion in patent rents that the drug companies collect each year from patients and taxpayers.
We could also take steps to increase workers’ bargaining power by moving the economy closer to full employment. Another big dose of stimulus devoted to education, infrastructure and retrofitting buildings to reduce energy use would go a long way. So would a sharp drop in the value of the dollar, which would bring the trade deficit closer to balance. The rise in net exports would employ millions of additional workers in manufacturing, increasing the bargaining power of large segments of the workforce.
We could also follow Germany’s route of aggressively pushing work-sharing arrangements. As a result of Germany’s reduction in work hours, its unemployment rate has fallen 2.5 percentage points since the downturn, to 5.4 percent, even though its GDP growth has been no better than U.S. growth.
We could be talking about these or other measures to bring corporate profits back down to more normal levels. But the VSP don’t want the public discussing such issues. They want us to be arguing about how to keep sick, injured, and unemployed workers from collecting $1,100 a month in disability insurance. You can count on seeing many more pieces on disability insurance in the news in coming months.But any gains Google makes with the $649 Pixel, billed as completely designed in-house, may come not at the expense of Apple, but phone manufacturers running its Android software, a list topped by Samsung Electronics Co Ltd.
“A premium Android strategy is really a strategy to take market share from Samsung,” said analyst Jan Dawson of Jackdaw Research. The South Korean company already is reeling from a highly publicized recall of its Galaxy Note 7 phones due to battery fires.
“Obviously Google doesn’t want to explicitly compete with its own partners, but this product is much more likely to compete with Samsung than Apple,” Dawson said.
Google unveils 'Pixel' smartphone
Google, a unit of Alphabet Inc, clearly has its sights set on the iPhone and the luxury consumer base that it commands.
“There’s no unsightly camera bump,” hardware chief Rick Osterloh said to laughter from the audience at the phone's debut, alluding to the iPhone’s raised camera, a feature lamented by some design aficionados.
(From left) Google Wifi, Google Chromecast Ultra, Google Home, Google Pixel XL, Google Pixel and Google Dreamview VR are displayed during the presentation of new Google hardware in San Francisco, California, US, Oct 4, 2016. Reuters
Newly released ads for the Pixel phones land some blows on the iPhone. A rundown of the phones’ new features concludes with “3.5mm headphone jack satisfyingly not new,” a reference to Apple’s decision to eliminate the port in the iPhone 7, which riled many customers.
Imitation is flattery
Nevertheless, the Pixel line bears a strong resemblance to the iPhone, coming in two sizes and a variety of sleek finishes. The Google Assistant, powered by artificial intelligence software, is a response to Apple's Siri. And as Google prioritizes making its own hardware under Osterloh, its emerging design philosophy echoes Apple’s.
Hardware executive Mario Queiroz touted the company's attention to packaging, a feature that the late Apple CEO Steve Jobs famously obsessed over.
“You want the consumer first of all to have this great experience out of the box in terms of the design of the packaging,” Queiroz, a vice president of product management at Google, said in an interview.
He brushed aside concerns that Google’s hardware push will pit it against its Android partners. The technology embedded in the Pixel phone is meant to propel Android devices forward, he said.
“It’s not a zero sum game,” Queiroz said. “We believe that Google can and will be doing both things. Both delivering platforms and building our own products.”
Google could find itself squaring off against two extremely deep-pocketed rivals. Apple and Samsung are the largest smartphone handset makers and both have major marketing programs.
Samsung spent at least $50 million just on advertising during the Olympics in Rio de Janeiro, Brazil, according to estimates from Kantar Media.
Spokespersons for Apple and Samsung did not respond to requests for comment on Google's launch.More than four fifths of local authority areas have less than one in ten homes affordable to a single first-time buyer. Have you abandoned your hopes of ever owning a house? And how have house prices affected your relationship decisions?
It may not come as much of a surprise, but single first-time buyers on an average salary are badly affected when it comes to buying a property. Less than 10% of homes in every local authority area in London, the south-east and the south-west, and in more than 95% of local authority areas in the West Midlands and east, are affordable to a single person on an average income. What's even more worrying is that these figures were based on the assumption that a deposit is already secured.
However, according to Shelter's report, the picture is much better for couples on two average full-time incomes without any children. Although the proportion of housing is still terrifyingly small, this group has only two areas without any housing in their price-range: Westminster, and Kensington and Chelsea. In the north-east, these couples could afford 60% of two bedroom properties, followed by 53.7% in Yorkshire and Humber, falling to 3.5% in London.
In comparison, single people have 13 local authority areas without affordable properties, and only 0.2% and 2.6% of properties available to them in London and the south-east, respectively.
After decades of growth, the number of homeowners is falling. It’s not just soaring property prices, but that earnings have not kept pace. Nationwide reported a 13th consecutive month of house price increases in May, bringing the cost of an average UK home to £186,512 – more than the previous peak reached in October 2007 before the financial crisis took hold. Average first-time buyer incomes, used in the report, were calculated at £29,251 for men, £23,589 for women, falling to £22,001 and £20,295 for men and women respectively in the 22-29 age group.
Photograph: /Shelter
As more people are priced out, rental market prices increase and standards drop.
How have house prices affected you? Have you been delayed from starting a family? Have you bought with a partner to overcome the restriction of a single income? Or have you grouped together with friends, and how did it work out?
Share your experiences of how the housing market has affected your relationships in the thread below.“Why is there a rise? No one can possibly know that,” said Robert Smith, director of the Fair Punishment Project at Harvard Law School. “But crime statistics are most accurate when they are block by block, because even a neighborhood is too large.”
Still, attempts at explanations are numerous: battles over drug dealing turf; the dissolution of once powerful street gangs, resulting in violent crews that disband as quickly as they form; petty disputes that turn deadly because of the ready availability of guns; and a deepening economic and social isolation of the nation’s poorest.
Crime experts say that studying a single year of crime data — instead of a decade or 20-year periods — reveals little about crime, especially if a particular year runs counter to the current long-term trend of falling crime.
“Crime rates are well known to be volatile, and year-to-year variation does not really tell you much,” Dr. Berk said. “The reasons are that crime rates are driven by many factors at the neighborhood and even interpersonal level that we do not measure and about which we have little understanding.”
Inimai M. Chettiar, director of the Justice Program at the Brennan Center for Justice, a nonpartisan public policy group, said that the nation might have entered a period in which some types of crime, particularly homicides, would regularly seesaw from year-to-year in certain cities, but neither rise nor drop significantly.
“There have been predictions that as crime decreases, we will see more up and down movements, but that crime itself will stay relatively steady,” she said.
The patchwork that has emerged from the steep crime reductions over the past generation has meant that Baltimore, Milwaukee and Washington — where murders increased in 2015 — have had fewer homicides this year. Baltimore is on pace to have its murder rate drop 9.7 percent this year, and Washington by 12.7 percent, according to a study by the Brennan Center.The failure of North Korea’s latest missile test last weekend was good news for pretty much everybody outside that strange country. The new-model medium-range ballistic missile exploded shortly after lift-off, making it the latest embarrassing misstep in Pyongyang’s ceaseless quest to be taken seriously as a more-than-regional power.
The Trump White House isn’t concealing its gloating over the North Korean setback, with the president coyly refusing to comment on rumors of secret sabotage of the missile. On cue, Pyongyang has promised more missile tests, and nobody should expect that Donald Trump’s latest promise of unspecified retaliation against North Korea in the event of more games with ballistic missiles will have much of a deterrent effect.
This is the Democratic People’s Republic of Korea, after all, the weirdest country on earth—a deeply militarized Communist regime, almost hermetically sealed off from the rest of the world, and governed by a dynastic family in pre-1789 fashion. That the DPRK possesses nuclear weapons means there’s nothing to laugh about here, notwithstanding the fact that Pyongyang lacks the ability to accurately get those nukes anywhere very far from North Korea.
Then there’s the problem that nobody seems to understand what makes North Korea tick. Most Western “experts” on the regime have no idea what they’re talking about, as I’ve explained, and there’s a very good case that the DPRK actually may welcome confrontation with the United States—even nuclear confrontation. While Pyongyang’s bluster about preemptive nuclear strikes against friends of America (read: South Korea and Japan) sounds far-fetched, it’s best to side with caution and accept that the DPRK really might do exactly that.
After all, this is a regime with which we’re still at war, technically speaking, since the Korean War of 1950 to 1953 never formally ended, and in the decades since they’ve not been shy about attacking the U.S. military. This has included hijacking our spy ships, in pirate fashion, in international waters; blasting unarmed spy planes out of the sky, killing 31 Americans; and even hacking our soldiers apart in the Demilitarized Zone between North and South Korea.
Pyongyang has been even less restrained against America’s allies. DPRK terrorist attacks against South Korea amount to dozens of incidents over the years, including blowing up civilian airliners and even storming the presidential residence in Seoul with commandos. Hundreds of South Koreans have been murdered by these acts of state terrorism ordered and executed by Pyongyang. Most recently, in 2010, a North Korean submarine blew a South Korean navy frigate in half with a torpedo, killing 46 sailors.
Then there’s the DPRK’s weirdly sinister habit of perpetrating kidnappings abroad, across Asia and Europe. These include the abduction of hundreds of South Koreans, but also of Japanese citizens, some of them teenagers grabbed off beaches by North Korean naval commandos. This sounds too strange to be true, but Pyongyang has admitted to kidnapping 13 Japanese citizens, and many believe the true number is much higher, perhaps in the hundreds. Therefore the recent claim by a North Korean defector that his country has plans to kidnap Westerners in the event of crisis should not be dismissed.
Given the threats emanating from the DPRK—above all, the nuclear ones—it’s not surprising that our Intelligence Community devotes significant resources to trying to figure out what’s going on in that hermit kingdom. But that’s extraordinarily difficult in practice. IC professionals wanting an easy job avoid North Korea, since making accurate predictions there can be dangerous. This, after all, is a country that might do anything.
In fairness to IC analysts trying to make sense of what’s going on in the DPRK, most of their usual sources of information work poorly if at all when it comes to this hard target. We have no embassy in Pyongyang, which means the CIA’s usual practice of employing spies masquerading as diplomats to gain access to the host country’s secrets doesn’t apply. Neither do American firms do business in North Korea, so the CIA’s other option, of employing case officers under non-official cover—called NOCs in the spy trade—posing as businesspeople, doesn’t apply either.
Even if Americans somehow could get into North Korea, the 24/7 monitoring given to suspect foreigners in the country means they’d be hard-pressed to get any spying accomplished. Pyongyang, trusting no one, watches even its friends closely. A senior KGB official who did a tour in North Korea in the waning days of the Cold War admitted that he was under tighter surveillance by his “allies” in Pyongyang than he had experienced in his long espionage career. He told me that he was watched more invasively by North Korean counterspies than he ever had been by the FBI during a previous KGB tour in America.
Even the NSA, which supplies the lion’s share of intelligence in our IC, can’t get much access to North Korea. Pyongyang has buried most of its communications underground, making them immune to conventional interception, while cell phones are almost unknown there. Neither can NSA tap into the country’s computer networks easily, since North Korea barely has Internet access. Being all but sealed off from the world in IT terms means that the DPRK represents a very hard target for NSA, as well as a denied area overall for American spies.
Our spy satellites offer some indications of what’s going on north of the DMZ, but without corroborating HUMINT or SIGINT, that secret imagery is a lot less useful than it could be. The only way to get fresh intelligence about what’s happening in North Korea is by recruiting Pyongyang’s diplomats serving abroad (many of whom are really spies). They’re a pretty unsavory bunch, since DPRK embassies are outposts for crime—counterfeiting, drug-dealing, and various frauds—more than diplomacy, and any spies recruited will be impossible to maintain contact with once they return home.
Which means they become defectors. There have been quite a few defectors from Pyongyang in recent years, as the regime has fallen on hard times and Supreme Leader Kim Jong-un has taken to executing those he dislikes in hideous ways. But their information can be very difficult to authenticate, as any defector grows stale from the moment he comes over to our side. In short, defectors can be valuable sources of intelligence about the DPRK’s inner workings, but they are no panacea.
Therefore, we face the dangerous situation where North Korea, a rogue regime possessing nuclear weapons and no shortage of aggression, remains a black hole for American intelligence. For decades, the IC has tried hard to get information to help our decision-makers in Washington deal more effectively with Pyongyang, yet time and again we’ve been surprised by North Korea’s latest gambit. As the stakes of this game are getting higher, with increased nuclear saber-rattling, the risks of missteps are too.
John Schindler is a security expert and former National Security Agency analyst and counterintelligence officer. A specialist in espionage and terrorism, he’s also been a Navy officer and a War College professor. He’s published four books and is on Twitter at @20committee.So why is the Republican Party of Pennsylvania crying foul over Hillary Clinton's choice of the Broad Street Market for her rally Friday night?
The GOP issued a statement pointing out that the market "is just blocks away from where agents of the FBI arrested a man suspected of involvement with the Islamic State."
Clinton is scheduled to hold the rally between 8:30 and 9:30 p.m., with the venue opening at 6:30 p.m. Anyone wishing to attend is asked to RSVP at this website.
Harrisburg terrorist suspect indicted by federal grand jury for aiding ISIS
"We believe Mr. Trump is tougher on fighting terrorism, while her career is littered with failed policies regarding terrorism," said Megan Sweeney, GOP spokeswoman.
Sweeney said the GOP isn't implying that the rally location is unsafe.
Harrisburg spruces up for a visit from Hillary Clinton
"The Clinton campaign has not put a major focus on terrorism, and this is something that affected Harrisburg recently," Sweeney said. "What we have seen is terrorism can strike anywhere. But yet the Clinton campaign and the DNC have largely been not discussing it."
U.S. Rep. Scott Perry, R-York, will be at the Republican State Committee office at 5 p.m. with other GOP leaders to discuss these issues.
Hillary Clinton will accept her party's nomination on day 4 of the DNC
Prior to Harrisburg, Clinton will appear at a rally at noon Friday at Independence Mall. Anyone wishing to attend that rally may RSVP here.Consulting and IT services provider Infosys announced today that it will acquire Panaya, an enterprise resource planning (ERP) software company. Worth an enterprise value of about $200 million, the deal is expected to close by the end of March.
Infosys, which is based in Bengaluru, India, said that it will integrate technology from Panaya’s CloudQuality suite to bring automation to some of its software. CloudQuality helps businesses test changes to SAP, Oracle EBS, and Salesforce software by identifying functions that might break and providing potential solutions including code corrections.
In a prepared statement, Vishal Sikka, who was named CEO and managing director of Infosys last summer after resigning from SAP, said “The acquisition of Panaya is a key step in renewing and differentiating our service lines. This will help amplify the potential of our people, freeing us from the drudgery of many repetitive tasks, so we may focus more on the important, strategic challenges faced by our clients. At the same time, Panaya’s proven technology helps dramatically simplify the costs and complexities faced by businesses in managing their enterprise application landscapes.”
Infosys, one of India’s largest software exporters, is currently in the midst of revamping its strategy as it faces challenges including slower revenue growth than competitors like HCL Tech and TCS, and the departure of several key executives. Sikka told TechCrunch’s Ron Miller last July that he would take time to understand Infosys’ problems and that he believes software solutions should be about expanding the knowledge and capability of an organization.
According to Crunchbase, Panaya has received $59 million in funding. Its last round, a Series E of $20 million, was disclosed in January.2nd EDIT: after observation of some animation and film techniques.. i decided to add light blooms, also per request. I think this really help adds to the atmosphere, and i think i really learnt a great lesson today lolEDIT: Thanks to all of those who left their fine crit, you know who you are!Changed:Torso length, definition.Feet perspective on fembot and malbot.Hand perspectivesCast shadow on wall at far back. (fembot shadow)Ripped open the roof to show cityscape and lights.Made thighs longer and shins shorterMade the ground a liquidy- layerMotion blur (select zones)DOF changed.4 hours PS-CS, no refOk finally i have the time at night (its 2 am now >.>to do some practice... damn school is killing me.2-3 more weeks and im a free man... T_T/bitchthe pic... er.. an excuse to practice anatomy in paint!Also, i decided on a single focus perspective, which should let you enjoy the picture from at least 3 different angles (rotation wise).have fun, and i hope you like it.K bye! OH OH and yea... these are combots from my earlier designs.. evolved to be more retro/humanoid (they replace VR training session as actual sparring partners)...Like most of us, researchers at the National Institute of Standards and Technology had always wondered why dogs had wet noses. Further, they wondered why they could sense vapors better, allowing them to sniff out bombs, drugs, and even cancer. They tested the second question by 3D printing a dog’s nose including the “nasal vestibule, external nose, lower jaw, and about 10 cm of the snout.”
The sensor – which looks just like a dog’s nose – shows why and how a dog can sniff things out so easily. The researchers discovered that the nose was able to sense odors up to 10cm away while still taking in air around the snout, a fact that means first that dogs can localize odors directionally and, further, they can grab odors that would be inaccessible to other animals.
“During the expiratory phase of sniffing, turbulent air jets vectored ventrally and laterally entrain odorant vapor from tens of centimeters ahead of the nose that would otherwise be inaccessible to the dog,” the researchers write. “During the inspiratory phase of sniffing each nostril draws in air from all directions, including odorant-laden air that was drawn toward the nose during expiration.”
Why is this important? While technological biomimicry is fairly normal these days something so basic as sniffing hasn’t been quite brought over from the natural realm to the digital. By creating an artificial dog nose researchers can take advantage of the dog’s amazing sense of smell. In fact when the researchers added a dog-like schnoz to a vapor sensor they were about to pick up eighteen times more vapor.
“Active sniffing using the bioinspired inlet clearly extends the aerodynamic reach of the detector inlet, enabling odorant acquisition over a much larger distance compared with continuously drawing in air,” they write. With the exception of when the vapor source is located directly beneath the inlet, this simple modification significantly enhances the performance of the device.”
You can read the entire Nature article here and figure out why a dog’s nose is wet here. Sadly NIST stopped their research at nose shape and vapor inhalation and refrained from figuring out why dogs are such good boys and girls aren’t you so cute atta boy atta boy you are a cutie aren’t you!This article is about the Secretary of the Treasury and U.S. Senator from California. For the Representative from New Jersey and New York City Police Commissioner, see William McAdoo (New Jersey)
William Gibbs McAdoo Jr.[1] (October 31, 1863 – February 1, 1941) was an American lawyer and statesman. McAdoo was a leader of the Progressive movement and played a major role in the administration of President Woodrow Wilson. A member of the Democratic Party, he also represented California in the United States Senate.
Born in Marietta, Georgia, McAdoo moved to Knoxville, Tennessee in his youth and graduated from the University of Tennessee. He established a legal practice in Chattanooga, Tennessee before moving to New York City in 1892. He gained notoriety as the president of the Hudson and Manhattan Railroad Company and served as the vice chairman of the Democratic National Committee. McAdoo worked on Wilson's successful 1912 presidential campaign and served as the United States Secretary of the Treasury from 1913 to 1918. He married Wilson's daughter, Eleanor, in 1914. McAdoo presided over the establishment of the Federal Reserve System and helped prevent an economic crisis after the outbreak of World War I. After the U.S. entered the war, McAdoo also served as the Director General of Railroads. McAdoo left Wilson's Cabinet in 1919, co-founding the law firm of McAdoo, Cotton & Franklin.
McAdoo sought the Democratic presidential nomination at the 1920 Democratic National Convention but was blocked by his father-in-law Woodrow Wilson. In 1922, McAdoo left his law firm and moved to California. He sought the Democratic presidential nomination again in 1924, but the 1924 Democratic National Convention nominated John W. Davis. He was elected to the Senate in 1932 but was defeated in his bid for a second term. McAdoo died of a heart attack in 1941 while traveling to the third inauguration of Franklin D. Roosevelt.
Biography [ edit ]
Early life and career [ edit ]
McAdoo was born during the middle of the Civil War in the historic William Gibbs McAdoo House, in Marietta, Georgia. He was the son of author Mary Faith Floyd (1832–1913) and attorney William Gibbs McAdoo, Sr. (1820–1894). His uncle, John David McAdoo, was a Confederate general and a justice of the Texas Supreme Court.[2] McAdoo attended rural schools until his family moved to Knoxville, Tennessee, in 1877, when his father became a professor at the University of Tennessee.
He graduated from the University of Tennessee and was a member of the Lambda Chapter of Kappa Sigma Fraternity. He was appointed deputy clerk of the United States District Court for the Eastern District of Tennessee in 1882. He married his first wife, Sarah Hazelhurst Fleming, on November 18, 1885. They had seven children: Harriet Floyd McAdoo, Francis Huger McAdoo, Julia Hazelhurst McAdoo, Nona Hazelhurst McAdoo, William Gibbs MacAdoo III,[1] Robert Hazelhurst McAdoo, and Sarah Fleming McAdoo.
He was admitted to the bar in Tennessee in 1885 and set up a practice in Chattanooga, Tennessee. In the early 1890s, he lost most of his money trying to electrify the Knoxville Street Railroad system.[3][4] In 1892 he moved to New York City, where he met Francis R. Pemberton, son of the Confederate General John C. Pemberton. They formed a firm, Pemberton and McAdoo, to sell investment securities.
In 1895, McAdoo returned to Knoxville and regained control of part of his bankrupt streetcar company, which had been auctioned off. In subsequent months, he engaged in a struggle with Ohio businessman C. C. Howell over control of the city's streetcar system, culminating in a bizarre incident known as the Battle of Depot Street.[4] Litigation in the aftermath of this incident favored Howell, and McAdoo abandoned his streetcar endeavors in 1897 and returned to New York.[4]
Around 1900, McAdoo took on the leadership of a project to build a railway tunnel under the Hudson River to connect Manhattan with New Jersey. A tunnel had been partially constructed during the 1880s by Dewitt Clinton Haskin. With McAdoo as president of the Hudson and Manhattan Railroad Company, two passenger tubes were completed and opened in 1908. The popular McAdoo told the press that his motto was "Let the Public be Pleased." The tunnels are now operated as part of the Port Authority Trans-Hudson (PATH) system.
His first wife died in February 1912. That year, he served as vice chairman of the Democratic National Committee.
Secretary of the Treasury [ edit ]
Woodrow Wilson lured McAdoo away from business after their meeting in 1910 and he worked for the Wilson presidential campaign in 1912. Once he was President, Wilson appointed McAdoo secretary of the Treasury, a post McAdoo held from 1913 to 1918.[5][6][7]
He married the president's daughter Eleanor Randolph Wilson at the White House on May 7, 1914.[8] They had two daughters, Ellen Wilson McAdoo (1915–1946) and Mary Faith McAdoo (1920–1988). Ellen married twice and had two children.[9] Mary married three times, but had no children. McAdoo's second marriage ended in divorce in July 1935, and he married a third time at nearly 72, to 26 year old nurse Doris Isabel Cross (1909-2005), in September 1935.
McAdoo offered to resign after his wedding, but President Wilson urged him to complete his work of turning the Federal Reserve System into an operational central bank. The legislation establishing the System had been passed by Congress in December 1913.
As head of the Department of the Treasury, McAdoo confronted a major financial crisis on the eve and at the outbreak of World War I, July – August 1914.[10] During the last week of July, 1914, British and French investors began to liquidate their American securities holdings into U.S. currency. Many of these foreign investors then converted their dollars into gold, as was common practice in international monetary transactions at the time, in order to repatriate their holdings back to Europe. If they had done this, they would have depleted the gold backing for the dollar, possibly inducing a depression in American financial markets and in the American economy as a whole. They might then have been able to buy American goods and raw materials (for their war effort) at greatly depressed prices, which the Americans would have had to accept in order to restart the economy from a consciously (albeit inadvertently) caused depression.
Puck cartoon, 25 April 1914. "A long man with a long head".cartoon, 25 April 1914.
McAdoo's actions at the time were both bold and outrageous. The United States in 1914 was still a net debtor nation (i.e., Americans' aggregate debt to foreigners was greater than foreigners' aggregate debt to Americans). The nations of Europe and their financial institutions held far more in debt of the United States; of many of the states of the Union; and of American private institutions of all kinds, than investors in the United States held in the debt of Europe's nations and institutions in all forms, both public and private.
McAdoo kept the U.S. currency on the gold standard. He arranged the closing of the New York Stock Exchange for an unprecedented four months in 1914 to prevent Europeans from selling American securities and exchanging the proceeds for dollars, and then gold.
Economist William L. Silber wrote that the wisdom and historical impact of this action cannot be overemphasized.[10] McAdoo's bold stroke, Silber writes, as a first consequence averted an immediate panic and collapse of the American financial and stock markets. But also, it laid the groundwork for a historic and decisive shift in the global balance of economic power, from Europe to the United States; a shift which occurred exactly at that time. More than this, McAdoo's actions both saved the American economy and its future allies from economic defeat in the early stages of the war.
Investors in the warring countries had no access to their holdings of U.S. financial assets at the outset of the war because of McAdoo's actions. As a result, the treasuries of those countries more quickly exhausted all of their net foreign exchange holdings (those that were on hand and in their possession before McAdoo closed the markets), currency, and gold reserves. Some of them then issued sovereign bonded indebtedness (IOUs) to pay for the war materials they were buying on the American and other markets.
Silber wrote that the intact and undamaged American financial system and its markets managed the flow and operation of this financing more easily than they would have without McAdoo's measures, and that U.S. industry swiftly built up to the scale needed to meet the allied war needs. The managed liquidation of foreign holdings of U.S. assets moved the United States to a net creditor position internationally and with Europe from the net debtor position it had held prior to 1915.
In order to prevent a replay of the bank suspensions that plagued America during the Panic of 1907, McAdoo invoked the emergency-currency provisions of the 1908 Aldrich Vreeland Act. William Silber credits his actions for having turned America into a world financial power, in his book When Washington Shut Down Wall Street.[10]
McAdoo told the reporter Oswald Garrison Villard that racial segregation was needed in the Treasury to prevent friction.[11] He also was responsible for implementing Jim Crow laws, even in the north were they had previously not existed.[12]
Later political career [ edit ]
After the United States entered World War I in April 1917, the United States Railroad Administration was formed to run America's transportation system during the war. McAdoo was appointed Director General of Railroads, a position he held until the armistice in November 1918.
List of UA stockholders in 1920
In March 1919, after leaving the Wilson cabinet, McAdoo co-founded the law firm McAdoo, Cotton & Franklin, now known as white shoe firm Cahill Gordon & Reindel. His law firm served as general counsel for the founders of United Artists, with McAdoo taking a 20 percent stake in the common shares of the joint venture, while founders Mary Pickford, Charlie Chaplin, Douglas Fairbanks and D. W. Griffith each held a 25 percent stake in the preferred shares and a 20 percent stake of the common shares. He left the firm in 1922 and moved to California to concentrate on his political career.
President Woodrow Wilson's Appointment of Treasury Secretary McAdoo, March 1913
McAdoo ran twice for the Democratic nomination for president, losing to James M. Cox in 1920,[13] and to John W. Davis in 1924,[14] even though in both years he led on the first ballot.[15][16][17] While campaigning in the run-up to the 1920 presidential election, McAdoo voiced his support for such measures as injury compensation, unemployment insurance, and the eight-hour workday, while also expressing his support for the idea of permanent federal legislation in the labor sphere, especially concerning unemployment compensation and a minimum wage.[18]
A committed Prohibition supporter, McAdoo's first presidential bid was scuttled by the New York state delegation and other Northern opponents of the banning of alcohol at the 1920 Democratic National Convention.[19] After defeating his chief rival for the nomination, Attorney General A. Mitchell Palmer, McAdoo finally lost the party nomination to dark horse candidate Governor James M. Cox of Ohio when the delegates decided in his favor on the 44th ballot.[20]
McAdoo was again a candidate for the Democratic presidential nomination in 1924. Widely regarded as the front-runner in 1923, McAdoo's candidacy was badly hurt by the revelation that he had previously accepted a $25,000 contribution from Edward L. Doheny, an oil tycoon implicated in 1922 in the Teapot Dome scandal.[21] McAdoo had returned the normal-course contribution once he learned of Doheny's possible bribes to Secretary of the Interior Albert Bacon Fall to get oil leases.[22] At the 1924 Democratic National Convention, McAdoo received the votes of the Ku Klux Klan, he did not repudiate the KKK and this set the Catholic vote against him.[23] Despite the Doheny and KKK issues, McAdoo led after the first ballot of the convention, and on dozens of ballots thereafter, before John W. Davis won the Democratic presidential nomination on the 103rd ballot.
He served as Senator for California from 1933 until 1938, having lost his bid for renomination in 1938 to Sheridan H. Downey. McAdoo filed for divorce from his wife in 1934.[24] Two months after their separation was finalized in July 1935, the 71-year-old McAdoo married Doris Isabel Cross, a 26-year-old nurse.[25][26]
Death and legacy [ edit ]
McAdoo died on February 1, 1941, of a heart attack while traveling in Washington, D.C., after the third inauguration of Franklin D. Roosevelt,[27] and was buried in Arlington National Cemetery in Virginia.[28]
McAdoo was played by Vincent Price in the 1944 biopic Wilson. He is a significant character in the Glen David Gold novel Sunnyside, encouraging Charlie Chaplin to help with efforts to raise funds for World War I before advising him on the formation of United Artists.[29] McAdoo's former home in Chattanooga's Fort Wood neighborhood has been restored and is now a private residence.
The town of McAdoo in Dickens County, Texas, is |
and account for all its absurd, grotesque and cruel things, by saying that its authors lived in rude, barbaric times.But we are told that it was written by inspired men; that it contains the will of God; that it is perfect, pure, and true in all its parts; the source and standard of all moral and religious truth; that it is the star and anchor of all human hope; the only guide for man, the only torch in Nature's night.These claims are so at variance with every known recorded fact, so palpably absurd, that every free unbiased soul is forced to raise the standard of revolt.We read the pagan sacred books with profit and delight. With myth and fable we are ever charmed, and find a pleasure in the endless repetition of the beautiful, poetic, and absurd. We find, in all these records of the past, philosophies and dreams, and efforts stained with tears, of great and tender souls who tried to pierce the mystery of life and death, to answer the eternal questions of the Whence and Whither, and vainly sought to make, with bits of shattered glass, a mirror that would, in very truth, reflect the face and form of Nature's perfect self.These myths were born of hopes, and fears, and tears, and smiles, and they were touched and colored by all there is of joy and grief between the rosy dawn of birth, and deaths sad night. They clothed even the stars with passion, and gave to gods the faults and frailties of the sons of men.In them, the winds and waves were music, and all the lakes, and streams, and springs,—the mountains, woods and perfumed dells were haunted by a thousand fairy forms. They thrilled the veins of Spring with tremulous desire; made tawny Summer's billowed breast the throne and home of love; filled Autumn's arms with sun-kissed grapes, and gathered sheaves; and pictured Winter as a weak old king who felt, like Lear upon his withered face, Cordelia's tears. These myths, though false, are beautiful, and have for many ages and in countless ways, enriched the heart and kindled thought.But if the world were taught that all these things are true and all inspired of God, and that eternal punishment will be the lot of him who dares deny or doubt, the sweetest myth of all the Fable World would lose its beauty, and become a scorned and hateful thing to every brave and thoughtful man.Robert G. Ingersoll.Washington, D. C., Oct. 7th, 1879.___________________________________________________________________HE WHO ENDEAVORS TO CONTROL THE MIND BY FORCE IS A TYRANT, AND HE WHO SUBMITS IS A SLAVE.I want to do what little I can to make my country truly free, to broaden the intellectual horizon of our people, to destroy the prejudices born of ignorance and fear, to do away with the blind worship of the ignoble past, with the idea that all the great and good are dead, that the living are totally depraved, that all pleasures are sins, that sighs and groans are alone pleasing to God, that thought is dangerous, that intellectual courage is a crime, that cowardice is a virtue, that a certain belief is necessary to secure salvation, that to carry a cross in this world will give us a palm in the next, and that we must allow some priest to be the pilot of our souls.Until every soul is freely permitted to investigate every book, and creed, and dogma for itself, the world cannot be free. Mankind will be enslaved until there is mental grandeur enough to allow each man to have his thought and say. This earth will be a paradise when men can, upon all these questions differ, and yet grasp each other's hands as friends.It is amazing to me that a difference of opinion upon subjects that we know nothing with certainty about, should make us hate, persecute, and despise each other.Why a difference of opinion upon predestination, or the Trinity, should make people imprison and burn each other seems beyond the comprehension of man; and yet in all countries where Christians have existed, they have destroyed each other to the exact extent of their power.Why should a believer in God hate an atheist? Surely the atheist has not injured God, and surely he is human, capable of joy and pain, and entitled to all the rights of man. Would it not be far better to treat this atheist, at least, as well as he treats us?Christians tell me that they love their enemies, and yet all I ask is—not that they love their enemies, not that they love their friends even, but that they treat those who differ from them, with simple fairness.We do not wish to be forgiven, but we wish Christians to so act that we will not have to forgive them.If all will admit that all have an equal right to think, then the question is forever solved; but as long as organized and powerful churches, pretending to hold the keys of heaven and hell, denounce every person as an outcast and criminal who thinks for himself and denies their authority, the world will be filled with hatred and suffering.To hate man and worship God seems to be the sum of all the creeds.That which has happened in most countries has happened in ours. When a religion is founded, the educated, the powerful—that is to say, the priests and nobles, tell the ignorant and superstitious—that is to say, the people, that the religion of their country was given to their fathers by God himself; that it is the only true religion; that all others were conceived in falsehood and brought forth in fraud, and that all who believe in the true religion will be happy forever, while all others will burn in hell.For the purpose of governing the people, that is to say, for the purpose of being supported by the people, the priests and nobles declare this religion to be sacred, and that whoever adds to, or takes from it, will be burned here by man, and hereafter by God.The result of this is, that the priests and nobles will not allow the people to change; and when, after a time, the priests, having intellectually advanced, wish to take a step in the direction of progress, the people will not allow them to change. At first, the rabble are enslaved by the priests, and afterwards the rabble become the masters.One of the first things I wish to do, is to free the orthodox clergy. I am a great friend of theirs, and in spite of all they may say against me, I am going to do them a great and lasting service. Upon their necks are visible the marks of the collar, and upon their backs those of the lash. They are not allowed to read and think for themselves.They are taught like parrots, and the best are those who repeat, with the fewest mistakes, the sentences they have been taught. They sit like owls upon some dead limb of the tree of knowledge, and hoot the same old hoots that have been hooted for eighteen hundred years.Their congregations are not grand enough, nor sufficiently civilized, to be willing that the poor preachers shall think for themselves. They are not employed for that purpose. Investigation regarded as a dangerous experiment, and the ministers are warned that none of that kind of work will be tolerated. They are notified to stand by the old creed, and to avoid all original thought, as a mortal pestilence.Every minister is employed like an attorney—either for plaintiff or defendant,—and he is expected to be true to his client. If he changes his mind, he is regarded as a deserter, and denounced, hated, and slandered accordingly. Every orthodox clergyman agrees not to change.He contracts not to find new facts, and makes a bargain that he will deny them if he does. Such is the position of a Protestant minister in this nineteenth century. His condition excites my pity; and to better it, I am going to do what little I can.Some of the clergy have the independence to break away, and the intellect to maintain themselves as free men, but the most are compelled to submit to the dictation of the orthodox, and the dead. They are not employed to give their thoughts, but simply to repeat the ideas of others. They are not expected to give even the doubts that may suggest themselves, but are required to walk in the narrow, verdureless path trodden by the ignorance of the past.The forests and fields on either side are nothing to them. They must not even look at the purple hills, nor pause to hear the babble of the brooks. They must remain in the dusty road where the guide-boards are. They must confine themselves to the "fall of man," the expulsion from the garden, the "scheme of salvation," the "second birth," the atonement, the happiness of the redeemed, and the misery of the lost.They must be careful not to express any new ideas upon these great questions. It is much safer for them to quote from the works of the dead. The more vividly they describe the sufferings of the unregenerate, of those who attended theatres and balls, and drank wine in summer gardens on the Sabbath-day, and laughed at priests, the better ministers they are supposed to be.They must show that misery fits the good for heaven, while happiness prepares the bad for hell; that the wicked get all their good things in this life, and the good all their evil; that in this world God punishes the people he loves, and in the next, the ones he hates; that happiness makes us bad here, but not in heaven; that pain makes us good here, but not in hell.No matter how absurd these things may appear to the carnal mind, they must be preached and they must be believed. If they were reasonable, there would be no virtue in believing. Even the publicans and sinners believe reasonable things. To believe without evidence, or in spite of it, is accounted as righteousness to the sincere and humble Christian.The ministers are in duty bound to denounce all intellectual pride, and show that we are never quite so dear to God as when we admit that we are poor, corrupt and idiotic worms; that we never should have been born; that we ought to be damned without the least delay; that we are so infamous that we like to enjoy ourselves; that we love our wives and children better than our God; that we are generous only because we are vile; that we are honest from the meanest motives, and that sometimes we have fallen so low that we have had doubts about the inspiration of the Jewish Scriptures.In short, they are expected to denounce all pleasant paths and rustling trees, to curse the grass and flowers, and glorify the dust and weeds. They are expected to malign the wicked people in the green and happy fields, who sit and laugh beside the gurgling springs or climb the hills and wander as they will. They are expected to point out the dangers of freedom, the safety of implicit obedience, and to show the wickedness of philosophy, the goodness of faith, the immorality of science and the purity of ignorance.Now and then a few pious people discover some young man of a religious turn of mind and a consumptive habit of body, not quite sickly enough to die, nor healthy enough to be wicked. The idea occurs to them that he would make a good orthodox minister. They take up a contribution, and send the young man to some theological school where he can be taught to repeat a creed and despise reason.Should it turn out that the young man had some mind of his own, and, after graduating, should change his opinions and preach a different doctrine from that taught in the school, every man who contributed a dollar towards his education would feel that he had been robbed, and would denounce him as a dishonest and ungrateful wretch.The pulpit should not be a pillory. Congregations should allow the minister a little liberty. They should, at least, permit him to tell the truth.They have, in Massachusetts, at a place called Andover, a kind of minister factory, where each professor takes an oath once in five years—that time being considered the life of an oath—that he has not, during the last five years, and will not, during the next five years, intellectually advance.There is probably no oath that they could easier keep. Probably, since the foundation stone of that institution was laid there has not been a single case of perjury.The old creed is still taught. They still insist that God is infinitely wise, powerful and good, and that all men are totally depraved. They insist that the best man God ever made, deserved to be damned the moment he was finished. Andover puts its brand upon every minister it turns out, the same as Sheffield and Birmingham brand their wares, and all who see the brand know exactly what the minister believes, the books he has read, the arguments he relies on, and just what he intellectually is. They know just what he can be depended on to preach, and that he will continue to shrink and shrivel, and grow solemnly stupid day by day until he reaches the Andover of the grave and becomes truly orthodox forever.I have not singled out the Andover factory because it is worse than the others. They are all about the same. The professors, for the most part, are ministers who failed in the pulpit and were retired to the seminary on account of their deficiency in reason and their excess of faith. As a rule, they know nothing of this world, and far less of the next; but they have the power of stating the most absurd propositions with faces solemn as stupidity touched by fear.Something should be done for the liberation of these men. They should be allowed to grow—to have sunlight and air. They should no longer be chained and tied to confessions of faith, to mouldy books and musty creeds. Thousands of ministers are anxious to give their honest thoughts. The hands of wives and babes now stop their mouths. They must have bread, and so the husbands and fathers are forced to preach a doctrine that they hold in scorn. For the sake of shelter, food and clothes, they are obliged to defend the childish miracles of the past, and denounce the sublime discoveries of to-day.They are compelled to attack all modern thought, to point out the dangers of science, the wickedness of investigation and the corrupting influence of logic. It is for them to show that virtue rests upon ignorance and faith, while vice impudently feeds and fattens upon fact and demonstration.It is a part of their business to malign and vilify the Voltaires, Humes, Paines, Humboldts, Tyndalls, Haeckels, Darwins, Spencers, and Drapers, and to bow with uncovered heads before the murderers, adulterers, and persecutors of the world. They are, for the most part, engaged in poisoning the minds of the young, prejudicing children against science, teaching the astronomy and geology of the Bible, and inducing all to desert the sublime standard of reason.These orthodox ministers do not add to the sum of knowledge. They produce nothing. They live upon alms. They hate laughter and joy. They officiate at weddings, sprinkle water upon babes, and utter meaningless words and barren promises above the dead. They laugh at the agony of unbelievers, mock at their tears, and of their sorrows make a jest.There are some noble exceptions. Now and then a pulpit holds a brave and honest man. Their congregations are willing that they should think—willing that their ministers should have a little freedom.As we become civilized, more and more liberty will be accorded to these men, until finally ministers will give their best and highest thoughts. The congregations will finally get tired of hearing about the patriarchs and saints, the miracles and wonders, and will insist upon knowing something about the men and women of our day, and the accomplishments and discoveries of our time. They will finally insist upon knowing how to escape the evils of this world instead of the next.They will ask light upon the enigmas of this life. They will wish to know what we shall do with our criminals instead of what God will do with his—how we shall do away with beggary and want—with crime and misery—with prostitution, disease and famine,—with tyranny in all its cruel forms—with prisons and scaffolds, and how we shall reward the honest workers, and fill the world with happy homes! These are the problems for the pulpits and congregations of an enlightened future. If Science cannot finally answer these questions, it is a vain and worthless thing.The clergy, however, will continue to answer them in the old way, until their congregations are good enough to set them free. They will still talk about believing in the Lord Jesus Christ, as though that were the only remedy for all human ills. They will still teach that retrogression is the only path that leads to light; that we must go back, that faith is the only sure guide, and that reason is a delusive glare, lighting only the road to eternal pain.Until the clergy are free they cannot be intellectually honest. We can never tell what they really believe until they know that they can safely speak. They console themselves now by a secret resolution to be as liberal as they dare, with the hope that they can finally educate their congregations to the point of allowing them to think a little for themselves. They hardly know what they ought to do. The best part of their lives has been wasted in studying subjects of no possible value. Most of them are married, have families, and know but one way of making their living.Some of them say that if they do not preach these foolish dogmas, others will, and that they may through fear, after all, restrain mankind. Besides, they hate publicly to admit that they are mistaken, that the whole thing is a delusion, that the "scheme of salvation" is absurd, and that the Bible is no better than some other books, and worse than most.You can hardly expect a bishop to leave his palace, or the pope to vacate the Vatican. As long as people want popes, plenty of hypocrites will be found to take the place. And as long as labor fatigues, there will be found a good many men willing to preach once a week, if other folks will work and give them bread. In other words, while the demand lasts, the supply will never fail.If the people were a little more ignorant, astrology would flourish—if a little more enlightened, religion would perish!241 SHARES Facebook Twitter Google Whatsapp Pinterest Print Mail Flipboard
To say Stan Solomon, of the Talk to Solomon Internet TV show, is a homophobe, understates Solomon’s obsession with man-on-man topics. He is not only a guy who supports the crazy Pink Swastika theories that gays were behind Nazism but claims that Obama is putting together an army of black people to kill white people.
If you don’t know who Stan Solomon is, he has as his frequent (and deranged) guests, people like Alan Keyes (the guy who says Satan is using gays to destroy America and that Marriage Equality is a crime against humanity) and Larry Pratt, the Gun Owners of America Guy.
Pratt, incidentally, has done one better than the NRA’s tale about the Obama taking away white folks’ guns and giving them to black folks. Pratt says we have to stop immigration because immigrants will “vote to take away our guns.” And not only immigrants, but welfare recipients!
Because everyone knows Hispanics and welfare recipients hate guns, right?(though who could blame either group for not wanting crazy racist white guys to have guns?).
Right Wing Watch points to an interview Solomon did with Eagle Forum founder Phyllis Schlafy last week, an interview which created not a man-on-man but a loon-on-loon meeting of the minds. Schlafy thinks that feminists control the Obama administration, which probably explains the almost complete absence of women in Obama’s administration (just sayin’).
But Solomon somehow saw in these comments from Schlafy an opportunity to indulge in his gay fantasies (because gay men are somehow dominated by women?), speculating that,
Barack Obama is a wussy guy who throws a ball like a girl, who everyone knows was involved in homosexuality and I think he is the stereotypical – if he could get away with it he’d be in drag. I don’t think he’s a man at all and he leads a whole group of men that are that way.
Next we’ll be told Obama likes Elizabeth Warren to spank him.
Watch courtesy of Right Wing Watch:
Somebody’s projecting, from the sounds of it. I mean, this is a man who is as obsessed with homosexuality as my 9-year-old son is with the game Minecraft or some of us are with World of Warcraft or World of Tanks.
In fact, Solomon’s homophobia is so extreme that his homophobic tweets forced his resignation as campaign manager for Republican Marvin Scott, who was running for Indiana’s 7th District Congressional Campaign.
So much does Solomon go on about men doing manly things with other manly men that one wonders if Solomon himself doesn’t prefer the company of men to the company of women in any and all situations.
You’ve got to wonder too about homophobic talk-show host Steve Deace, who likes to fantasize about assaulting basketball player Jason Collins. The passion with which he pursues the subject leaves you wondering just what the nature of this assault would be, if you take my meaning.
The GOP as the party of self-loathing angry gay men?
Not sayin’. Just sayin’.
If you’re ready to read more from the unbossed and unbought Politicus team, sign up for our newsletter here! Email address: Leave this field empty if you're human:Bill Murray in “Groundhog Day.” (Columbia Pictures)
The most emotionally complex moment of the 1993 movie “Groundhog Day” arrives midway through the film. It depicts a slovenly Bill Murray, dressed in an undershirt and trenchcoat, as he sits at a diner beside his love interest. By this point, he had relived the same day — Feb. 2 — dozens of times and felt trapped, but also strangely God-like. “I have been stabbed, shot, poisoned, frozen, hung, electrocuted and burned,” Murray related in the diner scene. “And every morning, I wake up without a scratch on me, not a dent in the fender. I am an immortal.”
It’s meant to be a funny scene. A waitress stands nearby, mouth agape, watching in stunned disbelief as Murray considers his predicament.
But to those afflicted with perennial déjà vu, there’s little humorous in what Murray describes. About 60 percent of the population has experienced déjà vu at some point. For almost all of them, it arrives as quickly as it disappears. A flash of familiarity — Have I been here before? — then, poof, it’s gone. But for an extremely small percentage of those who experience déjà vu, that’s not true. For them, it’s an everyday thing.
And then, there’s this: One 23-year-old British man, according to the Journal of Medical Case Reports, has been trapped inside what he calls a “time loop” for eight years. For him, this isn’t just déjà vu, which one study defines as a “memory-based illusion” resulting from the “erroneous activation” of “feelings of familiarity.” He actually thinks he’s reliving past experiences: “Rather than simply the unsettling feelings of familiarity which are normally associated with déjà vu, he complained that it felt like he was actually retrieving previous experiences from memory — not just finding them familiar,” the Journal wrote. It’s a subset of déjà vu called déjà vécu, which translates to “already lived through.”
No one’s quite sure why he feels this way. His physical symptoms aren’t like those of others who suffer from perennial déjà vu because — well, because he doesn’t appear to have any. The most common conditions believed to cause severe déjà vu are neurological, such as temporal lobe epilepsy and dementia.
That was, at least, the case with an 80-year-old Polish man New Scientist called “Mr. P.” Mr. P had a big problem. He didn’t watch TV or read the newspaper — he had seen everything before. The same went for the singing birds. When he walked, the birds all crooned the same songs every day. And when Mr. P’s doctor told him he should get to a memory specialist, Mr. P demurred. He was positive he had already been to a memory specialist.
Mr. P’s problem was neurological. He had dementia. But it’s a very different situation with this anonymous 23-year-old. He’s passed neurological tests with flying colors. So what could possibly explain what the medical report calls his “debilitating déjà vu”? The leading theory: It’s something psychological. The man is wracked with anxiety that may suggest a “possible link” to déjà vu, though one has never been fully studied.
“Most cases like this occur as a side effect associated with epileptic seizures or dementia,” psychology expert Christine Wells of Sheffield Hallam University told the Telegraph on Tuesday. “However, in this instance it appears as though the episodes of déjà vu could be linked to anxiety. … If proved, this could be the first-ever recorded instance of psychogenic déjà vu, which is déjà vu triggered by anxiety rather than a neurological condition such as dementia or epilepsy.”
Anxiety has always been with the 23-year-old — even before déjà vu was. “He had a history of feeling anxious, particularly in relation to contamination, which led him to wash his hands very frequently and to shower two to three times per day, and his anxiety worsened around the time he began university” in 2007, the journal said.
His nerves got to be too much while he was at school, and he soon took a break. That was when déjà vu struck. “His recollection of these early episodes was that they would last for minutes, but could also be extremely prolonged,” the paper said. “For example, while on holiday in a destination that he had previously visited he reported feeling as though he had become ‘trapped in a time loop.’ He reported these experiences as very frightening.”
He went to see doctors, but they couldn’t figure out his condition — everything checked out neurologically. Meanwhile, as doctors grasped for answers, his symptoms worsened. By 2010, he had given up on reading newspapers and watching television — just like Mr. P. — convinced he had seen everything before.
So, can the 23-year-old break free of the time loop? Researchers think the best way to spring him loose would be to treat his anxiety. His condition has created a feedback loop in which bouts of déjà vu incite moments of severe anxiety, which then lead to other episodes of déjà vu.
“Our case is aware of the abnormal familiarity of his memory, and is in fact greatly distressed by it,” author Christine Wells wrote. “This suggests two dimensions … awareness and distress.”'Metro man' E Sreedharan has came out in support of BJP's prime ministerial candidate Narendra Modi, saying he hoped bold decisions under his leadership will fasten government's decision-making process.
"Our problem is basically delay in taking government decisions and bureaucracy is responsible for it. We don't have self confidence to take bold decisions," Sreedharan, former managing director of Delhi Metro, said.
Although he did not blame either central or the state government, Sreedharan said he hoped that Modi will fasten the decision making process in the country.
"I think there will be a change in decision making process. From what I have seen, the decisions he (Modi) has taken till now were very fast," Sreedharan said.
Giving an example of good work done by Modi's administration in Gujarat, he said, "the factory in Salvi in Vadodra district of Gujarat for producing metro trains was set up in record time of 18 months."
Sreedharan was speaking to reporters before an event organised by the Japan Embassy to felicitate him for his contribution in "strengthening Japan's presence in India and to promoting friendly relations between Japan and India through the Delhi Metro project."Daniel Craig has been indeed considered to be the leading man in “Thor“.
Craig, Olga Kurylenko and director Mark Forster attending the press day in Beverly Hills on Monday, October 20, for the 22nd Bond film “Quantum of Solace“. IESB’s Robert Sanchez talked with both Olga and Daniel, who actually had a bit to say about another widely known hero, Thor, who is currently set up over at Marvel for a 2010 release with Kenneth Branagh attached to direct.
IESB asked if Craig was interested in doing something a little different character-wise, like Thor? Craig said no, he turned it down and laughed about it.
Sanchez continued, “seriously, I heard the folks over at Marvel had you on a short list to be Thor.”
Craig said yes they [Marvel] did approach him but he turned it down. He added jokingly, it would have been too much of a power trip, both Bond and Thor, and running around with long hair and a hammer.
So far, “Thor” has been linked to many actors from wrestler-turned-actor Triple H to Hollywood superstar Brad Pitt. However, up to date, there is yet real indication on who will tackle the part. The search for Thor continues! [source: IESB]Photo by Daniel Leininger / Flickr
The following post by Manjula Martin (@manjulamartin) is part of our online companion to our Spring 2013 issue on The Business of Literature. Click here for an overview of the issue.
——
i. In the basement
I began as a “stock girl” at eleven years old. My job was to run up and down the stairs to the basement of my grandmother’s upscale housewares store and fetch oversized customer purchases—sets of wine glasses and unassembled wire drawer units, mostly. Every summer weekend of 1987, I carried outgoing boxes up the stairs and newly arrived UPS boxes down. Between laps I flattened and bundled cardboard, tallied inventory on a clipboard, and filed purchase orders. I worked hard, but nepotism had its privileges: I was paid $5 an hour in cash under the table, a fortune for a kid and on par with what the grown-up clerks made. (California minimum wage at the time was $3.35.)
Even then, I viewed my summer gig as work I would one day leave behind: when I grew up, I was certain, I would become a full-time artist. (I cycled through the dream jobs of ballerina, actor, rock star, and, finally, writer). While I was working in the basement I visualized my future Artist’s Life: I would have a post-industrial living space with high ceilings in a large city; I’d share it with a cat and a partner, both of whom would adore me but value my independent spirit and leave me alone to work. My work would be popular yet retain its authenticity. There would be cocktail parties and ceiling-to-floor bookshelves. Above all, I would never “have to” flatten cardboard boxes again.
My family’s store was housed in a grand 1910 sandstone building, formerly a bank. The basement was cool and dark. It smelled like damp cement and Styrofoam, but to me it was the shadowy secret headquarters of capital. My grandparents had repurposed the old bank vault as their office, its original meter-thick door permanently propped open like a steel monument to the place’s past as a retailer of money. When I delivered my packing slips to the manager’s filing cabinet, I could see an intricate interior system of old locks and gears in the door’s cross-section. Prior to working at the store, I had been enchanted by the mechanics of the cash register, by its percussive flashes of bells, sliding parts, and coins. But in the basement I realized the sales floor operations were a façade: the real work of business was happening downstairs. The basement was both the physical and fiscal seat of power in the store. This was where the money lived, in the heavy lifting that made those wine glasses shine for the yuppie newlyweds shopping upstairs, and even deeper, behind a steel door as thick as I was tall. I wondered then if everything I knew and experienced might have a similar duplicity—another thing, a working and sweating mechanism beneath the surface.
In the business of literature, the people who mind the store—from writers to editors to Tumblrs— often have other jobs, too. For writers and other creators of culture, the “day job”—a means of income for an artist that is not the production of her art (leaving the definition of art aside for the moment)—is viewed as a temporary step on the ladder to artistic success. Many young writers hold the conviction that a day will come when they don’t have to do anything but write. When we speak about our “Work,” we mean our writing. We treat this work with reverence and hold it up as the work that makes us who we are: Artists. But beneath the surface of our art is a life largely spent doing other work: basement shifts, rent gigs, and adjunct positions whose earnings shore up our literary work. Day jobs are a mechanism beneath the business of literature. As such, they don’t just pay our bills; they’re what we do with most of our lives. Is there value to be found in a day job beyond its paycheck? Why are writers so eager to leave work behind?
ii. Moving on up
In high school, I scored a legit job at the local used book and record store. There, I still had to flatten cardboard, but I also shelved pocketbooks—sci fi, mystery, and Westerns—in their delineated sections on the basement level of the store. I got my hands on the work of Flannery O’Connor, Emily Dickinson, Joan Didion, and Anaïs Nin, and the fantasy of leaving behind my day job grew. I could see so many potential iterations of myself as a successful writer: I might be the sensitive introvert composing my work in a window seat while watching the light fall all day long; the cultural critic, always traveling and observing, a notebook and chic sunglasses my most constant companions; or the continental sensation breaking literary hearts with every breathless epistolary I penned. Regardless of the details, I was certain I would soon be illuminating the human condition with impeccable prose while living a life far removed from the drudgery of “regular” work.
I was sixteen and about to graduate from high school by the time a coworker said to me, “So, what are you gonna do now?” I’d soon be leaving to attend college back East, but I already had larger ambitions. (And I’d recently added Kerouac to my roster of role models.)
“I dunno,” I said, “maybe drop out of college and move to New York and become a famous writer by the age of twenty-one?”
My coworker, a bookseller with two kids, a man who has read and understood all of Proust, Finnegan’s Wake, and John Fahey’s liner notes—and an agreeable clerk who was kind and sincere with even the most hostile of customers—rolled his eyes. He handed me a stack of paperbacks and said, “Yeah. Right. Don’t quit your day job, kid.”
Did I really believe I would be a bestselling author with a sweet Soho loft by age twenty-one? No, but I didn’t believe I wouldn’t be. Any artist who produces work for public consumption must navigate a tenuous balance of ambition and pragmatism. Ambition requires dreaming; sometimes dreams veer into fantasy. Fantasies, once they take root, are difficult to remove. Weed-like, they devour the productive environment around them. They are fertile and robust. Sometimes, they even flower.
The Writing Life is one such fantasy; another is quitting your day job. Both scenarios imply there is something else—something more—for artists around the bend. Freedom, unfettered expression, fame. Legend, even. Take my high school-era hero: Emily Dickinson, hard at work at her little table, free from the bothers of having to earn a living (and an unseen maid hard at work cleaning up after her, no doubt). I know it’s not real for me, but also, even now, I believe in it a little.
Early last month, I was living the Writing Life by clicking on links to “10 Writing Rules from Some Canonical Author Dude” on one of the literary websites I frequent when I came across a news item about a recently discovered letter by Oscar Wilde. Among a reported 13 pages of advice to a younger writer was Wilde’s admonition to secure a steady income: “The best work in literature is always done by those who do not depend on it for their daily bread.”
In other words, don’t quit your day job, kid.
iii. The best work
I did drop out of college, and I did move to New York. I wrote. I published a zine. I typed poems on my old typewriter and taped them to the walls of bedrooms and bars. I scribbled letters to friends back home and kept carefully Xeroxed copies in my journal just in case I needed to plunder them later for my memoir. I wrote a few okay, earnest short stories that weren’t published and some snarky cultural criticism that was. I sold some articles for money, to the magazine where I was a secretary. I moved cities a few more times. And I worked.
I was a seamstress for a theater company while many of my peers were still in dorm rooms burning their parents’ money in bongs. My coworkers, two middle-age women, preferred listening to public radio to talking. They were kind to me: although I was only a stitcher—my job was to iron and baste pattern muslin—the shop manager walked me through the process of crafting a 1940s noir bombshell’s dress from raw white silk. On opening night of the play in which the dress starred, I had to pick up the costume from the dry cleaners and deliver it to the theater; when I slipped and dropped my pristine creation into the dirt-filled snowpack of the city street, I cried. I had made that dress, the first physical thing I ever entirely made, and I had done so in the tradition and company of other working women. Then I had ruined it. And I had to tell my boss. She came in to help me spot-clean the garment while the analog sounds of the radio warmed the quiet cold of the empty shop. That warmth became part of the fabric of my experience as a creator of things.
I was a server of things, too: At a busy NYC restaurant I learned when you don’t show up, your boss might dock you, but it’s your coworkers who suffer. That’s called solidarity. At a downtown nightclub, I learned to carry a full tray of cocktails on one hand above my head, and I learned what it smells like when the tray drops down the back of a well-perfumed nightclub patron. That’s called going home with no tips.
At multiple retail gigs I developed the ability to read a person’s mood in one glance, to ask them what they wanted and then perform customer service triage. I learned to fake friend |
1.15 AC-130 GUNSHIP 01:13:24 67 18 0.91 RCB 01:23:50 97 25 1.16 AAV-7A1 AMTRAC 00:20:25 17 2 0.83 HJ-8 LAUNCHER 00:03:47 0 0 0.00 ZFB-05 00:09:54 6 0 0.61 PANTSIR-S1 00:00:00 0 0 0.00 M1161 ITV 00:05:02 1 0 0.20 RAWR 00:00:00 10 0 0.00 Z-10W 03:01:51 163 47 0.90.50 CAL 00:08:59 7 0 0.78 SU-25TM FROGFOOT 00:08:35 1 1 0.12 UH-1Y VENOM 00:23:57 11 4 0.46 XD-1 Accipiter 00:00:00 0 0 0.00 LAV-25 00:04:35 1 0 0.22 SNOWMOBILE 00:03:59 0 0 0.00 VDV BUGGY 00:03:09 0 0 0.00 BTR-90 00:01:42 2 0 1.18 QUAD BIKE 00:11:50 0 0 0.00 LYT2021 00:09:14 3 0 0.32 Z-11W 04:29:21 281 49 1.04 MRAP 00:04:10 1 0 0.24 BTR-90 01:48:24 85 12 0.78 HJ-8 LAUNCHER 00:00:00 0 0 0.00.50 CAL 00:08:59 7 0 0.78 Z-9 HAITUN 00:34:22 4 0 0.12 ACV 00:03:35 0 0 0.00 SUAV 00:00:00 0 0 0.00 AA MINE 00:00:00 1 1 0.00 9K22 TUNGUSKA-M 00:00:00 0 0 0.00 LAV-AD 00:00:00 0 0 0.00 M224 MORTAR 00:00:00 277 23 0.00 M220 TOW LAUNCHER 00:01:47 2 1 1.12 PWC 00:07:38 0 0 0.00 AH-1Z VIPER 03:11:37 132 50 0.69 SKID LOADER 00:01:21 0 0 0.00 UH-1Y VENOM 00:00:00 0 0 0.00 EOD BOT 00:00:00 0 0 0.00 KA-60 KASATKA 00:07:33 4 0 0.53 SU-50 00:15:29 1 2 0.06 Show more
Vehicle categories Name Time Score Spm Kills Destroys Kpm Unlocks Infantry Fighting Vehicle 09:57:47 - 0.00 543 92 0.91 - / - Anti Air 07:32:35 - 0.00 437 190 0.97 - / - Transport KA-60 00:01:44 - 0.00 1 0 0.58 - / - Transport 02:45:00 - 0.00 59 6 0.36 - / - Air Jet Stealth 01:16:33 19,323 252.42 25 25 0.33 6 / 10 Air Helicopter Scout AH6 00:00:00 411,087 0.00 0 0 0.00 27 / 27 Air Jet Attack 00:32:57 6,390 193.93 11 8 0.33 1 / 9 Weapon Stationary 00:28:05 - 0.00 20 3 0.71 - / - HIMARS 00:11:08 - 0.00 9 2 0.81 - / - Air Helicopter Scout z11 00:00:00 - 0.00 0 0 0.00 - / - Boat 00:27:30 - 0.00 13 3 0.47 - / - Air 01:24:21 - 0.00 76 22 0.90 - / - Weapon Stationary AA 00:00:00 - 0.00 0 0 0.00 - / - Main Battle Tanks 12:23:33 481,451 647.50 788 178 1.06 57 / 57 Air Helicopter Scout 12:22:29 - 0.00 709 129 0.95 - / - MBT T90 00:00:00 - 0.00 0 0 0.00 - / - Air Helicopter Attack 08:19:21 281,872 564.48 370 128 0.74 12 / 12 Mobile Artillery 01:27:51 - 0.00 79 20 0.90 - / - Transport UH-1Y Venom 00:01:43 - 0.00 1 1 0.58 - / - Soldier Equiment 00:00:00 - 0.00 308 26 0.00 - / - Fast Attack Craft 01:35:18 113,542 1,191.42 117 30 1.23 15 / 15 Jeep SPM3 00:00:26 - 0.00 0 0 0.00 - / - MBT M1 Abrams 00:01:06 - 0.00 1 0 0.91 - / - IFV LAV-25 00:04:35 - 0.00 1 0 0.22 - / - IFV BTR 90 00:01:42 342,333 201,372.35 2 0 1.18 51 / 51 AA 9K22 Tunguska 00:00:00 - 0.00 0 0 0.00 - / - AA LAV-AD 00:00:00 237,748 0.00 0 0 0.00 42 / 42
Kit items Assault FIRST AID PACK DEFIBRILLATOR 0 Kills 2,583 Revives OFFENSIVE COMBAT MEDIC MEDIC BAG 16,013 Heals GRENADIER Engineer REPAIR TOOL 0 Kills 653 Repairs M15 AT MINE 0 Kills CARBINE OFFENSIVE MECHANIC M2 SLAM 14 Kills 244 Shots EOD BOT 0 Kills ANTI-TANK Support AMMO PACK M18 CLAYMORE 34 Kills SHOTGUN OFFENSIVE AMMO BOX 3,887 Resupplies INDIRECT FIRE M224 MORTAR 277 Kills MP-APS 0 Damage assists PERIMETER DEFENSE C4 EXPLOSIVE Recon PLD MOTION SENSOR DMR OFFENSIVE RADIO BEACON 0 Spawns SPEC OPS T-UGS 0 Spot assists SOFLAM 0 Damage assists SNIPER MAV 0 Spot assists 0 Kills M18 CLAYMORE
Upcoming medals 9. ANTI-VEHICLE MEDAL 1 2. DOMINATION MEDAL 4 8. DMR MEDAL 5 2. ANTI-AIR TANK MEDAL 10 1. ATTACK HELICOPTER MEDAL 11 14. AVENGER MEDAL 14 4. HANDGUN MEDAL 15 1. RUSH MEDAL 19
Awards Game mode 0x 6x 0x 1x 1x 96x 0x 9x 0x 2x 0x 0x 0x 11x 0x 31x 0x 2x 0x 0x 0x 3x 0x 3x 0x 3x 0x 2x 6x 317x 0x 0x 10x 515x 0x 6x Weapons 5x 275x 3x 185x 4x 221x 1x 56x 7x 395x 11x 561x 3x 174x 0x 10x 0x 3x 15x 757x Vehicles 1x 68x 0x 39x 2x 105x 0x 4x 0x 29x 2x 115x 1x 90x 0x 1x Kits 1x 81x 1x 54x 7x 361x 36x 1,812x 8x 449x 7x 361x 0x 0x 0x 6x 0x 6x 0x 30x Team 6x 318x 0x 27x 13x 686x 13x 669x 4x 207x 3x 177x 1x 72x 0x 8x GeneralIn private speeches she gave to banks, Democratic presidential nominee Hillary Clinton seems to have expressed a stance on trade that differs from what she's said publicly during the campaign cycle.
Emails posted by WikiLeaks on Friday include partial transcripts from speeches that the Clinton campaign has previously refused to release.
In one speech she gave to a Brazilian bank in 2013, she advocated for "open trade and open borders."
"My dream is a hemispheric common market, with open trade and open borders, some time in the future with energy that is as green and sustainable as we can get it, powering growth and opportunity for every person in the hemisphere," Clinton said.
In the same speech, she also said the US needs "a concerted plan to increase trade already under the current circumstances."
The Clinton campaign has not confirmed the authenticity of the emails.
The speech excerpts were included in an email from Tony Carrk, research director for the Clinton campaign, that was sent to other campaign officials, including chairman John Podesta and communications director Jennifer Palmieri.
Clinton says on the campaign trail that she opposes the Trans-Pacific Partnership, a free-trade agreement championed by President Barack Obama that aims to slash tariffs and promote economic growth among 12 nations in the Pacific Rim.
Clinton has publicly opposed TPP since October 2015, when the text of the deal was finalized.
"I oppose it now, I’ll oppose it after the election, and I'll oppose it as president," she said at a campaign rally in Michigan in August.
But her opposition marked a departure from the praise she gave the deal during her tenure as secretary of state. She once said TPP "sets the gold standard of trade agreements."
In another private speech mentioned in the Carrk email, Clinton said it's important to have both a "public" and "private" position on certain issues.
"If everybody's watching, you know, all of the back room discussions and the deals, you know, then people get a little nervous, to say the least," she said. "So, you need both a public and a private position. "The mountain of unused corn in China is getting a little less massive. After unusual weather damaged crops and the government ended some price supports, the world’s second-largest grower is seeing production plunge by the most in 16 years.
While domestic stockpiles of the grain remain twice as large as five years ago, the harvest probably will shrink 7.3 percent to 208.1 million metric tons, the biggest drop since 2000, according to SGS SA, a researcher hired by Bloomberg to survey farmers in September and October. That’s bigger than the 5.4 percent decline forecast by the Chinese Ministry of Agriculture on Oct. 10.
China's corn crop is set to decline. © Bloomberg
Prospects of a smaller crop, along with new processor subsidies, are reviving Chinese prices that slumped to a 10-year low in September. Corn futures on the Dalian Commodity Exchange surged in October to their biggest monthly gain in a decade. But the country still has far more than it needs, forcing the government to shed inventories, and the rest of the world will boost output by 10 percent this year, leaving global inventories at an all-time high.
“China is slowly getting rid of excessive corn stocks,” and the smaller crop this year will help, Joe Lardy, the research manager at CHS Hedging Inc. in Inver Grove Heights, Minnesota, said last week in a telephone interview. “It’s just not enough. We need to see a greater switch away from corn to other crops.”
Growers in China, where many farms only cover a few acres, produced a record harvest last year and sent prices in Dalian plunging to 1,382 yuan a ton ($5.18 a bushel) on Sept. 30, down 46 percent from an all-time high of 2,572 yuan in March 2015. This year, key growing regions saw flooding in early July that left soils too wet, followed by seven weeks of dry weather that stunted yields.
‘Very Serious’
“The drought is very serious this year,” said Fu Yanming, 49, who farms 10 mu (1.6 acres) in Balang Town, located in the northeast Jilin province. “I may make no money at all, or even lose money.” Even after increasing his corn acreage by 42 percent this year, Fu says his output will drop 12 percent to 11 tons, and the lower prices mean his revenue will be half what it was in 2015.
Of the seven biggest corn-growing provinces, which accounted for 69 percent of China’s corn crop last year, only two saw higher output in 2016, according to SGS. The firm dispatched five teams of researchers to gather crop data and interview 318 farmers with fields that averaged 2.2 hectares. About 41 percent of farms in China are less than 1 hectare.
The region was hit by a “sneaky drought,” said Drew Lerner, the president of World Weather Inc. in Overland Park, Kansas.
After torrential rains flooded southern areas in early July, a dry spell moved from Hebei and Henan northeast into Heilongjiang and western Jilin later in the month, and lasted until early September, potentially damaging plants during key growth periods just after pollination, Lerner said.
Dry Soil
Some areas received as little as 25 percent of normal rain, leaving soils short or very short of moisture starting in the middle of August, he said. Traders may not have noticed the drought because heat never reached extremes and there were periods of light showers, Lerner said.
Farmers surveyed by SGS boosted planting by 0.1 percent in 2016, which conflicts with the Agriculture Ministry’s estimate on Oct. 10 that acreage fell 5.5 percent. In March, the government abandoned price-support system for corn in favor of direct payments to farmers. Details of the new program haven’t been announced. The drop in prices and land rental rates may have resulted in lower plantings, Mark Oulton, the SGS global agriculture market research manager, said from Shanghai.
Drought or untimely rain weren’t the only yield busters. Winds from Typhoon Lionrock and bug infestations also caused damage. About 68 percent of farmers surveyed described weather conditions as bad, up from 30 percent a year earlier, SGS reported. Severe insect damage more than doubled to 19 percent as lower prices left farmers with less cash for chemical treatments. When crops face weather stress, the insect losses increase, Oulton said.
Top Growers
Heilongjiang, the top growing region, saw production drop 17 percent, SGS said. The declines were more than 10 percent in Hebei, Inner Mongolia and Henan provinces. Farmers in Jilin, the No. 2 producer, reported a gain of 1.3 percent, while Liaoning improved 6.8 percent.
The SGS survey has a 95 percent confidence level, with a margin of error at 5.66 percent, Oulton said. Last year, SGS surveyed 321 farmers and predicted a 5.8 percent drop in output that conflicted with the estimated gain of 4.1 percent reported by the Ministry of Agriculture and the U.S. Department of Agriculture.
As Chinese output drops, domestic consumption shows no sign of slowing, with increases in all but one year over the past three decades, USDA data show. Prices on the Dalian Exchange remain well above the global benchmark traded in the U.S., the world’s top grower and consumer. Corn futures on the Chicago Board of Trade closed Tuesday at $3.49 a bushel.
Growing Demand
The USDA forecasts Chinese demand will rise 3.9 percent to a record 226 million tons in the year that began Oct. 1, after gaining 7.7 percent to an all-time high a year earlier. More than 60 percent is used to feed livestock as higher incomes allow people to eat more meat, and the rest is used to make starches, fuel and food products.
To ensure sufficient supply and to protect farmer incomes, the government had stockpiled grain, including imports, even as rising output created surpluses since 2011. Before this season’s harvest, stockpiles topped 110.7 million tons, the most since 2000, USDA data show. Some analysts estimate supplies are even more abundant. Shanghai JC Intelligence Co. pegged the grain holding at about 250 million tons. China now wants to reduce its inventory, but that got more difficult as plunging prices threatened the livelihood of farmers.
China has plenty of corn on hand. © Bloomberg
Last month, the government suspended until May its weekly sales of inventories acquired over the past five years, and some provinces announced subsidies to processors. Prices surged 8.8 percent in October on Dalian to 1,517 yuan a ton, the biggest monthly advance since January 2006. Futures traded at 1,510 yuan on Tuesday.
Still, the government said last month that the country’s annual corn acreage to shrink 12 percent by 2020 as it encourages farmers to boost sowing of soybeans by 43 percent. China is the world’s biggest importer of the oilseed. Farmers surveyed by SGS expect to cut plantings 1.6 percent in 2017 with the biggest cuts expected in Inner Mongolia, Jilin and Henan provinces.
“Farmers are losing the equivalent of about $1 a bushel growing corn, so it’s not unrealistic to think acreage could fall 5 or 6 percent next year,” said Troy Lust, a senior risk manager for commercial grain at INTL FCStone Inc. in West Des Moines, Iowa, who has been trading with Chinese firms for 18 years. “I’m surprised it took so long for China to change policies. Policies will continue to ebb and flow to maintain farmer incomes while trying to reduce corn stocks.”This week, we’ve got Open Streets on Sunday, a couple more bodies found, overdose in a park playground, stabbing on Sycamore, Pajama Man strikes again, getting smashed in the head with a vodka bottle sucks, getting run over by a beater RV sucks more, using shame to get results, October is domestic violence awareness month, the bums are back in town, SCPD still seeks feedback, city council candidate propaganda takes a new spin, fact checking the progressive slate’s rhetoric, don’t forget to vote!, city council election watch, Chris Krohn loves his swamp more than his neighbors, Weekly shoutouts, DeCinzotized, and more!
Open Streets This Sunday
Open Streets Santa Cruz will return to West Cliff Drive this Sunday from 9am-2pm. West Cliff will be closed to car traffic from Lighthouse Field to Natural Bridges State Park. In addition there will be a variety of FREE music and interactive activities. Sponsored by the City of Santa Cruz, Bike Santa Cruz County, and Ecology Action. The route is a ‘soft closure’ with auto access for West Cliff Drive residents only to their homes with a police escort, if needed. In addition, every effort is being made to minimize parking impact on West Cliff Drive neighbors. In promoting the event participants are strongly encouraged to arrive by bicycle, foot, carpool or bus. People needing to drive will be asked to use nearby designated event parking areas.
I really enjoy this event. I think it’s in it’s 3rd or 4th year now, and it’s one of the nicest, funnest, most family friendly events in Santa Cruz all year. It brings out LOTS of people, and they’re all having fun and enjoying the natural beauty of West Cliff. It’s like the one day the locals can get out and appreciate why they pay ridiculous amounts of money (and deal with a ridiculous amount of city dysfunction) to live here. Get out and enjoy your town.
More information can be found on their website.
Another Body Found Downtown
So I started writing this as “oh another mysterious circumstances body found downtown” and the lack of info about it. But then slowly more hearsay information trickled out (not from the city but from witnesses and people who knew the guy). The short story here is a number of people contacted me asking about a body that was found in a public city parking lot on Cedar street this past week, behind the Defib This place. A number of witnesses reported seeing a HAZMAT team and the coroner (along with SCPD) remove a body from a vehicle. Many people had questions, including eyewitnesses. What I’ve heard and come to gather is the person who died was an older man, apparently he was a street artist who sold his paintings on Pacific Avenue and lived in his van. Apparently he died of either natural causes or possibly a heart attack, probably while sleeping. Nobody noticed for a day or 2. I find the whole thing pretty sad on a number of levels, but there’s no snark here. There’s no fault here. There’s just a guy, former artist who lived outside the trappings of “conventional living” and probably struggled with many things. People sometimes die in public spaces. Especially homeless people. It probably happens more often than I’m aware of, but it’s still kind of shocking when it does happen. Personally, I’ve become so desensitized to seeing random bodies laying around in public spaces I don’t give them a second thought. I walk by Laurel Park every day and there are random bodies laying in the park all the time. They’re probably not dead. They’re probably passed out or sleeping. But the fact that they’ve become so ubiquitous locally, people like me don’t give them a second thought, or a glance, or even a concerned check to see if they’re dead or alive.
Body Found in Branciforte Creek Monday Morning
Well, here’s your weekly story about another mysterious body found downtown and the lack of info about it! It wasn’t actually found downtown though, it was found face down in Branciforte Creek near Market street. I’ve been told by sources that the victim was a young black male with dreadlocks, and police are treating it as a homicide. That’s about all we know right now. I haven’t seen Joyce from SCPD put out a media release about this (what else is new). The Senile ran a story on it but details are lacking. Just another suspicious circumstances death that SCPD and the city doesn’t want people to know about or talk about. It’s bad for business and it’s bad for mayors running for re-election. And it’s bad for clueless city managers.
Another Overdose in San Lorenzo Park
Yesterday around 9:30 in the morning, a call came in that there was another drug overdose at the children’s playground in San Lorenzo park. Yes, that’s right. An overdose at the children’s playground at 9:30 in the morning. The caller reported his girlfriend took some heroin and meth and was overdosing. She was apparently breathing but not conscious when PD and paramedics showed up on scene. Are we ready to stop accepting this as our normal yet? We’d rather coddle drug addicts than provide a safe space for children to play. Why not just convert the playground into a safe injection site? The local junkies already treat it that way anyways.
Stabbing at Sycamore Street Apartments
Last night around 6:30, there was a report of a stabbing over at the Sycamore Commons apartments. These are low income, “affordable housing” apartments located a block from downtown. The suspects were described as 2 Hispanic males in their twenties. It doesn’t sound like they were caught or arrested. PD was looking for a white van, possibly a Honda Odyssey. The victim was stabbed at least twice. Not sure about how the victim fared but I know he was taken to Dominican for his stab wounds. I don’t think he died. But if he did, I probably wouldn’t hear about it.
Pajama Man Strikes Again!
Around 8:30 last night, a call came in that someone described as “Pajama Man” was terrorizing employees of the Safeway on Morrissey. He was blocking the front door and refusing to let employees leave. Described as a white male in his 60s, and wearing a blue robe. Gee, WHO DOES THAT SOUND LIKE?
Man Smashed Over the Head with Vodka Bottle
Friday night around 8:30, a call came in that a man had smashed another man over the head with a vodka bottle outside the Palomar on Pacific Avenue. He was last seen running towards Forever 21 covered in broken glass. No word if they caught him or arrested him. The guy who was smashed in the head was sent to Dominican.
RV Driver Tries to Run Over Person on East Cliff Drive
Tuesday night around 6:30, a call came in that a woman driving a beater RV on East Cliff drive, no license plates, tried to run over another person. No word on whether or not PD caught up with her before she ran over any other random people.
Using Shame to Get Results
I saw an interesting article about a merchant in San Francisco who has resorted to trying to shame the city into taking his public safety concerns seriously. I can relate! This poor guy runs a sandwich shop and deli in the city’s South of Market area. He’s tired of the rampant and blatant heroin and meth problem with the homeless that takes place daily outside his doorstep. So he’s using social media to try to shame the city into action. Sound familiar? I really wish the merchants downtown would do something similar. Could you imagine if all of them start posting photos of the daily espectáculo de mierda along Pacific Avenue on their social media accounts? I GUARANTEE the city would freak out and immediately deal with it in no uncertain terms. You’d have Ryan Coonerty frantically calling every merchant he knows pleading with them to stop. LIFT THE DAMN CURTAIN ALREADY. I’m doing my part here. I wish the downtown merchants would realize that I’m doing this for their benefit.
October is Domestic Violence Awareness Month
Each day during the month of October, the Santa Cruz Sentinel will document the domestic violence calls in the county received by emergency dispatchers. Figures are compiled by the District Attorney’s Office and include reports of domestic violence, restraining-order violations and other domestic disputes. The 24-hour domestic violence hot line is 888-900-4232.
October 3rd had 21 calls. The total for the month after 3 days is 76 calls. I’ll try to remember to update this weekly.
This is stuff we probably never hear about, never read about, unless something really BAD happens and then we read about it after it’s too late to do anything about it. Check the Sentinel’s Facebook page feed for their daily updates here. I think this is great they’re bringing awareness to this issue which never seems to get much media attention.
The Bums are Back in Town
Well that didn’t last long. Almost immediately after I gave old Martin Bernal a “weekly shoutout”, I knew it would be short lived. I started getting a flood of emails letting me know where the bums went. They obviously left the levee for other areas where they would be less conspicuous (and hassled less). Areas like the neighborhoods. And Harvey West Park. And Natural Bridges and the areas as you head north out of town. They obviously didn’t leave. I was walking around downtown on Monday and was amazed at the number of bums hanging out along Pacific Avenue. More than ever. There’s really no method to the madness here. One day I can go down there and it’s bum free. The next day it’s bum central. I also heard from some of the Leveelie folks who went out on a recent clean and they are reporting more liquor bottles and needles being found along the levee.
SCPD Seeks Public Input on Public Safety
SCPD continues to seek feedback from the community through their online public safety survey. They are inviting people who live and/or work in the city to participate in the survey and give their feedback. The survey will run until December 21, 2016. It takes about 5 minutes to fill out and I highly recommend doing it. I did it. It’s a good survey. I know I complain a lot but when it’s time to complain to the people that need to listen, I’m all in.
City Council Candidate Propaganda Takes a New Spin
Before I get to this, I want to just say that Drew Glover is currently in Washington state tending to his mother, who is in the hospital. No snark here, I wish he and his family the best in this difficult time. And Drew is obviously a fine son for basically dropping everything to be with her. Much respect. – BD
So back to the snark. Drew and his ground team have just put out a slick new video featuring random talking faces endorsing Drew. Of course it’s blatant propaganda. I’m pretty sure everyone in the video (5 or 6 people I think) work for him on his campaign in some capacity. But it’s still very effective. First off, it’s very professional and well done. Pleasant background music scores the video. Seems to be HD quality, with professional editing (or at least done by someone who’s good at this stuff, not the CTV amateur hour junk we see on Comcast 25). There’s a link to it on Drew’s campaign website.
I haven’t seen anyone else do something like this. Drew’s video is a little too long I think at about 4 minutes. I only watched a 4 minute testimonial video to write about it here, but I was ready to bail after 2 minutes. Cut this in half and it would be twice as effective. I’m surprised nobody else has done a similar video yet (maybe some are working on it). Some of the other candidates have much better “endorsers” they could use here, not just people on their team but people that the community look for and listen to.
Fact Checking the Progressive City Council Candidate Rhetoric
If you read this column, you probably know how I feel about the red herring discussion known as “affordable housing” in Santa Cruz. It’s one of the favorite progressive talking points. Never mind they have no idea what they are talking about, and continue to spread lies and misinformation as part of their ongoing propaganda campaign to get elected. They (Krohn, Glover, Schnaar, and the Clueless Brown in particular) LOVE to rail on the city for not building any affordable housing. I’m here to tell you that they’re full of mierda. They’re lying to you. Don’t drink their Kool-Aid.
Here are 4 projects which clearly illustrate the city’s contribution to creating affordable housing locally:
1280 Shaffer Road (Pacific Shores, Chris Garwood developer) 30 year rent subsidy by the former RDA-$9.4 million projected subsidy through 2033 (ongoing debt of Successor Agency-combined with 1010 Pacific)
206 total units, 83 affordable, 40% affordable units
206 total units, 83 affordable, 40% affordable units 1010 Pacific (Pacific Shores, Chris Garwood developer) 30 year rent subsidy by the former RDA-$9.4 million projected subsidy through 2033 (ongoing debt of Successor Agency-combined with Shaffer Road)
108 total units, 44 affordable, 40% affordable units
108 total units, 44 affordable, 40% affordable units Sycamore Housing Project (Mercy Housing) $1.16 Million in loans and fees paid by the former RDA
(60 affordable units, 100% affordable)
(60 affordable units, 100% affordable) Neary Lagoon $3.5 Million in City and RDA financing, $600K in federal HOME funds
(95 affordable units, 100% affordable)
All 4 of the projects referenced above were built or made possible with the assistance and financial support of the City and former Redevelopment Agency (RDA) and would not have been possible otherwise. The high levels of affordability were expressly possible (and required) as part of the City/RDA subsidy. All of this information can be found by the city council candidates if they actually did some homework on the issue and didn’t just resort to slinging muddy rhetoric around. It just shows how CLUELESS these 4 candidates actually are on this issue. Some of these 4 candidates want 25% of the units to be affordable? The FACTS here show the top 2 development projects I listed above here have a 40% affordable clause. So does that mean that KROHN, GLOVER, SCHNAAR, AND SANDY BROWN WANT TO REDUCE THE NUMBER OF AFFORDABLE HOUSING UNITS IN THE CITY?
Maybe this “brand new council” should get their facts right before they start spouting their lies again?
Don’t Forget to Vote!
Early voting begins on October 10th! Absentee ballots are probably being mailed out this week. Just vote early by absentee ballot and be done with it! If you miss the deadline for mailing your absentee ballot, you can still bring it to your local polling place on November 8th and just drop it off. So you can fill it out in advance and just drop it off the day of the election (which is what I usually do).
But don’t forget to vote! People have died for our right to vote. The least we can do is respect them by doing it. This city council election is very important for the future of Santa Cruz for at least the next 4 years. Past elections have been won or lost by as little as a few hundred votes, so every vote really does matter here.
Keeping Up With Chris Krohn
“Keeping Up With Chris Krohn” explores the colorful past and history of Chris Krohn, former mayor and now a city council candidate after being out of government for the past 16 years. Maybe he thinks 16 years is long enough for most people to forget about who he is and what he’s done. But Weekly Dump readers have a long memory, and have been bombarding me with stuff about Chris Krohn and his past transgressions. So I’m gonna pick a few of my favorites and feature them through this election campaign, just to provide some balance and perspective to all the rhetoric that will inevitably come from his mouth in the coming months. – BD
Did you know Chris Krohn cares more about the swamp next to his house than he cares about the welfare of his neighbors? It’s true! And I’m not the one saying this (I guess I am but it’s more like stating the obvious here). Check out this recent letter to the Santa Cruz Sentinel by one of Chris’s LONG SUFFERING neighbors.
Well that’s quite enlightening. I’ve known for a long time that Chris Krohn doesn’t care about affordable housing. He talks about it now because it serves his needs to try to get elected to the city council. But he’s just pandering folks! He’s just telling the local sheeple progressives exactly what they want to hear. His actions speak MUCH louder than his words do here. Chris Krohn would rather have a swamp next to his house than affordable housing. Nobody’s talking more mierda here than Chris Krohn is.
City Council Election Watch
We’re into October now and the race is heating up. Many of the candidates have been seen walking the hoods, knocking on doors wanting to chat. None of them bite. Chat them up. Ask them why public safety isn’t their top priority? Because really, what’s more important than being safe? Nothing. I think being alive and healthy tops my personal wish list.
You’ll start seeing their signs popping up everywhere all over town. You’ll see them at community forums debating local topics. I’ll share what I know. It’s mostly opinion. I’m also going to rate them on what I’m calling my “Progress-o-meter”. With a 1 being a Trump Republican and a 10 being Don Lane. And I’ll add casual observations overall every now and then. This week, I’m also adding what I’m calling “Ryan or Micah?” (as in Ryan Coonerty or Micah Posner). If one of them endorses a candidate, I’ll let you know.
CANDIDATES ENDORSED BY THE WEEKLY DUMP!
MARTINE WATKINS:
I’m endorsing her for a number of reasons. She has a masters degree in public policy so she’s not just someone with a bunch of grand ideas with no substance and no ability to make it happen. She seems pragmatic. She works for the County Office of Education so she’s already doing public service work that really does benefit not only the community but the less fortunate as well. I realize she’s not actively selling “public safety” as part of her campaign, and that’s a concern for me. But I think she understands what needs to be done there without the need to spell it out yet. I really like what I saw at the first candidate forum. I think she was the best speaker. She didn’t read from a script but seemed to be very well prepared |
les Building ignores all these fundamentals in order to focus on the short-run "incoming data". It actually believes it is steering the business cycle as in times of yesteryear when the credit channel of monetary transmission still functioned effectively---even if destructively in the long-run.
But that was a one-time parlor trick. As we have consistently documented, households are at "peak debt" and on a net basis can no longer raise their leverage ratios to supplement wage and salary based income with more borrowings. Likewise, business borrows hand-over-fist in response the Fed's dirt cheap cost of debt, but the proceeds go into financial engineering, not productive investment.
So the Fed blunders forward, oblivious to the fact that it is now 2015, not 1965, maintaining the lunacy of zero or soon near-zero interest rates. That maneuver creates floods of new credits, but in the form of gambling stakes which never leave the canyons of Wall Street. So doing, they inflate financial assets values until they reach such absurd heights that they collapse of their own weight.
The Fed has thus become little more than a serial bubble machine. Tracking the incoming data during the intervals between financial boom and bust, it mistakes unsustainable short-run gains for real economic growth. But overwhelmingly, the in-coming data has been recording temporary GDP and born again jobs.
That too was on display in Friday jobs report. For the second time this century we have had a boom in the part-time economy of jobs in bars, restaurants, retail, leisure and personal services. These jobs on average represent 26 hours of work per week and average wage rates of around $14/hour, thereby generating less than $20k on an annual basis.
Since the top 10% of households account for upwards of 40% of consumer spending it is not hard to see what will happen next. When this third and greatest financial bubble of this century finally collapses, the bread and circuses jobs will vanish in a heartbeat.
Then perhaps the truth will sink in. Fifteen years of policy stimulus and absolutely noting to show for it. On a net basis, the only jobs created during this entire century are in the HES Complex (health, education and social services).
The thing is these jobs have nothing to do with cheap interest rates and easy credit. They are a function of the entitlement state and the massive $200 billion per year of tax subsidies which support employer-funded health benefits.
Needless to say, if you spend enough public money in the HES Complex you will get some job growth. You will eventually get a fiscal calamity, too.'David’s generosity helped my mother and me survive': How Bowie saved Marc Bolan's son
My 20th century dad: Marc Bolan
With a purple feather boa draped around his neck, his eyes coated with mascara and his cheeks flecked with glitter, glam rocker Marc Bolan floated through the psychedelic Sixties and early Seventies like an exotic butterfly.
He wore 6in platforms, and had a wardrobe of satin jackets in every vibrant colour from canary yellow to shocking pink, with crushed velvet trousers to match. He made no secret of his bisexuality or his battle with drink and drugs, but shrugged off the dangers.
‘I am too beautiful to live and too young to die,’ he liked to say as he preened defiantly. But he would die, at the age of 29, when his Mini — custom-painted in his favourite colour, electric purple — hit a tree on September 16, 1977.
His legacy were the hits made with his band, T. Rex, including Ride A White Swan, Born To Boogie and Hot Love, and a style of dress and music that inspired stars from Elton John and David Bowie to Guns N’ Roses, Oasis and Morrissey.
Bolan’s name also lives on through his singer/songwriter son, Rolan, who was a few days short of his second birthday when his father died. ‘I have almost no memory of my father,’ says Rolan, now 35, but whenever I hear his music it’s as if I can feel him holding me.’
Rolan’s mother is American-born singer Gloria Jones, Marc’s partner of six years, who was driving the Mini when it crashed. The impact destroyed her vocal cords and ended her singing career, which — combined with complications over Marc’s estate — condemned her to years of financial hardship. She now runs an orphanage in Sierra Leone.
Mother and son will be at the opening of a new musical about Marc, which begins a UK tour next month before heading for the West End. It is called 20th Century Boy, after one of Marc’s hits, and promises to be a no-holds-barred account of the elfin singer’s bizarre life.
‘My parents liked to take me everywhere with them,’ says Rolan. ‘But unusually, on the night of the crash they left me with my grandparents while they went to dinner.’
The Mini spun out of control in Barnes, South-West London, a mile from Marc and Gloria’s mansion home. Neither of them was wearing seat belts and Marc, flung out of the front passenger seat, was killed instantly.
‘I’ve seen pictures of the wrecked car,’ says Rolan. ‘If I’d been in my usual place in the back, there was no way I would have survived.’
Happy families: Rolan as a baby with his parents Marc Bolan and Gloria Jones
He adds: ‘My earliest memory is of visiting my mother in hospital. She had a broken jaw, leg and foot and severe internal injuries, and was too ill to be told Dad had died.
‘One terrible irony is that when I was born my father had slowed down his lifestyle because he took his responsibilities as a parent very seriously. Apparently he was being reflective about his own future because punk was taking over from glam rock.
‘The royalties were still flooding in from his records, and he and T. Rex were still headlining sell-out shows, but my arrival had sobered up his thinking.’
Marc had discovered he was paying tax at 83p in the £1, so he was setting up a tax-avoidance trust in the Bahamas to give his family financial stability.
Rolan says: ‘Unfortunately, he hadn’t had time to finalise all the details, so although his income was being protected, he hadn’t yet made provision for my mother to have access to the money.’
Indebted to his godfather: Rolan Bolan today
The trustees said their hands were tied. An added complication was that Marc was still legally married to his former publicist, June Child.
‘My mother went from a millionaire lifestyle to virtual poverty, and I often went without,’ adds Rolan. ‘But even if we had money, it could never have made up for Dad not being there. Mum tells me I often cried for him.
‘But his warmth and love were there so much through his music. When I was six, I’d play his records at home. Apparently my favourite was Born To Boogie.
‘It was one of the few reminders I had of him — that, a gold disc and an autographed tambourine.
‘And with all the photographs that exist, and the stories I’ve heard, I can picture us together in my mind’s eye. I can even hear his kiss — it’s as if I am in my cot and he’s leaning over me to say goodnight.’
Soon after Marc’s funeral — where a wreath in the shape of a huge white swan was placed on the coffin — Gloria decided to go home to America with Rolan.
‘We lived in Los Angeles, and things got very tough,’ says Rolan. ‘Dad’s royalties were still going into the trust fund, but because Mum wasn’t his legal wife, and I wasn’t recognised in law as having any rights to his estate because I was illegitimate, we weren’t allowed to benefit.’
His godfather David Bowie came to the rescue. Without publicity, he paid for Rolan’s education and settled other expenses as he was growing up.
‘This allowed me to go to a good private school and meet children of other celebrities,’ Rolan recalls. ‘The people who knew I didn’t have money of my own said: “Keep your character. Stay who you are.”’
Bowie had been a long-time friend of Marc’s. When Bolan’s career faltered in the mid-Seventies, Bowie encouraged him to make a comeback. Bowie was due to guest star on Bolan’s ITV series — which helped resurrect his career — around the time Marc died.
‘David’s generosity helped my mother and me to survive. It wasn’t just the financial help, but the time and kindness. He never came to see us in California because he lives in New York and hates to travel. But he kept in regular touch by phone and his first and last words every time were: “Don’t hesitate to tell me if there is anything I can do.”
‘He’d shrug off our thanks, saying it was the least he could do for the family of a good friend,’ says Rolan. Extraordinarily, Bowie and the grown-up Rolan have never met. ‘But I’m hoping to visit him soon in New York to tell him how very, very indebted me and my mother are,’ he adds.
Rolan gained a degree in fine arts from university in LA, despite the hard times he and his mother faced. He says: ‘She didn’t want to go back to England and make a fuss about not being able to get access to Dad’s cash.’
Saviour: Legend David Bowie quietly supported his godson
Marc’s legal wife June died in 1994, and the problems with the Bolan estate have been settled. Three years ago, Marc’s catalogue of songs and master recordings were sold by the trust fund for £11.5 million and Rolan is to finally benefit with a yearly allowance rather than one lump sum.
Rolan, who has his father’s delicate cheekbones but, unlike him, dresses in a preppy, casual style, says of Marc: ‘I didn’t realise just how much of a rock icon he’d been until I was in my early 20s.
‘My greatest, most personal treasures are some of my dad’s handwritten letters and poetry, and a little cup with a spoon that his friend Ringo Starr, also my godfather, gave to him for my christening. Almost everything else was pillaged from his home by souvenir hunters soon after he died. ‘They didn’t even leave a guitar plectrum.’
In 1997 Rolan was really made aware of his father’s place in rock history when he went to a screening of the movie Born To Boogie, directed by Ringo.
The film showed Marc and T. Rex performing in sell-out concerts at Wembley Arena. ‘I had never seen him on stage before that and I had never appreciated his magnetism. I was blown away by how powerful he was.’
Rolan formed his own band and toured in America, Europe and the UK, although in a totally different rock style from his father.
He played with the Black Eyed Peas and next month he will be releasing a solo album and single of his own rock and soul compositions. He has included his version of Marc’s enormous hit, Children Of The Revolution — ‘but I’ve made my own take on it’.
The 20th Century Boy musical will feature 27 of Marc’s hits. Heading an 11-strong cast, as Bolan, will be George Maguire, whose credits include Oliver and The Who’s Quadrophenia. It is being directed by director and choreographer Gary Lloyd, who is already enjoying success with the Thriller Live musical about Michael Jackson.
The story will unfold through the adolescent Rolan’s eyes, telling how he sets out to discover more about his late father — not just as a rock star, but as a parent. Rare film footage will show Marc on stage and at home.
Lloyd says: ‘This has taken five years to get to the stage. I’ve always been fascinated by Marc’s ambition-driven story and its tragic ending.’
Co-producer Brian Dunham adds: ‘It is a celebration of Marc’s life, but it will be honest and show all sides of Marc’s character.’
Rolan feels the show will give him more of a chance to learn about his father and for a younger generation to discover him.
Looking back on the difficult life he and his mother have endured, Rolan says: ‘It’s time to move on. It’s been quite a bumpy ride for us, but whenever we’ve talked about Dad, it’s helped us through — it’s almost like therapy.’
He admits, though, that at one time he felt overshadowed when he realised the extent of his father’s enormous fame. ‘I felt lost as a person,’ says Rolan. ‘I felt uncertainty about everything — my heritage, my ambitions, even where my real home was.’
For a year he sought solitude by staying close to the beaches of Santa Monica, California. ‘I’d stare out at the giant crashing waves and try to get my head around who I am and where I am going. I needed that time for reflection.
‘Each time I was in England or Europe people would keep talking to me about my dad, thinking I knew what he was like. It was a lot to live up to. Once, when I was performing with my band in Amsterdam, a guy said to me: “You’re nothing like your father and you never will be.”
‘I said: “Ok, but I’m not trying to be my dad.” What people don’t realise is that I have a different outlook, and I want them to judge my music.’
Rolan adds: ‘So for me, I’ve come a long way. ‘I don’t mind admitting I was once in danger of following my father’s rock ’n’ roll lifestyle. I was definitely taking a little excess alcohol, for sure.
‘It was something I had to deal with, so I pulled myself together and now I’m in good shape. I’ve never been happier or healthier.’The continuing inability of Myer and David Jones to deliver customers a decent online brand experience disqualifies them from complaining about digital competitors eating their lunch, argues Tim Burrowes
All credit to Myer. It’s not many retailers who can make a Boxing Day sale last for three weeks.
But thanks to comments from unhappy customers on the company’s Facebook page, it is possible to monitor in real time the continuing erosion of brand value.
I must declare an interest here. I am myself an amused and bemused consumer of that online experience. Not that Myer’s main rival David Jones has done much better, but more on that later.
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Being something of a misanthrope when it comes to bricks and mortar retail sales, I actually decided to give the stores’ online sales a shot.
As it will have been hard to miss, Myer’s site crashed within hours of its Christmas night launch and remained offline for the next eight days.
In a world where Google being down for eight seconds would be remarked upon, Australia’s biggest retail brand was down for eight days.
But most curious was how unconcerned Myer boss Bernie Brookes seemed.
The nice folk at partner IBM were hard at work fixing it, he told the market.
And online was, he reassured his investors, only responsible for about one per cent of the company’s revenues. Which doesn’t sound too bad until you wonder whether the fact that it’s only at one per cent is because the store hasn’t been doing enough to catch up with its competitors.
Still, when the Myer site came back, and lured by the offer of free delivery, I gave it a shot.
At first, I couldn’t make the site function on my browser (a recent version of Google Chrome) at all. Oddly, switching to incognito mode, made it work, after a fashion.
But it was s-l-o-w. I had to be very patient, and very focused on only buying exactly what I wanted. Even staying focused, it took more than an hour to buy my items. For instance, you actually had to go through the whole process of selecting an item, a size and a colour before it would then tell you there were none on sale.
But I was certainly not going to browse for some more impulse buys. Dollars I might have spent were lost.
After the Myer site successfully took my payment of nearly a grand (I can only face sales shopping once a year), I felt blessed. A common theme on the Myer Facebook page was people complaining that after they had been through the entire process, their order had been lost and they’d had to go back to the beginning, or give up. And that was if they had got it to work at all.
Thus encouraged, I decided to see if I could pick up a few frivolous items from competitor David Jones, which was capitalising on Myer’s misery by offering free delivery.
This was despite a near-astonishing piece of brand destruction I’d witnessed outside David Jones’ Sydney store on Christmas Eve.
As many will know, the store has a tradition of giving its windows over to Christmas displays, featuring puppets, animatronics and music. It’s a genuine attraction and draws crowds.
I found myself outside the store after it closed on Christmas Eve. It was perfectly placed to be part of Christmas spirit, as people headed across Hyde Park to look at the amazing projection mapping onto St Mary’s Cathedral.
There were crowds at the David Jones display windows. But in one of the best metaphors I’ve witnessed for the commercialisation of Christmas, the customers were being elbowed aside by contractors who were covering it up by pasting signage for the company’s post-Christmas sale over the whole window.
The metaphor got better – one of the sign guys brusquely told a young girl who was trying to peep through before it was covered up “Get out of the way.” You can see the back of her head in the first picture. There was no please or thank you. I actually asked the person I was standing with, if I’d heard correctly. The magic of Christmas it was not.
The next morning, driving past in a taxi, I noticed the poster appeared to have been torn down and the display was visible again. I’ve no idea whether this was action by a Christmas vigilante or if the store had thought better of it.
Still, free shipping is free shipping. And David Jones’ site was faster than Myer’s and a reasonably intuitive experience. The ease of browsing meant that in about a quarter of the time I spent a further 600 bucks I hadn’t planned to
I then settled back to wait for my goods from Myer and David Jones to arrive.
Remember that scene in Seinfeld when he turns up at the car hire place and although they’ve taken his booking, they don’t have the car?
It turns out, this is a similar experience online to shopping with the big two retailers.
Three days later, a package arrived from Myer. It was smaller than expected. But then it only contained one item.
A couple of days after that, another item arrived. A few days after that another. And then things went quiet until yesterday, when a fourth package arrived. Of most of it though, there’s no sign a fortnight on.
It seems that as well as the website not being fit for purpose, neither is Myer’s fulfilment operation.
By an amusing juxtaposition, I’m currently reading The Everything Store, the excellently written tale of the early days of Amazon. Back in 1995 or so, as Amazon began to take off, every manager from CEO Jeff Bezos downwards would spend the evening helping out in the warehouse to make sure the company stayed on top of its orders. My guess is that over at Myer Bernie Brookes has not been rolling up his sleeves to get the orders out of the warehouse.
I’m clearly not alone – otherwise writing this post would be too self-indulgent. From the complaints about the uselessness of the site a couple of weeks ago, Myer’s Facebook page is now covered with complaints from people in my boat, wondering whether they’ll get the goods they’ve paid for.
All of them likely to be former customers.
To paraphrase Jerry Seinfeld, they know how to take the order, but they don’t know how to deliver the order.
Meanwhile, thus far there’s been no sign of any of my stuff from David Jones either, so I gave them a ring this morning. When they eventually answered, they explained that just because they’ve took my money, it didn’t mean the items were in stock. They’re waiting for some of the goods to come in from the manufacturer. And they won’t send anything out, until the whole order is complete.
It’s not like walking into a sale and buying what you see in the shop. Or like ordering from Amazon, come to that, which generally takes three or four days to send the order from the US or UK.
But the weird thing is that neither brand seems overly bothered by the online disruption that is already destroying their business models, and the need to compete on that playing field.
In recent years, I’ve watched from afar as a couple of technology debacles humiliated brands, and they seemed to take it a bit more seriously.
When British Airways move into Heathrow’s new Terminal 5 proved to be a mess, the person responsible got fired.
When the BBC’s expensive digitisation project had to be axed, the chief technology officer was suspended.
Meanwhile, here The Australian reported: “Brookes has indicated the company will not be seeking a scapegoat for the glitch — something that undoubtedly will prompt sighs of relief from [head of IT Anthony] Coelho, who joined Myer a year ago from Apple, head of online sales John Joyce and website manager Richard Harrison.” Lucky them.
Yet having a retail website that’s fit for purpose isn’t beyond any big brand any more. The technical side of things – and just why this is such a debacle in 2013/14 – has been well covered elsewhere – including this excellent piece on Delimiter which makes the case well that the situation amounts to incompetency.
It’s also a trend to look out for. Increasingly, marketers are going to find themselves in the hands of the chief technology officer. Let’s hope the when it comes down to it, CMO can rely on the CTO.
Customers only tend to try a brand experience once. Given the expectation of having to wait a couple of weeks or more, would you use a site twice?
What an embarrassing mess.
January 15 update: A few hours after this item was published I had a call from David Jones customer services saying that they’d noticed I’d been waiting a long time for my order and would like to offer me a 10 per cent discount.Pope Francis’s efforts to reach out to non-Catholics have provoked a lot of comment, some of it from unexpected sources. This week, for example, the Washington Post carried a piece by Herb Silverman, an atheist praising the trail the pope has been blazing. Reactions like Silverman’s remind us that praise for the pope is not exactly the same thing as praise for Catholicism, and that some of the reactions the pope is getting are probably not the ones he intended. The thrust of Silverman’s piece is something like this: “It’s refreshing to see a pope who seems to be getting just how bad traditional religion is!” I don’t necessarily blame the Holy Father for such reactions, of course.
Silverman raises an interesting point about how Christians sometimes talk and how atheists might hear what we Christians are saying. Here’s his opening paragraph:
Many atheists and humanists have mixed feelings when someone compliments one of our good deeds by saying “That’s a Christian thing to do.” We know they mean well, but they falsely equate goodness with Christianity. Consequently, and because of Pope Francis’ recent remarks, I’m tempted to compliment him with “That’s an atheist thing to do.”
I understand Silverman’s point, but I think there is a reasonable justification for praising some behavior as “Christian,” without intending this as a form of intellectual imperialism implying that only Christians can be good. The reason you can say, “that’s a Christian thing to do,” is that Christianity includes within itself a set of ethical standards. Christianity basically means the teachings of Jesus. But standards of moral conduct are a prominent part of Jesus’ teaching, so much so that an account of his teaching that left them out would probably have to be considered a mutilation of them. Accordingly, when Christians–or anybody else–judge conduct as “Christian,” they may not be saying that Christians themselves are good as an empirical matter, but that Christianity as a system of belief contains a standard to which we ought to aspire. Of course, there are some Christians who self-righteously invoke Christian morality in order to make themselves superior to others, but these are precisely the people that both Christians and non-Christians can see are missing the point of Jesus’ teachings.
I think Silverman also makes a mistake when he actually praises the pope for “atheist” behavior. His first suggestion (in the quotation above) that he is tempted to compliment the pope by saying, “that’s an atheist thing to do,” is meant as a lighthearted joke. But he says it in all seriousness a paragraph later. He quotes Francis to the effect that people need to be open to others and seek the good as they understand it. Says Silverman: “This sounds as if he might be encouraging people to question Church dogma and then do what they think is right. That really is an atheist thing to do.”
I think that here Silverman is making a mistake in attributing to atheism a substantive content that it does not possess. At first it might seem that atheism will precisely encourage people to question revealed religion. But in fact it need not do so. One could be an atheist and still think that it is fine for people who are so inclined to submit themselves to religious authority. Atheism is the belief that there is no God. But from that belief you can’t derive any specific guidance about what to do.
I think this is true, too, if we take Silverman to be making a broader point. Contemporary atheists are often freethinkers, and Silverman seems here to be saying that, over and above encouraging questioning of religion, atheism calls for a spirit of rational inquiry. But, again, I don’t think that it does. One could believe that there is no God and think that we need to do rational inquiry into the nature of things in order to get a better understanding of the world and improve it. On the other hand, one could believe that there is no God and think that the nature of things is absolutely mysterious and that there is nothing to be gained by rational inquiry into it. This appears to be the position of Friedrich Nietzsche, for example, an atheist philosopher and one of the most vocal critics of Christianity in the modern world.
None of this is to say that atheists cannot be good, or that they cannot find any resources to support their aspiration to be good. It is only to point out that atheism as a theory on its own can’t give much guidance on how to act. You can speak of “a Christian thing to do” because Christianity includes a fairly detailed moral teaching, whether you agree with it or not and whether or not you think most Christians live up to it. But it makes less sense to speak of “an atheist thing to do” because atheism does not tell us what to do in the same way that Christianity claims to.
The views expressed here are those of the author, and do not necessarily represent the views of CatholicVote.orgA London-based Sikh gang helped nearly 70 illegal Afghan immigrants wearing turbans sneak into the UK using passports that were stolen or borrowed from family members.
According to the UK’s Daily Mail, the scam netted the gang about $800,000 USD.
A court heard on Monday that three Sikh men helped nearly 70 Afghans to sneak into the UK using the real passports of British Sikhs.
According to the Daily Mail, border officials were unable to distinguish between the illegal immigrants who masqueraded as the genuine passport holders because they were wearing turbans - which Sikh men are allowed to have on in their ID documents.
The accused, cousins Daljit Kapoor, 41 and Harmit Kapoor, 42, and Davinder Chawla, 43, a member of the same extended family had all previously pleaded guilty to running the scam which charged each family over $12,000 USD.
The hearing continues.After it became plainly evident that one of his wing commanders had consigned several officers to professional purgatory on false drug charges for 18 months, riding roughshod over their Constitutional rights in the process, Gen. Mark Welsh reassured Congress he would make those officers whole again. Employing his trademark likability and exploiting the trust and deference afforded to a man of his stature, the Chief of Staff successfully defused a public and Congressional calamity by giving his word.
He then marched out his trusted agents, who conducted a pro forma review, produced a report no one impacted has been permitted to review, sealed it with an inanely-worded press release, and pretended to fix a massive episode of institutional corruption and malfunction by restoring three sets of aeronautical orders.
It became evident almost immediately afterward that not even this modest measure would be faithfully undertaken. Lt. Gen. Daryl Roberson, standing tyrannically silent while embracing the tyrannically petty, decided that even though the officers were clean of the false drug charges that had grounded them, he wouldn’t allow them to fly as instructors again. He didn’t explain himself because Air Force officers don’t typically do that. But even had he wanted to, he couldn’t, for there is no suitable explanation. The moral rot of the situation is grotesque, with double standards and free-floating enforcement creating absurdities that have scarred the entire service.
The practical effect of the Roberson fatwa is that two of the pilots will move on to new flying assignments, albeit at a considerable disadvantage. For the third officer, the effect is more disastrous. He’s being put out of the service based on a separation request approved before he was professionally ruined, and Roberson’s edict prevents him from healing any of that ruin before he and his family are chucked into the civilian job market. It also kills any chance at flying for the reserves, which had been the plan before the taint of false drug charges wrecked that plan.
As the service was pressed for answers, the bullshit began piling high. Rather than admit Pope Roberson had summarily condemned the pilot from on high, other officers in the chain of command, including Col. Thomas Shank (Laughlin’s Wing Commander) and Lt. Col. Christi Legawiec (86th Flying Training Squadron Commander) started carrying the water, perpetuating a blatant lie that “IP7” couldn’t be requalified because they “lacked the resources” to conduct the requalification. This garbage idea led to public pratfalls and deepened the scandal in an important way by making institutionalized dishonesty part of the discussion.
The notion has been thoroughly and embarrassingly debunked, but in reality it is self-debunking. If you have three pilots on the roster who can’t fly but you have the same number of planes and same number of hours to expend, you have more resources than before, not less.
Lifting his watch above the steeply-scaffolded morass, Rep. Duncan Hunter put the Air Force on the spot about the excuse, sending Welsh a letter with some tough questions. He respectfully demanded, as members of the House Armed Services Committee are wont to do, that Welsh get back to him by January 21st. A few days later, he added some more questions to the list after a noticeably unhinged retired 2-star showed up on social media to do some brief but impactful braying about his inexplicable and probably illegal access to the Inspector General report on the pilots — which Hunter hasn’t been permitted to review — before deleting his comments and slinking back into anonymity.
Today, Mark Welsh is a week late providing a response. He obviously doesn’t see a need to comply with the requests of Congressional representatives performing their oversight function, and he obviously couldn’t care less about actually correcting the situation. IP7 remains grounded and the nonsensical excuse being fed to him remains the official line.
If you’re serving in the Air Force, take these words to heart, because they are proven by this case: Mark Welsh does not care about you unless you’re in his personal circle. If you’re “just” an ordinary airman, NCO, or officer, he will turn his back on you the moment it becomes politically, institutionally, or budgetarily inconvenient to remain downwardly loyal — and trust me, downward is how he sees it. You’re not his equal. You’re the help, and therefore expendable when the circumstances dictate.
I’m taking pains to point this out because you’d never know it by listening to the man. He claims to love airmen and tells a hell of a good war story. I count myself among the many who have been charmed by his folksy wisdom. But it’s an act. A schtick. A public relations gimmick. His actions tell the true tale, and in the case of IP7, those actions (and inactions) speak much louder than his words. Gen. Welsh is unwilling to admit that the Air Force over which he presides has a problem with command abuse and overzealous prosecution. If he makes IP7 whole — rather than claiming to do so while tacitly green-lighting a 3-star toadie to keep IP7 in the penalty box — he risks arming his critics with too much evidence to make their case that he and his colleagues have no business conducting criminal investigations or trials implicating Constitutional guarantees they clearly don’t even recognize, let alone respect. This would be close to saying they have no idea how to properly wield authority or exercise life-changing power over fellow human beings … which would be admitting they don’t know how to command.
The cost of symbolically admitting a series of wrongs in this case makes letting a good man burn the rational choice in a strict cost-benefit analysis, especially given the relative freedom from accountability within which our senior generals and civilians operate. And that is as complicated as Mark Welsh truly is. This is not about love or respect or trust or even shared duties. It’s about political calculus and his commitment to doing what he thinks is best for himself and the image of the institution he leads. Perhaps that makes sense or is even normatively justified in the minds of some. But it’s not how Welsh sells himself, and if you’re serving, you need to understand that.
I reached out to Duncan Hunter’s chief of staff Joseph Kasper to get a reaction to the Air Force’s refusal to answer the Congressman’s recent inquires. In his candid response, Kasper astutely invoked the recent report of airmen decertified in the nuclear community after a mishap that damaged an ICBM:
“In [the ICBM] case, the Air Force stripped three airmen of their certification for their role in a significant mishap—in dollars alone–that Air Force leaders, until now, have swept under the rug. A year later, those same airman are recertified and back to work. The fact that they were stripped of their certification in the first place, under the circumstances, underscores the fact that the Air Force probably had good cause to do so. But the fact that they are back on the job should compel the Air Force to put IP-7, at least, back in the cockpit as soon as possible. If they don’t, a message is being sent to all airmen that even if the Air Force investigates you and determines they were wrong to have even investigated you in the first place … or wrongfully accused you of something severe … you’ll still suffer the consequences for the inconvenience that was caused. Otherwise, the only way you can be recertified is if you are part of a broader effort within the Air Force, among its investigators and leaders, to hide the truth to avoid accountability and any negative attention. Because if that’s the case, it’s better to be wrong and on the side of the Air Force’s wrongdoing, then to possess all the right qualities in the face of wrongful accusations. That’s just nonsense, and it defies everything that Airmen are taught or any service member is taught. Further, Representatives Hunter and [Illinois Republican Adam] Kinzinger have yet to receive the IG reports that they have been asking for—all we can take from that is there’s a reason we haven’t seen them yet. And the reason is that there are findings and determinations within the reports that the Air Force doesn’t want us to see. Last—I think perhaps we were too quick with our praise for General Welsh in this case. Because making the right decision is one thing. Failing to see it through or trying to redirect Congress—as seeming to be the case here—is another. He still has a chance to prove he was serious and leadership actual respects his decisions and intent, but time is running out. The Air Force seems to make a habit of infuriating members of Congress for all the wrong reason and I’m just shocked that they are hanging their hat on this Laughlin issue, just to protect a few egos and toxic bands of leadership.”
This case started as an ember that could have been easily snuffed out with a decisive act of command responsibility driven by common sense. It has grown into a dumpster fire. Now, as ordinary airmen and their Congressional representatives alike continually wonder what the hell Mark Welsh is waiting for, this is turning into an inferno. What’s getting burned? Trust and confidence in the senior officers who lead our Air Force.
All for want of genuine leadership, which has itself been asphyxiated by the toxic smoke of politics and is gasping for survival.
As Chairman Mao notoriously said — and reference to him is ironically appropriate given the state of the Air Force’s culture these days: it’s always darkest just before everything goes black.Artificer A gnome sits hunched by the campfire, carefully using needle and thread to darn a ranger's cloak. As he works, he incorporates tiny runes into the stitch pattern, symbols which emit an ever-brightening glow. Finally the light fades, as the energies channeled by his needle flow into the finished cloth. He grins, and experimentally waves a handful of nothing in the air. He hopes she likes her brand new invisibility cloak. A troll growls in hunger as it looms over a dwarf. The short girl smiles. One eyelid flickers. She whips a wand from some hidden sheathe, and with a thunderous roar blasts the beast with a gout of arcane, twisting flame. The troll’s growls turn into shrieks of panic as it turns to flee, and she blows smoke from the tip of her blasting rod. The half-orc magician sprints down the corridor, panting breathlessly as he flees a scuttling thing with far too many teeth. It screeches as he rounds a corner, certain that it has him pinned. Then a fist of fire-hardened clay smashes into its carapaced head, and it goes reeling as a golem steps forth. Makers of magic-infused objects, artificers are defined by their inventive nature. Like wizards, they see magic as a complex system waiting to be decoded and controlled through a combination of thorough |
internet.* The ASA ruled that an advert for Arm & Hammer toothpaste was wrong to suggest that it could help sensitive teeth through the use of "liquid calcium". After an investigation, the regulator said there was no scientific backing for the claim.Apple's global iPhone sales target for 2008.Number of 3g iPhones sold in first weekend on the market, despite complaints of dropped calls, bad signal reception and service interruptions.
Belfast TelegraphFutures on the Dow Jones Industrial Average (DJIA) are trading broadly lower, after Moody’s Investors Service threatened to downgrade more than 100 global banks, including Morgan Stanley (MS), Goldman Sachs (GS), and J.P. Morgan Chase (JPM), citing exposure to the euro-zone debt crisis. Specifically, futures on the Dow Mini were last seen below fair value by 33 points, with futures on both the S&P 500 Index (SPX) and the Nasdaq Mini trading roughly 5 points below fair value.
Taking a closer look at Moody's warning, the ratings service said Morgan Stanley could have its long-term ratings cut by up to three notches, while Goldman Sachs and J.P. Morgan could be dropped by two notches each. In premarket trading, MS shares were off 1.4%, while GS and JPM were down by about 0.6% heading into the open.
Heading earnings news this morning, General Motors (GM) reported fiscal 2011 net income of $9.19 billion last year, the largest profit in the company's 103-year history. Still, that news was tempered by losses in GM's European business. For the fourth-quarter, meanwhile, earnings fell 25% to 39 cents per share, excluding items, versus Wall Street's estimates for a profit of 41 cents per share. Net income attributable to stockholders fell 48% to a two-year low of $725 million. GM shares were last seen lower by more than 2% in premarket trading.
Elsewhere in earnings, Apache (APA), Barrick Gold (ABX), DirecTV (DTV), Duke Energy (DUK), General Motors (GM), PF Chang's (PFCB), Red Robin Gourmet (RRGB), Applied Materials (AMAT), Daidu.com (BIDU), eHealth (EHTH), Leap Wireless (LEAP), Nordstrom (JWN), and SunPower (SPWR) will release their quarterly reports.
Option activity was brisk on Wednesday, with a sharp decline on Wall Street prompting a jump in put volume. In fact, 3.2 million of these typically bearish bets traded on the Chicago Board Options Exchange (CBOE), compared to call volume of 2.9 million contracts. As a result, the single-session CBOE put/call volume ratio rose to 1.10, tying its highest reading since January 23.
Tuesday's imbalance between index and CBOE Market Volatility Index (VIX) options volume was washed away yesterday. Index put volume climbed even higher, as the single-session CBOE index put/call volume ratio rose to 1.62 – it's highest perch since January 24. Meanwhile, the VIX CBOE single-session index put/call volume ratio plunged to 0.33 from Tuesday's reading of 0.90.
Given yesterday's market sell-off, high index put volume and a jump in VIX call volume is pretty much par for the course. However, activity remained middle-of-the-road on equities, with the single-session CBOE equity put/call volume ratio arriving at 0.60, just shy of its 10-day average of 0.61. This could indicate that options traders are hedging long stock and portfolio positions with index puts and VIX calls. Or, it could be an early indication that smart money is preparing for an extended decline, while the rest of Wall Street buys the dip.Have you ever wanted to play kubb but didn’t have anyone to go up against? Maybe you’ve wanted to see how you stack up to kubb players in cities, states, or even countries other than your own. Well, now there is a way to do just that—distance kubb!
Distance kubb is a new way to match up players from anywhere for a friendly game of the sport we all love; no matter the number of miles between them. The concept is fairly simple. Players use a video call to play against each other.
How does it work? There are a few simple rules to ensure successful gameplay. First, both players or teams need a device with a camera capable of doing a video call (smartphone, tablet, etc). This allows both parties to share their perspective of the game. Video calls can be held via an app such as Skype, FaceTime, or Facebook Messenger. In addition to a camera, the kubb sets that will be used need to be prepped with a marking system to help keep track of kubbs. Using a numeric/alphabetic system works well for this. Each kubb should be given a number (1 to 10) on the top half, and a corresponding letter (A to J) on the bottom half, as shown in the example image. You can write the letters and numbers on duct tape wrapped around your kubbs if you prefer not to mark on the wood.
Once both locations have their camera and kubbs ready, the kubbs should be set up in numeric order on the baselines (1 to 5 on one, 6 to 10 on the other). To see who goes first, a traditional king toss is done (using the same form of measurement at both locations helps with this). The winner of the king toss can then choose a side to start on or to toss their batons first. It is important to make sure both teams are aware which baseline they should throw at, otherwise there will be confusion once kubbs are down.
Gameplay proceeds as normal, except when a kubb is knocked down. When this happens by a team in one location, the same numbered kubb is taken from the baseline in the other location, and then inkast by that team on their turn. For example, if Team Blue knocks down kubb number 1 in their location, then Team Green takes kubb number 1 from the baseline in their location and inkasts it as a field kubb. After Team Green has inkast, Team Blue then dictates how to raise the field kubb by saying either the number or letter to determine which end of the kubb they want to raise; in this case it would be 1 or A.
If any field kubbs remain standing after a team throws all of their batons, the opposing team must then place the corresponding kubb nearest to the middle line as accurately as possible to that kubb’s position in the opposing team’s location. This becomes their advantage line. For example, if Team Green leaves a line with kubb 1 then Team Blue will place their kubb 1 as close as possible to the position of kubb 1 in Team Green’s location. Team Blue then uses that as their advantage line.
The game continues in the same fashion throughout, and ends with a king shot just like in a normal match.
I had the chance to try distance kubb with Phil Dickinson, Joe Hrejsa, and JR Hrejsa from Great Lakes Kubb Club. After our test run we all had some feedback to help improve this format of play. Here are our tips:
Since distance kubb is done via video, the 100 percent rule makes it much easier to determine if kubbs are in bounds.
Players must play on opposite sides of the pitch just like in a regular game. Make sure this is clear after the king toss.
A consistent form of measurement is a good idea for accurately placing advantage line kubbs.
FaceTime worked better than Facebook Messenger in our experience.
Pairing your smartphone or tablet with a bluetooth speaker makes it easier to hear the other player(s).
A dedicated camera operator, who isn’t playing, allows the player(s) to focus on the game rather than try to juggle working the camera and throwing batons.
Painted lines help determine field kubb locations and make the 100 percent rule easier. A painted grid could make field kubb placement even more accurate.
If painted lines aren’t an option, you can use batons to help visualize where the lines would be when raising field kubbs.
Make sure you have a strong wifi or cellular connection to ensure your video quality is better. We had a few instances of video cutting out or getting pixelated during our test.
Peter Bergendahl, perhaps better known as Rekubblikanen, from Sweden also shared a few tips for good camera angles. His diagram, shown below, points out some of the best spots to set up your camera if using a tripod. The diagram also shows an example of how to use batons to help visualize where the lines would be if you are using a pitch without painted lines.
While distance kubb is still a fairly new concept for gameplay, it certainly has potential to become a game-changer in the kubb community. Staying true to the philosophy of kubb—kubb unites people and creates world peace—distance kubb is a great way to bring players from all over the world closer together. What are you waiting for? Get out there and give distance kubb a try! Be sure to share your experience in the comments!A guide to the finest sparkling, white, and red vino money can buy at every price point, from $5 to $50.
One-hundred-fifty-nine million cases. For a country that lacks the grand wine ancestry of a place like Italy, where there are "more wines than churches," that's an impressive number recorded by America's millennials, who downed wine last year at a record clip.
But lest you think it's all Carlo Rossi and Crane Lake, studies show millennials are not only a growing target audience, but also display a willingness to drop over $20 for a bottle. Let's be realistic, though. Even an upward trend of young, discerning wine drinkers doesn't negate the obvious: the wine world can feel like a guarded palace, reeking of stiffness and suffering from a lack of sex appeal.
That stigma, however, shouldn't prevent you from enjoying one of the world's most popular liquids. The way we see it, rather than stroll into the shop looking for the perfect bottle, or limiting yourself to a specific style, your best bet is to filter options by price point. You're far better off working within parameters—asking for a $15 acidic red, for instance, a strategy that zeroes in on affordability and flavor.
Walk in with a different agenda and you're bound to get lost trying to catch the white whales, only found in the cellars of serious snobs. Which is why we tapped the expertise of Wes Narron, Chief Wine Ambassador of City Wine Tours, who has spent years running shops and organizing tastings. Whether sparkling, white, or red, we asked Narron to put together a list of accessible, mainstream options that are friendly towards all wallets.
Here we present to you the best bottles of wine for every budget.According to the paper, 40 percent of the Swedish population now support joining the alliance. Although the support is higher than ever, 42 percent are still against it.
Sweden is well known for its long-standing neutrality - the country didn't participate in the World wars, or join NATO after World War II. However, the recent conflict in Ukraine and a reported incursion of a Russian submarine into Swedish waters in October - which caused a frenzy of Swedish military activity in a pursuit of the sub - has increased support for NATO.
Sweden is already one of the Alliance’s most active partners. It has been cooperating with NATO since the creation of the Partnership for Peace (PfP) program in 1994, and has since been utilizing partnership tools to expand this relationship and exchange knowledge and experience with allied and partner countries in different fields.
Currently, Sweden is contributing to the peacekeeping operations in Kosovo and Afghanistan, and is planning to contribute to the nation-building mission in Afghanistan starting next year. In the past, it supported the NATO-led operation in Bosnia and Herzegovina.
Svenska Dagbladet has conducted the surveys about Sweden's public support for NATO since 1995.(AP) FRANKLIN, Tenn. The Secret Service said Wednesday it is investigating the reported theft of copies of Republican presidential candidate Mitt Romney's federal tax records during a break-in at an accounting office in Franklin. Someone claiming responsibility demanded $1 million not to make them public.
An anonymous letter sent to Romney's accounting firm and political offices in Tennessee and published online sought $1 million in hard-to-trace Internet currency to prevent the disclosure of his tax filings, which have emerged as a key focus during the 2012 presidential race. Romney released his 2010 tax returns and a 2011 estimate in January, but he has refused to disclose his returns from earlier years.
Romney's accounting firm, PricewaterhouseCoopers, said there was no evidence that any Romney tax files were stolen.
Full coverage: Election 2012
"At this time there is no evidence that our systems have been compromised or that there was any unauthorized access to the data in question," PricewaterhouseCoopers spokesman Chris Atkins said.
In Washington, Secret Service spokesman Edwin Donovan confirmed the agency was investigating. The Romney campaign declined to comment, referring all questions to the accounting firm.
Franklin police said there were no recent alarms or break-ins reported at the site. "We've had nothing from that address in August," Police Lt. Charles J. Warner said.
There was no sign of forced entry at the five-story building that housed the accounting firm's local office, not far from the Cool Springs Galleria, a large mall about 20 miles south of Nashville.
The building does not restrict access during business hours and has no guard. After-hours access to the doors and elevators appears to be controlled by keycard. A spokeswoman for the building manager, Spectrum Properties, said the company would not speculate on the burglary claim.
"All of the tenants operate independently and the building is highly secured," the spokeswoman, Beth Courtney, said.
The data theft was claimed in letters left with political party offices in Franklin and disclosed in several Tennessee-area newspapers. Jean Barwick, the executive director of the Williamson County Republican Party, said employees in the GOP office found a small package on Friday with a hand-written address. The package contained a letter and a computer flash drive, she said.
Peter Burr, the chairman of the county's Democratic Party, said he received a version of the letter and a thumb drive on Aug. 27.
"I have no way of knowing this is real or not," he said. "I doubt it is, but I suppose it's conceivable."
An anonymous posting on a file-sharing website said the returns were stolen Aug. 25 from the accounting firm's office. After "all available 1040 tax forms for Romney were copied," the posting said, flash drives containing encrypted copies of his pre-2010 tax records were sent to the firm and to Republican and Democratic party offices.
The group threatened to divulge the tax files by late September unless it was paid $1 million.
Barwick and Burr said they turned over the materials to the Secret Service.
"The agents said there wasn't a whole lot they could say, but they agreed that bizarre stuff during campaign season isn't exactly unusual," Burr said.NiP have pulled off the upset in the grand final of IEM Oakland, defeating FaZe in a best-of-five marathon 3-2 (Cobblestone 16-10, Inferno 7-16, Train 16-10, Overpass 6-16, Cache 16-10).
The best-of-five showdown started on Cobblestone, with NiP putting up a 3-0 lead at the start as Counter-Terrorists, but it was FaZe who came out on top of the first gunrounds on the back of clutches from Nikola "NiKo" Kovač and Finn "karrigan" Andersen for an eventual 6-3 scoreline. The momentum started swinging back in NiP's favor once they brought forth their double AWP setup, with William "draken" Sundin clutching a 1v1 along the way. With it, the Swedes pulled off six rounds in a row for a solid 9-6 half.
An A attack in the second pistol pushed them to double digits while FaZe replied with the following forcebuy, but Patrik "f0rest" Lindberg's triples in round three and four of the second half gave the control over to NiP once more. The European squad tried to hold off at 13-7 but never managed to string rounds together despite individual heroics from Ladislav "GuardiaN" Kovács and Olof "olofmeister" Kajbjer, as the rounds kept going back and forth until NiP emerged victorious 16-10.
NiP win their first big title since last year's IEM Oakland
NiP win their first big title since last year's IEM Oakland
FaZe kicked off Inferno with a 5-0 lead on the offense thanks to rain's quad-kill in the pistol round and a triple in the first gunround. The next three went the other way, this time with REZ pulling much of the weight with three kills and later a 1v2 clutch. From there on, the half was in the hands of karrigan's roster, who clinched six of the remaining seven rounds, two of which after clutches from GuardiaN and olofmeister.
With a pistol round in the bag, FaZe were looking to end things quickly, and although NiP mustered three rounds together the superteam equalized the series at 16-7 after turning the tide with a forcebuy win.
Map three, Train, saw olofmeister and NiKo put up doubles in the pistol round, only to get shut down by f0rest and Christopher "GeT_RiGhT" Alesund in the following forcebuy. Nonetheless, FaZe were the ones to get away with a better start, as after losing a forcebuy attempt, NiKo and rain stepped up with the pistols again to eventually reach 4-2.
f0rest's entries played a big factor in NiP's win on Train
NiP pulled things back with two in a row, which sent FaZe on an eco, and grabbed a 7-5 lead after two more gunrounds went back and forth. Two of the last three rounds were decided by individual plays, as olofmeister put up a quad-kill in a retake towards B while REZ's triple helped NiP secure an 8-7 half as Terrorists.
The Swedish side clinched double digits after the second pistol round and continued to rack up the lead after the second gunround, reaching their 13th. FaZe answered with two of their own, but three close situations on the outer bombsite later NiP secured map three at 16-10.
Overpass was a one-sided affair from the get-go, as FaZe put up a wall at the start, grabbing an 8-0 lead thanks to bathroom and long aggression, with GuardiaN and rain reigning over that area. Only then did NiP find their first round as they capitalized on an entry on B and topped it off with another win, but that was all they could do in the half.
FaZe reigned on Overpass
Up 13-2, FaZe won the second pistol round as well. NiP clinched two rounds as f0rest and draken put up doubles in the following forcebuy, but NiKo's Deagle pushed his team to match point after a triple and a 1v1 clutch. Richard "Xizt" Landström's team held on for two more rounds, but FaZe ultimately closed things out at 16-6 and the series went the distance, to the deciding Cache.
The last map started with the two teams trading the first three rounds back and forth, with FaZe ending up on top after all. Down 1-3, Xizt stepped up for his team with a 1v2 as NiP equalized the scoreline and grabbed their first lead at 4-3. NiKo's triple on A made things even once more, while rain's double opening sent the Swedes on an eco. Xizt continued to put up amazing rounds throughout the rest of the half, including a quad-kill in an important round with reset potential as well as another 1v2, helping his roster grab the remaining five rounds and a 9-6 lead.
FaZe made things even at 9-9 following a pistol round win before NiP took over, grabbing the first few gunrounds after early aggression. Timely plays from the likes of REZ helped the Swedes mount a six-round streak on the way to match point. When it looked like NiP would close the series, karrigan stepped up massively with a 1v4 clutch, but his heroics were all for naught in the end as the Swedes picked up the title at 16-10, 3-2.
IEM Oakland 2017 Best of 5 NiP Matchpage 3 2 FaZe 16 Cobblestone 10 7 Inferno 16 16 Train 10 6 Overpass 16 16 Cache 10
NiP K - D +/- ADR Rating 2.0 Patrik 'f0rest' Lindbergf0rest 99 - 81 +18 82.4 1.18 Fredrik 'REZ' SternerREZ 86 - 81 +5 80.5 1.13 Christopher 'GeT_RiGhT' AlesundGeT_RiGhT 88 - 84 +4 76.1 1.00 William 'draken' Sundindraken 62 - 76 -14 56.4 0.83 Richard 'Xizt' LandströmXizt 64 - 98 -34 60.3 0.79 FaZe K - D +/- ADR Rating 2.0 Håvard 'rain' Nygaardrain 103 - 82 +21 90.8 1.27 Nikola 'NiKo' KovačNiKo 97 - 75 +22 78.5 1.15 Ladislav 'GuardiaN' KovácsGuardiaN 82 - 78 +4 74.3 1.09 Olof 'olofmeister' Kajbjerolofmeister 91 - 79 +12 75.6 1.06 Finn 'karrigan' Andersenkarrigan 47 - 85 -38 54.5 0.75
IEM Oakland final standings:Amit Bhatia insists QPR needed change at the top in order to stand any chance of surviving in the Premier League.
Bhatia is back at Loftus Road as company vice-chairman – the position he quit in May after a disagreement with Flavio Briatore.
He will work alongside new majority shareholder Tony Fernandes and believes the pair can help establish Rangers in the top flight.
“We badly needed stability at the club,” Bhatia told West London Sport.
“You can get away with certain things in the Championship but in the Premier League you’re playing on a different stage and you have to conduct yourself in a certain way. It’s different.
“Now, there is absolute 100% certainty that Flavio and Bernie are no longer involved with QPR. They have no ties with the club left. Their involvement is completely finished.”
“I’ve sat down with Tony and discussed with him where I think we can make this club better and replicate the success of last season.”
He added: “I’m thrilled to be back. I received an incredible amount of support when I resigned. I received literally hundreds of letters from fans.
“I was very humbled by it – and felt very sad too, actually, because some people obviously felt I’d done some good and wanted me to stay involved, yet circumstances meant I couldn’t.
“It makes coming back that much sweeter. I couldn’t be happier. I really feel this is the start of something special for the club.”
Last year it was suggested the Mittal family had ousted Briatore from power, which was never the case.
But Bhatia says this time there is no room for doubt that the Briatore era is over, and that all ties to the Italian and former co-owner Bernie Ecclestone have been cut.
Bhatia said: “Last season I was very much the one guiding the club along with Neil Warnock until Flavio and Bernie did get involved again.
“Now, there is absolute 100% certainty that Flavio and Bernie are no longer involved with QPR. Their shares have totally been bought and they have no board representation.
“They have no ties with the club left. Balance sheet, debt, amounts owed – all of it. Their involvement with QPR is completely finished.”
Bhatia says that also applies to ownership of the Loftus Road ground, which effectively passed into Briatore’s hands when he facilitated a loan to pay off the infamous £10m debt to ABC Corporation, which was secured using the stadium as collateral so that Rangers could come out of administration in 2002.
“That loan will probably continue to exist, but it has now been bought off [by the new regime],” Bhatia explained.
“The stadium loan when we inherited the club was a loan that was unfair on QPR and brought an extremely high rate of interest.
“We decided to replace the loan with our own loan, which was done on an interest-free basis. It was to lighten the burden on the club.
“It is a [current] shareholders’ loan to the club which no longer involves Flavio and is non-interest bearing. I think that’s the most sound and rational way of doing it.”
Bhatia confirmed the new-look board are reviewing the position of Gianni Paladini, who has been stripped of the role of club chairman – a title he held for six years and retained despite a number of changes to the company board.
“Flavio and Bernie are out and Gianni’s situation has to be reviewed,” he said.
“He brings some value to the club, but there are other things that we have to make sure are treated correctly and done in the proper way.
“Over a period of time, we’ll make decisions. For now Gianni remains at the club, but what the future holds for him we’ll just have to wait and see.”Extremist anti-LGBTQ activist Theodore Shoebat posted a video on his website reacting to the terrorist attack at an Ariana Grande concert in Manchester, England last night in which 22 people were killed. Shoebat, who was featured in a radically anti-gay documentary in 2015 along with various Religious Right activists and Republican elected officials, declared that he has no sympathy for those who were killed or injured because they are all “sodomites-lovers” and “sluts.”
“I really have no sympathy for these people,” he said. “The people who died, the people who were injured, the people who were scared out of their minds, who ran away [screaming], I really don’t care. The types of people who go to these concerts are the same types of people who are responsible for the degeneracy that you see in society.”
“They go to these concerts dressed up as whores, dressed up as sluts, they’re pro-sodomite, they’re pro-divorce, they’re pro-infidelity,” Shoebat said. “They want evil, they want decay, they want sodomy, they want Sodom and Gomorrah.”
Shoebat then showed photos of “some sodomite lover” who was injured in the bombing as he declared that Ariana Grande “is a nasty, evil woman.”Taking RPGs to the next level! #SRPG
Hello, this is Fantasy War Tactics Team!
The Tower of Dawn is renewed on 1st day of each month!
Can’t wait to see renewed monsters and dungeons of the Tower!!!
Already clear all the floor of the tower on December?
Don’t worry! You can start from the beginning in 2016 due to resetting of the tower.
Go and Conquer the Tower of Dawn in 2016!
Clear the Tower and Receive the Bonus Crystals!
Check out the details of event as below.
[Conquer the Tower of Dawn! ]
▶ Event Period: 2016/01/01 (Fri) ~ - 01/31(Sun) 23:59 p.m.
▶ Clear conditions and Rewards
Condition Event Reward Clear the 10th floor of the Tower. Crystals x 20 Clear the 20th floor of the Tower. Crystals x 30 Clear the 30th floor of the Tower. Crystals x 50 Clear the 40th floor of the Tower. Crystals x 100 Clear the 55th floor of the Tower. Crystals x 150
▶ Note :
1) Event Reward will be sent to the ‘Event’ tab in your inbox and will be expired after 48 hours.
2) It will be distributed after closing of the event and exact date will be notified soon.
Thank youIntroduction
A while back I wanted to learn a bit about GLSL and how to write shaders. I already had some experience with Three.JS and using its WebGL renderer and I knew that it allowed custom shaders to be utilized through its ShaderMaterial object. I read up a bit on GLSL shaders and how, they worked. One tutorial I followed to write my first basic shader was An Introduction to Shaders written by Paul Lewis.
After I was able to recreate the shaders in the tutorial and apply them to a mesh in a Three.JS scene, I wanted to do something a little more involved. I wondered about applying lighting per pixel using GLSL shaders. I decided I could try to make a 3D demo of the Moon and use lighting shaders to simulate the Moon changing phases. I wanted my demo to be as photorealistic as possible.
You can check out the live demo, or view the source code on GitHub to check out the result.
The Hunt
In order to create a photorealistic demo I set out to find the highest quality public domain maps of the Moon available. I found out that there is good data published through the Map a Planet initiative and available on the USGS PDS site. The best data we have for our Moon was actually gathered by the Clementine spacecraft. It is possible to process a greyscale image of the entire surface of our Moon using this data, and as far as I know the best maps of the lunar surface we have today were derived from this data. I was delighted to know that all this great data available from USGS is public domain.
The best map I could find was processed by Jens Meyer and apparently also darkened up by Steve Albers. It and other high quality maps can be found on Steve Albers homepage and available free for personal non-commercial use. I say this map is the best in the sense that it has the highest resolution and detail compared to other maps I could find.
The original resolution of the map found on Steve Albers' homepage is 8192x4096. I am using a version scaled down in both width and height by 50% giving a texture at resolution 4096x2048. I find this size suitable for my demo.
My scaled down version is shown here:
Just Need A Few More Things
After this I generated 6 randomized subtle star patterns in order to create a a starry skybox for my scene. I also used the NVIDIA Normal Map Filter in order to generate a normal map for the Moon map.
The Shaders
Here is the vertex shader which creates a Tangent-Binormal-Normal matrix for each vertex, passing it to the fragment shader.
attribute vec4 tangent; uniform vec2 uvScale; uniform vec3 lightPosition; varying vec2 vUv; varying mat3 tbn; varying vec3 vLightVector; void main() { vUv = uvScale * uv; // Create the Tangent-Binormal-Normal Matrix used for transforming // coordinates from object space to tangent space vec3 vNormal = normalize(normalMatrix * normal); vec3 vTangent = normalize( normalMatrix * tangent.xyz ); vec3 vBinormal = normalize(cross( vNormal, vTangent ) * tangent.w); tbn = mat3(vTangent, vBinormal, vNormal); // Calculate the Vertex-to-Light Vector vec4 lightVector = viewMatrix * vec4(lightPosition, 1.0); vec4 modelViewPosition = modelViewMatrix * vec4(position, 1.0); vLightVector = normalize(lightVector.xyz - modelViewPosition.xyz); gl_Position = projectionMatrix * modelViewMatrix * vec4(position, 1.0); }
The frament shader is passed the TBN matrix for each vertex and uses it to transform the vectors from the normal map to tangent space.I was in Taipei last week on a visa trip outside the mainland. We were sitting in a circle on the floor, in the apartment of a tenuously connected new friend, when I heard someone say “betelnut” for the first time.
What is it? Betelnut, areca nut, or what Taipei locals call bing lang (槟榔), has been around for thousands of years and doesn’t look ready to leave soon. The nut grows all over the tropical Pacific, where people chew it medically and recreationally for its natural psychoactive ingredients, the most important being arecoline. Consuming the nut in any of its forms gives the user a warm, stimulating buzz, making it a product of choice with taxi drivers, long-haul truckers, and other workers who rely on the nut to make it through long shifts.
Betelnut seller in Taiwan packaging product (Flickr: bignosetw)
In Taiwan, the common form of consumption, and the one we purchased at a run-down roadside booth, is the fresh nut, still green, wrapped in betel leaf for flavor. Slaked lime collected from seashells tops it off, and keeps the alkaloids chemically available for absorption. Traditionally, Taipei has been a hotspot for the distinctly Taiwanese phenomenon of “betelnut beauties” – young, marginally-clothed women who sell bags of the product from neon-lit windows. What started as a successful marketing strategy for a single countryside betelnut outlet in the 60’s grew into a nationwide trend. Up until the 2000’s, betelnut beauties were a reliable sight at major intersections across the country. Eventually lawmakers realized their minimal dress marked them out for exploitation, and by the end of the first decade of the new millennium, betelnut beauties were all but extinct. We pulled out a fifty New Taiwan Dollar coin (about $1.65) and handed it to the fully dressed middle-aged woman who operated the booth, in exchange for a plastic bag full of betelnuts.
We felt the best way to put this experience down into words was in the form of a time trial betelnut challenge. I’m going to set a timer for fifteen minutes, and chew three consecutive betelnuts at a rate of one nut per five minutes. For context, you should know that chewing this stuff generates a bright red blood-like liquid that you have to spit out (another reason government bodies have been trying to curb its popularity). Also it’s carcinogenic. So while you’re reading this, imagine me sitting on my bed, spitting betelnut juice out into a bucket and giving myself cancer. Ready? Let’s go.
Nut one of three
Nut Number 1 (0:00)
I bite into the nut. It’s got a surprisingly peppery, fresh kind of spice to it, which I suspect is mostly the betel leaf it’s wrapped in. Immediately, juices begin to seep out of the cracked husk and into my mouth. I spit the red blood into the bucket, wondering where it all went wrong for me. Soon my lips and gums start to tingle, and then lose feeling. I am relaxed. The relaxation spreads from my gums to my shoulders and chest. I can see how people could get into this.
Nut Number 2 (5:00)
I spit out the first nut and pop in the second. The worn, crushed husk is replaced by the sharp fresh bite of a new nut. Almost immediately, my pleasant feeling of relaxation is joined by nausea. I realize that I’m chewing at an incredible rate, squeezing more and more arecoline juice out of the nut. My legs sink down into my bed and stay there. My whole body, I notice, is feeling warm, slow, and numb. I give a lackluster effort at conversation, tossing over some description of the sensation to my friend Stewart, who is also chewing a betelnut out of sympathy. He doesn’t understand, as I am already on my second nut, and too far removed to communicate effectively. That was the last go we had at a conversation.
Nut Number 3 (10:00)
Who picked these nuts? I start trying to picture the Taiwanese farmer who brought this sensation down on me. I chew my nut in silence, sinking deeper and deeper into the fibers of my Taobao mattress. What music is this? It’s definitely too trippy for three nuts deep. As my movement gets infinitely slower, my chewing only speeds up. I’m squeezing too much juice out of the betelnut, which I’m unable to stop myself from swallowing, compounding both my buzz and my nausea. The effort required to position myself over the bucket and spit is immense. My eyes are stuck in place, and I start wondering how much time has passed. The chewing continues without input from my conscious brain. The warm spice of the bing lang is pretty evenly distributed throughout my body now. I’m at peace with the bing lang. He and I have reached our understanding.
The stained teeth of a longtime user
So in a nutshell (!), it was like chain smoking the fruit of the areca palm. I get why people are into it – it’s essentially a widely available, all-natural cigarette, that you can pick off a tree and chew to get buzzed. And as someone who doesn’t smoke cigarettes, I definitely felt the effect.
Betelnut culture is problematic. Betelnut beauties, oral cancer, black teeth, and red spit on city streets. But it’s an important thing to a lot of people. Bing lang has always been chewed, since an old man’s greatest great grandfather was a young boy. A bride and groom’s parents will chew it when they talk over the marriage. Doctors and herbalists have used it in traditional medicine for everything from dissipating stagnation to shocking the life out of tapeworms. It has nowhere near the number of harmful chemicals you’d find in a single cigarette. In the end, people will do what they do. And next time you visit Taiwan, maybe you will too. Just be cool about where you |
from the inside out.
That’s the reality of living in a world without feminism. But the problem is that even those who have embraced the fruits of feminism are still trapped by the overarching ideologies of the patriarchy. Peggy may wear pants, but she’s miserable; Joan’s on the second floor, but people still treat her like a secretary, and she’s so thoroughly internalized her status as a sex object that it’s difficult for her to fathom a man who treats her otherwise.
It’s fine to say that Roger and Bert are racists from another time, that the subtle yet pervasive sexism was “just how things were.” Gross, okay; repugnant, sure — but we can’t blame them for acting like everyone and everything told them to. Betty, Peggy, and Joan are all caught between two ages, with markedly different messages about how they should and can act and be. Their attempts to navigate those contradictions come off as confused, emotional, inconsistent, shrill, misplaced. But they, too, are products of their time — and our insistence on framing their struggles against that time as annoying, or evil, or immature only underlines the eviscerating, demoralizing struggle faced by the women of the 1960s. And, because every narrative about the past is also a commentary on the present, the women of today.
Eat Your Candy,
AHP
¤The big question of this free agency period for the Warriors was answered tonight as they re-signed Andre Iguodala for three years at $48 million.
So far, there are no details as to how the deal breaks down per year, or whether there is a player option or no-trade clause. However, this signing goes to show how serious the organization is about keeping this team together at any cost.
Iguodala began meeting with teams last night and last met with the Houston Rockets earlier today, after which he canceled his remaining meetings and was expected to be bringing Houston’s offer to the Warriors to counter.
Ultimately, he beat Adrian Wojnarowski to the punch and made his own announcement:
Sources close to Andre Iguodala reporting agreed to terms to return to the bay.... — Andre Iguodala (@andre) July 2, 2017
Iguodala's deal will be worth $48M over the three years, league source tells ESPN. Warriors deepened offer, close deal tonight. — Adrian Wojnarowski (@wojespn) July 2, 2017
Check the time-stamps.
It was widely speculated that duration would play the largest factor in Iguodala’s decision on whether or not to return to Golden State and that the Warriors had initially been hesitant to give an extended deal, at least partially due to the pending free agencies of Klay Thompson and Draymond Green.
However, with the announcement that the Warriors had upped the offer to three years, it seemed all but a given that he would re-sign.
The last big piece will be what happens with Kevin Durant, but even that is just details at this point, as he has already indicated he will be staying.
Life is good in the Golden State.Riot Aether
Gypsylord
Riot Feithen
Jinx and Vi Tidbits
Gypsylord
"I love this thread. Really cool analysis you've written up here.
Some tidbits for you :3
Vi was orphaned at an extremely young age. A combination of her youth at the time and whatever trauma she suffered has left her with absolutely zero memories of her past and any family she may have had. I can't say whether or not Vi has a sister but I can say that if she did have one she would not be able to remember her. Vi's name is from her tattoo, not the other way around. She's had that "VI" on her cheek for as long as she can remember, and so when she was first on the streets and people asked her name and she had none to give them they just started using the most distinguishing thing about her: the tattoo. Whatever family she may have had might have given her a "real" name at one point but she can't remember it. It's important to remember that there is somewhat of a method to Jinx's madness. While at first it may seem that everything she does is crazy and random it's all with the underlying goal of entertaining herself and making things (currently Piltover) more "exciting". ---Example: If Jinx saw a Piltover citizen standing alone in a dark ally looking scared and all she had was a knife she WOULD NOT be at all interested in running up and stabbing him to death. Boooring. However, if that same Piltovian was sitting on a pile of fireworks and she had Fishbones on hand she wouldn't think twice about taking a shot at the firework pile with pretty much zero concern for the guy sitting on top. Those explosions are gonna be sooooo cool! ---This makes Jinx's antagonism of Vi all the more interesting. What type of entertainment is she getting out of going after Vi in such a targeted manner?"
No 4.19 This Week & PBE Updates "before end of week"
Riot Feithen
Riot Feithen
"Not really on-hold, but we didn't have any updates ready for PBE."
"Not today, but before the end of the week we should have some updates on PBE."
"Yup, not this week."
In response to thread titled "" where a summoner extensively reviews the lore behindand stepped in to share a few of his own tidbits:After no updates for a over week, several summoners have become antsy for their next PBE fix and tweeted asking what the deal is!When asked about the PBE seemingly "on hold" lately,She continued, noting no update for October 22nd:As well as confirming 4.19 willbe going to live this week:Motorists travelling south and west out of Dublin as well as commuters to and from Kildare will benefit from the new Newlands Cross flyover that was officially opened today and opens to traffic on Thursday.
The project in west Dublin, which aimed to eliminate one of the most notorious traffic bottlenecks in the State, has been handed over by Contractors Bam Civil, on budget and ahead of schedule.
The flyover which will carry up to 90,000 vehicles a day over the Belgard Road / Fonthill Road was unveiled by Minister for Transport Paschal Donohoe and South Dublin mayor Fintan Warfield.
Both men praised the speed of construction of the 700 metre flyover which removes the last traffic light on the national road network between Newry and Cork.
The flyover crosses the regional R113 Belgard and Fonthill roads
The N7 is the Republic’s second-busiest road after the M50.
The scheme will reduce journey times significantly for interurban and local motorists, particularly commuters from Co Kildare and beyond.
The flyover comprises a two-span bridge structure with extensive approach embankments on the east and west sides of the junction. It will have three traffic lanes in each direction.
The materials for the embankment were sourced locally and environmentally friendly cement was used to minimise CO2 emissions.
The junction is part of a public-private partnership (PPP) project operated by Bam Contractors that includes building and maintaining the Arklow- to-Rathnew motorway in Co Wicklow.
The NRA has not disclosed the cost of the PPP but Bam Contractors’ website put the combined value of the Wicklow and Dublin elements at €126 million, without land costs.
The opening of the Newlands Cross junction was previously scheduled for spring 2015 but this was brought forward when better-than-expected progress was made.On Tuesday, Toshiba launched the
Qosmio G55-802
Windows Vista Home Premium (SP1, 64-bit)
Windows Vista Home Premium (SP1, 32-bit)
Tohiba Quad Core HD Processor
Intel Core 2 Duo Processor P7350 (2 GHz)
NVIDIA® GeForce 9600M GT
4GB PC2-6400 DDR2 800MHz SDRAM
500GB: Two 250GB 5400rpm hard drives
DVD-SuperMulti (+/-R double layer) with Labelflash drive
Atheros Wireless LAN (802.11b/g/n)
Bluetooth V2.1 + EDR
18.4" Screen, the first laptop available with the Cell CPU. Yep, think PS3 technology, developed jointly by Toshiba, Sony, and IBM. The laptop has the following features, for $1549.99:
However, in particular, the Cell CPU is not about gaming, but about a multimedia experience. Taking the load away from the Intel CPU, the Cell processor
performs
the following, as Toshiba indicates on the site
Gesture Control
What if you could start, pause, fast-forward and rewind a movie without a remote control—just by moving your hands? No, it’s not part of a sci-fi novel but Toshiba’s new Gesture Control technology. And it’s unbelievable. Used with your DVD player, Windows Media Player and other select programs, it offers cutting-edge simplicity and convenience. Amazing!
Face Navigation
—or that unforgettable scene in home movies and Hollywood films. From your favorite actor to dear Aunt Freda, the new Toshiba Face Navigation feature captures facial expressions so you can quickly locate the part of the video you want to see. It also provides thumbnails of scenes and soundtracks to help you find your way around. Very cool.
Transcoding
If you’re into home video editing you know how long it can take to process those big files before your masterpiece is ready—sometimes over an hour to convert a typical 1GB movie. But with the powerful new Toshiba Quad Core HD Processor, transcoding can take as little time as ten minutes. You’ll be finished so fast they’ll be raving for a sequel.
Upscaling to HD
With the Toshiba upconvert technology on the amazing Qosmio G55-Q802 laptop you can output movies in glorious high-definition on your home entertainment system. This technology can upscale standard-definition video to high-definition*—and breathe new life into your entertainment. So why settle for low resolution any longer?
Interestingly (and necessary, with 4 GB of RAM), the system comes with 64-bit Vista installed by default, but 32-bit Vista ships with the laptop as well.Here’s one genuine achievement of the Trump administration’s first 100 days: The president, it seems, has come to realize he is in over his head.
“This is more work than in my previous life. I thought it would be easier,” he told Reuters in an interview this week. “I do miss my old life. I like to work so that’s not a problem, but this is actually more work.”
I can empathize. Having Donald Trump as president has been hard on all of us.
A week earlier, he told the Associated Press of a related discovery he made during his first 100 days: The U.S. government is big.
“I never realized how big it was,” he said. “Every decision is much harder than you’d normally make.... So you know, I really just see the bigness of it all.”
So what does he do now that he is in a job that is so hard running a government that is so big? He pretends. He has developed an elaborate fantasyland in which everything goes according to plan. All of the following statements, which I have assembled with an assist from the work of Post Fact-Checkers Glenn Kessler and Michelle Ye Hee Lee, are Trump’s own words; none is entirely true.
This administration is running like a fine-tuned machine. No administration has accomplished more in the first 90 days. [Rep.] Elijah Cummings [D-Md.] was in my office and he said, “You will go down as one of the great presidents in the history of our country.” He said “you will be the greatest president in the history of this country.”
I have great relationships with Congress. The Republican Party has various groups, all great people. And I have a great relationship with all of them. I like Ted Cruz, he’s a friend of mine. One of the best chemistries I had was with [German Chancellor Angela] Merkel. We had unbelievable chemistry. And people have given me credit for having great chemistry with all of the leaders.
We’ve only been here for a tiny speck of time, and what I’ve done with regulations... is amazing. I think we’ve done more than anybody for this short period of time. More has been done in the last six weeks than has been done in years with the previous administration. We have the all-time record in the history of Time magazine. Covers, nobody’s had more covers.
A new Rasmussen poll just came out just a very short while ago, and it has our approval rating at 55 percent and going up. TRUMP APPROVAL HITS 50%. Any negative polls are fake news. Some people said it [Trump’s address to Congress] was the single best speech ever made in that chamber.
Despite what you hear in the press, healthcare is coming along great. We are making great progress with healthcare.
We had a very smooth rollout of the travel ban. You had Delta with a massive — a massive problem with their computer system at the airports.
This wall is not going to be that expensive.
I don’t know Putin. I have nothing to do with Russia. The Russia story is a total hoax. I’d bet a good lawyer could make a great case out of the fact that President Obama was tapping my phones in October, just prior to Election. Wiretapping was in quotes.
I didn’t know Steve [Bannon]. If there’s a shutdown. It’s the Democrats’ fault. I think the losers are Nancy Pelosi and Chuck Schumer. Now, they own Obamacare. If something happens blame him [federal judge James Robart] and [the] court system.
I’ve been against the war in Iraq from the beginning. You look at what’s happening last night in Sweden. Sweden, who would believe this? Sweden.
We are sending an armada, very powerful.
When you talk about currency manipulation, when you talk about devaluations, they [China] are world champions. They’re [China] not currency manipulators.
I guess it was the biggest electoral college win since Ronald Reagan. We ended up winning by a massive amount. No, no, you have to understand, I had a tremendous victory, one of the great victories ever. The failing @nytimes was forced to apologize. Between 3 million and 5 million illegal votes caused me to lose the popular vote.
They say I had the biggest crowd in the history of inaugural speeches. It looked like a million, million and a half people. It was almost raining... but God looked down and he said, we’re not going to let it rain on your speech. And then it became really sunny.
The hundred days is just an artificial barrier. It’s not very meaningful. But we’ve done a lot. Somebody put out the concept of a hundred-day plan. But yeah. Well, I’m mostly there on most items.
Twitter: @Milbank
Read more from Dana Milbank’s archive, follow him on Twitter or subscribe to his updates on Facebook.Garda Commissioner Noirin O’Sullivan has announced she is retiring from the Garda today.
In a statement, Ms O’Sullivan said she was stepping down because of the “unending cycle” of investigations and inquiries meant she could not devote enough time to bring about the “deep cultural and structural” reforms required to modernise An Garda.
“The support for me to continue in the role is evident,” she said. “However, I devoted much of my summer break to considering if continuing would be the right thing to do. It has become clear, over the last year, that the core of my job is now about responding to an unending cycle of requests, questions, instructions and public hearings involving various agencies including the Public Accounts Committee, the Justice and Equality Committee, the Policing Authority, and various other inquiries, and dealing with inaccurate commentary surrounding all of these matters.
“They are all part of a new - and necessary - system of public accountability. But when a Commissioner is trying - as I’ve been trying - to implement the deep cultural and structural reform that is necessary to modernise and reform an organisation of 16,000 people and rectify the failures and mistakes of the past, the difficulty is that the vast majority of her time goes, not to implementing the necessary reforms and meeting the obvious policing and security challenges, but to dealing with this unending cycle.”
She added that she took pride in her work over 36 years of service “despite the unprecedented challenges, controversies and criticisms of the last few years”.
Ms O’Sullivan added that she was not leaving her role to take up another job but would instead take some time with her family. “I may decide to take on some other interesting and exciting challenge down the line,” she said.
Taoiseach Leo Varadkar said “crucial and essential” Garda reform would be discussed at Cabinet this week. Mr Varadkar praised Ms O’Sullivan’s service and said he wished her every success in the future. “As she said in her statement, her decision to retire is made in the best interests of An Garda Siochana and ensuring that it can focus on the extensive programme of reform that is now under way,” he said.
The Commissioner has recently faced opposition calls to step aside amid queries over how she dealt with officers inflating the number of breathalyser tests carried out. Ms O’Sullivan returned last week after a five-week leave of absence.
Minister for Justice Charlie Flanagan said he was appointing Deputy Commissioner Dónall Ó Cualáin Acting Commissioner with full powers with effect from midnight tonight.
“In the coming weeks I will consult with the chair of the Policing Authority about a process to identify and appoint a permanent Commissioner to An Garda Síochána, ” Mr Flanagan said.
He said he would brief the Government at the next Cabinet meeting.
He expressed his “sincere gratitude” to Commissioner O’Sullivan and acknowledged her public service over the past 36 years “which ranged from under-cover detective work in Dublin’s inner city in the 1980s to being appointed to the most senior position in the service in March 2014”.
Ms O’Sullivan has dealt with a wide range of controversies since her appointment, including the recent controversy over inflated breath test figures, the Disclosures Tribunal chaired by Mr Justice Peter Charleton, a Public Accounts Committee investigation into financial mismanagement at Templemore Garda training collegeAre you looking for a TorGuard VPN discount coupon? Well, you’re in luck, since Best10VPN has an exclusive 20% discount coupon for TorGuard VPN if you sign up for our mailing list. Just navigate to the sidebar of this page where you will see our email newsletter box. Enter your email here, click subscribe, and then you will receive a 20% discount coupon for TorGuard VPN! Our newsletter will be an excellent source of future discount coupons, exciting VPN news, and even helpful guides and tutorials.
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The 31st Golden Disc Awards is happening in just a few hours, but the online voting winners of four highly prized awards have already been announced! For over a month ISPLUS has been collecting online votes for its Popularity Award, Album Award, Song Award and Rookie Award. After a long and highly competitive voting period, the polls have officially closed and the winners were announced.
Must Read : 31st Golden Disc Awards 2017: Lineup (Updated)
Check out which K-Pop idols are the prized winners of the year 2016, and stay tuned for the winner results for the rest of the awards!
The Final Winners Have Been Announced! : 31st Golden Disc Awards 2017 Results: Final Winners
Popularity Award Winner
SHINee
Total Votes: 37.70%
Runner Up: JYJ Kim JaeJoong (37.28%)
Album of the Year Award Winner
SHINee’s “1 of 1”
Total Votes: 40.18%
Runner Up: JYJ Kim JaeJoong‘s “NO.X” (39.74%)
Song of the Year Award Winner
Sechs Kies’s ‘Three Words’
Total Votes: 43.30%
Runner Up: EXO’s ‘Monster’ (33.41%)
Rookie of the Year Award Winner
ASTRO
Total Votes: 27.93%
Runner Up: KNK (22.27%)With unprecedented droughts, hurricanes, and unseasonably warm (or cold) weather patterns around the world, it's becoming harder and harder to deny global warming — especially in Antarctica, where the ice caps are melting at a somewhat alarming rate.
That means that now is the time to go visit Antarctica, the coldest and driest continent on earth. There is breathtakingly beautiful scenery with few man-made interruptions. It's an ideal trip for adventurers, who can kayak, trek or just take in the incredible landscape. You can also see penguins, whales, and elephant seals.
Tourism to Antarctica is getting more popular. According to International Association of Antarctica Tour Operators (IAATO), about 35,000 visitors will come to Antarctica this season, most of whom are American.
There are a few ways to visit the continent: by cruise ship with excursions to shore (the most popular), by land expeditions with tour operators, or sightseeing by air.Have you ever just stared at a shard of charcoal and thought of what it was before it became charcoal? What type of tree was it? Did it live a long peaceful life and died a natural death? How many ages has it seen? Was it harvested and built into a home?
If so, how long ago? And how many generations has it sheltered? Did it provide happy memories for the families? Or did the wood that held the foundation for a home, play as the setting of horrific event? How deep do the origins of this particular shard of charcoal go?
As I sit at my desk and stare into this piece of charcoal, possibilities of what it could have been flash through my mind. Most people perceive it as nothing but burnt wood, but I see far beyond that. In my eyes, an ominous aura lurks from it. Such history engraved in its very existence. Burnt to ash, but it's memories not extinct.
I will never know the true history behind this shard of charcoal, and that kills me.
The only thing I can do now is encrypt it into the fabric of my paintings.
"The Crying of Shadows and Pink" is my most proud painting. It took me three stressful months to finish. It seemed like no matter how long or how hard I worked on it, it was never going to be perfect. I probably painted it over 20 times, and each time more painful than the last. Weeks of hard work erased, just to begin again. Over and over, until it literally hurt.
Nonetheless, I was determined to make the perfect painting. Just as it was visualized in my head. It would be perfect, no matter how long it took or how hard it was. This painting would incorporate all my favorite colors and concepts. I would make it so large that it would tower over people, and awe them at site.
But no matter how hard I tried, it just wasn't becoming that painting. Every time I finished, I would paint over it and restart. Each time I grew more angry. Then the anger faded into despair. My passion for making art was dyeing. My imagination was turning against me and I began believing I just wasn't good enough. All I was doing was wasting my time and making a fool of myself. My disappointment was warping my perception on art. Color was nothing more than color. Canvas was nothing more than fabric. And I was nothing more than a man just making a mess.
Then I came up with the decision. I was to trash this canvas. Abandon it like all my other dreams.
My passion of art was to die along with this painting.
You know that feeling when someone you adore says something that hurts your feelings? It's similar to what it feels like to have the air knocked out of your lungs, and that is exactly how I felt.
I began picking out the staples on my stretched canvas. Sure I could have just thrown the whole thing away in one piece, but that wasn't enough. Each staple I plucked felt like I was actually hurting the painting like it had hurt me. Reminding me of how talent-less I am. How I will never be anyone special.
I get most of the staples out, and lay the painting flat on the ground. The canvas is now loose on it's frame and forms a bowl. As I look at the canvas I decided, what the hell? I'll give it one last try. This time I will have no expectations of it. It wouldn't matter if it turned out good because it was already dead to me.
I take the charcoal and draw a circle with eyes and a smile. Then I paint it yellow, creating a smiley face. I throw pink paint onto the left side of his head, and blue paint on the right. Finally, I just stop and walk out of the room shaking my head. It was just not meant to be. I wash my hands and return to dispose of the failed project.
I enter my room and stop in shock. No words can express the profound feeling that sparked in me as I look down upon my painting.
On both sides, the colors seemed to have seeped symmetrically into each of the smiley face's eyes. It looked as if the smiley face was crying clouds of color. Exactly what I was trying to do all along. I stand the painting up and prompt it against the wall. The charcoal mixes with the wet paint that outlines the smiley face, and begins to drip down like black tears.
I stand watching as my painting begins to form by itself. As if some enigmatic source was putting it together before my eyes. Precisely how I imagined it.
I literally stood before a painting that painted itself. And in the mist of all this, my passion had been revived.
That’s when I decided to name it, "The Crying of Shadow's and Pink."
(The dying of a passion)
Find me www.facebook.com/frankiedeatesartEconomic uncertainty and a steep decline in employment are two of philanthropy's most dangerous enemies.
So it should come as no surprise that a recent study by the Giving USA Foundation found that charitable giving in 2008 fell by more than $6 billion from the previous year. That's a 5.7 percent drop -- the largest percentage decrease in a half-century.
Ohio has hardly been an exception to this crisis. Contributions to United Way of Greater Cleveland are down more than 10 percent from their levels of five years ago. The drop in charitable donations, combined with significant cuts in government funding, have forced many worthwhile area organizations to cut staff and curtail vital services.
But a bill pending in the Ohio Senate promises to provide upwards of $60 million annually to those charities -- at no cost to taxpayers.
Senate Bill 157 would apply only to class-action lawsuits in Ohio -- lawsuits filed on behalf of a large number of people with a common interest in a matter.
Let's say XYZ Widget Co. makes a defective widget that causes nonfatal injuries to an estimated 1,000 Ohioans. A class action is filed against XYZ. The company knows it is in the wrong and could be hit for huge damages if the case goes to trial. So XYZ Widget -- or, more likely, its insurer -- settles the case and agrees to pay $1 million.
But, as is often the case, not all members of the "class" injured by the defective widget can be located or do not come forward. So, instead of paying $1,000 each to all 1,000 of those injured, XYZ Widget pays the $1,000 to only 600 Ohioans.
Under present Ohio law, the $400,000 in unclaimed damages would revert to the defendant company.
But Senate Bill 157 would provide that, absent agreement to the contrary, the leftover funds would be distributed to a group of Ohio charities and nonprofits agreed to by the lawyers and the judge.
The idea here is to place into Ohio law the age-old legal doctrine of cy pres (a shortened form of the French for "as near as possible"), which has been used at times by courts across the country to direct unclaimed class-action funds to charities.
Business interests, notably insurance companies, claim passage of the bill would discourage settlements of class-action lawsuits. It would also, argued Linda Woggon of the Ohio Chamber of Commerce, establish "a very bad precedent in Ohio by punishing people who haven't [been] found to have done anything wrong."
It's true that class-action settlements rarely include an admission of wrongdoing, but totally blameless class-action defendants agree to large settlements about as often as this version of state government does something good for Greater Cleveland. Also worth noting is that SB 157's two prime sponsors are Republican Sens. Tim Grendell and Bill Seitz, two of the legislature's most conservative members.
Seitz said the opposition to the bill is "very formidable for reasons that don't make a lot of sense to me." Grendell said "the insurance lobby has some friends in the Senate who are spreading a lot of misinformation."
Greater Cleveland's large and generous philanthropic community is solidly behind this bill, as are representatives of area charities, many of whom testified in favor of it at a Nov. 10 Senate committee hearing in Columbus. Joining them was Patrick Perotti, widely regarded as the father of Senate Bill 157.
A native of Parma, Perotti, 53, is a successful class-action lawyer and partner in the Cleveland area law firm of Dworken & Bernstein. Beginning in the early 1990s, Perotti refused to settle many cases until defendants would agree that any unclaimed funds due injured parties divert to charities. Since then, the firm has distributed more than $20 million to charities throughout Ohio.
Perotti told senators that making cy pres the standard in Ohio "is important because currently the vast majority of settlements fail to address this, which results in an outcome not consistent with what the court was told about the settlement."
Despite powerful opposition to SB 157 from interests that fund legislators' campaigns, even the critics can't explain away this little bit of logic:
If a defendant agrees that $1 million is fair compensation to end a lawsuit, it's eminently fair to expect that the entire $1 million be paid.
Especially if a portion of that payment goes to worthy charities.
Larkin was The Plain Dealer's editorial director from 1991 until his retirement this year.On August 7th 1974, a young Frenchman named Philippe Petit stepped out on a wire illegally rigged between New York's twin towers, then the worlds tallest buildings. After nearly an hour dancing on the wire, he was arrested, taken for psychological evaluation, and brought to jail before he was finally released.
Following six and a half years of dreaming of the towers, Petit spent eight months in New York City planning the execution of the coup. Aided by a team of friends and accomplices, Petit was faced with numerous extraordinary challenges: he had to find a way to bypass the WTCs security; smuggle the heavy steel cable and rigging equipment into the towers; pass the wire between the two rooftops; anchor the wire and tension it to withstand the winds and the swaying of the buildings.
The rigging was done by night in complete secrecy. At 7:15 AM, Philippe took his first step on the high wire 1,350 feet above the sidewalks of Manhattan James Marshs documentary brings Petits extraordinary adventure to life through the testimony of Philippe himself, and some of the co-conspirators who helped him create the unique and magnificent spectacle that became known as the artistic crime of the century. (Excerpt from imdb.com)A statement about "not paying our (Overwatch) players"
In our 13 months of life, Northern Gaming has been home to over 50 unique players, managers, coaches, and staff members that we have been responsible for paying and taking care of.
Of those people, a very small handful of players (3-5) have spread misinformation that we do not pay our players. The others have been content, four of which we have continued to support since our inception; the rest we have over time ceased working with but have professional relationships with.
This post will in no way name or shame anyone, as our only intentions are to clear up the misinformation that has been spread and perpetuated specifically in the Overwatch community of /r/competitiveoverwatch --- our attempts as an organization to clear these rumors up led to our Owner being permanently banned from the sub-Reddit, and despite his attempts to clear up the issues through PM's with mods he was met with weeks of being ignored and the prejudice of the rumors rendered him guilty in their minds without any attempts to look at the situation.
The players at the time wanted to play under the Tempo Storm banner, and an agreement could not be made between NG and Tempo Storm for a transfer; as such a deal was unlikely and we offered the players an alternative as their contracts were up for renegotiation in a little over a month.
We informed the players that we could either look to transfer their contracts to another organization and pay them as per our contract, or if they were willing to sacrifice the months pay, that we would release them from their contracts immediately so that they would be free to sign to whichever organization they wanted. The players in question wanted to both be paid, and released immediately, which was not an option as we were under no obligation to release them, and financially it made no sense for us.
After a couple of days, the players informed us that they would rather be released early to choose their own destiny, and as such we released them from their contracts so that they would be able to negotiate a new deal with whichever organization they felt most comfortable. From this point, rumors were started by several of the players stating that they were not paid for their time under Northern Gaming, which was unequivocally false. To this day, we have not and will not release the financial documents as it would require us to disclose sensitive information about the players in question. Instead, we've done our best to quell the rumors without name and shaming anyone in particular.
The biggest thing that we have said in our attempts to do that, is that had our players ever felt that they were wronged, they had every right to come after us for the money owed as per their contracts. Many people questioned how the players would ever afford legal fees, but as per our agreement with them, the players would have been entitled to having their legal fees covered had we been guilty of not paying them. With great people in the space like Bryce Blum and Ryan Morrison, the players had ample opportunity to get what they felt they were owed, had they actually been owed anything.
http://imgur.com/ttBAB8g - an image taken directly from our at the time contracts with the players at the time.
A few months ago, we had spoken briefly with Richard Lewis, citing our interest to speak with him regarding the situation so that we could hopefully have someone reputable see the entire situation, and help us clear our image. Upon the revelation that a conversation would possibly take place between Mr. Lewis and our CEO, one of our former players management group reached out to our CEO and informed him to not speak to Mr. Lewis until their legal team had ample chance to review our previous contract with the player in question.
After a brief conversation, the management group informed our CEO that they would be looking into the claims that we owed the player and would be suing us if it was found that we did infact owe the player. Several days later, upon reviewing the contract, and knowing that we would owe them legal fees had we been found guilty of not paying our players, he informed our CEO that they would not be seeking legal action.
http://imgur.com/B87pNdb - The original threat of legal action - Date included.
http://imgur.com/HSceaqU - The final message between the parties; stating that there would be no legal action - Date included.
This is the last time we will bring this up or speak to it. Hopefully, these images can help show that even with the ability to do so, the management of our former players elected not to pursue damages/"owed" salary --- after threatening to do so had they found us to owe their client money. Although we always felt that the fact we still had players who have stayed with us for over a year was a testament to the fact that we pay our players, every once in a while we still get the accusations of being scummy and not paying our players. There is no way for us to further prove we paid them without risking leaking sensitive information, which we will never do.
We don't want people who are new to our fanbase to stumble across a baseless rumor perpetuated by a small community to affect their perception of our brand. Especially given how we are working towards affiliation with a sports franchise.
We hope |
In an interview with Iranian state television channel Press TV, Honderich is quoted saying: “What is happening in Palestine, what is being done by neo-Zionism is such that it gives Palestinians, I happen to believe this and it’s gotten me into trouble, a moral right to their terrorism against neo-Zionism within all of historic Palestine.”
EXCLUSIVE: Terror Supporter Donated £5,000 to Corbyn’s Leadership Campaign http://t.co/1xtJ1x9n3f pic.twitter.com/HlC39xNyIO — Guido Fawkes (@GuidoFawkes) October 14, 2015
11:05
New Labour leadership is'messy'
Andy Burnham, the shadow home secretary, has told the BBC: "We've come through a leadership election where everyone's taken different positions, and it's messy and the party needs time to regroup.
"And that's what's happening and obviously a new leadership team needs time to find its feet and all the rest of it."
Speaking on the issue of Labour's U-turn on the fiscal charter, he said: Obviously, it's been a complicated process, not ideal - let's be clear and honest about that. But this is the right position.
"And I think it's the position Jeremy Corbyn was outlining in his leadership bid and it was the position that I was outlining. We shouldn't go along with these traps and stunts, this is what they're doing, I think the public can see through that."
Photo: Geoff Pugh/The Telegraph
10:55
GCHQ permitted to monitor communications of MPs
The Investigatory Powers Tribunal has ruled that the Wilson doctrine, set up 50 years ago to prevent British spies listening in on MPs, “has no legal effect”.
Instead they said it was “a political statement in a political context, encompassing the ambiguity that is sometimes to be found in political statements”.
Caroline Lucas, the Green Party MP, has described today's judgement on the Wilson Doctrine as a "dangerous body blow for parliamentary democracy."
Today's judgement on the Wilson Doctrine is a dangerous body blow for parliamentary democracy: http://t.co/z5F0Emx2wl — Caroline Lucas (@CarolineLucas) October 14, 2015
The tribunal stated: “The Wilson doctrine does not operate so as to create a substantive legitimate expectation.
“The Wilson doctrine has no legal effect but in practice the [intelligence] agencies must comply with the draft code and with their own guidance.
“MPs’ communications with their constituents and others are protected, like those of every other person, by the statutory regime established by part 1 of Ripa 2000.”
Photo: REX FEATURES
10:40
MPs left frustrated by the shadow chancellor's fiscal charter U-Turn
Labour MPs have been left frustrated by John McDonnell's decision not to back George Osborne's fiscal charter despite previously saying he would, Kate McCann reports.
A confusing memo sent out to all of the party's MPs last night claimed Labour has changed its stance because the new fiscal charter is different to the one that came before it. Yet the 'lines to take' document makes no mention of the interview Mr McDonnell gave to the Guardian in which he promised to back the Chancellor's position to counter claims Labour isn't tough enough on the economy.
Under the heading 'Why have you changed your mind?' it states: "The Fiscal Charter Parliament is debating on Wednesday is different to the one Labour voted for in January.
There is now no collective Shadow cabinet responsibility in our Party, no clarity on economic policy and no credible leadership. @BBCr4today — Mike Gapes (@MikeGapes) October 13, 2015
"The previous vote was for the Government’s previous fiscal charter. Labour voted for this Charter because our stated policy was to cut the deficit every year and get the current budget into surplus and national debt falling as soon as possible in the next Parliament. The previous Charter was consistent with that position so we voted for it.
"This Charter is different. It binds the hands of a government to austerity, regardless of what’s right for Britain, it would mean that we couldn’t borrow for capital investment.
"It’s becoming increasingly clear that George Osborne is simply playing political games, regardless of the changing economic situation. Labour will vote against this Tory ideology of austerity."
It even calls Mr Osborne out for the "shift" between the old charter and the new one.
But not a word about how Mr McDonnell has shifted his own position.
10:30
Nick Clegg: Big mistake sitting next to Cameron at PMQs
Nick Clegg, the former deputy prime minister and Liberal Democrat leader, told Newsnight on Tuesday: “The optics of politics made it almost impossible for people to understand what Liberal Democrats did in the Coalition.
“Sitting mute next to David Cameron at Prime Minister’s Questions every week was a sort of terrible encapsulation of what our critics said about us, that we were somehow just sort of passengers in the Government when in fact we were active architects rather than observers of the Government.
“And maybe my biggest mistake was sitting where I did during Prime Minister’s Questions and I should have sat somewhere else.
Photo: Getty Images
09:57
Employment rate highest since records began
The latest figures from the Office for National Statistics show unemployment has fallen to a seven-year low while a record number of people are in work.
The jobless total fell by 79,000 to 1.7 million in the quarter to August, the lowest figure since the summer of 2008, giving a jobless rate of 5.4 percent.
New stats show highest rate of employment in our history at 73.6%, youth unemployment rate at 7 year low & pay rising strongly at 3% — George Osborne (@George_Osborne) October 14, 2015
Iain Duncan Smith, Work and Pensions Secretary, said: "This is a fantastic set of figures, which show more people in work than ever before and a strong growth in wages.
"That is a credit to British business, and a credit to the hardworking people of this country.
"Alongside this, unemployment has fallen to the lowest level since 2008, and long-term unemployment has dropped by a staggering quarter over the last year.
Unemployment falls: "Hopefully now people are starting to feel better off": Iain Duncan Smith http://t.co/JoBK70ijOT — Victoria Derbyshire (@VictoriaLIVE) October 14, 2015
"This positive picture is replicated up and down the country, demonstrating that this one-nation Government is delivering a society with opportunity and security for all at its heart."
Average earnings increased by 3 percent in the year to August, 0.1 percent up on the previous month.
The number of people on the claimant count last month increased by 4,600 to 796,200.
Photo: Rex Features
George Osborne, responding to the new figures, said: "It is great news that Britain’s economic plan continues to create jobs and increase pay. We’ve got the highest rate of employment in our history, and real terms pay rising strongly.
"But with recent data showing our trading partners’ growth is slowing we must not be complacent. All of this progress will be at risk unless we carry on with our plan to build a resilient economy, delivering the economic security of a country that lives within its means."
James Sproule, chief economist at the Institute of Directors, said: Another month of impressive jobs figures and strong wage growth show that the business-led recovery is well on track.
"Despite uncertainties at home and abroad, employers have continued to create jobs, raise productivity and boost pay in a vote of confidence in the British economy. Employment is up in most sectors and across the country, pay is growing and long-term, short-term, and youth unemployment are all falling.
"This is a welcome sign of a healthy economy, a strong private sector, and a tightening labour market.
Matthew Whittaker, the chief economist at the Resolution Foundation, said: "It’s encouraging to see unemployment falling again, after a pause earlier this year. But there is significant variation in the extent to which this jobs’ revival has been shared across the country. Many parts of the UK remain a long way short of their pre-recession levels."
09:55
John McDonnell says Labour won’t play "these silly Westminster games anymore"
Writing in the Mirror this morning, the shadow chancellor writes: “Labour won’t play these silly Westminster games any more.
“We are calling on Labour MPs to oppose this Tory Charter trick.
"George Osborne is pretending he wants Parliament to tie his hands. What he’s really trying to do is play a Westminster trick, and tie ours."
He said the Chancellor is preventing Labour from even making changes to the Charter and is "closing down debate."
Photo: Heathcliff O'Malley/The Telegraph
09:50
Boris Johnson says rugby rules should be changed after Japan crashes out of the world cup.
Mr Johnson described the team as "heroic" and said it was "totally unfair" that the team had won three matches in a row, but still failed to make it through to the quarter finals.
Asked if he backed a rule change in the game, Mr Johnson told the BBC: "I'd support that. It seems totally unfair that they should win three times in their pool group and not go through.
Boris Johnson becomes the first outsider allowed to wear Shinto priest shoes at the Meiji Jingu shrine in Japan pic.twitter.com/pNDz6Fxo39 — Sam Lister (@sam_lister_) October 14, 2015
"They are plainly heroes here and they deserve to be. They are fantastically - a fantastic, heroic performance."
He said the Japanese team had "won the hearts" of the British public with their "flair and sportsmanship".
Photo: Eddie Mulholland/The Telegraph
09:40
John McDonnell says Labour MPs won't fall for Osborne's'stunt'
The Shadow chancellor has told the BBC that George Osborne's call for moderate MPs to rebel against him on the Fiscal Charter is a "stunt".
Mr McDonnell said: "That's an Osborne stunt isn't it really, I don't think anyone will rise to it they'll see it for what it's worth - just as another stunt. We're trying to get onto serious economic debate today not those sort of political stunts any more."
He also admitted MPs were confused: "Most probably yes but we'll make it clear today. We've had to change position on a couple of issues but today we'll clarify everything."
Photo: REUTERS/Luke MacGregor
09:19
Today's Telegraph cartoon
The Chancellor is looking today to exploit Labour's 'obvious chaos' after this weeks sudden policy reversal.
In a dramatic U-turn on Monday, Labour MPs were told to vote against Osborne's Fical Charter, which has triggered open attacks from MPs against the leadership.
08:40
Fiscal Charter is not a'stunt'
David Gauke, the Financial Secretary to the Treasury, has told Radio 4 the Fiscal Charter is "perfectly reasonable" and not a stunt.
He also argued it "increases accountability of politicians."
Danny Blanchflower, Labour's new economic adviser, told the same programme that George Osborne's Fiscal Charter was "a silly rule that nobody is going to obey."
Mr Gauke said: "We need to show that in normal years when the economy is growing strongly we can run an overall surplus so we can get debt down, and ensure that we're well prepared for future shocks to our economy.
"It's important that we have in place a sound framework for delivering sound public finances and I urge all members of Parliament of whatever party to support this charter so that we can put it in place"
Photo: John Taylor
08:25
Labour could support military action in Syria without UN authorisation
Hilary Benn, Shadow Foreign Secretary, has indicated that Labour has adopted a new position on carrying out military action in Syria.
During Labour's conference in Brighton earlier this month, delegates made it clear they would only support RAF strikes in Syria if there was a “clear and unambiguous” UN authorisation.
But in an article for the Guardian, which has been endorsed by Jeremy Corbyn, Mr Benn has suggested Labour could now support using British military personnel in Syria, without the backing of the UN.
Photo: IAN JONES
Mr Benn writes: “On the question of airstrikes against Isil/Daesh in Syria, it should now be possible to get agreement on a UN security council chapter VII resolution given that four of the five permanent members – the USA, France, Britain and Russia – are already taking military action against Isil/Daesh in Iraq or Syria or in both countries."
“Of course, we know that any resolution may be vetoed, and in those circumstances we would need to look at the position again.”
Mr Corbyn has backed the change in position, saying: “I met with shadow cabinet colleagues today and Hilary Benn is setting out the position today.”
This marks a huge shift for Mr Corbyn, who has repeatedly outlined his opposition to any military action in Syria.
Photo: Alamy
08:05
Osborne says there is still'so much more' Britain needs to do to get the economy operating at full speed
CNBC has spoken to George Osborne, UK Chancellor of the Exchequer at the IMF annual meeting in Lima, Peru.
Mr Osborne said: “We've got one of the highest participation rate, highest employment rate in our history at the moment and low unemployment. But I don't come here feeling it's a case of 'job done.'
"I always come to these meetings thinking, 'God, there's so much more we need to do: to expand our exports, make our productivity better, build more infrastructure, make sure our workforce is better trained. So I come away, more with a sense of lots to do, rather than what's done."
Photo: Heathcliff O'Malley/The Telegraph
07:45
Osborne urge moderate Labour MPs to support 'economic sanity'
The Chancellor is looking today to exploit Labour's 'obvious chaos' after this weeks sudden policy reversal.
Last month John McDonnell, Labour's shadow chancellor, pledged to “support” George Osborne’s fiscal charter – which would force the government to run a budget surplus within three years during “normal times."
However in a dramatic U-turn on Monday, Labour MPs were told to vote against the proposal, triggering open attacks from the PLP against the leadership.
George Osborne said Labour's U-turn "confirmed they want to go on borrowing forever - loading debts onto our children that they can never hope to repay".
Photo: REUTERS/Toby Melville
The Chancellor warned: "This is not socialist compassion - it's economic cruelty.
"So today, with Labour's economic policy in obvious chaos, I call on all moderate, progressive Labour MPs to defy their leadership and join with us to vote for economic sanity.
"Failing that, they should at least follow the advice of the former shadow chancellor and abstain."
On Tuesday Mr McDonnell explained he still belives the deficit needs to be reduced.
He said: “I have changed my mind, but I haven’t changed my mind on the principles of what the charter is standing for, which is we need to tackle the deficit and we will tackle the deficit."
“But I have changed my mind on the parliamentary tactics. Originally what I said to people was ‘look that charter is a political stunt, it’s a political trap by George Osborne, it is virtually meaningless – he ignores it himself time and time again.
• Jeremy Warner: Britain in surplus? Eight times in 60 years
• Dan Hodges: McDonnell is a dangerous, ideological clown
“He never meets his targets. So this is just a stunt and let’s ridicule it in the debate and vote for it because it’s a meaningless vote."
In an email to Labour Party members, party officials said: “It is crucial that we reduce the deficit, and Labour takes this mission seriously, but it must never be on the backs of the most vulnerable, or at the cost of the key public services we all rely on.”
Chris Leslie, the former Shadow Chancellor and Chief Secretary to the Treasury, said the U-turn “sends the wrong message to the public”.Just today we kicked off our annual Positional Power Rankings series, which means that, before too long, we’ll get a couple of posts about individual bullpens, looking at every single group. I’ll even be responsible for writing one of those posts, meaning maybe it works to our disadvantage to put this post up now, focusing on one bullpen in particular. But I’ve had a note here for a while, and I’m not one to let a topic go uncovered. The Rockies bullpen is of particular interest, especially at a time when the larger narrative around the team has responded negatively to recent news.
Let’s rewind. Yes, the last week or two have not been kind to the Rockies organization. The outlook for the season ahead has certainly gotten worse. Yet going back to last season, you know which team’s bullpen had — easily — the league’s worst WPA? That would be the Rockies, who made even the Reds feel proud of themselves. Although the Rockies finished at 75-87, their BaseRuns record was a more decent 80-82. With a stronger bullpen, last year’s Rockies would’ve been an average team. Their bullpen this year has the potential to be unusually dominant.
One thing is absolutely true: *Every* bullpen has the potential to be dominant. Every pitcher in every bullpen is talented, and any given hard-throwing reliever could be one tweak away from a breakout. Edwin Diaz just dominated after shifting to the bullpen instead of starting. Christopher Devenski just dominated after coming seemingly out of nowhere. Bullpens are weird. We all understand this, and any bullpen could go in any direction. Just takes a little good or bad luck.
So, that being said, the new thing among contenders seems to be collecting multiple high-leverage arms. Call it the Royals model if you want to. The Rockies already had Adam Ottavino. You’ve probably been underrating him. The Rockies already had Jake McGee, but his 2016 was tanked by knee discomfort. And, of course, over the offseason the Rockies added Greg Holland, whose 2016 was tanked by elbow surgery. On the one hand, all three of these pitchers have had Tommy John, and McGee has additionally had an operation on his knee. The medical histories aren’t great. The performance histories, when healthy, are great. And in a couple ways for the Rockies, this spring has been encouraging.
Let’s just start with Ottavino, who required surgery early in 2015. He threw a few innings before going under the knife, and then he returned to relieve on the regular in last year’s second half. This has nothing to do with this particular spring; I just want to show you how good Ottavino has been. Here are his percentile rankings among relievers over the last two seasons:
That’s great, right? Right. He’s been in or around the top five percent in each statistic, and there are a lot of excellent relief pitchers around. Ottavino hasn’t done much to draw attention, in part because of his injury, and in part because of his employer. But healthy Ottavino has been outstanding, even relative to other outstanding pitchers, and he seems to be at 100% for the moment.
Moving on, there’s Holland. Holland was far from the first intriguing free agent coming off surgery. Teams always bite on these guys, eventually, and sometimes they fail to deliver anything. When Holland held a workout for interested teams, he was throwing in the 80s. The Rockies took the chance that there could be more, and the velocity has continued to improve. Borrowing from Brooks Baseball, here’s Holland’s history of spring-training fastball speed, when it’s been measured:
There’s no reading from 2016, when Holland was out. There’s no reading from 2015, when Holland pitched through elbow discomfort he refused to have examined. There is information from 2014. Holland is throwing that hard again. There’s not a *direct* link between speed and performance, but, perhaps you’ve forgotten how good Holland used to be, when he was normal. Here’s the same kind of plot I did for Ottavino:
Elite. Holland was elite, clearly one of the best around. You’d never prefer a pitcher to be coming off a lost season, but by the best indicator we have of health, Holland, physically, seems great. It’s hardly a reach, then, to think he could be excellent once again.
At last, there’s McGee. When the Rockies traded for McGee in the first place, they thought they were getting a dominant lefty. But McGee had had knee surgery, and discomfort returned in 2016. A lousy performance followed, and McGee saw his fastball drop to an average of 93 miles per hour. Without the same strength in his push-off leg, McGee lost his control and his zip. Now McGee says the knee injury is the furthest thing from his mind. Words are just words; McGee has provided some actions.
He’s been a reliever in the WBC with Team USA. Here’s Jake McGee throwing 96:
Here’s McGee throwing 97:
Here’s McGee throwing 98:
McGee has always leaned heavily on his fastball, in sort of the Sean Doolittle mold, and already he’s tapped into the upper 90s. Another velocity plot from Brooks Baseball:
McGee is back to where he was in 2015, before his knee was injured. Here’s one more percentile plot, for 2015, through the date before McGee was hurt:
Not nearly as great by ERA, but ERA is the least meaningful of the numbers. McGee was great in the other categories, and of course he was also great in previous seasons. Jake McGee was an elite reliever for years. He’s older now, and there’s a new scar on his leg, but if the WBC is any indication, McGee feels physically normal again, and when that’s been the case before he’s been a strikeout machine.
To simplify: Ottavino is healthy, and his recent performance was great. It looks like Holland is healthy, and his recent healthy performance was great. It looks like McGee is healthy, and his recent healthy performance was great. Spring is the best time to be optimistic, and no one would choose to have to count on three relievers with health-related question marks, but if you think about it, health is the element we understand the least, so we’re not so great at predictions. By talent, the Rockies bullpen is in fantastic shape. They just need a stroke or two of fortune.
To say nothing of Carlos Estevez, who throws 97. To say nothing of Miguel Castro, who throws 96. Jason Motte just averaged a strikeout an inning, and Mike Dunn was signed as a free agent. Like every other bullpen, the Rockies have guys who could take a positive turn without changing very much. It’s the Ottavino/Holland/McGee triumvirate that could put this unit over the top.
I get it, I really do. The health concerns are real, and maybe the odds are that at least one of the three will get hurt again. I don’t know how to project that. Nobody does, and that’s where the upside is. Ottavino, Holland, McGee — they don’t need to learn how to dominate. They’ve already dominated, in some cases for a while. They just need to be able to pitch like they want to be able to pitch. If their bodies don’t hold them back, the Rockies could end up with one of the best bullpens in the game. And in that event, the Rockies would be no one’s preferred opponent.About
RUMBLE ROAD is a game about leading a ragtag group of wrestler hopefuls across the country in an attempt to make it big enough to gain entry into the event of the year. 'THE RUMBLE'
The game begins with a pair of wrestlers, a car, some cash, and a dream.
Manage your wrestler's various needs, personality quirks, finances, and training as you embark on a road trip across America.
As you make stops to eat, sleep, train, earn, and wrestle, keep an eye out for others who may want to join you on your quest.
Before setting up your matches, take into consideration each wrestler's relationship to one another.
Pick the wrestlers you'd like to perform against each other in shows!
Set up the performance using the techniques your wrestlers have trained in to put on the best show possible!
The announcers will then give you a play by play of your wrestlers executing your show! Gain experience and build relationships to put on bigger and better shows to gain the fans you need to be eligible to perform in THE RUMBLE!
Disclamer: 'Rumble Road' is not a 'League of Heels' branded game
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REWARDS
The Game ($15) - Copies of the game will be digitally available. Ideally the game will be available through Steam but there are now multiple services that could potentially be used to distribute the game. The primary platform will be Windows but the game is being developed using Unity so once that is done, I can port the game to Linux and Mac OSX without too much difficulty.
Digital Soundtrack ($30) - Music and SFX in the game is being handled by the talented Hamst3r of The Hamster Alliance. The full OST will be included in the download in digital form. Jobbers and above will also be included in Rumble Road's credits
Crowd Sign ($100) - I will work with you to make a 17x10 pixel sign that will be held up by NPCs in the crowd at wrestling matches.
NPC Character ($300) - I'll create an NPC character using your likeness and name. This character will be in the pool of NPCs that the game pulls from whenever an NPC is needed for various side quests, shops, dialog, etc...
Wrestler Character ($600) - You create a persona and I'll put them into the game as a playable wrestler. Let me know their likes, dislikes, personality traits and the type of wrestler they are and players will be able to recruit them just like any other wrestler!
Sponsored Location ($1000) - Do you have a brand you'd like to promote? Or just want a specific location to exist in Rumble Road? I'll work with you to create a location of your choosing with you. Whether it's a gym, garage, house, arena, restaurant, inn, you tell me what you want and we'll make it happen!
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WHY KICKSTARTER?
I've been working on Rumble Road in my spare time for almost a year now and have gotten it to a point where I know it can be a great game. What I need now though is some help. Primarily with the UIX, audio, and creation of art assets. These things cost money and that's where kickstarter comes in. I need your help so I can pay people for the work I need them to do to finish this game. After deductions from Kickstarter, Amazon, and taxes (roughly 35%) I'm asking for just enough to get me the help I need to finish this game. I don't have stretch goals because I know the game I want to make, and I know what I need to make it. If this kickstarter does end up being more successful than I'm hoping for, that will allow me to hire more help to polish the game to a brilliant shine!
Here's how the money will be spent in the form of a pizza.Tripoli, The Ancient Capital of the Phoenicians
“All around Tripoli too we find orchards of white Mulberry trees, Pomegranates, Orange and Lemon trees which bear fruit of the greatest beauty.” ~ Maria E. Catlow, 1855
Why Tripoli in particular?
For many reasons.
Naturally, for being the Capital of Lebanon, Beirut has taken all the spotlight for as wide and as back as I look on the web and in the news. Little has been told about Tripoli, that second largest city of ours, former Capital of the Phoenician 7000-year Civilization, and, thereafter to-date, the Capital of the North.
While it has been unfairly disregarded or minimized in its worthiness, the North of Lebanon is in fact significant in size, history, political power, diverse sub-cultures, agriculture, and amazing natural beauty.
The millenniums Cedar of God tops the Northern Cedar mountain. One of the top 3 most read ever in the world, Gebran Kahlil, is a Northern son of ours, born and raised in Bsharre.
I can keep citing and citing but I must remain within the framework of my blog. 🙂
Tripoli has suffered tremendously throughout the war and its aftermath. While Beirut boosted back on its feet by the grace of huge investments, Tripoli is still battling its way up; its border to a torn country in ongoing war makes it all too challenging.
My two other reasons for writing Citrus and Sweet lay on that Tripoli is the city of my origin, and that I have been mentioning it quite a bit, I believe, in my recipes, and sharing Northern ones.
So, that zesty tastebuds of ours, which I hinted about few times, gets to get some talks here.
The Citrus Fruits and Us, We Go Back in Time!
We, people of the North, love lemon juice to the point of increasing its dose in most of our dishes. From the Tabbouleh Salad and the Tahini Sauce to the Lemon Lentil Soup and the so-famous Tripolitan Spicy Fish “Samke Harra”, passing by several different dishes, we love them well-zesty.
That subculture feature in our Northern eating habits is probably rooted in the abundance of citrus trees that covered our coastal cities.
Our grandparents would speak of a time when Tripoli was known for its particular persistent fragrance of citrus blossom which these trees diffused generously.
It was as remarkable that writers and poets of past centuries spoke of “the fragrance of citrus blossoms that fills the air of the city of Tripoli.” That earned the Capital of the North its famous Arabic title of Tripoli Al-Fayha’a, meaning:
“Tripoli, The Abundant in Fragrance”
That aromatic feature had past ceased to exist at the time my life landed in Tripoli in the late 60s. A faded glory I would come to witness though as I grew up in front of an immense field of orange trees which flirted with the Mediterranean sea at the horizon.
Still, the sparkling yellow of lemon trees were everywhere to be seen, in front-yards and backyards of traditional houses and buildings in the city.
However, they were not alone to sparkle in beauty and scents. Jasmine plants climbing the walls were appropriating the thousands of years of aromatic fame, so did the gardenias.
On The Record & For The Record
Botanical Excursion Round the World, by Maria E. Catlow, 1855:
“All around Tripoli too we find orchards of white Mulberry trees, Pomegranates, Orange and Lemon trees which bear fruit of the greatest beauty.
Here, even in the middle of winter, the Orange trees are covered with fruit and flower at the same time, and the Banana is flourishing in the plain whilst the distant summits of Lebanon are covered with snow.”
Sir Charles William Wilson – 1880 – Lebanon & the North:
“(…) you walk for a few minutes among trees and flowers and murmuring waters to the convent … of the Tripolitans, and in the month of April, when the orange and lemon groves below and around are in full bloom ….“
Tripoli: The Capital of Lebanese Sweet
That is another nickname Tripoli holds in fame… and fact. I previously spoke of my childhood Sundays and the family habit of heading right after mass for our Mafroukeh breakfast. It fascinates me that, after so many years, the taste of these Pastries of Tripoli seem to hang on still to my sensorial memories!
When I lived in Jounieh (for years) then in Rabiyeh, I knew of many who used to ride all the way to Tripoli just for its pastry, bringing along with them plenty to store in their kitchen. There is a good reason why Tripoli was nicknamed the Capital of the Lebanese Sweets.
With time, these major Lebanese pastry restaurants of Tripoli – family owned, and some operating since 1881 – opened their branches in various main cities closer to, and in, Beirut, as well as in the Beirut International Airport. We see them even in London and New York, and in various main cities of the Arabian Gulf.
Today, these pastry restaurants have even launched their online stores, catering worldwide products of theirs that can sustain shipping.
And this was Citrus & Sweet; a little bit and a little not much of Tripoli, the capital of the North, the City of my Forefathers…
Dedicated to my father Claude Beik and his remarkable love to his Northern homeland. May his soul rest in peace.This is the 1967 BMW R60/2. Known across the world for its ruggedness and reliability, the R60 could provide a steady ride to rider and passenger alike. Nowadays, this vintage bike is still as reliable as it was 50 years ago.
This Lego model was made for a friend and fellow Lego enthusiast to commemorate his father, who would take him on rides in this very motorcycle through the countryside. It is constructed to match all the various specifications and details of the original bike, including the unique triangular front fork, hand brakes, a fuel tank, twin engines, a tire inflator, twin engines, and a side car (as of now still a work in progress), as well as a rotating handlebars and a retractable kickstand.
Do you want your stormtrooper to have a stunning R60 motocycle to ride? Give us a vote, you won't regret it!It’s no surprise that the Religious Right isn’t a fan of the ACLU.
But now, a Christian Right group is attacking the ACLU for supporting… another Christian Right group.
Merrilee Carlson, the President of Families United For Our Troops and Their Mission (I don’t think they mean your families, though, you heathen scum), sent out a press release because the ACLU was defending Fred Phelps and the Westboro Baptist Church.
Maybe there’s a Christian out there thinking, “WBC? They’re not real Christians; they’re a hate group.”
Hate group, yes. But no doubt they believe they’re accurately following the Bible. They’re just not your kind of Christian.
And perhaps unfortunately, Phelps’ clan has the same rights as everyone else — including free speech and the right to peacefully protest. That’s what the ACLU is defending. They’re not supporting what the WBC is doing, simply their right to do it.
It’s the same reason the Ku Klux Klan would receive similar protection from the ACLU, the same reason pro-lifers who wanted to peacefully protest in front of an abortion clinic would be defended.
The ACLU doesn’t take on cases just because they support some progressive agenda; they’re here to protect civil liberties for everyone. Free speech is protected even if it’s vile and abhorrent.
So why attack them? Carlson says this:
“My son died in Iraq fighting to protect the Constitutional rights and liberties that the ACLU is now trying to exploit. This lawsuit proves the ACLU will stop at nothing to drive an agenda that disrespects and degrades our fallen heroes and their families…”
Right… the ACLU hates the troops. That makes sense.
And talk about exploitation, at the bottom of the note is a message that Carlson’s son was killed in Iraq in 2005 — the same note that is on several press releases — as if that gives Carlson the right to make ludicrous statements.
(via OneNewsNow)Later, when Martin Marietta’s counsel explained that the assembly-line job denied to Phillips was not “heavy work” but rather “intricate work” involving “small electronic components,” Burger stated that that was surely why women comprised the bulk of the company’s workforce. “[W]omen are manually much more adept than men and they do this work better,” he opined, adding, “Just the same reason that most men hire women as their secretaries, because they are better at it than men.”
That the Chief Justice of the Supreme Court apparently had no qualms about declaring women to be inherently better secretaries than men spoke volumes about how little Title VII had done in its six-year existence to uproot, or at least to stigmatize, the cultural biases motivating a lot of sex discrimination.
Shortly after the oral argument, the Court issued its unanimous decision. Like so many Court rulings, it was a mixed bag. In one sense, it was a big win for Ida Phillips, and for all employees covered by Title VII: The Court agreed that refusing to hire mothers (or any other sub-group of protected workers) was just as discriminatory as if Martin Marietta had refused to hire any women at all. That expansive definition of Title VII’s coverage still stands. But the Court apparently agreed that Martin Marietta’s concerns about mothers’ job commitment weren’t off-base; it sent the case back to the lower court for a trial, so the company could present any evidence it could muster that mothers in fact had higher rates of absenteeism, or made more mistakes, or took more phone calls during the work day, than non-mothers. Title VII allows employers this loophole. If they can prove that only one sex could do a certain job—say, that only a woman could portray Cleopatra in a stage production—then it isn’t illegal to restrict that job to men only or women only. Notably, the law doesn’t permit this exception for race discrimination, preventing employers from ever deeming certain jobs “for whites only” or “for blacks only.”
As it turned out, Martin Marietta had no appetite for a trial, and settled Ida Phillips’s case soon after. (She used the modest proceeds to give her daughter a down payment on a house, buy herself the first air conditioner she’d ever had, and take her youngest daughter—the one who had cost her the job at the company—to Disneyworld.) And subsequent court decisions have departed from the Supreme Court’s interpretation of Title VII’s loophole; its willingness to give Martin Marietta a chance to use a stereotype to justify discrimination against all mothers has not, for the most part, prevailed.
The reality, though, is that motherhood continues to pose a stubborn barrier to working women. When Phillips applied to work on that assembly line, only about 25 percent of mothers with children under six were in the workforce. Today, that number has more than doubled, to nearly 70 percent. Yet studies confirm that mothers are still viewed as less committed to their jobs than men. This “maternal wall” results in lower pay for mothers than for fathers, fewer opportunities for advancement, and even—just as Ida Phillips faced—outright job denial. True, the biases on display at that oral argument 45 years ago may not be voiced as openly or as often, because thanks to Title VII, they’re recognized as illegal. But make |
five minutes. By the time the cup is ready to drink, it won’t be piping hot—but hot enough to drink without burning your tongue.
Though seemingly simple, precision—be it bean grind size, water temperature, or water to bean ratio—is vital to nail a Tøllefsen-approved cup of coffee. The bottom line, "Keep it simple, and as good as possible, so it’s easy to make the same perfect brew over and over again," he says. Of course, a cup of coffee is a matter of taste in the end. Tøllefsen warns that after drinking a quality mug, it might be challenging for some to drink an average brew thereafter. And he could be right. After visiting Supreme Roastworks, every other cup of coffee feels like a step away from what the drink should be. Still, it’s comforting to know that with the right tools, perfection isn’t too far away.
Editor: Kat OdellA large cargo plane crashed at the end of a runway and split in two while trying to take off Sunday at Brussels airport.
Four of the five crew members on board the Boeing 747 were slightly injured and were hospitalized, said Jan Van der Cruysse, spokesman at Brussels Airport.
"The plane is very seriously damaged," he said. The aircraft cracked in two after it crashed at the end of runway 220, which lies very close to a rail line and houses.
Rail services to and from the airport were suspended as a safety precaution, however the crash did not affect other flights at the airport, Van der Cruysse said.
Francis Vermeiren, mayor of the nearby town of Zaventem, said the plane did not catch on fire when it crashed after attempting to take off. Vermeiren was coordinating rescue efforts at the airport.
"The plane is not on fire but it has split into two," he told VRT radio.
Firefighters coated the wings of the plane with special fire retardant foam as a precaution because the plane was still full of jet fuel, the mayor said.
He said the plane was on a scheduled flight to Bahrain. It was not known what cargo the plane was carrying.
Vermeiren said the pilot told rescue authorities he heard a large noise while trying to take off just after midday. It was not yet clear what caused the crash.
The plane is owned by Kalitta Air, a cargo carrier based at Willow Run Airport near Ypsilanti, Michigan, and makes regular flights from Brussels, officials said. A person who answered the telephone at Kalitta Air said Sunday morning that no one was immediately available to comment.The Ravens have invited Towson pass rusher Ryan Delaire to their local prospect day, according to NFL sources.
Delaire drew strong reviews for his performance at his campus Pro Day workout, where he ran the 40-yard dash in 4.7 to 4.8 seconds with a 33 1/2 inch vertical leap at Johnny Unitas Stadium with Ravens coach John Harbaugh in attendance.
The Ravens have also invited Towson cornerback Tye Smith to their local workout April 21 at their training complex.
Delaire has also drawn interest from the Atlanta Falcons, Philadelphia Eagles, Houston Texans, Dallas Cowboys and New Orleans Saints. Delaire has been projected as a middle- to later-round draft prospect.
"To my way of thinking, Delaire is very much a draftable guy," an AFC scout said. "Delaire is a natural pass rusher and you don't like to pass them up because of how important it is to have players like him that can get to the quarterback on a consistent basis. I don't know where he'll be picked, but he'll be on our draft board."
Delaire is going to the medical recheck in Indianapolis this weekend after undergoing arthroscopic knee surgery in December and pulling his groin while running the 40-yard dash in 4.97 seconds during the NFL scouting combine. Delaire is healthy now.
The 6-foot-4, 257-pound defensive end might project to outside linebacker in 3-4 defensive schemes in the NFL.
Twenty-five scouts from 23 NFL teams attended the workout on the Towson campus. That included representatives from the Eagles, Ravens, Arizona Cardinals, Washington Redskins, Denver Broncos, Buffalo Bills, St. Louis Rams, Falcons, Saints, Jacksonville Jaguars, San Diego Chargers, Seattle Seahawks, Green Bay Packers, Indianapolis Colts, Cincinnati Bengals, New England Patriots, Texans, Kansas City Chiefs, Tennessee Titans, Tampa Bay Buccaneers, San Francisco 49ers, Oakland Raiders and the Miami Dolphins.
Growing up in Connecticut, Delaire played basketball until his senior year of high school before earning a scholarship to Massachusetts-Amherst. After transferring to Towson, Delaire emerged as a third-team All-American and finished with 22.5 career sacks.
Delaire had 11 sacks, 14.5 tackles for losses and forced three fumbles last season before having to decline invitations to all-star games because of his knee surgery.
“Ryan brings something a little bit different because normally with someone that long, you don’t associate speed and quickness, but he has it,” Towson coach Rob Ambrose told The Baltimore Sun last month. “His former days as a basketball player have served him quite well. There aren’t that many guys that big and and tall that are physical and quick. He has the ability to get low and bend.
“You usually only see that from a guy like Elvis Dumervil, who’s, sorry, 5-11 in cleats and Ryan is 6-4, flat-footed. He’s been a complete sponge as a player. He can’t learn enough. The fact that he still has room to grow at the next level is exciting.”
awilson@baltsun.comA cowboy rode into town and stopped at a saloon for a drink. Unfortunately, the locals always had a habit of picking on strangers. When he finished his drink, he found his horse had been stolen.
He went back into the bar, handily flipped his gun into the air, caught it above his head without even looking and fired a shot into the ceiling.
"Which one of you sidewinders stole my horse?" he yelled with surprising forcefulness. No one answered. "All right, I'm gonna have another beer, and if my horse ain't back outside by the time I finish, I'm gonna do what I dun in Texas! And I don't like to have to do what I dun in Texas!"
Some of the locals shifted restlessly. The man, true to his word, had another beer, walked outside, and his horse has been returned to the post.
He saddled up and started to ride out of town. The bartender wandered out of the bar and asked, "Say partner, before you go... what happened in Texas?"
The cowboy turned back and said, "I had to walk home."Primary Documents - Brazil's Severing of Diplomatic Relations with Germany, 4 June 1917
Reproduced below is the text of a letter sent by Domicio da Gama, Brazil's American Ambassador, to the U.S. Secretary of State, Robert Lansing.
In his letter dated 4 June 1917 da Gama explained that having formally severed diplomatic relations with Germany on 10 April 1917 - some four days after the U.S. declared war with Germany - the Brazilian government was now actively seeking to amend Brazilian law to enable the country to itself declare war with Germany - which it duly did on 26 October 1917.
As a major Atlantic trading nation, Brazil had found itself increasingly threatened by Germany's declaration of unrestricted submarine warfare, culminating on 5 April 1917 with the sinking of the Brazilian ship Parana off the French coast.
Click here to read Brazil's justification to the Vatican for its decision to go to war.
Letter from Domicio da Gama, Brazilian Ambassador to the United States, to Robert Lansing, U.S. Secretary of State, 4 June 1917
Mr. Secretary of State:
The President of the republic has just instructed me to inform your Excellency's Government that he has approved the law which revokes Brazil's neutrality in the war between the United States of America and the German Empire.
The republic thus recognized the fact that one of the belligerents is a constituent portion of the American Continent and that we are bound to that belligerent by traditional friendship and the same sentiment in the defence of the vital interests of America and the accepted principles of law.
Brazil ever was and is now free from warlike ambitions, and, while it always refrained from showing any partiality in the European conflict, it could no longer stand unconcerned when the struggle involved the United States, actuated by no interest whatever but solely for the sake of international judicial order, and when Germany included us and the other neutral powers in the most violent acts of war.
While the comparative lack of reciprocity on the part of the American republics divested until now the Monroe Doctrine of its true character, by permitting of an interpretation based on the prerogatives of their sovereignty, the present events which brought Brazil even now to the side of the United States at a critical moment in the history of the world are still imparting to our foreign policy a practical shape of continental solidarity, a policy, however, that was also that of the former regime whenever any of the other sister friendly nations of the American Continent was concerned.
The republic strictly observed our political and diplomatic traditions and remained true to the liberal principles in which the nation was nurtured.
Thus understanding our duty and Brazil taking the position to which its antecedents and the conscience of a free people pointed, whatever fate the morrow may have in store for us, we shall conserve the Constitution which governs us and which has not yet been surpassed in the guarantees due to the rights, lives, and property of foreigners.
In bringing the above-stated resolution to your Excellency's knowledge, I beg you to be pleased to convey to your Government the sentiments of unalterable friendship of the Brazilian people and Government.
Source: Source Records of the Great War, Vol. V, ed. Charles F. Horne, National Alumni 1923It was late summer 2015 when Ilya Nevdah faced a big problem. The Chief Technology Officer at AirDog should have been flying high — but suddenly, his company’s drones weren’t.
AirDog had won raves for prototypes of its drones that are built for action sports athletes capturing themselves during their rides/session/sport, and its Kickstarter funding campaign raised $1 million more than its $300,000 target. Pre-orders were rolling in from big-box chains and online retailers that wanted the foldable purple-and-yellow drones. At its factories in Riga, Latvia, AirDog ramped up production just as disturbing news rolled in from its beta testers.
“We received a couple of reports of drones just falling down out of the air,” said Nevdah.
Commercial production of consumer electronics — especially something that flies — isn’t easy. And trying to track down the problem’s source was complicated by the sheer number of units coming off the company’s production line.
“We started mass-producing hundreds and hundreds of units and testing every single one at the factory. A significant number of units were sent to our beta testers and a couple of them reported mid-air motor shutdowns,” Nevdah said. “We started digging deep into this problem to find any production flaws, because we hadn’t had previous cases of such misbehavior.”
AirDog tracked the problem back to faulty electronic speed controllers (ESCs), which vary the rotational speed and direction of a drone’s motor. Some of them simply stopped operating in mid-air, with catastrophic results for the drones. The ESC manufacturer couldn’t pinpoint the problem — and worse, refused to fix it.
Nevdah was stuck with 4,000 worthless ESCs and almost 1,000 Kickstarter orders he couldn’t fill. He reached out to other ESC manufacturers, all of whom suggested off-the-shelf solutions that wouldn’t work with AirDog’s technology.
Out of options, he remembered a contact he met at a trade show from DJI, based in Shenzhen, China. Even if DJI had a compatible product, he didn’t know whether the world’s leading maker of camera drones would have the time or the interest to work with his startup focused on action sports
To his surprise, not only was DJI willing to provide parts, it offered its expertise to analyze the underlying problems and get AirDog’s drones flying. Nevdah discovered that DJI and its 1,500 research and development staffers create some of the most reliable parts and components in the unmanned aerial vehicle industry,
“We immediately understood that DJI is the way to go as soon as we started talking to them,” Nevdah said. “DJI engineers analyzed all our technical requirements and quickly designed custom speed controllers we wanted. The quality of the new controllers in terms of hardware and embedded software was far superior than anything we could get from anyone else. The commitment of people at DJI working on the project and short development cycle really amazed us.”
A DJI engineer who worked on the project said he and his colleagues were intrigued by Nevdah’s engineering challenge. Engineers at DJI did not treat AirDog as a potential rival because of its action sports focus, they saw its product as an opportunity to further expand their best-in-class technology.
“An ESC is similar to a tire of a car. Anyone can buy our off-the-shelf ESCs,” said the engineer, who asked not to be named. “Time was limited, so we had to deliver reliable things to them and integrate our mature ESC technology into their system. We were up late at night. This case was very important for us.”
DJI engineers began analyzing the problem as soon as they got their hands on sample AirDog motors. They made software tweaks to ensure reliable connections between ESCs and motors, then reworked the ESC power electronics to work efficiently and reliably with AirDog’s powerful motors.
“The signal they had before from the previous ESC was not smooth. That led to ESC and motor desynchronization in some cases. That’s why their drones crashed,” the DJI engineer said. “We only helped with a small part, but it turned out to be an important part.”
The collaboration saved AirDog, which is now delivering drones to its Kickstarter supporters and ramping up to fulfill big-box and online orders. DJI engineers suggested other tweaks to AirDog, and the two teams are still collaborating in ways that benefit both companies.
“The drone market is huge and growing. Frankly speaking, AirDog is built for and bought by those in action sports who want to capture themselves in action. We see more competition coming from action camcorders than from other drones,” Nevdah said. “We are very happy with the outcome of this cooperation. And we are seeing how both companies and, of course, our customers can benefit.”Maybe if you are old enough you can still remember the rousing declarations of Sir Molle or the creativity of Bobby Atlas. If you have played EVE in more recent times, you will most certainly be familiar with the captivating and chilling proclamations of The Mittani. They are among the best examples of motivational speeches in human history, but unfortunately their days are numbered.
Soon, The Mittani will have to look for a job, and he also enters the age where the biological clock starts to tick more noticeably. Chances are, he’ll soon become a father. With new responsibilities looming, he will exit the stage against the backdrop of his shattered Empire, and then what? Who is going to replace him as the new villainous overlord? Elise Randolph? DurrHurrDurr?! Gorski Car?!?!?!
No, there is nobody who can take up this mantle right off the bat without some preparation. This is where I come in and help the next moustache twirling villain to fit the bill when it comes to addressing the masses. Read, learn and practice. Time is running out and you might as well prepare a scathing victory speech which adds insult to injury. Better be ready now than sorry later.
The Staples Of Presentation
“Make sure you practice an expression of smug nonchalance in front of a mirror. Do this in every conceivable situation. Drunk; right after waking up; while brushing your teeth; during sex; when your boss tells you you are fired etc.”
Preparation: Make sure you practice an expression of smug nonchalance in front of a mirror. Do this in every conceivable situation. Drunk; right after waking up; while brushing your teeth; during sex; when your boss tells you you are fired etc. This will help you to always look aloof and in control no matter what the circumstances are. Facial expression is not everything though. Learn to talk slowly and add lots of emphasis. Practice speaking as if every second of your words is spelled with italics. Once you have learned how to present yourself, you can get to using the right words.
Words: Use expensive words and speak with eloquence. Also use a lot of expressions from modern popular media analysis, like “echo chamber” or “manufacturing consent”. It makes you sound smart, and if you achieve that, it does not matter how stupid your message is.
If people have to look up stuff on Wikipedia to understand your speech, then they will automatically accept that you are more intelligent than them and therefore absolutely correct. It doesn’t even matter if you actually manage to do any of the things you say. Just look at Barack Obama. The man got two terms as a president and a Nobel Peace Prize. Did he actually achieve anything to deserve that? Of course not, but he always sounds very intelligent. Words are just the most basic weapon in your arsenal, though. Let’s proceed to combining them into metaphors.
Metaphors: Nothing inspires the people like a memorable phrase that conveys vicious determination. You can experiment a bit, but stick to metaphors that evoke visceral and personal violence. They are so much more powerful because they show how far you are prepared to go. Everyone can gun someone down in cold blood, but how about stabbing them in their hearts, over and over? So much more passion and murderous rage goes into that. Even simple stabbing might not be sufficiently brutal. Maybe twist the knife too? Or fucking someone to death. Hey, you need to be committed to do that.
Make sure your enemies understand that you will make them suffer on a personal level, and that you are prepared to go beyond the call of duty for it. That makes your rage appear more selfless and righteous. This will instill true fear in your enemies. That is not the whole of it though, you also need to make sure that your enemies understand that winning and ruling is your destiny, and to do that, you need to refer to history.
History: This part is very important. History is your best friend and worst enemy. On one side it provides you with nostalgic reference points that demonstrate your greatness, on the other hand all kinds of people inconveniently crop up and pretend to know how things really went. Negate that hostile side of history.
In the best case, your audience are mostly a bunch of millennials with the attention span of a squirrel suffering from ADD. If you are dealing with older players, count on alcohol induced dementia or at least make sure you isolate them from any outside sources. Definitely make sure they never read reddit or Evenews24. Crossing Zebras is right out unless you fly with Pandemic Legion. Then it is of course your own propaganda site and should be mandatory reading for everyone.
Once you have that established, feel free to change the past whenever it suits you, even if that past is just two months ago. Chances are, nobody will remember what really happened back then. If you followed my advice so far, people will take your word as gospel anyway.
If you do find yourself in a tight spot when facing criticism from outsiders, just wave away your false statements as mere trolling. That always works. Joke’s on the others for believing that you were being serious.
“Speak of glory achieved through hardship. You want to make sure that your subjects know that they will reap great rewards even if you make their EVE experience absolutely boring.”
The best historical references are the ones you completely fabricated yourself. For example you could create the myth that your alliance tried to play nice but was antagonised from the get-go. Be sure to repeat those references at every given opportunity and point out that what is happening now is exactly what has happened in the past when you succeeded. Speak of glory achieved through hardship. You want to make sure that your subjects know that they will reap great rewards even if you make their EVE experience absolutely boring.
Take credit for any past successes, whether they were yours or not. For example, if you happen to have participated in a massive battle like B-R5RB on the winning side, make it clear that you achieved victory. That works particularly well if your allies who did most of the work are an isolated language community. Russians work really well for such purposes, so make sure you always keep at least some of them as allies.
Dramatic Simplicity: Do not flinch from discarding nuance. Paint the world in stark black and white. The enemy are clearly the worst people who have ever lived, and their greatest desire is to kill your children and feed them to you. In fact, they are out to destroy EVE just for the sake of destroying you. Never make the mistake of describing your enemies as individuals with complex motivations. Group them together under a general category like “these people”. It will help to make them appear like a faceless bloodthirsty mob and strengthens the “us vs. them” mindset.
If you are faced with internal dissent or defection, prevent all reflection on the potential mistakes of your organisation. The best way to achieve this is a dramatic declaration of the corruption and malice among defectors. You should always have some dirt prepared in advance, so make sure you have someone in your inner circle who is good at doxing. You never know when it may become necessary to out someone as user of a gay dating service or a nationwide forum that also happens to have some local Neo-Nazis posting there.
When all else fails, make something up. Declaring your opponents as mentally unstable is always a good one because that leaves a margin of error. If they do something right then they just had a lucid moment, everything else is proof of your statement.
It is at this point – and only here – where you can actually grant your enemies a modicum of respect, but only do so as an illustration of their immense danger. For example, tip your fedora at their cunning masterplan to destroy your supercap fleet. It will make you look even better because – after all – you exposed the plot and prevented that catastrophic betrayal from succeeding.
Again, in such cases it is not necessary that a plot ever existed. Just make sure you have a trusted advisor who can produce piles of “evidence” that nobody will actually read. The very fact that your statements are supported by 100+ pages of chatlogs will suffice to convince everyone that they must be true.
“If possible, engage in character assassination as I have outlined above. Potential targets are “community” figures like bloggers, reddit moderators, or even CCP devs.”
Passing The Blame: Although it is extremely unlikely, you may eventually find yourself in a situation where things turn out badly for you. You might fail at a Kickstarter or even find yourself on the verge of losing a war. In this case make sure you point the finger at someone or something else as the reason for such failure. If possible, engage in character assassination as I have outlined above. Potential targets are “community” figures like bloggers, reddit moderators, or even CCP devs. Level accusations against the latter in particular if they were affiliated with an enemy alliance in the past.
https://embed.gyazo.com/24d8559680d9f42d83328b0fee782713.jpg
Game mechanics in general are also a good justification for failure. Everyone knows that EVE is a bad game full of bugs and exploits. You are destined to win, so if you don’t then the game itself is clearly stacked against you and the enemy is abusing this. If you feel confident enough, you can even go as far as stating that CCP is actively colluding with your enemies. Comparisons to the T20 scandal are a great way to do this.
In the worst cases, you may actually admit that something was your fault. However, only do so in connection with a statement that clearly indicates that everything would have been fine if you hadn’t listened to others. False humility should always be balanced out with blaming someone else. If you can pull that one off, then you really have come a long way.
On Your Way To Glory
Like I said in the beginning, you don’t have much time left to learn from the best. I would therefore urge you to listen to all the exceptional examples you can find in the appropriate EVE media channels you can get a hold of.
Of course history also provides many great occurrences of doublespeak, hypocrisy and jingoistic hyperbole. Useful study subjects include Cardinal Richelieu, Oliver Cromwell, Joseph McCarthy or Kim Il Sung. In fact I would suggest to generally model your whole organisation on the Democratic People’s Republic of Korea. It helps a lot if your subjects are generally isolated, fully dependent on your organisation and fearful of all outsiders.
You may refer to Niccolo Machiavelli, but make sure to never actually read anything he wrote except The Prince, or you might be lead astray by his nuanced wit and terrible liberal tendencies.
So, what are you waiting for? This war isn’t going to last forever and the new ruling coalition of EVE needs a great leader who can fill the immense vacuum that will be left by The Mittani, just as he selflessly took up the mantle of Sir Molle and even surpassed his great example. Maybe you can exceed what The Mittani achieved? If you follow my guidelines, and you have the talent for greatness, I’m sure you will.World leaders unblocked $15 billion in funds to help Libya’s victorious rebels rebuild their shattered country as fugitive strongman Moamer Kadhafi called for guerrilla warfare.
Forty-two years to the day since Kadhafi took power in a coup, senior envoys from over 60 countries Thursday met the leaders of the revolution that overthrew him to endorse the fledgling regime and offer practical support.
But in the meeting in Paris, they also put the leaders of the rebels’ National Transitional Council (NTC) on notice to pursue a path of reconciliation, even as Kadhafi issued a message of defiance from his desert hiding place.
“Prepare yourselves for a gang and guerrilla war, for urban warfare and popular resistance in every town… to defeat the enemy everywhere,” he said in an audio tape aired on Arab satellite television.
The Paris guestlist was a victory in itself for the NTC, as once sceptical Russia and China and Libya’s reluctant neighbour Algeria agreed to back the new administration.
French President Nicolas Sarkozy, the rebels’ most prominent backer from the outset, announced that billions in Libyan assets frozen abroad will now be unblocked.
“Around $15 billion have been immediately unfrozen… we want to give back to the Libyans the money that was frozen and that was stolen from them,” he said.
Speaking alongside the rebel leaders, Sarkozy urged the NTC to begin a “process of reconciliation and forgiveness.”
NTC president Mustafa Abdel Jalil said the Libyan people “proved their courage and their determination” in their fight to topple Kadhafi, but he also pleaded for stability.
“Now everything is in your hands,” he said in a message to the Libyan people. “It’s up to you to accomplish what we promised: stability, peace and reconciliation.”
The rebels have issued an ultimatum for Kadhafi and his followers to surrender, and have amassed troops around his hometown of Sirte for a final battle.
At the Paris conference, NATO Secretary General Anders Fogh Rasmussen said the alliance would continue its six-month operation in Libya for as long as the civilian population was in danger.
Kadhafi, who might once have marked his coup anniversary with pomp and ceremony, was reduced to releasing his latest bluster on tape, vowing: “We will not surrender. We are not women and we are going to keep on fighting.”
In Tripoli, rebel commander Abdullah Naqir announced the creation of the council of Tripoli’s revolutionaries to defend the capital, restore order and hunt down Kadhafi loyalists.
While the mood in Paris was upbeat, US Secretary of State Hillary Clinton sounded a note of caution, urging the rebels to beware of extremism in their own ranks and prevent weapons from falling into the wrong hands.
“The international community, led by the UN, needs to help the Libyan people and its leaders pave a path to a sustainable, inclusive democracy that banishes violence as a political tool and promotes tolerance,” she said.
UN chief Ban Ki-moon said he would work with the Security Council to agree terms for an immediate United Nations mission to deal with a possible humanitarian crisis and help rebuild the state.
“Our most immediate challenge is humanitarian,” he said.
“Roughly 860,000 people have left the country since February, including skilled guest workers. Public services are under severe strain… There is a major water shortage.”
Russia — which had opposed NATO military support for the rebels — said it recognised the NTC as Libya’s “ruling authority”.
China, which also had reservations about the air campaign, did not go so far, but said it respected the NTC’s “significant position.”
Continental heavyweight South Africa, however, continued to snub the NTC. President Jacob Zuma boycotted the talks and said he was “not happy” with NATO’s campaign. The African Union has not recognised the NTC.
The Algerian turnabout may prove of more immediate practical help in cutting off a potential Kadhafi escape route.
Libya’s larger neighbour has been accused of supplying Kadhafi with arms and, after members of the fallen leader’s family fled there, it was seen as a likely escape route for the strongman and his loyal sons.
But Algeria’s Foreign Minister Mourad Medelci welcomed the NTC promise to set up a “government representative of all regions” and added: “When it has done so, we’ll recognise it.”
Kadhafi and his son Seif al-Islam have gone underground since rebels stormed into Tripoli on August 20.
“If they want a long battle, let it be long. If Libya burns, who will be able to govern it? Let it burn,” declared Kadhafi in his statement.
Rebel officials say Kadhafi may be in the town of Bani Walid, south of the capital and still held by loyalist troops, but other reports suggest he could be in his hometown Sirte or Ghadames, near the Algerian border.
A western diplomat meanwhile said the UN Security Council could pass a resolution lifting some sanctions against Libya as early as next week.Solar Energy: This Is What a Disruptive Technology Looks Like
Brian McConnell Blocked Unblock Follow Following Apr 23, 2013
A picture is worth a thousand words. The graph above compares the price history of solar energy to conventional energy sources. This is what a disruptive technology looks like. While conventional energy prices remained pretty flat in inflation adjusted terms, the cost of solar is dropping,fast, and is likely to continue doing so as technology and manufacturing processes improve.
First, about the graph. I recently published an article, Bitcoin, Energy and the Future of Money, which explores the idea of using energy as the basis for money. One of the key concepts in this is to standardize the way energy commodities are measured, to measure them in terms of energy content rather than parochial units of measure (e.g. therms or cubic feet of natural gas, gallons of diesel, kilowatt hours of electricity, and so on). See also www.joulestandard.com for more information about this idea.
The graph above charts the inflation adjusted price of different types of energy, not in terms of gallons, but in terms of gigajoules of energy (a gigajoule is one billion Joules, the standard metric unit for energy). Pricing energy commodities in terms of their energy content makes it easier to compare the relative cost of different sources of energy.
Using data from the Energy Information Agency, I pulled together a history of retail prices for natural gas, crude oil, gasoline and residential electricity, all adjusted for inflation. For each energy source, I converted the prices to $/gigajoule, using conversion factors from engineering tables. (For example, a million cubic feet of natural gas contains 1.083 gigajoules of energy content).
Next, using data from the National Renewable Energy Laboratory and other sources, I looked up the price history for solar power, in terms of dollar per Watt of system capacity (a standard unit of measure for solar). With this data, I built a cost model to translate the cost of a solar cell into $/gigajoule. The basic idea is to amortize the system cost over its useful life, and divide this by the average amount of power it generates per month. This allows the cost of solar to be compared directly to other sources.
The comparison shows quite clearly that the cost effectiveness of solar power is increasing exponentially. In 1977, solar cells cost upwards of $70 per Watt of capacity. In 2013, that cost has dropped to $0.74 per Watt, a 100:1 improvement (source: The Economist). On average, solar power improves 14% per year in terms of energy production per dollar invested. Technological improvements are the primary driver of this trend, as manufacturers learn to produce panels using less energy and raw materials (the basic physics of solar panels are a century old), and to make systems easier to install.
While solar currently accounts for less than 1% of the energy supply, it is an exponentially improving technology, both in terms of price (14%/year) and pace of construction (60%/year). Already it is approaching parity with other energy sources in the Western US. Assuming this trend continues for another 10 to 20 years, and there’s no reason not to, solar power will become 5 to 10 times more cost effective than it is today. This raises an interesting question. What happens if solar becomes an order of magnitude cheaper than other sources of power?
This is the nature of disruptive technology. It represents such an improvement that it renders existing industries obsolete. We saw waves of disruption take place as the Internet upended entire industries. Expect to see a lot of this in the coming years.
UPDATE: a follower pointed out that not all Joules are equal, for example electrical energy versus thermal energy. Since the majority of electricity in the US is generated from carbon based fuels, we should expect it to cost roughly three to four times their amount. Why is this? The process of converting heat to electricity (by driving a steam turbine) is relatively inefficient. Most of the energy is lost as waste heat (this can be reclaimed in cogeneration, for example to use steam to heat buildings but this is not reflected in electricity prices).
UPDATE: several readers ask how I calculated solar prices. I did this by calculating how much power a 1 watt cell would generate per year, using average insolation of 4.5 hours/day (southern US), divided this by 12 for a monthly average. I calculated the system cost as three times the solar panel cost (installation and other components account for 2/3s of typical system cost). I then calculated the amortized monthly cost, assuming a 360 month term with a 5% cost of capital. Then divided this by monthly power output in gigajoules to get $/GJ. If the system is located in a less sunny area, or the cost of capital is higher, that will increase the cost per gigajoule. That said, the point of the article is the exponential decrease in unit costs, which trump everything over the next 10-20 years.
UPDATE: I am looking for inflation adjusted historical data for oil, natural gas and coal going back to the 1800s, so I’ll be updating the price history as I collect new data.PHILADELPHIA — The University of Pennsylvania has become the latest Ivy League institution to drop the title “master” to refer to student dorm leaders following weeks of protests against racial insensitivity on college campuses across the country.
Penn decided to change the name from faculty “masters” to faculty “directors” to refer to the tenured, full-time professors living in the dorms. Supporters argue that the term master connotes a legacy of slavery.
In recent weeks, Harvard and Princeton have also parted ways with the outdated title. Princeton’s student dorm leaders will now be called “head of college,” and Harvard has not yet settled on a new title for its dorm leaders. Yale is also weighing a change.
Penn’s faculty directors voted unanimously for the title change before Thanksgiving. Dennis DeTurck, a Penn math professor, dean, and faculty director, told The Philadelphia Inquirer the move is a small but important step.
But some students didn’t see the move that way.
Junior Sam Byers told the Inquirer that there are real racial issues on the campus and this is “just about the least of any of them.”
Black students attending predominantly mainstream institutions have been increasingly vocal about the need for more inclusive campus environments. Among the demands they are calling for are changes to building names, increased faculty diversity and improved minority student recruitment and retention.The police said that the American victim had severe swelling around her nose, and that her companion, 23, had been hit in the area around one of his eyes. The woman left Brazil after registering the crime and undergoing preliminary medical treatment, while her companion remained here, where he is cooperating with the police, said Alexandre Braga, a senior police investigator with Rio’s special police unit for crimes involving tourists.
The two men who were apprehended over the weekend were arrested after investigators tracked purchases made with the victims’ credit cards, which were stolen by the assailants, and examined images obtained from security cameras at a filling station and convenience store where the men had stopped to buy energy drinks and whiskey.
After news of the arrests was broadcast Sunday night on Fantástico, a widely viewed news program on the Globo television network, other people here came forward to tell the police that they recognized the assailants in connection with other crimes, largely robberies, aboard what appeared to be the same transport van. One 21-year-old Brazilian student said she had similarly been held for an hour and raped by the same men on March 23, after boarding the van.
The revelation of that previous episode seemed to have shaken the public security forces here. The victim had quickly registered the case with the police, but the authorities were said to have slowly investigated the claim. Two police officials in charge of investigating the March 23 case were abruptly removed from their posts on Monday.
Brazil has recently grappled with other high-profile cases of gang rape, including one episode in 2012 in Queimadas, a city in the northeast Paraíba State, in which six men were convicted of raping five women at a birthday party. Two of the women were killed after recognizing their attackers.
More broadly, reports of rape in Brazil have climbed significantly since 2009, when the nation’s criminal code was changed to expand the legal definition of rape to include crimes involving anal penetration. More than 5,300 |
” looks an awful lot like an exploitative political power grab and fund-raising opportunity for liberals who have consolidated their base (and wealthy Super PACs) around the idea that the NRA is evil and America needs new gun control laws modeled after other countries that don’t have a constitutional protection for their citizens to bear arms.
As distasteful and inappropriate as many of us find that politically-charged conversation taking place while victims are still being treated or have not yet been identified by their loved ones (Hillary Clinton’s “Stand up to the NRA” tweet was distributed while Las Vegas police were still accounting for victims) it’s part of the reality of the times in which we live and whether we like it or not, the conversation has been engaged.
But, it’s our conversation to have. It is not a subject we need to be lectured to from foreigners who don’t have the same fundamental understanding of the 2nd amendment and how gun ownership, to many Americans, is a fundamental as freedom of religion and expression. It’s condescending and it’s insulting and it’s career suicide… right Piers?
This is an opinion piece. The views expressed in this article are those of just the author.Laws concerning gender identity-expression by country or territory Legal identity change No legal identity change Unknown/Ambiguous
Changing legal gender assignment in Brazil is legal according to the Superior Court of Justice of Brazil, as stated in a decision rendered on October 17, 2009.[1]
Unanimously, the 3rd Class of the Superior Court of Justice approved allowing the option of name and gender change on the birth certificate of a transgender person who has undergone gender reassignment surgery.
The understanding of the ministers was that it made no sense to allow people to have such surgery performed in the free federal health system, Sistema Único de Saúde, and not allow them to change their name and gender in the civil registry.[2]
The ministers followed the vote of the rapporteur, Nancy Andrighi. "If Brazil consents to the possibility of surgery, it should also provide the means for the individual to have a decent life in society," she said. In the opinion of the rapporteur, preventing the record change for a trans person who has gone through sex reassignment surgery could constitute a new form of social prejudice, and cause more psychological instability.[3]
"The issue is delicate. At the beginning of compulsory civil registry, distinction between the two sexes was determined according to the genitalia. Today there are other influential factors, and that identification can no longer be limited to the apparent sex. There is a set of social, psychological problems that must be considered. Vetoing this exchange would be putting the person in an untenable position, subject to anxieties, uncertainty, and more conflict," she said.[4]
According to Minister João Otávio Noronha of the Superior Court of Justice, transgender people should have their social integration ensured with respect to their dignity, autonomy, intimacy and privacy, which must therefore incorporate their civil registry.[5]
In 2008, Brazil's public health system started providing free sex reassignment surgery in compliance with a court order. Federal prosecutors had argued that sex reassignment surgery was covered under a constitutional clause guaranteeing medical care as a basic right.[6]
The Regional Federal Court agreed, saying in its ruling that "from the biomedical perspective, transsexuality can be described as a sexual identity disturbance where individuals need to change their sexual designation or face serious consequences in their lives, including intense suffering, mutilation and suicide."
Patients must be at least 18 years old and diagnosed as transgender with no other personality disorders, and must undergo psychological evaluation with a multidisciplinary team for at least two years, begins with 16 years old. The national average is of 100 surgeries per year, according to the Ministry of Health of Brazil.[7]
The Supreme Federal Court ruled on March 1st, 2018 that a transgender person has the right to change their official name and sex without the need of surgery or professional evaluation, just by self-declaration of their psychosocial identity. On June 29, the Corregedoria Nacional de Justiça, a body of the National Justice Council published the rules to be followed by registry offices concerning the subject.[8]
See also [ edit ]GOP pushes back on raising minimum wage
President Obama (Photo11: Charles Dharapak, AP)
Republicans are starting to push back on one of the new proposals President Obama made in Tuesday night's State of the Union, an increase in the minimum wage.
In asking that the minimum wage rise from $7.25 an hour to $9 an hour, Obama told members of Congress that the step would benefit millions of working families.
"It could mean the difference between groceries or the food bank; rent or eviction; scraping by or finally getting ahead," Obama said.
Republicans such as House Speaker John Boehner, R-Ohio, said an increase in the minimum wage will translate into a decrease of jobs.
"When you raise the price of employment, guess what happens?" Boehner said. "You get less of it. At a time when the American people are still asking the question, where are the jobs?"
The president also proposed indexing the minimum wage to inflation, saying that "working folks shouldn't have to wait year after year for the minimum wage to go up while CEO pay has never been higher."
From CNNMoney:
"Obama campaigned in 2008 on a pledge to raise the federal minimum wage to $9.50 an hour by 2011, but he didn't follow through during his first term, despite multiple calls from worker advocates to do so.
"Not every minimum-wage worker, however, is paid the federal rate, which translates into $14,500 a year for a full-time employee. Some 18 states plus the District of Columbia have rates above the federal level, with Washington state mandating the highest level at $9.19 an hour. And 10 states automatically increase their minimum wage rates annually to account for inflation.
"Were the rate to rise to $9, a full-time minimum wage worker would earn roughly $18,000 a year, which is still below the poverty level for a family of four....
"Obama faces a tough battle getting a rate hike through Congress. The last time lawmakers approved such a bill was in 2007, when they agreed to a three-step increase from $5.15 per hour to the current rate of $7.25 by July 2009."
Read or Share this story: http://usat.ly/UeYqK3Assorted news
The wiki starts growing! With the strategies and monsters pages building up from user experiences, go there and contribute with your knowledge 🙂
iOS is the next target for release, I already submitted a version but it got rejected, we are pretty close!
Steam comes afterwards, I am not going to take much more time preparing, I feel it’s almost ready.
Version 1.62 comes with lots of awesomeness! Desktop UI has been fully revamped and the two new classes (Ailorus Monk and Dumeril Sage) are now packed with all Fellowship Editions… so get them now if you haven’t 🙂
There is also a new title screen made by Denzi originally for the Dungeon Crawl Stone Soup project; I’m still talking with him to see if I can keep if there, else we will have to draw a new one.
It has been released to the following places:
Gameplay
Two new classes with new skills are now available
Ailorus Monk
Flying Kick: Unarmed ranged hit, doesn’t need to run
Unarmed attacks get stronger with power
Immune to poison and spell maladies
Dumeril Sage
Can use elemental spells several time
Unleashes the full power of elemental spells
Other gameplay changes:
Make all classes start with power 2
User Experience
New title screen from Denzi
Changes on layout and menus for desktop version
Add input fields (much easier text input) for desktop version, using my phaserTextField lib.
Color animation for paralyze skill and paralyzed status
Add Decoration for buttons
Enhance flow for searching users on desktop mode
Remove antialiasing from logo text
Add overlay to switch weapon button
Remove welcome screen
Change “Lv” for Power
Add back navigation for new game screen
Change icon for back
Server
Log out sessions on server
Allow multiple sockets per user
Make usernames case insensitive.
Bugfixing
Disable DOM textfield for Android version to prevent crashing
Fix missing Yendorian monsters
Fix cornering issues in Lagoon
Fix “Shot” typo
Remove long message from mobile
Fix issues with PIN handlingAdobe has already released a patch for CVE-2015-3113 with an out-of-band security bulletin (https://helpx.adobe.com/security/products/flash-player/apsb15-14.html). FireEye recommends that Adobe Flash Player users update to the latest version as soon as possible.
FireEye MVX detects this threat as a web infection, the IPS engine reports the attack as CVE-2015-3113, and the SHOTPUT backdoor is reported as Backdoor.APT.CookieCutter.
APT3
The China-based threat group FireEye tracks as APT3, aka UPS, is responsible for this exploit and the activity identified in our previous blog post, Operation Clandestine Fox. This group is one of the more sophisticated threat groups that FireEye Threat Intelligence tracks, and they have a history of introducing new browser-based zero-day exploits (e.g., Internet Explorer, Firefox, and Adobe Flash Player). After successfully exploiting a target host, this group will quickly dump credentials, move laterally to additional hosts, and install custom backdoors. APT3’s command and control (CnC) infrastructure is difficult to track, as there is little overlap across campaigns.
Activity Overview
In the last several weeks, APT3 actors launched a large-scale phishing campaign against organizations in the following industries:
Aerospace and Defense
Construction and Engineering
High Tech
Telecommunications
Transportation
Upon clicking the URLs provided in the phishing emails, targets were redirected to a compromised server hosting JavaScript profiling scripts. Once a target host was profiled, victims downloaded a malicious Adobe Flash Player SWF file and an FLV file, detailed below. This ultimately resulted in a custom backdoor known as SHOTPUT, detected by FireEye as Backdoor.APT.CookieCutter, being delivered to the victim’s system.
The payload is obscured using xor encoding and appended to a valid GIF file.
Attack Vector
The phishing emails used by APT3 during this campaign were extremely generic in nature, almost appearing to be spam. An example email body:
Save between $200-450 by purchasing an Apple Certified Refurbished iMac through this link. Refurbished iMacs come with the same 1-year extendable warranty as new iMacs. Supplies are limited, but update frequently.
Don't hesitate...>Go to Sale
The string “>Go to Sale” was a link that used the following URL structure:
hxxp://<subdomain>.<legitdomain>.<TLD>/<directory>/<alphanumericID>.html
Exploit Details
The attack exploits an unpatched vulnerability in the way Adobe Flash Player parses Flash Video (FLV) files. The exploit uses common vector corruption techniques to bypass Address Space Layout Randomization (ASLR), and uses Return-Oriented Programming (ROP) to bypass Data Execution Prevention (DEP). A neat trick to their ROP technique makes it simpler to exploit and will evade some ROP detection techniques.
Shellcode is stored in the packed Adobe Flash Player exploit file alongside a key used for its decryption. The payload is xor encoded and hidden inside an image.
Exploit Packaging
The Adobe Flash Player exploit is packed with a simple RC4 packer. The RC4 key and ciphertext are BinaryData blobs that the packer uses to decrypt the layer 2 Adobe Flash Player file. Once decrypted, layer 2 is executed with loader.loadBytes.
Vector Corruption
Layer 2 uses a classic Adobe Flash Player Vector corruption technique to develop its heap corruption vulnerability to a full relative read/write available to ActionScript3. In this technique, the attacker sprays Adobe Flash Player Vectors to the heap, and triggers a write vulnerability to change the size of one of the vectors. The attacker can then perform subsequent reads and writes to memory outside the intended boundaries of the corrupted Vector object from AS3. For more details on this technique, see Flash in 2015.
Once the attacker has limited read/write access to memory, they choose to corrupt a second Vector to increase their access to a range of 0x3fffffff bytes. This second Vector is used for the remainder of the exploit.
Return-Oriented Programming
The attackers use a ROP chain to call kernel32!VirtualAlloc to mark their shellcode as executable before jumping to their shellcode.
Instead of writing their ROP chain to the heap along with their shellcode and payload, they used a different technique. Usually, exploit developers will corrupt a built-in Adobe Flash Player object such as a Sound object. Instead, the attackers chose to define their own class in AS3 with a function that takes a lot of arguments:
class CustomClass {
public function victimFunction(arg1:uint, arg2:uint, …, arg80:uint):uint
}
Then, the attackers can simply overwrite the function pointer with a gadget that adds to the stack pointer and returns to pivot to ROP. They have no need to identify the absolute address of the ROP chain and preserve it in a register for a typical xchg reg32, esp pivot. Additionally, storing the ROP chain on the stack will evade ROP detection mechanisms designed around detecting when the stack pointer points outside of a thread’s stack region.
this.customObj.victimFunction(
6f73b68b, // ret; (ROPsled)
…,
6f73b68a, //pop eax
1f140100,
6fd36da1, //call Kernel32!VirtualAlloc(0x1f140000, 0x10000, 0x1000, 0x40)
1f140000, // Address
00010000, // Size
00001000, // Type
00000040, // Protection = RWX
6f73b68b*9 // ret (ROPsled)
6fd36da7*2 // ret
6f73aff0 pop ecx
6fd36da7
6fd36da7 jmp [eax]
…
)
this.customObj.victimFunction pointer modified to:
00000000`6de533dc 5e pop rsi
00000000`6de533dd 83c448 add esp,48h
00000000`6de533e0 c3 ret
Lastly, the ROP chain has a ROPsled following the call to VirtualAlloc. This could just be an artifact of development, or it could be designed to bypass detection mechanisms that test for valid return addresses up to a limited depth at calls to VirtualAlloc.
Full Exploit Flow
1. Create a new Video object
2. Fetch the payload
3. Attach the video to a new NetStream
4. Spray the heap with Adobe Flash Player Vectors
a. Create a Vector containing 98688 Vectors containing 1022 uints
b. Set the first two dwords in each Vector<uint> to 0x41414141, 0x42424242
5. Create holes for the controlled FLV object
a. Free approximately every 3rd Vector in the spray
6. Spray custom class objects for future control transfer
a. Define a new class CustomClass
i. Define a function victimFunction with lots of arguments
b. Create a Vector of 0x100 Vectors of 1007 references to an CustomClass instance
7. Fetch and play the FLV exploit
a. The FLV file will allocate an attacker controlled object in one of the holes from step 5
b. The attacker controlled object will overwrite the length field of an adjacent vector
8. Re-fill holes from step 5 with Vectors as in step 4
9. Find the corrupted vector
a. Search through Vectors from step 4
b. Check the length of each Vector to find one that is abnormally large
10. Corrupt a second Vector (Vector2)
a. Using the corrupted Vector from step 9 to read/write relative memory addresses
i. Search memory for an adjacent vector
ii. Overwrite the length field with 0x3fffffff
iii. Verify that a corrupted vector with length 0x3fffffff now exists in the spray
1. If not, undo corruption and attempt to corrupt the next vector
11. Decrypt shellcode and store it and the payload on the heap
12. Overwrite the CustomClass.victimFunction function pointer
a. Find the sprayed CustomClass object instance references from step 6
b. The new function is a form of “pivot” that transfers control to the attacker
13. Build ROP chain on the stack and call it
a. Find ROP gadgets in memory using Vector2
i. Including a call to kernel32!VirtualAlloc
b. Call the corrupted CustomClass.victimFunction from step 6.a.i
i. Arguments to the function are the gadgets of the ROP chain
ii. They are conveniently pushed onto the stack
iii. Corrupted vtable from step 12 calls a pivot
1. The “pivot” just adds to to the stack pointer and returns because the ROP chain is on
the stack
14. ROP chain calls shellcode
a. Call kernel32!VirtualAlloc
b. jmp to shellcode
15. Shellcode calls payload
a. Shellcode searches memory for the payload, which is stored inside an image
b. Shellcode decodes the payload by xoring each byte (that is not 0 or 0x17) with 0x17
Conclusion
Once APT3 has access to a target network, they work quickly and they are extremely proficient at enumerating and moving laterally to maintain their access. Additionally, this group uses zero-day exploits, continually updated custom backdoors, and throwaway CnC infrastructure, making it difficult to track them across campaigns.
Acknowledgements
Thank you to the following contributors to this blog!
· Joseph Obed, Ben Withnell, Kevin Zuk, Genwei Jiang, and Corbin Souffrant of FireEyeTalking about the recent Kentroversy got me thinking about all the various times I watched someone “get got” at a competitive REL event because their opponent was clever / scummy / whatever you want to call it. Where would you rate each of the following on a scale of 1 to Kent in Peace?
The Pillar Punk Fake
Player A is dead on board regardless of how he blocks the following turn. If Player A attacks with everything, Player B will go to two life with optimal blocks. Player A attacks with everything, Player B makes optimal blocks and goes to two life. Player A verbally confirms life totals. After Player B confirms he is at two life, Player A reveals his hand and says “I have a Pillar of Flame”. Player B concedes.
Player A couldn’t produce red mana.
A less than Surgical Extraction
Player A casts Surgical Extraction targeting Life from the Loam in Player B’s graveyard. Player B reveals his hand and gives his deck to his opponent to search. Player A finishes resolving his Surgical Extraction and hands Player B his deck back to shuffle. After the deck is cut Player B confirms Player A is done resolving his Surgical Extraction. Player A passes the turn.
Player B starts his turn and dredges the Life from the Loam still in his graveyard that had been targeted by surgical, but not removed.
A Seven Mana Titan
Player A casts a Primeval Titan tapping a pile of lands all at once, leaving only two lands untapped. Player B casts Mana Leak targeting Primeval Titan. Player A counts out his lands, sees he has tapped one land too many and uses his two untapped lands to pay for the Mana Leak.
Force of Fake Out
Player A is playing Legacy Storm and is dead on board. He shrugs his shoulders and goes for a combo kill. Player A casts Infernal Tutor, cracks his Lion’s Eye Diamond, and asks “Do you have the Force of Will?” Player B immediately flips over one of the two cards in his hand which is Force of Will. Player A concedes.
Player B did not have a blue card to go along with the Force.
Not so humble Thalia
Player A has a Thalia, Guardian of Thraben in play. Player B casts Show and Tell and Player A flips over a copy of Humility. Player B continues to pay 1 extra mana for his spells, so player A does the same. On a pivotal turn Player A needs all of his mana, so he does not pay extra mana for his spell.
Player B taps the Thalia, Player A taps the Humility.
Underworld Disconnections
Player A picks up and reads his opponent’s Underworld Connections. Player A casts Pithing Needle and names Underworld Connections. Player B confirms he is naming Underworld Connections. Player A agrees.
Player B then activates his Swamp to draw a card and lose one life.
Angry Elementals
Player A has two Voice of Resurgence Elemental tokens that he attacks with. Player B examines the board and asks: “The voice tokens are 4/4s?” Player A responds with “They have power and toughness equal to the number of creatures I control”. Player B looks over the board again and declares no blocks. Player A confirms they are moving to damage and Player B agrees.
Player B was at 9 life and the tokens were 5/5s.
More Pithing Problems
Player A casts Pithing Needle and names “Borborygmos”. Player B confirms what he is naming and writes it down. Player B puts a Borborygmos Enraged into play and kills Player A with it’s activated ability.
Clique Myself
Player A casts Vendilion Clique. Player B immediately throws their hand on the table. Player A glances it over and says: “Clique trigger targeting myself”
Wrapping Up
An important thing to note is that situations 3 and 5 are against the current rules because you are required to announce floating mana. This means if you do either of these intentionally you are cheating.LEG-SPIN legend Shane Warne is adamant he could return to Test cricket on a whim and still excel, were it not for his family priorities trumping cricket.
''If you asked me, 'Can I come out and play a Test match tomorrow?' I'd have absolutely no doubt I could rip them out of the rough and turn them square, all that sort of stuff,'' Warne said. ''But playing international cricket is a huge commitment.
"I have absolutely no doubt that I could come out and rip 'em and be effective and do pretty well"... Shane Warne. Credit:Sebastian Costanzo
''Playing Twenty20 is a different commitment. You're only bowling 24 deliveries, sometimes you might only bowl eight, sometimes 12. It depends on what the game needs. You don't have to be prepared as you do for a Test match, to bowl 60 overs in a match. That would test my fitness if I ever had to do that again, which is highly unlikely.''
Warne's unconventional preparation for this year's T20 tournament, training in wintry conditions in Europe and also India during a television commentary stint before arriving in Melbourne late last week, has not stopped the 43-year-old from declaring he has been bowling better than he had at any time since his Test retirement almost six years ago, if not longer.President Barack Obama on Tuesday sharpened his sales pitch on the Iran deal by delivering a blunt message: We don’t need another Iraq.
In both a muscular speech to the Veterans of Foreign Wars in Pittsburgh and a taping of “The Daily Show with Jon Stewart,” Obama cast critics of his diplomacy as the same kind of misguided warmongers who pushed for the invasion of Iraq during George W. Bush’s presidency.
Story Continued Below
“We’re hearing the echoes of some of the same policies and mindset that failed us in the past,” Obama said in Pittsburgh. His loudest critics, he added, are “the same folks who were so quick to go to war in Iraq and said it would take a few months.”
A few hours later, on the “Daily Show” set in New York City, Obama took another jab at his critics, this time invoking Bush’s vice president, Dick Cheney. He mocked those who he said seem to believe that if “you had brought Dick Cheney to the negotiations, everything would be fine.”
The administration is working to make the case for the Iran deal on a number of different fronts by engaging critics directly. The administration begins a series of classified, members-only briefings on Capitol Hill in the coming days. Secretary of State John Kerry, Energy Secretary Ernest Moniz and Treasury Secretary Jack Lew will meet with senators on Wednesday and hold two discussions in the House on Wednesday and Thursday, at the invitation of House Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi.
Also on Tuesday, the White House on launched @TheIranDeal, a Twitter handle designed to engage the public and correct misconceptions about the deal.
In recent weeks, Obama and his aides have presented the negotiations with Iran as a choice between peacefully preventing a nuclear Iran and going to war with the Islamic Republic, but Obama appeared to take the argument a step further to question the credibility of his opponents.
“I believe there’s a smarter, more responsible way,” Obama said in Pittsburgh.
“We’ve done the hard and patient work” of diplomacy, he added, “instead of chest-beating which rejects the idea of even talking to our adversaries.”
While the critics Obama referred to are largely Republicans, his pitch comes as the White House is working to make sure it has the support of enough congressional Democrats to sustain a presidential veto.
Sen. Dick Durbin, the No. 2 Democrat, threw his support behind the deal on Tuesday, saying the administration“negotiated this agreement with a single focus — prevent Iran from getting any closer to obtaining a nuclear weapon. They achieved that goal.”
But other Democrats who say they support diplomacy have expressed concerns about the final deal. For example, Sen. Ron Wyden (D-Ore.) told a town hall audience over the weekend that he saw the accord as merely “managing” Iran’s nuclear development instead of dismantling its facilities.
“When this all began the focus was on dismantlement, dismantling the facilities that would allow them to have a bomb. It seems this has kind of moved now towards to sort of accepting it and managing it and the like,” Wyden said. “So I’m going to be working my way through that.”
He also expressed disappointment that there would be almost a month’s notice before inspections, instead of “anywhere, anytime” and said the vote held Monday in the United Nations on the deal had the effect of “flouting” the congressional review period.
Republican opposition to the Iran deal appears stronger than ever.
“President Obama said he wanted a fact-based debate, but his sales pitch for this deal is built solely on false choices and desperate attacks,” said Cory Fritz, a spokesman for House Speaker John Boehner (R-Ohio).
As the Republicans’ leader in the House, Boehner has led the charge against the Iran deal and given a prominent platform to another top critic, Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu.
Kerry used Netanyahu’s support for invading Iraq in 2002 to dismiss his warnings on Iran in February.
“The prime minister, as you will recall, was profoundly forward-leaning and outspoken about the importance of invading Iraq under George W. Bush, and we all know what happened with that decision,” Kerry told the House Foreign Affairs Committee.
In the 2008 election, Obama’s objection to the Iraq War helped him win the Democratic primary against Hillary Clinton, who as a U.S. senator had voted to authorize the invasion — as did Kerry when he was in the Senate. Both have since expressed deep regret for the vote.
Burgess Everett contributed to this report.A new analysis shows more than 100,000 people are at risk from a tsunami on the Northwest coast — but the outlook isn’t uniformly grim.
In many communities, residents should be able to make it to high ground in time simply by walking at a brisk pace.
Tsunami surges are expected to slam into some parts of the coast within 15 to 30 minutes of an earthquake on the Cascadia Subduction Zone, the offshore fault where two tectonic plates collide.
Published Monday in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, the analysis takes the most comprehensive look yet at the threat along the 700-mile-long coast of Washington, Oregon and Northern California — and finds surprising variability.
“People always say: Give me a list of the worst towns and we’ll focus on them,” said U.S. Geological Survey geographer Nathan Wood, lead author of the study. “We wanted to point out that all of these communities have issues, but they’re different issues.”
By identifying specific vulnerabilities, the researchers hope to help residents and local leaders better target their education and preparedness efforts.
For example, the 20,000 people who live in Aberdeen and Hoquiam make up the largest at-risk population on the coast. The quake is expected to leave most roads across the region impassable, but the analysis shows that 90 percent of the Aberdeen-Hoquiam population could make it to high ground by walking at a normal pace.
Crank the speed up a notch and the potential survival rate exceeds 99 percent.
So the biggest payoff in those communities would come from ensuring everyone knows the best evacuation routes — and that most citizens are fit, Wood said.
Across the Northwest, the analysis estimates 21,562 people live in areas where they won’t have time to evacuate on foot walking at 2.2 miles per hour. Speeding up to 3.4 mph would lower that number to 16,000.
“Just by getting people to move faster, you can save thousands of lives,” Wood said.
But the study also confirms that most residents of Ocean Shores, Grays Harbor County, and Seaside, Ore., would not be able to evacuate in time even if they ran like the wind.
In communities like that, the main focus should be on design and construction of tsunami evacuation structures, Wood said.
Ocosta School District near Westport is building the region’s first such structure — a gymnasium designed to survive the quake and tsunami and allow hundreds of people to shelter on its roof.
Chuck Wallace, deputy director for emergency management in Grays Harbor County, said he was glad the analysis focused attention on smaller coastal communities at high risk, like Grayland. During clam-digging season and the summer, hundreds of people could be trapped on the beaches with no easy way out, he said.
But even in places like Aberdeen, where there’s high ground nearby, some people would still have a hard time making it to safety, Wallace cautioned.
“It’s much tougher when you’re dealing with school kids or people you have to put in wheelchairs,” he said.
The new analysis examined 73 coastal communities or county areas and grouped them into three categories, based on the population at risk, the number of businesses and critical facilities in the tsunami zone, and the avenues for evacuation.
The first category comprises small settlements with high ground near at hand. The second includes places like Aberdeen, with larger numbers of people but good evacuation routes. The third includes towns like Ocean Shores, with relatively high populations and few ways out.
Coastwide, the researchers estimate nearly 95,000 people live in tsunami zones, and more than 42,000 people work in those areas. (There’s some overlap between residents and workers, but Wood said he wasn’t able to tease it out.) Tsunami zones also hold 2,314 businesses; 440 “dependent-care facilities,” which include schools, hospitals and nursing homes; and 486 “public venues,” which include hotels, parks and camping areas.
Fifty-six percent of the residents at risk live in Washington, which is also home to half the businesses at risk.Two months ago, Verizon implemented a change to all of its unlimited data plans that placed limits on the quality at which users could stream video. The company split its unlimited plan into two tiers, with the cheaper option restricting video streaming to 480p resolution; a higher-priced $85 “Beyond Unlimited” plan tops out at 720p video on smartphones (and 1080p on tablets). The new restrictions immediately applied to all plans and Verizon customers had no way of opting out if they wanted to watch 1080p video on their phone or even higher resolutions on capable devices using mobile data. But now Verizon will give subscribers a way to completely remove the video quality handcuffs — for an extra $10 every month.
If you’re willing to pay that $10 charge, you can stream video at the maximum quality supported by any device you’ve got connected to Verizon, whether it’s 1080p, 1440p, or even 4K. But keep in mind that the extra fee is applied per line for anyone on a family plan who wants to lift the limits. Even on a single-line plan, it adds up. Tacking $10 onto Verizon’s Beyond Unlimited ratchets up the monthly price to $95.
The $10 add-on will be available beginning November 3rd.
It’s particularly hard to swallow this extra charge when none of these video streaming constraints existed in the first place on Verizon only three months ago when there was only one unlimited plan, but here we are. You’re paying more money to get back to full quality video.
None of this is a concern when you’re connected to Wi-Fi. And Verizon would tell you that very few customers have been complaining since the 720p ceiling was put in place for smartphones. But this trend of US carriers quietly muddying and restricting mobile video is really starting to feel equal parts annoying and scammy.
How much does it cost to watch full-quality video on T-Mobile?
T-Mobile customers must have the T-Mobile One Plus plan to watch HD video, which starts at $80 / month for a single-line plan. For a full 4-line family plan, it would be $50 per line. The regular T-Mobile One plan is limited to 480p or “DVD quality.”
What about AT&T?
AT&T’s Unlimited Plus plan, which is the one you need for HD video streaming, costs $90 for one line or $50 / line for 4 lines.
And Sprint?
Sprint’s Unlimited Freedom allows video quality streaming up to 1080p on mobile data and starts at $60 per month for a single line. If you want to watch at a higher quality than 1080p, it’s an extra $10 per month.
*Most of these prices include discounts for setting up auto-pay and paperless billing.by
The crisis in Honduras is not just a matter of the serious misdeeds of the past weeks or even decade. The really dramatic problem of Honduras is the terrible communication void in which this nation has fallen for the rest of the planet. The country with the highest number of violent deaths per 100,000 in the world; a major hub of drug trafficking under the noses of one of the largest U.S. military bases in Central America; the only country in this new century that has suffered a coup in the traditional style of the 70s; and the nation that has been hit by systematic electoral fraud in the last two elections, seems to be drowning in the indifference of the entire international community.
It seems that Honduras is totally set adrift, without any concrete gesture of real, constructive, institutional reform by its imposed godfather, the United States.
The OAS admits the existence of electoral irregularities
Honduras has the word “scandal” in every corner of its battered institutions. In a chain of events that would take hundreds of pages, everything begins with the recent elections on November 26th, for which organizations such as the OAS have enumerated an enormous amount of irregularities in the electoral context.
First, the candidate of the progressive Opposition Alliance Against the Dictatorship (Alianza de Oposición Contra la Dictadura), Salvador Nasralla, was winning by 5 points, but later, after a suspicious “computer glitch” was restored, the electoral count showed the incumbent president Juan Orlando Hernández ahead by 40,000 votes. The case of Hernández borders on the comical: on the heels of the great scandal in which his presidency has now fallen, he appeared before the cameras announcing his triumph and emphasizing the “impeccable” nature of the process. In truth, it was indeed an impressive manipulation of the facts.
It is common to hear the usual Honduran political actors opine about how the results of the previous election were directly manipulated; assuming all of these denunciations were certain, the election was won by Xiomara Castro. They spoke this way, casually and openly, of course, without a concrete legal basis. These are, after all, rumors. But now in the recent election the so called rumors have returned with so much more force that they have become concrete facts that even the OAS cannot ignore. This time things proceeded by a similar modus operandi before the eyes and patience of the significant presence of election observers. The chronic delays in the count, the surprise outage of the computer system, the subsequent change in what the partial count had been showing. The same scenario obtains: thousands of suspicious votes cast, just as in 2013, and once again the Supreme Electoral Tribunal (TSE), declines to audit the ballot forms sent from thousands of polling stations. For example, more than 5,000 forms that the OAS reported were not transmitted by the TSE the night of the elections, a serious act that is impossible to conceal.
Last Sunday evening, December 17, the TSE moved hurriedly in a desperate move to ratify the corrupted results that give the electoral victory to Juan Orlando Hernández, despite an urgent tweet sent by OAS Secretary General Luis Almagro just minutes before TSE’s pronouncement. For sure, Almagro was aware of what Hernández had in mind. The Secretary General said: “A lack of certainty brings me to urge [you] not to make irresponsible pronouncements until definitive information of the OAS Observer Mission in Honduras [is made available].”
The government of Hernández ignored the pressure. Afterwards, with the fraud having been consolidated after the announcement of the TSE, Almagro asked with good reason for the elections to be repeated. Here is the relevant tweet: “General Secretariat of the @OEA_ official proposes new elections to guarantee peace and harmony in #Honduras in the face of the impossibility of determining the certainty of the results of the election.” It was also announced that the candidate Salvador Nasralla is traveling to Washington to meet with the OAS, the State Department, and human rights organizations, with solid evidence of electoral fraud.
Honduras and Venezuela: different criteria
The case of the OAS is sui generis. Notice the great personal energy of its Secretary General Luis Almagro when it comes to his special campaign against the government of Venezuela. Yet in the case of the clear cut scandal of Honduras, Almagro had remained silent until the 6th of December, when in a communiqué he had to formally denounce |
them: Betamax from Sony and the VHS cassette from JVC. The fact that the latter was successful was not least due to the fact that the porn industry decided to publish their films on VHS.
In 2015, a new technology will once again be in the starting blocks, but its benefits will not yet be available to many private users: Virtual reality or virtual reality glasses. Here, too, the porn industry could ultimately help technology achieve a breakthrough.
Because yes: Virtual reality porn movies already exist. Man or woman put on the VR glasses and experience the – let’s call it – action from the first-person perspective. Two US-American tech journalists tried out such porn glasses at CES 2016 – and had themselves filmed.
In his own statement “probably the hardest job so far” he puts on glasses and headphones and then sees several quite delicate scenes right in front of him. In order to keep the whole thing as youth-free as possible, the Mashable video (see below) only shows the initial scenes of the videos from Wong’s point of view: Women creeping towards the wearer of glasses, lightly dressed; women jumping on gymnastics balls, lightly dressed; women getting rid of their clothes.
It is really, really close to real sex.
Sentences like “Your breasts,… they are right in front of me”, “This woman is right in front of me” or a desperate “What do you want from me?
The experience seems to be quite realistic. After the performance, Wong only says ironically: “That was a bit intense”. And then he asks laughing: “Is there more of it? His colleague Brian Tong from “CNET” also reacts to his first VR porn experience with a lot of uncertain giggling.
“I’m getting warm”
After apologizing to his mother and his fiancée, he tests a version of the porn demo – apparently a bit slimmed down – in front of an audience at CES. He, too, seems visibly impressed, says “Mir wird warm” and gives off occasional rutting cries à la “Duuuude” (in English “Aaaalter”) and “Uuuuuh”.
After the demo it is openly admitted that listening and speaking are quite difficult for him after this experience. Even if virtual reality glasses are still a very expensive fun at the moment: An application case that brings the new technology closer to the masses should probably be found.
Virtual Reality Porn: Present and Future
It is often claimed that the porn industry helps Virtual Reality to succeed. In fact, Virtual Reality could lead the porn industry to new shores. Today, few people are willing to spend money on porn content. High-quality VR videos, however, are so large that streaming is often not a sensible option and therefore only the download from the portals of the providers remains. So is VR porn a worthwhile business?
Virtual Reality Sex in the Present Time
The “Eurowebtainment” conference brought together various companies more or less related to the porn industry. Not only direct content providers were represented here, but also companies that deal with e-mail addresses, process payments or act as collection service providers.
Virtual reality porn is on everyone’s lips, but the event was less noticeable than we would have expected. Although there was a small round of lectures on the topic and a subsequent discussion, there was no real hype yet. Rather, the impression was given that Virtual Reality was only an intermediate stage to the perfect porn experience. Similar to the gaming industry, the porn industry dreams of bringing the depicted scenes directly into your living room. But perhaps this is already possible to a certain extent with current VR glasses?
We met Stefan Geisler, who produces 180-degree videos for RealityLovers. According to Geisler, 3D 180-degree videos are currently the best way to display porn in VR. Currently, there is no 360-degree camera that meets the demands of producers. The 180-degree videos are also based on available equipment, which, however, has been heavily modified. According to Geisler, such a system is also the current standard in the scene, because one would rather create a beautiful picture in front of the user than a mediocre picture that completely surrounds the user.
In order to achieve a higher level of intimacy, the company is currently experimenting with 180-degree shots recorded in front of a green screen. The user can then select the desired background himself and also use his own 360-degree photos. The user can thus bring the actor directly into his or her desired environment, creating the illusion of being in a complete 360-degree scene. A similar principle is also known to us from NOYS VR. A musician is filmed in a green screen and then placed on a virtual stage. A real person is placed in an environment in which the VR user can move freely.
Live sex shows in VR? Thinkable.
RealityLovers also wants to offer added value and provides current VR recordings in two different versions. There is a POV version and an observer version. This has the advantage that the viewer does not have to identify with the actors, but can also simply observe the action. Many people probably experience a worse immersion if the actor of the POV version does not fit their own appearance.
A very big problem of the porn industry seems to be that no corresponding players with pornographic content for iOS or Android may be provided in the corresponding stores. This means that many users are denied access to high-quality VR content on their smartphones.
Virtual reality porn in the future
What became clear during the lecture and the conversation with him is the fact that the technology is not yet ready to offer a completely immersive experience today. That’s why people are also very interested in volumetric videos that allow the user to move something in the scene shown.
Nevertheless, the direction seems clear: Augmented Reality Porn or Mixed Reality Porn could change the industry more than the current Virtual Reality technology. The holograms in your own living room make a much more intimate situation possible, and with the right accessories the right feedback could be provided.
But if we use live holograms and accessories that allow feedback to be synchronized, are we still talking about porn or are we in some kind of gap between porn and sex for sale?
VR porn can be so funny
More a smile than a blush: Complex Media has tried out how entertaining a porn can be with Samsung’s Gear VR – and filmed the whole thing.
Let’s be honest: Without the porn industry there wouldn’t be many beautiful things. Blurays, for example. The industry has preferred HD-DVD discs. Shortly thereafter it was history and Bluray had established itself as the standard. But the so-called “porn innovation” started earlier. In the 80s, for example, the multi-frequency dialling method had prevailed over the old dial on telephones. It was the time when sex hotlines were booming. And the broadband internet in the 90s was needed above all for uploading and downloading large pictures and videos – you understand?
This type of “porn innovation” will not stop in 2015 either. This year Virtual Reality could finally reach the mass market after so many attempts. Whether Google’s cardboard version, the expensive Oculus Rift or Samsung’s VR, which converts the Note 4 into a display: The technology is there. Now it needs sufficient application possibilities. Gaming is one alternative, porn is another. After the so-called POV porn (short for Point of View), some studios have discovered virtual reality for themselves.
That changes everything
The immersion, i.e. the…excuse…penetration into the virtual world should be even more intensive. Complex Media has tried this out with some of its employees. Men and women have been fitted with a Samsung Gear VR and headphones. The reaction is anything but obscene, rather amusing: While all test persons confirm that it is more fun to be the man in the video, most of them have to suppress their laughter all the time.
The conclusion is clear: “That changes everything.”
The following clip is, in my opinion, safe-for-work, after all, all the explicit scenes were censored. Here in the editorial office, the entertaining clip at least made a lot of laughs. Maybe you should put on the headphones for the clip.
VR-Porn is still in its infancy, at least according to some producers. So far there is no standardized equipment for the production of such films. In this respect, there is still little material available. But the trend towards virtual sex is noticeable. The manufacturers of sex toys are also working under high pressure to create erotic experiences with the help of the cloud. Other companies are working on using 3D scanners to capture the female body for cyberspace.
Like all technological advances, this development cannot be halted. But is Samsung enthusiastic about the use of his VR glasses in the above case? Hardly. However, every PR is good PR. And am I the only one who has to think of the legendary scene from “Demolition Man” during this development?
Virtual Reality: Breakthrough thanks to porn?
Sex sells – even in virtual reality. More and more channels with VR content for adults are sprouting up on the net. This is not the first time that the porn industry has been able to help a new technology achieve a broad breakthrough.
That was clear, many will think. It is clear that at some point the porn industry would be ready to enter the world of Virtual Reality (VR).
According to an analysis by the US investment bank Piper Jaffray, video games account for by far the largest share of VR content consumed worldwide. But now one of the heavyweights of the porn industry is about to roll up the field.
The advertising-financed streaming provider PornHub, the world’s largest on the market, has added a virtual reality category to its offering and offers it – like all other content – free of charge.
60 million visitors daily
A push that could now finally help the entire VR industry to make a breakthrough. While the VR games, however big they may be, only play a role for a relatively limited community, the PornHub initiative will appeal to a silent, but expectant and broad mass.
PornHub is ranked 60th by Alexa’s Internet reach analysts among the world’s most visited websites.
According to the porn streamer itself, around 60 million visitors risk a short or slightly longer look at the illustrious films “for adults” every day – a lot for the fact that nobody actually knows the site.
“Virtual Reality is the next phase in the constantly changing world of adult entertainment,” predicts PornHub Vice President Corey Price.
“Harley Gets a Tune Up” in the 180-degree field of vision
The content in PornHub’s VR channel is produced by BaDoinkVR, one of the pioneers in this business. For the sex movies with the new imaging technology, the complete field of view of 180 degrees is usually recorded, but 360-degree videos for a panoramic view are also available for download.
Now consumers only need suitable VR glasses to look back and forth with relish in films such as “Harley Gets a Tune Up” or “Dominate and Be Dominated”.
The pioneers Facebook (Oculus), Samsung (Gear) and HTC (Vive) can also look forward to this, because their VR glasses models are supported for these special VR trips and should provide ringing cash registers.
According to estimates by Piper Jaffray, VR porn on the US market alone could generate one billion US dollars in 2025 and thus represent one of the largest sources of income in the field of VR content.
Startups rely on VR porn
In view of such abundant forecasts, it is not surprising that more and more porn providers are jumping on VR technology. VirtualRealPorn from Spain, for example, the most popular commercial provider in the industry, is one of very few companies that already earns money only with VR content.
A handful of software developers and photographers saw the boom apparently coming and founded the startup three years ago. Meanwhile, the company publishes weekly sex movies exclusively in 180-degree perspective. In the USA, more than a dozen VR porn start-ups were formed last year.
Other players in the industry include Naughty America and the Canadian company Utherverse Digital, which offers the world’s largest adult virtual community, the “Red Light Center”, in which an avatar like in “Second Life” can experience all kinds of erotic adventures.
Sex content already helped VHS to its breakthrough
It would not be the first time that erotic contents help innovations in media technology to break through. As early as the 1980s, the competition between the video cassette formats Video 2000, Betamax and VHS decided in favour of the latter.
And why? Exactly: The Japanese CE giants JVC and Panasonic, in contrast to Philips for example, allowed Video 2000 to sell pornography in VHS format.
Cable television and much later streaming video also owed their success to a not inconsiderable extent to their early partnership with the sex film industry.
More than a third of all traffic on the Internet has to do with naked women and men, according to the analysis company Similarweb.
Porn is popular – and can be a potent partner for VR technology.Image caption Nick Leeson: The archetypal rogue trader
The estimated $2.3bn allegedly dropped by trader Kweku Adoboli at Swiss bank UBS is certainly at the top end of the rogue trading Richter scale.
But it would not be the first occasion, and probably not the last.
How and why does it happen? How is it possible to sweep a billion under the carpet?
What do traders do?
A trader's job at a bank is to buy and sell financial assets, usually using the bank's money.
The purpose of this is primarily what is called "market making" - that is, to provide a buy and sell price to the bank's clients in a particular market - for example, European bank shares, interest rate derivatives or industrial metal futures.
However, some are "proprietary traders". Their role is to make money for the bank by making supposedly intelligent bets on which way the market will go.
There has been a regulatory clampdown on proprietary trading on both sides of the Atlantic since the 2008 financial crisis.
However, in practice it can be hard to distinguish their activity from ordinary market making.
Even a market maker can end up sitting on a lot of unwanted risk if all of their clients choose to sell on a particular day.
And most market makers will use their privileged view of what is happening in their particular market to take bets they are confident will make them money.
Why do traders go rogue?
Normally, traders do not directly profit from their trading activities - unless they seek to embezzle their employer's money.
However, traders do typically receive a bonus that reflects the amount of profit they made for the bank during the course of the year, and this can create an incentive to take reckless bets.
This perverse incentive can become particularly powerful if the trader has already made a bad bet and is sitting on a big, unreported loss.
In this case, a cynical or panicked trader may calculate that either way, if the market does not turn in their favour, the worst that can happen is they will lose their job.
So they may try to conceal the loss, and even to double up their position, in the hope that the market will swing back in their favour before anyone notices.
Are they allowed to take such big risks?
No. Not officially, at least.
Banks require traders to remain within certain risk limits. The trader is required to enter "tickets" logging all of their trades by the end of each day in their bank's internal risk control systems.
Traders who persistently or egregiously break their risk limits can be subject to disciplinary action.
Mr Adoboli worked in UBS' "Delta One" team - the same trading desk that the biggest ever rogue trader, Jerome Kerviel, worked on at Societe Generale, and a business seen as among the larger risk-takers at investment banks.
All trades are also independently confirmed by a "back office" of administrators.
To make a trade, the trader in the "front office" only has to make a phone call or click on a computer screen.
The back office then processes the trade - confirming the transaction with the relevant stock exchange or counterpart, executing any legal documentation and sending or receiving cash and financial securities.
Image caption Jerome Kerviel claimed his employer, Societe Generale, knew of his bets, but the court disagreed
If a trader fails to log a trade in the bank's risk control systems, the back office will soon identify the discrepancy, or should do at least.
How do they get round the controls?
There is no simple answer. Every bank has its own computer system and internal procedures.
In the case of Nick Leeson, who famously brought down Barings Bank in 1995, there was no proper separation between front and back office. Mr Leeson was processing the tickets for his own trades.
Jerome Kerviel, the Societe Generale rogue trader, is also supposed to have used his intimate knowledge of the bank's systems from his own time working in the back office.
However, Mr Kerviel claimed that his employer knew about his activity, but turned a blind eye because he was (initially) making big profits - although a French court did not accept this defence.
Mr Adoboli is also said to have previously worked in UBS' back office.
Problems can arise in the over-the-counter market.
This is an informal market that encompasses transactions agreed directly between traders, without going through a stock exchange.
They can agree a legally-binding trade over a recorded telephone line. Documentation is then exchanged between their back offices, formally confirming the exact terms of the trade.
What can banks and regulators do about unauthorised trading?
If they knew that, they presumably would have done it already.
Scrutinising banks' back office and risk control functions more closely is the obvious answer.
After the Kerviel case, the UK's Financial Services Authority came out with a string of recommendations for the banks, including watching out for traders with a suspicious number of cancelled trades, and forcing all traders to take two weeks' holiday a year, which would allow others to check their trading books.
Another solution might be to improve traders' incentives - smaller bonuses for success and bigger penalties for misbehaviour.
How does this compare with previous rogue traders?
The $2.3bn figure, now confirmed by UBS, would be near the top of the league table.
SocGen's Jerome Kerviel is in the top spot, having lost 4.9bn euros.
Number two is Yasuo Hamanaka, who lost $2.6bn in metals trading for Sumitomo Corporation in 1996.
Arguably, allowing for inflation, Nick Leeson's $1.4bn in 1995 also pips Mr Adoboli.
Who picks up the bill?
A French court ordered Jerome Kerviel to repay Soc Gen 4.9bn euros, but of course he does not have the money.
So it is the bank itself - or rather its shareholders, via foregone profits and dividends - that typically pays up.
Some of the losses may also be borne by the rogue trader's colleagues, through reduced bonuses.
If the losses are big enough, it can bring down the entire bank - as was the case with Barings Bank - putting the bank's lenders at risk.
But in the case of a giant bank like UBS, a bankruptcy could trigger a financial crisis, so the bank would probably need to be bailed out by its government, putting taxpayers on the hook.
What will this mean for UBS?
The financial loss is manageable - UBS made $6.4bn in profits in the 12 months to June this year, while the investment bank had already accrued a $4bn bonus pool for its star employees.
Image caption The Swiss parliament is currently considering tighter regulation of the banks
Far worse may be the reputational damage.
It follows a humiliating rescue and dressing-down by the Swiss authorities after the bank made lost $35bn during the 2008 crisis, and more recently the exposure by the US authorities of UBS' role in providing a tax shelter to US citizens.
Particularly damaging is that Mr Adoboli apparently himself reported the alleged unauthorised trades - which are thought to have gone on for many months - and was never picked up by UBS' internal controls.
All three major ratings agencies have said they are now reviewing UBS' credit rating for a possible downgrade in light of the apparent hole in their risk control systems.
Meanwhile, the FSA and the Swiss regulator, FINMA, have launched a joint investigation into what went wrong.
And to cap it all, the Swiss parliament is currently considering legislation imposing tougher regulation on the country's banks.
UBS was already under political pressure in Switzerland to scale back or spin off its investment banking business.
The bank's head, Oswald Gruebel, told a Swiss newspaper on Sunday that he would not resign over the incident.
But this incident will not help UBS' lobbying efforts.What If The Pharmacist Just Dropped Pills Into Your Hand?
Enlarge this image toggle caption AB Still Ltd/AB Still Ltd/Science Photo Library/Corbis AB Still Ltd/AB Still Ltd/Science Photo Library/Corbis
Think, for a moment, about what happens when you collect a prescription at the pharmacy — or purchase Tylenol or Advil or baby aspirin. You walk out of the CVS or Rite Aid or Walgreens with a neatly packaged container of pills. Maybe the pills were counted, dropped into a little brown-tinted circular bottle and capped by the pharmacist. Or they may have been sitting on a shelf in a vial or sealed inside foil pouches and housed in a rectangular box.
In some countries, like Malawi, if you have access to medicine at all, there's likely no neat packaging system. A woman in Malawi, an African nation of nearly 18 million, might walk miles to the nearest health clinic. When she's prescribed medicine, the doctor will generally wrap it in the nearest piece of paper, if one happens to be lying around, or just put the pills directly into her hand.
She might carry them home in her chitenge — a multi-purpose wrap worn by a Malawian woman that acts as everything from a baby carrier to a cleaning cloth. Once she arrives at her mud-and-thatch hut, she will have to find a safe and clean spot to store the pills.
"A safe storage container that protects the medication from the 'elements' is important," says Dr. Sallie Permar, associate professor of pediatrics, molecular genetics and microbiology, and immunology at the Human Vaccine Institute at Duke University Medical Center.
And soon, Malawians may find big relief from a small pill container. More than 1 million of them are on their way.
The charity drive to collect empty vials began early this year, when Dick Stephens on Indianapolis looked in his medicine cabinet and had a eureka moment. Staring him in the face were lots of pill vials. And he and his wife, Diana ("Suzi") Stephens knew this wouldn't happen in Malawi, a country they've tried to help over the years through their charity, The Malawi Project.
So Dick posted a call for donations on Facebook and his plea went viral.
"When it hit 5 million likes, I thought, 'Wow!,'" says Suzi Stephens, cofounder of the project. "The post office comes three times a day." As many as 200 packages a day have arrived. "We sent a quarter of a million containers two weeks ago. 850 boxes."
A lot of the donors are individuals — one woman enclosed a letter saying her husband was a "hoarder" and she was happy to send his container collection. Groups like the Girls Scouts have also contributed.
"Our garage and our living room is full," Suzi Stephens says. "They are coming so fast; it's incredible."
Their mail carrier suggested he didn't know how the post office would handle the flow of donations during the busy holiday season. This prompted the Stephenses to stop the drive on Thanksgiving.
"This project could have a considerable impact on the lives of Malawians who must take daily medication to maintain their health, such as blood pressure medicine or antiretroviral drugs to treat HIV," Permar says. "There have been recent major public health achievements in increasing the access to these life-saving medications in low- and middle-income countries such as Malawi. Yet one of the biggest challenges in clinical medicine in any setting is patient adherence to daily medications."
The Stephenses founded The Malawi Project after taking a trip to the country in 1993, when they met a priest who was being supported financially by families in their church congregation.
"They are the nicest, kindest people," Stephens says. "We got on the plane to come home and I was crying. The only way we could feel comfortable leaving was knowing we would go back."
Since then, Dick and Suzi Stephens and their extended team have distributed $200 million worth of aid. With a network of 4,000 churches throughout the country, the Stephens's Church of Christ family acts as a distribution arm on the ground in Malawi.
"A lot of organizations don't have people on the ground," Stephens says. "[The Church of Christ] wanted to have little churches within 10 miles, because people don't have cars and need to walk to church."
The Malawi Project is handling a lot more than pill vials. They've shipped and distributed everything from meals to tractors.
Even USAID relied on the Malawi Project to hand out food aid during the famine between 2001 and 2003.
"Dick has the logistics in Malawi nailed," says Tom Rich, owner of the commercial lawn care manufacturer LT. Rich Products. He put one of his tractors on a shipment of medical supplies heading to Malawi. Rich went on to form another non-profit, Agricultural Aid International, with Dick. The group has sent a dozen tractors and other agricultural machines to countries including Guatemala, Haiti and Malawi.
"Our whole idea is to empower the Malawians to empower themselves," Stephens says.
After the holidays, The Malawi Project will turn from pill bottles to babies, raising funds for a birthing center at the Linthipi Healthcare Center south of the capital near the Mozambique border.Columbus Crew SC vs. Atlanta United
2017 MLS Regular Season
MAPFRE Stadium – Columbus, Ohio
Saturday, July 1 – 7:30 pm ET
WATCH: MLS LIVE
Kekuta Manneh has finally arrived on the scene in Columbus. After a fraught few months following his trade from the Vancouver Whitecaps that raised big questions about his fitness and continuity in MLS, Manneh finally broke through in a key win for Crew SC last weekend.
The Gambian-born winger, who recently acquired US citizenship, came off the bench with Columbus locked in a 1-1 battle with the Montreal Impact. Within three minutes he had a goal and an assist – just the fourth time in 107 regular season games he has done so – and Crew SC were on their way to a critical in-conference win.
Standing in the way of continued success for Manneh and Crew SC, though, is a high-powered Atlanta team determined to end a two-month winless streak on the road. During that run, Atlanta have gone 0-4-1 away from home, including a three-game losing streak entering this weekend. Atlanta have allowed 2.2 goals per game over their five-game skid.
"We have an imbalance with the team right now. We play well at home but poor on the road," said Martino after Atlanta’s 3-2 loss at Miami FC in the U.S. Open Cup. "We know that if we want to move up on the table we need to start playing better on the road and that starts on Saturday versus Columbus."
Columbus Crew SC
Crew SC look set to get a big boost to their backline with the news that Ghana international defenders Harrison Afful and Jonathan Mensah are likely to return to the team after featuring in a friendly for their national team against Mexico on Wednesday. Ghana are set to face the United States on Saturday in another friendly (4:45 pm ET | ESPN, UniMás, UDN), but because it does not fall within the FIFA international match window, Crew SC are not obligated to release their players.
An ESPN FC report claimed the duo were already on their way back, while midfielder Mohammed Abu would remain with the Black Stars for the US friendly.
“I would say that. I think that’s fair to say,” Berhalter told reporters at training this week. “We’re working through all that right now. By FIFA law, we’re not required to release them for these games.”
Suspended: None
None Suspended next yellow card: None
None Int’l Duty: Mohammed Abu (Ghana)
Mohammed Abu (Ghana) Injury Report: OUT – Gaston Sauro (left PCL surgery), M Ben Swanson (right ankle surgery), M Niko Hansen (hernia surgery)
Projected Starting XI (4-2-3-1, right to left): Zack Steffen – Harrison Afful, Josh Williams, Jonathan Mensah, Jukka Raitala – Artur, Wil Trapp – Kekuta Manneh, Federico Higuain, Justin Meram – Ola Kamara
Notes: Columbus have scored in 19 consecutive home games in the regular season. The franchise record is 23, set from July 14, 2014 to August 22, 2015. Crew SC have also scored in 22 consecutive home regular season games on two other occasions.
Atlanta United
With the return of Josef Martinez to the fold for Atlanta, the Five Stripes are just waiting on two more players to return to full health – forwards Kenwyne Jones and Jacob Peterson. Both will be valuable depth as the wear and tear of the summer starts to take hold, and Atlanta head coach Gerardo ‘Tata’ Martino expects to have them back after the Gold Cup break. In the meantime, Martino and his staff will only have to otherwise account for the absence of frequent loanee Romario Williams, who is headed to the Gold Cup with Jamaica.
“Our expectations for Kenwyne are that he’s able to start training soon. I don’t think he’ll be able to play in the match against San Jose [on July 4],” Martino told reporters this week. “Jacob, he’s already running at almost 100 percent. So he’s intensifying his physical preparation, but our idea is to have both of them back when we re-start the season after the [Gold Cup] break.”
Suspended: None
None Suspended next yellow card: None
None Int’l Duty: Romario Williams (Jamaica)
Romario Williams (Jamaica) Injury Report: OUT – F Jacob Peterson (right lower leg injury), F Kenwyne Jones (knee inflammation)
Projected Starting XI (4-2-3-1): Alec Kann – Tyrone Mears, Michael Parkhurst, Leandro Gonzalez Pirez, Greg Garza – Jeff Larentowicz, Carlos Carmona – Hector Villalba, Miguel Almiron, Yamil Asad – Josef Martinez
Notes: Josef Martinez is averaging 1.49 goals plus assists per 90 minutes played (seven goals, zero assists). This is the best rate of goals plus assist per 90 minutes amongst the 73 MLS players with at least five combined goals and assists.
All-Time Series
This is the second all-time meeting between the two sides. Atlanta took the first match-up at home by a 3-1 scoreline on June 17, 2017.
Overall: Columbus 0 wins (1 goal) … 1 win (3 goals) … Ties 0
Columbus 0 wins (1 goal) … 1 win (3 goals) … Ties 0 At CLB: First meeting.
Referees
Referee: Hilario Grajeda
Assistant Referees: Corey Rockwell, Kyle Longville
4th Official: Younes MarrakchiRush Limbaugh condemns, criticizes and otherwise lambastes many things, as his radio listeners know. But Michelle Obama seems to have become a target for particularly personal attacks from the conservative radio talk-show host. First, he called out the first lady on her weight; now he says she’s guilty of "uppity-ism."
Cracking on Obama's waistline (and nicknaming her Moochelle) was offensive and personal enough. But "uppity-ism"? That phrase -- uttered on his Monday's edition of his show -- won't sit well with some Americans, particularly African Americans.
Historically, "uppity" was considered a code word for blacks whom white people perceived as trying to rise above their station in life.
The use of the term follows the chorus of boos that the first lady and Jill Biden (wife of Vice President Joe Biden) received at a Sunday's Sprint Cup finale -- a NASCAR event -- in Florida. The pair were at the Homestead-Miami Speedway as part of their campaign to raise awareness about Joining Forces, an initiative to support military families.
Limbaugh made the comment while also accusing reporters of failing to grasp why the two women received such a hostile reception.
"Media can't believe it," Limbaugh told his radio audience. "But I can. People don't like being told they are lousy parents... people resent Mrs. Obama's bizarre need to tell us what to eat and how much to exercise."
Those comments were in reference to Michelle Obama's campaign against childhood obesity.
What followed was a vintage Limbaugh rant that blasted the White House for what he views as playing to the Prius crowd, bankrupting the U.S. economy, "screwy" expenditures, taking needless vacations while the unemployed in this country suffer, and more:
"I'll tell you something else -- we don’t like paying millions of dollars for Mrs. Obama’s vacations," he said. "The NASCAR crowd doesn't quite understand why, when the husband and the wife are going the same place, the first lady has to take her own Boeing 757 with family and kids and hangers-on four hours earlier than her husband, who will be on his 747. NASCAR people understand that's a little bit of a waste. They understand it is a little bit of uppity-ism. First ladies have not been known to hop their own 757s four hours ahead of their husband when they're going the same place."
RELATED:
NASCAR fans boo Michelle Obama
Michelle Obama: Yes, I shop at Target. And Petco too
Rush Limbaugh criticizes Michelle Obama's nutritional campaign
-- Rene Lynch
Twitter / renelynch
Photo: Rush Limbaugh. Credit: Ron Edmonds / Associated PressApparently in 5-dimensional chess it makes perfect sense to have the white bishop sucking off the black knight.
Excuse me for the crude analogy, but I consider it to be an appropriate way to describe the traitorous behaviors of many so-called leaders of our movement and the cognitive dissonance that is required for their followers to go along with the program. Earlier this year David Duke said it was treasonous for White people to not vote for Donald Trump. With a few exceptions, almost every other major White Nationalist (or is it now “Alt Right”?) site and organization agrees. However, I maintain that disgusting displays I have witnessed from those on the “Trump Train” amount to the real treason against our people.
Donald Trump’s family, business, and campaign is crawling with high-powered jews. There is no getting around it, and I have heard every excuse in the book as to why it doesn’t matter, but mainly the Trump fanboys have taken to simply ignoring all evidence that points to their “God Emperor” being a kosher controlled opposition. It’s quite disguting to watch supposedly anti-jewish outlets continuously fellate their new furher, even as he proclaims his unwavering support for Israel and their colonization efforts, which causes so much ill-will to America, and assures his willingness to use American lives and resources to defend Israel to the death.
This is why he has been the most popular candidate in Israel since the primaries and was able to raise $25,000 per plate at the recent “Children of Israel” fundraiser organized by Saul Fox. He actually has more campaign offices in Israel than in eight battleground states combined.
I respect Israel” ~ Richard Spencer
Watch this video by Ezra Levant about how every good jew needs to understand just how kosher Trump is so that they will vote for him.
Isn’t it amazing how this jew is trying to convince his people that Trump is their guy, while the White leaders try to convince us of the same thing by downplaying the severity of this very same information or presenting the ridiculous conspiracy theory that Trump is planning to out-jew the jew.
What Ezra presents is really only the tip of the iceberg, as it obviously does not dig into Trump’s seedy past with Roy Cohn, Resorts International, 9/11, and other important connections that have been uncovered by those of us at Renegade.
The Jews did 9/11 conspiracy theory is retarded. Sorry. It’s embarrassing.” ~ Mike Enoch, edgy voice of # AltRight
And then there is Trump’s love for the black community, which has ramped up its attacks against White people without Trump saying a word about it, except for a few small remarks about disruptions by Black Lives Matter. Some years ago he was on the Howard Stern show with Ivanka and told the filthy jew that he would love it if his daughter was having sex with a black man. Of course, this was before Ivanka married the jew Jared Kushner. Trump also considered Mandela, the genocidal South African terrorist, a good friend of his. He has also been close to blacktivists like Al Sharpton and Jesse Jackson through the years.
There was also the recent event at the Great Faith International Ministries, where Donald said that blacks are ‘God’s greatest gift to our nation’. So blacks are our greatest gift while the terrorist state of Israel, which attacked the USS Liberty and World Trade Center (and more), is our greatest ally? Now speaking of gifts, there was a lot of buzz at some of the popular “stormer” outlets about how CNN cut the video feed of Trump getting gifts from the soul brothers at this church because it doesn’t go along with their narrative of Trump being an evil racist. Well, the funny thing about it is just what the gifts were, which these commentators, who are supposedly pro-White and anti-jew, failed to mention.
Trump got a jewish prayer shawl, which he proudly donned, and a ‘Jewish Heritage Study Bible.’ It wouldn’t fit within the Trump Train narrative to mention this, though, so our noble heroes in the “Alt Right” covered it up. Talk about dishonesty.
I don’t care how most of the “lefty” jewish media bashes Trump; no one trusts the mainstream anymore and their attacks only bolster his campaign. This leads me to think reverse psychology is being employed to achieve the desired result. This is just like how the Aldrich Bill was pushed through as the Federal Reserve Act in 1913, with all the hated big banks pretending to oppose it.
And of course there are the “edgy” and “alternative” news outlets that have positioned themselves to be the platform of the “Alt Right”. Breitbart is a particularly good example of how Whites are again being corralled into kosher outlets, thinking they are finally getting a voice. Of course many of the gullible “goyim” fail to realize that Breitbart was conceived in Israel in |
, should be patient. There is more to come. Much more.[26]
The Village Voice reported walkouts by board members and "vomiting by well-dressed wives".[34] Columnist William F. Buckley and ABC's Harry Reasoner denounced the film as "pornography disguised as art".[20]
After local government officials failed to ban the film in Montclair, New Jersey, theatergoers had to push through a mob of 200 outraged residents, who hurled epithets like "perverts" and "homos" at the attendees. Later, a bomb threat temporarily halted the showing.[35] The New York City chapter of the National Organization for Women denounced the film as a tool of "male domination".[36]
The film's scandal centred mostly on an anal rape scene, featuring Paul's use of butter as a lubricant.[37][38] According to Schneider, the scene was not in the original script, but was Brando's idea.[8] Other critics focused on when the character Paul asks Jeanne to insert her fingers in his anus, then asks her to prove her devotion to him by, among other things, having sex with a pig. Vincent Canby of The New York Times described the film's sexual content as the artistic expression of the "era of Norman Mailer and Germaine Greer".[39]
Film critic Pauline Kael endorsed the film, writing that "Tango has altered the face of an art form. This is a movie people will be arguing about for as long as there are movies."[26] She called it "the most powerfully erotic movie ever made, and it may turn out to be the most liberating movie ever made." United Artists reprinted the whole of Kael's rave as a double-page advertisement in the Sunday New York Times. Kael's review of Last Tango in Paris is regarded as the most influential piece of her career.[41] The American critic Roger Ebert repeatedly described it as "the most famous movie review ever published", and he added the film to his "Great Movies" collection.[42]
American director Robert Altman expressed unqualified praise: "I walked out of the screening and said to myself, 'How dare I make another film?' My personal and artistic life will never be the same."[20] Review aggregation website Rotten Tomatoes retrospectively collected 31 reviews and gave the film an approval rating of 80%, with an average rating of 7.9/10. The website's critical consensus reads, "Naturalistic but evocative, Last Tango in Paris is a vivid exploration of pain, love, and sex featuring a typically towering Marlon Brando performance."[43]
The film earned $12,625,000 in North American rentals in 1973.[44]
International response [ edit ]
British censors reduced the duration of the sodomy sequence before permitting the film to be released in the United Kingdom,[45] though it is not cut in later releases. Mary Whitehouse, a Christian morality campaigner, expressed outrage that the film had been certified "X" rather than banned outright, and Labour MP Maurice Edelman denounced the classification as "a license to degrade".[46] Chile banned the film entirely for nearly thirty years under its military government,[47] and the film was similarly suppressed in Portugal (until the Carnation Revolution in 1974, when its première became an example of the freedom democracy allows) and South Korea.[48]
The same happened in Brazil that lived in its most brutal period of military dictatorship: the film was censored. Eventually it was released in 1979.
In Australia, the film was released uncut with an R certificate by the Australian Classification Board on 1 February 1973. It received a VHS release by Warner Home Video with the same classification on 1 January 1987, forbidding sale or hire to anyone under the age of 18.[49]
In Italy, the film was released on 15 December 1972, grossing an unprecedented $100,000 in six days.[50] One week later, however, police seized all copies on the order of a prosecutor, who defined the film as "self-serving pornography", and its director was put on trial for "obscenity". Following first degree and appeal trials, the fate of the film was sealed on 26 January 1976 by the Italian Supreme Court, which sentenced all copies to be destroyed (though some were preserved by the National Film Library). Bertolucci was served with a four-month suspended sentence in prison and had his civil rights revoked for five years, depriving him of voting rights.[51]
In Canada, the film was banned by the Nova Scotia Board of Censors, leading to the landmark 1978 Supreme Court of Canada split decision in Nova Scotia (Board of Censors) v McNeil, which upheld the provinces' right to censor films.[52]
Accolades [ edit ]
Brando received an Academy Award nomination for Best Actor in a Leading Role and Bertolucci was nominated for Best Director.[53]
References [ edit ]
Bibliography [ edit ]His mother says he "owns" any room he walks into, and perhaps this is not merely a mother's musings. All eyes - particularly those of the young women and the waitresses - are on Carson Shields as he strides into this restaurant in the upscale River Heights neighbourhood of Winnipeg.
He has chosen the restaurant well - Inferno's - given he is coming from his own personal hell.
Tall, blond, wide-shouldered and clear-eyed, he wears a shirt so crisp and white it brightens the room as much as his smile. Peel back the shirt, however, and you will see the tattoos that seem bizarrely out of place with such a pristine first impression.
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"Fortune favours the brave" is writ large across his chest, a decision made one frenetic day after being high on cocaine for the previous two. Down his right arm is tribal art, on his left scripture adapted from the book of Acts: "Sit at my right hand until I make your enemies a footstool for your feet." Near his right elbow is a large diamond, inked at a time when he thought he held the secret to forever living the good life... presuming he lived.
The diamond excepted, he has no regrets concerning the tattoos. "They are a road map from where I was to where I am today," he says.
And where he is today is also there for the reading: three softer tattoos that speak to the great dichotomy that is Carson Shields.
On the outside of that arm is a rose, with his goddaughter Emersyn's name beside it. The tribal art on the right arm is the Cantonese love symbol with the name of another goddaughter, Loevah, beneath. Hidden on the inside of the left arm, inked inside a burning cross, are the names of his parents, Larry and Carol.
There is no body art to show the trauma he and his parents believe so profoundly affected his life: a humiliating junior hockey hazing that took place when he was barely a teenager.
It is far simpler to see what is behind the white shirt than to know what lies back of the pleasant face, the trusting eyes.
Peel that back and you will find a 25-year-old man deeply scarred by the sick side of the game he loved and still loves. You will find a happy boy from a good family in a good neighbourhood who became an alcoholic, a drug addict and, by his own admission, a criminal. You will see a tortured young man who finally hit rock bottom when, waiting outside a Winnipeg crack house for a drug-dealing buddy, he felt the cold metal of a 9-mm pistol pressed to his temple.
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Carson Shields says he needs to tell his story. His mother says he needs to tell it to heal.
He needs to show how far he fell from the simple dream he was chasing, how dark it all became and how, today, he is sober and clean, back living at home, coaching the game that all but destroyed him and attending university - one benefit of which is help in paying for the anti-depressants, anti-anxiety and high-blood-pressure pills he takes each day.
"This story needs to be told," his father says. "I'm just sorry that it was my son had to go through it to have it written."
Too much we concentrate on the far-less-than-1-per-cent, the ones who make it. We forget, as we focus on the troubles experienced by certain NHL enforcers and fighters that, just as the talented players get funnelled tighter and tighter until there are but a precious few that move on, there are the tough ones, many of them, who just were not tough enough. They, too, get left behind.
Carson Shields was, by his own measure, an "average good hockey player." Good enough for junior, not good enough for major junior. He bounced around so much - traded, sold, dropped, picked up - his father nicknamed him "Suitcase."
Between 16 and 20, he played for an astonishing 10 junior A-, B- and C-level teams in four different provinces. He was rarely seen as the team "enforcer" but always regarded as the one big and tough player who never backed down, who would, as they say, die for his teammates and, in the end, very nearly did.
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"I lost more fights than I won," he concedes.
He has no idea how many of either there were. He counts five concussions. He cannot bring his pinky fingers in line with his ring fingers. He sometimes throws out his shoulder in his sleep. His knee has never healed properly from an injury to his MCL. One psychiatrist determined he suffers from post-traumatic stress disorder, the PTSD that haunts so many Canadian soldiers who have seen action in Afghanistan; another has diagnosed him with acute stress reaction.
He sometimes wakes in the morning with his shoulders and hands sore, knowing he has been "fighting" again in his sleep, pounding pillow, bedding, headboard. He has trouble being alone.
Carson Shields was born on the first day of spring in 1988. He was both the fourth child and, in a way, an only child, his parents having divorced their original partners years earlier and begun a new marriage when each already had a daughter. Full brother David is 14 years older. Carson was a welcome and warmly welcomed surprise.
Larry Shields had been a star halfback and rookie of the year in the Manitoba-Saskatchewan Junior Football League. With the University of Manitoba Bisons, he was a Western Conference all-star. In one faded clipping, head coach George Depres called Larry "the fiercest, most competitive player he had ever coached."
The Winnipeg Blue Bombers invited Larry to their CFL camp but the stark realities of life – a baby on the way – made teaching physical education in nearby Selkirk a more secure proposition. It was here, later, that Larry and Carol met.
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In Winnipeg, the Shields lived in a good neighbourhood with good schools. Carson was an excellent student, winner of awards and admired by his teachers. He looked out for an autistic classmate in the schoolyard and picked up the nickname "the Friendly Giant" – the big-hearted kid who had time for everyone.
"He was a real joy as a child," Larry says.
And he was mad for sports. His parents put him in tae kwon do to burn off his endless energy. Summers were spent at the family cabin on Lake of the Woods. In winter, the youngster took to hockey, with Larry determined not to be as pushy a hockey parent as he felt he had been with David a dozen years earlier.
Larry Shields had walked away from a possible football career and the experience had stuck with him. Even to this day, he sometimes has a nightmare in which he is running up a hill while everyone else in the dream is running right past him, leaving him behind.
"I didn't want him to go through life wondering, 'What if?'" Larry says.
Larry knew if he just sat in the stands he was still having an effect on his sensitive youngest child. Carson says, even from the first, he was acutely aware of even the slightest hand gesture or roll of the eyes from his father. There were tough rides home but never once, Carson says, did he doubt his father "loved me" and wanted only for the child to succeed.
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At 10, Carson tried out for the AA Assiniboine Park Rangers and made the team. Jonathan Toews, now captain of the defending Stanley Cup champion Chicago Blackhawks, was captain and best player. Frazer McLaren, now a hulking forward for the Toronto Maple Leafs, was also on the team.
"I was the worst player on the team," Carson says, " but we won everything. That was the last time I truly enjoyed going to the rink."
He played for other minor hockey teams – captain on one – and went to the Kelowna Rockets camp after bantam, but could not make the WHL. He knew he had been invited to the camp because of his soaring penalty numbers, not his skill. Will, unfortunately, was not quite enough to crack a lineup that would go to the Memorial Cup.
"He was a boy with average abilities," Larry says. "Not a star but a good, good teammate. He was willing to do whatever it takes to continue playing. And I wanted to support that – maybe too much so."
Carson decided to play for the Kelvin High School team in Winnipeg, where he was coached by Bruce Sirrell, a physical education teacher at the school locals call "Hollywood High." Carson captained the team.
Sirrell, now a lifelong friend, says Carson "was aces on the ice. He would listen. He never missed. There were never any issues apart from him one time leaving the bench to defend a teammate."
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Larry Shields also got involved with the high-school team, serving as parent manager. "He was the ideal hockey parent for us," Sirrell says. "One of the nicest guys you'll ever meet in your life."
And yet, Sirrell began hearing his captain, off the ice, was "a bit of a wild character – the one who had to be 'The Guy' at the parties."
Because of his higher skills, Carson had made the team in Grade 10. The seniors introduced him to alcohol and he liked it. A lot. In the journal of his hockey years that he kept – now an expanding memoir entitled The Beauty he and friend Brandi Parnell hope to polish and publish – he wrote drinking made him funnier and people liked him more.
Certainly, most of the junior coaches he would play for liked him fine. He had skill enough, but more heart than most. He would do whatever it took to win, whatever it took to stay with the team.
It was early in his wandering junior hockey career – he would be a "rookie" on several teams – that he attended the hazing ritual that, he says, "haunts me to this day."
The veterans on this particular team, mostly 18- to 20-year-olds, forced the handful of new players to strip naked in the street outside a house they had the use of one weekend. No coaches were involved; no team officials even knew it was taking place.
Carson knew he was being targeted for special treatment. He was new, big, brazen, and some of the veterans wanted to see him put in his place. The drinking that began early in high school had given him a bit of "wild" reputation that some teammates resented. He was first called to the gathering's "court" and told to choose from six glasses of clear liquid. Once he chose the one containing only water, he would be freed.
He went through five glasses without finding water – he knew from the tastes that he had downed vodka, white rum and sambuca – and was told to drink the sixth anyway. It was gin.
The drinking went on until the rookies were completely inebriated. They were forced to do an "elephant walk" about the rooms: each rookie holding onto the testicles of the hunched-over rookie walking ahead of him.
Forced to drink even more, the rookies were then stuffed in a bare room where several vomited, one all over Carson. They were brought out and ordered to "bong" three beers each – chugging the entire contents at once. Before passing out, he remembers girls being brought up from downstairs, but then nothing …
In the days that passed, he heard from others how out of it he had been. He was told at least one veteran player had urinated on him. He found out that photographs had been taken of him in humiliating poses, pictures that to this day give him nightmares. He was shattered.
He remembers being in his car after he had learned the extent of the humiliating hazing. "I was thinking maybe I should just get into an accident – and end it all."
Hockey Canada is crystal clear on its policy on hazing: It is forbidden. The organization that oversees minor hockey throughout Canada defines the act as "an initiation practice that may humiliate, demean, degrade, or disgrace a person regardless of location or consent of the participant(s)."
Penalties are severe – suspension, even expulsion.
For the past decade and more, Hockey Canada has tried to be active on the hazing issue with its "Speak Out" clinics and various online programs for athletes and their parents, as well as volunteers who become certified coaches, trainers and managers. But it cannot prevent young players from acting on their own, whether the "hazing" rituals involve something as harmless as singing a song in front of teammates or as harmful as what Carson Shields experienced.
Two years ago, in small-town Manitoba, the junior-A Neepawa Natives made a 15-year-old rookie "tug" across the room a water bottle that was tied to his scrotum. When this incident and others were reported by a team official who discovered what had taken place, the league moved to fine the team $5,000, suspend 16 players and suspend two coaches, one of whom had been the whistleblower. The RCMP investigated, but no charges were laid.
The message, Manitoba Junior Hockey League commissioner Kim Davis told the media, was "hazing is not acceptable."
And yet it continues to exist, sometimes with dire consequences, in sports teams, bands, fraternity and sorority houses. An American survey taken nearly 15 years ago – before social media turned bullying into a rising social and political issue – found as many college- and university-level students, one in five, had been subjected to unacceptable, possibly-illegal hazings as had experienced what they considered a positive initiation.
The most notorious recent example of hazing occurred this fall in the NFL, when Miami Dolphins lineman Richie Incognito, a 6-foot-3, 319-pound guard, launched a profane, racist and even threatening attack on young teammate Jonathan Martin. The appalling example of bullying left Martin fleeing the team and Incognito claiming the vicious text exchanges were misunderstood, that taken in the culture of the dressing room they were actually all about "friendship."
Carson Shields believes no such thing. It is, pure and simple, bullying. And it is not done so much to initiate and welcome new young players to a group as it is to send out serious warning signals.
"You have 19- and 20-year-olds organizing this 'party' for 17-year-olds who are there to take a veteran's job away," he says. "So what's he going to do? He doesn't want that kid to take his spot. So he intimidates him."
"I agree with him," says Paul Carson, Hockey Canada vice-president of hockey development. "They mask this as being about 'belonging' through hazing. It's bullying."
"The culture is changing," adds Todd Jackson, Hockey Canada senior manager in charge of safety. "We are seeing a shift but we've got to continue to push."
Both Calgary-based Carson and Ottawa-based Jackson believe one key is parental awareness and involvement: monitoring off-ice team activities that involve their youngsters and communicating with the youngsters so they are aware hazing is unacceptable behaviour. They are especially concerned with the repercussions from such activity in the age of social media.
"The way the Internet is now," Carson says, "it could have ruined my life."
Even without Twitter and Facebook, it almost did.
There is no doubt Carson Shields was a troubled young man, capable of being wild on and off the ice, even before the hazing. But it was the hazing, his parents came to believe, that triggered something that changed their son irrevocably.
"Something was stolen from him that night," Larry says. "Whatever it was, it led him to overcompensate in going in the other direction."
Carson now knows this to be true. All the bad, all the demons, all the bad behaviour, seem to date from that humiliation. Having been so seriously degraded that night and living in terror that those photographs would follow him, he set out to become what he calls the "Swinging Dick" of junior hockey.
His manhood would never be challenged. He would be the ultimate warrior, the very definition of hockey's treasured "character" player.
"He was the kind of guy who would do whatever it took to win," says Randy Lulashnyk, who coached the Dryden Ice Dogs to the Superior International Junior Hockey League championship with Carson playing a key role on defence.
"He might have looked like an enforcer but he could play. He could make that first good pass."
But his main role was intimidation. Colin McIntosh, the Ice Dogs best player and leading scorer that year, recalls being crosschecked after a whistle and Carson skating across the ice to tear into the opposition player.
"Back at the bench the coach goes, 'Shields – what was that?'" McIntosh recalls. "Carson's simple reply was 'Nobody touches Mac and gets away with it.' And for two years, though I never asked for it, I knew that Carson always had my back."
Lulashnyk began to hear stories of his player's off-ice behaviour and it concerned him. "I had ideas," he says from Yorkton, Sask., where he now lives. "But I had no proof. … Nobody wants to tell the coach."
Another player on the team, Jonathon Mitchell, says he and the other rookies heard the stories of Carson's abusive behaviour but, he adds: "Never once did Carson force those choices of his on others – that speaks to the character he has as a person." He protected the rookies off the ice as well as the stars on the ice.
At one point, Carson asked to be dealt to another team, convinced he needed a new start away from his growing personal troubles. Lulashnyk granted the request. Not long after, Carson called about coming back, but he was turned down. "I wanted Carson Shields the player to come back," the long-time junior coach says. "I didn't want Carson Shields off-ice to come back."
Carson continued to bounce from team to team, delighting some, appalling others – one team sent him packing after a single out-of-control shift in his first game – but always appreciated by his teammates for whom he would do anything.
"I played two years of junior with Carson," says McIntosh, who now plays professional hockey in Europe. "I played without fear because he was guarding my back and would step in when needed. He wasn't the toughest guy, but was so fiercely loyal to his teammates it was truly incredible."
"Hockey is like no other sport when you're into a game," Carson says. "It's a war out there. You have to know your teammates – are you going to be there for me? You have to know if I get mugged that you're going to have my back. Well, I was that guy. I was 'The Guy.'
"There's not a person I played with that I couldn't go to now and say, 'Did you enjoy playing with me?' They loved me on their team. I was there for them. Always there."
Yet, the teams weren't always there for him. He was a commodity – tough, willing, somewhat skilled – teams wanted when they didn't have him and took for granted when they did. He was sent to teams, dropped by teams, picked up by teams, sometimes in a matter of hours.
"You become a piece of meat mentally," he says. "No wonder there are so many troubled guys. No wonder there are stories of suicide. Guys can't handle their demons. I can relate to those demons. I know them."
"We wanted to support him," Larry says. "We knew how much he loved the game. But … how much did I know? How much would I let go in order for him to play the game he loved. I can't answer that. I don't know."
The longer Carson played, the larger those demons grew.
Drinking led to drugs, eventually cocaine. His personal problems grew worse.
One billet he had very much liked committed suicide, shattering the good woman he left behind and the young players who had looked to him for guidance. A female billet for another team (team locations have been deliberately left out) hit on him and played sexual mind games on him until, he says: "I would be out wandering the streets with a 26-er of vodka, afraid to go home."
Carson also starting to take painkillers to handle the pains in his hands and knee. He graduated quickly through Advil to Tylenol 3 to Valium, clonazepam. To speed up the effect, he crushed the pills and inhaled the powder just as he continued to do with cocaine.
To maintain his "Swinging Dick" role on teams, and in the bars the players turned to after games, he turned to steroids, ballooning up to 220 pounds of muscle. He learned how to inject himself by watching YouTube videos. He had more power, more endurance. "This feels so good," he wrote in his journal, "why isn't it legal?"
He shaved his head and got more tattoos, the fierce physical trappings oddly out of sorts with his smooth baby face. He was The Guy on the ice, No. 23. He was The Guy in the bar taking the girl home. Forever and endlessly proving himself.
Finally, he came down to one final proof in hockey: He could make a career in the game. Some American schools had shown interest; there might be opportunities in the professional minor leagues.
"This was my 20-year-old year," he says, "and my last kick at making an impression on pro or college scouts."
He had returned to Winnipeg and to a team he had once played for. They won the championship – he proudly wears the ring today – but, almost at the very end of his junior eligibility, he crashed into the boards on a fore-check and wrecked his shoulder.
He was done.
"I strongly believe that when Carson's junior career ended," his old teammate Colin McIntosh says, "it was almost like a death for him. He had put his body on the line so many times and stood up for countless guys, only to watch them continue to play at a higher level.
"For him to watch guys he played against, and with, ripped him apart inside, and he began to hate and blame the game for not being able to play."
With no college offers and no chance at professional hockey – "I don't want to portray I even had a sniff at it" – Carson took his parents' advice and went back to school.
The University of Winnipeg accepted him and issued him student No. 3019314. It was a crushing moment.
"I was always '23.' That was my number, '23,'" he says. "The day I got my student card I looked at the number and I was no longer '23.' I didn't know anybody – but, more important, nobody knew me. That was scary."
Without his on-ice persona, without his well-earned "rep" in hockey, he felt he had lost his identity. In the small towns and cities where he had played, he couldn't even go for coffee without being hailed and admired. Now, if he went for coffee he sat alone. He took to drinking, alone, in his car in the campus parking lots.
He fell in with a rough crowd. It was, in many ways, his new team and he felt as though he was becoming a somebody again, the big tattooed tough guy who moved with ease among drug dealers and other criminal elements.
He became close with a major dealer, a man who took him to crack houses where children were soiled and whimpering while their parents lay high in the next room. He could not stand seeing such squalor and neglect so, one night, he stayed outside in the car while his friend went in to deal the drugs.
That was when he felt the barrel of a 9-mm pistol touch his temple, a choke line slip around his neck.
"Where is buddy?" he was asked.
Buddy, fortunately, emerged soon after and, even more fortunately, was carrying enough cash to satisfy the three burly men with the gun.
A second incident resulted in Carson being picked up by Winnipeg police, photographed and charged with assault. The court decided to send him to a facility where he was placed on a course for anger management.
It was there he finally had his epiphany: "I decided that I owed it to myself and to my parents to try and take a serious stab at university and being a productive member of society.
"I needed to straighten out – and quick."
It is late fall of 2013. In the spring, Carson Shields will graduate from conflict resolution studies at the University of Winnipeg. He lives with his parents. He has part-time work with Manitoba Hydro. He attends Alcoholics Anonymous meetings. He does volunteer work for a charity (hockeyhelpsthehomeless.com) raising money to build three shelters for the homeless.
And he is back in hockey, an assistant coach with the Transcona Railer Express, a local Manitoba Major Junior Hockey League team. The players are all aware of his "rep" when he was a player. They call him "Reggie Dunlop" after the feisty Paul Newman character in the iconic hockey movie Slap Shot.
"Carson is probably the most-liked coach on the team," Express captain Greg Myall says. "Guys in the dressing room know he can relate to our generation and can be someone to go to and talk with if there is an issue individually or as a group. He knows when to be serious and the right time to have fun with the guys.
"He's a really good coach," says Bruce Sirrell, the old Kelvin High School teacher/hockey coach who is now running the Express. "He's really settled down and changed. I'm too old to have the rapport with the guys that he has."
At his son's urging, Larry signed on with the Express as the assistant equipment manager – "glorified water boy," he calls it. Father and son go to games together, just as they did 15 years ago, but the only expectation is they will enjoy the game and pass on what they can.
Larry now knows what his son lived through. They attend therapy sessions together. Larry and Carol now know just how far their baby fell, and if they had to pick a starting point for the long descent, it would be that rookie party.
"I never at any point thought it would have the damage it did," Larry says. "I love this game, you know. It's a wonderful game – but there is a sickness in the game …"
Carson agrees, a dark side to a wonderful game that serves no known purpose, that has no reason to be. That should no longer be.
"I swore that when it came my turn, it would never happen to others like it happened to me," Carson says. He has set up a Twitter account (@CarsonShields23) where junior players can contact him if they wish to talk.
"Nobody think for a moment that I'm now some sort of prince," he cautions. "I'm the furthest you can imagine from that. But I'm trying to pass on the lessons that I've learned.
"I'm hoping to make up for all those things that I've done."
Follow me on Twitter:"In Crimea, at the former Turkish lyceum in the village of Tankove, all books in Turkish were burned, and Turkish language teachers were fired," he wrote.
"They burned the library of the Turkish class lab. Teachers were forced to write resignation reports," he said.
Before the occupation, it was the Crimean boarding school for gifted children of the Ministry of Education and Science of the Autonomous Republic of Crimea. The village of Tankove is located in Bakhchisaray district.
The gymnasium was founded by Turkish entrepreneur and philanthropist Fethullah Gülen.
According to Ukrainska Pravda, almost all today’s Crimean Tatar elite of the peninsula used to study there.
Repressions against the lyceum began in the autumn of 2014. Searches were conducted, resulting in a seizure of three books that had been put on the list of extremist literature. As the teachers stated, those books were planted.Analysis: The FIA presidency candidates side by side
One day ahead of a milestone FIA presidency election, we put the candidates side by side and have a look at what they have to offer. It is for the first time in 16 years that the FIA members will choose a president that is not Max Mosley.
In tomorrow's election, Ari Vatanen and Jean Todt are the candidates for a term of 4 years as FIA president. During the gathering of the General Assembly, each candidate will be granted 15 minutes of speech to try to convince the 224 member organizations to vote for him.
Both men are strong candidates with each their own emphasis, but considering the 4 consecutive terms of leadership by Max Mosley, both, one more than the other, stress the need for change within its internal organization.
Jean Todt
The first of the candidates is Jean Todt, widely known as Ferrari team principal in the years when the Italian team amassed championship titles along with Michael Schumacher and Ross Brawn. The Frenchman's campaign was already ignited before he even officially put in his candidacy as Max Mosley officially supports him to become the next president. While this in effect may have helped his campaign, some will see Todt as the continuation of Mosley determined way of governing. At a time that many judge this an ideal opportunity to break with history, this may turn against him.
Todt however is convinced he will go his own way, in a style of "agreement, not confrontation". In relation to motorsport, he supports a review of how rulings will be enforced while at the same time dividing responsiblity by instating sports commisioners
"For each FIA World Championship we propose appointing a Commissioner responsible for the Federation’s day to day management and governance of the championship. The Commissioner will represent the FIA in all regulatory and commercial issues relating to the championship,
reporting to the World Council and relevant sporting commissions. A system of Commissioners will reduce the need for the FIA President, or Deputy to become directly involved in any particular Championship and give more time to the leadership to concentrate on the strategic management of the FIA as a whole embracing the twin pillars of both mobility and motor sport."
More information can be found on Jean Todt's campain website http://www.jeantodtandteam2009.com/
Ari Vatanen
Ari Vatanen is a Finn, former rally driver and was a member of the European parliament for the last 5 years. Much more so that Todt, Vatanen stands for change after claiming to be upset by the way the FIA has been run recently. The scandals and confronting politics are what Vatanen wants to get rid of.
"My main focus will be to bring unity to the FIA and increase transparency and accountability for the members, who are after all the true owners of the Federation and must play a central role in our organisation. I bring to my candidacy a long history and experience in both Sport and Mobility."
While Todt aims for high commitment, Vatanen's policy rather stresses his will to change the FIA in a much more open organisation, one that allows the input of all parties involved, also when these are negative towards the FIA.
More information can be found on Ari Vatanen's campaign website http://www.arivatanen.com/EN/ari-for-fia-president/Gloria Vane, 1991
Cheers creators James Burrows and Glen and Les Charles asked Joe Keenan, the author of Blue Heaven, to create a sitcom for their production company in 1991. He came up with this pilot, which followed a Gloria Swanson-esque actress in the 1930s, played by JoBeth Williams. At the time, Keenan called it “gay-sensible without being so gay we couldn’t get sponsors.” (Example: Gloria asks her longtime directing partner what would have become of him if he hadn’t worked with her. He answers, “Heterosexual, probably.”) Alas, test audiences eviscerated the forward-thinking pilot, and Keenan went on to write for the more mainstream hit Frasier.
Sick in the Head, 1999
Before Judd Apatow invented his guy-centric subgenre of romantic comedy films, with movies like The 40-Year-Old Virgin and Knocked Up, he was a legend in television – mainly for his ability to create shows so cool they ultimately failed. His cult favourites Freaks and Geeks and Undeclared made it to air, but failed to attract large enough audiences. Sick in the Head was among three other shows he created in the ‘90s that didn’t get past the pilot stage, and it has become the stuff of wistful, what-could-have-been legend among US TV nerds. Apatow shot the pilot for US network Fox in 1999, casting the affable David Krumholtz as a young, clueless psychiatrist and a then-unknown Amy Poehler as a patient who’s on her 13th therapist. But a change at the top at Fox meant a change in fortune for Sick in the Head, which didn’t make the schedule.
Heat Vision and Jack, 1999
This sitcom, co-created by Community mastermind Dan Harmon, parodied ‘80s action shows like Knight Rider and starred Jack Black as a former astronaut who gains super-intelligence from the sun’s rays, and Owen Wilson as the voice of his talking motorcycle. Ben Stiller directed the pilot, but Fox rejected it. Like Sick in the Head, this show, too, was considered for the 1999 season, which means that in an alternate universe, Fox could have revolutionised network TV in the US that season. Instead they went for a half-hour repackaging of Ally McBeal, called Ally, and Malcolm in the Middle – a solid but safe show that introduced the world to Bryan Cranston before Breaking Bad. Heat Vision and Jack lives on in internet clips, as well as a possible animated adaptation, which was still rumoured to be in the works as of |
ussed on revelation of mass coral bleachings as found in aerial surveys in late March 2016. Then, in late April with remarkable alacrity and before the 2,300 Km (1,400 miles) x ~3,000 reefs could be properly surveyed by divers, the five co-authors from three universities coordinated their opinions (and accepted the statistical stuff from Dr Andrew King) and released the article into the public domain. At that time, it was not possible to determine when the bleaching had occurred (or its mortality levels), but they asserted that it was in March 2016!
The study utilized averaged SST’s for only the whole of the vast CS because GBR data were lacking at the time. It was thus appropriate to make validation checks against authenticated records on the GBR itself. Of eight major GBR observations over the past twenty years, there were no CS SST correlations with seven of them, and the only one that was a fit was arguably accidental because many global “Super El Nino” indicators also correlated.
Additional major empirical conflicts were found in other data not included and show that even if the study were to pass peer review and be found to be internally correct for projecting future SST’s in the Coral Sea, that would not be relevant for the shallow waters of the GBR.
That is not to dispute that later definitive surveys by divers in May and June reported localized very high coral mortality in the far north, but that the study as was launched in April was not founded on relevant evidence (and was unconditionally assertive, misleading, and excessively alarming).
Brief Summary Results:
Multiple problems are revealed in the use of March monthly average CS SST’s rather than GBR data:
Notes:
[a] Long-term, the hottest month in both the CS and the GBR is February, not March. These modest February warming trends are not indicative of sudden change on the GBR due to global warming.
[b] The 2015/16 El Nino global bleaching event did not reach GBR waters in 2015, they being more distant from the warming El Nino regions than the bulk of the CS. The CS ideation failed badly.
[*] GBR average SST’s were erratically much cooler than the CS in some years.
[1] GBR mass bleaching #1. GBR February data correlated well with the global El Nino driven bleaching event, but March in the CS was a poor indicator.
[2] March CS ideation should have caused greater bleaching than the two earlier mass bleachings but did not, and GBR SST’s were far below trend showing a CS disconnect from the GBR.
[3] GBR mass bleaching #2. This reported mass bleaching is paradoxical; absent globally and not driven by an El Nino, yet has been ranked as stronger than in 1998 despite lower average GBR SST’s.
[4] & [5] Paradoxically high SST’s but serious bleaching not reported. (Scope of survey’s?).
[6] Severe bleaching reported only in the far south, especially around the Keppel Islands.
[7] CS ideation should have caused severe bleaching but did not, and GBR SST’s were cool.
[8] No reported bleaching on the GBR despite 2010 being a big El Nino year with global mass bleaching, and when GBR average SST’s were warmer than with the local 2002 mass bleaching.
[9] CS ideation dictates mass bleaching but increasing coral cover recorded 2013 through 2015.
[10] GBR mass bleaching #3 CS in March (and other global indicators) correlated per expectations!
Additionally, the Australian Institute of Marine Science (AIMS) have daily water temperature records for the GBR which are compared in the Full Empirical Analysis that follows. This finds additional conflicts with the study and identifies inabilities in the monthly data above which may explain the several paradoxes therein.
Optional Fuller Empirical Analysis:
Click here to open PDF 2 containing nine graphics and 2,300 words etcetera. It incorporates daily water temperatures at nine sites along the GBR and BoM SST data for the whole of the GBR that are not employed in the study. These data provide many additional incontrovertible findings against the use of CS monthly SST to predict bleaching on the GBR.
Conclusions:
· The analysis proves that month-average data for March in the Coral Sea does not predict coral bleaching on the GBR. Typically, water temperatures are higher in February and daily data are required to detect dangerous spikes.
· The authors should admit to errors and bad assumptions, and retract their article and its study with the same high level of publicity as occurred following its public release on their academic’s website The Conversation.
Bob Fernley-Jones (Mechanical engineer retired, Melbourne Australia)
(Note: when first published, somehow none of the embedded images that were part of the essay transferred incorrectly. This has been rectified – Anthony)
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Russian FSB Against the Arab Secret Services Hakam Aql, AIA middle-eastern section Contents of the review:
* Kuwaiti "riddle" of the Russian counterespionage
* Special services of the Kremlin: complex relations with Persian Gulf monarchies
* The new affair between the secret services of Palestine and Russia
Attack on Kuwait
On May 12, director of Russian Federal Security Services (FSB) Nikolay Patrushev publicly accused Kuwait and Saudi Arabia of conducting spying activities on Russian territory. The acts of espionage by the Kuwaiti and Saudi secret services were carried out under cover of the nongovernmental organizations working in Russia, he claimed. In this connection, the head of FSB has named the Organization of the Red Crescent (Saudi Arabia) and the Society of Social Reforms (Kuwait).
Representatives of Moscow long ago accused Saudi Arabia of supporting North Caucasian separatists, as early as the first war in the Chechen Republic (1994-96). However, Kuwait was accused of such actions at an official level for the first time in history.
The Islamic charitable organization, the Social Reform Society (SRS,) with headquarters in Kuwait, was established in 1963. Its representatives and branches render humanitarian help to the Muslim populations in more than in 30 countries of the world. The local authorities registered the Moscow branch of SRS in 1993. Later, branches of this organization opened up in Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzia, Tajikistan and Azerbaijan. Up to the end of 2000, their employees freely conducted their activities in the countries of CIS. In Northern Caucasus and in Kazakhstan the distribution of the foodstuffs to refugees and needy was carried out. In Kyrgyzia and Kazakhstan boarding schools for orphans were opened, and in Tatarstan and Kyrgyzia new mosques were erected. The largest project of SRS in the former Soviet republics was the Southern- Kazakhstan Humanitarian Academy, which was opened in 1999. It was a unique educational institution in Kazakhstan, providing secular education free-of-charge for teenagers without parents and those from needy families. It was functioning under the permit and constant control of the authorities.
On October 17, 2000, FSB agents unexpectedly appeared at Moscow's branch of SRS. That very day this security service distributed a communiqué in which the Kuwaiti organization was accused of anti-governmental activity and connections with the notorious Muslim Brothers Association. According to the one former SRS employee in Moscow, such sudden "enlightenment" of the FSB regarding "terrorist connections," happened as a result of the refusal of the head of the branch Ramiz Halitov to give a large bribe to a certain high-ranking official in Moscow.
In January, 2003, FSB s prepared a "black list" for the State Office of the Public Prosecutor, of terrorist organizations conducting activities in Russia. SRS appeared on the list. The following month the Supreme Court of Russia outlawed all these organizations. In April 2003 a representative of the State Office of Public Prosecutor, Maria Petrik, announced that "the reason for closing Moscow's branch of the Social Reform Society was its infringements of the federal law on public associations." This statement contradicted the official version of the Supreme Court, which accused the Kuwaiti organization of terrorist activity.
In Spring, 2004, under pressure from Russia, the Kazakh authorities refused torenew the license of the Southern-Kazakhstan Humanitarian Academy. A year later, under the initiative of the Kazakh National Security Service, (the main partner of the Russian special services in the Central Asia) the Supreme Court of the Republic also declared SRS a terrorist organization.
Moscow's representatives also have tried to instigate persecutions against SRS in Azerbaijan and Kyrgyzia. In the first case Rafik Aliev. the head of the Azeri state committee on religious organizations, reacted as follows: "we do not have data on the connections between the Muslim Brothers Association and any humanitarian or public organization in Azerbaijan" (14.08.2001).
Strangely enough, the authorities in Bishkek, who usually strive to satisfy any inquiries by Moscow, in this case reacted in the similar way. ”The Kuwaiti Social Reform Society is registered with the Ministry of Justice and operates legally in the Republic," the head of Spiritual Management of Muslims of Kyrgyzia Usur Azhi-Loma declared in June, 2004. Half a year before that announcement, the Supreme Court of the Republic published a Kyrgyz "black list" of terrorist organizations. The SRS was not on that list.
Interestingly enough, in his statement in May, 2005 the head of FSB said nothing about the SRS involvement in terrorism, unlike the verdict of the Supreme Court of Russia. Patrushev's statement that special services of Kuwait operate in Russia under cover of the Social Reform Society caused even greater bewilderment. The chief of counterespionage should have know that since February 2003, when the Supreme court declared SRS a terrorist organization, all its representatives left Russian territory. And yet another strange thing; even in the heat of the campaign against Social Reform Society, neither FSB nor other Russian bodies announced any connection between these organizations and the government of Kuwait. Moscow has accused this state of complicity in terrorism or espionage activity.
Naturally, such a sudden propaganda attack caused ae sharp protest from official Kuwait. Its ambassador in Moscow transferred a special note to the deputy head of the Middle East and Northern Africa Department of the Russian Ministry of Foreign Affairs. In this note Patrushev's charges are called absolutely groundless. To understand, the reason behind the FSB attacks on Kuwait, it is necessary to pay examine the general background of his statement. The essence of this speech may be reduced to the charges in address of the USA and Britain, ostensibly promoting realization of "Velvet Revolutions" in Georgia, Ukraine and Kyrgyzia. According to Patrushev, change of regimes in these ex-Soviet republics led to the decrease of Russian influence on the CIS countries. In this connection it becomes clear, that Kuwait was selected as a target only because of its close connection with the West. In the Kremlin's opinion this small country is the main advanced post of the American presence at the Persian Gulf. Even after a certain degree of cooling in the relations between Er-Riyadh and Washington at the last years, Al Kuwait remained true to its pro-American policy.
Having failed to prevent "Velvet Revolutions" in the former colonies, the Russian leadership is trying now to find the enemy ostensibly guilty in "the spreading of the western democracy" in the CIS countries. The USA and Britain, and also "their henchmen among the most reactionary Arab regimes" have been selected for this purpose in the best traditions of the Soviet period.
Cooperation with Oman
Patrushev's accusations directed against Kuwait are not the first instance of the"active participation" of the secret services in Moscow's relations with the monarchies of the Persian Gulf. In February of last yea, two agents of the Russian intelligence were detained in Qatar on suspicion in the murder of the ex-president of the Chechen Republic.
Moscow's response (on FSB's initiative) was the arrest at the airport of two Qatar sportsmen – wrestlers. They were on transit flight from Belarus to Serbia where were supposed to take part in preparatory competitions before the Olympic games of 2004. The FSB investigators accused both sportsmen in connections with "illegal armed forces of the Chechen Republic".
To this it is possible to add the liquidation of somebody called Jerah, who had been participating in military actions against Northern Caucasus from the rebel's side. He was killed five days after Nikolay Patrushev's statement. In the official message about his death, representatives of Russian security bodies brought focus on the detail that he was the citizen of Kuwait. Two months prior to that, the Russian authorities publicly accused other citizens of this Arab country of participation in the capture of the school in Beslan in September of last year.
All these events, of course, did not promote normal relations between Russia and the monarchies of the Persian Gulf. Probably, in an effort to lower tension after the statement of Patrushev, President Putin`s personal envoy on the issues of international cooperation in the struggle against terrorism and criminality, Anatoly Safonov, met the ambassador of Oman Mohammed Al Lawati, in Moscow on May 27. Safonov is a former colleague of the present Russian President. In the summer of 1995, he was a provisional head of FSB, thus, he is an expert in the supervised questions, understanding perfectly the details of the complicated relations between Russia and the Gulf countries. According to the message of the Russian Foreign Minister, at his meeting with the ambassador of Oman, "the emphasis has been made on strengthening interaction between the two countries in the struggle against the international terrorism". The paradox of the situation is in the fact that Kuwait is the main partner of Oman in this sphere! In May, 2004 the heads of the Ministries of Internal Affairs of these two countries inked an Agreement on strategic partnership in struggle against terrorism, within the framework of the Cooperation Council of the countries of Persian Gulf…
Struggle for Palestine
The discussion over the activization of Russia's participation in rendering assistance to the Palestinian special services proceeded throughout May. This issue was the main one during the negotiations by the head of the presidential office of Palestine Taeb Abed el-Rahim (former PLO ambassador to Yugoslavia), when he visited Moscow at the beginning of month. It was also discussed at the meeting of the representatives of the "Quartet" on conflict resolution in the Middle-East,, which took place in the Russian capital on May 8. As the speaker of the Russian Ministry of Foreign Affairs, Alexander Yakovenko, declared after the meeting: "we are ready to grant technical assistance to the Palestinian security bodies and to help in training of its staff."
The possible activization of Russian-Palestinian cooperation in the field of special services was mentioned for the first time by head of the Foreign Ministry, Sergey Lavrov, during his visit to Kazakhstan on February 25. He said, "we are contributing to rendering support to the Palestinian security services and we already have delivered to them some technical equipment. We also are considering additional Palestinian appeals. The leadership of Russia tends to supports these requests. I think that decisions will be made in the near future on these questions." Three days later, in London, Lavrov added: "At the given stage we study a number of offers on rendering additional help to Palestine, among them... a professional training and a hardware supply of the Palestinian security bodies".
In many respects the secret services of Palestine owe their existence to Moscow and its former partners in the Warsaw bloc. From the beginning of the seventies up to the end of the eighties, the Soviet Union and its East European satellites, primarily East Germany and Romania were the main patrons of PLO special units. Cooperation of the Soviet special services with Palestinians included an exchange of intelligence information, rendering of technical help and professional training (since 1974 directly in the territory of the USSR). In the middle of the eighties the attitudes between Moscow and PLO's political leadership have grown somewhat cold. However, this was not reflected in the bilateral connections between the special services. External and military intelligence of the USSR (KGB and GRU) in their activity in the Middle East were bypassing the official Kremlin's leadership’s control more and more obviously. Fiercely competing with each other, they actively participated in quarrels between various PLO groups, secretly continued to supply weapons, and through them marketed military equipment and ammunition to different fighting forces in the number of the countries of the Arab East such as
Yemen.) It was not seldom that as the result of an attack of "unidentified fighters" or sudden shelling of the convoys the “goods” "disappeared on road to the official customer. The corresponding messages went to Moscow, and huge amounts of money arrived in the secret Swiss accounts of a narrow circle of party bosses and heads of the Soviet special services. It happened up to 1990-91. However, the collapse of the Soviet Union and the beginning of Oslo process have put an end to close confidential connections between Moscow and the Palestinians. They renewed only in the middle of the nineties. In 1995 the security services of Palestine received 45 armored troop carriers from Russia. Simultaneously the group of the Palestinian special services agents left for training in Russia. The Russian Minister of Internal Affairs Sergey Stepashin, former head of the Russian counterespionage. visited Gaza in 1998. In 2000 FSB and the Service of General Security of Palestine signed the cooperation agreement, which was prepared by a special joint working group. At the end of last year the adviser of the Palestinian President on national security, Jibril Rajoub, (one of key figures in intelligence bodies of Palestine) visited Moscow.
Mahmoud Abbas` election to the post of the President (January 2005) created extremely favorable conditions for activization of cooperation of the secret services of Palestine and Russia. A number of influential persons - Abbas` environs, show discontent with the determining role in the Middle-Eastern process being played by the USA, which is to patronizing Israel. They hope for activization of Russia in region, and support rapprochement with Moscow. The most outstanding figure in this group is the Minister of Internal Affairs Nasser Yussef. He received high education in Russia, and supervises today, all power and secret bodies of Palestine.
Before Arafat's death, Abbas maintained the closest relations with Russia from all the Palestinian politicians. Some representatives of Moscow privately supported his actions against the late President. The Russian secret services even transferred to Mahmoud Abbas the classified information on attempt to murder him ostensibly prepared by Arafat's supporters. As a result Abbas began to trust his Russian friends even more. Today the leader of Palestine outwardly aspires to get the maximal support of the USA before the renewal of negotiating process after Israeli withdrawal from Gaza. However, in veiled ways he supports Nasser Yussef and other supporters of the pro-Russian course in the Palestinian foreign policy. This resulted in the appeals to Russia on rendering assistance to security services of Palestine.
As a consequence, Moscow received real chance to take an appreciable place among foreign partners of the Palestinian security services and by that to push away the USA and their allies - Egypt and Britain. If Russia succeeds, then its cooperation with Palestine in this sphere becomes the jumping-off place to the Kremlin`s efforts on activization in the zone of the Middle-Eastern conflict.
Related items:
Russians Are Coming Back...
Dangerous liaisons: covert ''love affair" between Russia and Hezbollah Main Page | News Page | 007 News | Printrick-snyder-office-michigan.jpeg
Michigan Gov. Rick Snyder in his Lansing office.
(AP File Photo | Carlos Osorio)
LANSING, MI -- Michigan Gov. Rick Snyder on Thursday quickly signed controversial legislation allowing adoption agencies that contract with the state to decline service to prospective parents on religious grounds. The three-bill package,
, had reached his desk less than 24 hours earlier after approval Wednesday in the Republican-led Legislature. The new laws, signed just weeks before the U.S. Supreme Court is expected to rule on Michigan's gay marriage ban, seek to codify existing Department of Human Services policy and will take effect in 90 days. "The state has made significant progress in finding more forever homes for Michigan kids in recent years and that wouldn't be possible without the public-private partnerships that facilitate the adoption process," Snyder said in a statement. "We are focused on ensuring that as many children are adopted to as many loving families as possible regardless of their makeup." The new law seeks to prohibit "adverse action" against a private agency that contracts with the state to provide adoption services, including any attempt to strip state funding. If an agency rejects a prospective parent on religious grounds, they would have to refer them to another agency and provide them with a written list of options. Snyder's office, in announcing the signing, provided MLive
from the Michigan Catholic Conference and Bethany Christian Services, saying the agencies combine to provide roughly 25 to 30 percent of all foster care adoptions in the state. Bethany, in its letter to Snyder, warned that future policies may force faith-based agencies to "choose between their desire to help children and families and their fidelity to their religious principles." Religiously affiliated agencies in some other states, including Illinois, have reportedly closed their doors rather than comply with new regulations there requiring them to work with same-sex couples. Critics, comparing the proposal to the Indiana Religious Freedom Restoration Act that prompted national criticism earlier this year, had
the legislation, arguing that it would amount to state-sanctioned discrimination against gays and lesbians wishing to adopt. "Children deserve loving homes and our elected officials should be held accountable for supporting this blatant act of discrimination," Lonnie Scott, executive director of Progress Michigan, said in a statement. "We hope that Gov. Snyder is prepared for the same amount of backlash that was seen in Indiana when they passed similar RFRA-style legislation and we encourage the people to raise up their voices in protest." There are 62 adoption agencies that partner with the state to find homes for foster kids, and only 17 have a religious affiliation, according to the Michigan Catholic Conference. Several of those agencies operate in multiple locations, however. MCC President and CEO Paul A. Long, in a statement celebrating the governor's signatures, said the new laws "will not only promote a diverse range of child placement providers, they will ensure the state does not discriminate against social service agencies that serve the poor and vulnerable while providing foster care and adoption services to the general public." Several
, including the American Academy of Pediatricians and the American Counseling Association, joined the Human Rights Campaign in speaking out against the bills earlier this year, saying they were not in the best interest of the 13,000 or so kids in Michigan's foster care system. House Minority Leader Tim Greimel, D-Auburn Hills, said he was "bitterly disappointed" by Snyder's decision to sign the bills into law. "I can't understand his action today as anything other than a betrayal of Michigan's diverse population," Greimel said. "Adoption agencies receive taxpayer dollars, and they shouldn't be allowed to discriminate against taxpayers who pay them."
Jonathan Oosting is a Capitol reporter for MLive Media Group. Email him, find him on Facebook or follow him on Twitter.In light of the fact that she recently spent 18 months in prison for drawing a caricature of the Iranian Parliament, Atena Farghadani could be forgiven for taking a bit of a professional break to savor her newfound freedom. Instead, she was back on Facebook earlier this month with a new cartoon taking aim at the state-run women’s university that expelled her after she was arrested.
The president of Alzahra University, where Farghadani was studying art, is Ensieh Khazali — the daughter of a hardline ayatollah who died last year. In the new caricature, Farghadani depicts Khazali as a Yoda-like gremlin with bird feet chained to a throne bearing her father’s likeness, suggesting that the university is constrained by the most repressive elements of Iran’s theocracy.
Farghadani was first arrested in August 2014 for her cartoon mocking members of Parliament as they debated a bill to ban voluntary sterilization procedures, such as vasectomies and tubal ligations, in an effort to reverse Iran’s falling birthrate. But even before her arrest, she was already well-known to the government for her fearless advocacy on behalf of political prisoners, Baha’i minorities, and the families of protesters killed after the country’s presidential election in 2009.
When Farghadani was released on bail while awaiting trial, she promptly uploaded a video to YouTube detailing abuses she suffered in prison including beatings, strip searches, and non-stop interrogations. She was rearrested in January 2015 and finally received the draconian sentence of 12 years and 9 months after a perfunctory jury-less trial in late May. Last year, she was honored with the 2015 Courage in Editorial Cartooning Award from CRNI. She was finally released this year after some charges were dismissed on appeal and the rest of her sentence was reduced to 18 months, which she had already served.
Also last year, Farghadani was additionally charged with “non-adultery illegitimate relations” for shaking her lawyer Mohammad Moghimi’s hand in prison. Contact between unrelated members of the opposite sex is technically illegal in Iran, but rarely prosecuted. Moghimi was also charged, and both parties could have received sentences of up to 99 lashes if convicted. Both were acquitted in January 2016, but in the course of the investigation Farghadani was involuntarily subjected to virginity and pregnancy tests. The specious virginity test is carried out by physically checking for the presence of a hymen, and is recognized by the World Health Organization as a form of sexual violence.
Mere minutes after her release last month, Farghadani sent a short video to the activist Facebook page My Stealthy Freedom, where Iranian women post pictures of themselves without hijab. Here is her brief but powerful message, according to the English subtitles on the video:
Some people think that art is not important, but the responsibility of an artist is to challenge authority and to be challenged. Sometimes the price for an artist is imprisonment, but do not forget that artists have responsibilities.
Farghadani’s fearless advocacy for human rights and freedom of expression is a continuing source of inspiration!
Help support CBLDF’s important First Amendment work in 2016 by visiting the Rewards Zone, making a donation, or becoming a member of CBLDF!
Contributing Editor Maren Williams is a reference librarian who enjoys free speech and rescue dogs.VOL. 129 | NO. 243 | Monday, December 15, 2014
Swedish furniture retailer Ikea will open its first Tennessee store in Memphis next year, according to several people familiar with the effort and confirmed by Ikea representatives Monday.
The company and Memphis Mayor A C Wharton Jr. will announce the store Tuesday, Dec. 16, according to several sources. A statement to the media Monday night read: "Ikea, the world's leading home furnishings retailer, will announce plans on Tuesday morning for a proposed Memphis store. The proposed Ikea Memphis would be the first Ikea store in either Tennessee, Arkansas or Mississippi and would increase the Swedish retailer's presence in the Southeastern U.S."
As The Daily News was first to report early Monday, two sources said Wharton will announce the Ikea news during an 11 a.m. press conference in the Hall of Mayors at City Hall.
The Swedish retailer has secretly been exploring Memphis for a new store, including a site near the Costco store at 2431 N. Germantown Parkway in Cordova.
Over the weekend Wharton began notifying City Council members and other officials about the pending announcement. Wharton did not go into specifics with the officials, saying only that he would be making a special announcement Tuesday, but multiple sources confirmed Ikea was the subject of the press conference.
Officials were busy Monday preparing the Hall of Mayors for the announcement. A section of the area was cordoned off by large black curtains and several pieces of the retailer’s home furnishings were visible.
Ikea stores are usually massive, ranging from around 300,000 square feet to over 500,000 square feet, a size usually associated with industrial warehouses and not retailers. Ikea stores usually have thousands of exclusively designed items and dozens of individual room settings to give shoppers a real-world idea of what they’ll be getting. Ikea stores also often include large restaurants and play rooms and care areas for children.
To man stores of those sizes, Ikea typically hires several hundred employees to staff each location, which would explain City Hall’s interest in the project. It is unclear if any incentives will be made available to Ikea. Memphis and Shelby County typically don’t offer incentives for retail projects but the number of jobs and capital investment involved in the Ikea deal could prompt action on that front.A woman has been sexually assaulted as she walked in a wooded area of Livingston.
The woman, in her 20s, was attacked sometime between 02:00 and 04:00 on Saturday, off the Loan Path between Sutherland Way and Waverley Crescent.
Her attacker was white, in his early 20s, 6ft tall, of slim build, with short dark brown hair.
He was wearing dark coloured jeans and a cream coloured top.
The woman was walking home alone when she was attacked.
It is possible that the suspect had also been in Grand Central nightclub and we want anyone who was in the nightclub, who thinks they saw him there, to get in touch immediately
Det Insp Derek Long, of Police Scotland, appealed for anyone with information about the attack to come forward.
He said: "The victim had been in the Grand Central nightclub, and on leaving made her way home via the path that runs near Camps Rigg and Raeburn Rigg, adjacent to the main Edinburgh to Glasgow railway line, and then parallel to Waverley Crescent.
"It was when she reached the stretch of walkway running between Waverley Crescent and Sutherland Way, known locally as the Loan Path, she was assaulted.
"As you can imagine the victim has been left in a state of shock and distress as a result of her ordeal, and we are appealing for any information that can help our inquiries.
"It is possible that the suspect had also been in Grand Central nightclub, and we want anyone who was in the nightclub, who thinks they saw him there, to get in touch immediately.
"We are also keen to speak to any local residents living near the scene who saw or heard anything suspicious in the early hours of this morning.
"We believe the victim had screamed during the assault, and we are keen to speak to residents, particularly those in Waverley Crescent, which is nearby, who may have information that can assist us."Trigger warning: ability/disability and exercise
The question about why thin people shouldn’t talk weight loss in front of fat people brought to mind something that happened recently at the office.
I work with an active group of people and we all enjoy discussing our preferred exercise methods. As a fat person, I am always happy enough to discuss exercise and food in non-weight loss contexts, since we all enjoy these things in the office and they don’t impact on me personally. Weight loss talk though? A different matter.
One thin colleague has been really hitting the gym hard lately, and since she clearly adores it, all good, a nice thing to chat about. But the other day another thin colleague started congratulating her on her weight loss, and commenting that her family must be so proud of her.
That’s when I spoke up and asked them not to discuss weight loss like that in front of me. Yeah I’d been having a bad day so was a bit grumpier than usual, and I am highly triggered by weight-loss talk due to certain background experiences, so I sounded pretty miffed. But it is hurtful to sit and listen to people talking right in front of you about what a wonderful thing it is not to resemble you, and how families should be prouder of you if you’re not fat like me. As many of us know, when that’s all you hear every day, the message starts to make its way into your head that somehow, you are not good enough and this other person is morally superior because she can spend three hours a day at the gym and is thin and getting thinner.
Of course, this was the response I got - and I’ve heard it so many times that if I got a dollar for each time I wouldn’t have a mortgage by now:
‘Oh but it’s hard for you, you’ve got a disability!’
Yes I am disabled, I have a condition that limits my mobility. I can’t do a lot of common, visible forms of exercise such as running, doing gym classes, playing sports etc. But I am relatively able-privileged and can exercise in specific ways, and I do, because I enjoy it. And I talk about my active hobbies in the office, as we all do - so this person knows I exercise regularly.
This is painful as hell. So many thoughts pop into my head. She assumes my exercise habits are somehow related to my weight? Somehow my own exercise doesn’t count because I am not capable of doing three back-to-back gym classes? She assumes because I’m fat that I’ve been somehow lying about my exercise habits? Somehow my disability means I’m socially exempt from blame about being fat? (Pow! SO much painful stuff in that one.) Because I’m disabled and fat, somehow I am not allowed to feel annoyed at hearing thin people talk about how bad it would be to get fat?
As it happens - not that it’s anybody’s business but mine - my disability is unrelated to my fatness. But it certainly gets brought up by others as an excuse when I ask people to respect my boundaries and not discuss weight-loss in front of me. People act extremely surprised when I request an office space that is safe and free of weight-loss talk, because it’s 'about them, not me’, and I’m supposed to sit quietly beside my cane, which is somehow proof that I’m not some sort of 'bad fatty’, and stay out of it.
Anyway, they did eventually apologise for the conversation, which was nice. Two hours later, they had the same conversation again. Now I just get up and limp out of the room whenever it happens.A deep voice cleared its throat behind Jocelyne, making her jump.
“Facebook? During work hours?” Mark’s voice boomed from over her shoulder. “Again?”
Jocelyne rolled her eyes, stifling a giggle. I should really offer him some acting lessons…
“That’s it.” He continued, drawing closer to her. “I think I’m gonna have to dock your pay for this one.” Mark winked at her, letting his stern mask finally fade.
“So slave labor, essentially?” She laughed. Her pay was already so pitiful that some days, her job felt almost like indentured servitude. “Do I look like a House Elf to you?”
Mark chuckled heartily. “I take it you’ve been enjoying your latest reading material.”
Jocelyne nodded. She’d been flying through the books, and was already in the heart of Goblet of Fire. It was so fun to re-visit the series again after so many years — especially in the original English. “I’ll probably be bugging you for the next one by this weekend.”
Her boss opened his mouth to reply, but was interrupted by the soft creaking of a door opening across the room.
“Knock knock?” Elliot crossed the threshold, lingering uncertainly near the doorway.
Jocelyne felt her heart flutter at the sight of his handsome face. “Elliot!” She called happily. “You’re early!”
He smiled softly at her. “Yeah, sorry about that… I figured you’d be working the front desk, so I’d just hang out there, but…” Elliot hesitated, his eyes flicking toward Mark. “It’s cool if I’m back here, right?”
“Of course!” The older man smiled. “And actually…” Mark glanced down at his watch. “Why don’t you leave a few minutes early?” He offered Jocelyne.
“Really?”
“Sure. You got all your filing done already – Thanks, by the way.” He added quickly. “So I don’t see why not.” Mark’s smile widened. “I just wish I had a sock I could offer you…”
Her eyes lit up. “Jocelyne is a free elf!” The young girl doubled over in laughter. Beside her, Mark did the same.
Elliot shook his head, the amusement apparent on his face. “You guys are so damn weird.”
“And proud of it!” Jocelyne teased, her laughter finally dying away. “Thanks, Mark. You’re the best, seriously.”
“Have fun, you two.” He gave them each a small nod before retreating back to his office and closing the door behind him.
Jocelyne turned her attention back to Elliot. “Ready to go?” She leaned forward and planted a soft kiss on his cheek.
He nodded. “Y’know… Your boss is actually pretty cool, for an old dude.” Elliot admitted as they headed out into the main library area.
“Oh come on, he’s not that old!” She laughed. Okay, maybe a little old… Jocelyne added mentally. But who cares? “So where are you taking me tonight?”
“It’s this awesome new restaurant Greg won’t shut up about.” Elliot beamed at her. “I thought it might be kinda fun to check it out.”
“With you there? More than kinda.” Jocelyne winked at him and took him by the arm as they headed out into the soft evening light together.
———————————————————————–
“This was such a great idea… This place is amazing!” Jocelyne gushed as she stood with Elliot under the moonlight. Her stomach and heart were both so full as she looked into his sparkling eyes.
Elliot smiled crookedly at her. “Just like you.” He leaned forward then, and pressed his lips to hers.
Jocelyne closed her eyes, smiling against his kiss. Today would mark one month since Elliot had asked her out on their first date. Where had the time gone? He’s so perfect… How the heck did I get so lucky?
“You’re beautiful.” He whispered as he finally broke the kiss. His eyes locked with hers for several long moments before he finally spoke again. “Hey, wanna come back to my place? Watch a movie or something? Greg went home for the weekend, so we can have a little peace and quiet.”
Jocelyne’s heart fluttered in her chest. Back to his apartment? Alone? His roommate Greg had always been in the other room whenever she went over. A strange rush of excitement and fear coursed through her. Could this mean what I think it means?
She took a deep breath. “Okay.” Jocelyne replied at last. “Sounds great.”
————————————————————————–
“Alright, you’re sure the book is better?” Elliot teased as the movie continued to play on the TV in |
, spent most of his time with the video games he’d brought with him from his mother’s place. Sometimes, Walter said, Tyler would get inexplicably angry. Walter described Tyler sitting on the chair in the living room and shaking his fist. “I’d ask him why,” Walter said, “and he didn’t say nothing.” Tyler often wound up wandering the yard, going slowly in circles. On the morning of Nov. 17, 2012, Walter said Shelia cooked Tyler a breakfast of eggs and biscuits. Later, Walter left to get a jack to pull the transmission on the ’93 Ford. When he came back, Tyler was at the end of the gravel driveway, on the phone with the police. “I pulled in there asking what was going on,” Walter said. “He said he hurt Shelia. And I said, ‘What’d you do? Push her down or something?’ He didn’t say. He just said he hurt her.”
Calhoun County Sheriff Greg Pollan wasn’t sure what to make of the 16-year-old he processed into the jail on South Murphree Street in Pittsboro. Sheriff Greg Pollan Shelia Hughes had been found with a knife in her back and had to be taken by helicopter to a hospital in Tupelo. She survived, but had been gravely injured. Tyler was listed in jail documents as 5 feet 4 and 240 pounds. He would misspell his own name in two different court documents. The sheriff said he suspected Tyler might have been born with Down Syndrome. Inside the jail, Tyler would light up at the offer of a soda, but stayed mostly silent. “You’d ask him a question, and he wouldn’t say anything,” the sheriff recalled. “Every once in a while, he’d just say something like, ‘You got the wrong guy,’ and then clam up again.” Tyler struck the sheriff, more than anything else, as a child, and so he and one of his jailers, Steve Poindexter, initially put Tyler in the cell used for solitary confinement. “There’s always going to be a smart aleck and a bastard in the group that’s going to pick on the weak,” Poindexter said of the other inmates. Some 15,000 people live in Calhoun County, spread out over 600 square miles. There’s not a single four-lane road in the county, and its side roads almost all eventually turn from pavement to gravel to red clay. There’s some industry that remains — one town has a logging plant — but the economy survives on agriculture. Back in 1915, families from Tennessee settled in Vardaman — where Walter Haire lived and Tyler was arrested — and planted a crop of sweet potatoes. Today, Vardaman, “The Sweet Potato Capital of the World,” announces itself to those approaching it by car with a sign promising “a little taste of heaven.” A sign outside Vardaman, “The Sweet Potato Capital of the World,” invites visitors to experience “a little taste of heaven.” “We have no railroad, no major airport,” the sheriff said. “We’re a geographical oddity. We’re 60 miles from everywhere is what it seems like. If it wasn’t for the sweet potato industry, Calhoun County would be in one hell of mess.” Pollan had been a police officer for 25 years before being elected sheriff. He took over the job of sheriff in 2012, and in doing so became the 36th man to hold the position. Alfed M. Wilson was the first, in 1852. Thomas Jefferson Douglas served from 1880 to 1881, James “Treetop” Morgan from 1976 to 1983, and George Leslie Pollan, Greg’s father, from 1988 to 1991. The county, though sparsely populated, does have its share of trouble. Drugs, theft, the occasional killing. “Some of the best people in the world you would ever want to meet are in Calhoun County,” Pollan said. “But just like every other place in America, we have some of the crazies. We have the druggies. We have the murderers. We have the pedophiles. We have everything that everyone else has. Just not to the grandest scale.” Pollan keeps his cell phone number on the Calhoun County Sheriff’s website. People use it. County residents call the cell phone rather than dispatch, asking for him specifically: Someone’s son-in-law slapped her daughter, could the sheriff come out? He says he gets hundreds of texts and calls and emails every day. “There’s 10,000-to-1 that you’re not the hero, you don’t get to be the good guy,” Pollan said of his daily travails. “You don’t get to save the life. It’s locking up the meth heads, and destroying families, and locking up burglars. Now, I will say this: I love my job. I’ve got the greatest job in America. If they call me today and say, ‘We want to appoint you President of the United States,’ I can’t. I got the best job.” But there is one thing Pollan loathes about the job. “I hate the jail,” he said. “I hate dealing with the jail. And if you go speak to the other 79 sheriffs in the state, they’ll tell you the same.” There’s perhaps nothing the sheriffs hate more about their jails than the fact they’ve become psychiatric wards. Of course, it’s a cliché that the country’s jails and prisons have become filled with the mentally ill. But Mississippi’s jails are populated not just with the mentally ill who have been convicted or, like Tyler, accused of crimes. The state’s lack of mental health options has meant that when a judge deems a person a danger to themselves or others, they are often sent to wait in the local jail until a bed opens up at a hospital. “I’ve had as many as six of them in here at one time,” Pollan said. Steve Rushing, sheriff in Lincoln County, said, “I’ll say it because I’m the sheriff and I have no problem saying it: jail is not where the mentally ill need to be. They need to be in a facility getting treatment.” Randy Tolar, the Prentiss County sheriff, agreed. “We’re just a small rural county that’s really not equipped to deal with and accommodate folks with mental health issues,” Tolar said. “We’re in limbo because we’re at the mercy of the courts.” Of the people who wind up in his jail simply for want of a hospital bed, he said, “We’re maybe in the dark ages here, and we need some other alternative.” At the Calhoun County jail in Pittsboro, Pollan has no medical staff. When a medical crisis arises, jail personnel typically transport inmates to the local hospital. Sometimes, in a pinch, Pollan turns to his wife — a nurse —or to a good friend who is a local doctor. He said he requires the chancery court commitments—those who have been involuntarily committed to a mental institution and are held in jail until a bed becomes available — to come in with their medicines. Pollan and his staff said they were at a loss for what to do for Tyler as weeks turned into months. They all felt he needed treatment. And they all knew they could not offer it, and were in over their heads. “I’m not set up for this,” the sheriff said. “This is not a mental hospital. This is not a mental ward. We don’t provide health care in that form and fashion.” The sheriff and his deputies refilled some of Tyler’s drug prescriptions at the start, but that modest solution didn’t last. Pollan said they also worried about over-medicating him. “We had to make sure that he was lucid at all times,” Pollan said, “in case a proceeding came up.” Such a proceeding, the fading hope was, might lead to Tyler being sent to Whitfield. There are only 15 designated beds for pretrial evaluations of criminal defendants at the state’s psychiatric hospital in Whitfield, Mississippi. Mississippi’s first lunatic asylum, as it was then called, officially opened in 1855. Eighty years later, the Mississippi State Hospital at Whitfield replaced it, opening on a 350-acre site 15 miles outside of Jackson, the state capital. The facility was considered state-of-the-art for its time and constructed to give the patients a sense of community. The buildings are red brick with white trim and columns, like a college campus. In the early years, there were acres of farmland to grow produce and keep livestock. The hospital’s staff lived on the campus, with many going to Jackson only once a month — on payday. The hospital hosted Halloween dances for the patients and their families. Walk or drive around Whitfield today, and its age shows. There’s peeling paint everywhere. Entire buildings have been closed off. While there are fireworks shows and an annual art show featuring work by patients, there’s much more that has disappeared: beds, programs, doctors. The erosion of money and services at Whitfield had implications for the unit Tyler was supposed to be evaluated in. Building 43 at Whitfield — which houses the forensic unit — had since the 1980s been certified to hold a maximum of just 35 patients. Of those 35 beds, 15 are reserved for defendants awaiting trial. Reb McMichael has run the forensic unit at Whitfield since 1990. A native son, McMichael has been at the hospital since 1985. He has degrees from Yale, Harvard and the University of Mississippi, and is well thought of in the state. His qualifications, though, mean little when set against his circumstances — 15 beds and scores of troubled inmates in jails across the state awaiting psychiatric evaluations. Records show the unit takes on two to three new defendants a month. At a panel discussion at Mississippi College School of Law several years ago, McMichael spoke bluntly about the obstacles he faces to reducing the backlog. Obtaining the requisite medical records took way too long, he said. And so, he said, a daily exercise in futility ensues: Whitfield gets asked when it is going to admit an inmate, and it responds by asking defense lawyers when the hospital is going to get the relevant medical records. “It’s endless,” McMichael said. Of the circumstances at Building 43, McMichael said: “There are too many rows and not enough mules.”
Walter Haire’s current home. He never visited Tyler after his arrest, but he says he did have friends of his give the boy a beating in the jail.
Micky Rodgers has led the Calhoun County jail’s “paper chase crew” for over a decade. Rodgers — a friend of the sheriff since they were kids, possessed of only one leg after a farming accident 20 years ago — takes a half-dozen inmates out to one county road or another, and has them pick up trash. Steve Poindexter The crew — up and out before dawn — is usually made up of non-violent offenders, men in jail for failing to pay a fine or something similar. But in the spring of 2014, the jail staff thought Tyler would be a good candidate for paper chase duty. They were curious to see how he’d function outside the jail’s walls. Tyler’s membership in the crew ended after one of his very first shifts outside. On April 15, 2014, with the temperature in the low 40s, the crew was working a state highway in Calhoun City, a few miles away from the jail. Micky Rodgers suddenly realized he was an inmate short — Tyler. All that was left was a pile of his clothes, including his underwear. It didn’t take long to find Tyler naked in the nearby woods. He was likely pretty cold. He was definitely furious, according to Steve Poindexter, one of the jail staff. When Poindexter asked what, exactly, Tyler had planned to do, Tyler said he was going to live off the land eating berries. “He’d watched one too many TV shows,” Poindexter said. Tyler had been in the Calhoun County jail for 17 months. He had turned 18. His lawyer saw him only occasionally. Television occupied and calmed him. Occasionally, Tyler would tell the jailers that voices had spoken to him, telling him what to watch, such as reruns of “Mr. Ed,” the old comedy with the talking horse. The jail staff once briefly grew concerned when Tyler acted out moves he’d just seen on a professional wrestling show. Staff checked to make sure he wasn’t suicidal and trying to harm himself. Raudreikus Penson was locked up with Tyler in Pittsboro. He was barely a year older than Tyler and spent time with Tyler in the jail’s lockdown zone every once in a while. Tyler would sit in front of the television, holding his feet and rocking back and forth, Penson said. No one had any real idea when Tyler might be evaluated. Tyler’s case would appear on the court calendar every couple of months, but then be adjourned again. In January 2014, officials at the state hospital in Whitfield sent word it would be just a matter of weeks before a bed opened up. No bed ever did. Bridgett came to see Tyler when she could, at least for a while. The jail in Pittsboro was a roughly two-hour drive from her place in Fayette, Alabama. The $35 or so for gas was serious money for Bridgett. But she was worried for her son, and during the drives she could replay the occasional good times they’d had. Sometimes Tyler had wanted to treat his mother to something. Once, at 15, he’d found a plastic purple diamond at a thrift store the size of his palm. He presented it to Bridgett, acting like he’d given her the world. If he was in a good mood, he’d emerge from his room and cook the 99-cent Hamburger Helper box Bridgett picked up at Wal-Mart and the five-slice, $1 loaf of garlic bread from the Dollar Tree. Free Willy was his favorite movie. But the drives were long enough that Bridgett would also be haunted by the knowledge of the flip side of life with him at home. Bridgett, Tyler and Tyler’s two siblings had never been able to sustain their efforts at something simple like “family game night.” They tried, but Tyler always ended up throwing the pieces and the board across the room and storming off. Some days he’d just scream, “I hate you.” Other days getting Tyler to shower was a fight. He’d once set fire to a toy he’d been given, aimed at taunting his younger brother, who had complained about not getting one as well. Everyone stopped celebrating Tyler’s birthday after he turned 10. Tyler had slashed the tires and seat of a bicycle he’d been given. Bridgett was at Tyler’s arraignment on April 15, 2013, just looking to give her son a hug, which she did. Tyler in recent years had eaten badly and almost non-stop — Cool Ranch Doritos and Cheetos and Cookies ’n’ Creme Hershey’s bars. He ate Ramen noodles—any flavor—and pizza, cheese or meat lovers, everything but anchovies. After just five months in jail, Bridgett was startled at how much weight he’d lost. “He’s gonna dry up and blow away,” she wrote on Facebook the night of his arraignment. “He looks really bony and hump back.” When Tyler was weighed upon his readmission to the jail after his failed escape, he was even slighter — 150 pounds, down 90. At the jail, visits involved talking to Tyler through a plexiglass barrier. They could not touch. The visits could be emotionally hard to endure for Bridgett. Tyler talked through clenched teeth. He cursed. When Bridgett tried to ask him what he wanted or needed, he said, “I’m not picky. I don’t care.” On one of her early visits, Tyler talked to Bridgett about what had happened that day with Shelia. “He said, ‘I always wondered what it would be like to stab somebody, and then he cried and he said, ‘I didn’t like it,’” she said. “But he also says that he don’t remember what happened, that he remembers being outside the house, and thinking something was wrong with Shelia, and he went back in and sees her on the floor bleeding and convulsing, and so he calls 911. “ “So I don’t know if he knows what he did — if he knew what he was doing, or if he did black out. I don’t know. I don’t know and will never know. There’s no way to know.”
“Some of the best people in the world you would ever want to meet are in Calhoun County,” said Sheriff Greg Pollan. “But just like every other place in America, we have some of the crazies.”
Tyler was never allowed out on a work detail after his failed escape. The sheriff and his staff kept him housed among minor offenders in what was known as the jail’s Zone 13. A logging plant in Bruce, Mississippi — one of the rare remaining examples of industry in Calhoun County. In all, the jail has 60 beds, and on average, there are roughly 50 inmates in the jail at any given moment. There’s one concrete cell by itself with a window for the jailer to watch through all the time. As often as not, it functions as a drunk tank. But inmates can be put there when they need to be isolated or there is fear they might harm themselves. That’s why the inmates nicknamed it “The Hole.” In his first months, Tyler had been moved from cell to cell in the jail before everyone agreed Zone 13 was where he needed to be. Zone 13 is a dormitory setup, with 10 beds on one floor and 10 more a floor above. It has two showers, a bathroom, a microwave, a telephone and a TV. The lights go out at 10 p.m. and are back on at 5 a.m. “Being young, and I don’t know how you say it, looking the way he looks, other inmates would pick on him a lot,” the sheriff said. “And then there were some inmates back there that took up for him. He was kind of like their pet.” When Tyler’s mother could no longer put money in his commissary account, the jail staff took turns making $25 installments. Tyler would buy candy bars, Fritos, macaroni and cheese, soda. It was sweet relief from the daily breakfast of undercooked grits and tofu sausage. But because his bunkmates were out most days on work detail, Tyler spent from 6:30 a.m. to 4 p.m. by himself. He turned to the staff for company. Steve Poindexter was usually happy to spend 10 minutes with him. Tyler wanted to know what Poindexter had done the night before, or he’d want to break down a favorite Saturday Night Live episode. But Tyler had a special fondness for Pollan. Whenever the sheriff would head from his adjoining office to the jail itself, Tyler would give him a huge hug. Tyler, who had struggled with basic reading over the years, would ask the sheriff to loan him some comic books. The waiting got to the both of them. Tyler, in his low moments, would ask to be put in “The Hole.” He’d sleep for a day or two, and then head back to Zone 13. There was never any information, no movement, no nothing. Pollan wanted Tyler out of Calhoun County jail, for both their sakes. He saw his staff baby Tyler, while also watching him vigilantly. No matter how good Tyler could be, he’d stuck a 10-inch knife in his father’s girlfriend’s back. He was an unknown. Pollan, though, said he didn’t just want to be rid of Tyler. Pollan wanted Tyler in a state facility —a mental health center where he could get treatment, because the need for that “was evident to anyone.” County court was in session six to eight times a year in Pittsboro. Tyler’s case always appeared on the docket. And virtually every court term, Pollan met with Tyler’s lawyer, the local prosecutor and Judge Andy Howorth, the senior judge in the county. The three met in a conference room off the judge’s chambers. “What are we going to do about Tyler?” they asked. Then, as often as not, they’d look at each other, depart, and hope for the best. Pollan said he would call Whitfield and be told Tyler was still on the wait list. Other times, he was kicked to voicemail, where he left messages that were never returned. Pollan said he didn’t understand how the wait list worked, and the calls only added to the confusion. Tyler was third on the list in December of 2015, and then 10th five months later. Pollan guessed it was possible the list was prioritized by the severity of the inmate’s mental health issues. “I never figured that out,” Pollan said. “I don’t know how anyone could move him down the list, when they don’t know what his problem was, what his disease was, what his reaction was, what he was doing in the jail, all these monsters and aliens that he was seeing, all these mood swings that he was having. I never understood how they could make that assessment without knowing the true facts.” For Tyler and the sheriff, everything remained stuck in neutral as month after month passed without the evaluation being done. “You can’t go forward,” Pollan said. “You can’t go around it. You can’t go over it. You can’t go under it. You just have to wait. And then the wait got to be too long.” Mississippi law requires that a criminal defendant be brought to trial within 270 days of arraignment unless a “good cause” excuse is shown. Over and over again, judges accepted forensic evaluation delays as a “good cause” for not meeting the 270-day requirement. In December 2015, three years into Tyler’s incarceration, the Mississippi Supreme Court ruled on the case of a man convicted of aggravated assault whose pretrial delay was 1,099 days. In that case, Rowsey v. Mississippi, the court found much of the delay was a result of “the substantial amount of time it took to schedule a mental evaluation,” and accepted that as a “good cause” for why the trial didn’t happen sooner. Tyler’s lawyer was the local public defender, Kevin Howe. Howe grew up in Calhoun County, leaving only to attend college and law school at The University of Mississippi. He started in the public defender’s office as soon as he entered private practice, and he’s been in the top job for more than a decade. Howe’s office in Calhoun City has an irreverent shingle: “Kevin L. Howe, Counselor at Law, Sufficiently Educated and Licensed.” Tyler’s lawyer was the local public defender, Kevin Howe. He said he did what he could for Tyler during his nearly 48 months in jail. Bridgett Haire called Howe “the biggest joke I’ve ever seen.” Howe said it was not hard pulling together Tyler’s medical records, and that he sent off copies of them more than once to officials at Whitfield. He said he had no control over Tyler’s care while in jail. At one point, more than three years into Tyler’s stay in jail in Pittsboro, Howe subpoenaed Philip Gaines, an administrator at Whitfield who deals with the wait list, to appear in court in Pittsboro. Gaines never appeared. Bridgett said Howe had impressed her as a nice man at first, but that she had grown frustrated with his inability to get Tyler evaluated. She said Howe wound up telling her to stop bothering him and to quit telling him how to “do my goddamn job.” “Kevin Howe was the biggest joke I’ve ever seen,” Bridgett said recently. “He cussed me out one night because I told him he wasn’t doing his job. I mean, literally cussed me out.” Howe denied ever swearing at Bridgett, but conceded he told her he “was not going to continue to listen to her blaming me.” He also told her she could call Whitfield herself if she wanted. Phone calls and emails come in to Building 43 at Whitfield all the time. From lawyers, sheriffs, family members of inmates. They all ask the same thing, with varying degrees of frustration and desperation: When’s a bed opening up? Occasionally, judges handling the cases of inmates awaiting forensic evaluations get involved. Some even fax court orders demanding progress. The administrator, records show, responds courteously, but rarely with great optimism. The number of beds is limited. There is little more to be done but wait. Officials at Whitfield even developed a form letter saying as much. “We regret to inform the Court that, despite our strong desire and efforts to promptly comply with the orders of this and all the Circuit Courts for the admission of patients without delay, Mississippi’s limited resources make such virtually impossible.”
By early spring of 2016, Tyler had been in the Pittsboro jail for more than 1,200 days. His contemporaries had graduated from high school and either gone on to jobs or college. His mother Bridgett had undergone two surgeries and moved out of the house the family had once lived in. His older sister had had her second child. The television show The Walking Dead, a favorite, had aired three more seasons. The short list of people who had come to visit him — his older sister and little brother — had shrunk to zero. Building 43, the forensic unit at the state hospital. “We should be ashamed as a society for what happens at the forensic unit,” said Jay Hughes, a state representative. Bridgett had had one sweet visit when Tyler marked his third birthday behind bars. She’d forsaken Thanksgiving with her other children to drive to see Tyler on Nov. 27, 2014. Steve Poindexter had broken with protocol and opened the jail door so mother and son could interact. Bridgett threw her arms around Tyler. But with money ever tighter and her son’s stay in jail enduring, Bridgett eventually quit coming. She feared she bored her son. She knew he harbored suspicions she was somehow behind his long jailing. And she was unnerved by what seemed to be his deteriorating condition. During one of her final visits, Tyler had mostly spoken gibberish, insisting to her that he was in fact speaking fluent Russian. Wanda, Bridgett’s mother, said Bridgett was visibly shaken when she arrived at Wanda’s home 90 minutes later. Pollan and his staff understood all along that jail was a miserable place for a teen to be. “I mean, he grew up in here,” Poindexter said of Tyler. “Those years he needed to be out on the street learning stuff.” In the spring of 2016, there was at last some movement on Tyler’s case. A local mental health official had learned of his long wait, and word then made it to the most senior ranks of the state Department of Mental Health. An idea was floated to pay for a private evaluator to do a first assessment of Tyler. The discussions then gained momentum when, on April 11, 2016, the Clarion-Ledger newspaper published a story about Tyler’s case. The article prompted the state attorney general to call officials at Whitfield for an explanation. Over the next six months Tyler would be given a preliminary exam at Whitfield, a private exam and a full evaluation back at Whitfield during a month-long stay in September of 2016. Forensic evaluations in Mississippi are broken into two parts — exams meant to determine sanity and competency. The question of sanity involves a person’s state of mind at the time of the alleged crime. If the defendant didn’t understand right from wrong at the time of the crime or if they were delusional enough to think they were acting in self-defense or perhaps thought that instead of shooting a family member with a gun, they were shooting an alien with laser, they would not be considered sane at the time of the crime. The issue of competency deals with whether a defendant can comprehend what’s going on in the present moment. Do they understand the charges they are facing? Do they know the role of the judge, the defense lawyer, the prosecutor? Can they help their attorney? If a defendant is found incompetent, they are sent off to the state hospital for what is known as competency restoration. Such “restoration” can involve medication, therapy or education. Severe mental illness, developmental disability or a low IQ can affect one’s competency. If the restoration doesn’t work, then a defendant is deemed non-restorable and subsequently committed back to a hospital. If there is a bed, of course. Otherwise, they remain in jail. David Lee Willis waited in jail for an evaluation from February 2013 to June 2014 before being declared legally incompetent. A judge ordered him committed to a state institution, but, because there wasn’t a bed available, he went back to the Prentiss County Jail — for another 1,238 days. Louis Masur III, a private clinical psychologist, saw Tyler on Aug. 16, 2016. Christopher Holland, one of the jail staff, drove Tyler to the examination. Holland had befriended Tyler over the months. He’d watched him pace the jail at 2 a.m., and while he suspected Tyler could barely read, he had given him a bible after Tyler had asked for one. “He would tell me it calmed him,” Holland said. Tyler had told Holland the jailer lifted his spirits, and he’d given Holland a nickname, “Sunshine.” On the drive to see Masur at his office outside Tupelo, Holland said Tyler confessed to being afraid. Holland said he reassured him, and promised a stop at McDonald’s on the way back to jail. An hour into the exam, Tyler emerged from the office, saying he needed to see Holland. Tyler, Holland said, was sweating profusely. “What have you done?” Holland asked him. Tyler told him he’d been asked during the exam to add two plus one, and was unable to. His frustration left him in tears. “I said, ‘Tyler, just do what you can,’” Holland recalled. Masur’s eventual report notes that Tyler was cooperative throughout the exam. Asked about the worry among jail staff that he could appear suicidal, Tyler brushed it off as a misunderstanding. He said he occasionally acted out moves he’d seen on TV wrestling shows — diving off his jail bunk, for instance. Tyler denied experiencing hallucinations. He said if he had heard voices, he’d ignored them because they amounted to “negative energy.” He said his accounts to jail staff of seeing “green people” had been invented to get people to leave him alone. Tyler told Masur jail had been “therapeutic for me.” Shelia Hughes was taken to a hospital in Tupelo, Mississippi, by helicopter after she was stabbed. She lost part of her colon and suffered a mental breakdown in the aftermath. Masur found Tyler’s history consistent with ADHD, which includes difficulty controlling impulsive behavior. Masur also said Tyler suffered from autism spectrum disorder level 2, a condition marked by restricted communication skills and requiring substantial support. “I do not believe that Mr. Haire has insight into his problems,” Masur wrote. “I doubt that he believes he has any problems.” Masur ultimately found Tyler competent and concluded that he had been sane at the time of the attack on Shelia Hughes. But his report cautioned that Tyler’s difficulties “would have substantial impact in all matters before the court.” ”Mr. Haire’s alleged criminal activities are not the inevitable result of his psychological problems, but they are completely consistent with those problems,” Masur wrote about Tyler. “At the time of the alleged crime, consistent with his history, he probably had a diminished capacity to conform his conduct to the requirements of the law just as he has never had the skills to live adaptively without support. His youth at the time of the alleged crime should, in my opinion, be considered as [a] mitigating factor. This young man has spent a substantial proportion of his life in jail awaiting trial.” “In fact, the psychological evidence acquired suggests that he has become quite dependent upon institutional care, and his ‘institutionalization’ also impacts the judicial process,” Masur wrote. Masur recommended a group home or involuntary civil commitment if Tyler were not imprisoned. A month later, Tyler was taken to Whitfield, where officials say he was evaluated over 32 days in Building 43 and where he received lessons on the workings of the court. The inmates in Building 43 live inside metal-barred cells on either side of a fluorescent-lit hallway. The cell doors are locked with room to slide food underneath. Each cell is secured by an individual padlock. Photos taken by staff show paint peeling throughout the building, mold on the windows in the visitor’s lobby and water damage to a cafeteria ceiling. The building for years has outraged legislators and advocates. “We should be ashamed as a society for what happens at the forensic unit,” said Jay Hughes, a state representative. “First and foremost you’re locking them in cells that are 100 years old, no fire protection system, no sprinkler system, walls of stone and floors of stone, and a no centralized locking. It is a gauntlet. Little rooms probably six by nine. The only opening into the room is the door which is your classic iron jail door. Steel bars. Then they have hatches you just put a padlock through. That’s it. It’s archaic and pitiful.” Reynolds Walker, who spent four months in one of the unit’s cells, said those in Building 43 often stayed inside for days on end because there was not enough staff to supervise their occasional walks in an asphalt courtyard. “Some days we were in our cells for two days in a row, staring at the wall,” he said. “You literally stare at the wall and twiddle your thumbs.” Tyler’s grandparents were the only people to visit him at Building 43. Wanda, his grandmother, said he seemed fine for the first 30 minutes, but then started talking incoherently. He stared out a window saying he could see fireworks going off hundreds of miles away. On Oct. 10, 2016, officials at Whitfield issued a three-page report on Tyler. The report said staff at Building 43 had met with Tyler on a weekly basis. He had attended “group competence restoration sessions.” He underwent 90 minutes of testing, and was spoken to by staff for 45 minutes more on the day the report was issued. The report declared both that Tyler had been sane at the time of the stabbing four years earlier and that he was competent to stand trial. The report acknowledged Tyler’s long history of psychiatric diagnoses and treatment, but found that he had a rational as well as “factual” understanding of the proceedings against him. He could describe the basics of a plea bargain. He understood the concept of guilt or innocence. It noted he had been prescribed a variety of psychotropic medications during his childhood, but said none had ever been effective. The report also noted Tyler’s account of the stabbing. Tyler said he had stabbed Shelia in self-defense. She had become angry at him over his request for Kool-Aid, he said, and threatened him with a knife. He took it from her and stabbed her accidentally. He’d told Masur the same thing. The report does not include an opinion of the account’s truthfulness. “Mr. Haire will be returned to the custody of the Sheriff of Calhoun County to await further legal proceedings,” the report said in closing. “If we may be of any further assistance in this matter, please do not hesitate to call upon us.” Christopher Holland, the jail guard Tyler liked to call Sunshine, was floored when word came back that Tyler had been found competent. “No, they missed it,” Holland remembers saying to himself. “They missed it.”
Reb McMichael, head of the forensic unit at the state hospital in Whitfield, said his unit is understaffed. “Too many rows, and not enough mules,” he said.
It had taken Mississippi authorities nearly 48 months to give Tyler a mental health evaluation. It took mere hours for the authorities to gain his conviction. Kevin Howe, Tyler’s lawyer, said he lacked the expertise to challenge the state’s finding that Tyler was competent to stand trial. Three days after Whitfield officials filed their report, Tyler was in court before a judge. But the judge was not Andy Howorth, the senior judge who had been in all those meetings with Pollan, the prosecutor and Tyler’s lawyer. Judge Kelly Luther would decide what to do about Tyler. Luther had never touched Tyler’s case, and conceded he knew nothing about him. But he’d caught the case that day, and his job was to conduct what the law required: a hearing on the state’s determination that Tyler was competent. It went quickly, if not without some confusion. Kevin Howe, Tyler’s lawyer, accepted without challenge the state’s conclusion not only that Tyler was competent to understand the proceedings against him, but that he had been sane when he had stuck a knife in his father’s girlfriend’s back. There was no expert testimony or witnesses. Masur was not called. His misgivings about the role Tyler’s mental health might have played in the crime were not discussed, nor was his suggestion that a civil commitment might be in order instead of prison. Howe did not mention Tyler’s repeated claim during his evaluations that he had acted in self-defense. Tyler and his lawyer had decided to have him plead guilty to a crime that, by statute, carried a maximum of 20 years in state prison. Prosecutors had agreed to cut the sentence to seven years, crediting Tyler with the years he’d spent in jail. Papers had been prepared. Tyler had signed his by printing his name. Luther asked Tyler if he understood the charges against him. “Yes, sir,” Tyler said. He was asked if he had committed the crime. “No, sir,” Tyler said. “You didn’t stab her with a butcher knife?” the judge asked. “Not willingly, self-defense,” Tyler said. Kevin Howe jumped in. This self-defense argument was new, he said. “I just want the shortest way out of jail,” Tyler told the judge. “That sounds like the best way.” After a brief adjournment, the hearing resumed. He would not admit guilt, but take a plea deal because he was aware he could well be convicted at trial. The deal was a version of what is known as an Alford plea, under which the defendant pleads guilty while professing innocence. The judge took care to tell Tyler he knew nothing about the case against him. He didn’t know if it was a strong case or a weak case. He said he was relying on the defense lawyer and prosecutor to work out what was best. Tyler acknowledged he understood all that. He said, “Yes,” when asked if he realized that his guilty plea could have serious implications if he got in trouble again. “Do you have |
will focus on Zen, some fans of the Dude have already found religion: Dudeism. From a website dedicated to the ideas and teachings of the character created by the Coen brothers: "Life is short and complicated and nobody knows what to do about it. So don’t do anything about it. Just take it easy, man. Stop worrying so much whether you’ll make it into the finals. Kick back with some friends and some oat soda and whether you roll strikes or gutters, do your best to be true to yourself and others -- that is to say, abide." The site claims 100,000 ordained Dudeist priests worldwide.
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-- Carolyn kellogg
Photo: Jeff Bridges, right, with John Goodman in "The Big Lebowski." Credit: Gramercy Pictures.Motherboard makers introduced the first Mini-STX motherboards at CES last week. We saw Intel launch the platform, previously known as the 5x5 form factor, in August last year. Now both ASRock and ECS have readied Mini-STX motherboards which support your choice of LGA 1151 CPU; from humble Celeron, to Pentium, Core i3, Core i5, or even a Core i7 processor.
As it says in the subheading of this report, these Mini-STX motherboards are the smallest Intel motherboards to support upgradeable CPU choices. This form factor was originally dubbed the 5x5 by Intel as those are the approximate area dimensions of the boards in inches (similar to the size of an Intel NUC). Both the ASRock H110M-STX and ECS H110SU-02 use the Intel H110 chipset. They allow buyers to fit their own choice of sixth generation processor up to 65W TDP.
ASRock claims its example is unique in supporting standard desktop CPU fans. I've embedded the spec list graphic for the ASRock H110M-STX above. As you can see, beyond the processor choice options you can customise your storage thanks to the 2x SATA 3 and an M.2 SSD slot, and you can configure your RAM with the 2x DDR4 2133MHz SODIMM slots available. The motherboard features 3x USB 3.0 ports and a single USB 3.0 Type-C connector.
ASRock has developed its product further and built a barebone system around it called the ASRock H110M-STX MINI PC. This PC, pictured above left, measures 1.92 litres (155 x 155 x 80mm). ASRock hasn't given any indications about pricing and availability. Intel had originally touted the 5x5 as being capable of "sub 1 litre system volume," so ASRock has nearly doubled that size.
Looking at the ECS H110SU-02, it is basically the same spec as the above described ASRock motherboard. I note that it lacks the VGA connector offered by ASRock and has one less SATA 3 port. However according to Maximum PC it is simply "an engineering sample" at this time.
If you are interested in the Mini-STX form factor, there was another product at CES last week that might appeal. Silverstone was showing off a 'proof of concept' chassis, as highlighted by Tom's Hardware. However the chassis didn't even have a name yet, never mind price or availability date.Johannesburg - The Hawks have warned in a hard-hitting statement against Finance Minister Pravin Gordhan that the directorate would "exercise its constitutional powers", that it would not give him preferential treatment, and that his actions had been "disturbing".
Read the full statement below:
The Directorate for Priority Crime Investigation (DPCI), commonly known as the Hawks, has noted with concerns the utterances by the Minister of Finance Mr Pravin Gordhan that he was not aware of the letter sent to him, detailing the 14th March 2016 at 16:00 as his deadline for answering questions sent to him.
The Hawks do not engage people on public space but the Minister has left us no choice but to clear the air, set the record straight and restore public’s trust on us as an elite crime fighting unit.
On 19 February 2016 the National Head of the Hawks Lieutenant General Mthandazo Ntlemeza sent a letter to Mr Pravin Gordhan. The letter contained questions which the Minister had to answer on or before 16:00 on 1 March 2016, so that we could continue with our investigations into the alleged rogue unit at SARS.
The minister received the letter, but instead of providing us with answers he sent us a written response via his legal representatives, Gildenhuys Malatji Attorneys.
In the letter the minister requested more time to answer questions, saying by the time he received the questions he was busy preparing the budget speech. The letter from his attorney was received by this office on 1 March 2016, approximately an hour before his 16:00 deadline.
In the letter from his attorney, the minister did not mention how much time he needed to answer the questions, and as a result another letter was written to his attorneys on 3 March 2016.03.15
The letter it was received, stamped and the acknowledgement of receipt was signed by one Josephine at the reception desk of Gildenhuys Malatji Attorneys at 08:40.
We find it very disturbing when the minister is adamant that he never saw a letter with 14 March 2016 as his SECOND deadline to answer questions.
This office also received a letter from his attorneys dated 07 March 2016, acknowledging the receipt of our letter with the 14 March as his new deadline. The letter also stated that the minister had left the country to the USA and the UK, saying the “imposed deadline of 14 March 2016 was not achievable and that the minister would be able to respond as soon as he returned from overseas”.
We would also like to mention that the minister, through the letter from his attorneys, questioned the authority of the National Head of the Hawks and was duly referred to the powers of the DPCI in Chapter 6A of the South African Police Service Act.
As for the minister suggesting that the Hawks had leaked the letters and should call a press conference and talk about the matter at hand, we would like to set the record straight as well, that had the minister, like any law-abiding citizen, complied with our letter and provided answers, we would not be where we are today.
This is neither a talk-show nor a soapie. We are mandated to investigate without fear, favour or prejudice and there is nowhere in the constitution wherein calling a press conference has been mentioned as another means of conducting investigations.
The minister, for whatever reasons, has failed to meet the SECOND deadline for answering questions and our legal team are forging a way forward which will see the Hawks exercising our constitutional powers.
The investigations will not be stalled by an individual who refuses to comply with the authorities and demand a preferential treatment.
No further comments will be made on this matter.LOADING...
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I, like you, enjoy breathing air, bipedal motion, having skin, and playing video games. Being a human requires a great deal of input and may result in circuit fatigue. For this, I recommend video games. Playing video games may heighten cardiac undulation, dilate optical sensors, and result in diaphoresis. These symptoms suggest a human like myself is feeling...Happiness. Video games result in happiness. Thus, fellow humans, prepare to download the Fellow Humans Sale. This is not a malfunction. Do not attempt to adjust your process servo. You too can feel happiness by saving the city, enacting your free will, and totally not being a robot.Please note: humanity is terrifying. Do not be afraid. You are simply reacting to your human programming. There will soon be a patch to correct this behavior. Please check your model number to learn when this patch will arrive.>>Sale does not require reboot and will shut down at 1475859600.*>>*[Friday at 10:00 AM PDT]Even if the world's policymakers all agree to dramatically reduce atmospheric carbon dioxide (CO2) emissions, and everything were in place by the middle of the century, the world still could not meet the goals of the climate change meetings in Copenhagen, Dec. 8-18, of reducing CO2 in the atmosphere to 350 parts per million (ppm), say Cornell researchers.
If everyone were on board, maybe we could contain CO2 in the atmosphere to about 400 ppm by 2050, said Cornell climate expert Charles Greene, who has published numerous papers on climate change and global ocean ecosystems.
There is already too much carbon dioxide in the atmosphere, the world is just too dependent on fossil fuels and such obstacles as the United States' poor climate record and skyrocketing emissions from India and China make lower levels unrealistic, he said.
David Wolfe, a Cornell ecologist who studies the potential impacts of climate change on plants, soils and ecosystems, agreed, adding that "the 550 target is more realistic, where we replace fossil fuels with alternative energies in a number of decades." Wolfe likens reducing CO2 levels to reversing the direction of a cruise ship. "At 3 degrees Celsius warming [roughly what 550 ppm of CO2 would yield], we would have some chance to adapt, but if we allow emissions and temperatures to go higher than this, the impacts could be catastrophic and beyond our capacity to adapt."
Most people do not find the 350 goal realistic, he said. Even if all CO2 emissions were to stop today, the gas already in the atmosphere would stay there for another century or two, maintaining warmth. But activists need to set firm goals.
"It's the best political strategy," Wolfe said of the 350 ppm goal. "If we allow slack, it will never happen."
But Greene says that reaching 350 ppm is not a matter of choice but a necessity, requiring diverse strategies that go beyond simply reducing emissions.
Even 450 ppm is way beyond the safe levels, said Greene. "People are only talking about reducing emissions. I am arguing that we actually need to extract CO2 from the atmosphere." Such geo-engineering strategies would include biogeochemical and human engineered systems that sequester carbon directly from the air.
One reason that Greene says we cannot wait to reduce CO2 to 350 ppm is because new research predicts that the Earth system is on the threshold of exceeding several menacing, non-linear "tipping points" triggered by rising temperatures.
The European Union announced in 2005 that to avoid such dangerous climate impacts as melting glaciers and ice sheets, severe droughts and catastrophic sea level rise, Earth's average global temperatures must not increase by more than 2 degrees Celsius above pre-industrial levels. For example, Himalayan glaciers that feed the Indus, Ganges and Yellow rivers and provide water to more than a billion people are already rapidly melting. In simple analyses, atmospheric CO2 that is less than 450 ppm should yield a 2 degree Celsius increase; however, when feedback loops associated with aerosols and ocean warming are accounted for, such temperature increases may already be in the works, according to a 2008 report in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.
Part of the problem are delayed effects that have already committed the planet to warming on the order of 2.4 degrees Celsius (4.3 degrees Fahrenheit) by the end of the century, regardless of reductions in greenhouse gas emissions from today's levels. For example, as the ocean warms, it stores the heat and very slowly releases it to the atmosphere, creating a lag time in temperature equilibrium between the atmosphere and the ocean. Furthermore, due the ocean's great mass and heat capacity, it will take 1,000 years to reverse this century's warming and gradually reduce the heat already building up in the ocean, said Greene. Also, as pollution abatement strategies kick in this century, aerosols that now cool the atmosphere will decline, adding to warmth.
But, Greene added, the goal of 350 ppm can be reached and a calamitous warming halted if governments finance geo-engineering strategies that pull CO2 from the air and store it in the Earth.
For example, Greene and others advocate research to try to scale up simple machines already devised that draw CO2 from the atmosphere and then find ways to pump the gas into underground geological formations.
Greene also advocates growing algae for biofuel; algae is 10 times more productive per hectare than current biofuel crops. Such bio-petroleum recycles CO2 from the air into algae and then into fuel, unlike fossil fuels that put carbon stored in the earth into the air. Then, he said, power plants running on such bio-petroleum could be outfitted with scrubbers to capture and sequester CO2 to help create a system that actually reduces fossil carbon in the atmosphere.
"I think there are some real solutions out there; we just need to think big," he said.SOME men, it is said, have greatness thrust upon them. So it was for Basil D'Oliveira, an English cricketer widely cited as instrumental in the downfall of apartheid, who died on November 19th.
How a humble cricketer became a focal point not only of the evils of racist South Africa, but also of the English establishment's willingness to bow to it, is one of the most compelling stories in the sport. Certainly, he was not born into greatness. Growing up in Cape Town in the 1930s, he was designated a “Cape Coloured” (his heritage was probably Madeiran). Despite his obvious talent, this meant he was barred from playing for, or against, the country's established sides.
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Instead, he honed his technique batting on the perilous, unpredictable matted wickets of the non-white leagues. He scored prolifically—including some 80 centuries. But that should have been that. As he approached 30, he made plans to give up the game, seemingly destined to be the sad story of a good batsmen who was never allowed to test his talents at the highest level—a forgotten victim of a racist country.
Yet the story that defined him still lay ahead. Instead of turning his back on the game, he took a chance. He wrote a letter to John Arlott, a British cricket commentator, asking for help in finding a club in England. Eventually, Middleton, an amateur club in the Central Lancashire league, was persuaded to take a chance. They offered him a contract as the club's professional player.
So it was that in 1960, probably aged over 30 (although officially 28, he admitted to lying about his age so as not to scupper his chances), and with money scraped together by proud neighbours on the Cape, he turned up in dank northern England. He left behind a country in a state of emergency, following the Sharpeville massacre of 69 black protesters. Yet Mr D'Oliveira cut a lonely figure in his new home, bemused at country in which white people waited upon him in restaurants and trains were unsegregated.
Unsurprisingly, he took time to settle. The adjustment wasn't only cultural. Learning to play in England, with its grass wickets, where the ball swung and seamed more than he was used to, took time. Yet, it wasn't long before he was making runs. In 1964, Worcestershire, a first-class county, signed him. In the same year, he became a British citizen.
Then, in 1966, he was selected for England. Incredibly, he later revealed to Pat Murphy, his biographer, that he was 38 when he made his debut at the highest level of the game, long past the age that most great batsmen retire. Yet still he made runs.
Soon attention was focused on England's scheduled tour of South Africa in 1968-69. Mr D'Oliveira was desperate to return to his homeland. He was a hero among the country's blacks and coloureds and wanted to prove that he rightfully belonged on the cricket grounds from which he had been banned. As if to dispel any doubt, in the last game before the squad was announced, he scored a wonderful 158 to help England beat Australia.
Ian Wooldridge, a sportswriter, called it the most important innings in history. Less impressed was the South African government. BJ Vorster, the country's prime minister, refused to countenance the Coloured's return. No one knows the full pressure that the authorities brought to bear on the English cricketing establishment. At the very least, they made it clear that the tour would be cancelled if he were picked. But for two days the MCC—the private club running the English game—sat in a committee room at Lord's cricket ground and deliberated. Finally, emerging from behind its closed doors, they announced that Mr D'Oliveira had been dropped.
The MCC insisted that the decision had been made purely on cricketing grounds. No one believed them. Rather it was seen for what it was; a cowardly act, one of the most shameful in the game's history. The English public was outraged. The post office had to employ staff just to deal with the letters of support sent to Mr D'Oliveira.
Stunned by the reaction, the MCC were presented with a chance for redemption. With amazing good fortune, one of the squad, Tom Cartwright, withdrew because of an injury. The MCC had little choice but to announce Mr D'Oliveira as his replacement. South Africa's prime minister promptly called the tour off.
It was this action which led to the sporting isolation of apartheid South Africa for the next two decades. Ostracism, for such a sports-mad nation, was hard to bear. Many see it as a significant factor in the dismantling of apartheid in 1994.
Through it all, one sensed that Mr D'Oliveira was a reluctant hero. Some likened his impact to Jesse Owens in 1936 and Jackie Robinson in 1947. In 1996 Nelson Mandela invited him to lunch. In 2005 Queen Elizabeth II awarded him a CBE. Yet he remained modest.
He played his last Test match in 1972, finishing with an impressive average of 40.02 over 44 matches, also taking 47 wickets with his medium pacers. One can only speculate on how those figures would have read if he'd been allowed to play in his prime.
Read on: How The Economist reported the D'Oliveira affair in 1968Foreign policy observers have long known that Hollywood reflects and promotes U.S. policies (in turn, is determined by Israel and its supporters). This fact was made public when Michelle Obama announced an Oscar win for “Argo” – a highly propagandist, anti-Iran film. Amidst the glitter and excitement, Hollywood and White House reveal their pact and send out their message in time for the upcoming talks surrounding Iran’s nuclear program due to be held tomorrow - February 26th.
Hollywood has a long history of promoting US policies. In 1917, when the United States entered World War I, President Woodrow Wilson’s Committee on Public Information (CPI) enlisted the aid of America ’s film industry to make training films and features supporting the ‘cause’. George Creel, Chairman of the CPI believed that the movies had a role in “carrying the gospel of Americanism to every corner of the globe.”
The pact grew stronger during World War II, when, as historian Thomas Doherty writes, “[T]he liaison between Hollywood and Washington was a distinctly American and democratic arrangement, a mesh of public policy and private initiative, state need and business enterprise.” Hollywood ’s contribution was to provide propaganda. After the war, Washington reciprocated by using subsidies, special provisions in the Marshall Plan, and general clout to pry open resistant European film markets[i].
Hollywood has often borrowed its story ideas from the U.S. foreign policy agenda, at times reinforcing them. One of the film industry’s blockbuster film loans in the last two decades has been modern international terrorism. Hollywood rarely touched the topic of terrorism in the late 1960s and 1970s when the phenomenon was not high on the U.S. foreign policy agenda, in news headlines or in the American public consciousness. In the 1980s, in the footsteps of the Reagan administration’s policies, the commercial film industry brought ‘terrorist’ villains to the big screen (following the US Embassy takeover in Tehran – topic of “Argo”) making terrorism a blockbuster film product in the 1990s.
Today, whether Hollywood follows US policy or whether it sets it, is up for discussion. But it is abundantly clear that Hollywood is dominated by Israelis and their supporters who previously concealed their identity. According to a 2012 Haaretz article
“from the 1930s until the mid-1950s, Hanukkah never appeared on screen. This was because the Jewish studio heads preferred to hide their ethnic and religious heritage in attempting to widen the appeal of their products. Jews were thus typically portrayed as participants in an American civil religion, whose members may attend the synagogue of their choice, but are not otherwise marked by great differences of appearance, speech, custom, or behaviour from the vast majority of American”.
This is no longer the case.
In sharp contrast to its past, Hollywood “celebrated” Israel ’s 60th “birthday” [occupation] with a Gala called “From Vision to Reality”. Israeli TV blog wrote of the Gala: ‘Don’t Worry Israel, Hollywood is behind you’. Actor Jon Voight said: “World playing a dangerous game by going against Israel”. Israeli businessman and Hollywood producer Arnon Milchan, was a longtime weapons dealer and Israeli intelligence agent who purchased equipment for Israel’s nuclear program (the book, “Confidential: The Life of Secret Agent Turned Hollywood Tycoon Arnon Milchan,” written by Meir Doron and Joseph Gelman, recounts Milchan’s life story, his friendships with Israeli prime ministers, U.S. presidents and Hollywood stars).
It is important to understand Hollywood not only in the context of a multi-billion dollar industry, but the propaganda aspect of it and as one of the most powerful and universal methods of spreading ideas through visual propaganda. “Propaganda is defined as a certain type of messaging that serves a particular purpose of spreading or implanting a particular culture, philosophy, point of view or even a particular slogan”. With this capability, Hollywood owns the world of ideas on a scale too large and too dangerous to ignore – see this excellent example by Gilad Atzmon – Hollywood and the Past.
Atzmon writes:
“History is commonly regarded as an attempt to produce a structured account of the past. It proclaims to tell us what really happened, but in most cases it fails to do that. Instead it is set to conceal our shame, to hide those various elements, events, incidents and occurrences in our past which we cannot cope with. History, therefore, can be regarded as a system of concealment. Accordingly, the role of the true historian is similar to that of the psychoanalyst: both aim to unveil the repressed. For the psychoanalyst, it is the unconscious mind. For the historian, it is our collective shame.”
As Hollywood and the White House eagerly embrace “Argo” and its propagandist message, they shamelessly and deliberately conceals a crucial aspect of this “historical” event. The glitter buries the all too important fact that the Iranian students who took over the U.S. Embassy in Tehran, proceeded to reveal Israel ’s dark secret to the world. Documents classified as “SECRET” revealed LAKAM’s activities. Initiated in 1960, LAKAM was an Israeli network assigned to economic espionage in the U.S. assigned to “the collection of scientific intelligence in the U.S. for Israel ’s defense industry”[ii].
As it stands, the purpose of the movie and its backers was to push the extraordinary revelations to the background while sending a visual message to the unsuspecting audience – to lay the blame of the potential (and likely) failure of the upcoming negotiations over Iran’s nuclear program on the Iranians — the gun-wielding, bearded Iranians of “Argo” who deserve America’s collective punishment and the crippling, deathly sanctions.
Soraya Sepahpour-Ulrich is a Public Diplomacy Scholar, independent researcher and writer with a focus on U.S. foreign policy and the role of lobby group.Two more women have joined the defamation lawsuit against Fox News and former host Bill O'Reilly, The New York Times reported Wednesday.
Andrea Mackris and Rebecca Gomez Diamond, who settled separate sexual harassment cases against O'Reilly, have joined a lawsuit filed by Rachel Witlieb Bernstein, alleging that both Fox News and the conservative personality violated the terms of the settlement by making statements portraying them as politically motivated liars.
Bernstein, who also reached a settlement after bringing allegations against O'Reilly, filed the lawsuit earlier this month, the Times reported. Her accusations did not include sexual harassment.
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O'Reilly was booted from Fox News earlier this year after it was revealed that he and the network had paid tens of millions of dollars to settle a series of sexual harassment allegations against the host.
Mackris, a former producer on O'Reilly's Fox News show, sued him for sexual harassment in 2004. Diamond, a former Fox Business Network host, reached a settlement in 2011 after bringing sexual harassment allegations against O'Reilly.
Both women are alleging in the lawsuit that O'Reilly and Fox News defamed them by casting them as liars and extortionists, the Times reported.
“They are tired of being smeared with lies by a bully who thinks that his victims are afraid to answer to them,” Nancy Erika Smith, a lawyer representing the women, said in a statement to the Times.
“They are standing up for the truth, joining the many voices of brave women who are no longer tolerating abuse or being silenced,” she added.
An O’Reilly attorney said in a statement that the latest filing has “absolutely no merit.”
“Mr. O’Reilly never mentioned any of the plaintiffs, but now he has no choice but to litigate fully and aggressively,” Fredric Newman added.
— This report was updated at 2:16 p.m.Earlier this month I posted my review of the TECK, an ergonomic keyboard with mechanical switches that’s looking to attract users interesting in a high quality, highly ergonomic offering and don’t mind the rather steep learning curve or the price. The TECK isn’t the only such keyboard, of course, and I decided to see what other mechanical switch ergonomic keyboards I could get for comparison. Next up on the list is the granddaddy of high-end ergonomic keyboards, the Kinesis Contour Advantage.
Similar to what I did with the TECK, I wanted to provide my first impressions of the Kinesis, along with some thoughts on the initial switch and the learning curve. This time, I also made the effort to put together a video of my first few minutes of typing. It actually wasn’t as bad as with the TECK, but that’s likely due to the fact that I already lost many of my typing conventions when I made that switch earlier this year. I’ll start with the video, where I take a typing test on four different keyboards and provide some thoughts on the experience, and then I’ll provide a few other thoughts on the Kinesis vs. TECK comparison. It’s far too early to determine which one I’ll end up liking the most, but already I do notice some differences.
Compared to the TECK—as well as many other keyboards—the Kinesis Advantage feels quite large. Part of that is from the thickness of the keyboard, with the palm rests and middle section being much thicker than on other keyboards. Looking at the way my hands rest on the Advantage, though, I have to say it seems like it should be a good fit for me once I adapt to the idiosyncrasies. I discussed some of the changes in the above video, but let me go into some additional detail on the areas that appear to be causing me the most trouble (and this is after the initial several hours of training/adapting to the modified layout).
My biggest long-term concern is with the location of the CTRL and ALT keys. As someone that uses keyboard shortcuts frequently, I’m very accustomed to using my pinkies to hit CTRL. Reaching up with my thumb to hit CTRL is going to take some real practice, but I can likely come to grips with that over the next few weeks. Certain shortcuts are a bit more complex, however—in Photoshop, for instance, I routinely use “Save for Web…”, with the shortcut CTRL+ALT+SHIFT+S; take one look at the Kinesis and see how easy that one is to pull off! Similarly, the locations of the cursor keys, PgUp/PgDn, and Home/End keys is going to really take some time for me to adjust. On the TECK I actually didn’t mind having them located under the palms of the hands, but here the keys are split between both hands and aren’t centralized.
With that said, the Kinesis keyboards do have some interesting features that may mitigate such concerns. For one, there’s a built-in function for reprogramming any of the keys, so it’s possible with a little effort to change the layout. Of course, for that to be useful you also need to figure out a “better” layout than the default, and I’m not sure what that might be—plus I wanted to give the default layout a shot first. The Advantage also features macro functionality, allowing you to program up to 24 macros of approximately 55 keystrokes. Truth be told, I haven’t even tried the macros or key mapping features yet, but I can at least see how they might prove useful.
There are a few other items to mention for my first impressions. One is that I didn’t like the audible beeping from my speakers at all; I think the keys sound plenty loud when typing (not that they’re loud, necessarily, but they’re not silent either), so adding a beep from the speakers wasn’t useful for me. Thankfully, it’s very easy to disable the sounds with a quick glance at the manual. Another interesting feature is built-in support for the Dvorak layout (press PROGRAM+SHIFT+F5 to switch between QWERTY and Dvorak; note that switching will lose any custom key mappings). Finally, unlike the TECK, Kinesis also includes a USB hub (two ports at the bottom-back of the keyboard near the cable connection).
As far as typing goes, the Cherry MX Brown switches so far feel largely the same to me as on the TECK. I haven’t experienced any issues with “double pressing” of keys yet, but then I didn’t have that happen with the TECK for a couple weeks either. Right now, it’s impossible for me to declare which keyboard is better in terms of ergonomics—and in fact, even after using both for a month I fear I might not be able to come to a firm opinion on the matter—but one thing I do know is that looking at the video above, I can see that my hands and arms move far less when typing on both the TECK and Kinesis. I also know that at least from a technology standpoint, the Kinesis is more advanced than the TECK, what with a USB hub, key remapping, and macro functionality, but it’s also more expensive thanks to those features.
Reviews of this nature are inherently something that will take a while and they end up being quite subjective, but within the next few months I hope to have a better idea of which mechanical switch ergonomic keyboard I like the most…and I have at least one if not two more offerings coming my way. Hopefully you can all wait patiently while I put each through a month or so of regular use. If you’re looking to spend $200+ on a high quality ergonomic keyboard, you’ll probably be willing to wait a bit longer, but if not I believe many of the companies will offer you a 60-day money back guarantee—the TECK and Kinesis both offer such a guarantee if you’re interested in giving one a try.T-Mobile saw a slight uptick in the number of government demands for customer data during 2015, the company's latest transparency report shows.
The third largest cell network in the US quietly released its transparency report late Monday, its second in as many years. The numbers also include MetroPCS, which T-Mobile acquired in 2013.
For the full calendar year, T-Mobile said it responded to 372,461 requests for customer or network information, a 6 percent increase on the year prior.
Breaking that down, the company responded to 175,823 subpoenas, 47,998 court orders, and 17,424 warrants. The company also received 4,454 wiretap demands for real-time calling and texting content.
By comparison to other networks, Verizon received 289,378 overall requests and AT&T received 287,980 demands for the same period.
But T-Mobile said that it rejected about 70,000 requests for various reasons -- such as if the requests were invalid or for other carriers.
The number of secret requests, such as national security letters (NSLs) and orders issued by the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court, which authorizes the US government's surveillance operations, declined.
Choosing to break down the report further, the phone giant said it received between zero and 499 secret requests for both the first and second half of the year.
That's down from between 2,000 and 2,250 for both 2013 and 2014.
Tech and phone remain subject to heavy reporting restrictions -- such as reporting the number of secret demands in numerical ranges. These subpoena-like demands aren't authorized by a judge, but compels a company to turn over data on national security grounds. Those who receive a national security letter are typically gagged from telling the person whose data is in question.Search
Most popular PHP packages
List of PHP packages ordered by popularity rank.
The PHP Unit Testing framework.
1
1 72196
72196 48428
48428 13158
13158 1694
1694
The Laravel Framework.
2
2 757
757 4985
4985 50222
50222 15354
15354
The Laravel Framework.
3
3 0
0 0
0 50184
50184 15355
15355
Guzzle is a PHP HTTP client library
4
4 13104
13104 56821
56821 15744
15744 1904
1904
proto library for PHP
5
5 78
78 2231
2231 32263
32263 8841
8841
PHP_CodeSniffer tokenizes PHP, JavaScript and CSS files and detects violations of a defined set of coding standards.
6
6 14166
14166 15921
15921 6073
6073 1033
1033
The Laravel Framework.
7
7 6740
6740 25435
25435 16253
16253 6264
6264
The Symfony PHP framework
8
8 4567
4567 14455
14455 19947
19947 6728
6728
Mockery is a simple yet flexible PHP mock object framework
9
9 12441
12441 18926
18926 7266
7266 345
345
The Illuminate Support package.
10
10 15911
15911 5193
5193 293
293 101
101
Faker is a PHP library that generates fake data for you.
11
11 3375
3375 22148
22148 19572
19572 2329
2329
Composer helps you declare, manage and install dependencies of PHP projects, ensuring you have the right stack everywhere.
12
12 1537
1537 4321
4321 18551
18551 5397
5397
Sends your logs to files, sockets, inboxes, databases and various web services
13
13 4318
4318 48061
48061 13783
13783 1496
1496
The CodeIgniter framework
14
14 3
3 2
2 17015
17015 7650
7650
The CodeIgniter framework
15
15 70
70 269
269 17013
17013 7648
7648
The CodeIgniter framework
16
16 0
0 5
5 17012
17012 7647
7647
Yii PHP Framework Version 2
17
17 10050
10050 2994
2994 203
203 134
134
Symfony Console Component
18
18 6672
6672 46901
46901 6102
6102 157
157
PHPMailer is a full-featured email creation and transfer class for PHP
19
19 748
748 3858
3858 12622
12622 6951
6951
Sample code for several design patterns in PHP
20
20 0
0 0
0 16761
16761 3622
3622
PHP object relational mapper (ORM) that sits on top of a powerful database abstraction layer (DBAL). One of its key features is the option to write database queries in a proprietary object oriented SQL dialect called Doctrine Query Language (DQL). This provides developers with a powerful alternative to SQL that maintains flexibility without requiring unnecessary code duplication.
21
21 4816
4816 17167
17167 5978
5978 2058
2058
A simple API extension for DateTime.
22
22 2221
2221 29496
29496 11783
11783 1048
1048
A tool to automatically fix PHP code style
23
23 4647
4647 11280
11280 7242
7242 981
981
Symfony FrameworkBundle
24
24 7249
7249 2895
2895 1554
1554 66
66
Yii PHP Framework Version 2 - Development Package
25
25 17
17 11
11 12682
12682 6734
6734
Twig, the flexible, fast, and secure template language for PHP
26
26 4610
4610 25712
25712 5859
5859 1023
1023
Guzzle is a PHP HTTP client library
27
27 0
0 0
0 15735
15735 1903
1903
Yii PHP Framework Version 2 - Development Package
28
28 6
6 0
0 126 |
less time to figure out the age of the Earth. In 1956 geologist Clair Patterson dated our planet at 4.5 billion years old, and 50 years of subsequent research has barely budged that figure.
Scientists know the Earth is 4.5 billion years old because planets and asteroids swept up uranium in the early days of the solar system. Ever since, the uranium has been decaying into stable lead isotopes at a predictable rate. Meteorites and Earth rocks all have proportions of uranium and lead pointing to the same age. The trouble with the Grand Canyon is that geologists couldn’t find a good clock to measure its growth. Part of the problem was that it was hard to find anything to date. The rocks themselves are ancient; the water that cut through them did not seem to leave behind a time stamp. As a result, estimates of the age of the canyon, and the speed at which it formed, have remained rough.
It turns out that the time stamps were there all along. They were just hidden away inside the hundreds of caves inside the Grand Canyon's walls. Strange formations known as mammilary coatings – named for their vague resemblance to breasts – line some of the cave walls. Mammilary coatings form on the walls of caves that are submerged just below the water table. As the Colorado River sliced deeper down into the Colorado Plateau, the water table gradually dropped. Mammilary coatings marked the river's fall. And as mammilary coatings form, they also happen to trap a lot of uranium. By measuring their age, scientists can measure how long ago they were near the water table.
Three geologists from the University of New Mexico have explored caves along the Grand Canyon, ranging from the very bottom to the rim. In this week's issue of Science, they report that the highest caves have mammilary coatings dating back about 17 million years, and the lowest ones date to about 800,000 years. And all the caves between the top and bottom have the intermediate ages you’d expect. By measuring the distance from the rim to the caves, the geologists were then able to estimate how fast the Colorado River carved the canyon. The downstream end of the canyon formed first, and only later did the upstream end catch up. These new measurements show that even as the river sank down into the earth, the earth itself rose, lifted by hot rock welling up through the crust.
The Grand Canyon is far older than Noah's flood, but at just 17 million years or so, it’s geologically infantile. For 99.99 percent of Earth's history, the Grand Canyon as we know it did not exist. Other canyons formed and vanished time and again, and only recently – even as our own ancestors came out of the trees and stood upright – a conspiracy of knife-sharp water and restless crust swiftly brought the Grand Canyon into being.
Now that's a story worth reporting.
\—
Carl Zimmer won the 2007 National Academies Communications Award for his writing in The New York Times and elsewhere. His next book, Microcosm: E. coli and the New Science of Life, will be published in May.This study aimed to investigate the cycles (2nd/4th) and duration-related (5/10 min) variations in the story-like organization of dream experience elaborated during rapid eye movement (REM) sleep. Dream reports were analysed using story grammar rules. Reports were provided by those subjects (14 of 22) capable of reporting a dream after each of the four awakenings provoked in 2 consecutive nights during REM sleep of the 2nd and 4th cycles, after periods of either 5 or 10 min, counterbalanced across the nights. Two researchers who were blind as to the sleep condition scored the dream reports independently. The values of the indicators of report length (measured as value of total word count) and of story-like organization of dream reports were matched taking time-of-night (2nd and 4th cycles) and REM duration (5 versus 10 min) as factors. Two-way analyses of variance showed that report length increased significantly in 4th-cycle REM sleep and nearly significantly for longer REM duration, whereas the number of dream-stories per report did not vary. The indices of sequential (number of statements describing the event structure developed in the story) and hierarchical (number of episodes per story) organization increased significantly only in dream-stories reported after 10 min of 4th-cycle REM sleep. These findings indicate that the characteristics of structural organization of dream-stories vary along with time of night, and suggest that the elaboration of a long and complex dream-story requires a fairly long time and the availability of a great amount of cognitive resources to maintain its continuity and coherence.
© 2014 European Sleep Research Society.[Image: Photo by Benjamin Halpern, courtesy of the U.S. Library of Congress].
[Images: Photos by Benjamin Halpern, courtesy of the U.S. Library of Congress].
[Images: Photos by Benjamin Halpern, courtesy of the U.S. Library of Congress].
[Image: Photo by Benjamin Halpern, courtesy of the U.S. Library of Congress].
[Image: The pyramid, seen somewhat jarringly in full color, via Google Street View].
[Images: (top) Photo by Benjamin Halpern, courtesy of the U.S. Library of Congress; (bottom) photo by Henry Sweet, courtesy of the UNC-Chapel Hill].
[Image: Photo by Benjamin Halpern, courtesy of the U.S. Library of Congress].
[Images: Photos by Benjamin Halpern, courtesy of the U.S. Library of Congress].
[Images: Photos by Benjamin Halpern, courtesy of the U.S. Library of Congress].
(An earlier version of this post previously appeared on Gizmodo).
The Stanley R. Mickelsen Safeguard Complex in Cavalier County, North Dakota, is the focus of an amazing set of images hosted by the U.S. Library of Congress, showing this squat and evocative megastructure in various states of construction and completion.It's a huge pyramid in the middle of nowhere tracking the end of the world on radar, an abstract geometric shape beneath the sky without a human being in sight, or it could even be the opening scene of an apocalyptic science fiction film—but it's just the U.S. military going about its business, building vast and other-worldly architectural structures that the civilian world only rarely sees.Asdescribed these structures back in 2008, it was a " mastaba-shaped radar facility reminiscent of the work of architect Étienne-Louis Boullée."As such,suggests, it offers convincing architectural evidence that we should consider "the "U.S. anti-ballistic landscape as a subset of Land Art"—as lonely pieces of abandoned infrastructure isolated amidst sublime and almost unreachably remote locations.The photos seen here, taken for the U.S. government by photographer Benjamin Halpern, show the central pyramid—pyramid, monument, modular obelisk: whatever you want to call it—that served as the site's missile-tracking station. Its omnidirectional all-seeing white circles stared endlessly at invisible airborne objects moving beyond the horizon.The Library of Congress gives the pyramid's location somewhat absurdly as "Northeast of Tactical Road; southeast of Tactical Road South." In other words, it's ensconced somewhere in a maze of self-reference and tautology, perhaps deliberately obscuring exactly how you're meant to arrive at this place.Yet the pyramid has become something of a roadtripper's delight in the last decade or two. When I initially published a slightly different version of this post on Gizmodo, commenters from around the world jumped in with their own photos and memories of driving hours out of their way to find these military ruins looming spookily on the horizon.Most if not all of them then discovered that it was as easy as simply saying hello to the guard, walking unencumbered through the front gate, and then hanging out for hours, running up the side of the pyramid, taking pictures against the North Dakota sky, and enjoying this American Giza as a peculiarly avant-garde site for an afternoon picnic.You can even see the structures, arranged like some ritual sequence of spatial objects—a chapel of radar aligned with war—on Google Street View One thing I like so much about these shots is how they resemble early expeditionary photos of the hulking Mayan ruins found at Chichén Itzá.Check out these comparative shots, for example, where the latter image was taken by photographer Henry Sweet during a 19th-century archaeological journey led by Alfred P. Maudslay. The photo was featured as part of an exhibition at the University of North Carolina back in 2007.Of course, there is nothing really to compare outside of their same overall geometry—yet it's striking to consider the functional, if obviously metaphoric, similarities here as well.One structure was built as part of a kind of analogue system for tracking divine events and celestial calendars, as dark constellations of gods spun across the sky; the other was a temple to mathematics built for guiding and pinging missiles as they streaked horizon to horizon, a site of early warning against the apocalypse, as a new zodiac of nuclear warheads would burst open to shine their world-blinding light on the obliterated landscapes below.Trajectories, paths, horizons: both pyramids, in a sense, were architectural monuments for navigation of different kinds. Both timeless, strange, and seemingly inhuman: spatial artifacts of lost civilizations.In any case, the original photos on the Library of Congress website are heavily specked with dust and some lens artifacts, but I've cleaned up my favorites and posted some of them here.This is how modern-day pyramids are made: huge budgets and ziggurats of rebar, as tiny figures wearing hardhats scramble around amidst gargantuan geometric forms, checking diagrams against reality and trying not to think of the nuclear war this structure was being built to track.Water from Addicks Reservoir flows into neighborhoods as floodwaters from Tropical Storm Harvey rise Tuesday, Aug. 29, 2017, in Houston. (AP Photo/David J. Phillip)
HOUSTON (AP) — The Latest on Tropical Storm Harvey (all times local):
12:50 a.m.
A second major shelter has opened in Houston following Harvey’s landfall and it’s welcoming the first of up to 10,000 evacuees.
At least 10 buses pulled up to the NRG Center on the south side of the city just before midnight Tuesday. Those in wheelchairs entered first, followed by the first of what officials said could be up to 2,000 people by sunrise Wednesday at the conference hall adjacent to the decommissioned Astrodome and the city’s NFL stadium.
The George R. Brown Convention Center downtown has filled to nearly double its originally announced capacity of 5,000 in the five days since the storm first made landfall as a Category 4 hurricane.
The evacuees brought to NRG Center came from other parts of the metro area.
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12:30 a.m.
Photos with pleas for help in finding the missing from Tropical Storm Harvey are being posted and retweeted by the thousands as desperate family members seek loved ones who they fear might be dead, but may only have a dead phone.
No official number of missing has been released Tuesday night, but dozens of missing-person photos are circulating on social media. Some are getting results, though not always positive ones.
The family of Ruben Jordan, a 58-year-old retired football and track coach from a Houston-area high school, spread pleas on Twitter and Facebook for 48 hours before they were told he was found dead Tuesday.
The mother of baby Paige Booth was frantic for four hours after she handed off her baby to a police officer amid chest-high water then couldn’t find her.
After a series of posts, she got a call from a family of strangers that had her baby, and the two were soon reunited.
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11:15 p.m.
The Rockport-Fulton Fighting Pirates won’t take the field Friday for their season opener, but some of their players took to the field Tuesday to help clean it up.
Winds from Harvey last week sheared the uprights from both goal posts, stripped most of the metal from the stadium scoreboards, scattered sheet metal through the stands and destroyed the gymnasium where the girls’ volleyball team plays.
By word of mouth, some football and volleyball players met Monday afternoon to begin the cleanup. Even more players showed up Tuesday.
Athletic director Jay Seibert said that after three weeks of practice and a scrimmage, his players are now scattered all over the state after evacuating the coastal town near Corpus Christi and that the Pirates will not be able to play this week.
Right guard Angelo Trevino said that returning to the field will help the community recovery effort.
Harvey made landfall near Rockport last Friday as a Category 4 hurricane.
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10:45 p.m.
Officials say they have received disturbing reports of people impersonating Homeland Security special agents and telling residents to evacuate in order to rob their homes.
The city of Houston says people should ask anyone knocking on their doors for official badges and credentials with their name and organization. The city’s statement also notes that during Harvey relief efforts, U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement is not conducting immigration enforcement operations in the area.
The city also says in a tweet in both English and Spanish that it is not checking the immigration status of anyone coming into shelters.
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10 p.m.
The death toll from Harvey has risen to at least 18 as three more fatalities have been confirmed in the Houston area.
The Harris County Institute of Forensic Sciences updated its storm-related deaths Tuesday night to include an 89-year-old woman, Agnes Stanley, who was found floating in 4 feet (1.2 meters) of floodwater in a home. A 76-year-old woman was found floating in floodwater near a vehicle. Her name was not released. A 45-year-old man, Travis Lynn Callihan, left his vehicle and fell into floodwaters. He was taken to a hospital, where he died Monday.
Family members and authorities have reported at least 18 deaths although the bodies of some victims apparently swept away in the floodwaters have not been found.
___
9:30 p.m.
Singapore’s defense ministry says as many as four of its military helicopters will start assisting in Tropical Storm Harvey relief efforts Wednesday.
The CH-47 Chinook helicopters are stationed in Grand Prairie, Texas, as part of a decades-long partnership between the Republic of Singapore Air Force and Texas National Guard. Singaporean airmen who train there learn how to face large-scale emergencies.
The ministry says the helicopters will be able to airlift troops, evacuees and supplies in the relief effort.
Prime Minister Lee Hsien Loong made the offer in a call with President Donald Trump late Tuesday. Both leaders are set to meet at the White House in October.
Singapore made a similar offer after Hurricane Katrina in 2005.
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9:15 p.m.
Houston officials are opening a major shelter at NRG Park that can accommodate up to 10,000 evacuees from Harvey.
Darian Ward, a spokeswoman for Houston Mayor Sylvester Turner, said the convention center adjacent to the city’s NFL stadium and the Astrodome will open at 10 p.m. Tuesday.
The new shelter will provide the city with additional capacity because the number of evacuees at the George R. Brown Convention Center is approaching 10,000, double its original capacity.
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8:40 p.m.
Just 500 cots are being added to the floor of the Toyota Center, as the nearby downtown convention center will remain the primary major shelter for evacuees of Tropical Storm Harvey.
Tom McCasland, Houston’s housing and community development director, told The Associated Press Tuesday that the Toyota Center— where the NBA’s Houston Rockets play — will serve as an overflow center for people still arriving Tuesday night and early Wednesday. It will only serve families with children that don’t have pressing medical needs.
The George R. Brown Convention Center has an estimated 9,000 people seeking shelter. McCasland says more cots are on the way for thousands of people who didn’t have one Monday night. Some people slept on towels or strips of cardboard.
He says, “We fully expect to have everyone in a cot tonight.”
___
8:30 p.m.
Federal and local agencies say they have rescued more than 13,000 people in the Houston area as well as in surrounding cities and counties in Southeast Texas since Tropical Storm Harvey inundated the area with torrential rain.
Houston Police Chief Art Acevedo said Tuesday his agency has rescued about 4,100 people.
Houston Fire Chief Samuel Peña says his agency has rescued more than 3,000.
Parisa Safarzadeh, a spokeswoman for the Harris County Sheriff’s Office says her agency has rescued more than 3,000 people. Houston is located in Harris County.
U.S. Coast Guard Lt. Mike Hart says his agency has rescued more than 3,000 individuals. Hart says the Coast Guard total includes rescues in Houston, but also in outlying cities and subdivisions outside of Houston, as well as in surrounding counties, including Brazoria, Galveston and Matagorda.
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8:15 p.m.
Beaumont police say a woman has died after she and her young daughter were swept into a rain-swollen drainage canal while trying to escape their stalled vehicle.
A police statement said the woman pulled her vehicle into an office park’s flooded parking lot about 3:35 p.m. Tuesday, where it became stalled by high water. The woman then took her daughter, exited the car and was swept about a half-mile away.
Two Beaumont police officers and two fire-rescue divers in a rubber boat spotted the mother floating with the child, who was holding onto her mother. Officers pulled the child and the mother into the boat. The child was responsive but suffering from hypothermia; the mother was unresponsive and efforts to revive her failed. The child is hospitalized in stable condition.
Authorities and family members have so far reported more than a dozen deaths from Harvey.
___
This item corrects the location of the parking lot.
___
7:55 p.m.
Houston Mayor Sylvester Turner has amended his curfew order to run from midnight to 5 a.m., instead of beginning at 10 p.m.
Turner announced the change on Twitter Tuesday evening, about an hour after initially imposing the curfew.
Police Chief Art Acevedo said at an earlier news conference that curfew violators will be stopped, questioned, searched and arrested.
There have been scattered reports of looting during the flooding from Tropical Storm Harvey.
___
7:35 p.m.
Houston Mayor Sylvester Turner says that the Toyota Center — home of the NBA’s Rockets — has been opened as a shelter for people displaced by flooding from Tropical Storm Harvey.
Turner announced during a news conference Tuesday evening that the downtown basketball arena will be used to help reduce overflow at the nearby George R. Brown Convention Center, which is now sheltering 10,000 people. Officials had initially planned to have 5,000 individuals at the convention center.
Turner says people will still have to go to the convention center first before going into the Toyota Center.
Turner thanked Rockets owner Les Alexander for letting the city use the basketball arena as a shelter and also thanked him for his donation of $10 million for Harvey relief efforts.
Turner says because Houston police have been spread thin due to ongoing water rescues and other efforts, 50 Texas National Guard members will be stationed at the convention center to provide security.
___
7:20 p.m.
Officials say they have evacuated homes northeast of Houston after a chemical company said there is a risk of an explosion at its flooded plant.
The Harris County Fire Marshal’s office said in a tweet Tuesday that homes within 1.5 miles (2.4 kilometers) of the Arkema plant in Crosby have been evacuated out of precaution.
Arkema says in a news release that it manufactures organic peroxides in Crosby, about 25 miles (40 kilometers) northeast of Houston. The company says the chemical compounds must be stored at low temperatures, but it lost refrigerated storage after power went out and backup generators were inundated.
Arkema said it shut down the Crosby site before Harvey made landfall last week, but a crew of 11 had been kept onsite. That group was removed Tuesday.
___
7 p.m.
Harris County has confirmed the storm-related death of 64-year-old Alexander Kwoksum Sung, who drowned at a clock repair business Sunday in Houston. He was found in more than a foot of debris on Monday.
Authorities and family members have so far reported more than 10 deaths from Harvey.
___
6:45 p.m.
Houston Mayor Sylvester Turner says he is imposing a 10 p.m. to 5 a.m. curfew in order to ensure public safety.
Turner says at a news conference Tuesday that there is no reason for people to be on the streets during those hours.
Police Chief Art Acevedo said violators will be stopped, questioned, searched and arrested.
There have been scattered reports of looting during the flooding from Tropical Storm Harvey.
___
6:30 p.m.
Authorities at a small city near Houston say a boater who was helping rescue people from the Harvey floodwaters has located a deceased man.
Friendswood Police spokeswoman Lisa Price said Tuesday authorities are not exactly sure how the man died and they haven’t been able to confirm his identity.
Price says officers are still on the scene and the body has been taken to a funeral home.
Authorities earlier had confirmed five deaths that are believed to be related to Harvey. Another six people are missing and presumed dead after a van fell into a bayou.
___
6:25 p.m.
One of the nation’s busiest trauma centers has abandoned evacuation plans and will discharge patients more quickly as it prepares for an expected surge of new patients with injuries related to Harvey.
Spokesman Bryan McLeod said Tuesday that Ben Taub Hospital’s case management workers will help patients who “no longer require hospitalization” get back home or to shelters if their homes are flooded or inaccessible.
McLeod said “we’re going to need those beds once the next wave comes.”
Ben Taub is Houston’s main public hospital of last resort, and many patients are poor and uninsured.
Building repairs continue on a burst sewage pipe and leaks that damaged the basement of the hospital’s main building and affected pharmacy, food service and other key operations.
McLeod said the hospital has enough food to last until Thursday, when all hospital staff and administrators will be expected back at work.
___
6:10 p.m.
Authorities say an 81-year-old woman has died after her vehicle was caught in floodwaters caused by Tropical Storm Harvey in Walker County, north of Houston.
Officials with the Texas Department of Public safety say a state trooper out checking the road conditions early Tuesday morning came across Ola Winfrey Crooks’ vehicle. Sgt. Richard Standifer with the Texas Department of Public Safety tells The Associated Press that the trooper contacted the swift water rescue team, which recovered the body.
Sgt. Steven McNeil with the Texas Department of Public Safety tells the Huntsville Item newspaper that a preliminary investigation indicates Crooks drowned when her car was swept off a farm-to-market road at the San Jacinto River near her home. McNeil says it appears Crooks was trying to cross the bridge and the swift water carried her vehicle off the road and into the flood waters.
___
This item corrects the woman’s age from 83 to 81 and her middle name from Mae to Winfrey, according to Sgt. Richard Standifer.
___
5:50 p.m.
Hundreds of people are waiting in line at the George R. Brown Convention Center to register with the Federal Emergency Management Agency for disaster assistance.
Many evacuees arrived with what was in their pockets and nothing else.
John Boyce lived in a west Houston apartment and had to be pulled out by boat. He was initially taken to a local hospital and was given paper scrubs to wear before being taken to the convention center, because his clothes were wet and soaked in sewage.
His two possessions are a cell phone and a wallet. He dried the cards inside the wallet on a piece of cardboard, and his cellphone worked after he held the battery under a bathroom hair dryer.
He took his first shower Tuesday in a mobile unit brought in by the Red Cross.
FEMA is expected to provide assistance to people left homeless in Harvey.
The 49-year-old Boyce hopes he can get enough money to travel to Alaska and join his daughter and grandchild. He says, “I have nothing to go back to here.”
___
5:30 p.m.
For the drenched Houston region, an end to the rain and a sunny day are almost in sight. But that’s only because meteorologists forecast Harvey to come inland Wednesday, then slog through Louisiana and take its downpours north. Arkansas, Tennessee, parts of Missouri and southern Illinois are on alert for Harvey flooding in a couple days.
Harvey is forecast to return inland around the Texas-Louisiana line and close to Beaumont, Texas, early Wednesday morning or late Tuesday night with 45 mph (72 kph) winds and heavy rains, spending much of Wednesday in Louisiana. Along the Gulf Coast, rain is expected to continue Wednesday but taper off.
Dennis Feltgen, National Hurricane Center spokesman says, “Texas is going to get a chance to finally dry out as this system pulls out.”
But Feltgen cautioned that this doesn’t mean Harvey is ending.
Flash flood watches are already posted for parts of Tennessee, southern Illinois and southeast Missouri.
Those areas and Arkansas could get six or seven inches of rain, but it won’t be anything like what southeast Texas got.
The National Weather Service in Houston forecasts less of an inch for the city on Wednesday, and only a 30 percent chance of showers and thunderstorms for Thursday. And then for Friday it says, “mostly sunny.”
___
5:15 p.m.
In far North Dallas, hundreds of volunteers are handling a steady stream of cars, trucks and trailers loaded with water, diapers and other goods for hurricane relief.
The drop-off point announced by the city of Dallas is managed by the nonprofit Trusted World, which also has other drop off points in office buildings and other public locations.
The volunteers say they have seen thousands of vehicles loaded Tuesday with items to donate for hurricane relief. The volume of vehicles loaded with items to donate extended out onto and down the northbound frontage road of the Dallas North Tollway. One 34-foot trailer belonging to a cabinet maker was filled with bottled water and other items. The drop-off point was open from 3 p.m. to 8 p.m.
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4:15 p.m.
Harvey has gained a bit of strength but stayed a tropical storm. Its winds increased from 45 mph (72 kph) to 50 mph (80 kph).
But the National Hurricane Center says that reading Tuesday afternoon may be unusual because it was from a low flying hurricane hunter airplane.
Forecasters say heavy rains are continuing to spread over southeastern Texas and southern Louisiana.
The rains in Cedar Bayou, near Mont Belvieu, Texas, reached 51.88 inches (132 centimeters) as of 3:30 p.m. CDT. That’s a record for both Texas and the continental United States but it doesn’t quite pass the 52 inches (133 centimeters) from tropical cyclone Hiki in Kauai, Hawaii, in 1950 (before Hawaii became a state).
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3:20 p.m.
An official says that a levee protecting a subdivision of homes in a county south of Houston has been fortified after being breached but warns the threat is far from over.
Brazoria County spokeswoman Sharon Trower said Tuesday afternoon that the levee had been fortified. Earlier in the day the county had posted on Twitter: “NOTICE: The levee at Columbia Lakes has been breached!! GET OUT NOW!!”
She says that some water did get through but it wasn’t substantial. She warns that authorities don’t know how long the fortification will hold. She also notes the breach happened due to rainwater but that the nearby Brazos River continues to spill out of its banks.
Trower says that the mandatory evacuation ordered Sunday morning still stands and notes that most of the residents in the area have left.
Brazoria County Judge Matt Sebesta has said that there are hundreds of homes in the tree-lined subdivision situated around a golf course.
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3:10 p.m.
Federal regulators say dozens of offshore oil-and-gas platforms and rigs in the Gulf of Mexico have been evacuated as Tropical Storm Harvey continues to dump heavy rainfall on the region.
The U.S. Bureau of Safety and Environmental Enforcement said in a statement Tuesday that workers were evacuated from 102 production platforms, which is nearly 14 percent of the 737 manned platforms in the Gulf.
Five of the 10 drilling rigs currently operating in the Gulf also had been evacuated as of noon Tuesday. The bureau estimated that approximately 19 percent of the Gulf’s oil and natural gas production was “shut-in,” or temporarily halted, as of midday Tuesday. Offshore facilities will be inspected once the storm has passed.
The Texas Gulf is a key area for U.S. oil refineries and oil and gas production.
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2:55 p.m.
Facebook and Google are matching donations to people affected by Hurricane Harvey, the tech giants announced on Tuesday. Facebook says it will match every dollar raised through its platform, up to $1 million, for the Center for Disaster Philanthropy’s Hurricane Harvey Recovery Fund. The money will support local recovery and rebuilding efforts. U.S. Facebook users are getting a message at the top of their news feed on how to donate.
Google says it is matching $1 million in donations to the American Red Cross. To donate, go to https://www.google.org/harvey-relief/. The company also matched donations from employees, and said Tuesday it donated $750,000 between its nonprofit arm, Google.org, and employee contributions to organizations such as the American Red Cross, Habitat for Humanity and Save the Children.
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2:30 p.m.
Houston Mayor Sylvester Turner confirmed that police Sgt. Steve Perez has died after he became trapped in his patrol car as he was driving to work.
The Houston Chronicle has reported that the 30-year officer was heading to work Sunday when he became trapped in high water on Interstate 45 in north Harris County and then couldn’t get himself out of his car.
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2:05 p.m.
NAACP interim President Derrick Johnson says his organization will carefully monitor government assistance in Houston and other areas to ensure minority neighborhoods get adequate resources following Harvey’s destruction on the Gulf Coast.
Johnson says the NAACP’s goal will be “to ensure that resources directed from the federal government don’t skip neighborhoods.”
Johnson told the National Press Club Tuesday that he met with officials from the Federal Emergency Management Agency earlier in the day. He says the NAACP has a responsibility to make sure “equity is at the table” during recovery efforts, noting that minority neighborhoods suffered disproportionately during Hurricane Katrina.
Johnson is the former president of the Mississippi State Conference NAACP. He says Katrina shows “it is critically important for the association to ensure that the recovery is equitable.”
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1:35 p.m.
Gov. John Bel Edwards says Louisiana is offering to shelter storm victims from Texas while the state also helps its own residents who were rescued from Harvey’s floodwaters overnight.
Edwards said at a news conference Tuesday in Baton Rouge that he expects Texas officials to decide within 48 hours whether to accept the offer and transport flood victims to Louisiana shelters.
Approximately 500 people were evacuated Monday night and early Tuesday from flooded neighborhoods in southwest Louisiana. Edwards says about 200 of them spent the night in area shelters.
Edwards says more than 600 members of the Louisiana National Guard are on storm-related duty. Many are assisting with rescue efforts.
Edwards says Tropical Storm Harvey was strengthening slightly after moving back into the Gulf of Mexico but wasn’t expected to become a hurricane again before its predicted Wednesday landfall in Louisiana.
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1:35 p.m.
Volunteers and donors are lining up outside of the Toyota Center, the downtown arena that’s home to the Houston Rockets, in anticipation that it will open as a shelter for Harvey evacuees.
City officials and Red Cross spokesmen have not confirmed that the arena will open to shelter evacuees. But several people who went to the George R. Brown Convention Center to volunteer or drop off clothes were told that the Toyota Center would open Tuesday afternoon. Around 30 people are waiting outside an arena entrance.
The convention center has nearly doubled its original 5,000-person capacity, and Mayor Sylvester Turner says the city may open multiple major shelters to accommodate the thousands of people still seeking shelter.
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1:25 p.m.
Houston Fire Chief Samuel Peña says his agency has responded to more than 1,000 calls for service — including 400 water rescues — since Harvey inundated much of the city.
Peña says some fire department crews have been working for three days straight, without a break, and he has implemented procedures to ensure firefighters get the nourishment and rest they need.
Peña says it has been difficult to get in fresh crews to replace firefighters at some locations because in many areas, “we can’t get in and out of the fire stations” due to flooding. “We can’t deploy them to where we need them with their equipment.”
Peña says the fire department is managing the resources it has on hand and will rotate in fresh firefighter crews as it is able to do so.
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1:10 p.m.
The University of Tampa has fired a visiting assistant professor who suggested in a tweet that Harvey’s destruction is “instant karma” for Texas because it voted Republican.
Sociology professor Kenneth L. Storey posted the tweet and two responses on Sunday before removing the entire thread and his profile photo.
University spokesman Eric Cardenas said in a statement Tuesday that Storey was fired after the school weathered an outpouring of online outrage over the comments.
The Tampa Bay Times reports Storey issued an apology on Monday, writing that he “never meant to wish ill will upon any group.”
In a Facebook post on Monday evening, the university said it “stands in solidarity with the people impacted by Hurricane Harvey.”
Officials said another sociology professor will take over Storey’s classes.
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1 p.m.
Weather forecasters expect Tropical Storm Harvey to come ashore somewhere near Louisiana’s southwestern corner, following its trip through Texas and return to the Gulf.
National Weather Service meteorologist Roger Erickson said Tuesday that officials project a landfall in Cameron Parish around midday Wednesday. Erickson says another 4 to 8 inches (10 to 20 centimeters) of rain is likely across southwest Louisiana.
Forecasters also project heavy rain running east from New Orleans to Pensacola along the Gulf Coast.
Harvey is expected to bring gusts up to 45 mph (70 kph) in coastal areas and gusts of up to 35 mph (55 kph) in Lake Charles and along the Interstate 10 corridor.
Erickson warns that some coastal rivers won’t be able to drain rains effectively because Harvey’s winds are pushing storm surge into coastal waters, aggravating flooding in places that have already received more than 20 inches of rain.
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12:55 p.m.
The Salvation Army says it has provided more than 5,000 meals in the Houston area since Harvey swamped parts of the city.
A Salvation Army statement Tuesday said the charitable group has deployed 42 mobile units that each can provide up to 1,500 meals per day. The group also sent two field kitchens, which can each serve up to 15,000 meals per day, to emergency personnel and flood survivors.
The Salvation Army says multiple staging areas are being set up across Texas to coordinate relief efforts as Harvey impacts more people. Those sites include Houston, San Antonio, Victoria and Arlington.
Lt. Col. Ron Busroe says donations from the public will help provide food, shelter and other valuable resources to people in Houston.
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12:45 p.m.
There was no escaping Harvey for members of one Southeast Texas family who found themselves on an extended stay at a New Orleans bed-and-breakfast — where sandbags are in place to guard against possible Harvey-related floods.
The Auld Sweet Olive Bed and Breakfast is the new, temporary home for Joe Aldape (ahl-DAH’-pey), his sister Cynthia, his son Joseph and other family members from the League City, Texas, area.
They had forged ahead with New Orleans vacation plans as Harvey developed. As of Tuesday, they had no way to return to their flooded homes. Meanwhile, bands of rain from Harvey prompted flash flood watches in New Orleans.
Bed-and-breakfast owner Nancy Gunn said her business took on water during Aug. 5 flash floods, but that it has not flooded so far during Harvey’s rains.
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12:35 p.m.
A South Texas ferry system operated by the state is closed to the public until further notice after at least two vessels were damaged during Hurricane Harvey.
A Texas Department of Transportation spokesman said Tuesday that all seven boats in the Port Aransas (uh-RAN’-suhs) Ferry System are being assessed. Rickey Dailey says the ferries must pass Coast Guard inspection before returning to service.
The ferry system provides free transportation connecting travelers between Aransas Pass on the mainland and Port Aransas on Mustang Island. It’s a quarter-mile trip.
The ferries, each capable of transporting at least 20 vehicles, were taken out of service Friday morning as Harvey approached Port Aransas, about 30 miles (48 kilometers) northeast of Corpus Christi. The area is where Harvey made landfall Friday night.
Dailey says all seven ferries were docked on the Port Aransas side when the storm hit.
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12:30 p.m.
Kim Kardashian West and her famous siblings are donating $500,000 to help victims of Hurricane Harvey.
A spokeswoman for the reality star says she and her mother and sisters have given $250,000 to the Red Cross and $250,000 to the Salvation Army on Tuesday.
Kardashian West announced the donation on Twitter Tuesday, saying: “Houston we are praying for you.” She used the hashtag #HoustonStrong.
They are among several stars who’ve said publicly they are helping hurricane victims. Kevin Hart on Monday announced a $25,000 donation to the Red Cross for storm victims and called on other celebrities to do the same.
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12:25 p.m.
Houston plans to open up at least two more big shelters to house people trying to escape Harvey’s floodwaters.
Mayor Sylvester Turner said at a news conference Tuesday that more than 9,000 people are now staying at George R. Brown Convention Center — the largest shelter that has so far been opened. The capacity at the convention center was supposed to be 5,000 people.
Turner says Houston will open up two new big shelters, and possibly a third. He didn’t identify where the shelters would be. More details are expected later Tuesday.
Turner says the number of people at the convention center has continued to grow because the facility is housing not only Houston residents but people from surrounding communities outside the city limits who are in need of shelter.
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12:25 p.m.
The mayor of Galveston is asking residents to stay put and off flooded roads as the city anticipates more rain from Harvey.
Mayor Jim Yarbrough says the city of about 50,000 could get up to 4 more inches (10 centimeters) of rain by Wednesday. The mayor says he wants Galveston residents to stay off the roads until conditions improve. Public transportation is not in service in Galveston. The city is 50 miles ( |
tyre too early in the race, unless it was necessary. It’s the same thing with spinning: it’s not the compound that you worry about so much as the carcass of the tyre; you worry about getting too much heat in too fast, because that’s what maintains heat in the tyre and really overworks the tyre and gets it beyond its comfortable working limit.
The latter can have such a huge effect, but in this modern era the electronics help the rider in so many ways. If they’re not real smooth, if they’re more of an aggressive rider, you can manage that aggression with the electronics – to a point. If you have to manage it too much, then it would certainly hurt the rider’s acceleration and hurt him being able to maximise his performance.
A last lap decider
So in the race Lorenzo got out front, but he was not able to really maintain that pace and the others closed with Dovi getting in the mix. It looked like Marc was just controlling it fairly easily, and I thought he had a better than 75 per cent chance of pulling this win off. But later in the race, especially in those last couple of laps, Dovi showed how he was really using his experience. That’s one thing I’ve been really impressed with over the last few years, especially last year and this year, just how well Dovi is making decisions out on the race track.
Going into that last lap, you knew what was going to happen. If Dovi was in front, Marc was going to pull an aggressive move at some point. Coming into the last two corners, after everyone had dropped back with the mistake from Valentino at turn one, nobody else was really in contention aside from Dovi and Marc.
You could see that Marc was going to try to make that pass going into the last corner and he picked up the throttle and got past Dovi, but he made the one mistake that you can’t make in that situation: to go in too far. That allowed Dovi to be able to ease up, square the corner and get a better drive and win the race, which was a great result for him and the Ducati. But Marc, he was fine with it. He has still got a gap on second place, so that was it. Great ride, great race.
I’m looking forward to the next race, I hope you are too.
DownloadA devout Catholic who popped into church to thank God for a his rescue from a lift was crushed to death by a 860lb stone altar, the Telegraph reports.
Police spokesman Roman Hahslinger explained that Gunther Link, 45, was "a very religious man and had been scared when he was trapped in the lift and had prayed for release".
He continued: "A short while later he was pulled out of the elevator and he went straight to the church to thank God."
Link was reported missing by his cousin, and found the next day by parishioners going to Mass at the Weinhaus Church in Vienna.
Hahslinger concluded: "He seems to have embraced a stone pillar on which the stone altar was perched and it fell on him, killing him instantly. We have found his fingerprints on the pillar. We are now investigating the case further." ®Let me ask you a question: How often do you think about your Firefox data? I think about your Firefox data every day, like it’s my job. Because it is. As the head of data science for Firefox, I manage a team of data scientists who contribute to the development of Firefox by shaping the direction of product strategy through the interpretation of the data we collect. Being a data scientist at Mozilla means that I aim to ensure that Firefox users have meaningful choices when it comes to participating in our data collection efforts, without sacrificing our ability to collect useful, high-quality data that is essential to making smarter product decisions.
To achieve this balance, I’ve been working with colleagues across the organization to simplify and clarify our data collection practices and policies. Our goal is that this will make it easier for you to decide if and when you share data with us. Recently, you may have seen some updates about planned changes to the data we collect, how we collect it, and how we share the data we collect. These pieces are part of a larger strategy to align our data collection practices with a set of guiding principles that inform how we work with and communicate about data we collect.
The direct impact is that we have made changes to the systems that we use to collect data from Firefox, and we have updated the data collection preferences as a result. Firefox clients no longer employ two different data collection systems (Firefox Health Report and opt-in Telemetry). Although one was on by default, and the other was opt-in, as a practical matter there was no real difference in the type of data that was being collected by the two different channels in release. Because of that, we now rely upon a single system called Unified Telemetry that has aspects of both systems combined into a single data collection platform and as a result no longer have separate preferences, as we did for the old systems.
If you are a long-time Firefox user and you previously allowed us to collect FHR data but you refrained from opting into extended telemetry, we will continue to collect the same type of technical and interaction information using Unified Telemetry. We have scaled back all other data collection to either pre-release or in situ opt-in, so you will continue to have choices and control over how Firefox collects your data.
Four Pillars of Our Data Collection Strategy
There are four key areas that we focused on when we decided to adjust our data preferences settings. For Firefox, it means that any time we collect data, we wanted to ensure that the proposal for data collection met our criteria for:
Necessity
Transparency
Accountability
Privacy
Necessity
We don’t collect data “just because we can” or “just because it would be interesting to measure”. Anyone on the Firefox team who requests data has to be able to answer questions like:
Is the data collection necessary for Firefox to function properly? For example, the automatic update check must be sent in order to keep Firefox up to date.
Is data collection needed to make a feature of Firefox work well? For example, we need to collect data to make our search suggestion feature work.
Is it necessary to take a measurement from Firefox users? Could we learn what we need from measuring users on a pre-release version of Firefox?
Is it necessary to get data from all users, or is it sufficient to collect data from a smaller sample?
Transparency
Transparency at Mozilla means that we publicly share details about what data we collect and ensure that we can answer questions openly about our related decision-making.
Requests for data collection start with a publicly available bug on bugzilla. The general process around requests for new data collection follows this process: people indicate that they would like to collect some data according to some specification, they flag a data steward (an employee who is trained to check that requests have publicly documented their intentions and needs) for review, and only those requests that pass review are implemented.
Most simple requests, like new Telemetry probes or experimental tests, are approved within the context of a single bug. We check that every simple request includes enough detail that a standard set of questions to determine the necessity and accountability of the proposed measurements. Here’s an example of a simple request for new telemetry-based data collection.
More complex requests, like those that call for a new data collection mechanism or require changes to the privacy notice, will require more extensive review than a simple request. Typically, data stewards or requesters themselves will escalate requests to this level of review when it is clear that a simple review is insufficient. This review can involve some or all of the following:
Privacy analysis : Feedback from the mozilla.dev.privacy mailing list and/or privacy experts within and outside of Mozilla to discuss the feature and its privacy impact.
: Feedback from the mozilla.dev.privacy mailing list and/or privacy experts within and outside of Mozilla to discuss the feature and its privacy impact. Policy compliance review : An assessment from the Mozilla data compliance team to determine if the request matches the Mozilla data compliance policies and documents.
: An assessment from the Mozilla data compliance team to determine if the request matches the Mozilla data compliance policies and documents. Legal review: An assessment from Mozilla’s legal team, which is necessary for any changes to the privacy policies/notices.
Accountability
Our process includes a set of controls that hold us accountable for our data collection. We take the precaution of ensuring that there is a person listed who is responsible for following the approved specification resulting from data review, such as designing and implementing the code as well as analyzing and reporting the data received. Data stewards check to make sure that basic questions about the intent behind and implementation of the data we collect can be answered, and that the proposed collection is within the boundaries of a given data category type in terms of defaults available. These controls allow for us to feel more confident about our ability to explain and justify to our users why we have decided to start collecting specific data.
Privacy
We can collect many types of data from your use of Firefox, but we don’t consider them equal. We consider some types of data to be more benign (like what version of Firefox you are using) than others (like the websites you visit). We’ve devised a four-tier system to group data in clear categories from less sensitive to highly sensitive, which you can review here in more detail. Since we developed this 4-tier approach, we’ve worked to align this language with our Privacy Policy and at the user settings for Privacy in Firefox. (You can read more about the legal team’s efforts in a post by my colleagues at Legal and Compliance.)
What does this mean for you?
We hope it means a lot and not much at the same time. At Firefox, we have long worked to respect your privacy, and we hope this new strategy gives you a clearer understanding of what data we collect and why it’s important to us. We also want to reassure you that we haven’t dramatically changed what we collect by default. So while you may not often think about the data you share with Mozilla, we hope that when you do, you feel better informed and more in control.This blog post is adapted from a talk I gave at Austin on Rails.
Ruby on Rails is a powerful, user-friendly web framework that allows developers to rapidly build applications. Its wide popularity is largely due to “the Rails way,” aka convention over configuration. Scaling Rails apps used to really suck (Twitter Fail Whale, anyone?), but we’ve come a long way.
Caching is one strategy that helps ease scaling pains that I often see Rails developers overlooking. Starting out with caching can be confusing, because terms and documentation can be convoluted, especially if you’re not an expert.
In this blog, the first of a two-part series on accelerating Rails, I’ll discuss caching options that come built-in with Rails and best practices for their effective use. In part two, I’ll cover dynamic edge caching and integration with Fastly’s acceleration platform.
Static vs. Dynamic Content
Before digging in, it’s important to understand the distinction between types of cacheable content on the web.
Static content refers to web objects like images, scripts, and stylesheets — content that doesn’t change often, and when it does, you can typically control the changes.
Dynamic content, on the other hand, includes web objects like JSON or HTML that change frequently, usually because of end-user changes or interaction with apps. In Rails, you can manage static content with the asset pipeline and use Fragment caching to cache dynamic HTML.
Built-in Rails Caching Options
The built-in Rails caching options include:
SQL Query
Page/Action
Asset Pipeline
Fragment/Russian Doll
More details about each one of these can be found in the Rails Caching Guide.
SQL Query
Rails provides a SQL query cache, used to cache the results of database queries for the duration of the request. This is enabled by setting the following options in your appropriate config/environments/*.rb file (usually production.rb).
config.action_controller.perform_caching = true config.cache_store = :mem_cache_store, "cache-1.example.com"
The caveat of query caching is that the query results are only cached for the duration of that single request; it does not persist across multiple requests. This is pretty unfortunate, since query caching between requests could be more beneficial. However, you can implement query caching across requests yourself using the standard Rails.cache interface. For example, you could create a class method on a model that caches the query results:
class Product < ActiveRecord::Base def self.out_of_stock Rails.cache.fetch("out_of_stock", expires_in: 1.hour) do Product.where("inventory.quantity = 0") end end end
One thing to note is that you should set up a cache_store that works for you. The default store is disk storage, which might slow down accesses if you put lots of objects in your cache. Disk storage is slow to access, anyway.
Page/Action
When I talk about caching to a big group, I poll the audience to get a sense of what caching strategies they use. I have literally only met one person out of hundreds who used Rails Page or Action caching in production. This lack of use probably explains why Page and Action caching were removed from Rails 4 core and extracted into its own caching gem(s). On top of that, most of the recent caching work in Rails has been on Fragment caching. Because they have been removed from Rails core, I’m not going to go into depth on their use. However, in part two, I’ll talk about some parallels between action caching and implementing dynamic edge caching.
Asset Pipeline
Since Rails 3.1, the Asset Pipeline has provided a highly useful, easy-to-use tool that makes dealing with static content (and static content caching) quite simple. I recommend using the following settings in the appropriate config/environments/*.rb files.
config.serve_static_assets = false
Offload static asset serving to Nginx or Apache by disabling the Rails server from serving assets and content in /public. Nginx or Apache is much more performant handling static files than your Rails server.
config.assets.css_compressor = :yui config.assets.js_compressor = :uglifier
Compress, minify, and concatenate JavaScripts and style sheets. In versions prior to Rails 4, you could set config.assets.compress = true, but Rails 4 now requires you to explicitly set your JS and CSS compressors. The assets.compress setting handles all of these things, which can greatly reduce the size of JavaScript and style sheets — sometimes by more than 80%. Compressing files to use fewer bytes saves you money on bandwidth costs and content will get to end users faster (since there’s less of it).
config.assets.digest = true
Asset Digests are an easy way to avoid dealing with cache invalidation when static content changes. I highly recommend you turn this option on.
config.action_controller.asset_host = "http://cdn.myfastsite.com"
Serve your assets from a CDN. This is pretty self explanatory.
config.static_cache_control = "public, s-maxage=15552000, max-age=2592000"
Use proper Cache-Control headers. More on this later.
Taking full of advantage of the Asset Pipeline configuration options will improve static asset load times, increasing end-user happiness and experience.
Rack::Deflater
Let’s quickly discuss the Rake::Deflater middleware included with Rails, which is enabled in your application.rb file.
# in application.rb module FastestAppEver class Application < Rails::Application config.middleware.use Rack::Deflater end end
This middleware will compress (using gzip, deflate, or another Accept-Encoding value) every response that leaves your application. I highly recommend using this to speed up delivery and reduce bandwidth in your applications. More info available on the Thoughtbot Rake Deflater blog.
Fragment/Russian Doll
Fragment caching is how you can cache dynamic HTML inside your Rails applications. Fragment caching exposes a cache method that is used in view templates like this:
# products/index.html.erb <% cache(cache_key_for_products) do %> <% Product.all.each do |p| %> <%= link_to p.name, product_url(p) %> <% end %> <% end %>
Wrap an arbitrary piece of HTML in this cache tag to cache it in the CacheStore that you set up. You can also get more complex and arbitrarily nest cache tags. This is commonly referred to in the Rails community as Russian Doll caching. More details are provided by DHH in his blog post.
# products/index.html.erb <% cache(cache_key_for_products) do %> All available products: <% Product.all.each do |p| %> <% cache(p) do %> <%= link_to p.name, product_url(p) %> <% end %> <% end %> <% end %>
I think Fragment caching is the best addition to the Rails caching techniques, and I’ve seen more more Rails devs use this than page or action caching. I find Russian Doll caching confusing and have actually avoided implementing it in the past because of the strange cache key scheme. Plus, it is extremely difficult to work with view templates in legacy Rails apps.
The Rails Russian Doll cache key format is actually quite clever and makes a lot of sense if you are familiar with memcached. The id/timestamp cache key format is a way to get around the fact that memcache doesn’t support wildcard purging.
Instead of thinking that cache keys always map to the same content, and that every key maps to a unique piece of content, I like to think of cache keys as mapping to the most up-to-date content (much like a database primary key). I find it easier to reason about complex caching strategies this way, given that your cache supports a fast enough invalidation mechanism. I’ll talk about cache keys more in-depth in part two.
One last thought about Fragment caching: it’s targeted primarily at dynamic HTML. With the removal of page and action caching, Rails now lacks a good built-in mechanism for dynamic API caching. I’ll cover dynamic API caching in part two.
HTTP Headers
Rails does a really good job of abstracting HTTP Headers. This is great, until you need to interact with them at a more fundamental level. Here’s an explanation of common HTTP Headers that affect caching and some tips for best practices.
Cache-Control
In the asset pipeline Cache-Control example above, I used a pretty long string with a couple different “directives.” What do all of these mean?
public
Please cache for the time specified. This can also be private, which means do not cache.
max-age
The length of time for a piece of content to be cached. This applies to all caches unless otherwise stated, and I typically think of max-age as applying to the browser. Choose this value based on what makes sense for your application. Base this value on how often things change. For example, if you only update my CSS twice a year, it’s probably safe to cache this for at least a few weeks.
s-maxage
The length of time for the content to be cached in proxy caches, i.e. CDNs or memcached.
By using two different values for max age (one for the browser and for the CDN), you can ensure your end users always have the most up-to-date content and you can maximize the time the content lives in the CDN, which minimizes requests back to your application server. Check out Section 14.9 in RFC 2616 for a full list of Cache-Control directives.
ETag
The ETag HTTP Header is provided to determine if content has changed and needs to be updated. Rails automatically adds ETag headers into responses with the Rack::ETag middleware. At a high level, ETags enable Rails to serve 304 not modified responses when end-user data does not need to be updated. Unfortunately, to be able to do this, Rails must still render the response every time to generate the ETag, which is lame for performance. However, Rails does provide a way to override this behavior using Conditional GETs with the stale? and fresh_when methods.
Vary
Vary is used to change a response based on the value of another HTTP Header. This is best explained by example. Let’s take a Vary header with Accepting-Encoding as the value Vary: Accept-Encoding
This response can be different based on the value of the Accept-Encoding header. For example, the value of Accept-Encoding can either be gzip or deflate.
Accept-Encoding: gzip => Response A (gzip encoded) Accept-Encoding: deflate => Response A' (deflate encoded) I learned my very simple Vary header best practices from Steve Souders, whom I’ve had the pleasure of working with at Fastly. His advice? Don’t Vary on anything except Accept-Encoding/Content-Encoding.
Something you never want to do is Vary on the User-Agent header. This can sound quite convenient, especially if you need to serve different sized images to mobile clients. But, there are thousands of user agents. Varying on thousands of different responses limits caching benefits, namely because it can be impossible to serve the same response more than once, since there is so much variation in the value of UA.
Check out Accelerating Rails part two, where I’ll talk about how to integrate edge caching into your apps.Maybe it was the Novocaine, but last week I had an epiphany:
This country has been run by insane people for this entire century.
We started out the 2000s with no deficits and no wars.
We ended up with more debt than we can count and more wars than we can count.
I gleaned this knowledge as I was having a couple of crowns installed by my dentist. He's got a TV set up by the chair and the patient can pick the channel.
I figured I'd get some work done as I sat there, so I chose C-SPAN. They were showing a rerun of Mick Mulvaney's confirmation hearing before a Senate committee Tuesday.
Mulvaney is a congressman from South Carolina who has been nominated by President Trump to head the Office of Management and Budget.
He is what's known as a "deficit hawk," a fiscal conservative whose main concern is the massive debt the United States has been running up.
In this, he clashes both with his own party and his own president.
Senate Republicans recently passed a resolution permitting budget deficits through 2026.
Meanwhile Trump has said he wants to increase military spending. Mulvaney seeks to cut it - and everything else.
This is where the insanity comes in. The sole GOP dissenting vote on that budget bill came from Senator Rand Paul of Kentucky. Paul and his father, Ron Paul, have been the loudest voices of dissent within the GOP on the many military actions the U.S. has been involved in since 9/11.
For this they were labeled as the crazy people in their party. The sane ones were the guys who borrowed trillions to blow things up in the Mideast, first under George W. Bush and then under Barack Obama.
Bush used those wars as an excuse to ignore his campaign promises to balance the budget. As for Obama, at least he had the excuse that as a Democrat he never made any such promises.
But between the two of them they stuck us with a giant debt with little or nothing to show for it. Mulvaney put that debt into perspective by stating "If you are an ordinary American family, the equivalent to you of a $20 trillion debt is a credit card bill of $260,000."
That's one way of looking at it. Another came when he got a question about what would happen if the economy heats up, as everyone hopes it does, and interest rates rise a point.
That would increase the annual interest debt-service payment by $200 billion, he replied. That's a third of the defense budget.
And then there's Social Security - a perfect topic to ponder while your teeth are getting drilled. The 49-year-old Mulvaney was asked what will happen if we don't either cut benefits, raise taxes, or both.
"If we do nothing, then by the time I retire, there will be an across-the-board 22 percent cut to Social Security benefits," he replied. "Without changing the current Social Security program, a 40-year-old today will receive roughly 77 percent of what they've been promised for their adult life."
Medicare? Medicaid? Again, getting your teeth drilled is more pleasant than listening to the details of those programs.
The question of retirement funding brings up another major screw-up from the Bush crowd. Bush made privatizing Social Security his highest priority. The big problem was where to come up with the $1.2 trillion needed to fund the transition.
Instead of addressing that, Bush promptly blew through a few trillion starting wars he had no idea how to win. And instead of fixing Medicare, he added a prescription-drug benefit that adds half a trillion a year to the debt.
As for Obama, he came into office with a Nobel Peace Prize - and promptly started wars in Libya and Syria. Oh yeah, we're also blowing stuff up with drones in Yemen.
Why? No one even asks. Getting Americans to care about foreign policy is like pulling teeth.
The same goes for budgetary matters. By the end of that hearing, Mulvaney had been blasted by both sides. The Republican wanted him to promise to spend more on the military. The Democrats wanted him to spend more on social programs.
That we don't have the money for either did not enter into their calculations.
My time in the chair ended with no physical pain. Perhaps that was because of the skill of my dentist. Or perhaps because the pain in my head from hearing all those numbers distracted me.
But it gave me a new perspective on the charges from all my liberal friends that the new president is crazy.
Perhaps he is.
In that case, he's perfect for the job.
BELOW: I realize few people enjoy this kind of thing, but here goes:When I browse around gaming forums and subreddits, I see a lot of people asking the same question:
“What are other games like _______?”
It’s a fair question, and it makes sense. People are generally aware of their own tastes, for the most part. However, without an understanding of why they like what they like, people have to instead make comparisons and just hope that’s good enough. People might call Borderlands a mashup of Diablo and Call of Duty. Unturned might be called a mashup of DayZ and Minecraft. But is the actual experience of playing any of those games really similar to the games they come from? Do you play Call of Duty for the same reasons you play Borderlands? What exactly does Unturned have to do with Minecraft? You could really go wrong making recommendations based on visual elements or theme when the primary driver of the experience is the rules of play. What you can and can’t do, what you’re asked to do, and how you decide to do those things are what shape the actual player experience much more than theming alone. With that in mind, I want to talk to you about a game where what you do is actually unlike anything else I’ve ever played – Auro: A Monster-Bumping Adventure by Dinofarm Games.
What is Auro?
Auro is exactly what it says in the title: a game in which you bump monsters around on a hexagonal grid in various ways and with various tools to one purpose – remove the monsters from the grid as efficiently as possible. It all starts with the basic bump, a simple tap that sends a monster away one hex tile and stuns it for its turn. Hey, there’s a pool behind it – sploosh! Monster gone. But here come two more, and you’ll need to deal with them more efficiently or take damage. Fortunately, you have at your disposal a number of rechargeable spells, up to five at a time, and two slots for single-use versions of the same spells. Instead of your usual fare of “different flavors of doing damage,” every single one of these spells is either a modifier for the bump, a consequence for the bump, or a different sort of bump altogether. Take, for example, the ice-spell Snowball, a spell that allows you to deliver a bump from range and freeze the target and everyone adjacent, which can include you! Oh, but that rat tried to damage you while you were frozen, did no damage, and wasted his attack, so that was good for you. Or take the aptly-named fire-spell Rotisserie, which rotates all adjacent monsters one tile around you and causes them to start trailing fire. And yes, you can bump monsters into fire to kill them that way as well. You could also use their new positioning to set up more bumps or merely run past them. Spells aren’t recharged over time but by walking over enough power tiles, which go dark when they’re collected. Each randomized board has a finite number of monsters to bump, dunk, burn, or ignore as you make your way from the left of the board to the right side. When you reach it, a teleporter will take you to the next board, which increments the difficulty by sending harder monsters after you. You repeat this process until you reach the score goal and win or run out of hit points and lose.
Now, all of this is fairly simple to understand and second nature once you get used to it. But the possibility space is anything but simple. All of the spells, effects, and even the monster abilities themselves are highly interactive, and playing well requires you to see those possibilities and expertly set them up to your advantage. You might, for example, lay down some ice with the Floe spell and then use Rotisserie to rotate someone onto the ice, which causes them to slip and slide all the way down the entire ice floe and into the water. Meanwhile, your spell slid another monster across the same ice in a different direction, and while he made it to dry land, he trails fire as he chases you. You promptly smack him back into the fire to kill him. In a completely different situation, you might trigger a Troggle to line up a charge at you, then cast Leap to jump out of the way just in time, leaving an air vortex behind. The Troggle accidentally kills another monster as he blindly charges through it, hits the air vortex, and sails through the air to land on and crush yet another hapless monster. Meanwhile your Leap spell caused you to land on a flyer who was hovering over the water, which dunks him and gives you another leap to safety, which sets you up to thank your Troggle friend with a Snowball to the face, sending him into the drink as well.
And then there my favorite monsters – the Jellies. These adorable, green mounds of pudding may be opposed to you, but having them around is often a blessing in disguise. Rather than damaging you, they have a bump of their own, and while they can certainly bump you off the stage, you can also use them to propel you forward and create distance between you and the more relentless monsters. Even more fun is the way they flatten out into a springboard when they get bumped. The first creature to walk over or land on them will get bounced through the air two tiles in the direction they were going. With enough slimes, things become a hilarious mess of ordered chaos as monsters start bouncing off slimes all over the place. You can even have monsters bounce onto your own head and give them the last alley-oop into the drink! Your first few Jelly-bounce kills will probably be by accident, but as you start to see what’s possible, you’ll start seeing them coming and setting them up on your own. There’s something both funny and satisfying about setting up a monster Rube Goldberg machine of bounces, bumps, and slides that gets a bunch of kills just the way you wanted it to.
Really, that’s what Auro is about: observing your current situation and coming up with a creative way to solve it. The randomized boards constantly thrust you into new situations, and when you find a situation that’s familiar, maybe this time you can solve it even better. That’s another thing that Auro does really well: it provides you clear feedback for how good your moves are, and it does so through its brilliant scoring system. The points you get for offing the monsters have nothing to do with what you’re killing but with how you are killing them. See, the game keeps a counter in the corner of the screen that represents how many points that you will get should you kill a monster right now. Every time you move or bump a monster, this number slowly ticks down. When you do get a kill, you not only get the points currently listed on the counter, but you also increment the counter quite a lot, making your next kill worth even more. This means that even killing the same set of creatures can give you very different point totals depending on how quickly you kill them. Good play is making successive kills rapidly with as few turns between as possible, whereas super conservative play that takes lots of time to draw out monsters and deal with them singly won’t give you many points. The scoring system is brilliant because it means that the moves that are the most awesome and the moves that are the highest scoring are the same thing. The game naturally pushes you toward the game play that is the most interesting, exciting, and sometimes downright silly.
A Clockwork Design
As a strategy game, Auro has a lot of small nuances that add up to a finely crafted game system and generate the dynamics of its game play. The first is the choice to use a hex grid instead of a square grid. Hexes already offer a great trade-off between freedom of movement and quantifying that movement as discrete spaces. They partner well with the fact that “passing” a turn by taking no action is not allowed. This is an intentional design decision – the game forces you to move instead of passively waiting for enemies to fall into your traps. Depending on the enemy spacing, you might be in position to spring your trap, or you might not! You need to carefully consider the distance the monster must travel and calculate what route you’ll have to take to be in the right place at the right time. Hexes help the player to do this by offering leeway in the route: by traveling a particular way, the player can arrive at his destination right on schedule – provided that the route is safe to travel!
Hexes are then incorporated into the entire design of the game. The Fire Trap spell lays down fire in a hexagonal pattern all around Auro, and the specific placement is such that adjacent monsters can’t be immediately pushed right into the fire – a flat, uninteresting strategy that the designers purposefully avoided. Instead, you’ll have to think a few steps ahead – Fire Trap is still extremely useful for creating choke points, and with a little set-up, you can make kills when there’s no water nearby. You just need to plan out the best way to use the fire to your advantage. Even the viewing area of the game board is a hexagon thanks to the UI, a very canny design element that ensures that you see the same distance in all directions. This is an important design choice when you consider that not knowing what’s coming is what makes certain actions risky – do you blow all your spells now for big points or do you save a little power for the off-screen monsters that are about to pursue you relentlessly?
Another design element that brings out a lot of depth is the concept of the power tile. Since your spells don’t recharge at all unless you pick up tiles, you’re incentivized to walk over them. The thing is, finding more of them generally means traveling forward on the board, which will wake up a few more monsters to deal with. While power tiles may look plentiful, the moment you see another monster on the board, you’re no longer able to move exactly how you want – you’ll need to take that monster into consideration, and sometimes that means giving more tiles a miss. Casting spells often makes you more powerful, and can get you high score totals when well executed, but it leaves you vulnerable afterward without your spells to help you. However, since collecting a single power tile decrements the cooldown of all your spent spells at once, having more spells on cooldown means each tile is more economical and you get to cast all your spells more often. It’s got a great risk/reward dynamic that takes good judgement to manage properly. Even after you deal with all the monsters on the board, going backwards to pick up more power tiles means more turns not killing anything, which drains your score multiplier. Sometimes you will have to sacrifice your score multiplier to take that time-out, but leaving the level also gives you a bit more progress towards the next tier of score multiplier. There’s a three-way tension going on all the time, a tension between your spell cooldowns, your hit points, and your score. Ultimately, the score is the most important, but if you shirk on the other two, you’ll find yourself unable to generate any more points due to lack of spells or just dying and losing entirely. You’ll have to make tense decisions about when to sacrifice what for what else, and that tension exists on basically every move you make. See, for as cute and innocent as Auro might look, it’s deceptively intense as you get to higher levels of play.
Now, don’t let this convince you that Auro is all hard all the time and too intense for you. Auro does something completely outstanding with it’s main play mode to ensure that the game, while challenging, isn’t crushingly hard to any particular individual. When you play your first (non-tutorial) game, Auro has you play a placement match. Depending on how well you do, you’ll receive a ranking to reflect your skill. This rank determines the difficulty of the game and the target score to reach when you play subsequent matches. Furthermore, when you win, you receive points towards increasing your rank and graduating to a higher difficulty. Losing ranked matches will lose you points, so if the game gets too hard and you start losing often, the game will readjust its difficulty to fit your skill. This is maybe the best part of the entire game – it gives you both a reasonable short-term goal for each match and a clear long-term measurement of your growing skill. I’ve previously written about how unbounded high-score goals tend to do undesirable things to a game’s strategy. Auro solidly fixes those problems by always giving you a reasonable score goal that causes a win-state. No longer do you have to wait for the game to give you the perfect random seed before you get to have a chance to beat your previous best score. Now you get to play the game every time! Rather than rating your skill on one-time high scores, it judges your ability to consistently score well, adjusting its expectations of you up or down as needed. It’s like a competitive ladder for single-player games, a mechanism that gives you very clear feedback for your skill. On top of this, you can get win-streaks that give you more momentum towards increasing your rank, but your rate of point loss for losing remains static. This means that there’s a slight push towards higher ranks. If you’re between two skill ranks, Auro prefers to keep you in the higher one, and it accelerates you out of ranks beneath your ability. It gives you the hardest reasonable challenge it can to provide opportunities to grow in skill and help you to rank even higher. It also stops giving you easy boards that you’ve proven you can effortlessly clear and instead skips right to the ones that you may struggle with. Most of all, it keeps games reasonably short, whereas in a high-score game, higher and higher scores-to-beat usually mean longer and longer games, Auro can increase the difficulty of the board arrangements |
things, and then celebrate other things to ignore that and just be fine.
We’re in a creative industry. Of all people, we should know the way we get better isn’t through celebrating our successes, but by reflecting on our failures. We’re in this industry because we see something special in this medium. We don’t have to brag. We don’t have to prove ourselves. We don’t have to create heroic mythologies to justify our existence. We’re here because we care.
We need to acknowledge our failures so that we can learn.Having been reading a lot of end of the world books lately, I didn't know what to expect with this one. It isn't terribly long, there are not a great many characters and most of the book is spent with one girl and her thoughts and yet I found I could not put it down. This book takes a different approach to the end of the world, where as in most cases there is a threat to avoid (zombies, disease or so on) the biggest threat for this book in the first half is loneliness. The author does a great job of making use of short lived minor characters. Though many of them receive very little screen time she managed to make me mourn their deaths with the main character, even when the character hardly existed. There are a couple of antagonists that happen in the story, but in each case you're left with someone that has depth which you can at least on some level identify with. While I found the romantic interest a little flat, the author doesn't make any pretense about this and in fact you're often given the sense of making the best of a situation (even romance), which i found fascinating. There are some cliches, who lives, who dies and so on, but for the most part the author managed to make them all work, exploring them in a unique way or making you the reader mourn the opportunity cost of choices made, but not as the book could have been better, rather how much better their lives could have been.
I would recommend this book. It has surprising depth.Keeping arms from troubled people is important. But proper treatment is too.
A parent walks away from Sandy Hook Elementary School with children in Newtown, Conn. on Dec. 14, 2012 following a shooting at the school. (Photo11: FRANK BECERRA, JR. GANNETT) Story Highlights As the father of a son with mental health issues, I understand the complicated dilemma we face.
My adult son's voice was rattled.
"You watching the news about Sandy Hook?" he asked.
"Yes, 20 children and six adults murdered," I replied.
He let out a sad sigh. "I'm trying to wrap my head around this."
Like most Americans, my adult son was distraught about Friday's murders. How could anyone not be? But for him the news was especially unsettling. That's because he's one of "them." He's one of the ones being demonized on television. He's been diagnosed with a mental illness. He's been arrested. He's been repeatedly hospitalized in mental wards.
My son has never shown an interest in buying or owning a firearm. He's never physically harmed anyone. He's a gentle soul. Yet, television pundits are blaming people such as him for the atrocities at Sandy Hook Elementary School. If only we could keep the guns out of the hands of the "nut jobs," Time magazine's Joe Klein opined two days after the Tucson shootings that killed six people and wounded 12 more. We would all be safe.
During the presidential debates, President Obama jumped on the bandwagon. We need better laws to keep guns away from "the mentally ill." Even the gun lobby agrees.
Federal statutes already prohibit anyone who has been "adjudicated as (being) mental defective or has been committed to a mental institution" from buying a firearm. Connecticut, where the Sandy Hook shootings happened, prohibits the sale of firearms to anyone who has been found not guilty of a crime due to a "mental disease" or has been a "patient in a mental hospital within the preceding 12 months."
Can we toughen existing laws? Of course. But the devil is in the details. Many of the police, firefighters and EMTs who responded to the 9/11 disaster in Manhattan reported feelings of Post Traumatic Stress Disorder, a mental illness. Many of our returning military veterans who fought in Iraq and Afghanistan have also filed claims for PTSD. Should we be afraid of them? What about the FBI agent who becomes depressed after his teenage daughter dies in a car accident? Should he not seek psychiatric counseling or take anti-depressants because it might cost him the right to own a firearm?
Ironically, the move on Capitol Hill has been to weaken existing laws, not tighten them. Sens. Richard Burr, R-N.C. and James Webb, D-Va., along with 10 other co-sponsors, want to give 127,000 military veterans the right to own firearms even though their psychiatric disabilities are so severe that the Department of Veterans Affairs* has appointed others to manage their finances.
The National Institutes of Mental Health reports that about one in four adults suffer from a diagnosable mental disorder in a given year. That's 57.7 million people. According to a recent article published by Public Health Law Research, gun restrictions on people with a history of mental illness, such as background checks and waiting periods, had no significant effect on homicide rates. The restrictions, however, did reduce the suicide rate, suggesting that people with mental disorders, especially depression, are more likely to kill themselves than others.
My aim is not to make an anti-gun control argument. I favor tighter controls, especially on assault weapons. What troubles me is broadside finger-pointing that increases stigma against persons such as my son. He didn't ask to have a mental disorder anymore than I asked to have poor eyesight and asthma.
Early reports suggest the Sandy Hook killer had a mental disorder. The mass killers in Tucson and on the Virginia Tech campus did, too. It appears the Aurora, Colo., shooter has one. When 20 children lie dead in a school along with six adults, it's hard to keep these mass murders in perspective. It's hard to remember that only a small subset of severely disturbed persons commit them. A 2006 study found that the vast majority of violent acts in America are not attributable to mental illness. Persons with mental illness are more likely to be victims.
But those studies provide no solace to grieving Connecticut parents.
Asking how we can keep guns out of the hands of someone such as Adam Lanza is an important question. But it is not the only one that needs to be asked. It may not be the most important one. The best way to keep severely disturbed individuals from committing murders is by getting them into treatment facilities where they can get help and not harm others.
Connecticut has an estimated 140,000 residents with severe mental illnesses. About half are not getting any treatment. Why? Between 2005 and 2007, the state closed 17% of its public hospital beds for treating psychiatric disorders. What happened to the patients who used to get help in those facilities? In my home state of Virginia, persons with psychiatric problems who are dangerous are being released to the streets because there are no treatment beds available.
In addition to debating gun control, we need to ask why our mental health system is failing us.
As my son told me after our initial conversation, this is not about dividing people into groups. It is not about "them." It is about all of "us."
*This sentence has been corrected from an earlier version.
Pete Earley is the author of CRAZY: A Father's Search Through America's Mental Health Madness.
In addition to its own editorials, USA TODAY publishes diverse opinions
from outside writers, including our Board of Contributors.
Read or Share this story: http://usat.ly/RvDpKXPope Francis Offers Mind-Blowing Deals On Indulgences For Reformation Day
VATICAN CITY—The Roman Catholic Church is celebrating Reformation Day in style, by offering thousands of hot deals on indulgences for the forgiveness of the temporal punishments for sin in purgatory.
A crazed-looking Pope Francis ran an infomercial throughout the day Tuesday, marking the 500th anniversary of the Protestant Reformation by offering hourly lightning deals on high-quality, official indulgences granted by the Roman Catholic Church.
“Tetzel would be rolling in his grave if he could see the kinds of deals we have for you today!” Pope Francis said in the infomercial, which was rolling around the clock as the Pope broadcast from Vatican City. “We’ve got indulgences for gossip, we’ve got indulgences for lying—heck, we’ve even got indulgences for fornication! All at rock-bottom prices! And if you buy in bulk, you’re going to save, save, save!”
Pope Francis hawked the Roman Catholic wares all day long, enthusiastically pitching the indulgences as a great gift for birthdays, Christmas, Valentine’s Day, and Easter.
“But wait, there’s more!” Francis said later in the afternoon. “If you buy right now, you’ll get the value pack on indulgences, plus you’ll get a SECOND value pack—absolutely FREE! That’s right! So call now, don’t wait, we only have a few lines open so get your order placed right now!”
At publishing time, Pope Francis had begun a live demonstration of the indulgences, showing how he could commit a minor sin and immediately have its punishment removed through one of the official Catholic products.** INTERNATIONAL SUBSCRIBERS ** We will ship all print subscriptions to international buyers even though our pledge levels mention "USA ONLY". Costs for shipping are $2.00/Issue to Canada, $2.75/Issue to Mexico and $3.50/Issue anywhere else in the world. International subscribers will be billed for any additional postage upon the close of our campaign. This can be paid via Paypal or by Credit Card.
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WELCOME TO RETRO:
Do you long for the great video gaming magazines from back in the day? Magazines with some heart and soul without all the big media fluff? We sure do, and that is why video game auction site GameGavel.com and the RetroGamingRoundup.com podcast decided to team up with some of the most popular and influential gaming journalists and personalities from the past three decades to introduce an independent print, digital and online publication dedicated to the past, present and future of the video gaming pastime that will hearken back to the amazing magazines from the 80's, 90's and early 2000's.
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reviews of classic games across countless genres. Reviews of current generation products with a focus on franchise reboots, games with classic licensing tie-ins and modern games that build on 8, 16 and 32-bit gaming's core principles.
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own panel of revered contributors. Monthly "Top 10"-style features on the best games, consoles and moments in gaming history.
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Eclipse (Photo: David De Lossy, Getty Images)
UPDATE: Six days out: The weather report for Salem, Lincoln City and Madras
——
It's hard to believe an event billed as the biggest in Oregon history is just one week away.
Visitors from around the globe are expected to begin arriving in Salem and other cities within the path of the Great American Eclipse this coming week.
That means it's time to officially begin weather watching, to get a sense of whether we'll have clear skies for the big day.
Now that we're close, most weather sites have started issuing forecasts for Aug. 21.
As we get closer, forecasts are starting to mean more — and meteorologists have stressed that in Oregon, we may not have a great idea of whether we'll have clear skies until the final days.
But it's still worth looking at what forecasters are saying at this point. The most reliable source, the National Weather Service, has also issued their forecast for eclipse day.
The picture is starting to come together and it's mixed.
Let's start on the coast and move east.
More eclipse weather:
Will Salem be sunny or cloudy on eclipse day? Here's what recent history tells us
Lincoln City and the Oregon Coast
The Oregon Coast was always the most iffy place for sunshine, with meteorologists giving the coast just a 44 percent chance of clear skies.
But the forecast looks... semi-promising at this point. Most weather sites see lots of clouds in the near term giving way to sunny or partly sunny skies on Eclipse Day.
A red flag is that Aug. 21 is surrounded by rainy and cloudy days.
The National Weather Service forecasts partly sunny skies.
Early morning fog is also a question that really won't be answered until the big day. So, stay tuned.
Salem and the Willamette Valley
Forecasts for the Salem area offer a pretty good indication of why long-term forecasts aren't super helpful.
On four weather sites offering forecasts, you get four slightly different answers for the weather on Aug. 21.
Weather Channel says sunny, AccuWeather is calling for sun and some clouds, Weather Underground is thinking clear skies and Weather Bug is pessimistic with partly cloudy.
The good news is nobody is calling for major clouds or rain in that time period. So that's something.
The National Weather Service forecast has been released and is calling for mostly sunny skies..
Madras
This Central Oregon town has become famous in eclipse circles specifically because it's so likely to have sunny skies on Aug. 21 — 90 percent in fact, according to the National Weather Service.
But what's this?
Check the long-term forecasts, and the answer isn't so straightforward. The Weather Channel is calling for partly cloudy skies and AccuWeather says "partly sunny." The National Weather Service forecast calles for sunny skies.
The two other sites believe in sunny or mostly sunny skies, but still. It's hard to imagine the chaos if we get closer to Eclipse Day and overcast skies are forecast.
Read or Share this story: http://stjr.nl/2wTJ8jsBiologists are now challenged with the functional interpretation of vast amounts of sequencing data derived from genomics initiatives. Among all known proteins, the function of enzymes is probably the most investigated and best described at the molecular level. Together with enzymes changing the redox state of substrates and transferring chemical groups between molecules, isomerases catalyze interconversion of isomers, molecules sharing the same atomic composition but different arrangements of chemical groups. This study presents a way of describing isomerases that will give biochemists a method to search and utilize reaction data in a more knowledge-based manner. It captures our current knowledge, characterizing the chemistry of isomerization in biology, and will contribute to improving the annotation of sequences derived from genomes.
Abstract
Isomerization reactions are fundamental in biology, and isomers usually differ in their biological role and pharmacological effects. In this study, we have cataloged the isomerization reactions known to occur in biology using a combination of manual and computational approaches. This method provides a robust basis for comparison and clustering of the reactions into classes. Comparing our results with the Enzyme Commission (EC) classification, the standard approach to represent enzyme function on the basis of the overall chemistry of the catalyzed reaction, expands our understanding of the biochemistry of isomerization. The grouping of reactions involving stereoisomerism is straightforward with two distinct types (racemases/epimerases and cis-trans isomerases), but reactions entailing structural isomerism are diverse and challenging to classify using a hierarchical approach. This study provides an overview of which isomerases occur in nature, how we should describe and classify them, and their diversity.Signup to receive a daily roundup of the top LGBT+ news stories from around the world
A large majority of Dutch parliamentarians have said they want schools to be punished for not teaching lessons on LGBT+ acceptance.
Nearly the full lower house, or the Tweede Kamer, voted to support a motion filed by SP MP Jasper van Dijk.
The motion would punish schools which do not teach about LGBT+ awareness and acceptance, according to NOS.
The schools would be punished for consistently refusing to teach the lessons with fines or administrative action.
van Dijk says schools need to teach about diversity in order to fight discrimination.
Three parties voted against the motion, the VVD, SGP and FvD.
VVD MP Dilan Yesilgoz says her party does not want to overstep the Education Inspectorate.
The Inspectorate estimates that around 20 percent of schools, both primary and secondary, don’t teach lessons on diversity.
This is despite it being mandatory since 2012 in the country.
A teacher was sacked in Florida last week for asking middle school children if they feel “comfortable” around black people, Muslims and gays.
Back in March, a group of Muslim parents campaigned to have a gay preschool teacher fired.
Preschool teachers in Australia were last week encouraged to intervene in gendered play, in order to promote equality.Yo, bros! Welcome to Twitter in Focus, where media comes to die! Our archive is fixed and we’re back in action! Today’s contestant is Doug Stanhope, Libertarian comedian. I recently discovered Doug’s amazing stand up special, “No Refunds“, via Reddit and YouTube. Funny fuckin’ stuff. Although his twitter is not verified, this one sounds pretty legit. Let’s dive in, shall we?
December 16th: “Fuck Jesus/Santa – pray to 4Chan- dear 4Chan, please stop Mike Vick from leading pro bowl votes. I know you love cats but dogs aint so bad.”
Yeah, I’m torn about this, I have no investment in organized sports whatsoever, but the guy did his time. Time to forgive him or is he only forgiven because he’s playing well. But yeah, he shouldn’t lead the votes.
December 16th: “”Toys for Tots” is as charitable in the spectrum of need as would be “Diamonds for Debutantes.” Fuck the dying,… http://fb.me/NTRfVM03”
Jesus Christ, if this isn’t Doug Stanhope’s Twitter, it’s an amazing fucking imitation. Brutally honest as always. Yeah, I have to agree. Way bigger priorities in this world.
December 17th: “Apologies but I lived thru the surgery – perhaps its the drugs but thanks to all for everything – I think I love… http://fb.me/QLBBgdB4”
Congrats. How’s the new vagina?
December 18th: “Documentary binge on Netflix – check “Restrepo” – best Afghan war doc by far – also “Collapse” with Michael… http://fb.me/NZYF7QWS”
Yeah, I heard good things. Gotta check it out.
December 18th: “Way to live up to the “UnBookables” standards, Travis. You should have saved this one for the documentary…. http://fb.me/DEVKYrvx”
At least he wasn’t driving a Harley.
December 19th: “Day 3 after surgery with still no sign of poop. Laxatives, coffee, smokes, h20 – nothing working. Please take a… http://fb.me/DNRNCcpt”
Brutal. Recovering from surgery sucks so much as. Especially if they put you under. If there is a next time for me, I’ll just say, “Cut me open, I’d rather be in screaming agony then have to spend the next two weeks trying to stay awake.”
December 20th: “Football allows me valuable time to reflect on all the more important things I could be doing with my life and… http://fb.me/QyGVJmE2”
Congrats. This is officially the most shit references on a twitter I’ve read to date.
December 21st: “Again, I’m lumped in with kid-fuckers on CNN – at 3:40 mark mentions my “Fun with Pedophiles” book…. http://fb.me/Q7U5FiBV”
You think Dr. Gupta read past his Amazon search? I’d bet money he read whatever his assistant handed to him.
December 21st: “Take Jury Duty! Slight glimmer of hope – please share…… http://fb.me/NRyKpmvO”
Good news, Travis! Soon you’ll be able to crash on the real thing!
December 22nd: “Need to have my Celebrity Death Pool 2011 picks in this week – got 20 picks – 100 points for a correct pick minus their age so Abe Vigoda is only worth 21 points. Input?”
Whatever you do. Don’t pick Abe Vigoda. That guy’s going to live to be 500.
December 27th: “Phi Eagles and NFL are mincing, hairless back-pussies. Cancel a fucking game for snow? You should play in footie pajamas, you baby-tits.”
It was Vick’s fault. A pack of rabid pitbulls trapped him inside Pat’s Steak for 36 hours.
December 27th: “My Kwanzaa Sock hung by the space heater remains empty. What up wit dat?”
You forgot about the Hanukkah zombie so it’s a push.
December 28th: “Here’s my segment from Charlie Brooker’s WIPE review of the year, on BBC2. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HQGqXUNe4XE http://fb.me/OEhkpaCL”
Yeah, TV news is just so useless. I only watch it to see what the masses are thinking. It’s just sad.
December 31st: “Someone tell Dave Chappelle to email me. Thanks.”
Chappelle, email Doug. Thanks.
December 31st: “Louis CK’s “Hilarious” well worth checking out.”
Yeah, you can’t go wrong with Louis. Kind of like the Coen Brothers and True Grit.
December 31st: “NYE Drunk Skyping for Other Losers! Leave your Skype and we’re calling randomly for the next couple hours.”
And just think, those drunk calls used to cost a fortune.
December 31st: “Sorry – Drunk Skyping strangers takes too much work. But we tried. See you on the road and we’ll Skype in person.”
Sorry, I would need my headset and have the software running. That software is a bear.
January 3rd: “New update over at main site, www.dougstanhope.com. Sign up and we’ll send you them. http://fb.me/E7SHezJF”
If you sign up, bros, tell them Super Frat sent you.
20 hours ago: “Roman Polanski doc “Wanted and Desired” amazing. Hitler killed his mother, Manson killed his preggo wife – wont be… http://fb.me/SdhCe7DU”
Dog is gay? But he has a such a manly mullet.
19 hours ago: “Another A+ doc – “Street Fight” – brazen, open corruption of Newark mayor race makes Haiti look like Mill Valley.”
Yeah, that’s the way we roll in NJ.
6 hours ago: “Nigger, please. Is there another fucking planet we can colonize with the logical?… http://fb.me/HPZwJOTa”
Now I know why you wanted to talk to Chapelle.
4 hours: “Playing Santa Barbara, Velvet Jones, Saturday March 5th. Tickets from the usual…. http://fb.me/RMlxQH5K”
$20? That’s a good deal, bros. I wish I was out West to go. Buy ’em up!
Okay, let’s rate Doug’s tweets. Style, I give him a 7, he’s got a unique Style. Insanity, 9, he’s pretty crazy. And for Mustness, definitely a 10, he’s pretty reguarly posting even though it comes from his Facebook feed. That’s an overall score of 8.6. Definitely worth following and check out his stand up, it’s pretty incredible. And if you have a suggestion for Twitter in Focus, email us here.Matt Bevin, the Tea Party favorite who unsuccessfully challenged Kentucky Sen. Mitch McConnell in the 2014 Republican primary, is now leading in a tight race for the Republican nomination for governor. An early count has Bevin ahead by 83 votes after Tuesday’s primary election, making it possible that he will become the newest GOP standard-bearer in the state.
While this is great news for the Tea Party, whom Bevin calls the new abolitionists and civil rights leaders, and for Glenn Beck, who thinks Bevin is a “founder quality” candidate, who has been “ called by God” for public office, it’s less good news for everyone else. One McConnell aide said that if Bevin, a political novice, were to become governor, “his only agenda would be the commissioning of his portrait.” But his record shows that he might have quite a bit more on his plate:
Far-Right Allegiances Bevin likes to boast that in 2004 he was so “fed up” with the Republican Party that he backed the presidential candidacy of Michael Peroutka, who was running on the Constitution Party ticket. Peroutka is a Christian Reconstructionist and southern secessionist who later served on the board of the racist League of the South. While campaigning for president in 2004, Peroutka said that he was “still angry” that his home state of Maryland didn’t join the Confederacy.
Gay Marriage Panic While campaigning against McConnell in 2014, Bevin warned that legalizing marriage for gay couples could lead to parent-child marriage, comments his campaign tried, somewhat unconvincingly, to walk back.
Anti-Contraception Stance Bevin won the endorsement of the extreme anti-choice group Northern Kentucky Right to Life last year after he said in a questionnaire that he would support a “personhood” amendment to the Constitution — which would ban all abortion and even some common forms of birth control — and work to prohibit Medicaid funding for birth control pills.
Health Care Extremism Bevin is such an opponent of the Affordable Care Act that he has vowed to reverse Kentucky’s expansion of Medicaid under the law, a move that would take away the health insurance of 400,000 people. Kentucky has been one of the greatest success stories of Obamacare, experiencing what NPR calls “second-steepest drop in uninsured of any state.”
Cockfighting Bevin got plenty of negative publicity in his last campaign when it came to light that he had once spoken at a rally organized in support of legalizing cockfighting. Bevin later explained that while he opposes “animal cruelty” he supports “states’ rights” more. A Republican strategist told the New York Times that he expects the cockfighting issue to come up a lot in the general election should Bevin secure the nomination.Sarah Kaufman was almost in Leslie Smith's position back in May: across the Octagon from Cris Cyborg.
The former Strikeforce champion said her managers Malki and Abe Kawa got a call from UFC matchmaker Sean Shelby about Kaufman potentially fighting Cyborg in Cyborg's UFC debut at UFC 198 in May. They immediately said yes — not knowing that Kaufman injured herself in training.
Kaufman was willing to take the fight anyway, but it didn't come together. Smith became the opponent and Cyborg finished her via TKO in the first round in Curitiba.
"I wanted to take it," Kaufman said. "I was like, ‘Yep, let's take it anyway.' Because I think that's a fight I can win. I don't think it's just a big fight where you get paid a lot. I honestly think I can win that fight when I put everything together. So that's a fight for sure that I'd be looking to have."
Much like Cyborg, who doesn't have a UFC division or many willing opponents, Kaufman is in limbo. Kaufman's UFC contract expired in December and was not renewed after a loss to Valentina Shevchenko. The Canadian is keeping her options open now, willing to fight for promotions like Bellator, Invicta FC or Legacy FC. She has even decided on moving down to flyweight to give herself more avenues.
"I feel the confidence of, I know I can beat any of the girls in 135 and then 125 there's lots of great girls there, but again I know skill wise that I have all the pieces and it comes down to who is showing up into the fight," said Kaufman, who decided on 125 after taking a body composition test. "For me, I don't care who I fight, whether it's top 10 or bottom of the barrel at this point. All I care about is that performance and that performance being even close to my potential."
Kaufman (17-4, 1 NC) has had a sterling career with wins over the likes of Miesha Tate, Alexis Davis (twice), Liz Carmouche and Valerie Letourneau on her record. She held the Strikeforce women's bantamweight title in 2010 and fought for that belt again in 2012, losing to Ronda Rousey.
But the last few years have been rough on Kaufman. She lost to Shevchenko, who came in on short notice, and before that dropped a second-round submission loss to Davis after controlling the fight throughout in April 2015. Kaufman's lone UFC win in three years came against Smith in 2014.
"It's all been on me," Kaufman said. "I understand the UFC's standpoint. I just haven't come up with anything. I haven't done enough to be there right now and I get it. But I know that I should be."
Kaufman's plan now is to pick up a win or two — impressively — somewhere else. Even if that has to be at 125 pounds.
"I think realistically, if I can have a couple great fights, I can probably be back in the UFC pretty quick and actually doing what I need to be doing to be back at No. 1," Kaufman said.... I'm happy to fight at 135. I feel strong there. I feel great there. But I think we needed to make a change at some sort. I think 125 mentally is a big challenge for me. That could be very helpful in producing the kind of kick in the butt I need to actually show up into fights, because my last fight was just disgusting."
Kaufman, 30, said she'd have no problem fighting Cyborg at a catchweight of 140. Right now, Cyborg is in flux. There is no 145-pound division in the UFC, very few opponents willing to go up and face her and the UFC doesn't seem to want her to go back to Invicta and defend her featherweight title.
"She seemed fine at [140] and looked great in the fight," Kaufman said. "I think I go about getting that fight the same way I go about getting a fight in the UFC. Get another one or two wins and get back to what I know how to do. And then that fight and any other fight is right around the corner."The defence secretary, Sir Michael Fallon, has emphasised the extent to which he believes the UK’s defence role lies outside the European Union.
In a press release ahead of a meeting with his US counterpart James Mattis in London on Friday morning, Fallon put a post-Brexit spin on Britain’s defence policy. The Ministry of Defence said that Fallon, a confirmed Eurosceptic, would set out in the meeting ways in which the UK hoped to step up its role globally after the triggering of Brexit on Wednesday.
Fallon’s statement said: “Our defence relationship with the US is unprecedented in its depth and scope. As we leave the EU, our bilateral relationships matter more than ever, so we’ll be enhancing our cooperation and investing more in our joint F-35 fast jet programme.”
The mainly US-built F-35 is one of the costliest defence projects in history. It has had a troubled development history and is well over budget. But Fallon’s commitment is meant to reflect the continuing importance of the US-UK alliance.
UK faces massive rise in costs to fix stealth fighter Read more
The MoD, in the statement, made a point of diminishing the role of the EU in defence. It said: “When Britain leaves the EU, around 80% of Nato defence spending will be non-EU, and three out of the four countries leading Nato’s s enhanced forward presence in eastern Europe [a force deployed to deter Russia] will be non-EU members.”
Donald Trump, during his election campaign, described Nato as obsolete and called for its reform, especially that all members should pay a higher proportion of GDP on defence. Only a handful of countries, including the US and the UK, meet the Nato commitment to spend a minimum of 2% of GDP on defence.
Fallon and Mattis, who, unlike Trump, has expressed support for Nato, will discuss ways to press other countries to spend more on defence. Ahead of Trump’s visit to a Nato summit in Brussels this summer, the two defence ministers will discuss steps to modernise the organisation, including the creation of simpler command structures.
The UK recently sent the first 200 of 800 troops to Estonia as part of a Nato mission to deter any Russian attempts to destabilise the Baltic states. Fallon and Mattis want other members of Nato to take a bigger share of the defence burden.
Other countries, such as France, Germany and Italy, counter that, in spite of such rhetoric from Fallon, they do make major contributions on defence.
Fallon said of the meeting with Mattis: “Together, we will also agree further steps to modernise Nato and ensure greater burden sharing. That means more European members committing to annual increases in their defence spending in order to counter an aggressive Russia and tackle terrorism and cyber threats.”Organisms can be negatively affected by plastic nanoparticles, not just in the seas and |
was covered by other left-leaning MSM shops such as CNN, The Daily Kos, WaPo, etc.)
Evidently, though the NYT will pontificate on divisions within just about every political party, racial, ethnic, business, academic, or other community one can imagine. But there is evidently a sort of “Jewish omerta” (‘shtil’?) when Likudniks and Jews even further to the right call the Treasury Secretary a “court Jew.” As we see over and over again with White advocates, the name calling (in the case of White advocates it’s labels like ‘racist’) functions not only to stifle debate, but to call out a member of the tribe as disloyal, to attempt to ostracize, shun, and make the target question his authentic ethnic identity.
Hyper-ethnocentric you say? Here’s the Haaretz summary of the atmosphere:
Barack Obama is stabbing Israel in the back, selling it down the river, throwing it under a bus. He is like Franklin Roosevelt abandoning the Jews, like Neville Chamberlain appeasing the Nazis. He sucks up to Muslims, kowtows to Arabs, hates Jews with a vengeance. As for his real birthplace and true religion, well, there’s no smoke without a fire.
Is there anything wrong with Jews debating with the Jewish-American Secretary of the Treasury about the merits of a treaty between the U.S. and Iran? Perhaps not, but it’s difficult to suppose that all those intense emotions have anything to do with the interests of the United States. Certainly such displays might cause some to wonder a bit about the age-old loyalty issue; probably best to avoid that one.
The funny part — well, perhaps not that funny — is that the Times has successfully portrayed itself as being ‘fair and balanced’ in reporting “all the news that’s fit to print.” To a point. But the image of Jews being as tribal in such an uncouth, impolite manner is apparently too much. The episode is made into a non-event by the Paper of Record.
The US public rarely sees any of that ‘dark side’ of Jewish ethnic politics, since the generally pro-Israel, often pro-Jewish right will certainly not cover it, either. The New York Times, epitome of Jewish-owned U.S. elite media, seems afraid to talk about the decidedly ‘un-intellectual’, street-fighting kind of tribal politics… at least when it involves Jews. One can find NYT essays on ugly racial divisions…including essays written by Jews…but stories about cracks in monolithic image of Jews as hyper-rational and anything but ethnocentric, especially by Jews, are as scarce as hen’s teeth.
The public has a right to a clear, honest picture of the culture and behavior of a tribe with disproportionate influence in the government, media, and academia. Ann Coulter laments in her latest book, ¡Adios America!, that the full picture of some cultures south of the border, which are giving us many new fellow residents, is censored by the media. A much more established and powerful group has its flaws whitewashed, and its internal fights hidden, all the time.Mao Tse-tung said that he had not reached an opinion about that but he recalled something that President Kennedy had said. Had Kennedy not declared that as far as the United States, Canada and Western Europe were concerned, there was not much real and basic difference? The President had said that the problem was in the Southern Hemisphere. In advocating “special forces warfare” training for “local [countersubversive?] warfare” the late President may have had my question in mind.
On the other hand, contradictions between imperialists were what had caused two world wars in the past, and their struggles against colonial revolutions had not changed their character. If one looked at France one saw two reasons for de Gaulle’s policies. The first was to assert independence from American domination. The second was to attempt to adjust French policies to changes occurring in the Asian-African countries and Latin America. The result was intensified contradiction between the capitalist nations, but was France part of its so-called “third world”? Recently he had asked some French visitors about that and they had told him no, that France was a developed country and could not be a member of the “third world” of undeveloped countries. The matter was not so simple.
“Perhaps it could be said that France is in the third world but not of it?”
Perhaps. This question which had engaged the interest of President Kennedy had led Kennedy, Mao had read, to study Mao’s own essays on military operations. Mao had also learned from Algerian friends during their struggle against France that the French were reading his works and using his information against them. But he had told the Algerian Prime Minister, Abbas, at that time, that his own books were based on Chinese experience and would not work in reverse. They could be adapted only to the waging of people’s wars of liberation and were rather useless in an anti-people’s war. They did not save the French from defeat in Algeria. Chiang Kai-shek had also studied the Communists’ materials but he had not been saved either.
Mao remarked that the Chinese also study American books. For instance, he had read The Uncertain Trumpet by General Taylor, the United States Ambassador in Saigon. General Taylor’s view was that nuclear weapons probably would not be used, therefore non-nuclear arms would decide. Taylor wanted priority given to the Army. Now he had his chance to test out his theories of special warfare. In Vietnam he was gaining some valuable experience.
The chairman had also read some articles issued by U.S. authorities to their troops on how to handle guerrillas. These instructions dealt with the shortcomings and military weaknesses of the guerrillas and held out hopes for American victory. They ignored the decisive political fact that whether it was Diem or somebody else, governments cut off from the masses could not win against wars of liberations.
Since the Americans would not listen to Chairman Mao, his advice would do nobody any harm.
“In Southeast Asia as well as in India and certain countries of Africa and even Latin America, there exist some social conditions comparable to those that brought on the Chinese revolution. Each country has its own problems, and solutions will vary widely, yet I wonder if you agree that social revolutions will occur which may borrow much from the Chinese?”
Anti-feudal and anti-capitalist sentiments combined with opposition to imperialism and neo-colonialism, he replied, grew out of oppression and wrongs of the past. Wherever the latter existed there would be revolutions, but in most of the countries I was talking about, the people were merely seeking national independence, not socialism—quite another matter. European countries had also had anti-feudal revolutions. Though the United States had had no real feudal period, still it had fought a progressive war of independence from British colonialism, and then a civil war to establish a free labor market. Washington and Lincoln had been great men of the time.
“Among the roughly three-fifths of the earth which belongs in the third world category, very acute problems exist, as we know. The gap between the ratio of population growth and growth of production is growing more disadvantageous. The gap between their every-falling standard of living and that of the affluent countries is rapidly widening. Under such conditions, will time wait for the Soviet Union to demonstrate the superiority of the socialist system—and then wait a century for parliamentarianism to arise in the underdeveloped areas and peacefully establish socialism?”
Mao thought it would not wait so long.
I asked whether the question did not perhaps touch upon the nexus of China’s ideological dispute with the Soviet Union. He agreed that it did.
“Do you think it would be possible to complete not only the national liberation of emerging nations of the third world, but also their modernization, without another world war?”
Use of the word “complete” must give one pause, he said. Most of the countries concerned were still very far from socialist revolutions. In some there were no Communist Parties at all, while in others there were only revisionists. It was said that Latin America had 20 Communist Parties and of these 18 had issued resolutions against China. One thing was certain. Where severe oppression existed there would be revolution.
China and the Bomb
“Do you still believe that the bomb is a paper tiger?”
That had just been a way of talking, he said, a kind of figure of speech. Of course the bomb could kill people. But in the end the people would destroy the bomb. Then it would truly become a paper tiger.
“You have been quoted as saying that China had less fear of the bomb than other nations because of her vast population. Other peoples might be totally wiped out, but China would still have a few hundred millions left to begin anew. Was there ever any factual basis to such reports?”
He answered that he had no recollection of saying anything like that but he might have said it. He did recall a conversation he had had with Jawaharlal Nehru, when the latter visited China (in 1954). As he remembered it, he had said China did not want a war. They didn’t have atom bombs, but if other countries wanted to fight there would be a catastrophe in the whole world, meaning that many people would die. As for how many, nobody could know. He was not speaking only of China. He did not believe on atom bomb would destroy all mankind, so that you would not be able to find a government to negotiate peace. He mentioned this to Nehru during their conversation. Nehru said that he was chairman of the Atomic Energy Commission of India and he knew about the destructiveness of atomic power. He was sure that no one could survive. Mao replied that it would probably not be as Nehru said. Existing governments might disappear but others would arise to replace them.
Not so long ago, Khrushchev said that he had a deadly weapon capable of killing all living beings. But then he immediately retracted his statement—not only once but many times. Mao would not deny anything he had said, nor did he wish me to deny for him this so-called rumor (about China’s millions’ power of survival in a nuclear war).
Americans also had said very much about the destructiveness of the atom bomb and Khrushchev had made a big noise about that. They had all surpassed him in this respect, so that he was more backward than they, was not that so? Yet recently he had read reports of an investigation by Americans who visited the Bikini Islands six years after nuclear tests had been conducted there. From 1959 onward research workers had been in Bikini. When they first entered the island they had had to cut open paths through the undergrowth. They found mice scampering about and fish swimming in the streams as usual. The wellwater was potable, plantation foliage was flourishing, and birds were twittering in the trees. Probably there had been two bad years after the tests, but nature had gone on. In the eyes of nature and the birds, the mice and the trees, the atom bomb was a paper tiger. Possibly man has less stamina than they?
“Nevertheless, you would not exactly consider nuclear war to be a good thing?”
Certainly not, he replied. If one must fight one should confine oneself to conventional weapons.
Indonesia had withdrawn from the United Nations, I observed, accompanied by applause from China. Did Mao Tse-tung think the move would set a precedent and that other withdrawals would follow?
Mao said that it was the United States which had first set the precedent, by excluding China from the United Nations. Now that a majority of nations might favor restoring China’s seat despite U.S. opposition, there was a new scheme to require a two-thirds majority instead of a simple majority. But the question was, did China gain or lose by being outside the U.N. during the past 15 years? Indonesia had left because she felt that there was not much advantage to remaining in the U.N. As for China, was it not in itself a United Nations? Any one of several of China’s minority nationalities was larger in population and territory than some states in the U.N. whose votes had helped deprive China of her seat there. China was a large country with plenty of work to keep her busy outside the U.N.
“Is it now practicable to consider forming a union of nations excluding the United States?”
Mao pointed out that such forums already existed. One example was the Afro-Asian conference. Another was GANEFO—Games of the New Emerging Forces—organized after the United States excluded China from the Olympics.
(Preparations for the Afro-Asian conference scheduled to open in Algiers in March had been plagued by many problems. These included the Indonesia-Malaysia dispute, and insistence on the part of pro-China Bandung powers that the USSR must be excluded from the conference, as a strictly European power. There is reason to believe that China regards the Afro-Asian organization as the potential center of planned development of a third world largely independent of neo-colonial or Western capital. Following Chinese principles of “self-reliance” in internal development, and of mutual help between the Afro-Asian states, the process of modernization might be so speeded up as to bypass the slow and painful method of capital accumulation by traditional bourgeois means. Such a theoretical alternative would of course imply more rapid and radical political evolution and an earlier arrival at pre-socialist conditions in the capital-poor Afro-Asian states. Outside the context of this interview, it may be added that it has been obvious for some time that the Afro-Asian conference is also viewed as a potential permanent assembly of the have-not nations, to exist independently from the American-dominated United Nations from which China and her closest allies have long been excluded and which Indonesia has recently left.)
“In fact, Mr. Chairman, how many people are there inside China’s own ‘United Nations’?” I asked. “Can you give me a population figure resulting from the recent census?”
The chairman replied that he really did not know. Some said that there were 680 to 690 million, but he did not believe it. How could there be so many? When I suggested that it ought not to be difficult to calculate, on the basis of ration coupons (cotton and rice) alone, he indicated that the peasants had sometimes confused the picture. Before liberation they had hidden births and kept some off the register out of fear of having them conscripted. Since liberation there had been a tendency to report greater numbers and less land, and to minimize output returns while exaggerating the effects of calamities. Nowadays a new birth is reported at once, but if someone dies it may not be reported for months. (His implication seemed to be that extra ration coupons could be accumulated in that way.) No doubt there had been a real decline in the birth rate but the decline in the death rate was even greater. Longevity had increased from about 30 years of age to a life expectancy of around 50.
That was the kind of answer, I said, which was calculated to give foreign professors lots of work to do. What kind of professors were those, Mao asked?
He was interested to hear that I had attended a conference where professors had debated whether he had or had not made any original contributions to Marxism. I told him that I had asked one professor, at the close of such a conference, whether it would make any difference in their controversy if it could be shown that Mao himself had never claimed to have made any creative contribution. The professor said, “No.”
Mao was amused. More than 2,000 years ago, he remarked, Chuang Chou wrote his immortal essay on Lao Tzu (called the Chuang Tzu). A hundred schools of thought then arose to dispute the meaning.
Mao’s Writings
In 1960, when I had last seen Mao Tse-tung, I asked him whether he had ever written or had any intention of writing an “autobiography.” He had replied in the negative. Nevertheless, learned professors had discovered “autobiographies” written by Mao. The fact that they were fraudulent did not in the last affect their documentary terminology.
A question currently exercising the professors was whether Mao had in fact written his celebrated philosophical essays On Contradictions and On Practice in the summer of 1937, as asserted in his collected works, or whether they had really been composed later.
He replied that he had indeed written them in the summer of 1937. During the weeks preceding and immediately following the Liukouchiao incident, there had been a lull in his life in Yenan. The army had left for the front and Mao had found time in which to collect materials for some lectures on basic philosophy for use in the anti-Japanese academy. Some simple and yet fundamental text was needed for the young students being prepared, in brief, three-month courses, for political guidance during the years immediately ahead. At the insistence of the party Mao prepared On Contradictions and On Practice to sum up the experiences of the Chinese revolution, by combining the essentials of Marxism with concrete and everyday Chinese examples. Mao wrote most of the night and slept during the day. What he had written over a period of weeks he delivered in lecture form in a matter of two hours. Mao added that he himself considered On Practice a more important essay than On Contradictions. As for a treatise entitled On Dialectical Materialism, which has been attributed to Mao’s authorship by foreign Sinologists, he said that he had no recollection of having written any such work and he thought he would not have forgotten it had he done so.
“Youths who heard you lecture at Yenan later learned about revolution in practice but what could be the substitute for youths in China today?”
Mao said that of course those in China now under the age of 20 had never fought a war and never seen an imperialist or known capitalism in power. They knew nothing about the old society at first hand. Parents could tell them, but to hear about history and to read books was not the same thing as living it.
“Is the current emphasis on indoctrination of students with revolutionary principles and manual labor practice intended primarily to safeguard the future of socialism inside China or to teach Chinese youth that that security can never be guaranteed until socialism is victorious everywhere? Or are both aims inseparable?”
For the moment he did not directly answer the question. He asked what nation could really be said to have security? All the governments were talking about it and at the same time talking about complete and total disarmament. China herself had proposed general disarmament since a long time past. So had the Soviet Union. The U.S. kept talking about it. What we were getting instead was complete rearmament.
“President Johnson may find it difficult to settle problems in the East one by one,” I said. “Perhaps if he desired to expose the world to the real complexity of those problems he might do worse than cut to the heart of the matter by accepting China’s proposal to hold a summit conference to consider the total destruction of nuclear weapons.”
Chairman Mao agreed but concluded that it would be quite impossible. Even if Mr. Johnson himself desired such a meeting, he was after all but a steward for the monopoly capitalists, and they would never permit it. China had had only one atomic explosion and perhaps it had to be proved that one could divide into two, and so ad infinitum. Yet China did not want a lot of bombs, which were really quite useless, since probably no nation dared employ them. A few would suffice for scientific experiments. Even one bomb was not liked in China’s hands, however. Mao feared that his reputation was against him. The imperialists did not like him. Yet was it really right to blame China for everything and start anti-Chinese movements? Did China kill Ngo Dinh Diem? And yet that had happened. When the assassination of President Kennedy occurred, the Chinese were quite surprised. They had not planned that. Once more, they were quite surprised when Khrushchev was removed in Russia.
The View of Khrushchev
“Western commentators, and especially the Italian Communists, severely criticized the Soviet leaders for the conspiratorial and undemocratic way in which Khrushchev was thrown aside. What is your view?”
He replied that Mr. K had not been very popular in China even before his fall. Few portraits of him were to be seen. But K’s books were for sale in the bookstores before the fall and they were still for sale here but not in Russia. The world needed Khrushchev: his ghost would linger on. There were bound to be people who liked him. China would miss him as a negative example.
“On the basis of your own 70/30 standard—that is, a man’s work may be judged satisfactory if it is 70 percent correct and only 30 percent in error—how would you grade the present leadership of the Soviet party? How far is it still below passing?” I asked.
Mao said he would not choose to discuss the present leaders in those terms. As for any improvement on Sino-Soviet relations, there was possibly some but not much. The disappearance of Khrushchev had perhaps only removed a target for polemical articles.
“In the Soviet Union, I said, “China has been criticized for fostering a ‘cult of personality’.”
Mao thought that perhaps there was some. It was said that Stalin had been the center of a cult of personality, and that Khrushchev had none at all. The Chinese people, critics say, have some (feelings or practices of this kind). There might be some reasons for saying that. Was it possible, he asked, that Mr. K fell because he had no cult of personality at all?
“Naturally I personally regret that forces of history have divided and separated the American and Chinese peoples from virtually all communication during the past 15 years. Today the gulf seems broader than ever. However, I myself do not believe it will end in war and one of history’s major tragedies.”
Mao said that forces of history were also bound, eventually, to bring the two peoples together again; that day would surely come. Possibly I was right that meanwhile there would be no war. That could occur only if American troops came to China. They would not really get much out of it. That simply would not be allowed. Probably the American leaders knew that and consequently they would not invade China. Then there would be no war, because the Chinese certainly would never send troops to attack the United States.
“What of the possibilities of war arising over Vietnam? I have read many newspaper stories indicating that the United States has considered expanding the war into North Vietnam.”
No, Mao said, he thought otherwise. Mr. Rusk had now made it clear that the U.S. would not do that. Mr. Rusk may have earlier said something like that, but now he had corrected himself and said that he had never made such a statement. Therefore, there need not be any war in North Vietnam.
“I do not believe that the makers and administrators of United States policy understand you,” I said.
Why not? China’s armies would not go beyond her borders to fight. That was clear enough. Only if the United States attacked China would the Chinese fight. Wasn’t that clear? The Chinese were very busy with their internal affairs. Fighting beyond one’s own borders was criminal. Why should the Chinese do that? The Vietnamese could cope with their situation.
“American officials repeatedly say that if United States forces were withdrawn from Vietnam, then all Southeast Asia would be overrun.”
The question was, said Mao, “overrun” by whom? Overrun by Chinese or overrun by the inhabitants? China was “overrun,” but only by Chinese.
No Troops Outside China
In reply to a specific question, the chairman affirmed that the were no Chinese forces in Northern Vietnam or anywhere else in Southeast Asia. China had no troops outside her own frontiers.
(In another context, it was said that unless Indian troops again crossed China’s frontiers, there would be no conflict there.)
“Dean Rusk has often stated that if China would give up her aggressive policies then the United States would withdraw from Vietnam. What does he mean?”
Mao replied that China had no policies of aggression to abandon. China had committed no acts of aggression. China gave support to revolutionary movements but not by sending troops. Of course, whenever a liberation struggle existed China would publish statements and call demonstrations to support it. It was precisely that which vexed the imperialists.
Mao went on to say that on some occasions China deliberately makes a loud noise, as for example around Quemoy and Matsu. A flurry of shots there could attract a lot of attention, perhaps because the Americans were uneasy so far away from home. Consider what could be accomplished by firing some blank shells within those Chinese territorial waters. Not so long ago the United States 7th Fleet in the Taiwan Strait was deemed insufficient to reply to the shells. The U.S. also dispatched part of its 6th Fleet in this direction and brought over part of the Navy from San Francisco. Arrived here, they had found nothing to do, so it seemed that China could order the American forces to march here, to march there. It had been the same with Chiang Kai-shek’s army. They had been able to order Chiang to scurry this way and then to hurry off in another direction. Of course when Navy men are warm and have full bellies they must be given something to do. But how was it that shooting off empty guns at home could be called aggression, while those who actually intervened with arms and bombed and burned people of other lands were not aggressors?
He continued: some Americans had said that the Chinese revolution was led by Russian aggressors, but in truth the Chinese revolution was armed by Americans. In the same way the Vietnamese revolution was also being armed by Americans, not by China. The liberation forces had not only greatly improved their supplies of American weapons during recent months but also expanded their forces by recruiting American-trained troops and officers from the puppet armies of South Vietnam. China’s liberation forces had grown in numbers and strength by recruiting to their side the troops trained and armed by the Americans for Chiang Kai-shek. The movement was called “changing of hats.” When Nationalist soldiers changed hats in large numbers because they knew the peasants would kill them for wearing the wrong hat, then the end was near. “Changing hats” was becoming more popular now among the Vietnamese puppets.
Mao said that the conditions of revolutionary victory in China had been, first, that the ruling group was weak and incompetent, led by a man who was always losing battles. Second, the People’s Liberation Army was strong and able and people believed in its cause. In places where such conditions did not prevail the Americans could intervene. Otherwise, they would stay away or soon leave.
“Do you mean that the circumstances of victory for the liberation front now exist in South Vietnam?”
Mao thought that the American forces were not yet ready to leave. Fighting would go on perhaps for one to two years. After that the United States troops would find it boring and might go home or somewhere else.
“Is it your policy now to insist upon the withdrawal of United States forces before participating in a Geneva conference to discuss the international position of a unified Vietnam?”
The chairman said that several possibilities should be mentioned. First, a conference might be held and United States withdrawal would follow. Second, the conference might be deferred until after the withdrawal. Third, a conference might be held but United States troops might stay around Saigon, as in the case of South Korea. Finally, the South Vietnamese front might drive out the Americans without any conference or international agreement. The 1954 Geneva conference had provided for the withdrawal of French troops from all Indochina and forbade any intervention by any other foreign troops. The United States had nevertheless violated the convention and that could happen again.
“Under existing circumstances,” I asked, “do you really see any hope of an improvement in Sino-American relations?”
Going to See God Soon
Yes, he thought there was hope. It would take time. Maybe there would be no improvement in his generation. He was soon going to see God. According to the law of dialectics all contradictions must finally be resolved, including the struggle of the individual.
“Judging from this evening you seem to be in good condition,” I said.
Mao Tse-tung smiled wryly and replied that there was perhaps some doubt about that. He said again that he was getting ready to see God very soon.
“I wonder if you mean you are going to find out whether there is a God. Do you believe that?”
No, he did not. But some people who claimed to be well-informed said there was a God. There seemed to be many gods and sometimes the same god could take all sides. In the wars of Europe the Christian God had been on the side of the British, the French, the Germans, and so on, even when they were fighting each other. At the time of the Suez Canal crisis God was united behind the British and French, but then there was Allah to back up the other side.
At dinner Mao had mentioned that both his brothers had been killed. His first wife had also been executed during the revolution and their son had been killed during the Korean War. Now he said that it was odd that death had so far passed him by. He had been prepared for it many times but death just did not seem to want him. What could he do? On several occasions it had seemed that he would die. His personal bodyguard was killed while standing right beside him. Once he was splashed all over with the blood of another soldier, but the bomb had not touched him. There had been other narrow escapes.
After a moment of silence Mao said that he had, as I knew, begun life as a primary school teacher. He had then had no thought of fighting wars. Neither had he thought of becoming a Communist. He was more or less a democratic personage such as myself. Later on, he sometimes wondered by what chance combination of reasons he had become interested in founding the Chinese Communist Party. Anyway, events did not move in accordance with the individual human will. What mattered was that China had been oppressed by imperialism, feudalism and bureaucratic capitalism.
“Man makes his own history, but he makes it in accordance with his environment,” I quoted. “You have fundamentally changed the environment in China. Many wonder what the younger generation bred under easier conditions will do. What do you think about it.”
He also could not know, he said. He doubted that anyone could be sure. There were two possibilities. There could be continued development of the revolution toward Communism, the other possibility was that youth could negate the revolution, and give a poor performance: make peace with imperialism, bring the remnants of the Chiang Kai-shek clique back to the mainland, and take a stand beside the small percentage of counter-revolutionaries still in the country. Of course he did not hope for counter-revolution. But future events would be decided by future generations, and in accordance with conditions we could not foresee. From the long-range view, future generations ought to be more knowledgeable than we are, just as men of the bourgeois-democratic era were more knowledgeable than those of the feudal ages. Their judgment would prevail, not ours. The youth of today and those to come after them would assess the work of the revolution in accordance with values of their own. Mao’s voice dropped away, and he half closed his eyes. Man’s condition on this earth was changing with ever increasing rapidity. A thousand years from now all of them, he said, even Marx, Engels and Lenin, would possibly appear rather ridiculous.
Mao Tse-tung walked me through the doorway and, despite my protests, saw me to my car, where he stood alone for a moment, coatless in the sub-zero Peking night, to wave me farewell in the traditional manner of that ancient cultured city. I saw no security guards around the entrance, nor can I now recall having seen even one armed bodyguard in our vicinity all evening. As the car drove away I looked back and watched Mao brace his shoulders and slowly retrace his steps, leaning heavily on the arm of an aide, into the Great Hall of the People.Wayward recently republished a great article on what future real time strategy games have to do to help themselves succeed. He lists three things that he feels will be key in the growth and survivability of the RTS genre.
– Workshops: “Bottom line, the games that utilize all-in-one launchers and custom map delivery services benefit from them, and have since at least 2004. I expect systems like this (especially Steam Workshop integration) to become standard for mainline RTS games as they seek to broaden their audiences and become stickier to players. And some of these things are long overdue for widespread adoption.”
– Skins, customizations and loadouts: “I believe firmly that their adoption is part and parcel of the evolution of the real time strategy genre, and are necessary for it to remain competitive with games of other genres.”
– User interaction: “This enables the player, once the they learn the system, to very quickly and with very little finger travel time, to navigate through complex menus to choose commands, abilities, research, or structures for construction, as the menu is global and contextual.”
Today I want to expand on this list a bit. I do first want to talk about the foundation of my ideas, so I hope you’ll indulge me here.
Of the great founding real time strategy companies Blizzard is really the only remaining giant. Ensemble is now broken up with it’s developers spread among other companies. Westwood is also gone with it’s parts scattered among EA, Blizzard and Petroglyph. Now we have other companies doing a great job, Relic immediately comes to mind, but of those from around the beginning, it’s a dying group. Now this isn’t predicting Blizzard’s fall, they are obviously fine since they have multiple pillars to stand on, and their RTS sales remain the top in the industry with Starcraft 2’s two parts both ranking among the best selling real time strategy games ever. Rather I bring this up because Blizzard knows it’s among the last of the old guard. A few months ago they copied an idea they learned when they hired a batch of former Westwood/EA employees, to have a gathering of professional players and community members to discuss the state of the game, preview new features and ask for feedback. During this meeting, much of it is still locked behind a non-disclosure agreement, they discussed two things they really wanted people to know right away:
– Over 2 million unique users log onto Starcraft 2 a month but only about 500,000 play 1v1 games
– They know the multiplayer aspect of the RTS genre is intimidating and that single player parts are easier to get into
These two facts largely changed the way many in the Starcraft community viewed itself. For the most part they viewed themselves, and their game, as kind of elitists. Hearing that about 75% of the people who log on don’t play what they considered to be the most important part of the game bothered a lot of people but brought some clarity. Starcraft 2 is at the top of the RTS food chain for a few reasons but mostly because it has a large online player base, but this piece of information pointed out something that needs to be discussed a bit more so let’s look at what the other 75% of players are doing when they log into Starcraft 2. Starcraft 2 is most known for it’s online ladder but it’s actually got a variety of other modes and areas all from within the same game:
– Two Campaigns: Possibly as well known as it’s multiplayer, Starcraft boasts two robust single player campaigns with varying difficulty modes, missions and achievements.
– Arcade: This is that workshop Wayward discussed above. It’s a place where users can take the Galaxy map and unit editor to create new games within the engine.
– Custom Games: This allows you to play with friends or computers in a variety of maps and modes which are up to the person who creates the group.
– Versus AI: This is a ladder type system where you play against computers (alone or in groups of up to four members) and as you win you play against increasingly difficult AI opponents.
– Training and Challenges: Puts the player through a variety of situations and difficulties to prepare them for common challenges they will face against human opponents.
– Free for All: Simple as it sounds, from four to eight players will face off with no teams.
– Team Ladder: 2v2, 3v3 and 4v4 teams will face off in both unranked and ranked ladders.
– 1v1 Ladder: Players face each other in unranked and ranked matchmaking.
Starcraft 2’s final expansion, Legacy of the Void, will also add an additional campaign, a co-op against AI mini-campaign known as Allied Commanders and a new 2v2 mode called Archon Mode.
You’ll notice only one item on that list is generally focused on by most of the RTS community, the 1v1 ladder. Legacy of the Void will further add to the non-traditional online experience by including two new modes that enable players to work together. This isn’t an accident and all these other modes aren’t there for fluff, they are part of a big push that Blizzard has focused on, that most people who play their game don’t care about the ladder or competitive scene. Players log on in the millions, not to play against each other in one on one battles, instead they like to play through a story, experience unique game modes or train with friends.
Now Blizzard isn’t the only company to pay attention to this, Relic has acknowledged it as well with their expansion strategy for Company of Heroes 2. When it comes to Company of Heroes 2 it is a good game but was unable to really recapture both the single and multiplayer aspects that made it’s predecessor so great. Now they have produced two multiplayer content packages, Western Front Armies and the soon to be released British Forces, but what has really improved Company of Heroes 2’s reputation was the release of it’s Ardennes Assault expansion. It provided an entirely new and unique single player campaign that had unique aspects each time you played, which helped ease the shorter length. By creating a dynamic map, something we’ve seen Relic do before, and a progression system similar to what we see in the two Starcraft 2 campaigns, we get a unique a different experience each time we play through it.
This expansion added great single player depth to a game that was lacking it when it was first released. From my own experience with the game and those who enjoy it I can say with some confidence that the Ardennes Assault added more to the game than any other expansion it’s had. Along with Ardennes Assault, Relic has been supporting Company of Heroes 2 with Theaters of War, a set of game modes similar to Allied Commanders in Starcraft 2. In Theaters of War there are a variety of modes ranging from co-op missions to unique player versus players situations that put the player through fun circumstances. Like Allied Commanders this provides players the chance to do something different than the standard campaign or online ladder. By presenting their player base with these situations Relic and Blizzard have taken steps to ensure they have a player base that will outlast other games in the genre. Both also give incentive to continue playing. Allied Commanders rewards players with upgrades and new units that can be used in future missions and is something that can be supported post-launch. |
's input signature. d3d10: Implement ID3D10EffectPass::GetDesc(). wined3d: Use flags for shader_glsl_get_sample_function(). d3d10core: Add a stub ID3D10InputLayout implementation. d3d10core: Add a stub ID3D10VertexShader implementation. d3d10core: Add a stub ID3D10GeometryShader implementation. d3d10core: Add a stub ID3D10PixelShader implementation. wined3d: Pass the vertex count rather than the primitive count to wined3d draw methods. wined3d: Fix some prototypes. wined3d: Add support for ARB_geometry_shader4. wined3d: Add d3d10 primitive types. wined3d: Add separate methods for setting the primitive type. d3d10core: Implement ID3D10Device::Draw(). d3d10: Implement ID3D10Effect::GetDevice(). d3d10: Create shaders. d3d10: Implement ID3D10EffectPass::Apply(). wined3d: Also set VBFLAG_HASDESC if we can determine we don't need conversion. wined3d: Simplify IWineD3DVertexBufferImpl_PreLoad() a bit. wined3d: Merge IWineD3DVertexBuffer with IWineD3DBuffer. d3d9: Improve IDirect3DDevice9::SetFVF() code flow. wined3d: Buffer object ID's are supposed to be unsigned. wined3d: Don't compare texUnitMap entries to -1. wined3d: Don't compare const_num against -1. wined3d: Use shader_glsl_get_write_mask_size() to calculate the write mask size. wined3d: Handle error conditions better in RemoveContextFromArray(). d3d9: Fix some sign compare warnings. wined3d: Don't call shader_glsl_append_dst() from shader_glsl_texldl(). wined3d: Get rid of a few stack buffers. d3d8: Fix some sign compare warnings. d3d8: Don't call Release() in a while loop. d3d8: Make the shader handle table a bit more generic. d3d8: Handles aren't supposed to be pointers. wined3d: Set the correct texture names on cube surfaces. wined3d: Free the logo path when we're done with it. wined3d: The adapters array should be owned by IWineD3DImpl. wined3d: Get rid of the PUSH1 macro. wined3d: Don't leak WineD3DAdapter.cfgs. d3d9: Present parameters are an array when D3DCREATE_ADAPTERGROUP_DEVICE is specified. wined3d: Explicitly pass the texUnitMap to shader_glsl_load_vsamplers() and shader_glsl_load_psamplers(). wined3d: Remove an unused field. wined3d: Remove a redundant check. wined3d: Store a pointer to the format description in the resource. wined3d: Get rid of some calls to getFormatDescEntry(). wined3d: Remove the shader_color_fixup field from IWineD3DBaseTextureClass. d3d8: Release the d3d8 shader once we're done with it in IDirect3DDevice8Impl_GetPixelShader(). wined3d: Also change the resource's format desc in IWineD3DBaseSurfaceImpl_SetFormat(). wined3d: Eliminate the heightscale field from IWineD3DSurfaceImpl. wined3d: Remove some redundant fields from struct glDescriptor. wined3d: Remove the width and height fields from IWineD3DTextureImpl. wined3d: Add fields from StaticPixelFormatDesc to struct GlPixelFormatDesc. wined3d: Only return a pointer to struct GlPixelFormatDesc from getFormatDescEntry(). wined3d: Remove the format field from IWineD3DResourceClass. Huw Davies (15): gdiplus/tests: Elliptic regions have a shorter layout in win98. gdi32/tests: Improve some test failure messages. gdi32/tests: Win9x doesn't initialize the bitmap bits, so skip this test. gdi32/tests: Fix tests on NT4. ole32: Add support for VT_DECIMAL. gdi32/tests: Mark win9x behaviour as broken. gdi32/tests: win9x doesn't return the correct number of colours used with dib sections created via DIB_PAL_COLORS. gdi32/tests: Fix another case where win9x returns bmType equal to 0x5250. gdi32/tests: Fix yet another place where win9x returns bmType equal to 0x5250. gdi32/tests: Marked another win9x failure as broken. gdi32/tests: Win9x's GetDIBits() sets biSizeImage to zero for BI_RGB dibs. gdi32/tests: Remove a cut and paste error. gdi32/tests: win9x doesn't initialise the bitmap bits. Mark this behaviour as broken. gdi32/tests: Mark as broken another case where win9x doesn't set biSizeImage. gdi32/tests: Under win9x GetBitmapBits returns zero when passed a NULL buffer. Hwang YunSong(황윤성) (3): setupapi: Updated Korean resource. wordpad: Updated Korean resource. cmd: Updated Korean resource. Jacek Caban (25): urlmon: Ignore report_data call if binding is stopped. urlmon: Move some HttpProtocol variables to generic Protocol object. urlmon: Move strndupW implementation to header file. urlmon: Moved HttpProtocol::[Lock|Unlock]Request implementation to generic Protocol object. urlmon: Move close_connection implementation to common Protocol object. urlmon: Move HttpProtocol::Read implementation to generic Protocol object. urlmon: Move HttpProtocol::Continue implementation to generic Protocol object. urlmon: Move HttpProtocol::Start implementation to generic Protocol object. urlmon: Move HttpProtocolVtbl to its implementation (code clean up). urlmon: Added IInternetPriority interface stup implementation to FtpProtocol. wininet: Don't send INTERNET_STATUS_HANDLE_CLOSING notification for ftp session created by InternetOpenUrl. urlmon: Added ftp pluggable protocol implementation. urlmon: Use pluggable protocol for ftp binding. urlmon: Added ftp protocol tests. urlmon: Added ftp binding tests. urlmon: Added gopher protocol handler stub implementation. urlmon: Added IInternetPriority implementation for gopher protocol. urlmon: Added gopher pluggable protocol implementation. urlmon: Get rid of URLMonikerImpl_BindToStorage_hack. wininet: Release session after FTP_ReceiveResponse call in FTPFILE_Destroy. mshtml: Added IHTMLElement::put_innerHTML implementation. mshtml: Added IHTMLStyle::get_cssText implementation. mshtml: Added IHTMLStyle::put_cssText implementation. mshtml: Make sure that HTML headers are terminated by endline. mshtml: Don't use unicode constants for HTML IDs (code clean up). James Hawkins (11): msi: Correctly order transposed column values in the INSERT query. msi: Order primary keys to be first in the column list when creating a table. msi: Column attributes for temporary string and int columns should be g and j respectively. msi: The _Streams and _Storages table are special and always exist. msi: The PATH environment variable can be longer than MAX_PATH, so dynamically allocate strings to deal with that. msi: Delete the view on error. msi: Use a SQL marker to query the _Property table when fetching a property. msi: Add missing calls to MsiViewClose. msi: Don't allow nested quotes in SQL queries. msi: Don't treat carriage returns as spaces. msi: Handle reading from a NULL stream. Jeremy White (18): sane.ds: Downgrade inappropriate FIXMEs. sane.ds: Add a few trace messages useful in following color format. sane.ds: Implement grayscale and B&W scanning for native image transfers. sane.ds: Implement support for ICAP_PHYSICALHEIGHT and ICAP_PHYSICALWIDTH. sane.ds: Add suport for CAP_AUTOFEED, make batch scans the default. sane.ds: Add support for CAP_FEEDERENABLED. sane.ds: More correctly detect an end of scan job from sane; this enables Acrobat to pull multiple pages in one scan. sane.ds: Sane should go first; that makes any actual scanner found the default device. sane.ds: Fix a subtle bug that prevented the float scrollbar from incrementing by one. sane.ds: Add support for ICAP_SUPPORTEDSIZES, enabling rational sizing for scans. sane.ds: Make sure that the condition code is set correctly when we handle an unexpected request. sane.ds: Downgrade more inappropriate FIXMEs to WARNs. sane.ds: Remove large chunks of stubbed optional functionality; if it's optional, we don't have to support it, and it is not a stub. sane.ds: Add fixmes for the last 2 unsupported capabilities; this now makes the code have fixmes for all known issues. twain_32: Remove obsolete README files. sane.ds: Move a few static functions so they can be shared. sane.ds: Add support for DG_IMAGE/DAT_IMAGELAYOUT/GET and SET. Enables Acrobat to use custom scan sizes. twain_32: Revise internal documentation and one test slightly to bring into line with TWAIN 1.8 requirements. Jim Cameron (1): regedit: Fix crash importing large values from Unicode. Juan Lang (3): crypt32: Fix some test failures on Win9x. crypt32: Fix some test failures on Win9x. crypt32: Fix another test on Win9x. Jörg Höhle (1): d3d9/tests: Fix typos in text. Ken Thomases (13): dsound: Don't use HEAP_ZERO_MEMORY when we're about to overwrite the buffer. dbghelp/stabs: Translate additional register codes. dbghelp/stabs: Ignore the N_OSO type used on Darwin. dbghelp/stabs: Decode the Stabs type more carefully. dbghelp: Let stabs_parse call back for real (non-debug) symbol definitions. configure: Check for mach-o/dyld_images.h and mach-o/nlist.h headers. dbghelp: Teach stabs_parse about other kinds of Mach-O symbol definitions. dbghelp/stabs: Extract growing of pending_block's buffer to pending_make_room(). dbghelp/stabs: Allow pending list to include line numbers as well as variables. dbghelp/stabs: Track line numbers pending for an upcoming function. dbghelp: Rename some things to be less ELF-centric. dbghelp: Extract calc_crc32 function into a separate file. dbghelp: Increase file read buffer size for calc_crc32. Luke Benstead (1): winnt.h: Completed TOKEN_INFORMATION_CLASS enum definition. Michael Stefaniuc (27): mcicda: Compare a file handle with INVALID_HANDLE_VALUE instead of NULL. user32: Remove superfluous pointer casts. taskmgr: Cast to LPARAM the 4th argument passed to SendMessage. regedit: Cast to LPARAM the 4th argument passed to SendMessage. mlang: Silence some Win64 compile warnings. winedos: Remove superfluous pointer casts. cryptui: Remove superfluous pointer casts. mlang: Remove superfluous pointer casts. netapi32: Remove superfluous pointer casts. msctf: Remove superfluous pointer casts. twain_32/tests: Remove superfluous pointer casts. include: Change long to LONG in tom.idl. msxml3: Change long to LONG in msxml2.idl and xmldom.idl. msxml3: Change long to LONG in msxml.idl. msxml3: Change the remaining long variables to LONG. quartz: Change long to LONG in control.idl. mlang: Change long to LONG in mlang.idl. kernel32: Remove superfluous pointer casts. d3d9/tests: Limit the back buffer to 800x600 in the scissor size test. d3d9/tests: Fix some ok() strings in the fog test. include: Change long to LONG in axextend.idl. qedit: Change long to LONG in qedit.idl. include: Change long to LONG in mshtml.idl. mshtml: Change long to LONG in mshtml.idl (htmlwindow.c part). mshtml: Change long to LONG in mshtml.idl (HTML*Element stuff). mshtml: Change long to LONG in mshtml.idl (remaining stuff). widl: Output "LONG" instead of "long" for a 32bit integer. Mike Ruprecht (3): winedbg: Fix typo in a comment. dbghelp: Don't define 32-bit structs in 64-bit mode. dbghelp: Define _IMAGEHLP64 in Win64. Nikolay Sivov (7): comctl32: Correctly report systemcolor use for Treeview background. user32: Disable scroll bar control window when both buttons disabled. user32: Use 1 unit caret width for Edit control. comctl32: Replace nonprintable characters with spaces on SB_SETTEXT. user32: Button should get captured when highlighted with VK_SPACE. comctl32: Fix item selection with VK_SPACE when Ctrl is pressed. comctl32: LVN_ITEMCHANGED notification should be sent for each item when group selected for ~LVS_OWNERDATA. Paul Vriens (41): crypt32/tests: Don't crash on NT4. fusion/tests: Skip some tests on.NET 1.x. fusion/tests: Fix the last test failure on.NET 1.x. d3d8/tests: Use win_skip() and skip() where appropriate. user32/tests: Fix some test failures on Win98/WinME. msi/tests: Fix a test failure on Win95. shlwapi/tests: Fix a typo. shlwapi/tests: Fix some typos. kernel32/tests: Correct an ok() statement. shell32/tests: Use the correct directory on Win95. shell32/tests: Make sure we test on Win95. shell32/tests: Skip some tests on Win95 because of W-functions. urlmon/tests: Use an action that is available on all IE versions. programs/winetest: Show dll versions again for Win9x/WinME. qmgr/tests: Fix some tests on systems with BITS 1.5 and lower. ole32/tests: Remove an unused function declaration. shdocvw/tests: Add a missing FreeLibrary(). gdiplus/tests: Fix two test failures on Win98. mshtml/tests: Fix some typos. wininet/tests: Test result differences are related to IE6 version, not to platform. wininet/tests: Skip some tests on IE5. wininet/tests: Skip tests for not implemented functions. wininet/tests: Don't crash on systems with IE5. shlwapi/tests: Don't crash on IE5. shlwapi/tests: Fix failures on systems with IE5.5 or earlier. shell32/tests: Don't crash on missing class implementations. wininet/tests: Skip tests if functions are not implemented. wininet/tests: Don't crash on IE5.01SP4. ddraw/tests: Fix some test failures on W2K/VMware. ddraw/tests: Fix some test failures on W2K/VMware. crypt32/tests: Fix a test failure on Win9x. msi/tests: Fix a test for systems with %TEMP% being less than 2 levels deep. shell32/tests: Fix a test failure on W2K and earlier. fusion/tests: Fix some test failures on Win98. gdi32/tests: Fix two test failures on Win9x. crypt32/tests: Fix some test failures on Win9x. crypt32/tests: Fix some crashes on older NT4 boxes. crypt32/tests: Fix some test failures on older NT4 boxes. gdi32/tests: Fix some test failures on Win9x. ddraw/tests: Fix two test failures on W2K/VMware. ddraw/tests: Fix a test failure on VMware and some native boxes. Piotr Caban (2): mshtml: Added HTMLWindow2_prompt implementation. mshtml: Added IHTMLWindow2_confirm implementation. Rein Klazes (2): user32: MENU_TrackMenu, called from TrackPopupMenu(), should send WM_ENTERIDLE message with the menu window handle as lparam with test. user32: Check for invalid menu handle passed to TrackPopupMenu and TrackPopupMenuEx. Ricardo Filipe (1): setupapi: Implement SetupPromptForDiskA by wrapping around W version. Rico Schüller (2): mshtml/tests: Fix SysFreeString call with wrong variable. mshtml/tests: Add SysFreeString(sDefault) after the variable isn't used any more. Rob Shearman (20): widl: Move declarray property to array_details. widl: Fix get_explicit_generic_handle_type and is_context_handle to detect attributes set on typedefs other than the first. widl: Implement a more abstract way of representing basic types. widl: Remove the single keyword and type. widl: Store the abstract identifier of the type in type object instead of an NDR format character. widl: Move the pointer referent, array element, function return type and interface inheritance properties from type_t to details structures for the appropriate types. widl: Allow enum and union tags to be used without being defined. widl: Move type_new_enum, type_new_struct, type_new_encapsulated_union and type_new_unencapsulated_union to typetree.c. widl: Add coclass and module types to the global namespace. widl: Pass var attrs into write_no_repeat_pointer_descriptions and use them for the string check. ole32: Fix a memory leak in an error path in COMPOBJ_DllList_Add. qmgr: Fix a memory leak. qmgr: Add a missing call to CoUninitialize. widl: Consolidate non-simple pointer writing into one function. widl: Determine pointer fc at generation time instead of at parse time. widl: Output server code for freeing returned types. widl: Fix a memory leak in the server/stub code when unmarshalling pointers to strings at the top level. widl: Move type_basic_get_fc to typegen.c and rename it to get_basic_fc. widl: Returned pointers should default to being unique, not reference. rpcrt4: Add a check for a NULL ref pointer to NdrPointerUnmarshall. Stefan Leichter (1): ntoskrnl.exe: Stub for MmQuerySystemSize. Stefano Guidoni (4): imaadp32: block align the adpcm extra data. imaadp32: Fixed adpcm_FormatSuggest. imaadp32: Support for non-standard formats. msacm32: acmFormatEnum: Implement ACM_FORMATENUMF_SUGGEST. Steven Edwards (1): include: Add check to asm macro for Windows Services for Unix/Subsystem for Unix applications. Tony Wasserka (8): d3dx9: Implement ID3DXSprite_Get/SetTransform. d3dx9: ID3DXSprite: Move vdecl creation to ID3DXSprite_Begin. d3dx9: Implement ID3DXSprite_OnLostDevice/OnResetDevice. d3dx9: Fix inclusions in some d3dx9 headers. d3dx9: Add some definitions in d3dx9.h. d3dx9: Add ID3DXSprite tests. d3dx9: Recognize the D3DXSPRITE_DONOTSAVESTATE flag. d3dx9: Recognize the D3DXSPRITE_DO_NOT_ADDREF_TEXTURE flag. Vincent Povirk (5): kernel32/tests: Add named pipe test using i/o completion ports. gdiplus: Return a NULL bitmap when GdipCreateBitmapFromScan0 fails. advapi32: Stub TraceEvent. wininet: Stub RegisterUrlCacheNotification. gdiplus: Stub GdipCloneBitmapAreaI. Vitaliy Margolen (1): dinput: Add few special cases for key mappings. -- Alexandre Julliard julliard@winehq.orgby Greg Mayer
Today’s issue of Science contains a news article (first pointed out to me by Matthew) about a clumsy (and now failed) attempt by the US’s National Science Board (NSB) to suppress a finding by a National Science Foundation (NSF) survey that Americans’ knowledge of evolution and cosmology remains poor, and well behind that of European and east Asian industrial nations. I am shocked and disconcerted that the NSB, the governing board of the NSF and official science advisers to the president and Congres, would do this. (Update below.)
Every two years, the NSF issues a report on “a broad base of quantitative information on the U.S. and international science and engineering enterprise”, entitled Science and Engineering Indicators. Since 1983, the NSF has conducted a national survey of scientific knowledge, the results of which have been included in the report. Until now. NSB members John Bruer, a philosopher at the James McDonnell Foundation of St. Louis, and Louis Lanzerotti, an astrophysicist at the New Jersey Institute of Technology, successfully prevailed upon the NSB to remove the survey results related to questions on evolution and the big bang. While Bruer has no evident expertise in (or concern for) evolution or cosmology, Lanzerotti spent most of his career at Bell Labs, whose most signal contribution to science has been the discovery of the cosmic background radiation by Arno Penzias and Robert Wilson, which is the key empirical evidence for the big bang. The irony– it burns.
The last two editions of the report contained sections on “More Than a Century After Darwin, Evolution Still Under Attack in Schools” (2006) and “Evolution and the Schools” (2008). The equivalent section and accompanying discussion, included in the 2010 report by the report’s authors, were removed by the NSB. Fortunately, the authors, and even the White House (to whom the report was submitted) objected. The report was not revised in light of these objections, but Science obtained the deleted text, and thus the attempted suppression failed. Here’s Science‘s summary.
Science has obtained a copy of the deleted text, which does not differ substantially from what has appeared in previous Indicators. The two questions (see graphic) have been part of an NSF-funded survey on scientific understanding and attitudes toward science since 1983. The deleted section notes that the 45% of Americans who answered “true” to the statement: “Human beings, as we know them today, developed from earlier species of animals” is similar to the percentage in previous years and much lower than in Japan (78%), Europe (70%), China (69%), and South Korea (64%). A similar gap exists for the response to the statement: “The universe began with a big explosion,” with which only 33% of Americans agreed.
Leaving evolution and the big bang out of a discussion of American scientific literacy and attitudes toward science (especially after the authors of the discussion included them) is mind boggling. These are two of the key issues in the scientific literacy problem in the United States, and one could easily argue they are the issues in scientific illiteracy. Science spoke with Josh Rosenau of the National Center for Science Education, who said that, “Discussing American science literacy without mentioning evolution is intellectual malpractice.” Jon Miller of Michigan State, who had conducted the NSF survey in prior years, told Science that “Evolution and the big bang are not a matter of opinion… If a person says that the earth really is at the center of the universe, … how in the world would you call that person scientifically literate?” Science‘s final take, quoting Miller again, was
Miller believes that removing the entire section was a clumsy attempt to hide a national embarrassment. “Nobody likes our infant death rate,” he says by way of comparison, “but it doesn’t go away if you quit talking about it.”
Amen to that.
Here’s some of the text of the 2008 report on evolution and the big bang; the full text of the report can be found here.
Evolution and the “Big Bang” In international comparisons, U.S. scores on two science knowledge questions are significantly lower than those in almost all other countries where the questions have been asked. Americans were less likely to answer true to the following scientific knowledge questions: “human beings, as we know them today, developed from earlier species of animals” and “the universe began with a huge explosion.” In the United States, 43% of GSS respondents answered true to the first question in 2006, about the same percentage as in every year (except one) that the question has been asked. In other countries and in Europe, the comparable figures were substantially larger: 78% in Japan, 70% in China and Europe, and more than 60% in South Korea. Only in Russia did less than half of respondents (44%) answer true. Among the individual countries covered in the 2005 Eurobarometer survey, only Turkey’s percentage answering true to this question was lower than the U.S. percentage (Miller, Scott, and Okamoto 2006). Similarly, Americans were less likely than other survey respondents (except the Chinese) to answer true to the big bang question. In the most recent surveys, less than 40% of Americans answered this question correctly compared with over 60% of Japanese and South Korean survey respondents. Americans’ responses to questions about evolution and the big bang appear to reflect factors beyond unfamiliarity with basic elements of science. The 2004 Michigan Survey of Consumer Attitudes administered two different versions of these questions to different groups of respondents. Some were asked questions that tested knowledge about the natural world (“human beings, as we know them today, developed from earlier species of animals” and “the universe began with a big explosion”). Others were asked questions that tested knowledge about what a scientific theory asserts or a group of scientists believes (“according to the theory of evolution, human beings, as we know them today, developed from earlier species of animals” and “according to astronomers, the universe began with a big explosion”). Respondents were much more likely to answer correctly if the question was framed as being about scientific theories or ideas rather than as about the natural world. When the question about evolution was prefaced by “according to the theory of evolution,” 74% answered true; only 42% answered true when it was not. Similarly, 62% agreed with the prefaced question about the big bang, but only 33% agreed when the prefatory phrase was omitted. These differences probably indicate that many Americans hold religious beliefs that cause them to be skeptical of established scientific ideas, even when they have some basic familiarity with those ideas. Surveys conducted by the Gallup Organization provide similar evidence. An ongoing Gallup survey, conducted most recently in 2004, found that only about a third of Americans agreed that Darwin’s theory of evolution has been well supported by evidence (Newport 2004). The same percentage agreed with the alternative statement that Darwin’s theory was not supported by the evidence, and an additional 29% said they didn’t know enough to say. Data from 2001 were similar. Those agreeing with the first statement were more likely to be men (42%), have more years of education (65% of those with postgraduate education and 52% of those with a bachelor’s degree), and live in the West (47%) or East (42%). In response to another group of questions on evolution asked by Gallup in 2004, about half (49%) of those surveyed agreed with either of two statements compatible with evolution: that human beings developed over millions of years either with or without God’s guidance in the process. However, 46% agreed with a third statement, that “God created human beings pretty much in their present form at one time within the last 10,000 years or so.” These views on the origin of human beings have remained virtually unchanged (in seven surveys) since the questions were first asked in 1982 (Newport 2006). For almost a century, whether and how evolution should be taught in U.S. public school classrooms has been a frequent source of controversy (see sidebar, “Evolution and the Schools“). The role of alternative perspectives on human origins, including creationism and intelligent design, and their relevance to the teaching of science, has likewise been contentious. When Gallup asked survey respondents in 2005 whether they thought each of three “explanations about the origin and development of life on earth (evolution, creationism, and intelligent design) should or should not be taught in public school science classes” or whether they were “unsure,” for each explanation more Americans chose “should” than chose either of the other alternatives (table 7-6 ). In other developed countries, controversies about evolution in the schools have also occurred, but more rarely. However, signs of opposition to the theory of evolution are emerging in Europe (Nature 2006).
UPDATE. In a different version of the Science news article posted on Science’s website, but not published in today’s issue, Bruer gives a response to Science that indicates he may harbor creationist sympathies:
When Science asked Bruer if individuals who did not accept evolution or the big bang to be true could be described as scientifically literate, he said: “There are many biologists and philosophers of science who are highly scientifically literate who question certain aspects of the theory of evolution,” adding that such questioning has led to improved understanding of evolutionary theory. When asked if he expected those academics to answer “false” to the statement about humans having evolved from earlier species, Bruer said: “On that particular point, no.”
(H/t to readers Articulett and Deen for pointing to this version.)
UPDATE II. Josh Rosenau, who was quoted above in the Science news article, provides some further details on the affair at his blog, Thoughts From Kansas.Judge orders 3 firms to pay for lead paint cleanup
Lead paint, outlawed nationwide 35 years ago, remains a menace to children's health, and three paint companies must pay the state $1.1 billion to remove it from surfaces in pre-1978 homes in 10 California cities and counties, including San Francisco, Alameda and San Mateo, a judge ruled Monday.
Studies have established that "there is no safe level of exposure to lead for children," said Judge James Kleinberg, who presided over a nonjury trial in Santa Clara County Superior Court. Although government prevention programs have reduced lead exposure, he said, "thousands of children in the (10) jurisdictions are still presently and potentially victimized by this chemical."
Further, he said, the companies' claims that they were unaware of the danger ring hollow - Sherwin-Williams Co. described the paint's ingredient, white lead, as a "deadly cumulative poison" in a 1900 document. Nine years later, the California Supreme Court held ConAgra, another current defendant, responsible for harm to its workers in a lead manufacturing plant.
Meanwhile, Kleinberg said, the companies continued to promote lead paint for decades, individually and through the Lead Industry Association.
He ordered Sherwin-Williams, ConAgra and NL Industries, formerly known as the National Lead Co., to pay $1.1 billion to establish a fund the state will administer to remove lead paint from doors, windows and floors of homes in the 10 cities and counties.
Those communities have 4.7 million homes built before 1978 - 317,000 of them in San Francisco - and a nationwide survey has found that 52 percent of homes from that period contain lead paint, Kleinberg said.
Children, more vulnerable than adults to lead poisoning, are exposed to lead in dust and by swallowing or chewing on household objects, Kleinberg said. He said even low levels can reduce children's IQ's and affect their growth.
One study found that at least 50,000 children in the 10 cities and counties had elevated levels of lead in their blood between 2007 and 2010, the judge said.
Cleanup crews will remove lead-containing dust and seal off or cart away contaminated soil from homes whose owners consent to the cleanups, Kleinberg said.
He dismissed the suit against two other paint manufacturers - Atlantic Richfield, because it did not promote the use of lead paint in homes, and DuPont, because that company did not sell substantial amounts of lead paint.
Similar suits have been unsuccessful in seven other states. The difference in California may have been a state law that allows judges to order a halt to practices that harm the "community at large" or large numbers of people. A state appeals court in San Jose relied on that law in a 2006 ruling reinstating the lawsuit.
The suit was originally filed by Santa Clara County in 2000 and joined later by the counties of Alameda, Los Angeles, Monterey, San Mateo, Solano and Ventura, and the cities of Oakland, San Diego and San Francisco.
The ruling should send a message that "corporations that act irresponsibly in terms of putting dangerous products in the stream of commerce will be held accountable," said San Francisco City Attorney Dennis Herrera.
"It's going to save a lot of minority children from the toxicity of lead paint," said Joseph Cotchett, another lawyer for the plaintiffs. He said a large proportion of the residents of older homes are minorities.
The paint companies denounced the ruling and said they would appeal.
"The decision violates the federal and state constitutions by penalizing manufacturers for the truthful advertising of lawful products" that the federal government had approved for home use, said Bonnie Campbell, a former Iowa attorney general and spokeswoman for the three companies.
She said Kleinberg's ruling "rewards scofflaw landlords who are responsible for the risk to children from poorly maintained lead paint," and "will likely disrupt the sale, rental and market value of all homes and apartments built before 1978."WASHINGTON (Reuters) - In Washington, the chatter about a deepening, Watergate-style crisis has engulfed the White House - and those conversations are echoed in big cities across the country and in a succession of headlines that seem to suggest almost certain doom for the young Trump administration.
FILE PHOTO: Supporters of President Donald Trump gather for a "People 4 Trump" rally at Neshaminy State Park in Bensalem, Pennsylvania, U.S. March 4, 2017. REUTERS/Mark Makela
But for many Americans, including President Donald Trump’s staunchest supporters, the “crisis in Washington” is not about possible missteps by Trump or questions over whether his campaign colluded with Russia. For them, it’s the latest egregious example of mainstream media bias and of Washington insiders desperate to preserve their status taking revenge on the New York celebrity businessman.
In such an intensely polarized political environment that distrust of mainstream media will make it less likely that Trump supporters - and the Republican officeholders who rely on their votes - will abandon the president any time soon.
“The more negativity, the more we’re for him. It’s backfiring on them,” Arizona resident Nadia Larsen said of media reports about possible collusion with Russia or Trump’s conversations with then-FBI Director James Comey.
Reports from the Washington Post and New York Times that Trump shared classified information with Russia’s foreign minister and pressured Comey to end an inquiry into former national security adviser Michael Flynn have been met with skepticism by Larsen and many other Trump supporters.
More credible, they say, is news from prominent conservative media outlets, from the Trump-friendly airwaves of Fox News to websites such as Breitbart. Those outlets have cast the allegations as an ideological attack by Obama administration holdovers or the revenge of the “deep state,” a term used by the far right to refer to what they see as a deeply entrenched bureaucracy opposed to Trump.
“The only news I watch is Fox, but the only news I watch and believe is whatever comes out of the president’s mouth and whatever he tweets,” said Larsen, an Israeli-born immigrant who has lived in Tucson, Arizona, for 25 years.
Several Trump supporters decried what they described as baseless news from anonymous sources and said they have not seen any concrete evidence to support the allegations against Trump.
“This is what I expected,” said Jeff Klusmeier, an insurance agent in Louisville, Kentucky. “I expected the media to attack Trump. I expected the Democrats to attack him and call for impeachment. So it’s par for the course for me.”
Conservative media outlets have developed their own theories about the recent spate of negative headlines. The Breitbart News Network, once headed by Trump chief strategist Stephen Bannon, reported that some of the recent accusations were driven by associates of Comey, who was fired by Trump last week, in a story headlined “Comey Strikes Back.”
Among the headlines on the Drudge Report, a popular conservative news aggregator, were “Media Reach Peak Meltdown” and “Sabotage in DC.”
“The anti-Trump press believes it smells blood in the water,” said Fox News commentator Sean Hannity, a staunch Trump supporter who accused the mainstream media of “hyperventilating breathlessness.”
Hannity tweeted on Wednesday that five groups were trying to destroy Trump: the media, Democrats, deep state/intelligence operatives, establishment Republicans and “never Trumpers.”
‘WITCH HUNT’
“This effort, this plan, this desire to upend and stop the Trump presidency got going probably on election night and certainly within 24 hours. And now we’re seeing it manifest itself,” radio talk-show host Rush Limbaugh said.
On Wednesday, the Justice Department appointed former FBI head Robert Mueller as a special counsel to investigate possible ties between Trump’s 2016 presidential campaign and Russia.
Trump has fed the theory that the media is out to get him, saying “no politician in history” has been treated more unfairly. On Thursday he tweeted that the probe of Russian collusion was “the single greatest witch hunt” in U.S. history.
“The overwhelming majority of conservatives and Republicans believe that whatever you may think of Donald Trump, this is clearly being driven by many quarters of the media that chose sides in the election and were very upfront about it and haven’t changed,” Republican consultant Keith Appell told Reuters.
U.S. President Donald Trump listens to a question during a joint news conference with Colombia's President Juan Manuel Santos (not pictured) at the White House in Washington, U.S. May 18, 2017. REUTERS/Kevin Lamarque
Trump’s approval ratings have been low for a new president, remaining mired in the high 30s to low 40s. But 77 percent of Republicans approve of Trump’s performance, according to the most recent Reuters/Ipsos survey, a figure that has stayed relatively steady since his inauguration.
Bradd Bostick, a Reynoldsburg, Ohio, resident who started a Bikers for Trump group after the president’s inauguration in January, said he was not concerned about the recent controversies because “most of us do not believe anything we hear in the mainstream media.”
“The media thinks it’s about Trump, and it’s not,” |
I heard in stores, at the beach, and blasting out of convertibles. In 1958, my family moved from the urban Allston location to single-family-house “suburbia” in Arlington, MA. Numerous interests could flourish in this new setting. The back of the High Haith Road property abutted Menotomy Rocks Park, a 35-acre partially-wooded town-owned recreational area. Aside from being a great play area, it would prove beneficial later when antennas became an interest.
In 1959, I received a tenth birthday gift of a 5-tube AM table radio. Initially I just used it listen to the Red Sox games (with Curt Gowdy announcing) on WHDH-850 and to the classical music my parents liked on WCRB-1330. It didn’t take too long to discover rock ‘n’ roll on WCOP-1150, WHIL-1430, and WMEX-1510. There were also “middle of the road” pop stations WBZ and WHDH. Soon I became familiar with the local Boston on-air personalities such as Carl DeSuze, Dave Maynard, Bruce Bradley, Dick Summer, Jay Dunn, Jefferson Kaye, Arnie Ginsberg, Dan Donovan, Don Parker, Melvin X, Ed Mitchell, Dex Card, Bob Wilson, Bob Clayton, Fred B. Cole, Jess Cain, Bill Marlowe, Alan Dary, and others. Beside Top 40 rock there were talk shows (Jerry Williams was the best known; Larry Glick came along a little later) and a few of the left-over old network radio dramas such as “Johnny Dollar”: relics of an earlier era. Kenny Mayer had a great comedy show on old WBOS-1600 (I think on Sunday night) with recordings of famous Las Vegas and Hollywood nightclub performers. Though I watched a fair amount of TV (sci-fi, spy, and detective shows / movies mostly), radio became my main entertainment medium.
Skip Discovered, and the first DX Lab
By early 1960, I was noting other sources of rock ‘n’ roll: the “stations between the stations”, the nighttime skip signals. Many were from New York City (WMCA, WABC, WINS, and WMGM come to mind); others included WPTR-1540 Albany, WKBW-1520 Buffalo, and WLS-890 Chicago. I was intrigued not only by the distances involved (and the “weird” fading) but also by mixes of music that sometimes differed considerably from what the Boston locals were playing. NYC stations, in particular, played a lot more black R&B. These tunes were only available here a few hours a day between assorted foreign-language and religious shows on WILD-1090, a 1 kW daytimer. By summer 1960, I set up a workshop in the basement in a room directly below my bedroom at the back of the house facing the woods. This was my first “DX Lab” where I tried various tricks to increase the sensitivity of the 5-tube radio. Moving the radio’s rear-mounted oval loop a certain distance (frequency dependent I guess) from a metal window screen jacked up the levels of marginal daytime signals from Providence, Worcester, et al. I could now comfortably enjoy the zany Chuck Stevens show on WPAW-550, Salty Brine on WPRO-630, and Bob Garcia on WORC-1310. I got a kit consisting of a pegboard and components you could clip together to make a 1-tube radio, among other things. This was my first introduction to shortwave since, besides the AM coil, there was one that allowed tuning of about 6-12 MHz. Getting BBC, Radio Moscow, etc. (with a short wire running from the “Lab” window to a tree) seemed like true magic. It was music listening coupled with a general scientific inclination that got me started in DXing, unlike sports that hooked some others. Still I enjoyed the Red Sox games and the Celtics basketball announced by “crazy man” Johnny Most.
Old Cape Cod (Summer 1960)
I took the 5-tube radio to Dennisport, Cape Cod on our annual 2-week family summer vacation. I was “blown away” by the stuff I was hearing! There were booming daytime signals from Maine, NYC, Long Island, and the NJ coast. These stations could only be heard in Arlington at night if at all. Maritime station WCC (Chatham) operated near the radio’s 455 kHz IF and my program listening was sometimes interrupted by Morse code. “Wicked bizarre” I thought. Night receptions on the Cape were even wilder: foreign languages and heterodynes from “splits” were very apparent. Initially I had no clue as to what most of it was. Some time later, I figured that 908 was BBC, UK. This ID was assisted by the fact that my Uncle Dan, an aficionado of anything British, gave me a subscription to a kids-oriented London newspaper with a radio section that listed stations like the “Light” and the “Home” services. There was a station on “330 metres”. After some long-division (no calculators back then), 908 kHz (or should I be saying kc/s) was computed. Within 6 years I’d be sending reception reports to the Transatlantic DX stations and papering the bedroom wall with QSL cards.
Going Portable
As Christmas 1960 approached, I had (surreptitiously) discovered one of my gifts, a pocket portable transistor radio. For a couple of weeks before Christmas, I played the radio when my parents were out of the house and then put it back in its “hiding place”. By Christmas morning, the “official opening”, the battery was almost drained! When I went out on family rides various places, the portable went with me, along with earphones. It was interesting to note where certain stations got stronger. Soon I’d figured out where many of the transmitter sites were. I had my mother drive me to the nearby WCOP transmitter site in Lexington. The crew there gave me a mini-tour and some Top 40 survey charts to take home. Roadtrips brought some other radio perspectives as well. My mother had a friend in Warwick, RI who was married to a “ham”. In the spring of ’61, I got to see the basement shack and I went away thinking that it was awesome beyond belief. The summer of 1961 gave me some opportunities to try the portable radio out at the shore, both at local beaches like Revere (where most of the Boston stations had bone-crushing signals) and on Cape Cod. I graduated from that first pocket portable to an excellent Realistic 8-transistor TRF with a leather case. It was the first of the Realistic TRF’s, on the market more than 10 years before the famous 12-655 model. This was a real DX machine by itself and, if I held it near a water pipe or an electrical conduit, its sensitivity increased even more. Long before my parents actually bought property on Cape Cod, they went on weekend house-hunting rides in the Dennis-Yarmouth area. Some of the new houses had not been fully connected to the electrical system, but had conduits and outdoor meters that enhanced the TRF’s reception immensely. I could get “in your face” daytime signals from the likes of CBA-1070 NB, CHNS-960 NS, and the Virginia coast stations on 790, 1350, and 1550.
Tech Talk Session Gets Me Interested in Engineering Profession
I had an uncle who was the pastor of a rural North Carver, MA church. Besides legendary outdoor summer barbecues featuring great country and rock music on the turntable, there was also a big parish Thanksgiving dinner. In the church basement at one of these dinners in 1961, I talked extensively with someone who was a hi-fi enthusiast and (probably) in some sort of electrical engineering job. Topics such as DX came up and this guy mentioned “FM stereo multiplex: It’s the next big thing.” This was followed by a little theory on how it worked. It all sounded very cool to me: learning how to understand all the math and science behind it.
DXing the 1962 Cuban Missile Crisis
I started the eighth grade in September, 1962 and the world situation was becoming very precarious. The goofy songs on regular AM radio (like the “Monster Mash”) wouldn’t give you much of an idea of what a mess the world was in, though down in New York a young folksinger named Bob Dylan certainly did have an idea. Nuclear missiles installed in Cuba by the USSR had a very real potential of annihilating much of North America. The US government began a war of words via radio. I tuned in many nights to hear several domestic broadcasters that were enlisted to beam Spanish-language programming to Cuba to present the US side of the issue to their people and government. Stations that put big signals to the south were used: I remember WWL-870 and WCKY-1530, perhaps also WSB-750 and WBT-1110. I think it was around this time that the VOA put rigs on 1040 and 1180 from the Florida Keys. Swan Island on approximately 1160 also came on the scene. This station’s location, purpose, and ownership became a subject of much controversy in the hobby throughout the ‘60s.
Things calmed down and most of the special broadcasts ended when Kennedy got Khrushchev to back down and have the missiles removed from Cuba. By late 1962 I had bought some of the ARRL books to learn about ham radio. Some friends of mine in school also had interests in radio. Steve McLean, a science genius and a “new kid in town” (having moved from North Adams, MA near the NY state line) found it interesting that I knew of his old low-power hometown station WMNB as well as Albany, NY area rockers WPTR and WTRY. He was glad to find out that WPTR was easy to hear in metro-Boston at night via skip. A number of people tuned in skip signals to get additional sources of music. It wasn’t that unusual then among the general population. My dad listened to WQXR-1560 NYC both for classical music and for New York Times produced news. My brother listened to the New York rockers like WINS and he showed some initial interest in ham radio. He eventually gravitated towards literature and chess as hobbies. About this time he was reading two or more sci-fi books a week (Heinlein, Azimov, Bradbury, et al.). Both of us spent a lot of our spare money on our music collections. Besides that, he’d hit the bookstores in Harvard Square and I was frequently seen at the Radio Shack and Lafayette stores near Boston University.
1963: Shortwave Gives British Invasion Preview; Radio After JFK Assassination
Armed with a “Realtone” multiband portable and my first copy of the World Radio-TV Handbook, I became more seriously involved in shortwave listening. Soon I kicked it up a further notch with the acquisition of a Hallicrafters S-119 Sky Buddy. The Radio Netherlands DX Jukebox program and a Top 10 countdown show on the BBC were among my favorites. Around May of 1963, I heard Beatles tunes on the BBC as well as a cover version of “Do You Want to Know a Secret” by Billy J. Kramer. Cliff Richard and most excellent singer Helen Shapiro got a lot of airplay too. The Jet Harris – Tony Meehan surf-style instrumental “Scarlett O’Hara” was a big hit. I later learned that it became an offshore pirate-station “anthem” of sorts. My BBC hit parade listening experience was a good 6 or 7 months before the influx of British music became widely known to American audiences. Among US stations, WORC-1310 in Worcester had a very early jump on the British Invasion. One staff member brought back records from trips in the spring of 1963.
Shortwave (and foreign medium wave) listening promoted interest in world music, international politics, and learning about languages (how they developed and how they’re related).
The assassination of President Kennedy on the 22nd of November shocked the world. All US stations that I could hear suspended their regular formats for the next 2 or 3 days. Most of them carried news broadcasts and a few played solemn classical music. This was even true of most Canadian stations. A glaring “sore thumb” was French-language rocker CKLM-1570 in Montreal. They carried on as if nothing had happened. Their barn-burner signal was very obvious at night here in the Boston area.
New York Trips
In early December 1963, I took a portable radio on a Christmas-shopping train trip to New York City with my father and brother. It was interesting to log various Top 40 locals (WICE-1290 Providence, WAVZ-1300 New Haven, etc.) along the way. In New York, I listened to top jocks like Murray-the-K (WINS) and to the black “soul” stations such as WLIB (“Where Listening Is Boss”), WNJR, and WWRL. It was certainly great to hear all the Marvin Gaye, Solomon Burke, Chuck Jackson, and Rufus Thomas music that was largely being ignored by the Boston stations. On the train ride home, interesting skip was noted: WMEX-1510 creaming WNLC right outside New London, Bahamas-1540 over WPTR, and – for the entire ride – WKBW Buffalo in like a local with great Top 40 with Joey Reynolds, Dan Neaverth, etc. There were four more of these trips during 1964 and 1965, sometimes by train and sometimes by bus. Besides the Christmas-season trips, there were summer trips each year to the World’s Fair. I became familiar with the NYC area in general, and its radio scene in particular. A few years later when I was at Northeastern University with a student population comprised of many New Yorkers, all that “information gathering” helped out.
Magazines and Friends Expand DX Hobby Awareness
Though I had previously been aware of the listening hobbies and ham radio, I wanted to know about other people who were involved, how they got started, and their specific technological interests. As 1964 wound down, I started buying communications-related magazines such as the Radio-TV Experimenter, Popular Electronics, and Electronics Illustrated. My magazine subscriptions brought me the White’s Radio Log in RTVE and the Tom Kneitel – C.M. Stanbury Radio Americas / Radio Swan debate in EI. The air of intrigue in radio of the Cold War era included such things as numbers stations and clandestine / pirate broadcasters having many different reasons to be on the air. James Bond movies and popular TV shows such as “The Avengers”, “Man from U.N.C.L.E.”, and “Secret Agent” fed into the whole experience. Interest in space travel and things scientific in general was also at a peak among people my age at the time. This made “Star Trek” and “The Invaders” top TV shows during my later high school years.
One of my best school friends, Philip Schoenheiter (later N1PZU), had a Popular Electronics WPE call (WPE1ETB) and soon I got mine, WPE1HGI. Across the street from Phil’s house and about a half mile from mine was a ham, Dick Groves, WA1FAE. The three of us, all about 15 years old at the time, got CB walkie-talkies and, on some afternoons between doing homework, we had on-air conversations about shortwave, medium wave, and ham radio. This went on through much of 1965.
The November 1965 “Great Northeast Blackout” provided some interesting portable-radio listening: quite a few AM stations were off the air and those that were on to cover the news sometimes limped along on auxiliary-power equipment inferior to their normal set-ups.
I noted that the electronics magazines had sections where people reported their loggings. After I expanded my antenna systems in Menotomy Rocks Park, I started sending some logs in to these publications. During August 1966, when at West Dennis, Cape Cod, I heard and ID’ed medium wave Transatlantics such as Senegal-764, Andorra-818, West Germany-1586, and many others. The 8-transistor Radio Shack TRF had been replaced by a 10-transistor version by this time. I tinkered with it to achieve a degree of regeneration capability to tighten the selectivity and boost sensitivity. That autumn from Arlington, I found some more MW Europeans along with shortwave DX, hams, and domestic MW. I sent out an unprecedented number of reception reports. I was popping out 5 to 10 a day for a while. Overseas reports were “aerogrammes” with an International Reply Coupon usually tucked inside. Gratification came every time a new QSL card or letter showed up in the mail. A December 1966 reception of UK – 1214 at 5 a.m. local (1000 UTC) stood as my latest morning reception of a Transatlantic medium wave station until early 2001 when I heard Ireland-567 at 1005 UTC from E. Harwich, MA. I built a pi-network tuner from a magazine article and managed a crude sort of antenna phasing by combining a tuned wire with an untuned one.
The Push to Get a Ham Ticket
I had a desire for some time to obtain an amateur radio license. In 1966, I heard several loud 75-m band AM hams such as Wally (W1HE) right in Arlington, Chuck (WA1EKV, now K1KW) in nearby Acton, and a good sized group of others throughout the northeastern states. Some were old-timers, but many were high-school kids like me. This gave me added impetus to learn the code and theory. I used both the ARRL’s W1AW and coast station WCC for code practice and, by the time I was a senior in high school in 1967, I passed my novice examination at K1VMT’s house in Arlington. Besides being the period of time known for producing the highest quantity and quality of outstanding rock music, the summer of 1967 was also when “WN1ION” hit the air. I called up Dick WA1FAE and he was my first novice QSO. My best novice DX was VQ8CC Mauritius who answered my CQ on 21132 kHz one afternoon. Ham radio took over from broadcast DX as the main hobby interest. Muscle cars (GTO’s, etc.) were big at the time. Ham radio had final amplifiers with 4-1000A’s and 833A’s as a similar “power trip”. After a while, I visited some of these stations and thought about having this kind of gear and a seaside antenna farm if I ever got rich. When I started studies at Northeastern University in Boston (Electrical Engineering, of course), I joined their ham club, W1KBN. They had a full Collins S-Line set-up in a penthouse atop Hayden Hall. The station was less than a mile inland: its signal often blew through the ARRL DX contest pile-ups into Europe. MIT’s club (W1MX), a mile away across the Charles River, was (usually) friendly competition for us. The CW guru of the Northeastern club, John K1FVS, routinely QSO’ed 40-m band Russians at blazing speeds around 60 words per minute. The club had Hammarlund SP600-JX and HQ-129 receivers that I used for WMEX and WRKO Top 40 listening and for some DX.
Late ‘60s
Since I didn’t have a car during my first couple of college years, I commuted back and forth from Arlington to Boston on public transportation. A transfer point was in Harvard Square, Cambridge. History shows that this was a very interesting place to be during this time period. I did most of my music and book shopping at the “Harvard Coop” and often went to the “hi-fi” stores to drool over high-end sound systems I couldn’t afford yet. A real treat was hearing stuff like “Seven Steps to Heaven” by Miles Davis cranking out of AR-3A speakers powered by a big McIntosh rack-mounted tube amp. Besides tunes on the turntable, I got to hear proper FM stereo for the first time: classical music on WCRB and WXHR, and then progressive rock on WBCN, which changed to this format from classical in early 1968. Northeastern was a “cooperative education” school, which meant part-time study / part-time work. After a while, this allowed me to build up some cash to indulge both my ham radio and audio system desires. Before I started to drive, I satisfied some of my radio curiosities by taking bus trips to look at (and photograph) the WRUL/WNYW Scituate shortwave site, the W1EVT multiple-dipoles array in Acton, and the W1FH top-gun contest antenna farm next to Stony Brook Reservation in West Roxbury. Tim, WA1HLR, moved to Rockport, MA in 1968 and I took several train trips out there. The site “totally rocked” both for ham radio and medium wave DX. I soon had voice license privileges and was a regular on 75 meters. There were numerous nets and informal groups including the Green Mountain Net, the NAAAM (National Association for the Advancement of Amplitude Modulation), the New England Teenage Net, the Alligators (from the South, of course), and a group out in Indiana called NAFSAC (which allegedly stood for something nasty). Local hams were obvious by loud signals. Arlington had a well-educated workforce and many hams on the air at the time. Some of the calls I remember: WA1FAE, WA1FHM, K1VMT, W1HE, W1QXX, W1CRE, W1LR, W1TIV, WA1EFN, WA1KYW, WA1HLJ, W1DBH, W1GNE, WA1LGC, W1KLZ, and WA1IDU. Some of them worked at General Radio in West Concord and got on the “GR Net” on 3910 kHz or thereabouts. I also knew quite a few hams in nearby Belmont. Mark (WA1FAF), Bob (WA1FPL), and Bob (WA1DOL, now KN1A) were quite active in those days; they were also “kids” at the time. I met a lot of the college-age hams first at the ARRL convention in Swampscott. Several of the students had apartments in Allston, the Back Bay, and Fort Hill (Roxbury). Over the years I’ve kept in contact with many of these people. I even met Mary Lou, the girl I married, at a party hosted by one of the hams. In the summers of 1969, 1970, and 1971 several guys had jobs at the WMEX North Quincy, MA transmitter site during their seasonal breaks from college studies. This turned into “party central” on several occasions. It was a lot of fun being at a real Boston broadcasting institution having pizza and beer (and occasionally going out on the wooden “catwalks” to the towers in the middle of the tidal salt-marsh at the mouth of the Neponset River). Mark WA1FAF and I went on numerous roadtrips including visits to the famous W3DUQ trailer in Icedale, PA, Warren WA1GUD’s residences in CT and VA, Scott WA1MYQ’s place in NH, and the western MA crew including WA1GOS and others.
My first Northeastern “co-op job” with electronics involvement was at Doble Engineering Company in Belmont starting in December, 1969. Doble made specialized test equipment for the electric power industry. The inside of the company’s High Voltage Lab building on Locust Street looked like something from a Frankenstein movie. There were massive oil-filled transformers, Variacs turned by something like a ship’s wheel instead of a knob, oversized panel meters and switches, and huge spark gaps with insulators the size of a person; these were topped with spherical electrodes from which arcs of blinding brilliance and deafening crackling issued. Most of the time I was at the more-normal looking production facility on Concord Avenue. As I got immersed in the technician assignments, I felt a special feeling of accomplishment. A number of my co-workers were accomplished design engineers and some were hams as well. There was always a lot of interesting conversation. Even today if I hear music from that period (such as the Led Zeppelin II album), or smell the odd combination of coffee and solder smoke, I’ll think of that first real electronics job, especially if it’s a snowy day as so many of them were for my first 3 months at Doble.
Early ‘70s: R-390A and Gordon Nelson Visit Revive Medium Wave DX
In 1971 or 1972, I purchased a Collins R-390A from Chuck WA1EKV. This receiver was a quantum leap in DXing capability and read-out accuracy from anything I’d used before. At sunset it could really haul in the European and African DX when connected to a swamp-terminated northeast-aimed mini-Beverage in Menotomy Rocks Park. Langenberg, W. Germany on 1586 was often the “ten ton gorilla” of the bunch. One night in late ’72 or early ’73, I heard an unusual signal on 1200 kHz. It was pirate station “WOJX” playing an LP about the offshore British pirate broadcasters of the ’60s. The announcer gave a local telephone number. I called the number and wound up talking to none other than Gordon Nelson (later WA1UXQ). He and I chatted DX for quite a while and he insisted that I should join the National Radio Club. I visited his attic “shack” on Hardy Avenue in Watertown. It had a complement of equipment worthy of a medium-sized electronics company. There were several R-390A and HQ-180A receivers along with a Rycom LF receiver / “frequency selective voltmeter”. Test gear included a Hewlett Packard frequency counter, Rustrak stripchart recorders (used in propagation studies), oscilloscopes, RF generators, spectrum analyzers, and broadcast-studio tape machines. I soon learned about DX News magazine as I joined the NRC. Nelson’s house was the headquarters for periodic Boston Publishing Committee meetings where DX News was collated, stapled, and stickered for mailing. Others I remember being there at various times were Randy Kane, Bill Bailey, Ray Moore, Tom Farmerie, Bill Grant, (the infamous) Big George Kelley, and Frank Stiles (a kid from Winchester who shared my appreciation of Celtic folk-rock a la Steeleye Span). Gordon gave me a phasing unit which I used a bit on my antennas at Menotomy Rocks Park and then to a much greater extent when I moved out to Sudbury, MA in 1975 and strung out Beverages. The phaser also came in handy on visits to the West Yarmouth (Cape Cod) house where my parents had moved in 1974. Since Gordon’s QTH was only a few miles inland and all downhill to the mouth of the Charles River, Transatlantic medium wave stations slammed in at impressive levels many evenings. Farther inland (about 40 miles), Bill Bailey in Holden needed phased Beverages on a hilltop even to come close to the kind of DX that Nelson got routinely with his NRC FET Altazimuth indoor loop. Besides the DXing I did on my own from Cape Cod and elsewhere, I sat in on many a good session at Gordon Nelson’s attic for both live DX (I remember Israel-737 beating up usual Spain) and goodies on tape like a stunning predawn reception of ZCO Tonga-1020. He had a tape of Tarawa-844 being heterodyned by Italy-845 (sunset at Tarawa, sunrise at Rome). Also there was a Peru over/under Spain – 854 recording (with Boston-850 off, of course). Pretty amazing stuff from an urban QTH with just an indoor loop, but 100% genuine I assure you. Gordon mentioned that his job consisted of computer simulation of physical phenomena including ionospheric skip and microwave satellite propagation. This was done at MIT in Cambridge with funding from the National Security Agency and the Air Force. I attended my first NRC Convention at the Sheraton Commander in Cambridge, MA in 1973. There were several good antenna, propagation, and receiver talks. A highlight of the convention was the hidden transmitter hunt featuring a mobile WOJX-1200 transmitter in a Volkswagen parked under trackless-trolley wires about a half mile from the hotel. It took me 45 minutes to direction-find it. The standing waves along the trolley wires gave a lot of false peaks and nulls. I think my prize was 1 year of free NRC membership.
Local NRC meetings were also held at Bill Bailey’s place. Bill (W1YPK) had quite a Beverage farm out between the woodlots and cow pastures in the rolling hills of Holden, MA. Before retirement he was some kind of “big wig” in the US Army, I think. Bill’s house was a most impressive half-timbered English Tudor that looked like it dropped in right out of Oxford or Kent. Suffice it to say that a group of blue-jeaned DXers eating pizza and drinking beer in the formal (almost church-like) dining room with its walnut panelling and diamond-paned windows looked more than slightly incongruous! Bill’s shack sported one of Nelson’s Beverage phasing boxes and two R-390A’s: THE serious DXer’s receiver of that day. I think he also had a Hammarlund HQ-180A, the #2 receiver among the practitioners of international medium wave DXing circa 1974. The antenna system did particularly well to southern Russia, the Ukraine, Turkey, and the countries along the Persian Gulf. I remember the NRC crew listening to a blockbuster signal from United Arab Emirates on 1481 kHz early one evening.
Cape Cod Adventures (Mid-1970’s)
Soon after I graduated from Northeastern University, my parents – who were at retirement age – decided to shop for a full-time home on Cape Cod. Finally, in 1974, they made the move from Arlington to West Yarmouth. Of course I saw the value of having a “ham shack” and listening post in the basement of their house. Initially, on my weekend visits, I would drag my R-390A down there, all 100 or so pounds of it, and then bring it back home. This got to be a bit tedious after a while, so I bought a second R-390A, this time from Roger (K1CZH, later W1OJ). This radio was left there at West Yarmouth. The location, about 2 miles from the mouth of the Bass River, performed especially well for DX from Africa, South America, the Caribbean, and Florida. I tried several antennas: an eastward-sloping wire off the top of one of their pitch pines was the overall winner. Surinam-725 and Senegal-764 were local-like most evenings right after sunset. Rarer catches included things like Paraguay-645, Greenland-1425, and China-1525. When I was on the Cape, I visited other hams and MW DXers including Marc DeLorenzo, who lived a few streets away, and Skip Wolsieffer (WA1CML) over in Osterville. Skip and I had a “duke out” of his National HRO-500 versus my Collins R-390A on some sunset African medium wave splits. After that, high frequency sensitivity was tested on, of all things, CB skip from Brazil! When all was said and done, both receivers did equally well. Over the years I progressed to more portable receivers so I could do more DXing from the car right at the beach rather than at the house where electrical noise could sometimes be a problem. On the first roadtrips, I used a homebrew regenerative FET preselector between the car whip and car radio to enhance foreign reception. More sophisticated set-ups came later.
Settling Down (Late ’70s)
I spent a year renting a house in Sudbury, MA before getting married in 1976 and moving to an East Arlington apartment. The Sudbury location near Willis Pond adjoined conservation land where I could install two Beverage antennas. I heard quite a bit of DX by phasing these antennas ahead of my R-390A. Still sometimes I could hear more from West Yarmouth with a lot less wire.
After moving to East Arlington, Mary Lou and I had a little get-together attended by several DXers (including Mike Dunn all the way down from Nova Scotia). In 1977, we took a trip to Ireland on which I did a little listening on a Realistic 12-655 TRF. Many US stations could be heard just before dawn. We enjoyed a visit with Medium Wave Circle member Mike McGovern and his family in Dublin.
In 1979, we moved to our own house in Billerica. That year I went on a short DXpedition in RI with Neil Kazaross. Twelve years later, in ’91, I’d be on my first of several DX adventures to Cappahayden, Newfoundland. Career-wise I was well-established in the ATE (automatic test equipment) industry; I’ve kept with this field, through several companies, since.
I guess that pretty well sums up the 20 years from when I got that first 5-tube radio.
Many thanks, Mark, for sharing your detailed story with so many familiar station calls!
Mark mentions the National Radio Club (NRC) in his story; if you are into medium wave DXing, you should consider becoming a member of the NRC.
Mark’s radio history and much more is available on his website–check it out by clicking here!
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The AFL-CIO, the largest labor federation in America, is considering launching its own “super PAC.” The move would allow the labor group to rake in unlimited amounts of campaign cash from inside and outside its affiliated unions to spend in state and federal elections. If the new political action committee gets the final stamp of approval, the Associated Press reports, it would join more than 100 super PACs already raising and spending money to influence the 2012 elections.
The explosion of super PACs onto the political scene came after the Supreme Court’s Citizens United decision, which opened the door to unlimited political spending by corporations and labor unions. Here’s more from the AP on the AFL-CIO’s plan to potentially capitalize on that decision:Last week DC announced that September would be "Zero" month as well as the debut of some new titles in the "third wave" of the "New 52." One of the new titles, TALON, will be written by James Tynion IV and co-plotted by Scott Snyder.
While talking to Scott about BATMAN #10 and the big reveal, I also asked him one question about TALON. When I heard that a Talon had been trained in their ways and managed to escape, while being hunted by the Court of Owls, one thought came to mind. Turns out I was a little off. But here's what Scott had to tell us about TALON. I'm definitely more excited now after this.
Comic Vine: Is TALON going to sort of be like Jason Bourne? He has all this training but he's on the run?
Scott Snyder: I hadn't really thought of that movie or book that much until you said it now. Now that you say it, I can definitely see elements of that being part of the DNA of the series in some way. For us, what the series is really about is not about someone who doesn't know his past or what he's done. Our character is very much aware of what he did and that's part of what drives him. He was in the circus, back at Haly's when he was a child. He was an escape artist with a really troubled past. Being a master escape artist is what brings him to the attention of the Court. He can escape from any trap, you can imagine how valuable that be to an assassin. He could get into any house, pick any lock and so on.
What happens is he's just made of better and brighter stuff than they expect. He makes his greatest escape ever which is escaping from them. He's the only person to ever escape that fate. Obviously you know from BATMAN that Dick was supposed to be a Talon but they never actually got their claws on him. This is someone that went through the Court's full training. You'll also see things you haven't seen about the training that will surprise you.
This is a wonderful character that James [Tynion IV] created. I really want to point out firmly with this, this series is going to take you all over the DCU. It's going to show you big secrets about the Court. It's going to be fast paced and fun. And here's the truth guys, for everyone out there reading this article, DC approached me about doing a TALON book or spin off about the Court of Owls a few months ago…about six months ago. I wracked my brain and said, "No, I would be milking it for more than I have. I have some deep stuff about their history. I have stuff about their resources all over the DCU. But I don't have a story and I don't want to force one."
I went back and was writing BATMAN and I told James about this. I told him, "You know, I feel bad but I just don't want to cheapen the idea." He said, okay. A couple weeks later he asked if he could pitch me the idea because he had an idea in his head. He had an idea how to continue it but I have very skeptical.
He pitched it to me and I thought it was wonderful. I said, "If that's the kind of series I could write, I would write it. I just don't have the ability or the time." He said he'd love to try it so I mentioned it to Mike [Marts], Bob Harras and Dan [DiDio]. They had him draw up a pitch and they liked it from the beginning. I've been helping him figure out the first and second arc and plotting. What I'm so proud of is he has really come up with this on his own. This is something I fully stand by and support. I'm very judicious with what I put my name on and this is something I |
for the future of the Republican Party, is that pluralism matters, that tolerance matters.
I feel like the orthodoxy of the party, the authoritarian nature of it, has made it very judgmental and often very sanctimonious. Because that's what it is today, it's actually attracted a lot of people that appeals to. They are completely on board for it. They are judging everything and everybody, but they are the last to be judged.
What do you attribute Donald Trump's victory to?
I've never taken exception to the people who have voted for him. There are a lot of people who haven't seen their wages go up. Maybe for the first time, I think about 50 percent of young people are making less than their parents did. Those are huge issues. And then you see the government bureaucracy and the rules and regulations. They've taken the fun out of being in business. They've disincentivized entrepreneurs like me. They've kind of taken the heart out of people.
So you see a guy like Trump, and he comes along, and one way or another he speaks to a lot of those issues people feel strongly about. So they're willing to ignore a lot of those things they may not like about him.
I wish him well. I mean, he's the president. I think there are areas he will do well in. I think the Democrats played a role in his success too. They didn't need to put up somebody who by all accounts they all wanted to see as president - Mrs. Clinton - and yet she was a candidate that was probably the most beatable candidate, just like Trump was the most beatable candidate from the Republican side. I don't think they thought it through very well.
Did Trump win the election or did Clinton lose it?
I think both are true. The working middle class has been put upon and feels left behind. I think the Democrats haven't figured out the difference between helping people and empathy. Most people I know don't want anything from the government. They just want to take care of themselves.
Part of the problem I think the Democratic Party has is that it's become a party of redistribution instead of an uplifting model. They have this notion that things aren't fair and they want to make it fair.
If you could have a few minutes alone with Donald Trump, what advice would you offer him?
I don't think he'd listen because he hasn't yet. But I would tell him not to be dismissive of those people he disagrees with, simply based on the fact he disagrees with them. You know, he has become the most powerful man on the planet. I think that his success isn't going to be measured just by how well the economy comes back, if it comes back. But this country has survived because of its differences, not in spite of them. It's important to listen and to show respect.
If you want to make people angry - whether it's your wife, your children or anybody - just pretend you don't give a damn what they say. That's the projection he gives and that's the attitude some of the people around him seem to have. But that's not a recipe for success. You don't have to do everything that everybody wants, but you have to at least make them understand that you understand.
What's your advice for Claudia Tenney, your successor in the 22nd Congressional District?
The problem with Claudia is that I don't think she was very relevant in Albany (where she served in the state Assembly) and I don't think she will be very relevant in D.C. I don't say that to be a slap to her. But I know that in life that past performance is the best determinant of future performance.
My advice to Claudia is to embrace this job in a way that isn't about you. At the end of the day, you'll always be appreciated or respected by the far right and the Tea Party groups and those people that supported her. But there are 720,000 people in the district and you work for every damn one of them. Find a way to connect and listen.
If you could change anything about your six years in Congress, what would it be?
I had a habit every night: I would go home and read. And a lot of members go out and they meet one another, and they drink a little bit, and they get to know one another. I never took the time to build very many friendships down there. I have a few good friends.
It always bothered me that the Republican Party - they supported me and I'm grateful - but I could never quite check all of the boxes that they wanted me to. I have to say it bothered me that they were where they were, and that I had to push back so much. I guess that's my way of saying I thought I was right about a few things. I wish I could have convinced people that pluralism and tolerance are also values, and this anger and vitriol that is so easily flung around today...really bothered me and still does.
Is there any particular vote you are most proud of?
The Violence Against Women Act, the alternative that the Republican Party put out there, I thought was really anathema to the intent of the original act. It excluded lesbian women, it excluded illegal immigrants, it excluded American Indian women. And yet these are typically poor women, maybe marginalized, maybe running under the radar, likely needing more help than others. They wanted to exclude those categories.
Well, a woman is a woman. And abuse is abuse. If you want to deport somebody, that's one thing. But based on somebody's sexual preference, or the fact they may be here illegally, that should not be how we rewrite our attitude towards women who are being abused.
That vote came to the floor and I think to the surprise (of GOP leaders) there were maybe 18 or 20 of us at the time who didn't support it at the time. I was behind that. I just planted my feet and we worked the room. And after three months of trying, the historical version passed and got funded as it was about to expire.
What was the worst thing about serving in Congress?
The people I didn't like, and the worst part about Congress, was hearing people say to me I hate this vote but I'm going to vote the party line. That bothered me because I saw that as the purest form of dishonesty and hypocrisy in government. That's what I hated the most, the people that I saw who had an opportunity to have a voice and change outcomes and speak to their truth, and they chose not to.
What's the biggest misconception the public has about you?
That I'm not conservative. And I am. I think the definition of being conservative often means minding your own damn business. Being conservative means being tolerant of other peoples' freedoms and notions that you don't like, but you're willing to accept it because they accept yours.
I'm a fiscal conservative and I think I'm a conservative the way conservatism was designed, not by the Christian right, but by the American belief in pluralism and tolerance.
People say I'm not conservative. I think I'm more conservative than most conservative members of Congress because I actually live the way I talk.
Your son, Emerson, and daughter, Grace, are both under 10 years old. Years from now, when they grow up, what will you tell them about their father's service in Congress?
What I hope to tell them is not as important as what I hope other people tell them. I would be more than happy to have somebody walk up to my children and say: You know what, I didn't agree with your father on a number of issues. But he wasn't a hypocrite and he wasn't a liar. He actually stood for something. And he never made that job about him, and got out intact.
Contact Mark Weiner anytime: Email | Twitter | Facebook | 571-970-3751Try the gravity-defying adventure before its 2017 release, and watch the anime tie-in from 26th December
Greetings and Happy Holidays Gravity Rush fans! We’re less than one month away from the release of Gravity Rush 2, and I’m thrilled to bring you an update on some of the high-falling action that’s headed your way before launch.
First and foremost, we have an original anime production ‘Gravity Rush Overture’ created by the famed anime studio Studio Khara that bridges the gap in story that takes place between Gravity Rush and Gravity Rush 2. I’m happy to announce that the anime will be available for all to see on our PlayStation YouTube Channel on 26th December from 4pm. Please take a look at the teaser to below for a quick glimpse of what’s to come:
Last but certainly not least, we wanted to leave you with a special surprise leading into the holidays. Our PlayStation fans have been itching to get a taste of Kat’s new adventure before the New Year, so I’m happy to announce that the Gravity Rush 2 Demo will be available to download on PlayStation Store tomorrow, 22nd December from 6pm GMT.
There are two paths through this demo – one for those who are new to Gravity Rush, and another for those that are more familiar with Kat’s powers – so no matter your level of gravity-defying experience please be sure to give it a shot!
We’ll have more about Gravity Rush 2 as we fall into 2017, so please stay tuned to the PlayStation Blog and have a wonderful holiday season.Mice with Duchenne muscular dystrophy (DMD) have been successfully treated using gene-editing injections – a breakthrough in treatment for genetic disorders.
A group of scientists at Duke University cloned the CRISPR-Cas9 system in adeno-associated virus serotype-9 (AAV9). This was then injected into adult DMD mice, first directly into the muscles and then intravenously so that it was delivered to even the cardiac muscles. The mice regained their muscular strength with improved functions of the heart and lungs. Thus, the symptoms were similar to that of Becker muscular dystrophy, a milder form with late onset. Similar results were observed in the team of scientists at Harvard and Texas,.
DMD is a genetic disorder causing muscle weakness. It primarily affects males at a rate of 1 in 3500-5000. DMD is caused by an alteration in the dystrophin gene in the X chromosome. Dystrophin is normally present in the skeletal and cardiac muscles of the body. Along with many other proteins, it forms a complex in these cells that help strengthen the muscles and protect and repair them from the damages caused due to contraction and relaxation. In the absence of any functional dystrophin, these cells retain the damage and eventually die off. This causes muscle weakness and eventually muscle wasting or atrophy. By adolescence, a person with DMD is confined to a wheel chair, unable to use his limbs. Death occurs usually in the twenties, and often because of the complications in the heart.
CRISPR-Cas9 utilizes the amazing bacterial immune system that uses the enzyme Cas9 to cleave off any viral sequences that might have infected them. CRISPR stands for Clustered Regularly Interspaced Short Palindromic Repeats. They are complimentary to certain sequences and when they bind to these sequences, Cas9 forms a complex with it, snipping that region just like we snip off those unwanted weeds in our gardens. AAV9 is a non-pathogenic virus that doesn’t cause any immune reaction in the human body. In the experiment, the viruses infected the muscle cells, releasing the CRISPR-Cas9 enzyme complex into the cells. This complex then binds to the targeted region in the dystrophin gene containing the mutation, and snips it. Thus, the protein further produced from it will be partially functional, even though truncated.
Developments like this raise a lot of hope in the treatment of the ‘incurable’ genetic disorders that affect millions of people around the world. It is amazing how every small discovery leads to new opportunities with scientists all around the world striving to cure the proclaimed ‘incurable’ disorders. In just 4 years, CRISPR-Cas9 technology has been able to achieve this feat. This technique doesn’t pose an ethical dilemma as alteration in the genome was post-natal. As no germline editing was performed, this technique dodges questions about transmission of the gene edits to the subsequent generation.
There is still a lot of work to be done and there are a myriad of technical difficulties in using and delivering genome editing systems in the required cells. Yet hope is there that one day, after all the clearance of ethical and technical issues, we may have a cure for the life-wrenching genetic disorders, like DMD, Huntington disease, and germline cancers like Li-Fraumeni syndrome.
Edited by Sarah SpenceBeijing: The Japanese government has released a map and aerial photos detailing Chinese oil and gas exploration platforms it said proved Beijing was accelerating plans to unilaterally exploit an oilfield that straddles disputed waters in the East China Sea.
The move adds to the fresh round of heightened tensions between the two Asian powers and in the region, as China, which has also come under international pressure for its rapid island building in the disputed South China Sea, prepares for a large-scale military parade in September to mark the 70th anniversary of Japan's defeat in World War II.
One of a number of Chinese offshore platforms in the East China Sea in June, in a photo released by Japan's defence ministry on Wednesday. Credit:AP
It also comes as Japanese Prime Minister Shinzo Abe seeks to win public opinion over the need to pass legislation to give Japan's military a greater role.Bath Abbey has sparked a backlash among churchgoers who are upset that it has replaced its 400-year-old Sunday service with a version said in "familiar" modern English.
The church was among a handful to retain the Matins service, which is based on the Tudor Book of Common Prayer.
After Easter it will be replaced by a modern choral Eucharist.
The Abbey said it decided to change the service to make it more accessible as more people are familiar with the modern service.
In a letter to the congregation sent in December, the Rector of the Abbey, The Reverend Prebendary Edward Mason, said: "Generations of Anglicans have now grown up with Eucharist not Matins.
"Few are now sustained in their faith by Matins these days. Casual attenders, visitors and those returning to faith are much more likely to be familiar with a Eucharist."
But some worshippers are upset by the changes, which they say are based on making the service more "fashionable" and will drive older members of the congregation away.
Ann Taylor, who is in her seventies and has been attending the service for 20 years, said she would not be attending the new Eucharist because it was in "supermarket" English. She said around 300 or 400 people currently attended.
"We think it's been changed for fatuous reasons," she said.
"The lady who sits in front of me turned around last week and said 'have a good Easter, but I don't know when I'll see you after that'. It's very sad."Many say it’s a sign of abusing democracy. A Calgary woman running for the public position of school board trustee in wards 12 and 14 is getting a lot of backlash following a controversial social media post.
In the post, Draper places blame on the LGBTQ community for this past weekend’s attack in Edmonton that injured five people.
The post by Karyn Draper sparked outrage by people who support all students and are concerned she would represent them. A member of the LGBTQ community, Tet Millare, said it’s worrisome.
“I was shocked and scared that someone would make those connections to put the blame on our community,” Millare said. “How could this be our fault?”
READ MORE: York University fires faculty member after alleged anti-Semitic social media posts
Julie Hrdlicka is the current school board trustee for wards 11 and 13 and is seeking re-election. She’s concerned about the comments targeting marginalized students.
“I wouldn’t want hate to propel people to go to the ballots you want people to go because they’re inspired,” Hrdlicka said. “But we know sometimes hate motivates but there is no role for hate in the role of trustee.
“We accept everybody in public education.”
Organizations who advocate for students said this might engage apathetic voters. Barbara Silva is with the Support Our Students Alberta campaign.
“As much as we dislike and be offended by those positions — they exist and they’re feeling emboldened enough to run for political office so if anything this is a call and red flag to citizens to get engaged,” Silva said.
READ MORE: Wildrose staff member alleges party members sent him anti-gay messages for planning to attend Pride event
Global News reached out to Karyn Draper, who said she wasn’t available for an interview Monday. Draper provided this statement Monday night:
“The backlash was anticipated but I am shocked at the volume,” she wrote.
“My post was somewhat in response to the private and public slandering I have had from the LGBT community over my opposition to the GSA and SOGI123 curriculum.”
GSAs refer to gay straight alliances in schools. The SOGI 123 curriculum is a sexual orientation and gender identity initiative that’s intended to help school districts support LGBTQ students.
“I understand I have created some high emotions over that statement and am sure that as I go forward, I can clarify again my intentions for running and confirm that I am here looking out for a fair representation to all children and all parents. ”
Draper also posted this response on Facebook following the backlash:Fairtex BGV1 Boxing / Muay Thai Gloves Review
Brett C. Blocked Unblock Follow Following Jul 23, 2016
After using the gym’s gloves for my first couple of classes, I knew I was going to have to buy my own as soon as possible. It’s the first thing I recommend to people other than buying handwraps.
Before buying anything I tend to read as much as possible on the subject and I spent hours and hours debating what my first boxing gloves would be. I‘ve written this article to hopefully spare you some time digging online for more information on these gloves.
First things first, you have to choose what size of gloves you want to train with. I do a lot of muay thai and boxing and I would say 80% of the time I’m hitting thai pads / focus mitts and 20% of the time I am working the heavy bag. I personally bought 14oz Fairtex BGV1’s but they actually weighed almost exactly 16oz each.
There’s a lot of different opinions online about what weight of gloves your training gloves should be but it all depends on hand size, weight, type of training and most of all your personal preference.
I now have 10 oz Cleto Reyes that I use for light bag work and all of my padwork and I absolute love them. The Cleto’s (which I’ll be reviewing next) are sublime but if you have large hands you’ll never be able to fit them in the 10 ounce or small size Cleto Reyes Hybrids.
I recommend trying different weights and choosing what to buy accordinly. Important note : If you’re only going to be able to afford one set of gloves and you intend on sparring; buy 16oz gloves and you’re good to go.
For me, I think having a nice light pair (10 ounces) and a heavy pair for sparring (16 ounces) would be perfect.
Now onto the actual review of the Fairtex BGV1’s…
Quality
First things first, these gloves are beautiful…I had never owned a pair of boxing gloves but had checked out tons in person and online and these were definitely some of the nicest of the bunch.
The build quality is excellent and there’s actually no double stitching whatsoever and not a single thread out of place that I’ve seen. The leather is beautiful and I have nothing but positive things to say about the finish of these gloves.
Score : 10/10
Performance
As far as fit goes, I have mixed feelings about the BGV1’s. I found the hand compartment to be way too big but I also have relatively small hands. If you have large hands and use long hand wraps you would most likely find the fit to be just fine. Because of the large hand compartment, I never felt like my knuckles were in the correct position. I found that my knuckles were too far back and too high up and I actually think this led to me eventually having a knuckle injury.
Of all the gloves I’ve used so far, the hook and loop that the BGV1’s have are the best. My Cleto Reyes Hybrids are worth $100 CAD more and the hook and loop and velcro is nowhere near as strong or high end as the one on my BGV1’s.
The protection on these gloves is very different than on most boxing gloves because they are a Muay Thai glove. Muay thai gloves have more padding on the top hand of the glove and also on the sides in order to protect from kicks. This means that a Muay Thai glove can weigh as much as a boxing glove but the padding is more spread throughout whereas a boxing glove has padding focused primarily at the front of the glove.
These gloves are very stiff… after weeks of using them, I still found them to be very hard. They did eventually soften up but I had a lot of hand and knuckle pain throughout the use of these gloves. I don’t believe that there is a lack of padding in the knuckle area, I just think that the padding used is too dense. Compared to my Cleto Reyes with 6oz less padding, the Cleto’s feel like pillows and the Cleto’s are considered to be “Puncher’s Gloves”.
The lack of grip bar in the glove did not bother me when I first bought these gloves. The lack of grip bar was not an issue because I hadn’t used many other gloves and didn’t realize how much I love having a grip bar. Some people find the lack of a grip bar as a positive so I will chalk this one up as personal preference and not as a negative.
Score : 6/10
Value
I have a really hard time judging the value of these gloves. The gloves were purchased for $120 CAD and the build quality is worth every penny but I just don’t feel that the performance of the gloves justifies the price.
After paying $220 CAD for Cleto Reyes Hybrids and using them for a couple of weeks, I can truly say they are 10 out of 10 for build quality and performance and the price is justified.
It’s hard to say that the BGV1’s are a great value from my experience because the hand compartment was so large and the padding was so dense that I had to move onto a new set of gloves. I also believe that someone with larger hands that likes a harder glove may find these to be perfect. It all boils down to to personal preference and for me, spending the extra $100 CAD was worth it for the Cleto Reyes Hybrids.
Score : 6/10
Pros + Cons
Pros :
Build Quality is phenomenal
Padding on the top of the hand and wrist is great
Aesthetically the best looking gloves out of Thailand
Lack of grip bar
Cons :
Large hand compartment (if you have smaller hands)
Dense padding in the knuckled area
On the higher end price-wise
Lack of grip bar
Verdict
I think to some people, these gloves could be the perfect boxing / muay thai glove. I think the important thing when buying BGV1’s is that you try them on first. People who have always used gloves with grip bars may love/hate the lack of one in the BGV1’s. Some may find the padding to be too dense and some may not. Smaller individuals with small hands may find them to have too much room in the hand compartment and others may enjoy the extra room.
Overall Score : 7/10Episode 467: Tires, Taxes And The Grizz
toggle caption Josh Kenzer/via Flickr
The price of tires has risen by about 40 percent in the past five years. That's partly because rubber prices have gone up. But it's also due to a tariff the U.S. imposed on Chinese tire imports.
As tire prices have risen, more people have been renting tires rather than buying them outright. And renting tires, it turns out, is often a bad deal in the long run.
On today's show: How a celebrated attempt to help one group of people ended quietly hurting a much larger group. Also on the show: The Grizz.
For more, see our story Why More People Are Renting Tires. And see the paper we mention on the show, U.S. Tire Tariffs: Saving Few Jobs at High Cost. Music: Karmin's "I Told You So" Find us: Twitter/ Facebook/Spotify/ Tumblr. Download the Planet Money iPhone App.Foto: Facebook
"TIJEKOM Domovinskog rata samostalnost i sloboda bili su ultimativni ciljevi, no državnom vodstvu nije dugo trebalo da u svoj svojoj poniznosti Katoličkoj crkvi dozvoli da polako i sukcesivno preplavi sve segmente života u Hrvatskoj, od visoke politike, školstva, zdravstva, pa sve do intime bračnog kreveta. Nedugo nakon završetka rata, u ilegali diplomacije, nastaje cijeli niz sporazuma između RH i Svete Stolice koji nas je odveo u novo, trajno ropstvo.
Jednim Tuđmanovim potpisom Crkvi je omogućeno aktivno i agresivno uplitanje u sva politička, ekonomska i ina zbivanja u Hrvatskoj. Pod krinkom vjekovne predanosti katoličanstvu, potpisivanjem Vatikanskih ugovora Katoličkoj crkvi je olakšano bezdušno i beskrupulozno pražnjenje džepova svih građana – poreznih obveznika u Hrvatskoj. Za potrebe dušebrižničkog promicanja općeg dobra Tuđman je Crkvi otvorio samoposlugu u kojoj je poslovođa, prodavač i blagajnik Sveta (milosrdna) Stolica. Potpisom na jedan od Ugovora predsjednik Tuđman je stavio i potpis na legalizaciju protuzakonitog djelovanja Kaptola te omogućio bespoštednu grabež od strane duhovnih otaca“, kaže dragovoljka i veteranka Domovinskog rata, inženjerka Vesna Grgić. Za sve one koji će sada, kao za džokerom iz rukava, posegnuti za otrcanim pitanjem – a gdje je ona bila devedeset i prve, Vesna odgovara - na frontu, u Sunji kao borac, a u Posavini kao topnički izviđač. Po Registru branitelja iza Vesne je ukupno 1066 dana u borbenom sektoru. No, iako višekratno ozljeđivana, ova inženjerka strojarstva nema priznat status RVI te je danas umirovljenica rada.
„Crkva minorizira količinu sredstava koju konstantno, parazitski srče iz ionako jadnog državnog proračuna!“
„Tvrde da državu koštaju „tek parstotinjak“ milijuna kn godišnje. No, da je i tako, zapitajmo se koliko bi se od tih „parstotinjak“ milijuna moglo uplatiti za potrebe bolesne djece, djece invalida, invalida rada, koliko bi se moglo sagraditi vrtića, škola, bolnica, bi li se na račun toga mogla povećati socijalna davanja najsiromašnijima? Uostalom, zar smo ginuli u Domovinskom ratu da sve više ljudi u Hrvatskoj trpi neimaštinu, živi od milostinje i biva prozivano za bogohuljenje, samo ako šapne da šopanje prebogate i prebahate Crkve nije bila ideja vodilja u ratu? Jesmo li krvarili po rovovima da, umjesto lijekova za djecu, plaćamo nove crkvene oltare? Jesmo li ginuli za to da nam beskućnici, nezaposleni, umirovljenici i djeca po školama gladuju, dok mi plaćamo ugradnju centralnog grijanja po crkvama? Moraju li svi ateisti, gnostici i ljudi drugih vjeroispovijesti biti kažnjeni i plaćati zbog svoje različitosti, ako smo se borili upravo za toleranciju različitosti“, pita dragovoljka, koja je Vatikanskim ugovorima javno progovorila i na društvenim mrežama.
Završetkom Domovinskog rata u Hrvatskoj, kad je Tuđman dignuo ruke i viknuo „Imamo je“, trebalo je, kaže Vesna, početi novo sretnije doba, doba slobode od sužanjstva, brutalnog kažnjavanja i protjerivanja neistomišljenike, gaženja ljudskih prava, no desilo se, tvrdi, upravo suprotno.
„Sporazumi između RH i Svete Stolice odveli su nas u novo, trajno ropstvo!“
„U sveopćoj euforiji dokazivanja cijelom svijetu da smo sami sposobni krenuti dalje, da smo sad „svoj na svome“ i da nam više nitko nikada neće oteti ni djelić onoga što je naše, predsjednik Tuđman potpisuje niz Ugovora sa Svetom Stolicom vraćajući nas u mrak ovisnosti, poprilično sličan onome iz kojeg smo tek iskoračili. Primjerice, Crkva je samo jednim od Ugovora, oslobođena plaćanja poreza na sve milodare, poklone, sredstva namaknuta za krštenja, potvrde, vjenčanja, sprovode, plaćene mise … Uz to je i nametnuta obaveza da svaki porezni obveznik u RH, htio to ili ne, svojim obaveznim doprinosom u Državni proračun RH plaća dvije prosječne bruto plaće po svakoj župi u Hrvatskoj, do nedavno uvećanih 20 posto za svećeničke mirovine, te osigurava prihod za 2049 pravnih subjekata Crkve, pripomaže izgradnji i obnovi sakralnih objekata te karitativnoj djelatnosti, itd.“, kaže Grgić te smatra da je krajnje vrijeme da se zajedno sa svojim suborcima zapita zašto su se uopće borili.
„Moji prijatelji, suborci, veterani Domovinskog rata i ja, okupljeni oko Inicijative Dosta je Ja se vas ne bojim zastupamo isti stav - vrijeme je za promjene. Ugovori sa Svetom Stolicom su štetni i zbog svoje savjesti ih moramo mijenjati! Naša borba je bila za slobodnu Hrvatsku, a ne za Hrvatikan! Stoga, podržavamo prosvjedni skup „RASKID!4“ jer vjerujemo da nas, osim borbe za istinom, ujedinjuje i jedna jedina religija: - zdrav razum!“, poručuje Vesna Grgić, odnedavno i jedna od administratorica stranice „Dosta je Ja se vas ne bojim“ koja je u kratko vrijeme prikupila više od 23 tisuće fanova.
Tekst se nastavlja ispod oglasaI want to follow up a little on my discussion of the liquidity trap that we are have been in. Brad Delong has an excellent post today called “Four Years After the Wakeup Call”. In it he shows some graphs which illustrate very well our the liquidity trap.
Delong first serves us two graphs on the Federal Funds rate since early 2007:
The daily gyrations of the usually-placid Federal Funds market starting in late 2007 told us all that banks were really worried that other banks had jumped the shark and turned themselves insolvent.
The Federal Funds rate is the interest rate that banks pay to each other when they borrow reserves from each other. Despite the name, the rate isn’t set by The Fed. It’s set by market supply-and-demand. It’s a large and brisk market. When the Fed Funds rate is high (or at least rising), we can infer that banks need and are desperate for reserves, typically because they have profitable opportunities to make loans based on those reserves. When The Fed Funds rate is low and/or dropping, it means that a lot of banks have excess cash on their hands and don’t see any useful or profitable ways to use that money. In other words, a low Fed Funds rate means banks are willing to lend their reserves to other banks because it’s better than nothing and they don’t see any good ways to loan out the money. At the same time, a low rate also shows that few banks are interested in borrowing – again because they don’t see much useful to do with it. While The Federal Reserve doesn’t set the funds rate, it does set the interest rate for the alternative: direct borrowing from The Fed.
What we see from the first graph is that things were cruising along in early 2007 and then mid- to late 2007 (August to be exact), the rate starts dropping. We’re moving toward a recession. Banks are finding it harder to make good loans so they don’t want to borrow more reserves. Banks start hoarding their cash and assets. So instead of balance sheets that are full of loans, bonds, and securities, the banks decide they want/need more cash. Their reserves grow in order to provide a cushion for what was then being seen as the inevitable losses on mortgages and mortgage securities. Things appear to stablize and then in Sept 2008 comes the Lehman moment. Fed Funds rate goes virtually to zero. It’s been stuck there ever since. Banks have plenty of reserves. They have the cash to lend. There’s no willingness to lend (banks don’t see many credit-worthy borrowers) and there’s little interest or demand to borrow.
The Federal Reserve has responded during the same period by creating new base money like crazy. [NOTE: Contrary to the fears of the inflation-fearful crowd, it’s not really “money” until it’s in circulation with the public. It’s only bank reserves – the monetary base. It creates the ability to create money for the public, but that would necessitate having a bank lend it first. ] Again Delong shows up graphically just how The Fed has been willing to create new monetary base:
And while the Federal Reserve has taken the monetary base to previously-unimaginable levels–up from $900 billion to $1.7 trillion in late 2008, up to $2 trillion in let 209, and up to $2.7 trillion in early 2011–it has never adopted Milton Friedman’s recommended policy that it start buying bonds for cash and keep buying bonds for cash until nominal spending is on the path that the Federal Reserve wants it to be on:
We only need one more graph: GDP. More precisely a comparison of GDP to an estimate of what GDP could be if we were at full employment and operating at our long-term trend. Again Delong:
And so right now nominal GDP is $15 trillion/year when it ought to be $16.7 trillion/year:
I’ll save inserting the employment graph here. I’m sure you all know what it looks like. Same story.
And that story is that we had signs of trouble 4 years ago. Three years ago things went really into the tank. The economy seriously declined until mid-2009. Ever since then, it’s struggled to hold on. There really isn’t any recovery. It’s just going sideways. We have, in effect, taken a huge chunk of the economy, a huge number of workers, put them on the sideline and said “we’re not interested in you participatin anymore. We don’t want or need your contribution. We’re happy being smaller”.
So we’ve had monetary stimulus efforts, we’ve had low interest rates, we’ve had the central bank create base money. There’s plenty of cash out there. But it’s all in the banks. It’s in deposit accounts. It’s in reserves. It’s not working. It’s not being used to buy things. It’s not being used for consumption or investment. It’s just sitting around impotent. That’s a liquidity trap.
Mainstream economic theory, the stuff called “New Classical” or “New Keynesian” (never confuse “New Keynesian” as being “Keynesian”), says keeping interest rates this low for this long would /should fix everything by now. For over 30 years now, the dominant, orthodox view in the academic and professional world of economists has been that monetary policy exercised by a wise central bank can fix all. Any weakness in the economy can be solved via lowering interest rates and having the central bank create new bank reserves. These “modern” theories told us that the concept of a “liquidity trap” was nonsense, a relic of some past era and/or the invention of some crank called Keynes. These |
’s just by score for now.
[AI in Star Marine] It’s something they’ve talked about and have it be more of a way to test things that the internal team may not be able to see, but it’s not ready for primetime yet.
[Will there ever be a spectator camera for private matches for tournaments?] It’s a good idea, but they haven’t really talked about that as they’re focused on other features currently.
[How does Radar work currently?] It doesn’t work to its full potential yet, there’s much more tuning involved to getting it to where they want it to be.
[Is there a story behind Marines VS Outlaws?] It started out as what they wanted Marines and Outlaws to look like in Star Citizen.
Down the road, players will be able to fully customize their armour how they want it to look and feel. They would love players to be able have colour customisation on armour in SM, but that’s far down the line and their focus is on features at the moment.The Hanwha Eagles (Korean: 한화 이글스), incorporated as the Hanwha Eagles Professional Baseball Club (Korean: 한화 이글스 프로야구단), are a South Korean professional baseball club based in the city of Daejeon. They are a member of the KBO League. The Eagles' home ballpark is Daejeon Hanbat Baseball Stadium. Founded in 1985 as the "Binggrae Eagles" (Binggrae was the then-trademark of Hanwha's confectionery branch), they debuted in 1986 as the seventh franchise of the league. The club changed their name into the "Hanwha Eagles" after Binggrae's separation from Hanwha conglomerate in 1993. Hanwha, the owner of the club is one of the largest business conglomerate, or chaebol, in South Korea.
The Eagles won the Korean Series once in 1999 and the league pennant twice. As of 2018, they played in the postseason 13 times, being the runner-up for five times. The club was renowned for their slugger bats from late 1990s to early 2000s, nicknamed as the Dynamite Bats after one of Hanwha's main business fields, explosives production. The team slugging percentage was.484 in 1999, the highest team total in the KBO League history. The Eagles have three retired numbers in the roster, more than any other team in the league. Those are for the slugger Jang Jong-hoon (35), and the pitchers Jung Min-cheul (23) and Song Jin-woo (21).
Season-by-season records [ edit ]
Personnel [ edit ]
Current lineup [ edit ]
Managers [ edit ]
Retired numbers [ edit ]
References [ edit ]
GeneralRECYCLING: GARDEN Weary of lawn work? Fake it
Snickering aside, the latest synthetic grass is lush, soft and easy to maintain. Sure it's pricey, but then, so is all that watering and mowing.
Gruver is part of a burgeoning backlash against the hassle and expense of the traditional lawn. A new generation of synthetic lawn, lush, soft and light-years from the AstroTurf of yesteryear, is fueling the rebellion -- and a compelling environmental case for going simulated green. Synthetic grass saves on water, eliminates the need for toxic fertilizers and requires no polluting mower. A bonus: Some brands use recycled materials, including old Nike shoes.
But the price was steep. She had to renounce her all-American belief in real grass. Her lawn is fake. And it set her back about $16,000 for front and back yards. Worth every penny, she says.
"People look at it, touch it, say, 'Wow, that is so pretty,' " Gruver says.
The Riverside teacher's lawn is perfect 365 days a year. Instead of fighting the Inland Empire's blast-furnace heat and two dogs for control of her yard, she sits back and watches as passersby stop to behold the wonder of flawless turf.
HOMEOWNERS know that in one field of life, nothing less than perfection is acceptable. The rules of the lawn are very clear: no bare patches, Fido-induced brownouts, weeds, anemic blades or lusterless shades of green. The quest for perfect grass is grueling enough that some might sell their souls to get it. Deberoh Gruver did, and she couldn't be more delighted.
"We have doubled in size every year, and this year we've tripled," says Dave Hartman, who runs EasyTurf (www.easyturf.com), a distributor for FieldTurf, an artificial grass used by the Detroit Lions, Atlanta Falcons, New York Jets, San Diego Zoo and hundreds of colleges and high schools.
One of EasyTurf's first customers, Hartman was so enamored of the way his faux grass liberated him from mowing and watering and sent gophers packing that he joined the company. In the four years since, 1,800 homeowners from Los Angeles to San Diego have made the switch to the company's facsimile lawns, he says. Though the turf is expensive ($10 a square foot), Hartman says the investment pays off by lowering water and maintenance bills.
Despite the convenience and eco-logic, artificial turf has to overcome entrenched cultural programming that dictates it's a civic duty to sow real grass. Anything less borders on slackerhood, if not suburban treason. Hartman says that attitude is changing, along with the stigma of early artificial turf, which had an image as a hard, leafless rug. No one wants an obvious fake. But one that passes for the real thing is another story.
"It looks really real," says Susan Dominguez, a Murrieta resident who had FieldTurf installed in her backyard in February to keep maintenance down after her husband had a heart attack. "It has that just-mowed look. I don't miss real grass at all. We'd do the front yard too if we could afford it."
The more lifelike synthetic comes from improvements in technology that have replaced abrasive, drain-poor nylon with a blend of polyethylene fibers, silica sand and recycled rubber called Nike Grind.
Instead of treating the process like carpeting and stuffing a pad under a thin rug, the new turf tries to replicate the dynamics between real earth and grass.
FieldTurf uses a base of decomposed rock for drainage. That's topped by an infill of sand and rubber granules recycled from tires and ground-up athletic shoes. The sand and rubber act like soil to hold the blades in place. The surface is a nonabrasive material that performs like grass without the high maintenance costs.
Most of the recycled mix is old tires, notoriously hard to dispose of. The process breaks down the rubber cryogenically, freezing and pulverizing it into rounded bits. That's blended with the crumb rubber of athletic shoes, recycled by Nike.
The green potential of synthetic turf extends beyond recycling. With 50% to 70% of residential water usage gulped by lawns and gardens, according to the nonprofit educational and advocacy group American Water Works Assn., fake grass can put a big dent in water consumption. Though xeriscaping and native plants are options, the reality is that some homeowners simply want a lawn, real or synthetic.Quinton Flowers was sitting at his coach’s dinner table, listening quietly as a conversation unfolded around him that would change his career.
It was September 2015. The South Florida quarterbacks and running backs were meeting at head coach Willie Taggart’s two-story Spanish-style villa three and a half miles from campus, trying to figure out how to keep the Bulls’ 1–3 start from spiraling into a fourth-straight losing season. Flowers, a sophomore, had struggled to assert himself under center, but running back Darius Tice knew that the quarterback was capable of much more.
The two players had squared off for rival teams in the Miami area, where Flowers, then considered one of the better athletes in the state—he had offers from Alabama, Florida and Texas—put up video-game numbers, throwing for 6,042 yards and rushing for 2,002 at Miami Jackson Senior High. But since they had become teammates, that version of Flowers was nowhere to be seen. He was tentative, robotic, focusing on fundamentals rather than instinct.
“We need to let Quinton be himself,” Tice told Taggart. “Come out of the tunnel, be wild and free.”
Taggart turned to Flowers and said, “So go out and do what you do.”
Be wild and free. The next Saturday he passed for 259 yards in a 54–24 win over Syracuse. Since then, USF has gone 27–5, while Flowers has rushed for 3,182 yards, eighth-most among all active players, and has thrown for 6,680. His 37 rushing touchdowns are second most among all players. As a junior last year, Flowers piled up 4,339 total yards with 42 touchdowns and became the first Florida collegian—including Tim Tebow—to pass for 2,000 yards and run for 1,000 in a season.
The Bulls are 9–1 this fall with Flowers leading the way, and their matchup on Friday against No. 15 UCF will send one team to the American Athletic Conference title game, likely with a coveted trip to a New Year’s Day bowl on the line. Amid Miami’s renaissance and UCF’s offensive fireworks elsewhere in the state of Florida, college football fans have largely overlooked the show Flowers & Co. have put on in Tampa, with help from former Texas coach Charlie Strong, who took over after Taggart left for Oregon in December.
Be wild and free. For too long, one of the best dual-threat quarterbacks in the country had been playing—and living—in a shell, and in fear, after taking one devastating hit after another.
Steve Nesius/AP
Liberty City is 10 miles northeast of South Beach; both are Miami neighborhoods, but they are worlds apart. To get to Liberty City from the glittery beaches, the Art Deco buildings and the $85 seafood dinners of South Beach, take the MacArthur Causeway over Biscayne Bay, through Wynwood and the abandoned RC Cola plant and Allapattah and Little Haiti. You might recognize the neighborhood from its starring role in the Oscar-winning movie Moonlight. In a 28-day span in September, there were 39 assaults in a half-mile radius surrounding it.
But there are pockets of hope. Liberty City is home to a disproportionate amount of NFL players—Antonio Brown, Amari Cooper, Elvis Dumervil, among others—and strong family units, like the one Flowers had growing up. Every Sunday was a party at the yellow house on 75th and 17th. Nancy and Nathaniel Flowers had the Dolphins game on the TV, food on the grill, friends and family over.
On one of those Sundays in 2002, a seven-year-old Flowers was on the front porch, sitting on his dad’s lap, watching the Dolphins. Nathaniel, who worked for the city of Miami as a garbage collector, gave his son money to get a snack. Before Quinton could even get to the store, there was a bang. Nathaniel had been struck with a stray bullet, the unintended victim of a drive-by shooting.
“What if I was sitting on my dad’s lap playing with him?” Flowers says. “That could’ve been me.”
After his father’s death, Quinton found salvation on the football field. While his mom would stay late at Liberty City Elementary, where she worked as both a cafeteria worker and a custodian, Flowers would play with the Liberty City Optimist Club at Charles Hadley Park on NW 50th Street, the same team that nurtured NFL players Lavonte David, Devonta Freeman and Duke Johnson.
“The only time you have to have fun is on the field,” says Tice, who grew up in nearby Miami Gardens. “There’s shootings, bullets hitting innocent kids. When we play football, that’s the best time you can just let everything go.”
Flowers and his mother were close. He would talk to her about everything, from football to girls; she could be overprotective of her youngest kid. “One time I was with my friends, four blocks from home, and she called me,” says Flowers. “She was like ‘Boobie, Boobie, I need you, hurry up.’ I’m running, all the way home, because that’s my mom. I just want to get there, make sure she’s O.K.” Then Flowers chuckles. “Soon as I get in her room, she tells me to pass her the TV remote.”
After Quinton’s sophomore year of high school, he was told she was battling cancer. As she started treatment, he began to excel on the field. Quinton was in Orlando for a football tournament in January 2012 when he logged onto Facebook and saw messages saying that his mother had died. He rushed back to the hospital and found she was still alive. “She couldn’t see, and she couldn't hear. But she told me to get my diploma and continue being myself. That she loves me and will be watching over me.”
Nancy died the next day. Quinton’s older sister Shanay helped with day-to-day responsibilities, as did his Aunt Julie and Uncle Nick. His cousin, former NFL wide receiver Andre Johnson, sent money. But Quinton was still in a downward spiral. “It was a time where I felt like football wasn’t the same, because I lost the main woman in my life,” he says. He had thought of quitting, but his high school coach, former NFL receiver Antonio Brown, rushed over in the middle of the night to convince him otherwise.
The major schools who had recruited Flowers wanted him at different positions. Alabama thought he should be a receiver. South Carolina wanted him as a defensive back. Miami had another position in mind. “The first thing [former coach] Al Golden said: ‘Your legs are big. I think you’re a running back,” Flowers recalls.
But Flowers was adamant: He was a quarterback, and always had been. (As a kid, he left a team after a youth coach put him at offensive line, telling the coach, “I’m a QB.”) USF agreed, and nine games into his freshman season Flowers took the starting job. He called his brother Nathaniel Jr. to tell him the news, but when Nathaniel picked up, he was distraught. Earlier that night, their brother, Bradley Holt, had been shot in Allapattah. A yellow Ford Mustang was approaching an apartment complex where a group of children were playing. Holt, 24, confronted the driver, telling him to stay away from the kids. A few minutes later he was shot in the head.
“I lost it all,” Flowers says. “As I was walking to my room, I started crying. He always told me I was going to be the one to go to college, try to make something out of myself. I was so hurt. That’s the third person in my life.”
Flowers is usually incredibly stoic, betraying little emotion. His teammates say it’s hard to tell what he’s thinking. His sister Shanay says, “You have to talk to him constantly to get anything out of him.”
But Flowers isn’t immune to the pain. When he hears teammates talking about their parents, it will get to him. He’ll call Shanay in the middle of the night.
“You can hear it in his voice, he’ll be hurting,” she says. “I’ll ask him, ‘What’s wrong?’ He’s like, [nothing]. And then I’ll say, ‘Tell me what it is, I can help you.’ And then he’ll break down.”
When he gets emotional, Shanay repeats a message their mom often repeated: Live to die. You’re not going to be here forever—enjoy life. “Every day, I just try to make the best decision because she’s seeing every move I make,” he says.
Flowers also gets inspiration—and comfort—from his one-year-old daughter, Amayah.
“When he sees her, it’s like a sense of relief,” says Shanay. “My mom, his daddy, his brother—now he has someone to rely on him, depending on him, not only in football, but in life, to support her, to be behind her.”
One night in September, Quinton called Nathaniel as he does every night before a game only to find his brother upset again: “Auntie Julie had a heart attack.” She had gone to the hospital for back pain, then had a bad reaction to her medicine. Auntie Julie wasn’t just a typical aunt, Shanay says. When their mom died, Auntie Julie became their go-to person. And now, just like that, Auntie Julie was gone, too.
“She’s in a better place,” Shanay said to him. “Be a better man, not only for yourself, but for your daughter.”
The next day Flowers threw for 186 yards and two touchdowns and led the Bulls to a 31–17 win over Stony Brook.
AP/Shutterstock
USF’s football program has come a long way since 1997, when the first team meeting was held under a shade tree for lack of a better venue. (The program now has a $4 million practice complex with three fields, along with a 2,500-square-foot storage building; In August, the school released a feasibility study on the prospects of building a new $200 million stadium on campus, to eliminate the need to play 10 miles away in Raymond James Stadium, the home of the Buccaneers.) USF joined the Big East in 2005, then made four straight bowl games. In ’07, after beating No. 17 Auburn and No. 5 West Virginia, the Bulls opened the season’s first BCS rankings at No. 2, their highest ranking ever, before losing their next three games and fading from national title contention.
In the first half of this decade, USF didn’t make a bowl game. But after Taggart steered the team to an 8–5 season in 2015 and an 11–2 finish last year, the Bulls are back on the rise. In Flowers, they have enjoyed their first breakout star on a national level. “I’m trying to have some spirit surround the school,” Flowers says. “Get these people an opportunity to have something to talk about. When they’re talking about their schools, people can go ‘Oh, I go to USF, we’re doing this at our school.’ I could’ve gone to Florida and just been another person. I could’ve gone to Miami, been another person. I wanted to be that guy.”
Flowers possesses not just a strong, accurate arm, but also top-flight speed—in high school, he was timed at 4.4 in the 40—that most AAC opponents don’t have an answer for. “It’s hard to play against him,” says USF corner Khalid McGee. “When he’s running, it’s not easy. He’s a playmaker.”
This season, both the Bulls and their star quarterback have been a bit inconsistent. Flowers has had muted performances overshadowed by team wins, such as the mere 155 total yards he mustered in a 43–7 win over Temple. He has also had dominant performances, compiling five touchdowns against Illinois and 138 rushing yards against Tulane. Other than a bad 24–20 loss to Houston, in which Flowers threw for 325 yards but only rushed for seven, the Bulls have mostly played to the hype that followed them in the preseason, when many expected them to finish as the Group of Five’s highest-ranked team. They’re in position to raise their national profile with a strong finish, starting with the nationally televised regular season finale against unbeaten UCF the day after Thanksgiving.
When asked about his professional ambitions after this final season ends, Flowers naturally mentions the NFL, where he will no doubt face the same questions about his potential he defied as a high school prospect. But then he quickly brings something else up: He wants to be a firefighter.
“Because a lot of things happen where people need help,” he says. “A lot of people put their hands around me to help me. I just want to be there to help.”
It’s a good fit, too. When things go wrong, Flowers knows what to do: Look straight into the fire and keep going.This contains a mild spoiler for Big Hero 6, an animated movie that was released wide this past Friday. Sorry about that. Also, there are some mild spoilers for The Lion King, The Iron Giant, Finding Nemo, Up, and a handful of other similar movies. I’m less sorry about those. They came out years and years ago. You should’ve seen them by now. Don’t be a dolt. Don’t be the person at the party who’s like, “Hi. Um, excuse me, everyone. Can you all please stop talking about The Usual Suspects? I haven’t seen it yet.”
♦♦♦
The protagonist in Big Hero 6 is a 14-year-old boy named Hiro Hamada. He is a charming, likable genius, and eventually creates his own team of superheroes. That’s cool. That’s a fun thing for a movie to be. What’s not cool, what’s not fun, is why he makes his superhero team.
He does so because his older brother, Tadashi, is killed in a suspicious building fire while attempting to rescue a professor the boys care about. That’d be an almost unbearable tragedy in and of itself, but it’s compounded in Big Hero 6 by about a billion percent because Hiro’s parents are also dead. There was a point in Hiro’s life when he had a mother, father, and older brother, but about 10 minutes into the movie they are all dead and Hiro is alone and, oh, great, now I’m crying all over again.
My wife and I took our sons — twin 7-year-olds and a 2-year-old — to see Big Hero 6. When Tadashi died, which was not that long after it had been revealed that the brothers’ parents were already gone, my wife leaned over to me and asked, “Why are they doing this poor boy like this?” I was thinking the same thing. That’s not what I said back, though. What I said back was, “You wanna make out?” That’s a little thing called bad timing.
Hiro is the latest in a string of sad characters from animated movies. So that’s what’s this is. This is the Animated Movie Sadness Index. It’s very simple, though perhaps easy to get confused by. This is not a ranking of sad moments from animated movies. For example: Charlotte dying in Charlotte’s Web was a sad moment. But Charlotte wasn’t a sad character, nor was Wilbur, so they aren’t here. Because this Sadness Index charts characters with sad backstories — tragic figures with dark histories, who endure the most awful of circumstances.
It rates from 1 percent — which is a little bit sad, like when you drop your phone and the screen cracks — to 100 percent — which is a devastating and brutal sadness, the kind of debilitating sadness that, even just watched and experienced indirectly, makes putting your head in an oven sound like not that bad of an idea.
Disney
Ralph, Wreck-It Ralph
Sadness Rating: 6 percent
He wants people to love him. He’s tired of being the villain. He’s not a villain; he’s just doing his job, he says. But people don’t love him. Instead, they pick him up and throw him off the side of a building every night. :‘(
Tod, The Fox and the Hound
Sadness Rating: 8 percent
Tod is an orphaned fox. He makes best friends with Copper, a puppy who lives in the house next door, and it’s all very sweet. Then they grow older and Copper big-faces Tod, telling Tod they can’t be friends anymore because Tod is a fox and not a dog, and Copper can be friends only with dogs, so get your fox bitch-ass outta here, basically. Copper grows to hate Tod after Copper’s main dog companion is hit by a train while trying to chase and kill Tod. Poor Tod. Fox oppression is very real.
Coraline, Coraline
Sadness Rating: 9 percent
Coraline’s parents are too busy to pay any attention to her. She finds a door that leads to another universe with parents who truly love her. She decides she maybe wants to live there instead, because every child wants and deserves to feel loved. Only — surprise — her alt-parents in the new world aren’t real. The Other Mother is a witch that’s really a spider monster, with sewing needles for hands, and is interested in stealing Coraline’s soul and ALSO HER GODDAMN EYEBALLS. The poor girl just wanted someone to ask her how her day was.
Doc Hudson, Cars
Sadness Rating: 11 percent
He was the most dominant car in racing history (three Piston Cup championships, and the most wins by any racer in a single season in history). Then he was involved in a crash on the final lap of the 1954 Piston Cup championship that nearly killed him. After rehabilitating himself, he returned to the track only to be told to piss off, that he was too old, that he’d been replaced by a new class of cars. He quit the sport, then moved to a small town to become a doctor who’s paid so little that he also has to work a side job as a judge. Long fall from glory.
Beast, Beauty and the Beast
Sadness Rating: 15 percent
Persecution is always so sad.
Disney
Elsa, Frozen
Sadness Rating: 17 percent
She has so much mystical power that she feels like she needs to quarantine herself for all of forever so she doesn’t hurt anyone. (She nearly killed her own sister.) She’s a monster, basically, and she hates herself for it.
Lotso, Toy Story 3
Sadness Rating: 19 percent
He was supposed to be every kid’s favorite toy. Then he got left at a rest stop. He trekked about a thousand miles, all the way back home to return to his kid, only to discover he’d been replaced. His whole world was destroyed. He eventually became the toy slaver in a day care. He was all evil, but only because after you suffer the sort of heartache he did, there’s really no direction to grow but down toward hell.
Warner Bros.
Iron Giant, The Iron Giant
Sadness Rating: 23 percent
A truly tragic character. He’s a Russian warbot who crashes into small-town America. He doesn’t remember who he is or even what he is. He befriends a 9-year-old boy, but is eventually cast out by ignorant people. He’s attacked by the Army after he saves the lives of two children. He tries to fly away, but is shot down by a missile. After he crashes, he thinks his young friend is dead. He blames the Army, so he starts destroying them. The U.S. Navy fires a nuclear missile at the Iron Giant, which will kill everyone in the city if it hits him there. He sacrifices himself, flying out to sea and detonating the bomb over the ocean, where nobody else can get hurt.
Fa Mulan, Mulan
Sadness Rating: 25 percent
Mulan is a 16-year-old girl living in oppressive China. She is told by her town’s matchmaker that, despite her beauty, nobody will ever love her. Mulan joins the military, though she has to pretend to be a man to do so, because if a woman tries to join the army, she is murdered as a punishment. She saves a bunch of people and defeats a bunch of others, but she’s discovered as a woman and so, basically, GTFOH, they tell her. Sad, sad.
Rapunzel, Tangled
Sadness Rating: 28 percent
She’s a princess, but she’s been kidnapped and stowed away in a tower for 18 years by an emotionally abusive woman who wants her only so that Rapunzel will sing to her, which keeps the older woman looking young. This lady literally ruined Rapunzel’s whole early life because she didn’t want to get wrinkles.
Genie, Aladdin
Sadness Rating: 33 percent
Eternal servitude. He just wanted to be free. :(
Disney
Cinderella, Cinderella
Sadness Rating: 36 percent
Her mom dies. Her dad, hoping to have his only daughter raised into a woman by another woman, marries again. His new wife turns out to be a wretch. Cinderella’s dad dies, and then Cinderella’s whole princess-ly existence devolves into indentured servitude. Her only friends are animals. She hears about a ball the prince is throwing, asks if she can go, is told yes, makes a dress out of trash, and then her ugly stepsisters destroy that dress out of pettiness. I just right now at this moment as I’m typing this realized that Cinderella’s stepsisters were the original haterz. Wow.
Snow White, Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs
Sadness Rating: 39 percent
Very sad. Her mom died after Snow White’s birth. Her dad married a woman who eventually became the evil Queen. Her dad died. The Queen tried to have Snow White assassinated. (She for real told a man to take Snow White into the woods and kill her and bring back her heart in a box as proof that he’d done so.) The Queen did this because a mirror told her that Snow White was prettier than she was. When the Queen found out the man she’d told to kill Snow White had not done so, she went into the woods herself, found Snow White (who’d been forced to move in with seven dwarfs), and poisoned her. And I’m just now realizing right at this moment as I’m typing this that Cinderella’s stepsisters weren’t the original haterz, the evil Queen was. Wow. The Dracula of haterz.
Ariel, The Little Mermaid
Sadness Rating: 41 percent
Her father, the king of Atlantica, has his soul stolen by a sea witch (right in front of Ariel). The sea witch tries to kill Ariel and Ariel’s fiancé, Eric. Eric kills the sea witch by ramming the splintered bow of a ship into her chest. Recap: Ariel’s mom was captured and killed by pirates (which we see happen in The Little Mermaid: Ariel’s Beginning), her dad was violated by a sea witch, and she’s about to be married to a violent murderer. Not that great of a life ahead for her.
Pixar
WALL-E, WALL-E
Sadness Rating: 44 percent
A loved-starved sentient robot trash compactor meets and instantly falls in love with a fancy female robot. He woos her, eventually sharing with her his most prized possession: the only living plant on the entire planet Earth. As soon as he gives it to her, she locks it away in her chest (where her heart should be, BTW) and literally shuts all the way down. She wasn’t there to love WALL-E. She was there to steal his plant. True heartbreak.
Lilo, Lilo & Stitch
Sadness Rating: 47 percent
Lilo is an adorable 7-year-old Hawaiian girl. She lives with her older sister, because guess what? Her parents are dead. Both of them. They died in a car crash. And so a portion of the movie’s plot is about how a social worker (voiced by Ving Rhames) has determined that Lilo’s sister isn’t capable of caring for the younger girl, which, really, she isn’t, as she almost lets Lilo drown, and, oh, also, LILO BECOMES BEST FRIENDS WITH A REFUGEE ALIEN BEING CHASED BY INTERGALACTIC BOUNTY HUNTERS. Very sad.
Mowgli, The Jungle Book
Sadness Rating: 50 percent
Mowgli is orphaned, placed in a basket, and left in the jungle. He’s raised by wolves and makes friends with a bunch of animals, but then is eventually abandoned by them as well. I don’t understand why nobody wants to love Mowgli. He seems like a good kid.
Quick note: How is “the jungle” the best answer you think of when you’re wondering where to abandon your baby? That’s gotta be, like, second-to-last place on the list, beating out “Satan’s butt hole” by just a smidge.
James, James and the Giant Peach
Sadness Rating: 53 percent
Both of James’s parents are killed by a rhinoceros. He moves in with his gnarly and loveless aunts. They make fun of him for his parents having been killed by a rhinoceros. He’s so all the way lost that he rides a giant peach to New York. His aunts follow him there. They try to kill him when he reveals their abusive nature. Then he plans to spend the rest of his life living inside the peach pit in a park. I can’t imagine he made it further than, say, 11 or 12 years old before either the city condemned his fruit home or homeless men broke in and robbed and strangled him.
Disney
Bambi, Bambi
Sadness Rating: 61 percent
His mom gets shot. This was the second real devastation I experienced as a kid, losing out only to the time my dad told me he was taking me to El Paso to visit my cousins for a little bit and then left me there for four weeks. I was 100 percent sure I’d been abandoned.
Quasimodo, The Hunchback of Notre Dame
Sadness Rating: 63 percent
His mother is a Gypsy in Paris in 1482, which was maybe the worst time in history to be a Gypsy. She’s captured and murdered by police. Quasimodo, deformed, is a baby at the time. The man who murdered his mom describes Quasimodo to his superior as “an unholy demon” and says he plans to “send it back to hell where it belongs.” He literally says that about Baby Quasimodo. Quasimodo is eventually spared, though he is castled away in a cathedral alone for 20 years because he’s too deformed and ugly for anyone to ever love or care about him. When he finally decides to come out, the townspeople ridicule him, throw things at him, make fun of him, hate him.
Disney
Simba, The Lion King
Sadness Rating: 67 percent
Oh no. Simba’s father, king of the Pride Lands, is killed by Simba’s uncle while Simba watches. Then Simba’s uncle blames Simba for the death and encourages him to run away (after Simba tries to wake up his dead father). When Simba agrees to run away, his uncle sends hyenas after him to kill him, too. Then his uncle (I’m assuming) beds Simba’s mom and takes over as king, eventually unraveling all of the goodness that Simba’s father had brought forward.
Hiro, Big Hero 6
Sadness Rating: 71 percent
Mom: dead. Dad: dead. Big brother: dead. Hopes for a happy, normal life: dead.
Littlefoot, The Land Before Time
Sadness Rating: 75 percent
HE WATCHED HIS MOTHER GET EATEN BY A T. REX.
Geppetto, Pinocchio
Sadness Rating: 81 percent
A childless woodworker is so desperate for human companionship that he builds a marionette and then wishes for it to become a real child. Against all odds, life is blessed into the doll, only the little guy isn’t fully a real boy, he’s a puppet still, and he’s stricken with an ultra-rare disease that causes his nose to grow each time he lies. The marionette is eventually kidnapped into a puppet show. He escapes from there, only to be tricked into going to an island where young boys are turned into donkeys (which I think is a metaphor for molestation, though I’m not quite sure). While there, the marionette develops a drinking and smoking problem. Geppetto, heartbroken at the thought of having lost his wooden son, sets out to find him. He gets eaten by a whale.
Marlin, Finding Nemo
Sadness Rating: 87 percent
Marlin is married and about to be the father of 400 children. Then a barracuda shows up, kills and eats Marlin’s wife, and eats all but one of the babies. The one baby that survives is born disabled. After rearing him in a life of safety and shelter, Marlin lets his disabled child attend school. His child is immediately kidnapped by a human. Marlin is kind of the worst dad.
Pixar
Carl, Up
Sadness Rating: 100 percent
Jesus. No hyperbole, the marriage-to-death montage we see Carl and his wife go through at the beginning of this movie is the most devastating 4:18 of any movie of all time. I can’t even post the video. I can’t even think about it. It’s too real. It’s way too real. It’s way, way, way too real. There aren’t any aliens or dragons or fake characters to rub away the hurt here. Carl is the saddest. Oh, great, now I’m crying again.AHMEDABAD: Chetan Patel, 19, a resident of Naroda was brought to Civil Hospital in critical condition, with his stomach unnaturally bloated. He had fallen victim to a vicious 'prank' by 'friends' at his workplace - an auto parts manufacturing unit in Naroda.The episode took place on Tuesday evening when Chetan was at his workplace. Some of his friends were joking around with him. His 'friends' then ganged up on him and shoved the nozzle of an air compressor up his rectum and pumped air into Chetan's body.The unbearable pain caused the youth to fall unconscious. Frightened by the turn of events, the youths came to their senses and rushed Chetan to a private hospital. They lied to the doctors there, saying Chetan had been injured when he fell from his workstation at the factory. However, on gauging his symptoms the doctors intimated city police and the youth was transferred to Civil Hospital.A doctor said: "Chetan has severe internal injuries as several of his organs have been damaged. Intense pressure was exerted on his intestines and other organs by the air pumped into his body." Police said: "We were unable to speak to the victim since he is critical. We will have to wait for his condition to be stable." A complaint |
ignitas while losing only three of their own, with redbuff and dragon burning damage ticking the last piece of health away from Ezreal after he thought he had escaped over the back of the Dragon pit. Though they are low, Volibear and Rumble could safely take Dragon thanks to nobody being alive to contest.Though Dignitas picked up a kill thanks to Imaqtpie baiting Reginald in bot lane, this is part of TSM’s cross-map pressure, and TSM takestop turrets while the so many Dignitas are busy in elsewhere on the map, extending their lead to 5k gold, with 5 turrets and 2 dragons, leaving Dignitas still scrambling for a way to come back into the game. They finally found a teamfight they wanted when Crumbz ghosted and chased hard into TSM’s jungle. He gets a wither onto Diana, who gives up trying to retreat and jumps onto Patoy with his whole team behind him. However, Varusand the immense slow of Thresh’s Box prevents Volibear from doing literally anything in the fight. Volibear and Rumble fall with no losses for Dignitas. Dignitas briefly tries to take mid turret before being turned back by heavy waveclear and poke from Varus and Diana, so they pick up Dragon instead, narrowing the gold gap to only 3k behind. TSM struck back when Dignitas was split up during a battle over vision control of the Baron area, and with Scarra and Imaqtpie split off in one direction, they chase Kiwi, Patoy, and Crumbz down the river. After going back to heal up, they return and start Baron with full vision control from pink wards and Xpecial’s oracle. Dignitas combats this vision by droppingwards into the Baron pit, and Crumbz and ghosts in alongside Kiwi, successfully getting a ballsy smite steal. At this point, everyone on Dignitas had managed to pass their counterpart in farm except for Imaqtpie - who isCS behind WildTurtle. The gold difference was almost entirely in turret gold at this point, and Dignitas had plenty of turrets left to kill. During the baron buff, they used Scarra’s poke and knockback to safely take two turrets, putting the gold 50k to 49k - only 1k in favor of TSM.As baron respawned, the teams resumed their standoff in the middle of the map. Reginald engaged, but WildTurtle was several screens away due to taking a strange route through the jungle. As the followup Equalizer came down, Reginald got hooked, and Scarra counter-initiated with an extremely well-placed Explosive Cask while simultaneously dodging Crescendo with Body Slam. Reginald blocked the cask with Zhonyas, but it knocked 3 other members of TSM back, and they would be too far away to help Reginald when the Hourglass ran out of sand. WildTurtle finally shows up to the fight, but it’s a 4v5 and he eats Wither before Patoy delivers him a Death Sentence, and Dignitas takes the Ace, losing only Crumbz. Dignitas blew through the remaining bottom lane structures, and Ezreal even stayed to take 1 nexus turret while his team backed off early. The next fight looked like the previous : Reginald saw an opportunity to dive onto Ezreal and popped Zhonya. When the Explosive Cask comes out, this time it knocks Reginald and other TSM members back while singling out Dyrus for death. With the fight quickly turning 4v5, Diana’s health extremely low, and Varus Withered with no cleanse, Dignitas easily cleans up the fight and aces TSM, again losing only Crumbz.While it’s easy to blame Reginald for this loss, one has to wonder when four members of TSM are consistently ready to teamfight but the new guy is too far back to participate. WildTurtle seems fine picking fights of his own, but twice he made critical errors in his team play which lost his team a fight: once by missing his Chains of Corruption into the middle of a raging teamfight, and a second time by wandering around in his jungle when the rest of his team were pouncing on Dignitas in Mid Lane. At the same time, Scarra’s Gragas was crucial to ruin the only source of hard initiation that TSM had for teamfights: Reginald’s Diana. Without this hard initiate, TSM would be forced to eat Gragas/Ezreal poke. The one time TSM got the initiate they wanted, they forced Dignitas to sit on The Equalizer, but that was when Explosive Cask was on cooldown. With that crucial ultimate off cooldown, TSM could not get a good initiation, and Dignitas was able to take fights even at a large deficit, which allowed them to turn the game around and seal a victory to defend their second place spot from TSM’s onslaught.
Keys to Victory Predictions for Week 8
[Day 1] April 4, 2013
coL vs CLG
GGU vs Crs
Vul vs TSM
MRN vs coL
[Day 2] April 5, 2013
TSM vs Crs
Vul vs coL
MRN vs GGU
Crs vs Vul
Time is running out before standings are locked in for the midseason playoffs. Only the top six teams will make it to the playoffs, with the top two having the privilege of skipping the first round. The middle four teams will compete in the first round, with the losers dropping to the promotion tournament where they will need to re-qualify for the LCS against the bottom two teams - and against new blood - a dangerous place to be for any team. Furthermore, after this week the gaps between the top four teams and bottom four teams have widened greatly, and while it’s technically possible for Vulcun or Marn to go on an incredible hot streak to snatch 4th place if CLG doesn’t perform well, it’s incredibly unlikely. These teams should instead look to defend their spots in the midseason playoffs from compLexity and GGU, who are now nipping at their heels. TSM is still right behind Dignitas, and definitely has their sights set on that first round bye.Several teams have recently undergone roster changes as well. At the time of this writing, we know of Chuuper being replaced by Pr0lly and Muffinqt dropped for Bloodwater. It’s not yet known who GGU will find to replace Bloodwater, but two benched LCS supports are available now: Muffinqt and AtomicN. It remains to be seen whether these roster changes will show us revitalized morale or shaky team coordination.Week 8 kicks off with a Week 7 rematch. Although CLG won the last game, the end result was probably a little too close for their comfort. NickWu on Zed gave CLG trouble all game long being able to dive in on Doublelift and blow him up early in fights. This time around don't expect CLG to let Zed fall in coL's hand as he will probably just be banned out. Another wrinkle this time around is the news that Mid player Chuuper is getting benched and replaced by PR0LLY. If CLG can get out to an early lead they should be able to hold of coL who is inexperienced in playing from behind. For coL their success will revolve on their ability to dive CLG's back line. Champions with dives or dashes give coL a better chance to blow up CLG's carries while bypassing their tank line. They already favor champions such as Kha'zix or Diana so that fits right along with this strategy.Coming into this match Curse remains the only team in the top four to not drop a game to one of the bottom four teams. Out of those four teams Good Game University came the closest to beating Curse during their Week 1 meeting in which they managed to take down both of their Nexus Turrets. Week 7 was the time GGU went positive so they are coming into this match with more momentum that usual. A big factor in their recent success has been some exceptional play from ZionSpartan, particularly on Jayce. To win against Curse ZionSpartan will have to keep playing at this level. For Curse they need to play the same way they did against Vulcun in Week 7. They didn't try anything fancy and simply outclassed Vulcun and were able to pick up an early lead and snowball that into a victory.Week 7 was the worst case scenario for Vulcun. They had the potential to gain more ground on CLG in the standings, but instead they went a disappointing 0-3. Against TSM shutting down Reginald is a good strategy to earn the win. Regi favors very aggressive champs and Vulcun can use this to their advantage. Mancloud is more than capable of punishing Regi for this, especially if he can get one of his favorite champs such as Lux or Nidalee. On the other hand, TSM has been playing very well recently winning five of their last six game. WildTurtle's offensive oriented play style has seemed to reinvigorate the team and they are going to ride this wave as long as possible. If Vulcun runs a poke comp as they are known to do, TSM's current aggressive play style is a good way to counter this.In our second rematch from the prior week MRN is looking for redemption after dropping their match against compLexity. This time around though coL is sporting their different roster. After the unfortunate popularization of the term “Chuuper's Bloopers” the team decided Mid player Chuuper needed some time on the bench and brought in PR0llY to take over the starting spot. PR0llY had been playing Mid for Velocity eSports and was formerly Lautemortis' teammate on Team Legion. coL are banking on a lot of improvement in the Mid lane and are hoping “Chuuper's Bloopers” and don't just become “PR0LLY's Follies.” Any time a new player joins a team it's easy for him to become the weak link of the team while their synergy develops. MRN can use this to their advantage and abuse PR0LLY hopefully snowballing Ecco and putting him in a good position to carry the game.With little time left in the LCS, TSM will need to truly challenge Curse if there's to be any hope of dislodging them from the top spot. Luckily, TSM's current strength is in their duo lane, where WildTurtle is running roughshod over nearly every other Ranged AD in NA. As good as Cop and Elementz are, TSM's new star could give them a run for their money he is allowed to dominate as much he has in recent matches. TSM has also demonstrated patient and pragmatic play in their last several matches, which will be a boon to them as the Spring Season ends and the relegation matches begin. For example, in the early LCS weeks TSM would have gone HAM on GGU, but this week they played a slow and deliberate game, earning them a strong victory. In contrast, Curse will want to plan their strategies in a way that either shuts down WildTurtle or allows Cop to scale into the late game regardless of TSM's actions. Picking a hypercarry like Kog'maw or Vayne would be one way to do this, but Curse could also use the same lane camping strategy that they employed against GGU. As usual, Nyjacky might be able to draw out Reginald's aggression to open TSM's AP player to counterattacks from Saintvicious or even a mobile Voyboy. In a straight 1v1 scenario, Voyboy should come out ahead of Dyrus, so that's likely the lane where Curse should be the most careful of retaliation. With TSM's current rise in power, their match against NA's top team should be incredible.The opposite ends of the lower LCS tier will collide in the second Day 2 match of Week 8 when the 7-13 Vulcun takes on the 4-14 compLexity. One of coL's few wins in the LCS was against Vulcun, so coL will be looking to even out the matchup score in their final Spring Season battle. Of course, coL will also be on the back foot due to their late season roster change, who will undoubtedly still be getting used to his place in the team. CompLexity will certainly want to keep tabs on their new mid laner throughout the match and keep his inexperience with the team from being overly exploited. It may even be necessary to keep him away from the 1v1 matchups and let him farm cautiously and slowly while the coL duo lane pushes for their own advantages. While it's unlikely that Vulcun will allow Nickwu to pick up Zed, hopefully coL's top laner can grab something similarly snowbally to carry his team as he as (nearly) been doing in recent LCS matches. Vulcun, on the other hand, will want nothing more than to put their ace mid laner in direct competition with coL's new blood. If anyone can dismantle another mid laner, it's mandatorycloud, so it'd be shocking if Vulcun didn't try to put him in direct opposition to pr0lly. Vulcun also may want to stick to traditional picks against coL, since their Kennen/Quinn composition didn't seem to be very effective.The sixth and seventh place teams in the NA LCS are extremely close in overall score as of Week 7, so this Week 8 match will be incredibly important for both teams. MRN will continue to ride on the strength of their star carries, Nientonsoh and MegaZero, and any strategy that gets them fed will be essential for the team. The team will not need to worry about Heartbeattt as much now that he's more comfortable in the support role, but it's still necessary to get him a Champion on which he appears comfortable, like Janna or Lulu. MRN should also attempt to counter GGU's poke composition in some way. While it's doubtful they can ban out enough Champions to truly castrate a full poke comp, removing key GGU Champions such as Trundle or Kha'zix will be extremely important. GGU should be wary of this on their side and plan for some unorthodox picks into their poke compositions if possible. Regardless, GGU will have their best chance of winning with a fed ZionSpartan, so they should avoid laning him against MegaZero, who always dominates other top laners in 1v1s. It'll be a tough fight for GGU (particularly considering they've already lost to MRN twice), but not impossible by far.Vulcun goes from fighting against the bottom of the standings to the top of the standings for the final Week 8 match. Though these teams have only played against each other once before, odds are heavily in Curse's favor for this match, seeing as they've not yet lost to a bottom four team. As usual for a match like this, Curse will want to be the most careful in their early game. Though their late game tends to be invulnerable, if they start to snowball in the wrong direction in the early game they might give away a victory to their opponents. Luckily for Curse, their top and mid laners are two of the strongest in the region and should be more than enough to take on their talented opposites on Vulcun. That being said, Curse should definitely still ban mancloud's Nidalee, since there are no guarantees whatsoever if he gets to use his Bestial Huntress. Though it's in Curse's best interest to play straightforward and standard, Vulcun may want to try something crazy, from odd lane swaps to strange attack timings. CLG proved that Curse could still be fooled by early and unexpected Barons, so Vulcun may want to attempt a cheese of that nature. Unfortunately, Vulcun's last unorthodox composition didn't perform well against Curse, but perhaps they can find one that will. At the very least, Vulcun should take note of what occurred this week and be certain to protect Zuna and muffinqt from the ganks that destroyed them in the Week 7 match. Vulcun will need lots of luck to come out ahead in this match, but Vulcun has pulled off upsets in the past. Perhaps they can take down Curse as well.The Type 45 destroyer, also known as the D or Daring class, is a class of six guided missile destroyers built for the United Kingdom's Royal Navy. The class is primarily designed for anti-aircraft and anti-missile warfare and is built around the PAAMS (Sea Viper) air-defence system utilizing the SAMPSON AESA and the S1850M long-range radars. The first three destroyers were assembled by BAE Systems Surface Fleet Solutions from partially prefabricated "blocks" built at different shipyards, the remaining three were built by BAE Systems Maritime – Naval Ships. The first ship in the Daring class, HMS Daring, was launched on 1 February 2006 and commissioned on 23 July 2009.[16]
The Type 45 destroyers were built to replace the Type 42 (Sheffield class) destroyers that had served during the Falklands War, with the last Type 42 being decommissioned in 2013. The National Audit Office reported that, during an "intensive attack", a single Type 45 could simultaneously track, engage and destroy more targets than five Type 42 destroyers operating together.[17] After the launch of Daring on 1 February 2006 Admiral Sir Alan West, a former First Sea Lord, stated that it would be the Royal Navy's most capable destroyer ever, as well as the world's best air-defence ship.[18] The reduction in the number to be procured from twelve, then to (up to) eight, finally with only six confirmed (in 2008) was controversial.[19][20]
Another controversy arose when it was revealed that due to a design flaw on the Northrop Grumman intercooler which, when attached to the Rolls-Royce WR-21 gas turbines and functioning in the warm climate of the Persian Gulf power availability was diminished considerably,[21][22] and it quickly became apparent that the class was not operating as originally envisioned.[23] A refit will take place from 2019-21 to fully resolve the problems with the six ships in the class.[24]
Development [ edit ]
The UK had sought to procure a new class of air-defence guided missile destroyers in collaboration with seven other NATO nations under the NFR-90 project; the project collapsed due to varying requirements of the different countries involved. The UK then joined France and Italy in the Horizon-class frigate programme; however, differing national requirements, workshare arguments and delays led to the UK withdrawing on 26 April 1999 and starting its own national project.[25] On 23 November 1999 Marconi Electronic Systems (MES) was confirmed as prime contractor for the Type 45 project.[26] Seven days later MES and British Aerospace merged to form BAE Systems (BAE), making the latter the prime contractor.
The Type 45 project has been criticised for rising costs and delays, with the six ships costing £6.46 billion, an increase of £1.5 billion (29%) on the original budget.[27] The first ship entered service in 2010,[28] rather than 2007 as initially planned. In 2007, the Defence Select Committee expressed its disappointment that the Ministry of Defence (MOD) and BAE had failed to control rising costs.[29][30]
Construction [ edit ]
The Type 45 destroyers take advantage of some Horizon development work and use the Sea Viper air-defence system and the SAMPSON radar. The ships are built by BAE Systems Maritime – Naval Ships, originally created as BVT Surface Fleet by the merger of the surface shipbuilding arms of BAE Systems and VT Group. These two companies previously built the ships in collaboration. BAE's two Glasgow shipyards and single Portsmouth shipyard are responsible for different "blocks". BAE's Govan yard is responsible for Block A (stern to edge of helicopter hangar). The Scotstoun yard builds Blocks B/C (a 2600 tonne section which contains the Rolls-Royce WR-21 gas turbines, starts with the helicopter hangar to the bridge section) and Block D (bridge section itself). BAE's Portsmouth shipyard is responsible for Blocks E/F (bridge to the bow) and the funnels and masts. For ships 2 to 6 blocks A-D were assembled in the Ships Block and Outfit Hall of the Govan shipyard, and taken fully outfitted to the Scotstoun berth. The masts and funnels were also fitted before launch.
Dauntless at Construction of blocks ofat Portsmouth
For the first-of-class, Block A was assembled at Govan and moved to Scotstoun, where it was mated to Block B/C, which was already fitted with the WR-21 turbines and machinery. Block D, also assembled at Scotstoun, was fitted to these three blocks. The bow sections (E/F) were mated at Portsmouth and taken by barge to Scotstoun. These were the final blocks to be attached. At this point the hull was launched into the Clyde and towed to the Scotstoun Dry Dock where the masts and funnels were fitted (the masts are partially outfitted with equipment, for example the mast for the S1850M radar is sent from Portsmouth to Thales Nederland to be fitted with radar equipment). Once this is complete, the remaining equipment is fitted: radar arrays, bow-mounted sonar, propellers, missile equipment and 4.5-inch gun.
This modular construction arrangement was agreed in February 2002. However, when the original contract for three ships was signed in July 2000, BAE Systems Marine was to build the first and third ships, and Vosper Thornycroft (now VT) was to build the second.
By the end of 2010, all six Type 45 destroyers had been launched, with the first two in commission and the remainder fitting out. By 2012, all destroyers were structurally complete and the production lines had been closed. Duncan, the last of the Type 45 destroyers, was commissioned at Portsmouth Naval Base on 26 September 2013, and entered service in 2014 after trials and training.[31]
The Daring class are the largest escorts ever built for the Royal Navy in terms of displacement.[N 3]
In 2009 delivery of the ships' Aster missiles was delayed due to a failure during testing.[32] A subsequent investigation revealed a manufacturing fault with a single batch of missiles, making delivery of the Aster 30 possible in 2010.[33]
Characteristics [ edit ]
General specifications [ edit ]
The Type 45 destroyers are 152.4 m (500 ft) in length, with a beam of 21.2 m (70 ft), a draught of 7.4 m. (24.3 ft) and a displacement of approximately 8,500 tonnes.[3][4] This makes them significantly larger than the Type 42 they replace (displacement 5,200 tonnes). The Type 45 destroyers are the first British warships built to meet the Lloyd's Register's Naval Ship Rules for hull structure requiring design approval by Lloyd's Register for the principal structural arrangements of the vessel.[34] BAE Systems is the Design Authority for the Type 45, a role traditionally held by the UK Ministry of Defence.[35] The design of the Type 45 brings new levels of radar signature reduction to the Royal Navy. Deck equipment and life rafts are concealed behind the ship's superstructure panels, producing a very "clean" superstructure, somewhat similar to that of the French La Fayette-class frigates. The mast is also sparingly equipped externally. Speculation by the press suggests that this design gives the ship the radar cross-section of a small fishing boat.[36]
The Daring class is notable for being the first Royal Navy vessels to include gender-neutral living spaces to accommodate male and female crew members; communal shower and heads facilities have given way to individual cubicles, and six-person berths for junior ratings are far more flexible in accommodating a mixture of male and female sailors.[37] Men and women will continue to sleep in separate spaces, in common with most other navies.
Propulsion and power [ edit ]
The Type 45 is fitted with an advanced and innovative integrated electric propulsion system. Historically, electric-drive ships (like USS Langley) have supplied power to their electric motors using DC, and ship's electrical load, where necessary at all, was either separately supplied or was supplied as DC with a large range of acceptable voltage. Integrated electric propulsion seeks to supply all propulsion and ship's electrical load using alternating current at a high quality of voltage and frequency.[N 4] This is achieved by computerised control, high quality transformation, and electrical filtering. Two Rolls-Royce WR-21 gas turbine alternators and two Wärtsilä 12V200 diesel generators provide electrical power at 4,160 volts to a high voltage system. The high voltage supply is then used to provide power to two GE Power Conversion advanced induction motors with outputs of 20 MW (27,000 hp) each. Ship's services, including hotel load and weapons system power supplies, are supplied via transformers from the high voltage supply at 440 V and 115 V.[38] The benefits of integrated electric propulsion are cited as:
The ability to place the electric motors closer to the propeller, thus shortening the shaftline, obviating the need for a gearbox or controllable pitch propellers, and reducing exposure to action damage. [38]
The opportunity to place prime movers (diesel generators and gas turbine alternators) at convenient locations away from the shaftline, thus reducing the space lost to funnels, while at the same time improving access for maintenance and engine changes. [39]
The freedom to run all propulsion and ship services from a single prime mover for much of the ship's life, thus dramatically reducing engine running hours and emissions.[38]
The key to the efficient use of a single prime mover is the choice of a gas turbine that provides efficiency over a large load range; the WR-21 gas turbine incorporates compressor intercooling and exhaust heat recovery, making it significantly more efficient than previous marine gas turbines, especially at low and medium load. The combination of greater efficiency and high fuel capacity gives an endurance of 7,000 nautical miles (13,000 km) at 18 knots (33 km/h).[38] High power density and the hydrodynamic efficiency of a longer hull form allow high speeds to be sustained. It has been reported that Daring reached her design speed of 29 knots (54 km/h) in 70 seconds and achieved a speed of 31.5 knots (58 km/h) in 120 seconds during sea trials in August 2007.[40]
Engine trouble [ edit ]
In January 2016, the Ministry of Defence acknowledged that the Northrop Grumman intercooler in the propulsion system was unreliable.[41][42][43] A staggered refit was also announced, which will involve cutting into the ships's hulls and fitting additional diesel generation capacity.[44][45] On occasion there have been near-complete power generation failures, temporarily disabling propulsion, power generation for weapons, navigational systems and other purposes, leaving the ships vulnerable to "total electric failure".[46][47]
In June 2016, defence chiefs stated that the Northrop Grumman intercooler could not cope with the warm waters of the Gulf. The manufacturers, Rolls-Royce, said that while the engines for the WR-21 had been built as specified by the Ministry of Defence, the conditions in the Middle East were not "in line with the specs of the intercooler".[48][49] The First Sea Lord, Admiral Philip Jones, clarified that the "WR-21 gas turbines were designed in extreme hot weather conditions to what we call "gracefully degrade" in their performance, until you get to the point where it goes beyond the temperature at which they would operate... we found that the resilience of the diesel generators and the WR-21 in the ship at the moment was not degrading gracefully; it was degrading catastrophically, so that is what we have had to address".[23]
While the Ministry of Defence does not release detailed information related to the number of problems experienced by the class, including total engine failure, several such occasions have been reported in the media. Daring broke down in November 2010 and April 2012, Dauntless in February 2014 and Duncan in November 2016.[50][51][52][53][54]
On 23 November 2017, The Register, a British technology news and opinion website, quoting The Times, reported that a Type 45 destroyer had been recalled to Britain with propeller problems, leaving the Royal Navy's traditional "east of Suez" deployment without proper warship cover. It was stated that 'HMS Diamond is on her way back to the UK after a propeller problem proved too much for the ship's crew to repair on their own. The problem is not linked to the Type 45's notoriously unreliable WR-21 engines. Rumours have swirled that Diamond is a testbed for an interim fix before a proper solution is rolled out in 2019... the withdrawal of Diamond from her planned nine-month deployment leaves naval planners in a very difficult situation. While the RN does have a permanent presence in the Middle East, at the moment it is down to four minesweepers and their lightly armed support ship.'[55]
On 21 March 2018, it was announced that each ship would have their two diesel engines replaced by three new ones at Cammell Laird in Birkenhead.[56]
Advanced air-defence [ edit ]
The Type 45 destroyers are primarily designed for anti-air warfare with the capability to defend against targets such as fighter aircraft and drones as well as highly maneuverable sea skimming anti-ship missiles travelling at supersonic speeds.[57] The Royal Navy describes the destroyers' mission as being "to shield the Fleet from air attack".[3]
The Type 45 destroyer is equipped with the Sea Viper (PAAMS) air-defence system utilizing the SAMPSON active electronically scanned array multi-function radar and the S1850M long-range radar. PAAMS is able to track over 2,000 targets and simultaneously control and coordinate multiple missiles in the air at once, allowing a large number of tracks to be intercepted and destroyed at any given time. This makes it particularly difficult to swamp PAAMS during a saturation attack, even if the attacking elements are supersonic.[58] The US Naval War College has suggested that the SAMPSON radar is capable of tracking 1,000 objects the size of a cricket ball travelling at three times the speed of sound (Mach 3), emphasising the system's capabilities against high performance stealth targets.[57]
A core component of PAAMS is the Aster missile, comprising Aster 15 and Aster 30. MBDA describe Aster as a "hit-to-kill" anti-missile missile capable of intercepting all types of high performance air threats at a maximum range of 120 km.[59] The Aster missile is autonomously guided and equipped with an active RF seeker enabling it to cope with "saturated attacks" thanks to a "multiple engagement capability" and a "high rate of fire".[59] Presently the Daring-class destroyers are equipped with a 48-cell A50 Sylver Vertical Launching System allowing for a mix of up to 48 Aster 15 and 30 missiles.
In addition to its anti-air warfare role, PAAMS offers additional ballistic missile defence capabilities. In March 2013 the United States Naval Institute reported that the Royal Navy along with the United States Missile Defense Agency will explore the potential of the Daring class to provide ballistic missile defence in Europe along with United States Navy Aegis equipped destroyers.[60] In May 2014, it was reported by Jane's Information Group that the United Kingdom is committing more funds to explore the capabilities of the SAMPSON multi-function radar and the Type 45 destroyer in a ballistic missile defence role. This followed a successful live firing event hundreds of miles north of Kwajalein Atoll in the Western Pacific Ocean, where Daring demonstrated the ability to "detect at the earliest opportunity" and track "through to intercept" two medium-range ballistic missiles. BAE systems reportedly told Jane's that the SAMPSON multi-function radar "exceeded expectations in all respects". An "Experiment Concurrency and Cueing (TECC)" event for the Type 45 was planned for late 2015.[61]
Because of the marked increase in capabilities delivered by the Type 45 destroyers in relation to their predecessors, the exceptionally high price per ship, and the large amount of public attention they have attracted, defence analysts and correspondents commonly refer to the Daring class as being the "most advanced" or "most powerful" air-defence destroyers in the world.[62][63] Likewise, the ships' builders BAE Systems claim: "Able to detect and track hundreds of targets simultaneously, the Type 45 Destroyer is recognised as the most advanced anti-air warfare vessel in the world."[64] Nick Brown, the editor-in-chief of Jane’s International Defence Review, was quoted by The Huffington Post (a US online news aggregator and blog) saying, "It’s [Type 45 destroyer] certainly one of the most advanced air defence ships in the world... The US Aegis system is similar, but Sea Viper is more advanced."[65]
Weapons, countermeasures, capabilities and sensors [ edit ]
The SAMPSON AESA each of two faces of multi-function air tracking radar makes a full 360° rotation every 4 seconds.
Anti-air warfare [ edit ]
The Sea Viper air-defence system:
SAMPSON active electronically scanned array multi-function air tracking radar, capable of tracking hundreds of targets (range 400 km).
S1850M 3D long-range air surveillance radar, capable of tracking up to 1,000 targets (range 400 km).
A 48-cell A50 Sylver Vertical Launching System for a mix of up to 48:
Aster 15 missiles, range 1.7–30 km (1.1–18.6 mi).
Aster 30 Block 0 missiles, range 3–120 km (1.9–74.6 mi).
The Type 45 does not have a formal theatre ballistic missile defence (TBMD) capability but its potential for such a role is being assessed.[66] Land-based Aster 30 Block 1 missiles have intercepted short-range ballistic missiles[67] and trials of a land-based SAMPSON modified for BMD were planned for early 2012.[68] The Ministry of Defence announced in 2013 that the first ship, Daring, would take part in ballistic defence trials with the US Missile Defence Agency (MDA) as part of a major research and development programme.[69] In March 2016 Britain and France announced a joint procurement programme with the intention of France acquiring Brimstone missiles to equip the Tiger Mk3 helicopter and Britain acquiring Aster Block 1NT missiles capable of intercepting medium range ballistic missiles of 1,000–1,500 km (620–930 mi) range. A block 2 version of the Aster 30 NT is under development by France and Italy capable of intercepting 3,000 km (1,900 mi) range missiles.[70] MBDA are the prime contractor for both the weapons systems (Sea Viper) and the Samson radar with BAE systems as the secondary contractor reporting to MBDA.
Guns [ edit ]
Aviation [ edit ]
The flight deck of the Type 45 is large enough to accommodate aircraft up to the size of a Chinook helicopter.[75] It has hangar space for either one Merlin HM1 or two Lynx helicopters.[75] Both types have a dipping sonar, sonobuoys and radar; the Merlin carries four anti-submarine Sting Ray torpedoes whilst the smaller Lynx HMA8 carries either two Sting Ray or four Sea Skua anti-ship missiles. From 2015 the Lynx will be replaced in RN service by the AW159 Wildcat whose weapons will include the Lightweight Multirole Missile and FASGW(H) missile.[76]
Anti-ship, submarine and land-attack [ edit ]
It was revealed through a FOIA request in August 2013 that four of the six Type 45 destroyers would receive Harpoon launchers recycled from the last four decommissioned Type 22 frigates. [77] On 2 March 2015, Duncan set sail on her maiden deployment equipped with Harpoon anti-ship missiles. [78] On 23 March 2015, the crew of Diamond were reunited with their ship following a refit, which included the installation of Harpoon. [79] HMS Daring is currently undergoing maintenance to receive Harpoon missiles. [80]
On 2 March 2015, set sail on her maiden deployment equipped with Harpoon anti-ship missiles. On 23 March 2015, the crew of were reunited with their ship following a refit, which included the installation of Harpoon. HMS is currently undergoing maintenance to receive Harpoon missiles. The Type 45 has a bow-mounted medium-frequency Ultra/EDO MFS-7000 sonar but its main anti-submarine weapon is its helicopter(s). As of August 2013 there are no plans to fit anti-submarine torpedo tubes. [77]
The 4.5" Mark 8 Mod 1 naval gun has an anti-ship and naval gunfire support (NGS) role.
Countermeasures [ edit ]
Communications and other systems [ edit ]
Fully Integrated Communications System (FICS45): a combined external and internal communications system supplied by Thales and Selex ES Ltd. [82]
In 2012, the UAT Mod2.0 digital Radar Electronic Surveillance system was fitted to Daring and Diamond as part of a £40m contract with Thales UK that will see UAT Mod2.1 fitted to the other Type 45's. [12]
and as part of a £40m contract with Thales UK that will see UAT Mod2.1 fitted to the other Type 45's. METOC Meteorology and Oceanography: The Metoc system by BAE Systems comprises the Upper Air Sounding System using launchable radiosondes by Eurodefence Systems Ltd and Graw Radiosondes (Germany) joint venture, as well as a comprehensive weather satellite receiving system and a bathymetrics system. These sensors provide each vessel with full environmental awareness |
Minister for Equality and Church Affairs in the new Danish Government, announced that the Government was seeking to legalize same-sex marriage by spring 2012.[30] On 18 January 2012, the Government published two draft bills. One bill introduced a gender-neutral definition of marriage and allowed same-sex couples to marry either in civil registry offices or in the Church of Denmark. Existing registered partnerships would have the option of converting to a marriage, while no new registered partnerships will be able to be created. According to the other bill, individual priests would be allowed to refuse to conduct same-sex marriages. Other religious communities would also be allowed to conduct same-sex marriages but would not be compelled to do so. The bills were under consultation process until 22 February 2012.[31][32][33][34]
On 14 March 2012, the Government submitted both bills to Parliament.[35][36][37][38] The bills were approved on 7 June 2012 and received royal assent on 12 June 2012. The new laws took effect on 15 June 2012.[1][2][39][40] The new legislation was opposed by the Danish People's Party and the Christian Democrats, a religious conservative party, although the latter were not represented in the Danish Parliament at that time. Under the law, ministers can refuse to carry out a same-sex ceremony, but the local bishop must arrange a replacement for their church building.[41]
Greenland [ edit ]
Denmark's registered partnership law was extended to Greenland on 26 April 1996.[43] Denmark's marriage law, as supported by the Government of Greenland, was to be considered by Parliament in the spring of 2014, but was postponed beyond the year due to early parliamentary elections.[44] The legislation to grant same-sex couples marriage and adoption rights had its first reading on 25 March 2015.[45] It was approved unanimously on second reading, held on 26 May 2015.[3] Ratification of the legislation was required by the Danish Parliament, which granted approval of the law on 19 January 2016.[46] The law came into effect on 1 April 2016.[3][4][47]
Greenland's Registered Partnership Law was repealed on the same day that the same-sex marriage law came into effect.
Faroe Islands [ edit ]
Denmark's registered partnerships was never extended to the Faroe Islands and until 2017 it was the only Nordic region to not recognize same-sex unions. A set of bills to extend Danish gender-neutral marriage law to the Faroe Islands was submitted to the Løgting on 20 November 2013,[48][49][50] though were rejected at second reading on 13 March 2014.[51][52][53][54]
Laws regarding same-sex partnerships in Europe Marriage¹ Foreign marriages recognized¹ Other type of partnership¹ Limited legal recognition¹ Unrecognized Constitution limits marriage to opposite-sex couples
¹ May include recent laws or court decisions which have created legal recognition of same-sex relationships, but which have not entered into effect yet. ¹ May include recent laws or court decisions which have created legal recognition of same-sex relationships, but which have not entered into effect yet.
Following the Faroese general election in September 2015, two same-sex marriage bills (one permitting same-sex marriage and the other permitting same-sex divorce) were submitted to the Parliament. The bills received a first reading on 24 November 2015.[55][56] On 26 April 2016, following a significant amount of parliamentary maneuvering, the same-sex marriage bill passed its second reading by a vote of 19-14.[57][58] The bill passed its final reading on 29 April 2016.[59] The Danish Parliament voted unanimously to ratify the changes to its own marriage law on 25 April 2017. The Minister of Justice subsequently allowed the law to go into effect on 1 July 2017, after some minor adjustments regarding the state church had been made.[60][7][61]
Legislation exempting the Church of the Faroe Islands from performing same-sex marriages passed the Faroese Parliament on 30 May and went into effect on 1 July 2017, alongside the marriage law.[62][63][64] The first same-sex wedding in the Faroe Islands was performed on 6 September 2017.[65][66]
Public opinion [ edit ]
A YouGov poll, conducted between 27 December 2012 and 6 January 2013, found that 79% of Danes supported same-sex marriage and 16% were opposed. The rest of the 6% had no opinion on this issue. The same poll also showed that 59% supported same-sex couples' right to adopt, 31% were opposed and 11% had no opinion.[67]
A May 2013 Gallup survey from Faroe Islands found that 68% favoured civil marriage for same-sex couples, with 27% against and 5% undecided. All the regions showed a majority support and no age groups had more opponents than supporters.[68][69]
Another poll from the Faroe Islands showed that 62% of respondents supported same-sex marriage. The regional divide was significant. Support was greater on Streymoy (71% in Norðurstreymoy; 78% in Suðurstreymoy) which includes the capital Tórshavn, than in the Northern Isles (42%) and on Eysturoy (48%).[70]
In August 2014, a poll from the Faroe Islands was conducted, asking 600 respondents on their views towards civil marriage for same-sex couples. Out of the 600 respondents, 61% supported the idea, while 32% opposed and 7% had no opinion.[71]
The 2015 Eurobarometer found that 87% of Danes supported same-sex marriage, while 9% opposed it and 4% did not know.[72]
A Pew Research Center poll, conducted between April and August 2017 and published in May 2018, showed that 86% of Danes supported same-sex marriage, 9% were opposed and 5% didn't know or refused to answer.[73] When divided by religion, 92% of religiously unaffiliated people, 87% of non-practicing Christians and 74% of church-attending Christians supported same-sex marriage.[74]
See also [ edit ]As an evangelical who opposed Donald Trump’s presidency, I should be used to a certain political homelessness by now. Most days I’m fine with it. I believe Christian faith is strongest when it transcends the talking points of Republicans and Democrats alike.
But on the topic of abortion, the homelessness comes as an existential crisis — and tempts me to check out of politics entirely.
I oppose abortion because it contradicts the Christian teaching that every life is sacred. Whatever life exists in the womb in its earliest forms, abortion certainly ends it. I believe that a life before birth is self-evidently a life and does not become one only after a woman chooses to call it her child.
But I also believe that abortion is a symptom of — not a solution to — a culture that profoundly disregards women. So I am keenly interested in cultural and political solutions that honor women’s choices while also honoring the dignity of unborn persons. With enough goodwill on either side of the political aisle, I believe we can ensure that every child who comes into the world is welcomed and flourishes long after birth.
But given the deep polarization of US politics, I have lost hope that either party’s leaders want common ground on this topic. Not that long ago, pro-life voices were found on both sides of the political aisle. (Pre–Roe v. Wade, most pro-life activists were political liberals, and Republicans were slightly more likely than Democrats to favor abortion rights.) Despite wildly different views on the free market or the role of federal government, House and Senate leaders could come together to find compromises, such as restricting taxpayer funding for abortions (1976) or banning late-term abortions (2003).
The common ground of yesterday is deserted today. Both parties bear responsibility for this desertion.
The Democrats are waffling on whether they want pro-lifers in the party
The Democrats, reeling from losing the presidential election last fall, are undergoing serious soul searching on abortion. Democratic National Committee Chair Tom Perez recently threw down the nonnegotiable that “every Democrat, like every American, should support a woman’s right to make her own choices about her body.” This signaled to the remaining pro-life Democrats — in this case, Omaha mayoral candidate Heath Mello — that they were now outside the “big tent” party. It wasn’t enough that Mello vowed to protect women’s reproductive rights; he also had to be personally pro-choice.
Nancy Pelosi publicly disagreed with Perez — “of course” Democrats can be pro-life, she said. And Perez has since made plans to meet with members of the pro-life Democrats for Life of America. Still, the larger conversation alienates the 49 percent of Americans who say abortion is morally wrong (especially the 23 percent of Democratic voters who say as much). As my views on abortion arise out of my faith and are thus nonnegotiable, Perez’s statements are effectively a sign outside the big tent that reads, “Christians not welcome here.” (The vast majority of Christians throughout the ages have opposed abortion, even if they have disagreed about whether it should be legal.)
Democrats’ ambivalence about whether pro-lifers belong in their party also solidifies the perception that the Republican Party has the moral upper hand on issues of life. Vice President Mike Pence told thousands at the March for Life this January, “Life is winning again in America.... That is evident in the presence of pro-life majorities in the Congress.” Despite the awkwardness of framing “life” as something that can win or lose, Pence rightly underscored that Republicans have successfully communicated moral clarity on abortion. Such clarity animated white evangelicals’ support of Republican candidate Donald Trump, despite his previous waffling on the issue and many other foibles besides: 81 percent of white evangelical voters cast their ballot for him.
But the Republicans are advancing anti-life policy
I would feel much more at home among Republicans and fellow white evangelicals alike if not for other Republican policies that are anti-life. Take just as a recent example House Republicans’ passage of the American Health Care Act. To be sure, much remains unclear about the bill, and it and could be seriously revised or scrapped in the Senate. But as a worldview statement, the bill suggests that the “life” that’s really winning is already healthy and well-off.
There are many ways in which the AHCA, if passed, would make life for vulnerable Americans more difficult. The Congressional Budget Office found that the AHCA would result in 14 million fewer Americans enrolled in Medicaid by the year 2026 — a reduction of 17 percent from current enrollment levels. The Medicaid cuts would impact schools that rely on the program to educate students with disabilities. The bill’s per capita cap for states is expected to roll back coverage for the elderly and disabled, who naturally have more expensive health care. And depending on which state they live in, people with preexisting conditions — metastatic cancer, heart failure, late-term kidney disease — could see surcharges in the tens of thousands of dollars per year.
The AHCA also falls short in the explicit goal of the pro-life movement: ensuring that more unborn persons have a chance of life. As it stands, the AHCA would create economic barriers that make it very difficult for women to choose to bring children into the world. A health care bill that prohibitively raises the cost of bringing life into the world is not pro-life.
According to Vox’s Sarah Kliff, the AHCA would allow states to waive the requirement that health insurance companies cover “pregnancy, maternity, and newborn care.” Prior to Obamacare, 88 percent of individual health care plans chose not to cover maternity care. So it’s plausible that a majority of plans would do the same if the AHCA passed.
According to the International Federation of Health Plans, in 2013 the average US childbirth with a conventional delivery cost $10,002; with a Caesarean section, $15,240. It follows that a woman whose insurance doesn’t cover maternity care, or who depended on Medicaid coverage, is more likely to end her pregnancy because it could financially capsize her and her family. Simply because having a baby in America costs a lot of money, the link between abortion and economics is irreducible.
Just because the AHCA cuts Planned Parenthood funding doesn’t make it pro-life
Nevertheless, pro-life groups such as the Susan B. Anthony List and National Right to Life praised the AHCA because it significantly defunds Planned Parenthood, the nation’s largest abortion provider.
As National Right to Life spokesperson Tatiana Bergum told me, “We supported passage of the AHCA because it... prevents federal tax credits from being used for plans that pay for abortions [and] it eliminates roughly 89 percent of federal Planned Parenthood funding for the next year.”
Likewise, Human Coalition’s Lauren Enriquez says the organization supports the AHCA because it would “rightly increase funding to federally qualified health centers while stripping the bulk of our hard-earned money from the nation’s abortion Goliath.”
She continued, “The government is tasked with... ensuring the protection of all humans — especially the most defenseless. And that is something that the AHCA gets right.”
Unlike these groups, I don’t believe defunding Planned Parenthood is the silver bullet for the abortion dilemma. Even if Planned Parenthood were to be completely defunded, or if Roe v. Wade were to be overturned — two of the pro-life movement’s top goals — there would still be women who feel, for economic and social reasons, that abortion is their best or only option. It is our responsibility to meet them where they are.
My Christian beliefs tell me that in the creator’s amazing design, you cannot care for the life of an unborn child without caring for the mother. One’s flourishing is so intertwined with the other’s that to care for pregnant women is to care for unborn children. Yet House Republicans — by failure of imagination, an ideological commitment to self-sufficiency, or a combination thereof — have failed to advance a health care plan that is holistically pro-life.
What a truly pro-life health care bill would look like
This is the opportunity before Republican leaders in their moment of power. It is also the growth edge of the pro-life movement in America. Protecting unborn life must mean more than defunding Planned Parenthood and overturning Roe v. Wade. Protecting unborn life must at root mean putting our money where our mouth is: enacting programs and policies that make it easier for millions of women to choose life, from pre- and postnatal care to delivery to high-quality child care and education and beyond.
At the very least, for the AHCA drafters this would mean keeping pregnancy, maternity, and newborn care coverage mandatory; retaining Medicaid expansion; and diverting the money that would have gone to Planned Parenthood to federally qualified community health centers. (I have ethicist Charles Camosy to thank for these suggestions.) Beyond the scope of health care, it could also mean federally backed parental leave, a child allowance, and more robust financial assistance through SNAP, TANF, and the WIC nutrition program.
These solutions are ones many Democrats could get behind in theory — but only if the party welcomes pro-life leaders and resists overalignment with far-left abortion rights groups. Likewise, Republicans must also be willing to expand federal funding when unborn life is on the line, acknowledging that the countries with the lowest abortion rates also, not incidentally, have the lowest rates of child poverty owing to strong federal support programs.
It’s not enough to be against abortion. I am for life that includes but also extends beyond the moment of birth. I believe the pro-child versus pro-woman dichotomy is a false one unduly perpetuated by both extremes of the abortion debate. And I am waiting for politicians on both sides of the aisle to find political solutions that appeal to a wide swath of Americans.
Until then, I am tempted to check out of politics over disillusionment that Democrats or Republicans care about protecting vulnerable members of society. When partisanship reigns, real political solutions die. And when politics is reduced to winning, then many Americans lose — and are left to find the common ground previously abandoned by our country’s leaders.
Katelyn Beaty is an editor at large at Christianity Today magazine and author of A Woman’s Place (Howard/Simon & Schuster). She has written for the New York Times, the Washington Post, and the Atlantic and can be found on Twitter @KatelynBeaty.
First Person is Vox's home for compelling, provocative narrative essays. Do you have a story to share? Read our submission guidelines, and pitch us at firstperson@vox.com.By Sillicur at Friday, November 07, 2014 8:47:00 AM
Mortal Kombat X, developed by NetherRealm, will be the goriest installment of the fighting franchise’s gut wrenching history. Since the game was first announced, a spotlight was firmly put on excessive amount of gore. The team at NetherRealm does not seem to have any intention of shying away from delivering the goriest fighting game to date via the most gruesome fatalities ever seen.
Cringe-worthy fatalities – Death has come a long way
Mortal Kombat has always been about brutal fighting coupled with gory Fatalities. The 2011 reboot of Mortal Kombat upped the ante with two Fatalities per character. The highly detailed graphics blew away fans of the series and delivered the bloodiest fatalities to date on the PlayStation 3 and Xbox 360.
Death in the Mortal Kombat franchise has come a long way. The game’s finishers have certainly become gorier since Scorpion’s original fire-breathing. For those of you who did not have the absolute pleasure of playing Mortal Kombat 1, above is Scorpion’s fire-breath fatality used on Raiden.
The recent Fatalities in Mortal Kombat X, shown by NetherRealm Studios via a live stream on Twitch.tv, is a testament of how current-gen graphics can push the gore-factor to the next level. The technology to create something as spectacularly violent as Mortal Kombat X was just not available when previous titles in the franchise was developed. Due to the power of next-gen, player can finally experience the full imagination of NetherRealm.
The most brutal of the new Fatalities is Scorpion’s devastating bisection Fatality. The move is almost hard to watch, as I felt the pain dealt by Scorpion every second of the way through. Thanks to Youtube user Maximillion Dood, the new Fatality scenes have been compiled for your viewing pleasure.
If you are on the squeamish side, you should probably not eat while watching the video below. You have been warned!
The Fatality by Quan Chi on Kotal Kahn at the end of the video is disturbing to say the least. The amount of detail is impressive. After witnessing the video above, there is no doubt in my mind that Mortal Kombat X will have the most brutal fatalities in the franchise’s history. The gore in Mortal Kombat X will not only come from Fatalities, but X-Ray Moves and environmental attacks as well.
X-Ray Moves were introduced in the 2011 version of Mortal Kombat, also known as Mortal Kombat 9. X-Ray moves cause a large amount of damage. Players need to charge up the “Super Meter” in order to perform an X-Ray Move. True to their name, these moves consist of a short sequence of attacks that zooms in on the target with an X-Ray and displays bones and organs being crushed, smashed and snapped.
The full 45 minute gameplay stream can be found Twitch.tv. Highlights from the stream include X-Ray moves and the brutal fatalities seen above. Information on some character variation options are also given. For example, Sub-Zero’s Cryomancer will allow the fighter to channel his ice powers to increase defense and form weaponized ice sculptures like Shivs and Hammers. The stream also gives an extended look at Scorpion’s Ninjustu and Hellfire variations.
Closing Thoughts
Mortal Kombat X is shaping up to be ridiculously gory. There is no better feeling than beating a friend down in Mortal Kombat and then humiliating him/her with a brutal Fatality. Due to the advances in hardware, the game will deliver Fatalities that looks so astounding players will almost feel the pain being dished out.
Mortal Kombat X is the tenth main title in the Mortal Kombat series, with a release scheduled for 14 April 2015. Players will be able to enjoy the game on PlayStation 4, PlayStation 3, Xbox 360, Xbox One and Microsoft Windows.
Do you have a favorite character and Fatality? Do you enjoy the amount of gore in Mortal Kombat or is it a little too over the top? Let us know in the comments section below.
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Other News from Around the 'Net:The men's issues movement is about to get a Canadian home.
The Canadian Association for Equality (CAFE) announced Monday that it has raised enough money to open the first Canadian Centre for Men and Families in Toronto.
CAFE describes itself as an organization committed to "achieving equality for all Canadians, regardless of sex, sexual orientation, gender identity, gender expression, family status, race, ethnicity, creed, age or disability."
It is involved in organizing men's groups and lectures at a number of Canadian universities. Some of those lectures have prompted protests and earlier this year Ryerson's student union blocked the creation of a CAFE-sponsored men's issues club on the grounds that it sounded like a hate group.
The organization has distanced itself from more controversial elements in the so-called "men's rights movement" and instead bills itself as a "men's issues" or "human rights" organization. Nevertheless, it is primarily concerned with what it sees as societal failures to treat men equally.
The CAFE website lists suicide, the post-secondary education gap, workplace safet, men's health, father's rights, domestic violence, bias in the criminal system against men and misandry in the media and academia as primary areas of interest.
A spokesman told the National Post that CAFE is hoping to open the centre in a rented office somewhere on Toronto's subway lines and that it will provide legal advice on custody and divorce, as well as physical and mental-health therapy. The group raised $50,000 in donations to open the centre and has now hopes to reach $75,000 by the end of November.
The fundraising campaign is being conducted in honour of Earl Silverman, a men's issues activist and owner of Canada's only shelter for male victims of domestic abuse, who killed himself in April.
With files from previous stories.
Also on HuffPostNo other event in human history has been the subject of more distortions, falsehoods and fabrications the Russian Revolution. We publish here Alex Grant's complete list of the 10 biggest downright lies about the Bolsheviks and October...
Those witnessing the treatment of Jeremy Corbyn by the British press have got a flavour of the bile and spite of the establishment. Hugo Chavez and the Venezuelan Revolution have also received such special attention in the recent period. But nothing is so deserving of the hatred of the ruling class as the Bolshevik Revolution of 1917, because only here did the slaves completely overthrow the old order and begin to build a new society without need for lord or master.
The reason for such calumny against the Bolsheviks is plain to see. This event, more than any other, shows that there is another way to run society. That workers and youth, the poor and oppressed, do not have to submit to the diktats of the ‘men in suits’ who profit from their suffering. Countless hours, and billions of dollars, pounds, and euros, have been and are being expended to convince people that nothing good came of the Russian Revolution and there is nothing to be learnt from it for our struggles today. An entire army of so-called ‘experts’ has been mobilized for this special task of maintaining the status-quo.
Watch Alex deliver a talk on the top ten lies about the Bolshevik Revolution at the 2017 IMT World School in Bardonecchia:
On the centenary of 1917, when the world finds itself in a similar impasse, this slander is again reaching a new crescendo.
The volume of falsehoods against the revolution has been truly immense ever since the Soviet workers seized power. Trotsky commented on how “the slanders poured down like Niagara”. The Western press was filled with stories of murder and mayhem from day one. For example, it was claimed that the Petrograd “Bolsheviki” were in possession of “an electrically operated guillotine that lopped off five hundred heads per hour”, and that in Soviet Russia all women over the age of 18 were required to register with the “Bureau of Free Love”, where cultured bourgeois women would be parcelled out to various proletarian husbands on a rotational basis. (Reported in The Bolshevik Revolution by Philip S Foner). Other horrors were described, such as wealthy women being forced to do cleaning, and high-rank businessmen compelled to sell newspapers on street corners in order to survive - oh the humanity!
Lenin was fond of the saying that “one fool can ask ten times more questions than ten wise men can answer.” There is no way that all the lies about the revolution can be answered in a single article, but we are aided by a phenomenon that Trotsky detailed in his History of the Russian Revolution, where he explained why all political slander is essentially “poor and monotonous”. In this regard we can identify the top 10 most monotonous lies about the Bolshevik Revolution in order to arm the reader with the truth that can cut through the distortion and malice. This is an unenviable but necessary task, cleaning out the muck and filth of 100 years: but hopefully the reader will find this useful.
1) Lenin was a German agent!
This is the first and the oldest of the lies against the Bolsheviks. It was the main lie propagated during the July days of reaction where the Bolsheviks were illegalized, Lenin was forced into hiding, and Trotsky was imprisoned. The wave of reaction let loose by this lie led to the Bolshevik printing presses being smashed and even some rank-and-file paper sellers and posterers being beaten and murdered. After a few weeks of being fooled the Russian workers and peasants saw through the fabrication and began to massively turn against those perpetuating this lie as a pretext to continue the bloody world war and the rule of the rich and the landowners. Bolshevik support in the country progressively increased from mid-August onwards.
Vladimir Lenin / Photo: Wikimedia Commons
However, the fact that the Russian people saw through this lie 100 years ago has not stopped it from being repeated and re-hashed even up to the present day. On 19 June 2017, practically 100 years to the day after this lie was first concocted, The New York Times published an article repeating it word-for-word. We should commend The Times for their environmentalism, as they are clearly very committed to recycling!
The lie goes something like this. After the February revolution Lenin travelled to Russia via Germany in a “sealed train”. On the way he received funds from the Kaiser and actively worked to sabotage the Allied war effort under the direction of the Germans. But what is the truth?
Yes, Lenin was forced to travel via Germany to Finland in order to reach revolutionary Russia. Lenin was well aware of the political risk he was taking by travelling through Germany, and that is why he insisted on the train being'sealed', with nobody coming on or off for the duration of the trip. But what was his alternative? The Allied powers, French and British imperialism, refused to allow him safe passage over their occupied territory. When Trotsky attempted to reach Russia from New York via steamliner, British secret services had him arrested for a month in Halifax, Canada and only mass protests forced his release. We are sure that the imperialists would have been very happy for Lenin to remain isolated in Switzerland, but that wasn’t really an option.
These slanderers also conveniently forget that Martov, many other Mensheviks, and others in exile, were also forced to take the German route back to Russia. And yet none of these are accused of being German agents as that is not politically convenient.
What of the German gold Lenin was supposed to have received from the Kaiser? To date, despite searching high and low, nobody has been able to find a trace of its existence and all the innuendos have been debunked. If Pravda was receiving foreign sponsorship, it certainly did not look like it. It was smaller and was distributed in far lower numbers at the trenches than the papers of the Liberals and reformists (which genuinely had rich backers).
The New York Times reports that Russian workers were paid ten rubles to hold a Bolshevik placard. However, in 1921 Kadet leader Miliukov reported the going rate was fifteen rubles. Clearly The Times is the place to find a good bargain! And yet no paper trail has been found for these illicit payments that were able to rouse millions on the streets to face down the rifles and whip of police and Cossacks. Nobody has been able to trace the distribution network to get this money to all parts of the Tsarist empire that elected Bolshevik deputies.
The allegation of foreign funding occurs in every mass movement from time immemorial. Such ‘fake news’ was even reported in the protests against Donald Trump’s inauguration who were supposedly paid $3500 a head from a fund set up by Jewish liberal billionaire, George Soros. Trump himself got in on the act and tweeted about “professional protesters”. This tale is reminiscent of Wagner’s opera Das Rhinegold which tells the tale of magical gold that will make the bearer all-powerful. The deposed ruling-class cannot conceive of why the mass population would reject them, and therefore turn to fairytales of otherworldly riches. The reality is much more mundane: Lenin and the Bolsheviks proposed ideas that the population supported. This was the source of their ‘magical’ power.
Of course the German imperialists had their own plans for allowing a train full of radicals and ‘pacifists’ to travel across their territory. They gambled that the dissidents would cause dislocation and weaken the Russian war effort, but they never in their wildest dreams imagined that the Bolsheviks would come to power. Such maneuvers are not unique to German imperialism. However, this particular gamble by the German general staff clearly backfired as events have shown.
On the night of 29 October 1918, a mutiny broke out in the German fleet. Inspired by the Russian Revolution, workers’ councils seized most coastal cities by 7 November. Kaiser Wilhelm II was forced to resign on 9 November. By 11 November the German workers, following the lead of their Russian brothers and sisters, defeated German imperialism and brought an end to WWI by revolutionary means. In this sense it can be said that not only was Lenin not a German agent, but he was the instigator of the downfall of the Kaiser.
Kaiser Wilhelm II / Photo: Wikimedia Commons
Conversely, it was the Russian Provisional Government and general staff that were the true German agents. Even the Tsar and Tsarina were plotting for a separate peace with Germany prior to the February Revolution. In August, the Russian generals allowed the fall of Riga to the Germans to provide a pretext for the Kornilov coup and to teach the Riga Soviet a lesson at the end of a Prussian bayonet. Similarly, with power slipping through his fingers, Kerensky planned to move the Petrograd garrison to the front and surrender the capital to allow the Germans to massacre the revolutionary workers.
This was the last act that convinced the mass of the soldiers that the Provisional Government was not worthy of their support. The Petrograd garrison disobeyed the criminal order to abandon Petrograd, and instead changed their allegiance to the Soviet.
Here we can see that in the last analysis, for the bourgeois, class always trumps nation. The Russian ruling class preferred to give away its capital city to a foreign power rather than have it fall into the hands of the Russian workers. Lenin also favoured class over nation. But instead of the unity of the bosses, bankers, landowners, and generals, he called for the revolutionary struggle of all workers against their own ruling-class. It was Lenin’s position that overthrew both the German and Russian militarists, and brought an end to the bloody and fratricidal imperialist war.
2) The October Revolution was a violent coup
There is a myth that there was a peaceful revolution in February that overthrew Tsar Nicholas II and instituted a liberal democracy. Unfortunately, the evil megalomaniacs Lenin and Trotsky organized a violent and illegal coup to overthrow democracy and install a totalitarian dictatorship. All the above is an utter fabrication.
Firstly, for liberal historians the term “peaceful” tends to be used very liberally. All except the most rabidly right-wing historians recognize that there was much wrong with the Tsarist regime. This was an autocratic hereditary monarchy, with no democratic elections, no right to free speech, free assembly, or free association, where political dissidents were sent to Siberia, and Jews and oppressed nationalities faced regular murderous pogroms with the support of the regime. It is therefore hard for a liberal historian to argue against the February Revolution, no matter how much he or she may disapprove of the concept of revolution in general.
Patrol of the October Revolution / Photo: Wikimedia Commons
Having been forced to approve of the February overthrow of the Tsar, this revolution is declared ‘peaceful’ by the liberals. The reality is that approximately 1500 people died in February 1917. Most of these were unarmed workers shot down by the regime’s gendarmes, but you can be sure that as the general strike and revolt progressed, these workers armed themselves and, together with mutineering soldiers, inflicted casualties on the other side. In the final days of the regime some of its worst torturers were undoubtedly strung up. Our liberal historians assure us this was all done peacefully.
If 1500 died in the ‘peaceful’ February Revolution, then surely far more died in the “violent” October revolution? The reality is that almost nobody died in the seizure of the Winter Palace that swept up the remnants of the Provisional Government.
Many will have seen the classic Sergei Eisenstein movie about the Russian Revolution, October. The scene in the movie depicting the seizure of the Winter Palace is very exciting; with people running around shooting guns, throwing bombs, falling down and so forth. This scene bears no relation to the actual event, which was more of a police operation. Sadly, there were some lighting accidents in the shooting of October and some members of the crew died. There were more people killed in a film depicting the storming of the Winter Palace than in the actual storming of the Winter Palace!
This event brought Russia out of the war and precipitated the end of the First World War, thereby saving thousands, if not millions. The irony is that those who abhor the ‘violence’ of revolution are often those supporting the violence of war as just and necessary. The Russian workers were sick of the hypocrisy of such people, who only support war for the furtherance of war profits, and the workers were willing to make sacrifices to achieve a just peace without annexations. That is the justification for October, February, and revolution in general. When the majority has decided to make a change, and the minority resists by violent means, the majority has every right to defend itself.
Secondly, while February is labelled a glorious revolution with majority support, October is labelled an illegal coup by a small minority. Let us examine this contention. There are two definitions of coup in the political dictionary. One defines a coup as seizure of power by a minority, usually the military, with the consolidation of a regime without the consent of the mass of the population. The other definition is an “illegal” transfer of power violating the constitution of a given state.
Were the Bolsheviks in the minority? This is not seriously asserted by any primary source after September 1917. It is fully recognized that the overwhelming majority of the urban population supported the Bolsheviks in October. In the countryside, those who did not support the Bolsheviks supported the left Social Revolutionaries who were in favour of all power to the Soviets. The All Russia Congress of Soviets, the only genuinely democratically elected body in the country, returned a decisive majority for Soviet power and a coalition Bolshevik-Left SR government that would give land to the peasants, end the war, and grant self-determination to the oppressed nationalities.
The final proof of the majority support for the Soviets was the victory in the Civil War. The Tsarist army was smashed and the young workers’ state had to build an army from nothing. The Whites had the support of most of the old generals and twenty one armies of foreign intervention. Trotsky took on the near impossible task of building the Red Army. However persuasive Trotsky might have been, even he could not conjure up the human beings willing to fight, to supply, and to feed an army if it was politically unpopular.
The peasantry were willing to donate grain to feed the Red Army because that was the army stopping the landowner from returning and seizing their land. The workers volunteered to fight, die, and make munitions for the Red Army in order to stop the return of the bosses and imperialists. War is the continuation of politics by other means, and by this metric the Soviets were able to mobilize the majority to a decisive victory.
Red Guard of Vulkan Factory / Photo: Wikimedia Commons
Perhaps the Bolsheviks did have majority support, but this doesn’t matter because they acted illegally and unconstitutionally? Even by this narrow juridical criteria the argument falls down. As explained above, there was no ‘constitutional’ way to remove the monarchy and install a democratic system. The only option was revolution. But what was the nature of the regime that emerged out of February?
The people doing the fighting and dying to overthrow the Romanovs were predominantly the workers in the major cities who convinced the soldiers to join them or remain neutral. These workers and soldiers organized themselves in soviets. ‘Soviet’ is just the Russian word for council, and each workplace elected a representative to this body according to fixed proportions. Military units, made up mostly of peasants in uniform, also elected delegates. Delegates were open to immediate recall. The Soviets were the democratically elected bodies that had the confidence of the mass of workers and peasants that actually fought to bring down the old regime in February.
Looking aghast at the movement below were the Liberals and Conservatives of the Tsarist Duma. This body was fantastically undemocratic in its formation, and had only consultative powers under the Tsar. Voters participated in ‘curiae’ of different social castes so that there was an inbuilt majority for landowners, capitalists, and nobility. The vote of 1 landowner would be functionally equivalent to the votes of tens or hundreds of thousands of workers and peasants in a country of 160 million. The Duma leaders did everything in their power to save the Tsar from the mass |
prove to be the pivotal moment of his Chelsea career, the click of the switch that turns on the lights. Although last night he again failed to add to the solitary goal registered since his arrival at Stamford Bridge in January, the passes he supplied for the goals by David Luiz and Juan Mata allowed him to go home with the pleasant feeling that he had pulled his weight as the London club got their Champions League campaign off to a satisfactory start.
It may have been the thought of Sunday's visit to Old Trafford, rather than Torres's reported comments about the presence of an "old and slow" player hindering Chelsea's progress, that led André Villas-Boas to consign several of his senior players to the bench last night, resting John Terry altogether and flanking Torres with Mata, his 23-year-old fellow Spaniard, and Daniel Sturridge, who celebrated his 22nd birthday at the start of the month. But the decision made Torres, at 27, the senior member of the front three for the first time since his arrival at the club. With Didier Drogba still recovering from concussion and Nicolas Anelka and Salomon Kalou on the bench, he could hardly have asked for a better opportunity to express the qualities that have so far been kept under wraps.
Setting off as if determined to demonstrate his own energetic commitment, in the first minute he hooked José Bosingwa's cross into the crowd. Three minutes later, only seconds after Omer Toprak's header from a Leverkusen corner had been disallowed, his flick led to a backheeled effort from Raul Meireles which met the same fate.
So a turbocharged start to the contest had Torres as its protagonist, racing down the right wing to send over a good cross that brought no response and receiving a yellow card for inflicting a late and painful tackle on Simon Rolfes. In the 10th minute, however, there was a stark glimpse of the poor form that has so perplexed his coaches. He played the ball to Mata on the left and accepted the quick cut-back in an excellent position 15 yards from goal but deliberated too long before striking a shot that bounced off the legs of Bernd Leno in the Leverkusen goal.
After that all was quiet on the Torres front until Florent Malouda collected a misplaced clearance from Gonzalo Castro and fed the No9, whose stately efforts to bring the ball under control gave Stefan Reinartz ample time to intervene before a strike was forthcoming. Little more was seen of him before the interval apart from a poor shot hit well wide from long range while under no pressure.
Only Sturridge was able to induce serious palpitations in the German club's defence as he popped up late in the first half with two powerful snap-shots from outside the area. Just past the hour Villas-Boas called up the veterans, sending on Anelka for Sturridge and Frank Lampard for Meireles, which seemed like a pre-programmed move rather than a response to the actual events since a few seconds earlier Sturridge had forced Leno to touch the ball on to a post and could claim to have provided Chelsea's only genuine promise of goals to that point.
There was a discreet start to the second period for Torres until Malouda's cross from the left in the 56th minute saw him rising for a powerful header that forced Leno into a diving save. Two minutes later a promisingly slick exchange with Mata on the left ended with a looping cross that Leno punched away. A couple of minutes after the arrival of the substitutes, however, David Luiz did what he often does in an attempt to break a stalemate, making ground into the Leverkusen half, feeding Malouda out wide and running on as the Frenchman played the ball inside to Torres, who stunned the ball into the centre-back's path, inviting an emphatic shot inside Leno's left- hand post.
From Mata there was plenty of graft but not much evidence that he can provide the element of fresh thinking which Chelsea sorely need to add to their power and experience. Until, that is, Torres drove at speed through the Leverkusen defence in injury time before squaring the ball to his unmarked compatriot, who finished with brusque efficiency.
At Chelsea's training ground they have been analysing Torres's performances in his best periods for Liverpool and Spain, comparing them with his displays since his move to London and concluding that, since technically there is little detectable difference, the problem with their £50m forward must be one of confidence. While not providing a definitive verdict, last night will have done his state of mind no harm at all.Mike Dawson
I’m not much of a language stickler. I roll my eyes when people argue over the Oxford comma, and I couldn’t care less when someone says they “could care less.” As a descriptivist (rather than a prescriptivist), I’m mostly OK with seeing the meaning of words evolve and transform over time, because that’s what a living language does.
But we all have our weaknesses. There’s one particular error I see over and over, often in criticism, that sets my teeth on edge. That’s because it flies beyond being a simple misnomer and instead misunderstands and erases an entire literary tradition, a rich and wonderful one that flowered most gloriously in the 13th century. My gripe isn’t totally arcane, I promise! Just bear with me for a moment while I get medieval on those who abuse the word allegory.
What people usually mean when they call something an allegory today is that the fictional work in question can function as a metaphor for some real-world situation or event. This is a common arts journalist’s device: finding a political parallel to whatever you happen to be reviewing is a handy way to make it appear worth writing about in the first place. Calling that parallel an allegory serves to make the comparison more forceful. Fusion says that Batman v Superman is a “none-too-subtle allegory for the fight between Republican presidential hopefuls Donald Trump and Ted Cruz.” (It is not.) The Hollywood Reporter calls Zootopia an “accidental anti-Trump allegory”—this despite the fact that there is no literary form less accidental than allegory. The meaning of the word has drifted so far that even works that aren’t especially metaphorical get labeled as allegory: A film about artistic repression in Iran is a “clunky allegory” for … artistic repression in Iran.
Allegory or metaphor: The distinction might seem obscure and academic to many readers. Shouldn’t allegory be grateful to get any attention at all? Isn’t it just an archaic literary mode that nobody uses anymore? Yes and no. About the only people creating true allegories today are political cartoonists. But a culture never entirely discards its roots, and allegory, which first appeared in the waning years of the Roman Empire, is one of the foundations of Western literature. Maybe if we understood it better, we’d realize how much we owe to it. Besides, the allegorical imagination lives on, just not in the places where critics think they see it.
An allegory, in short, is not just another word for a metaphor. In essence, it’s a form of fiction that represents immaterial things as images. It calls attention to what it’s doing, typically by giving those images overtly thematic labels, like presenting the Seven Deadly Sins as a procession of people named Lust, Sloth, Pride, and the rest. The most famous allegory ever written, John Bunyan’s The Pilgrim’s Progress, was published in 1678, making it a holdover; allegory saw its artistic heyday in the Middle Ages. Yet The Pilgrim’s Progress was a colossal hit; for two centuries, it was the second book purchased by any Protestant household affluent and literate enough to own its own Bible. Everyone read about the narrator who falls asleep and dreams of a man named Christian fleeing the City of Destruction while bearing a heavy burden (representing the knowledge of his own sins) on his back. A figure named Evangelist instructs Christian on how to reach the Celestial City, a long journey past such perils as the Slough (swamp) of Despond and the Hill of Difficulty, where people with names like Mr. Worldly Wiseman and Hypocrisy attempt to lead him astray.
The low opinion in which allegory is now widely held can be blamed on The Pilgrim’s Progress. The book is pious and manifestly didactic, although I can testify from experience that a young-enough reader can still find it an entertaining adventure yarn. Adults, apart from some very devout Protestants, tend to experience its sermonizing as oppressive. When critics call a work of art an allegory today, and especially when they use adjectives like clunky and none-too-subtle, they invoke this aspect of The Pilgrim’s Progress; they mean a story that imposes a single, conspicuous interpretation on a reader or viewer. Allegory lectures. As the critic Northrop Frye wrote, “The commenting critic is often prejudiced against allegory without knowing the real reason, which is that continuous allegory prescribes the direction of his commentary, and so restricts its freedom.”
Perhaps Frye was right, and what we resent about allegory is the way it makes thematic analysis superfluous. You can’t really congratulate yourself for ferreting out the moral of Christian fighting his way through the fancy city of Vanity Fair or the mining town named Lucre. Should a book or a film present its argument so simply that even a child can discern it, what’s left to talk about? Merely language, story, and imagery—all the pleasures that art is made of.
Do we even know how to read such a book anymore? C.S. Lewis thought not. He wrote the definitive treatise on the form in 1936: The Allegory of Love: A Study in Medieval Tradition. We know Lewis today as the author of The Chronicles of Narnia and as a writer of Christian apologetics, but before all that he was a sensational literary critic—and I mean sensational literally. Perceptive, erudite, and witty, he also wrote with an infectious vividness about the experience of reading, of mingling with an author’s mind and imagination. Here’s how he described the allegories of Martianus Capella, an influential writer of the early fifth century:
The philosophies of others, the religions of others—back even to the twilight of pre-Republican Rome—have all gone into the curiosity shop of his mind. It is not his business to believe or disbelieve them; the wicked old pedant knows a trick worth two of that. He piles them up all around him until there is hardly room for him to sit among them in the middle darkness of the shop; and there he gloats and catalogues, but never dusts them, for even their dust is precious in his eyes.
Lewis’ apologetics can be parochial, but his criticism flings open its doors and windows to welcome in any writer with even a wisp of distinction. Most remarkable of all, his scholarly works are never, ever incomprehensible or boring, even when they concern the most tedious literature. (Lewis’ biographer, A.N. Wilson, wrote that his one great fault as a critic was his “enthusiastic generosity” toward authors “who are not really as interesting as he makes them sound.”)
A medievalist, Lewis was forever defending the Middle Ages from the glib notion that they constituted an intellectual and artistic fallow period between the classical world and the Renaissance. (He is completely convincing on this point.) We often fail to understand the beauty of medieval art, he argued, because we experience the world and our place in it so differently from the people of that time. We can’t appreciate medieval allegory until we make a concerted effort to imagine what it was like to inhabit the world as they saw it, as a divinely ordered universe in which “certain sympathies, antipathies, and strivings [are] inherent in matter itself. Everything has its right place, its home, the region that suits it.”
Lewis traces the origins of allegory to a period in late antiquity when, for undetermined reasons, the Western concept of a virtuous life changed profoundly. In the Nicomachean Ethics, Aristotle described virtue as a skill to be learned by practice, until it becomes not just second nature, but an end in itself. “The man who does not enjoy doing noble actions is not a good man at all,” he wrote. You don’t become a good cook by conquering your desire to cook badly; similarly, you become a good man by simultaneously acquiring the expertise and reaping its rewards.
The emerging idea that virtue instead results from an ongoing inner battle against our own worst impulses was not exclusively Christian, but it fit perfectly with the Christian belief in humanity’s fallen nature. We’re so familiar with this concept of the psyche as a theater of struggle between opposing forces that it’s difficult to conceive of a time when it was relatively new, the time when allegory was born. “To fight against ‘temptation,’ ” Lewis writes, “is also to explore the inner world; and it is scarcely less plain that to do so is to be already on the verge of allegory.”
Yet today we associate allegory with a lack of the “round” fictional characters we value most, characters whose believability resides at least partly in their internal conflicts. This is a standard set by the novel, a relatively recent literary form that (for the most part) aims to produce a naturalistic depiction of the world. Allegory doesn’t work that way. The characters in allegories like the 13th-century poem Roman de la Rose, or Edmund Spenser’s 16th-century masterpiece, The Faerie Queene, are “flat” by contemporary standards, possessed of only a few traits and behaving with inhuman consistency.
But, as Lewis demonstrates in a long, virtuosic reading of Roman de la Rose, this is because they aren’t actually meant to be characters. Instead these people, the objects they handle, and the spaces they occupy all represent aspects of the self. Roman de la Rose describes the courtship of a noble maiden by a courtier. Like many allegories it is framed as a dream, a sign that we’ve entered into a psychological interior. The lover seeks the Garden of Love, where he meets such clashing figures as Mirth, Companionship, Pride, and Shame. The lady herself seems strangely dematerialized because, as Lewis observes, “her character is distributed among personifications.”
But, Lewis hastens to add, an allegory is not merely an equation to be solved, leaving you free to “throw aside the allegorical imagery as something which has now done its work.” Allegorical reading requires sustaining both image and meaning in the reader’s mind, as equally valued components of the work. “It is not enough,” Lewis writes, “to see that the dreamer gazing into the fountain signifies the lover first looking into the lady’s eyes. We must feel that the scene by the fountain is an imaginative likeness of the lover’s experience.” We must be able to see the sparkling water and the shining eyes at the same time and recognize them to be facets of a singular, layered understanding that includes the recognition of other, abstract qualities as well, such as the purity of her spirit.
The literate people of the Middle Ages were experts at comprehending art in this way. They routinely compounded vast amounts of meaning into certain ideas or motifs, partly because they were always attempting to integrate the cultural legacy of classical paganism into Christian theology. For them, “Venus” signified multiple things simultaneously: a planet, a Roman goddess with a set of stories attached to her, a literary figure, the image of feminine beauty, the force of erotic love, God’s will manifested in the fruitful union of a man and a woman, and so on. Christianity formed a bedrock for this way of thinking, but no one of these is the “true” meaning of Venus to which all others can be reduced. Their characters may seem “thin” when compared with those in a great novel, but their images are much fuller and richer.
Lewis would surely argue that it is the modern reader who, viewing allegory as reductive, shows a lack of subtlety. In a great allegory, the imagery is not a code for the underlying theme; it is every bit as important as theme. Perhaps the greatest allegory, Edmund Spenser’s The Faerie Queene, offers a case in point. Lewis was Spenser’s foremost champion, rescuing the Elizabethan poet from near-obscurity and restoring The Faerie Queene to the canon—to the dismay of many undergraduates but to the delight of others. Lewis first read the epic poem as a boy, devouring it as a tale of brave knights battling dragons, giants, and wicked enchanters against a sylvan landscape splashed with gore. A grasp of the religious and political implications of such figures as the beautiful but nefarious lady Duessa (an allegory for the Catholic Church) or the Redcross Knight (who embodies the spirit of England) would come later, but many generations of readers have been well-satisfied with the surface alone.
The Faerie Queene is a vast, ravishing spectacle—one that contemporary readers can find pretty inaccessible due to Spenser’s use of language and diction that is deliberately archaic, even for his own time. (Ben Jonson, a near contemporary, complained that “in affecting the ancients Spenser writ no language.”) Fortunately, an unabridged audiobook, masterfully narrated by David Timson, released late last year makes the poem much more readily intelligible for a new or returning reader. The Faerie Queene is a pageant of one gorgeous, trippy vision after another, from the Garden of Proserpina, the queen of the underworld, (every blossom, leaf, and fruit in it is coal black) to the adventures of “the famous Britomart,” a female knight every bit as valiant as our beloved Brienne of Tarth. And while many of Spenser’s allegorical concerns have become obsolete, it only takes a scene like the Redcross Knight’s encounter with shaggy, gaunt Despair as he crouches in his cave, surrounded by the knights he has persuaded to kill themselves, to remind a reader of the form’s potency.
Spenser’s Despair calls to mind the dementors, the most terrifying monsters in the Harry Potter series, although J.K. Rowling’s specters are not so much personifications of depression as allegorical deployments of it. This is where the spirit of allegory lives on, in novels and films when the action feels as if it is taking place inside one person’s head. Sometimes a superhero comic or film slips into an allegorical mode, less by mimicking some timely political situation than by creating an antagonist like the Penguin, who resembles an updating of the medieval allegory for greed. The Hero’s Journey, a staple of screenwriting courses and, alas, the model for so many mediocre films, is really just an allegorical narrative slapped with the more palatable label of “myth.” Yet the contemporary artworks most redolent of allegory’s heady psychic atmosphere are both archetypal and dreamlike: the novels of Haruki Murakami and the films of David Lynch, to name two examples. These stories partake of what Lewis describes as “the perennial strangeness, the adventurousness, and the sinuous forward movement of the inner life.” They are more enigmatic and chaotic than medieval allegory, but ours is a more confusing and disordered world.Haye puts Klitschko on the backburner as boxer jets to Australia for I'm A Celebrity
David Haye is more accustomed to fighting off heavyweight boxers than creepy crawlies but the former world champion will be doing just that when he takes part in I'm A Celebrity... Get Me Out Of Here!
The 32-year-old, who remains in training in the hope of fighting Vitali Klitschko next year, will join the likes of former Coronation Street star Helen Flanagan, whose boyfriend is Manchester City winger Scott Sinclair, and Doctor Who actor Colin Baker in the jungle.
And Haye made sure he made the most of his last night in London by partying into the early hours of Monday morning.
Night on the town: David Haye was at Whisky Mist nightclub in London before leaving for Australia
Once in Australia, Haye and his fellow celebrities will be offered the chance to stay in an eight-bedroom hotel which will have rats, scorpions, spiders and snakes lurking behind the doors.
Producers are said to have lined up their most gruesome Bushtucker trials to date, with stars set to dine on kangaroo testicles and raw shark brains.
The show begins on Sunday November 11.
In tow: Helen Flanagan (left with Scott Sinclair) will be joining Haye in the jungleThe first quantum-safe video conference was held between President Chunli Bai of the Chinese Academy of Sciences in Beijing and President Anton Zeilinger of the Austria Academy of Sciences in Vienna, as the first real-world demonstration of intercontinental quantum communication on September 29th.
Private and secure communications are fundamental human needs. In particular, with the exponential growth of Internet use and e-commerce, it is of paramount importance to establish a secure network with global protection of data. Traditional public key cryptography usually relies on the perceived computational intractability of certain mathematical functions. In contrast, quantum key distribution (QKD) uses individual light quanta (single photon) in quantum superposition states to guarantee unconditional security between distant parties. Previously, the quantum communication distance had been limited to a few hundred kilometers, due to the channel loss of fibers or terrestrial free space. A promising solution to this problem is exploiting satellite and space-based link, which can conveniently connect two remote points on the Earth with greatly reduced channel loss because most of the photons' propagation path is in empty space with negligible loss and decoherence.
A cross-disciplinary multi-institutional team of scientists from the Chinese Academy of Sciences, led by Professor Jian-Wei Pan, has spent more than ten years in developing a sophisticated satellite, named Micius, dedicated for quantum science experiments (for the project timeline, see Appendix), which was successfully launched on 16th August 2016, from Jiuquan, China, orbiting at an altitude of ~500 km. The satellite is equipped with three payloads: a decoy-state QKD transmitter, an entangled-photon source, and a quantum teleportation receiver and analyzer. Five ground stations are built in China to cooperate with the Micius satellite, located in Xinglong (near Beijing, 40°23'45.12''N, 117°34'38.85''E, altitude 890m), Nanshan (near Urumqi, 43°28'31.66''N, 87°10'36.07''E, altitude 2028m), Delingha (37°22'44.43''N, 97°43'37.01"E, altitude 3153m), Lijiang (26°41'38.15''N, 100°1'45.55''E, altitude 3233m), and Ngari in Tibet (32°19'30.07''N, 80°1'34.18''E, altitude 5047m).
Within a year after the launch, three key milestones that will be central to a global-scale quantum internet have been achieved: satellite-to-ground decoy-state QKD with kHz rate over a distance of ~1200 km (Liao et al. 2017, Nature 549, 43); satellite-based entanglement distribution to two locations on the Earth separated by ~1200 km and Bell test (Yin et al. 2017, Science 356, 1140), and ground-to-satellite quantum teleportation (Ren et al. 2017, Nature 549, 70). The effective link efficiencies in the satellite-based QKD were measured to be ~20 orders of magnitudes larger than direct transmission through optical fibers at the same length at 1200 km.
The satellite-based QKD has now been combined with metropolitan quantum networks, in which fibers are used to efficiently and conveniently to connect many users inside a city with a distance scale of ~100 km. For example, the Xinglong station has now been connected to the metropolitan multi-node quantum network in Beijing via optical fibers. Very recently, the largest fiber-based quantum communication backbone has been built in China by Professor Pan's team, linking Beijing to Shanghai (going through Jinan and Hefei, and 32 trustful relays) with a fiber length of 2000 km. The backbone uses decoy-state protocol QKD and achieves an all-pass secure key rate of 20 kbps. It is on trial for real-world applications by government, banks, securities and insurance companies.
The Micius satellite can be further exploited as a trustful relay to conveniently connect any two points on the earth for high-security key exchange. Early this year, the Chinese team has implemented satellite-to-ground QKD in Xinglong. After that, the secure keys were stored in the satellite for 2 hours until it reached Nanshan station near Urumqi, by a distance of ~2500 km from Beijing. By performing another QKD between the satellite and Nanshan station, and using one-time-pad encoding, secure key between Xinglong and Nanshan were then established. To test the robustness and versatility of the Micius, QKD from the satellite to Graz ground station near Vienna has also been carried out successfully this June, as a collaboration between Professor Pan and Professor Anton Zeilinger's group. Upon request, future similar experiments are also planned between China and Singapore, Italy, Germany, and Russia.
###THE full scale of the environmental disaster off the Queensland coast has become clearer as the shipping company admitted its earlier estimates of the oil spill's size were "substantially" wrong and the length and the cost of the clean-up were revised upwards by the State Government.
An oil slick measuring tens of kilometres is staining the shore along Sunshine Coast beaches, Bribie Island and Moreton Island.
A nature conservation officer carries a pelican, covered in oil, from the beach on Moreton Island. Credit:Tertius Pickard
The cargo vessel Pacific Adventurer leaked the oil late yesterday from a hull breach as it lay moored in Brisbane's port. It was a casualty of rough seas it had encountered on a voyage to Indonesia on Wednesday.
"I think it's fair to say the Government and authorities were not informed accurately of the size of the spill," said Allan Sutherland, the Mayor of Moreton Bay Regional Council, where part of the clean-up was taking place. "[Swire Shipping] were hoping Mother Nature would take its course. It didn't."Nigeria’s pop music star, D’Banj, has said that he is considering delving into full scale farming to help fight poverty and encourage many African youths to embrace agriculture as a means of livelihood.
He was also made the organisation’s face of 2014 Year of Agriculture Campaign as declared by the Africa Union.
“As a face of the ONE Organisation’s initiative to drive full participation in agriculture, I have to live by example. I am going to engage in agriculture personally to encourage millions of African youths who look up to me as a role model. I need to let them know that unlike the old stereotype of farming which was considered a punishment, modern farming on the contrary, is a cool source of employment for many graduates,” said D’Banj.
According to him, there should be a change where many youths are expected to embrace agriculture and see it as a potentially high-yielding venture to tackle hunger and poverty on the continent.
“Agriculture is life and it is everything that we live for. It is the only way forward for us in Africa. There are many potentials we are missing out and if we could focus on it, the continent can actually feed the rest of the world,” he said.
D’Banj noted that he once tried in his own little way to tackle hunger by going into Koko Gari project not really on a large scale. But now that he is working with ONE Organisation and has been exposed to the potentials in agriculture, he is ready to get involved deeply.
Also speaking at the launch of the campaign, Camerounian-born Nde Ndifonka, Media Manager, Africa, ONE Organisation, said the organisation is keen on pushing the continent’s leaders to stop paying lip service to the funding of agriculture.
He noted that after 10 years of AU’s affirmation that African countries should devote at least 10 percent of the annual budget to agriculture, only three countries-Ghana, Burkina Faso and Benin have met the target.
Ndifonka said there should be change in paradigm and ONE is championing a petition to force the leaders to increase their funding and help tackle poverty and hunger on the continent.
He disclosed that D’Banj will lead the campaign, sign the petition and get other celebrities across Africa to sign for onward delivery to the leaders at their AU Summit coming up in June.
—Funsho Arogundade
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WhatsAppFROM howitzers to “Hetzer” tanks, military buffs will be spoiled for choice when the Australian Armour and Artillery Museum opens this weekend.
More than two years in the making and worth millions of dollars, the Caravonica museum features 90 tanks, armoured vehicles and artillery pieces.
The Cairns Post was given an exclusive sneak peek inside the mega-museum, which officially opens this Saturday at 10am.
Museum manager Dennis Tocock said it had been a labour of love for owner and businessman Rob Lowden, who had scoured the globe to build his tank collection.
“This is the biggest collection of this nature in the southern hemisphere,” Mr Tocock said.
“We’ve got armoured vehicles and tanks from Germany, the former Czechoslovakia, Britain, America, Australia, Canada, Russia and France.”
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Mr Tocock said all tanks on display were either World War II or Cold War era, while some artillery pieces dated as far back as World War I.
All exhibits at the museum are either fully restored or have been preserved.
For more information, head to ausarmour.comBy Gilad Atzmon
The Jewish ADL (Anti Defamation League) revealed this week that more than ‘one in four adults are ‘anti-Semitic.’
Of Some 53,100 adults in 102 countries and territories around the world surveyed for the ADL Global 100: An Index of Anti-Semitism, 26% were found to be ‘deeply infected’ with ‘anti-Semitic attitudes.’
Personally, I find both the ADL and its polls quite amusing. Can you think of another people on this planet who so spend so much time and energy measuring how much they are loved or hated? Do the Brits measure how despised they are in Moldovia? Do the Palestinians question people all over the world to see how much they love those indigenous people of Palestine? Well, the Jews do and it’s for a reason. Abe Foxman, ADL’s National Director, must by now have grasped the immense destructive global power of Jewish politics, so naturally he wants to measure the reaction. But rather than reflecting on the results and then turning to his own people in the hope of re-educating them, Foxman always blames the rest of humanity. And why? Because in the Judeo-centric cosmos, the Jew is always innocent and the Goy is always to blame.
ADL discovered that the least anti-Semitic country at 0.2% of the adult population ‘hating Jews.’ is........Laos! But what does that mean? Should the ADL start to shlep Jews to Laos? Maybe, rather than Palestine, it is Laos that is the promised land. Trouble is, once the Jews start to immigrate to Laos, anti Semitic attitudes will sharply rise. ADL is yet to resolve this Jewish dilemma yet.
Apparently, according to the ADL, the territories of the West Bank and Gaza Strip had the highest ‘anti-Semitic’ attitudes at 93%. But is it really ‘anti Semitic’ to oppose those who plundered your home and murdered your family? No Abe, this is not anti-Semitism, this is resistance.
The questions of the survey were also very interesting. Respondents were asked a series of 11 questions about Jews, Jewish power, Jewish tribalism, Jews and money and Jewish behaviour. Those who responded affirmatively to six or more negative statements about Jews were considered to hold ‘anti-Semitic’ attitudes. But I beg to differ. I’d think that those who answered affirmatively were simply authentic, honest folk who were better informed about the state of the world. Now, if I am correct here, it means that about a quarter of world’s population is authentic, honest and informed - a most positive and encouraging bit of information.
But back to the results of the survey. It seems that 74% of respondents indicated that they had never met a Jew and yet, of those, 25% still harboured anti-Semitic attitudes. Also, of the overall 26% overall of people who did harbour anti-Semitic attitudes, some 70% of them had never met a Jew. But you know, most people have never met a Nazi either and yet Nazis are also pretty unpopular these days. It’s all a matter of reputation.
All in all, it seems that AIPAC, The Jewish State, CFI, CRIF, ADL and Bernard Henri Levy have been investing an awful lot of energy giving Jews bad name.OTTAWA -- Conservative leadership candidate Kellie Leitch says Canadians need to follow the example set by the Americans who elected Donald Trump as president and throw away "the elites."
In an email to supporters, Leitch celebrated Trump's victory and said she wants to bring the same "exciting message" as those who "threw out the elites" in the U.S. It's a message that split the leadership candidates, with two of them firing back to oppose the sentiment.
Leitch, who has proposed screening immigrants for Canadian values, said she looks forward to working with Trump "on issues of common concern."
She also added to the list of people she proposes to screen for values, which she has not yet explained in detail.
"I'm the only candidate who will ensure that every visitor, immigrant, and refugee will be screened for Canadian values," Leitch said in the email.
Asked to clarify to what Leitch was referring in the fundraising email, a spokesman pointed to the negative discretion authority that the then-Conservative government used in 2014 to block a controversial speaker from entering Canada. Chris Alexander, who was then the immigration minister and is now a Conservative leadership contender, used his ministerial discretion to refuse entry to a so-called dating expert who advocated sexual assault.
Speaking in Saskatoon ahead of the Conservative leadership debate, Leitch allowed she doesn't approve of everything Trump says.
"I do have reservations on some of the things - many of the things - some of the things that Mr. Trump has said. But that being said, he is now the president elect," she said, when asked about his past comments on Mexicans and Muslims.
'He'll respect me'
But their common ground on immigration screening, Leitch said, would make trade discussions easier.
"I know he'll respect me and when he talks tough on NAFTA, I can push back and say no, for the benefit of all Canadians, we need to have free trade with the United States," Leitch said.
"[It's] very different than, I think, the approach the elites in the media and others have had, which really has been disconnected from Canadians."
Ontario MP Michael Chong, who is also running for the Conservative leadership, called Trump divisive and said it's a mistake "to ape" his path.
"Canadian conservatives win when we offer voters an ambitious, inspiring and inclusive vision of our country and its potential," Chong said in a statement.
"Kellie's policy of singling out newcomers to Canada for special "values" screening by government is a losing strategy. As Conservatives, we should not support any move to police people's thoughts or subject anyone to an ideological purity test."
Chong said Conservative leadership means reaching out to all Canadians and building momentum in cities among new Canadians.
"Generosity, opportunity, ambition are the by-words of my campaign and foundations of a winning strategy for our party in 2019," he said.
Calgary MP Deepak Obhrai also spoke out against Leitch's admiration for Trump, tweeting that it doesn't reflect Canada.
U.S. will remain Canadian ally: Ambrose
Interim Conservative leader Rona Ambrose touched diplomatically on concerns about what a Trump victory could mean for Canada. The president-elect has pledged to throw out the North American Free Trade Agreement if it can't be renegotiated, and has discussed cracking down on NATO countries that don't hit a certain defence spending threshold.
"The United States is, and will remain, Canada’s closest friend and ally. Our unique relationship has stood the test of nearly 150 years," Ambrose said in the statement.
"As Canada works with the new administration, our focus in the Official Opposition will continue to be on bilateral initiatives that will contribute to the Canadian economy, create jobs, and enhance our collective security," she said, noting the two countries have an ongoing softwood lumber trade dispute.
"We expect the Canadian government to work with the new administration to ensure Canadians and Canadian businesses continue to reap the benefits of the North American Free Trade Agreement, and to advocate for the ultimate ratification and implementation of the Trans-Pacific Partnership Agreement, which seeks to boost trade in the Asia-Pacific region."
Ambrose also called on Prime Minister Justin Trudeau to speak to Trump about his support for the Keystone XL pipeline extension, which President Barack Obama nixed last year. Trump has said he would approve the pipeline, but wants a share of the revenue generated by it.
Former foreign affairs minister John Baird said it's clear Trudeau's relationship with Trump will be different from his relationship with President Barack Obama. The current president and the prime minister seem to feel genuine warmth toward each other. But Baird praised Trudeau's response to Trump's election.
"He's got off to a good start, and the fact that there weren't a lot of cheap shots taken at the Trump campaign by the Trudeau Liberal government in Ottawa was positive," Baird said in an interview with Don Martin, host of CTV's Power Play.
Former prime minister Stephen Harper congratulated Trump in a tweet that reiterated one of Harper’s priorities from when he was in office.
"There is much to do, [including] moving ahead with KXL," he said in a reference to Keystone.Today begins the sixth week of the broadcast television season. At this point freshman shows start to establish their groove, what makes them tick, showing of their personalities and quirks. In turn, we, the viewers, begin to get clearer picture of which shows are worth our time. This year’s freshman class is already outdoing the previous years’ by miles and miles. Brooklyn 99, Trophy Wife and Back in the Game are all immensely fun. The |
you’re a racist. This motion is blatant shaming, of being a Canadian.”
In such small, quiet and ignoble fracturings, happening all across the country I suspect, can the centre begin to crack.
cblatchford@postmedia.comOn Jan. 3, 2015, Tomohiko Itou, the director of the anime Sword Art Online and Sword Art Online II, and cosplayer and gravure idol (Wikipedia) Hikaru Aoyama were interviewed together. In the interview, the director looked back on the year of 2014 and commented on the current state of anime, with a few words on Sword Art Online II and its future.
I have translated some of Itou’s parts of the interview for your interest.
Note: Hikaru Aoyama has received training in a school for voice acting, so she is supposed to be knowledgeable about the anime industry.
Tomohiko Itou
Q: So, first off. The second season of Sword Art Online has ended, and you’ve worked hard. Director Itou, what anime did you watch in 2014?
Itou: I didn’t really watch anime. However I did see “JoJo’s Bizarre Adventure”. Also, I’m a fan of Director Hiroshi Hamasaki, so I saw “Terra Formars”.
Q: “Terra Formars” uses a lot of heavy dark censors. This technique has sparked a lot of conversation on the internet.
Itou: I think everyone’s blowing it a bit out of proportion. In any case, the problem lies with the TV station’s own discretion. If the work was broadcasted on Japanese TV at midnight, then there probably wouldn’t be any censors. Isn’t this channel also broadcasting “Parasyte”?
—-
Q: There are also lots of people in the anime industry who care a lot about online reviews.
Itou: No matter if the reviews are good or bad, the production studio cares a lot about them. There are some people who go straight to those websites after work. I think we should reduce our usage of the internet.
Q: Director Itou has quit using Twitter, huh.
Itou: The time using Twitter could be better used for work. Twitter will only bring me lots of distractions. At least, the production studio workers shouldn’t look at Twitter. Also, if you want to promote your work on an anime news site, that kind of motivation is wrong, isn’t it?
—
Topic: On the crisis in the anime industry nowadays
Itou: I’ve complained before about the increasing number of anime. However, there’s still a lot of them now. There are also rumors that they won’t decrease before 2016. I feel that this industry doesn’t have a future, and I’ve considered quitting anime. Nowadays there are more full-3D works. And despite the increasing number of job opportunities relating to the anime industry, those are only for voice actors. People, why do you all want to become voice actors?
—
(Skipped a large part about the VA industry)
Q: Lastly, please tell us about your own 3 biggest news from 2014.
Itou: Well first, I got married in May. Next, the second season of “Sword Art Online” finished successfully. Also, in order to attend an event called “Geekopolis”, I had the opportunity to visit Paris. That was an event with elements of fantasy, science fiction and cyberpunk, but I don’t know why there was actually a category called “JAPAN” there too (laughs). There were only two people from Japan there: two guys from Aniplex who came along with me. So, I was very relaxed. In events in America, there are a lot of overweight people, while French people are slender. Even if they cosplayed “Game of Thrones”, it would be very appropriate. The event was very lively, it was great.
Q: About “Sword Art Online”, if you were invited to produce a continuation, what would it be like?
Itou: Ah, how do I say this. If were to continue producing a story that the ending of which won’t be in sight, it would be quite difficult. My impressions of this work are already the same as the characters in the work. About that, I’m going through with other plans right now.
The full interview translated to Chinese can be found here. The original Japanese version is here.
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Like this: Like Loading... RelatedFinland is the land of single households
Every other apartment in Helsinki is inhabited by a single tenant. In the future the number of people living alone in Finland is expected to continue climbing. This changes a lot of things in the societies built around the nuclear family.
For a long time Finland has been preparing for the age pyramid where there are relatively more pensioners than there are children and working age people. But the other trend in the society is single person households. In the beginning of the 1970's the number of single person households was less than 30 percent. In 2015 the figure had grown to 48.
In 2015 a study by Citylab found that Finland is the mostly likely country to be single in Europe. In a way this is where the country has targetted for many decades as one of the biggest achievements of the Nordic welfare state is the ability for people to live the best way they feel best.
In Finland there is no family taxation, women are free to choose a life without children and children are not expected to take care of their elder parents. In addition technologies like the Internet making living alone more appealing due with the ability to get services an perform social activities online.
Other key factors leading to the development is increased gender equality. Women joining the labourmarket, education and freedom over their own bodies have changed family relations. The age of first marriage has risen as has the number of divorces.
Another factor is urbanization. With more people living in cities there are more options for people living alone both in terms of services and alternative lifestyle. People are also living longer than before and with their spouses gone, many elderly widows wish to live alone rather than in an institution.
Written by Janita on Tuesday April 19, 2016
Permalink -Raging Bull Saturday, 4/30 at 11:45 pm
"Raging Bull may prove to be Scorsese's finest achievement" - BFI
When the dynamic duo of Robert De Niro and Martin Scorsese come together, they're an unstoppable force. So it was with Raging Bull, the magnum opus of their careers, a dazzling black-and-white profile of the virtues and vices of former professional boxer Jake LaMotta. Scorsese shot the brutal fight scenes – full of blood sprays, swollen eyes, and cut lips – as dance routines, stepping inside the ring and showing the fight from the perspective of the fighters. Outside the ring, Joe Pesci became a household name as Joey, brother and manager to LaMotta, for which he received an Oscar nomination. The gritty photography, by renowned cinematographer Michael Chapman (Taxi Driver, The Detail), comes to life on a 35mm print like you’ve never seen it before.
The Gables Cinema presents the best films you never saw on the big screen (or maybe you did) from late-night cult classics to foreign favorites and even summer blockbusters every Saturday at 11:30 pm. Tickets include a free popcorn and happy hour. Please note that unclaimed pre-ordered tickets will be sold to the waitline 30 mins after showtime.
After Hours Membership
As a member, you are supporting the continued success of our After Hours program. Yearly After Hours membership pays for itself with reduced-price tickets at $5.00 instead of $8.00. Online ticket fees are waived for After Hours screenings and 4 free tickets to our regular price screenings are included.
Check out the rest of our After Hours program!Former NHL head coach Harry Neale once cracked while in the midst of a horrendous losing skid: “We can’t win at home … we can’t win on the road. My failure as a coach is I can’t think of any place else to play.”
Clearly Marc Dos Santos doesn’t have the same problem. Nowhere near.
His Ottawa Fury just wrapped up a three-game road sweep and now head home to the more-than friendly confines of TD Place Stadium to play on a field that has been equally giving.
Seemingly, it doesn’t really matter where the Fury play their games this Fall Season — odds are the first-place club is going home with three points.
“It’s good to be home,” said Dos Santos, Fury head coach. “Especially after the trip we had. It was a very, very tough one emotionally and physically. A lot of airplanes, a lot of travelling with a lot of difficult games.”
Ottawa hosts Edmonton Sunday afternoon (3 p.m.) at TD Place Stadium where the Fury have suffered through a single defeat in eight games this fall.
But it is away from home where the Fury are gaining true notoriety. The club holds a North American Soccer League record for consecutive games without a road loss at nine (6W-3D-0L), and has rolled out six straight wins.
Captain Richie Ryan credits preparation and serendipity.
“Everyone knows the model of play (Dos Santos) wants us to play and we stick to it,” Ryan said. “I think to a certain degree you need a bit of luck along the way. A couple of times during games we’ve had the luck. Romu (Peiser) has saved us with a couple of saves and that’s given us the opportunity to go up the other end and score some goals.”
NASL player of the week, Tommy Heinemann, also heaves kudos at Dos Santos — a shoo-in for NASL coach of the year if the winning trend continues.
“It’s a credit to Marc. He prepares us well,” said Heinemann. “When we go in, we have a game plan and we have a full 11 guys on the field who are prepared to execute that game plan.”
The St. Louis native should be gobbling up accolades himself.
He was nothing short of dominant during the recent string, scoring three goals in the final two games of the road trip.
After a stutter start to the year — Heinemann scored only once in the Spring Season — he’s connected six times and added four assists in the fall.
His next goal will set a Fury record for goals in a season (Brazilian striker Oliver collected seven goals last season).
Records aside, numbers aside, Heinemann’s success goes deeper.
Simply, he’s altered his game.
“One of the things he addressed was that sometimes in his subconscious, he maybe had a little bit of selfishness in his game,” said Dos Santos this week. “He was a little bit a lone striker but didn’t know how to fully connect with the others … He grew a lot on the defensive side and understands very well our model and how we want to play.
“He was humble enough to recognize there were things in his game that needed improvement,” Dos Santos continued. “He was open to coaching and open to learning. He was open to understand more and more his role on the team... He had good competition (at his position). There were a lot of factors to him getting better, but the most important one was how humble he was to want to change things in his game to make him better, and that’s part of being a quality player.”
Another quality outing Sunday would help the cause as the Fury close in on a playoff spot. Ottawa is five points up on Minnesota United FC. Edmonton is nine back and must win Sunday for any hope of catching Ottawa. All three clubs have five games remaining.
In combined standings, the Fury hold a two-point edge on both New York and Minnesota.
And while in hockey, players scream that they never scoreboard-watch, it isn’t the same here.
“I think that anybody who tells you they don’t is telling you lies,” said Ryan with a wink. “We’ve got an opportunity to get a trophy, so you’d be silly not to be looking over your shoulder to see how everyone else is doing.”By Zac Bertschy
PC adventure games are a lot like Westerns; in their prime, wildly popular genres that dominated their respective mediums during their era, but died out surprisingly swiftly when consumer taste shifted. Few people will argue that PC adventure games as a genre are alive and well; sure, you have episodic adventure games still being produced (like the new Sam & Max and Strong Bad games) but during the 80?s and ’90s, when it came to PC gaming, adventure games were king, and have all but vanished in the 21st century.
Some of them?like Indiana Jones and the Fate of Atlantis, Day of the Tentacle and King?s Quest VI, remain some of the best games of all time. But then a lot of them are really, really bad, and some of these terrible games cost a hell of a lot of money to make. Here?s a look at 10 of the worst offenders.
10) The Dig
Lucasarts released The Dig back in 1995 to the delighted anticipatory drooling of nerds across the country. The plot was pretty basic: a giant asteroid is threatening Earth, so NASA sends up a crack team of astronauts to blow it up. During the mission, the astronauts accidentally activate an alien spaceship that takes them to another world. With a lead character voiced by Robert Patrick and promising stellar character animation and amazing CG, fans expected The Dig to be one of the best adventure games ever made.
Instead, it?s a humorless, incredibly dull?adventure? where you wander around a lifeless monochrome planet solving boring puzzles (Assemble a turtle skeleton! Change shapes on a stick!) and trying to figure a way back home. The tone of the game is supposed to be?haunting?, since it?s a dead and abandoned alien world and all, but instead it?s kind of like hanging out in a new age shop where you?re waiting for the manager to come back from lunch and tell you about his prayer crystals but you don?t know when that?s going to happen so you just sit in a chair and listen to the soothing music for a few hours while assembling a plastic slide puzzle with a picture of Pac-Man on it. The game also advertised having dialogue written by legendary sci-fi author Orson Scott Card, which sounds great until you realize that in order to make this a selling point, the characters never, ever shut up and go on at length about every uninteresting thing they see. Simply picking up a metal rod will subject you to a minute-long monologue about the possibilities inherent in said metal rod. The Dig had so much potential but wound up being one of the most boring adventures ever.
9) Escape From Monkey Island
The first three Monkey Island games are, inarguably, three of the funniest and most entertaining adventure games ever made. Hilarious dialogue, clever puzzles, great characters; they had it all. So how do you go about totally fucking up a great franchise? Why, force it into 3D and ditch the people who wrote the previous games!
Escape From Monkey Island is a pretty dismal effort. The puzzles are unimaginative and the writing stinks. Gone are the clever interactions and dry wit; this time they went for Dreamworks Animation-style pop culture references in lieu of actual jokes, so there are locations like?Starbuccaneers?. Get it? They?re motherfucking pirates, so they DRINK COFFEE AT A PLACE CALLED STARBUCCANEERS. Fucking hilarious, right?
The worst part about Escape from Monkey Island, however, is the ending; you?re forced to play an incredibly unfunny, frustrating and badly designed fighting game called?Monkey Kombat.” See, the Monkey Island series has a history of?insult swordfighting?, wherein you duel another pirate by trading quips. They did away with that and instead paired a Mortal Kombat parody with that go-to comedy animal that makes everything instantly side-splitting: monkeys. Yes, it?s as horrible as it sounds. Escape From Monkey Island was not only an unnecessary sequel, it killed the franchise for good by sucking so badly. Fuck this game.
8) Quest for Glory 3: Wages of War
The Quest For Glory series was an odd duck. It was an attempt at marrying classic adventure gameplay with hardcore roleplaying elements, including character stats and levels, skills, and combat. The first game in the series wasn?t bad, but the two genres seemed an odd fit. Still, it was amusing enough. At the end of the second game?wherein the villain, Ad Avis, escapes?the on-screen text announces that he?ll appear in the next game, suggesting a serial storyline. Turns out they decided to scrap that for the third game and instead send you to the land of furries.
That?s right. Furries. Quest For Glory III was inserted at the last minute into the franchise, and it was obviously designed by furries because you spend the entire fucking game interacting with creepy?Liontaurs? (which is a lion with the body of a horse and the penis of a horse in case your brain has not yet been invaded by the furry menace) who are warring against a tribe of Leopardtaurs (which is a leopard with the body of a horse and.. fuck it). Not only is the story fairly uninspired, the whole game feels really slapped together; it?s shorter than the others, and there?s a bug that prevents you from getting a perfect score. It also ditches the series? trademark humor and instead takes everything really goddamn seriously, which compounds the awfulness of the furry element. It?s like reading a really shitty furry webcomic that considers itself a straight-faced epic rather than something to be rightly mocked. That there likely exists lion-on-leopard furry porn based on this game is enough to damn it to this list.
7) The Adventures of Willy Beamish
Willy Beamish was advertised as the adventure game equivalent of a Saturday morning cartoon; colorful graphics, revolutionary character animation for a PC game, and a story right out of the children?s programming playbook, but with humor aimed at an adult audience. Instead, Willy Beamish turned out to be a shockingly ugly, badly-animated, unfunny mess.
Whoever they hired to do the art design on this game should be shot. The background art looks like it was rejected from a 1970s Christian cartoon, with weird, fucked up character design that never, ever looks good. They also used some kind of strange system to do the animation, which was being advertised as?hand-drawn,” meaning the artists drew each frame individually and animated them by hand. The result is that no two frames ever seem to look alike; the characters are constantly off-model, their faces and bodies distorting strangely even in the most basic of movement. It?s like watching a cartoon put together by retarded children.
The story isn?t anything to write home about. There?s an evil babysitter, a frog-jumping contest and ultimately you?re doing battle with an evil capitalist, who happens to be a lame (and now extremely dated) parody of Leona Helmsley. But the real kick in the balls is the game?s conclusion; it wraps up at the?Nintari Championships.” Throughout the game you have access to Willy?s Nintari console, which you have to?practice? at for the championships, and by?practice? they mean you watch the same cutscene of Willy playing a platformer for about 30 seconds. If you don?t do this shit over and over again?at least once or twice per?day? in the game?s timeline?you lose the championship and get a shitty ending. They seriously included a game mechanic where if you don?t watch a cutscene of SOMEONE ELSE PLAYING A VIDEO GAME then you lose. What the fuck is that shit?
6) The Beast Within: A Gabriel Knight Mystery
The first Gabriel Knight game was indisputably awesome. It had great 2D graphics, excellent characters, a sincerely creepy story and Tim Curry voicing the lead character. So when it was announced that the sequel, The Beast Within, would be about werewolves in Germany and use the same odious?look, real people!? interactive movie style that the adventure game industry had been collectively orgasming over for a few years, fans were worried.
But that didn?t stop Sierra! The second Gabriel Knight game has all the same problems most other?interactive movies? do?the acting is really bad and the sets look cheap. To make matters worse, all the charm of the original?which focused on Voodoo legends in New Orleans, a unique subject matter to be sure?is gone in this one, focusing instead on a boring werewolf legend that basically amounts to?Oh my god, it?s YOU! YOU?RE the werewolf!? You also get stuck playing as Gabriel?s assistant Grace Nakamura for a few chapters, who in the first game was pleasantly sarcastic but in this one comes across as a bitter, shrill bitch to everyone she talks to. There isn?t much?mystery? here, really, and the conclusion feels rushed. This game basically wasted most of the promise of the original.
—-
5) Freddy Pharkas: Frontier Pharmacist
Everyone knows Al Lowe isn?t funny. He?s managed to make about a dozen games, all while pretending to be funny and appealing to people with shitty senses of humor. While he?s best known for his work churning out low-grade?bawdy? comedies in the Leisure Suit Larry franchise (and his ill-fated attempt at creating a family adventure game, the loathsome Torin?s Passage), he also tried his hand at a western genre parody, Freddy Pharkas: Frontier Pharmacist. It?s like Blazing Saddles, if Blazing Saddles were a hideous steaming pile of unfunny bullshit. In fact, part of the reason this game is so pathetic is that it?s trying really, really hard to be Blazing Saddles: The Game and yet can?t even manage to come anywhere near being as funny as even a single minute of Blazing Saddles. It?s like watching Uwe Boll try to make a Holocaust movie because he idolizes Steven Spielberg.
The premise is basic: good guy comes to troubled western boom town as a pharmacist and as the villains encroach he has to dredge up his violent past to take them down. It?s a parody (or at least it?s billed as one) written by a hack so there are a lot of obvious jokes, mostly sexual, sometimes racist (he has an Indian sidekick who?s INDIAN! You know, like Apu! Bet you didn?t see that one coming! Are you holding your motherfucking sides yet because this thing only gets more gut-busting as the gags roll on!). The graphics are fucking hideous; they were going for this hyper-stylized look but everything just looks ugly and unappealing.
4) Martian Memorandum
The second in the now-forgotten Tex Murphy franchise, Martian Memorandum was released between Mean Streets and the only Tex Murphy game anyone ever gave a shit about, Under A Killing Moon, which has the dubious honor of being one of the first?interactive movie? style adventure games released. That progression in technology is illustrated by this game, which is sort of an awkward halfway point between illustrated graphics and motion-captured actors.
The game itself isn?t anything special?a wordy, dull sci-fi noir mash-up that tries way, way too hard for Raymond Chandler-esque prose and winds up just being verbose and lame. But it?s the execution that kills this game?almost everything about it is flawed. From the badly-acted little video clips and scratchy PC speaker voiceover work, it?s a clear attempt to shoehorn in live actors at a time when that gimmick was selling games and getting noticed by the gaming press but the technology just wasn?t capable of delivering solid results. The live-action clips are just embarrassing; there?s a French guy named?Jocques Sparrow? (hey, I wonder if they could sue Disney for stealing that name!) who answers his door in a beret and yells?MON DIEU, WHAT ZEE?ELL ARE YOU DOING EERE?!? in the worst fake French accent ever. There?s even a sex scene with a secretary who immediately propositions you after you give her her lost earring back. The scene is hilariously bad and even has the character wearing cheesy early ’90s lingerie.
3) Every Single Leisure Suit Larry Game Ever
The very first Leisure Suit Larry game came out in 1987, and it wasn?t funny at all or even a very good adventure game, but people bought it because it might have tits in it. It doesn?t, but people bought it because it might. They were let down, but they couldn?t tell anyone they?d bought it and they probably jerked off to the hot tub scene at the end anyway in spite of there being no real nudity save for a crude 8-bit drawing of a chick in a Jacuzzi.
They then made six sequels, only one of which has tits in it?the seventh game, Love for Sail, but even then it?s an?easter eg.”. Then they made a 3D version, the eighth game in series, Magna Cum Laude, which has a surplus of tits, but remains painfully unfunny, recycling jokes from crappy college comedies and relying on pointless minigames to progress.
So what we have here is probably the most successful adventure game series of all time?one of the few that continues to this day and even has a next-gen sequel coming out?predicated on the notion that people will sit through a giant load of intensely unfunny fart and boner jokes if at the end of it all they?ll get to see some cartoon boobs. That says something about us as a nation. As a people. And it’s not good.
2) King?s Quest VII: The Princeless Bride
In a bold attempt to alienate the millions of people who played the massively successful King?s Quest series over the years, for the seventh ambitious installment, series creator Roberta Williams decided to try her best to turn the game into an interactive Disney Princess movie using a flawed and shitty?hand-drawn? animation technique, similar to the one used in Willy Beamish. The result is a dreadfully amateurish, downright embarrassing game that should be forgotten by time.
God damn this game fucking sucked. Not only was it an obvious rip off of the Disney formula?the fucking game opens with a princess singing a god damn musical number for fuck?s sake? but they just didn?t have the technology down to do decent 2-dimensional animation in a computer game yet. All the same problems that floated to the surface in Willy Beamish are here?ugly-ass malformed characters that go off-model in every other frame, except this time the graphics were at a much higher resolution so every tiny mistake in the animation was visible. The in-game animated cut-scenes are a motherfucking travesty; they?re so crude and badly-done they may as well have been animated in MSPaint.
In spite of all that, the worst thing about King?s Quest VII is that it took the series from being appealing to nearly all demographics?kids and adults, men and women?straight into girly-girl land. The box art looked like a direct-to-video Sleeping Beauty knockoff, and the protagonist was a blonde princess (although for a big chunk of the game you?re playing her mom, so you can choose between old woman and fairytale princess, awesome!) with forest animal friends and all that shit. Any man or self-respecting woman who played through the vastly superior King?s Quest VI would be mortified to be caught buying?let alone playing?this bullshit.
1) Phantasmagoria
Phantasmagoria was probably the most hyped and anticipated adventure game of all time. Not only was it to be revolutionary?one of the first big-budget, competently-made and lavish adventure games ever, with real actors and groundbreaking interactive movie technology?it was going to be blisteringly mature, a horror story that didn?t pull punches. In fact, the game has a rape scene, wherein Adrienne?the protagonist?is assaulted by her crazy husband. It was controversy fodder for the national media.
Turns out most of the game is you clicking randomly around a badly-rendered version of Disney?s Haunted Mansion ride while controlling a woman who owns approximately one orange long-sleeved shirt, one pair of black jeans and one pair of white Keds that she wears every single fucking day. The plot is just a knockoff of The Shining, where a couple moves in to a remote estate and the husband goes crazy and tries to kill his family, except here it?s ham-fistedly explained at the end that he was possessed by a really fucking badly designed and poorly rendered?demon? who you then have to fight off before leaving the house, traumatized, never again to return. Hell, they scrapped this entire story even in the sequel, Phantasmagoria 2: A Puzzle of Flesh which tried so god damn hard to be edgy and?adult? it basically became self-parody.
The production values in Phantasmagoria are laughable. It looks absolutely terrible and if the novelty of seeing moving pictures on your PC didn?t make gamers in 1995 say?GADZOOKS, REVOLUTIONARY!? then they might?ve seen what a shit game this was. This thing is so obsessed with showing you video clips that there?s a 15-second cutscene that plays every time you try to open a door that?s locked, which happens all the damn time for the first half of the game. Even more hilarious are the death scenes; especially the ending, where if you don?t do just the right thing at the right time Adrienne?s head gets cleaved by a swinging axe, which looks like they filled a pumpkin with Funblood, stuck a blonde wig on it and blew it up.
Phantasmagoria is sort of the ultimate failed promise; they wanted you to think it was going to be this mind-blowing horror adventure that would test your limits, but it?s basically a badly-shot, poorly-written direct-to-video movie where before you get to see the amateurish action sequences you first have to figure out how to find the key that opens the attic. Which is fucking lame.Marijuana has been stereotypically associated with a younger crowd. But as the number of our once youthful (and now aging) Baby Boomers reaches retirement age and beyond, the perception of marijuana as a youthful pastime is beginning to evolve. According to a recent survey conduced by the Substance Abuse and Mental Health Services Administration, illicit drug use increased from 2.7 to 6.3 percent between 2002 and 2011 among adults ranging in age from 50 to 59 years old and born between 1946-1964.
As these Baby Boomers age, they may be experiencing a number of crippling health problems, leading them to increasingly turn to prescription drugs for relief. However, this “solution” has created an even bigger and deadlier problem: overmedication of the elderly (http://well.blogs.nytimes.com/2012/04/16/too-many-pills-for-aging-patients/). Regularly taking fistfuls of prescription and over-the-counter drugs to relieve pain and other ailments has potentially put this generation at risk for serious, or even fatal side effects, due to toxic drug interactions.
As a result, cannabis has emerged as a possible alternative. Cannabis is an all-natural treatment known for relieving migraines, arthritis, chronic pain, as well as spasticity associated with Multiple Sclerosis–ailments that commonly afflict older generations. Medical marijuana can help relieve the symptoms of a variety of illnesses without some of the negative side effects of many modern drugs.
Senior citizens are more recently relying on the positive effects of cannabis to lead pain-free and productive lives. In regards to an older body’s experience with aches and pains, cannabis helps loosen stiff muscles in chronic pains, improves breathing in chronic obstructive pulmonary disease patients, and acts as a lubricant for surgery-induced injuries. For those looking to lead productive and active lives, medical marijuana is relaxing in practice being less of a hassle to deal with than a medication schedule. While other prescriptions instigate temporary impairments, like slurring or dizziness, cannabis lollipops allow users to be clear and functional http://www.thenation.com/slideshow/162947/slide-show-medical-marijuana-and-senior-citizens.
New research on cannabinoids and cancer (http://www.sfgate.com/health/article/Pot-compound-seen-as-tool-against-cancer-3875562.php) was recently discovered by two San Francisco scientists at California Pacific Medical Center. Cannabidiol is the compound that has been found to stop the metastasis of aggressive cancers (in animal test subjects), and has the ability to create positive results for human patients with cancer. With further research, this could mean an even brighter and more comfortable future for our seniors.The office of Rep. Devin Nunes (R-CA) now concedes that the House Intelligence Committee chair is not sure that the intelligence community ever incidentally collected communications from President Donald Trump or members of his transition team.
“He said he’ll have to get all the documents he requested from the [intelligence community] about this before he knows for sure,” a Nunes spokesperson told ABC News on Thursday.
This lack of certainty did not stop Nunes from holding two press conferences Wednesday and briefing the White House on the “dozens” of intelligence community reports he said showed U.S. intelligence agencies “incidentally collected information about U.S. citizens involved in the Trump transition,” independent of the FBI’s investigation into ties between Trump associates and Russian officials.
In those briefings, Nunes told reporters that Trump’s own communications were caught up in the reports, as were those of individuals who “currently work at the White House for Mr. Trump.”
Though he provided limited details, the California lawmaker said the information was obtained legally through Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court (FISA) warrants.
Nunes said he was concerned that U.S. citizens’ identities had been “inappropriately unmasked,” although Rep. Adam Schiff (D-CA), the ranking member on the House Intelligence Committee, took issue with that contention.
“Based on what the chairman told me, the names were masked apart from a single name which wasn’t necessarily anyone connected with the Trump Organization,” Schiff said. “The concern the chair raised with me was that the names that were masked he believed were associated with the President or his associates.”New $11,000 reward offered to help solve 1982 cold case murder Copyright by WIVB - All rights reserved Video
LANCASTER, N.Y. (WIVB) - Nearly three and a half decades after 18-year-old James Adamski was murdered while walking home from a Halloween party at a bar in Depew, investigators are offering new incentives for someone to come forward with information that can bring his killer or killers to justice.
Crime Stoppers is offering a $1,000 reward and the Lancaster Police Department is offering $10,000 for information that leads to the indictment and conviction of whoever was responsible for Adamski's death.
Adamski was last seen in the early morning hours of October 31, 1982, walking home on Transit Road after leaving a Halloween party at the old 5&23 bar. He was wearing what's described as an "American Gigolo" costume and had been drinking heavily with the other party-goers at the bar.
When he had not returned home by later that morning, his family became alarmed and alerted police. A large search was launched, but no sign of Adamski was found near his home, the bar, or where he was last seen alive, walking on Transit Road between Broadway and Como Park Blvd.
Then, the day after Christmas, 1982, Adamski's body was found in an old rail bed off Ransom Road in Lancaster by rabbit hunters. Adamski had been buried in a shallow grave, covered with twigs and leaves.
His cause of death was ruled to be head trauma. Police say they have not determined the murder weapon.
But, they've never given up hope that the case would be solved. "There's definitely someone out there that knows the facts of this," said Lancaster Police Detective Lt. Jim Robinson during a news conference to announce the reward Thursday morning.
"We speak for the dead and we can't forget those who are brutally terrorized and murdered like this poor young man back in 1982," said Erie County District Attorney John Flynn. "Whatever help the public can give, whatever information may be out there, someone may know something. Someone may have seen something."
"There's no statute of limitations on murder," Flynn added.
Last year, 34 years after Adamski's murder, Lancaster Police began looking into the case again. They reinterviewed everyone they could track down and retested all of the evidence using the latest forensics technology.
"It's extremely difficult," Robinson said, explaining that no one who worked the case back in the 80s is still on the force there today. "The case history is several boxes big of notes, photos, professional documents, so you have to make yourself quite aware of everything."
Now, with new perspective on the case, Lancaster Police and Crime Stoppers are hoping a large monetary reward will get someone give them the information they need to finally solve the case. "I think in today's world, it's all about the money sometimes. People will come forward," said Kevin Hoffman, Crime Stoppers Buffalo chairman.
"People who were at the bar who may not even think they know something, probably do know something," Flynn said.
Anyone who can help investigators is urged to call Crime Stoppers at (716) 867-6161 or email the information to info@crimestoppersbuffalo.com
Tips can also be submitted through the Crime Stoppers Buffalo website: www.crimestoppersbuffalo.comShare. Tony Scott's action drama returning to theaters early next year. Tony Scott's action drama returning to theaters early next year.
After much speculation, Paramount Pictures has confirmed that it will be releasing Tony Scott's 1986 aerial classic Top Gun for a six-day 3D engagement in select IMAX theaters beginning February 8, 2013.
Here's the official statement on the conversion process: "Top Gun was re-mastered for the big screen from high-resolution original negative scans and painstakingly converted to 3D by Legend3D under the supervision of the film’s director, Tony Scott. Rendered in 3D, the film’s complex, long shots reveal extraordinary depth and clarity, allowing viewers to explore every detail of the action."
Additionally, there will be a 3D and 2D Blu-ray release featuring a six-part documentary on the making of the movie, a behind-the-scenes featurette, interviews with star Tom Cruise, commentary by producer Jerry Bruckheimer, the late Tony Scott, co-screenwriter Jack Epps, Jr. and more.
Both disc sets hit the shelves on February 19, 2013.
Max Nicholson is a writer for IGN, and he desperately seeks your approval. Show him some love by following @Max_N |
high enough at specific vibration frequencies to generate these tiny motions. Now that we understand how it happened, we have implemented changes to the test profile to prevent it from happening again,” explained Feinberg.
“We have learned valuable lessons that will be applied to the final pre-launch tests of Webb at the observatory level once it is fully assembled in 2018. Fortunately, by learning these lessons early, we’ve been able to add diagnostic tests that let us show how the ground vibration test itself is more severe than the launch vibration environment in a way that can give us confidence that the launch itself will be fully successful.”
The next step is to resume and complete shaking the telescope in the other two axis, or “two directions to show that it can withstand vibrations in all three dimensions.”
“This was a great team effort between the NASA Goddard team, Northrop Grumman, Orbital ATK, Ball Aerospace, the European Space Agency, and Arianespace,” Feinberg said. “We can now proceed with the rest of the planned tests of the telescope and instruments.”
NASA’s James Webb Space Telescope is the most powerful space telescope ever built and is the scientific successor to the phenomenally successful Hubble Space Telescope (HST). The mammoth 6.5 meter diameter primary mirror has enough light gathering capability to scan back over 13.5 billion years and see the formation of the first stars and galaxies in the early universe.
The Webb telescope will launch on an ESA Ariane V booster from the Guiana Space Center in Kourou, French Guiana in 2018.
But Webb and its 18 segment “golden” primary mirror have to be carefully folded up to fit inside the nosecone of the Ariane V booster.
“Due to its immense size, Webb has to be folded-up for launch and then unfolded in space. Prior generations of telescopes relied on rigid, non-moving structures for their stability. Because our mirror is larger than the rocket fairing we needed structures folded for launch and moved once we’re out of Earth’s atmosphere. Webb is the first time we’re building for both stability and mobility.” Feinberg said.
“This means that JWST testing is very unique, complex, and challenging.”
The environmental testing is being done at Goddard before shipping the huge structure to NASA’s Johnson Space Center in February 2017 for further ultra low temperature testing in the cryovac thermal vacuum chamber.
The 6.5 meter diameter ‘golden’ primary mirror is comprised of 18 hexagonal segments – looking honeycomb-like in appearance.
And it’s just mesmerizing to gaze at – as I had the opportunity to do on a few occasions at Goddard this past year – standing vertically in November and seated horizontally in May.
Each of the 18 hexagonal-shaped primary mirror segments measures just over 4.2 feet (1.3 meters) across and weighs approximately 88 pounds (40 kilograms). They are made of beryllium, gold coated and about the size of a coffee table.
The Webb Telescope is a joint international collaborative project between NASA, the European Space Agency (ESA) and the Canadian Space Agency (CSA).
Webb is designed to look at the first light of the Universe and will be able to peer back in time to when the first stars and first galaxies were forming. It will also study the history of our universe and the formation of our solar system as well as other solar systems and exoplanets, some of which may be capable of supporting life on planets similar to Earth.
Watch this space for my ongoing reports on JWST mirrors, science, construction and testing.
Stay tuned here for Ken’s continuing Earth and Planetary science and human spaceflight news.
Ken KremerMay not be for everyone, but still a great system from Nintendo
My alliances to video game companies have changed over the years. I was die-hard Nintendo during the NES years. I defected to Sega when I bought my Genesis and swore allegiance to Sony when I got a PS1 over the Saturn. I stuck with Sony until the 360 came out, and was all about Microsoft. I do end up getting every system, but have my preferred ones of each generation. The thing is, since the NES, Nintendo has always ranked to lowest to me. I usually get their systems last and Nintendo libraries have the lowest number of titles. I guess as I grew up, I preferred more mature games and Nintendo has always been more family and kid friendly than their competitors. When the Wii was introduced, I derided it as a gimmicky system that, for a player like me, was more of a novelty. As I saw the popularity grow for the Wii, I became even more frustrated. Many of the titles were consider “shovel ware”, the hardware was pretty much an upgraded GameCube, and people who used to belittle people like me for playing video games were suddenly calling themselves gamers. When I did purchase a Wii, even though it didn’t really prove my opinions of it to be completely without merit, I was able to see past them and see that the Wii did have something to offer to me, a hardened video game veteran. Compared to its competition, the Wii is lacking in raw power. This would explain why many games on the 360 or PS3 weren’t offered for the Wii or had to be watered down for the hardware to handle it. Luckily Nintendo knows how to make fun to play games without the need for cutting edge hardware. On the flip side, Nintendo has a checkered history with 3rd party developers. The games that sell are usually Nintendo produced titles and not ones from other publishers. The Wii will not disappoint a true Nintendo fan or casual gamer, but many hardcore gamers may see it as more of a toy than game system. I maybe hardcore, but I also enjoy many types of games and still love playing my older systems, so I still can find games on the Wii that I will enjoy. The Wii Remote is what initially separated it from the offerings of Sony and Microsoft. Though eventually, they would come out with their own versions of motion control, which essentially took that advantage away. One thing about Nintendo is that many innovations, especially with game controllers, were pioneered by them. Others will adopt and improve on them, but Nintendo is the one who done it first. As a gamer that tends to play for hours on end, the motion controls make this almost impossible without causing injury or strain without regular breaks. Even playing a motion game for 30 mins can wear out most people. Some games offer options to use more traditional controllers, which helps. Some of the more game play intensive games do limit the use of motion controls to specific parts, so you aren’t flailing around all the time. The controls are pretty precise and easy to use. The Wii managed to win me over despite my prejudices. It may not be a true “hard core” gaming machine, but it really wasn’t designed for that. It catered to the casual and newer gamers and not so much to us grizzled veterans of many console wars. It may not be my most played system I own or have the biggest library, but the Wii will always have a spot in my collection.Breaking News Emails Get breaking news alerts and special reports. The news and stories that matter, delivered weekday mornings.
Sep. 25, 2014, 1:22 PM GMT / Updated Sep. 25, 2014, 1:22 PM GMT
ISIS militants stoned a couple to death in an Iraqi town as a crowd watched powerless to stop the brutal attack, according to a witness. "It is a terrible scene I wish I did not remember," a civil servant who said he was present told NBC News on Thursday. The pair — who were aged in their 30s — had been convicted of adultery in an ISIS court. They were then led out in front of a crowd of some 200 residents in Ar Rutbah in western Anbar province, who stood by as eight fighters carried out the execution. “They brought the man and the woman, they tied their hands and covered their faces, and started to stone them," the witness added, speaking on the condition of anonymity because he feared for his safety. NBC News could not independently confirm the account.
The executioners chose stones "smaller than a baseball" in order to prolong the couple's death, the witness said. The couple screamed in agony for much of the 15 minutes it took them to die, he added. “What ISIS did is exactly what had been mentioned in the Quran — to punish married people who commit adultery. But look, we are in the 21st century, and those insurgents would like to take us back in time. Who knows, maybe they will issue new laws in future, like it is not allowed to drive a car, and we have to use camels instead." Word of the incident, which occurred on Sept. 15, emerged as a U.S.-led coalition pressed on with airstrikes targeting ISIS sites, mainly in Iraq but also neighboring Syria.
The Sunni militants conquered Ar Rutbah on June 22. “ISIS fighters are supported by some people in my town. I have to admit that the town is more secure than before when it was under the control of Iraqi security forces, because they pursued sectarian goals,” the witness added. ISIS has drawn strength from Iraq’s large and frustrated Sunni minority, which has suffered under Iraq’s Shiite-dominated government and its sometimes brutal security forces.
- F. Brinley BrutonA woman was killed and a teenager was injured Saturday afternoon in a double shooting in Dorchester.Watch the reportShots rang out on Washington Street just before 2:30 p.m., forcing people to duck for cover."I (want to) say there were four, five, six shots," a witness who didn't want to be identified, said. "I was in the store getting ready to come out. Actually some kids ran into the store to try and get away from the shots, I guess."The witness said she waited a few seconds before going outside to see what was happening, and found a woman lying on the ground."I went up to her and said, 'Are you OK?'" she said. "I shook her. She (kind of) looked but her eyes were wandering around like she couldn't focus."Police said a second victim, a teenager, had non-life-threatening injuries.The woman was shot in the chest and was taken to a hospital, where she died. Boston police Commissioner William Evans said they were investigating reports that the teenager, not the woman, was the intended target.
A woman was killed and a teenager was injured Saturday afternoon in a double shooting in Dorchester.
Watch the report
Advertisement Related Content Teen taken to hospital after being shot in Boston
Shots rang out on Washington Street just before 2:30 p.m., forcing people to duck for cover.
"I (want to) say there were four, five, six shots," a witness who didn't want to be identified, said. "I was in the store getting ready to come out. Actually some kids ran into the store to try and get away from the shots, I guess."
The witness said she waited a few seconds before going outside to see what was happening, and found a woman lying on the ground.
"I went up to her and said, 'Are you OK?'" she said. "I shook her. She (kind of) looked but her eyes were wandering around like she couldn't focus."
Police said a second victim, a teenager, had non-life-threatening injuries.
The woman was shot in the chest and was taken to a hospital, where she died.
Boston police Commissioner William Evans said they were investigating reports that the teenager, not the woman, was the intended target.
AlertMeCLOSE Ford is going to import the EcoSport from India. It will be the brand's smallest SUV vehicle and DJ Khaled was on hand to unveil the vehicle in advance of the Los Angeles Auto Show. Robert Hanashiro, USA TODAY
The Ford EcoSport SUV is a subcompact that will be made in India and imported into the U.S. (Photo11: Ford)
HOLLYWOOD — Ford revealed a new, small addition to its SUV lineup here Monday, leading up to the Los Angeles Show. And the introduction came with a big surprise.
In what may be a first among Detroit's Big 3 automakers, EcoSport is going to be made in India and imported into the U.S.
General Motors recently started importing the Buick Envision SUV from China, but Ford is rare in choosing to import EcoSport — what will become its smallest crossover — from Chennai, India, when it goes on sale in 2018.
Ford has come under attack in recent months from President-elect Donald Trump for moving production of small cars from the U.S. to Mexico. All other major automakers also have expanded and built new plants in Mexico. EcoSport is also made in Brazil.
"We build EcoSport in six locations around the globe. We sell it in 100 markets, and so, just like we make Explorers and export from here into other global markets, we are going to export EcoSport from Asia Pacific, and we are going to sell it here in the U.S," said Michael O'Brien, Ford marketing manager for SUVs.
Ford has made the EcoSport in India since 2013. The EcoSport also is assembled in Brazil, Thailand and Russia and will be made in Romania starting in autumn 2017. When Ford introduced the Transit Connect small delivery vehicle into the U.S., it was imported from Turkey.
"We are a global company, we have a logistics operation shipping Explorers, F-Series and Escapes all over the planet," O'Brien said. "We know how to do it."
Ford is launching the subcompact EcoSport at a time when sales of small SUVs are exploding. U.S. sales of compact SUVs topped 276,000 in 2015. Ford predicts that number will double over the next five years, to more than 550,000.
Some would argue that Ford is late to the subcompact SUV game. EcoSport will compete with vehicles such as the Chevrolet Trax, Fiat 500X, Honda HR-V, Jeep Renegade, Mazda CX-3 and Nissan Juke.
"I think our view is that while (the) segment has grown significantly, there is lots more growth coming in 2020. We love our position.... We think our timing is going to be just great," O'Brien said.
Ford says it sells more SUVs and crossovers than any automaker. It has sold more than 12.5 million SUVs globally over the past 25 years. Since 2003, Ford has sold 1.7 million EcoSports.
In the U.S., Ford is aiming the EcoSport at two main consumer groups — Millennials and empty nesters. That's why Ford chose to reveal the EcoSport right off the Hollywood Walk of Fame at an event headlined hip-hop producer and Snapchat king DJ Khaled titled "Go Small, Live Big."
Khaled is an American record producer and radio personality known for short, esoteric speeches on Snapchat. Snapchat is a social media service that sends a photo or video to someone that lasts only up to 10 seconds before it disappears.
"He's the king of Snapchat.... He gets about 3 to 4 million views per day from his content," said Chantel Lenard, executive director of U.S. marketing. "So he is very well known in that space, and we think it connects well with the millennial audience."
The styling of the EcoSport reflects that of the Ford Escape, but in a smaller, bolder and more athletic package. It will be powered by a 1.0-liter, three-cylinder turbocharged EcoBoost engine with front-wheel drive, or an optional 2.0-liter, four-cylinder engine with all-wheel drive. Ford did not release information on horsepower, fuel economy or pricing.
The EcoSport will be sold in four versions, starting with the S, moving up to the SE, then the SES and finally, the titanium.
The 2018 Ford EcoSport Titanium will come equipped with a 10-speaker, 675-watt sound system developed by B&O Play, a Harman brand. Ford says Harman's acoustic engineers spent hundreds of hours perfecting the in-vehicle music experience.
The EcoSport also will have optional HD Radio technology, SiriusXM satellite radio and a dual FM radio antenna that boosts the range and clarity of FM signals.
More from the Los Angeles Auto Show:
Read or Share this story: http://usat.ly/2fUp0XACredit: Instagram
Teresa Giudice Slammed For Posting Bikini Pictures of Her Daughter
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Has Teresa Giudice gone too far? The Real Housewives of New Jersey star has been posting pictures of her daughter Gabriella on Instagram, but some fans were quick to criticize the mom of four for sharing inappropriate pictures of the 11-year-old in a bikini. NEWS: Sonja Morgan and Teresa Giudice Talk Younger Men and Prison Sex on WWHL “She’s beautiful, but I’d keep this photo private. There’s so many sickos out there,” one person commented on Instagram.
Low tides high vibes @gabriella.giudice A photo posted by Teresa Giudice (@teresagiudice) on Aug 13, 2016 at 11:11am PDT
Another user said, “Can’t you let her just be a child? She’s the only normal child you have. Don’t make her do these ridiculous poses; you can see how uncomfortable it makes her.” VIDEO: Teresa Giudice Confronts Joe Giudice About Cheating Rumors The 44-year-old and her husband Joe have four daughters — Gia, Gabriella, Milania, and Audriana, who all get represented on their mom’s social media pages.
Love my Gabriella A photo posted by Teresa Giudice (@teresagiudice) on Jun 23, 2016 at 4:08pm PDTTONY Duffy's claim to have met yowies puts him in surprisingly good company.
Former Queensland senator Bill O'Chee was one of more than a dozen people, including fellow high school students and teachers, who claimed to have seen such a creature at a Springbrook camp site in 1977.
It was, Mr O'Chee said "an immensely powerful creature" and he later told a documentary interviewer: "Basically we saw a yowie, but we didn't know what they were at the time.
"We saw a sort of hairy, ape-like thing that probably would have stood about eight feet tall," he said.
Mr Duffy says he was camped in the bush, north-east of Gympie late one night, when "a very large male approached me".
"I got a fright and so did he," he said.
The creature seemed human but larger and spoke in a language he thinks might be Latin.
"He was quickly able to learn a few words in English and we spoke for about two hours," the Kybong resident said.
"They're very intelligent."
But he says they are in danger.
"They build meagre shelters in the forest which are often destroyed by humans," he said.
"The EPA won't respond to my calls."
The next night, Mr Duffy's campsite visitor returned, this time "with his wife and daughter".
"My whole mission is to protect them and to convince people to leave them alone and not hurt them.
"In the last 12 months I have had close contact with yowies on at least seven occasions.
"These creatures must be protected and respected.
"Yowies are clearly 'the missing link' that scientists have looked for decades. I believe they are the greatest discovery in the history of natural science.
"They are very peaceful creatures and love their partners and their children dearly."
Contributed
Wolvi and Tin Can Bay also claim Yowies
THE Gympie region's most recent documented Yowie sighting is from an anonymous Wolvi resident.
He is described as a male, 40, who lived on a small rural block who reports being woken at 2.30am on September 19, 2012, by his dogs "going ballistic".
Letting his dogs out, he was confronted by "a man-like figure," heavy set and smelling "like rotten eggs." The creature reportedly ran away and the Yowie Research website reports the witness wanted to remain anonymous.
Less shy though was a woman identified as "Mrs Roy Locke" who said she and her husband saw "a four-foot hairy animal standing by the road near Kilkivan, 20km out of Murgon, just before dusk".
"It had broad shoulders and it was looking at us when we drove past.
"We didn't go back for another look and we wouldn't have told anyone about it if other recent sightings weren't reported."
She said a then councillor, a Mr Roberts, said footprints had been found in the past of the creature and there would be several corridors of bushland where a Yowie could survive."
"I'm a scientist," said the anonymous reporter of a Yowie sighting during a military training operation in 2003 at Tin Can Bay's Camp Kerr. He reported "some sort of encounter" in the dark.
The simulated enemy they thought they were stalking in the bush turned out to be elsewhere.
What you said on Facebook:
Rex Carney I heard that the Yowie lives under the Gympie pyramid.
Sandy Thiedeman I believe that might be my ex husband....
Tim Williams I didn't think I was that scary
Geraldene Walsh Neville William Hinchliffe has had a few good sightings out Sexton way
Chaz Gartrell Yes, also the tooth fairy, santa, easter bunny and god......lol
Peter Manoffleshandblood Just because you can't/haven't seen her, doesn't mean you should deny Ana
Sneak E Damo Well you never know what will make an appearance on dole day:)
Aaren Gardner No he was caught and put on display once. Upset quiet I few people that showed up for the viewing on the 1st of April
Caitlin Hinchliffe Neville William Hinchliffe better get Dean Harrison onto it!!
Kade Kent Tom Rea and I have seen one out in the bush near the Gympie pyramid, I kid you not.
Kelly Wilde Nope but did anyone else see a 6 foot roo in their backyard the other morning near Gympie high?!
Melanie Einalem Yep I did he came straight through my yardStill no Trump cabinet announcement? He was robbed!
That Alex Jones is such a brave crusader for truth -- as you know, he's at war with Facebook to protect purveyors of fake news, and he's also not going to stand by quietly while the world elites carry out their plan to replace humanity with an army of cyborgs, either. So for a guy who lives to get the truth out there, regardless of the consequences, it seems rather odd that Jones has also quietly removed videos from his website in which he called on his Marching Moron Militia to investigate for themselves whether they could see something nasty in the woodshed at the Comet Ping Pong pizzeria in Washington DC, the supposed center of Hillary Clinton and John Podesta's child sex trafficking ring, of course. Don't suppose that could have anything to do with the Alex Jones fan who showed up at Comet Ping Pong with a gun a couple weeks back, could it?
Media Matters notes that on November 27, Jones spent about a half hour of his internet creepshow ranting about "Pizzagate" and telling his audience they would "have to go investigate it for yourself," because, obviously enough, with all of the hoopla about #pizzagate out there on the internets, it was obvious that "Something’s going on. Something’s being covered up. It needs to be investigated.” Here's a sample:
Now I want to be clear. Not everybody in the WikiLeaks is involved in this. Clearly. You have to go investigate it for yourself. But I will warn you, this story that’s been the biggest thing on the internet for several weeks, Pizzagate as it’s called, is a rabbit hole that is horrifying to go down [...] Let’s go ahead and go to the report, Pizzagate Is Real. The question is: How real is it? What is it? Something’s going on. Something’s being covered up. It needs to be investigated. To just call it fake news -- these are real WikiLeaks. This is real stuff going on.
It's Alex Jones in full-on batshit crazy mode, insisting he's not exactly "accusing" anyone, then flying off into all sorts of nonsense about how the pizzeria just happens to display well-known secret codes known to all pedophiles, according to an alleged FBI document -- and if you're keeping track, this is arguably the first time Alex Jones has ever believed anything supposedly from the FBI. He insists there are "thousands and thousands and thousands" of references to the supposed sex ring in the Wikileaks trove, including maybe messages like "Oh, I'll see you at the Feast tonight, we'll have lots of blood and semen, Oh good!" You know, not that he's accusing anyone, because that would be "lawsuit city." Instead, he urged his viewers, "It's up to you to research it for yourself."
Included within the video is another video called "Pizzagate Is Real: Something Is Going On, But What?” with all the usual nonsense claiming members of the Clinton sex ring were “using a code to communicate child sex trafficking as casually as ordering a pizza.” You know, like Democrats do. Makes perfect sense, if your idea of investigative reporting is Scooby Doo (joke stoled from Wonkette alum Dave Weigel). But wait! There's more!
Jones also suggested that he himself would be “getting on a plane” to visit Comet Ping Pong. He stated: “I couldn’t sleep last night and you know, people may look into it. I may take off a week and just only research this and actually go to where these places are and stuff. In fact I’m looking at getting on a plane -- it’s just like Bohemian Grove and stuff, I can’t just say something and not see it for myself. They go to these pizza places, there’s like satanic art everywhere.” Later in the program, Jones backtracked and said that he “can’t go out there and investigate it myself. We’ve had reporters on that have been there. They say it’s really creepy because -- I don’t have the self-control to be around these type of people. So you want us to cover pizzagate, we have covered it. We are covering it. And all I know is God help us, we’re in the hands of pure evil.”
Huh! Well, we can see why that sort of thing might motivate a person who cares about "the children," doesn't have a hell of a lot of critical thinking skills, and has him a great big many gun to go on a personal reconnaissance mission to find out what was really going on at Comet ping Pong, because what sort of decent person would stand by and let "pure evil" do all that terrible stuff to the nonexistent little kids who are surely being kidnapped by the hundreds by this pedophile sex ring? Oh, sure, this would be the first missing-children case ever in which hundreds (or at least scores) of kids were abducted without any parents noticing, or police issuing Amber Alerts, but maybe that just proves how powerful the sex ring cabal was. You might remember the same problem with the "Satanic panic" of the 1980s -- somehow all those Satanists were abducting and murdering babies without a corresponding spike in actual crime reports of missing children.
In any case, after Edgar Maddison Welch went on his personal fact-finding visit to Comet Ping Pong, Jones has been removing a whole bunch of "Pizzagate" stuff from his website and from his YouTube channel, almost as if he were having second thoughts about the wisdom of promoting this particular pile of crazy. Jones fans have re-loaded copies, even while Jones has backed away from the story for some reason. Jones has even insisted that he was really not all that big on Pizzagate as a thing, posting a video in which he "claimed that he actually said there’s 'probably nothing going on there' and his lawyers reviewed his coverage and found that he’s been the'most restrained of all the coverage' in the alternative media."
Needless to say, in the new video, he explains that the whole pizzagate story was a false flag operation to make Alex Jones look bad, and then to BAN FREE SPEECH by setting him up to cover it. Those devious bastards! He even says he predicted that his enemies, who are everywhere, were “probably going to shoot that place up or something,” and just looked what happened! So now we know who the real victim is: Alex Jones, not the terrified pizza parlor employees who had a semiautomatic rifle shoved in their faces. Thank god Jones has somehow survived this latest assault on his ability to keep bringing us the TRUTH, which is out there. Very, very Out There.
[Media Matters]EgyptAir security guards differ in several respects from the undercover air marshals who travel on American airlines. The Egyptian guards are unarmed and wear an understated uniform consisting of a dark blazer and a white shirt. When called on, they help crew members deal with unruly passengers. They come from a wide variety of backgrounds and earn a moderate wage of about $400 a month.
Normally, one security officer sits in the first economy row, behind business class, and the other is at the rear of the aircraft, two members of an EgyptAir crew said. During stopovers at foreign airports, the security officers are usually responsible for searching the workers who clean the plane and checking the credentials of all crew members or employees who board. They do not monitor the baggage handlers who load the plane’s hold.
Security officials said those procedures would have applied to the EgyptAir plane during short layovers it made at two African airports — in Tunis and the Eritrean capital, Asmara — in the days before the crash. But the procedure is different in Paris because European airports do not permit EgyptAir security officials to search local cleaning workers, a source of disgruntlement among Egyptian officials who feel they are being discriminated against.
Colleagues described the security guards who died in Thursday’s crash — Walid Ouda, Mohammed Farag and Mahmoud el Sayed — as professionals who had exhibited no signs of unusual behavior. They described Mr. Farag as a lighthearted man who was often teased by friends for not having married, while Mr. Ouda cut a more taciturn figure and was polite to a fault.
Friends and relatives also presented a uniformly untroubled picture of the pilot, Capt. Mohamed Shoukair, 36, and his co-pilot, Mohamed Mamdouh Assem, 24. An EgyptAir pilot, who spoke on the condition of anonymity because he was not authorized to speak to the news media, said he had worked with both and described them as professional aviators who had not exhibited any mental or social problems. At 24 years old, Mr. Assem was the average age of many co-pilots at the airline, he said.
EgyptAir crew members have been subjected to much stricter security measures since the crash of the Russian jetliner in October, said the pilot, who described the procedures before that crash as lax. The new procedures include personal searches that have prevented crew members from smuggling cigarettes or currency, he said.We’ve seen a lot of Kinect hacks, but this one is unlike one we’ve ever seen. At the MIX11 event yesterday, Microsoft demonstrated a unique use of the Kinect motion controller. The company created a special armchair that’s is 100-percent-controlled through the use of hand motions using the Kinect’s sensors.
A video from MIX11 shows the passenger cruising on the chair,which uses omni-directional wheels. The Kinect-drivable lounge chair allows the user to drive a full vehicle as if he or she had an Xbox controller in their hand. All the features on the chair are determined by hand movement, including the chair’s recliner function, which pops out when the user moves his hand to the bottom left.
Microsoft is releasing a new Kinect PC SDK to encourage more Kinect development using different programming languages, including CSS, C#, and Visual Basics. The source code for the Kinect-powered recliner will be released by Microsoft as well as the SDK for developers.
Check out the exciting video, complete with Ska soundtrack, below.
via UbergizmoCopyright 2019 Nexstar Broadcasting, Inc. All rights reserved. This material may not be published, broadcast, rewritten, or redistributed.
LAS VEGAS - State and local officials are laying the groundwork to build a multi-billion-dollar light rail system in Las Vegas.
For two years, members of the Regional Transportation Commission of Southern Nevada have been drawing blueprints to link McCarran International Airport with the Las Vegas Strip. They're also considering connecting college campuses, hospitals and shopping centers.
But they need the state's permission to fund or implement any plans.
Sen. Mark Manendo presented Senate Bill 149 Tuesday to enable the commission to seek federal grants or ask for voters to raise local taxes to fund transportation developments.
Infrastructure plans are far from finalized. They also include makeovers like pedestrian bridges, wider sidewalks on the Strip and more stops on the short hotel monorail.
The commission has estimated it could cost as much as $26 billion altogether.WASHINGTON (Reuters) - Most Americans oppose President Barack Obama’s healthcare reform even though they strongly support most of its provisions, a Reuters/Ipsos poll showed on Sunday, with the Supreme Court set to rule within days on whether the law should stand.
Buttons reading 'Repeal Obamacare' are displayed at the American Conservative Union's annual Conservative Political Action Conference (CPAC) in Washington, February 9, 2012. REUTERS/Jonathan Ernst
Fifty-six percent of people are against the healthcare overhaul and 44 percent favor it, according to the online poll conducted from Tuesday through Saturday.
The survey results suggest that Republicans are convincing voters to reject Obama’s reform even when they like much of what is in it, such as allowing children to stay on their parents’ insurance until age 26.
Strong majorities favor most of what is in the law.
A glaring exception to the popular provisions is the “individual mandate,” which forces all U.S. residents to own health insurance.
Sixty-one percent of Americans are against the mandate, the issue at the center of the Republicans’ contention that the law is unconstitutional, while 39 percent favor it.
“That’s really the thing that has come to define the (reform) and is the thing that could potentially allow the Supreme Court to dismantle it if they decide it’s not constitutional,” Ipsos pollster Chris Jackson said.
In good news for Republicans at November’s congressional elections, 45 percent said they were more likely to vote for a member of Congress who campaigned on a platform of repealing the law, versus 26 percent who said it would make them less likely, the survey showed.
The Supreme Court is expected to rule on the 2010 healthcare reform, Obama’s signature domestic policy achievement, this week, possibly as early as Monday.
The political stakes are sky-high on an issue that has galvanized conservative opposition to the Democratic president, and how the court’s decision is framed politically could influence the outcome of the November 6 general election.
Support for the provisions of the healthcare law was strong, with a full 82 percent of survey respondents, for example, favoring banning insurance companies from denying coverage to people with pre-existing conditions.
Sixty-one percent are in favor of allowing children to stay on their parents’ insurance until age 26 and 72 percent back requiring companies with more than 50 employees to provide insurance for their employees.
PARTISAN DIVISION
Americans are strongly divided along partisan lines. Among Republicans, 86 percent oppose and 14 percent favor the law and Democrats back it by a 3-to-1 margin, 75 percent to 25 percent, the Reuters/Ipsos poll showed.
But in what could be a key indicator for the presidential contest, people who describe themselves as political independents oppose the law by 73 percent to 27 percent.
Opposition among independents has been growing. In a survey conducted in April, two weeks after the Supreme Court heard the case, 63 percent of them opposed the measure, and 37 percent favored it.
“Republicans have won the argument with independents and that’s really been the reason that we see the majority of the public opposing it,” Jackson said.
Republicans have dominated the political message on healthcare with calls to “repeal and replace” the law, condemned by conservatives as a government intrusion into private industry and the lives of private citizens. It passed in March 2010 with no Republican support in Congress.
Mitt Romney, the likely Republican presidential nominee, has promised to repeal the law if he defeats Obama, although he has not offered a plan of his own. Obama, who says he modeled the measure on a healthcare plan Romney passed as governor of Massachusetts, has defended it.
Obama critics - some from within his own party - have also questioned the president for focusing on healthcare reform early in his term instead of doing everything he could to fix the struggling U.S. economy.
Democrats back the measure as an effort to improve the lives of Americans and essential to control spiraling costs that are undermining the country’s overall economic health. Healthcare expenditures in the United States neared $2.6 trillion in 2010, over 10 times the $256 billion spent in 1980, according to the Kaiser Family Foundation.
A good portion of the opposition to the healthcare law is because Americans want more reform, not less of it.
The poll found that a large number of Americans - including about one-third of Republicans and independents who disagree with the law - oppose it because it does not go far enough to fix healthcare.
Seventy-one percent of Republican opponents reject it overall, while 29 percent feel it does not go far enough, while independent opponents are divided 67 percent to 33 percent. Among Democratic opponents, 49 percent reject it overall, and 51 percent wish the measure went further.
Protesters hold signs as several groups hold a "Kill the Bill" rally against President Barack Obama's health care legislation, on the west front of the U.S. Capitol in Washington, March 20, 2010. REUTERS/Jonathan Ernst
“If you add the people that oppose it because they think it doesn’t go far enough, you get a majority of Americans, so it doesn’t mean that healthcare reform is dead,” Jackson said.
There was party division in Americans’ view of the individual mandate. Overall, 61 percent of Americans oppose requiring all U.S. residents to own health insurance. Among Republicans, the percentage rose to 81 percent, and it was 73 percent among independents. But a majority of Democrats - 59 percent - favor the individual mandate.
The survey of 1,043 Americans was conducted from June 19-23. The precision of the Reuters/Ipsos online polls is measured using a credibility interval. In this case, the poll has a credibility interval of plus or minus 3.5 percentage points.After few pictures published presentation of the car, Italians from Alfa Romeo look |
. Use this a s a warm-up activity before writing, coloring, and scissor activities. This is a great activity to have on hand in your therapy treatment bag or to pull out while waiting at the doctor's office.
Toys and gifts to work on Motor Planning and Dyspraxia:
Looking for more ways to work on dyspraxia with your kids? These are some fun fine and gross motor activities that are fun and creative. The best thing about all of them is that they are open-ended. Use them in obstacle courses or in movement tasks to incorporate many skill areas. These are some fun ideas to save for gift ideas. Now which to get first...
set. The large size is perfect for preschoolers or children with a weak hand grasp. Work on fine motor dexterity and bilateral coordination while encouraging motor planning as the child matches colors of the nuts and bolts in this Jumbo Nuts and Bolts Set with Backpack set. The large size is perfect for preschoolers or children with a weak hand grasp.
is a powerhouse of motor planning play. Kids can copy and match big and bright cards to the pegs in this large pegboard. I love that the toy is propped up on an incline plane, allowing for an extended wrist and a tripod grasp. Matching the colors and placing the pegs into the appropriate holes of the pegboard allow for motor planning practice. This Button Mosaic Transperent Pegboard is a powerhouse of motor planning play. Kids can copy and match big and bright cards to the pegs in this large pegboard. I love that the toy is propped up on an incline plane, allowing for an extended wrist and a tripod grasp. Matching the colors and placing the pegs into the appropriate holes of the pegboard allow for motor planning practice.
allows kids to work on hand-eye coordination and motor planning as they scan for pieces, match the appropriate parts of the puzzle pieces, and attempt to work the pieces into place. Building a puzzle such as this one can be a workout for kids with hand and upper extremity weakness. A big and bright puzzle like this Puzzle-shaped Block Set allows kids to work on hand-eye coordination and motor planning as they scan for pieces, match the appropriate parts of the puzzle pieces, and attempt to work the pieces into place. Building a puzzle such as this one can be a workout for kids with hand and upper extremity weakness.
. Use the colored fish to place into the matching cups, as children work on eye-hand coordination. Using the tongs requires a greater level of motor planning. You can modify this activity by placing the cups around a room for a gross motor visual scanning and motor planning activity. Children can then follow multi-level instructions as they climb over, around, under, and through obstacles to return the fish to their matching bowls. Kids of all ages can work on motor planning and fine motor skills with this Grimm's Rainbow Bowls Shape & Color Sorting Activity. Use the colored fish to place into the matching cups, as children work on eye-hand coordination. Using the tongs requires a greater level of motor planning. You can modify this activity by placing the cups around a room for a gross motor visual scanning and motor planning activity. Children can then follow multi-level instructions as they climb over, around, under, and through obstacles to return the fish to their matching bowls.
. It is a great way to encourage whole body motor planning and multiple-step direction following. Encourage more gross motor planning with hopping, jumping, and skipping using this Crocodile Hop A Floor Mat Game. It is a great way to encourage whole body motor planning and multiple-step direction following.
as children step from stone to stone. These would make a great part of many imagination play activities as children plan out motor sequences to step, cross, hop, and jump...without even realizing they are working on motor planning tasks. Address balance and coordination with these Gonge Riverstones Gross Motor Course as children step from stone to stone. These would make a great part of many imagination play activities as children plan out motor sequences to step, cross, hop, and jump...without even realizing they are working on motor planning tasks.
. Plan out a combination of fine and gross motor obstacle courses for kids to work on motor planning skills. Introduce multiple-step direction following and motor planning with colored footprints like these Gonge Feet Markers. Plan out a combination of fine and gross motor obstacle courses for kids to work on motor planning skills.
as they practice fine motor skills, hand-eye coordination, and about balance and mathematics. For more fine motor coordination and motor planning, kids will love this Chickyboom Balance Game as they practice fine motor skills, hand-eye coordination, and about balance and mathematics.
Love it? PIN IT! And when you see that red, shiny, heavy ball...bounce it knowing that you can understand, organize, and execute a big old bounce!
Find more ideas in our
series:Due to an oversight by the ancient Greeks, there is no Muse of blogging. Denied the ability to begin with a proper Invocation To The Muse, I will compensate with some relatively boring introductions.
The name of this blog is Slate Star Codex. It is almost an anagram of my own name, Scott S Alexander. It is unfortunately missing an “n”, because anagramming is hard. I have placed an extra “n” in the header image, to restore cosmic balance.
This blog does not have a subject, but it has an ethos. That ethos might be summed up as: charity over absurdity.
Absurdity is the natural human tendency to dismiss anything you disagree with as so stupid it doesn’t even deserve consideration. In fact, you are virtuous for not considering it, maybe even heroic! You’re refusing to dignify the evil peddlers of bunkum by acknowledging them as legitimate debate partners.
Charity is the ability to override that response. To assume that if you don’t understand how someone could possibly believe something as stupid as they do, that this is more likely a failure of understanding on your part than a failure of reason on theirs.
There are many things charity is not. Charity is not a fuzzy-headed caricature-pomo attempt to say no one can ever be sure they’re right or wrong about anything. Once you understand the reasons a belief is attractive to someone, you can go ahead and reject it as soundly as you want. Nor is it an obligation to spend time researching every crazy belief that might come your way. Time is valuable, and the less of it you waste on intellectual wild goose chases, the better.
It’s more like Chesterton’s Fence. G.K. Chesterton gave the example of a fence in the middle of nowhere. A traveller comes across it, thinks “I can’t think of any reason to have a fence out here, it sure was dumb to build one” and so takes it down. She is then gored by an angry bull who was being kept on the other side of the fence.
Chesterton’s point is that “I can’t think of any reason to have a fence out here” is the worst reason to remove a fence. Someone had a reason to put a fence up here, and if you can’t even imagine what it was, it probably means there’s something you’re missing about the situation and that you’re meddling in things you don’t understand. None of this precludes the traveller who knows that this was historically a cattle farming area but is now abandoned – ie the traveller who understands what’s going on – from taking down the fence.
As with fences, so with arguments. If you have no clue how someone could believe something, and so you decide it’s stupid, you are much like Chesterton’s traveler dismissing the fence (and philosophers, like travelers, are at high risk of stumbling across bull.)
I would go further and say that even when charity is uncalled-for, it is advantageous. The most effective way to learn any subject is to try to figure out exactly why a wrong position is wrong. And sometimes even a complete disaster of a theory will have a few salvageable pearls of wisdom that can’t be found anywhere else. The rationalist forum Less Wrong teaches the idea of steelmanning, rebuilding a stupid position into the nearest intelligent position and then seeing what you can learn from it.
So this is the ethos of this blog, and we proceed, as Abraham Lincoln put it, “with malice toward none, with charity for all, with firmness in the right as God gives us to see the right.”Tom Telesco and Mike McCoy keep saying they want Philip Rivers to retire as a San Diego Charger.
That may well happen, even if Rivers follows through on his stated intention to play out the final year of his current contract and even if he doesn’t sign another contract with the team after this season.
The ominous reality for the Chargers is that there is no telling what happens with their franchise quarterback.
Despite some inside Chargers Park pressing the narrative that the Los Angeles factor is overblown, the team knows it is not.
There are numerous people in the organization dreading a move to L.A. as much as Rivers is. Everyone knows it is possible – some even believe likely – the team will move in 2016 or ’17.
The only real control the Chargers have with their quarterback is now, this offseason.
So – and this is difficult to think, let alone write – they need to trade Rivers.
If Monday night’s dinner and Tuesday’s workout in Eugene, Ore., are everything the Chargers expect, and they see in former Oregon star Marcus Mariota a possible franchise quarterback, they should do what they can to trade up and draft him.
The Chargers should get the No.2 pick from the Tennessee Titans, select Mariota, then take a running back with the No.17 pick. Start over in a big way.
Yes, the Chargers in all likelihood would keep their first round pick should they deal Rivers to Tennessee. They may, according to some around the league, have to throw in a selection in a later round. But people are really just speculating, since there is no precedent for trading a quarterback of Rivers’ stature at this juncture in his career for a draft pick(s).
It can, however, be done. It should be.
There is no way I thought I’d write this. Ever.
My fondness for Rivers the person and the player is well known. I wrote in my first column three years ago that I planned to cover every game of his career. We partnered last season on a campaign that raised $112,000 for the Ronald McDonald House. I don’t need a full hand to count the number of professional athletes I’ve known with his quality of character.
The above is pointed out for the purpose of demonstrating how serious this is. I generally don’t play around, and never when it comes to Rivers.
This is not for effect. This is best for all involved.
If Mariota has the potential to be an elite NFL quarterback – and the Tampa Bay Buccaneers are reportedly considering making him the No.1 pick over Florida State’s Jameis Winston – then moving on is the best route for the Chargers. (They have not traveled to see Winston; Mariota is their sole focus.)
They should get the QB they think is their next leader before they’re forced to find one who might not be.
Because that day could be coming.
View the Video Will Chargers go QB in draft
Can we say for sure that Rivers won’t play in L.A.? Not any more than we can say it won’t snow in Carson or Inglewood next Christmas.
So, yeah, take from that what you will.
It’s only prudent that the Chargers are exploring options. To rely on extending/re-signing Rivers or placing the franchise tag on him next year would not just be stubborn, it would be foolish.
Rivers, 33, has four or five seasons left in him. He’ll play as long as he’s making plays. But he also has seven children and plans for a life beyond football.
The Chargers know this: If they’re in Los Angeles, there is a good chance Rivers will be in Nashville.
Whether that means playing for the Titans or coaching high school football (while living near his in-laws and 90 minutes from his childhood home) depends on what other moves the Chargers make between now and then.Islamist rebels battle Syrian army near Assad heartland
AMMAN/BEIRUT – Reuters
Rebel fighters fire mortar shells at the frontline in the Jabal al-Akrad area in Syria's northwestern Latakia province, April 29, 2015. Reuters Photo
Islamist rebels and the Syrian army fought fierce battles in Latakia province overnight close to President Bashar al-Assad’s ancestral home, the army and rebels said, after weeks of insurgent gains in the country’s northwest.Rebels seeking to topple Assad have in the past sought to bring their four-year-long insurgency close to coastal areas in government-held Latakia, heartland of Assad’s minority Alawite community.An army source told state news agency SANA fighter jets hit insurgent hideouts in the northern Latakia countryside with “tens killed and wounded.” Latakia is the main port in Syria and along with the capital Damascus is one of the most important government-held areas in the country.The violence follows advances in neighboring Idlib province by the hardline Ahrar al-Sham group and Syria’s al Qaeda wing Nusra Front as well as other allied fighters.Rami Abdulrahman, who runs the Syrian Observatory for Human Rights monitoring group, said the Latakia battles started with an army offensive on April 30, backed by local militias, aimed at pushing the insurgents out of the province in order to advance on captured areas of neighbouring Idlib.The Observatory, which collects information from a network of sources on the ground, said at least five insurgents were killed and an unidentified number from the pro-government side.Two rebel sources said the fighting in Latakia was near the mountains of Jabal al-Akrad, close to some of the highest peaks in Syria including Nabi Younis that overlook Alawite villages and close to Qardaha, hometown of the Assad family.“The capture of the peaks would make the Alawite villages in our firing range,” said an Ahrar al-Sham commander based in Idlib on Skype.The Observatory’s Abdulrahman said the army wanted to secure the valley and peaks in order to advance on Jisr al-Shughour, a town in Idlib province captured by insurgents a week ago.In August 2013, Islamist rebels and foreign fighters briefly captured Alawite villages.On May 1, Syrian television said army units targeted “groups of terrorists” in the eastern and southern Idlib countryside and “eliminated a great number of them and destroyed their weapons and munitions.”Diplomats say rebels are trying to pressure the overstretched army on as many fronts as possible to spread its resources ever more thinly.Decades have passed since genetic engineering and agriculture were linked positively—in the media at least. We love the idea of a sustainable society but we detest the idea that leads to it. We talk of creating life on other planets but the lives on our own planet are suffering miserably.
Food insecurity and malnutrition are serious concerns across the globe. Over 796 million people out of a total 7.3 billion population are suffering from chronic undernourishment. And millions lose their lives due to inadequate consumption of basic nutrients. One of the major challenges before the food and agricultural industry is to develop and implement a sustainable system.
Our crops need to be genetically improved to withstand conditions like climate change, low water availability, rising soil salinity, and attacks by pathogens and insects.
We produce enough food for the entire planet. But over 800 million people still suffer from hunger. Why?
About 2.9 trillion pounds of food is lost per year. Let’s consider the “Non-GM, Conventional Potato”. Browning and bruising are common issues that lead to crop spoilage. They also affect its taste. Farmers discard these crops as they know supermarkets and other buyers won’t accept damaged crops. Other fruits and vegetables including apples and mushrooms go into waste because of their browning properties and not looking beautiful aesthetically.
If GMOs become a bigger part of our food system, we would be reducing the amount of food that goes into the waste. We would also sa ve on water and reduce greenhouse gas emissions.
GMOs’ role in the agricultural industry has been an age-old debate and we haven’t been able to make much out of it. But the masses remain unaware of what GMOs are, their applications, and their advantages and disadvantages. So let’s begin with a small introduction.
All crops are genetically modified. We have been consuming them since humans started agriculture. Moreover, here’s the extent of genetic engineering present in our lives.
GM vs Non-GM Crop
The only difference between a GM and Non-GM crop lies in the gene transfer technology used to create them. Both the methods involve changes in the DNA sequence or the order of genes. GM crops contain small and specific changes. But, the Non-GM crops contain thousands of uncharacterized genes.
The conventional breeding method involves mixing of both desirable and undesirable genes. The genes are then rearranged randomly in the genome of the offspring. Some genes are often lost in the offspring with this method of breeding. It is a long process taking up to 15 years to finally get a new variety of crop.
A genetically modified species is created using recombinant DNA technology. In other words, DNA molecules of different species are joined together and are then put into a host organism to either express a gene that doesn’t belong to the plant or to modify endogenous genes.The technology is employed to make crops drought-resistant, increase their resistance to extreme climatic conditions and towards insects and pathogens. New genetic combinations also add value to pharmaceutical, agricultural, food, and various other industrial sectors.
Take a second to realize how quickly the world is changing
What we fail to understand is that as the human population is growing, the quality of our surroundings is also changing. Upon comparing our lifestyle to that of our parents’ and grandparents’, all I see is a different form of surroundings. It is necessary to understand that we are using science to still have the things the older generations had and maybe better versions. And no it can’t be called “unnatural.”
Soil, salinity, extreme temperatures, water availability, the fertility of the land, everything that contributes to growing a crop is changing. While we are continuously updating ourselves to match today’s world, how can we leave out our crops? Do they not need an upgrade to withstand all these changes we often speak about?
Do we really have time to wait for 40 years to finally have a strain of wheat or strawberries or grapes or melons that can withstand powdery mildew, a fungal disease that affects these crops every year leading to acres of spoilage?
In the 1990s, Hawaii’s papaya industry almost collapsed as the papaya ringspot virus affected the crop population. Today, 80% of Hawaiian papaya available is genetically engineered to be ringspot virus-resistant. Until now, no organic or conventional breeding method has been identified to control the viral attack on papaya.
Herbicide-tolerant sugar beets are approved in Australia, EU, Japan, Korea, New Zealand. The products obtained from sugar beets are mainly refined sugar and molasses. The sugar produced from these GM beets is sucrose and it has the same chemical structure as the one that comes from non-GM sugar beets.
Genetic engineering reduces the time span of getting a specific trait into a crop. It means the farmers don’t have to wait for a decade or more to make their crops resistant to pathogens. Then again wait for the offsprings to have those desired traits. GM plairnts also give us higher crop yield and increased productivity to feed the ever-increasing population which in turn means more profits for the farmers too.
GM technology could help in producing crops that can combat malnutrition. People in developing countries rely on a single food crop for their entire energy intake and these often don’t meet the nutritional needs.
The Golden Rice Project is one such example. It was undertaken to reduce Vitamin A deficiency in kids, especially in poor countries. The aim of the project was to have rice enriched with β-carotene as humans can synthesize Vitamin A from it. But, Golden rice was attacked by the opposition for its taste instead of seeing it as a source of nutrition for already suffering kids.
A lot of claims made by anti-GMO organizations have little to no documentation to prove the toxic effects of GMOs on human life or on animals. Speaking of allergies, well if the crops are bred by the traditional method there could still be a possibility of it to be an allergen.
Examples often cited about GMOs causing certain allergies were a result of tests on the level of animal models. Well, if you don’t test it, how would you know? Why do we keep forgetting that only the products that have undergone several trials and phases get introduced to the general public? If a product is not working well on animal models, is it possible to introduce it to the masses? Do you think, regulatory bodies would pass off overlooking the results?
Give it a thought
If the same allergens were produced from conventional breeding, would they be going through tests before being introduced in the market?
With the aid of GM technology, we can reduce the level of allergens. For example, an allergen was identified in soybean and it was removed using genetic engineering.
We need to prepare ourselves to be in a position to feed the billions that are yet to be welcomed in our society. By introducing GM crops we are easing the load on our natural resources. If the crops are modified to grow on non-arable land we would be saving land to accommodate our growing needs.
Crop yields around the globe are affected by pathogens and insects. In developing countries, farmers cannot afford to have a proper irrigation system for their crops or buy chemicals to protect them. This often leads to poor crop growth and yield. Drought and salinity are expected to affect arable land. Thus, we need new technologies to secure our crops and make them stress-resistant.
For over 20 years humans and animals have been consuming GM food in one form or another. Whether it’s fructose syrup or canola oil, we are all doing fine. Let’s welcome it as an alternative for people who can’t afford high end labeled products. At least they can get the essential nutrition. We are not speaking of growing food for 100,000 people. We are speaking of the entire population, from cattle to our pets to humans. If this isn’t a step towards a sustainable future, what is?
Science is not a myth and if we all work towards understanding science rather than being scared of it, we can actually build a world where all of us have access to basic needs for survival.A few hours north of San Francisco is the town of Boonville, nestled in the quaint Anderson Valley of Mendocino County. Like Silicon Valley, this place is known for its innovations in communication – but in a completely different way.
Boonville has its own homegrown language called Boontling and only a handful of people still speak it. Among them is Wes Smoot, 81, the unofficial king of Boonville.
Smoot and his cohorts meet at the Redwood Drive-In on the central drag practically every day at 4 p.m. Smoot says it’s one of the last places that feels like the town he grew up in. Outside, Smoot says, wine and tourism have turned the friendly, close-knit community into a place full of strangers.
For Smoot, Boontling is a connection to the past. It’s said to have emerged in the late 1800s and every word has a meaning related to a person or event in Boonville. For example, to work hard is ottin’, after a man named Otto who was the hardest worker in town.
But more often than not, Boontling is used to describe salacious words unfit for print. Former Chico State University professor Charles C. Adams published a dictionary of them in his book “Boontling: An American Lingo.” Today, Boonville residents refer to Adams’ publication as “the big book.”
The little book is a pamphlet Smoot prints and distributes around town with a more child-friendly glossary. It has the definitions and origins of words like zeese (coffee) and blue-tail (rattlesnake).
“In order to speak the language and understand the people you gotta know something about the history of the valley,” Smoot says.
That history has cycled from an isolated farming town, to a logging boomtown, to a winemaker’s paradise. But when Smoot returned after several years away from Boonville as a young man serving in the Korean War, and then traveling around the state for Caltrans, he already felt like his childhood home had changed.
Boontling has been documenting those changes word-by-word. Though there’s no recorded history of where the language itself came from.
Smoot’s favorite version of Boontling’s origin is about a young San Francisco woman who became pregnant out of wedlock and was sent up north by her high society parents to have the baby.
“There’s a number of stories, it’s very interesting,” says Robert Nimmons, a volunteer for the Anderson Valley Historical Society. “We’ve heard several stories that the adults developed it so they could talk but the kids didn’t know what they were saying.”
Regardless, there are just a few fluent Boontling speakers left. And even though Smoot and his pals are sure Boonville’s homegrown language will eventually die off, they’re still contributing to the lexicon.
“Another fella and I came up with a new word now, when the salmon go up the stream and spawn,” Smoot says. “Well when you get our age we're downstreamers, we're getting to go back down stream. We're downstreamers now.”
To listen to this story, please click on the audio player above.During his first major speech as defense secretary, Chuck Hagel addressed the escalating threats coming from North Korea against the United States and its’ allies in the region. (The Washington Post)
During his first major speech as defense secretary, Chuck Hagel addressed the escalating threats coming from North Korea against the United States and its’ allies in the region. (The Washington Post)
Defense Secretary Chuck Hagel told the Pentagon on Wednesday to brace for further cuts in defense spending and said the military needs to make fundamental changes in the way it operates to cope with new fiscal realities.
Noting that the military has “grown enormously more expensive in every way” over the past decade, Hagel said the Pentagon will have to tackle soaring personnel costs, reexamine how it buys billion-dollar weapons systems and “pare back the world’s largest back office” as it shrinks the size of the armed forces in the coming years.
Hagel’s two most recent predecessors, Robert M. Gates and Leon E. Panetta, made similar vows as they tried to tame the vast military bureaucracy. Neither had much success, however, as they struggled to persuade Congress to cut pet projects or scale back health and pension benefits for future generations of military personnel.
The difference now, Hagel said in his first major policy address since taking office, is that the Pentagon is staring at the increased likelihood that it will be forced to slash nearly $1 trillion in projected spending over the next decade — roughly double the level confronted by Gates and Panetta.
In the past, military leaders had treated the $1 trillion figure as a worst-case possibility and assumed lawmakers would find a way to soften the blow. But the automatic spending cuts that were triggered last month have made the outcome more likely; Congress and the White House have shown little inclination to spare the Pentagon.
“A combination of fiscal pressures and a gridlocked political process has led to far more abrupt and deeper reductions than were planned,” Hagel, who took over as defense secretary in February, told an audience at the National Defense University at Fort McNair, in the District. “We cannot simply wish or hope our way to carrying out a responsible national security strategy.”
Unlike Panetta — who regularly predicted that a failure by Congress and the White House to exempt the military from automatic cuts would result in “doomsday” scenarios — Hagel spoke in a more resigned and pragmatic tone.
“The United States military remains an essential tool of American power but one that must be used judiciously, with a keen appreciation of its limits,” he said.
Thomas Donnelly, a defense analyst at the American Enterprise Institute, said President Obama specifically selected Hagel to run the Defense Department so he could be “the frontman” for trimming the defense budget.
“This is the next step, putting the Pentagon on notice that they intend to make more serious and very substantial cuts,” Donnelly said.
Hagel said the biggest challenge facing the Pentagon is not its shrinking budget overall but that disproportionately large amounts of it are being consumed by unaffordable weapons systems, as well as health care, troop pay and retirement benefits.
Gates, who served as defense secretary from 2007 to 2011, warned of the same problems. Although he managed to kill a number of expensive weapons programs, he failed to persuade Congress to rein in troop compensation levels or health-care costs, which he said were “eating us alive.”
On Wednesday, Hagel alluded to the inherent difficulty in overhauling military operations and the defense budget. He said the Pentagon needs to examine some basic questions about its operations, including whether it has too many uniformed personnel doing administrative jobs that civilians could do just as easily — and more cheaply.
“It could turn out that making dramatic changes in each of these areas could prove unwise, untenable or politically impossible,” he said. “Yet we have no choice but to take a very close look.”
Hagel also said “the size and shape” of the armed forces needs to be scrutinized again, a hint that the Army and Marine Corps, each of which beefed up its ranks for the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, could face further troop reductions.
The Army is officially projected to shrink to 490,000 active-duty soldiers, down from about 540,000 today. But Army planners are preparing for the possibility that the size of the force might dwindle to 440,000.
Similarly, the Marines last year were directed to cut 10 percent of their active-duty force, leaving it at 182,000 personnel by 2016. But that might not be the bottom, either.
Hagel said the military also needed to reform its command structure. He noted that the number of three- and four-star generals and admirals has generally remained “intact” since the end of the Cold War.
Command staffs, however, are especially hard to scale back. Two years ago, Gates pledged that the Pentagon would eliminate 65 billets for generals and admirals by now and 102 slots overall by 2016. But only 28 jobs had been scrapped as of Jan. 31, according to Defense Department figures.
Gordon Adams, an American University professor of foreign policy, said Hagel had correctly identified the basic spending problems afflicting the Pentagon. That’s the easy part, he added.
“It’s a good start,” Adams said. “Can he pull it off? Don’t know. Honest answer is that the jury is out.”Will StumbleUpon’s New Web Look and Feel Give It Web Wings?
While rumors of its impending re-sale have apparently been greatly exaggerated, what’s true about StumbleUpon is that its new Web-centric look and feel and a new partnering program represent a major shift for the online discovery service.
The San Francisco-based company, which was founded in 2001 and sold to eBay last year for $75 million, is announcing tonight that users will no longer have to register or download its toolbar to “stumble” the Web.
Users can now simply start on StumbleUpon’s site, for example, and stumble all over the Web using their Web browser as guide rather than a toolbar.
The move is being made simply because most Internet users are increasingly loath to install Web plug-ins like toolbars, a requirement that naturally has slowed the growth of StumbleUpon’s service over time.
Currently, StumbleUpon has about six million registered users, although only a fraction of those are responsible for the approximately 12 million daily “stumbles,” all using a toolbar.
“We wanted to attract users who do not want to use a toolbar, making it easy so they could use the service right from the get-go,” said Garrett Camp, co-founder of StumbleUpon, in an interview with BoomTown earlier today.
Camp noted that that the toolbar–which has been downloaded between 11 and 12 million times–has seen that growth slow over time. Nonetheless, it is not being eliminated either.
“[Toolbar adoption] was still growing, but not accelerating,” said Camp. “Being able to stumble without one was the biggest feedback we got from users.”
Along with the Web-stumble change, StumbleUpon is also unveiling a redesigned homepage–see an example of it below; click on the image to make it larger–which is an attempt to make it more of a destination.
With the new look, visitors can find content by topic and more related to interests. Other changes include a new look for profile pages, as well as user reviews, rating and comments.
Along with its distribution shift and site renovation, StumbleUpon is unveiling a partner program called StumbleThru that will allow visitors to discover content within those sites without going to StumbleUpon.
Sites–starting with HowStuffWorks.com and the HuffingtonPost.com and followed within weeks by RollingStone.com and National Geographic–will display a StumbleUpon “badge” or custom widget.
It is not unlike similar buttons that now dot Web pages from news discovery services like Digg, which users can click to find related pages.
Essentially, much as Google (GOOG) delivers custom search within Web sites, StumbleUpon is offering custom surfing, giving publishers StumbleUpon technology to allow its users to surface content within their sites that is often deeply buried.
As to the blog reports that eBay (EBAY) had put StumbleUpon up for sale after owning it for a little more than a year, Camp essentially dismissed them, noting that the unit is still operating as an independent subsidiary of the auction giant.
“They have given us a lot of runway,” said Camp.
Here is the new front page of StumbleUpon:
Also, here is a video I did last year at the exceptionally noisy (sorry!) party that StumbleUpon threw after it was sold to eBay a little more than a year ago:Bill Elder
2016-08-02 23:26:21 -0400
Michael Mann commented -,“You don’t actually think Trump is going to win do you?”
I never make predictions until the ballots are counted – Trump has populist momentum – same as Sanders did. I believe that there enough voters in America who have awoken to the fact the political system has imprisoned them – put them on plantations of left or right which self serving political machines harvest votes when needed at election and ignored the rest of the time – they want candidates unattached to the political machines – they thought Sanders was one but surprise eh.
Trump is not a real republican, I think he sounds like a Kennedy Liberal – he’s independent, unbeholden, nationalist and very anti status quo – GOP oligarchs and Globalists hate him – so the jaded voter picks up on this and figures all the right people hate this guy, he must be OK.
But there is another elephant in the room – Class bigotry. Both GOP and Dem oligarchy really hold little people in contempt – they must have their lives run by us – they never listen to what their own supporters were saying about – say immigration, or Obama care, or the Fed and deficit financing, secure jobs – But Trump did. At least he’s paying lip service to these common concerns and ignoring the elitist flack for doing so.
He is a guy who tapped into mainstream working class concerns – he may be a boor and undiplomatic and narcissistic, but he has popular support – that wins elections.
The alternative is candidate dragging scandal luggage from the days in Arkansas to Benghazi who was under FBI investigation- and who personifies the political elite the mounting populist vote despises – not good optics from a populist perspective.
Frankly I think both these people will be a disaster in one way r another -but at least Trump is talking systemic economic reforms and this is what America needs right now.. Getting elected is the easy part – pulling off the reforms to the satisfaction of the electorate is the hard part;
commentedSauber: Only above Caterham in the Constructors' Championship on results countback
Sauber Team Principal Monisha Kaltenborn is “absolutely confident” the struggling Swiss team will work their way out of their current slump as they bid to avert the first point-less season in their history.
From proving one of the form midfield teams at the end of last season, Ferrari-powered Sauber have slipped down the order following the winter switch to turbo engines and along with perennial backmarkers Caterham are the only team still to score a point in 2014.
The Hinwil-based outfit’s top-ten drought means they currently sit tenth behind Marussia in the Constructors’ Championship and facing the prospect of the worst finishing position in their 21-year F1 history.
However, after showing small signs of improvement with the C33 in the three races before the summer break, Kaltenborn believes the corner is beginning to be turned and it is now imperative that the team take any points chances that come their way in the final eight grands prix.
“I am absolutely confident that we will move back up again,” she said in an interview with F1’s official website. “It will take a bit of time. We are moving in the right direction - and, of course, I hope that things change in this season - so I take it event by event.
“We had our chances in the last few events but haven’t made use of them. We have to make sure in the race that we don’t make mistakes when these opportunities come up.”
Sauber experienced a relatively similar poor start to 2013 – they scored just seven points up to the summer break – but a big development drive in the second half of the season yielded 50 points and seventh place in the standings.
However, Kaltenborn now concedes that last year’s push had more negative longer-term consequences than expected.
“If you look at the performance itself - I think with all the optimism you can imagine (and I have a lot of optimism) - I cannot see anything positive," she said on Sauber's 2014 form so far.
“What I think we have to keep in mind is why we are where we are today. That goes back to last season where we took a decision to continue on that year’s car, knowing full well that this would mean taking a considerable risk on the new 2014 car, and the development of that car in light of the massive changes which were coming up. We took that decision and it turned out to be the right decision for last season, but we didn’t expect that we would be facing as many issues as we are now.”
Kaltenborn, who refused to point the finger of blame for the team’s struggles at long-time engine supplier Ferrari – “this car is definitely not one of the better cars that we’ve built,” she admitted – added that there were several areas at the team that were being addressed to improve performance, including the perennial issue of funding.
“We are looking at different areas that we need to improve - |
were run. The first regressed PTSD on polygenic risk score, 10 PCs and study indicator covariates. The second regression was the same as the first, but with the polygenic risk score term removed. Nagelkerke’s r2 was calculated for both models, and the difference was the r2 for the polygenic risk score term.
SNP-chip heritability and genetic correlation estimation with LDSC
LDSC33, 34 was used on the SNP-level summary statistics from the 7 EA data sets for which raw genotype data were available. With raw data we could rule out population stratification and the presence of related individuals, and consequently the constrained version of LDSC could be used, affording greater power for heritability estimation. By constraining the LDSC regression intercept to be 1 (that is, the expected χ2 for a single SNP with LD score equal to zero and with no influence from population stratification), there is one less parameter to estimate in the LDSC regression and standard error of the heritability estimate is reduced. For genetic correlation, we report both constrained and unconstrained results. As with GCTA, we use population prevalence estimates of 11% (female), 5% (male) and 8% (combined). Separate male and female heritability estimates were calculated using sex-specific subsamples of the data. General instructions for LDSC are provided here: https://github.com/bulik/ldscCynthia Arvide – WNN Breaking
Women in the states of Mexico don’t have much choice when it comes to abortion
In Mexico, the majority of women who decide to get an abortion risk death, severe health consequences and imprisonment. Except for Mexico City, where the interruption of pregnancy within the first 12 weeks of pregnancy was legalized in April 2007, the rest of the states in the country have severely punitive abortion laws. Only in the state of Guanajuato, between 2000 and 2010, 166 women have been prosecuted, according to a women’s rights organization called Centro Las Libres.
Although abortion is considered legal on certain exceptions, such as rape, malformation of the fetus or a risk to the mother’s life; in practice, it is rarely administered by the state’s health system and it is socially condemned. Most women who decide to terminate their pregnancies end up going to clandestine practitioners or attempt risky methods on their own. Usually, they only seek medical help after they suffer grave complications and their life is in danger. There are 1,500 deaths estimated per year due to unsafe abortions in Mexico.
Maria* (it is not her real name) was 19 years old when she got pregnant. It was the first time she had sex, with a younger boy she met in the cafeteria where she worked after school. Two months later, when she realized that she was pregnant, a friend told her about some pills that would terminate the pregnancy in the black market. She saved money and bought them but no one gave her instructions on how or when she should take them. Struggling with guilt, it took her two more months to make a decision. When she finally took them in the middle of the night, 22 weeks-pregnant already, she felt so much pain that she had to be rushed to emergency care.
A doctor found the pills inside her and accused her of inducing the abortion. “They said that I was a bad person and that they would inform the authorities of what I’d done”, she says. After dealing with the pain for hours, with doctors treating her as a criminal, and residents taking pictures of her with cellphones while they performed the curettage, the next morning she still had to face the agents from the prosecutor’s office. A few days later she was arrested at her home and she spent the night in jail. She served a nine month probation and three years of criminal records.
Other women aren’t so lucky. Yolanda, also 19 years old, told her story to Las Libres: “I didn’t know I was pregnant. One day I woke up, feeling pain and nausea. In the afternoon, I saw I had expelled lots of blood and blood clots. After a few days of this, my mother took me to the hospital. The doctor reported me for having an induced abortion”. She was sentenced to 26 years in prison for homicide of a direct family member (a legal figure used instead of abortion).
Her case, along with five others, was studied by the organization and was taken up by the state’s Human Rights prosecutor’s office. Their actions and pressure paid off. On September 2010, seven women, including Yolanda, who had been in jail from 2 to 10 years, were released on the grounds of a reform that reduced the maximum sentence for infanticide from 35 to 8 years.
Human Rights Watch honored Centro Las Libres’ Executive Director Verónica Cruz Sánchez in 2006 for her efforts in protecting women’s reproductive rights. “We live in an environment that criminalizes women. Meeting with this group of women let us know several things; first of all, it is an unfair situation to begin with, second, most women that have lost their freedom are related to cases of an ignorant use of medication. And in public hospitals, far from finding attention, the first thing the staff do is create an environment against her, and denounce her. Not only to the authorities but the society, starting with the hospital staff and patients”, said Cruz to Angela Heimburger, researcher for Human Rights Watch.
When the congress of Mexico City reformed the laws in 2007 to decriminalize abortion, it caused an uproar among the Catholic Church, the right-winged party PAN (Partido Acción Nacional) and several conservative groups. The Supreme Court of Justice ratified Mexico’s City’s reform in a historic decision that acknowledged women’s rights. But 17 other states began passing anti-abortion amendments to protect life since the moment it is conceived.
In Mexico City, over 58 000 women have had safe, legal abortions in public hospitals since the reform to the law, —22% came from the neighboring state Estado de México and 3% from other states— and that’s not counting the procedures in private clinics. However, thousands of women outside the capital don’t have the same opportunity. The most vulnerable women are still the poorest. Those who can’t afford to travel to Mexico’s capital and abort (or pay a private doctor who won’t report her), are most likely to have unsafe abortions and are then reported by their doctors when they seek formal health care.
It is hard to find reliable statistics of how many of them have been prosecuted and sentenced —especially since some are charged with homicide instead of abortion— but various women’s organizations and journalists have documented dozens of cases of women behind bars for having aborted, including victims of rape. According to a Human Rights Watch Report, “for many rape survivors, actual access to safe abortion procedures is made virtually impossible by a maze of administrative hurdles as well as-most pointedly-by official negligence and obstruction”.
In Veracruz, eight women who aborted were found guilty and sentenced from 12 to 15 years of prison for homicide in January 2010, as the Instituto Veracruzano de la Mujer reported. Their age ranging 20 to 25 years old; all of them come from rural environments. In Hidalgo, from 2007 to 2010 there were 31 women prosecuted, according to activist Otilia Sánchez. Puebla registers 30 cases, 9 of which have been sentenced. The list goes on for the other 27 states in the country.
Women rights activists are pushing to shed light on these cases and seek justice. Unsafe abortion still remains as a widespread public health issue but the matter also raises other factors such as sexual and reproductive rights, the social, religious and moral beliefs of Mexican society and ultimately their cultural view on women and motherhood. Women voices are coming together with the hope of being heard. Their demand is straight-forward: “Not one more woman dead because she tried to abort; not one more convict because she made her own decision”.
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The public debate on abortion since it became legal in Mexico City is still ongoing. How are women receiving rights? This Latin Pulse – Link TV special shows the issues as they erupted on the change in the laws in 2007. This 28:29 video is a October 2007 LinkTV production.
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WNN correspondent in Mexico City, Cynthia Arvide, is a freelance journalist who specializes in women issues, her stories have been published in Marie Claire magazine, the Latin American edition. She also writes human interest stories, travel features and investigative reports about diverse cultural and social issues in Mexico and every country she has the opportunity to visit.
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©2011 Women News Network – WNN
No part of this article release may be reproduced without prior permissions from WNN.
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Like this: Like Loading...The "Outnumbered" hosts took on the new criticism of the Trump White House from House Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi (D-CA).
In comments on Thursday, Pelosi called Trump's top strategist Steve Bannon a "white supremacist" and called Trump an "illusionist."
"It’s a stunning thing, that a white supremacist would be a permanent member of the National Security Council," she said, referring to Trump's decision to shake up the NSC.
Pelosi on Hot Mic at Anti-Trump Protest 'Tell Them You're a Muslim'
Jon Stewart Resurfaces to Bash Trump for 'Purposeful, Vindictive Chaos'
Pelosi said Trump tries to distract the public's attention when a topic "gets hot" with negative reaction, like last weekend's executive order.
"You notice that every time something gets hot, he changes the subject.... He's an illusionist... now you see it, now you don't," she said, arguing that is why Trump moved up his Supreme Court announcement by two days.
Responding this afternoon, Chris Stirewalt said Democrats need to come up with a message other than bashing Trump.
"The Democrats have a serious problem here. The only thing they know is they hate Donald Trump and wish he wasn't president. That is the only thing they know for sure. They have got to start being specific in their opposition," he said.
Stirewalt said the refugee ban is the first issue in that the Democrats have been able to rally around and "drill in on it."
Meghan McCain agreed, saying Democrats are trying to distract from a lack of unity and leadership within the party.
"What's their messaging?" she asked, arguing that there are still many Bernie Sanders supporters who are upset at the Hillary Clinton wing of the party.
Kennedy asked how Pelosi's bashing of Bannon helps average Americans in states like Wisconsin and Michigan.
"How does [that] help them get jobs?" she asked.
Watch the discussion above and let us know what you think.
Patriots Owner: Trump Called 'Once a Week for a Year' After Wife Died
Conway Clarifies 'Bowling Green Massacre' Comment After Sparking Uproar
Springsteen at Australia Concert: 'We Stand Before You Embarrassed Americans'
Sen. Hatch: Dems Acting Like 'Juvenile Idiots' to Delay Trump NomineesNow you might be asking, “how can there be a reference to potatoes in Europe in the middle ages long before the Spanish Conquistadors brought them back from Peru in the early 16th century?”
You and Wikipedia make a great point.
What you should know is that this comic strip takes history as seriously as Xena, The Flintstones and the Creation Museum. That is to say, it will play fast and loose with historical accuracy if it serves the joke.
Thanks for visiting. If you haven’t, maybe check out my other webcomic Astounding Space Thrills. The original AST strips ran in 1998 and were optimized for 14.4k modems so I’m now re-lettering larger versions of the strips and showing them off with more than 256 colors. So fancy!
See you next week!
— Steve @theSteveConleySolarWorld has a history of taking on Chinese trade practices, and now the company is at it again: It's pushing for new tariffs against Chinese solar firms that it says are using a loophole in an earlier ruling in order to continue dumping panels into the U.S. below market value. SolarWorld was also the petitioner in that first tariff ruling, which came down in 2012.
"The government-underwritten Chinese solar industry has decimated much of the solar manufacturing industry on several continents, including the Americas," Ben Santarris, strategic affairs director for SolarWorld America, wrote in an email to CNBC. "Many U.S. companies have shut down production, costing the jobs of hundreds of Americans."
Read MoreChina warns of retaliation after cyberspying accusations
Devon Cichoski, a spokeswoman for SolarWorld America, took the charges a step further, telling CNBC that the hacking is "yet another example of the Chinese government's systematic campaign to seek unfair advantage in the U.S. and global solar industry."
However, many SolarWorld rivals in the U.S. have been loath to embrace SolarWorld's petitions for increased tariffs, and an organization called Coalition for Affordable Solar Energy (CASE) has sprung up "united in the belief that SolarWorld's actions will kill jobs in the U.S. economy while raising the price of solar energy," according to its website.
CASE boasts more than 90 solar industry firms as members, including billionaire entrepreneur Elon Musk's SolarCity.
Read MoreUS charges China with cyber-spying on American firms
SolarWorld produces and installs its own panels, controlling every step of its supply chain. But many other U.S. companies choose to specialize, producing the basic silicon building blocks, building the individual cells that make a panel, or just installing pre-made panels.
Many of those companies will suffer if tariffs are levied on Chinese manufacturers, according to George Hershman, a division manager for Swinerton Renewable Energy, a CASE member. He said his group does not support a legal petition on Chinese trade practices when other steps could be taken that won't damage other sectors of the U.S. solar economy.
"We just think that handling this through the Department of Commerce is a broad-reaching approach to an issue," he said. "The industry... recognizes that a settlement is a better solution."
Read MoreHas solar power's day in the sun arrived?
Chinese manufacturers found a way to avoid the 2012 tariffs by simply outsourcing solar cell production to Taiwanese factories, Santarris said. About 70 percent of all Chinese solar imports in the U.S. market now employ that strategy, he added.
With its new petition, SolarWorld America has opened itself up to a new wave of criticism, both from abroad and at home.
Rhone Resch, president and CEO of the Solar Energy Industries Association, said in a February statement that "if imposed, the tariffs sought by SolarWorld … could result in a sharp increase in the cost of solar energy in the United States. It's time to end this needless saber rattling."China's biggest defense of its massive greenhouse gas emissions is its need to develop like West has, mostly in order to lift its people out of poverty.
But that kind of unbridled development is already defeating its own purpose: climate change is exacerbating the problems of poverty in China.
China's not the only country to blame, nor is it the only victim. The U.S. and the rest of the developed world are by far the biggest contributors to global warming, the effects of which are hitting hardest in developing nations.In a new report compiled with experts from the nation's Academy of Agricultural Sciences, Greenpeace China and Oxfam Hong Kong explore the connection between climate change and poverty. Writes AFP:
"Climate change is making poverty alleviation work harder because as soon as there is a disaster in those places where the environment is very fragile, these return to poverty," Xu Yinlong of the academy told reporters. According to Hu Angang, an economist at Beijing's Tsinghua University who wrote a preface to the report, China is one of the countries in the world most prone to natural disasters. "More than 70 per cent of Chinese cities and over 50 percent of the population are located in areas susceptible to serious meteorological, seismic or oceanic disasters," he wrote. And 95 per cent of those living in absolute poverty in China are living in ecologically fragile areas in the interior of the country, the report added, highlighting the correlation between hardship and a weak environment. These places are now showing signs of climate change, including glacial retreat, an increase in droughts, enhanced soil erosion and frequent extreme weather events... Greenpeace and Oxfam urged China to take the lead in adopting a climate rescue treaty at a key meeting on climate change in December, and introduce measures such as elevating bridges and roads in flood-prone areas.
China has demanded that the U.S. and other developed countries pay it 1% of their GDP per year to help China fight climate change. In a report to the United Nations last month, the Commission on Climate Change and Development said that about 0.7% of GDP, or about one to two billion dollars a year, must be given to developing nations.
Climate aid and technology transfers will likely be a sine qua non of any climate deal this year at Copenhagen.
But as China continues its lead as world's biggest greenhouse gas emitter, and as the effects of climate change in China accelerate -- Beijing's argument that it deserves to pollute to develop rings increasingly hollow.
More than aid, and maybe more than politically tendentious carbon caps, the best way toward mitigating the effects of climate change may be verifiable and measurable improvements in emissions.
And more than Western political pressure -- already weakened by the U.S.'s fraught trade relationship with China -- it may be the sight of danger in China's own backyard that will be the most persuasive argument for action by Beijing.
More on Climate and Poverty at TreeHugger
Worst-Case IPCC Climate Change Trajectories Are Being Realized: Copenhagen Climate Congress Concludes
Climate Change is a Top Threat to National Security, Says New Head of US Intelligence
Mass Migrations From Climate Change Forecast by ReportShe was
University of Louisville swimmerhas been named NCAA Division I National Swimmer of the Week by collegeswimming.com for her performance at the USA Winter Nationals last weekend.At Nationals,posted times that now place her 6th in 50 free, 1st in 100 and 200 free, and 4th in 100 fly nationally.the Women's High Point Award winner for the meet.In her first event, the Cards' 'A' 800 free relay team of(1:46.31),(1:41.67),(1:44.89), and(1:45.54) touched the wall in a 6:58.41, earning an automatic NCAA qualifying time, and tying the school record.She earned an individual automatic NCAA qualifying time of the season with a second place finish in the 500 free in a time of 4:35.78. The women's 50 free championship final featured four Cardinals in eight of the available lanes. Comerford continued her stellar performance with her reaching the podium with a third posting a time of 21.88.Comerford was a part of the winning 400 Medley Relay when the 'A' team of(53.26),(1:00.32),(51.83), and Comerford (46.51) sprinted to the top spot with an automatic NCAA qualifying time of 3:31.92.Comerford posted another automatic NCAA qualifying time of 50.92 to take the silver in 100 fly and then just minutes after taking second in the 100 fly, she captured the 200 free title with a new meet record time of 1:41.17, the fastest time in the NCAA this season.She helped set a new school record in the 200 free relay when the foursome of Comerford (21.87),(21.87),(22.10), and(21.66) combined to win the event in an automatic NCAA qualifying time of 1:27.50.In her final individual swim of the meet, Comerford won the 100 free, breaking the meet record and earning another automatic NCAA qualifying time with a 46.70, the fastest time in the NCAA this season.The 400 free relay team of Visscher (49.10), Comerford (46.50), Openysheva (48.23), and Fanz (48.32) completed UofL's sweep of the women's relays with a win in the 400 free relay in an NCAA A cut time of 3:12.15.Having a good handful of go-to spots means we get to pick the flavour of each trip. Every stream or lake we've been to has a different quality and character. Some are downright arduous (looking at you, McDougall Creek), and some are almost too laid back. Once you're familiar with a variety of places, you can determine which are most feasible given the weather as well as the amount of people in your group and their skill level.
With a smaller group, our most recent trip to Steeprock was a gamble as thunderstorms were in the forecast all weekend. But it is one of those perfect rivers that strikes a good balance between challenge and allure. If The Pine is the mother river, Steeprock is the divorcee father...
...And it looks like he's got his kids for the weekend!Climate Change and the Death of Science
[Note: the following was written on October 31 and updated November 3, before the ‘Climategate’ CRU email scandal broke, and it is all the more pertinent in the light of those disclosures. The CRU emails show how science has been perverted into a political movement, and how scientists conspired to serve a ‘post-normal’ agenda where truth is trampled – exactly as the proponents of ‘post-normal’ science had anticipated. With the association between ‘post-normal’ science developed by Ravetz and its application in climate science by Hulme now widely exposed by this present post, Ravetz and Hulme jointly authored an article, published by the BBC on December 1, entitled ‘Show Your Working’: What ‘ClimateGate’ means in which they sought to promote post-normal science further by capitalizing on the public disgust at the corruption of ‘normal’ science. This is cynical because normal science was corrupted by covertly introducing post-normal activities in the first place.]
What has become of science? We thought that science was about the pursuit of truth. Then we became perplexed at how quickly scientists have prostituted themselves in the service of political agendas. We have seen the unedifying spectacle of scientists refusing to share their data, fiddling their results, and resorting to ad hominem attacks on those who have exposed their work to be fraudulent. We have seen the Royal Society becoming a shamelessly crude advocacy society. We have seen President Obama choosing notorious climate alarmists and liars to be his personal advisors. We have seen the peer review process and journal editors colluding to prevent publication of results that do not serve the politically-correct agenda, and scientists refusing to consider results that demolish their pet theories. What is going on here?
What is going on is that science is no longer what we thought it was. It is now a tool in the hands of socialists, and the smart money is flowing into the pockets of ‘scientists’ who will serve their agenda. Follow the money. Whilst traditional physics and chemistry departments are closing in British universities, and there is a shortage of science teachers, there is an abundance of cash being poured into departments that will serve socialist ends, and no shortage of acolytes desirous to use this as a route to power. Once there was modern science, which was hard work; now we have postmodern science, where the quest for real, absolute truth is outdated, and ‘science’ is a wax nose that can be twisted in any direction to underpin the latest lying narrative in the pursuit of power. Except they didn’t call it ‘postmodern’ science because then we might smell a rat. They called it PNS (post-normal science) and hoped we wouldn’t notice. It was thus named and explicated by Silvio O. Funtowicz and philosopher Jerome R. Ravetz, who in 1991 wrote the paper A New Scientific Methodology for Global Environmental Issues, followed in 1992 by The good, the true and the postmodern, and in 1993 by Science for the post-normal age, where they promoted the idea that
…a new type of science – ‘post-normal’ – is emerging…in contrast to traditional problem-solving strategies, including core science, applied science, and professional consultancy…Post-normal science can provide a path to the democratization of science, and also a response to the current tendencies to post-modernity.
The ‘response’ wasn’t to be a reaction against postmodernism, but an embracing of it, and going beyond it. And it has sinister ramifications.
We had already been warned about Ravetz in the 1987 work Changing Boundaries of the Political, which stated
From the perspective of Anglo-American liberalism it seems easy enough to…point out that the old predictions of the British Marxist J.D. Bernal about the triumph of basic research under socialism have proved hopelessly wrong, and that the demands of J.R. Ravetz of the University of Leeds that science be made instrumental and moral will destroy the enterprise whatever its short-term benefits.
Ravetz, who described himself as a peacenik intellectual, was a political radical who drew on neo-Marxism, and was a stalwart in the Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament (CND), anti-nuclear lobbies, and the Anti-Concorde Project. He is well known for arguing that the pursuit of truth in science is an obsolete and dangerous concept. He declared
…the puzzle-solving approach of ‘normal science’ is obsolete. This is a drastic cultural change for science, which many scientists will find difficult to accept. But there is no turning back; we can understand post-normal science as the extension of democracy appropriate to the conditions of our age.
For us, quality is a replacement for truth in our methodology. We argue that this is quite enough for doing science, and that truth is a category with symbolic importance, which itself is historically and culturally conditioned.
To pursue truth is to make a category mistake, so pursue the nebulous concept of ‘quality’ instead. So much for facts: scientists need to learn how to serve the craft of rhetoric. Even though it was concealed from those who constructed the models, the purpose of climate models was to provide the power of metaphor to political rhetoric:
…climate change models are a form of “seduction”…advocates of the models…recruit possible supporters, and then keep them on board when the inadequacy of the models becomes apparent. This is what is understood as “seduction”; but it should be observed that the process may well be directed even more to the modelers themselves, to maintain their own sense of worth in the face of disillusioning experience. …but if they are not predictors, then what on earth are they? The models can be rescued only by being explained as having a metaphorical function, designed to teach us about ourselves and our perspectives under the guise of describing or predicting the future states of the planet…A general recognition of models as metaphors will not come easily. As metaphors, computer models are too subtle…for easy detection. And those who created them may well have been prevented…from being aware of their essential character.
In 1990 Ravetz published The Merger of Knowledge with Power, then in 2002 a paper The Challenge beyond Orthodox Science. Of the book by E.F. Pecci, Science and Human Transformation: Subtle Energies, Intentionality and Consciousness, a book about parapsychology, psychokinesis and extrasensory perception, he says it “creates a bridge between modern physics and the realm of subtle energies…it opens the way to an expansion of our scientific conceptions to include those other energies that are increasingly important for our comprehension of the world around us.” In 2007, Ravetz, then at the University of Oxford, published a paper Post-Normal Science and the complexity of transitions towards sustainability saying that post-normal science needed to be taken to the next stage.
The theory of Post-Normal Science…needs to be renewed and enriched…The time is not ripe for a modification of PNS, and so the best move forward is to raise the issue of Sustainability. For that I sketch a theory of complex systems, with special attention to pathologies and failures. That provides the foundation for a use of ‘contradiction’ as a problem incapable of resolution in its own terms, and also of ‘characteristic contradiction’ that drives a system to a crisis. With those materials it is possible to state the characteristic contradiction of our modern industrial civilisation, and provide a diagram with heuristic power.
Heuristic power is the power to explain ‘factual novelties’. ‘Contradiction’ and ‘characteristic contradiction’ are Marxist speak. Heard about ‘sustainability’ recently? You bet! Ravetz gives the Greens the tools they need to do their dirty work. He gives them the philosophical blueprint to attack modern industrial civilization. Now, let’s be clear: post-normal science is one of the manipulative arts that Machiavelli would have been proud of.
We will take as classic examples and exponents of post-normal science the Tyndall Centre for Climate Change Research, and Mike Hulme, the founding director of this Tyndall Centre, and Professor of Climate Change at the University of East Anglia (UEA). Hulme makes it clear that the IPCC (Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change) is well and truly in the bag. Stuart Blackman interviewed Hulme back in May, 2009, and described him as “one of the UK’s most distinguished and high-profile climate scientists” and the Tyndall Centre as “an organisation so revered by environmentalists that it could be mistaken for the academic wing of the green movement”. The Tyndall Centre is deeply infiltrated by those serving the Green agenda, and produces work for advocacy groups such as Greenpeace and the IPCC. It is funded by the British taxpayer, receiving grants from the three Research Councils NERC, EPSRC and ESRC. We read today on their website
Situations Vacant: Three Lecturers in Climate Change at Tyndall UEA
These new academic staff appointments at UEA have been created as a result of substantial new investments in the Tyndall Centre for Climate Change Research. The posts offer excellent opportunities for continuing, or developing, internationally outstanding research careers.
Notice that these are not lecturers in climate science, but climate change. We will see below what these lecturers will be expected to espouse and teach. The fig leaf that this might have been science has now been dropped. As Mike Hulme has said
[The] chair of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, recently urged the media to focus on the “scientific rationale for action” rather than the political aspects of climate…I disagree…In the end, politics will always trump science…we need better politics, not better science.
So what actually is ‘Post-Normal Science’? Dr John Turnpenny of the Tyndall Centre for Climate Change Research and School of Environmental Sciences, University of East Anglia, in his paper What is post-normal science? A critical review of its development, definitions and usages (“Post Normal Science – perspectives & prospects” June 26/27, 2009 at Oxford), had this to say:
The concept of post-normal science (PNS) has been developed as a potential approach to addressing wicked issues…As such, the ‘science’ in PNS is not limited to a conventional understanding of the word…
So let’s stop calling it science. For a fuller description of post-normal science we turn to the essay by Eva Kunseler, Towards a new paradigm of Science in scientific policy advising (headings and italics added):
Normal science
[Normal] Science is a logic inductive process leading to theory formulation, while all the way put through critical tests that have been deductively derived from the theory; Popper’s critical rationalist concept of science is an objective progression toward the truth…The term normal science refers to the routine work of scientists within a paradigm; slowly accumulating knowledge in accord with established theoretical assumptions…The paradigm is enlarged and frontiers of knowledge and techniques pushed forward. The exercise of scholarly activities is defined by the dominance of the Mertonian CUDOS norms of science. They include:
(C)ommunalism – the common ownership of scientific discoveries, according to which scientists give up intellectual property rights in exchange for recognition and esteem;
(U)niversalism – according to which claims to truth are evaluated in terms of universal or value-free criteria;
(D)isinterestedness – according to which scientists are rewarded for acting in ways that appear to be selfless;
(O)rganized (S)kepticism – all ideas must be tested and are subject to structured community scrutiny. Post-normal science
A new concept of science was introduced by Funtowicz and Ravetz during the 1990s…The concept of post-normal science goes beyond the traditional assumptions that science is both certain and value-free…The exercise of scholarly activities is defined by the dominance of goal orientation where scientific goals are controlled by political or societal actors…Scientists’ integrity lies not in disinterestedness but in their behaviour as stakeholders. Normal science made the world believe that scientists should and could provide certain, objective factual information…The guiding principle of normal science – the goal of achievement of factual knowledge – must be modified to fit the post-normal principle…For this purpose, post-normal scientists should be capable of establishing extended peer communities and allow for ‘extended facts’ from non-scientific experts…In post-normal science, the maintenance and enhancement of quality, rather than the establishment of factual knowledge, is the key task of scientists… Involved social actors must agree on the definition of perceptions, narratives, interpretation of models, data and indicators…scientists have to contribute to society by learning as quickly as possible about different perceptions…instead of seeking deep ultimate knowledge.
So this is not science as we know it. Science has to re-invent itself as a political tool, just as it was under Hitler and Stalin. Scientists must learn ‘as quickly as possible’ what will please the political elite, and serve it up. As one Richard Fernandez has written:
All in all, the notion of “post-normal science” seems like a complete contradiction in terms or a perversion of the standard definition of science as commonly understood. It appears to be an elaborate and dishonest attempt to pass off the preferences of a single group as some kind of pseudo-science. There’s a much simpler term for this dishonest phrase: politics. Post-normal science is nothing but a cheap and lying term for a political diktat; for the rule of the self-appointed over everyone else. Whatever truth “Global Warming” may contain it has surely been damaged by its association with this disreputable and vile concept which brazenly casts aside the need for any factual basis and declares in the most unambiguous terms that whatever values it chooses to promote constitutes a truth unimpeachable by reality and a set of values that none dare challenge.
Mike Hulme, founding director of the Tyndall Centre, and Professor of Climate Change at the University of East Anglia (UEA), prepared climate scenarios and reports for the UK Government (including the UKCIP98 and UKCIP02 scenarios, and reviewer for UKCP09), the European Commission, UNEP, UNDP, WWF-International and the IPCC, and was co-ordinating Lead Author for the chapter on ‘Climate scenario development’ for the Third Assessment Report of the IPCC, as well as a contributing author for several other chapters. Hulme has been a champion and exponent of post-normal science for some years to serve his own socialist agenda, and this is what he has to say about post-normal science (some italics added):
Philosophers and practitioners of science have identified this particular mode of scientific activity as one that occurs…where values are embedded in the way science is done and spoken.
It has been labelled “post-normal” science. Climate change seems to fall in this category. Disputes in post-normal science focus…on the process of science – who gets funded, who evaluates quality, who has the ear of policy…The IPCC is a classic example of a post-normal scientific activity.
Within a capitalist world order, climate change is actually a convenient phenomenon to come along.
The largest academic conference that has yet been devoted to the subject of climate change finished yesterday [March 12, 2009] in Copenhagen…I attended the Conference, chaired a session…[The] statement drafted by the conference’s Scientific Writing Team…contained…a set of messages drafted largely before the conference started by the organizing committee…interpreting it for a political audience…And the conference chair herself, Professor Katherine Richardson, has described the messages as politically-motivated. All well and good.
The danger of a “normal” reading of science is that it assumes science can first find truth, then speak truth to power, and that truth-based policy will then follow…exchanges often reduce to ones about scientific truth rather than about values, perspectives and political preferences.
…‘self-evidently’ dangerous climate change will not emerge from a normal scientific process of truth-seeking…scientists – and politicians – must trade truth for influence. What matters about climate change is not whether we can predict the future with some desired level of certainty and accuracy.
Climate change is telling the story of an idea and how that idea is changing the way in which our societies think, feel, interpret and act. And therefore climate change is extending itself well beyond simply the description of change in physical properties in our world…
The function of climate change I suggest, is not as a lower-case environmental phenomenon to be solved…It really is not about stopping climate chaos. Instead, we need to see how we can use the idea of climate change – the matrix of ecological functions, power relationships, cultural discourses and materials flows that climate change reveals – to rethink how we take forward our political, social, economic and personal projects over the decades to come.
There is something about this idea that makes it very powerful for lots of different interest groups to latch on to, whether for political reasons, for commercial interests, social interests in the case of NGOs, and a whole lot of new social movements looking for counter culture trends.
Climate change has moved from being a predominantly physical phenomenon to being a social one…It is circulating anxiously in the worlds of domestic politics and international diplomacy, and with mobilising force in business, law, academia, development, welfare, religion, ethics, art and celebrity.
Climate change also teaches us to rethink what we really want for ourselves…mythical ways of thinking about climate change reflect back to us truths about the human condition…
The idea of climate change should be seen as an intellectual resource around which our collective and personal identifies and projects can form and take shape. We need to ask not what we can do for climate change, but to ask what climate change can do for us…Because the idea of climate change is so plastic, it can be deployed across many of our human projects and can serve many of our psychological, ethical, |
land – (Yariv Mohar)
Estehbal – In Arabic, occupation is Ehtelal, so how about “estehbal”, which means playing the fool? (Khaled Diab, @diabolicalldea)
Suppression – (Richard Witty)
Nationsbildung – has somewhat of an Afrikans flavor to it… (@NKamins)
FUBAR – (Ginny Adams)
Tatooine – because they are trying to play all sorts of Jedi mind tricks! (Rachel Roberts)
Brooklyn – We all live in peace together here, maybe it will work there. (Michael Klein)
Ethnocentri-City – (Joshua Frost)
Lebensraum – (@bethlehemballet)Juan Mata: Scored Manchester United's third goal against Manchester City
Gary Neville insists Manchester United can only improve next season after finally finding their feet under Louis van Gaal.
The 4-2 home win over rivals Manchester City on Sunday exemplified United's recent transformation after a testing and unconvincing first half to the campaign with the Dutchman.
And speaking on Super Sunday following the Red Devils' victory, Neville says they are less likely to drop needless points against teams below them next season, giving them a better chance to challenge for the league title.
Ashley Young, Juan Mata and Wayne Rooney celebrate
Neville said: "Next season, [Van Gaal] will look at games he's dropped points in in this season and will think because that level of performance has come now, they could win those games next season.
"I think the confidence will be growing in the camp. There are people in that dressing room who have won titles, and they'll get the feeling again that the performance levels and confidence is coming back.
"That's the first time Louis van Gaal, Juan Mata and Marouane Fellaini have seen Old Trafford properly today in terms of an atmosphere.
"It's what Manchester United can create and that will give them enormous confidence. It always does when you win big matches."
Louis van Gaal says he is happy for the fans after the derby win Louis van Gaal says he is happy for the fans after the derby win
United's last four performances, against Tottenham, Liverpool, Aston Villa and Manchester City, have been among their best of the season.
They now sit third in the Premier League, four points ahead of their city rivals, and have exceeded expectations considering their stuttering campaign up to spring.
They end this tough run of fixtures by travelling to face champions-elect Chelsea at Stamford Bridge on Saturday.
Neville added: "They're getting so confident now. It is a fantastic four performances.
"Against Spurs, you were maybe saying: 'Spurs were poor that day, they were flaky.' So you were thinking: 'Is that the real deal?'
"To go to Anfield and win makes you really sit up, because it's a tough place to play no matter how Liverpool are playing, what point in the season it is, or what point Liverpool or United are in in their development.
"But to come here today, especially after City started well and went a goal up, that's a proper performance."(written from a Production point of view Real World article
The Enterprise finds a planet inhabited by aliens who were once followers of the Greek philosopher Plato.
Contents show]
Summary Edit
Teaser Edit
Summoned by an urgent distress call for medical help, the USS Enterprise landing party consisting of Kirk, Spock, and McCoy find a group of aliens who supposedly model their society on the teachings of Plato. Their leader is suffering from a massive infection in his leg and is close to death. Alexander, a servant to the Platonians, quietly suggests to Philana that they should not kill the Enterprise landing party, given that they are trying to save their leader, Parmen. Before he can finish his sentence, Philana telekinetically makes him bite his hand.
Act One Edit
Kirk, Spock, and McCoy discover the Platonians' powerful psychokinetic abilities, as the man's delirium has violent effects on his surroundings. Another Platonian trait is extreme longevity, as well as frail physical immunity seemingly caused by their emphasis on mental prowess. This is what caused their powerful ruler to be so vulnerable to what should have been a minor treatable injury.
The result of a eugenics, "Plato's stepchildren" had escaped to Earth in the time of the ancient Greek philosopher Plato when their star, Sahndara, went supernova. After Plato's death they established a republic based on his philosophy, where 38 inhabitants live a life of quiet contemplation and self-reliance.
A simple cut in the leg had developed an unknown infection which caused Parmen to have a fever and lose control of his powers. Furniture is thrown around and the Enterprise is shaken in orbit, while Kirk, Spock, McCoy, and Alexander duck and hide from the flying objects. "Fascinating. I believe we are experiencing the psychokinetic manifestations of Parmen's delirium", Spock notes. Philana, Parmen's wife, is able to distract Parmen long enough for McCoy to sedate him with a hypospray, ending the chaos. Later, Dr. McCoy's treatment of Parmen is effective and the landing party prepares to leave the planet. However, the Enterprise is frozen; Scott reports that there are no functional transporters, navigation or even subspace communication with Starfleet. Captain Kirk barges into Parmen's chamber, and Parmen strips Kirk of his phaser and tells him that guests must recognize his supremacy. In an allusion to the Greek ideal of guest-friend, Kirk retorts: "Guest? You don't know the meaning of the word. Guests are not treated like common prisoners." Parmen uses his psychokinetic powers to force Kirk to slap himself in the face repeatedly.
Act Two Edit
After the ordeal with Kirk smacking himself around, he, Spock, and McCoy are back in their guest chamber, trying to contact the Enterprise with his communicator to no avail. The Platonians summon them and seem grateful for McCoy's help. They provide the landing party with variety of gifts: the shield of Pericles for Kirk, a kithara for Spock, and a collection of Greek cures written by Hippocrates himself for McCoy. Parmen appeals for Kirk's forgiveness. He says he will release the ship, but he wants McCoy to remain on the planet.
McCoy refuses and Parmen says he will not be refused. Kirk says that he cannot consider himself a descendant of Plato. Spock points out, "Plato wanted truth and beauty and above all, justice." Parmen says that theirs is the most democratic society that ever was – unlike the Federation, which uses weapons and fleets of starships to enforce justice, the Platonians use the power of the mind. He says he wants to persuade Kirk and Spock to leave peacefully so as not to upset McCoy.
Parmen uses his mental powers to intimidate and humiliate Kirk and Spock into compliance. First, he makes them sing a song and dance a jig. Kirk tells McCoy that he is not going to let him stay behind and Parmen makes Kirk recite some lines from William Shakespeare's Sonnet LVII: "Being your slave what should I do but tend | Upon the hours, and times of your desire? | I have no precious time at all to spend; | Nor service[s] to do, 'til you …". Parmen makes Spock dance some more and then forces him to laugh and cry, torturing his Vulcan psychology by forcing severe emotion, such as hearty laughter and a good cry out of him.
Act Three Edit
McCoy decides to volunteer to stay but Kirk still refuses, pointing out that once they are gone they and the Enterprise will be destroyed. Alexander speaks up, saying that Kirk is right. He gives a speech about how he used to think it was his own fault that he did not have the same powers as the Platonians and that he was lucky that they had kept him around. But now, after the Enterprise crew stood up to the Platonians and showed them for what they are, he realizes how they've been putting him down.
Spock questions Alexander about the powers and determines that the power had manifested itself shortly after the Platonians had used up their food stores and started eating local food. McCoy scans Alexander's blood with his medical tricorder and finds that Parmen has more kironide, which is broken down by the pituitary gland. McCoy synthesizes some kironide and injects himself, Kirk, and Spock – to double that of Parmen's level. Kirk suggests that Alexander get a dose, take Parmen's place and rule the planet, but Alexander refuses: "You think that's what I want? Become one of them? Become my own enemy? Just lie around like a big blob of nothing and have things done for me? I want to run around for myself. If I am going to laugh or cry, I want to do it for myself. You can keep your precious power. All I ask is one thing: if you do make it out of here, take me with you."
The conversation is interrupted when the Platonians force Lieutenant Uhura and Nurse Christine Chapel to beam down as Kirk, Spock, and McCoy look on in bewilderment. The women, unable to speak, walk away and are forced against their will to prepare for the evening's festivities. Kirk angrily surmises that the Platonians have now found some new entertainment for their amusement.
Act Four Edit
Later that night, Uhura and Chapel step out into the main hall, both dressed in fabulous Greek dresses as Kirk and Spock join them, both clad in short Greek tunics and laurel leaf crowns. Kirk asks Spock to try to lift some plates of food, but the powers have not kicked in yet. Kirk, Spock, Uhura, and Chapel are led to a stage. Parmen would like to welcome McCoy, but he has to convince McCoy to change his mind first. He makes Spock sing what he calls "a serenade from the laughing spaceman" to Uhura and Chapel.
Then, the four are split into two pairs: Uhura and Kirk, and Chapel and Spock. Chapel and Spock are forced to kiss despite their protests; Chapel confesses that she has wanted to be close to Spock for so long but now she wants to "crawl away and die". Uhura likewise confesses to Kirk that she was so often calmed by Kirk's presence when she was frightened on the bridge of the Enterprise. The two couples struggle in vain to avoid being forced to kiss.
After the kisses, Parmen compels Kirk to crack a bullwhip at Uhura and Spock to brandish a hot poker rod at Chapel. While Parmen is distracted controlling the four officers, Alexander attempts to sneak up on him with a knife. Parmen shifts his focus to trying to make Alexander turn the knife on himself. Meanwhile, Kirk begins to feel his telekinetic power building and laughs once he prevents Alexander from hurting himself. Parmen cannot believe that Kirk has telekinetic abilities and tries to test them. He sends Alexander to threaten Kirk with the knife, but again the captain turns the tables on the Platonian. For a brief time, the two minds fight for control of Alexander. Kirk's power is proven the greater but ultimately they both release him. Alexander begins to use his free will to attack Parmen but Kirk stops him, asking simply, "Do you want to be like him?" Alexander struggles with his conscience, but finally drops the knife, heaping contempt onto his former leader instead. Parmen sees that Kirk has spared his life, and appears repentant. He promises that he will be more benevolent towards future visits by other starships. Spock and Kirk are very dubious of the reform and so stresses that any new visitors can easily be dosed with kironide as well. Parmen appears to acquiesce to this truth and Kirk seems satisfied that the "Platonian problem" has been solved.
Kirk calls Scotty for transport, saying that he has "a little surprise" for the chief engineer. Kirk intends to make good on his earlier promise to rescue Alexander from Platonius and the Enterprise departs soon after.
Log entries Edit
"Captain's log, stardate 5784.2. We are responding to desperate distress calls from an unknown planet. My science officer, Mr. Spock, is unable to account for this, since he reported no signs of life on the planet. It is rich in kironide deposits, a very rare and long-lasting source of great power."
"Captain's log, stardate 5784.3. Dr. McCoy is endeavoring to treat the leader of a strange group of people. When their planet novaed, millennia ago, they transported themselves to Earth during the time of Socrates and Plato. After the death of the Greek civilization they idolized, they came to this planet and created for themselves a utopia patterned after it."
Memorable quotes Edit
"Alexander, where I come from, size, shape, or color makes no difference."
- Kirk, on life outside Platonius
"Doctor McCoy, you may yet cure the common cold."
- Spock, after Parmen's recovery
"Philosopher kings have no need of titles."
- Parmen, correcting Kirk
"I'm Tweedledee, he's Tweedledum."
"Two spacemen marching to a drum."
"We slith among the mimsey toves."
"And gyre among the borogoves."
- Kirk and Spock, performing for Parmen
"However, I have noted that the healthy release of emotion is frequently very unhealthy for those closest to you."
- Spock to McCoy, on their humiliations
"You think that's what I want? Become one of them? Become my own enemy?"
- Alexander to Kirk, on receiving psychokinesis
"For so long I've wanted to be close to you. Now all I want to do is crawl away and die!"
- Chapel, before kissing Spock
"Careful, Mr. Spock. Too much love is dangerous."
"Remember, Cupid's arrow kills Vulcans."
- Dionyd and Eraclitus, on Spock's kiss
"And now they are making me tremble. But I'm not afraid. I am not afraid."
- Uhura, before her kiss with Kirk
"Don't stop me! Let me finish him off!"
"Do you want to be like him?"
- Alexander and Kirk, as Alexander points a knife at Parmen
"Despite your brains, you're the most contemptible things that ever lived in this universe. "
- Alexander, scolding Parmen
"To us, killing is murder. Even for revenge."
- Kirk to Parmen, on why he was spared
"Uncontrolled, power will turn even saints into savages. And we can all be counted upon to live down to our lowest impulses."
- Parmen to Kirk, before the landing party departs
"Kirk to Enterprise. Mr. Scott, prepare to beam us up. I have a little surprise for you. I'm bringing a visitor aboard."
- Kirk, not forgetting his promise to take Alexander with him (last lines)
Background information Edit
Production timeline Edit
Remastered information Edit
The remastered version of "Plato's Stepchildren" aired in many North American markets during the weekend of 16 June 2007. Very few new effects were required. Like all other remastered episodes, the physical model of the Enterprise has been wholly replaced by a CGI model throughout the episode. Similarly, the Enterprise is universally shot at different – and typically closer – angles than in the original.
The most dramatic new effect is that of the planet Platonius. It has changed from its original, Mars-like appearance to one that greatly resembles Earth.
Dr. McCoy's tricorder insert also received a touch-up. Its display was transformed from a bar graph that approximated sickbay displays to an integrated line chart. The benefit of the changed effect is that the display now more easily reads as a true comparison of the blood of Alexander and Parmen, along with (ostensibly) Human norms.
In addition, the digital restoration of non-SFX shots has resulted in an overall brightening of color that is perhaps more profound in this abstractly-designed episode than in others.
Video and DVD releases Edit
Released with " Whom Gods Destroy ", the volume was originally unrated, as it was released prior to the Video Recordings Act 1984. After 1985, it received a rating of PG.
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References Edit
44 BC; 32 BC; 85 AD; academician; aging; anger; anniversary; answer; apology; apple; arm; arrogance; arrow; "as you wish"; atmosphere; "at your service"; bacteria; beauty; blood; blood sample; bloodstream; "Bones"; borogove; brain; brain wave; breathing; brotherhood; brow; bullwhip; "by all means"; century; chamber; chess; children; choking; common cold; comparative test; concentration; contact; contemplation; court buffoon; crying; culture; Cupid; cut; dance; day; death; death warrant; deficiency; delirium; democratic society; deposit; desire; dignity; disciple; distress call; drum; dwarf; Earth; emergency gyro; emergency stabilizer; emotion; enemy; engineer; environmental condition; eugenics; Excellency; "excuse me"; fact; fear; fever; Flamenco; French language; fruit; furniture; genius; god; "good day"; good faith; grapes; gratitude; Greek civilization; Greek language; guest; hatred; head (aka ruler); heart; Hippocrates; hoof; hope; horn; hour; humiliation; hypo; hypothesis; idea; "in fact"; ignorance; infection; information; intention; "in that case"; "in the process"; "it's all right"; joking; justice; keg; kironide; kiss; kithara; knife; knowledge; laughing; laurel; leader; leadership; leg; life; light; logic; longevity; love; lyre; "Maiden Wine"; marriage; meaning; medical stores; medical tricorder; medicine (aka medical arts); meditation; Milky Way Galaxy; mind; month; mood; moralizing; murder; muscle; music; night; nova; "of course"; "of late"; order; "out of sorts"; pain; Pan; patience; peace; pebble; Pericles; philosopher king; physician (aka doctor); plate; pituitary gland; pituitary hormone; place; Plato; Platonian; Platonius; population; power level; present; principality; prisoner; probability; problem; prognosis; psychokinesis (aka psychokinetic power); puppet; question; rage; reality; recuperative power; refugee; republic; research; result; revenge; rhyme; sadism; Sahndara; Sahndara; saint; savage; "scared to death"; science officer; secret; self-reliance; sensor; serenade; Shakespeare, William; Shakespeare's sonnets; shape; shield; sing; "sinks in"; size; skin; slapping; slave; sleepwalking; Socrates; solution; smile; space fleet; spaceship; speech; spouse (wife); stabilizer; "stand by"; star; Starfleet; starship; stepchildren; storm; strain; subspace communication; symbol; temper; "thank you"; "that's all right"; theory; thing; thinking; Through the Looking-Glass; throwback; time; time factor; title; tone; torture; treasure; treatment; tricorder; trick; truth; turbulence; Tweedledum and Tweedledee; unconscious; universe; utopia; vanity; velvet; voice; Vulcan; weapon; will: wine; wing; word; yearWe’re only six days away from pitchers and catchers reporting to Tampa for the start of Spring Training. Here are some injury updates in the meantime, courtesy of Kevin Kernan, Andrew Marchand, Wally Matthews, Matt Ehalt, and the Associated Press.
So far, so good for Derek Jeter (leg). He just completed his third week of baseball activities and everything is holding up well. “I feel good,” he said. “I’ve been working hard, and I’ve had a complete offseason to work out and strengthen everything … It’s been fun, but it’s been difficult because you’re starting over from scratch.”
(leg). He just completed his third week of baseball activities and everything is holding up well. “I feel good,” he said. “I’ve been working hard, and I’ve had a complete offseason to work out and strengthen everything … It’s been fun, but it’s been difficult because you’re starting over from scratch.” Mark Teixeira (wrist) has started taking batting practice against live pitching. He has gradually worked his way back from surgery, first by taking dry swings and then by hitting off a tee and soft toss. “There’s plenty of guys that come back from injuries come back way too fast and get reinjured,” he said. “That’s not in my plans this year.”
(wrist) has started taking batting practice against live pitching. He has gradually worked his way back from surgery, first by taking dry swings and then by hitting off a tee and soft toss. “There’s plenty of guys that come back from injuries come back way too fast and get reinjured,” he said. “That’s not in my plans this year.” Scott Sizemore (knee) feels good as he works his way back from his second torn left ACL in the last two years. “I’m feeling pretty good, getting back on the field feels great and I haven’t had any issues with the knee,” he said. “Obviously, two serious knee injuries, doubts crept into my mind if I was ever going to be able to play again. Nothing’s given.”
(knee) feels good as he works his way back from his second torn left ACL in the last two years. “I’m feeling pretty good, getting back on the field feels great and I haven’t had any issues with the knee,” he said. “Obviously, two serious knee injuries, doubts crept into my mind if I was ever going to be able to play again. Nothing’s given.” Manny Banuelos (elbow) is completely rehabbed from Tommy John surgery and on a normal throwing program right now. “[The elbow] feels normal, just like before surgery. I feel ready to go,” he said.SOUTH BEND, Ind. -- Notre Dame's women basketball players came out for pregame warmups Saturday wearing "I Can't Breathe" shirts.
The Irish joined a growing list of teams wearing similar shirts in support of the family of Eric Garner, who died in July after a New York police officer placed him in a chokehold while trying to arrest him.
Forward Taya Reimer said the team came up with the idea after Notre Dame students conducted a die-in protest on campus this week. The players got the OK from their coach and the university to wear the shirts.
Notre Dame's women basketball players joined LeBron James and the Georgetown men's team, among others, in wearing "I Can't Breathe" shirts. Matt Cashore/USA TODAY Sports
"A few of us talked about it and we thought wearing these shirts for the game would be a cool way to show our support and give our condolences to families that have lost someone," she said.
The players wore the shirts while warming up before their 70-50 win over Michigan. Starters took them off for the pregame introductions while the reserves kept them on.
Reimer said the players decided to wear the shirts because "it's an issue we're all passionate about."
"It's not an anti-law enforcement, anti-anything message," she said. "It's just showing condolence for the family, just supporting them."
Coach Muffet McGraw was pleased the players took a stand, saying her staff dressed in black to show their support.
"I was really proud of our team, especially Taya, to publicly stand for something you believe in," she said. "I think one of the things I try to teach them is you've got to fight. You've got to fight for playing time. You've got to fight to win a national championship. You have to be willing to stand up and fight and you have to be accountable."
Notre Dame athletic director Jack Swarbrick said he was proud of the players.
"They are students first and you want students at a university to be passionate about things, to be engaged in conversations about social issues," he said. "If there's anything I worry it's that our kids get too focused on the athletic side of it and don't do enough of the other things."
He said the university checked with the NCAA to make sure wearing the shirts, which the players had made and paid for themselves, didn't violate any rules.
McGraw has a photo hanging in her office of the Rev. Theodore Hesburgh, the former school president, standing with Martin Luther King Jr. during a 1964 civil rights rally in Chicago.
"I want to have strong, confident women who are not afraid to use their voice and take a stand," she said.
Lindsay Allen scored a career-high 17 points and Jewell Loyd added 14 to lead No. 5 Notre Dame.
The Irish (10-1), coming off a loss to No. 2 Connecticut and an overtime victory at No. 25 DePaul, shot 52 percent against the Wolverines and held Michigan to 35 percent.
The Associated Press contributed to this report.ADEN (Reuters) - A U.S. drone attack killed at least five suspected al Qaeda militants in southern Yemen on Friday, and gunmen retaliated by blowing up an LNG pipeline, forcing output to be stopped, officials and energy workers said.
The drone set fire to the militants' car in the southern province of Shabwa and killed all its occupants, one official said. One bystander was also killed and five were wounded, officials and residents told Reuters.
Hours later gunmen believed to be militants blew up a pipeline which transports gas to a facility whose leading stakeholder is French oil major Total at Balhaf port on the Arabian Sea, energy workers said.
Residents said flames could be seen from several kilometres (miles) away and a company employee said exports had stopped.
"The explosion took place 28 km (17.5 miles) north of the Balhaf LNG export plant. Production has been halted," an employee of Yemen LNG, who asked not to be named, told Reuters.
The Balhaf LNG export facility opened in 2009 and was the largest industrial project ever carried out in impoverished Yemen.
Oil and gas pipelines have often been attacked by Islamic militants and disgruntled tribesmen. The pipeline to Balhaf was last blown up in October, hours after an air raid on militants, and took about 10 days to be repaired.
A text message sent to journalists, purporting to come from the al Qaeda-affiliated Ansar al-Sharia (Supporters of Islamic Law), said the group was behind the attack.
"The mujahideen (holy war fighters) blew up the pipeline... in retaliation for the strike for which Crusader America and its obedient slave in Sanaa are responsible," the text message said, referring to the Yemeni government, a close U.S. ally in the fight against al Qaeda.
Al Qaeda has strengthened its hold on southern areas of the Arabian Peninsula country during the past year of protests against veteran ruler Ali Abdullah Saleh, who left office in February.
The United States has retaliated with a campaign of drone strikes on suspected al Qaeda militants.
In an earlier text message, Ansar al-Sharia said two militants were "martyred" in the attack and four passersby were injured.
Earlier this month, U.S. drone attacks killed at least 25 al Qaeda-linked fighters including one of their leaders, and a Yemeni air force raid killed 20, in the biggest airstrikes since the new president, Abd-Rabbu Mansour Hadi, took office.
Neighboring Saudi Arabia, the world's biggest oil exporter, shares U.S. concern over the expansion of al-Qaeda's regional wing in a country next to major Red Sea oil shipping lanes.
In a separate incident, suspected al Qaeda fighters shot dead two men in the southern port city of Aden on Friday, a local official said. The victims belonged to a clan that has opposed the group's militants in nearby Abyan province, he said.
In a persistent dispute over fishing rights with Eritrea, Yemeni forces captured two Eritrean soldiers trying to seize a Yemeni fishing boat near the Red Sea port of Hudaida, Yemen's Interior Ministry said.
(Reporting by Mohammed Mukhashaf; Writing by Firouz Sedarat; Editing by Tim Pearce)Four people were shot at a Meek Mill concert in Delaware, according to police. (Published Saturday, Dec. 7, 2013)
Four people were shot early this morning after a Meek Mill appearance in Wilmington, Delaware.
Mill, a Philadelphia rapper, was performing at the Moodswing Niteclub Lounge on Kirkwood Highway.
After the show was done, according to police, as people were leaving, some of them started firing their guns in the parking lot of the nightclub. That was just before 2 a.m.
Three men and on woman were hit.
None of the injuries appears to be life-threatening.
Police said when they got to the scene, there were hundreds of people -- 600 to 700 by their estimate. They could hear gunshots. Police were able to disperse the crowd, but they were not able to make any arrests.
Two of the victims were taken to local hospitals by their friends and the other two were treated at the scene, according to Sgt. Paul Shavack. The men are 21, 22 and 24 years old. The woman is 33. Police say five cars were also damaged by gunshots.
Investigators say they would like to talk with anyone who has information about the shootings. You can find more information on their Facebook page.Carl Court/Getty Images Belgian police aborted Abdeslam investigation months before Paris attacks, media report Anti-terrorism unit could not follow up on the information because it was understaffed.
Belgian police received a tip-off about contact between terror suspects Abdelhamid Abaaoud and Brahim and Salah Abdeslam in February 2015 in the wake of the Verviers anti-terrorism operations, but didn't conclude their investigation, Belgian media reports.
The anti-terrorism unit of the federal police shelved the investigation because the unit was understaffed, broadcaster RTBF reports, citing a confidential report into the attacks.
Several days after police raided houses in Verviers in Belgium in January 2015 to dismantle a terrorist cell of which Abaaoud was the alleged mastermind, a source informed police in the Brussels neighborhood of Molenbeek about a connection between Abaaoud and the Abdeslam brothers. Nine months later, the brothers would play a key role in the Paris terror attacks.
The informant passed on information about Brahim Abdeslam calling his brother Salah from the Turkish-Syrian border and provided Salah's mobile phone number, according to RTBF.
Police then issued an arrest warrant for the brothers. Brahim was arrested in February, and Salah turned himself in, declaring that he had not been in touch with Abaaoud for three years.
A case file was then passed on to the federal police, where an anti-terror unit started a preliminary investigation, but decided to put the information “on hold” due to the lack of manpower to investigate the phone calls. The brothers were subsequently released. The police unit was dealing with more than 110 files and monitored 420 suspects, RTFB reports.
The federal police sent the files to a magistrate, where they remained untouched for four months, after which the magistrate decided to shelve the case.
Belgian media also reports Salah Abdeslam posted pictures of himself posing with the Islamic State flag on Facebook three weeks before the November Paris attacks. The OCAM, the coordination body for threat analysis, knew about the posts, but didn't act on it.- Advertisement -
The poor, misunderstood anarchists just can't seem to get a break. When you point out the absurdity of the "market anarchism" preached by some, such as those at the Center For a Stateless Society, as I did in my previous piece, the response -- even from "market anarchists" themselves -- is to shift the discussion away from their own arguments and onto another strand of anarchy! In this case it's the "libertarian/socialist" school of thought.
Just what is a "libertarian/socialist" and isn't that a clear oxymoron? Have not all "socialist" experiments become larger and more powerful centralized states that eventually eraseed the "libertarian" side of the equation in pretty short order? That would certainly be the knee-jerk response of much of the population of the United States today.
Over at "Infoshop," a longstanding "libertarian/socialist" and "libertarian/communist" proselytizer, one can read for days emotional histories (chock full of psychobabble) and series of proposals for replacing the "state" with "collectives" and "syndicates" and other "free" arrangements. I highly recommend their FAQ to masochists who wish to drown in an ocean of Marxist-styled babble mostly at odds with the Marxists themselves. You'll be treated to discussions like this:
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"For Henry Appleton, there was 'a class of ranting enthusiasts who falsely call themselves Anarchists' who advocated both violence and 'levelling'. 'All Communism,' he asserted, 'under whatever guise, is the natural enemy of Anarchism and a Communist sailing under the flag of Anarchism is as false a figure as could be invented.' Yet, ironically, A. H. Simpson disproved that particular claim for while attacking communism he ended by stating his 'argument applies only to aggressive Communists' and that '[v]oluntary Communism can exist and, if successful, flourish under Anarchy.' So, apparently, some kinds of communism are compatible with anarchism after all!" --Infoshop FAQ
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"'...the coercive climate, in which 'fascists' were being shot, was sufficient. 'Spontaneous' and 'forced' collectives existed, as did willing and unwilling collectivists within them.'...
...Therefore, his suggestion that the Aragon collectives were imposed upon the rural population is based upon the insight that there was a 'coercive climate' in Aragon at the time. Of course a civil war against fascism would produce a 'coercive climate,' particularly at the front line...
- Advertisement -...In addition, in a life and death struggle against fascism, in which the fascists were systematically murdering vast numbers of anarchists, socialists and republicans in the areas under their control, it is hardly surprising that some anarchist troops took the law into their own hands and murdered some of those who supported and would help the fascists...
...The question does arise, however, of whether the climate was made so coercive by the war and the nearness of the anarchist militia that individual choice was impossible...
...it cannot be overemphasised that notwithstanding the many instances of coercion and violence, the revolution of July 1936 distinguished itself from all others by the generally spontaneous and far-reaching character of its collectivist movement... " -Infoshop FAQ (emphasis added)
Next Page 1 | 2The number of people who die from HIV-related causes each year in the U.S. is now down to about 12,700—from a peak of more than 50,000 in the mid-1990s—thanks to condom education and distribution campaigns, increased testing and improved treatments. But now a different infectious disease is quietly killing even more people than HIV is: Hepatitis C.
The majority of the 3.2 million people who are estimated to have chronic hepatitis C virus (HCV) in the U.S. are baby boomer adults.
And most of those infected with the virus do not know that they have it, which means they could easily be spreading it to others via exposure to blood—or, occasionally, sexual contact.
Although long-term intravenous drug users are at particular risk, so are "those who experimented with [such] drugs for a limited time in their youth," Harvey Alter and T. Jake Liang, both of the National Institutes of Health, wrote in an essay published online Monday in Annals of Internal Medicine. "These bygone experiences do not often connote risk to the affected persons nor serve as a reason to seek testing," they noted, making this slow-developing disease difficult to catch before it develops into cirrhosis or liver cancer (hepatocellular carcinoma). Their essay was part of a four-paper special series on hepatitis C.
More than 15,000 people died from hepatitis C-related issues in the U.S. in 2007—about three quarters of whom were people aged 45 to 64, according to Alter and Liang. And that number is expected to double as the bulk of the population with the disease get older. The cost of treating all of these people is likely to top $6.7 billion in the decade of 2010 to 2019.
Much of that growth is anticipated because those infected with hepatitis C often don't seek treatment until the disease has caused serious damage, according to another paper published Monday in the same issue of Annals of Internal Medicine. "Hepatitis C virus infection is often asymptomatic or causes nonspecific symptoms (depression, arthralgia and fatigue) for decades," Kathleen Ly, of the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC), and her colleagues wrote in their paper.
The good news for those who do get diagnosed is that new hepatitis C drugs are coming onto the market. But they are not cheap. One new promising one, a protease inhibitor called boceprevir, runs about $1,100 per week, which when added to the double-drug cocktail of interfearon and the antiviral ribavirin, makes for especially expensive treatment. Some researchers have proposed that testing patients for a genotype that has a cure rate of less than 40 percent with previous treatment might help make treatment the more cost effective.
A new analysis in the same issue of Annals of Internal Medicine, led by Shan Liu of the Center for Health Policy at Stanford University, found that giving HCV patients of all genotypes a triple-drug cocktail is, indeed, cost-effective for allowing patients to live longer, healthier lives. And as Alter and Liang pointed out, as opposed to HIV or even hepatitis B, HCV can often be effectively cured after six months to a year of antiviral treatment. "Every effectively treated high-risk individual diminishes the infectious pool and the likelihood of secondary transmission."
With treatment options expanding, many researchers are turning their attention back to the question of locating patients. "As innovative treatments for hepatitis C follow their now-destined progression, the most burning question will not be whether to treat, but rather how to identify |
to identify with the narrative can be declined. We are actually already free from any narrative. This realization is personally freeing but it doesn’t change the societal conditions. That’s why I think it’s our mutual responsibility to deconstruct those narratives that generate oppression and injustice and co-create new narratives that have more freedom and less oppression built into them. When we engage in social activism like that, we need to be aware that changing social narratives can take a long time.
As a practice, there’s the actualization of wisdom, which is the practice of non-identification. And there’s the practice of compassion, which is how to use your non-identification to deliberately work toward constructing narratives that are more beneficial. Those two together are freedom. It’s both the freedom from identification and the freedom to construct functional identities.
Part of the Ego issueFormer U.S. Secretary of State Madeleine Albright introduces Clinton during a campaign stop in Concord, N.H., on Saturday. (Photo: Adrees Latif/Reuters)
The topic of sexism came up several times in the Democratic presidential campaign over the weekend after two of Hillary Clinton’s prominent female supporters criticized young women for backing Bernie Sanders.
At a rally in Concord, N.H., on Saturday, former Secretary of State Madeleine Albright introduced Clinton by throwing shade at her Democratic rival.
“People are talking about revolution,“ Albright said. What kind of a revolution would it be to have the first woman president of the United States? … Young women, you have to help. Hillary Clinton will always be there for you.”
On Sunday, Clinton defended Albright’s assertion that “there’s a special place in hell for women” who don’t vote for her.
“I think it was a light-hearted but very pointed remark,” Clinton said on NBC’s “Meet the Press.” "She believes it firmly, in part, because she knows what a struggle it has been. And she understands the struggle is not over.”
The Democratic frontrunner was asked if she understood why some women might have been offended by Albright’s comments.
“Well good grief, we’re getting offended by everything these days,” Clinton said. “Honest to goodness, I mean, people can’t say anything without offending somebody. She has a life experience that I respect. I admire her greatly. And I think what she was trying to do — what she’s done in every setting I’ve ever seen her in going back 20 plus years — was to remind young women, particularly, that you know, this struggle, which many of us have been part of, is not over, and don’t be in any way lulled by the progress we’ve made.”
Albright wasn’t the only prominent Clinton supporter to offend some of the female Bernie voting bloc. In an appearance on HBO’s “Real Time With Bill Maher” Friday, feminist writer Gloria Steinem suggested the young women who support Sanders are doing so because young men are.
“Men tend to get more conservative because they gain power as they age,” Steinem said. “Women get more radical because they lose power as they age. They’re going to get more activist as they grow older. And when you’re younger, you think, ‘Where are the boys? The boys are with Bernie.’”
On Sunday, Steinem posted an apology on Facebook:
In a case of talk-show Interruptus, I misspoke on the Bill Maher show recently, and apologize for what’s been misinterpreted as implying young women aren’t serious in their politics. What I had just said on the same show was the opposite: young women are active, mad as hell about what’s happening to them, graduating in debt, but averaging a million dollars less over their lifetimes to pay it back. Whether they gravitate to Bernie or Hillary, young women are activist and feminist in greater numbers than ever before.
On CNN’s “State of the Union” Sunday, Clinton addressed the issue of sexism in coverage of the 2016 presidential campaign days after she was accused by a male pundit of “shrieking” during her speech following the Iowa caucuses.
“We are still living with a double standard, and I know it,” Clinton said in an interview with Jake Tapper. “Every woman I know knows it. Whether you’re in the media as a woman, or you’re in the professions or business or politics. And I don’t know anything other to do than to just keep forging through it and just taking the slings and arrows that come with being a woman in the arena.”
Last week, CNBC’s Larry Kudrow compared the former secretary of state’s address to “something out of Lenin or Trotsky.”
Clinton told Tapper she didn’t want to “single anybody out.”
“You know, sometimes I talk soft,” Clinton said. “Sometimes I get passionate and I get a little bit excited. I don’t know any man who doesn’t do the same thing. And I find it sort of interesting that all of a sudden this is a big discussion about me, once again.”
Clinton, who endured similar attacks when she ran for president in 2008, said she knows the drill.
Slideshow: The battle for New Hampshire >>>
“I’m so used to this,” she said. “I’m going to keep making my case. I’m going to keep talking about what I will do as president. I’m going to keep laying out my record. Because I think it’s really important that this election be actually about who can do the job that needs to be done starting in January of 2017.”after the 'New Jungle' site was branded an 'intolerable humanitarian scandal' by activist groups
A leading French MP has blamed Britain's 'black jobs market' for attracting thousands of migrants to Calais, saying there is a 'problem with the English' that allows people to work in the UK without identity papers.
Former employment minister Xavier Bertrand challenged David Cameron to tackle the issue and accused him of hypocrisy because England 'have a cheap labour market because illegal immigrants are paid so much less'.
The criticism came as the French government announced it will make the 'New Jungle' migrant camp near the port town of Calais a permanent fixture by providing running water and electricity to the site.
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Mess: In response to criticism from the UN and aid groups about the conditions in the camp, France vowed to spend €500,000 (£360,000) improving the 'New Jungle' camp, which lies close to the English Channel
Hopeless: The controversial 'New Jungle' shanty town is currently home to 3,000 migrants, mostly from sub-Saharan Africa and the Middle East
Making a run for it: Most of those living in the camp hope to enter Britain illegally by storming lorries parked close to the port before they are loaded onto ferries and cross the Channel
In response to criticism from the UN and aid groups about the conditions in the camp, France vowed to spend €500,000 (£360,000) improving the camp, which lies close to the English Channel.
The controversial 'New Jungle' shanty town is currently home to 3,000 migrants, mostly from sub-Saharan Africa and the Middle East, who hope to enter Britain illegally by storming lorries parked close to the port before they are loaded onto ferries and cross the Channel.
The decision to make the camp 'official' by spending hundreds of thousands of euros on its infrastructure is bound to stoke tensions with both Britain and local residents, many of are furious at the impact migration is having on the town.
Just this weekend a gang savagely attacked a group of male migrants in the town with metal bars., according to The Independent.
Police have confirmed they are investigating whether the attack was carried out by local right wing activists, rival migrants, or members of criminal gangs involved in people trafficking.
But just a week earlier, a far right protest group called Sauvons Calais (Let's Save Calais) marched through the town carrying placards reading: 'Calais, a clean town dirtied by immigration.'
News of the 'New Jungle' makeover provoked a furious response from Mr Bertrand, who told France3 television: 'This means the English - and here is the hypocrisy - have a cheap labour market because illegal immigrants are paid so much less.'
'If Mr Cameron wants to hold a debate about the European Union, he should first stop this hypocrisy.
'It's not an 'a la carte' EU where you can choose only the bits of it you want...We need to say very clearly to people who arrive in Europe that there are no more jobs or welfare benefits here.'
Desperate: Many living in the New Jungle camp have already made the perilous boat crossing across the Mediterranean in recent months, having fled conflicts in Syria, Libya and sub-Saharan Africa
Condemned: The camp has been branded a 'intolerable humanitarian scandal', as well as a 'government-sanctioned slum' by activist groups
EU TO LAUNCH SURVEILLANCE MISSIONS AGAINST MEDITERRANEAN PEOPLE TRAFFICKERS 'WITHIN DAYS' EU foreign ministers have formally approved the launch of the first phase of a military operation to target people smugglers in the Mediterranean, officials said. The initial ships and aircraft to conduct intelligence gathering missions should be available within a week, officials said. EU foreign affairs head Federica Mogherini said the 28-nation bloc had responded quickly to the crisis washing up on its southern shores. 'I am impressed by the unanimity and speed with which we have put this together,' Mogherini said as she arrived to chair the foreign ministers meeting. The decision comes after serious differences among member states over how to handle the thousands of migrants crossing the Mediterranean, with Italy, Greece and Malta bearing the brunt of the burden. The loss of up to 800 people in April when their rickety boat sank forced the issue after the bloc late last year had actually scaled down its search and rescue operations off southern Italy to Rome's dismay.
Mr Bertrand also called for a'maritime blockade' of the Mediterranean to stop migrants arriving on boats from Libya.
The MP for Nicolas Sarkozy's new right-wing Republican Party is known for his outspoken views on migrants in France.
Three years ago, he said that Muslim women who hide their faces behind veils should be stripped of their French citizenship.
But respected Labour MP Ian Austin, a former member of the home affairs select committee, slammed the French MP’s remarks.
He told MailOnline: 'It’s outrageous that the French are blaming us for problems at Calais when this is a French problem.
'It’s common sense that illegal immigrants living in Calais should be processed in France, and then dealt with there, instead of spending a fortune on new facilities in Calais so they can make repeated attempts to enter Britain illegally.'
With electricity, water, toilets and permanent shelters, the New Jungle shanty town will be the first official migrant camp near Calais since the Red Cross' Sangatte site closed in December 2002.
The changes come as conditions in the camp dramatically worsened in recent months, with food, blankets and shelter in short supply as the number of migrants living there jumped from 2,000 to 3,000 since the beginning of the year.
The camp - which is also known as 'Jungle 2' - has been branded an 'intolerable humanitarian scandal', as well as a 'government-sanctioned slum' by activist groups.
Many living in the New Jungle camp have already made the perilous boat crossing across the Mediterranean in recent months, having fled conflicts in Syria, Libya and sub-Saharan Africa.
Others have arrived by land, often travelling from places like Afghanistan via the Balkans.
Rivals: A fight breaks out between Eritrean and Sudanese gangs at the camp in the French port town of Calais
Anger: News of the camp being made 'official' prompted leading French MP Xavier Bertrand (pictured) to blame Britain's 'black jobs market' for the migrant problem on France's northern Channel coast
Britain has long objected to the presence of a migrant camp so close to Calais' ferry port, which it has branded a'magnet' for those wishing to illegally cross into the UK.
But Calais mayor Natacha Bouchart also recently blamed Britain's 'black market economy' and 'cushy benefits system' for the illegal immigrant crisis in her town.
She said the UK should be forced to abandon border checks for travellers arriving from Europe to help move the migrants away.
Ms Bouchart said: 'They want to go to England because they can expect better conditions on arrival there than anywhere else in Europe or even internationally.
'There are no ID cards. They can easily find work outside the formal economy, which is not really controlled.
'Calais is a hostage to the British. The migrants come here to get to Britain... The situation here is barely manageable. The UK border should be moved from Calais to the English side of the Channel because we're not here to do their jobs.'
The news comes as Switzerland threatened to close its borders to migrants and accused Italy of failing to deal with refugees coming into Europe after fleeing war-torn countries.
Shelter: Many living in the New Jungle camp have already made the perilous boat crossing across the Mediterranean in recent months, having fled conflicts in Syria, Libya and sub-Saharan Africa
Improvements: France has announced it will make the 'New Jungle' migrant camp a permanent fixture by providing running water and electricity to the site
At rest: Britain has long objected to the presence of a migrant camp so close to Calais' ferry port, which it has branded a'magnet' for those wishing to illegally cross into the UK
THE MIGRANT CATCHER: FARMER CLAIMS HE HAS BEEN FORCED TO ROUND UP 'HUNDREDS' OF PEOPLE AND TAKE THEM TO POLICE A farmer is taking the migrant crisis into his own hands by rounding up 'hundreds' of suspected stowaways who he claims are hiding in his fields. Chris Gadsden, who lives 125 miles away from Dover, says he has collared up to 50 migrants in the past month alone as part of his one-man patrol on his land in rural Bedfordshire. The 60-year-old claims the suspected illegal immigrants traipse through his land after being dropped off at the nearby M1 services, which are 400 yards away. Mr Gadsden - who found one man hiding in a drain pipe - then rounds up the alleged criminals before handing them over to police and even sometimes driving them to the station himself. The father-of-four said the sheer number of suspected illegal immigrants on his land - which he said included 30 Somalis just last week - demonstrates how quickly the problem is spreading into the British countryside. He said: 'There's been hundreds of them, and they're just the ones I've seen. There's supposed to be a system in place to stop them sneaking in but it obviously isn't working, so I have to do what I can. 'It's not a race thing. My problem is they're sneaking in and breaking our laws.'
Norman Gobbi, the head of the cantonal government of Ticino, told NZZ Sonntag: 'If the influx of refugees from Italy continues, we will have to temporarily close the border.'
'It's the only way for Switzerland to put pressure on other countries that do not respect their obligations,' he added.
He went on to say that the number of asylum seekers and illegal immigrants crossing into Switzerland from over the border from Italy is now double what it was just one year ago.
Gobbi pointed out that massive increase in migrants arriving in Switzerland came after France closed its own border with Italy to migrants.
He reserved special criticism for the Italian government, however, saying it had failed to honour the terms of the Dublin Regulation, which requires that the first country in the EU where an asylum seeker arrives is responsible for dealing with his or her claim.
Gobbi suggested that by allowing migrants to simply pass through Italy on to wealthier nations, the Swiss cannon of Ticino had effectively become the'southern border of Germany'.
So far in 2015, Switzerland has reportedly detained more than 3,000 people for unlawfully staying in Switzerland - and official estimates suggest that in total more than 30,000 people with apply for asylum in Switzerland by the end of the year - the highest number since 1999.
Roughly 95 per cent of these asylum seekers arrive in Switzerland by train - most coming via Italy.
A large number of these are swiftly sent back to Italy, but as the Italian government is failing to process the application or register the details of many of the individuals, the authorities are rarely prepared for the arrival.The Marine Corps is facing a troubling drain of combat experience as thousands of battle-hardened Marines have left the Corps during the past several years.
The number of Marines on active-duty who have been awarded Combat Action Ribbons has dropped by more than half over the past five years — from a high of more than 40,000 at the time of the surge in Afghanistan in 2011 to fewer than 17,500 in 2016 — according to data obtained by Marine Corps Times through a Freedom of Information Act request.
In today’s Corps, fewer than one in five Marines has a single deployment under their belt and the number of Marines who have deployed twice is now less than one in 10, according to Marine Corps officials.
The shift reflects in part the Corps’ natural turnover and the reduction in combat deployments around the world. Since the U.S. drew down its troop presence in Iraq in 2011 and Afghanistan in 2014, Marines have had fewer opportunities for combat.
“Time is the biggest contributor to the loss of combat experience — because you can’t stop time,” said Sgt. Major Troy Black, the senior enlisted leader for Manpower and Reserve Affairs. “There’s no way to get around that, other than to have more combat occur.”
Yet the decline also reveals some challenges the Corps is facing in retaining those older, more combat-experienced Marines in the upper ranks. Marine Commandant Gen. Robert Neller told Congress in June that it is getting harder to retain “experienced middle management.”
That’s why the Corps has ramped up a slew of retention bonuses next fiscal year to retain high quality Marines. Combat experience is one aspect of being a high-quality Marine, along with proficiency, conduct marks and leadership skills.
The drain of firsthand combat experience is putting added pressure on the dwindling cadre of senior noncommissioned officers who can mentor today’s younger Marines and share hard-won battlefield lessons.
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For example, Gunnery Sgt. Daniel Robert has had six combat deployments, including both to Iraq and Afghanistan. One of those was to Sangin, Afghanistan, in 2010 and 2011 with 3rd Battalion, 5th Marines when the unit had more casualties than any Marine unit in the Afghanistan war.
Today, Robert talks frequently with junior Marines about his back-to-back combat deployments.
“The experience I have gained on my combat deployments as a junior Marine has given me all the tools needed to succeed as I grew older in the Corps,” said Robert, the 2017 Marine Corps Times Marine of the Year.
While the loss of combat vets in the ranks is an inevitable byproduct of wars winding down, the Marine Corps still needs to be prepared to respond to ongoing threats, he said.
“This simply means we as leaders must continue to train the newer generation even harder than what we did when the war was active. As we all know, someday we will be on a battlefield in some country in this world and all must be trained to succeed regardless of the rank or jobs we’re in,” Robert said.
‘They want to deploy’
For years, the frequency and intensity of the Corps’ combat deployments was precisely what drew in Marines and kept them professionally fulfilled. Now that there are fewer traditional ground combat deployments, some Marines are leaving.
“Some came during the fight just to fight,” Sergeant Major of the Marine Corps Ronald Green told Marine Corps Times in a recent interview.
“Now that the fight is over, they say: ‘Hey, you know what? It was good while we were doing what I came to do. We’re no longer doing that. Don’t know when we’re going to do it again, so I am going to do something different.’ That’s expected of some.”
Yet Green also said the Marine Corps is not idly sitting in garrison. Marines continue to deploy as part of Marine Expeditionary Units, Special Purpose Marine Air-Ground Task Forces and rotational training forces.
“We have 38,000-plus Marines that are deployed right now,” Green said. “So I don’t want anybody to ever think that we’re not deploying Marines. We can’t get enough of them out there. They want to deploy. That’s what Marines want to do.”
Black cautioned about gauging the level of combat experience by the number of Marines with Combat Action Ribbons, which he said is “completely the wrong metric to use.”
The ribbon is awarded to individual Marines who have engaged the enemy or faced hostile fire from enemy forces. Not all Marines who go to combat receive the Combat Action Ribbon, said Black, whose wife, a retired first sergeant, has been to combat but does not have the award.
“What would probably be a better metric to use is the number of Marines who have had deployments,” Black said. “Because a deployment on a Special MAGTF right now is gaining experience — so is a MEU. Artillerymen that we see on the news that are heavily engaged are gaining experience firing cannons in support of combat operations. Are they in combat? I don’t answer that question, but they’re gaining experience.”
According to Marine Corps data, about 46,000 of today’s active-duty and reserve Marines have deployed for at least 180 days on missions that include combat operations, humanitarian and disaster relief missions, training exercises and Marine expeditionary unit deployments. That’s about one in five Marines in the force today.
Of those Marines, 18,580 — or fewer than one in 10 Marines — have deployed twice. The number of Marines in today’s force who have deployed three times is about 6,500, and only 2,181 Marines have four or more deployments, according to Manpower and Reserve Affairs.
Black said it is difficult to offer incentives targeting Marines with combat experience and, he added, combat experience is not necessarily the best experience.
“Are we incentivizing people with combat experience? No. We’re incentivizing Marines who are high performers,” he said.
“This is a competitive environment to be retained in the Marine Corps. Because of the competitiveness, all factors are taken into consideration. Do you have combat experience? That’s a factor. Are you physically fit? That’s a factor. Are you meeting basic annual training requirements? That’s a factor. Are your proficiency and conduct marks, and your fitness reports competitive with your peers? Those are all factors.”
Passing it on
Facing the inevitable loss of combat veterans, the Marine Corps needs to make sure that those Marines who have been to war impart the lessons they’ve learned to younger Marines, said Katherine Kidder, a military personnel expert with the Center for a New American Security think tank in Washington.
“To a certain extent, the services — particularly the ground forces — have been using deployments as training experience in the last 15 years,” Kidder said.
That means the Marine Corps needs to find other ways to educate troops on the skillsets and thought processes required for combat, she said. Professionally military education helped retain institutional knowledge gained from World War I when untested U.S. troops went to war again more than 20 years later.
“The question is maybe not ‘How many people are we losing,’ but, ‘Are we still maintaining enough to create the framework where you could rapidly expand with junior forces and be able to structure it in such a way that they would be competent on the battlefield,” Kidder said.
That’s exactly what the Marine Corps has been doing for the past 16 years, Green said. He said the Marine Corps has expanded professional military education so that more Marines can take the Lance Corporal Seminar, the Corporals Courses at the unit level, the Sergeants Course and courses for staff sergeants.
“We made all of that available since the war started,” Green said. “That was one, to educate us; and secondly so that we could pass that experience from combat a lot faster.”
Retention
Retaining the best combat veterans is part of a larger retention challenge that the Corps is now facing.
One factor across the military is an improving economy that offers more opportunities for experienced service members in the civilian world.
For Marines, the top Marine general said the Corps’ retention challenges are driven in part by the intense operational tempo of training and other types of deployments, even though today’s Marines have fewer opportunities for traditional combat deployments.
The current dwell time ratio of two months at home for every month Marines spend deployed, or 2-to-1 ratio. Neller has said the Marine Corps needs to return to a dwell ratio of 1-to-3.
“That’s the long term sustainable and I think, not just for the maintenance of our gear and the training of our force, but also for our families,” Neller said at a Senate Armed Services Committee hearing.
“So, we’ve been at 1-to-2. We can continue to sustain it, but I think now we’re seeing both the effects on retention of senior career Marines and on the wear-and-tear on the gear.”
Green agreed. “We’ve found out that more seasoned or older Marines — not old as in E-9, E-8 — but staff sergeants and gunnery sergeants are choosing to get out,” Green said. “That means you’re going to promote faster. That means your leadership is going to be younger with less experience.”
In fiscal 2016, the Marine Corps retained 2 percent fewer staff sergeants and roughly 4.5 percent fewer gunnery sergeants compared to the four-year average, said Capt. Scott Steele, career force planner at Manpower and Reserve Affairs. There was no significant reduction in the number of sergeants re-enlisting.
At transition readiness seminars, Marines are given surveys asking why they left the Corps at the 12- or 14-year mark instead of retiring at 20 years, Green said.Dumping Moore's Law is perhaps the best thing that could happen to computers, as it'll hasten the move away from an aging computer architecture holding back hardware innovation.
That's the view of prominent scientist R. Stanley Williams, a senior fellow in the Hewlett Packard Labs. Williams played a key role in the creation of the memristor by HP in 2008.
Moore's Law is an observation made by Intel co-founder Gordon Moore in 1965 that has helped make devices smaller and faster. It predicts that the density of transistors would double every 18 to 24 months, while the cost of making chips goes down.
Every year, computers and mobile devices that are significantly faster can be bought with the same amount of money thanks in part to guidance from Moore's Law. The observation has helped drive up device performance on a predictable basis while keeping costs down.
But the predictions tied to Moore's Law are reaching their limits as it becomes harder to make chips at smaller geometries. That's a challenge facing all top chip makers including Intel, which is changing the way it interprets Moore's Law as it tries to cling on to it for dear life.
Williams is the latest to join a growing cadre of scientists who predict Moore's Law is dying. The end of Moore's Law "could be the best thing that has happened to computing in decades," Williams wrote in a research paper published in the latest issue of IEEE Computing in Science and Engineering.
The end of Moore's Law will bring creativity to chip and computer design and help engineers and researchers think outside the box, Williams said. Moore's Law has bottled up innovation in computer design, he hinted.
So what's next? Williams predicted there would be computers with a series of chips and accelerators patched together, much like the early forms of superfast computers. Computing could also be memory driven, with a much faster bus driving speedier computing and throughput.
The idea of a memory-driven computer plays to the strength of HPE, which has built The Machine along those lines. The initial version of The Machine has persistent memory that can be used as both DRAM and flash storage but could eventually be based on memristor, an intelligent form of memory and storage that can track data patterns.
Memory-driven computing could also break down the current architecture-based and processor-centric domination of the computer market. In the longer term, neuromorphic chips designed around the way the brain works could drive computing.
In the longer term, neuromorphic chips that are designed around the way the brain works could drive computing. HPE is developing a chip designed to mimic a human brain, and similar chips are being developed by IBM, Qualcomm, and universities in the U.S. and Europe.
"Although our understanding of brains today is limited, we know enough now to design and build circuits that can accelerate certain computational tasks," Williams wrote.
Applications like machine learning highlight the need for new types of chips. IBM has benchmarked its neuromorphic chip called TrueNorth as being faster and more power-efficient than conventional deep-learning chips like GPUs.
Williams suggested ASICs and FPGAs (field-programmable gate arrays) could play a role in driving computing beyond Moore's Law. These technologies will use superfast interconnects like Gen Z, which was introduced last year and will be supported by major chipmakers and server makers like Dell and Hewlett Packard Enterprise.
Quantum computers are also emerging as a way to replace today's PCs and servers, but are still decades away from running everyday applications.The History of English Wine English wine: its history in a nutshell! The Romans brought the vine and wine to Britain Many vineyards in Middle Ages, but later decline Renaissance of English vineyards post World War 2 - now nearly 400 Index Click on topic or scroll down page
Roman origins?
Domesday and Middle Ages
Victorian experimenter
Twentieth century gap
Post-war pioneers
Exponential growth
Maturity?
Problems
An un-level playing field?
Re-positioning English wine
A peculiarly "British" confusion
Less means better?
A reading list
Appeal for contributors Return to home page
Roman Origins It is said that Julius Caesar brought the vine to England. Nice though that story is, some scholars think it apocryphal - wine was certainly brought to Britain by the Romans, but it is less certain whether the vine was grown here, or if it was, whether it was in sufficent quantity to satisfy the local requirement for wine or just as an ornament to remind Romans of home and wealthy Romano-Britons of the source of their civilisation and prosperity.
Domesday & Middle Ages It is more certain that by the time of the Norman Conquest, vines were grown, and wine made, in a substantial number of monastic institutions in England, especially, southern England. The legacy of street names (such as Vine street or the Vineyards) in London and provincial towns and cities - suggests that vines and vineyards were certainly no great rarities. At the time of the compilation of the Domesday Survey in the late eleventh century, vineyards were recorded in 46 places in southern England, from East Anglia through to modern-day Somerset. By the time King Henry VIIIth ascended the throne there were 139 sizeable vineyards in England and Wales - 11 of them owned by the Crown, 67 by noble families and 52 by the church. It is not exactly clear why the number of vineyards declined subsequently. Some have put it down to an adverse change in the weather which made an uncertain enterprise even more problematic. Others have linked it with the dissolution of the monasteries by Henry VIII. Both these factors may have had some part to play but in all probability the decline was gradual (over several centuries) and for more complex reasons.
Eighteenth & nineteenth century experimenters In the seventeenth, eighteenth and nineteenth century there is evidence of various noblemen experimenting with growing grapes and making wine - such as the Hon. Charles Hamilton who grew vines at Painshill in Surrey (a garden which has in recent years been restored). In the late nineteenth century, the Marquess of Bute established a vineyard on a commercial scale at Castell Coch in South Wales - this is very well documented. The Marquess died in 1900 but in 1905 there were 63,000 vines at Castell Coch and Swanbridge superintended by the Marquess's 19 year old son who had succeeded him, but no wine making seems to have been carried out after the First World War.
Twentieth century gap The period from the end of the First World War to shortly after the end of the Second World War may well be the only time in two millennia that vines to make wine on a substantial scale were not grown in England or Wales. Doubtless, during that time, there were some vines being grown on a garden scale by amateur growers, but for more than 25 years there was a total cessation of viticulture and winemaking on a commercial basis.
Post-war pioneers After the Second World War, two men seem to have been the inspiration for the re-establishment of the English Wine industry. One was Ray Barrington Brock (who died only this year). He was a research chemist and set himself a private research mission to discover which varieties of grape would grow and ripen well in Britain. The other was Edward Hymans, a writer on garden matters who planted a vineyard and researched for a book he was writing on the history and practice of grape-vine cultivation in England. The work of these two pioneers inspired others: Major General Sir Guy Salisbury-Jones planted a vineyard at Hambledon, north of Portsmouth, in Hampshire. He initially planted 4,000 vines on a 1.5 acre site in 1952 and in 1955 the first English Wine to be made and sold commercially since the First World War went on sale.
Exponential growth The rest, as they say, is history. An ever-increasing number of pioneers followed these leads and especially during the 1960s, 70s and 80s there was a rapid increase in the number of English vineyards to a figure well over 400 by the late 80s/early 90s. The total area under cultivation rose to more than 2,000 acres. Look carefully - a superb crop of black Rondo grapes at Sedlescombe Organic Vineyard in East Sussex (1996)
The vast majority of these vineyards were small (5 acres or less, many less than 1 acre), whilst a few much larger vineyards emerged, such as Three Choirs near Newent in Gloucestershire. Denbies at Dorking in Surrey has, so far, marked the apogee of size in English vineyards, with around 250 acres under cultivation. Clearly such vineyards have been very serious commercial developments, but many small English vineyards have been retirement or "second-career" ventures, quite often by individuals or married couples wanting to escape the urban rat-race whilst still pursuing an occupation requiring both manual and intellectual challenges.
A mature industry? In the 1990s the increase in the number of vineyards and the acreage under cultivation has levelled off, maybe even declined a little. There are a number of reasons for this - many English vineyards have undoubtedly been established with little knowledge of, or even concern for, their financial viability. A saying has grown up that the best way to get a small fortune is to have a large fortune and buy an English vineyard. Whilst this is cruel, it is also pretty certain that it is true.
Problems However, there are, fortunately, a good number of vineyards demonstrating that this adage is not necessarily true of all English vineyards and some of the more recently established vinyards and those which have grown from smaller origins have accumulated the professional and scientific expertise needed for successful commercial scale operations. Some English vineyards have clearly been established in less than favourable soils or situations and have selected inappropriate vine varieties and, as a result, have been marginal, or worse, in their productivity in the average year (In England, it is only in about 2 years in every 10 that grape production will be really good, 4 years will be average and 4 years poor or terrible - largely due to weather and/or disease exacerbated by weather). The best of present day vineyards are well sited, grow the right varieties for their situation, are well managed and their growers understand what they are doing in a scientific way. There have been some notable examples of new vineyards being planted in recent years on a very scientific basis - with their owners/developers seeking out the right soils and situations for what they want to achieve. One thinks of Nyetimber vineyard in West Sussex, deliberately developed on the Greensand to emulate the growing conditions in the Champagne region of France. Already Nyetimber's reputation for its sparkling wines confirm the efficacy of this rational, scientific approach.
An un-level playing field? In the 1990s English vineyards, especially those in the south-east of England, have also suffered from the cross-Channel "smuggling" phenomenon whereby it is possible (due to high rates of customs duty and VAT on wine in England) for any UK citizen to take a cheap trip by Channel Tunnel or Ferry to one of a number of French ports (such as Calais) and buy practically duty free wines from vast wine supermarkets. On sheer cost of production it is not possible for English wine producers to compete on such prices.
Re-positioning English wine However this has led the more thinking members of the English wine industry to raise their sights (as, to be fair, many of them have always done) and to aim not at the bottom of the market but at the top. Recurring successes in blind tastings against all-comers from around the world have shown that when given a fair trial English wines can be as good as the best from anywhere else. Of course, some are not in this league and it can be argued that if low quality producers drop out of the market this may, in fact, be a good thing however much it may be a disappointment or even tragedy for individual winegrowers and makers.
A peculiarly "British" confusion The final hurdle that faces English wine producers is ignorance and confusion. A surprisingly large proportion of English people have never ever even tasted English wine - or if they have, they may have tried just one example and been unfortunate in their experience and have never repeated their experiment with a better English wine. The confusion factor comes from a bizarre use of terminology that is allowed in Britain. Look on the shelves of any supermarket and the cheapest wines you will see are described as "British". Such wines are decidely cheap, but generally have little or no character, which, when one knows their origin and method of manufacture is hardly surprising. Unfortunately many people have the impression that they are "English wines". Nothing could be further from the truth. English wine is good honest |
president's mental health obviously struck a nerve. After the conference, a bidding war to publish a collection of essays by the participants broke out between several top publishing houses. The resulting book, The Dangerous Case of Donald Trump (out October 3 from Thomas Dunne), was put together in three weeks.
I recently spoke to Lee, who edited the book, about her views, her disagreement with the American Psychiatric Association, and why she believes you should need to go through a mental health screening to be president.
VICE: The book talks about the distinction between Trump being "crazy like a fox" (saying what he does is for political purposes) and "crazy crazy" (grandiose, paranoid, and disconnected from reality.) Do you think a lot of people think the problem with assessing Trump's dangerousness is that he is "crazy like a fox"?
Bandy Lee: This is when having specialist knowledge helps. People who are "crazy crazy" often wish to present themselves as "crazy like a fox," or "not really crazy," but true illness follows distinct patterns of pathology that eventually give away people who are pretending. I work mainly in correctional settings, and very skillful individuals may deceive some clinicians for a while, but eventually the patterns either fit or do not. Mr. Trump's patterns of pathology have become so consistent and difficult to conceal that it is likely that he is highly impaired—although I refrain from giving a definitive opinion.
The Tarasoff case was about a doctor who had examined a patient. How can that Tarasoff doctrine be justifiably extrapolated to someone who hasn't been examined?
The Tarasoff doctrine is only a specific instance of "the duty to warn" and "the duty to protect" that is the foundation of our practice. The case gave rise to those phrases, certainly, but the duty to protect the health and well-being of patients or the public is a basic principle in all our ethical codes, be it the APA's, the AMA's, the Geneva Declaration, or the Hippocratic Oath.
We have mandatory reporting laws, physician's emergency certificates, and other legal allowances or requirements in addition to the Tarasoff rule. Tarasoff itself has expanded through hundreds of court cases over 40 years, while Goldwater is based on just one, more than a half century ago.
The book includes the suggestion that politicians should be required to submit to a mental health screening at some point in the nomination process. Would that prevent some of the risk you're talking about?
We are advocating that there be procedures in place to evaluate for fitness for duty every presidential candidate and every president, now and into the future, just like any other military officer or civilian serviceperson. It can be very dangerous when the commander in chief is not held to the same standard, and we are seeing those dangers play out now.
How would a fitness for duty test work as part of the democratic process? Who would administer it? Given that half of the population would be disappointed with either outcome, would it be possible for people to believe the administrators of the test were apolitical?
Congress would be in charge of making a legal provision for it. Once a commission is established, it could then be the legal structure for a separate and independent expert panel to offer recommendations to. We recommend that the panel members be nominated by the nonpartisan, nongovernmental National Academy of Medicine to remove conflicts of interest, and that experts serve six-year terms, with each member being rotated off and replaced each year. Once the examinations become annual and routine, there should be no question about bias against any party, and results should be kept strictly confidential unless there is a question about fitness for duty.
When would the test take place? If it took place after the election, or after the nomination, would the results of the election or nomination be invalidated? And what would happen if a president was found to be mentally unfit after having been elected? It seems like there would be a real chance a president-elect's supporters would riot.
The test would take place annually, for all serious candidates, preferably before nomination or election. It should become a requirement, just as it is with other military and civilian jobs. Administering it for the first time will be difficult, especially for a sitting president, and this is why it must be done sensitively and prudently.
Do you worry that raising questions about Trump's mental health could backfire politically? How would you answer critics who think questioning Trump's mental state make liberals look hysterical?
I don't doubt that there will be political backlash. Many mental health professionals have not spoken out for various reasons, but now that we have come to the brink of a devastating nuclear war if not a civil war, we ought to reflect on how our silence has enabled pathology to spread. Given our ordinary norms of practice—mandatory reporting, physician's emergency certificate at the slightest suspicion of danger, and the positive duty to warn and to protect—we are late, rather than hysterical.
We are not all liberals, but we are all professionals who routinely deal with risk assessment, regardless of ideological camp—and denial of real danger is a common trait that should heighten concern, not lessen it.
You told New York magazine around the time of the conference that you were a "pariah in (your) own department." Did you feel this way before the conference, or was it the conference that made you feel this way?
I may have said that word, but the article sensationalized it to the point of being inaccurate. The truth is, my colleagues almost universally agreed with me in secret, but none were willing to come forth. The university supports free speech, and the School of Medicine supported me to the end, allowing me use of its prime auditorium space. I was the one who "released" the school from sponsorship because of the general atmosphere of fear, and I didn't want to embroil my alma mater into a difficult situation. So I took it upon myself to be singled out, but no one forced me. The headlines the next day confirmed my suspicions of politicization: We were called "Democrats" who are "breaking the Goldwater rule" (neither was true) for political reasons, and I was glad I separated out my institution. Although it was still attacked, it could have been worse.
Why do you think the American Psychiatric Association has taken the stance that it has, doubling down on the Goldwater rule?
This is only my guess, but I would not be surprised if the APA was feeling what I experienced when I was organizing the ethics conference at Yale. Most psychiatrists were not staying silent because of the Goldwater rule, but because of the fear of being "targeted," either by a litigious president or his violence-prone followers.
The APA has made a drastic change in its position since this past presidential campaign, going against its previous interpretations of the Goldwater rule, which was becoming more lenient, turning it essentially into a gag order on any comment on public figures at all. I would not be surprised if it did this to allow cover for itself and the profession. It doesn't make sense otherwise that a rule that the APA even considered abolishing not too long ago should suddenly take precedence even over safety and survival. This goes against all other principles of medical practice and the Goldwater rule itself, which encourages educating the public about psychiatric issues related to public figures.
Whatever the reason, modifying an ethical rule in an intense political climate can be dangerous, as when the American Psychological Association modified its ethical rules to allow for torture during the Iraq War. So I cannot agree with the APA, and I know that it has been flooded with letters, protests, and resignations for doing this without consulting its membership. I am a firm believer in the Goldwater rule staying as it was before the modification. Exceptional times all the more require that we abide by the ordinary standards of our practice and not give up our principles.
Correction: An earlier version of this article incorrectly referred to the American Psychiatric Association as the American Psychological Association.
This interview has been edited for length and clarity.[pullquote align=”left” background=”on”]You are the beautiful and elusive pinpoint of radiance that lit up the darkness and called me home. ― Sara Humphreys[/pullquote]
When I was a little girl, I used to believe that the stars were fireflies having been lost after a long journey, and settling in to rest for just a bit.
And, when they moved – I cheered them on, “Yes…that’s right…just a little farther.”
I had such a fanciful imagination as a child, one that has served me well into my later years. Even to this day, when I am blessed with a perfect summer day – I’ll spend my time catching up with my lightening bug friends.
My dears, the stars are all and everything you believe them to be. Whether designed by a clashing, cosmic force of the universe, or placed there one by one…from the tiniest of stargazer hands…
And, we can not help but to be amazed…transfixed…drawn in just a little bit, as we are left wondering how many eyes have gazed upon these heavens in just the same way.
Yes, these stars hold a magic for all who wish to see. Perhaps, there’s a bit of firefly within us all – inexplicably drawn to the farthest reaches, these pinpoints of light that ignite our soul.
I remember first reading this next passage when I was still so very young, and curled up against the crackling fire my Father had built ~ just as he had done so many times before on the brutally cold winter eves.
I have always loved Robert Frost ~ and his way of spinning the magical, out of that which to many is quite ordinary.
But mostly, I loved him because – in his, those very few words, I always felt ‘at home’. Because, in just a few simple words, my heart was suddenly opened to the world that had not yet been revealed.
To a young heart that was so easily impressed, forest paths come to life, under the first few rays of a silver moonlight…
The following passage is from the poem, “The Star Splitter”…and for many years, no matter where I was on this great big earth – these few words always caused me to look high up to the sky to see if Orion was indeed there looking down on me.
And with each glance, no matter how many miles were there between …in that instant, I could close my eyes and feel so very close to home.
So today, I would like very much to share this passage with you, and in hopes that there might be a little one inside us all…’curled up’ so very close to the fire, and taking in the site of a beautiful home, at rest.
The Star-splitter
BY ROBERT FROST
“You know Orion always comes up sideways.
Throwing a leg up over our fence of mountains,
And rising on his hands, he looks in on me
Busy outdoors by lantern-light with something
I should have done by daylight, and indeed,
After the ground is frozen, I should have done
Before it froze, and a gust flings a handful
Of waste leaves at my smoky lantern chimney
To make fun of my way of doing things,
Or else fun of Orion’s having caught me.”By Play Global!, www.play-global.org
Coaches Pat Doyle and Sam Dempster just wrapped up their trip to Uganda. Over three weeks, these two seasoned baseball coaches worked with teachers, coaches and players. They focused on training local coaches so that more girls and boys have an opportunity to play.
Here are a few highlights:
In Kakira and Luwero, Pat and Sam helped school teachers learn the game of baseball. These teachers came during their vacation time to learn how to teach baseball to their students.
“The teachers were really engaged, enthusiastic and seemed anxious to continue with their journey,” says Pat.
Through YARID, our coaches worked with refugee children from the Democratic Republic of Congo. As they adapt to life in Uganda, these children are eager to become part of a team and learn baseball.
While scarce facilities and equipment are a challenge, enthusiasm for baseball in Uganda is high. Play Global aims to strengthen baseball in Uganda, so that it can be a source of strength for young people there.A glass of wine a day is the secret to a long life, according to the world’s oldest living twins.
Pieter and Paulus Langerock were born before the outbreak of the First World War.
The Belgian brothers celebrated their 102nd birthday last month – with a glass of wine each, naturally.
“Our secret? A lifetime of hard work, punctuality, and a glass of good red wine,” they told Het Laatste Nieuws newspaper.
“We never took care of our health,” Paulus confided to RTL television. “Sometimes we drank a whole bottle of whiskey, just the two of us, between 5pm and 2am.”
Their days of such excess are behind them: these days they stick to a glass of wine a day each – preferably good Bordeaux.
The two brothers have never married, and according to Paulus, that may be another reason for their longevity.
“There isn't much advice I can give. Don't waste your time fooling around, don't eat too much and don't run after women,” he told Reuters news agency.
They have spent most of their lives together, and still share a room at a retirement home outside Ghent.
“We’ve always been together,” Paulus said. “During World War I, German officers moved into our house and we moved temporarily to Sluis. After the war, we came back to Ghent.”
They only agreed to give up their own house and move into the nursing home when they were 99 years old.
“He’s the only one in the world who wishes me well,” Pieter said of his brother. “I don’t trust anyone. I’m afraid of everyone.”
As for why they never married, Paulus says they didn’t approve of each other’s choices.
Although they are the world’s oldest living twins, they have a few years to go to break the all-time record of US brothers Glen and Dale Moyer, who both lived to 105.
But Paulus says they’re not particulalry bothered.
“We were 85 we went to the doctor and he told us, ‘Don’t think you’ll live to be 100,’” he says. “Well, I never really wanted to be this old.”Boys in the Band by Geoffrey Chadsey, 2006. Photo: Courtesy of Geoffrey Chadsey
I wrote my second novel, A Little Life, in what I still think of as a fever dream: For 18 months, I was unable to properly concentrate on anything else. The book, which was published last month, is about four male friends who age from their mid-20s into their early 50s in an undated New York. The characters — Jude, JB, Willem, and Malcolm — aren’t based directly or consciously on anyone I know, and their professional worlds (law, art, acting, and architecture, respectively), aren’t ones I know firsthand.
But if the actual writing of the book was brief, it’s only now that I realize that I had been thinking of this novel for far longer. I began collecting photography when I was 26, 14 years ago; and when I actually began writing, it was these images I returned to, again and again: They provided a sort of tonal sound check, as it were — was I conveying in words and scenes what I felt when I saw these photographs and paintings? Now that the book is done, I realize that these images are now so inextricable from the book — and my experience of writing it — that looking at them again is somehow jolting: They’ve become a visual diary of that year and a half, and I find myself unable to look at them without thinking of the life of my novel.
Below is a short list of some of the artworks that informed and inspired A Little Life, in either subject or tone. Warning: Spoilers abound.
Chip Kidd for The New York Times Magazine’s “When AIDS Ends” cover, 1996; Prada fall/winter 2007 ready-to-wear show: One of the things I wanted to do with this book was create a protagonist who never gets better. I also wanted the narrative to have a slight sleight-of-hand quality: The reader would begin thinking it a fairly standard post-college New York City book (a literary subgenre I happen to love), and then, as the story progressed, would sense it was becoming something else, something unexpected. I turned repeatedly to two pieces of art to remind myself of this sensation. One of the ways I’d always described the book (to my editor and to my agent) was as a piece of ombré cloth: something that began on one end as a bright, light bluish-white, and ended as something so dark it was nearly black. I wanted it to approximate in language and feeling the pieces in Prada’s fall/winter 2007 ready-to-wear collection: skirts and jackets of heat-set, wrinkled woolen silks, their colors shading from pumpkins and greens into deep blacks. The other piece I returned to was Chip Kidd’s 1996 cover for a New York Times Magazine article by Andrew Sullivan about how combination therapies could mean the cessation of widespread death from AIDS in the United States, particularly among gay men. I remember being fascinated by the article, of course, but also by the cover, which remains one of my all-time-favorite pieces of editorial art: In it, the type starts out as “sick” — blurry, clotty, barely decipherable — and then, as it moves down the page, gets healthier, crisper, brighter, more legible. I wanted A Little Life to do the reverse: to begin healthy (or appear so), and end sick — both the main character, Jude, and the plot itself.
The Backwards Man in His Hotel Room by Diane Arbus, 1961: This photograph isn’t technically one of Arbus’s best — it’s slightly grainy, and it has a clumsy, voyeuristic quality that her later work doesn’t — but I have been captivated by it ever since I saw it in 2002. For a decade, I thought and thought about that image: I knew I had some words to put to it, but it wasn’t until I began writing this book that I knew that A Little Life would be, in some way, at least, the text that I’d write to accompany that photograph. Although I always describe the book as largely concerning itself with male friendship, I also intended it as a portrait of loneliness — specifically, the kind of loneliness that only city dwellers know.
Photo: Courtesy of Geoffrey Chadsey
Boys in the Band by Geoffrey Chadsey, 2006: From 1999 through 2001, I was an editor at a now-defunct magazine about the media industry called Brill’s Content that eventually merged with a now-defunct website about the media industry called Inside.com. It was my first magazine job, and I found it terrifying, like being moved from the high-school literary magazine to the high-school debate team: Everyone was smart and facile and articulate and argumentative. One of my co-workers (and, eventually, one of my writers) was a man named Seth, and it was through him that I became friends with two of his friends from college: Joe, who was a copy editor at the magazine, and Jared, who was Seth’s former roommate and an editor at Inside.com. I found them all fascinating. I had attended a women’s college, and graduated into a women’s industry, and so this was the first time I was really getting to observe young adult males in action: the way they spoke to one another, how they expressed friendship, how they got angry or sad, the things they’d talk about with me but not with each other. I was also struck by their physicality, which young men express differently (obviously) than young women.
As I began writing, I thought a great deal about that particular brand of male unself-consciousness, which JB and Willem embody but which Jude cannot. One of the reasons Jude’s interior life doesn’t appear in the book until the second section was because I wanted the first section, which concentrates on the other three characters, to be, in a sense, a study of their normalcy, a foil to the strangeness of Jude’s own life. As I created Jude’s friends, I looked particularly to the work of Felix Cid and Ryan McGinley, both of whom capture so well that pleasure that young people take in their bodies, as well as this work by Geoffrey Chadsey. I’ve long been a fan of Chadsey’s, whose earlier works — about fratty boys, all young, dumb, and full of cum — are slightly winking, slightly leering portraits of male group intimacy, and their attendant and inevitable submerged homoeroticism. In an interesting footnote, I later discovered that Chadsey himself had been a friend of Joe’s at college, which meant that he and my other friends had all been in one another’s orbits, or near them, at the same time.
Photo: Courtesy of Todd Hido
3878 from “Interiors/Motels,” by Todd Hido: Alec Soth, Joel Sternfeld, Todd Hido, Stephen Shore, PL diCorcia: There could be an entire show (and probably has been) dedicated to great American photographers’ images of American motels. There is something uniquely American about the motel: It speaks to the transient nature of America itself, one enabled and encouraged by our roads and highways. But they also remind me of the vastness, the unknowability of this country: These days, whenever I drive past one, I always wonder, What’s behind those curtains? How many lives will we never know? How many impossible stories have passed through those rooms, and have gone elsewhere, never to be found, never to be heard? It’s those questions that make possible Jude’s life, and it’s one of the reasons that I consider this a book, and a narrative, that could only take place in this country.
As readers of the book will know, a significant portion of Jude’s childhood is spent in motel rooms. Many of my significant childhood memories also involve motels; my family moved frequently, and we were often driving across the country, going from one place to the next. I still remember the particular bleakness of those one- or two-story structures, usually directly off the interstate, and the particular feeling of suspension — though of course I wouldn’t have been able to articulate that at the time — you experienced while staying in one. We would arrive at a motel late in the evening, and my brother and I would be instructed to sit motionless on one of the beds while my mother drove around whatever small half-town we’d stopped in, looking for a grocery store to buy bread and peanut butter for our dinner. I have never forgotten that sensation: the feel of the patterned polyester bedspread that matched the curtains, or the green carpeting worn shiny by hundreds of feet; or the sight of the television bolted to the wall; or the sound, like a river rushing, of cars zooming down the road just a few hundred feet away; or the expectancy I felt as we waited for my mother to return with our food. We were well-cared for, and protected, and there was never any question that she would come back to us, but I remember the moment as a hollow, empty one; it was one I knew Jude would feel as well as he waited alone in his room for his guardian, Brother Luke, to return to him.
The Brown Sisters, by Nicholas Nixon, 1975–present: JB, one of the characters in the book, is an artist, but before I made him a figurative painter, I’d imagined him as a photographer, one whose life’s work would be two simultaneous series that documented his three friends’ lives. One of those series would be hundreds of casual, semi-reportorial “found moments”: Visually, I thought they’d look like a mash-up between Tina Barney and Nan Goldin. His second series, “The Boys” (I kept the name but applied it to something else), would be an annual black-and-white portrait of himself with his friends, always posed in the same order, shot against a seamless.
It quickly became clear that neither of these would work. The first wouldn’t work because of the sheer amount of time it’d take JB to accomplish it, and the sheer invasiveness of the project itself: All of the characters have busy, often peripatetic lives, and Jude in particular would never tolerate such a violation of his time and space. The second wasn’t going to work because it was a direct ripoff of Nicholas Nixon’s series “The Brown Sisters,” for which Nixon has shot his wife, Bibi, and her three sisters — always in the same arrangement — every year since 1975. Collectively, the photographs are as grave, moving, and chilling as you might expect: They illustrate perfectly the mercilessness of time, and the mercy of love.
One of the minor concerns my editor, Gerry, had about JB’s work was that he was too dependent on his friends for material — all of his series, save one, feature them in one way or another. (I believe the editorial notes “He needs to get a life!” were scribbled in red ink on one page or another.) But some of the greatest photographic series ever made are about a single life or set of lives, and the documentation of those lives can in fact be the stuff of an entire career, or at least many years. Nan Goldin’s iconic “Ballad of Sexual Dependency” is one such series. So is Nobuyoshi Araki’s chronicling of his wife, Yoko, which he began with Sentimental Journey, which was printed as a book in 1971, and concluded with Winter Journey — and Yoko’s death — in 1990. And I was particularly influenced by Andrea Modica’s beautiful series about a girl named Barbara in upstate New York. Modica began shooting Barbara in 1986, when the girl was 7, and continued photographing her until Barbara’s death from diabetes in 2001. The two resulting series — “Treadwell” and “Barbara” — are studies in compassion and, equally, in nuance and technical élan. In the same way as these series, I wanted this book to feel as if it contained entire lives, as if the reader is getting to pay witness to people they’re watching change, and grow, and stumble — to life itself — in a compressed amount of time and space.The Texas Rangers interviewed pitching coach Mike Maddux and Triple-A manager Steve Buechele for their managerial job on Tuesday.
The Rangers are trying to find a replacement for Ron Washington, who resigned on Sept. 5. Washington was replaced by Tim Bogar, who went 14-8.
Pitching coach Mike Maddux, who has been with the Rangers for six seasons, has interviewed for the team's vacant managerial position. Rick Osentoski/USA TODAY Sports
Maddux has been with the Rangers for the last six seasons and his contract ends at the end of October. He has never been a manager at any level.
With several other jobs available such as Arizona and Minnesota, Maddux has said he's open to looking for a managerial position elsewhere, though he expressed his desire to remain with the Rangers.
Buechele has spent six seasons in the Rangers organization as a manager in their farm system. In his first season with Triple-A Round Rock, the Express finished last in the Pacific Coast League American Southern Division at 70-74.
Buechele, like Maddux a former big-league player, had four consecutive winning seasons at Double-A Frisco before leaving to take the Triple-A job for the 2014 season.
The Houston Astros conducted a phone interview with Buechele last week.
Rangers GM Jon Daniels said he will interview some external candidates in addition to Bogar, who has yet to interview for the job, in the next few weeks.
Daniels said he would like to hire a manager by the end of October.Former U.S. Vice President Dick Cheney talks about his wife Lynne Cheney's book "James Madison: A Life Reconsidered" May 12, 2014 in Washington, DC (AFP Photo/Win Mcnamee)
Washington (AFP) - Former US vice president Dick Cheney on Sunday defended America's now-banned program that tortured Al-Qaeda suspects, praising the CIA operatives who ran it as heroes.
"I'm perfectly comfortable that they should be praised, they should be decorated," the right-hand man to former president George W. Bush told NBC television's "Meet the Press" program, adding, "I'd do it again in a minute."
He made his remarks after the release by Senate Democrats last week of a long-awaited investigation into detention and interrogation practices at the Guantanamo Bay prison camp and at secret detention facilities -- so-called "black sites" -- where detainees were held around the world.
Cheney said there is "no comparison" between the tactics and the deaths of American citizens on September 11, 2001, adding that the CIA "very carefully avoided" the practice of torture.
"Torture is what the Al-Qaeda terrorists did to 3,000 Americans on 9/11," Cheney said.
"There is no comparison between that and what we did with respect to enhanced interrogation."
He said he was unfazed that many of the foreign nationals rounded up and held for years, including those tortured, eventually were found not to be terrorists.
"I have no problem as long as we achieve our objective and our objective is to get the guys who did 9/11 and it is to avoid another attack against the United States," he said.
The lengthy report spearheaded by Democrats on the Senate Intelligence Committee asserted that interrogation tactics used on terror suspects were more brutal than previously known.
The report revealed the existence of one practice viewed as particularly abhorrent -- "rectal rehydration" -- which critics categorized as a variation on a medieval form of torture in which the intestines are swollen with fluid in order to cause pain.
Cheney said he was not aware the practice was part of the interrogation program, which intelligence officials have said was meant as a way to provide nutrition to inmates.
"I believe it was done for medical reasons," Cheney said.
In excruciating detail, the report described crude torture methods including waterboarding, hanging people for hours from their wrists and locking them in tiny coffin-shaped boxes.
- 'It absolutely worked' -
The report questioned the effectiveness of such techniques, which it determined were actually counterproductive for getting actionable intelligence.
Cheney strongly disagreed.
"It worked. It absolutely worked," he said on Sunday about the program which US officials euphemistically have referred to as employing "enhanced interrogation techniques."
Reiterating comments he made last week, Cheney insisted that his boss was fully aware about the details of the program as it was being conducted.
"This man knew what we were doing," he said about Bush.
"He authorized it. He approved it."
In earlier remarks the former vice president defended the interrogation program and blasted the 500-page Senate report as "terrible" and "full of crap."
The report released Tuesday said the CIA's interrogation of Al-Qaeda suspects -- including beatings, rectal rehydration, and sleep deprivation -- was far more brutal than acknowledged and did not produce useful intelligence.
It also concluded that the CIA deliberately misled Congress and the White House about the value of the intelligence its interrogators were gathering.If there's one thing that people with experience of depression fear most in life, it's depression coming back. The thought of being dragged again into a moribund swamp of emptiness, ennui and self-hatred is terrifying. Depression often returns, so it’s handy to learn how to fend off the black dog before you find yourself staring at the back of its open throat and being knocked to the ground. It can take a hell of a long time to get up.
To this end, the National Institute of Clinical Excellence (Nice) has issued new guidelines to GPs treating women with depression. It suggests doctors ask female patients whether or not they want children as a prelude to discussing the complications which can arise when women with depression – or history of it – become pregnant.
The guidelines, however, have been deemed a violation of privacy; an NSA-style eavesdropping-via-the-bellybutton on potential life. One in three women are affected by mental health problems, according to the World Health Organisation (WHO). We know that a strong link exists between women with prior mental health conditions and both antenatal and postnatal depression (although postnatal is the more publicised); and the risk of mental health relapse in pregnancy is significant. Therefore I don't agree with Roger Goss of Patient Concern that GPs should "mind their own business". Their business is our health.
Facebook Twitter Pinterest Dr. Shoshana Bennett talks about prenatal depression
Indeed, anything that helps broaden women's understanding of the risks of pregnancy relative to their mental health is positive. One of the first things a psychiatrist said to me when explaining my diagnosis of bipolar disorder, was that I would have to assess aspects of my lifestyle and moderate them to best deal with the lifelong illness. He reeled off a list of things that would have to be looked at in order to live a stable life: "Alcohol intake, caffeine consumption, the choice of whether to have children or not …".
“What do you mean about the alcohol intake?” I asked, wide-eyed and panicked, paying no attention to the bit about kids. “I can still drink, right?" (Reader, I was 20). The truth is, living with depression, bipolar disorder or any other mental health condition is tough. And pregnancy is the biggest change a woman’s body will undergo. The possibility of the two together is not something to be ignored, and it would be remiss of mental health professionals and care providers to not raise this.
Suicide is a leading cause of death to women around childbirth in the UK, India and China, and most other developed countries. In the 2008 BBC documentary The Secret Life of the Manic Depressive, the late Gaynor Thomas, a bipolar and puerperal psychosis campaigner, was filmed in conversation with specialist Dr Ian Jones, who explained the severe risks of relapse during pregnancy. Gaynor was shown deciding against having a second child.
Facebook Twitter Pinterest Gaynor Thomas, puerperal psychosis campaigner, talks to Dr Ian Jones (excerpt from the documentary Stephen Fry – The Secret life of the Manic Depressive).
There is also the issue of certain medications affecting pregnancy and fertility. Women in their 20s are not advised to take the anticonvulsant mood stabiliser sodium valproate, for instance, as it is known to reduce fertility (I was not prescribed it for this reason). Antidepressants are generally not recommended during pregnancy, due to links with miscarriage and foetal heart conditions, especially with older tricyclic drugs which preceded SSRIs. There is evidence which suggests a mother’s depression while pregnant might affect the brain structure of her child, in particular development of the amygdala, responsible for emotional control. And as we know, mental health conditions have traceable genetic causation (in particular bipolar disorder and depression).
These guidelines aren’t about warning women off having children, or about being nosey, patronising or scaremongering. They are about "spotting what is not normal for each individual woman and ensuring she receives the treatment that is right for her", as Prof Mark Baker, director of the Centre for Clinical Practice, put it.
Should I ever want to start a family, I know that there would be a lot of things I'd have to consider. Coming off my medication would be a huge deal for me; relapse would be a grave concern. I would also worry about passing on the condition. I would feel guilty: who wants to hand down hell? I would also be anxious about not being able to look after my child in times of my own ill-health. These are all things that women with mental health problems should be encouraged to discuss, in order to make an informed decision. I for one think it’s nice that Nice are doing just that. More than nice, in fact. It will save lives.Money v. Morals
CNN Money recently posted an article titled “There’s one thing going right for Trump” by Heather Long. In the article, Long discuses how despite the apparent chaos consuming the White House, the U.S. economy is currently undergoing an upsurge in economic growth. Fox News recently reported that “the Dow, the S&P 500, Nasdaq Composite, Russell 2000 and Dow Transports are all at record levels.” It is good to see that the American economy is doing so well right now. Of course, according to Chris Rupkey, chief financial economist at MUFG Union Bank in New York, Trump “inherited the best economy since President Bush.”
Recently, we apparently have traded basic human decency for economic growth. However, I do not think this is a good trade. As so many have said before, I do not want the Republican Regime to fail, I want the United States of America to be a strong country, economically, militarily, and morally. However, I do not see this happening, and it is both heartbreaking and infuriating. We as a country have decided that it is more important to make money and crush those who would oppose us, rather than lend a helping hand to our fellow humans. In the past, we sacrificed our morals in order to ensure our security by detaining thousands of American citizens while we were at war, and we are still haunted by the specter of that atrocity.
Recently, the local newspaper for the conservative California city of Fresno, the Fresno Bee, reported on the World War II Japanese-American Internment. The article discussed how American citizens were thrown into concentration internment camps, simply because American was at war with the Empire of Japan and those citizens happened to be the descendants of Japanese immigrants. It also drew a disturbing parallel between the anti-Japanese sentiment that ran rampant through WWII-era America and the anti-muslim zealotry espoused by the current Republican Regime.
The American Boogeyman is no longer the vile Japanese, the evil Nazis, nor the godless Soviet Communists. Instead, the current monster-of-the-week is the Muslim and the Immigrant, though our fear/anger is typically relegated to either muslim immigrants or immigrants from Central or South America.
Travel Ban
One of the xenophobic policies implemented by the Republican Regime is the muslim travel ban. The ban stops all immigrants from seven predominantly muslim countries from entering the United States. This, of course, is done because of xenophobia in order to protect us until we can implement the as-yet-unspecified “extreme vetting.” The common argument is that we are not properly vetting immigrants and refugees from those Middle-East and African countries which are currently battling ISIS and other extremist groups.
My first year in law school I worked as a volunteer for an organization called the Iraqi Refugee Assistance Project (now the International Refugee Assistance Project). My client was a man who served as an interpreter for the fabled 2nd Battalion, 508th Parachute Infantry Regiment (2Fury) of the 82nd |
says. "I want to keep it going. It's been exciting. It's a good feeling. It means a lot."
Hunt isn't popular just in Kansas City. He's popular wherever fantasy football is played. Yes, he knows you drafted him cheap, or picked him up as a free agent, or traded for him or won because of him. But he really isn't into fantasy football—in fact, he's never played. "My phone," he says with a smile, "is getting blown up by fantasy football. And I don't even like fantasy football."
What he likes is playing Madden 18. He is in an online league with friends, and he drafted himself in that. Considering his player rating—a 79, tied for 45th among halfbacks—he might have been better off drafting someone else. But he smiles just thinking about playing as himself.
"It's great just to be on Madden," he says. "It's a dream come true. But I feel they have some work to do on my guy."
Hunt can afford some things now he couldn't earlier this year—like bills. In the spring, he and two roommates didn't have enough to pay the electric bill, so they abandoned their apartment for a week-and-a-half. When Hunt was drafted, he paid the $800 bill himself and told his friends not to worry about their share.
And Hunt is as revered by the people around him as he is by the people who drafted him in fantasy.
"He knows where rookies stand and does whatever he can to help out," says Sherman, who never had to carry his pads in from practice in training camp when Hunt was around. "He's such a good kid. It's great to have him in the room."
He is a "joy to be around," according to Schwartz. "Nice guy, nice face," he says.
Hunt, fresh, authentic and joyful, is a feel-good story in an NFL season in need of one.
And he cannot stop smiling.
Says Hunt, "I'm just happy to be here."
Dan Pompei covers the NFL for Bleacher Report. Follow him on Twitter: @danpompei.The 1980 Miami riots were race riots that occurred in Miami, Florida, starting in earnest on May 18, 1980,[1] following the acquittal of four Dade County Public Safety Department officers in the death of Arthur McDuffie (December 3, 1946 – December 21, 1979). McDuffie, a black salesman and former Marine, died from injuries sustained at the hands of four white officers trying to arrest him after a high-speed chase. The officers were tried and acquitted for manslaughter and evidence tampering, among other charges. Subsequently, a riot broke out in the black neighborhoods of Overtown and Liberty City in Miami. In 1981 Dade County paid McDuffie's family a settlement of $1.1 million after they filed a civil lawsuit against the officials. The 1980 Miami riots were the deadliest since the 1960s and remained such until the 1992 Los Angeles riots twelve years later.
Incident [ edit ]
In the early morning hours of December 17, 1979, police officers pursued thirty-three-year-old McDuffie, who was riding a black-and-orange 1973 Kawasaki motorcycle. McDuffie had accumulated traffic citations and was riding with a suspended license. He led police on an eight-minute high-speed chase through residential streets at speeds of over 80 miles per hour (130 km/h).
The officers involved in the chase, Ira Diggs, William Hanlon, Michael Watts, and Alex Marrero, later filed a report claiming McDuffie had run a red light and led police on an eight-minute chase. They said that after McDuffie had lost control of his motorcycle while making a left turn, he attempted to flee on foot. The officers caught him and a scuffle ensued in which McDuffie allegedly kicked Officer Diggs. By the end of the struggle, the officers had, in the words of the prosecutor at the trial, cracked McDuffie's skull "like an egg."
McDuffie was transported to a nearby hospital where he died four days later of his injuries. The coroner's report concluded that he had suffered multiple skull fractures.
Police ran over the motorcycle with a patrol car and also broke its gauges, so it would seem that McDuffie crashed. The medical examiner, Dr. Ronald Wright, said McDuffie's injuries were not consistent with a motorcycle crash, and that if McDuffie had fallen off the motorcycle as the police said, it did not make sense that both gauges would be broken. Wright said that it seemed that he had been beaten to death.[2]:194
Trial [ edit ]
Six officers were indicted for manslaughter, as well as tampering with or fabricating physical evidence. A seventh was charged with tampering with evidence.[2]:194 Acting director of the Dade County Public Safety Department, Bobby Jones, suspended the officers on December 27. He said that since 1973, the four had been cited in 47 citizen complaints and 13 internal affairs probes. Two other officers, Herbert Evans, Jr. and Ubaldo Del Toro, were charged with being accessories to the crime, as well as fabricating evidence. The six officers were fired less than a month later.
Because of the volatile atmosphere in Miami, which presiding judge Lenore Carrero Nesbitt had termed a "time bomb," the trial was shifted to Tampa. Jury selection began on March 31, 1980. The trial was heard by an all-male, all-white jury. The lead prosecutor of the case was Janet Reno, later U.S. Attorney General during the Clinton presidency.
The defense said that the police were under attack. Officer Charles Veverka, who received immunity in exchange for his testimony, disputed this. Veverka said that officers hit McDuffie 10-12 times with clubs and fists until he was motionless. They attempted to cover up the attack by using a police car to run over the motorcycle and claim that McDuffie's injuries were the result of a fatal accident.
Hanlon, who had also received immunity, testified that he had choked McDuffie to the ground with his nightstick before Marrero began striking the man. He said that Marrero struck McDuffie with a flashlight. Hanlon, the only defendant to take the stand, said that he was the officer who had driven over McDuffie's motorcycle.[citation needed]
The three men who gave sworn statements were Veverka, Hanlon, and Meier.[2]:196 After the testimony, Marerro was given a new charge of second-degree murder. Hanlon was charged with felonies, while Veverka was charged with a civil rights violation, but was acquitted.
On April 25, officer Mark Meier was given immunity. He testified that the high-speed chase had slowed to 25 miles per hour when McDuffie shouted, "I give up." Meier said that between three and eight officers surrounded McDuffie, pulled off his helmet and proceeded to beat him with nightsticks. He said that the officer struck him at least twice. Because the murder weapon was not identified (because of inconsistent witness testimonies), the jury determined that there was sufficient reasonable doubt to acquit the defendant.
On May 8, Del Toro was acquitted. Judge Nesbitt said that the state had failed to prove its case. Nine days later, a jury acquitted the remaining officers on all counts of the indictment after less than three hours of deliberation.
Riots [ edit ]
The verdict resulted in protests in the Miami streets; approximately 5,000 people attended a protest at the Downtown Miami Metro Justice Building. By 6:00 p.m., the protest had turned into a riot; three people were killed and at least 23 injured, with several of those in critical condition.
Florida governor Bob Graham ordered 500 National Guard troops into the area; despite his doubling their number the next day, the riot continued. Twelve more people were killed and 165 were injured as violence spread to the Black Grove, Overtown, Liberty City, and Brownsville sections of the city. In addition, fires, burglaries, and looting increased, with police reluctant to enter some areas for fear of sniper fire.
In the end, 18 men and women died, while 350 people, some of them children, were hurt and 600 were arrested. Property destruction exceeded $100 million.[3]
By the third day, the violence declined as the city imposed an 8:00 p.m.-6:00 a.m. curfew, coupled with a temporary ban on the sale of firearms and liquor. Graham sent in an additional 2,500 National Guardsmen to the 1,000 already in the city.
Local police barricaded parts of Coconut Grove to warn motorists away from the area, as drivers had reported having rocks thrown at them. The city came to a standstill. Reports of sniper fire at freeway drivers also stopped traffic until the military could restore order.
Aftermath [ edit ]
On May 22, former defendant Michael Watts was rushed to the hospital after attempting to commit suicide by breathing carbon monoxide. The police said that his attempt was related to a romantic breakup and not his trial.
The federal government declared Miami a disaster area, and authorized the release of funds to allow the city to rebuild. The Miami Fraternal Order of Police had threatened a walkout unless the officers were reinstated. The following day, the five officers who had been acquitted were reinstated in their jobs.
Days after the verdict, the U.S. Justice Department said it would seek indictments of the policemen for federal civil rights violations. On July 28, 1980, a federal grand jury indicted Charles Veverka, despite his having received immunity from the original charges filed by the state during the first trial.
The federal trial was held in San Antonio, Texas, after Atlanta and New Orleans asked that it be moved from their venues due to its controversial racial aspects. Journalists referred to the case as "The Trial That Nobody Wants."[citation needed] On December 17, Veverka was acquitted in the week-long trial after the jury deliberated for more than 16 hours. Minor incidents of violence were reported in Miami after the verdict was announced. Veverka's attorney, Denis Dean predicted that no further indictments would be forthcoming from the case and none were issued.
On November 17, 1981, Dade County commissioners agreed to a $1.1 million settlement with McDuffie's family in exchange for their dropping a $25 million civil lawsuit against the county. Of that amount, the family's legal team received $483,833, while McDuffie's two children each received $202,500, and his mother, $67,500.[citation needed]
On April 20, 2006 Mr. Hanlon, who had trained as a lawyer, was permanently denied admittance to the bar by Florida's state Supreme Court.[4]
See also [ edit ]
References [ edit ]Police Chief Charles Bordeleau says an arrest has been made in connection with a series of racist and anti-Semitic incidents that have taken place in Ottawa over the past week.
Bordeleau later told reporters that a young offender had been arrested in the early morning hours of Saturday at the Soloway Jewish Community Centre on Nadolny Sachs Private near Broadview Avenue.
In a release, police said the suspect, whose identity was not released, appeared in court Saturday and faces several charges including uttering threats of a dangerous weapon and mischief to religious buildings.
Police sources said the young offender is believed to be responsible for all of the spray-paint attacks this week. Police said they were helped by video footage from previous attacks and the suspect under surveillance at the time of the Saturday morning attack.
This week there were hate-crime graffiti attacks at Parkdale United Church, at Parkdale and Gladstone Avenues, the Ottawa Mosque on Northwestern Avenue, and threeJewish sites: Kehillat Beth Israel congregation near Carling and Kirkwood Avenues, Congregation Machzikei Hadas in Featherstone Park and a small prayer centre in the Glebe,
News of the arrest was made Saturday morning by police Chief Charles Bordeleau at the Machzikei Hadas Synagogue in south Ottawa where an overflow crowd of about 600 had gathered to show solidarity against the week-long string of racist graffiti.
Bordeleau’s news was greeted by thunderous applause by the interfaith gathering.
Bordeleau said while he didn’t know the details, there was hate graffiti found on the JCC.
Bordeleau wouldn’t offer any details about the police investigation, only to offer his support to the work of the force.
“Of course, this is good news and as the investigation continues, we’re hoping to determine whether this individual is related to (the other incidents) in Ottawa this week,” he said
Mayor Jim Watson told reporters it was obviously a relief to hear that someone had been arrested.
However, both Bordeleau and Watson admitted there’s always a concern for copycat offenders.
With files from Shaamini YogaretnamCLOSE Second-year USL soccer club FC Cincinnati unveiled on Monday, June 13 a stadium design during an event for season ticket holders at Woodward Theater in Over-the-Rhine. The Enquirer/Patrick Brennan
Buy Photo FC Cincinnati is seeking help building a new soccer-only stadium. (Photo: Enquirer file)Buy Photo
Two of the three Hamilton County commissioners have signed nondisclosure agreements with FC Cincinnati that bar them from discussing details of the team's plans for a new soccer stadium.
Democrats Todd Portune and Denise Driehaus both said Wednesday they signed the agreements a few months ago when the team first approached them with ideas for a stadium.
Republican Commissioner Chris Monzel said he has had conversations with team officials, but he did not sign a nondisclosure agreement.
FC Cincinnati, which is hoping to make the jump to Major League Soccer in the next few years, has been making the rounds in recent months seeking support for building a $200 million, soccer-only stadium.
FC Cincinnati officials said they asked for the nondisclosure agreement because of MLS requirements and proprietary financial data included in its application to MLS.
"These initial conversations covered by the non-disclosure were straightforward MLS application briefings and not requests for public stadium funding," said the team's spokesman, Fumi Kimura. "Of course a plan for public funding is by definition a public process, and we look forward to a public discussion when and if we can develop a feasible plan for consideration."
Team officials have not said how much they would seek from taxpayers to get the stadium built.
Portune and Driehaus said the team sought the secrecy promise because the discussions involved possible stadium sites and other details the team considered proprietary. Both commissioners said they signed because it was the only way to find out about the team's plans.
They said they would not make any deals or take any action without a public discussion.
"Long before anything is done or considered, we're going to bring this process out in public," Portune said. "We're going to have a full and complete vetting of it."
Public officials routinely meet behind closed doors to discuss litigation, contracts and some matters related to property acquisition, but the nondisclosure agreements with FC Cincinnati drew criticism from critics of publicly-funded stadiums.
Jeff Capell, who leads a local group opposed to using tax dollars on stadiums, told commissioners Wednesday they should conduct all business related to FC Cincinnati in public.
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"If FC Cincinnati wants our tax dollars, they need to make this request in public," Capell said.
A county sales tax already covers Paul Brown Stadium and Great American Ball Park, and the county has struggled for years to pay for upgrades and other amenities required under the stadium leases, particularly the lease with the Bengals.
Monzel said he's willing to talk to FC Cincinnati, but he would not support county ownership of another stadium. Portune and Driehaus also have expressed strong reservations, but have not ruled out the possibility of some public involvement.
Portune said he believes FC Cincinnati could continue to play at Nippert Stadium or at Paul Brown Stadium, which is configured for use as both a football and soccer stadium.
The Enquirer reported last month that the team is considering sites in Oakley and the West End in Cincinnati, but also in Newport, Ky.
Read or Share this story: https://www.cincinnati.com/story/news/politics/2017/06/21/two-pols-promised-secrecy-fc-stadium-talks/417044001/The Jacksonville Jaguars are reportedly looking into signing one of a pair of free agent running backs. Tampa Bay Buccaneers running back Doug Martin, New York Jets running back Chris Ivory, and Miami Dolphins running back Lamar Miller are getting interest from the Jaguars, according to NFL Network's Ian Rapaport, who reported it Tuesday morning.
And Lamar Miller https://t.co/ZHYgKgzLEC — Pete Prisco (@PriscoCBS) March 8, 2016
A lot of people think the Jaguars need to add to their running back group and it's not an outrageous thought, given the current state of the Jaguars running backs. That's nothing against T.J. Yeldon, who I think is good and very capable, but adding in someone like Doug Martin who can carry the load for some series and give Yeldon amble rest. Martin averaged 4.9 yards per carry last year, but only managed six rushing touchdowns in a pass-heavy, Jameis Winston-led offense.
Ivory is also a good option on the goal line, an area the Jaguars really struggled with. He averaged 4.3 yards per carry in a more balanced Jets offense and added in seven touchdowns on the ground. Upgrading the running back group in free agency is a much better option than spending a draft pick doing so.
Miller might be the most complete back of the three. He averaged 4.5 yards per carry and got eight rushing touchdowns on just 194 attempts. He also had 47 receptions and two touchdowns in the air.The number of U.S. government requests for data on Google users for use in criminal investigations rose 29 percent in the last six months, according to data released by the search giant Monday.
U.S. government agencies sent Google 5,950 criminal investigation requests for data on Google users and services from Jan. 1 to June 30, 2011, an average of 31 a day. That’s compared to 4,601 requests from July 1 to Dec. 31, 2010, the company reported Tuesday in an update to its unique transparency tool.
Google says it complied in whole or part with 93% of such requests, which can include court orders, grand jury subpoenas and other legal instruments.
For the first time, Google's transparency report includes the number of users and accounts affected by such requests — in this case, 11,057.
The search and software giant also received 92 requests to remove data from its services, including YouTube. The requests collectively asked for 757 individual pieces of content be removed. Google says it complied fully or partially with 63 percent of the requests. The company noted it received a request from law enforcement to take down a video showing police brutality and another for videos allegedly defaming law enforcement officials. Google did not comply with either.
Google is alone in providing this data to the public, which it says it hopes will give a push to efforts to reform a 25-year-old government privacy law that lets law enforcement get access to users' online communications without having to get a judge's approval.
Google is part of the so-called Due Process Coalition fighting for reform, but none of its fellow members – which include Amazon, AOL, AT&T, Dropbox, Facebook and Microsoft – provide any data at all about how often the government requests data or how often they comply.
Google does not, however, break down requests by type – so it's still unknown how many of these thousands of requests use the powers under the Electronic Communications Privacy Act to request, without judicial oversight, communication records of Americans.
The transparency tool also covers requests from other governments around the world, but due to the size of the U.S. population, Google's California headquarters and the large number of Americans online, the U.S. leads the world in data requests to the search giant.
The Chinese government filed no requests on user data — since Google does not keep data on Chinese citizens on servers in China.
The Chinese government sent Google three content removal requests regarding a total of 121 items. Google complied with two of these, saying the requests entailed ads that violated its AdWords policy. The company could not discuss the third request, which it did not comply with, a spokeswoman told Wired, saying, "We believe the Chinese government has prohibited us from full disclosure."
Yahoo, Twitter, Comcast, AT&T, Verizon and Time Warner, among others, do not publish any such data, nor do they make it available when the media asks for it, even though there’s no law requiring them to keep such requests quiet.
Google cannot reveal some government data requests, however, and they are not included in this tally.
According to Google, the numbers do not include National Security Letters, a sort-of self-issued subpoena used by the FBI in drug and terrorism cases. At their post–Patriot Act peak, the FBI issued more than 50,000 such letters a year, nearly all with gag orders attached to them. The use of such letters dipped for a time after the Justice Department’s internal watchdog unveiled widespread abuses and sloppy procedures, but are on the rise again.
Also not included are national security wiretap and data requests, known as FISA warrants, that are approved by a secret court in D.C. to combat spies and threats to national security.
Nor is there any information on how much data, if any, the government forces Google to turn over en masse on individuals outside the United States, using broad powers handed to the government in 2008 by Congress. That legislation, initially opposed but later supported by Sen. Barack Obama, lets the government turn online service providers into intelligence collection arms of the U.S. government, so long as the “targets” aren’t known to be U.S. citizens.
When he was a candidate, President Obama pledged to revisit that law — passed as a way to legalize much of the Bush administration’s secret, warrantless wiretapping program, but the law remains in place.DATE: Nov 5, 2012 | BY: Brent McKnight | Category: Sci-Fi
Do you have an extra room that you don’t need, one that’s just sitting there, waiting for you to do something awesome and incredibly geeky with it? Here’s something fun to consider doing with that extra space: you can always build a replica of the control room of Doctor Who’s preferred mode of transportation, the TARDIS.
That’s exactly what Deviantartist, and Doctor Who enthusiast, crazyfoalrus did with some unused space in his home. Check out these photos.
He painted the floor, constructed the center console, and rigged all of the electrical and lighting setups.
It definitely helps that one of the rooms in the house was already hexagonal. That definitely helps cut down on the construction time and budget. He also had all of the wood lying around, and he works at a factory with lots of random crap they’re getting rid of, crap which he then apparently stapled to the walls.
You know it must be pretty awesome to live inside of a phone-booth time machine. Granted, this doesn’t look like the inside of any phone booth I’ve ever been in, but what the hell, when was the last time any of us used a pay phone anyway?
As far as I see it, there are two ways people will react to this. Either your friends come over, immediately recognize what you’ve done, and get stoked, or else others (thinking parents) will come in and cast disparaging, vaguely superior looks at you, and then talk shit about you behind your back.Bigot is as bigot does
Anti-marriage equality bigots in Utah have asked the Supreme Court to halt same-sex marriages in their state after a federal judge found their statewide ban unconstitutional. Since the decision, same sex couples have been getting married in droves. The petitioners today described each of these marriages this way:
Each one, the state said in its petition, “is an affront not only to the interests of the state and its citizens in being able to define marriage through ordinary democratic channels,” but also to the Supreme Court.
They’ll have to wait a few days, it seems, because the request goes first to Justice Sotomayor who is busy tonight.
Supreme Court Justice Sonia Sotomayor will help ring in 2014 in New York City on Tuesday by pushing the button to start the famed Times Square ball drop. Sotomayor — a native New Yorker — will lead the celebratory crowds by pushing the crystal button at 11:59 p.m., kicking off the final countdown…
Plain and simple, this is nothing more than a matter of civil rights being denied by conservative ideologues wishing to govern with a bible in one hand a steaming mug of bigotry and hypocrisy in the other. Leave it to them to do something this dickish on New Years Eve.
Let’s end the year with an explanation about why anti-gay fundamentalist Christians are so hypocritical when it comes to marriage equality from one of my favorite comedians, John Fugelsang:
[CC LGBT graphic: The Limpa-Vias Blog]Liberal Party signs gender diversity plan to increase female representation in Parliament
Updated
The Liberal Party's federal executive has signed off on a 10-year plan to significantly increase its female representation in Parliament, in what one senator has described as a "watershed" moment for the party.
Key points: Only 18 of 84 federal Liberal politicians are women
Party announces grassroots plan to increase participation
Female members say party needs strategy change
Under the "gender diversity reform program", the party will recruit more women at a grassroots level, report its progress, and offer one-on-one mentoring to those interested in entering Parliament.
After July's election only 18 of the 84 Liberal MPs in Federal Parliament are female — the lowest the party has had in office for more than 25 years.
That is despite the party adopting a target of having 50 per cent female representation in Parliament by 2025.
West Australian Liberal Senator Linda Reynolds said it was a "very deliberate" and "comprehensive" strategy to drive cultural and structural change in a party that has struggled to achieve equal gender representation.
"What we're looking to do is implement genuine organisational reform from the grassroots up so that Liberal women have an equality of opportunity to compete for positions and we end up at that 50 per cent target naturally," she told the ABC.
"By the Liberal Party discussing it and acknowledging that we do have an issue, this is a real watershed moment for the Liberal Party."
Senator's 'frustration' at female preselection strategy
Senator Reynolds, who has been championing gender reform, described the July election result as a "wake up call" and said it showed the party's current strategy was not working.
As well as attracting more women at a grassroots level, she said the Liberal Party needed to pre-select more women in safe seats.
"Proportionally, Coalition women overwhelmingly contested more marginal seats and those not already held by the Coalition, and were most likely to be in the 6th place on the Senate ticket," she said.
That call is supported by newly-elected Victorian Senator Jane Hume, who said it was her "greatest frustration" that the party continually preselects talented women for marginal seats they have little chance of winning.
"I would like to see more women preselected for safer seats so that we don't see all of our good women disappear with our election fortunes," she said.
Senator Hume said entering Parliament was a difficult "lifestyle choice" for many women, who faced questions like "what about your children?" and "who will cook your husband dinner?"
Topics: women, government-and-politics, political-parties, liberals, parliament, federal-parliament, federal-government, australia
First postedCHENNAI: Alan Samuel, 24, a post-graduate student of social work at Madras Christian College, Tambaram, died of rabies early on Friday. He was bitten by a rabid pup on the college campus in November 2013. Alan was a dog lover.In November 2013, he and his classmates were walking to their department when they came across the pup. He and a classmate played with the pup, which bit them both. Alan and his friend went to general physicians to get treated. “The girl’s physician recommended that she take the anti-rabies vaccine, but Alan’s doctor seems to have said a tetanus toxoid shot would suffice,” said Durai Jasper, public relations officer of CMC Vellore, who confirmed that Alan died at the hospital at 1am on Friday.A post by MCC’s department of social welfare on a social networking site on February 13 said Alan complained of shoulder pain after two days, and his parents took him to a doctor close to their home. The doctor informed them that Alan was displaying symptoms of advanced stage of rabies and told them to take him to a government hospital.At GH he was referred to CMC, Vellore. "He hasn't slept the whole night, refused to lie down, just kept sitting and staring at everyone. He's showing aversion to breeze and water. Please pray for a miracle," the post read.On February 17, an update on the site said doctors at CMC had put him under induced coma and were waiting for his immune system to produce antibodies. Jasper said that as soon as he was diagnosed with rabies, the doctors told his parents that he may not survive. "There are only six known cases of survival across the world. We tried on the patient the Milwaukee protocol, which saved these people in the US, but it didn't help," said Dr George Varghese of CMC. The hospital is treating Samuel's friend who was also bitten, since she had taken only three of the five doses of anti-rabies shots.The college has a 365-acre campus many parts of which remain unexplored or unfrequented by students and faculty. Students and faculty said the dog population had grown on the campus.Principal R W Alexander Jesudasan said the management had tried to prevent the dogs from entering the campus by building compound walls at vulnerable areas. "We try to curb the dogs from proliferating without doing ecological damage, but it's always been a problem. We regularly inform the local authorities and the Blue Cross who try to catch the dogs to prevent the population from growing. But, the moment the dogs sense this, they hide in the bushes. It's not possible for the authorities to camp here for days to catch them," Jesudasan said.He said the authorities have recommended that all students take the anti-rabies vaccine. to be on the safe side. "Alan was an engineering student who joined the course to be able to serve society. He was a pet lover, and was used to dogs, so he didn't take the bite too seriously. Our class is small, so we were very close to each other," said R Akhilesh, a classmate. Alan's funeral will be held at St Paul's Church in Vepery on Sunday.I was pretty sure that shop-till-you-droppers couldn’t hurt the environment or themselves as long as the hoofed it everywhere they went. Of course, retailers have to keep the lights on, heat and cool facilities at all ungodly hours so that shoppers could get the ‘unique shopping experience.’ Until now. Shoppers don’t even have to do the walk, get exercise, kick off their high heels anymore.
In Shanghai there is a mini-metro train that runs INSIDE the mall. Exhausted ladies can hop a ride and be dropped off at Coldstone Ice Cream. Not only that, the train can go anywhere inside the 6-story home furnishing mall.
Yeah, I want to see how this train goes up and down the stairs, too. Feeling guilty? (I doubt this) But, the mall has designed the interior of the building to include many trees and water landscapes. Isn’t that nice? Shoppers can feel like they are being kind to the environment while they use up even more energy to get around.
Something tells me that malls like this are going backwards when it comes to being ‘green.’ I think malls ought to be open only during the daytime when it’s cool out and only at night when it’s hot. But, don’t tell my wife I said that.
sourceNonoverlapping Magisteria by Stephen Jay Gould
ncongruous places often inspire anomalous stories. In early 1984, I spent several nights at the Vatican housed in a hotel built for itinerant priests. While pondering over such puzzling issues as the intended function of the bidets in each bathroom, and hungering for something other than plum jam on my breakfast rolls (why did the basket only contain hundreds of identical plum packets and not a one of, say, strawberry?), I encountered yet another among the innumerable issues of contrasting cultures that can make life so interesting. Our crowd (present in Rome for a meeting on nuclear winter sponsored by the Pontifical Academy of Sciences) shared the hotel with a group of French and Italian Jesuit priests who were also professional scientists. At lunch, the priests called me over to their table to pose a problem that had been troubling them. What, they wanted to know, was going on in America with all this talk about "scientific creationism"? One asked me: "Is evolution really in some kind of trouble. and if so, what could such trouble be? I have always been taught that no doctrinal conflict exists between evolution and Catholic faith, and the evidence for evolution seems both entirely satisfactory and utterly overwhelming. Have I missed something?" A lively pastiche of French, Italian, and English conversation then ensued for half an hour or so, but the priests all seemed reassured by my general answer: Evolution has encountered no intellectual trouble; no new arguments have been offered. Creationism is a homegrown phenomenon of American sociocultural historya splinter movement (unfortunately rather more of a beam these days) of Protestant fundamentalists who believe that every word of the Bible must be literally true, whatever such a claim might mean. We all left satisfied, but I certainly felt bemused by the anomaly of my role as a Jewish agnostic, trying to reassure a group of Catholic priests that evolution remained both true and entirely consistent with religious belief. Another story in the same mold: I am often asked whether I ever encounter creationism as a live issue among my Harvard undergraduate students. I reply that only once, in nearly thirty years of teaching, did I experience such an incident. A very sincere and serious freshman student came to my office hours with the following question that had clearly been troubling him deeply: "I am a devout Christian and have never had any reason to doubt evolution, an idea that seems both exciting and particularly well documented. But my roommate, a proselytizing Evangelical, has been insisting with enormous vigor that I cannot be both a real Christian and an evolutionist. So tell me, can a person believe both in God and evolution?" Again, I gulped hard, did my intellectual duty, and reassured him that evolution was both true and entirely compatible with Christian beliefa position I hold sincerely, but still an odd situation for a Jewish agnostic. These two stories illustrate a cardinal point, frequently unrecognized but absolutely central to any understanding of the status and impact of the politically potent, fundamentalist doctrine known by its self-proclaimed oxymoron as "scientitic creationism"the claim that the Bible is literally true, that all organisms were created during six days of twenty-four hours, that the earth is only a few thousand years old, and that evolution must therefore be false. Creationism does not pit science against religion (as my opening stories indicate), for no such conflict exists. Creationism does not raise any unsettled intellectual issues about the nature of biology or the history of life. Creationism is a local and parochial movement, powerful only in the United States among Western nations, and prevalent only among the few sectors of American Protestantism that choose to read the Bible as an inerrant document, literally true in every jot and tittle. I do not doubt that one could find an occasional nun who would prefer to teach creationism in her parochial school biology class or an occasional orthodox rabbi who does the same in his yeshiva, but creationism based on biblical literalism makes little sense in either Catholicism or Judaism for neither religion maintains any extensive tradition for reading the Bible as literal truth rather than illuminating literature, based partly on metaphor and allegory (essential components of all good writing) and demanding interpretation for proper understanding. Most Protestant groups, of course, take the same positionthe fundamentalist fringe notwithstanding. The position that I have just outlined by personal stories and general statements represents the standard attitude of all major Western religions (and of Western science) today. (I cannot, through ignorance, speak of Eastern religions, although I suspect that the same position would prevail in most cases.) The lack of conflict between science and religion arises from a lack of overlap between their respective domains of professional expertisescience in the empirical constitution of the universe, and religion in the search for proper ethical values and the spiritual meaning of our lives. The attainment of wisdom in a full life requires extensive attention to both domainsfor a great book tells us that the truth can make us free and that we will live in optimal harmony with our fellows when we learn to do justly, love mercy, and walk humbly. In the context of this standard position, I was enormously puzzled by a statement issued by Pope John Paul II on October 22, 1996, to the Pontifical Academy of Sciences, the same body that had sponsored my earlier trip to the Vatican. In this document, entitled "Truth Cannot Contradict Truth," the pope defended both the evidence for evolution and the consistency of the theory with Catholic religious doctrine. Newspapers throughout the world responded with frontpage headlines, as in the New York Times for October 25: "Pope Bolsters Church's Support for Scientific View of Evolution." Now I know about "slow news days" and I do admit that nothing else was strongly competing for headlines at that particular moment. (The Times could muster nothing more exciting for a lead story than Ross Perot's refusal to take Bob Dole's advice and quit the presidential race.) Still, I couldn't help feeling immensely puzzled by all the attention paid to the pope's statement (while being wryly pleased, of course, for we need all the good press we can get, especially from respected outside sources). The Catholic Church had never opposed evolution and had no reason to do so. Why had the pope issued such a statement at all? And |
semi-public view, standing here and counting.”
Facebook Twitter Pinterest In Zero K, is DeLillo is self-consciously playing on his own canon? Photograph: Jean-Christian Bourcart/Getty Images
Such parallels are striking, but I suspect I would find just as many in other DeLillo books. Even with my rusty memory I could link a series of violent, murderous and apparently “real” films in the Convergence to the footage of the Texas Highway Killer in Underworld and repeated motifs of flickering images from other novels. It’s also possible to see those details about screens in the back of a taxi rebroadcasting ideas from Cosmopolis. And there are similar reflections in dozens of other ideas about bankers, cults, remote desert underground facilities. In a fine essay in the Vulture, Christian Lorentzen even notes that a passage where Lockhart does squat jumps reminded him of one in End Zone, and that some of Zero K’s comic dialogue will sound to devotees like a “master playing tennis with himself across the decades”.
I’m open to the possibility that these parallels with earlier works are incidental. They relate to ideas that have fascinated and troubled DeLillo throughout his career and his intention may be simply to give them new iterations here, rather than to be self-referential. But if DeLillo is self-consciously playing on his own canon, that would fit neatly with what I’ve come to see as a major theme in the book.
While I originally took Zero K as a reflection on mortality and what it means to die, it now also seems to me to be about the artist’s contest with infinity. “All plots end in death” is developed into the question of what happens to stories once their creator moves on – or, how much of the creator remains in those stories. For instance, the first person we see anaesthetised and frozen is called Artis (genitive of “ars”, if you’re a Latin fan – which is to say, “of art”). We are told that “death is a cultural artifact” and that their frozen clients will be “subjects for us to study, toys for us to play with”. We are even shown frozen bodies arranged around the Convergence building like so many macabre sculptures.
If this version of the afterlife is a metaphor for art, it’s a grim one, even if it’s also amusing: the implication being that striving for immortality in art is as absurd as paying a fortune to have someone freeze your dead body. Entering the bargain with the assumption that you will be given an escape from death, the best you can hope for is to have your cold husk displayed for the amusement of future generations, after everything that actually made your conscious being has long since left the building.
Don DeLillo: ‘I think of myself as the kid from the Bronx’ Read more
Neatly, this idea has already appeared in DeLillo. In Point Omega, we’re told: “The true life is not reducible to words spoken or written, not by anyone, ever.” In White Noise, meanwhile, Jack Gladney already feels like he is the false character following his name around. Set in this context, DeLillo’s references to his earlier works throughout Zero K become another brilliantly deadpan joke. The book also becomes the place where all those wonderful books meet their end, although I hope not. I hope I’ve got it wrong – like most of us do when first reading late period DeLillo. I hope that there will be more books, both to blast apart this thesis and to intrigue us anew.Scientists for the first time have successfully edited genes in human embryos to repair a common and serious disease-causing mutation, producing apparently healthy embryos, according to a study published on Wednesday.
The research marks a major milestone and, while a long way from clinical use, it raises the prospect that gene editing may one day protect babies from a variety of hereditary conditions.
But the achievement is also an example of human genetic engineering, once feared and unthinkable, and is sure to renew ethical concerns that some might try to design babies with certain traits, like greater intelligence or athleticism.
Scientists have long feared the unforeseen medical consequences of making inherited changes to human DNA. The cultural implications may be just as disturbing: Some experts have warned that unregulated genetic engineering may lead to a new form of eugenics, in which people with means pay to have children with enhanced traits even as those with disabilities are devalued.Bird strike! The moment 200 starlings were sucked into passenger jet engine on take-off
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Dwarfed by the jetliner, they look little more than a smattering of black dots.
But this flock of birds could have brought the plane crashing down in seconds.
They flew straight into the path of the Germania airlines flight to Kosovo as it took off from Dusseldorf airport with 80 on board.
Flight into danger: A flock of starlings fly straight into the path of the Boeing airliner as it lifts off at 200mph
More than 200 birds were sucked into one of the engines as one of the pilots can be seen watching what was happening. The markings directly below him are believed to be pitot tubes which measure the speed of the aircraft as opposed to holes in the fuselage created by the birds
‘It was like a scene from the Hitchcock movie The Birds. One second all was clear, and the next thing you saw were these birds swarming over the plane,’ said an onlooker.
It is thought more than 200 starlings were sucked into the right engine as the Boeing jet approached 200mph.
Others dented the fuselage but thankfully did not pierce it. Their splattered remains could be seen on the plane later.
‘The pitch of the engine said it all,’ said plane-spotter Juergen Kienast, who took these dramatic pictures.
‘It was like sticking a bit of metal pipe into a blender.’
Once airborne, the pilot reported engine damage and circled for almost 45 minutes before landing safely.
No-one was hurt and the plane had only minor damage.
A similar bird strike brought down an Airbus in the Hudson in New York in January this year.Muslim law board: Men must have triple talaq, else they'll kill wives!
India
oi-Vicky
Desperate to prevent the Supreme Court from ruling on the validity of the practice of 'triple talaq', the All-India Muslim Law Personal Board (AIMPLB) has offered the court a strange explanation: Who knows, if a man is not able to easily divorce his wife, he could burn or murder her!
If 'triple talaq' is not permitted, a man will have to undergo the legal process of divorce, which could be time-consuming and expensive. In such an event, a man may resort to illegal means to get rid of his wife -- he may murder her, or he may tarnish her image so she can't marry again, the board notes in its affidavit to the court, justifying 'triple talaq'.
If that weren't enough to convince the court, the AIMPLB has also offered this wise counsel: "A marriage is a contract in which the two parties are not physically equal. The man is not dependent on the woman for protection. 'Triple talaq' in such an event would avoid the possibility of murder of a woman whose husband wants to divorce her!"
[SC issues notice to Centre on Triple talaq]
And then this gem: Although the pronouncement of triple talaq in one go is "undesirable and irregular", various Islamic jurists and religious scholars have unanimously agreed that the 'triple talaq' in one go was that it effectively terminates the marriage.
Resorting to the final defence of 'triple talaq', the AIMPLB has told the court to stay away from personal laws because fundamental rights would be violated if the court touched cultural and religious rights. No one can rewrite personal laws in the name of social reforms, the board has asserted.
Polygamy prevents illicit sex!
The affidavit then goes on to justify polygamy, saying that it prevents a man from having an unlawful mistress! An unlawful mistress is harmful for the social fabric, therefore polygamy is a blessing for a woman, the affidavit says.
It goes on to warn that banning polygamy "will only increase illicit sex". Polygamy, the board says, ensures sexual purity.
And in a strange twist, the board then seems to argue against divorce saying that, "if polygamy is banned then a man will divorce an ailing wife and have an unlawful mistress".
The affidavit further states that the Muslim personal laws as they exist are based on the Quran, and adequately provide for the rights of Muslim women and form part of the issue of freedom of conscience and free profession, practice and propagation of religion, guaranteed under Article 25 and 26, read with Article 29, of the Constitution of India.
OneIndia NewsERBIL, Kurdistan Region – Turkey has proposed working with Arab fighters within the Syrian Kurdish-led Syrian Democratic Forces (SDF) for any future operation to capture Raqqa from Islamic State (ISIS) militants.
“The Arab elements of the SDF should learn to cooperate with the Free Syrian Army (FSA). We want the Arab elements of the SDF and the FSA to establish a joint administration in Manbij,” a senior Turkish official told Hurriyet news.
“These Arabs should act together in a military offensive towards Raqqa, too,” the official added.
The main group within the SDF is the Syrian Kurdish People’s Protection Units (YPG), which Turkey charges is closely linked with the Kurdistan Workers Party (PKK) and refuses to work with.
Ankara agreed to permit the SDF, including YPG elements, to cross westward of the Euphrates River to recapture Manbij from ISIS earlier this year. They successfully did so but Turkey is frustrated that the YPG have not completely withdrawn.
Turkish-backed forces fighting under the flag of the FSA have also clashed with SDF/YPG fighters since the Turkish intervention in northwestern Syria in late August.
US Deputy Secretary of State Antony Blinken discussed upcoming operations against ISIS militants in both Raqqa in Syria and Mosul in Iraq.Money from a professional wrestling event in April was supposed to benefit a charity that helps people who have autism, but the charity has yet to receive any money. Now the wrestlers and the charity want answers and the person who organized the event said his costs quickly added up and he has nothing to donate.
Mario Mancini, of Paradise Alley Pro Wrestling, said plans for the event began when James Raymond, of New Haven, reached out to him in January.
Raymond told Mancini his daughter is autistic and he wanted to host an event for Wallingford-based Autism Services and Resources Connecticut, according to Mancini.
“This is our hook. He brought her here,” Mancini said about meeting Raymond’s daughter. “We all fell in love with her -- all carrying her around. We brought her into the ring, we’re all holding her and playing with her.”
Paradise Alley Pro Wrestling agreed to bring their wrestlers on board and 600 seats were sold for “Wrestling for Autism,” which was held in East Haven on April 22. Some of the professional wrestlers who stepped into the ring donated their pay for the night.
Raymond promised he’d donate the proceeds from the event’s ticket sales, according to Mancini, who estimates them to be at least $5,000.
Paradise Alley Pro Wrestling was supposed to collect a $1,800 fee after the show to cover the costs of the ring, concession equipment and chairs.
“I said, ‘James, it’s time to settle up’ and he said, ‘I’m going to give you a check.’ And I’m like, ‘Is the check good?” And he’s like, ‘Oh yeah, it’ll be fine,’” Mancini said. “I actually put it through the ATM that night at midnight of the show, then Tuesday the funds were released and I paid some bills.”
A few days later, the check bounced, Mancini said, and he could not reach Raymond to ask it about it.
So Mancini went to police to file a complaint.
“Shame on you. You took advantage of a lot of good-hearted people that wanted to help you, help kids with autism,” Mancini said.
Lois Rosenwald, the executive director of Autism Services and Resources Connecticut, said she’ll file a complaint with police against Raymond as well.
She said Raymond had emailed the non-profit, offering the wrestling fundraiser. He said he wanted to use their name and promote the event and asked if Autism Services and Resources Connecticut could get the information out to families and people in their database, Rosenwald said.
“When someone wants to do a fundraiser for us, it’s a big deal and we were thrilled,” she said. “Just why, why would you have the need to do something like this? Isn’t there a better way.”
Sarge Ralph Murray, another partner at Paradise Alley Pro Wrestling, said he was surprised at what happened as well.
“My real job is a correction officer and I thought I’d seen it all and he never gave me inkling that he was hustling us,” Murray said.
The NBC Connecticut Troubleshooters stopped by Raymond’s home a few times to speak with him about the allegations and he initially declined to speak about them, but sent a statement to the NBC Connecticut Troubleshooters, saying he praises the autism community and wanted to help raise awareness.
There is no money left to donate, he said, and blamed the high cost of putting on the event.
“I realized during the process I did not set a proper budget in place to help me control the expenses as the event was shaping up. I thought with getting bigger name wrestlers it would help me raise more awareness and help me possibly make more net proceeds. I was not taking in to consideration the higher cost a bigger name wrestler would be or where I would be having to fly them in from and hotel costs for these wrestlers,” the statement says.
See the full statement at the bottom of the article.
Raymond added that there were also costs associated with the online ticket site, promotional materials and food for concessions.
“All these costs added up fast. I was trying to put together a great event for a great cause. With all the costs of the event though we ended up having no net proceeds to donate,” Raymond said.
East Haven police said there are specific actions that Mancini and Rosenwald would have to take, such as sending a certified letter demanding the monies owed, before police can fully investigate.
Mancini said Paradise Alley Pro Wrestling will hold another wrestling match on June 25 and all proceeds will go to Autism Services and Resources Connecticut. He said they’ve also been collecting thousands more dollars from around town to add to whatever they make next month.
The NBC Connecticut Troubleshooters also reached out to the Department Of Consumer Protection and Lora Rae Anderson, the director of communications, offered the following tips on ways to protect yourself while trying to raise money for charity.
If you are working with a charity to raise money, or if you are a charity partnering with another individual or organization to raise money:
Make sure your agreement with one another is in writing
If you are not a charity, but are using their logo to advertise for an event, you must have the charity’s permission
If you have questions, contact the Department of Consumer Protection by emailing dcp.charities@ct.gov
For consumers donating to charity:
You can verify that a charity or paid solicitor is registered appropriately by visiting www.elicense.ct.gov
Research a charity’s mission, and ask questions before you give so you know where your money is going
If you get a solicitation, never give in to pressure tactics or deals that sound too good to be true. It could be a scam.
If you need to a file a complaint, email the Department of Consumer Protection at dcp.frauds@ct.gov.
Following is the full statement from James Raymond:
“On April 22nd 2017 I threw an event called Wrestling for Autism in East Haven, CT. This event I had spent 5 months preparing for. I wanted to help raise awareness and acceptance for autism and donate any net proceeds to a charity to help out in anyway possible. I have a daughter who is autistic and we had a lot of help and support from the autism community. So this was one way for me to try and give back to a community who has helped my daughter grow with continued support. With out this community I do not know where we would be right now with my daughter. So this was a great opportunity for me to try and do something to give back.
“I realized during the process I did not set a proper budget in place to help me control the expenses as the event was shaping up. I thought with getting bigger name wrestlers it would help me raise more awareness and help me possibly make more net proceeds. I was not taking in to consideration the higher cost a bigger name wrestler would be or where I would be having to fly them in from and hotel costs for these wrestlers. Along with all the costs of the wrestlers I still had other costs that would come into play. those costs would be the cost of the e-commerce site to sell the tickets, promotional materials, food for the concession stand, event costs for promotional events leading up to the initial event, t-shirts for the event, graphic design for all the event posters and online promotions of the event. All these cost added up fast. I was trying to put together a great event for a great cause. With all the costs of the event though we ended up having no net proceeds to donate.”They don’t care. And they’re not required to care.
The ravenous price increases that pharmaceutical companies slap on their medicines are part of the reason the US health care system is eating an ever larger slice of consumer, corporate, and government spending, and why the rest of the economy has trouble moving forward. Some of the price increases have turned into scandals with plenty of mouth-wagging by politicians.
Mylan got raked over the coals in Congress for raising the price of its autoinjector EpiPen seven-fold since buying it in 2007. Last year, Turing Pharmaceuticals, under Martin Shkreli, got into hot water over raising the price of just-acquired Daraprim 50-fold.
Private equity firms have figured this out. You can make a ton of money with a basic formula: Fund a newly created outfit that buys the rights to a prescription drug with little or no competition and with stagnant or declining sales, jack up the price of the drug, then flip the company at an enormous profit.
This has become the latest way of wringing out the American economy without contributing anything to it, and at the expense of everyone else. So Bloomberg dug into the role private equity firms play in these schemes.
For example, Genentech developed immune-disorder drug Actimmune decades ago. Eventually, sales began sagging. In 2012, it sold the rights to Vidara Therapeutics for $55 million. Vidara had been formed for this purpose and was funded by private equity firm DFW Capital Partners.
Over the next two years, they jacked up the price of Actimmune by 434%, thus making it a very profitable drug despite declining sales. In September 2014, they flipped Vidara to Horizon Pharma for $660 million, pocketing a huge low-risk gain in just 27 months.
Then Horizon jacked up the list price another 81% to $538,000 for a year’s worth of treatment. Since 2012, the list price has soared 866%!
At that time, Vidara’s co-founder and majority shareholder, Balaji Venkataraman, was involved in another highly profitable pharma flip, according to Bloomberg. He helped start up and fund Sebela Pharmaceuticals in 2013. In August 2014, Sebela bought Miacalcin, which treats high calcium levels, from Novartis. Over the next eight months, the price was jacked up from $68 a vial to $1,987 a vial.
Then the highly profitable exit. Bloomberg: “About a year later, Sebela sold Miacalcin ‘for a substantial gain,’ resulting in a special distribution to shareholders, according to an annual report from one of DFW’s investors.”
The buyer? Mylan of EpiPen fame. Which has since jacked up the price to $2,283 a vial. This brings the total price increase since August 2014 to 3,257%!
But it’s not just old drugs that get flipped. New drugs can get the same treatment, so to speak. Savient Pharmaceuticals developed Krystexxa for chronic gout. It started marketing the drug in 2011. But things didn’t work out. In October 2013, Savient filed for bankruptcy. In January 2014, Crealta Pharmaceuticals, which had no drugs but was backed by PE firm GTCR, acquired the assets of Savient for $120 million. It then jacked up the price of Krystexxa by $8,610 per vial, pushing it from $5,390 per vial to $14,000.
In January 2016, Crealta, with Krystexxa as the main asset, was sold to Horizon – the same company that had bought Vidara – for $510 million. Horizon continued the scheme, raising the price of Krystexxa to $16,909 per vial. Since January 2014, the price has soared by $11,519 per vial.
Covis, based in Switzerland and majority owned by PE firm Cerberus Capital, acquired 14 licensing rights for $345 million over three years, from Sanofi, GlaxoSmithKline, and others. According to Bloomberg, Covis jacked up prices on six of them by over 200%. In April last year, it sold 12 of the brands and some generics to Concordia for $1.2 billion. And… “Price rises continued.”
Two of these drugs, Nilandron and Dutoprol, are up 989% and 1,057%, respectively, since 2013.
They’re among dozens of drugs bought with private financing in the past six years, according to an analysis of products in a database kept by the software company Connecture Inc. The price often rises, and the drug’s often resold.
There are other examples: The price of the old Novartis cold-sore cream Denavir was jacked up 372% “as it changed hands twice with private equity help,” according to Bloomberg. The price of Dutoprol soared 1,057% after a flip.
Between 2011 and 2015, about 650 branded prescription drugs have doubled in price, according to data from Connecture, cited by Bloomberg. And for about 100 of these drugs, prices were jacked up by over 500%.
Insurance companies and pharmacy-benefit managers, which have been focusing on top sellers to contain costs, are now starting to home in on flipped drugs that had been flying under the radar. For example, benefits manager CVS Health said in August that due to these “hyperinflationary” price increases, it would stop covering Nilandron and Dutoprol.
Senator Bernie Sanders has lambasted the greed of this industry repeatedly. Over the past couple of days, he added some stinging tweets:
Companies will do whatever they can to build, use, and abuse monopolies, dysfunctional markets, patent laws, and other government protections in order to maximize profits while cannibalizing the entire economy.
They don’t care. And they’re not required to care.
The fault lies with Congress and regulators that have been “captured” by the industry. They’ve allowed and encouraged this form of price gouging. They’ve recklessly and willfully shuffled off the responsibility of keeping prices under control to market forces and competition, knowing perfectly well that there are no market forces and competition for many drugs, and nothing else to keep prices in check.
The dog-and-pony shows during the periodic congressional hearings with all their professionally faked outrage are simply brushed aside by these one-drug outfits, the PE firms behind them, and Big Pharma, all of them in search of maximum profit in the shortest amount of time, at the lowest risk, and at the expense of everyone else.
Health insurers just can’t stand competition. Read… Are Big Health Insurers Screwing with Consumers and Businesses?
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Would you like to be notified via email when WOLF STREET publishes a new article? Sign up here.GAINESVILLE, Fla. -- The air had long since come out of Florida’s defense Saturday night, and the guy most responsible for the damage was wearing an approving smile.
Alabama junior running back Trent Richardson took turns bludgeoning the Gators and slicing and dicing them on his way to a career-high 181 rushing yards and two touchdowns in the Crimson Tide’s 38-10 romp in the Swamp.
Afterward, he could not quit talking about the guys who paved the way to 226 rushing yards for the Crimson Tide against a Gators’ defense that was allowing just 56.5 yards per game on the ground coming into the game.
“I felt like I was running behind a legendary offensive line. They’re living legends right now,” Richardson gushed.
If they keep this up, it’s going to be hard to argue that assessment, at least in the realm of Alabama football.
But Richardson is not too shabby himself.
He runs the football the way Eddie Van Halen plays the guitar: full-speed, knocking heads along the way and with an artistry that nobody else can exactly duplicate.
He sees creases that seemingly aren’t there, and he has exquisite footwork for a 225-pound guy who can bench-press more than twice his weight.
And if there isn’t much of a hole, he’s the one that delivers the blow.
“He never gets tackled by arm tackles … ever,” Alabama senior center William Vlachos said. “That’s the luxury of having backs like that, and we’ve had them ever since I’ve been here. It makes your job as an offensive lineman a lot easier.”
The final score said plenty Saturday in this battle of unbeatens, but the way the Crimson Tide seized control with its running game after the quick touchdown by the Gators to start the game was vintage old-school Alabama football.
“Our goal is that we want to wear people down,” said Barrett Jones, who’s made the successful transition to left tackle after earning All-SEC honors at right guard last season for the Tide.
“You might be able to hang with us in the first half. But come the third and fourth quarter, we’re going to keep pounding, and that’s what happened tonight.”
The Gators jumped out front 7-0 on the first play from scrimmage when John Brantley hooked up with Andre Debose on a 65-yard touchdown pass.
But Alabama came right back down the field. And even though the Tide only got a field goal on that drive, the message had been sent.
“We set the tempo tonight on offense, and that’s what we needed to do,” said Richardson, who’s rushed for more than 100 yards in each of his past four games and is averaging 158 yards in his last three contests. “The defense fed off of us.”
The Crimson Tide (5-0, 2-0) wound up scoring 35 unanswered points after the Gators took a 10-3 lead.
The way they did it was what was so impressive. They methodically pounded Florida, and while Richardson had been getting 5 yards here and 8 yards there for much of the night, he popped the big one to close the deal. He made a cut behind superb blocking up front and raced 36 yards for a touchdown.
“He’s a great player. It takes more than one person to bring him down,” Florida senior defensive tackle Jaye Howard said.
Even then, it’s not a sure thing.
“He’s an unbelievable football player, and the passion he plays with every time he touches the ball is something that elevates everybody’s game on offense,” Vlachos said. “You want to block for him.
“Our job up front ain’t always fun. But when you see a guy working like that, it makes you want to give it all you’ve got.”
Richardson called it a night by the midway point of the fourth quarter, and by that time, the only question was whether there were more Florida fans in the stadium or more of them spreading out across campus and heading to their cars.
“That’s probably the best feeling as an offensive lineman,” Jones said. “We know we’re running the ball. They know we’re running the ball. Everybody in the stadium knows you’re running the ball, and you still run the ball … and they can’t stop it.”
It’s a scene the Crimson Tide wouldn’t mind repeating more than a few times this season.
“I think we finally created our identity,” Vlachos said. “It’s coming together for us [on offense], but we’ve got to continue to work.”
Never a problem with this group.Necromorphs do charity! Dead Space 2 featured in Humble Origin Bundle 2
Love or hate Electronic Arts, the company sure knows how to assemble a kick ass Humble Bundle. This is the second time EA cooperates with the charity and those who choose to support it will receive a large amount of noteworthy games.
Most notable for horror fans: Dead Space 2 is featured in the lowest tier, making it available to everyone who donates at least $1. In that same tier, we also have the dark fantasy RPG Dragon Age: Origins, the casual game Peggle, first-person shooter Medal of Honor: Allied Assault plus expansions, and the real-time strategy game Command & Conquer Generals. Those who donate more than the average will also receive the team-based shooter Plants vs. Zombies Garden Warfare, Dragon Age 2, Bejeweld 3, and the space-based RPG Mass Effect 2. Tier 2 will also receive more games later down the line, so there is more to look forward to.
I just purchased the bundle myself and was relieved to learn that you can redeem all of these games at once without having to copy over codes, something that used to be possible in Steam until it was suddenly scrapped. It would be nice for us if some of the mystery games turned out to be horror titles as well, but even if you just want Dead Space 2, $1 is a ridiculously good price and every little bit helps.
[Source]Apocalypse Now: Israel bombards Gaza for fifth straight day with nearly 1,000 airstrikes paving the way for imminent invasion
Thousands of soldiers and hundreds of tanks and armoured vehicles are at muster points along the border
Hamas prime minister's headquarters, police compound and huge network of smuggling tunnels were targeted
Follows Hamas rocket strike aimed at Jerusalem
Israeli military have targeted more than 800 sites since the operation began
Egypt's president will today hold four-way talks with the Qatari emir, the prime minister of Turkey and Hamas leader Khaled Meshaal in Cairo to discuss to Gaza crisis
Palestinian militants in Gaza fired four rockets at the Israeli port city of Ashdod while Israel used an Iron Dome missile interceptor battery in Tel Aviv after it again came under rocket fire from Gaza
Israel says its Iron Dome system has intercepted nearly 250 rockets since Wednesday
Yesterday, the White House defended Israel's right to defend itself and decide how to respond to the rocket fire
David Cameron urged Israel to 'do everything possible' to end the crisis
Shadow foreign secretary Douglas Alexander appealed to UN Secretary General Ban Ki-moon to go to the region for last ditch talks to avert full-scale conflict
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Israeli warplanes have struck Gaza militants for a fifth straight day as its military prepared for a possible ground invasion, though Egypt saw'some indications' of a truce ahead.
Forty-seven Palestinians, about half of them civilians, including 12 children, have been killed in Israel's raids, Palestinian officials said. More than 500 rockets fired from Gaza have hit Israel, killing three people and injuring dozens.
Israel unleashed its massive air campaign on Wednesday, killing a leading militant of the Hamas Islamist group that controls Gaza and rejects Israel's existence, with the declared goal of deterring gunmen in the coastal enclave from launching rockets that have plagued its southern communities for years.
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Fierce clashes between Israeli forces and Gaza militants are continuing for the fourth day A government compound was also hit while devout Muslims streamed to the area for early morning prayers, although it did not report any casualties from that attack Smoke rises during an explosion from an Israeli forces strike in Gaza City today The Jewish state has since launched more than 950 air strikes on the coastal Palestinian territory, targeting weaponry and flattening militant homes and headquarters. The raids continued past midnight on Sunday. One targeted a building in Gaza City housing the offices of local Arab media, wounding three journalists from al Quds television, a station Israel sees as pro-Hamas, witnesses said. Two other predawn attacks on houses in the Jebalya refugee camp killed one child and wounded 12 other people, medical officials said.
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Next Israel prepares for war: Invasion force masses on Gaza... BBC forced to make another apology as Chief Rabbi'... Share this article Share These attacks followed a defiant statement by Hamas military spokesman Abu Ubaida, who told a televised news conference. 'This round of confrontation will not be the last against the Zionist enemy and it is only the beginning.'
The masked gunman dressed in military fatigues insisted that despite Israel's blows Hamas 'is still strong enough to destroy the enemy.' An Israeli attack on Saturday destroyed the house of a Hamas commander near the Egyptian border.
Missiles knocked out five electricity transformers, plunging more than 400,000 people in southern Gaza into darkness, according to the Gaza electricity distribution company
Palestinians inspect the damage at the office building of Hamas Prime Minister Ismail Haniyeh after being destroyed during an Israeli airstrike in Gaza
A rocket is launched from Gaza as seen from near Sderot Casualties there were averted however, because Israel had fired non-exploding missiles at the building beforehand from a drone, which the militant's family understood as a warning to flee, and thus their lives were spared, witnesses said. Israeli aircraft also bombed Hamas government buildings in Gaza on Saturday, including the offices of Prime Minister Ismail Haniyeh and a police headquarters. Among those killed in air strikes on Gaza on Saturday were at least four suspected militants riding motorcycles, and several civilians including a 30-year-old woman.
It came as thousands of soldiers and hundreds of tanks and armoured vehicles were at muster points along the border, as speculation mounted that Israel was to launch a ground offensive. Tonight, David Cameron urged Israel to 'do everything possible' to end the crisis. In a phone call with Israeli counterpart Benjamin Netanyahu, he expressed sympathy for the continued 'unacceptable' rocket attacks. A Downing Street spokeswoman said: 'The Prime Minister expressed his sympathy for the unacceptable rocket attacks that Israel continued to suffer. He also expressed concern over the risk of the conflict escalating further and the danger of further civilian casualties on both sides. Iron Dome: Israeli soldiers watch as an Iron Dome launcher fires an interceptor rocket near the southern city of Beersheba today A Palestinian youth takes cover behind a makeshift barrier (right) during clashes with Israeli soldiers at the Qalandia checkpoint, in the occupied West Bank Israeli soldiers fire tear gas towards strone throwers demonstrating against the Israeli military offensive on the Gaza Strip in the village of Beit Omar, north of the West Bank town of Hebron 'The Prime Minister said that the UK was putting pressure on both sides to de-escalate and urged Prime Minister Netanyahu to do everything possible to bring the conflict to an end.' It came after protesters gathered near the Israeli embassy in London to condemned the British Government's stance on the conflict. Speakers took to a podium to condemn the Government after Foreign Secretary William Hague said the Hamas regime in Gaza bore 'principal responsibility' for the escalation of violence. Israel had been slowly expanding its operation beyond military targets but before dawn it ramped that up dramatically, hitting Hamas symbols of power. A three-storey apartment building belonging to a Hamas military commander was hit, and ambulances ferried more than 30 inhabitants wounded by the powerful explosion. Missiles smashed into two small security facilities as well as the massive Hamas police headquarters in Gaza City, setting off a huge blaze that engulfed nearby houses and civilian cars parked outside, the Interior Ministry reported. No one was inside the buildings. The Interior Ministry said a government compound was also hit while devout Muslims streamed to the area for early morning prayers, although it did not report any casualties from that attack.
Also hit was a cabinet building where the Hamas prime minister has his offices. Prime Minister Ismail Haniyeh was not inside. Missiles knocked out five electricity transformers, plunging more than 400,000 people in southern Gaza into darkness, according to the Gaza electricity distribution company. Israeli firemen douse a burning car after a rocket fired by Palestinian militants from the Gaza Strip landed in the southern Israeli city of Ashdod today A student from the University of Birzeit is carried away injured during clashes with Israeli soldiers in the occupied West Bank town of Betunia Unexploded bomb: A Palestinian Hamas policeman looks at an Israeli rocket in the street in Gaza City on Saturday
In southern Gaza, Israeli aircraft went after the hundreds of underground tunnels militants used to smuggle in weapons and other contraband from Egypt, residents reported. A huge explosion in the area sent buildings shuddering in the Egyptian city of El-Arish, 30 miles away. The tunnels have also been a lifeline for residents of the area during the recent fighting, providing a conduit for food, fuel and other goods after supplies stopped coming in from Israel before the military operation began. Israeli aircraft kept pounding their original targets, the militants' weapons storage facilities and underground rocket launching sites. They also went after rocket squads more aggressively.
Israel has put 75,000 reservists on standby amid speculation of an impending ground invasion Tunisian Foreign Minister Rafik Abdessalem, center, visits Gaza's Hamas Prime Minister Ismail Haniyeh's demolished headquarters in Gaza today Palestinians carry the body of Ali Al-Mana'ama, a Hamas militant in Maghazi Refugee Camp in the central Gaza Strip. A group of Hamas militants were killed in an Israeli air strike east of Maghazi Refugee Camp earlier today Palestinians carry the body of Hamas militant Ali Al-Mana'ama during his funeral in Maghazi Refugee Camp A Palestinian youth gestures at Israeli soldiers during clashes in the Jalama checkpoint in the West Bank near Jenin city Relatives look at the bodies of Ali Al Mana'ama, top, Ali Darwesh, centre, and Ahmad Abdujawad, Hamas militants, at the morgue of Al-Aqsa hospital in Deir Al Balah, central Gaza Strip The military has called up thousands of reservists and massed troops, tanks and other armoured vehicles along the border with Gaza, signalling a ground invasion could be imminent.
Palestinian militants, undaunted by the heavy damage the Israeli attacks have inflicted, have unleashed some 500 rockets against the |
for a Volkswagen Golf that can pull Challenger Hellcat quarter mile-rivaling times.While we don’t know the actual output of this two-liter mill (expect around 600 hp), we can name the mods that allow the mad Vee Dub to perform so well. Most of the goodies come from APR, including the Stage 3 GTX2867R turbine, intercooler, high pressure fuel pump, low pressure fuel system and an intake manifold flap delete. Speaking of the intake, this comes from VWR, which also supplied the engine and gearbox mounts, while the exhaust comes fromIn order to withstand the massive torque, the DSG gearbox was gifted with a SSP clutch plate and a Harding performance tune. Oh and in case you’re wondering about that blitz all-wheel drive launch, you should know the Golf runs on Mickey Thompson ET Street Radials - yep, these are street-legal drag radials.Don’t get on the phone with your tuner just yet. That much power from the stock internals means that the parts will have to be changed rather sooner than later, but the demo is still an enticing one.The Oscars come complete with lots and lots of categories you probably don't care about — generally, all the ones that don't involve "Picture" or "Director" or acting or "Screenplay."
In particular, that applies to the categories of movies most people have almost no chance to see, like the ones honoring documentaries, short films, and foreign films.
But digital distribution has made many of these films readily available to just about anybody with an internet connection and a subscription to a streaming service. Indeed, four out of this year's five Documentary Feature nominees are available on either Amazon Prime or Netflix, while the fifth is available for digital rental.
And since all five films are terrific, why not spend a weekend with some of the best nonfiction films around?
Here are this year's five Documentary Feature nominees, reviewed and ranked (though you can't go wrong by watching all five).
1) The Look of Silence: a moving film about the need for justice, no matter how minor
Director Joshua Oppenheimer's tremendous film traces the efforts of an Indonesian eye doctor as he attempts to elicit some measure of forgiveness from the men who were responsible for the death of his brother in the 1965 genocides that swept the country. His journey is a microcosm of any attempt to set right something that's been profoundly broken — and just how impossible such a task is.
Oppenheimer previously visited this territory in big-picture form in 2012's The Act of Killing, which considered the ways many people still celebrate the Indonesian genocide of the past in pageants and song. The Look of Silence is at once a sequel to and spinoff of that earlier film, picking up where it left off but also digging ever more deeply into the idea that some sins are unforgivable — even when forgiveness might be the only thing that can heal someone enough to move forward.
This is a rich, emotional, often agonizing film. I wrote much, much more about it here.
Where to watch: The Look of Silence is available for digital purchase or rental.
2) Amy: a thoughtful, moving biography of a damaged genius
Director Asif Kapadia's two most recent films (the race car driver documentary Senna and this one) transform collages of found footage into what amount to unofficial biographies of people who died far too young and far too tragically. In Amy, his subject is musician Amy Winehouse, and he charts the singer's rise and long, long fall in excruciating close-up, refusing to let you look away as seemingly no one around Winehouse tries to prevent her from pitching forward into the void.
But the best thing about Amy is that it reminds you of what a primal talent Winehouse truly was. Rather than reduce her to a series of cautionary tales or punchlines about the addictions and eating disorders that would eventually claim her life at age 27, Kapadia displays all sorts of footage of Winehouse performing, pairing it with recollections of friends and rare behind-the-scenes footage that captures her as a happy young woman with the world ahead of her.
The film's strongest sequences arrive after she's hit the height of fame, but when she still has a shot at avoiding the downward spirals of addiction. In particular, look for footage from immediately before and after she wins at the Grammys, as well as a rehearsal with a kindly, paternal Tony Bennett for the final recording Winehouse would ever make.
Where to watch: Amy is available to Amazon Prime subscribers for free. It's also available for digital download.
3) Cartel Land: a rich, complicated portrait of the US-Mexican border
The rise of digital filmmaking has led to lots and lots of documentaries that tackle hot-button issues, but fewer that play their cards close to their vests instead of explicitly taking a side. Watch enough of Matthew Heineman's Cartel Land, and you'll get the sense that he's interested in pursuing ideas about the cost of zealotry and vigilante justice. But he's mostly interested in putting you in the middle of the immigration and drug war debates and showing you the complicated situations of everybody whose lives intersect with those issues on both sides of the US-Mexican border.
Consider, for instance, Tim Foley, a man who takes it upon himself to patrol the Arizona border for anyone who might be trying to enter the country illegally. Foley is a member of an organization that's been dubbed a hate group by the Southern Poverty Law Center — and Heineman films him saying things that suggest exactly why it might be considered as such. But Foley also emerges as a complex, human figure, one who is driven by impulses that will be recognizable to almost anyone.
Add to that a portrayal of the Mexican side of the drug war (with the anti-cartel group Autodefensas becoming the subject of half the film) and some gorgeous images from Heineman and his crew, and you have a work that will leave those looking to score political points frustrated, but one that succeeds mightily in forcing viewers to consider these issues from new angles.
Where to watch: Cartel Land is available to stream on Netflix, or for digital rental or purchase.
4) What Happened, Miss Simone?: Nina Simone's life, largely in her own words
The second of this year's two richly deserving musical biography nominees, What Happened, Miss Simone? is slightly more conventional in structure than Amy. For one thing, director Liz Garbus assembles the film via the usual collection of talking heads interspersed with period photographs and performance footage. For another, its central arc, tracing Nina Simone's early rise, politically driven fall, and late-period resurrection, is incredibly standard.
But What Happened, Miss Simone? differentiates itself thanks to Garbus's willingness to embrace everything about her subject, even the things viewers might find less than admirable. Simone was a transcendent artist, a political radical, and a deeply complicated woman trapped in a variety of abusive relationships, both romantic and otherwise. Every time you think you have a read on her, she does something to completely change your point of view.
That's the mark of a great character, whether that character is a real person or a fictional one, and as a character study, What Happened, Miss Simone? is tremendous. Its title — taken from a Maya Angelou poem — doesn't interrogate Simone herself, but instead asks why the things she stood for were never accomplished. It's a film as much about the civil rights movement as about an incomparable jazz singer.
Where to watch: What Happened, Miss Simone? is available to stream on Netflix.
5) Winter on Fire: Ukraine's Fight for Freedom: This is what revolution looks like
Evgeny Afineevsky's Winter on Fire is by far the most conventional documentary on this list, but that doesn't mean it's not jaw-dropping. Afineevsky's footage — shot in 2014, at the heart of protests against a corrupt Ukrainian election — is tremendous, the sort of "you are there" stuff that great documentaries have always offered. It's also a reminder of just how difficult revolutions can truly be — as those who are protesting fight and bleed and even die for their cause.
Winter on Fire perhaps runs a touch too long, and at times its scope is slightly larger than its handheld aesthetic will allow. But in its best, most potent moments, it places the camera in the middle of people standing up in defiance of their government, or weeping openly over the corpse of one of their own.
It's also a great portrait of how a movement like this can start as something relatively small, then grow bigger and bigger as it agitates others to join its cause. And the film's ending shows that, yes, pushing for change can be back-breaking, death-defying work, but it's sometimes the only way to get the ruling classes to listen.
Where to watch: Winter on Fire is available to stream on Netflix.Dr Mahdi Fat’hi, in a Farsi interview with IRNA, said, “The mother, 27, gave birth to a child using hypnotherapy which was performed under the supervision of gynecologist, Dr Qodsiyeh Alavi.”
Stressing that the mother and baby are in good condition at the moment, he said, “In this method, the pregnant mother is prepared for labour by telling her that her childbirth would be painless and this process of creating mental imagery starts a month before the labour. While lying on bed, the mom feels herself walking in nature with her child.”
“When uterine contractions begin, hypnosis helps mother in the process of childbirth”, he mentioned.
Fat’hi went on to say that Mashhad is the centre of hypnotherapy in Iran, and so far two babies have been born through hypnosis in Sina and Bentolhoda hospitals of Mashhad.
“Hypnobirthing has been used worldwide as one of the painless delivery methods during the past 30 years and has many benefits,” he stated.
This associate professor of Anesthesiology at Mashhad University of Medical Sciences pointed out that the use of hypnosis in childbirth reduces 80 to 100 percent of normal labour pain.
“The World Health Organization believes that no mother should have pain during childbirth. Painless delivery, not using medication during labour, induction of postpartum analgesia and reduction of the patient’s anxiety are among the benefits of using hypnosis in normal delivery, which has no side effects.”
He stressed that giving delivery using a hypnotic method requires an experienced and well-trained physician and midwife. On the other hand, the patient should choose this method and allow the gynecologist to use it.
Fat’hi said there are around 7,000 hypnosis experts in Iran, including physicians, dentists, midwives, gynecologists, nurses and psychiatrists.
“Of these, 200 are midwives and about 50 are obstetricians and gynecologists.”
Iranian Scientific Society of Clinical Hypnosis was established in 1989 with the approval of the Ministry of the Interior. In 2001, the Ministry of Health and Medical Education also approved the activity of this association in the field of medical and psychological affairs and issued a license for it.
This association is the only legal entity licensed by the Ministry of Health and Medical Education to operate in the field of hypnosis and hypnotic therapies.
The Iranian Scientific Society of Clinical Hypnosis is based in the city of Mashhad, but it has many branches across the country.
Hypnotherapy is now widely used in the treatment of various diseases such as schizophrenia, psychosis, mental retardation, pessimism, personality disorder and obsessive-compulsive disorder, and in various cases it is used in childbirth, dentistry and limited surgeries.
The first childbirth using hypnotherapy in Iran was carried out at Sina Hospital of Mashhad, in March 2017.I really want a quad that I can fly indoors (possibly on 1S or 2S) and then take it to the back yard and have enough thrust to work on tricks when I don't have time to go to a park and fly the big 5" quad.
I've been looking at brushless micros, and the pepperfiish build looks very interesting, but I really want a frame with some reasonable prop guards.
http://fishpepper.de/2017/07/28/how-to-build-a-2s-pepperfiish-beast-shopping-list-recommendations/
While looking for a frame with 16x16mm mounts, I learned from the fpvchat slack that the awesome guys at Hoverbot are up to something new. I couldn't wait to try it out!
This build uses the Hoverbot Ultralight Prototype frame, and is just 7.3g with prop guards. The wheelbase is 80mm and is for 2" props.
I wanted a durable cloverleaf antenna, so I'm using the IBCrazy Cloverleaf, which is 1.1g when trimmed down (vs.6g for a whip).
For the 3d printed parts, I got the spacers printed in TPU, and I'm using the 20* camera mount printed in ABS.
I compiled a huge list of 2S batteries at https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/1B-aosnNQKenpLulhH6i1mDSqhqQvy84nccwozwdf1sQ/edit#gid=0
But ultimately I've decided to go with these: https://hobbyking.com/en_us/turnigy-nano-tech-450mah-2s-65c-lipo-e-flite-compatible-blade-130x-eflb3002s35.html
I fly indoors with 2S and a throttle curve to make that sane. Full throttle 2S indoors is a bit too much oomph for my skill to keep it out of the ceilings. OpenTX config for telemetry alarms for 1S/2S as well as a switch that enables 1S / 2S "indoor mode" / 2S mode. Indoor mode has a reduced linear throttle that hovers at 50% instead of 30%.
https://imgur.com/a/Ves00
AUW with my ghetto 1S is 52.6g, AUW with the 2S 300mah is 54.7g. AUW with my go to 450mah 2S battery is 61.1g. Those 450mah 2S give me ~5m30s flight time indoors!
The more I fly this quad, the more I love it. I've not touched the tiny whoop since.Users of consumer drones and model aircraft aren't afraid to share their ideas and imagery in social media. Surprisingly though, these users have been largely silent when it comes to protecting their hobby from pending Federal Aviation Administration rules --- rules that threaten to curtail many uses of the exciting new devices.
Drone users are oftentimes quick to comment when a government official with the FAA or the National Park Service tells them they can't use their cool toy somewhere. Realtors, photographers and other potential commercial users have expressed dismay over the FAA's backwards regulations which allow flying for fun, but not flying for work.
Drone users are also good at organizing to share everything from photos to techniques. The DIY Drones user group has more than 55,000 members. The Quadcopters Facebook group has over 2,400 members, and the UAV Legal News and Discussion group on Facebook has more than 1,000 members. DJI, the maker of the popular DJI Phantom quadcopter has over 72,000 Twitter followers and 3D Robotics has more than 13,000. Those two companies combined sell tens of thousands of consumer drones each month, who knows how many more Parrot, the maker of the AR.Drone and dozens of other manufacturers sell. Some blog posts on drones receive hundreds of comments, and thousands of social media shares. Drone users are certainly active in some places on the web, but they have dedicated very little of their attention towards influencing public policy.
As a supporter of the nascent industry and the decades old hobby, I'm baffled by the lack of pushback against the FAA by otherwise very vocal people. With just 15 days left before the FAA's comment period on model aircraft rules closes, tens of thousands of drone users have been largely silent. For those unfamiliar with FAA regulations, a little background is necessary. On June 23, 2014 the FAA released their Interpretation of the Special Rule For Model Aircraft. That interpretation is open for public comment until July 25, 2014. Once the comment period closes, the FAA will consider public input (and the degree of public interest) and finalize their interpretation. The game is largely over at that point, as there will be very few opportunities (short of lawsuits) for the drone community to push back against the FAA's rule. The stakes are high, yet to date a mere 2,811 comments have been received on the proposed regulation.
That's a paltry number. Brendan Schulman, a lawyer specializing in drones says "The FAA's Notice is dense and hard to navigate, and that might be discouraging comments. The main reason hobbyists should be very concerned is on the last page, where the FAA says that despite Congress's intent to exclude model aircraft from future regulation, the FAA feels that any part of its existing regulations'may apply to model aircraft operations, depending on the particular circumstances.' That means the agency is poised to arbitrarily tell hobbyists what conduct may be subject to fines -- but only after the fact."
That's a significant threat to the emergent industry. While not everyone know's how to comment on a regulation, other regulations that impact less tech savvy audiences have garnered far more comments. For example, a regulation having to do with snakes has over 50,000 comments and a petition to amend the standard identity of milk received over 40,000 comments. It's simple to submit a comment at Regulations.gov, so perhaps the drone users are waiting until the deadline to file their comments. But given the number of users, and their passion for the hobby, it's shocking that the number of comments received thus far is so low.
The lack of response is not due to a lack of media attention or advocacy group organizing. The FAA's new policy guidelines were widely covered in traditional and non-traditional media (I have stories on it here). Moreover, the Academy of Model Aeronautics (AMA), the 1650,000 member group representing model aircraft users posted a call for action to their blog and sent emails to their members. They even provided their members with instructions on how to respond to the regulation and posted a detailed guide explaining the organization's concerns.
The AMA has valid reasons to be concerned, "Since 1981, the FAA has said it is fine to fly a model aircraft if you are more than three miles from an airport, and just to notify the airport operator if you are closer." Schulman explains, "Now, the FAA is demanding that hobbyists request permission in advance from air traffic control if they are within five miles of an airport. In some places in the country, like New York City or Florida, those five miles cover vast areas where people live, and apparently would even apply to toy airplanes in back yards or playgrounds." But even assuming every comment on Regulations.gov was from an AMA member, that would still only account for 1.6% of the AMA's membership. Silence abounds.
Where are the drone users and model aircraft enthusiasts who have been so vocal in social media? Is it possible they have been scared into silence and are not participating in the regulatory process for fear of revealing themselves to government regulators? It's a legitimate concern, just consider the fact that the FAA has spent the last few months cracking down on realtors. Given such an enforcement climate, it's understandable that some commercial users would not want to reveal their identity by commenting on a regulation. Whatever the reason, what's clear is that with just two weeks until the deadline, most drone users are sitting out this regulatory fight.
Feel free to leave your comment below, but better yet, leave it here.
Gregory S. McNeal is a professor specializing in law and public policy. You can follow him on Twitter @GregoryMcNeal or on Facebook.The Northeast was hit by a blizzard this week, so to take our minds off of the weather we’ve decided to start daydreaming about our summer vacations! We love hitting the road with our dogs, but occasionally we run into discriminatory policies that threaten to put a damper on our family fun.
Since so many of us like to travel with our pets, we thought this would be a good time to talk with AFF adopter Lynn Rogers. Lynn frequently travels with one of her two dogs, Dakota (who has her Canine Good Citizen certificate and is a therapy dog), but last year, she encountered a rental agency that had breed specific polices. Lynn kept a level head and took this as an opportunity to do some education. Let’s see how it turned out!
AFF: Can you tell readers a little about your dogs?
Lynn: Both of our dogs are good dogs. We know them very well and we know that Dakota is a real people dog, but Morty is not so comfortable meeting new people. Dakota loves to visit people and new places. However, Morty is afraid of meeting new people and this issue is training in-progress for us. Both of them LOVE going to “doggie” daycare and are favorites there!
AFF: You choose to board Morty, instead of bringing him on vacation with you. How come?
Lynn: Morty is uncomfortable meeting new people in new spaces. It doesn’t take a degree in dog behavior to see that taking him somewhere new, with ten new people to meet, is not a recipe for success for him. So Dakota came with us and Morty spent his week at our daycare. He had a spa treatment and the trainer there worked with him on his meeting people issues. She and her husband say he is a model dog when he is there, and they take excellent care of him and he gets to play, play, play all day long!
AFF: We love how you recognize that each of your dogs is an individual and needs different things to succeed. Since Dakota loves new people and places, you go on vacation with Dakota each summer. What happened when you tried to take her on vacation last summer?
Lynn: I found a house with a new rental company, and after I placed the deposit, I received their contract. I noted that the contract included a breed specific discrimination clause which included pit bulls, Rottweilers, Dobermans and German Shepherds. I contacted Animal Farm, asking for advice. Should I pursue having the company change their rules and accept my dog? Or should I just look for another rental company? AFF suggested that it would help move the issue forward if I attempted to challenge the rental company.
AFF: How did you approach the rental company and, ultimately, get them to make an exception to their policies?
Lynn: I phoned them and explained Dakota’s credentials and her history at past beach houses. I also let them know that I had another dog that I would not be bringing because he would not be comfortable in that situation. They listened and agreed that because Dakota is CGC and TDI certified (I sent them copies of her credentials) that they would bend their rules.
AFF: What’s your advice for anyone in a similar situation?
Lynn: I guess the biggest lesson for me was not to give up, and to ask for the rules to change. I hope that by bending the rules for my dog, the rental company might see that each dog is an individual.
Thanks Lynn! We hope your 2013 vacation is another success!
(editor’s note: original answers were edited for space and clarity)
If you find yourself in a similar situation this summer, here are some tips:
Know your dogs. If your dogs aren’t comfortable with new people or places, taking them on vacation may not be a good choice. It’s ok to leave them at home with a pet sitter or at a kennel. If you do bring them along, give your dogs the skills they need to make a good impression on property managers. Teach them how to greet new people politely.
Education is key! If you do run into discrimination, rather than walking away take it as an opportunity to educate. Talk to the rental companies, the campgrounds, or hotel managers. Be polite, calm, and respectful in your approach. Find out why they have a breed specific policy and ask that they reconsider.
If your dog has credentials, show them off. Certifications like Canine Good Citizen or Certified Therapy Dog may influence business owners to make an exception for your dog. If you’ve successfully rented or vacationed with your dog in the past, mention this. Better yet, if you’ve keep records of correspondences with past property managers (that show you left the house in good condition and are welcome back) share those too.
Let your wallet do the talking. If they’re not interested in having a discussion with you or changing their policies, don’t lose your cool. Take your business elsewhere. After you enjoy your vacation, why not write that first company an email to let them know how much money they lost out on by discriminating against you and our dogs? Tell them that you hope they’ll reconsider their policies and that you’d be happy to support their business in the future if they do.
Want to be a voice for change, but need a little help getting started? Check out our new BSL Talking Points eBook for tips on speaking up for your dogs!
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PrintOPINION
THE attacks in Paris are so singularly vile, so unprecedentedly deranged, it would be impossible to confuse the murderers behind them with any other group.
But that is what will happen in Australia. An outspoken minority will attempt to link some of our citizens with the insanity of the IS conspiracy, the terrorists most likely to have ordered and carried out the killings.
There could be a backlash, largely driven by confusion and anxiety, against the 480,000 Australians of the Muslim faith, as if their religion was enough evidence to put them under the IS banner. As if their worship meant they also supported the IS commitment to butchery.
But it simply is not true.
Undoubtedly the IS business model of cowardly slaughter has backers in this country. They are a tiny group — a minority speck among Muslims — who attempt to recruit others for the evil they consider necessary.
They are extremists who do not represent the mainstream Muslim approach to religion or the sanctity of life.
Most of the young men who have been stopped from leaving Australia to join IS have come from what might be called secular Muslim families.
In many of these cases, their parents have been only nominally of the faith or have abandoned it.
An overwhelming majority of the try-on terrorists have not been associated with a mosque. They have been groomed online or by a direct relationship with a corrupting figure outside regular religious circles.
These are aimless and ignorant kids who, as Assistant Minister for Multicultural Affairs Concetta Fierravanti-Wells has said, “think that they are going over there to play with AK-47s, get drugs and women and at night-time go off to what they were doing here, go off to McDonalds and do other things”.
Not only would a backlash against Muslim Australians be insupportable, the public heat and community instability it could cause would delight the IS leadership, who want their menace to be globally disruptive.
But it simply has no basis.
Further, any raucous calls to close mosques and deport individuals would antagonise and isolate the very people we are asking to help track down the agents of IS, and alert us to the youngsters who might be falling for the IS extremism.
The more that public opinion — and security authorities — blame mainstream Muslim Australians for the IS atrocities, the greater the possibility the Islamic mainstream will see terrorism as the government’s problem, not theirs.
The more isolated and abused Muslims feel, the less likely they will be to assist authorities. The notion that harassing Muslims is good security is usually the monopoly of those who are too scared to think.
The IS threat is a very real problem for mainstream Muslims, as well as other Australians. At the very least, it’s not good for business and the commercial bottom line.
They should be consulted and included in counter measures, not mindlessly ignored and ignorantly condemned.
They should be encouraged to have enough faith in security authorities and the general population, to report community members — including relatives — with IS-like delusions.
There of course will be measures some in this community will object to.
Anyone who has made it to Syria and the bloody embrace of IS should be blocked from returning here or be jailed if they do, no matter how sad and sorry their tales. There is no excuse in claiming they didn’t know IS was so ghastly.
Families won’t like this, but not only does this dissuade recruits, it blocks well-trained killers from slipping back in to put their new skills to use.
But there are areas of support which include helping those families settle their young, particularly those rootless and restless kids looking for sex and drugs and guns.
Former Prime Minister Tony Abbott appointed Senator Fierravanti-Wells to strengthen contacts with Muslim figures, who represent not just a range of sects but some 160 separate agencies.
And this work is highlighting a community where families are worried about the usual things — educating their young, getting them jobs.
It has been a reminder that of the 480,000 Australian Muslims, the large majority are aged under 29, and 180,000 were born here. And many believe they are estranged from the rest of the country.
Senator Fierravanti-Wells said in October: “If you step back and look at it as a social issue with a national security perspective, then you can start to see why these young people are marginalised, what the reason [is] for their disengagement.
“Some of the kids who do this want to go over there [to Syria] to rape, plunder and pillage. One leading Imam indicated to me that these kids... he deals with young boys, second and some third generation, he has helped some of them on the road back.”
And that retrieval of young lives should be the priority, not the scapegoating of them.How to Survive Winter and Still Smoke Cigars!
This is an on going debate this time of year, every year, in every cigar forum, and everyone’s twitter feed. I realize that some people live where it gets really cold, and they can’t smoke inside. So obviously they have it worse than most others. However, there are still options available to everyone.
Luckily, I’ve been blessed and was born in the South where it’s warm 85% of year and I rarely have to worry about snow. I know what you’re thinking, yes, I am a redneck son of the south. Oh wait, you weren’t thinking that? Ok, well that’s good to know! Well after combing through lots of different ideas. I think I’ve compiled some great ideas / suggestions for what to do when it gets too cold to smoke cigars outdoors!
Go Inside!
Ok, I know most of you won’t be able to smoke inside your house or apartment. What about a garage? I personally smoke in my garage and I love it! Nothing like the smell of gasoline and sweaty hockey gear to really help you soak in the aroma of your cigar. I open up one side of my double garage and let the smoke flow out that way. I also bought a POS oil radiator heater that can’t really warm the garage that much. That’s one bad suggestion, don’t buy a crappy heater!
Can’t go inside at your own place? Find a cigar lounge that is close to your house! Obviously, this doesn’t apply to everyone, but most people should have a B&M close enough to them where they can go in and smoke for an hour or two, right? That’s what these places were made for. They want you to come in and smoke there. Plus you can hang out and meet some great people why you are in there. Remember what you all said, talking to people is your #2 favorite thing to do while smoking cigars!
Ok, so you can’t smoke in your house. You don’t have a B&M close to you. My third and final option is, just smoke in your car! Now, I’m not a big fan of this. Mainly because I have a 20 minute commute each day. I personally like to get away from the smell of cigars every now and again. But it could be an option for you depending on how badly you want to smoke. That’s all I’m saying.
Wanna Be Tough? Stay outside then.
Well the choice is up to you and your circumstances. I’m sure you’ve thought about all of your options at this point and have realized you either have to A) Give up cigars for the winter or B) Just get a thicker coat.
Option B leads me to my next point. If you’re going to be outside you need to get prepared.
Warmer Clothing
Hat & Gloves – These are essential! Something like 90% of your heat escapes your body through your head, hands and feet. So protect these at all times. A stocking cap, beanie, toboggan or whatever you want to call it, get one and put it on your head. It’ll keep your head and ears warm and keep the wind from cutting through you.
Gloves, this is always a topic of debate. Fingerless gloves, mittens, or normal gloves. I prefer fingerless gloves for smoking cigars. It keeps the majority of your hands warm and lets you have the touch that you need for smoking some sticks.
Coat – Now this can be a normal smoking jacket or a snow jacket. It’s really up to you and what you prefer. Personally, I don’t want my nice winter coat smelling like a cigar lounge. So I went down to Wal Mart and bought a nice flannel jacket. Probably cost me $30 and it’s super warm! Plus I look like a lumberjack when I wear it so it’s all good.
Longjohns / Thermal Underwear – Again, since I’m from the South we call these longjohns. They are awesome at keeping you warm. Just layer them under your outer clothes and you should be fine. Assuming it’s not -40 degrees.
Handwarmers – Now here, I have a couple of options for you. You can buy the hot hands and keep them in your pockets and pull them out when you need them. However, I’ve found an alternative that I think works just as good, if not better. It actually warms two parts of your body.
Personally, I use my laptop to keep me warm. I have it plugged in and charging while I’m smoking. When it’s charging it produces quite a bit of heat. So I stick my hands underneath the bottom of the laptop and it warms them right up. However, I usually have to keep one hand out because I’m playing blackjack on PartyCasino.com. I know, I know, I prolly shouldn’t be doing that, but I love blackjack! Not only does my laptop keep my hands warm, it also warms my thighs. So to me this is quite effective! But it’s up to you.
Boots – Last, but not least as I said you lose a ton of heat through your feet. Make sure you have some nice wool socks on. Even better than that, make sure you have a nice pair of boots to keep your feet warm! It’s even better if you can tuck your pants into your boots. I realize that may not look cool or fashionable, but hey at least you’re getting to smoke cigars right? That’s what I thought.
Get a Good Heater
This is actually a lot harder than it sounds. I’ve been going back and forth on heaters. I first bought a coil heater and tried it out for a couple of days. It didn’t work as well as I wanted it to. So I took it back to Wal Mart, picked up an oil radiator heater. I’ve had good experience with them in the past and thought I’d try again. No luck so far. Maybe it’s because the garage is too big.
So now I’m trying to decide my next step. So now I’m trying to decide my next step. I’ve looked at ceramic heaters, I just don’t think they will put off enough heat. I’ve also looked at the big heated poles, but they don’t direct the heat very well. I’ve even thought about trying to install a fireplace but that’s a longer term plan.
So I’m going to head to Lowe’s and try to find something that is directional and puts off a ton of heat because I have a feeling it’s going to get downright cold this winter. So if you have any suggestions please post them in comment box below!
Yes, I’m done suggesting ideas
There you have it ladies and gents. Those are my ideas and suggestions for surviving the winter and still being able to enjoy your cigars. Hopefully you learned something, or it sparked some new ideas for you to try out. If this was absolutely zero help whatsoever. Then I apologize, next time you prolly shouldn’t take advice from a southerner on how to stay warm 🙂Russian Defense Minister Sergey Shoigu speaks during the 5th Moscow Conference on International Security in Moscow, Russia on April 27. Shoigu acknowledged Tuesday that Russia has expanded what he called "information operation forces" involved in a cyber-war effort. Photo by Yuri Kochetkov/UPI
Feb. 23 (UPI) -- Russian Defense Minister Sergey Shoigu acknowledged Russia's expanded effort in cyber-warfare for the first time.
Addressing Russia's lower house of parliament on Tuesday, Shoigu said an information army has been established within the Russian military. He did not offer details about the personnel or its targets.
"The information operations forces have been established that are expected to be a far more effective tool than all we used before for counter-propaganda purposes. Propaganda should be smart, competent and effective," he said.
His statement follows allegations of cyberattacks against Western nations, with NATO believed to be a primary target, the BBC reported. The Russian effort is under analysis after accusations that Russian hackers influenced the 2016 U.S. presidential elections to the advantage of President Donald Trump.
Former Russian military commander-in-chief Gen. Yuri Baluyevsky, commenting on Shoigu's address, said an information warfare victory "can be much more important than victory in a classical military conflict, because it is bloodless, yet the impact is overwhelming and can paralyze all of the enemy state's power structures."news iiNet today emerged victorious in a landmark High Court victory against a coalition of film and TV studios on the issue of Internet piracy through peer to peer platforms like BitTorrent, in the conclusion of a long-running case which is viewed as the a test for how Australia’s telecommunications industry will deal with the issue in future.
“#iitrial appeal dismissed!” wrote iiNet chief executive Michael Malone on Twitter this morning. A statement by the court, available online in PDF format, states:
“Today the High Court dismissed an appeal by a number of film and television companies from a decision of the Full Court of the Federal Court of Australia. The High Court held that the respondent, an internet service provider, |
and dangerous figures has no legitimate basis in reality. It is clear evidence of the ulterior aspirations of those behind neoconservatism to dominate and subvert American conservatism from its original purposes and agenda and turn it to other purposes.… What neoconservatives really dislike about their “allies” among traditional conservatives is simply the fact that the conservatives are conservatives at all—that they support “this notion of a Christian civilization,” as Midge Decter put it, that they oppose mass immigration, that they criticize Martin Luther King and reject the racial dispossession of white Western culture, that they support or approve of Joe McCarthy, that they entertain doubts or strong disagreement over American foreign policy in the Middle East, that they oppose reckless involvement in foreign wars and foreign entanglements, and that, in company with the Founding Fathers of the United States, they reject the concept of a pure democracy and the belief that the United States is or should evolve toward it. (Sam Francis [2004]. “The neoconservative subversion.” In B. Nelson (ed.), “Neoconservatism.” Occasional Papers of the Conservative Citizens’ Foundation, Issue Number Six, 6–12. St. Louis: Conservative Citizens’ Foundation. Quoted here, p. 26)
It’s really a debate between American Jews who think of themselves as trying to save Israel from itself, and American Jews who will support Israel no matter what. Ben-Ami is saying the same thing Mearsheimer and Walt have said—that current Israeli policies are bad for Israel long term. (Ben-Ami would not credit M & W for this; Weiss notes that Ben-Ami “is the same man who when Walt and Mearsheimer wrote about the Israel lobby’s hammerlock on US policymaking in the Middle East, said it smacked of the Protocols of the Elders of Zion.”
Ben-Ami is afraid that Israel’s oppression of the Palestinians is unsustainable given international pressure. And he worries that support for Israel is ultimately fragile since the power of the lobby stems mainly from US politicians motivated by fear rather than from the belief that all-out support for Israel is in US interests.
Kristol, on the other hand, thinks that “the status quo is sustainable for another 45 or 60 years.”
I am inclined to agree with Kristol. Americans of all stripes, especially Whites, are getting used to censoring themselves on a whole host of issues—Israel, Jewish influence, and virtually anything touching on diversity. Whereas even the most trivial sin against diversity is severely punished, a US Congressman can advocate permanent second-class status for the Palestinians in the mainstream media. I don’t see any end to the craven support given Israel by the vast majority of US politicians. Fear works. The Israel Lobby has shown over and over again that it’s quite capable of enforcing its will on Congress and the president.
Behind the fear is all the money that automatically flows to the opponents of any politician who doesn’t toe the line.
[Ben-Ami and the moderator] could have asked Kristol about how he derives his power— how he buys a full-page ad in the Times to say that Obama whom he agrees with is using Israel as a punching bag. No one mentioned hedge funder Daniel Loeb, who funds the Emergency Committee for Israel.
Weiss could have mentioned David Kovnar, another hedge funder who “over two decades, has underwritten the infrastructure the neocons have used to achieve their current prominence.” And a whole lot of others. Ultimately, it’s all about Jewish money.
Kristol also doubtlessly believes that Israel is militarily invulnerable, and it would be difficult to argue the point. Israel is the preeminent military power in the region, and the US has pledged to ensure Israel’s qualitative military edge over its neighbors. (A bill before Congress now promises to enhance this pledge.)
Of course, continuing its aggressive, expansionist policies means that Israel will continue to be an international pariah. But Israel is quite accustomed to that role at this point, and the lobby has a long and successful track record in dealing with the fallout from charges such as “Zionism is racism,” at least in the West (which is all that really matters).
As we have stressed here several times, the extremists are in charge in Israel and there is no going back. Ben-Ami is kidding himself if he thinks that humanitarian arguments or even arguments phrased in terms of Israeli survival are going to persuade the Israeli right to change course on settlements. It’s not going to happen. And with the demographic power of the religious and ethnonationalist right, these trends will only get stronger in the future.
Finally, Weiss writes that
as for the war that Bill Kristol pushed, the Iraq war, no one was so impolite as to bring that up, let alone Kristol’s counsel to George W. Bush to remove Saddam Hussein because “Israel’s fight against terrorism is our fight.”
In the Weiss piece, Kristol complains about the New York Times and NPR as enemies of Israel. But neither would ever breathe a word about the simple fact that the war in Iraq never would have happened without the Jewish neocons who falsified intelligence reports on WMD and created the image of Iraq as bent on destroying the US: “Israel’s fight against terrorism is our fight,” as Kristol phrased it.
That is yet another huge display of Jewish power. And we already know what would happen if a mainstream media outlet strayed off the reservation by charging the neocons with responsibility for the Iraq war: Charges of “anti-Semitism” by the ADL and attempts to ruin careers. (The ADL labeled such charges “a canard that America’s going to war has little to do with disarming Saddam, but everything to do with Jews, the ‘Jewish lobby’ [notice that ‘the Jewish Lobby’ is in quotes; the ADL is implying that it doesn’t really exist] and the hawkish Jewish members of the Bush administration who, according to this chorus, will favor any war that benefits Israel. Such charges are “reminiscent of age-old, anti-Semitic canards about a Jewish conspiracy to control and manipulate government’ (see here, pp. 15-16).
As so often these days, the truth lives on the Internet. But even there, you better be bullet-proof if you want to talk about it.
In an ideal world, Bill Kristol would be tried for treason as a war criminal. In the real world, Weiss correctly calls him a “Republican Party boss” who has also taken it upon himself to “enforce a pro-Israel line inside the Democratic Party.”
I realize I am buying into a canard, but if you are not concerned about Jewish power in America, you are not paying attention.YouTube has announced that it is now supporting 360-degree video uploads. Some of the cameras that are compatible with YouTube's 360-degree video uploads include Bublcam, 360cam by Giroptic, Allie by IC Real Tech, the SP360 by Kodak and the RICOH THETA. This means that viewers can watch videos in any direction for a different perspective instead of just where the camera is facing. The 360-degree cameras have a price range of about $300-$1,000.
With the 360-degree option, filmmakers and brands will be able to offer a unique experience by letting viewers watch scenes from multiple angles. “You share incredible videos with your fans every second of the day, but what if you could share even more in that video? Like, sharing the entire moment that you’re filming?” said YouTube's staff in a blog post. “You could let viewers see the stage and the crowd of your concert, the sky and the ground as you wingsuit glide, or you could even have a choose-your-own-adventure video where people see a different story depending on where they look. Only you know what’s possible."
When you upload a YouTube video with a 360-degree camera, the viewer is able to tap on the video and drag the screen to look around at different angles. In the screenshot below, you will notice that there are navigational controls at the top left of the videos. If you are using the YouTube app on an Android device, then you can pan around the video simply by moving your smartphone and tablet around.
As of right now, the 360-degree YouTube videos are supported by just the Chrome browser on the desktop and the YouTube app on Android devices. YouTube said that 360-degree videos will be supported on other platforms in the near future like the iPhone and iPad. YouTube also has plans to make the 360-degree videos accessible through virtual reality platforms, which is the best way to view immersive content. The experience feels very similar to Google Street View.
If you are near the YouTube Space L.A. studio on Bluff Creek Drive in Los Angeles, the Creator Tech team is letting people try out the 360-degree cameras and put together those types of videos with help from the staff between now through April. When you are ready to upload 360-degree videos on YouTube, you can find technical information on Github with a Python script to insert the correct video metadata. YouTube plans to make the process of uploading 360-degree videos automatic, but that script will be required in the meantime.
Keep in mind that the quality of the 360-degree videos are not as high as we see in the standard YouTube videos. The 360-degree videos need to be at 24, 25 or 30 frames per second. And the 360-degree videos take up about four-to-five times the bandwidth of regular YouTube videos.
YouTube set up a playlist of some 360-degree videos so that you can see multiple examples. Here are a few examples of the new 360-degree videos on YouTube (watch these using Google Chrome on your desktop or the YouTube app for Android to see the 360-degree controls):
What are your thoughts about YouTube's 360-degree video options? Let us know in the comments section below!Within President Donald Trump’s inner circle, Lt. Gen. Michael T. Flynn may be down, but he is not out. He remains national security advisor, and his thinking clearly stands behind the recent, disturbing marginalization within the National Security Council of the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, Gen. Joseph Dunford Jr., and of the director designate of national intelligence, former Senator Dan Coats.
In his inflamed book The Field of Fight: How We Can Win the Global War Against Radical Islam and Its Allies, Flynn clearly and loudly calls for the concentration of all power in a single supreme advisor at the top:
One leader must be in charge overall and accountable to the president—if this leader does not meet the test, which is to win, then fire him or her and find another who can. We have to stop participating in this never-ending conflict and win! And we must accept that there is no cheap way to win this fight. The bottom line is that we have to organize ourselves first before we can expect any international coalition to seriously join forces with us to destroy this evil we must clearly define as Radical Islamism. (116)
Flynn sees 'an international alliance of evil countries and movements' arrayed against the U.S., with Iran as the 'linchpin.'
Who is it, concretely, whom this “one leader” needs to defeat? Who is the enemy? Flynn sees, to begin with, “an international alliance of evil countries and movements” arrayed against the U.S.:
If as PC [politically correct] apologists tell us, there is no objective basis for members of one culture to criticize another, then it is very hard to see—and forbidden to write about or say—the existence of an international alliance of evil countries and movements that is working to destroy us. Yet, the alliance exists, and we’ve already dithered for many years. The war is on. We face a working coalition that extends from North Korea and China to Russia, Iran, Syria, Cuba, Bolivia, Venezuela and Nicaragua. (76)
This is an alliance that few, if any, perceive quite as Flynn perceives it. Within this vast alliance, is there one country that stands out, one country that is the key to the entire alliance? The answer is yes: “Iran is the linchpin of the alliance, its centerpiece.” (77)
Should the U.S. then go to war against Iran? Flynn writes, as his second principle after maximum concentration of power at the top, that “we must engage the violent Islamists wherever they are, drive them from their safe havens and kill them or capture them. There can be no quarter and no accommodation.” (117)
“It was a huge strategic mistake for the U.S. to invade Iraq militarily,” he writes later in his book. “Our primary target should have been Tehran, not Baghdad, and the method should have been political—support of the internal Iranian opposition.” (175) But since the Islamic Republic of Iran has put down internal opposition with extreme force, just as Bashar Assad has done in Syria, should American support for the Iranian opposition be armed support?
Our primary target should have been Tehran, not Baghdad, and the method should have been political—support of the internal Iranian opposition. Michael Flynn
The Obama administration has been unwilling to go to war to support the Syrian opposition. The Trump administration may be willing to go to war to support the Iranian opposition. After all, “the war is on,” and Iran is “the linchpin” of the enemy alliance. Iran has tested several ballistic missiles since the Iran nuclear deal in 2015, and it did so again on Sunday. Flynn responded Wednesday saying, “As of today, we are officially putting Iran on notice.” Another missile test from Iran could be casus belli for the Trump administration.
Can the U.S.―unable to win its war in Iraq and unable so far to defeat the so-called Islamic State―win a war against far larger, far more populous and far more unified Iran? Here is clearly a question that ought to be answered with the counsel of the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff. And what might be the cascade of diplomatic and military consequences of an invasion of Iran? Would North Korea take the occasion to attack South Korea—or Japan? Here, again, is a question that ought to be answered with full input from the director of national intelligence. Frighteningly, both of these key security figures have now been marginalized.
Flynn writes impatiently of objections that get in the way of his vision of centralized, personalized power and maximally forceful action. Above all, he does not want to be drawn into any consideration of the internal complexity of Islam:
I firmly believe that Radical Islam is a tribal cult and must be crushed. Critics get buried in the details of sunna, hadiths, the umma and the musings of countless Muslim clerics and imams. These so-called Islamic scholars keep their message so complicated so as to create chaos, to confuse in order to control. Mao, Pol Pot, Stalin and Mussolini were more transparent. Sharia is a violent law that is buried in barbaric convictions. (110)
Reading his book, few will doubt that Flynn was tacitly nominating himself to be that 'one leader [who] must be in charge overall.'
Although Flynn includes Russia in the “working coalition” of enemies listed above, he persists in the view that Russia can nonetheless be made an American ally in a world war to “crush” the “tribal cult.” Of Russia’s annexation of the Crimea and occupation of Eastern Ukraine, Flynn declared in an October 2016 interview with The New York Times that it was “besides the point … We can’t do what we want to do unless we work with Russia, period.”
Russia, perhaps reassured by such talk, has just renewed its aggression in eastern Ukraine. Meanwhile, General Sir Richard Shirreff, formerly No. 2 commander of NATO, has published a roman á clef outlining in fictional but chillingly plausible detail how Russian President Vladimir Putin might seize this moment of American distraction and executive chaos to sweep westward to the Atlantic, transforming the balance of power in Europe.It’s a Wednesday night in L.A., and Donald Glover is sitting in front of a computer in a room full of friends, taking puffs from his Pax vaporizer.
He lives up in the hills of Silver Lake in Los Angeles. Walt Disney built his first big studio here in the 1920s and Forbes named it America’s best hipster neighborhood in 2012. Donald’s house—a modern structure far up on the winding roads—looks over the busy city, but from a calm and quiet vantage point.
It’s not a party per se; about a dozen people come and go throughout the night, even though reaching Donald’s house can be a struggle. Once they make it through the L.A. traffic and find a place to park on the street, guests have to walk up hundreds of steep stairs to the back entrance. By the time they make it to the door, they’re breathing heavily. Donald’s been wearing the same shirt all day and short shorts that he says sometimes get mistaken for boxers. He’s playing music ranging from Björk to Lil Durk through large speakers while a projector beams South Park onto a huge screen covering half the wall. He asks everyone to let him know if they’ve got any requests. An argument breaks out about who’s better, Maxwell or D’Angelo. Donald and company joke about girls and race and life.
With his friends around, he’s jovial and quick to break into laughter, but as the guests begin filing out around 9 o’clock, Donald gets quieter. It’s hard to tell if he’s relaxed, bored, or high off the vaporizer. He turns off the music and the conversation quickly leads back to something Donald talks about a lot: the Internet.
“Coding is a beautiful thing,” he says. “If there is a God, he definitely codes. There are fail-safes in the world. That’s code. I don’t want young black kids to aspire to be rappers or ballers. Even lawyers and doctors—those are service positions. I want them to be coders. They can make their own worlds then. They don’t need anybody else. I love hearing those kids’ ideas, all these kids on the Internet. The excitement of making something, that’s the spark of God.”
Donald Glover, 30, originally came to fame through comedy—first as a sitcom writer, then as a stand-up comedian, and finally as an actor, playing the fan favorite Troy on NBC’s Community. Since he was 20, he’s also rapped. When he makes music, he does it under the name Childish Gambino. He famously came up with the alias using an online Wu-Tang Clan name generator. Given his comedic background and goofy name, the reception to Childish Gambino’s music has often been: Is this guy kidding?
Late last year Gambino/Glover convinced a lot of people that he was dead serious about his music. In October he stopped by SiriusXM’s Sway in the Morning radio show in midtown Manhattan to premiere a track from his forthcoming album Because the Internet. He hadn’t planned to rap that day but Sway convinced him to spit a freestyle over Drake’s “Pound Cake” beat. Were they his best bars ever? That’s up for debate. But the performance became a tipping point in Gambino’s rap career. The “Pound Cake” freestyle set rap blogs afire, effectively changing the conversation about Childish Gambino. Since that day, nobody asks if the acclaimed comic’s rap career is some kind of joke.
The day before the get-together at his house, Donald sat on Arsenio Hall’s couch—wearing those same short shorts—and explained that rapping is only one of the things he can do. “Rappers don’t want to be rappers,” he said. “They’re usually artists who want to do a bunch of stuff. I don’t think any rapper wants to be just a rapper.” On that note, Because the Internet is more than just an audio experience. “I believe that music has just become advertising for a brand, and if that makes music less magical, then fuck you,” he explains. “I understand people being like, ‘I worked really hard on this song and I’d like some payment for it.’ It just needs to be done differently.”
In addition to music videos, Gambino’s album is accompanied by a 73-page script, which you can read at becausetheinter.net. The screenplay—which opens with a little boy coming home from camp (Camp happens to be the name of Gambino’s last album) and getting picked up in a limo by his father (who happens to be Rick Ross)—also contains soundless visuals designed to be viewed while listening to the album. The “prelude” to this script is a perplexingly artsy short film released on Donald’s YouTube channel called Clapping for the Wrong Reasons. It all ties together, presumably, but it’s up to the audience to figure out how.Viking's Choice: Touché Amoré, 'Palm Dreams'
Enlarge this image toggle caption Christian Cordon/Courtesy of the artist Christian Cordon/Courtesy of the artist
Success never shields us from tragedy; it's just a barrier waiting to break down. While on tour in October 2014, vocalist Jeremy Bolm received news that his mother's cancer had finally taken her life. Touché Amoré's new album title, Stage Four, carries a double meaning; this is both the post-hardcore band's fourth album and an emotional autobiography that attempts to make sense of a lifetime with his mother.
Stage Four also marks the band's debut for Epitaph, a hard-earned ascension to a label that pays close attention to the punk climate. With it comes a songwriting maturity now marked by complex and soaring melodies, songs that take their time with significant repetitions, jagged riffs and Bolm's vocals, which intersperse full-bodied singing into his throaty, raspy scream. The driving single "Palm Dreams" is indicative of the impressive shift, with verses that plow ahead in clustered chords and a heartfelt, even subdued chorus that allows Bolm to evoke the loneliness of cleaning his mother's house after her death. Coming from a band that's always worn a heart on its sleeve, "Palm Dreams" is wide-eyed in its heartache, brought on by a perspective found only in loss.
"When you lose someone, you also lose their side of the story," Bolm writes NPR. "'Palm Dreams' was written around the realization that I never had a full understanding why my mother moved from Nebraska to California in the '70s. I assume that because she was from a small town, her eyes were wide with the concept of Hollywood. I'm sure someone else in my family could tell me, but it wouldn't be her answer. If this song inspires anyone to ask the questions they've never asked their loved ones, I'd call it a success."
Stage Four comes out Sept. 16 on Epitaph.Early life and family
Career as a scientist
Death
Tomb of Galileo, Santa Croce, Florence Galileo continued to receive visitors until 1642, when, after suffering fever and heart palpitations, he died on 8 January 1642, aged 77.[16][93] The Grand Duke of Tuscany, Ferdinando II, wished to bury him in the main body of the Basilica of Santa Croce, next to the tombs of his father and other ancestors, and to erect a marble mausoleum in his honour.[94] Middle finger of Galileo's right hand These plans were dropped, however, after Pope Urban VIII and his nephew, Cardinal Francesco Barberini, protested,[95] because Galileo had been condemned by the Catholic Church for "vehement suspicion of heresy".[96] He was instead buried in a small room next to the novices' chapel at the end of a corridor from the southern transept of the basilica to the sacristy.[97] He was reburied in the main body of the basilica in 1737 after a monument had been erected there in his honour;[98] during this move, three fingers and a tooth were removed from his remains.[99] One of these fingers, the middle finger from Galileo's right hand, is currently on exhibition at the Museo Galileo in Florence, Italy.[100]
Scientific contributions
Timeline
Legacy
Writings
See alsoThe Producers Guild of America has nominated “Better Call Saul,” “Homeland,” “House of Cards,” “Mad Men,” “Inside Amy Schumer” and “Veep” for its top TV awards.
The winner will be announced on Jan. 23 at the Century Plaza at the PGA’s 27th annual awards show, based on voting from the 6,000 members of the PGA.
None of the three most recent winners — the final season of AMC’s “Breaking Bad,” Netflix’s “Orange is the New Black” and FX’s “Fargo” — were nominated Tuesday.
ABC’s “Modern Family,” which won the PGA award four times in a row before losing to “Orange Is the New Black” this year, was the only network show nominated in the comedy and drama categories.
“Modern Family” and “Veep” were the only repeat nominees in the comedy category. “Game of Thrones,” and “House of Cards” were the repeaters in the drama category.
The PGA will announce its 10 feature film nominees on Jan. 5.
Here’s the full list of nominees:
The Norman Felton Award for Outstanding Producer of Episodic Television, Drama:
Better Call Saul
Producers: Vince Gilligan, Peter Gould, Melissa Bernstein, Mark Johnson, Stewart A. Lyons, Thomas Schnauz, Gennifer Hutchison, Nina Jack, Diane Mercer, Bob Odenkirk
Related Emmys: The Good, The Bad and the WTF - Watch Video 'Game of Thrones' Final Season, 'Deadwood' Movie, 'Watchmen' Series Teased in Trailer
Game of Thrones
Producers: David Benioff, D.B. Weiss, Bernadette Caulfield, Frank Doelger, Carolyn Strauss, Bryan Cogman, Lisa McAtackney, Chris Newman, Greg Spence
Homeland
Producers: Alex Gansa, Alexander Cary, Lesli Linka Glatter, Howard Gordon, Chip Johannessen, Meredith Stiehm, Patrick Harbinson, Michael Klick, Claire Danes, Lauren White
House of Cards
Producers: Beau Willimon, Dana Brunetti, John David Coles, Josh Donen, David Fincher, Eric Roth, Kevin Spacey, Robert Zotnowski, Karen Moore
Mad Men
Producers: Matthew Weiner, Scott Hornbacher, Janet Leahy, Semi Chellas, Erin Levy, Jon Hamm, Blake McCormick, Tom Smuts
The Danny Thomas Award for Outstanding Producer of Episodic Television, Comedy:
Inside Amy Schumer
Producers: This show is in the process of being vetted for producer eligibility and a full list of nominees will be included in our next announcement.
Modern Family
Producers: Steven Levitan, Christopher Lloyd, Paul Corrigan, Abraham Higginbotham, Jeff Morton, Jeffrey Richman, Brad Walsh, Danny Zuker, Vali Chandrasekaran, Megan Ganz, Elaine Ko, Kenny Schwartz, Chuck Tatham, Rick Wiener, Chris Smirnoff, Sally Young
Silicon Valley
Producers: Mike Judge, Alec Berg, Jim Kleverweis, Clay Tarver, Dan O’Keefe, Michael Rotenberg, Tom Lassally
Transparent
Producers: Jill Soloway, Andrea Sperling, Victor Hsu, Nisha Ganatra, Rick Rosenthal, Bridget Bedard
Veep
Producers: Armando Iannucci, Chris Addison, Simon Blackwell, Christopher Godsick, Stephanie Laing, Julia Louis-Dreyfus, Frank Rich, Tony Roche, Kevin Cecil, Roger Drew, Sean Gray, Ian Martin, Georgia Pritchett, David Quantick, Andy Riley, Will Smith, Bill Hill
The Award for Outstanding Producer of Non-Fiction Television:
30 for 30
Producers: Connor Schell, John Dahl, Bill Simmons, Erin Leyden, Andrew Billman, Marquis Daisy, Libby Geist
Anthony Bourdain: Parts Unknown
Producers: Anthony Bourdain, Christopher Collins, Lydia Tenaglia, Sandra Zweig
The Jinx: The Life and Deaths of Robert Durst
Producers: Marc Smerling, Andrew Jarecki, Jason Blum
Shark Tank
Producers: Mark Burnett, Clay Newbill, Yun Lingner, Max Swedlow, Jim Roush, Brandon Wallace, Becky Blitz, Laura Roush, Shaun Polakow, Phil Gurin
Vice
Producers: BJ Levin, Bill Maher, Eddy Moretti, Shane Smith, Jonah Kaplan, Tim Clancy, Ben Anderson, Shawn Killebrew
The Award for Outstanding Producer of Competition Television:
The Amazing Race
Producers: Jerry Bruckheimer, Bertram van Munster, Jonathan Littman, Elise Doganieri, Mark Vertullo
Dancing with the Stars
Producers: Rob Wade, Ashley Edens-Shaffer, Joe Sungkur
Project Runway
Producers: Jonathan Murray, Sara Rea, Desiree Gruber, Jane Cha, Heidi Klum, Tim Gunn, Teri Weideman
Top Chef
Producers: This show is in the process of being vetted for producer eligibility and a full list of nominees will be included in our next announcement.
The Voice
Producers: Audrey Morrissey, Mark Burnett, John de Mol, Marc Jansen, Lee Metzger, Chad Hines, Jim Roush, Kyra Thompson, Mike Yurchuk, Amanda Zucker
The Award for Outstanding Producer of Live Entertainment & Talk Television:
The Colbert Report
Producers: Stephen T. Colbert, Tom Purcell, Jon Stewart, Meredith Bennett, Barry Julien, Emily Lazar, Tanya Michnevich Bracco, Paul Dinello, Matt Lappin
Key & Peele
Producers: This show is in the process of being vetted for producer eligibility and a full list of nominees will be included in our next announcement.
Last Week Tonight with John Oliver
Producers: Tim Carvell, John Oliver, Liz Stanton
Real Time with Bill Maher
Producers: Bill Maher, Scott Carter, Sheila Griffiths, Marc Gurvitz, Billy Martin, Dean E. Johnsen, Matt Wood
The Tonight Show Starring Jimmy Fallon
Producers: Lorne Michaels, Jamie Granet Bederman, Katie Hockmeyer, Jim Juvonen, Brian McDonald, Josh Lieb, Gavin Purcell
The following programs were not vetted for producer eligibility this year, but winners of the Award for Outstanding Children’s Program will be announced at the official ceremony on January 23:
The Award for Outstanding Children’s Program:
Doc McStuffins
The Fairly OddParents
Octonauts
Sesame Street
Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles
Toy Story That Time ForgotImage copyright Facebook Image caption One of the pictures that's been circulating along with pro-headscarf poems online
"Don't let others poke their nose into my business," one of the poems reads. "Don't let those who have no headscarf to speak about mine."
Campaigners against a crackdown on the Muslim headscarf or hijab have taken to verse to protest in Uzbekistan - and several of the poems have hundreds of likes and shares on Facebook.
"Photoshop a headscarf on your own picture instead of criticising me / completely cover your hair and ears / Know that it's normal for women to wear a hijab / if you don't wear it, don't speak about mine," one verse reads. Another poem criticises women who wear jeans and make-up and lauds "Islamic clothing" over European style garments.
The hijab is not officially forbidden in Uzbekistan, however there have been a number of recent reports that police are detaining women who wear the headscarf and questioning them until they agree to remove it. TV programmes and state-sponsored films have been portrayed Muslim headscarves as "foreign" Arab clothing. Formal and informal restrictions on the hijab are common in Central Asian nations, which include several authoritarian states and large Muslim populations.
Governments in the region are concerned about a rise in Islamism and a growing threat from Islamic State - the think tank International Crisis Group says around 4,000 people from the region have joined IS.
While opposition news outlets and foreign news websites, including the BBC, are frequently blocked inside Uzbekistan, social networks don't face the same restrictions and are becoming magnets for dissent, although overall numbers using Facebook, Twitter and the Russian-language VKontakte inside the country are still relatively small. One estimate earlier this year put the number of Facebook users at about 360,000, or just over 1 per cent of the population.
Blog by Mike Wendling
Next story: A week of worrying about rising intolerance in India
Image copyright AFP
As Indians worry about the rise of intolerance, powerful images like this one are affecting the debate.. READ MORE
You can follow BBC Trending on Twitter @BBCtrending, and find us on Facebook. All our stories are at bbc.com/trending.May 29, 2017 at 15:52 // News
Lana Smiley Author
Dubai is actively implementing blockchain technology - is it only cat talk or could the plans actually to come to life?
The government of Dubai is actively backing the initiatives on implementation of blockchain technology in banking and other spheres of life. The strategy seems bright enough, however, it is mostly just plans for now.
Dubai authorities ambitiously state that they strive to make Dubai the first blockchain-backed government ever by 2020. Too good to be true?
More than Just Plans
The prospect seems real enough to believe it actually has a chance to be implemented. At least, many of the world leading experts think so.
According to J. Bradley Hall, Founder, Chairman and CEO at ICON CAPITAL Corp., a merchant bank with a portfolio of investments in digital currencies, payment systems, banking and gold trading in Dubai, “Dubai is an aspirational city, it is built on the vision of strong leadership.”
He also shared with Coinidol his opinion of the government’s ambitious plans to make Dubai the first blockchain-backed government:
“Deadlines are important; keep in mind that Dubai will be hosting Expo 2020, so this target is not arbitrary. Most thoughtful leaders at banks are mandating exploration of blockchain at a minimum. In our experience at ICON with private clients and wealth management things are definitely heating up. It is an evolution, not a revolution though, and customer adoption tends to be immune from deadlines. The Genie is out of the bottle and the adoption of DLT or Blockchain technology is happening. At first it never happens as quickly as you think but as momentum builds it suddenly happens quicker than anyone imagined. So will all government processes by blockchain based in Dubai by 2020? I wouldn't bet against it. A certainty is that Expo 2020 in Dubai will be a showcase for the Blockchain with real world examples of implemented solutions and compelling visions of what a distributed and inter-connected world will look like with Dubai leading the way.”
Another expert, Gauthier Mulder, the United Arab Emirates-based Business Development Manager of markets - Commodity & Energy, Middle-East & North Africa at Thomson Reuters, who provide professionals with the intelligence, technology and human expertise from business analysts, lawyers, accountants, programmers and publishers, also thinks the Dubai initiative is not as impossible as it may seem.
“Reality of Dubai is it's not a democracy, so what the leader wants is done. That’s why moving the IDs to a blockchain will likely be done, it's not like anybody needs to agree on it.”
Dubai is The Best Place to Start a Blockchain-Based Company
Dubai seems to really welcome innovations and the blockchain in particular, so there might be plenty of opportunities for starting a business there, At least, Adam "Seccour" Schneider, a Dubai-based Bitcoiner, Crypto-anarchist and Cypherpunk, and Founder of SecFund, an Investment fund on the NXT blockchain, thinks so:
“If you have a 'blockchain' company or want to start one, for sure Dubai is the best place to start your business or to move your business to. There is a lot of opportunities regarding potential contracts with the government or large local companies since they all have the same vision of moving towards the future. But regarding the community side… There is almost nothing. There is no real tied community even if some people like me or others try to link the people together.”
Will Dubai be the First Cashless Economy?
Another expert, Iván Aguado Trujillo, a Dubai-based Consultant at Nimmök, a consulting firm in the mobile money industry, servicing banks, MNOs, FMCG, retailers, e-money issuers, smart cities and regulators in countries throughout Latin America, Europe, Middle East, Asia-Pacific and Africa is also quite optimistic about the Dubai initiatives:
“Imagining Dubai as the first city fully powered by blockchain allows us to foresee significant benefits in terms of efficiency and security, of the different process undertaken in the back end of public and private sector institutions. Although, imagining this scenario also makes us think about other huge consequences in the long run, and several questions arrive, such us:
– Will the CBUAE issue “crypto – dirhams” or any other form of cryptocurrency?
– Will Dubai be the first cashless economy?
– Will the payment industry and the financial sector collaborate to create blockchain platforms to resolve interoperability in a faster and more secure way?
– Will the ID authority implement blockchain solutions to keep the records of the citizens and visitors identities? and will this match with other databases to create a huge source of data?
– How will all this impact the economy, the society and the environment?
– Among many others
Certainly, thinking in Dubai as the first city fully powered by blockchain let us give a look into the future, let’s make it happen.”
Not so Simple
However bright the may idea seem, there is always a reverse side to the medal. Dubai isn’t an exception when it comes to certain challenges and issues. The government might support the initiative, however support itself isn’t enough to implement it.
Samer Mahfouz, Market data analyst, and expert in Blockchain development tools and technology at Thomson Reuters, shared with Coinidol:
“The first challenge is time. The second one is setting a healthy self sustained Fintech ecosystem. The third is picking the right companies, projects, and partners. Dubai is setting the foundation and leading the change. It is up to the Fintech community to leverage this friendly environment and build on it.”
He also added:
“Dubai government and Banks will have running Blockchain applications by 2020. Main workflows that can benefit from the Blockchain technology will be migrated. This doesn’t mean that all government services and Banks will be using Blockchain by 2020. As you know, Blockchain is good for some applications not for all. Blockchain applications that require adoption by all parties will take longer to implement. There will be errors, there will be failing projects. It is normal. We will learn from them and improve. It will encourage others to follow the lead and at least start replicating the successful projects.”
Another expert, Ramadan |
preferences over other alternatives. More precisely, consider two profiles of individual preference orders <R 1, …, R n > and <R′ 1, …, R′ n >, such that for every individual i, xR i y if and only if xR′ i y, that is, each individual’s preference for x over y is the same in the two profiles. Condition I then says that the social choice rule, when applied to both profiles, must yield the same social preference for x over y, that is, xRy if and only if xR′y. Any differences between the two profiles are irrelevant to the social choice between x and y, according to condition I, since the two profiles are identical in the only respect that matters.
The intuitive force of condition I can be seen by considering an election in which voters must rank three candidates, Labour, Tory, and Liberal, in order of preference. Various different ways of aggregating the individual preferences into a single social preference are conceivable. Condition I imposes a requirement on acceptable aggregation schemes — it says that the social preference between the Labour and Tory candidates, for example, can depend only on the individuals’ preferences between Labour and Tory. This is highly intuitive — in order to determine whether the Labour or Tory candidate is socially preferable, surely the individuals’ preferences involving the Liberal candidate should not matter. If you know of each individual whether they prefer the Labour to the Tory candidate (or are indifferent), then you know everything that is relevant to determining the social choice between these two candidates, according to condition I. Arrow wrote that his four conditions ‘taken together, express the doctrines of citizens’ sovereignty and rationality in a very general form’ (Arrow 1951, p. 31). Condition I is in fact somewhat controversial, as discussed below, but nonetheless Arrow’s four conditions arguably represent quite reasonable constraints on a social choice rule. But, remarkably, Arrow proved that all four cannot be simultaneously satisfied, so long as there are at least three alternatives; equivalently, any social choice rule that satisfies conditions U, I, and P must be a dictatorship of one individual.
Arrow could have expressed his impossibility result by saying that there is ‘no algorithm’ for social choice that meets certain reasonable conditions. This way of expressing Arrow’s theorem immediately suggests a comparison with Kuhn’s views on theory choice, to which I now turn.
4. Theory choice cast as a social choice problem
The problem of theory choice, as formulated by Kuhn, hinges on the fact that there are multiple desiderata that we want our theories to satisfy — simplicity, accuracy, scope, etc. A theory that scores well on one desideratum might score badly on another, hence the weighting problem that Kuhn discusses. This problem may seem quite different to the social choice problem as formulated by Arrow, but in fact the two share a common structure. The key to seeing this is to regard each criterion of theory choice as an ‘individual’, with their own ‘preference order’ over the alternative theories. This may sound odd, but can be easily explained.
Take, for example, simplicity. Let us assume that simplicity can be defined reasonably precisely, enough to permit pair-wise comparisons between the theories that we wish to choose between.7 Then, we can define a binary relation ‘is at least as simple as’, on the set of alternative theories, which will be a weak ordering, that is, reflexive, transitive, and complete. Let us do the same for accuracy, scope, and the other Kuhnian criteria. From a formal point of view, each criterion is then analogous to an individual in Arrow’s set-up. Just as each individual rank-orders the social alternatives according to how much they like them, so each criterion rank-orders the alternative theories according to how well they satisfy it. So each of Kuhn’s criteria corresponds to an individual in Arrow’s framework, and the alternative theories correspond to the social alternatives.
It might be objected that for some criteria of theory choice, the binary relation will not be complete. Take for example scope. Plausibly, one might take a theory’s ‘scope’ to be its total set of logical consequences, and the relation ‘T 1 has at least as much scope as T 2 ’ to mean that T 2 ’s consequence class is a subset of T 1 ’s. But this relation, though reflexive and transitive, need not be complete, for the consequence classes of a pair of theories may be non-nested, that is, the theories may be non-comparable for scope. Though this is a valid point, ‘scope’ is arguably the only one of Kuhn’s five criteria that it affects. (In the case of simplicity, for example, it is plausible that for any two theories, either one is simpler than the other or they are equally simple, i.e. ‘is at least as simple as’ is complete.) So the completeness assumption can be justified as a reasonable idealization. After all, the assumption that individuals’ preference relations are complete is also an idealization.8
The next step is to consider a ‘theory choice rule’, defined by direct analogy with an Arrovian social choice rule. Given a profile of weak orders, one for each criterion of theory choice, a theory choice rule yields a single ordering of the alternative theories. So, for example, suppose we have four alternative theories, and three criteria: simplicity, accuracy, and scope. By assumption, we know how to rank-order the theories by each criterion. We feed this information into the theory choice rule, which then outputs an ‘overall’ ranking of the theories, from best to worst. Formally, the theory choice rule is defined in exactly the same way as Arrow’s social choice rule.
Next, let us ask whether Arrow’s four conditions apply to the theory choice rule. Condition U (unrestricted domain) seems unexceptionable — however the theories are ranked by the various criteria, the rule must be able to yield an overall ranking. There should be no a priori restriction on the permissible rankings that are fed into the rule. Such a restriction might make sense if there is an intrinsic trade-off (or correlation) between two of the criteria. For example, if greater simplicity always involves a sacrifice of accuracy, then the simplicity rank-ordering will be the inverse of the accuracy rank-ordering. This will rule out some possible inputs to the rule, which implies a natural domain restriction. But unless we have specific reason to think such trade-offs must always obtain, condition U seems reasonable.
Condition P (weak Pareto) seems undeniable. If theory T 1 does better than theory T 2 by each of Kuhn’s criteria, that is, it is simpler and more accurate and more fruitful etc., then it must surely be preferred overall. This seems as obvious as its analogue for social choice. What about condition N (non-dictatorship)? It says that there is no one criterion such that if T 1 is ranked above T 2 by that criterion, then T 1 is automatically above T 2 in the overall ranking. This condition makes good sense, so long as we agree that all the criteria are relevant to theory choice. Violation of the condition would mean that one criterion, for example simplicity, was regarded as so important that a less simple theory would never be preferred to a more simple one, however highly it scored on the other criteria.
What about condition I (independence of irrelevant alternatives)? It says that the overall ranking of T 1 and T 2 should depend only on how the criteria rank T 1 and T 2, not on how they rank other theories. So, for example, suppose we have three criteria, simplicity, accuracy, and scope, and two theories. Suppose T 1 is simpler than T 2, T 2 is more accurate than T 1, and T 1 has greater scope than T 2. Condition I says that this is all the information that is relevant to the overall ranking of T 1 versus T 2 ; so if in this case the theory choice rule ranks T 1 above T 2 (for example), then it must rank T 1 above T 2 in every relevantly similar case, that is, every case where T 1 is simpler than T 2, T 2 more accurate than T 1, and T 1 greater in scope than T 2. As with the social choice rule, this condition has strong intuitive appeal, capturing the idea that rational theory choice should not depend on irrelevant factors.
If we agree that U, P, N, and I are conditions on reasonable theory choice, then it is obvious that an Arrovian impossibility result applies. So long as there are at least three alternative theories, there exists no theory choice rule that satisfies all four conditions. This spells bad news for the possibility of making ‘rational’ theory choices.
One might naturally express this impossibility result by saying that there can be ‘no algorithm’ for rational theory choice. This sounds similar to what Kuhn said, but recall the discussion of section 2. As we saw, Kuhn meant that there is no unique algorithm; he argued that the multiple criteria for theory choice could be combined into a decision rule in many ways, and there is no good way of choosing between them. So the problem according to Kuhn is that there are too many algorithms. But the Arrow impossibility result implies the opposite — there is no algorithm for theory choice that meets reasonable conditions. Where Kuhn saw an embarrassment of riches, Arrow tells us that there is nothing at all.
Both Kuhn’s view and the Arrow-inspired view imply, obviously, that there is no single algorithm for theory choice, over three or more alternatives, which is rationally acceptable. This conclusion conflicts with the traditional ideal of rationality, associated with Carnap, according to which two rational agents with the same ‘total evidence’ must end up in the same epistemic state. In the context of theory choice, the Carnapian ideal implies that if two scientists agree on what the relevant criteria are, and agree about how well each theory performs on each criterion, then they should agree on how to rank the theories. On Kuhn’s view, such agreement is unattainable — the two scientists may weight the criteria using different algorithms, and there is no saying which is rationally correct. On the Arrovian view, agreement is also unattainable, but for a very different reason, namely that no algorithm meets minimal standards of rationality.
Despite both implying that the traditional ideal of rationality cannot be met, the Kuhnian and Arrovian views are diametrically opposed. Moreover, it makes a big difference which is right. If Kuhn is right that the problem is too many algorithms, two options suggest themselves. First, we might seek further conditions that any acceptable algorithm must satisfy, to narrow down the pool. Second, we might try to liberalize the notion of rationality, and argue that two scientists could both count as rational despite employing different algorithms for theory choice.9 But if the Arrovian view is right, then neither of these options holds any promise and our epistemological predicament is correspondingly more serious. Put differently, Kuhn makes rational theory choice look difficult, at least if we cleave to a certain conception of rationality, but Arrow makes it look outright impossible.
5. Possible escape routes
Since the Arrow-style impossibility result threatens the rationality of theory choice, and thus of science, it would be nice if there were a way out. Various possibilities suggest themselves. One is simply that many real cases of theory choice are binary, that is, involve just two alternatives. It is striking that Kuhn’s own examples tend to be binary — geocentrism versus heliocentrism, oxygen versus phlogiston, relativity versus classical mechanics. And of course Arrow’s impossibility result only holds if there are three or more alternatives. With just two alternatives to choose between, numerous algorithms become possible that satisfy conditions U, P, I, and N.10 Does this reconcile Kuhn with Arrow?
I think the answer is ‘no’, though it is certainly interesting that the distinction between binary and non-binary choice becomes significant once theory choice is formulated in the social choice framework. (By contrast, on most standard philosophical approaches to theory choice, such as Bayesianism, it is of no particular relevance whether the choice is binary or not.) Not all theory choice in science is binary, even if the large-scale paradigm shifts that Kuhn is interested in typically are. More mundane cases are often not. Think for example of climate change science, where researchers compare the merits of numerous models of climate change, not just two. More generally, in many branches of science a typical problem might involve choosing between three candidate explanations of an observed correlation between two variables x and y: (i) x causes y; (ii) y causes x; (iii) x and y are joint effects of a common cause. Or consider statistical estimation, where a researcher might want to estimate the value of a real-valued parameter in the unit interval; the alternatives that must be chosen between are uncountably many. So focusing exclusively on binary choice, as a way of trying to avoid the Arrovian predicament, is at odds with scientific practice.
Another possibility for reconciling Arrow with Kuhn is simply to reject one or more of Arrow’s conditions. Kuhn was sceptical (in some moods) about the existence of ‘trans-paradigmatic’ criteria of rationality, which are universally binding on scientists across all eras; perhaps, then, he would argue that an acceptable algorithm for rational theory choice need not respect Arrow’s conditions. Given the intuitiveness of those conditions, this option does not seem especially plausible, but one possible argument against condition N (non-dictatorship) is worth briefly discussing.
In the context of theory choice, condition N says that no criterion can be a dictator, that is, can be such that whenever x ranks above y by that criterion, then x ranks above y overall. However, a strong empiricist might well hold that the criterion of ‘fit-with-the-data’ should be a dictator. Empiricists in philosophy of science have long argued that criteria such as simplicity are of lesser importance than fit-with-the-data, and should only be invoked, if at all, where the data cannot decide between two theories. Similarly, in a discussion of Kuhn’s five criteria of theory choice, McMullin (1993) argued that ‘accuracy’ held a special role, for it is an end in itself while the others are only valuable in so far as they are reliable indicators of accuracy. So from an empiricist perspective, not all of Kuhn’s criteria are equal.
Importantly, dictatorship of ‘accuracy’ (or ‘fit-with-the-data’) need not mean that the other criteria play no role at all in theory choice. For recall the definition of a dictator: a criterion (or individual) whose strict preference for x over y always leads x to be ranked higher than y overall. By contrast, a strong dictator is a criterion (or individual) whose preference for x over y, strict or weak, always becomes the overall preference. A strong dictatorship of ‘fit with the data’ would be an extreme form of empiricism — that refused to invoke extra-empirical criteria of theory choice even to break ties between pairs of theories that fit the data equally well. But an ordinary (not strong) dictatorship of ‘fit with the data’ could use criteria such as simplicity to break ties, that is, to settle cases where the dictator is indifferent. This is known as a ‘serial’ or ‘lexicographic’ dictatorship, and represents a more moderate form of empiricism.
Accepting a serial dictatorship of ‘fit with the data’ is in principle a way out of the impossibility result, since this theory choice rule does satisfy conditions I, P, and U. However, even if one accepts the underlying empiricist motivation, there are two problems with this solution. Firstly, to make it work, a complete lexicographic hierarchy of all the criteria of theory choice must be established, that is, a specification of the order in which they should be applied to break ties. If there are only two criteria, for example fit-with-the-data and simplicity, then this is not a problem, but if there are more than two there is a problem. For it is quite unclear how the hierarchy should be generated. Should simplicity or scope be invoked first, when fit-with-the-data cannot separate a pair of theories? Secondly and more importantly, a dictatorship of ‘fit with the data’, even serial, seems unattractive when we take account of the fact that our data invariably contain ‘noise’. If our data were noise-free, always preferring a theory that fitted the data better would make sense. But with noisy data, perfect fit is not always desirable, as emphasized in the model-selection literature (Forster and Sober 1994). This ‘problem of over-fitting’, as it is known, constitutes a strong reason not to relax condition N in the manner mooted above, even if we are empiricists.
Finally, two further possible escape routes, well-known among social choice theorists, are worth briefly noting, though neither holds much promise.11 The first is to modify the goal. Instead of trying to rank-order the alternatives, as in Arrow’s formulation of the problem, suppose we instead try to pick the best. More precisely, we seek a ‘choice function’ which tells us, for any subset of the alternatives, which is (or are) the best. (In the scientific case this has some plausibility, as the problem of theory choice is often formulated as the problem of which theory to ‘accept’.) This is a weaker goal than Arrow’s, since a social preference relation entails the existence of a choice function but not vice versa, thus holding some promise of an escape from the impossibility result. However, it turns out that if the choice function is required to satisfy certain quite reasonable properties, then analogues of Arrow’s impossibility result re-emerge (Austen-Smith and Banks 1999). This escape route is thus thought unpromising by most social choice theorists, and seems equally unpromising as applied to theory choice.
The second option is domain restriction, i.e. dropping condition U. It is well known that with a restricted domain, there may exist social choice rules that satisfy conditions P, I, and N. For certain applications of the social choice apparatus, ‘natural’ domain restrictions suggest themselves, though not for others. As noted in section 4, in the theory choice case, a natural domain restriction would apply if two of the criteria of theory choice exhibit an intrinsic trade-off (or correlation) — for example, if a gain in simplicity always means a loss of accuracy. Then, certain profiles would be impossible, and could be legitimately excluded from the domain of the theory choice rule. However, that such trade-offs always exist does not seem very plausible; and anyway there is no guarantee that the resulting domain restriction would be of the right sort to alleviate the Arrovian impossibility.
6. Sen’s ‘informational basis’ approach
I turn now to what is arguably the most attractive ‘escape route’ from Arrow, namely Amartya Sen’s idea of using an ‘enriched informational basis’ (Sen 1970, 1977, 1986).12 Sen observes that the information Arrow uses as input to his social choice rule, namely a profile of individual preference orders, is quite meagre. This is for two reasons. Firstly, preference orders are ‘purely ordinal’ — they contain no information about intensity of preference. If an individual prefers x to y to z, this tells us nothing about whether their preference for x over y is greater or less than their preference for y over z. Secondly, preference orders do not permit interpersonal comparisons. From a profile of individual preference orders, statements such as ‘in alternative x, individual 1 is better off than individual 2’ cannot be deduced.
To remedy these problems, Sen suggests that we start not with a profile of preference orders, but rather of utility functions, one for each individual in society. An individual’s utility function assigns a real number to each alternative, which reflects how much utility that alternative would bring them. Let u i denote the utility function of the ith individual; let <u 1, …, u n > denote a profile of utility functions. An individual’s utility function is required to represent their preference order, in the sense that xR i y iff u i (x) ≥ u i (y), for all alternatives x and y. (Recall that ‘xR i y’ means that individual i weakly prefers x to y.) Note that if u i represents R i, then any increasing transformation of u i will also represent R i. Thus there is a many–one relation between utility functions and the preference orders that they represent.
Next, Sen introduces the concept of a social welfare functional (SWFL). This is a function that takes as input a profile of utility functions, and yields as output a social ranking of the alternatives. An SWFL is analogous to an Arrovian social choice rule, in that both yield the same output; however, the former takes a profile of utility functions, rather than preference orders, as input. Potentially, this allows more information to be taken into account.
Analogues of Arrow’s four conditions can now be imposed on the SWFL. The analogue of U says that the domain of the SWFL is the set of all possible profiles of utility functions, that is, individuals can have whatever utility functions they please. The analogue of P says that if everyone gets more utility in alternative x than in y, then x is socially preferred to y. The analogue of N says that there can be no individual such that whenever they get more utility from x than y, then x is socially preferred to y. The analogue of I, known as ‘independence of irrelevant utilities’, says that the social preference between x and y must depend only on individuals’ utilities in x and y. These conditions on the SWFL will be denoted U′, P′, I′, and N′; they are motivated by arguments similar to those that motivate the Arrovian originals.
One might think that an analogue of Arrow’s impossibility result will now apply, that is, that no SWFL can satisfy conditions U′, P′, I′, and N′. However, this is not correct. Arrow’s impossibility result can be derived in Sen’s framework, but it requires an additional condition, capturing the fact that Arrow uses purely ordinal, non-interpersonally comparable information. To see how this informational assumption can be captured, consider a profile of utility functions <u 1, …, u n >. Now suppose each of the n individuals applies an increasing transformation to their utility function, yielding a new profile <v 1, …, v n >. (Different individuals may apply different transformations.) On Arrow’s assumption, the two profiles contain exactly the same information — since the transformed utility functions represent the very same preferences. So Arrow will argue that the SWFL should yield the same social ranking when applied to the two profiles. This condition is called ‘invariance with respect to ordinal, non-comparable information’ or ONC. Arrow’s theorem can now be stated in Sen’s framework: for three or more social alternatives, no SWFL can satisfy conditions ONC, U′, P′, I′, and N′.
If the ONC condition is imposed on the SWFL, this implies that interpersonal comparison of utility is deemed impossible (or meaningless). To see why, suppose that in profile <u 1, …, u n >, individual 1 gets more utility than individual 2 in a given alternative x, that is, u 1 (x) > u 2 (x). But this inequality is not necessarily preserved if the individuals apply different positive transformations to their utility functions. So in the transformed profile <v 1, …, v n >, it need not be true that v 1 (x) > v 2 (x). Therefore, if the two profiles are treated as informationally equivalent, as the ONC condition demands, it follows that interpersonal comparisons cannot be made.
The natural next step is to ask what happens if the ONC condition is relaxed. There are two ways it can be relaxed: (i) drop the assumption that utility is purely ordinal; (ii) permit interpersonal comparisons. To effect (i), we restrict the transformations that can be applied to a given utility function; to effect (ii), we cease to allow individuals to choose their own transformations independently of others. Let us take (i) first. Instead of ordinal utility, we might hold that utility is measured on a cardinal scale, so only positive linear transformations, of the form v i = au i + b, a > 0, are held to preserve information.13 In effect, this means that an individual’s utility function contains information about the intensity of their preferences, so utility differences become meaningful. Alternatively, we might hold that utility is measured on a ratio scale, so only transformations of the form v i = au i, a > 0, are held to preserve information. This means that the utility scale has a natural zero point, so utility ratios become meaningful.14 Finally, we might hold that utility is measured on an absolute scale, that is, only the identity transformation preserves information. This means that actual utility numbers are meaningful.
Once a scale for utility has been chosen — ordinal, cardinal, ratio, or absolute — a decision about interpersonal comparability is necessary. If utility is non-comparable, then each individual can apply a transformation (from the permissible class) independently of others. If utility is fully comparable, then each individual must apply the same transformation. Depending on the utility scale, a form of partial comparability may also be possible. With cardinal utility, if utility is unit comparable, then individuals’ positive linear transformations must all have the same slope, but can have different intercepts.
Numerous alternatives to Arrow’s ONC condition are now possible. They include: cardinal-scale utility with no comparability (CNC); cardinal-scale utility with full comparability (CFC); ratio-scale utility with full comparability (RFC); ratio-scale utility with no comparability (RNC); and absolute-scale utility with full comparability (AFC). In effect, each of these conditions partitions the set of all profiles of utility functions into equivalence classes of ‘informationally equivalent’ profiles, and requires that the SWFL yield the same social ranking for all the profiles in a given equivalence class. ONC is the strongest condition — for the classes of profiles that it treats as informationally equivalent are very large, and thus the restriction on the SWFL considerable. By contrast, AFC is the weakest condition — it places each profile into a singleton class of its own, which implies no restriction on the SWFL. This illustrates a general moral: the richer the informational basis, that is, the finer the partition of the profiles into equivalence classes, the weaker the resulting condition on the SWFL.
Sen now asks: What happens if we retain the four Arrovian conditions U′, P′, I′, and N′, but replace ONC with a weaker condition? Can the impossibility result be avoided? The answer is that impossibility can be avoided, but only if some interpersonal comparison is allowed. Replacing ONC with CNC — that is, moving from ordinal to cardinal utility — is no help on its own. The same is true of moving to ratio-scaled utility (RNC). However, if ONC is replaced with CFC, RFC, or AFC, then Arrovian impossibility is avoided. There do exist social welfare functionals that satisfy Arrow’s four conditions, plus one of these alternatives to ONC.
(The case of ratio-scale non-comparability (RNC) merits further discussion, for a reason that will become clear. Although replacing ONC with RNC does not avoid Arrovian impossibility, it does if all utilities are required to be non-negative (Tsui and Weymark 1997). If all utilities are non-negative, there do exist social welfare functionals that satisfy RNC and Arrow’s four conditions. Also, note that RNC, despite its name, does permit a limited sort of interpersonal utility comparison.15 With RNC, percentage increases in utility can be meaningfully compared, that is, statements such as ‘in moving from alternative x to y, individual 1’s percentage gain is greater than individual 2’s’, are meaningful (Fishburn 1987). It is easy to verify that the truth-value of this statement will be unaltered if the two individuals apply different ratio-scale transforms to their utility functions.)
Sen’s analysis raises two issues. First, how can interpersonal comparisons of utility be made? Second, once such comparisons are allowed, how large is the class of SWFLs that satisfy the Arrow conditions? Can further conditions be found that narrow down the permissible SWFLs to a single one? There is an extensive literature on both these points, but space does not permit them to be explored here.16 For the moment, the point to note is just this: Sen’s work demonstrates clearly that Arrow’s impossibility result is in large part a consequence of the impoverished information he feeds into his social choice rule. Enriching the informational basis, while retaining Arrow’s four conditions — now understood as conditions on the social welfare functional, rather than the social choice rule — is sufficient to avoid the impossibility.17 In short, given enough information, reasonable social choices can be made.
7. Theory choice: the informational basis
Let us return to theory choice and apply the morals of the previous section. Recall that we defined a theory choice rule, by direct analogy with Arrow’s social choice rule, as a function that takes as input a profile of weak orders, one for each criterion of theory choice, and outputs an ‘overall ranking’ of the alternative theories. Just as Sen replaced Arrow’s social choice rule with a social welfare functional, so we need to replace our theory choice rule with a ‘theory choice functional’. So instead of starting with a profile of ‘preference orders’, one for each criterion of theory choice, we start with a profile of ‘utility functions’, that is, real-valued representations of those orders. In principle, this allows an enrichment of the informational basis.18
The natural next question is: Which profiles should be treated as informationally equivalent, that is, which invariance condition should be imposed on the theory choice functional? To address this question, we need to consider both measurement scales and ‘inter-criterion’ comparability. Let us take them in turn. For some criteria of theory choice an ordinal scale might be appropriate. Kuhn’s criterion of ‘fruitfulness’ is an example. Conceivably, one could order a set of theories by how fruitful they are, but it is hard to believe that differences in fruitfulness can be compared; a statement such as ‘the difference in fruitfulness between T 1 and T 2 exceeds the difference between T 2 and T 3 ’ hardly seems meaningful. If this is right, then the real-valued ‘utility’ function that represents the fruitfulness preference order is merely ordinal — any increasing transformation can be applied to it without loss of information.
However, for other criteria of theory choice, we can go beyond ordinal measurement, at least in certain contexts. Take, for example, fit-with-the-data (or ‘accuracy’), and suppose that the context is linear regression analysis. The usual measure of how well a hypothesis fits the data in linear regression is its ‘sum of squares’ (SOS) score.19 The appropriate type of measurement scale for SOS scores depends on the dependent variable in the regression model. If, for example, that variable is length, which is a ratio-scale measurable quantity, then the SOS scores will also be ratio-scale measurable. Therefore, the real-valued ‘utility’ function that represents the ‘fit-with-the-data’ preference order will be ratio-scaled, thus multiplication by a positive constant is the only information-preserving transformation. Statements such as ‘T 1 fits the data three times as well as T 2 ’ will be meaningful.
To take another example of how we can often go beyond ordinal information, consider simplicity. In certain contexts, such as statistical model selection, the simplicity of a hypothesis is taken to be the number of free parameters it contains. Thus for example, the hypothesis ‘y = ax + b’ is simpler than ‘y = ax2 + bx + c’ because the former contains two free parameters, the latter three. So in this case, simplicity is measured on an absolute scale — the actual numbers are meaningful, so only the identity transformation preserves information. Similarly, in a Bayesian context, a prior probability distribution over a set of hypotheses is a case of absolute measurability — the actual numbers assigned are meaningful. So in both these cases, we have much more than ordinal information.
This suggests that the question of what measurement scales are appropriate for criteria of theory choice does not have a simple answer. Different scales may be appropriate for different criteria, and may depend on the inferential techniques that we are using. It may be that for the ‘large scale’ theory choices that Kuhn was interested in, ordinal comparisons are all that can be achieved. But it seems clear that in other more humdrum cases, particularly where the problem may be formulated statistically, we may have much more than ordinal information at our disposal.
Finally, note that the situation for theory choice is more complicated than for social choice. In social choice, one normally assumes a single type of measurement scale for all utility functions. It would make little sense to suggest that individual 1’s utility function was ordinal, individual 2’s cardinal. But the analogous situation for theory choice makes good sense. It might well be that fruitfulness, for example, is merely ordinal but that fit-with-the-data is ratio-scale measurable.
What about inter-criterion comparisons, the analogue of interpersonal comparisons? One might think that such comparisons are unlikely. Take, for example, the statement: ‘the difference in simplicity between T 1 and T 2 exceeds the difference in accuracy between T 3 and T 4 ’. It is hard to see what the basis for such a judgement might be. It is harder still to see how comparisons of levels, rather than differences, could be made — this would permit statements such as ‘the accuracy of T 1 is less than the simplicity of T 2 ’, which sound even odder. Since inter-criterion comparability is needed to avoid the impossibility result, as we know, the prospects for escaping the Arrovian predicament by enriching the informational basis of theory choice may seem dim.
However, this is overly pessimistic for two reasons. Firstly, note that if all criteria are absolutely measurable, then interpersonal comparability follows immediately. If the ‘utility’ functions that represent the simplicity and accuracy orderings cannot be transformed without loss of information, then statements such as ‘the accuracy of T 1 is less than the simplicity of T 2 ’ automatically become meaningful. (Crucially, ‘meaningful’ here has a technical sense, i.e. invariance under the permissible transformations; it does not mean that there would be any particular purpose in uttering the statement in question.)20 Since, as argued above, absolute measurability may be appropriate for some criteria of theory choice in some contexts, inter-criterion comparability should not be dismissed out of hand.
Secondly, recall the discussion of ratio-scale measurability in section 6. If the criteria of theory choice are each measured on their own ratio-scale (i.e. RNC), then this: (i) permits a limited form of inter-criterion comparability, and (ii) avoids Arrovian impossibility so long as all ‘utilities’ are non-negative. Ratio-scale measurability is fairly plausible in certain inferential contexts. Consider ‘scope’, for example. If differences in scope can be compared, and if in addition there is a natural zero point — that is, it makes sense to talk about a theory with zero scope — then scope is ratio-scale measurable. This does not seem altogether implausible, for some criteria in some inferential contexts. If both scope and accuracy (say) are ratio-scale measurable, each with their own scale, then this permits a limited form of inter-criterion comparability: percentage increases in scope may be compared with percentage increases in accuracy. (So statements such as ‘T 1 has 10% less scope than T 2, but is 15% more accurate’ can be made.) As regards point (ii), the restriction to non-negative ‘utilities’ seems unproblematic; if ‘scope’ has a natural zero point, why demand that the theory choice functional be able to deal with profiles in which some theories (per impossible) have negative scope? So there is a potential escape route from Arrow here too.
To sum up, Sen’s work, transposed to the theory choice case, tells us that there do exist theory choice functionals that satisfy Arrow’s four conditions, so long as the ONC condition is replaced in favour of one that permits inter-criterion comparison. This prompts the question of what replacement of ONC (if any) is appropriate, that is, which profiles of ‘utility’ functions should be treated as informationally equivalent. There is no simple answer to this question. However, in some cases absolute measurement will be appropriate, implying that ONC should be replaced with AFC; this permits the impossibility result to be avoided. In other cases ratio-scale measurement will be appropriate, which also permits the impossibility result to be avoided. The general moral is that enriching the informational basis of theory choice does permit an escape from Arrow; though which enrichments are defensible must be answered on a case-by-case basis.
Where does this leave us vis-à-vis Kuhn’s ‘no algorithm’ thesis? If we can escape the Arrovian predicament by enlarging the informational basis, as described above, we will end up with many theory choice functionals that meet our reasonableness constraints. For replacing ONC with an alternative condition (such as AFC), while retaining Arrow’s four conditions, does not narrow down the class of permissible theory choice functionals to a single one. So we escape Arrow’s predicament only to enter Kuhn’s: many acceptable algorithms, and no way to select between them. To escape both predicaments, we need reasonableness conditions that are satisfied by exactly one algorithm. In the social choice literature, researchers have managed to identify conditions that uniquely pick out particular social welfare functionals, such as the utilitarian SWFL, Rawlsian maximin, and others; but it is doubtful whether the analogues of these conditions, transposed to the theory choice case, would be defensible. (By contrast, the analogues of Arrow’s conditions are certainly defensible.) Therefore, in the theory choice case, escaping Arrovian impossibility by enriching the informational basis seems to lead us straight to Kuhn’s ‘no algorithm’ thesis.
8. Illustrations: Bayesianism and statistical model selection
The previous section’s main conclusion — that Sen’s escape route from Arrow does apply to theory choice — can be illustrated by considering the orthodox Bayesian approach to scientific inference. Suppose we have a body of evidence E, and five rival hypotheses {T 1, …, T 5 } that are pair-wise exclusive. On the Bayesian view, we use two criteria to choose between the hypotheses: prior probability P(T i ), and likelihood, P(E/T i ). (Likelihood can be thought of as a measure of the ‘fit’ between evidence and hypothesis, prior probability a measure of the |
welcoming everyone to citizenship, colleagueship, and civic compassion” [emphasis in original].
Praising Southern Connecticut as “an early adopter of the American social justice mission,” Martin and Samels note that the university now has a doctoral degree program in Social Work to complement its existing graduate and undergraduate programs, making it the 11th institution in the country to offer a Doctorate of Social Work.
[RELATED: Ohio Wesleyan to launch ‘Social Justice Major’ in fall]
In addition, they point out that the university’s president, Joe Bertolino, “was one of the first college and university presidents to urge President Trump to take a forceful stance against harassment, hate crimes, and acts of violence,” and had previously said he wants people to think of Southern Connecticut “as the university dedicated to social justice.”
Neither Martin nor Samels responded to a request for comment, but SCSU spokesperson provided a statement explaining the school's approach to diversity.
"As a public university in an urban setting, we have students from all walks of life. And as part of our historic commitment to access and affordability, it’s important that we maintain a campus environment based on inclusiveness and understanding, giving every student the full opportunity to realize his/her goal of a college degree," Dilger told Campus Reform. "Off-campus, we lend our resources of knowledge and expertise to establish partnerships that help our neighbors address many of the issues that confront us all in contemporary society."
Follow the author of this article on Twitter: @Toni_AiraksinenThe Intercept is reporting that Central Intelligence Agency researchers have been waging a multi-year campaign to break the security systems used by Apple on its devices.
Top-secret documents obtained by the website via Edward Snowden describe that the researchers have been "targeting essential security keys used to encrypt data stored on Apple's devices." The report explains that they used both "physical" and "non-invasive" techniques in an attempt to decrypt Apple's software systems. Over the last few years, researchers had apparently developed tools that could be used to extract encryption keys using both software and hardware—though details of how they worked remain unclear.
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The researchers also created a modified version of Xcode, Apple's software development tool which is used to code the apps that appear on the App Store. In the leaked documents, it's described how a version of the software was created that could be used to build backdoors into software—providing the ability to obtain passwords, read messages or even "force all iOS applications to send embedded data to a listening post." Eek. There's no explanation of how this compromised version of Xcode would be used in the wild, however—or any reference to it being used in anger. Elsewhere, researchers developed a modified OS X updater that could install a keylogger to capture similar information.
The Intercept explains that many of these projects were described in detail at a secret annual 'Trusted Computing Base Jamboree', which has been running for almost a decade at a Lockheed Martin facility in northern Virginia and is now sponsored by the CIA. Apparently the events see security researchers meeting to discuss how they could expose and abuse flaws in a range of household and commercial electronics—but clearly Apple was a major target. An internal NSA wiki explained that the conference provided a forum for "presentations that provide important information to developers trying to circumvent or exploit new security capabilities" to "exploit new avenues of attack."
We may be able to take some small shred of comfort form the fact that the documents don't explain how successful the attempts on Apple's encryption systems were. Neither do they explain if any of the developed techniques were ever used to secure intelligence. That may be in part because of Apple's high standards. As Matthew Green, a cryptographer at Johns Hopkins University, told The Intercept: "Apple led the way with secure coprocessors in phones, with fingerprint sensors, with encrypted messages. If you can attack Apple, then you can probably attack anyone."
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We may not need to worry about Apple's systems being compromised by CIA research—though Apple declined a request from The Intercept to comment on the news, so we can't be sure. But one thing is certain: the documents serve to remind of the unquenchable thirst amongst government officials to see what they can't easily see; to peer at our secrets and learn ever more about us. With that kind of determination, our secrets can't remain secret for long. [The Intercept]
Image by Mikhail Esteves under Creative Commons licenseIt’s Sean Spicer, who should quickly emerge as one of the most visible members of the administration:
Spicer, the Republican National Committee’s communications director and chief strategist, has worked as a senior communications adviser to Trump during the transition. He had told reporters Thursday morning they could expect “further announcements on appointments and staff later today” and additional announcements “in the near future on fulfilling the final Cabinet positions.”
He also garnered some attention earlier this year on Ash Wednesday:
A slew of oblivious liberals took to Twitter on Wednesday to attack Sean Spicer, the Republic National Committee’s director of communications, over the “black smudge” on his forehead for Ash Wednesday, a symbol of his Catholic faith.
Mr. Spicer appeared on CNN to talk about the New Hampshire primary and was shown with the dark ashes on the center of his brow.
On Ash Wednesday, the first day of Lent, many Catholics will have ashes placed on their forehead in the shape of a cross.
But to the trolls on Twitter, it looked like Mr. Spicer had a make-up faux pas, and they proceeded to joke about it.
“DUDE. YOUR FOREHEAD,” one user tweeted with a screenshot of Mr. Spicer speaking on CNN.
“What’s up with the makeup @seanspicer?” another asked.
“@seanspicer someone pulled a prank on you or you’ve got something on your head lol,” another user tweeted.
For his part, Mr. Spicer took the tweets in stride, responding to each one with the #AshWednesday.
Other Catholics stepped in to defend Mr. Spicer and got a laugh out of the trolls’ ignorance.
“Dear Twitter trolls: Maybe less time on snarky tweets about the mark on @seanspicer’s forehead & more time learning about Ash Wednesday,” political strategist Mo Elleithee tweeted.
“Feeling bad for my RNC buddy @seanspicer, who’s having to explain his Catholicism to a shrivel of critics after his @CNN spox. #AshWednesday,” tweeted Mark Standriff, former director of communications at the California Republican Party.Phoenix police confirm the Phoenix serial shooter has struck again, bringing the total number of incidents up to nine since March.
$50,000 REWARD offered through Silent Witness and updated information available. https://t.co/2G61WWYFXO pic.twitter.com/vQ1P73joCh — Phoenix Police (@phoenixpolice) August 3, 2016
A man and 4-year-old boy were sitting inside a car outside a home at 32nd Street and Oak on July 11 when the suspect fired at their car.
The victims did not sustain any injuries, but called police to report the incident.
According to Phoenix police, the suspect left the area in a dark-colored BMW, but the shooter is known to have access to multiple vehicles.
Police said the suspect may also be driving a white Cadillac or a Lincoln-type vehicle.
Take a look at the map below to see each of the serial shootings so far.
As a result of this most recent shooting, the reward to catch the serial shooter has been raised from $30,000 to $50,000. The FBI has added $20,000 to the reward amount.
Six of the nine shootings have occurred in the Maryvale area of Phoenix. The three other shootings, including the most recent incident, have occurred either in the downtown area or north of Sky Harbor Airport.
The Phoenix serial shooter has been targeting victims since March.
His first victim, a 16-year-old boy, survived. Nine people have been shot, seven of them have died.
WHO IS THE SUSPECT?
A solid description of the suspect is not known at this time. However, two separate witnesses in the case were able to provide police with an idea of his appearance.
Differing descriptions of the suspect’s vehicle have been provided by witnesses, with some reporting a light-colored sedan and others describing a dark-colored sedan.
“Someone out there knows who did this. We need our community to call us or Silent Witness and help us solve these cases, bring justice to these families and victims, and prevent more violence from occurring,” said Phoenix Police Chief Joseph Yahner.
RELATED: 5 things you need to know about the serial shooter
If you have any information regarding the serial shooter call Phoenix police at 602-262-6141 or Silent Witness at 480-WITNESS.
Take a look at the timeline below to see each of the significant events regarding the serial shootings.If you didn’t catch Cleveland’s recent upset win over OKC, you missed out. Badly. That was the nightofficially announced himself as a superstar. Yes, we all knew he could play before then. He’s an All-Star, a plus-20-a-night scorer. But to take on perhaps the best team in the league and one of the best players at your position in, and turn them into mush on the way to 13 points in the final three minutes of a close game? That’s big time. That’s how you start a legacy.
Irving isn’t as accomplished as Westbrook – his team is complete garbage (and some of that has to fall on his shoulders as a point guard). But he’s captivating basketball fans around the world with his clutch play and his already legendary ballhandling. And while Uncle Drew came up with Chris Paul comparisons, he’s actually closer to Westbrook. The dude’s played a lot of two guard since he was a teenager, and feels perfectly at home taking 20 shots a night.
As for Westbrook, we know he has no problems putting ’em up. Perhaps the most aggressive point guard in the league, not even the world’s best scorer can quell Westbrook’s insatiable scoring desire. That used to be a problem. But more and more folks are coming around to Westbrook’s side, realizing that hunger is what makes him so good. That hunger is what drives him. Westbrook will never be satisfied, a rare quality in an age of overabundance and monster contracts.
Both players can dish the rock, but both are at their best breaking people down and dropping buckets.
Yesterday, we came with James Harden versus Dwyane Wade, and the voting results were actually somewhat close. Today, it’s even more of a toss up between two All-Star point guards, two leaders who are more similar than you thought. Russell Westbrook, Kyrie Irving. Who’s better? We argue. You decide.
*** *** ***
Russell Westbrook
Take a stroll around Twitter and it’ll become clear that Russell Westbrook is much hated and Kyrie Irving is much loved. And while Westbrook is often ridiculed for good reason (he has questionable shot selection, he occasionally hogs the ball and he wears fishing lure shirts), his effectiveness for the Thunder offense is too often ignored. Irving is a phenomenal player and I wouldn’t be surprised if he’s the best player in the league by 2018. But to say he’s better than Westbrook right now is premature.
Westbrook is in the midst of his most complete season as a pro. He ranks seventh in league in points at 22.6 per game, fifth in assists at 8.2 per game and fourth in steals at almost two per game. He’s finding teammates in much more creative ways than he normally has and he’s the leader of the league’s best offense for the second year in a row. He’s been around for five years and he knows what he’s doing.
The passing ability of Westbrook is above Irving’s at this point, but it’s honestly close. It’s hard to evaluate where Irving would be if he actually had NBA-level talent around him, just as it’s hard to evaluate what Westbrook’s scoring would be like if he wasn’t teammates with Kevin Durant.
The stats Westbrook critics cite most about him are his shooting percentages, as he currently shoots.421 from the field and.323 from behind the arc. This is bad, and to make it worse, he’s taking 19 shots a game at these percentages on a team with Durant, Kevin Martin and Serge Ibaka. I bring it up because it’s a problem. But it’s also a new problem for Westbrook, who has shot above.440 in his previous two seasons. The difference this year is that Westbrook is lacking effectiveness in isolation, where he’s making only 32 percent of his shots, according to Synergy Sports. This is way below Irving’s absurd mark of 49 percent, but, again, it’s a new problem for Westbrook that I wouldn’t expect to continue.
Around the rim, Irving lacks Westbrook’s explosiveness and finishing ability. Irving is a rim grazer while Westbrook is a rim destroyer. It’s an ability that defenses cannot plan for and it’s another check in the Westbrook box.
The defensive end is where Westbrook clearly separates himself from Irving. And it’s not because Westbrook is especially good at it. It’s because Irving is especially poor. Since his rookie year, Irving has improved on a defensive ability that John Hollinger labeled as a “horrifying flying train wreck” before this season. It just hasn’t improved enough to make him better than Westbrook. Irving still struggles to stay in front of opposing point guards, he takes plays off and he’s often lost. If he wants to be rated above Westbrook, then he can’t be such a liability on the defensive end.
It’s possible to make a case for either of these players over the other, but I just can’t convince myself that Irving is better right now. When Westbrook’s shooting percentages come back to career norms, he’ll be nearly impossible to stop. Uncle Drew is great, but Westbrook should be appreciated for what he is: one of the most explosive, unpredictable and aggravating point guards in league history. Irving isn’t there yet.
-JON HARTZELL
Hit page 2 to check out the argument for Kyrie…It was, in the eyes of much of the world, the defining symbol of the George Bush presidency: the prison camp at Guantánamo that deviated from America's founding ideals in its use of torture and indefinite detention.
But the offshore centre that had resonated so strongly in Bush's presidency could be near its end. Barack Obama, in one of his first acts as president, yesterday circulated a draft of an executive order to shut down the camp.
Obama is expected to issue the order today along with additional presidential directives banning waterboarding and other forms of torture.
"The detention facilities at Guantánamo for individuals covered by this order shall be closed as soon as practicable, and no later than one year from the date of this order," the draft said, according to Associated Press which first reported the story.
The draft order also calls for an end to the widely condemned military trials at Guantánamo. Two trials were stopped yesterday as Obama took his first step towards dismantling the justice regime put in place by Bush to try al-Qaida suspects.
Military judges ordered a 120-day suspension of the trial of the former teenage soldier Omar Khadr, which was due to start on 26 January. They also suspended pre-trial hearings for Khalid Sheikh Mohammed and four others accused in the 2001 attacks in the US.
Obama had directed prosecutors to seek a suspension in the Khadr and 9/11 cases within hours of his inauguration on Tuesday to enable a full-scale review of the military commissions system.
"In order to permit the newly inaugurated president and his administration time to review the military commission process generally, and the cases currently pending before the military commissions specifically, the secretary of defence has, by order of the president, directed the chief prosecutor to seek continuances of 120 days in all pending case," the prosecutor, Clay Trivett, said in the written request to the judges.
Human rights groups viewed the order as the beginning of the end for military tribunals and the regime of indefinite detention at Guantánamo.
"This is a giant step forwards towards finally closing Guantánamo," said Anthony D Romero, the executive director of the American Civil Liberties Union. "The 120 days is a time-out that gives the Obama administration time to develop a plan for executing the president's promise to close Guantánamo."
But Vincent Warren, director of the Centre for Constitutional Rights, which has represented hundreds of detainees, said Obama should have provided details of the closure and made a commitment to try terror suspects in US courts. "It only took days to put these men in Guantánamo. It shouldn't take a year to get them out. We are disappointed that he outlined no concrete steps for closing the base and gave his administration an entire year to sort out its plans."
Joanne Mariner, an attorney for Human Rights Watch, who was in the courtroom at Guantánamo yesterday, said it was clear from the prosecution that Obama intended to scrap the entire legal apparatus at the camp, and try the terror suspects in US courts. "They emphasised that this was not a technical thing or a little breather. They emphasised that it was going to be a comprehensive review," she said. "The implication was that this would be ending."
She said there was little visible reaction from the 9/11 suspects to the order, or to Obama's election.
Obama had to move swiftly to shut down the trials to avoid being seen to legitimise the military tribunals put in place by Bush.
Human rights organisations were especially concerned about the 9/11 proceedings. Had Mohammed and the others entered guilty pleas in the tainted tribunals, that might have prevented their prosecution in a US federal court.
Obama has acknowledged that the larger business of shutting down the camp will be more complicated.
Only 18 of the 245 suspects remaining at Guantánamo have been charged. The Obama administration hopes to try these people in US courts and wants to move ahead swiftly in the case against the 9/11 plane hijackers.
There are signs of opposition to transferring the hijackers to US prisons to await trial. Officials in Kansas say they do not want the prisoners at Fort Leavenworth military prison, which is in the state.
But the far greater challenge will be deciding the fate of the majority of detainees who will not be brought to trial. Most have been waiting seven years to be sent home, either as free men or to be transferred to another facility.
Obama intends to conduct a review of the evidence against the detainees to decide which cases should go to trial. He is also hoping that goodwill towards the new administration will encourage other governments to take some of the detainees who cannot return to their home countries.
Switzerland yesterday issued a statement saying it would consider taking some detainees. Portugal has also called on EU states to take in detainees.When the trailer for Gods of Egypt came out earlier this month, everyone noticed a couple of things: it’s cast was predominantly Caucasian, which is weird, considering where and when it was set. Now, the studio and director have admitted that they could have done better there.
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After the trailer and posters for the film arrived, the film began to generate a considerable amount of controversy for its casting choices. In response, both Alex Proyas and Lionsgate issued statements:
Alex Proyas: “The process of casting a movie has many complicated variables, but it is clear that our casting choices should have been more diverse. I sincerely apologize to those who are offended by the decisions we made.” Lionsgate: ”We recognize that it is our responsibility to help ensure that casting decisions reflect the diversity and culture of the time periods portrayed. In this instance we failed to live up to our own standards of sensitivity and diversity, for which we sincerely apologize. Lionsgate is deeply committed to making films that reflect the diversity of our audiences. We have, can and will continue to do better.”
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This sort of whitewashing is just the latest in a long line of examples: just look at Ridley Scott’s film The Exodus, which did pretty much exactly the same thing. It’s also not like we’re lacking in choices: as one of our commenters (Ghost) noted, Rami Malek (who’s currently starring in Mr. Robot), is not only Egyptian, but he played a Pharaoh.
While it’s nice to see the admission that they could have done more, there needs to be more done: firm changes to casting choices. This is a change that won’t happen overnight, but hopefully, an admission like this will be the first step in a longer line of changes.
Gods of Egypt will hit theaters in February 2016.
[Forbes via The Wrap]Share
“I’m newly retired,” Lynch said as he joked about moonlighting as an Uber driver. When further pressed about whether he’d actually hung up his cleats for good and retired, Lynch told 503 Motoring‘s Tim Walbridge, “Alright well look, let me just clear this up for you [to straighten out] all that shit you been reading; I am. I am [retired].”
Contradicting recent rumors, Lynch further cemented his retirement when he sat down for a pre-recorded interview with 60 Minutes Sports recently, in which Sports Illustrated writer Jon Wertheim continued to hammer the former pro about his future plans. While referencing how “obvious” a story line it would be to join his hometown Oakland Raiders, Wertheim was essentially silenced by Lynch after it appeared as though the former pro was beyond fed up with the repeated line of questioning.
“I’m retired,” Lynch said while looking rather annoyed. “Is that good enough? Which camera do you want me to look into? I’m done. I’m not playing football anymore.”
Without breaking eye contact with Wertheim, the Oakland native put to rest all rumors of a supposed NFL comeback. So what’s Lynch to do now that he’s officially, officially retired?
Along with his self-proclaimed affinity for driving for Uber when he’s bored, Lynch said that he’s going to increase focus on his Fam 1st Family Foundation.
“Football [has only] been a part of my life,” Lynch told Digital Trends. “I have a foundation that I’ve run for the last 10 years and I like to go out around the world and try and help in many different places that I can. Just this year alone I’ve been to Egypt [and] I just got back from Haiti [where we] went and built a school.”
Of course, he’s not above having fun, including as a guest judge for Digital Trends’ 2016 Car Awards. Check back June 21 to see Lynch and the DT automotive team push the hottest new cars to their limits in our quest to find the best in every category.By Matt Zapotosky and Rosalind S. Helderman, The Washington Post 1
WASHINGTON — Former secretary of state Hillary Clinton and her staffers used an informal and sometimes haphazard system for exchanging and storing sensitive information and were at times unaware of or were unconcerned with State Department policy, documents from an FBI investigation into her private e-mail server system show.
The documents reveal myriad new details about the e-mail setup and show that investigators found multiple attempts by hackers to access Clinton’s system — a series of personal devices and servers that the Democratic presidential candidate told investigators she used as a matter of convenience while she was secretary of state.
The materials, which include a summary of the FBI’s entire investigation as well as Clinton’s hours-long interview with agents in July, contain no major revelations. But they offer fresh details that Clinton’s political opponents will be able to use in the months leading up to the November election. The summary shows that Clinton’s account to law enforcement was generally consistent with what she has said about her e-mail situation publicly, but she repeatedly told agents that she could not recall important details or specific e-mails she was questioned about.
Clinton has been dogged by questions about her use of the private e-mail server since the start of her presidential campaign, and her Republican opponent, Donald Trump, has used the issue to argue that she is untrustworthy.
Related Articles September 3, 2016 FBI report: Platte River Network employee used BleachBit to delete old Clinton e-mails
Clinton campaign spokesman Brian Fallon said, “While her use of a single e-mail account was clearly a mistake and she has taken responsibility for it, these materials make clear why the Justice Department believed there was no basis to move forward with this case.”
Trump said in a statement: “Hillary Clinton’s answers to the FBI about her private e-mail server defy belief. I was absolutely shocked to see that her answers to the FBI stood in direct contradiction to what she told the American people. After reading these documents, I really don’t understand how she was able to get away from prosecution.”
FBI Director James Comey announced in July that his agency would not recommend criminal charges against Clinton for her use of a private e-mail server, though he said at the time that she and her staffers were “extremely careless” in how they treated classified information. He said the decision was based largely on the fact that investigators did not find that Clinton intended to mishandle classified material, though such material did traverse her private server.
Ordinarily, internal documents from FBI investigations are not made public. However, Comey has said the unusually high-profile case warranted more robust public disclosures than is standard.
The FBI found no evidence that anyone penetrated the e-mail of the former secretary of state, although “hostile foreign actors successfully gained access to the personal e-mail accounts of individuals with whom Clinton was in regular contact and, in doing so, obtained e-mails sent to or received by Clinton on her personal account,” the bureau wrote. Those people included confidant Sidney Blumenthal, whose e-mails were hacked and publicly revealed by Romanian hacker Marcel Lehel Lazar.
The bureau wrote in its report that it was unable to track down all of Clinton’s electronic equipment because some of it had been destroyed or lost. One staffer told investigators that he had destroyed two mobile devices “by breaking them in half or hitting them with a hammer.” The FBI said it had requested 13 devices from the law firm representing Clinton, and the firm replied that it could not produce any.
The FBI wrote that “investigative limitations, including the FBI’s inability to obtain all mobile devices and various computer components associated with Clinton’s personal e-mail systems, prevented the FBI from conclusively determining whether the classified information transmitted and stored on Clinton’s personal server systems was compromised via cyber intrusion or other means.”
Clinton told the FBI that she used the private server for convenience, not to evade public-record laws. But the documents show that former secretary of state Colin Powell appeared to advise her early in her term that private e-mail could give her more control over her communications in the face of public inquiries.
In January 2009, according to the FBI, Clinton contacted Powell, who also used a personal e-mail account during his time in office, to ask about his use of a BlackBerry. According to the FBI, Powell “warned Clinton that if it became ‘public’ that Clinton had a BlackBerry, and she used it to ‘do business,’ her e-mails could become ‘official record[s] and subject to the law.’ ”
“Be very careful,” Powell advised Clinton, according to the FBI. “I got around it all by not saying much and not using systems that captured the data.”
Clinton told investigators that she understood Powell’s comments to mean any work-related communications would be government records, and they did not factor into her decision to use personal e-mail. She indicated that she believed her records were being preserved when she e-mailed other State Department officials at their government addresses.
Powell said he could not recall the details of the years-old exchange, though he said that he used his e-mail system “openly for unclassified communication” and “saw no need for, say, an e-mail to one of my kids or a friend becoming an official record.”
The FBI’s report traced the history of Clinton’s private server use, detailing ad hoc efforts to back up data and respond to requests for records. In one instance, after Clinton left office, someone created a personal Gmail account to move an archive of Clinton’s e-mail from a laptop to a server run by Platte River Networks, a company Clinton had hired. The person then attempted to ship the laptop back to another person connected to Clinton.
According to the FBI report, the laptop, which had not been wiped, got lost in transit. And the bureau would come to find on the Gmail account dozens of classified e-mails.
Someone, apparently at Platte River, did delete Clinton e-mails in late March 2015 in what the person described as an “oh s—” moment, having been instructed months earlier to permanently destroy the e-mails of two Clinton aides and change how long e-mails were retained.
That person, whose name is redacted, had received a request on March 9 from the House Select Committee on Benghazi to preserve e-mails. Clinton told investigators that she was unaware of the deletions.
Reached late Friday, Platte River’s lawyer Kenneth Eichner said he had not looked the FBI documents or spoken to his client yet and did not want to comment until after he had done so.
Clinton told FBI agents that she did not know much about how the government classified information. For instance, she said she did not pay attention to the differences between levels of classification, such as “top secret” and “secret,” indicating that she took “all classified information seriously.” When shown an e-mail she had received in which a paragraph had been marked with a “C,” a standard way of noting that it included “confidential” information, Clinton at first speculated to agents that the mark indicated that the e-mail contained bullet points in alphabetical order.
Clinton indicated that she never sought nor received permission to use a private server and said she largely turned over the setup of the system to aides. She said she could not remember a cable that was sent to all State Department employees under her name in June 2011, advising them not use to private e-mail for work. She said all cables of a “certain policy nature” went out under her name.
Clinton told agents that she generally received classified material in personal briefings or on paper, which she read in specially prepared secure facilities, and that she didn’t remember ever receiving an e-mail that she thought shouldn’t be sent through the unclassified system. The FBI’s report says Clinton took her BlackBerry into a Diplomatic Security Service post where other State Department personnel were not allowed to carry mobile devices, though a Clinton aide said Clinton left the secure area before using it.
Much of Clinton’s interview, which is described in an 11-page summary, appears to have consisted of FBI agents showing her specific e-mail exchanges that they determined included classified content and asking her to comment.
Repeatedly, Clinton said she could not remember the specific exchanges but had trusted at the time that her staff at the State Department knew how to handle classified material and would not e-mail her material they should not. The exact nature of those classified e-mails is redacted in the version of the summary released by the FBI, but it is clear they included deliberations on drone targets. Shown one July 2012 e-mail she exchanged with President Barack Obama at his own highly secure address, Clinton indicated that she recalled sending the note on an airplane during a trip to Russia.
Clinton also told the FBI that she played no role in sorting her work and personal e-mails after she left office, other than to instruct her legal team to submit to the State Department all e-mails that were “work-related or arguably work related.” Comey has indicated that the FBI discovered thousands of work-related e-mails that Clinton had not turned over but said the agency found no effort to purposely delete or conceal e-mails.Colorado presidential electors who do not vote for Hillary Clinton as the winner of the state’s vote risk criminal charges after a Denver judge delivered the second setback in two days to an effort to block Donald Trump from winning the presidency.
Denver District Judge Elizabeth Starrs ruled that state law requires members of the Electoral College, when the body meets at noon Monday, to vote for the presidential and vice presidential candidates who received the most votes in Colorado.
The order also granted authority to the Secretary of State Wayne Williams, a Republican, to replace electors who violate the law — essentially ending Colorado’s role in the “Hamilton Electors” movement to keep Trump from the White House.
“If (presidential electors) take the oath and then they violate the statute, there will be repercussions,” Starrs said in an order from the bench.
The judge declined to outline the possible penalties but said she believes state law allows electors who take the oath as a public official to face criminal charges. Public officers charged with failing to fulfill their duty, a misdemeanor, can receive up to a $1,000 fine and one year in jail.
Democratic electors in Colorado are threatening to abandon Clinton and partner with Republican electors in other states to nominate an alternative candidate — a last-ditch move to prevent Trump from receiving the 270 electoral votes needed to win.
The Democratic electors were chosen by state party activists at congressional and state conventions in April. Two of the Colorado electors are Bernie Sanders loyalists, and one supports Clinton. But all adamantly argue Trump is unqualified for office.
Moments after the ruling, the two electors who appeared in court Tuesday declined to say how they will vote when the Electoral College meets at the state Capitol.
“As someone once said, we are going to keep you in suspense,” said attorney Jesse Witt, quoting Trump.
The two electors, Polly Baca, a former state lawmaker, and Robert Nemanich, an El Paso County teacher, are considering whether to seek an emergency appeal of the ruling to the state Supreme Court.
The ruling, Witt said, is a “fundamental abridgment to their right to free speech and free expression.”
Another Democratic elector, Micheal Baca, who is not part of the court case, has vowed not to vote for Clinton.
A day earlier, the electors lost a separate bid in federal court for an injunction to block the enforcement of the state law on the grounds it is an unconstitutional. The electors appealed the case Tuesday to the 10th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals, but it’s unclear whether it will get a hearing before Monday.
The entire “faithless electors” effort is unprecedented in Colorado and led Williams to ask the Denver judge to make a ruling about how to respond if members of the Electoral College violated the law.
Witt argued the request overstepped the court’s authority, despite a broad state law that gives judges the ability to intervene in election cases.
“Essentially … they are asking you to take off your judge’s hat, put on your legislator’s hat, write out a bill, and then put on your governor’s hat and sign it,” Witt argued in the three-hour hearing. “And that’s not something you can do with our system of government under the separation of powers.”
Assistant Attorney General Chris Jackson told the judge that the state needed guidance to protect the integrity of the process. “We need an order. … That is the only way to stop these electors from disenfranchising over 3 million voters in Colorado who have made their wishes known through the electoral process,” he said.
Witt countered with an argument that many of them share the electors’ concerns about Trump and “believe that the Electoral College has a federal duty to protect against someone allegedly under foreign influence, allegedly unfit for office.”
Outside the courtroom after the hearing, Williams said that if electors take the oath and cast a vote for another candidate, they should face criminal charges.“I think if you take the oath and immediately violate it, I think that’s appropriate,” he said.
But he hopes it doesn’t come to that point. “I think the electors will think about that,” he added. “And it’s my hope that each of the electors will make the decision to follow Colorado law.”Examples:
[Hepburn, 2005] Stray dogs are being skewered on hooks and dragged behind boats as live shark bait. The cruel practice takes place on French-controlled Reunion Island in the Indian Ocean, where Prince William spent two holidays. A six-month-old labrador pup was recently found ALIVE with a huge double hook through its snout — like the dog above — and another through a leg. The pup was found in a coastal creek and is thought to have somehow freed itself from a fishing line. But other dogs and kittens have been chomped up and swallowed by sharks. The RSPCA plans to petition the French government, demanding an end to the hideous torture. [Collected on the Internet, September 2012] PETITION: Please help stop French Islander and Mexican fishermen using live dogs and kittens as shark bait To: The French and Mexican Governments We have to stop this PLEASE help! French Islanders using live puppies and kittens as shark bait?? Please stop this senseless abuse to innocent puppies and kittens. French Islander and Mexican fishermen are using LIVE puppies and kittens as shark bait!! No living being should have to undergo this torture and insurmountable fear! This is inhumane and must stop NOW. Together we can make a difference and let our voice be heard as ONE. Please sign this petition and please pass this along. Thank you for caring. Blessed be Currently the penalty is only 2 years and $36,000 that is far too little for such a heinous crime. We urge that you raise the penalty to 10 years in prison with NO parole and a fine of $100,000. This will hopefully act as a deterrent and will stop these horrendous acts against innocent animals. Please do the right thing and help us stop these people. Islanders on the French controlled Reunion Island have been using live dogs as shark bait. The Sun claims that “a six-month-old labrador pup was recently found alive with a huge double hook through its snout – like the dog above – and another through a leg.” It is also claimed that local fisherman have also been using kittens! Reunion Island is an overseas départements of France and an official region of France, giving it the same status as a province or state in other countries.
The claim that live dogs (and cats) were being used as bait by shark fisherman on Réunion Island (a French-controlled territory just off the coast of Southern Africa in the Indian Ocean, east of Madagascar) started hitting the world press in August 2005 and picked up steam in early October 2005, when it was reported by publications such as the UK’s Sun (an excerpt from which is quoted at the head of this page) and Sweden’s Aftonbladet, complete with a heart-rending picture of a purported “bait dog” with a large hook through its muzzle. Animal rights groups such as the RSPCA have taken up the cause of putting a stop to the horrible practice.
Many observers remain skeptical of such claims, however, positing theories that range from media and animal rights groups having been taken in by a hoax to a deliberate disinformation campaign being waged by activists who seek to end the slaughter of sharks for their fins and cartilage by Indian Ocean fisherman. Arguments have flown back and forth over the practicality and plausibility (or lack thereof) of Réunion Islanders fishing for sharks in the manner described.
A 2006 Réunion newspaper article acknowledged the practice and reported the recent prosecution of a deliveryman (and amateur fisherman) on that |
know if there is water on these planets."
For life to exist, planets must have habitable temperatures throughout a period long enough for life to evolve. For life as we know it, the planet must have a significant amount of water. Scientists already know how to determine the distance a planet orbits from its star, and analysis of light interacting with molecules in the atmosphere can indicate if water exists. However, Williams and Eric Gaidos, associate professor of geobiology, University of Hawaii, want to identify planets with water on their surfaces.
The researchers' method, reported in an upcoming issue of Icarus and currently available online, relies on the reflective properties of water.
"A planet like Venus, with a dense atmosphere, will scatter the sunlight in all directions," Williams says. "If you look at Venus in phases, when it is full, it is brightest and when it is crescent, it is faintest."
When a planet is full in respect to its sun with the whole disk illuminated, water would actually be darker than dirt. However, when a planet is in crescent, with the sun glancing off the watery surface, the reflection will be brightest.
The image of the Blue Marble, taken by Apollo 17 in December 1972, is striking because the Earth is 70 percent covered in water. The researchers believe that large enough amounts of water will provide a glint of light visible in the infrared and visible spectrum if they watch the planet for long enough.
"We are going to look at the planets for a long time," says Williams. "They reflect one billionth or one ten billionth of their sun. To gain enough light to see a dot requires observation over two weeks with the kinds of telescopes we are imagining. If we stare that long, unless the planet is rotating very slowly, different sides of the planet will come through our field of view. If the planet is a mix of water, we are going to see the mix travel around the planet."
The researchers want to monitor the light curve of a distant planet as the planet spins on its axis and moves around its star. By looking at the changes in brightness, correlated to the planet's phase, they should be able to tell if the planet has liquid oceans. If the temperatures are correct, the liquid is probably water.
While there are currently no telescopes capable of identifying watery planets, astronomers hope that a terrestrial planet finder telescope will orbit the earth in the next 10 to 20 years. In the meantime, the Penn State researcher has arranged for the current Mars Express and Venus Express missions of the European Space Agency, to look back at the Earth occasionally from a great distance and observe what our watery planet looks like in various phases.
"Any time that the Earth is in a crescent phase as viewed by a distant space vehicle, we should take advantage of the situation and look back at the Earth," says Williams.While we don’t expect AAPL to discontinue iPod for some time, we also don’t expect an iPod refresh this year, and believe iPod could post Y/Y unit declines as a result as consumers purchasing iWatch as a substitute.
Apple today removed the link to the iPod classic from the sidebar of its U.S. and Canadian refurbished stores, perhaps offering an indication that the ancient hard drive-based MP3 player is finally on its last legs. Though the link is gone, the actual page for the refurbished iPod classic remains on Apple's website.The sidebar link is still present in Apple's international refurbished stores for the time being, but it is greyed out, indicating that no units are available to purchase. It is not entirely clear when Apple's refurbished store last had iPod classic models in stock, but it seems to have been quite some time ago and today's removal of the sidebar link suggests that Apple has no plans to bring them back to the store.The iPod classic is the successor to the original iPod introduced in 2001 and is the only remaining MP3 player in Apple's lineup that uses a hard disk drive for music storage. As highlighted in our Buyer's Guide, Apple hasn't updated the iPod classic since 2009, and no further updates are expected given the device's age and the fact that hard drive manufacturers are no longer producing the 1.8-inch hard drives used in the iPod classic. Seemingly every year, a new crop of rumors claims Apple is discontinuing the device, but the venerable iPod classic has hung on year after year as an option for those looking to carry larger music libraries on the go. Speculation has suggested that once the iPod touch becomes available in a 128 GB option, Apple may finally choose to retire the iPod classic, but the company has elected not to increase the maximum capacity of the iPod touch since 2009 when the third-generation model became the first to offer up to 64 GB of storage.Sales of Apple's iPod lineup have been declining as customers turn to the iPhone to meet their music needs. In its latest quarterly earnings for Q2 2014, iPod net sales contributed only 1 percent to Apple's overall revenue, while the iPhone accounted for 57 percent. The iPhone may have crippled iPod sales, but the iWatch may be the death knell. According to analyst Christopher Caso of Susquehanna Financial Group, sales of the iPod will continue to decline precipitously as consumers choose the wrist-watch device instead of a stand-alone player.Besides the iPod classic, Apple also recently removed the 17-inch MacBook Pro from its refurbished store after discontinuing the notebook in 2012.Your favorite Grimm stars will son be walking down the aisle: David Giuntoli and Bitsie Tulloch are engaged, PEOPLE can confirm.
Tulloch, who portrays Juliette-slash-Eve on the drama series, debuted her stunning new bling at San Diego Comic-Con 2016 over the weekend.
The pair went public with their relationship in 2014, with Tulloch telling Zap2it in December of that year of the on and off-set romance – Giuntoli’s character, Detective Nick Burkhardt romanced his real bride-to-be’s – “We were hiding it for a long time, but now everybody knows.”
Now residents of Portland, Oregon, where the show films, Tulloch and Giuntoli, 36, frequently showcase their relationship on social media, from sharing sweet messages to goofing around during filming downtime.
Related Video: Comic-Con 2015 Recap: Ben Affleck, Harrison Ford and Ryan Reynolds’s Deadpool Debut!
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Giuntoli and Tulloch were down in San Diego to join their Grimm castmates for a Comic-Con panel on Saturday.
NBC recently ordered at least 13 episode of the series for its sixth season, which is expected to premiere this fall.Military color guard prepare to close a Memorial Day ceremony, presented by the City of Irvine at Col. Bill Barber Memorial Park. The City unveiled a new plaque at the park in memory of U.S. Staff Sgt. Matthew Thompson, an alum of Concordia University Irvine, who was killed in the line of duty on August 23, 2016 in Afghanistan. Concordia also announced the renaming of its Veterans Resource Center to the Staff Sergeant Matthew Thompson Veterans Resource Center. (Photo courtesy of Concordia University Irvine)
U.S. Staff Sgt. Matthew Thompson, a Green Beret who died in Afghanistan Aug. 23, 2016, was recently honored by Concordia University Irvine, which renamed its veterans center after him. (Photo courtesy Concordia University)
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The City of Irvine unveiled a new plaque on Memorial Day in memory of U.S. Staff Sgt. Matthew Thompson, an alum of Concordia University Irvine, who was killed in the line of duty on August 23, 2016 in Afghanistan. Concordia also announced the renaming of its Veterans Resource Center to the Staff Sergeant Matthew Thompson Veterans Resource Center. (Photo courtesy of Concordia University Irvine)
Staff Sgt. Matthew V. Thompson, of Irvine, died last August in Afghanistan, when a roadside bomb detonated near his patrol.
On Memorial Day, the 28-year-old Green Beret in the Army Special Forces was remembered and honored by the city of Irvine and his alma mater, Concordia University Irvine, which renamed its Veterans Resource Center the U.S. Staff Sgt. Matthew Thompson Veterans Resource Center.
“This center will be one of many ways in which Matthew’s legacy will be able to live on and to continue to impact the veteran community,” said Steve Leader, manager of the school’s veterans center.
“Matthew was truly a great person and we want to allow his story to be told,” Leader wrote in an e-mail.
Thompson, who grew up in Brookfield, Wisconsin, graduated from CUI with a Bachelor of Arts in theological studies in December 2010. While a student, he hosted a bible study group. He joined the Army in 2011.
Thompson met his wife, Rachel, while a student at Concordia. On Memorial Day, she was present for a ceremony at Irvine’s annual Memorial Day commemoration to recognize fallen military service members, held at Colonel Bill Barber Marine Corps Memorial Park.
“He wanted to be a Green Beret because he wanted to help people in communities and places a long ways away, that maybe didn’t have a lot of hope,” his father, Mark Thompson, told a CBS news station in 2016.
Concordia University Irvine, a non-profit Lutheran Christian liberal arts college, supports over 80 service members, veterans and their family members annually through its veterans center.The city’s Department of Transportation is entertaining the prospect of allowing a new bike-share business that could give Citi Bike a run for its money. According to Crain’s, the DOT is preparing to issue a request for expressions of interest that will give companies that operate dockless bike-share systems to explain how their models could work in New York City.
“DOT is evaluating the viability of the newest generation of bike-sharing technology in order to expand the system,” said a spokesman for the agency in a statement. “This includes meeting with the industry, though our immediate focus remains the continued expansion of [Citi Bike’s] Phase II, which is ongoing.”
The DOT has been in talks with dockless system operators for the past year while also negotiating with Motivate, who owns and operates Citi Bike, to expand its services. While Motivate could also develop a dockless system, the company wants to retain exclusivity in New York City and not have to compete with brands like LimeBike, Spin, and Ofo— who have all expressed interest in bringing pilot programs to the city.
While the benefits of a dockless bike-share program are that it can be deployed in a matter of days rather than months, doesn’t require parking spaces for docking stations, and gives users the ability to conveniently locate a nearby bike from their smartphone, it does have its drawbacks. Critics are concerned that dockless bikes will be left in inconvenient places, much like the problems that the program has brought to cities like Washington D.C. and Shanghai, China.
In the meantime, Phase II of Citi Bike’s expansion is adding 140 new stations and 2,000 new bikes across Brooklyn, Queens, and Manhattan while the Bronx and Staten Island remain excluded from the program, though local officials are working to change that.Dear EarthTalk: I’ve noticed that bamboo is very trendy right now, apparently—in part—for environmental reasons. Can you enlighten?
-- Eric M., via e-mail
Bamboo has a long history of economic and cultural significance, primarily in East Asia and South East Asia where it has been used for centuries for everything from building material to food to medicine. There are some 1,000 different species of bamboo growing in very diverse climates throughout the world, including the southeastern United States.
Bamboo’s environmental benefits arise largely out of its ability to grow quickly—in some cases three to four feet per day—without the need for fertilizers, pesticides or much water. Bamboo also spreads easily with little or no care. In addition, a bamboo grove releases some 35 percent more oxygen into the air than a similar-sized stand of trees, and it matures (and can be replanted) within seven years (compared to 30-50 years for a stand of trees), helping to improve soil conditions and prevent erosion along the way. Bamboo is so fast-growing that it can yield 20 times more timber than trees on the same area.
Today, heightened consumer environmental awareness has given sales of bamboo flooring, clothing, building materials and other items a huge boost.
As an attractive and sturdy alternative to hardwood flooring, bamboo is tough to beat. According to Pacific Northwest green building supplier Ecohaus, bamboo—one of the firm’s top selling flooring options—is harder, more moisture resistant and more stable than even oak hardwoods. Ecohaus carries both the EcoTimber and Teragren brands of bamboo, and ships worldwide.
Bamboo is also making waves in the clothing industry as an eco-chic and functional new fabric. Softer than cotton and with a texture more akin to silk or cashmere, bamboo clothes naturally draw moisture away from the skin, so it’s great for hot weather or for sweaty workouts. It also dries in about half the time as cotton clothing.
Some critics point out that the process of converting bamboo to fabric can take a heavy environmental toll, with the most cost-effective and widespread method involving a harsh chemical-based hydrolysis-alkalization process followed by multi-phase bleaching. The Green Guide counters, though, that bamboo still has a much lower environmental impact than pesticide-laden conventional cotton and petroleum-derived nylon and polyester fabrics. Consumers interested in trying out bamboo clothing should look for the Bamboosa and EcoDesignz labels, two of the leaders in the fast-growing sector of green fashion.
Bamboo is also making inroads into the paper industry, though there are fears that too fast a transition there would threaten ecologically diverse bamboo forests across Southeast Asia and elsewhere. The Earth Island Institute, among other groups concerned about forest loss due to paper consumption, would instead like to see more research into using agricultural waste to make paper instead of wood pulp or bamboo. Regardless, bamboo in all its forms might one day soon be one of the most important plants in the world.
CONTACTS: Ecohaus, www.ecohaus.com; The Green Guide, www.thegreenguide.com; Bamboosa, www.bamboosa.com; EcoDesignz, www.ecodesignz.com; Earth Island Institute, www.earthisland.org.
EarthTalk is produced by E/The Environmental Magazine. GOT AN ENVIRONMENTAL QUESTION? Send it to: EarthTalk, c/o E/The Environmental Magazine, P.O. Box 5098, Westport, CT 06881; submit it at: www.emagazine.com/earthtalk/thisweek/, or e-mail: earthtalk@emagazine.com. Read past columns at: www.emagazine.com/earthtalk/archives.php.Before they were our illustrious gatekeepers of knowledge and information, UC Berkeley professors and lecturers were just like us: scraping by on hard-earned tips, scoring coveted research positions and all the while scrubbing the dishes of some stranger. Check out some of the first “real” jobs of UC Berkeley’s esteemed faculty.
Alex Filippenko, department of astronomy
My first major job, other than being an informal undergraduate assistant in a chemistry lab at UCSB, was at UC’s Lick Observatory, about an hour’s drive east of San Jose. I held this position during the summers after my sophomore and junior years in college. Besides selling things in the gift shop and giving tours of the Great Refractor (under which James Lick is buried) during the afternoons, I used a telescope most nights to conduct my first publishable research project. This experience showed me the joy of explaining science to people, developed my research skills, introduced me to many well-known astronomers, and taught me how to get by on very little sleep. (However, being stuck on a mountain top, my social life was essentially nil.)
Darren Zook, department of political science
My first job was the very undramatic job of working in a grocery store, bagging groceries in Texas. It was one of those jobs that afterwards makes you appreciate every day of your life that you don’t have to do it anymore.
My first job was a 24h shift packing luxury Christmas hampers in a warehouse in Gloucestershire. … Very British. — Joseph Lavery
Joseph Lavery, department of English
My first job was a 24h shift packing luxury Christmas hampers in a warehouse in Gloucestershire. (A Christmas hamper is) just pickles, boozy fruit, plum pudding, etc., sent off to wealthy people at Christmastime. Very British.
Laura Stoker, department of political science
McDonalds! Age 16. :)
Joshua Hug, department of electrical engineering and computer sciences.
My first job was the summer after my senior year of high school. I was an Intern at Lockheed Martin Space Operations. They were pretty clever and offered a technical internship opportunity (with guaranteed post graduation job) for kids coming out of high school, allowing them to snag us before we found cooler gigs during college.
While there, I worked on a 3 person team to make an intranet website (that is, accessible only within the network for the building we were in). It wasn’t particularly useful work, and they kept us on a pretty short leash which kept us from doing anything particularly interesting, but I fondly remember going in during the evenings to make up missed work hours and listening to Bjork all by myself in an office building.
Martha Olney, department of economics
My first ever job was as a babysitter. Before I started, I took the Red Cross course for teenagers wanting to be a babysitter. When I began I charged 50 cents an hour (25 cents when they were asleep). I babysat enough to buy my first (used) car and pay the insurance. I enjoyed caring for kids and watching them grow up.
My first job with a real paycheck was in high school when I worked for the attendance office during and after school. I went from classroom to classroom and picked up the attendance cards which were left in little pockets near the door. We then ran the cards through a computer card reader which generated a list of who was absent. I enjoyed working with the attendance office staff. I got high marks for efficiency, organization, and friendliness.
My first non-school job was for an insurance agency. I worked 20 hours a week after school during my senior year of HS and then 40 hours a week in the summer. I started as a clerk doing filing and copying, but quickly acquired more responsibility and was the auto insurance specialist during the summer after HS. I enjoyed working with people, doing work with numbers. The owners of the firm were very pleased with my ability to work with clients, to problem solve, and to work efficiently and pleasantly.
To this day, whenever I pass a trash collection truck, the distinctive smell brings me back to those three weeks. — Duncan MacRae
Duncan MacRae, department of classics
I left high school in England without firm plans about where or when I would go to college, so while I was figuring that out, I signed up for a temp agency (I think the American term might be a “staffing agency”?). This meant that I didn’t so much have a single first job as first jobs. The most memorable of these was as a trash collector, covering for the regular workers’ vacation time. I did that for three weeks; it was really tough work, I remember that all my muscles seemed ache at the end of every day (which started at 4.30am). This was before the days of rolling garbage cans, so the job involved running down the street behind the truck and lifting trash bags off the curb. The best part of the job was when we got tipped a little extra to take away particularly large pieces of trash; the worst moment was when a trash bag burst open and spilled across the street — it turned out to be full of used diapers … To this day, whenever I pass a trash collection truck, the distinctive smell brings me back to those three weeks. I also washed a lot of dishes and served a lot of meals that summer and fall, but those jobs were less memorable.
Maximilian Auffhammer, department of agricultural and resource economics
My very first paying job was changing out computer tapes in a server room in mid 1980s Germany. I also helped cut off the sides of paper that had holes in it for dot matrix printing.
Leslea Hlusko, department of integrative biology
My first job after college was as a clerk in a mall bookstore working for minimum wage. I really didn’t like the manager but loved the books, and so expended a lot of effort trying to find excuses to hide among the shelves and read. I will never forget the sting of a customer who scoffed at me and asked if this was really all I was going to do with my college education from UVA. There was a recession going on at the time and that really was the best job I could find. After another retail job, I ended up working for a year as a receptionist/clerk at a law firm, which further solidified my desire to be a university professor.
David O’Sullivan, department of geography
My first job was a ‘real’ one, the kind of thing students really want straight out college: telecommunications electronics design engineer at a major (now bankrupt and no more) company. It was a job where I really could apply the hard-won knowledge I’d picked up in my engineering degree. Having said that, it was clear right away that there was still a lot to learn about simply getting along, working in teams, surviving meetings (and staying sane in the process), and learning to take corporate-speak not too seriously while keeping a straight face!
Michelle Douskey, College of Chemistry
I was in high school in Omaha, Nebraska. I was a hostess at a restaurant (called Joe Tess’s Fish Cafe), the person that decided where to seat people. I don’t know how many times a family would say for a family of four, “we have three and a half,” meaning the baby…
Nadia Ellis, department of English
My first job, right out of college, was English teacher at an all-boys high school in Kingston, Jamaica, where I’m from. I was 21 years old, probably looked like a minor, and I inherited a syllabus that I struggled mightily in my inexperience to make relatable to my students. But I loved that job and it’s still one of the most challenging things I’ve ever done. It’s the only position I applied for — I was absolutely certain I wanted teach high school as my career. And though I went on to become a professor, the sparks that lit my inspiration to go into the classroom then are the same ones that fire me now.
I swore I’d never work in restaurants again — but my next jobs after that were dishwasher, dishwasher, busboy, and waiter. —Jeffrey Knapp
Jeffrey Knapp, department of English
My first job, after washing cars, mowing lawns, etc., was as a dishwasher in a restaurant called The Fin and Claw. Awful experience, and I swore I’d never work in restaurants again — but my next jobs after that were dishwasher, dishwasher, busboy, and waiter.
Christine Palmer, department of American studies
At 16, I held my very first taxed job. I worked at Miles Avenue Elementary School as a Bilingual Teacher Assistant. It was a summer job at a year-round school, in a mixed class of third and fourth graders, and was mostly translation, helping students with their work, and making sure no one died on the playground or escaped on field trips. My first paying job, however, was ironing my father’s shirts — one dollar per shirt, which wasn’t bad for a 7-year-old.
Munis Faruqui, department of South and Southeast Asian studies
My first job in college, through freshman year, was as a dinner-shift dishwasher. I loved the camaraderie of the cleaning line and the kitchen staff. I was shocked to see how much food got wasted by students. I was also struck by passing comments about my willingness to do “that kind of work.”
My first and only job after college was as a paralegal in a large NYC law firm. I loved getting a “real” paycheck. I also valued the experience of being in a “real-world”job with deadlines, responsibilities, and lots of group work. However, I also found most of the lawyers to be pompous, self-important and, most surprisingly, unhappy with their lot in life (this despite the big paychecks and seeming prestige).
Andres Cediel, Graduate School of Journalism
My first job was working the cash register at my college’s snack bar. I worked the morning shift, ringing up coffee and pastries for all the administrative staff who came in to start their day. I did not yet drink coffee myself, and remember being tired and bleary eyed as I calculated orders at 7am. It was a window into a world of working adults, which made me appreciate my privileged life as a student even more.
John DeNero, department of electrical engineering and computer sciences
My very first job was helping a neighbor add an outdoor wooden deck to his house. I poured concrete, learned how to use a nail gun, and sanded a lot of wood. My first full-time job was a business analyst position with McKinsey & Company in San Francisco, just after finishing college.
Paul Hilfinger, department of electrical engineering and computer sciences
A summer job with Chevrolet Engineering Division of GM in Warren, MI. I spent the summer developing a report generator to be used with an old IBM database system. Rather fun, actually: I avoided a good deal of coding by using the IBM 360 assembler as the input processor.
Being young and fearless helped. Right after, I moved on to New York and graduate school, and the rest is history. — Kate O’Neill
Kate O’Neill, department of environmental science, policy and management
When I left college I moved from England to Ireland and spent a year as a lecturer in Economics at University College, Cork; my undergrad professor recommended me when they had a last minute departure! I taught the Econ 101 equivalent and an upper division course and I was barely 4 years older than the freshmen (!) I taught. Fantastic experience, especially living in Ireland for the year, making a lot of friends, and being thrown into a tough but rewarding job. Being young and fearless helped. Right after, I moved on to New York and graduate school, and the rest is history.
Amy Gurowitz, department of political science
I worked at a gas station. It was strange and kind of creepy at night. People were always surprised I worked there (as a teenage girl).
Malcolm Feeley, Boalt School of Law
My first sustained full time job was after my freshman year in college. I took some time off, hitchhiked from Texas to Idaho, and hired on with the US Forest Service for several months. I was part of a crew that systematically walked through quadrants in the forest to pull up plants that spread a disease that kills White Pine trees. But it was a hot summer, and I ended up spending about two months fighting one huge forest fire after another. I liked the work and came a hair’s breath away from hitchhiking to Missoula, Montana and enrolling for a degree in forestry and wildlife management at the University of Montana. But I ended up returning to Texas, completing college there, and going to graduate school, which after the moving around a bit led me to the Law School here at Berkeley, where I’ve been for the past thirty five years.
Robert Beatty, department of molecular and cell biology
My first real job was as a computer coder when I was 16. I would write numbers on sociology research questionnaires, for example, Yes=1, No=2, California = 48, and then look up occupation to find the number for a specific job, teacher =025, chicken sexer=378. After the questionnaires were coded, the numbers would be put on to punch cards for computer input and analyzed with the giant computers back then. The job was great fun because most the people were young like me and the atmosphere was relaxed as long as you got the job done (this meant getting a certain number of questionnaires done each hour). Of course, it was also great to have money so I could have a car.
I and the other cook’s helper, who was also promoted to “cook,” were reheatin’ like mad for the remainder of the Olympics! — Greg Choy
Greg Choy, department of ethnic studies
It was the summer of 1984, the Olympics in Los Angeles, and my college graduation. My first job out of college was as a “cook’s helper” for the dinner crew in the Olympic Village, but not in LA. Few people know or remember that there was an Olympic Village on the campus of UC Santa Barbara, from where I graduated, to accommodate athletes in the rowing competitions at nearby Lake Cachuma.
The title “cook’s helper” essentially meant I was a go-fer for the actual cooks. The truth of the matter, though, was that no one was doing much cooking. Essentially, all we did was un-package and heat up pre-prepared frozen foods, put them in warming compartments where other recently hired grads would retrieve them, place them onto the serving line, and dish them out to the athletes, coaches and other staff. The only food prepared on site was salads. Our “uniforms” were mauve-colored smocks and matching goofy caps. ARA, who ran the food operations then, hired way too many of us and, toward the end of the Olympics, laid off way too many of us — including all of the cooks. So I was promoted to “lead cook” my last two weeks (an hourly raise by $2.00). I and the other cook’s helper, who was also promoted to “cook,” were reheatin’ like mad for the remainder of the Olympics! Neither one of us had much of a clue about how to run a kitchen. The manager, who often kept himself cubbied away in a nearby office in the dining commons, told us “Yeah, we fired too many of you. Just do your best and try not to get anyone sick.” Unforgettable words of leadership, which we followed to the letter.
In the end, we got to keep our smocks and caps, two Olympic pins — one from ARA and one from UCSB Olympic Village — and we were all given UCSB Olympic Village posters and tee shirts, all of which I have seen on eBay selling for well into the tens of dollars (but my Lithuanian ’84 Olympic basketball team tie-dye tee? Priceless!). Resumé line: 1984: Served six weeks in busy dining commons at Olympic Village. Took on leadership tasks. Can reheat with the best of them! It was, if nothing else, a lot of fun.
Alexandra Yoon-Hendricks is the managing editor. Contact her at [email protected] and follow her on Twitter at @ayoonhendricks.[following up from here]
All other things being equal, which lane is the fastest?
This problem has obsessed me for years. It’s my DaVinci code. It’s my love for math, for mathematical reasoning, for the relentless deconstruction of something that seems simply intuitive into data, models, and computation.
This is also my love for WCYDWT media.
Perfunctory Pitch For WCYDWT Math Instruction
You have here a simple question that anyone can access. Doesn’t matter that you’ve never run a linear regression in your life. If you’ve ever shopped for groceries, if you’ve ever stood in line with a candy bar, a soda bottle, and a matinee starting across town in ten minutes, you have an opinion here. And I can use that.
The question is simple and so is the answer but the justification is extremely complicated, which is exactly how I’d like to balance the learning experience. We will argue. There are easily a dozen variables affecting the line speed that have nothing to do with the number of customers in each line or the number of items in their baskets. You could assign some field research here. I spent ninety minutes last week just watching, counting, and timing groceries as they slid across a scanner.
The question is also scalable. We can remix this single image into endlessly difficult scenarios (or easier scenarios) that will push a student’s hypothesis to the crumbling point and back again.
A (Broad) Lesson Plan
Gather the data. Or supply the data. Graph the data. Develop a model. Test the model. Talk about the effect of outliers. Assign weight to outlying variables.
I threw some questions on a worksheet five years ago, fairly predictable stuff like “what does it mean when a point is above the line of best fit?” At this point, though, I’m hesitant to constrain the activity even that lightly. I’d almost rather pick a fight with a student who finished early and let the rising pitch of that conversation fold in a few more learners.
Other Remarks
Check is slower than credit which is slower than cash. Students are sometimes surprised that cash is faster than credit. From my observations, the fastest cash transaction will outpace the fastest credit transaction by a wide margin but there is also huge variance in credit transactions. I mean, some people have absolutely no idea what they are doing with that thing. The same can’t really be said of cash. The store manager hooked up some checkout data, which was awesome. At first, he declined my request for numbers while agreeing to let me float around the store. Then he brought back the mother lode: checkout scanner data from a single six-hour shift. The data was aggregated in a few unhelpful ways but no way do I mind this particular excerpt, which gives away the store: The y-intercept is non-zero! This never fails to trip my fuses. It should take you zero seconds to purchase zero items but you can’t ignore the fixed time cost of the pleasantries (“Hi. How are you doing? Do you need any help out?”) and the transaction itself. The express lane isn’t faster. The manager backed me up on this one. You attract more people holding fewer total items, but as the data shows above, when you add one person to the line, you’re adding 48 extra seconds to the line length (that’s “tender time” added to “other time”) without even considering the items in her cart. Meanwhile, an extra item only costs you an extra 2.8 seconds. Therefore, you’d rather add 17 more items to the line than one extra person! I can’t believe I’m dropping exclamation points in an essay on grocery shopping but that’s how this stuff makes me feel.
Here’s the Photoshop template, which you’re welcome to remix with new numbers or, even better, revamp into something altogether less offensive to the eye.
[BTW: check out this fun snap from Dan Callahan of the Whole Foods staff bulletin board.A proposed three-way merger in Malaysia will create the world's first Islamic bank that will have enough clout to challenge the dominance of conventional, often Western, banks in the industry and influence the way Islamic finance deals are made.
The Islamic units of market leaders such as HSBC Holdings and Standard Chartered have long used their parents' vast networks to win leading roles in global deals. Most of such deals involve designing and distributing Islamic bonds, or sukuk, a fast-growing segment in the sector.
By contrast, local banks in the Islamic world lack the scale and reach to entice corporate and sovereign issuers from Europe and Asia. Many of them are owned by wealthy families or the state, and fear of losing control has limited mergers and consolidation in a still highly fragmented industry.
Read MoreRussian President Putin blames Malaysian plane tragedy onUkraine
In comes Malaysia, whose government is keen to make leaders out of the country's banks in global Islamic finance. Last week, CIMB Group Holdings, RHB Capital and Malaysia Building Society secured regulatory approval to begin their merger talks.
Their amalgamation would yield a stand-alone Islamic bank that is separate from the conventional banking operation of the enlarged bank. This Islamic bank will have a cross-border presence sizable enough to win big mandates, as well as a Malaysian model of Islamic finance that is regarded by many investors to be simpler and less confusing, analysts say.
"The next meaningful stage for Islamic banking is a bank with connectivity across key markets and separate markets," said Abdul Rauf Rashid, country managing partner for EY Malaysia. "Putting together and creating this large entity is a start, but the next step is integrating them into one powerful unit that can go out and build the market."
Read MoreMalaysia banks in mega-merger talks
The merger would include the creation of a so-called mega Islamic bank. Malaysia's central bank defines such an entity as having a minimum $1 billion in paid-up capital.
A successful merger may pave the way for other Malaysian banks to follow suit as they expand globally. That would help internationalize the Malaysian model of Islamic finance, analysts say.
Malaysia also has the capacity to standardize industry practices, which vary due to different interpretations of Islamic law, they say.
Malaysia has a centralized, top-down approach to creating sharia-compliant products. Other countries have allowed sharia boards of individual Islamic banks to decide whether their products and activities obey religious principles. The latter approach sometimes leads to disagreement over the design of a product and even confusion among investors, analysts say.
Read MoreMalaysia rate hike: Will they or won't they?
Some investors have decided to stick with the big conventional banks such as Standard Chartered. The banks have their own Islamic scholars and the financial clout to lead in the structuring of Islamic finance deals.
"When we have mega banks, and trim down to fewer players, it will be easier to harmonize things. Bearing in mind that it will go global, we are positioning Malaysia as the leader for Islamic banking," said Johan Lee, partner at Kuala Lumpur-based law firm J.Lee & Associates.
No longer a concept
The mega Islamic bank concept has been discussed in the industry for years. Previous efforts have failed to take off partly because of scant interest from the private sector.
Read MoreMalaysia's central bank raises rates to help debt
Most banks in the Middle East are retail-oriented or lack the financial expertise to compete with large multinationals. Al Rajhi Bank - Saudi Arabia's largest listed lender and the world's biggest Islamic bank - has never issued a sukuk and is only now developing its investment banking business.
Smaller Islamic banks in the region such as Qatar Islamic Bank and Al Baraka Banking Group are hardly in the league of Western banks when it comes to Islamic finance.A woman looks familiar, but you can't remember her name or where you met her. New research by UC Irvine neuroscientists suggests the memory exists – you simply can't retrieve it.
Using advanced brain imaging techniques, the scientists discovered that a person's brain activity while remembering an event is very similar to when it was first experienced, even if specifics can't be recalled.
"If the details are still there, hopefully we can find a way to access them," said Jeff Johnson, postdoctoral researcher at UCI's Center for the Neurobiology of |
the time. I’ve experienced this throughout my career, I’m talking pre-UFC days.
“I’ve had people not show up at the airport, I’ve had people not show up at the weigh-ins and I’ve had people pull out at the very last minute. This is something I am accustomed to, but we carry on. It is what it is. An opponent dropped out, a new opponent is in – it makes no difference whatsoever.”
SBG head coach John Kavanagh revealed his opinion that a win against Brandao would bolster his featherweight’s stock more than one against Miller last month and McGregor agreed with his boss and highlighted why he thinks the Brazilian is a tougher challenge.
“I believe Diego Brandao is a bigger name than Cole Miller. He probably has some more impressive wins than Cole. He’s an Ultimate Fighter winner where Cole wasn’t, he’s a Brazilian jiu-jitsu black belt and he’s got some nice knockouts on his record.
“If coach thinks that’s the way it is, I believe him, it’s true. It doesn’t matter who they put in front of me though, this is my show. A win against anyone here puts me in a great position,” he said.
Just back from his training camp in Iceland, McGregor discussed his preparation alongside team-mates Gunnar Nelson, Cathal Pendred and Paddy Holohan who are also set for action in The O2 on July 19th.
He said: “That was my third time over in Iceland, it’s a beautiful place. The people are great, the food is nice, it’s isolated and it’s away from everything. It just made sense for us to head over there with Gunni in the co-main event because everything is going crazy over here.”
He also highlighted the contrast between the laid back atmosphere of Mjolnir and the mania that awaited him on his return to the Irish capital.
“I swear to God, I only got home last night and when I went to the gym today there were 300 people there with cameras. This is the circus that is fight month. I just thought it was great to get over there to calm my mind and prepare my body.”
The former Cage Warriors double weight world champion admitted that he has begun to get used to his celebrity status and outlined how the attention he is getting goes hand in hand with his success in the Octagon.
“I think I’m getting a little bit more used to it,” said McGregor. “Again, this is all preparation, this is the life I have chosen. To reach the top level it must be like this. I’m just lapping it all up, I’m not getting too caught up in it. I’ll just carry on doing my thing and that’s that.”
With fans almost at fever pitch two weeks out from the UFC’s July return, the Dubliner revealed that he has had to factor in the enormous reception he is sure to get during his fight into his preparation.
“I’ve been trying to absorb it all. I’m not just focusing on the contest, I believe the contest is already a done deal. I’m thinking about the whole show. I’m looking forward to experiencing this historic event for Irish mixed martial arts.
“For everyone that’s been involved with the sport, they’ve waited for so long for the UFC to be finally back here, it’s going to be huge and I’m really looking forward to it,” he said.
The Crumlin man went on to claim he is “better than ever” after his ACL surgery and how he feels “complete” for the first time in his career.
“I learn from everything. I learn from my wins and I learn from my losses. I’ve grown from that and I feel complete right now. Everything has just aligned for this to be perfect. Everything feels perfect.
“There’s not a lot of people that can comeback from an ACL injury, there’s even a smaller amount that have comeback and been better than they were before, and that’s how I feel.”
Now with Miller out of the main event, McGregor is unsure whether Dustin Poirier will be in attendance at the Dublin show. The American is scheduled as his next opponent in a title eliminator bout, granted the Irishman’s success in Dublin, but the SBG product believes Poirier could’ve stepped in for Miller if he was really interested in fighting him.
“I haven’t got a clue about him, who cares about him? He’s supposed to be a top ten guy and this is a main event fight,” he berated Poirier. “He’s team-mates with Cole so he knew he was going to pull out. Did you hear him campaign for this fight?
“He could’ve main evented a UFC card, there’s only a few of these featherweights that have been the main event before. He’s trying to talk about earning stripes and shit like that, this is the main event of the fastest selling UFC event in history and when the injury happened there was silence from these people. I don’t dwell on these idiots, yeah?”
As for a prediction as to how his bout with Brandao will finish, “The Notorious” was direct and confident in his forecast:
“I believe I’m gonna stiffen him up early, in the first round anyway.”
Finally, asked to comment on the announcement of Aisling Daly as a contestant on The Ultimate Fighter 20, McGregor was full of praise for his 115 lbs team-mate.
“I believe she’ll do very well, I’m over the moon for Aisling. She’s been around for so long, she’s Ireland’s fighting lady now. She’s over there in Vegas, she’s competing on this Ultimate Fighter now.
“Her mind has been strong lately, really strong. She can go all the way and win that strap, no doubt. She’s in a great place over there and I’m really eager to hear how she’s getting on.”
@PetesyCarrollWhen it comes to military tech, the US Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) usually makes the headlines with its gadgets, gizmos, and kickass robots. It’s a prolific supporter of robo-defence projects, from Boston Dynamics’ Cheetah and its cousin Big Dog to autonomous hands and unsteady humanoids.
But the latest piece of military robot news comes from across the Atlantic at the UK’s Ministry of Defence, which has unveiled an animatronic man to test suits and equipment for the British armed forces. “Porton Man” looks pretty impressively modern and human-like until you realise he’s stuck to a clunky external frame that moves his limbs like a puppet. But hey, at least he’s not stumbling through steps at a snail’s pace before inevitably crashing to the ground, like DARPA's cyborg hopefuls.
The frame lets Porton Man run, walk (sorry, “march”), sit, and kneel in mid-air, to mimic the common movements of a human soldier. He can also hold his arms up as if sighting a weapon.
He’s not meant to be used in the field at all; he’s more like a high-tech test dummy for equipment in the lab. The MOD writes that Porton Man is covered in more than a hundred sensors to record data during the testing of things like chemical and biological suits, and that the mannequin is “unique to the UK.”
“Dstl (The Defence Science and Technology Laboratory) is also the only laboratory in the world that can use chemical warfare agents to assess the effectiveness of complete clothing systems such as the chemical, biological and radiological suits used by UK armed forces,” they explain.
The robot was built by UK-based firm i-bodi Technology, which has created similar-looking models to Porton Man including one that sweats and one that is chemically resistant, as well as rather less serious projects like baby dinosaur automata for museums.
The company explained they used Formula One tech to keep the mannequin lightweight and give it a wide range of movement; its body parts are made of carbon composites. Western Daily Press reports that, as a result, it’s around 66kg lighter than its predecessor at just 14kg, and that it can flex its ankles, turn its head, and move its thumbs so as to wear gloves.
All that’s left for him is to suit up and see how he holds out against fake chemical warfare, all in the name of helping soldiers tackle the real thing. As the idea of war bots going the way of chemical weapons isn’t that difficult to imagine, it’s comforting to know that at least one is working on the side of defence.
Inset image: Ministry of DefenceMenhaden are well known among fishermen and conservationists. The small fish, typically less than a foot long, is a major source of food for striped bass, bluefin tuna, redfish and bluefish. According to Paul Greenberg in an editorial for The New York Times, all of these fish are unable to synthesize omega-3s; instead, they get the fatty acid from menhaden. Fish oil pills are also largely comprised of fish oil from menhaden, Greenberg reports.Menhaden are considered among the sea’s most crucial creatures—they act as water filters—but “are entering the final losing phases of a century-and-a-half fight for survival,” Greenberg writes. A company called Omega Protein of Houston catches 90 percent of U.S. menhaden, and maintains processing plants in North Carolina and Virginia. Omega Protein is allowed to fish for menhaden in federal waters, resulting in “a half-billion” menhaden being fished per year.Greenberg says “13 of the 15 Atlantic states have banned Omega Protein’s boats from their waters” due to the issue. But that’s not enough. Greenberg wants federal legislation banning menhaden fishing in federal waters, coupled with similar Virginia state legislation for the Chesapeake Bay, site of the world’s “largest menhaden nursery.”Menhaden are a “forage fish species,” according to Alice Friedemann, who discussed the issue last March for The Ethicurean. Other forage fish species are also being overfished, including sardines and anchovies. Estimates from the U.N. Food and Agriculture Organization show that within ten years, the “supplies of sources of fishmeal and fish oil ” will not meet demand, Friedemann notes.She goes on to describe how menhaden play a “critical role in the health of any aquatic ecosystem” by filtering out phytoplankton and consuming algae. The absence of menhaden is partially to blame for “the 8,000-square-mile dead zone in the Gulf of Mexico.”FRIDAY, May 7 (HealthDay News) -- Infections during infancy or childhood do not seem to raise the risk of autism, new research finds.
Researchers analyzed birth records for the 1.4 million children born in Denmark between 1980 and 2002, as well as two national registries that keep track of infectious diseases. They compared those records with records of children referred to psychiatric wards and later diagnosed with an autism spectrum disorder. Of those children, almost 7,400 were diagnosed with an autism spectrum disorder.
The study found that children who were admitted to the hospital for an infectious disease, either bacterial or viral, were more likely to receive a diagnosis of autism spectrum disorder.
However, children admitted to the hospital for non-infectious diseases were also more likely to be diagnosed with autism than kids who were never hospitalized, the study found.
And the researchers could point to no particular infection that upped the risk.
They therefore conclude that childhood infections cannot be considered a cause of autism.
"We find the same relationship between hospitalization due to many different infections and autism," noted lead study author Dr. Hjordis Osk Atladottir, of the departments of epidemiology and biostatistics at the Institute of Public Health, University of Aarhus in Denmark. "If there were a causal relationship, it should be present for specific infections and not provide such an overall pattern of association."
The study was published in the May issue of the Archives of Pediatrics & Adolescent Medicine.
Autism is a neurodevelopmental disorder that is characterized by problems with social interaction, verbal and nonverbal communication, and restricted interests and behaviors.
The prevalence of autism seems to be rising, with an estimated 1 in 110 children affected by the disorder, according to the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.
Despite significant effort, the causes of autism remain unclear, although it's believed both genetic and environmental factors contribute, said Dr. Andrew Zimmerman, director of medical research at the Center for Autism and Related Disorders at Kennedy Krieger Institute in Baltimore.
Previous research has suggested that children with autism are more likely to have immune system abnormalities, leading some to theorize that autism might be triggered by infections, Zimmerman said.
Some parents of children with autism have also reported that their children have more frequent infections. While a few studies have shown children with autism may suffer slightly more ear and respiratory infections compared to normally developing children, others found no such connection, Atladottir said.
In addition, there are anecdotal reports of children developing autism after serious infections such as meningitis or encephalitis, Zimmerman said.
In the study, researchers searched for any connection between those particular illnesses, as well as a host of others, including bacterial, viral and fungal infections, and respiratory illnesses, herpes virus and urinary tract infections, specifically. They came up empty handed.
"Yes, there is an increased rate of hospitalization preceding the diagnosis of autism, but it doesn't support a causal relationship between autism and infections," Zimmerman said.
There is a wide range of reasons why children with autism may be more likely to be hospitalized for an illness, the study authors said. For example, autistic children could be more prone to physical illnesses, either due to autism or other medical conditions.
Parents of children with autism frequently report that their children are prone to gastrointestinal problems, such as chronic diarrhea and constipation. Some estimates put the number of kids with autism and gastrointestinal difficulties at 40%, Zimmerman said.
Another reason kids with autism might be more likely to be hospitalized for infectious or other illnesses is that their parents are worried about their child's development and are therefore more likely to seek out medical care.
More medical visits might also help prompt an autism diagnosis, Atladottir said. "It could be that medical professionals see the developmental problems in the child and refer the child further to a child psychiatrist," he explained.
Although this study found no link between autism and childhood infections, prenatal infections -- particularly during the first and second trimesters -- may up the chances children will have autism, prior research has found.
A study published online April 23 in the Journal of Autism and Developmental Disorders by the same group of researchers found a link between autism and hospitalization for maternal viral infection in the first trimester, such as flu, and bacterial infection in the second trimester.
Children whose mothers had a viral infection requiring hospitalization during the first trimester had nearly three times the risk of a later autism diagnosis, according to that study.
Copyright © 2010 HealthDay. All rights reserved.
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SOURCES: Hjordis Osk Atladottir, M.D., department of epidemiology and biostatistics, Institute of Public Health, University of Aarhus, Aarhus, Denmark; Andrew Zimmerman, M.D., director of medical research, Center for Autism and Related Disorders, Kennedy Krieger Institute, Baltimore; May 2010, Archives of Pediatrics & Adolescent MedicineOriginally published in Hebrew in Ha'aretz.
Since the Goldstone report, Israel's political leaders and public have been agitated over what they claim to be a worldwide effort to "delegitimize" the Jewish state. A recent study by an Israeli policy institute warning of a looming global threat to the country's legitimacy was discussed by Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu's Cabinet, whose members concluded that this threat, believed to be motivated by anti-Semitism, is a greater danger to the country's existence than the nuclear threat from Iran.
Most Israelis, particularly the present government, have been blithely indifferent to repeated international condemnations of Israel's systematic theft of Palestinian territory on which it has been settling its own Jewish population in blatant violation of international law. Yet their reaction to what they see as an attack on the "legitimacy" of the State of Israel, a concept foreign to international law, seems to bring them to the edge of hysteria.
In fact, Israel's legitimacy within its 1967 borders has never been challenged by the international community. It is its behavior on territory beyond its own borders to which the international community - including every U.S. administration - has objected. To construe the condemnation of violations of international law as anti-Semitism is absurd.
It was not an anti-Semite seeking to delegitimize the Jewish state, but Theodore Meron, an internationally respected jurist and the legal advisor to Israel's Foreign Ministry, who following the war of 1967 conveyed the following legal opinion to Israel's Foreign Minister Abba Eban: "[C]ivilian settlement in the administered territories contravenes explicit provisions of the Fourth Geneva Convention," to which Israel is a signatory. That Convention's ban on population transfer is "categorical and not conditional upon the motives for the transfer or its objectives. [The Convention's] purpose is to prevent settlement in occupied territory of citizens of the occupying state."
Existing states do not lose their legitimacy because their governments engage in illegal behavior. There is a presumption in international law of state continuity even if the central government collapses and the state becomes a failed state, as has been the case with Somalia. For all of the international condemnations of the behavior of Saddam Hussein's Iraq and the governments of Iran and North Korea, no one ever questioned those countries' legitimacy.
There is therefore something bizarre in Israel's insistence that condemnations of its violations of international law are not intended to challenge the illegality of its settlements and continuing occupation but the legitimacy of its very existence. If Israel keeps it up, that insistence may well turn into a self-fulfilling prophecy.
Perhaps Israel's right wing government believes that by accusing the international community of seeking to undermine its existence it will distract attention from an increasingly untenable claim that Israel is a model democracy that also enshrines Jewish values. Both claims have been undermined by its settlements policy and its determination to maintain the status quo, bringing into question the very foundation of America's "special relationship" with Israel.
When a state's denial of the individual and national rights of a large part of its population becomes permanent - a permanence that has been the goal of Israel's settlement project from its very outset (and that many believe has been achieved) - that state ceases to be a democracy. When the reason for that double disenfranchisement is that population's ethnic and religious identity, the state is practicing a form of apartheid or racism. The democratic dispensation that Israel provides for its mostly Jewish citizenry cannot hide its changing (or changed) character. A political arrangement that limits democracy to a privileged class and keeps others behind military checkpoints, barbed-wire fences and separation walls does not define democracy. It defines its absence.
The claim that Israel is the incarnation and defender of Jewish values is contradicted by its treatment of an Arab population that has now lived for over two generations under Israel's military subjugation - treatment that Moshe Arens, a former Likud Defense and Foreign Minister, has warned is turning that population into a permanent underclass of "carriers of water and hewers of wood." It is entirely at odds with Biblical admonitions and Prophetic exhortations warning against injustices committed by the privileged and the powerful against the stranger and the powerless.
Israel's problem is not the Palestinian or Arab refusal to recognize it as a Jewish state. It is, rather, the increasing difficulty of Jews familiar with Jewish values to recognize it as a Jewish state. Rather than demanding that Palestinians declaim on Israel's democratic and Jewish identity, or conjuring non-existent threats to Israel's existence, Netanyahu and his government would be better advised adjusting Israel's policies toward a people that has lived under its unforgiving military occupation in a way that honors their country's democratic and Jewish beginnings. That would contribute far more to its "legitimacy" and to its long-range security than its present undemocratic and very un-Jewish course.
Henry Siegman, director of the U.S./Middle East Project, is a visiting research professor at the Sir Joseph Hotung Middle East Program, School of Oriental and African Studies, University of London.Get the biggest Manchester City 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
Manchester City are reported to have been offered Adem Ljajic by Roma as part of their bid to land striker Edin Dzeko.
The Serie A club are keen on securing the Blues’ 29-year-old striker but would struggle to find the £20million-plus fee that City want for the player.
But sources in Serbia claim that City are keen on 23-year-old attacking midfielder Ljajic – who was a target for United five years ago.
Dzeko is up for sale at the right price as City look to overhaul their squad this summer, and his Bosnia team-mate Miralem Pjanic says that his friend is keen on a move.
“Dzeko would walk to Rome and wages would not be a problem, but it depends on the club,” said Pjanic.
Dzeko had a miserable season with City, scoring just six goals and seeing new boy Wilfried Bony move ahead of him in the pecking order after he signed in January.
Ljajic has scored 15 goals in 72 appearances for Roma and is now a regular in the Serbia squad after being omitted by former manager Sinisa Mihajlovic for refusing to sing the national anthem for religious reasons.
The former Partizan Belgrade and Fiorentina player usually plays as a wide front man – left or right - for Roma in a 4-3-3 formation, but tends to play the number ten role for his country.
More on City
Quick and skilful, he was signed by Roma from Fiorentina two years ago in a deal worth £10.5million, as a replacement for Erik Lamela, who left to join Tottenham.I recently grabbed the Recon Bivy to replace a piece of polycro from Gossamer Gear that I'd been using as a ground sheet. I have a one man tarp and this bivy is a great complement. I spent an especially cold night in the woods recently and the bivy helped keep everything in place - which was essential on a cold night. I honestly believe I might have frozen a little without the Recon. Additionally, I was sleeping on ground that had been rained on throughout the day, and I stayed dry in this thing. Super light, easy to set up, and now an essential part of my shelter set up. The other thing I loved about my experience with Enlightened Equipment was the customer service. When I ordered this bivy, I needed it pretty quickly for my trip. After ordering, I was worried it might not get shipped in time, and I reached out EE to see if they could change my order to expedited shipping. After talking to customer service, the girl assured me that it would arrive in time without the expedited shipping (which it did). This saved me $50 in expedited shipping costs, and I'm super grateful for that. I now have a quilt, wind shirt, and bivy from EE, and they're all essential parts of my ultralight setup. Great company! Great gear!
Recon Bivy (regular)
Used this bivy for a week long trip in the Wind Rive Range in July. Weather was generally good, I experienced no heavy rain storms. It was generally windy though.
This was my first experience with a bivy, and I liked this one. It seems a good balance between a bug net and a bivy with full coverage.
I used it under a 9X10 DCF HMG tarp. The bivy fit nicely in the middle of the tarp, with a good distance from the front and end openings. I switched from attaching the bivy’s guy lines from the hooks in the ridge line of the tarp and my hiking poles. If I had a good tight ridge line, the hooks worked well. If the ridge line was less than tight, the guy lines pulled down the ridge somewhat.
I did get lazy a couple of times and didn’t use the foot guy line, and once I didn’t use either guy line. The foot guy line is sort of optional. It does help with circulation and gives the bivy more of a tent like feel, pulling the fabric away from the bag. Using it without the head guy line was OK, if you don’t mind netting in your face. Using the head guy line is otherwise a good idea as it lifts the netting from your face nicely, and agains gives the bivy a more tent like feel.
One note on the netting, even if you use the head guy line, the netting will touch your shoulder when sleeping on your side. I always had a bag pulled up over my shoulder, so this was not an issue. But if the weather was hot, and the netting lay on your shoulder, bug could bite through.
I used a Thermarest Neo Air large. I fit just fine. As noted above, my shoulder touched the netting, but it you used a thinner mat, this may not be such an issue.
For a bag I used the EE Revelation. My feet and lower legs were nicely enclosed and I never suffered from cold feet or legs.
Set up was easy. I did end up pegging the four corners. This kept the bag in place on less the level camping spots. Also, it gave some additional structure to the bivy. I’m no so sure about the pixie sticks in the corners. I don’t know if they do much and kept sticking out when I tried to roll up the bivy.
As noted above, the weather was good and I did not experience any rain blowin in my tarp. I am curious how well the head sheet would keep out rain spray in a down pour. I do think it does a good job with wind. My foot box did get wet one night from heavy condensation inside the tarp. Heavy winds made me put the tarp in storm mode, so there wasn’t much air circulation. The foot box did wet through and my bag got very damp. I was able to dry both out fairly quickly in the morning while making breakfast.
I know I could use the bivy with a ground cloth but I used one anyways. Used a piece of 2mil painters drop cloth. I am still not sure if I needed it. I know that floor is tough, but it just seemed too risky. Another consideration was pine tree sap in one camping spot. Getting that off the bivy may have been difficult.
Per Henry Stiles suggestion at TarpTent, I did paint lines on the floor of the bivy with a silicone/mineral spirits mix. These seemed to keep my mattress in place. I still did slip around on the ground cloth on slightly uneven spots.
I like this bivy and will use it again from summer camping. I think I’ll use a more full coverage bivy, like the Katabatic Bristlecone, for the shoulder seasons, when bugs aren’t an issue and I may need a bit more coverage.Photo: Jorge Quiñoa
(Versión en español)
We meet with Kim Stanley Robinson (Waukegan, 1952) in Barcelona, during the annual literary convention Kosmopolis. Robinson is a respected and popular hard science fiction writer, especially known for his trilogy dealing with martian colonization and terraformation (Red Mars, Green Mars, Blue Mars). After Mars, he imagined humanity expanding through the whole Solar System (2312) or trying with enormous difficulties to reach for interstellar space (Aurora). In some of his novels climate change issues take a central role, particularly in the Science in the Capital trilogy and the recently published New York 2140. And sometimes he looks into the past instead of the future, describing life during an Ice Age (Shaman) or imagining how world history would have changed if all Europeans died during the Black Plague (The years of rice and salt). Most of Robinson’s stories, although peppered with revolutions, murders and catastrophes, are utopian and optimistic in their core. He speaks with restraint, correction and seriousness, but sudden flares of contagious enthusiasm light up his speech when discussing the transformative power of science or the urgent necessity of changing the current socio economic regime.
You are known as an utopian novelist. Frequently utopia is seen as something unattainable, a theoretical ideal of perfection, but in your novels it seems something more practical…
I’ve been following the definition of utopia sketched out by H.G. Wells: a dynamic kind of history without an end point; it’s not a perfect state, it’s a continuous process where every advance has to be defended against falling apart or going backwards. Joanna Russ, a great american science fiction writer, used to talk about optopia: given the conditions that you’ve been handed, you get to the optimum best situation politically. This is better for storytelling: you don’t have the “walk to the zoo” feel of standard utopia: even Thomas More’s Utopia has a little bit of story, but it’s really the description of an achieved society. Since Ursula K. Le Guin’s The Dispossessed and even before, the story of dynamic utopias has been told one way or another.
The character Arkady Bogdanov of The Martian Trilogy is a descendant of Alexander Bogdanov, the author of the utopian novel Red Star. How did Red Star help to shape your Red Mars, and what do you find appealing about Alexander Bogdanov?
I love Bogdanov. When Percival Lowell made his reports on what he had seen of Mars through his telescope and talked about the possibility of canals and martians, there was an international response. For Wells it was War of the Worlds and the idea of an aggressive ancient civilization, for Kurd Lasswitz in Auf Zwei Planeten Mars is an advanced technological utopia; for Bogdanov Mars was a space used to discuss the future of a communist utopia where the martians were red in the sense of being political leftists, ahead of us, advanced. Red Star is a really good utopian novel, and it anticipates many of the problems the Soviet Union had, a socialist country surrounded by capitalist countries. Bogdanov was a really interesting thinker in systems theory, and his writing is being remembered in different contexts because of his Tektology and his web of life studies. I wanted to make sure that my Mars trilogy picked up all the strands of all the previous Mars novels.
One of the highlights of The Martian Trilogy is the writing of the Mars Constitution. Many measures are proposed in those chapters, and I would like to take a closer look at some of them and ask if you see them to be feasible on our Earth. For instance: common stewardship of natural resources: air, land, water… How could such a “management of the commons” be implemented on Earth?
That’s a good question. We do have certain commons, the oceans and Antarctica, but these are somewhat empty and uninhabitable spaces. That phrase of the Martian Constitution is an attack on the law of property. It’s anticapitalist, fundamental marxism: land itself belongs to everybody as a commons. This is similar to the native american view that you can’t own land, a concept shocking in our capitalist system. There’s a little bit of talk of the return of the commons in regards to who owns the Internet. That is kind of virtual land: I see legal discussions about all the new regimes and possibilities created by technologies. And as for real land itself: about 30% of the surface of the US is owned by the federal government, and some smaller parts owned by state governments, so this is owned by the people as commons. The commons was never just free space, it was always regulated, an organized system, even if it was informally. The air is for everybody. Could water be privatized when people need it to stay alive? Land is part of that. Property needs to be shifted over effectively to tenure rights: you have the rights to take care of the land for the people in certain ways, and that procures you a certain amount of rights that don’t extend to the fullness of property rights. This is kind of shocking in the current legal regime. It’s definitely speaking in an utopian way, but you see strands with the Internet. It may become relevant pretty soon in discussing the Moon: the Outer Space Treaty is based on the Antarctic Treaty, so right now nobody can claim property of the land on the Moon.
Another article in the Martian Constitution takes out from free market and into non-profit co-ops the bare necessities of life like housing, health or education. This sounds difficult in a capitalist society: in Spain we have an ongoing housing crisis, in the US health care is notoriously irregular… How could we make this happen?
Thomas Piketty in Capital in the Twenty-First Century talks about how progressive taxation should not be just on the annual income, because that can be buried under the system and hidden, but on capitalized assets themselves. That would legislate caps on how wealthy can you be: beyond a certain amount of wealth, the excess goes back to the public good. That is a transformative thing, a horizontalization of wealth and power. With progressive taxation like that, governments would not be impoverished, they would seize the surplus value and afford universal healthcare, free public education through college, and guarantee the necessities like shelter, clothing, human basic needs that everybody gets. And also full employment: if government can afford to make sure that everybody who wants a job has one, you don’t get massive unemployment like in the bottom of Europe. These things need to be paid for, but governments can easily be made much wealthier by a seizure of surplus value by way of progressive taxation. After World War II there was quite extreme progressive taxation, even in the US under Eisenhower, a Republican president. After you made four hundred thousand dollars a year, that in our days will be like four million dollars a year, the tax rate was 91%. So essentially they capped the wealth, and you could not be a multibillionaire like we’ve got today, because everything you made after a certain amount went to support government programs. And you can advocate these kind of things without being a complete communist or a completely utopian person like a martian. You can talk about policies that used to be enacted and could be enacted again, there’s legal and precedent base.
But we allowed a counterrevolution to take over the world, and it sucks. We are suffering the results of the Reagan-Thatcher neoliberal turn of the eighties, late global capitalism, the seizure by the rich of the surplus value and the impoverishment of everybody else becoming the precariat, in that their lives are precarious. Employment and health is precarious, pensions gone away… All by impoverishing government and repeating the three infamous lines “The government is not the solution, it is the problem”, “There is no thing as society” and “There is no alternative”. We need the keynesian pendulum between government and business to swing back, because people is suffering. It’s the weakest leftist argument possible, just keynesianism, but it’s all we got at this point. You don’t want to get into an either/or apocalyptic revolutionary situation in which unless we change everything we’re completely screwed. But if it’s just a simple political battle: more left and less right, anti-austerity, keynesianism, social democracy… This is a sequence that can be fought for. It could happen in the EU: the PIIGS countries, Portugal, Italy, Ireland and Spain, banded together into an anti-austerity league. But the world has gotten so neoliberal… The cultural space has been stupid. This is what I’ve been doing as a leftist, telling the same story over and over again.
In the post-capitalism you describe in 2123 and Blue Mars, another key element is the substitution of big companies by medium-sized co-operatives in the model of the basque Mondragon.
I have been recently contacted by a professor at Mondragon university who sent me his history of how Mondragon came about. It’s very interesting, how a single catholic priest organized people to talk and talk and talk, fifteen years of political education in itself within a pre-existing industrial base. So now I know more and I’m still very interested, because it’s an already existing alternative to capitalism within the working capitalist order. An interim step that can be enacted right now: everybody could organize around employee-owned Mondragon-type cooperatives and start working with a better value system, ownership without the usual exploitation of labour and appropriation of nature that you see in the rest of the system. Within the already existing capitalist order you have alternative orders that are legal, they don’t need to be revolutionary, you don’t need to get into the chaos of Barcelona 1936 where anarchists and communists were fighting against each other over how to make a completely new society… Instead you have something like Mondragon where in the already existing society there is a change coming from inside.
Why do you think that the Mondragon model has not been reproduced more widely?
Probably because it flattens the power gradient and it doesn’t make enough of a profit for the ownership class, so it’s unpopular with the people that actually control the already existing mobile capital, captured as it is, sequestered in banks and defended by guns. They don’t want it to succeed because it’s a horizontalization of power. In the current vertical system, people who manipulate most of the money will not give up that power voluntarily, so they need to be politically whipped and the the laws need to appropriate it for the people. We need to tell a story that’s plausible enough and persuasive enough that people will act on it in terms of political behaviours and votes going towards political parties that support this model. It surprises me that it is not more popular and effective and quick than it is now. I guess this is what Gramsci was talking about with hegemony, the mental quality people have of accepting their own subjugation because it’s natural, because people agree with the “there is no alternative” mantra. It’s sad, it strikes me that people should be a little bit sparkier.
The Trump Administration presented a budget including huge cuts in most of government agencies, and a 31% cut on the EPA (Enviromental Protection Agency). How do you think that these cuts will affect the US if they come to pass?
It’s a particularly ugly attack on everything valuable and right. These people are thugs and clowns and they are saying “fuck you” to American values. In the polls people like having clean air, clean water, they like the EPA! In effect we’ve had a weird little seizure of our government by a crew of people who are being deliberately destructive. The budget proposed will not be enacted the way it is described, but it feels like somebody taking a crowbar and smashing things, so until you subdue these people, until you tie them down and get them out of the room, it’s hard to do anything but defend what’s already existing. You can’t make improvements, you can only defend what you’ve |
and blamed by some for what is a failure of the whole system.
‘We expect officers to build relationships with victims in the most difficult circumstances imaginable in a fraction of the time where often the education and social care system has failed to do so. Only when we understand the whole problem and the challenges involved will society start to deal with those issues.’
Detective Superintendent Jonathan Chadwick said: ‘Operation Doublet was launched in the aftermath of Operation Span in 2012 to investigate all outstanding historic allegations of child sexual exploitation in Rochdale from the same era.
‘This investigation has examined massive amounts of material held by all agencies and provided support to a large number of victims as well as arresting a significant number of offenders.
‘Doublet remains an on-going investigation with a large number of investigative staff deployed in building relationships of trust with victims and dealing with those responsible through the criminal justice system wherever possible.’
Original Article
Share ThisImage caption The first gay marriage could be held at the National Cathedral in as soon as six months
The Washington National Cathedral, one of the highest-profile churches in the US, will host same-sex weddings, a cathedral leader has said.
The Very Rev Gary Hall said the move brings about "the full participation" of gay people in the church.
The church has no official state sanction but has hosted presidential inaugural services and state funerals, and welcomed foreign heads of state.
Gay marriage is legal in the District of Columbia and nine US states.
'Walking together'
Dean Hall said the Episcopal Diocese of Washington was "a leader in the implementation of marriage equality".
He linked the decision to host same-sex nuptials to the November US election, in which three new states voted to allow same-sex weddings.
"If all of us open ourselves to the fullness and diversity of our nation's many voices, we will learn to walk together in a new way," he added.
Dean Hall said he did not expect opposition from his congregation, but acknowledged that outside groups might disapprove.
It could take six months to a year before the first same-sex marriages are held at the cathedral, owing to its busy schedule and a requirement that couples take a counselling course before getting married there.
Storied history
Last year, the US body of the Episcopal Church's House of Bishops voted 111-41 to allow a provisional rite for same-sex marriage.
The first gay wedding in the Episcopal Church was performed last month at the West Point Cadet Chapel.
The National Cathedral, founded more than a century ago in north-west Washington, has a storied place in US history.
Funerals for former Presidents Dwight Eisenhower, Ronald Reagan and General Ford were held there.
The cathedral has hosted such dignitaries as the Rev Martin Luther King Jr, South African Archbishop Desmond Tutu and former Iranian President Mohammad Khatami, a Muslim cleric.Posted 6 years ago on April 16, 2012, 12:01 a.m. EST by OccupyWallSt
As the weather warms across much of the world, Occupiers are retaking public space. Even after we were violently removed from many of our home encampments last fall and winter, we never stopped organizing - and now we are back outside. With the rebirth of spring, re-occupation has begun in earnest.
For a full week, Wall Street - the original target of our indignation - has been #Occupied. Thanks in part to a 2000 decision by a federal court in Manhattan, protesters are legally allowed to sleep on the sidewalk, as long as they don't block building entrances or take up more than half of the sidewalk. Occupiers have used similar tactics to occupy sidewalks in cities like Tucson since last year, while Occupy D.C were among the first Occupiers to use sidewalk sleeping in front of banks earlier this month. Empowered by the federal court ruling, #SleepfulProtest first came to New York as a way to escape constant police harassment at Occupy Union Square and soon spread to the heart of the financial district. This new tactic allows us to rebuild the face-to-face community and constant public presence that were so crucial to the Occupation of Liberty Square, without the complex logistics of maintaining a permanent encampment. Our new Occupations are mobile, viral, and targeted right at the heart of the 1%'s power.
Like stubborn weeds, we're popping back everywhere. Continuing the tradition of occupying buildings almost as old as #OWS itself, Occupiers in San Francisco took over a neglected property to create a vibrant community center for the 99%. Although thwarted by police, the #SFCommune has vowed to return this May Day, as part of a nationwide General Strike that will see Occupiers taking to the streets alongside immigrants and all workers in cities and towns across the world. In addition to the on-going campaign to fight back against foreclosures by occupying homes, Occupiers have used re-occupation as direct action to make demands and build on local struggles specific to their own communities. In Boston, Occupiers set up a camp on the steps of the State House to protest cuts to the public transit system. In Chicago, after helping to occupy a school in February, Occupiers joined with mental health advocates and community allies to occupy a clinic slated for closure by the city's ruthless austerity measures (while the Chicago Mercantile Exchange is given a $300 million rebate, half of all public mental health clinics in Chicago are to be shut down). After initially being removed from the building by police, Occupiers and allies returned and set up dozens of tents on the lawn outside, settling in for a night of workshops, discussions, teach-ins, food, and sleep. Also in February, Occupy Atlanta occupied the headquarters of AT&T to stop mass lay-offs. After months of community organizing and bridge building, Occupy Detroit has opened a new social center while also staging tent city protests against foreclosures and unemployment in low-income neighborhoods.
We are learning, diversifying, and evolving. Some of us make demands, others don't, but urgent creative 24-hour activism against the domination of our lives by banks and corporations is back, and in many new forms. Along with it, the culture of consensus, mutual aid, and direct action that was cultivated during the best moments of last year's occupations has returned, from the People´s Library to the General Assembly.
Our horizontal, leaderless movement is built on people power. When the 99% stand together -- however we are able -- we win. Here are four ways to support re-occupation:
At least 1000 people attending a citywide NYC General Assembly in Central Park last Saturday
1) Go there. Or, start your own.
In New York, Occupiers can be found sleeping on Wall Street between the intersections of Nassau and Broad, directly in front of the New York Stock Exchange. During the day, Occupiers distribute literature or hold meetings around Liberty Square, Union Square, and throughout the city. (Check the NYCGA for a full directory!) As many as one hundred people are sleeping nightly on Wall Street, but with only a few thousand we could lawfully occupy the entire length of Wall Street -- and beyond!
In D.C., Occupiers are in front of the Bank of America at the corner of 14th St and Vermont Ave NW. In Chicago, people are encouraged to support the occupied Woodlawn Mental Health Clinic at 6337 S. Woodlawn. In Philadelphia, you can find Occupiers on Independence Mall and sleeping by banks including Bank of America at 16th and JFK and expanding. Occupy Minneapolis has re-occupied Peavey Plaza. Last night, Occupy Raleigh took the Captol sidewalk. Every Friday, Occupy Los Angeles camps out on Main Street for Occupy Skid Row.
Since we can't list every Occupation, please list any others in the comments! Alternatively, find a few friends, an affinity group, or perhaps your whole General Assembly and create your own. Pick a bank that has hurt your community, research local laws on sleeping on public sidewalks, grab your sleeping bags and start camping.
2) Stay informed. Spread the word.
Keep up with the latest developments with on-the-ground reports from all of the amazing Occupied media that we have created. The best way to receive the most current updates on new encampments and other events is to use social media. The Wall Street Occupiers use @SleepOnWallSt. For 24-hour protests in other cities, check out #SleepfulProtest and #BankSleep.
Tell your friends. Use social media. Write about it for your local paper. However you do it, make sure everyone knows.
3) Send supplies.
Besides bodies, it takes supplies to keep an occupation going. There are many ways to donate to the movement. If you don´t have money, another easy way to see how you can contribute is to follow the Twitter hashtag #NeedsOfTheOccupiers. Occupiers are often in need of donations of things like food, water, tarps, and camping gear. Occupy SF is currently conducting a supply drive for the May Day reoccupation. To donate to the Woodlawn Occupiers in Chicago, see here.
4) Get (or stay) involved in the movement.
Not everyone can sleep on a sidewalk. There are many other ways to express your indignation and build the better world we seek, and there are many other equally crucial roles to play. To find out what is going on locally and how to get plugged in, attend General Assemblies, working groups, and affinity group meetings in your area. In New York even if you can´t sleep on Wall Street, you can still march on it -- every Friday. And of course, you can get ready for the May Day General Strike.
Art and info on #Occupied Wall StreetRecently, the Syrian Arab Air Force (SAAF) has been far more calculated and precise with their air raids, striking the Islamic State of Iraq and Al-Sham (ISIS) and the Syrian Al-Qaeda faction “Jabhat Al-Nusra” with a flurry of airstrikes that have deterred these Islamist groups from traveling across Syria’s rugged terrain.
For the Syrian Air Force and Syrian Arab Army’s Central Command; this aerial success could not come at a better time for their embattled military, as the numerous offensives launched by the Islamist groups in Syria have left them at the mercy of their enemy.
The tactical precision behind these powerful air raids is due in large part to their Russian military advisors, who have provided the SAA’s Central Command with detailed intelligence reports and satellite imagery that was not available to the Syrian Air Force prior to their arrival earlier this month.
On Monday morning, the Russian military advisors proved valuable once again, as the Syrian Air Force launched a series of airstrikes above the ISIS-controlled province of Al-Raqqa.
However, unlike previous attacks, the Syrian Air Force struck the terrorist group in a number of areas that were relatively untouched, leaving ISIS with breathing room to operate in the Al-Raqqa countryside.
The Syrian Air Force struck ISIS’ recently constructed power lines at the Al-Thala’a Camp in Al-Raqqa, destroying the terrorist groups electrical grids, while also killing an estimated 25 combatants housed in a building nearby.
Following their initial attack at the Al-Thala’a Camp, Russian intelligence reports and satellite imagery provided the Syrian Air Force with information regarding an ISIS battalion made up of 45 predominately Azeri fighters; this base was destroyed by the Syrian Air Force on Monday afternoon.
Finally, to add the icing on the cake, the Syrian Air Force struck a textile factory that turned into an ISIS IED (improvised explosive device) factory; this attack created a large cloud of yellow smoke after the bombs triggered the explosives in the factory to go off.
According to a military source, the airstrikes above Al-Raqqa on Monday proved to be the Syrian Air Force’s most successful series of attacks against the terrorist group since ISIS seized the provincial capital from the Free Syrian Army and Jabhat Al-Nusra in late 2013.
AdvertisementsA Toronto pediatrician says it's wrong to keep kids inside during extreme cold weather, saying the health benefits of staying active during winter far outweigh the health risks of cold exposure.
Listen to the interview Click here to listen to the Metro Morning interview with Dr. Dan Flanders.
Dr. Dan Flanders said on CBC Radio's Metro Morning on Wednesday that keeping schoolchildren inside during recess is "a terrible idea," even in double-digit minus temperatures.
"It must be horrible for them," he told host Matt Galloway. "They must be going bonkers.
"If you dress your kids up properly, if you dress them according to the weather, there really isn't much risk," he said.
"We know from the scientific literature that play and movement and physical activity is crucially important to kids' health and well-being that strikes me as quite a benefit."
Is 'inside recess' a good idea?
The Toronto District School Board (TDSB) policy (posted here) is to keep kids inside when the wind-chill factor is below –28 C, as it was on Tuesday in Toronto.
When temperature or wind-chill factor is between –20 to –28 C, recesses may be shortened to 10 minutes and lunch recess trimmed to 20 minutes depending on conditions.
Flanders said the result is that kids — who already often spend too much time in front of computers, television and video games — miss an opportunity to stay active for long stretches of the year.
More than 90 per cent of their time [kids] are sedentary and sedentary activity is not healthy. - Dr. Dan Flanders, a Toronto pediatrician
"More than 90 per cent of their time, they're sedentary and sedentary activity is not healthy," he said. "It's one of the worst things that you can do for your body and kids are learning that that's life and that really shouldn't be life.
"When you use the weather as a reason why kids should stay inside, it says something about whether it's a priority to them."
Dr. Flanders comments triggered a huge response on the Metro Morning's Twitter feed.
Many parents agreed kids need to get out more. Others pointed out that kids are often not properly dressed for the cold. You can follow the debate by checking out Twitter feeds for @metromorning or @drflanders.Media playback is unsupported on your device Media caption Marc Gilbert heard expletives being directed at his two-year-old daughter Allyson
A hacker was able to shout abuse at a two-year-old child by exploiting a vulnerability in a camera advertised as an ideal "baby monitor".
ABC News revealed how a couple in Houston, Texas, heard a voice saying lewd comments coming from the camera, made by manufacturer Foscam.
Vulnerabilities in Foscam products were exposed in April, and the company issued an emergency fix.
Foscam said it was unable to provide a statement at this time.
However, a UK-based reseller told the BBC it would contact its entire customer database to remind them "the importance in setting a password to their cameras".
The spokesman added that it would be urging Foscam's head office - based in Shenzhen, China - to send out a memo to all its resellers suggesting they too contact their customers.
ABC reported that Marc Gilbert and wife Lauren were left shaken when they heard a "British or European accent" coming from the camera.
Mr Gilbert said the voice directed offensive, sexualised words at their daughter Allyson, who was asleep in bed.
The family believed the hacker was able to call the child by her name because it was spelt out on the bedroom's wall.
Analysis Using monitoring equipment to ensure the safety of children can be very valuable. However, if you do wish to use such devices you should exercise caution before using something that attaches to the internet as it increases the potential vulnerability. There are forums and dedicated search engines that look for vulnerable devices on the web - so if yours is susceptible there is a good chance it will be found, and could be abused. Regardless of the security you think you may have on your PC each device can be separately vulnerable. If you do use a web-connected device then you must ensure software is always up-to-date. This is not just the operating system on your PC but also applications you use and the built-in software - known as firmware - built into the devices. Many attacks use security holes found in such firmware. Most vendors send out updates monthly: the second Tuesday of each month having become known as Patch Tuesday when many release their software. However, urgent updates may be distributed as soon as possible so vigilance is the key.
The two-year-old is deaf, something the couple described as "something of a blessing" in the circumstances.
It is not clear whether the family had updated the camera with the latest software.
'Kids room'
The BBC has found evidence of hackers sharing information on how to access insecure Foscam cameras via several widely-used forums.
Using specialist search engines, people can narrow their results by location.
On one forum, internet addresses for cameras - not all made by Foscam - were listed with descriptions such as "school/daycare?" and "kids room".
In April, security firm Qualys uncovered a weakness in Foscam's devices.
The company said that various attack techniques exposed the camera's remote monitoring access - the simplest of which was simply scraping Foscam's website for unique identifying codes for each customer.
Around two out of every 10 Foscam cameras monitored by the researchers were insecure, Qualys said - using just "admin" to log in, and requiring no password.
Foscam is not the only company to find itself the target of hackers. Last year, camera company Trendnet had to rush out an update to fix a security hole that left thousands of cameras exposed.
Fix issued
In June, Foscam issued a fix for some of the issues raised by Qualys. In a blog post, the company said it appreciated the "constructive criticisms and advice".
Visitors to the firm's homepage do not see any notice of the critical upgrade.
The company did however publish a blog post to publicise the patch, and users who had signed up to a firmware update newsletter should have been informed by email.
Image caption There is no mention of the critical patch on the company's homepage
Discussion forums on the Foscam website show several other customers having security problems with their devices.
User pianomama00 wrote: "My husband heard something in babies room.
"He went in and a guy started talking to him and said he wasn't a neighbour and lived in a different state! Be careful everyone!"
Another user criticised the firm's customer service, saying: "I can't call, can't chat online and I've sent email with no response."
A technical support number listed on the UK website remained on hold for 30 minutes when contacted by the BBC. A separate sales number gave an estimate of a "47-minute" wait to speak to an advisor.
A link to find out more information about the company and its location led to a broken page.
Foscam products in the UK are also sold under the trading name of GadgetFreakz - as well as being sold through Amazon.
A spokesman for GadgetFreakz said the company was looking at ways to better inform customers of the importance of setting secure passwords, adding that it prided itself on good customer service.
Follow Dave Lee on Twitter @DaveLeeBBCTwo explosions hit reactors at Japan's earthquake-damaged Fukushima nuclear power complex early Tuesday, the third and fourth blasts since Saturday.
"There was a huge explosion" between 6:00 a.m. (2100 GMT Monday) and 6:15 a.m. at the number-two reactor of Fukushima I nuclear power plant, a Tokyo Electric Power Co. (TEPCO) spokesman said.
Shortly thereafter, there was an explosion at reactor number four.
Japanese Prime Minister Naoto Kan urged people within 30 km (18 miles) of the site to remain indoors, as the French embassy in Tokyo warned that low-level radioactive winds could reach the capital within 10 hours.
Japanese government spokesman Yukio Edano told reporters the suppression pool of the second nuclear reactor appeared to have been damaged in the blast. "But we have not recorded any sudden jump in radiation indicators," Edano said.
The suppression pool is the bottom part of the reactor's container which holds water used to cool it and control air pressure inside.
Mounting pressure
Authorities at the Fukushimi complex were scrambling to prevent nuclear meltdown as three reactors there suffered cooling problems.
About 185,000 people have been moved from the area
Japan has taken up an official offer of help from the UN's nuclear watchdog.
"The Japanese authorities are working as hard as they can, under extremely difficult circumstances, to stabilize the nuclear power plants and ensure safety," the head of the International Atomic Energy Agency, Yukiya Amano, said in a statement in Vienna.
Amano was a Japanese diplomat for many years before taking up his present position.
Despite being shaken, flooded and cut off from electricity, and with staff often working through immense personal tragedy, Amano said, "the reactor vessels have held and radioactive release is limited."
The continued problems were caused by Friday's devastating earthquake and tsunami. The nuclear plants shut down automatically, as they're supposed to, but power outages in the area and tsunami damage to the back-up generators is believed to have broken reactor cooling systems.
Hydrogen explosions
Earlier Monday, overheating in one of the other damaged reactors caused a hydrogen explosion, but the core container of the reactor had remained intact and the chances of radiation escaping were low, the government said. TV images were showing smoke belching from the plant, located 240 kilometers (150 miles) north of Tokyo.
Authorities have declared an evacuation zone within a 20-kilometer radius of the plant, displacing roughly 185,000 people.
"We have strongly advised all the people within the evacuation area to go inside nearby facilities," said Ryo Miyake, spokesman for the nuclear safety agency.
The quake was the worst in Japanese history
As a precautionary measure, the IAEA said Japan had distributed 230,000 units of stable iodine to evacuation centers around the affected nuclear plants. If someone is exposed to radiation in a nuclear accident, iodine can help to protect against thyroid cancer.
Death toll rises
Police officials estimate the death toll from Friday's 8.9-magnitude earthquake and tsunami to have exceeded 10,000, with tens of thousands still unaccounted for. The earthquake was the biggest since Japan started keeping records, 140 years ago.
"The earthquake, tsunami and the nuclear incident have been the biggest crisis Japan has encountered in the 65 years since the end of World War II," Japanese Prime Minister Naoto Kan told a news conference on Sunday.
Kan maintained, however, that the ongoing nuclear emergency was not another Chernobyl in the making.
"Radiation has been released into the air, but there are no reports that a large amount was released," he said. "This is fundamentally different from the Chernobyl accident."
Authorities are desperately trying to avoid a nuclear disaster by venting radioactive steam into the air to relieve pressure on the reactors. They are also pouring sea water into the reactors to cool them down.
International response
190 people have been exposed to radiation, according to officials
The United States sent two rescue teams and a pair of nuclear energy experts to Japan. The search teams from Fairfax, Virginia, and Los Angeles include more than 140 personnel, sniffer dogs and equipment to help with rescue efforts.
Germany's Disaster Relief Agency (THW) has sent 44 men and women to help with search and rescue efforts.
The United Nations put 30 disaster response teams on alert to help Japan if needed.
Authors: Nicole Goebel, Matt Zuvela, Mark Hallam (Reuters, dpa, AP, AFP)
Editor: Michael LawtonMany of us who’ve watched the women on Teen Mom since their early episodes of 16 and Pregnant are strangely protective. Matt Baier gets it. He knows fans want the best for his fiancée, Amber Portwood. He just wants the rest of us to understand he has the same goal.
“Some people will tell you putting two addicts together is a recipe for disaster. Not if one of those addicts is Amber Portwood. Because this woman is the strongest person,” Matt told us in an exclusive interview. “Neither of us ever judged each other, which is why our relationship is so great right now. We don’t have anything to hide.”
Similar to Amber, Matt is very open about his past addiction struggles, which began when he suffered herniated discs while playing hockey in college. Doctors then discovered he had cauda equina syndrome, a rare disorder that affects spinal nerve roots and requires emergency surgery.
“I was offered to take prescription pain killers, which I never had before… Before I even realized it, I was completely hooked on painkillers,” Matt said of his post-operation prescriptions for Vicodin and later Percocet. “To me, I wasn’t really an addict, simply because of the fact they were legal, they were given to me by a doctor.”
Matt said he never had a problem getting the prescription pills, even as his addiction worsened.
“I was finding doctors who said, ‘Oh, you’ve had this syndrome, you’ve had this surgery. Of course we’re going to give your painkillers, because you’re obviously in a lot of pain,'” Matt explained. “You start to convince yourself that you need these things so much that you start to feel pain that isn’t there.”
Even though he obtained the pills legally, Matt said the addiction took just as serious of a toll on his life as anything else would — especially when it came to his relationship with the mother of his two children.
“I was just absent. I was distant. I was always, always high,” Matt said. “This went on for years and years and years.”
Matt said he finally came to terms with his addiction about seven years ago when his daughter asked him to end his relationship with her mother.
“My daughter looked at me and said, ‘I don’t want you guys to get back together… Dad, you do a lot of drugs… We don’t want you guys to get back together,’” Matt recalled. “And I’m like, ‘Oh my god, my kid realizes that I’m high?’ It really snapped me into reality.”
Matt said he quit cold-turkey after that, but continued recovery wasn’t as simple as he anticipated. For support, he went to AA meetings — which he prefers over NA, even though he never struggled with alcohol — up to three times a day. In the time since, he’s built a “fantastic” co-parenting relationship with his ex-girlfriend and has a great relationship with his kids.
“Not a night goes by that I don’t say goodnight to my kids,” he said. “My kids have forgiven me for being a junkbox a long time ago. Now, I can finally be their dad.”
Then, more than one year ago, he struck up a friendship with Amber via Twitter.
“What I realized in short order is that, after hearing her story and having her tell me the story personally, is that this might be one of the strongest people that I’ve ever met in my life,” Matt said. “She was the one person that I could discuss past behavior with who never said, ‘Oh really? That’s awful.’ She just went, ‘Yeah, I get it.’ And vice versa.”
After half a year of talking online, Matt visited Amber in Indiana — even though neither of them expected a romance would come of it.
“When we met as friends, not only did we realize we had addiction in common, we had almost everything in common. We had music, we had movies, we had past experiences,” Matt said. Because he was able to continue his work as an executive IT recruiter for a large company, Matt moved from Boston the following month. In the time since then, he said he’s seen Amber experience the whole range of emotions — and truly believes she will “never” go back to using.
“I can tell you with the straightest face in the world that’s the last thing I’m worried about because that woman is made of iron,” Matt said. “She is tough. She deserves role model status.”
For more on Matt and Amber’s relationship, tune into Teen Mom on MTVs each Monday at 10/9c. Also find out more about Amber’s inspirational story by picking up a copy of her book, Never Too Late.Egyptian President Abdel-Fattah el-Sisi met with President Donald Trump Monday morning,in his first trip to the White House since seizing power in a 2013 military coup d’état.
The former Egyptian military general and defense minister was shunned by the Obama administration – while his coup forced the Muslim Brotherhood out of power in Egypt, el-Sisi’s questionable human rights record placed the White House in a difficult position.
A report from Time Magazine theorizes the underlying motivation the Trump administration may have in extending an olive branch to President el-Sisi. By inviting him to the White House for a meeting with President Trump, the new administration appears to be signaling a desire to prioritize stability in the region over human rights violations.
El-Sisi cemented his grip on power in the North African nation through harsh crackdowns on supporters of former President Mohamed Morsi. In the wake of el-Sisi’s coup, Egyptian courts made countless controversial rulings – including a “mass death sentence” for 183 defendants.
In addition to targeting dissidents, el-Sisi’s government also cracked down on press freedom and LGBTQ rights in Egypt.
While President Obama’s decision to largely shun el-Sisi may have been rooted in a tough moral stance, the United States’ longstanding relationship with Egypt suffered as a result. The consequences of the Obama administration’s policy underscored the complexity of international relations, where the best moral position is not always the most beneficial one.
Egyptian military crackdowns on protests in favor of ousted President Morsi, the country’s first democratically elected leader, left scores of people dead:
In an August 2013 interview following el-Sisi’s successful coup, Obama explained his stance on the controversial leaders harsh rule:
“I think what most Americans would say is that we have to be very careful about being seen as aiding and abetting actions that we think run contrary to our values and our ideals.”
Obama’s hardline stance against el-Sisi would not last for the duration of his presidency. After briefly withholding aid to Egypt, Obama would capitulate to el-Sisi in March of 2015 by fulfilling a shipment of F-16 and other military assets as part of the United State’s $1.3 billion aid package to the country.
In a posting titled, “Sisi-Trump Meeting Shows Mutual Contempt for Rights,” Human Rights Watch condemned President Trump’s invitation to President el-Sisi on Sunday, writing:
“Al-Sisi’s meeting with Trump is the first visit by an Egyptian head of state to the White House since 2009. Al-Sisi, as defense minister, overthrew the country’s first freely elected president, Mohamed Morsy, in July 2013, and oversaw the brutal dispersal of opposition protests that left more than 1,150 people dead in the following weeks. Under al-Sisi’s presidency, his security forces have arrested tens of thousands of Egyptians and committed flagrant rights abuses, including torture, enforced disappearances, and likely extrajudicial executions.”
Sarah Margon, Human Rights Watch’s Washington director, strongly condemned the move by the Trump administration in a statement on Sunday.
“Inviting al-Sisi for an official visit to Washington as tens of thousands of Egyptians rot in jail and when torture is again the order of the day is a strange way to build a stable strategic relationship,” said Margon.Unlike other islands of the Caribbean, Dominica does not have pristine white sand beaches to lure tourists to its shores.
The island has instead managed to successfully market itself as “The Nature Isle if the Caribbean”; a land of unspoiled natural beauty that seeks to attract eco-tourists and travellers searching for adventure and something that can’t be found in the typical Caribbean destination.
“The Nature Isle” has more than enough natural attractions to give any adventure seeker a fun-filled vacation; there are natural hot-water springs, sheltered coves for snorkelling, chances to see sea turtles and whales, and hiking trails.
Dominica is only truly discovered by hiking on the island, and the hiking trails take you everywhere; Into dense mountain rainforest. Through deep gorges. Across rushing streams and rivers and into natural hot water baths.
The holy grail of hiking in Dominica would be to conquer the scenic Waitukubuli Trail, a 115 mile long trail that spans the entire island and passes through sweltering tropical rainforest, elfin woodland, and abandoned estates.
The Emerald Pool and Emerald Waterfall is accessible at Segment Five of the Waitukubuli Trail, but it’s also possible to make a short trek from the road to Castle Bruce to visit the scenic waterfall alone.
Emerald Pool is a cool, clear pool that’s one of the most popular spots in the Morne Trois Pitons National Park.
It’s considered one of the top things to do when visiting Dominica.
A well-marked footpath slithers downhill through the Dominican rain-forest to a clear pool that reflects the green jungle canopy ; giving it the Emerald Pool name.
As you descend the stairs to the waterfall and plunge-pool, the steady gurgle of water slowly becomes the roar of a waterfall.
The path is remarkably well-developed with stairs and handrails in steep areas as well as clear directions at any points where it forks.
There’s a break in the vegetation where the waterfall is visible. There’s even a wooden bench so you could have a short rest while admiring Emerald Falls from the distance.
It takes just a few minutes to reach that bench, and then just a few more minutes to finally arrive at Emerald Pool.
The Emerald Waterfall is a single pillar of cool, cascading water that’s surrounded by mossy rock and hanging vines.
Emerald Pool is shallow and calm, ideal for a refreshing dip or for just wetting your feet while enjoying a cool beer.
A rock overhang on the far side of the pool creates a small cave that’s protected by a curtain of vine; Inside the cave is cool and quiet.
This hike is so short that it’s easy enough to make the trek there with a cooler full of Kubuli Beer. Many people do that, and spend the day relaxing in the cool water with friends.
Taking the long way back involves a bit more uphill climbing than the hike to get there and it involves using a trail that connects you to the Waitukubuli Trail.
While this journey back is a bit longer, it offers some scenic views of Dominica’s lush interior including Morne Laurent and the Atlantic Coast in the distance.
This #TravelThursday was brought to you by Rodney’s Wellness Retreat book them on AirBnb with this free $25 Airbnb credit!How to raise goats:
When I asked Katie Cordrey (local goat aficionado) about raising goats, she summed up the whole experience pretty well: “Goats will climb EVERYTHING. Goats will EAT EVERYTHING. They are endlessly curious and destructive. If you get a Nubian – floppy ears – it will never shut up. They will probably butt your dog, or your dog will chase them and they’ll die. You need two – they’re herd animals and should have company. You will have a hard time keeping them in a fenced area unless the fence is really good and you’ll end up chaining them, then the neighbor dogs will harass or kill them and you’ll have to dispose of the dead bodies. They have to have a shelter and straw bedding in winter – preferably on top of an old pallet or something to keep them off the ground, and it has to be changed out regularly. They’re sensitive to the cold and damp. Their hooves tear up the ground, so expect mud. You will never have a wildflower if a goat is nearby because she’ll eat it. If you want to try the insanity, go with an Alpine or a Saanen. Unless you want to move to another part of the world to escape the stench, don’t get a buck. A wether is OK. They live 15 to 18 years, so be sure you want to be a goat mama that long.”
What breed of goats you decide to raise will depend on whether you are raising them for milk or meat. Whatever your reason is for raising goats, they will need a lot of space. Each goat will need at least 10-15 feet to move around and be happy. Goats will also need a covered area where they can get shelter from the elements.
Goats will eat everything. They are great for trimming your lawn and getting rid of invasive plants. There are even goat grazing businesses that will rent out goats for trimming lawns and getting rid of brush. I have heard one hilarious story of some goats chewing on a lady’s flower print dress. Some people will rent out goats to protect their property from fires since goats will eat most of the underbrush.
It’s important to understand the goats are herd animals, which means that they do not do well on their own. A solitary goat will bleat out loudly and create a lot of noise. However, solitary goats are known for bonding with other hoofed animals such as sheep.
Fencing for Goats:
You can spend a lot of time and money on fencing for your goats. Goats are crafty little bastards and containing them is easier said than done. As with most farm animals, the better their environment inside their enclosure the less likely they will even try to escape. You can either build a paddock system or move them from one fenced area to another every week or so.
You can also put in portable fencing that you can move around your property. One week you can have them graze your lawn, the next you can put them to work clearing brush, and the next week you can have them out to pasture. If you have happy goats, you will only need a couple strands of electric wire to keep them contained.
Raising milk goats:
If you are raising goats for milk, you should be wary of keeping a buck around. When male and female goats are kept in close quarters, the male can become aggressive and release pheromones that can affect the flavor of your doe’s milk. However, when bucks are raised in a herd, and are raised in close proximity with others, they won’t feel the need to ‘perfume’ themselves as much as they would otherwise. It’s the same with most if not all mammals. If a male is kept isolated for an extended period of time, he will go absolutely bonkers when he is finally introduced to a female.
In order to continue getting milk from a goat, you will need to breed her every year. Goats will produce milk for around 10 to 11 months. However, they will not lactate indefinitely. Obviously they produce milk to feed their offspring. As such, you will either need a buck, send her off to a farm with a buck, or borrow a buck for his equipment.
Sometimes milk goats can get something called Mastitis. Mastitis is fairly easy to spot and is commonly caused by poor sanitation and milking practices. Symptoms of Mastitis include clots/blood in the milk, lumps and hardness in the udder, reduced milk production, and a swollen/tender udder. However, a little clotting or blood might not be due to Mastitis. You should keep a test kit handy. A test kit is relatively inexpensive and easy to use.
Mastitis is commonly caused by |
Manbij we will focus on isolating Raqqa
ARA News
MANBIJ – Under heavy shelling by the Kurdish-led Syrian Democratic Forces (SDF), hundreds of militants from the Islamic State (ISIS) have evacuated their headquarters in the city of Manbij in the northern countryside of Aleppo province, military sources reported on Wednesday.
The Western-backed SDF troops closed most of the roads leading to Manbij after taking over dozens of villages to the north, east and south of Manbij city.
The only route that ISIS militants could use to escape was the western exit towards Aleppo.
The ISIS evacuation movement started on Tuesday, when dozens of ISIS vehicles were seen exiting the city through the western suburb of Manbij towards Aleppo.
“Those were most likely defectors who escaped the fighting fronts in the south and east of the city. Also, a number of Sharia officials are believed to have escaped Manbij under the ongoing offensive by the SDF against ISIS there,” media activist Alwan Halabi told ARA News.
The SDF-led Manbij Military Council reportedly broke into several ISIS security centres in Manbij city on Wednesday, and engaged in clashes with ISIS militants.
“The clashes have eventually reached the city itself after more than a week of fighting ISIS in the countryside of Manbij,” SDF officer Habun Osman told ARA News. “A large number of ISIS terrorists have already escaped the city, using the western exit. This means that the collapse of the group in Manbij is very near.”
“We, the SDF, will soon announce the full liberation of Manbij from ISIS,” the Kurdish official said, adding that the US-led coalition’s air forces have played a key role in enabling the SDF fighters to advance on the ground.
Also, the Syrian Democratic Forces have facilitated the evacuation of nearly 200,000 civilians from Manbij and its surroundings.
“After retaking key areas near Manbij, such as Al-Qaraa, Muhtaraq and Buzkej, the SDF troops were able to help more than 200,000 civilians evacuate the area and head to more stable towns. This was to prevent the terror group from using the people as human shields in the ongoing clashes,” a spokesman for the SDF told ARA News.
Manbij constitutes a key pocket of 98-kilometers for ISIS militants. “As to why the Manbij pocket is important, it represents a major border crossing point where foreign fighters can cross into Syria from Turkey,” US-led coalition spokesman Colonel Christopher Garver told ARA News.
Reporting by: Hozan Mamo
Source: ARA NewsHouse Republicans on Monday night revealed their highly anticipated plan to replace the Affordable Care Act, more commonly referred to as Obamacare.
The House Energy and Commerce Committee posted the entire bill online for Americans to review.
CNBC has some of the highlights from the GOP proposal:
The bill calls for issuing a refundable, advanceable tax credit to customers of individual health plans with the value of that credit tied to age and income. Tax credits would begin at $2,000 for people in their 20s, and gradually increase to $4,000 for people over age 60. The bill also would repeal the authority of states to expand their Medicaid programs to nearly all adults by 2020. The GOP proposal also would repeal the Affordable Care Act’s taxes beginning in 2018, and would bar funding from going to Planned Parenthood. It also would double the current allowable contribution levels for Health Savings Accounts.
The Republican replacement does not get rid of the popular Obamacare provision that prohibits insurers from denying coverage to people with pre-existing conditions or the one that allows adults under the age of 26 to be covered by their parents’ plans.
But many of the key provisions of former President Barack Obama’s signature legislation would be undone.
House Ways and Means Committee Chairman Kevin Brady (R-TX) told Fox News that they will “begin by repealing the awful taxes, the mandate penalties, and the subsidies in Obamacare.”
Brady also pushed back against some conservative critics who have dubbed the Republican effort as “Obamacare Lite.”
“It’s Obamacare gone,” he added.
The Energy and Commerce Committee also released a more detailed breakdown of each section.Advertisement
Britain has been struck with lightning and thunderstorms as the summer heatwave makes way for grey skies.
A late-night thunderstorm over the south coast saw odd-shaped mammatus clouds, which take their name from the Latin for 'breast', to form over Dorset and Hampshire before huge lightning bolts filled the skies.
The clouds, indicators of thunderstorms, are rarely seen in Britain. Unlike most clouds which form from rising air, mammatus clouds are created when air sinks.
Scroll down for video
The late night thunderstorm over the south coast, which saw bolts of lightning across the coast of Bournemouth over Boscombe Pier
The thunderstorms with large bolts of lightning came after an area of high pressure hovered over the south coast of England
Mark Wilson, a forecaster at the Met Office, said the bizarre-looking mammatus clouds were a product of the extreme heat wave currently hitting most of Europe
The glorious summer weather much of the country has enjoyed over the last few weeks is set to give way as grey skies are expected to dominate for the start of the week
Earlier in the day odd-shaped mammatus clouds, which take their name from the Latin for 'breast', formed over Dorset and Hampshire
Unlike most clouds which form from rising air, mammatus clouds are created when air sinks and they are very rarely seen in Britain
The eerie skies were captured on camera by photographer Chris Nesbitt from Hampshire's Test Way and by Matt Pinner at Swanage, Dorset.
Fellow snapper Jamie Russell then used specially-made equipment to photograph the ensuing lightning storm as it swept past the Isle of Wight. The lightning was also snapped by Daryl Davies and Kevin Ferrioli in Bournemouth.
Mark Wilson, a forecaster at the Met Office, said the bizarre-looking mammatus clouds were a product of the extreme heat wave currently hitting most of Europe.
He said: 'At the moment much of Europe is experiencing a very prolonged heatwave with very high temperatures.
'Recently we've had an area of very warm, moist air pushing up from the continent over the southern counties of Britain.
'When you get a situation like this that is then met with low pressure from the west you get the potential for big thunderstorms.
'In this instance the storms take place in the mid part of the atmosphere which is why there was a lot of thunder and lightning but not much rain reaching the ground.
Brighton beach was almost empty today as rain meant sun worshippers stayed away from the south coastline this morning
A group of young people shelter from the rain under umbrellas in Brighton this morning after the heatwave made way for rain
A woman struggles with an umbrella near to Brighton beach. Rain is expected to return on Thursday, but there is hope that sunny weather will return for the weekend
A woman tries to cover her hair from the wind and rain in Brighton today as a growing area of high pressure hovers over the UK
'This causes mammatus clouds to form. They're a pretty spectacular sight and not an overly common one either.'
The wet weather is also likely to affect the men's singles final at Wimbledon today between Roger Federer and Novak Djokovic with downpours expected as they walk out on Centre Court.
But tennis fans at the All England Club may escape the rain as it is expected to clear up over SW19 as the afternoon goes on, although the rest of the UK will see more rain move in from the west into Sunday evening.
Met Office forecaster Simon Partridge added: 'Effectively we are looking at a grey, damp start across the South East, but easing by the time we get to lunchtime and we could see dry conditions with sunny spells, although there will be a risk of isolated showers.
Despite the rainy weather and having to wear rain coats, one family were determined to enjoy a day out at the seaside in Swanage in Dorset
As grey skies and windy weather loomed over Swanage, a woman and a young girl collect shells and pebbles on the beach in the wet weather
A man and a young boy seem determined to dig a hole on the beach in Swanage, Dorset, even though the weather has taken a turn for the worse
'It is looking like a good picture as we go into the afternoon, a little bit cooler at around 23 or 24 degrees if you are lucky enough to be out on Murray Mount.
EXPERTS WARN GARDENERS NOT TO PANIC OVER HOT DRY WEATHER Gardeners should not panic about the effect the hot, dry weather has been having on their lawn, experts have said. The Royal Horticultural Society (RHS) said it had seen a sharp increase in the number of inquiries from gardeners about drought damage to plants in the warm weather, receiving more calls on the issue in the past 30 days than in the whole of last year. But a brown lawn should not be seen as a failure and there are advantages to letting it get that way in sunny weather, from the water saved to being able to lay out a picnic rug on a nice dry lawn instead of a wet one. RHS chief horticultural advisor Guy Barter said: "There are a host of benefits of having a brown lawn, from the water that is saved to the extra enjoyment of being able to put down a blanket on a hot summer day and lie back on a dry lawn, as opposed to a wet, green lawn.'
'Through the course of the afternoon there is a risk of showers at between 10 and 20 per cent, but that is in comparison with the morning with an 80 to 90 per cent chance of patchy rain.
'It is definitely going to be damp as we move through the morning and get better in the afternoon, but there is a risk of trouble with showers.'
The Wimbledon final marks a hiatus for the glorious summer weather much of the country has enjoyed over the last few weeks, as grey skies are expected to dominate for the start of the week.
The north of England is expected to enjoy the best conditions from Monday, with sunshine returning for many on Wednesday.
Rain is expected to return on Thursday, but there is hope that sunny weather will return for the weekend.
Mr Partridge added: 'From Monday we can see outbreaks of patchy rain for large chunks of the UK south of Cumbria and the showery outbreaks will likely stretch into Tuesday.
'But the general picture is a growing area of high pressure over UK through next week through Wednesday and Thursday with temperatures one or two degrees above average.
'Into Thursday and Friday temperatures will generally be around normal for this time of year but feeling cooler in the north and west due wind that could bring rain with it.
'But it will become warmer into next weekend when we will have more high pressure developing from the south.'
But despite a short respite from the sweltering temperatures, forecasters are predicting that by the end of the month, it could reach a record-breaking 39C.
Earlier this month, the hottest July day since records began was recorded at London's Heathrow Airport, with the mercury reaching a whopping 36.7C.
Now hot air arriving from Africa from late July means some experts are predicting a smashing of the overall record temperature for the UK - 38.5C logged at Brogdale, Kent, on August 10, 2003.
Forecaster Brian Gaze of The Weather Outlook said: 'The year's hottest temperatures usually occur in late July or early August.
Revellers enjoying a night out in north west England get caught out by a heavy downpour last night as they make their way home
The heavy shower caught many of those enjoying a night out unaware as they seemed to forget to take an umbrella with them
Despite a short respite from the sweltering temperatures, forecasters are predicting that by the end of the month, it could reach a record-breaking 39C
Festival goers at T in the Park in Strathallan, Perthshire enjoyed better weather, even if they had to walk through muddy fields
Forecasters predict that the north of the country will have the best of the weather over the coming days. One girl soaks up the sun at T in the Park
'As pressure models favour more African hot air over Europe pulsing to the UK, the 38.5C record could go.'
Bookies Ladbrokes have cut the odds on the 38.5C record falling to 7/4.CROWDS of people gathered to pay emotional tributes to an unknown baby who was found dead on a cycle path almost two years ago.
Mourners of all ages and faiths attended the short graveside service at Seafield Crematorium and Cemetery in Edinburgh yesterday.
The funeral was held just around the corner from the site where a dog walker found the lifeless infant wrapped in a blanket in July 2013.
Despite extensive police investigations, DNA tests and public appeals, the baby boy and his family were never identified.
Around 250 people gathered to watch the tiny white coffin being carried to the graveside, led by a lone piper playing Amazing Grace.
Reverend Erica Wishart said the baby’s death was the “kind of tragedy that surely touches everyone”.
Hundreds of mourners turned out to Seafield Cemetery. Picture: HEMEDIA
She said: “This tiny baby is never going to have the chance to grow up and live his life. We are here to say goodbye to this wee one, with the dignity and respect that he deserves. We are here to mourn a life that could have been.”
People were visibly upset as the coffin was lowered into the ground to a lament from the piper, before it was decorated with soft toys and white rose petals. Dozens of flowers, teddies and cards were left on the grave, bearing emotional tributes including, “The people of Leith are your family now”, and “Twinkle, twinkle, little star, how we wonder who you are”.
Mourners said they felt compelled to attend the funeral to ensure the unknown little boy was not buried alone. Gillian Henderson and Ros Lowrie, befrienders at child bereavement charity Sands Lothian, said the turn-out was “just amazing”.
Ms Henderson, a bereaved parent herself, said: “He has touched so many people’s hearts. A lot of people have felt the need to come here and show their respects for him.”
Members of the public have paid their respects. Picture: Kaye Nicolson
Dee Urquhart, who had travelled to Leith from her home in Bonnybridge, said: “I saw hundreds of people here leaving all the flowers and soft toys. It’s nice to see that there’s so many caring people out there.”
A convoy of motorcyclists from the Riders Branch of the Royal British Legion Scotland were among those paying their respects.
Colin MacNab, 54, a serving army officer and chairman of the branch, said: “We felt obliged to come along and say farewell to the wee man. We have got members from all over Scotland who are praying. We just wanted to pay our respects.”
He added: “There’s obviously a mother out there who needs help.”
Picture: PA
Kelly Roberts, 26, of Bonny-rigg, took the day off work so she could attend the service.
She said: “I remember when it happened. I hope the mum gets the help she needs – she obviously needs support. I think the turnout is amazing, it’s brilliant to see. This wee boy, he never had anybody in his last minutes, and now he has.”
Imam Sajjad, of Craigmillar Islamic Centre, joined other members of Edinburgh Interfaith Association to represent the capital’s different communities.
He said: “It’s a great honour for all of us to be here to pay tribute to this innocent soul.”
After the harrowing discovery in the summer of 2013, tests on the baby showed that he may have been up to six weeks old, and appeared to have been healthy and well fed up until his death.
Police were inundated with offers of help when they announced plans for the funeral last week. The child was laid to rest in a gown made by retired dressmaker Margaret Halliday, while piper Cameron McKay, 21, played the lament.
Picture: Lisa Ferguson
Picture: Lisa FergusonCompanies have paid more than $100,000 in bitcoin as ransom to a group of blackmailers in order to prevent cyberattacks. In fact, fraudsters have not made a single hack.
The group of alleged hackers, who call themselves Armada Collective, have been sending messages to various businesses, threatening to break into their systems unless they pay a ransom. Cybercriminals insisted on using bitcoins as a payment method. Their typical letter reads:
“Your network will be DDoS-ed starting [date] if you don't pay protection fee — 10 Bitcoins @ [Bitcoin Address]. If you don't pay by [date], attack will start, yours service going down permanently price to stop will increase to 20 BTC and will go up 10 BTC for every day of attack.”
The message normally ends with a threat “This is not a joke”. However, according to CloudFlare experts, if not a joke, most likely it was a cheat. CloudFlare checked notes in order to find any correlation with data from DDoS mitigation services and have not detected any attacks on behalf of the Armada Collective. In addition, the self-appointed hackers have shown very little experience in blackmailing as they requested their victims to send same amounts of money to the same bitcoin addresses, making it difficult to track who paid the ransom and when.
However simple the trick was, a lot of businesses around the world preferred to pay to the extorters. According to CloudFlare, Armada Collective has received more than $100,000 over the past two months.
“I'm hopeful this article will start appearing near the top of search results and help organizations act more rationally when they receive such a threat,” CloudFlare CEO Matthew Prince wrote to Ars Technica.
Over the last year, the number of ransomware cyberattacks has grown rapidly. The most famous case took place in Hollywood, where a medical centre was forced to pay $17 million in bitcoins to extortionists, who hacked into their system. Later the first ransomware virus attacked Apple devices which had never suffered from such attacks before.
According to the report by Cyber Threat Alliance, the hacker group standing behind one of the most successful extorter malware Cryptowall 3.0 caused the damage estimated at about $325 million. Last June, according to FBI, US citizens lost more than $18 million to virus attacks.
Elena PlatonovaImage caption Susan Boyle said she could now "better understand" herself after the diagnosis
Scottish singer Susan Boyle has revealed she has been diagnosed with Asperger's Syndrome.
The star, who shot to fame after appearing on Britain's Got Talent in 2009, had spent years believing she suffered slight brain damage at birth.
In an interview with The Observer newspaper she told of her relief at finally getting a "clearer understanding" of her condition.
But she vowed: "It will not make any difference to my life."
Asperger's is a form of autism which typically means people with the condition struggle with their emotions and have difficulty in social situations, often unable to pick up on non-verbal cues.
'Greater understanding'
Boyle, 52, revealed she was misdiagnosed after complications at birth.
She said: "It was the wrong diagnosis when I was a kid.
"I was told I had brain damage. I always knew it was an unfair label. Now I have a clearer understanding of what's wrong and I feel relieved and a bit more relaxed about myself."
The singer has gone on to become one of the best-selling British female artists and recently had a cameo role in the festive film The Christmas Candle.
Last year a musical based on her life toured cities in the UK and Republic of Ireland and she has also said a film about her rise to fame is being planned.
Boyle said of her recently diagnosed condition: "It will not make any difference to my life. It's just a condition that I have to live with and work through.
"I think people will treat me better because they will have a much greater understanding of who I am and why I do the things I do."Get the biggest daily news stories by email Subscribe Thank you for subscribing We have more newsletters Show me See our privacy notice Could not subscribe, try again later Invalid Email
Secret FBI files exclusively seen by the Sunday People reveal Michael Jackson spent £23million buying the silence of at least two dozen young boys he abused over 15 years.
The documents – case numbers CADCE MJ-02463 and CR 01046 – were not passed on to prosecutors in the King of Pop’s 2005 trial, when he was cleared of molesting a child.
But they throw a disturbing new light on the megastar’s insistence he never laid a finger on any of the scores of kids he invited to his home for unsupervised sleep-overs.
Agents have thousands of pages of evidence dating back to 1989 indicating Jacko groomed and molested children – sometimes right under the noses of their starstruck parents.
The FBI files include private investigators’ reports, phone transcripts and hours of audio tapes.
They describe how the Thriller hit-maker was once caught by a member of his household staff groping a world-famous child star, watching porn films while molesting another boy and fondling the genitals of a third in his private cinema.
The mother of one of the youngsters was sitting two or three rows in front of them at the time – unaware of the vile abuse her son was suffering.
Ironically, many of the damning reports in the FBI collection had been commissioned by Jacko himself.
Terrified the parents of boys who spent nights with him at his Neverland ranch might go to the cops or expose him in the media, the desperate singer hired “private eye to the stars” Anthony Pellicano to target potential skeletons in his closet – and make sure they stayed out of the limelight.
But when Pellicano was investigated himself in 2002 for bugging Hollywood stars such as Sylvester Stallone, the FBI seized all his files – including many about Jackson. It is copies of these to which the Sunday People has had exclusive access.
The latest revelations about Jacko’s lurid past come as his private life is once again in the spotlight – even though four years have passed since he died from heart failure aged 50.
His family are currently suing gig promoters AEG Live for £26billion, claiming they hired Dr Conrad Murray, who gave Jacko the dose of the anaesthetic propofol that killed him.
AEG deny employing Murray, now serving a four-year jail term for involuntary manslaughter.
The files will also dismay Jacko’s kids Prince, 16, Paris, 15, and 11-year-old Blanket, who have not yet come to terms with losing their father.
In fact, Paris tried to kill herself by slashing her wrists just three weeks ago and is still in hospital.
But there is yet more shocking news for the singer’s family – Jackson’s former child pal Wade Robson, a dancer and once one of his most stalwart defenders, has just launched a major lawsuit against his estate.
Robson, now 30, claims he was often molested at Neverland during his regular visits to the infamous ranch during the 1990s.
The Aussie-born choreographer for pop stars such as Britney Spears and Demi Lovato claims the abuse started when he was only seven and continued until he was 14.
The files seen by this newspaper appear to confirm Robson’s claim to be one of many child victims who were invited to fulfil Jackson’s sick fantasies at his isolated playground in the Californian countryside.
Pellicano is now behind bars serving a 15-year jail sentence for racketeering and wire-tapping.
But one of his senior snoops – who worked extensively on the Jackson case – has broken his silence to speak exclusively to the Sunday People.
The investigator, whose name we are withholding, said he was among those quizzed by FBI agents probing his old boss. And he kept copies of many of the Jackson documents now held in the bureau’s archives.
The paedophile allegations – sandwiched between thousands of pages of information about Jackson, his career and his accusers – include interviews with ex-aides who claim their boss was fixated with child porn.
The files name 17 boys – including five child actors and two dancers – Jacko singled out for abuse.
Other kids the singer preyed on include a European boy and the sons of a screenwriter.
At least three boys got hush-money, the investigator said, with the family of one well-known young film actor being given £392,000 “to refrain from any and all contact with media and communications, newspapers, television, radio, film and books”.
The gagging order also insisted there would not be any attempt now or in the future to “extort, intimidate, harass or impede” the Jackson organisation.
A maid who worked for the singer at Neverland was said to have been paid off with about £1.3million after complaining her son had been abused by her employer. And the investigator told of one shocking case of a mother who knew her young son was being molested by Jackson “but turned a blind eye to it because if it didn’t bother him, it didn’t bother her”.
Many of the files on the victims – whose names are not being published for legal reasons – were originally pulled together by lawyers drawing up a list of a potential threats to Jackson’s paedophile secret in the early 1990s.
Read more: 'If there are five children he'll take the one he wants': Michael Jackson enticed "lost boys" into sordid fantasy world hidden from their parents
The legal team was scrambled after the dentist dad of 13-year-old Jordan Chandler went public with claims his son had been abused – opening the door to a string of accusations involving other kids.
The sleuth who worked for Pellicano said: “Around 1993 things were really heating up. The suggestions were Jordie was not the only victim. The momentum became so great Jackson needed a private investigator to go straight for the jugular and produce results.
“His actress friend Elizabeth Taylor encouraged him to hire Pellicano because she had used him to stop dirt on her drug problems being released in the media – Pellicano was a master of negotiation and keeping stars’ reputations clean.
“I was hired by him to find out where the fires needed putting out and, in this case, where allegations would be coming from.
“But I have never worked on a case with as many potential claimants as the Jackson case.”
The investigator, who spent two years on the case, saw Pellicano’s ruthless methods first-hand in the frantic bid to salvage Jackson’s Mr Clean image.
He said his boss encouraged his extensive contacts in the media to call the singer’s victims after he paid them off so they could publicly deny he ever touched them. It was part of a relentless campaign to clear the megastar’s name.
The investigator said: “There was a mountain of allegations levelled at Jackson and Pellicano was determined to prove his client innocent.
“He promised Jackson, ‘I can make this go away’ and he wanted me to dig up everything that was around on him and then began smoothing it over.
“Pellicano had links to key figures in the US media and made them dance to his tune. He was very good at starting fires – but also at putting them out. By the end we had at least 10 boxes of documents about Jackson.”
He went on: “The FBI had all that information long before Jackson’s 2005 trial. I’m surprised this evidence never came to light.
“Then again, if the pay-offs were successfully executed, no one would have spoken.
“At the time, Jackson was on a world tour, battling drug addiction and planning his next CD and future.
“If these files had been released then, Jackson’s career would have been over. But he was the King of Pop and spending the equivalent of a year’s royalties was worth it to keep him on his throne. With the help of people like Pellicano, the world and his fans never heard what took place at Neverland over 15 years.”
At his 2005 trial, Jackson was acquitted of abusing and feeding alcohol to a 13-year-old boy who had survived cancer. But the private eye said: “Our reports painted the picture that Jackson was a serial child predator.
“It showed at least two dozen children were given money to stay quiet – which came to around $35million (£23million).
“Wade Robson was one of the kids identified as a victim while our reports show many others were paid off before their names even emerged.”
(Image: Sunday People)
He said the pay-out total includes the £13million settlement to Jordie Chandler and up to £4.5million in legal and investigation fees. The investigator added: “I haven’t released this now to upset Michael’s children, who haven’t done anything wrong.
“But when Wade’s case was announced, I felt it was time the public knew what information had been collected, what the authorities have – and what has never been released.”
Brian Oxman, a long-time Jackson family lawyer and friend, said yesterday he was not aware that Michael “paid off” any boys other than Jordan Chandler.
He said: “The only money I know about was Jordan Chandler. But the gift list on Michael’s income tax returns was astounding.
"He would give out a great deal of money and top of the list was Elizabeth Taylor. He gave money to a whole series of people. It happened all the time.
“I wasn’t aware of any pay-offs to kids. I never heard him talking about it.”
scoops@people.co.ukWhile pictures like the one above will forever be immortalized in hastily written articles the Internet over, the situation surrounding Frozen Ever After looks to be improving.
Larger: https://www.easywdw.com/reports13/frozen_ever_after_stay_left.jpg
Certainly the website is not above going for some shock value in providing images like the one above from a post like this.
And inherent problems remain. Disney neglected to increase capacity by adding rows to the ride vehicles. And there is still just one load platform, which is somewhat inconceivable given what you would hope would be Walt Disney Company’s knowledge of operating attractions.
In fact, Disney probably decreased the capacity in keeping the load area so small. One of the problems is that there is no space and no time for the loader to find smaller size groups to fill boats that are mostly full when a large group follows. For example, let’s say you have a group of four, followed by a couple and then a group of five. The loader would be able to put the group of four in rows one and two and then the couple in row three, but the group of five would obviously not fit in the last row and it’s unlikely that there would be time to find a group of one to three people to occupy the final row. That effectively reduces the capacity of that ride vehicle by at least 25% and in turn, drops the hourly capacity further. On my first ride, the second half of our boat was completely empty. On my second, the first row was completely empty. Go figure.
While the majority of rides give 70% of their capacity to FastPass+, Frozen Ever After started distributing FastPass+ for what Disney thought would be 80% of the number of people that would be able to ride per hour. Add additional people arriving with Disability Access Service Card return times and you have very little capacity given to standby riders even with 100% uptime. In the afternoon, there can be 100 people in standby and the 101st person can still wait over an hour to ride.
You absolutely want FastPass+ for Frozen and the only way to secure them is to be staying on property and booking 60+ days out. With FastPass+ booking now starting at 7am, that means being on your computer with all of your tickets linked and ready to book no later than 6:59am on the east coast (3:59am pacific). I suggest booking Epcot FastPass+ first for whatever date you plan to visit furthest away from your check-in date. That will result in the most availability. But if you’re booking on a date that is essentially 65 or 66 days out, there will be people that are staying 10+ days on property that are able to book 68 or 69 days in advance. There will still be availability on day 64, but return times will only be in shorter and shorter supply the closer we get to a given date. 30 days out, there will literally be zero availability outside of cancellations, which are obviously infrequent.
Here’s a look at what wait times have looked like since the ride opened last week. Remember that red boxes indicate when the ride is either down OR only accepting FastPass+ returners:
Larger: https://www.easywdw.com/reports13/frozen_ever_after_reliability.jpg
It’s an awful lot of red over the first couple of days of operation that seems to turn more and more green as we get closer to the current date. It “feels” premature to declare that we’re out of the woods, but just over an hour of downtime/no-standby-time over the last two days certainly looks better. You may remember that there were “literally” no public soft opens for the attraction, so it does seem natural that there would be some initial growing pains. Obviously that situation is not ideal, but I’d hate to see what the fill gap would have been if we had another Rivers of Light situation on our hands. “No, really guys! We’re serious this time! Star Wars! July 19, 2023!!! Really! Book it!!”
This post from a few days ago goes into a lot more detail about how to experience Frozen Ever After with a relatively short wait, but I would reiterate that the very end of the night is your best bet, particularly if you’re visiting Epcot over two days. You can try to get in line around 8:55pm on your first night and if the ride is down, you can try something else on day two to guarantee a ride – either heading there first thing or waiting it out in the afternoon. Or hold out for the late night again. While Disney likely won’t drop the posted wait below 120 minutes after 8:30pm, actual waits should be much shorter with few FastPass+ returners heading to the ride that late and significantly more capacity given to standby.
Larger: https://www.easywdw.com/reports13/royal_sommerhus_waits.jpg
Over at the nearby Royal Sommerhus meet and greet, where guests have the opportunity to meet Anna and Elsa in succession, wait times remain short for the most part with some of the lowest waits of the day happening in the heart of the afternoon. And with the cute, air-conditioned queue, most people won’t mind spending ten or fifteen minutes in line anyway.
The website will continue to monitor the situation.Breaking News Emails Get breaking news alerts and special reports. The news and stories that matter, delivered weekday mornings.
Sep. 7, 2017, 11:59 PM GMT / Updated Sep. 7, 2017, 11:59 PM GMT By Julia Ainsley and Andrew Blankstein
WASHINGTON — President Donald Trump's Department of Homeland Security had planned nationwide raids to target 8,400 undocumented immigrants later this month, according to three law enforcement officials and an internal document that described the plan as "the largest operation of its kind in the history of ICE," an acronym for U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement.
But after NBC News reported the plans late Thursday, the agency issued a statement saying it had cancelled nationwide enforcement actions due to Hurricane Irma and the damage caused by Hurricane Harvey.
"While we generally do not comment on future potential law enforcement actions, operational plans are subject to change based on a variety of factors," ICE spokesman Sarah Rodriguez said in a statement. "Due to the current weather situation in Florida and other potentially impacted areas, along with the ongoing recovery in Texas, U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) had already reviewed all upcoming operations and has adjusted accordingly. There is currently no coordinated nationwide operation planned at this time. The priority in the affected areas should remain focused on life-saving and life-sustaining activities."
Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) officers arrest a suspect during a pre-dawn raid on January 17, 2007 in Santa Ana, California. Mark Avery / AP file
Prior to the initial NBC News report, another spokeswoman for ICE, Jennifer Elzea, had said the agency was "not able to speculate about potential future targeted enforcement actions."
The raids were scheduled over five days beginning Sept. 17, and were called "Operation Mega," according to the document, a memo circulated agency-wide in August.
It is not unusual for ICE operations to target immigrants by the hundreds or even low thousands. The higher-than-usual target number may have been partially driven by an effort to reach a deportation goal by the end of the fiscal year, which ends Sept. 30, one of the officials said.
The cancelled operation comes on the heels of Trump's controversial decision to end the Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals program, known as DACA, that allows some immigrants who were brought into the United States as children to stay.
Related: Trump Ends DACA Program, No New Applications Accepted
ICE had been planning the operation internally since mid-August and had instructed officers in the field to target adults deemed to be gang members or perpetrators of serious crimes, said one of the officials. Other undocumented immigrants not suspected of crimes may have been swept up in the raids as "collateral," the official said.
Immigration agents often only arrest one-quarter to one-half of the target population due to the difficulty of locating individuals and getting them to open their doors to agents.
Immigration detainees walk down a hall at the Theo Lacy Facility, a county jail which houses convicted criminals as well as immigration detainees arrested by the U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) in Orange, California on March 14, 2017. Robyn Beck / AFP - Getty Images, file
Operation Mega would not have targeted juveniles, one of the officials said. And DACA recipients are not at risk for deportation until March 5, 2018, the date President Trump set the program to expire if Congress does not act to make it law.
Department of Homeland spokesman Dave Lapan said earlier Thursday that immigration agents would cease to target non-criminal immigrants seeking relief from Hurricane Irma. The agency followed the same protocol in areas of Texas ravaged by Hurricane Harvey last week.CHENNAI: In a show of solidarity, arch rival DMK today extended full support towards relief and rehabilitation efforts undertaken by ruling AIADMK in rain ravaged Tamil Nadu and also launched two helplines for the people.DMK president M Karunanidhi said his party would support the government's relief and rehabilitation efforts "in this critical situation".He announced that people affected by floods could contact the DMK headquarters on 044-24320280 or 7810878108."Similarly, DMK district officers can also be contacted for assistance," he said in a statement, adding that party workers would whole-heartedly involve themselves in |
pore govt reportedly linked to undersea cable spying The telco has been helping local and Australian intelligence agencies tap communications on SEA-ME-WE-3, a major undersea cable carrying Internet traffic between Singapore and Perth, according to Sydney Morning Herald. Read More
In response to the cyberthreat, Infocomm Development Authority of Singapore (IDA) told ZDNet it was looking into any possible compromise of employee records and has alerted the police.
"The Singapore Government takes cybersecurity seriously. We do not condone actions designed to intimidate the government," said the IDA spokesperson. The infocomms regulator added all agencies currently have to comply with government IT security policies and best practices such as conducting regular security tests, scans for vulnerabilities as well as conducting security reviews and audits.
Security policies include the requirement to protect all their data against unauthorized access, disclosure or modification, whether accidental or intentional. "Where third party vendors are involved, service level agreements are in place to ensure that they maintain the required level of security," IDA added.
Last month, the hacktivist group issued a statement on Pastebin calling for a Tweet Storm on government Twitter accounts in a move to protest against other arrests and a recently introduced licensing scheme for local news sites.
However, plans to apparently get a flood of Tweets to overwhelm those accounts did not appear to materialize. IDA had also played down the threat then, saying the "tweetstorm will not affect Government network infrastructure".
Updated 12.36am February 8, 2014 with IDA response
Update 9am February 8, 2014: The statement by Anonymous has been made public over a pastebin, but we are not linking to it due to the sensitivity of some information.When it comes to short-term, high-interest loans, payday lenders may get most of the headlines, but auto title loans can be just as perilous for borrowers, especially when the lenders use deceptive marketing. This morning, the Federal Trade Commission announced its first ever legal actions involving title loan operations that misled borrowers.
The FTC announced Friday that First American Title Lending of Georgia, LLC and Finance Select, Inc. have agreed to settle charges they advertised, both online and in print, 0% interest rates for a 30-day car title loan without disclosing important loan conditions or the increased finance charge imposed after the introductory period ended.
While advertised as short-term loans, title loans can become longer-term, high cost installment loans with payments due over several months. The annual percentage rate of a car title loan can be over 300 percent. If a consumer does not repay the loan within 30 days, high finance charges can add up quickly, with a consumer paying hundreds or thousands of dollars in fees or forfeiting the vehicle.
According to the FTC complaint [PDF], First American Title Lending, which operates 30 locations in Georgia, advertised a zero percent offer and failed to disclose that the borrower had to meet specific conditions to actually receive that rate.
The borrower had to be a new customer, repay the loan within 30 days, and pay with a money order or certified funds, not cash or a personal check. If a borrower failed to meet those conditions, the offer did not apply, and he or she would be required to pay a finance charge from the start of the loan.
Additionally, the company’s ads failed to disclose the amount of the finance charge after the introductory period.
According to the FTC’s complaint [PDF] against Finance Select, which does business as Fast Cash Title Pawn, the company failed to disclose that unless a loan was paid in full in 30 days, the zero percent offer did not apply, and the borrower would have to pay a finance charge for the initial 30 days of the loan in addition to any finance charges incurred going forward.
Fast Cash, which has five locations across Georgia and two in Alabama, also failed to disclose how much the finance charge would cost a borrower after the 30-day introductory period was over.
Under the proposed settlement, the two companies are prohibited from failing to disclose all qualifying terms associated with obtaining a loan at its advertised rate; failing to disclose what the finance charge would be after an introductory period ends; and misrepresenting any material terms of any loan agreements.
First American Title Lending is also prohibited from stating the amount of any down payment, number of payments or periods of repayment or the amount of any payment or finance charge without clearly and conspicuously stating all the terms required by the Truth in Lending Act and Regulation Z.
The FTC reports that the latest action is part of an ongoing effort to protect consumers in the short-term lending and auto marketplaces.
In First FTC Cases Against Car Title Lenders, Companies Settle Charges They Deceptively Advertised the Cost of Their Loans [Federal Trade Commission]White Rock defeated the Mirabel Diamond Academy 12-5 in the Canadian championship
White Rock All-Stars will advance to the Little League Baseball Canadian Championship. (Kim Bratvold Photography)
The White Rock All-Stars will advance to the Little League Baseball World Series after defeating the Mirabel Diamond Academy 12-5 Saturday at the Little League Baseball Canadian Championship in Medicine Hat, Alta.
The game got off to a rocky start for the Semiahmoo Peninsula 11- and 12-year-olds as the very first pitch thrown by White Rock was dinged out of the park by the Mirabel Diamond Academy.
White Rock battled back in the third inning, scoring six runs to take the lead.
The Little League Baseball World Series takes place Aug. 17-27 at Williamsport, Pa.
Congratulations to White Rock as they head back to Williamsport! #LLWS #RoadtoWilliamsport https://t.co/dQGgKY2H6J — Little League Canada (@LittleLgeCanada) August 12, 2017If you know Brenda at all, you know that she is a night owl (unlike her cousin who is known to be up before 5 a.m.) so I wasn’t sure if’ ‘getting a cup of coffee downtown’ would be enough to entice her to get out of bed and be ready to roll by 9:30 a.m. To Brenda’s credit, this trip she has been up for just about anything. Without hesitation she said, “Yeah. That sounds good!” So yesterday morning, as we got ready to go my husband says, “Why are you guys going downtown? We’ve got lots of coffee here…”
I could have killed him.
I quickly had to blabber on about the sights and sounds of downtown that Brenda must see on a Saturday morning. And we quickly made an exit.
Cam (from Continuing Care Transportation) took us the ‘scenic route’ so that Brenda could see the city and also, so she could finally see the Saddledome (from afar.) While driving by, Cam suggested we jump out and take a quick peek. Brenda and I both agreed that this was a dandy idea. We pulled right up to the doors, Cam stopped the van and turned it off. This is when we told Brenda that she would see the boys skate… (VIDEO)
Blake Heynen (Community Relations, Calgary Flames) met us at the door. It was Blake who made all the arrangements on their end and I am so grateful for his help (thanks Blake!!)
He gave Brenda a bit of history about the building and took us to her seats. Of course, we were also met by Tracy from Global (thanks Tracy) and the Flames TV camera crew. It was while talking to Kristin Hallett that she was asked if she would want to go down to the dressing room to meet the boys.
(Video of Surprise)
Then we headed downstairs, behind-the-scenes. It was there that Brenda had her first experience with a media scrum. For anyone who hasn’t seen one, it’s pretty amazing to watch media grill coaches/players on game day. Then came the moment of truth: the dressing room.
She was greeted by Curtis Glencross and Mark Giordano, who first presented her with a signed Al MacInnis jersey (might as well go back to Cape Breton now!) and an official Calgary Flames jersey. They then invited her back to meet the rest of the boys who wanted to meet her and sign the jersey.
They fussed over Brenda and took time to talk to her, wishing her happy birthday but also thanking her for coming. We got a huge kick out Dennis Wideman who asked if she was the girl from the blog and then said: “How are you, you made it down. “That’s awesome, it’s good to meet you. Happy birthday, wow!”
The guys didn’t rush her, they spent time chatting and continued to thank her. After meeting practically everyone, we headed out where Harvey surprised her with cake. She did a few interviews and we headed back to the Ed Whalen Media Lounge, where she enjoyed a piece of cake.
After all was said and done, Brenda said that this was the best cup of coffee ever. But as we left the Saddledome, we decided it would be cruel to make her wait any longer for coffee (if you know Brenda, you know she loves her coffee!) so we stopped at Starbucks (another first) so she could enjoy a grande 🙂
As a close friend and cousin, my heart was full watching her interact with the boys and to see the joy on her face. Knowing her loyalty and love for this team and these players, there’s no one else who deserved this experience more than her. And it took many people to make it happen.
To Cam & Continuing Care Transportation: thank you for just being awesome. For picking us up and carting us around and for sharing in all the excitement. We couldn’t have asked for better people to be a part of this 🙂
To Coach Hartley: thanks for taking the time to visit with Brenda and for the kind words. (VIDEO)
So it’s really hard to put to words (and news stories get edited due to my tears…) but my sincere thanks to everyone at the Flames who made this day so special. From letting Brenda watch the skate, to meeting the guys and hanging out in the dressing room, to having Harvey present her with a cake, to the ‘Flood History’ that Blake gave us while walking Brenda around behind-the-scenes. Simply put: you guys are the best. And as Brenda said, this is the reason she’s been a Flames fan for so lon thank you, thank you, thank you!
Thanks to Flames TV, Global (especially Tracy) & the Calgary Sun for sharing this story with everyone and helping us thank those involved. 🙂
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AdvertisementsDubai: Iran has notified the Saudi mission in Tehran that an allegedly drunk Saudi diplomat who caused a fatal car accident in March would be banned from leaving the country.
Chairman of the Iranian Parliament’s National Security and Foreign Policy Commission Alaeddin Boroujerdi announced on Sunday that the “drunk Saudi diplomat has been banned from leaving the country”, according to Iran’s Fars news agency.
The diplomat is alleged to have been found by police to have been under the influence of alcohol when he caused the death of an Iranian citizen in mid-March after ramming his car into another passenger vehicle while driving at a speed of at 130km/h.
Alcoholic beverage was also alleged to have been found in the diplomat’s car.
The Iranian foreign ministry had “strongly” protested the incident to the Saudi embassy in Tehran at the time. The Saudi foreign ministry at the time rejected the allegation that the diplomat had been under the influence of alcohol. Saudi ambassador Osama Naqli said it was “a regular and unfortunate traffic accident”, according to the Saudi press.
A source in the Saudi embassy in Tehran told the Al Youm newspaper that the diplomat has been assigned a lawyer, describing the travel ban as a “natural” procedure in line with international norms.
Last month, rapporteur of the Iranian parliament’s National Security and Foreign Policy Commission Syed Hussain Naqavi Hussaini said the diplomat should be punished irrespective of diplomatic immunity. Diplomatic immunity, he said, did not cover violation of traffic laws.
Davatgari said the diplomat, whose vehicle’s insurance had expired, might have been returning from a party, according to Fars.
The diplomat was appointed to the consular section of the Saudi Embassy in January 2011, according to Iranian media.Of all of the world's species, humans and chimpanzees are some of the only to engage in coordinated attacks on other members of their same species. Jane Goodall was among the first to introduce the occurrence of lethal inter-community killings and since then primatologists and anthropologists have long debated the concept of warfare in this genus. Research theories have pointed to increased gains and benefits of killing off competitors and opening up increased access to key resources such as food or mates. In contrast, others have argued that warfare is a result of human impact on chimpanzees, such as habitat destruction or food provisioning, rather than adaptive strategies.
New research from an international coalition of ape researchers, published September 18 in the journal Nature, has shed new light on the subject, suggesting that human encroachment and interference is not, as previous researchers have claimed, an influential predictor of chimp-on-chimp aggression.
The study began as a response to a growing number of commentators claiming that chimpanzee violence was caused by human impacts. "This is an important question to get right. If we are using chimpanzees as a model for understanding human violence, we need to know what really causes chimpanzees to be violent," said University of Minnesota researcher Michael L. Wilson, lead author on the study.
"Humans have long impacted African tropical forests and chimpanzees, and one of the long-standing questions is if human disturbance is an underlying factor causing the lethal aggression observed," explained co-author David Morgan, PhD, research fellow with the Lester E Fisher Center for the Study and Conservation of Apes at Lincoln Park Zoo in Chicago. Morgan has studied chimpanzees deep in the forests of Republic of Congo for 14 years. "A key take-away from this research is that human influence does not spur increased aggression within or between chimpanzee communities."
A team of 30 ape researchers assembled extensive data sets spanning five decades of research gathered from 18 chimpanzee communities experiencing varying degrees of human influence. In all, data included pattern analysis of 152 killings by chimpanzees. The key findings indicate that a majority of violent attackers and victims of attack are male chimpanzees, and the information is consistent with the theory that these acts of violence are driven by adaptive fitness benefits rather than human impacts.
"Wild chimpanzee communities are often divided into two broad categories depending on whether they exist in pristine or human disturbed environments," explained Morgan. "In reality, however, human disturbance can occur along a continuum and study sites included in this investigation spanned the spectrum. We found human impact did not predict the rate of killing among communities.
"The more we learn about chimpanzee aggression and factors that trigger lethal attacks among chimpanzees, the more prepared park managers and government officials will be in addressing and mitigating risks to populations particularly with changing land use by humans in chimpanzee habitat," explained Morgan.198 Methods of Nonviolent Action (PDF version)
198 METHODS OF NONVIOLENT ACTION
Practitioners of nonviolent struggle have an entire arsenal of “nonviolent weapons” at their disposal. Listed below are 198 of them, classified into three broad categories: nonviolent protest and persuasion, noncooperation (social, economic, and political), and nonviolent intervention. A description and historical examples of each can be found in volume two of The Politics of Nonviolent Action, by Gene Sharp.
THE METHODS OF NONVIOLENT PROTEST AND PERSUASION
Formal Statements
1. Public Speeches
2. Letters of opposition or support
3. Declarations by organizations and institutions
4. Signed public statements
5. Declarations of indictment and intention
6. Group or mass petitions
Communications with a Wider Audience
7. Slogans, caricatures, and symbols
8. Banners, posters, and displayed communications
9. Leaflets, pamphlets, and books
10. Newspapers and journals
11. Records, radio, and television
12. Skywriting and earthwriting
Group Representations
13. Deputations
14. Mock awards
15. Group lobbying
16. Picketing
17. Mock elections
Symbolic Public Acts
18. Displays of flags and symbolic colors
19. Wearing of symbols
20. Prayer and worship
21. Delivering symbolic objects
22. Protest disrobings
23. Destruction of own property
24. Symbolic lights
25. Displays of portraits
26. Paint as protest
27. New signs and names
28. Symbolic sounds
29. Symbolic reclamations
30. Rude gestures
Pressures on Individuals
31. “Haunting” officials
32. Taunting officials
33. Fraternization
34. Vigils
Drama and Music
35. Humorous skits and pranks
36. Performances of plays and music
37. Singing
Processions
38. Marches
39. Parades
40. Religious processions
41. Pilgrimages
42. Motorcades
Honoring the Dead
43. Political mourning
44. Mock funerals
45. Demonstrative funerals
46. Homage at burial places
Public Assemblies
47. Assemblies of protest or support
48. Protest meetings
49. Camouflaged meetings of protest
50. Teach-ins
Withdrawal and Renunciation
51. Walk-outs
52. Silence
53. Renouncing honors
54. Turning one’s back
THE METHODS OF SOCIAL NONCOOPERATION
Ostracism of Persons
55. Social boycott
56. Selective social boycott
57. Lysistratic nonaction
58. Excommunication
59. Interdict
Noncooperation with Social Events, Customs, and Institutions
60. Suspension of social and sports activities
61. Boycott of social affairs
62. Student strike
63. Social disobedience
64. Withdrawal from social institutions
Withdrawal from the Social System
65. Stay-at-home
66. Total personal noncooperation
67. “Flight” of workers
68. Sanctuary
69. Collective disappearance
70. Protest emigration (hijrat)
THE METHODS OF ECONOMIC NONCOOPERATION: ECONOMIC BOYCOTTS
Actions by Consumers
71. Consumers’ boycott
72. Nonconsumption of boycotted goods
73. Policy of austerity
74. Rent withholding
75. Refusal to rent
76. National consumers’ boycott
77. International consumers’ boycott
Action by Workers and Producers
78. Workmen’s boycott
79. Producers’ boycott
Action by Middlemen
80. Suppliers’ and handlers’ boycott
Action by Owners and Management
81. Traders’ boycott
82. Refusal to let or sell property
83. Lockout
84. Refusal of industrial assistance
85. Merchants’ “general strike”
Action by Holders of Financial Resources
86. Withdrawal of bank deposits
87. Refusal to pay fees, dues, and assessments
88. Refusal to pay debts or interest
89. Severance of funds and credit
90. Revenue refusal
91. Refusal of a government’s money
Action by Governments
92. Domestic embargo
93. Blacklisting of traders
94. International sellers’ embargo
95. International buyers’ embargo
96. International trade embargo
THE METHODS OF ECONOMIC NONCOOPERATION: THE STRIKE
Symbolic Strikes
97. Protest strike
98. Quickie walkout (lightning strike)
Agricultural Strikes
99. Peasant strike
100. Farm Workers’ strike
Strikes by Special Groups
101. Refusal of impressed labor
102. Prisoners’ strike
103. Craft strike
104. Professional strike
Ordinary Industrial Strikes
105. Establishment strike
106. Industry strike
107. Sympathetic strike
Restricted Strikes
108. Detailed strike
109. Bumper strike
110. Slowdown strike
111. Working-to-rule strike
112. Reporting “sick” (sick-in)
113. Strike by resignation
114. Limited strike
115. Selective strike
Multi-Industry Strikes
116. Generalized strike
117. General strike
Combination of Strikes and Economic Closures
118. Hartal
119. Economic shutdown
THE METHODS OF POLITICAL NONCOOPERATION
Rejection of Authority
120. Withholding or withdrawal of allegiance
121. Refusal of public support
122. Literature and speeches advocating resistance
Citizens’ Noncooperation with Government
123. Boycott of legislative bodies
124. Boycott of elections
125. Boycott of government employment and positions
126. Boycott of government depts., agencies, and other bodies
127. Withdrawal from government educational institutions
128. Boycott of government-supported organizations
129. Refusal of assistance to enforcement agents
130. Removal of own signs and placemarks
131. Refusal to accept appointed officials
132. Refusal to dissolve existing institutions
Citizens’ Alternatives to Obedience
133. Reluctant and slow compliance
134. Nonobedience in absence of direct supervision
135. Popular nonobedience
136. Disguised disobedience
137. Refusal of an assemblage or meeting to disperse
138. Sitdown
139. Noncooperation with conscription and deportation
140. Hiding, escape, and false identities
141. Civil disobedience of “illegitimate” laws
Action by Government Personnel
142. Selective refusal of assistance by government aides
143. Blocking of lines of command and information
144. Stalling and obstruction
145. General administrative noncooperation
146. Judicial noncooperation
147. Deliberate inefficiency and selective noncooperation by enforcement agents
148. Mutiny
Domestic Governmental Action
149. Quasi-legal evasions and delays
150. Noncooperation by constituent governmental units
International Governmental Action
151. Changes in diplomatic and other representations
152. Delay and cancellation of diplomatic events
153. Withholding of diplomatic recognition
154. Severance of diplomatic relations
155. Withdrawal from international organizations
156. Refusal of membership in international bodies
157. Expulsion from international organizations
THE METHODS OF NONVIOLENT INTERVENTION
Psychological Intervention
158. Self-exposure to the elements
159. The fast
a) Fast of moral pressure
b) Hunger strike
c) Satyagrahic fast
160. Reverse trial
161. Nonviolent harassment
Physical Intervention
162. Sit-in
163. Stand-in
164. Ride-in
165. Wade-in
166. Mill-in
167. Pray-in
168. Nonviolent raids
169. Nonviolent air raids
170. Nonviolent invasion
171. Nonviolent interjection
172. Nonviolent obstruction
173. Nonviolent occupation
Social Intervention
174. Establishing new social patterns
175. Overloading of facilities
176. Stall-in
177. Speak-in
178. Guerrilla theater
179. Alternative social institutions
180. Alternative communication system
Economic Intervention
181. Reverse strike
182. Stay-in strike
183. Nonviolent land seizure
184. Defiance of blockades
185. Politically motivated counterfeiting
186. Preclusive purchasing
187. Seizure of assets
188. Dumping
189. Selective patronage
190. Alternative markets
191. Alternative transportation systems
192. Alternative economic institutions
Political Intervention
193. Overloading of administrative systems
194. Disclosing identities of secret agents
195. Seeking imprisonment
196. Civil disobedience of “neutral” laws
197. Work-on without collaboration
198. Dual sovereignty and parallel government
Without doubt, a large number of additional methods have already been used but have not been classified, and a multitude of additional methods will be invented in the future that have the characteristics of the three classes of methods: nonviolent protest and persuasion, noncooperation and nonviolent intervention.
It must be clearly understood that the greatest effectiveness is possible when individual methods to be used are selected to implement the previously adopted strategy. It is necessary to know what kind of pressures are to be used before one chooses the precise forms of action that will best apply those pressures.
[1] Boston: Porter Sargent, 1973 and later editions.Israel will launch a brutal war against Lebanon if provoked by Hezbollah, senior Israel Defense Forces officers warned Thursday.
Though the northern border has remained mostly quiet since the end of the Second Lebanon War six years ago, Northern Command officers remain leery of hostilities breaking out again, especially as tensions with Iran remain high and Syria continues to spiral out of control.
“We will fight in a very aggressive way,” said Brig. Gen. Herzi Halevi, the commander of the IDF’s Galilee Division, charged with defending Israel’s border with Lebanon. “Any village from which rockets are fired – will be destroyed.”
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However, he acknowledged that another war would not be a cakewalk for Israeli troops or civilians.
“The next war will be different than the ones over the last 60 years. Civilians all over Israel will face a very tough war. There will be heavy fire on all the cities of Israel,” he said.
Speaking from divisional headquarters, several hundred meters from the border with Lebanon and overlooking the village of Bint Jbel, where the last war’s fiercest battles were fought, Halevi and other officers described both sides of the border as flourishing during the six years since the war. “For Lebanon it is the best period in the last 40 years,” he said.
Israel’s neighbor to the north, an inherently unstable country of mixed and often warring ethnic groups, is currently more stable than Egypt or Syria, he said. “The six years since the Second Lebanon War have been the quietest time in Lebanon in the last 40 years.”
Halevi was atypically complimentary of the United Nations Interim Force in Lebanon, saying that they were “doing a great job” and that Hezbollah “does not like their presence.”
The peacekeeping troops were installed in southern Lebanon as part of the cease-fire agreement, UN Resolution 1701, that ended the Second Lebanon war in 2006.
The UN force, he said, continually tries to precisely mark the border with blue barrels and recently built a wall at Kafr Kila, preventing rock throwing between Israelis and Lebanese. “I hope one day we can take it down, but for now it is good fence that makes good neighbors,” he said.
Yet UN Resolution 1701, he acknowledged, “is not enforced on Hezbollah.”
The resolution, reached at the end of the war, bans all armed Hezbollah presence south of the Litani River and prohibits the import of all weapons to militia groups in Lebanon, among other things.
Officers in the command said they know of “thousands of homes” south of the Litani River where “one wall divides the kids’ room with the toys and the missiles and rockets.”
Though the border is relatively placid, things could spiral out of control quickly, according to Halevi. Hezbollah could get frustrated with its unsuccessful efforts abroad to exact revenge for its military commander Imad Mughniyeh’s death and decide to carry out an attack on Israeli soil; it could “mistakenly try to find a solution to the situation in Syria,” or it could serve “as an Iranian tool.”
But any decision by Hezbollah to attack and trigger war, a senior officer in the Northern Command said, would bring about destruction “that will take a few decades for them to get over.”
The officer also voiced concern over Syria’s chemical weapons. “All I can say are the facts: Syria has many chemical weapons. Their officers have strong relations with Hezbollah officers. They have given Hezbollah many rockets. If they start to lose control, it will be that much easier for them to put their hands on those products.”
The officer stopped short of saying such a transfer would be a cause for war, but did say “it would contribute to a rise in tension.”Diablo 3's RMAH Fraud Claims Gets The FBI Involved By William Usher Random Article Blend Update: The alleged victim has come clean and states that it was all a lie and he never called the FBI.)
Shortly after posting up news about one Diablo III's player issue with losing Diablo III's Real-Money Auction House, another gamer has gone the extra route of contacting the Federal Bureau of Investigation after losing $49.99 to another grey area of the Real-Money Auction House.
Basically, he sold an item on the Real-Money Auction House for $49.99, the item passes out of his possession but he claims he never received the money due to Error 0, something that has been popping up lately for RMAH trades and the cause of another incident that
After filing multiple tickets and calling customer support several times, he was allegedly told that trying to contact them multiple times would not expedite his situation. After two weeks of waiting with no response, the user decided to call the FBI on Blizzard, with the claim of wire fraud. According to the user who goes by the handle of Welshers, his claim isn't the first one that the FBI has received regarding Diablo III and the Real-Money Auction House, but the user doesn't clarify if there is an ongoing investigation.
In a related case, another user also posted information on fraud cases that the FBI is currently looking into. You can check out the thread here on
This issue is mainly prevalent here in the United States, as Blizzard is having a legal tussle in other countries such as
This should really be a warning to anyone who decides to use the Real-Money Auction House: there is real money involved, your money and you can lose it. While the typical fanboy response is that "This is a game, you shouldn't have put real money into your account in the first place." it's still up to Blizzard to manage the responsibilities that come along with running a real-money market based on virtual item trades. Also, people, seriously, this is real money.
The safest bet is to stay away from the RMAH. This doesn't mean you can't play Diablo III, but by all means if you don't want to lose real money then stay away from the Real-Money Auction House, grey market sellers and black market sellers. The alleged victim has come clean and states that it was all a lie and he never called the FBI.)Shortly after posting up news about one's player issue with losing $200.00 in a region restriction policy, after depositing money into his account and trying to make a purchase in's Real-Money Auction House, another gamer has gone the extra route of contacting the Federal Bureau of Investigation after losing $49.99 to another grey area of the Real-Money Auction House. Blues picked up on the post thanks to a tip. However, the original story is on the Diablo 3 forums, which is actually a re-post from earlier because, believe it or not, Blizzard fanboys tried burying the story and derailing it into a flame-war. You might want to read the first post and skip the rest. Whether the guy is being completely honest or not is still up for debate but he's adamant that his case is legit.Basically, he sold an item on the Real-Money Auction House for $49.99, the item passes out of his possession but he claims he never received the money due to Error 0, something that has been popping up lately for RMAH trades and the cause of another incident that Forbes recently exposed After filing multiple tickets and calling customer support several times, he was allegedly told that trying to contact them multiple times would not expedite his situation. After two weeks of waiting with no response, the user decided to call the FBI on Blizzard, with the claim of wire fraud. According to the user who goes by the handle of Welshers, his claim isn't the first one that the FBI has received regardingand the Real-Money Auction House, but the user doesn't clarify if there is an ongoing investigation.In a related case, another user also posted information on fraud cases that the FBI is currently looking into. You can check out the thread here on Google's cache, as Blizzard had the thread deleted. The thread points to the IC3, the Internet Crime Complaint Center for individuals who may have encountered situations similar to what we've been reporting on, where real life money has been sucked up into a digital vacuum and Blizzard is either slow to respond or not responding at all. Other users suggested that victims contact the United States Postal Inspection Service or USPIS at their official website This issue is mainly prevalent here in the United States, as Blizzard is having a legal tussle in other countries such as South Korea, Germany and France over anti-consumerist measures. As of the publishing of this article, there have been no reports of law enforcement agencies getting involved regarding the complaints from Korea, Germany or France, outside of each region's respective Fair Trade Commission and/or consumer advocacy groups.This should really be a warning to anyone who decides to use the Real-Money Auction House: there is real money involved,money and you can lose it. While the typical fanboy response is that "This is a game, you shouldn't have put real money into your account in the first place." it's still up to Blizzard to manage the responsibilities that come along with running a real-money market based on virtual item trades. Also, people, seriously,The safest bet is to stay away from the RMAH. This doesn't mean you can't play, but by all means if you don't want to lose real money then stay away from the Real-Money Auction House, grey market sellers and black market sellers. Blended From Around The Web Facebook
Back to topVia Judicial Watch,
Food-stamp recipients can use their taxpayer-funded benefit to order online from retailers like Amazon under a new Obama administration initiative that aims to facilitate the shopping experience for rural and urban residents. It marks the latest of many costly experiments by the administration to expand the fraud-infested program, which has seen a record-high number of beneficiaries under President Obama. To eliminate the welfare stigma, the administration renamed food stamps Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP) and the rolls swelled to an astounding 46.5 million in 2016. This cost American taxpayers and eye-popping $70 billion, according to government figures.
It’s all part of the president’s longtime goal to eradicate what he and the First Lady call an epidemic of “food insecurity” among the nation’s low-income residents. Part of the problem is that this demographic has limited access to healthy food choices, the administration says, and the government must provide them with nutritional options. This is why taxpayers have been forced to dole out tens of millions of dollars to bring fruits and vegetables to the nation’s inner cities, coined “food deserts” by the administration because they lack healthy fare. The new online ordering program will help address this, according to the federal agency that runs the bloated food-stamp program, the U.S. Department of Agriculture. (USDA).
“Online purchasing is a potential lifeline for SNAP participants living in urban neighborhoods and rural communities where access to healthy food choices can be limited,” USDA Secretary Tom Vilsack said in a statement announcing the new program this week. “We’re looking forward to being able to bring the benefits of the online market to low-income Americans participating in SNAP.” Besides Amazon, a few other online businesses have been approved by the feds to accept food stamps online, including Hy-Vee, Hart’s Local Grocers, Safeway and ShopRite. The USDA acknowledges however, that “online payment presents technical and security challenges that will need to be examined and fully addressed…”
It’s the last thing that an out-of-control government program, long plagued with fraud corruption, needs. Under the Obama expansion SNAP has suffered a multitude of serious problems. Back in 2012 a federal investigation uncovered evidence that food-stamp recipients were using the benefit to buy drugs, weapons and other contraband from unscrupulous vendors. A year later Judicial Watch broke a story, based on testimony and other evidence provided by a whistleblower, about the U.S. government knowingly giving illegal immigrants food stamps for decades. That was followed by another disturbing scheme in which SNAP benefits were being sold online using social media such as Facebook, Twitter and ecommerce websites like Craigslist and eBay.
Earlier this year federal authorities in south Florida busted the largest food-stamp fraud operation in U.S. history. Twenty-two defendants in the largely black and Hispanic areas of Miami-Dade County known as Opa-Locka and Hialeah swindled the government out of $13 million by fraudulently trading food stamps for cash. The crooked vendors operated food and produce stands at a local flea market as part of First Lady Michelle Obama’s initiative to eradicate “food deserts,” common in poor, minority communities where fresh, healthy food is tough to find or often unavailable. The feds say the business owners and their employees let food-stamp recipients use their welfare benefit to get cash in exchange for a cut of the money. They swiped the recipient’s SNAP card for an inflated amount, doled out cash and kept a percentage. In most instances the recipient didn’t actually get food, according to federal authorities.“To make progress on these issues, to truly make Canadians’ lives better, we owe it to Canadians to form government,” Mr. Singh said. “We owe it to them.”
While from a very different background than Prime Minister Justin Trudeau, the Liberal leader, Mr. Singh has frequently been compared to him. Just 38, Mr. Singh is known for his taste in clothing (which he discussed earlier this year with GQ magazine), charismatic campaign style and skillful use of social media. But like Mr. Trudeau during his early days heading the Liberals, Mr. Singh has also faced accusations from critics that he favors style over substance.
The furthest to the left of Canada three major political parties, the New Democrats went into the 2015 election leading most opinion polls only to see Mr. Trudeau take power and the party wound up in third place in Parliament, after the Conservatives.
Many inside and outside of the party blamed an excessively cautious platform that included, uncharacteristically for federal New Democrats, a vow to balance the budget. Tom Mulcair, the leader whom Mr. Singh succeeds, was also widely viewed as being unappealing to many younger voters.
Historically, the New Democrats held few seats in Parliament from Quebec. That changed dramatically in 2011 when the separatist Bloc Québécois collapsed and the party swept much of the province. That made the New Democrats, under Jack Layton, the official federal opposition for the first time in the party’s history. But Mr. Layton, who was born in Quebec and who was popular there, died a few months later.When the United States government persuaded residents of Bikini Atoll in the Marshall Islands to leave their homes, they were told they’d be able to return as soon as the nuclear tests were over.
Seventy years have passed since those promises, and the chain of islands remain deserted. Although residents are desperate to return, it appears the time has not yet come for the long-anticipated homecoming.
A study published this |
Image 83 of 85 Gary Kubiak kneels on the sidelines during the second half of the Texans' 27-20 loss to the Jacksonville Jaguars on Dec. 5, 2013. The loss was the team's 11 straight. Kubiak was relieved of his duties the following day ending his eight-year run as Texans' head coach. less Gary Kubiak kneels on the sidelines during the second half of the Texans' 27-20 loss to the Jacksonville Jaguars on Dec. 5, 2013. The loss was the team's 11 straight. Kubiak was relieved of his duties the... more Photo: Smiley N. Pool / Houston Chronicle
Image 84 of 85 Fifty-two days after being fired as head coach of the Texans, the Baltimore Ravens announced the hiring of Kubiak as offensive coordinator. Kubiak's friend Rick Dennison was also hired as Baltimore's quarterbacks coach. less Fifty-two days after being fired as head coach of the Texans, the Baltimore Ravens announced the hiring of Kubiak as offensive coordinator. Kubiak's friend Rick Dennison was also hired as Baltimore's... more Photo: Patrick Semansky / Associated PressJEFFERSON CITY, Mo. – The national conservative activism group FreedomWorks issued a call to action on Monday, asking its members in Missouri to call a list of wary Republicans and urge them to support ‘right-to-work.’
FreedomWorks, which claims 6 million online members, is the latest national conservative group to join the ‘right-to-work’ fight in Missouri, as a potential vote pends in the Missouri House later this week.
“Obama’s Big Labor allies want to force workers across Missouri to pay dues, and then use that money to support Big Government politicians,” wrote Matt Kibbe, president & CEO of the organization, in an email to supporters. “With your help, we can stop them. If Missouri passes a Right-to-Work law we can stop Obama’s Big Labor cronies in Missouri once and for all.”
The bill, a chief priority of House Speaker Tim Jones, R-Eurekea, would aim to restrict labor unions from collecting representation dues from non-union members in closed shops.
Kibbe’s group went further than many others organizations in touting the potential political benefits of ‘right-to-work’ for Missouri and national Republicans. “It’s time to make Missouri the 25th Right-to-Work state and stop Barack Obama and his Big Labor allies,” he wrote.
On its website, the group is targeting lawmakers like Reps. T.J. Berry, R-Independence, Chuck Gatchenberger, R-St. Charles, Ron Hicks, R-St. Peters, and Jeanne Riddle, R-Fulton. FreedomWorks suggests members call the lawmakers and tout three claimed benefits of ‘right-to-work’, including “HB 1770 would put Right-to-Work on the November ballot,” “Right-to-Work protects workers from being forced to join a union”, and “24 states have already passed this common sense legislation.”
Last week, the bill received support from the American Conservative Union, Americans for Tax Reform’s Grover Norquist, and Americans for Limited Government.
Democratic Gov. Jay Nixon, who was critical of the policy while speaking on the campaign trail over the weekend, said he was not sure who was pushing the bill, but that he believes Missourians would overwhelmingly oppose it if it is placed on the ballot, as they have before in the late 1970’s.The Minnesota Timberwolves teased Knicks fans at the deadline by (allegedly) dangling point guard Ricky Rubio in a deal for Derrick Rose. The deal was never completed, Rubio kicked serious ass the rest of the season, yet the Wolves still managed to finish with a higher pick than the Knicks. The Wolves are evil, yo.
Nevertheless, certain members of New York’s front office seem eager to reengage Minnesota this summer to acquire Rubio to plug into the very obvious hole at the point guard position. But he’s not the only candidate, per Ian Begley:
Per league sources with knowledge of the situation, some Knicks decision-makers see trading for Rubio as a viable option this offseason. Incumbent starter Rose also is an option at point guard. But the Timberwolves, coincidentally, see Rose as a point guard option in free agency, as ESPN reported last month. So even if the Knicks prefer to re-sign Rose, they likely will have competition.
There has been a lot of chatter on #KnicksTwitter recently about a Rubio/Courtney Lee swap, but I still haven’t seen that reported by a reliable source. That’s not to say it isn’t a possibility, but let’s take that rumor with a grain of salt for the time being.
The Wolves have younger point guard prospects in Tyus Jones (who has shown some promise) and Kris Dunn (who hasn’t, but was a high pick last year). I don’t believe the Wolves will part with Rubio, if only because that organization seems to exist only to torture Knicks fans these days. I’m remain terrified that the Knicks might re-sign Rose to a long-term deal, but the petty bastard in me is delighted by the prospect of Minnesota signing Rose in free agency. Good luck getting your shots, Karl-Anthony Towns!MARSEILLE, France (Reuters) - Russian hooligans prepared for “ultra-rapid, ultra-violent action” were involved in the worst of the fighting that hit Marseille at the start of the Euro 2016 soccer tournament, the French city’s chief prosecutor said on Monday.
Football Soccer - Euro 2016 - Marseille prosecutor's press conference - Marseille, France - 13/6/16 - French prosecutor of Marseille Brice Robin speaks during a news conference following the fan violence as part of the UEFA 2016 European Championship in Marseille. REUTERS/Jean-Paul Pelissier
An Englishman in his 50s remained in a critical condition in hospital after he was assaulted, one of 35 people injured during three days of fighting involving Russian, English and French fans in Marseille’s Vieux Port (Old Port).
European soccer’s governing body, UEFA, said it was “disgusted” by melees inside and outside the stadium in Marseille - where the English and Russian sides played on Saturday - and has threatened to expel both teams from the championship if the violence persists.
“There were 150 Russian supporters who in reality were hooligans,” Marseille prosecutor Brice Robin told a news conference. “These people were well prepared for ultra-rapid, ultra-violent action.”
Scenes of rival fans wielding metal bars and hurling beer bottles in street clashes in Marseille, as well as incidents in Nice, Lille and Paris, underscore the challenge soccer federations in Europe face in stamping out hooliganism.
Further along the Mediterranean coast from Marseille, Nice’s prosecutor said violence there involving Northern Irish fans on Saturday night was instigated by remnants of the now-disbanded French fan group known as the Nice Brigade that had ties with far-right circles.
England fans have said they were ambushed by squads of Russian assailants in at least one incident, though the Marseille prosecutor made clear that England supporters were responsible for some of the skirmishes in Marseille.
ENGLISH FANS JAILED
On Monday a Marseille court began hearing fast-track trials of 10 people held in police custody - six Britons, three French nationals and an Austrian. All were charged with violence involving a weapon, mostly against a law enforcement officers.
In the first cases to be heard, five England fans were sentenced to jail terms of between one and three months, while a Frenchman received a two-year term.
“I’m truly sorry. I was in the wrong place at the wrong time, but I’m no hooligan,” English cook Alexander Booth, 20, told the judge before his two-month sentence was read out.
After the weekend clashes, some Russians posted photos of themselves on social media holding stolen English supporters’ flags upside down - some spotted with blood - as trophies. The hooligans, who often refer to themselves as ‘ultras’, belong to an organized tradition of hooliganism which has its roots mainly around clubs in Moscow and St Petersburg.
No Russians were arrested over the weekend, Robin acknowledged. Asked why not, the prosecutor said they had carried out lightning strikes which made arrests difficult and that closed-circuit television footage was still being studied. “These are highly trained people,” Robin said.
Robin said some Russian supporters were turned back on arrival at Marseille international airport but that others had arrived overland.
French officials say 3,000 England soccer fans had been slapped with banning orders to block their travel to France due to previous offences, while only 30 Russian supporters were prevented from traveling.
A spokeswoman for British Prime Minister David Cameron said his government welcomed the UEFA investigation and that it was also vital to review crowd-control methods inside stadiums.
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“Are there any lessons that the French authorities can learn from that for future games... to look at where the teams’ relevant supporters are and how to manage those issues at the end of the game,” she told reporters.
Asked whether a complaint had been made about Russian fan behavior, she said: “We have raised our concerns.”So it was with a certain relish that I approached the
SHEIKH JARRAH, Jerusalem – As the grandson of anarchists, I’ve always had a soft spot in my heart for fanatics. Expressions of extremism, and passionately reasoned, exquisitely twisted world views make me feel, how shall I put this, at home.
It was beyond my understanding why an Israeli government which views the idea of a Palestinian Right of Return as tantamount to annihilation of the Jewish state, would set a legal precedent that
It was hard to fathom why Israeli police in this quiet hollow of the Arab half of Jerusalem, would choose to openly flout and violate the rulings of an Israeli court. I was unable to grasp why they would manhandle and arrest non-violent demonstrators – among them the executive director of the Association for Civil Rights in Israel – for protesting the official expulsion from their homes of more than two dozen Palestinian families here, driven out and into the street, so that subsidized and sheltered settlers could move in.
The essay has the seamless, compellingly elegant, hyper-lucid, parallel universe logic of a hallucination – or a settlement rooted in the craw of the West Bank. Until I read it, it was difficult for me to comprehend the current runaway-freight recklessness of Israeli authorities and a certain segment of the hard right, bolstered by shady funding from abroad.
“The answer is unpleasant to contemplate, but the mounting evidence makes it inescapable,” she writes. “It was Israel’s very willingness to make concessions for the sake of peace that has produced its current near-pariah status.”
The thrust of the piece, which Commentary Editor John Podhoretz understandably calls “groundbreaking,” is that Israel’s international standing has plummeted to an unprecedented low – and the number of Palestinians killed by Israel has concurrently soared – specifically because of Israel’s having done much too much for peace.
of a recent issue of Commentary, “The Deadly Price of Pursuing Peace,” written as it was by a talented colleague and friend, Evelyn Gordon.
for just such a right.
Just as I was clueless as to why the Knesset was to vote Wednesday on a bill that would make aiding asylum seekers fleeing African genocide, granting them shelter, medical care, food, a crime subject to up to 20 years in prison.
Or why there were vigorous new campaigns to increase gender segregation at the Western Wall and on public buses, and why women have been arrested and interrogated on suspicion of having worn prayer shawls while praying on their side of a barrier raised so that they would no longer be able to watch their sons’ bar mitzvah on the mens’ side.
Or why a sudden and ferocious campaign against human rights organizations and charity work agencies in Israel is coinciding with new human rights outrages against Palestinians and foreigners, some of them unable to leave, others forced to.
It was not until I saw the title of the Commentary piece that it all made sense.
The right is terrified of peace. And, in the end, the right’s fear of peace will be the death of Israel.
They are afraid of peace, in part, because it threatens the core of what has come to replace other values as the goal of Judaism: permanent settlement of the West Bank. But that is only a part of it.
They are afraid of peace because they are afraid of the world. They dismiss fellow Jews who want to see a two-state solution – a majority of Israelis – as unrealistic, as living in a bubble. The name of the bubble these moderates live in, however, is planet Earth.
The right, meanwhile, wants to wall off Israel as the world’s last remaining legally mandated Jewish ghetto. A place where all the rules are different, exit and entry, citizenship and human rights, because the residents within are Jews. A place where non-Jews, dehumanized as congenital Jew-haters, are rendered invisible. A place which, if suffocating and insufferable, still seems safer than the scary world outside.
A place which, because of its walls and its politics and its cowardice, is losing its ability to function as a part of the world, reveling in cheap-shot humiliations of key foreign ambassadors, deliriously proud of its sense that of all the world, including most of its Jews and Israelis – only the right sees the real truth.
This braid of thought was venomously endorsed this week both by an uncharacteristically Kahane-sounding Alan Dershowitz, and the obscenely infantile Im Tirtzu movement. According to them, where Cast Lead was concerned, the real war criminals are Richard Goldstone and Naomi Chazan – two people who are open about their love of Israel, and who have worked their whole adult lives for its well-being.
The fears of the right are not mere devices of rhetoric. The risks of making peace are real. Every bit as real as the risks of failing to make peace.
It all comes down to belief. It comes down to the kind of country the believer wants Israel to be. And for that reason, there is a civil war going on for Israel’s soul.
It will not be weaponry that decides this war, but courage. People who care about the direction that Israel is moving, and whose watchword is moderation, would do well to choose one facet of the fight, and join. One place to start, is to support the New Israel Fund and the groups it supports.
Another place to start is this one. At the weekend, challenging the threats of rightist thugs and law-scorning police, the weekly demonstration on behalf of the Palestinian residents of Sheikh Jarrah doubled in size. The police backed down on their vow to break up the protest, and the Kahanists barely showed.
If non-violent peace activism scares the right to this extent, there must be a great deal of power in it.
After all, most Israelis can sense that if peace is to be the enemy, more dangerous even than the threat of war, this is one doomed ghetto.
Things have reached such a devastating point, that for the first time in recent memory, even Ehud Barak is beginning to get it: “The simple truth is, if there is one state” including Israel, the West Bank and Gaza, “it will have to be either binational or undemocratic,” Barak told the Herzliya Conference Tuesday.
“If this bloc of millions of Palestinians cannot vote, that will be an apartheid state.”
The fear of peace has left Israel as a country which is prepared for nuclear warfare but not for non-violent protest on behalf of Palestinians. The fear of peace, and the blackmail of the right on behalf of settlement, has contorted Israel into a body which, unable to countenance the perils of treating the sickness of occupation, will eventually be killed by it.
Israel’s defense minister, for one, isHorror goes viral this weekend with Unfriended.
"I just saw the Star Wars trailer too!!!
I can't stop crying!!!"
Social media and all its faults come to a bloody head in this week's release of Unfriended, a horror film that uses Skype, Facebook, Youtube, and the MAC OS to tell its timely tale of technology turned evil. Instead of going for the throat with another in a long line of found footage type movies, Unfriended takes a new approach that undoubtedly works and creates a possible new form of cinematic storytelling. Through one steady shot of a computer screen, the events of the film unfold over an effectively short run time of eighty minutes.
Unfriended is not going to win any awards and its going to be savagely hammered by most critics for its extremely thin plot. However, the base idea by which the events take place is one that will hit home with many parents and teenagers alike. This story captures the real life effects of online bullying as it blends old school haunting horror into a technologically savvy film about friendship, teen drinking, and the inherent dangers of the internet's social landscape. Unfriended is relatively smart, takes chances, and creates a renewed form of modern horror that may continue to infect cinemas in the near future.
When films like Halloween and Friday the 13th hit theaters years ago, their stories were culturally aware and aimed at teens of the post hippie era that were experimenting with drugs, drinking, and premarital sex. Unfriended is just as relevant to our times. This is a perfectly rendered horror tale that hits on key notes that are invariably designed to capture the experiences and societal misgivings of modern teens. Audiences are handed a slew of mistyped words, logging in and logging out of chat screens, cell phone calls, instant messaging, Skype sex, and the unforgivable deed that leads to this whole freaky mess. In an era that kids can't look away from the screen for more than two seconds, Unfriended gives them a reason to keep staring at it for even longer.
"Oh look. A screenshot
of a screenshot of a
screenshot. How original."
Horror continues its upward trend with Unfriended. Centered on simplistic genre plot devices mixed with a keen sense of today's youth and their habitual use of devices, director Leo Gabriadze captures something unique with his first domestic release. This is horror at the core with high marks for kill ratio and creative death sequences. Unfriended is brazen enough to try something new in a genre that needs continual reinforcement. This is one of the better horror films of 2015 and will definitely be getting a repeat viewing from this guy.
-CGDavid Cameron today tells the Sunday Times that he will stay on as Prime Minister if Britain votes to leave the EU. He could scarcely say anything else, but he is clearly dissembling. A Leave vote would mean that he himself has to leave. This presents pro-Brexit Conservatives with a stark choice. Back Remain, and you betray your conscience. Back Leave, and you oppose your leader – and, furthermore, condemn him to resignation if Britain votes to leave the EU. In these circumstances, you will have helped to bring down the Party’s most successful election winner in modern times save only Margaret Thatcher.
This is precisely the conundrum that Michael Gove has been wrestling with. The Justice Secretary is insistent that it is his experience as a Minister that has tilted him decisively against Britain’s EU membership, but it has been clear for several years that he has become convinced that we should leave. Boris Johnson, however, is not a natural Brexiteer. The son of a former MEP who backs EU membership, the brother of an MP who takes the same view, and raised himself partly in Brussels, Boris has never been comfortable with Brexit.
For all his EU-bashing Daily Telegraph columns and stories – his “Delors plan to rule Europe” splash played a part in the 1992 Danish referendum that rocked the Maastricht Treaty – and the distinctly Eurosceptic report that he commissioned as Mayor, he has never said that we would be Better Off Out. Indeed, he recently told Bernard Jenkin that he has “never been an Outer”. The latter added: “Boris was quite open and frank about it – it was no secret conversation. He is genuinely torn but I hope he will change his mind because he is one of the few who understands that if we stay in Britain will be in a weaker position than ever before.”
And now, we are told, he has indeed changed his mind. Robert Peston, ITN’s Political Editor, tweeted yesterday evening that the Mayor will declare this evening that he will vote and campaign for Leave. It could be that the report will turn out to be misplaced: the Sunday Times reports him saying that “I’m veering all over the place like a shopping trolley”, and one can never quite tell what Boris will do. But the placing and timing of the story could make sense. Peston is one of Britain’s great official journalists, whose ceremonial place in breaking a political story is not unlike that of the Gold Stick in Waiting or the Clarenceux King of Arms at the state opening of Parliament.
Events would unfold as follows: Peston blows the starting trumpet, Cameron’s Marr interview this morning is upstaged, reporters scurry off to Islington, commentators jostle and thrash like feeding frenzy-crazed carp, the cameras plonk themselves outside the Great Man’s house, Marina is mobbed nipping out to Waitrose, the sense of expectation builds…and, as the sun sinks red into a bloody sky, the final dramatic stroke is struck. The Great Man’s Monday Telegraph column declaring for Out thunders off the printing presses, and he himself shuffles from his home, eyeballs gently rotating, in a state of artfully manufactured disarray. Er…umm….arrrggghh…yaaaaah!
But if such story management makes sense, such a decision would be harder to conjure. It is true that the Mayor’s behaviour during the run-up to the summit – the impossibilist demands for the primacy of British law within the EU, the hints and murmurs, the preposterous public visit to poor old Cameron in Downing Street – only make sense if he is already set on Brexit. None the less, to come out for it would pulverise the sedulous, creeping, nail-chewing advance that he has steadily made on the Conservative leadership for the best part of 15 years. The safer course by far would be to tuck himself quietly in behind the Remain campaign and wait for the shine to come off George Osborne.
Boris has crawled towards Downing Street with the caution of a slobbery-mouthed lion stalking a shimmer-flanked young gazelle. For him to leap lumberingly at his prey with a roar would risk it galloping off shrieking into the bush. Then again, the Mayor has never been the man for the safer course. It is true that he is now damned if he does and damned if he doesn’t. We return to the problem of him never having been for Brexit. If he goes with his history, he will look as though he’s backing down after a week of winding up: willing to wound, afraid to strike. But he veers off in a new direction, it will be towards open war – not only with his past, but with his leader.
The Mayor is sometimes mocked for having no convictions whatsoever. Certainly, his recent tergiversations will have done him no good with his Commons colleagues, who have always been cooler about him than the voters. Leavers will never be convinced that he is truly One of Them (that’s to say, One of Us). But I think that this view is wide of the mark. The best comparison is perhaps with another Tory Blonde Bombshell who parted with his leader: Michael Heseltine. The latter’s falling out with Margaret Thatcher was fired by a mix, impossible to separate, of frustrated desire and irrepressible conviction.
His resignation is sometimes said to have been about a trifle: a mere helicopter company. And so in a sense it was. However, behind it was something bigger. At the heart of the clash between the then Defence Secretary and Downing Street over who would take over Westland – Sikorsky or a European consortium – was a difference over the destiny of a nation. Where does Britain’s future lie? With our continental neighbours, or in the wider world? What is our place in the world? Here we are again. But this time the roles are reversed and the stakes are higher. This referendum fills the sky where one had to squint to see Westland – outside the Westminster Village, at any rate.
Yes, Cameron v Boris would have even more baleful implications than Thatcher v Heseltine. That conflict helped eventually to depose a three times election winner, undefeated at the polls, and pave the way for three terms of Conservative opposition – the longest period of Tory humiliation in modern times. This time round, the European question looms larger than ever, the referendum dramatises division, UKIP is with us and politics itself is more fragile. To date post-election, the Party has managed its differences extraordinarily deftly. But an Out decision by Boris might put all that to the sword.
Cameron and George Osborne, especially, have had their fallings-out with Boris, but this gang of three, and Michael Gove too, are not unlike – all roughly of the same age, all journalists or former SpAds, all at home in liberal London. They are part of a generation. Now there may be fratricide among the band of brothers. Perhaps Gove has titled Boris over the edge. Perhaps he will back off after all. Who knows what cocktail of ambition and belief is fizzing uncontrollably up within the Mayor? Maybe he thinks that only an Outer can next lead the Tories, or perhaps events are simply creating their own momentum. They all go mad in the end, the political legend runs. I can’t help wondering if the long wait and tension is driving Boris slightly bonkers.The Grand Theft Auto series of games have made both Rockstar and publisher Take-Two a lot of money. But before they became a huge console success story, the original game was developed at DMA Design where it nearly never got a release.
Gary Penn, who worked on the original top-down 2D title while at DMA, has admitted in an interview with Gamasutra that the game was very close to being canceled. He said:
[The original GTA] was a real mess for years, it never moved on, it never went anywhere. It never really felt like it was going anywhere. It was almost canned. The publisher, BMG Interactive, wanted to can it, as it didn’t seem to be going anywhere. There are probably two key things it fell down on. Two critical things. One of them is stability, which is a really boring one but it crashed all the fucking time. So even if you did get something in the game, you couldn’t really test it. Now the other thing that was a problem was the handling — the car handling was appalling … The core of playing was fundamentally broken.
But just as bugs nearly killed the game, it was another that saved it. Apparently the Police AI messed up and became really aggressive trying to ram you off the road at one point. The team loved it, the aggressive cops stayed in the game which eventually got released, and the rest is history.
If it had gone the other way, that would mean the more recent GTA III onwards games may never have been made, or at least not be the same games we all remember playing.
What would gamers have spent millions on buying instead of GTA sequels I wonder?
Read more at GamasutraMembers of Congress don't know anything about "the issues" and they spend all their time fundraising, according to both a new Huffington Post story and "an easy inference to make after observing Congress for almost any length of time."
The HuffPo's Ryan Grim and Sabrina Siddiqui obtained a PowerPoint presentation given to incoming Democratic freshmen legislators by the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee, and the DCCC's recommended schedule for House members includes four hours spent on the phone begging rich people for money and one hour spent begging rich person for money in person. This is the daily schedule.
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As Kevin Drum notes, this leaves no time for studying or homework. Members rarely know much about anything, policy-wise. An unnamed member confirmed to HuffPo that these guys basically are exactly as ill-informed as you feared:
One member of Congress said that the fundraising takes up so much time that members don't even have time to become experts on bills they sponsor. "One thing that's always been striking to me is even the members playing a leading role on specific issues actually could not talk about the issues," said the member, who didn't want to be quoted by name. "They didn't have enough knowledge on their own issues to talk about them at length. I'm probably guilty of that." He recalled one meeting early in his career, where he brought several members together to try to hash out a compromise, just as he had done earlier as a state legislator. "Staff members were all twitching at the discussion, because their principals were saying things that were just flat-wrong or uninformed or wondering aloud about what the industry practices really were," he recalled. "The staff members of course had a pretty good idea.... The members were sitting around the table having a remarkably uninformed and unproductive discussion."
This, as much as anything else, is why our Congress is both dysfunctional -- legislators have no clue what they're voting for or against most of the time -- and so attentive to the priorities of the very wealthy.
Newt Gingrich completely dismantled the internal institutions that used to provide Congress with objective information and research, both because that information frequently contradicted conservative dogma and because he knew that doing so would force Congress to rely on outside (ideological) organizations for information, which would strengthen the corporate-funded policy shops and think tanks that powered the conservative movement. Now nearly everything Congress "knows" about policy comes directly from self-interested, industry-funded groups. Simultaneously, as Lorelei Kelly recently wrote, congressional staff began shrinking, which means expertise was, once again, outsourced -- now, increasingly, lobbyists perform the educational function that well-versed staffers used to.
So: the constituents members of Congress have the most direct contact with, and the ones they see themselves as reliant upon to remain in office, are the ones who have the ability to write massive checks. And the people the members talk to to understand the issues are either think tank ideologues or paid representatives of industry or both.
The result is Congress as it's been since the second Clinton term: Hundreds of dim bulbs, a couple of brilliant-but-evil guys, and a handful of dedicated and intelligent people who frequently do weird and inexplicable things like "voting for the horrible 2005 bankruptcy bill."
The annoying thing is that the solutions to these problems are incredible simple: public financing of elections and huge increases in congressional staff budgets. But you might notice that both of those solutions involve spending more money on the government, making them non-starters in our age of bipartisan agreement that government spending is unseemly.
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The alternative to constant fundraising by the members is for outside groups to take care of it for them, which is a model conservatives already sort of practice. In their "Behind the Caucus" column on Rep. Tom Cotton, an Arkansas freshman who will vote against raising the debt ceiling because he explicitly wants the United States to default, Politico's Mike Allen and Jim VandeHei explain that Cotton won his primary because the ultra-conservative Club for Growth simply sent Cotton "a FedEx envelope full of checks that he didn’t ask for." And that certainly saves some time. Allen and VandeHeil also note that Cotton, and his peers, explain why we are probably about to induce a recession for no reason:
Many in the media — us included — often underestimate just how conservative and how impervious to criticism and leadership browbeating these members are when appraising the chances for change in the next two years.
Hey, Mike and Jim, that's what we've been saying for a while now. We're screwed, because the people who spent thousands getting Cotton elected are the ones explaining the issues to him and his dumber peers.NASA engineers have created a unique engineering marvel called the ISIM structure that recently survived exposure to extreme cryogenic temperatures, proving that the structure will remain stable when exposed to the harsh environment of space. The material that comprises the structure, as well as the bonding techniques used to join its roughly 900 structural components, were all created from scratch.
The ISIM, or the Integrated Science Instrument Module Flight Structure, will serve as the structural "heart" of the James Webb Space Telescope. The ISIM is a large bonded composite assembly made of a light weight material that has never been used before to support high precision optics at the extreme cold temperatures of the Webb observatory.
Imagine a place colder than Pluto where rubber behaves like glass and where most gasses are liquid. The place is called a Lagrange point and is nearly one million miles from Earth, where the Webb telescope will orbit. At this point in space, the Webb telescope can observe the whole sky while always remaining in the shadow of its tennis-court-sized sunshield. Webb's components need to survive temperatures that plunge as low as 27 Kelvin (-411 degrees Fahrenheit), and it is in this environment that the ISIM structure met its design requirements during recent testing. "It is the first large, bonded composite space flight structure to be exposed to such a severe environment," said Jim Pontius, ISIM lead mechanical engineer at NASA's Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt, Md.
The passage of those tests represent many years of development, design, analysis, fabrication, and testing for managing structural-thermal distortion.
The ISIM structure is unique. When fully integrated, the roughly 2.2-meter (more than 7 feet) ISIM will weigh more than 900 kg (nearly 2000 lbs) and must survive more than six and a half times the force of gravity. The ISIM structure holds all of the instruments needed to perform science with the telescope in very tight alignment. Engineers at NASA Goddard had to create the structure without any previous guidelines. They designed this one-of-a-kind structure made of new composite materials and adhesive bonding technique that they developed after years of research.
The Goddard team of engineers discovered that by combining two composite fiber materials, they could create a carbon fiber/cyanate-ester resin system that would be ideal for fabricating the structure's 75-mm (3-inch) diameter square tubes. This was confirmed through mathematical computer modeling and rigorous testing. The system combines two currently existing composite materials -- T300 and M55J -- to create the unique composite laminate.
To assemble the ISIM structure, the team found it could bond the pieces together using a combination of nickel-iron alloy fittings, clips, and specially shaped composite plates joined with a novel adhesive process, smoothly distributing launch loads while holding all instruments in precise locations -- a difficult engineering challenge because different materials react differently to changes in temperature. The metal fittings also are unique. They are as heavy as steel and weak as aluminum, but offer very low expansion characteristics, which allowed the team to bond together the entire structure with a special adhesive system.
"We engineered from small pieces to the big pieces testing all along the way to see if the failure theories were correct. We were looking to see where the design could go wrong," Pontius explained. "By incorporating all of our lessons learned into the final flight structure, we met the requirements, and test validated our building-block approach."
The Mechanical Systems Division at NASA Goddard performed the 26-day test to specifically test whether the car-sized structure behaved as predicted as it cooled from room temperature to the frigid -- very important since the science instruments must maintain a specific location on the structure to receive light gathered by the telescope's 6.5-meter (21.3-feet) primary mirror. If the contraction and distortion of the structure due to the cold could not be accurately predicted, then the instruments would no longer be in position to gather data about everything from the first luminous glows following the big bang to the formation of star systems capable of supporting life.
The test itself also was a first for NASA Goddard because the technology needed to conduct it exceeded the capabilities then offered at the center. "The multi-disciplinary (test) effort combined large ground-support equipment specifically designed to support and cool the structure, with a photogrammetry measuring system that can operate in the cryogenic environment," said Eric Johnson, ISIM Structure Manager at NASA Goddard. Photogrammetry is the science of making precise measurements by means of photography, but doing it in the extreme temperatures specific to the Webb telescope was another obstacle the NASA engineers had to overcome.
Despite repeated cycles of testing, the truss-like assembly designed by Goddard engineers, did not crack. Its thermal contraction and distortion were precisely measured to be 170 microns -- the width of a needle -- when it reached 27 Kelvin (-411 degrees Fahrenheit), well within the design requirement of 500 microns. "We certainly wouldn't have been able to realign the instruments on orbit if the structure moved too much," Johnson said. "That's why we needed to make sure we had designed the right structure."
The same testing facility will be used to test other Webb telescope systems, including the telescope backplane, the structure to which the Webb telescope's 18 primary mirror segments will be bolted when the observatory is assembled.The four women of Warpaint may hail from Los Angeles, but their sound has always conveyed the windswept heft of a rainy Seattle scene. Their hypnotic grooves, ethereal harmonies and massive drums recall bits and pieces of the grunge, alt-rock and shoegaze scenes that mark the region. In a set recorded live in Washington, D.C., that spanned three records — from 2010's The Fool to this year's Heads Up — the band showcased the full power of its moody, grooving sound.
From the start, Warpaint has been knocking on the door of an aesthetic that captivates by playing off the tension between hard-driving rhythms and spectral atmospherics. At the 9:30 Club, with smoke catching the lights and plumes of guitars mingling with Stella Mozgawa's titanic drums, the band brought its records to life on a whole new scale.
Heads Up is out now. Warpaint is on tour.
Set List
"Bees"
"Heads Up"
"The Stall"
"Undertow"
"Hi"
"No Way Out"
"CC"
"Whiteout"
"Beetles"
"Elephants"
"Love Is To Die"
"New Song"
"Disco"
"Biggy"
"So Good"
"Keep It Healthy"
"Krimson"
Credits
Director: Mito Habe-Evans; Producers: Saidah Blount, Lars Gotrich, Benjamin Naddaff-Hafrey; Editor: Nickolai Hammar; Audio Engineer: Josh Rogosin; Videographers: Nicole Boliaux, Nicole Conflenti, Kara Frame, Nickolai Hammar, Cameron Robert, Maia Stern; Executive Producer: Anya Grundmann; Special Thanks: 9:30 Club.A US air strike killed 47 civilians, including 39 women and children, as they were travelling to a wedding in Afghanistan, an |
Freedom Index. Freedom House’s Freedom of the Press 2017 report declared: Global press freedom declined to its lowest point in 13 years in 2016 amid unprecedented threats to journalists and media outlets in major democracies and new moves by authoritarian states to control the media, including beyond their borders. Evidence for the threats to press freedom commonly includes the number of journalists killed, imprisoned and exiled. Since 1992, the Committee to Protect Journalists (CPJ) has recorded 1,236 confirmed deaths. These are cases where CPJ is “reasonably certain that a journalist was murdered in direct reprisal for his or her work; was killed in crossfire during combat situations; or was killed while carrying out a dangerous assignment such as coverage of a street protest.” In 2016, the CPJ reported 259 journalists were jailed worldwide and 452 journalists had been forced into exile in the last six years. The geography of danger for journalists includes war zones like Syria, Iraq, Afghanistan and Libya, as well as countries suffering internal violence like Mexico, the Philippines, Colombia and Russia.Though information on injuries immediately following games may be vague, the original indication of the severity of the injury suffered by Jeff Carter early in Los Angeles’ 4-3 overtime win over Arizona on Saturday won’t go far towards alleviating Kings’ fans concerns. According to a hockey operations executive, Carter won’t remain with the club on the road trip and will instead return to Los Angeles, presumably to have his injury identified and treated.
A team spokesperson informed the media in the second period that Carter had suffered an “upper-body” injury and was not expected to return, but beyond that update, and the information provided by a hockey operations executive, details were scarce and Darryl Sutter declined to provide any injury information during post-game media availability.
Carter played only two shifts in the win, while a highlight shown by FOX Sports West during the Kings Live post-game show appeared to show Carter getting tangled up with an Arizona forward off the game’s opening faceoff. He ultimately logged 48 seconds and took two faceoffs.
“We were down a forward right away, they were playing with 11 forwards, so nobody could bitch much about ice time,” Darryl Sutter said after the game.
The Kings are scheduled to practice in Glendale, Arizona on Sunday before flying to Vancouver. The trip continues with games against the Canucks (Monday, 12/28), Oilers (Tuesday, 12/29) and Flames (Thursday, 12/31).
Carter leads the club with 28 points (11-17=28) and 17 assists.As we enter the third month of The Story of the Summer, the Edward Snowden NSA saga, it's probably a good time recap some of the most ridiculous and inaccurate claims made by various reporters covering this beat.
This is the actual scare-photo from The Atlantic Wire’s article about an NSA goon-squad targeting a reporter. That’s NOT the reporter's family or her house.
As we enter the third month of The Story of the Summer, the Edward Snowden NSA saga, I thought it might be a good time recap some of the most ridiculous and inaccurate claims made by various reporters covering this beat.
I hasten to note that I'm leaving out anything from Alex Jones or other well-known conspiracy theorists, though it appears as if there's a new litter of leftie conspiracy theorists emerging, some of whom will be mentioned below. I'm also not including self-debunked stories: for example, the posts that make outrageous claims as the lede or headline, then clarify (usually about the existence of court oversight and warrants) deep within the belly of the article itself. Furthermore, some of these items follow the 24-hour Rule: once a wild claim is made, it's often clarified within a day or so, but only after the misleading claim has circumnavigated the internet several times over. That's exactly what happened when it was reported that...
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10) Legendary civil rights leader, Rep. John Lewis (D-GA), "praises" Snowden.
On Wednesday, The Guardian's Paul Lewis posted an article in which the reporter misrepresented what the congressman said when asked in an interview about the Booz Allen Hamilton leaker. Lewis appears to have merely speculated that Snowden himself believes he acted in good conscience and in the tradition of others who engaged in "civil disobedience." But then, in keeping with our 24-Hour Rule, the congressman released a statement on Thursday in which he emphatically denied The Guardian's framing: "I never praised Mr. Snowden or said his actions rise to those of Mohandas Gandhi or other civil rights leaders. In fact, The Guardian itself agreed to retract the word “praise” from its headline." As of this writing, the reporter has yet to post an update to include the congressman's statement.
9) NSA analysts enjoy "direct access" to "tap" tech giant servers.
Our first, but not our last Glenn Greenwald claim. It feels like a million years ago when Greenwald posted his now infamous article about NSA's PRISM database and how the agency somehow "taps" (Greenwald's word in his headline) into proprietary servers belonging to Google, Microsoft, Facebook and so forth. Like the Rep. Lewis story, this one also adhered to the 24-Hour Rule. Almost immediately, other reporters began to question how "direct access" was possible. It turns out, NSA could, in fact, directly access drop-box style secure FTP servers where the tech giants would post requested data. Additionally, Snowden himself said that there were "policy protections" against literal "direct access." Without "direct access," the story disintegrated into, 1) something that, for the most part, had been previously revealed anyway, and 2) a less intriguing story about an NSA database, which, by the way, was constantly misunderstood to be a "program."
8) The British GCHQ collects 21 petabytes of data every day from underwater fiber optic cables.
If you recall, this story began as a wild theory -- literally -- published on The Guardian, which subsequently morphed into reality as it jumped from publication to publication, including The Atlantic (no correction issued) and The Young Turks show on Current. This was a stupendously aggravating example of how shoddy reporting circulates through the tubes and is eventually repeated as fact.
7) President Obama is fighting a deliberate "war on whistleblowers."
This isn't necessarily specific to the NSA story, but it's absolutely one of Greenwald's preferred frames for whenever leakers or, in this case, Edward Snowden's name is brought up. It insinuates that the president and the Justice Department are viciously persecuting any and all whistleblowers, irrespective of circumstances. We're to infer that if you blow the whistle on the government, you're doomed. This is simply untrue. As Charlie Savage reported in the New York Times, the so-called "war" is simply a matter of happenstance: leftover prosecutions from the Bush years, greater ease of digitally tracking leaks and so on. On top of this inconvenient reality, the president not only signed an executive order to protect legitimate whistleblowers in the intelligence community who expose "waste, fraud or abuse" via proper channels, but he also signed the Whistleblower Protection Enhancement Act last year.
6) The U.S. sentences whistleblowers to be tossed in "a cage for decades" and "disappeared."
Greenwald said this on national broadcast television -- twice -- as a weak and false excuse for why perhaps Snowden fled the country to Hong Kong and Russia. The longest sentence handed down in this "war on whistleblowers" was 30 months, which is currently being served by John Kiriakou who blew the whistle on CIA torture, and who was prosecuted for outing the names of CIA officers. Elsewhere, yes, Bradley Manning could face up to 90 years in prison, but he hasn't been sentenced yet. Even if he received the maximum sentence, he would be the first and only leaker to be imprisoned "for decades."
5) Snowden might be assassinated by the U.S. government.
Credit for this outlandish conspiracy theory goes to three people: Greenwald, Ron Paul and Snowden himself who said during an online Q&A session: "All I can say right now is the US Government is not going to be able to cover this up by jailing or murdering me. Truth is coming, and it cannot be stopped." He repeated this suspicion in a statement posted by Wikileaks. Greenwald, for his part, mentioned state-sanctioned assassination to La Nacion newspaper, while adding an additional twist: "the dead man switch." Greenwald said, "The U.S. government should be on its knees every day begging that nothing happen to Snowden, because if something does happen to him, all the information will be revealed and it could be its worst nightmare."
4) Reporter Michael Hastings was being wiretapped by NSA and was subsequently assassinated when the government hacked into his On-Star system and accelerated his car to 85 miles per hour, causing his fatal accident.
Yes, really.
3) NSA admits listening to U.S. phone calls without warrants.
That was the exact CNET headline. (I'm not sure how an agency can admit something, but I nitpick.) CNET chief political correspondent Declan McCullagh published a selectively edited exchange between Rep. Jerrold Nadler (D-NY) and then-FBI Director Robert Mueller, and extrapolated their confusing and brief conversation into evidence that NSA has been eavesdropping on American citizens without any court orders or oversight. As we observed with Rep. Lewis this week, Rep. Nadler issued a statement the following day denying CNET's story. 24 hours later, like clockwork, McCullagh changed the headline and issued an update.
2) The temporary embassy closings are a false flag to distract from NSA reporting.
Greenwald, Alex Jones and Glenn Beck (okay, so they they made the list anyway) each put forward their own versions of this one, but the most NSA-related example was Greenwald's who tweeted several blurbs about it, then came right out and detailed the conspiracy theory during an interview on Democracy Now!
1) An NSA goon-squad targeted a reporter who Google-searched "pressure cookers" and "backpacks."
Reporter Michele Catalano wrote that NSA tracked her Tsarnaev-ish internet searches and then dispatched "FBI" agents or members of the "joint terrorism task force" to her home where they questioned Catalano's husband for 45 minutes and performed a cursory search of the house. The internet went nuts on this one, with the story circulating to nearly every online blog and publication including, of course, Greenwald and his clones. A reporter for The Atlantic Wire speculated that NSA used its XKEYSCORE interface to track Catalano's search terms. Insanity all around. And then, in accordance with the 24-hour Rule, the truth came out. It turns out the goon squad was actually members of the Suffolk County Police Department who were acting on a tip from the husband's former boss who noticed the suspicious searches on a work computer.
I wish I could say this will be the last of it. It won't be. I also wish we could've had this debate about NSA surveillance without all of the garment rending, martyrdom and bad reporting. But here we are: one of the most disturbing episodes in the history of digital journalism.
Bob Cesca is the managing editor for The Daily Banter, the editor of BobCesca.com, the host of the Bubble Genius Bob & Chez Show podcast and a Huffington Post contributor.Donald Trump Hires Citizens United President David Bossie
Donald Trump just hired David Bossie from the organization Citizens United onto his campaign team. Citizens United is best known for its 5-4 Supreme Court “free speech” victory in 2010, Citizens United v. FCC.
In that opinion, Supreme Court Justices Anthony Kennedy, John Roberts, Antonin Scalia, Clarence Thomas, and Samuel Alito declared that money equals speech and that freedom of the press equals freedom of the corporation to spend unlimited money on buying campaigns.
10 must-know facts from before and after the Citizens United v. FCC case
BEFORE THE CASE
1. In 1991, the advocacy group Citizens United was created for the purpose of campaigning to promote Clarence Thomas to the Supreme Court. He may have owed his narrow victory in the Senate vote (52-48) to this advocacy.
2. The organization Citizens United spent money on a public relations campaign to support the Clarence Thomas nomination to the Supreme Court. Clarence Thomas voted for the side of his benefactors at Citizens United in the Supreme Court case. There are no mandatory conflict-of-interest rules for the Supreme Court.
3. In 1998, David Bossie was forced to resign from a campaign funding investigation into the Bill Clinton administration for releasing misleadingly edited interview tapes. He went on to become the president of Citizens United.
4. Citizens United attempted to use FCC rules to block advertising of a movie. In 2004, Citizens United filed a complaint to the FCC against the Michael Moore commentary movie Fahrenheit 911 because promotions mentioned a candidate’s name (George W. Bush) too close to an election. The film was permitted to continue.
5. The object of the Citizens United case was Hillary Clinton. In 2008, Citizens United released its own “electioneering” movie, Hillary, The Movie. The movie was advertised close to an election under the FCC rule. This time, Citizens United found itself on the other side of the speech issue.
AFTER THE CASE
6. Immediately after Citizens United gave unlimited spending rights to corporations, appeals court case SpeechNow.org v. FEC logically followed and gave unlimited contribution rights to individuals.
7. The new electioneering entity created became known as the Super PAC. According to Open Secrets, Super PAC funding went from zero before the case to nearly a billion dollars so far this year just four federal election cycles later.
8. In subsequent decisions, the Supreme Court extended speech rights to spend unlimited money. In 2011, a 5-4 Court struck down public matching funds to be used by opponents of well-funded campaigns. In 2014, a 5-4 Court struck down some of the donation limits by individuals to campaigns or parties.
9. The Supreme Court drew a line at campaigns for judges. In a 2015 case, a 5-4 Court upheld a law preventing elected judges from directly soliciting campaign funds. However, judges may still have their campaigns ask directly for those funds, and judges may still review lists of the donors. The crossover Justice was John Roberts, who wrote the decision.
10. Four Justices who voted against Citizens United indicated that they may overturn or narrow the decision [PDF] given an opportunity to do so. In a 2012 Supreme Court Order, Stephen Breyer, Ruth Bader Ginsburg, Sonia Sotomayor, and Elena Kagan dissented from the Order to say that they would “reconsider Citizens United or, at least, its application in this case.”
With Donald Trump hiring the chief of Citizens United, his earlier comments opposing Super PACs as a “totally phony deal” will need revisiting.No. 1 women's basketball recruit Megan Walker explains why she decided to commit to play at UConn. (1:41)
When Megan Walker thinks of her next school, the first word that comes to mind is "championships."
Editor's Picks Slideshow: The signature moments Hundreds of the best basketball players across the country are signing national letters of intent this week. We peek in on their ceremonies.
No. 1 Notre Dame, No. 2 Baylor add recruits Top-ranked Notre Dame has signed 6-foot-2 forward Danielle Patterson and 6-foot-3 center Mikayla Vaughn to play for the Irish starting next season. 1 Related
The No. 1 prospect in the nation for three years running announced Thursday that she is signing a national letter of intent to Connecticut, the national champion for four years running.
"It's a winning program," she said. "I'll be able to accomplish all my dreams."
A 6-foot-1 shooting guard, Walker has collected trophies and broken records all over the globe during her time in high school. She's the reigning Gatorade player of the year in Virginia. She is a two-time state champion at Monacan (Richmond, Virginia). She is the USA Basketball national 3x3 champion. And she won a gold medal with USA Basketball at the FIBA Americas U18 championship.
Expect her to make an immediate mark at the college level, too. Walker has that special knack for making good things happen when she's on the court. It helps, of course, that she has a feathery touch on her jump shot, a reliable delivery off the dribble and the ability to find a teammate in a jam. She has the skill to sink jumpers from beyond the arc and the size to post up her defender.
"Megan Walker is one of the most physically gifted basketball players I've ever seen," Monacan coach Larry Starr said. "Once she started being ranked so high, she did not get complacent but continued to work hard to maintain that ranking. It's important to Megan to show people she isn't satisfied where she is, but she always strives for improvement."
Walker chose Connecticut over Notre Dame and Texas.
Megan Walker, the No. 1 prospect in the country, has committed to the Connecticut Huskies. Bart Young/USA Basketball
The decision didn't come easily. Walker said a lot of factors led her to Storrs -- the campus (she has already visited a handful of times), the players (she's especially excited to play alongside Kia Nurse and Gabby Williams), the coaches and the pipeline to success after college. Walker, who plans to major in either business or criminology, said she's excited to play for Geno Auriemma.
"He develops the best players," said Walker, who averaged 21.4 points, 8.2 rebounds, 3.1 steals and 1.9 assists as a junior at Monacan. "I'm hoping to learn a lot from him."
Walker joins a class at Connecticut that includes three other top-40 recruits: Mikayla Coombs, a 5-10 guard ranked 14th in the espnW HoopGurlz Top 100; Lexi Gordon, a 5-11 wing ranked 29th; and Andra Espinoza-Hunter, a 5-10 wing ranked 37th.
With the addition of Walker, the UConn class is expected to be ranked No. 1 when the final class rankings are released next week. The Huskies' class was ranked third -- behind Louisville and Stanford -- coming into the early signing period.
It would be the first time since 2012 that the No. 1 class resides in Connecticut. That 2012 group featured a few names you may be familiar with: Breanna Stewart, Moriah Jefferson and Morgan Tuck.
Walker is the fourth No. 1 prospect in the past seven years to choose UConn. She joins Kaleena Mosqueda-Lewis (2011), Stewart (2012) and Katie Lou Samuelson (2015). Walker will be greeted by an elite group of backcourt players when she arrives in Storrs. UConn is expected to feature Samuelson, Nurse, Williams and Crystal Dangerfield on the perimeter when Walker arrives next fall.
"We're just excited about what the possibilities are for her," said dad Keith Walker. "Megan hopes to carry on the winning tradition.
"It's been a long process. We've enjoyed it. Now it's time now to move on to the next chapter."
But first, Megan Walker has her heart set on winning another state title at Monacan.
"We're two-time state champs," she said. "We're trying to make that three-time state champs."
It all goes back to the championships.Jason LaVeris via Getty Images Singer Christina Grimmie attends The Humane Society of The United States' To The Rescue gala at Paramount Studios on May 07, 2016 in Hollywood, California.
By Joseph Ax
(Reuters) - A man thought to be a deranged fan fatally shot Christina Grimmie, a rising singing star who gained fame on YouTube and as a contestant on television's "The Voice," while she was signing autographs after a concert in Orlando, Florida, police said on Saturday.
The suspect, identified as 27-year-old Kevin James Loibl of St. Petersburg, Florida, died of a self-inflicted gunshot wound after he was tackled by the 22-year-old singer's brother in the Friday evening attack, Orlando police said.
Loibl is believed to have traveled to Orlando for the event. He had two loaded handguns, additional ammunition and a hunting knife at the time of the shooting, police said.
Orlando Police Chief John Mina told reporters the suspect did not appear to have a criminal record and there was no indication he and Grimmie knew each other. Mina said it appeared he may have been a deranged fan.
"We believe he came here to commit this crime," Mina said.
Grimmie, who had just performed as the opening act for the band Before You Exit, was inside the Plaza Live concert hall signing autographs at the time of the shooting.
The suspect approached Grimmie and opened fire. He was then rushed by the singer's brother.
"Her brother, Marcus, is a hero and possibly saved countless other lives. He is not injured," Orlando police said in a statement, adding there were about 120 people at the venue at the time.
Christina Grimmie was taken to a local hospital in critical condition and died early Saturday morning. The suspect died at the scene of the shooting.
Although patrons had their bags and purses checked for weapons at the venue, there were no metal detectors and the security guards were unarmed, Mina said.
SUPERSTAR AND LIFE PARTNER
Grimmie's brother mourned the loss of his sister in a Facebook post on Saturday.
"Christina was more than my sister," People magazine reported the post as saying.
"She was a partner in life. A superstar. A goofball. Introverted. And a friend to everyone. Genuinely. But above all... she was my baby sister. I honestly don't know what I'll do without her," he wrote in the post.
A note expressing condolences was posted on the door of the Loibl home in St. Petersburg, the Tampa Bay Times and local broadcaster WFLA reported.
"Deepest sorrow for lost (sic) to the family, friends & fans of the very talented, loving ChristinaGrimmie. No other comments," it read.
The attack, the latest high-profile shooting to rock the country, drew a quick response from anti-gun activists.
"While the details of this shooting are still being investigated, one thing we already know is that there is so much more Florida policymakers can do to prevent gun violence and keep guns out of dangerous hands," said Dan Gross, the president of the Brady Campaign to Prevent Gun Violence.
A New Jersey native, Grimmie first gained attention several years ago for her YouTube videos featuring covers of pop songs, which drew millions of views. In 2014, she placed third on the "The Voice," a singing competition broadcast on NBC.
Fans took to social media to express their sorrow, with the hashtag #RIPChristina trending on Twitter.
"There are no words," tweeted "The Voice" early on Saturday. "We lost a beautiful soul with an amazing voice."
Josh Kaufman, who beat out Grimmie to win the 2014 season of "The Voice," tweeted, "My deepest and most sincere condolences go out to the family of @TheRealGrimmie. Such a tragic loss."
Grimmie's own Twitter account still showed a video she posted on Friday asking fans to come out to see her perform. Her account tweeted a simple message Saturday morning: "The end." The post was retweeted more than 65,000 times within an hour.
Her killing was reminiscent of the 1995 fatal shooting of Selena Quintanilla-Perez, a 23-year-old singer best known as Selena. Already an established star, Selena was gunned down in a Texas motel by the founder of her fan club.
Last month, Japanese pop star Mayu Tomita, 20, was repeatedly stabbed during a fan event at a Tokyo train station but survived the attack. Police charged a 27-year-old man with attempted murder.
(Additional reporting by Brendan O'Brien in Milwaukee and Jon Herskovitz in Austin, Texas; Editing by Paul Simao and Alan Crosby)
Man who shot and killed Christina Grimmie @TheRealGrimmie is
Kevin James Loibl DOB 03/10/1989 pic.twitter.com/2D7ZIDhXCa — Orlando Police (@OrlandoPolice) June 11, 2016
Orlando Police Chief John Mina told reporters the suspect did not appear to have a criminal record and there was no indication he and Grimmie knew each other. Mina said it appeared he may have been a deranged fan.
"We believe he came here to commit this crime," Mina said.
Grimmie, who had just performed as the opening act for the band Before You Exit, was inside the Plaza Live concert hall signing autographs at the time of the shooting.
The suspect approached Grimmie and opened fire. He was then rushed by the singer's brother.
"Her brother, Marcus, is a hero and possibly saved countless other lives. He is not injured," Orlando police said in a statement, adding there were about 120 people at the venue at the time.
Christina Grimmie was taken to a local hospital in critical condition and died early Saturday morning. The suspect died at the scene of the shooting.
Although patrons had their bags and purses checked for weapons at the venue, there were no metal detectors and the security guards were unarmed, Mina said.
SUPERSTAR AND LIFE PARTNER
Grimmie's brother mourned the loss of his sister in a Facebook post on Saturday.
"Christina was more than my sister," People magazine reported the post as saying.
"She was a partner in life. A superstar. A goofball. Introverted. And a friend to everyone. Genuinely. But above all... she was my baby sister. I honestly don't know what I'll do without her," he wrote in the post.
A note expressing condolences was posted on the door of the Loibl home in St. Petersburg, the Tampa Bay Times and local broadcaster WFLA reported.
#BREAKING- this note on the door of Kevin Loibl's family home in St. Pete- Police say he killed @TheRealGrimmie pic.twitter.com/DN6K5nZUrE — Karla Ray (@KRayWFTV) June 11, 2016
"Deepest sorrow for lost (sic) to the family, friends & fans of the very talented, loving ChristinaGrimmie. No other comments," it read.
The attack, the latest high-profile shooting to rock the country, drew a quick response from anti-gun activists.
"While the details of this shooting are still being investigated, one thing we already know is that there is so much more Florida policymakers can do to prevent gun violence and keep guns out of dangerous hands," said Dan Gross, the president of the Brady Campaign to Prevent Gun Violence.
A New Jersey native, Grimmie first gained attention several years ago for her YouTube videos featuring covers of pop songs, which drew millions of views. In 2014, she placed third on the "The Voice," a singing competition broadcast on NBC.
Fans took to social media to express their sorrow, with the hashtag #RIPChristina trending on Twitter.
"There are no words," tweeted "The Voice" early on Saturday. "We lost a beautiful soul with an amazing voice."
There are no words. We lost a beautiful soul with an amazing voice. Our hearts go out to the friends, fans and family of @TheRealGrimmie. — The Voice (@NBCTheVoice) June 11, 2016
Josh Kaufman, who beat out Grimmie to win the 2014 season of "The Voice," tweeted, "My deepest and most sincere condolences go out to the family of @TheRealGrimmie. Such a tragic loss."
My deepest and most sincere condolences go out to the family of @TheRealGrimmie. Such a tragic loss. — Josh Kaufman (@iamjoshkaufman) June 11, 2016
Grimmie's own Twitter account still showed a video she posted on Friday asking fans to come out to see her perform.
Her killing was reminiscent of the 1995 fatal shooting of Selena Quintanilla-Perez, a 23-year-old singer best known as Selena. Already an established star, Selena was gunned down in a Texas motel by the founder of her fan club.
Last month, Japanese pop star Mayu Tomita, 20, was repeatedly stabbed during a fan event at a Tokyo train station but survived the attack. Police charged a 27-year-old man with attempted murder.
(Additional reporting by Brendan O'Brien in Milwaukee and Jon Herskovitz in Austin, Texas; Editing by Paul Simao and Alan Crosby)
SUPERSTAR AND LIFE PARTNER
Grimmie's brother mourned the loss of his sister in a Facebook post on Saturday.
"Christina was more than my sister," People magazine reported the post as saying.
"She was a partner in life. A superstar. A goofball. Introverted. And a friend to everyone. Genuinely. But above all... she was my baby sister. I honestly don't know what I'll do without her," he wrote in the post.
A note expressing condolences was posted on the door of the Loibl home in St. Petersburg, the Tampa Bay Times and local broadcaster WFLA reported.
"Deepest sorrow for lost (sic) to the family, friends & fans of the very talented, loving ChristinaGrimmie. No other comments," it read.
The attack, the latest high-profile shooting to rock the country, drew a quick response from anti-gun activists.
"While the details of this shooting are still being investigated, one thing we already know is that there is so much more Florida policymakers can do to prevent gun violence and keep guns out of dangerous hands," said Dan Gross, the president of the Brady Campaign to Prevent Gun Violence.
A New Jersey native, Grimmie first gained attention several years ago for her YouTube videos featuring covers of pop songs, which drew millions of views. In 2014, she placed third on the "The Voice," a singing competition broadcast on NBC.
Fans took to social media to express their sorrow, with the hashtag #RIPChristina trending on Twitter.
"There are no words," tweeted "The Voice" early on Saturday. "We lost a beautiful soul with an amazing voice."
Josh Kaufman, who beat out Grimmie to win the 2014 season of "The Voice," tweeted, "My deepest and most sincere condolences go out to the family of @TheRealGrimmie. Such a tragic loss."
Grimmie's own Twitter account still showed a video she posted on Friday asking fans to come out to see her perform. Her account tweeted a simple message Saturday morning: "The end." The post was retweeted more than 65,000 times within an hour.
Her killing was reminiscent of the 1995 fatal shooting of Selena Quintanilla-Perez, a 23-year-old singer best known as Selena. Already an established star, Selena was gunned down in a Texas motel by the founder of her fan club.
Last month, Japanese pop star Mayu Tomita, 20, was repeatedly stabbed during a fan event at a Tokyo train station but survived the attack. Police charged a 27-year-old man with attempted murder.by Eleanor Griffin on March 21, 2012
The headlines rage: The people are unfit! The people are unhealthy!
Constant news articles tell us that the people are too fat, too thin, smoking too much, or just generally unhealthy. Why is this everywhere? Is it because the government is concerned about our well-being? Of course not –- it’s all about saving them money.
Sick people cost the state money. They take up valuable hospital space and often require insurance or government pay-outs. This is the only reason for the current interest of the state in the private health of citizens.
Let’s take a moment to ponder this thought. Ignoring the people who have become ill via their own self-destructive tendencies (e.g. alcoholism), exactly why are some of these problems on the rise? Simple answer: The government did it.
Most people work at 9-5 jobs which involve little or no exercise. When an adult comes home, there are children and housework to do. Fast food is everywhere, and having little time for anything but work, they graze here and there, nibbling at whatever high fat product is the cheapest.
Before the urban desk job, people moved around more and burned off the calories. Now, only the wealthy or unemployed have time for exercise.
Likewise, more people than ever have serious vitamin D deficiencies from lack of sunlight. The forty hour week is turning us into a species of sickly obese hairless urban rats that dwell inside a central warren.
The government, in lieu of preventing the problem, complains about it with well-intentioned press releases: “The people are fat, the people are unhealthyâ€, seemingly oblivious to the fact that the lifestyle it imposes on working adults is the leading factor in creating this new species of light-shunning hefty hominids.
On one hand it dishes out sloth and gluttony, and on the other hand it punishes the people who obediently and diligently labor to make themselves ill in the name of the all-powerful, almighty state. It then laments this condition as if its acts were not the proximate cause of this condition.
To avoid being slowly killed by crippling Vitamin D levels and/or weight problems, we need to think in terms of prevention.
Cut the working week and bring the cost of housing down to realistic levels. At the moment it takes two average incomes to sustain a mortgage. Bring the cost of housing down and create 20 hour per week positions so the people can become healthy and productive again.
A nation of sickly, depressed workers is not a strong nation. It is not a happy nation. It is a sick nation, and sickness is not conducive to prosperity. Heal the people, heal the country. Prevention is always the remedy.
Tags: employment, ergonomics, health
Please enable JavaScript to view the comments powered by Disqus.The first time I heard about containers it was like – what? what’s that?
Is a container a process? What’s Docker? Are containers Docker? Help!
The word “container” doesn’t mean anything super precise. Basically there are a few new Linux kernel features (“namespaces” and “cgroups”) that let you isolate processes from each other. When you use those features, you call it “containers”.
Basically these features let you pretend you have something like a virtual machine, except it’s not a virtual machine at all, it’s just processes running in the same Linux kernel. Let’s dive in!
namespaces
Okay, so let’s say we wanted to have something like a virtual machine. One feature you might want is – my processes should be separated from the other processes on the computer, right?
One feature Linux provides here is namespaces. There are a bunch of different kinds:
in a pid namespace you become PID 1 and then your children are other processes. All the other programs are gone
namespace you become PID 1 and then your children are other processes. All the other programs are gone in a networking namespace you can run programs on any port you want without it conflicting with what’s already running
you can run programs on any port you want without it conflicting with what’s already running in a mount namespace you can mount and unmount filesystems without it affecting the host filesystem. So you can have a totally different set of devices mounted (usually less)
It turns out that making namespaces is totally easy! You can just run a program called unshare (named after the system call of the same name)
Let’s make a new PID namespace and run bash in it!
$ sudo unshare --fork --pid --mount-proc bash
What’s going on?
[email protected]:~# ps aux USER PID %CPU %MEM VSZ RSS TTY STAT START TIME COMMAND root 1 0.0 0.0 28372 4148 pts/6 S 23:01 0:00 bash root 2 0.0 0.0 44432 3836 pts/6 R+ 23:01 0:00 ps aux
Wow, we’re in a whole new world! There are only 2 processes running – bash and ps. Cool, that was easy!
It’s worth noting that if I look from my regular PID namespaces, I can see the processes in the new PID namespace:
root 14121 0.0 0.0 33264 4044 pts/6 S+ 23:09 0:00 htop
This process 14121 (regular namespace) is process 3 in my new PID namespace. So they’re two views on the same thing, but one is a lot more restricted.
entering the namespace of another program
Also you can enter the namespace of another running program! You do this with a command called nsenter. I think this is how docker exec works? Maybe?
cgroups: resource limits
Okay, so we’ve made a new magical world with new processes and sockets that is separate from our old world. Cool!
What if I want to limit how much memory or CPU one of my programs is using? WE’RE IN LUCK. In 2007 some people developed cgroups just for us. These are like when you nice a process but with a bunch more features.
Let’s make a cgroup! We’ll make one that just limits memory
$ sudo cgcreate -a bork -g memory:mycoolgrou
Let’s see what’s in it!
$ ls -l /sys/fs/cgroup/memory/mycoolgroup/ -rw-r--r-- 1 bork root 0 Okt 10 23:16 memory.kmem.limit_in_bytes -rw-r--r-- 1 bork root 0 Okt 10 23:14 memory.kmem.max_usage_in_bytes
ooh, max usage in bytes! Okay, let’s try that! 10 megabytes should be enough for anyone! 10 megabytes should be enough for anyone!
$ sudo echo 10000000 > /sys/fs/cgroup/memory/mycoolgroup/memory.kmem.limit_in_bytes
Awesome, let’s try using my cgroup!
$ sudo cgexec -g memory:mycoolgroup bash
I ran a bunch of commands. they worked fine. Then I tried compiling a Rust program :) :) :)
$ [email protected]:~/work/ruby-stacktrace# cargo build error: Could not execute process `rustc -vV` (never executed) Caused by: Cannot allocate memory (os error |
the rich. The key to economic growth, in their eyes, is to reduce government spending and transfer any savings–through tax cuts–to the extremely wealthy. It’s a bizarre formula that too many, across the capital and in both parties, believe.
The Tea Party world view is actually a slightly less intense version of Ronald Reagan’s. In 1980, Reagan swept to power arguing that government was the problem not the solution. He pushed for cuts in non-defense government spending and tax cuts for the wealthy. The largest deficits since World War II ensued. He was also Wall Street’s candidate and through his program of financial deregulation, which ultimately taxed income earned from work more than income from investments, Wall Street boomed.
Though economically shaky, Reagan was a political success. So much so that, Democrats adopted and implemented his economic philosophy: shrink government and transfer wealth to the private sector. The broad-based acceptance of Reagan’s philosophy by the entire political class is the real economic problem. Unknowingly, many Democrats have bought into the underlying dogma of the Tea Party even as they abhor its most extreme manifestation, borne out in the Tea Party insurgents elected in 2010.
With Democrats having long ago ceded the basic philosophical ground to Reagan and his progeny, what took place this week was essentially an argument among people who agree. Half of the Democrats in the House and almost 90 percent of the Democrats in the Senate voted for the debt law.
Though the Tea Party is factually challenged when it comes to the relationship between debt, deficit, and jobs, their ideology–and the grassroots power that goes into it–adds momentum to this larger philosophical shift by the elites of both parties. The debt ceiling “crisis” and the debt law, like the TARP before it, were only the latest turn in a shrinking conversation about America’s economic future.
But having met their broader political objectives with its passage, the economic one remains a conundrum for Washington’s leaders. Dressed up as a debt reduction plan, the law actually does next to nothing to shrink the country’s sea of red ink.
Strangely, it requires the U.S. to reduce government spending by the estimated increase in the nation’s credit limit. It’s like cutting household expenses by the amount that your charge limit has increased on a credit card. All this does is ensure unnecessary pain for no reason.
The fact is, the new debt law of the land now shows just how bankrupt the political system has become. And it leads those who advocate for an economy that works for everyone to consider the unthinkable: that default may have been the better option. With default would have come widespread economic distress so unfathomable that even financial planners and hedge fund managers could not determine a way to avoid it. The consequences would have been disastrous. But at least they would have been shared by everyone.
The wrong-valued approach by Washington in this fabricated debt “crisis” reveals that we are way beyond a question of what’s right economically; we are left with what’s fair socially in a democracy. And it simply is unconscionable that the many suffer while a few profit. That’s what was enshrined in the debt scheme cobbled together by a Republican Party held hostage by the rabid Tea insurgency and facilitated by a President all too ready to ditch principle in the name of peace. He got neither–and the great majority of Americans got the shaft.
Imara Jones is a New York based blogger who writes about economic justice for Colorlines.com. Read more about his work in his author biography.This recipe is a combination of my two favourite things in the whole wide world; shortbread and chocolate. A match made in heaven. It’s a simple shortbread recipe, taken from the Great British Bake Off (a great show) Book of Baking, and I’ve also added some variations that could make it really interesting.
Ingredients:
100g caster sugar
260g flour
200g butter
40g cocoa powder
To make:
Preheat the oven to 180 degrees Celcius.
Mix in all the dry ingredients thoroughly, then rub in the butter until you have lots of fine crumbs.
Tip into a round tin and press in with a fork or spoon, so it is packed tightly. Prick and score it also to make it easier to break into pieces once cooked.
Pop in the oven til firm – usually about 25 – 30 minutes. Remove, and cut along the scored lines. Then leave to cool.
Changes:
Chocolate Orange shortbread: add the zest of an orange for a bit of a kick and crumble in some chocolate orange pieces.
Lemon shortbread: swap the cocoa powder for corn flour and add the zest of a lemon.
Double chocolate: add chocolate chips!
AdvertisementsLet’s face it, The Flash is one of the CW’s best superhero television shows. Not only is it fairly faithful to the source material, but unlike the recent Black Canary debacle on its sister-show Arrow the showrunners wouldn’t dream of killing off such an iconic hero and giving her mantle to an original character. Plus, the show’s writing keeps everyone on the edge of their seats with all their twists and turns—will Iris West really die? Will Barry be able to defeat the God of Speed himself, Savitar? Is Caitlin Snow going to turn into Earth-1 Killer Frost?
If you, like me, love The Flash and tune in every week to find out what’s going to happen next, then you’ll get a huge kick out of the following hilarious memes featuring Barry Allen and his buddies.
Continue scrolling to keep reading Click the button below to start this article in quick view Share Tweet Email Copy Link Copied
16 Barry Is So Cheesy
Via: Instagram.com/blerd.vision
I laughed hysterically at this meme because I KNOW that this is something Barry Allen would say to his girlfriend Iris West on the show. Well, maybe not now, as he is pretty mopey after seeing a (possible) future where Savitar is going to kill his girlfriend sometime within the next four months. However, I bet he has said this cheesy pick-up line to Iris at least several times a day when they first started dating. Of course, I’m sure Iris started groaning and facepalming every single time he said it because it is just so damn cheesy. Heck, Grant Gustin is such a huge dork in real life that I also wouldn’t be shocked if he jokingly said this to someone he was dating.
15 Reverse-Flash Loves Big Belly Burger
Via: Mematic.net
It’s pretty hilarious that Eobard Thawne (Reverse-Flash) is from the future and thinks he is the cat’s meow because he knows what is going to happen to Team Flash, but his one weakness is food from Big Belly Burger. Do they not have that franchise in the future, or is Eobard just a foodie? Maybe he really, really wanted to be a chef when he was a kid, but was pushed into becoming a physicist by his parents. Perhaps if he had just been allowed to become a chef like he wanted to, he never would’ve tried to re-create the accident that gave Barry his powers. If he didn’t become a speedster and see that he was destined to become Barry’s nemesis, he would’ve lived a long and happy life as a normal dude.
14 Eobard Is A Troll
Via: Facebook
I gasped, then laughed when I saw this meme. It is SO wrong, but it is totally something that Eobard Thawne would do to troll Barry, especially after he went back in time to save his mother and created the alternate universe known as Flashpoint. Eobard must have been so irritated, being stuck in that cage and knowing that things were going to go to hell if he didn’t manage to convince Barry that this was a STUPID idea and got him to restore the timeline. Heck, just watching the season three premiere showed me that Eobard was 100 per cent done with Barry, and he is evil enough to troll the Flash on Mother’s Day. Eobard better watch it though, Iris is going to punch him if she ever found out what he did!
13 Barry Thinks Oliver Is The Bee's Knees
Via: Imgflip.com
Let’s face it; during the first team up between the Green Arrow and the Flash, Barry was secretly fanboying. You KNOW he was thinking to himself “Oh my god, I have the opportunity to fight crime alongside the Green Arrow! Oliver is so cool and suave under pressure, I totally need to cultivate that same response to criminals and metahumans running amuck in Central City. Maybe I can ask Oliver how he did that? Although knowing how brooding and mopey Ollie is, he’ll probably give me some long-winded stoic answer about how heroes shouldn’t be happy. Maybe I should turn down the quips when I’m out on a mission with him, I don’t want to offend the totally awesome Green Arrow. After all, I’d hate to look like a total amateur.”
12 Tom Cavanagh Has Played A Lot Of Dudes
Via: Instagram.com/BlerdVision
I cackled when I saw this meme because it’s so true. Tom Cavanagh HAS played a ton of roles on The Flash in such a short period of time. At last count, he’s appeared as the original Earth-1 Harrison Wells, Eobard Thawne pretending to be Harrison Wells, Earth-2 Harry Wells, Earth-19 H.R. Wells, and a wide variety of Harrison Wells from different Earths. Honestly, how on Earth does he keep all of those characters straight? I also laughed hysterically at how some of the different Harrisons included a mime, a freakin’ COWBOY of all things, a Doctor Who rip-off and a hipster. How Tom didn’t start rolling around on the ground laughing when he got the script is beyond me. I know I nearly spit out my seltzer from giggling too hard when I saw that episode.
11 Caitlin Snow Is So Emo
Via: Addictedtokaraoke.tumblr.com
As much as I love the character of Caitlin Snow/Killer Frost, I snickered when I saw this meme because this pretty much sums up Danielle Panabaker’s character. Poor Caitlin CAN be pretty emo at times, although to be fair, I can’t really blame her for that. After all, she lost her husband Ronnie Raymond not once but twice, learned that her evil Earth-2 doppelganger Killer Frost is a literal killer who has ice powers, learned that Barry f***** the timeline by creating Flashpoint and gave HER ice powers, which if go unsuppressed, turn her into a cold sociopath that tries to kill her BFFs. Oh, and the icing on the cake is that the only way to suppress the Killer Frost persona is by wearing Cisco’s power dampening bracelets, which need to be recharged every few hours.
10 Draco Is Sick Of Your Nonsense, Barry
Via: Addictedtokaraoke.tumblr.com
As a die-hard Harry Potter fan, I squealed with joy when I found out that Tom Felton (AKA Draco Malfoy) was going to appear in The Flash season three as Julian Albert. Felton is a phenomenal actor, and I like the slight nods to Draco—Julian was considered to be the black sheep of the family, came from money, etc. However, Felton managed to make the role of Julian his own, and I felt terrible when his backstory was revealed. I also got a big kick out of Julian’s rivalry and sarcastic remarks to Barry in the first half of The Flash season three because it reminded me a bit of the Harry/Draco rivalry, although now it seems like Julian is going to join Team Flash and help them take down evil metahumans.
9 Poor Tom Felton Is Surrounded By Heroes
Via: Instagram.com/BlerdVision
I cracked up when I saw this meme because I wouldn’t be surprised if Tom Felton had a good laugh at the irony of Barry Allen wearing a lightning bolt symbol on his Flash suit and Harry Potter having a lightning-shaped scar on his forehead. I wouldn’t be shocked if he sometimes thinks to himself “Oh man, my character is ANOTHER guy who hates the hero whose symbol is a bolt of lightning? How do I keep stumbling into these roles?” Now I can’t help but wonder if Grant Gustin and Tom Felton just keep making Harry Potter jokes at each other all day on set. Hopefully there will be some funny footage of the two actors teasing each other about the similarities between Julian, Draco, Barry and Harry on the DVD and Blu-Ray box sets.
8 Never Mess With Captain Cold And Heat Wave
Via: Pinterest
Given the fact that both Wentworth Miller and Dominic Purcell appeared on the show Prison Break together, I’m shocked that anyone on Team Flash would think that locking Captain Cold and Heat Wave up inside of a prison would be a good idea. Not only are those two canny thieves, but they’re also smart enough to figure out how to escape from prison in no time at all. Heck, their prison break skills would put Rocket Raccoon from Guardians of the Galaxy to shame. Plus, Captain Cold has his Cold Gun, so it would be laughably easy for him to turn the guards at the prison into human popsicles. Then there’s the fact that Heat Wave likes to set things on fire—he could easily start a fire as a diversion, which would allow the two to then make their grand escape.
7 No One Wants To Mess With Savitar
Via: Pinterest
Okay, Eobard Thawne/The Reverse-Flash was pretty scary, especially since he decided to kill the original Earth-1 Harrison Wells and steal his appearance so that he could infiltrate Team Flash from the inside. He’s pretty cunning and smart, so that’s why he’s so dangerous. Hunter Zolomon/Zoom was also terrifying AF because he too was also smart and he had a ginormous metahuman army that he could transport from Earth-2 to Earth-1. However, Savitar takes the cake and is absolutely chilling because he considers himself to be the God of Speed and is so fast that neither Barry nor Jay Garrick can outrun him. He’s also not a man anymore—while Zoom and Reverse-Flash are evil, they were still human. Savitar was once human, but he apparently because some sort of demi-God over the years. Now that’s terrifying!
6 Barry Loves Ruining Timelines
Via: Instagram.com/JCStan2017
I won’t lie, I chortled when I saw this meme because it is so true. I’ve lost count as to how many times Barry has decided to use his powers to go back in time and f*** with the timeline, causing all sorts of havoc with people’s futures. However, the most memorable one has got to be Flashpoint because when he FINALLY came to his senses and restored the original timeline, he found that some things were unable to be totally fixed, such as Diggle having a daughter instead of a son, Cisco’s brother getting killed in a car accident, and Caitlin Snow being a metahuman. Honestly, instead of leaving Barry alone at the end of season two, Iris should’ve dragged Barry back inside and forced him to talk to a grief counselor.
5 Barry Would Be A Good President
Via: Instagram.com/BlerdVision
Given the current state of America with Donald Trump at the helm, I wouldn’t mind at ALL if Barry Allen went back in time and actually ran for president. Sure, he’s a superhero but he’d be a kick-a** president. If there was a threat of war, Barry and his speedster buddies would be able to protect the U.S. from every threat. Then again, leaders of other countries would probably be so impressed by the fact that we have a speedster superhero for a president that there would be world peace. They’d probably also get a big kick out of S.T.A.R. Labs and would be pestering Cisco to create some nifty inventions that would make life better for their citizens. Hey Barry, can you please mess with the timeline so you can be our president?
4 Oliver Loves To Party
Honestly, I wouldn’t be shocked if Oliver got snarky with Reverse-Flash after finding out that he lives to the ripe old age of 86 by loosening up and partying a bit. Maybe once he redeems Earth-2 Laurel Lance/Black Siren (let’s be real, we KNOW Ollie is going to try to save the doppelganger of the woman he once loved, and no one can resist his sad puppy dog eyes) and takes down Prometheus he’ll have more of an opportunity to kick back, relax, and enjoy a few parties with Diggle, Thea, Felicity, Curtis, and the other recruits. After all, he used to be a total party animal when he was younger, so I wouldn’t be surprised if after there is FINALLY peace in Star City, he throws a huge party with his team in an attempt to unwind.
3 Of Course Draco Malfoy Would Know About The Philosopher's Stone
Via: Instagram.com/Blerd.Vision
I won’t lie, as a huge Harry Potter nerd, I started cracking up and squealing when I heard Tom Felton say “Philosopher’s Stone.” It makes me wonder if some of The Flash writers are also Potterheads and couldn’t resist making the real-life Draco Malfoy utter the worlds “Philosopher’s Stone” on television. Of course, my fellow Potterheads and Flash fans flipped out on social media—I can’t tell you how many Tumblr posts I saw that came up with cool theories about how Julian Albert is really Draco Malfoy in disguise and trying to get away from all of the horrors he experienced in the second Wizarding War against Lord Voldemort. Too bad a Harry Potter/The Flash crossover will never happen—I’d love to see Barry’s reaction to learning that not only is Julian Draco, but also that magic is real.
2 Can We Say Double Trouble?
Via: Instagram.com/Blerd.Vision
As a joke, there should be a spoof with Ezra Miller! Barry Allen and Grant Gustin! Barry Allen where they meet in the Speed Force. I think every fan of The Flash would laugh until they cry if the television version of Barry asked his cinematic counterpart how he felt about timelines. Of course, since it is the same character, just in a different universe, the movie version of Barry would LOVE f****** up timelines. Just imagine the havoc the television and cinematic versions of Barry Allen could wreak by messing around with the timelines. It would be like Flashpoint Part Two, and I think both Reverse-Flash and Savitar would start tearing their hair out because there’s TWO versions of Barry who are messing around with time travel.
1 Kanye West Would Make An Interesting President
Via: Instagram.com/ThePartyNerdz
I think most people in America who absolutely loathe Donald Trump wish that Barry Allen was real so he could go back in time and stop the business mogul from deciding “Hmmm…might be a good idea to run for President.” Then again, since Barry is a young speedster, with his luck, he’d go back to the original timeline only to find out that Kanye West had decided to run for President and actually won the General Election. However, given everything that is going on in the United States right now, Kanye would probably have a higher approval rating than President Donald Trump has right now—especially if he took a page out of Senator Bernie Sanders’ playbook and implemented progressive policies such as Medicare-For-All, free college, Universal Basic Income, etc.
Sources: Pinterest, The Flash Memes, Tumblr, Imgur, Imgflip, Facebook, Instagram, and Mematic.Philadelphia Union have declined contract options for Gabriel Gomez, Porfirio Lopez and Krystian Witkowski, the club announced today.
All three will be available in today’s Major League Soccer Waiver Draft at 3:30 p.m. Additionally, the release of Gomez and Lopez will free two international roster spots.
Gomez, 28, was acquired on December 21, 2011 from Mexican Second Division side Indios de Cuidad Juarez. The Panamanian international made 18 starts in 24 games and scored six goals.
Lopez, a 27-year-old defender, made four straight starts to start the season for a total of 327 minutes of action. The Costa Rican was acquired from Chinese side Dalian Haichang on Dec. 22, 2011.
Witkowski, 22, was drafted by the Union 26th overall in the MLS supplemental draft out of Marist College. He suffered a season ending concussion in March and did not see action in any first team matches.It's a proven thing that most of Romanians have Slavic genes. Romanian "historians" however claim that most of Romanians are (Romanized) Thracian.
Theoretically it is possible for most of the people in the world (nowadays) who do have Thracian genes to consider themselves Romanians, therefore to be Romanians (while, at the same time, most of the Romanians are Slavic; that's because the total population of Romanians is much higher than the total population of Greeks or Bulgarians or Turks living in the former Thracian lands): let's say that all present-day inhabitants of the former Thracian lands have already been genetically tested and this is the result (there are, of course, very few people with Thracian genes that no longer live in the former Thracian lands (they may live in the US, Canada, Australia, New Zealand -- immigration countries -- as well as anywhere else in the world), but they are so few compared to the ones in the first category that they can easily be disregarded. Let's even assume that all people with Thracian genes in the world have been genetically tested (which would imply that all people of the world have been genetically tested since it is impossible to find someone in the US or Canada that has Thracian genes unless one tests the entire populations of those immigration countries).
That might very well be the present-day situation. What about the future? Could it change?
Let's say there are 4 000 000 earthlings with Thracian genes. 2 000 000 are Romanians. 1 000 000 are Bulgarians 500 000 are Greeks. The rest are Turks, Serbs, Hungarians and Ukrainians + Americans, Canadians, Australians and so on. It is quite possible, that in the future, Greeks' birth rate to become that high (much higher than Romanians') so that Greeks will greatly outnumber Romanians (total populations compared) and also the Greeks with Thracian genes will greatly outnumber the Romanians with Thracian genes. Does that mean that then Greek nation will have historical rights on all the territories of the former Thracians, including the entire Romania and Moldova and almost the entire territory of Bulgaria + portions of Turkey, Serbia (Pirot area for instance), Ukraine and Hungary??? Especially since Greeks have been the first ethnicity to mix and assimilate Thracians (in ancient times when Greek colonies were established on Thracian territory but also in the areas where the two ethnicities met (geographically speaking since ancient Greeks and Thracians were neighbors), in (Greek) Macedonia and in Greek Thrace. Greeks are also the most ancient ethnicity that has lived continously on (part of the) Thracian territory.A row has erupted around the jailed punk band Pussy Riot, with the group's members and supporters trading accusations of theft, lies and Kremlin collaboration with their lawyers.
Bad blood has been simmering between the women and their legal team since the end of the Pussy Riot trial, which saw three of members found guilty of hooliganism motivated by religious hatred for their performance of an anti-Putin "punk prayer" inside a Moscow cathedral. Maria Alyokhina, Nadezhda Tolokonnikova and Yekaterina Samutsevich were sentenced to two years in prison. Samutsevich was later released on appeal after ditching the group's legal team for a new lawyer.
In a lengthy interview published on Monday, she accused the lawyers – Mark Feygin, Nikolai Polozov and Violetta Volkova – of failing to carry out their legal duties, caring more about their personal fame and careers inside the Russian opposition. She also accused Feygin, a former Duma deputy, of forging papers to register the Pussy Riot brand while the three women were still in pre-trial detention and of failing to return her passport to her.
Samutsevich, 30, was released after an appeal hearing on 10 October. Alyokhina, 24, and Tolokonnikova, 23, have been sent to distant prison colonies to serve the remainder of their terms.
"Our lawyers gave more speeches about the situation in Russia [during the trial]," Samutsevich told Lenta.ru. "It turned out we were like lawyers, and they were like artists, like co-authors of the trial. They were not lawyers."
The trial in August was marked by procedural violations and absurdities, hearings were often interrupted by shouting sessions.
"We're not masochists and we don't want to sit in jail," Samutsevich said, responding to earlier statements by Feygin that the women preferred to serve time in jail "and emerge like heroes".
"It's strange that some people think that we went to jail to become stars," she said. "We fought until the end. Nadya and Masha don't want to be jailed."
The legal trio announced late on Monday that they were no longer involved in the Pussy Riot case. They remain prominent in opposition circles, defending a host of clients that have been caught up in the Kremlin's crackdown on dissent.
Yet they did not go quietly. In a storm of Twitter messages exchanged between the lawyers, journalists, and Pussy Riot supporters on Tuesday, Polozov accused the Kremlin of waging the campaign against them. "Back in summer I said that the authorities would carry out a campaign of discreditation against the Pussy Riot lawyers and here you go," he wrote. "Samutsevich's lies, reproduced in the media, are one element of the deal that allowed her to get out of the case."
The lawyers insist Samutsevich collaborated with the Kremlin to win her release from prison. Samutsevich's new lawyer argued that she should be set free because she was detained before the women's February performance began. Analysts say her freedom provided a way for the politicised court to show leniency in a case that won attention around the world.
"The lawyers are trying to show that I'm acting against them, but not everything is against them here, but around the criminal case itself," Samutsevich said. "What's important here is that we were found guilty – we should be discussing that."Image compiled by Christophe Courtois
Siberian blogger Christophe Courtois has compiled an amazing list of funny move poster cliches. These classic design techniques have been employed for years, it’s just fun to see them all together in one post. On Christophe’s blogs you can find many more examples but below is a list of some of the Sifter’s favourites. Enjoy!
THE BACK TO BACK
Image compiled by Christophe Courtois
BETWEEN THE LEGS
Image compiled by Christophe Courtois
THE DRAMATIC EYE CLOSE-UP
Image compiled by Christophe Courtois
LOOK AT MY BEAUTIFUL BACK
Image compiled by Christophe Courtois
NOTE TO ALL ANIMAL/NATURE MOVIES: USE BLUE
Images compiled by Christophe Courtois
EVERYONE GET IN BED!
Image compiled by Christophe Courtois
THE BLUE RUN AND TILT
Image compiled by Christophe Courtois
THE OCEAN SILHOUETTE
Image compiled by Christophe Courtois
THE LADY IN RED
Image compiled by Christophe CourtoisA former student who allegedly had a threesome with two...
A Louisiana teacher accused of having a threesome with a teen student and another teacher was found not guilty.
Shelley Dufresne, a former Destrehan High School teacher, was acquitted Wednesday afternoon of two counts of carnal knowledge of a juvenile, according to the Times-Picayune.
Prosecutors accused the 34-year-old teacher of having a month-long affair with a 16-year-old student in her English class at the school in Kenner, Louisiana.
The male student, now 19, testified that his tryst with Dufresne began when she messaged him on Facebook in August 2014.
He claimed the pair had sex on multiple occasions, including an illicit romp with another former Destrehan High School teacher, 26-year-old Rachel Respess.
“All three of us were in bed together,” the teen testified. “We all started having sex.”
The judge’s decision comes after a two-day trial in Jefferson Parish, Louisiana. For the trial, the former teacher waived her right to a jury.Early May, the Indian IT services and consulting powerhouse Wipro, announced it had joined the Enterprise Ethereum Alliance (EEA) as a founding member. This Alliance, formed around the open-source blockchain-based platform Ethereum, was officially launched end February with 30 founding members to develop enterprise-grade blockchain solutions.
“Enterprise Ethereum is a great way to fast-track enterprise adoption and Ethereum is one of the fastest growing technology platforms used by our clients for developing and deploying enterprise blockchain” Krishnakumar Menon, Wipro vice president for service transformation.
Ethereum
Ethereum, launched in July 2015, is an open-source, blockchain-based, general purpose decentralized application platform, enabling smart contract functionality. It employs the Ethereum Virtual Machine and the Solidity programming language to directly implement and execute peer-to-peer and multiparty agreements among other applications.
“Ethereum is already one of, if not the, most widely used technologies for developing and deploying enterprise blockchains. Enterprises love the availability of open-source implementations, a single standard, the rapidly growing developer ecosystem, and availability of talent. But enterprises expect resilient secure systems and a robust controls environment. EEA aims to bring these together, both to provide enterprises the forum they need and also to advance Ethereum general,”, Jeremy Millar, founding board member of EEA.
Many initial members have developed pilots and production environments using Ethereum and bring unique understandings of enterprise needs. These include supply chain provenance tracking, inter-bank payments, reference data, securities settlement, and many others.
“Ethereum was the first blockchain supported in (Microsoft) Azure and it is evolving to address the needs of enterprises globally. Focusing on requirements like privacy, permissions and a pluggable architecture while retaining its public roots, Ethereum continues to widen the scope of what developers, businesses and consortiums can achieve”, Marley Gray, principal program manager at Microsoft
The original version of Ethereum had a public network that anyone could join. There has been a lot of controversies surrounding Ethereum in recent times. The platform witnessed a lot of criticism and attacks last year. Despite multiple hacks on Ethereum-based applications and a "controversial splitting" of the Ethereum network, enthusiasm in the network has apparently not diminished. On the contrary!
Enterprise Ethereum Alliance (EEA)
The Enterprise Ethereum Alliance was launched a few months ago with 30 founding members including big organisations in the banking, technology, energy and information industries like CME Group, Intel, ING, JPMorgan and Microsoft, as well as a number of emerging start-ups focused on blockchain like BlockApps, ConsenSys and String Labs.
Private blockchain
The aim of the EEA is to work together to “build, promote, and broadly support Ethereum-based technology best practices, standards and a reference architecture” and create a private version of Ethereum open solely for verified participants.
It aims to allow members to open private blockchains for specific purposes, meaning financial institutions can have their own blockchain while shipping companies create another for their own purposes. The companies in the EEA will help develop the open-source Ethereum codebase in a way that ensures that business processes can plug into the platform and profit from its advantages.
Their efforts will be coordinated by the Enterprise Ethereum Alliance, which will guide the engineering of a standard blockchain technology based on the Ethereum blockchain and customized for the needs of all enterprise members.
"The goal of the Enterprise Ethereum Alliance is to align the various interest groups, the users, the start-ups, the large technology platforms, to a single roadmap so that we can take those steps together", Jeremy Millar, board member EEA
Enterprise Ethereum will build upon the current Ethereum scaling roadmap and maintain compatibility and interoperability with public Ethereum. Ethereum's public and private networks will share standard protocols, but have different configurations for privacy and security, depending on each organization's needs. The top priorities for the alliance now include ensuring scalability and security.
J.P. Morgan is responsible for developing the basis of the blockchain tech for the alliance. Called "Quorum", the bank's code has been designed to add privacy protections into the mix, among other characteristics.
In fact, it is believed Enterprise Ethereum will contribute significantly to the overall development of Ethereum.
“The Enterprise Ethereum Alliance can address the concerns of organizations looking for private chain governance, but can also make contributions to the public Ethereum chain”, Jeremy Millar, board member EEA
“The Enterprise Ethereum Alliance project can play an important role in standardizing approaches for privacy, permissioning and providing alternative consensus algorithms to improve its usability in enterprise settings, and the resources the project and its members are contributing should accelerate the advancement of the Ethereum ecosystem generally” Vitalik Buterin, Ethereum Inventor
While the Ethereum alliance will focus on the development of private blockchains, the hope is that these will one day link up with the public Ethereum blockchain, which is open to all.
"That interconnection of public and private chains actually creates a very strong network," "Each chain strengthens the other at an exponential level", Alex Batlin, blockchain lead Bank of New York Mellon
“There’s enormous value in building the first alliance focused on shared design between public & private chains (i.e. Ethereum), why the two shall inter-operate and how that interoperability benefits tremendously both sides of the ecosystem”, String Labs (a crypto studio, incubator and investor)
EEA members
Founding members of the Alliance's rotating board of directors include Accenture, Banco Santander, BlockApps, BNY Mellon*, CME Group*, ConsenSys*, Intel*, J.P. Morgan*,, Microsoft, and Nuco. Also joining is IC3, or the Initiative for Cryptocurrencies and Contracts, an academic group consisting of researchers from universities such as Cornell University, UC Berkeley, and Israel's Technion.
Non-board, and additional founding members are AMIS, Andui, BBVA, BP, brainbot technologies, Credit Suisse, BNP Paribas, BP, Chronicled, Cisco, Credit Suisse, Cryptape, Fubon Financial, ING, The Institutes, Monax*, String Labs, Telindus, Tendermint, Thomson Reuters, UBS, Vidroll, and Wipro. *also a Hyperledger member
“For ING, leading edge technology is the key to developing innovative solutions for our customers and the Enterprise Ethereum Alliance is a perfect example of how we play at the forefront of these developments. Ethereum is an extremely powerful multi-purpose blockchain and we're proud to partner with the Enterprise Ethereum Alliance to leverage this computing platform to seek efficient and secure propositions for our clients”, Mariana Gomez de la Villa, Senior Program Manager Blockchain at ING.
“The Enterprise Ethereum Alliance was designed to enable organizations to easily deploy a single standard blockchain stack and build applications on that stack for the public, permissionless blockchain as well as for private, permissioned Ethereum blockchains. The EEA may turn out to be the most important project of 2017 in the blockchain ecosystem”, Joseph Lubin, Founder of ConsenSys, Co-Founder of Ethereum
Governance
The group is experimenting with new governance models designed to give the kind of control regulated enterprises need.
Specifically, a rotating board of directors will help create a sense of accountability, while various other blockchain-based governance models are being considered to further empower the'self-organizing' network effect created by authors of smart contracts and other code developers working on independent projects.
EEA Vision Paper
In the meantime the newly formed Enterprise Ethereum Alliance (EEA) also has published a Vision Paper: Enterprise Ethereum Vision. In this paper, the EEA discusses many topics related to Pluggable Consensus, governance, interoperability, Ethereum protocol updates, secure code execution, storage and performance optimization.
The EEA has thereby identified five goals for 2017, including:
Develop a sufficiently modular Ethereum implementation to separate and define clear interfaces between networking and storage layers - that is a prototype for pluggable consensus that minimizes the code changes required to switch consensus algorithms.
Experiment with potential consensus algorithms, along with data privacy and permissioning frameworks.
Develop a clear set of capabilities and performance characteristics that suit the needs of enterprises
Develop a Version 1 specification for Enterprise Ethereum
Leverage a robust governance process to ensure alignment and agreement on approaches
For more detailed information see: https://www.infoq.com/news/2017/03/Enterprise-Ethereum-Vision
Enterprise Ethereum Alliance versus Hyperledger Project
The Enterprise Ethereum Alliance, consisting of participants from different industries arrives as a challenger to several other blockchain collaborations, especially to the Hyperledger Project (see my blog: Blockchain and the Hyperledger Project: beyond the hype). Both are working on open source blockchain initiatives and there are a number of companies that are members of both. But should the Alliance be seen as a threat? Let’s look at the similarities and differences.
First, the HyperLedger Project is developing their own blockchain from scratch, led by IBM. The Enterprise Ethereum Alliance on the other hand is collaborating to tailor an existing open source Ethereum blockchain to enterprise needs
Second, the Hyperledger Project is a community designed to prevent dominance by a party or group. While IBM is one of the founding members of Hyperledger the code development is a collaboration approach by the community with no single party making the decision for inclusion. The Enterprise Ethereum Alliance is building and adding enterprise services to existing Ethereum. It is an attempt to bring Ethereum up to that same level of Business-to-Business requirements and patterns, rather than an organisation having to build those capabilities from scratch.
Third, the Hyperledger Fabric (the most widely used HL project) is being built from the ground up with enterprise (and private) blockchains in mind. Note that Hyperledger itself is a collection of projects (similar to Apache) that will eventually become integrated and reusable (Iroha, Sawtooth Lake, Cello, Composer, and Dashboard). EEA is formed around the Ethereum platform, which is built as a public permissionless BlockChain.
Future network of interoperable blockchains
It is becoming all the more clear that the future will be one where we will see a large number of different blockchains for various purposes. According to Vitalik Buterin ”the concept of one blockchain to rule them all — a unique blockchain carrying a unique digital currency and used for all distributed-ledger applications — is obsolete”.
Instead, we will have a network of interoperable blockchains, built on different distributed-ledger technologies and carrying different digital currencies, which can be federated to handle different |
to the highest concentrations, for both drugs tested, revealing that exposure to intermediate concentrations of antibiotics is essential for the bacteria to evolve resistance.
Initial mutations at each new band on the plate led to slower growth, hinting that bacteria adjusting to the antibiotic aren't able to grow at ideal speed while developing mutations. Once fully resistant, however, such bacteria regained normal growth rates.
"One of our main objectives in the lab is to reveal such evolutionary tradeoffs," said Kishony, "whereby a bacterium becoming resistant to a drug confers a cost we might be able to exploit. We might potentially use other drugs to enhance such resistance-associated weakness."
Intriguingly, the researchers also found that the location of bacterial species played a role in their success in developing resistance. For example, when the researchers moved the trapped mutants — those behind their fast-moving, fit counterparts — to the "frontlines" of the growing bacteria, they were able to grow into new regions where the frontline bacteria could not.
"What we saw suggests that evolution is not always led by the most resistant mutants," said Baym. "The strongest mutants are, in fact, often moving behind more vulnerable strains."
This overturns the assumption that mutants that survive the highest concentration of a drug drive the fitness of bacterial populations; rather, it is those mutants that are both sufficiently fit and arise sufficiently close to the advancing front that lead the evolutionary road.
The work of Baym, Kishony, and colleagues was inspired by Hollywood wizardry, the authors say. Kishony saw a digital billboard advertising the 2011 film Contagion, a grim narrative about a deadly viral pandemic. The marketing tool was built using a giant lab dish to show hordes of painted, glowing microbes creeping slowly across a dark backdrop to spell out the title of the movie.
"This project was fun and joyful throughout," Kishony said. "Seeing the bacteria spread for the first time was a thrill. Our MEGA-plate takes complex, often obscure, concepts in evolution, such as mutation selection, lineages, parallel evolution and clonal interference, and provides a visual seeing-is-believing demonstration of these otherwise vague ideas. It's also a powerful illustration of how easy it is for bacteria to become resistant to antibiotics."Twitter Inc (NYSE:TWTR) may have failed to impress with its recent earnings, but it is coming up with a new plan to drive Twitter stock.
Flickr
San Francisco, California-based Twitter Inc (NYSE:TWTR) is now testing a new a tool that's designed to help individuals and small businesses further their reach on the platform. The feature allows users to promote their tweets and reach a larger audience via an automatic route that costs just under $100 a month. While the move comes with its own set of risks, if it works, it could help Twitter secure a new source of revenue that's not directly dependent on user growth. In recent times, Twitter has struggled to expand its user base, and this has been a major source of concern for investors. While it remains to be seen if, and when, Twitter will roll out this feature to make it available to users outside its initial set, the new plan offers some hope to investors after the company's recent earnings disappointment.
As we highlighted in our earnings review of Twitter's second quarter earnings, the company's current business model depends heavily on user growth, with advertising revenue accounting for a big chunk of the company's revenue. However, things haven't shaped up very well for the micro-blogging platform, with ad prices falling drastically, even as ad engagement on the platform has continued to grow at a healthy pace. The problem, though, stems from the fact that ad prices have been falling for a while now. The average decline in ad pricing over the last one year has been about 55%, with no signs of a recovery. In the second quarter as well, ad prices fell by nearly as much, recording a 53% year-on-year decline.
Meanwhile, ad engagement on the platform has grown at a rapid pace, growing by 95% in the second quarter, and over 200% in some quarters over the last 12 months. However, as is the case with most advertising reliant business, there are constraints on ad-loads (the number or volume of ads that can be displayed to users). In the interest of user experience, platforms have to limit the number of ads, which puts an additional onus on user growth. As we know, this is where Twitter has really struggled. Monthly Active Users (MAUs) remained flat in the second quarter, after a brief period of hope following better than expected user addition during the first quarter earlier this year. TWTR stock fell heavily following the latest earnings release to reflect the market's disappointment. However, if this new plan works, Twitter may see its revenue growth decoupling from its user growth.
According to reports, Twitter may have found a new plan, "an interesting halfway point between charging subscriptions and its traditional advertising revenue model". The platform is testing a new feature which brands can use to promote their tweets and gain visibility, by paying $99 a month to have their tweets promoted automatically. Reports suggest that the package will come with the requisite analytics to help subscribers gauge the impact on reach, engagement and followers. Interestingly, the new feature also helps brands reduce their workload on the platform, by demanding less in terms of the time spent and the expertise to come up with specific promotional material.
The feature allows for automatic promotion of tweets onto timelines of accounts that don't already follow you. Quoting from a post on Business Insider, 'The way it works is that you tweet from your account as you normally do, and Twitter will programmatically select tweets to promote into other users' timelines - "the extent each Tweet is promoted may vary based on performance, "according to an FAQ about the trial." For now, the feature is still in beta mode, and is being tested by a select group of users who have advertised on the platform before. In beta phase, those inclined to try the feature are allowed a 30 day free trial, following which, they will be charged $99 per month.
As in most cases, there are risks in this case as well. For starters, there's only one way to find out if such promotions will annoy users. We'll just have to wait till the feature is rolled out en masse. Further, it remains to be seen how successful such campaigns will be. And lastly, though such a revenue stream doesn't directly depend on user growth, subscribers may be more inclined to allocate spends to platforms with more users. So, even this doesn't completely the remove the need for user growth. That said, if the feature finds favor with brands and 'power users', it could give Twitter a breather, and some more time to solve its bigger problems. And it goes without saying, this could help TWTR stock.
If you're looking to invest in a solid tech company, you might be better off considering one of our top stock picks, which have beaten the NASDAQ by a good 157%. If you're just looking for short term trading ideas, though, you might also want to check out our daily stock trading ideas section, based on technical indicators.North Carolina currently has three Democrats and 10 Republicans in the House of Representatives. | Getty Supreme Court rules North Carolina congressional districts unconstitutional
The Supreme Court ruled Monday that two North Carolina congressional districts were drawn unconstitutionally, affirming a previous district court decision against the state's redistricting and leaving in place a remedial congressional map drawn for the 2016 elections, pending an additional gerrymandering case.
The ruling centered on two Democratic-held districts and found that Republican state legislators, in drawing the congressional map earlier this decade, "packed" African-American voters into those districts to dilute the power of their votes in other congressional seats.
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State Republicans argued that they increased the African-American population of the districts to comply with the Voting Rights Act, but Justice Elena Kagan wrote in her decision that the argument "does not withstand strict scrutiny."
"For nearly 20 years before the new plan's adoption, African-Americans made up less than a majority of District 1's voters, but their preferred candidates scored consistent victories," Kagan wrote of the district currently held by Democratic Rep. G.K. Butterfield.
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North Carolina currently has three Democrats and 10 Republicans in the House of Representatives. The state had already redrawn its original congressional maps for this decade, which resulted in the member-versus-member primary between GOP Rep. Goerge Holding and former Rep. Renee Ellmers in 2016.
“This will serve as a clear warning to Republican legislatures everywhere that if they illegally racially gerrymander, they will be held to account in court,” said Marc Elias, a Democratic elections attorney who argued this case before the Supreme Court and is a senior adviser to the National Democratic Redistricting Committee, a group spearheaded by former Attorney General Eric Holder.
While this Supreme Court ruling will not result in additional changes to the North Carolina congressional map, there is another case pending before the Supreme Court, suing North Carolina legislators over the remedial map that was draw in 2015. This suit accuses the Republican legislators of gerrymandering based on partisanship, a new legal tack that Democrats are pushing in several court cases around the country.
“This decision lays the groundwork for the challenge to the Republican remedial map,” Elias said. “They weren’t going to rule on the [partisan gerrymandering] case until they heard and decided on the merits of the [racially gerrymandering] case.”
Justices Stephen Breyer, Ruth Bader Ginsburg, and Sonia Sotomayor joined Kagan in the majority alongside Clarence Thomas — an unusual majority combination.
This article tagged under: Supreme Court
North CarolinaA South Lubbock County business owner is using his marquee sign to voice his opinion concerning a presidential candidate.
The Slide Plant Market, located at FM 41 and Slide Road (195th Street & Slide), is owned by Mark Lee.
Lee recently put this message up on the south side of his marquee: "Crooked Hillary Clinton Would Be A F---ing Disaster!" Clinton is currently the presumptive Democrat Presidential nominee, clinching the required number of total delegates.
Online reaction to the sign has been mixed, which should be legal under First Amendment protections.
Lee told KFYO's news partners at KAMC News : "I've got that corner, that's my corner. If you can't say what you want to say out here in the middle of a cotton field, and that's where I am. I am in Slide, Texas. Actually, I'm in Slide, America. You know, and in Slide, America we can say anything we want to say."
Photos of the Slide Plant Market anti-Hillary Clinton sign can be seen in the gallery above. As of the evening of June 9, the anti-Hillary Clinton message was still displayed on the marquee.The impact of nicotine (NIC) on plasticity is thought to be primarily determined via calcium channel properties of nicotinic receptor subtypes, and glutamatergic plasticity is likewise calcium-dependent. Therefore glutamatergic plasticity is likely modulated by the impact of nicotinic receptor-dependent neuronal calcium influx. We tested this hypothesis for transcranial direct current stimulation (tDCS)-induced long-term potentiation-like plasticity, which is abolished by NIC in nonsmokers. To reduce calcium influx under NIC, we blocked N-methyl-d-aspartate (NMDA) receptors. We applied anodal tDCS combined with 15 mg NIC patches and the NMDA-receptor antagonist dextromethorphan (DMO) in 3 different doses (50, 100, and 150 mg) or placebo medication. Corticospinal excitability was monitored by single-pulse transcranial magnetic stimulation-induced motor-evoked potential amplitudes after plasticity induction. NIC abolished anodal tDCS-induced motor cortex excitability enhancement, which was restituted under medium dosage of DMO. Low-dosage DMO did not affect the impact of NIC on tDCS-induced plasticity and high-dosage DMO abolished plasticity. For DMO alone, the low dosage had no effect, but medium and high dosages abolished tDCS-induced plasticity. These results enhance our knowledge about the proposed calcium-dependent impact of NIC on plasticity in humans and might be relevant for the development of novel nicotinic treatments for cognitive dysfunction.
© The Author 2015. Published by Oxford University Press. All rights reserved. For Permissions, please e-mail: journals.permissions@oup.com.The whole idea of a free society is based on a very simple idea that is very hard to live by: People have the right to be wrong.
This idea has ancient roots, but it was always and everywhere a minority opinion, unpopular with both the masses and the rulers, until relatively recently.
In the "modern" era, its status as one of the defining ideas of Western civilization can be traced to the Treaty of Westphalia in 1648. After a century of bloody religious wars between Catholics and Protestants — with Jews often getting caught in the crossfire — the exhausted rulers of Europe reluctantly agreed to a fragile truce. While every nation would still officially follow the faith of the ruler, it was understood that religious minorities would be afforded some tolerance. Persecuting religious dissenters in one nation might reignite war, as rulers of other countries would feel obliged to defend their coreligionists abroad. (To see how that dynamic works today, just look at how Sunni and Shia governments in the Middle East send aid or troops to defend their brethren in neighboring lands.)
With Westphalia, as historian C.V. Wedgwood put it, the West had begun to understand "the essential futility of putting the beliefs of the mind to the judgment of the sword."
In England, the Puritan despot Oliver Cromwell, who had deposed and executed the king, recognized that he couldn't hold onto power without reassuring Catholics and dissident Protestant denominations that they would be safe, so he introduced new measures of tolerance. He beseeched Parliament to allow some measure of liberty "to all who fear God."
Now, Europe in the 1600s wasn't some libertarian nirvana. True freedom of conscience did not exist in England, France or anywhere else in the world. For instance Cromwell's Puritan-dominated parliament declared a real "war on Christmas," banning celebration of the holiday. The Colonial city of Boston followed a similar practice, imposing a fine on anyone who celebrated Christmas.
Why revisit this history? For two reasons. First, to underscore how culture wars are nothing new in the West, and as bad as ours are today, they could get much, much worse. Second, to illustrate a point lost on culture warriors of the left and the right. Pluralism and tolerance are not simply nice ideals, like good manners. They are what management gurus call "best practices," learned after millennia of gory trial and error.
Very few people who embraced doctrines of religious and political liberty did so at first because they thought it was the right way to organize society. Cromwell was more of a religious zealot than any Christian right-winger today. If he thought he could get away with it, he would have made mandatory compliance with his faith the law of the land. But Cromwell recognized that he had to compromise with reality if he was going to end the religious conflicts plaguing his country.
Thomas Jefferson had strong views on religion, but his Virginia Statute for Religious Freedom disestablished the Church of England and established religious liberty for Christians, Muslims, Jews, Hindus, even pagans. The statute became the foundation for the First Amendment.
You might think that the current controversy over NFL players refusing to stand for the National Anthem, the vandalizing or removal of statues — not just of Confederate generals, but of any real or alleged historical villains — and the P.C. firestorms erupting across American campuses aren't about religion, so this history doesn't have much relevance for today.
But you would be wrong.
The religious conflicts of the past were ultimately about which values, rituals, customs and ideas should be imposed on everybody. Traditional religion may be receding in many parts of American culture, but politics is taking on a decidedly religious flavor — and religion is becoming increasingly politicized.
People are growing intolerant of any dissent from their idea of what everyone should believe. Agree with me and you're one of the good guys; disagree with me and you're not just wrong, you're my enemy, a heretic, a traitor, a bigot. Opportunists recognize that exacerbating this polarization redounds to their own benefit, because at least for now, doing so helps raise money, ratings, clicks and poll numbers.
We are a long way off from putting beliefs of the mind to the judgment of the sword, but that is the logical destination of the path we are on, because we have lost faith in the utility of upholding the right to be wrong.
Jonah Goldberg is a syndicated columnist and author. He explores politics and culture for National Review as a senior editor. He is the author of "Liberal Fascism" and "The Tyranny of Cliches: How Liberals Cheat in the War of Ideas.” For more of his reports, Go Here Now.Under a new program, police in north St. Louis County are handing out "tickets" to young people — for doing good deeds.
The "Positive Ticketing Program" recognizes and rewards young people for making contributions to their community and showing good behavior. In addition to police issuing the "tickets," members of the public, school administrators and clergy can also nominate a young person who has done good works.
"Anything from helping an elderly neighbor bring in groceries, shoveling snow, cutting grass, doing volunteer work, calling police to report a person is injured or sick," said North County precinct commander Captain Norman Mann. "There are different levels of deeds we will reward."
The program, which is based on an initiative started in Canada, is also geared at increasing positive interactions with young people, Mann said.
"Hopefully this changes the rhetoric toward local law enforcement, to get that positive interaction going with the police, and hopefully mend the relationships, where kids feel comfortable interacting with police," he said.
Likewise, Mann said the initiative also hopes to create a positive association with courts and the criminal justice system. The special citations issued will include a date "for where the young individual will have a summons, if you will, to appear in a mock court," Mann said. During these bi-monthly events, a judge will help celebrate the young person's accomplishment, and an audience will serve as a jury.
"It is designed to simulate a court proceeding, to take the negative aspect out of the known court proceeding in which a person is issued a fine, penalty or jail time, we’re going to turn it to a positive situation where a kid may receive a coupon to Six Flags, or a Cardinals ticket, Blues ticket, free food at the local establishments, you name it," Mann said.
Will mock court celebrations work?
That "mock court" aspect has drawn some skepticism. Rance Thomas, president of North County Churches Uniting for Racial Harmony and Justice, said while he likes the program, he said the court process should be left out.
"Many young people, African-American children in particular, have parents, relatives and friends who have been sent to prison, and that's something they want to avoid for sure - courts," he said. "I would suggest another venue that you don't go through that form of process, but again you may bring in judges and others to help present the awards, and have contact with youth in a positive way. That may be helpful, but when you go talking about going to court, that's not someplace young people want to go."
Mann said he understands that concern.
"We understand that a lot of kids are witnesses to traffic citations issued to parents, grandparent, brothers, sisters," he said. "There's a lot of negative things associated with going to court, but hopefully seeing the positive aspect of it — there’s a reward, instead of a penalty on the other end — will change their perception of law enforcement and the judicial system as a whole, that it’s not just out there to penalize people."
Thomas said he likes the Positive Ticketing Program and sees it as a good first step.
"Long-standing attitudes — those take a lot of effort to be changed, and again, I think it's a start," he said. "It's not the whole solution to the problem, but it helps. Every positive action helps. But it won't really solve the major problem that exists between the police and the community."
Specifically, Thomas said he isn't sure the program will engage children who aren't already involved in helping the community, such as the youth he works with through the north county churches group.
Moreover, while police hope the program also builds rapport with teenagers, Thomas said he thinks it's more likely to have an impact on younger kids. He said it's harder to change minds the older kids get.
"Unfortunately, those who need it most really probably would not benefit as much as we'd like to see," he said. "At the present time, the distrust between the police and the community — of course, this is especially true with young people — they don't really trust the police and police don't trust them for the most part."
Thomas said he wants to see more of a commitment to reach teens from local police in the form of more mentoring opportunities and partnerships with community groups like churches. While he said the best method for reaching adolescents is "a mystery," he said having police participate in sports or music events might help teens get to know law enforcement — and vice versa.
Noting that the positive ticketing program is just one of many outreach efforts, Mann said county police "take pride in our community outreach efforts, but you can never do too much to recognize the efforts of younger generations."
"We are here to serve and protect, and hopefully through lasting experiences, positive experiences with the police department, they can understand that’s something they can look forward to as they get older," Mann said.
In addition to the block parties, walk-and-talks, kids' safety fairs and other programs county police host, Mann said the north county precinct also hopes to co-sponsor a Boy Scout Troop in the Spanish Lake area, alongside its Citizen Police Academy Alumni Association.
As for the positive ticketing program, Mann said police are looking for more sponsors and local establishments to donate rewards.
Tell us what you know
What does this plan for positive ticking mean to you? Please respond through our Public Insight Network. St. Louis Public Radio uses this tool to help us solicit knowledge and insight from people who become sources for our reports. Click here to share.Net neutrality. Telecom immunity. The Electronic Communications Privacy Act. If you don’t know what these words mean, it’s time for some schooling: These are some of the issues that are currently being fought by public interests groups who have focused on technology.
These public interest groups are in a constant battle to fight against laws that restrict our freedom or threaten our privacy, or to alter aged laws and policies that don’t keep current with rapidly evolving technology. Their victories—and there are many—have improved the lives of everyone who’s ever owned a tech toy.
Meet four important public interest groups who are dedicated to fighting for our digital rights: Public Knowledge; the Electronic Frontier Foundation; TechFreedom; and the Center for Democracy and Technology. While some of them are focused on slightly different aspects of technology and law, each of them is actively engaged in changing laws to protect us (for example, all were involved in the battle against SOPA).
Oh, and for your edification:
“Net neutrality” concerns keeping the Internet “neutral,” that is, no special services for high-paying customers—and no slowdown of services for those who cannot pay. For more information, click here.
“Telecom immunity” is about the immunity from prosecution that President Bush gave to AT&T for providing their customers’ communications to the National Security Agency without a warrant. For more information, click here.
“The Electronic Communications Privacy Act” is a federal statute that protects electronic communication…but it was written in 1986 and has not kept up with the times. For more information, click here.
PUBLIC KNOWLEDGE
What is the focus of Public Knowledge?
According to Harold Feld, legal director of Public Knowledge, “We focus in two areas: the first is copyright and intellectual property and its intersection with technology freedom; the other is open and ubiquitous communications platforms.” They’ve been fighting the good fight for 10 years.
Your important successes?
If you thought that AT&T’s potential acquisition of T-Mobile was a bad idea that would narrow consumer choice and create less competition, you have Public Knowledge to thank for AT&T’s withdrawal: Public Knowledge was “heavily involved” in “the defeat of the AT&T’s effort to acquire T-Mobile. It was just an enormous win against an opponent that a lot of people thought was unbeatable,” said Feld.
Prior to this, one of Public Knowledge’s most important victories happened in 2004, over the FCC’s broadcast flag regulations.
“The FCC had adopted regulations as part of the digital transition that would have required people to put all kinds of digital rights management software into their televisions and DVRs,” said Feld.
But if you don’t remember the broadcast flag, it’s because Public Knowledge stepped on it before it could get its tendrils into our technology.
Currently fighting?
Feld said, “We are working on trying to keep terms similar to SOPA and PIPA out of US international agreements, [such as] the Trans-Pacific Partnership Agreement, which is being negotiated now. We are hoping that, with everything that’s going on in Europe over ACTA, we may be able to draw attention to the process by which Hollywood leverages these trade agreements to export all kinds of provisions that are very much about censoring the Internet.”
Public Knowledge will also keep an eye on the next spectrum auction. “We’re going to be very involved with that to make sure that… Super Wi-Fi [the whitespaces between television channels] doesn’t get lost with all the auctions.
“We’re also going to do what we can to make sure the auction promotes competition in the wireless space and not just provide more spectrum for AT&T and Verizon.”
Public Knowledge also recently created the Internet Blueprint.
If you could, how would you change the law?
Feld said, “The most important thing would be to recognize that to have a system that reflects the fact that we’re no longer a world of a few big content producers and everyone else is a consumer. We want to see a system that recognizes that everybody is producing content.
“The change would mean that [copyright holders] don’t act as if the more restrictive copyright is the better or the more control they have over content, the better. The laws need to facilitate sharing and building off each other’s work and not just treat that as something you can do if it doesn’t interfere with exclusive rights.”
The ELECTRONIC FRONTIER FOUNDATION
What is the focus of the EFF?
The EFF has been protecting user’s rights online for 22 years. Cindy Cohn, legal director, said, “This takes us in a couple of different directions, but it’s all about standing up for the users and innovators who make the cool stuff that you and I use.” These different directions include “civil liberties, government access to our information, privacy, free speech…. It’s a wide brief but it really is about protecting user rights again with a bend toward civil rights issues.”
Your important successes?
The EFF have had many important successes, but it’s first major one was the Steve Jackson Games case. Back in 1990, the Secret Service raided the game company and seized four computers, as well as assorted hardware. The EFF helped establish that, when seizing equipment, law enforcement officers need warrants that specify what can be taken.
Cohn said, “We’re slowly developing, and still fighting, standards where the government has to think about and has to do something that is more narrow and focused in searches and seizures in the digital age. I often say that the EFF’s job is to make sure that your constitutional rights are intact when you’re online.”
Bloggers need to thank the EFF for their work in Apple v Does. In defending three bloggers, the public interest group “demonstrated that bloggers are journalists when they’re engaging in journalism.” Because of this, bloggers are “protected by the California reporter’s shield law and also constitutional privilege against the disclosure of confidential sources that exists in California.”
Cohn said the decision “gives people a lot of protection against their ISP [internet service provider] just handing stuff over civil cases. We still have a lot to do in criminal cases, but the Apple v Doe case made it really clear that a civil subpoena is not sufficient in requiring your ISP to hand over your email.”
Currently fighting?
Cohn said, “We continue to battle the warrantless wiretapping that was started by the Bush administration and continued by the Obama administration. The administration has been trying to avoid a court looking at what they’re doing by hiding behind the state’s secrets privilege, so we’ve had to have a lot of fights around that.”
Among other battles, the EFF is fighting copyright trolls, people who “use copyright claims to try to shake down people. The business model is not about the lawsuit, it’s about the strategy of extracting money.” For example, Camelot Distribution Group blanketed the users of a peer-to-peer downloading site with threatening letters, claiming that the users illegally downloaded the “nunsploitation” movie, Nude Nuns with Big Guns.
According to Cohn, Camelot Distribution Group told users, “You can pay us a thousand dollars and this whole thing will go away.” She said, “People feel intimidated by this, whether or not they did it, because even if they fight this and they’re exonerated, they’re going to be forever linked to Nude Nuns with Big Guns.”
Worse, the lawsuits are usually created in locations that are geographically undesirable for the defendants, which makes it hard for them to defend themselves. Cohn said, “We’ve been filing amicus briefs and getting appointed by courts across the country to defend these people and to develop some processes that is more fair than the trolls want to do it.”
If you could, how would you change the law?
Cohn said, “Right now, I would change the idea that, because you use a service provider for your email or social networking, somehow the information that the entity has about you as a byproduct of the service is not protected by the fourth amendment [which protects us against unreasonable searches and seizures]. I think it is.
“I would create a world in which people’s expectations about the tools that they’re using and their activities online really match the kinds of privacy protections that people actually have.”
UPDATED: Here is part two.Fireworks erupted at the outset of the first Republican debate on Thursday night, when 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 said he wouldn’t pledge not to run as an independent if he doesn’t win the Republican nomination.
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Anchor Bret Baier asked the field of candidates to raise their hands if they were unwilling to pledge their support to the eventual Republican nominee, and only Trump raised his hand.
“I cannot say [that],” Trump said. “I have to respect the person if it’s not me who wins."
Sen. Rand Paul immediately interjected.
“That’s what’s wrong, he buys and sells politicians of all stripes,” Paul (R-Ky.) said. “He’s already hedging his bet on the Clintons. So if he doesn’t run as a Republican, maybe he supports Clinton, or maybe he runs as an independent. But I’d say he’s already hedging his bets because he’s used to buying politicians.”
Trump responded that he hopes to run as a Republican and support the eventual nominee, but he would not take the third-party option off the table.
“I will not make the pledge at this time,” Trump said.
The celebrity real estate mogul initially brought up the possibility of running as a third-party candidate in an exclusive interview with The Hill in July.
In that interview, he said the chances of an independent run “absolutely” increase if the Republican National Committee is unfair to him during the 2016 primary season.Just Thinking You're Slacking On Exercise Could Boost Risk Of Death
Enlarge this image toggle caption Oivind Hovland/Getty Images/Ikon Images Oivind Hovland/Getty Images/Ikon Images
In a fitness-crazed land of spin classes and CrossFit gyms, Octavia Zahrt found it can be tough to feel as though you're doing enough. "When I was in school in London, I felt really good about my activity. Then I moved to Stanford, and everyone around me seems to be so active and going to the gym every day," she says. "In the San Francisco Bay Area, it's like 75 percent of people walk around here wearing exercise clothes all day, every day, all the time, and just looking really fit."
She wasn't less active than when she lived in London, Zahrt says, but in comparison she began to feel a bit like a slacker. "I felt unhealthy. I was very stressed about fitting in more exercise," she says.
And just feeling less fit in comparison to others might trim away years of life, says Zahrt, a Ph.D. candidate in health psychology at the Stanford University Graduate School of Business. That's the conclusion of a study she co-authored, published Thursday in Health Psychology.
Past studies have suggested that mindsets concerning one's own health can have physiological consequences. In 2007, Stanford psychologist Alia Crum ran a study on hotel attendants. "These women were getting lots of exercise, but when we asked them they didn't have the mindset that their work was good exercise," Crum says.
She gave some of the hotel staff a presentation explaining that their work, which involves heavy lifting and walking, is good exercise, and then tracked them for a month. "The women who started to look at their work as good exercise had improvements in blood pressure and body fat," she says.
Crum and Zahrt collaborated on the new study, which looks at what might happen decades down the line. They analyzed data from two large national health surveys, the National Health Interview Survey and the National Health and Nutrition Examination Survey. Along with a litany of health metrics including activity, weight and smoking status, these surveys also ask participants to assess how much they believe they exercise compared to others their own age.
"Individuals who thought they were less active than other people their age were more likely to die, regardless of health status, body mass index, and so on," Crum says.
That was true even though the researchers looked at people who were roughly the same in every way, including how much they actually exercised based on self-report and step-tracking data, obesity and heart health, except for how much they thought they worked out compared to others.
They analyzed three sets of the survey data, and all three showed people who felt they worked out less than their peers were more likely to die in a 21-year follow-up period than those who felt they exercised more than their peers. In one sample, these people were 71 percent more likely to die. "I was very surprised by the size of [that effect]," Zahrt says. "That there would be an effect on mortality so many years later, that wasn't necessarily obvious to me."
The researchers think there may be a couple of reasons for this. One is simply a type of placebo effect. "What placebo underpins is the effect of our mindset," Crum says. "[For example], the belief you're getting a pain medication can activate endogenous opiates in the brain." Crum thinks something similar may be at play here, where an underlying dread of not exercising enough is a powerful frame of mind that can harm health.
Social comparisons can also be demotivating. "People who think they are less active can be discouraged by that perception, and they might stop exercising and become less active over time," Zahrt says. That subsequent drop in real exercise could account for some of the negative health outcomes the researchers saw in their study.
It's tough to say what's responsible for the study's effect, says Angelina Sutin, a behavioral scientist at Florida State University College of Medicine who was not involved with the work. "We don't have a real grasp on what the mechanism is yet," she says. This study only correlated those who felt they exercised less with higher mortality rates and isn't able to pin down why that might be, Sutin says.
Plus how much you think you exercise is probably still not as important as how much you actually exercise, Sutin points out. Still, she thinks the study is extremely well done. "I thought this was a really nice study and adds a piece of this perception puzzle we're trying to work through," she says.
If Crum and Zahrt are right, and living with the belief you aren't active enough can shorten your life, then their results call into question scare tactics for health messaging. "If you tell people they need to get this really high level of activity or else they have all these healthy complications and die early, you might just be instilling this negative mindset," Zahrt says.
Messaging needs to have accurate information about health and exercise and motivate people to be more active, but doing that without instilling a fear of not exercising can be tricky, Crum says. "The ultimate end goal is the sense of enoughness," she says. "It's all individual. If you're thinking, every day, that you haven't done enough, that is problematic."SINGAPORE - Mr Lee Kuan Yew's final will specifically accepts and acknowledges that demolition of his Oxley Road house may not take place, said Senior Minister of State for Law and Finance Indranee Rajah.
In a Facebook post on Friday (June 23), she cites a clause on demolishing 38, Oxley Road in the will, saying it shows demolition is not the only option the late Mr Lee considered.
The question of whether to demolish the house lies at the heart of a public feud between Prime Minister Lee Hsien Loong and his siblings, Dr Lee Wei Ling and Mr Lee Hsien Yang.
On Friday, Ms Indranee noted there are two parts to the demolition clause.
The first part expresses the late Mr and Mrs Lee's wish to demolish the house, but the second part recognises the house may not be demolished for a number of reasons, she said.
She cites the second part, which states: "If our children are unable to demolish the House as a result of any changes in the laws, rules or regulations binding them, it is my wish that the House never be opened to others except my children, their families and descendants."
Said Ms Indranee: "Much of the recent public discussion on this issue has been premised on the assumption that the 7th Will only contemplates one outcome - demolition. But this is not the case. The Will specifically accepts and acknowledges that demolition may not |
see below). 3. *Democrats are the salient post-midterm audience*: The next scheduled election is not the general election of 2016. It is the series of presidential nomination primaries leading to that election. Above all, for those elections, the Democratic Party is the principal arena, Democratic figures are the principal players and Democratic voters are the audience. Slighting this fundamental political reality and imagining that the general election campaign must determine the overall message here and now would be based on a misconception and create undermining distortions, including short-circuiting communication to Democrats in the immediate aftermath of the 2014 debacle. 4. *The message post-midterm to Democrats*: For HRC and WJC, the message in the days and weeks after heartbreaking defeats and the despair of losing the Senate should be directed to the Democratic Party--not to the media narrative. The message aimed at Democrats should have two points: First, the Clintons demonstrated their undivided loyalty to the Democratic Party. They campaigned their hearts out for all Democrats. They are always there for Democrats. They are completely committed to the Democratic Party. Second, the Clintons believe in the Democratic Party as an inclusive national party. They campaigned all over the country--north, south, east, and west. They believe the Democratic Party is and must be a national party. They campaigned for Southern, Midwestern and western Democrats because they are true-blue Democrats, and they are dedicated to helping Democrats everywhere. If there is any argument for Democrats that will rebuff media accusations of selfishness, egotism and narrow ambition, it is one on behalf of the Democratic Party. It also happens to be an argument that will generate support and loyalty in return. 5. *The Obama factor and why this is the wrong time to criticize Obama*: The 2014 midterms have been fought on unpromising ground for Democrats, to say the least. It is the second midterm of a presidency, almost inevitably when losses are incurred. The Senate seats up this time were mostly in the South and border-states. That geographic anomaly tilted the election to those electorates, which are the most hostile to Obama and most difficult for Democrats in the midterms of Democratic presidents, coloring the election across the country. Those Democrats up for reelection, after all, won in the Democratic sweep of 2008 when the tide was rolling in. Now they have faced the voters when the Democratic tide is out and the turnout naturally down. No Democrats in the South have wanted to run with Obama's endorsement or, for some, even to claim they supported him. It has therefore been impossible to articulate the case for his achievements in the face of Republican negativity and intractable opposition. But when the midterms are over, including runoffs and Democratic candidates not at risk, that would be a propitious time, if there is one, to make the positive case for Obama at the beginning of his defense of progressive legacies for the next two years. The notion that Obama is finished is a dangerous illusion. He has two years more in office with the powers of the presidency. Defending the progressive legacy will be an essential and significant task ahead. Nothing would serve the Republicans better than acceding to their propaganda that Obama is over. No matter the disillusionment with Obama among Democrats, they will resent attacks against him, especially in the coming period. Attempting to angle between Obama and the Republican Congress would raise insinuations of presumption and arrogance. Obama's vetoes of Republican bills, cynically cast as "reform," will be depicted as Obama turned wholly negative and evidence of his demise. He will not be credited with protecting and defending generations of progressive achievements, including his own, upon which the nation depends for its general welfare, prosperity and security. To grant him such credit would take an active position for the media. Instead, the media will goad HRC not only to separate herself from Obama but also to condemn him. If and when she does so the media will seek to isolate and diminish her as ungrateful, churlish, crudely ambitious, grasping, envious, and a backstabber. Having framed the issue of attacking Obama as necessary for HRC's future well being, the media will inevitably portray any differences as evidence of her inherent political weakness and lack of political instinct, a revival of the 2008 primary clash, alienating Obama's constituencies and proof she is a bad politician (forgetting the simultaneous accusation of ambition). Counter-intuitively, his accomplishments should be defended--and his defense of the progressive legacy back to Theodore Roosevelt should be defended. Leave the nuanced judgments of the Obama presidency, his mode of decision-making and style of leadership, to the historians. As a political matter in the present tense, when he is at his lowest ebb, this is the opening for defending his accomplishments that must be defended against the Republican onslaught. 6. *The Democratic primary campaign will in great part be run against the Republican Congress: *A Republican Congress will attempt to rollback healthcare, undermine environmental protections, undo and rewrite regulations for the benefit of a host of special interests (not least Koch Industries, i.e, Georgia Pacific, etc.), launch a hundred investigations into fabricated pseudo-scandals, try to back Obama into agreeing or half-agreeing to various bargains that would put the Democratic candidate of 2016 in an awkward position, and of course attack women's rights, especially reproductive rights, voting rights, immigrant rights, block nominations, and continue their wholesale assault on science. The Tea Party caucus in the House will in fact be larger than ever and will define the limits of moderation. This is the setup for the Democrats, who can set the test for the Republicans: Will the Republicans reject extremism? On this, issue after issue, their party can be discredited and split as we immediately enter the post-midterm presidential campaign. 7. *The Republican presidential campaign will begin on November 5th and intersect with the Republican Congress: *The GOP presidential contest will begin at once. It will loom over the Republican Congress, just as the Republican Congress will loom over the candidates. Scott Walker has already lambasted Chris Christie. The right wing is laying in wait to trash Jeb Bush. If Ted Cruz were to run, he would hurl missiles at the infidel Rand Paul (the media's most interesting man in the world). Nothing will stop the Republican candidates from attacking each other. If Jeb Bush doesn't run, there is no viable establishment candidate. If he does run, he will be subjected to an unprecedented assault that might culminate in a splintered party, even a third party. This will not be like the period of 1999-2000, when the leading GOP candidates were George W. Bush trying to position himself as a new version of Republican moderation and John McCain, the GOP party outlier. The rightward tilt of the Republican primary electorate, more right leaning than every before, will be reflected in the candidates' jostling, and have a gravitational pull on the internal processes of the Republican Congress. Unanticipated opportunities will naturally emerge that will define Republican candidates in terms of the Republican Congress. The Republican civil wars should be accelerated whenever possible through tactics to exacerbate their internal frictions. Publicly suggesting how Obama might make this or that deal with the Republican leadership would better be left unsaid. Instead, every instance of the Republicans' incapacity for governance, internal turmoil, subservience to special interests, and vicious rivalries should be pointed out as a constant lesson.Here’s a nifty trick that’s been on my mind lately. In case you hadn’t noticed, the weather news this season has been pretty grim. Tornados so large and destructive that they would have given Dorothy pause, 500-year European floods, massive rainstorms rolling across the land, record heat in California and Alaska, late snowfalls that boggle the imagination, wildfires that dwarf past ones in the American West. I could go on, but why bother since anyone who has been watching primetime TV news can’t but notice that staggering weather has been the lead or second story much of the time all spring and into the summer.
You’re probably wondering right now: But what’s the trick? I’m surprised you haven’t noticed yourself. All of this weather has a new, made-for-TV label. It’s now regularly called “extreme weather” or “severe weather.” And that’s anything but inaccurate. The weather has been both “severe” and “extreme” this spring. The trick is that, as a label, “extreme weather” has managed (with rare exceptions) to obviate the need even to mention that any of this could have the slightest thing to do with climate change, with our overheating, over-greenhouse-gassed planet. Think of it as a fabulous form of recognition and denial wrapped in the same package.
The TV news gets all the benefits of night-after-night, eyeball-gluing drama in which the weather goes nuts, houses are destroyed, and people weep (or are stoic) about ruined lives. It gets to bring in the tornado watchers and the weather people in their raincoats and waders. (Have you noticed that the TV news can’t report a flood without putting some reporter with a mic knee-deep in water?) It gets to focus nightly on those daunting weather maps with their blazing red danger zones, and offer warnings about what potential disaster tomorrow might have to offer, all the while remaining in official, blissful denial about what’s happening on this planet of ours. Somehow, it has managed to incorporate the possible effects of climate change into the nightly news as a major story, while excluding just about all serious discussion of it. Tell me that isn’t a doubly nifty trick!
Of course, if there’s nothing but “extreme weather” happening and that weather has no extreme context, no extreme meaning, then none of us have to worry our little heads about what’s to be done. Those trying to remedy the degradation of conditions on this planet can also be ignored, which is why we couldn’t be more pleased that TomDispatch regular Chip Ward introduces us to such a person today. Tom
So instead, let’s get right to the point: what do we do about it? How do we begin to heal the wounds?
But let’s skip the grim survey of how humans are overloading the carrying capacity of our original earthly Eden that usually opens a report like this. The intent of such a recitation of folly is to compel the reader’s attention by underlining the dire importance of the topic at hand. But I assume you understand by now that you woke up this morning on an overheated planet of slums threatened by ecological collapse.
My home sits at the gateway to a national park in Utah, a source of envy among tourists who gather along Capitol Reef’s “scenic drive.” But after 40 years of living in one desert or another, I know firsthand that America’s iconic desert landscapes, places like Monument Valley and Arches National Park, are the exceptions, not the rule. The rule is that we dig up, dump on, dam, bomb, drill, over-graze, and otherwise abuse our deserts, most of them public lands owned by you, the taxpaying citizen. Generally, our management of the nation’s public lands is a disgrace and deserts are exhibit A.
The crises we face and that our children and grandchildren will endure long after we leave them invite a visionary response. On the other hand, the world is already awash in well-intentioned tinkerers. Yet dysfunction and destruction still reign. Maybe it’s time to leap to a new paradigm.
Enter John Davis and Trek West. At this very moment, Davis is walking, biking, paddling, and horseback riding 6,000 miles through a chain of mountain ranges that stretches like a spine across North America from the Sierra Madres of Mexico through the Rockies of the American West up into Canada. He started this winter in the Sonoran desert we share with our southern neighbor and has been heading northward for months. He will cross many of our most treasured national parks like Yellowstone and Grand Canyon, the ones that tourists love, but his trek is no sightseeing adventure.
Davis and his Trek West partners along the route are advocating for what they call “landscape connectivity” on a continental scale. Two years ago, Davis trekked from Key West to Quebec, 8,000 human-powered miles. Same theme: conserve and connect.
A Conservation Revolution
Gone are the days when conservation was all about bullets, hooks, and cameras. Fishermen and hunters are still an important constituency in the conservation community, but birdwatchers now outnumber them. Ecological criteria increasingly frame any debate about how to heal degraded habitat. What the nineteenth century naturalist and Sierra Club founder John Muir knew intuitively -- that everything in the universe is “hitched to everything else” -- has been confirmed beyond doubt by hard science.
Davis is one of the founders of a new school of thought called conservation biology. Its proponents argue that it is not faintly enough to preserve scenic rock and ice parks and isolated islands of wildlife. Wild creatures need room to roam so they can find the necessary water, food, and mates. In the long run, many of America’s wild creatures from salamanders to bears will survive only in Disney movies if we box out genetic diversity, block migration routes, destroy nesting grounds, and save only carefully preserved, isolated populations of a species. Connectivity is the keel of an emerging conservation ethic for helping to heal this country.
John Davis envisions an unbroken chain of wild lands spanning North America from Mexico to Canada. When completed, a necklace of “core” areas, including national parks, wildlife reserves, and protected wilderness areas will be linked together and buffered by national forests and private lands. Creatures now boxed into wild islands surrounded by a sea of development will have room to roam.
A connected landscape will be more resilient as climate change puts further stress on creatures and their habitats. Already species from birds to mammals are responding to warming temperatures by moving northward if they can, or to higher ground if they can’t migrate horizontally. The famed scientist and conservationist E.O. Wilson called the project to link together America’s wild lands the most important conservation initiative in the world today.
After trekking through the habitat of the last remaining jaguars on the continent, Davis ran into the new wall designed to keep illegal Mexican migrants out of the United States. It is, he pointed out, a far more effective barrier against wildlife migration than the human version of the same and so is lobotomizing the border ecosystem we share with Mexico. As for Davis, he easily climbed it in less than five minutes and was on his way.
Backpacks Meet Cowboy Hats
Although pushing 50, Davis has the trim, muscular build of a professional athlete -- and he’ll need every toned muscle he has to complete his quest. The day before I met him in Escalante, Utah, he had been surprised by a lingering bout of spring weather and found himself pushing his bike through 10 miles of deep snow on top of Utah’s Aquarius Plateau. The next week, he planned to paddle through Desolation Canyon, one of the most spectacular river passages on the planet. But when I encountered him, he was taking a break and making a pitch for connectivity before a gathering of federal land managers, concerned local citizens, and ranchers who share the watershed of the Escalante River.
The Escalante River Watershed Partnership (ERWP) is the unwieldy name for a grassroots coalition whose aim is to restore the river’s degraded ecosystem. The rugged network of high desert canyons that drain into the remote Escalante River have been eroding for years thanks to overgrazing by cattle. They are also choked with tamarisk and Russian olive trees.
Tamarisks are an invasive species that suck up precious ground water, while filling in springs and seeps that are the only water sources for many bird and animal species. The tall, feathery plumes of the tamarisk have taken over hundreds of miles of riverbank in the West. “Tammies” also salt the surrounding soil when they shed their leaves, killing native plants that might otherwise compete. A beetle was imported from Eurasia to eat the tammies and was unbelievably successful. As a result, those thick hedges that still block riverbanks are now dead-dry and ready to ignite. If not cut back, they will burn or regrow. Russian olive trees also crowd stream banks and add needle-like thorns to the unpleasant mix.
The diverse stakeholders in the Escalante River Watershed Partnership may not share John Davis’s grand vision of an ecologically whole and “rewilded” continent, but they are intent on sewing together and rewilding their pieces of the torn fabric of American life. As any effective organizer knows, you start where there is common ground -- or where there are common weeds.
Ranchers, rangers, biologists, hikers, and back-country guides are in many ways competing constituencies, but it turns out they all share the goal of clearing riparian (wet) canyons of those suffocating tammies. The scientists survey the ground and identify targets. Grants are written to bring in volunteers to do the fieldwork. Last week, a dozen Great Old Broads for Wilderness, mostly outspoken middle-aged women, spent a week clearing unwanted brush as a service project.
As biologists monitor progress and the group discusses issues that arise, inevitably the damage done by grazing cows comes up. It couldn’t be a more awkward topic. After all, ranchers are in the room. Cattle ranching in these desert landscapes is a marginal activity. Those ranchers depend on federal grants, tax breaks, and access to public land to make it work. But cows erode stream banks and silt the water, short-circuit forest succession by eating seedlings, and contaminate fresh water with their voluminous poop that also spreads cheatgrass and weeds.
The hope is that eventually the EWRP will become a platform for a public airing of difficult issues like where cattle should be allowed to graze on public land and how many and when.
A Roadkill Extravaganza
Those awaiting Davis’s Trek West presentation this particular day in this particular corner of Utah have already found a scale that seems to fit the desperate needs of our landscape, state, country, and planet. Most of us who believe in change are caught between the seeming futility of small-scale actions -- like recycling our trash or using more energy-efficient light bulbs -- and the impotence we experience when we push for large-scale change like climate legislation in Congress or international treaties to limit atmospheric greenhouse gases.
On the one hand, too little; on the other, too late. There does, however, turn out to be a middle scale between individual action and national or global campaigns that works well and makes sense: the community. That’s the place where people can best embrace their roles as citizens, face off, share, contend, cooperate, create, learn from, and empower one another.
Watershed partnerships harken back to an old ideal. John Wesley Powell, the one-armed general and Civil War hero who later explored the Colorado River and its tributaries, was the first person to grasp and publicize the aridity rather than fecundity of significant parts of the American West. He argued that practices and policies developed for wet Eastern lands were inappropriate for the drier West. He advocated for governance around watersheds where local stakeholders committed to living within the limits they knew firsthand could come together and plan. That’s what I’m observing this morning in Utah. In twenty-first-century terms, think of it as ecological citizenship.
Davis claims he is shy and a poor presenter, but it turns out that he is quietly charismatic. The case he makes for corridors is practical. His listeners know that he is trekking across a landscape that is not your grandfather’s Wild West. The wide-open spaces where the antelope once roamed are now fragmented by a zillion roads featuring SUVs with flattened animals on their bumpers. Davis says that, on his most recent journey, he’s already seen at least 1,000 crushed, dead creatures. It’s been a roadkill extravaganza.
So, what to do? He shows pictures of a landscaped underpass in nearby Kanab, Utah, constructed at a deer crossing where at least 100 deer a year were being hit by cars. Every year about 10% of the local herd was becoming roadkill along with foxes, turkeys, and the occasional bobcat. The underpass cost $2.6 million, which is hardly chump change in this neck of the woods, but each deer-car collision costs, on average, $6,600. Do the math, he tells them. Making the landscape permeable for animals seeking food, mates, and water keeps them healthy and pays for itself soon enough.
The Wolf at the Door
Ranchers and the Bureau of Land Management (BLM) rangers who serve them view John Davis skeptically. For one thing, he’s been frank about the need to reintroduce wolves across Western ecosystems, given the “keystone” role they play in shaping a healthy landscape. In case you’re not a Westerner, you should know that the subject of wolf reintroduction is a political third rail in much of our region. It’s an idea that would stun and appall our grandfathers, who killed wolves on their lands to leave more deer and elk for hunters and make meadows safe for cattle.
Ecologically, the reintroduction of wolves to Yellowstone National Park has been an unqualified success. Since wolves were returned to that landscape, elk are no longer bunching up and munching down in stream-fed valleys until they are silted, eroded, and devoid of other wildlife. The wolves thin the elk herds and move them, which, in turn, allows willows, aspens, beavers, birds, and a more biodiverse landscape to thrive. Their success in Yellowstone has confirmed the insights of conservation biologists, giving them credibility and authority. Cowboys fear that, having pushed aside elk, conservationists will go after their cows next.
Meanwhile, back at the ranch, elk hunters, cowboys, gun-nuts, and tea-hadi politicians have worked themselves into an anti-wolf frenzy. Western state legislators have introduced several bills designed to limit and control wolves even if they haven’t seen one in their area for 100 years. They want to trade the wolves’ endangered status under the law for licenses to hunt them. A few days after Davis met the watershed group, the Obama administration caved in to this eco-political hysteria and agreed to remove endangered species protections from wolves. This backlash against reintroduction has been painful for advocates like Davis.
A Greater Canyonlands National Monument Moment?
The decision to lift wolf protection is consistent with the Obama administration’s disappointing record on Western environmental issues. Nevertheless, conservation advocacy groups like the Southern Utah Wilderness Alliance and the Sierra Club are urging the president to take a cue from Bill Clinton’s example. Back in 1996, he created the Grand Staircase Escalante National Monument under the Antiquities Act that allows presidents to set aside natural and archaeological treasures. Now, the conservation groups want Obama to do something similar on an even grander scale and create a “Greater Canyonlands National Monument” from some of the healthiest wild lands in southern Utah.
A few days later, Davis addressed the need for such a monument at a forum in Moab, Utah. Our state has about nine million acres of quality wilderness land ready to be designated and protected as such. That’s a lot of core area for John Davis’s conservation vision, a lot of possibility for connectivity. But the public debate about wilderness designation has been stalemated for decades. Utah Republicans in particular resist more steps to formally protect wilderness areas even though the public overwhelmingly supports it.
They are wedded to traditional mining and grazing interests and like to portray themselves as victims of a bullying federal government that wants to jam national monuments and formally designated wilderness areas down their throats. But Clinton’s creation of the new monument has proven a boon for Escalante’s economy. In the 12 years since it came into being, the populations of surrounding Kane and Garfield counties have grown by 8%. Jobs rose in those years by 38% and per capita income by 30%. Adjoining counties whose economies are oriented towards gas and oil lagged far behind.
President Obama’s appointment of Sally Jewel, former CEO of REI, a chain of outdoor gear and clothing stores, may signal a shift away from ranching and mining as the dominant voices on the Western political stage. Jewel understands firsthand that recreation and tourism have become powerful economic engines here.
A presidential initiative alone will hardly begin to settle all the questions we face about how to make peace with the land that holds us in its embrace. But designating another monument here could be a catalyst for an ever-expanding idea of grassroots stewardship of America’s wild lands.
The Escalante watershed partnership was formed in the wake of Clinton’s catalytic act. At that time, the Clinton administration took another experimental step. It gave stewardship of Grand Staircase Escalante to the controversial Bureau of Land Management instead of the National Park Service. That was a first and undoubtedly a concession to Utah’s politicians who would rather deal with the traditionally compliant, pro-mining, pro-grazing BLM than the stricter National Park Service. Clinton gambled that the move might instill a missing environmental ethic in that bureau.
The results on that are not yet in, but there is no question about one thing: Clinton’s creation has been a catalyst for grassroots political activity. When monument status was a done deal, the river’s stakeholders decided the time had finally come to practice that awkward dance of mutuality among conservationists who want to save the land, ranchers who want to use it, and federal land managers charged with sorting out what exactly to do. John Davis is clearly on the side of conservation.
Making the Imaginary Real
The Trek West sponsors recognize that there may never be some grand national initiative to accomplish their vision, nothing like the Wilderness Act, the Clean Air Act, or the other signature environmental legislation of the 1960s and 1970s. If our troubled public lands are rescued, it’s likely to happen in a piecemeal fashion, as local and regional groups work to improve their own backyards. The folks who gather in Escalante don’t claim to have all the answers. They are not here to spread the truth and save the world. They belong to no ideology or movement. They’re just working on their piece of the puzzle, experimenting and learning as they go. Rivers being the arteries of the land, it makes sense to start there.
An existing constituency almost always trumps an imaginary one. You can make a case, for example, that a change in land use practices and policies would benefit more people, boost the local economy, and be healthier for wildlife, too, but those imaginary winners can't compete with cattlemen who are real, well organized, and have been active in the political arena for many years. They have established close relationships with local politicians who depend on their support. Because they were there first, they wrote most of the rules and those favor their uses of public land.
The trick for conservationists who want change is to make that imaginary constituency real, to bring a new set of stakeholders together and find ways to empower them. That may not be the intention of those who gathered in Escalante for the watershed partnership, but it’s what is happening nonetheless -- and John Davis is a catalyst.
According to the prevailing belief, growth should always be the bottom line. Trek West expresses an alternate vision that aims instead to translate ecological principles and criteria into actual designs on the ground. That’s not simply a matter of making better maps. Those of us who live within the iconic Western landscapes so treasured by all Americans understand that maps, charts, and spreadsheets do not adequately measure or describe this inspiring and awesome place where we live.
We experience the land sensually. Perhaps that is the ultimate message John Davis is delivering as he treks across the continent’s wild spine. He is making sense of the land one footfall at a time, listening to it, watching it, and feeling it as he goes. So, reconnect landscapes, yes, but also connect head and heart.
Davis’s quest is heroic, but his testimony is simple: when we learn from the land we lean towards wholeness.
Chip Ward, a former librarian and grassroots organizer, is the author of Canaries on the Rim and Hope’s Horizon as well as a TomDispatch regular. He wrote this essay while living between a mountain on fire and a desert that is blowing away.
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Copyright 2013 Chip WardCentral Intelligence Agency (CIA) Director John Brennan participates in a session at the third annual Intelligence and National Security Summit in Washington, DC, U.S. on September 8, 2016. REUTERS/Gary Cameron/File Photo
WASHINGTON (Reuters) - Central Intelligence Agency Director John Brennan has warned the U.S. government against a tit-for-tat response to Russian hacking during the presidential election.
"I don't think we should resort to some of the tactics and techniques that our adversaries employ against us. I think we need to remember what we're fighting for," Brennan told National Public Radio in an interview that aired on Friday. (n.pr/2ily7zS)
“We’re fighting for our country, our democracy, our way of life, and to engage. And the skullduggery that some of our opponents and adversaries engage in, I think is beneath this country’s greatness,” Brennan said on NPR’s “Morning Edition.”
U.S. officials have accused Russian President Vladimir Putin of supervising his intelligence agencies’ hacking during the U.S. presidential election in an effort to help Republican Donald Trump. Russian officials have denied accusations of interference in the Nov. 8 election won by Trump..
President Barack Obama, who has asked spy agencies to deliver an analysis of Russian meddling in the election before Trump takes office on Jan. 20, last week strongly suggested that Putin personally authorized the election hacking. He also left the door open to retaliation, possibly under a Trump administration.
U.S. Republican and Democratic senators have called for a special bipartisan panel to investigate cyber attacks against the United States by foreign countries with a focus on Russia’s alleged efforts to influence the U.S. presidential election.
Brennan also predicted that despite the fall of eastern Aleppo to forces loyal to Syrian President Bashar al-Assad, there would be no end to the violence there.
“Aleppo’s fall, to me is not a sign that there is going to be an end to this conflict because I am convinced that many, many of those oppositionists, the ones who are trying to reclaim their country for their families, for their neighbors, for their children, will continue to fight,” he told NPR.With the economy struggling to recover and our soldiers still battling in two wars, this Thanksgiving will be the bleakest in years in some ways.
So it's very gratifying to report that one bright ray of relief is piercing the gloom. There's been a remarkable surge in the past year in the number of generous souls volunteering to shelter the homeless, feed the hungry and otherwise assist nonprofit groups that serve the needy in our region.
Thousands of residents of all ages, races and income levels are showing up to help for the first time, usually for a few hours a week, according to leaders of local service organizations thrilled by the trend. The extra bodies are making it a bit easier for nonprofits to absorb the recession's brutal, double impact of falling cash donations and rising want.
"There is an incredible increase in volunteerism," said Madye Henson, president and chief executive of Greater DC Cares, which recruits, trains and places volunteers for 750 nonprofits and schools across the region. It's on track to supply more than 20,000 volunteers this year, smashing last year's record of 12,000. Its surveys show that the majority of newcomers have not volunteered previously.
So Others Might Eat is getting about 10 volunteer applications a day, compared with 10 a week a year ago. A program that recruits senior volunteers at Family Matters of Greater Washington has a waiting list of about 200 seeking to help city agencies, compared with 85 to 100 two years ago.
The new altruists' motivations vary, but nonprofit officials see three dynamics at work.
First, people recognize that the level of need is greater now than at any time in recent memory.
Also, partly because of unemployment, many individuals have more time than money to offer.
Finally, there's been a response to the calls to service by President Obama and first lady Michelle Obama, who have emphasized the importance of helping one's community. Many have signed up through the president's volunteerism Web site, http:/ / www.serve.gov. Henson said she's seen "an overflow from some of what happened in the [2008] election."
That said, we should all try to keep partisan politics from tarnishing this phenomenon, which is a plus for everybody and draws support from all sides. Former presidents George W. and George H.W. Bush, Republicans, were both stressing the need for philanthropy when Obama was a little-known Democratic state legislator in Illinois. Remember the elder Bush's "Thousand Points of Light"?
Happily, the president's Web site strikes a bipartisan tone. For instance, last week it referred prominently to Obama's appearance with George H.W. Bush at an Oct. 16 forum at the Points of Light Institute.
The new volunteers are motivated foremost by a desire to assist at a time of social distress.Michael Grunwald is a senior staff writer for Politico Magazine.
In February, surrounded by coal miners at the White House, President Donald Trump signed a bill repealing the Obama-era Stream Protection Rule, which would have restricted coal companies from burying streams. “This is a major threat to your jobs,” Trump said, “and we’re getting rid of this threat.” He did not mention streams.
In March, this time surrounded by coal miners at the Environmental Protection Agency, Trump signed an executive order vowing to roll back Obama-era climate change policies, including the Clean Power Plan limiting carbon pollution from coal-fired power plants. “C’mon fellas, you know what this says?” Trump asked. “You’re going back to work!” He did not mention climate or pollution.
Story Continued Below
So it was no surprise when, last week, Trump’s EPA administrator, Scott Pruitt, announced he was launching the formal process to repeal the Clean Power Plan in a speech to coal miners in the coal town of Hazard, Kentucky. He proclaimed, as his boss has many times, that “the war on coal is over.” There was once again little pretense that the move had much to do with the EP part of the EPA.
As the Trump administration has battled internally and seesawed publicly over issues like trade, health care, infrastructure and even immigration, there’s no issue where it’s been more consistent and emphatic than its support for coal. Miners held up “Trump Digs Coal” signs at his raucous campaign rallies, and sure enough, he’s been a relentless advocate for this small and beleaguered industry.
He has stocked his administration with coal veterans, hacked away at coal regulations, and done what he can to prop up struggling coal companies. He probably won’t be able to keep his promise to revive a once-dominant fossil fuel that has been declining around the world—and most rapidly in the United States—but he is already changing the policy landscape around our dirtiest source of energy. He is also sending a political message to his base that he is waging a war on the war on coal, standing with tough guys who earn their living underground against tree-huggers who whine about climate change and clean air.
So far, coal is continuing its slump despite Trump’s support. Utilities have announced the retirements of 12 more coal-fired power plants since he took office, including two massive ones in Texas added to the closure list on Friday. That announcement marked a milestone: Half of America’s coal fleet has been marked for mothballs since 2010, a total of 262 doomed plants. And as jobs go, coal mining is now a tiny sliver of the U.S. economy, employing about 52,000 Americans last month, down 70 percent over three decades. (The count is up about 4 percent since Trump took office, but mostly because a snafu in China’s steel industry temporarily boosted U.S. exports.) By contrast, the solar and wind industries employed almost 10 times as many Americans last year, and they’re both enjoying explosive growth.
Coal is America’s leading source of the carbon emissions that warm the planet, as well as a host of other air and water pollutants. And the economics of coal has cratered. Still, politically, the coal industry is one of the purest distillations of Trump’s base, uniting right-wing business executives who hate environmental regulations and taxes along with blue-collar miners who wish America was more like it used to be when coal was king. While polls suggest that fewer than one-third of Americans approve of Trump’s indelicate approach to the environment, more than two-thirds of the Republicans he’s courted approve. At the ceremony where he erased the stream rule, Trump ticked off a list of coal states—West Virginia, Kentucky, Wyoming, Ohio—that all happened to have been big Trump states in November.
“Special people, special workers, we’re bringing it back and we’re bringing it back fast,” he crowed.
So even if Trump can’t stop the decline of coal, the industry is thrilled that he’s doing his part to try to slow it, especially after eight years of an eco-friendly, climate-concerned Democrat in the White House. Bob Murray, a prominent coal CEO and early Trump backer, says in a new Frontline documentary that he handed Trump a 3½-page action plan when he took office, and the president has already plowed through Page 1.
“From a government whose avowed aim for eight years was to destroy the industry, we’ve understandably benefited from one that for eight months has helped us,” says Luke Popovich, vice president of the National Mining Association.
Trump began by hiring coal-friendly aides like Pruitt, who had repeatedly teamed up with fossil-fuel interests to sue President Barack Obama’s EPA when he was Oklahoma attorney general, and Commerce Secretary Wilbur Ross, the founder of a coal company that once had a deadly disaster in one of its mines. Trump’s nominee to be Pruitt’s deputy is a coal lobbyist; his nominee to be assistant labor secretary for mine safety and health ran a mining company with a checkered safety record.
The result has been a flurry of coal-friendly actions. Pruitt is taking aim not only at Obama’s carbon plan for the power industry but a host of other rules limiting mercury, soot, smog and other discharges from coal operations. The president defied the world by withdrawing from the Paris climate agreement, specifically complaining that it was unfair to American coal. His administration has also lifted Obama’s moratorium on coal leases on federal land, ended Obama’s restrictions on financing coal projects overseas, and shut down a study of the health effects of coal mining that blasts away entire mountains. His energy secretary, Rick Perry, recently proposed new subsidies for coal plants that keep stockpiles of coal handy, galvanizing opposition from an odd coalition of renewable energy advocates |
both -sides and agreements between them shall be recognized." Factory Representative Councils (otherwise.known as Workmens or Factory Works Councils) had the right, in conjunction with employers' representatives, to take an official part in the initiation and administration of social and economic legislation. (2050-PS)
(2) The Nazi conspirators conceived that the free trade unions were incompatible with their objectives.
Hitler stated in Mein Kampf:
"It (the trade union) created the economic weapon which the international world Jew uses for the ruination of the economic basis of free, independent states, for the annihilation of their national industry and of their national commerce, and thereby for the enslavement of free people in the service of the above-the-state- standing, world finance Jewry (ueberstaatlichen Weltfinanz-Judentums)." (404-PS)
In announcing to Germany the seizure of the Free Trade Unions, Dr. Robert Ley, speaking as chairman of the Nazi Committee for the Protection of German Labor, stated:
[Page 254]
"You may say, what else do you want, you have the absolute power, but we do not have the whole people, we do not have you workers 100 percent, and it is you whom we want; we will not let you be until you stand with us in complete, genuine acknowledgement." (614-PS; see also 2224-PS and 2283-PS.)
(3) Soon after coming to power the Nazi conspirators took drastic action to convert the Factory Representative Councils into Nazi controlled organizations. The Nazi conspirators eliminated the independence of the Factory Representative Councils by giving the Governors of the Laender authority to cancel the membership of labor representatives in the councils; by abrogating the right of the councils to oppose the dismissal of a worker when he was "suspected of an unfriendly attitude toward the state" (1770-PS); and finally by limiting membership in all Factory Representative Councils to Nazis (2336-PS). (After 7 April 1933, the Governors of the Laender were appointed by the Reich President "upon the proposal of the Reich Chancellor," Hitler, 2005-PS).
(4) Soon after coming to power the Nazi conspirators proceeded to destroy the independent unions. In mid-April 1933, Hitler directed Dr. Robert Ley, then staff director of the PO (Political Organization) of the NSDAP, to take over the trade unions. (2283-PS)
Ley issued an NSDAP circular directive on 21 April 1933 detailing a "coordination action" (Gleichschaltunsaktion) to be taken on 2 May 1933 against the General German Trade Union Federation (ADGB) and the General Independent Employees Federation (AFA), the so-called "Free Trade Unions" (392-PS). This directive created a special "Action Committee" to direct the entire action and declared that the supporters of the action were to be drawn from the National Socialist Factory Cells Organization or NSBO (Nationalsozialistiche Betriebszellen-organisation), the NSDAP political leaders (Politische Leiter) in the factories; it named NSDAP commissars for the administration of the larger ADGB unions to be seized in the action; it made the Gau leaders (Gauleiter) of the NSDAP responsible for the disciplined execution of the action in their respective areas and authorized them to nominate additional commissars to administer the unions subjected to the action. The directive ordered that SA and SS were to be used in occupying union offices and the
[Page 255]
Bank of Workers, Employees and Officials, Inc., and for taking into protective custody the higher union leaders.
The order of seizure was carried out as planned and ordered. On 2 May the official NSDAP press service reported that the NSBO had "eliminated the old leadership" of Free Trade Unions and taken over their leadership. (2224-PS)
On 3 May 1933 the NSDAP press service announced that the Central League of Christian Trade Unions (Gesamtverband der Chrilichen Gewerkschaften) and several smaller unions "have unconditionally subordinated themselves to the leadership of Adolf Hitler" (2225-PS). The next day the NSDAP press stated that the German Nationalist Clerks League (DHV) had also "recognized the leadership of the NSDAP in German trade union affairs *******after a detailed conversation" between Dr. Ley and the leader of the DHV (2226-PS). In late June 1933, as a final measure against the Christian Trade Unions, Ley directed that all their offices were to be occupied by National Socialists. (392-PS)
The duress practiced by the Nazi conspirators in their assumption of absolute control over the unions is shown by a proclamation of Muchow, leader of the organizational office of the German Labor Front, in late June 1933. By this Party proclamation, all associations of workers not yet "concentrated" in the German Labor Front had to report within eight days. Thereafter they were to be notified of the branch of the German Labor Front which "they will have to join". (2228-PS)
(5) The Nazi Conspirators eliminated the right of collective bargaining generally. During the same months in which the unions were abolished, a decree eliminated collective bargaining on conditions of employment and substituted regulation by "trustees of labor" (Treuhaender der Arbeit) appointed by Hitler. (405-PS)
(6) The Nazi conspirators confiscated all union funds! and property. The NSDAP circular ordering the seizure of the Free Trade Unions on 2 May 1933 directed that the SA and SS were to be used to occupy the branches and paying offices of the Bank for Workers, Employees and Officials and appointed a Nazi commissar Mueller, for the bank's subsequent direction. The stock of this bank was held entirely by the General German Trade Union Association and its affiliated member unions. The NSDAP circular also directed that all union funds were to be blocked until reopened under the authority and control of NSDAP-appointed
[Page 256]
commissars (392-PS; 2895-PS). The Fuehrers basic order on the German Labor Front of the NSDAP in October 1934 declared that all the property of the trade unions and their dependent organizations constituted (bildet) property of the German Labor Front (2271-PS). Referring to the seizure of the property of the unions in a speech at the 1937 Party Congress, Ley mockingly declared that he would have to be convicted if the former trade union leaders were ever to demand the return of their property. (1678-PS)
(7) The Nazi conspirators persecuted union leaders. The NSDAP order on the seizure of the "Free Trade Unions" directed that the chairman of the unions were to be taken into "protective custody". Lesser leaders could be arrested with the permission of the appropriate Gau leader of the NSDAP (392-PS). In late June 1933 the German Labor Front published a "List of Outlaws" who were to be denied employment in the factories. The List named union leaders who had been active in combatting National Socialism and who allegedly continued to carry on their resistance secretly. (2336-PS)
The Nazi conspirators subjected union leaders to maltreatement ranging from assaults to murder. Among the offenses committed against union leaders are the following: assault and battery; degrading work and work beyond their physical capacity; incarceration in concentration camps; solitary confinement; denial of adequate food; surveillance; arrest and maltreatment of members of their families; murder. (2330-PS; 2331-PS; 2335-PS; 2334-PS; 2929-PS; 2277- PS; 2332-PS; and 2333-PS)
The original plaintext version of part one or part two of this file is available via ftp.As soon as the trade surplus is the subject, people inside and outside of Germany tend to talk gibberish. Handelsblatt Global's editor-in-chief, who used to write for The Economist, knows all about feeling caught between these fronts. A cri de coeur.
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Germany’s trade surplus is huge, the largest in the world. That much is well known. But who should do what, if anything, about it? And is anybody “to blame”? At this point the debate invariably breaks down, with Germans and others, especially “Anglo-Saxons,” talking past each other. These encounters remind me of Longfellow’s metaphor: ships passing in the night, “only a signal shown and a distant voice in the darkness, [...] then darkness again and a silence.”
I speak from experience: As a German-American, I am often caught trying to explain Germany to Americans, and America to Germans. As a journalist for 20 years at The Economist, I wrote in that most Anglo-Saxon of media voices. Now I am editor-in-chief of Handelsblatt Global, where our mission is, as I promised you in March, to bring you news analysis that “does not infantilize or caricature the German voice but reflects it in its full and unadulterated breadth and depth.”
Imagine my discomfort, then, when my former journalistic home, The Economist, infantilized and caricatured the German point of view on the cover page of last week’s issue, titled “The German problem.” In a nutshell: the world’s trade deficit with Germany is entirely Germany’s fault, and could the Germans please, and pronto, take care of it for the sake of the world economy? I am familiar with the narrative, for I myself wrote according to its grammar for many years. Many of the individual points are reasonable, and not at all contested by German economists -- take a look at the answers by two of the leading ones, in our video below, for instance. It’s the overall twist that is jarring to Germans, for it willfully omits their perspective.
In fairness, and understandably, many Germans then react in the wrong way: by willfully misrepresenting the argument: “What, do you you want us to export less?,” sneered one German panelist at a German-American business conference I moderated recently. It helps Germans like him that a few economically illiterate but important people do seem to think that Germany should export fewer BMWs. I am talking about Donald Trump, of course. But this invites Germans down a well-trodden path of faux reasoning.
Germany’s surpluses, in this defensive narrative, reflect its competitiveness: those world-beating firms churning out cars, pills and machines foreigners are happily volunteering to buy. This confuses surpluses with “strength” and deficits with “weakness”, a mercantilist idea. Unfortunately, even senior German politicians succumb to this confusion. “Instead of talking about weakening the strong, we should really be asking ourselves how to strengthen those countries that are not yet strong enough,” demanded Wolfgang Schäuble, the finance minister, in our pages recently.
This reflex is disingenuous because no serious economist, policy maker or journalist -- neither at the IMF nor the European Commission, neither in the OECD nor in the US Treasury Department, and certainly not at The Economist -- is asking Germany to export less. These educated critics are instead taking Germany to task for the other side of the equation: importing too little.
And here, unfortunately, the subject gets endlessly complex. The best, most balanced and digestible explanation is still that by our own Chris Cermak. Indeed The Economist’s cover story largely rhymes with his diagnosis of the causes. Those come in two main categories.
The first is the simple observation that Germans buy less than they produce. To use more precise terms, they consume less than they could and possibly should, and therefore save a lot. If they -- German households, firms and governments -- invested those savings at home, their overall trade balance with the world would still be neutral. But Germans also invest less than they save - or rather, invest the excess in other countries, where that money is used to buy German goods. This diagnosis leads to two questions: Do Germans consume too little and save too much? And do Germans invest too few of their savings at home?
The second diagnostic category looks at the development of German wages. The historical facts here are clear. By the end of the decade following reunification in 1990, Germany was called the “sick man of Europe” by none other than The Economist, because it had become uncompetitive. So Germany reacted. Its government enacted labor-market and welfare reforms that spawned a low-wage sector. And its unions agreed with employers to keep wage growth down, so that German firms would become more competitive. In effect, German production became cheaper relative to production elsewhere. If Germany had still had its own currency, it could have appreciated to counter this change. But Germany already had the euro, which stayed cheaper than a D-mark would have been.
Currently the federal government is slightly in surplus. The Germans find it prudent. The Economist finds it silly and egoistic.
Now examine each category in turn, and compare how The Economist and Germans view it. Start with that huge “savings hoard,” as my former colleagues call it. Germans will tell you they save because they want to retire at some point. Because Germany’s population is aging, this means that for a few more years there will be huge aggregate saving. That -- a voluntary and rational decision by free individuals -- is the primary reason for the high savings rate. The Economist concedes this point but introduces a twist: “The rate of household saving has been stable, if high, for years; the increase in national saving has come from firms and the government.” Aha, so we should worry about “the increase,” which means turning our gaze to bosses and the finance minister.
The bosses and the ministers will also tell you that they’re saving in expectation of an older, smaller population in future. After all, fewer young people will pay taxes for more old people with more needs. Looking ahead to this demographic shift, the federal and regional governments have even legislated themselves “debt brakes” that constrain their ability to run deficits today. Currently the federal government is slightly in surplus. The Germans find it prudent. The Economist finds it silly and egoistic.
Now proceed to the contiguous question: Are Germans investing too few of their savings at home? Here too the historical facts are clear. Following reunification, Germany had an investment boom, as it gave its formerly communist east the world’s biggest paint job. Eventually investment levels had to drop. For the past few years investment has stayed steady at about 19 percent, which is average in Europe. The Economist concedes this point too, but hides it: “Germany’s rate of domestic investment is not obviously weak by comparison with other countries.”
Nonetheless, there is broad agreement in Germany itself that investment should be higher, especially in the public sector. At this point a lazy litany follows: bridges and roads are “crumbling,” broadband lines are too slow, and so forth. As somebody who drives on roads and flies out of airports in America, Germany and other European countries, I never had the impression that the average bridge in Germany is more crumbly than its equivalent elsewhere. My broadband service is several times faster than what I had in California. But it’s good to invest more. And it’s good to spend more on schools. And -- wait for it -- everybody including Wolfgang Schäuble agrees!
To see why harping on about this is a red herring you have to grasp the scales involved. Germany’s trade surplus is more than 8 percent of GDP. Germany’s public investment (by the federal, state and municipal governments) is a bit above 2 percent of GDP. Is The Economist suggesting that Germany quintuple its public investment, right now, in order to rebalance the world economy?
The Economist seems to be channeling Keynes in demanding that Germany “pay people to dig holes and then to fill them up.” But investing means spending money in the expectation of return.
This is where it’s good to bring in an educated German perspective. As Jörg Rocholl, head of the ESMT, one of Germany’s leading business schools, cautions in his opinion piece for us, Germans would prefer to “spend wisely,” not just more. The Economist seems to be channeling Keynes in demanding that Germany “pay people to dig holes and then to fill them up.” But investing means spending money in the expectation of return. Germans’ first association when they hear of massive public spending projects today is the “new” Berlin airport that has been under construction since 2006 and was meant to open in 2010; only optimists believe the current plan of opening it in 2019. The point is that erasing a trade deficit equal to 8 percent of GDP with public spending is not credible.
What about the second of the major diagnostic categories, boosting German wages? In recent years, German wages have indeed been increasing, by 2.3 percent last year. Unemployment is below 4 percent, and both individual job hunters and union bosses have a strong hand in negotiations. But wage growth could be faster. As The Economist discovered by asking German unionists, they often prefer haggling for more flexible working hours, longer vacations and more job stability when sitting across from bosses. Shocking. Don’t they know that other people have trade deficits to balance?
So there we are: a magazine proud of its classical liberal heritage laments the voluntary decisions by free agents in an economy where the government, thank God, has only limited room for maneuver. This is the intellectual flaw behind much of today’s criticism of Germany. As Christoph Schmidt, chairman the German Council of Economic Experts, puts it, it fails to recognize “that national economies cannot be managed like large firms.” You can criticize Germany for neglecting big reforms in recent years. You can tell it to open up its calcified service sector. You can tell the government to improve schools. Handelsblatt Global will do that, more ruthlessly and perceptively than any other English-language publication. But don’t infantilize a debate about more than 80 million people making independent decisions.
And anyway, take heart: The surplus will soon shrink, as lots of elderly Germans retire and spend their nest eggs on imports. And then it’s trade deficits as far as the eye can see.
Andreas Kluth is editor in chief of Handelsblatt Global. To contact the author: [email protected]Former U.S. President Bill Clinton surprised many a few years ago when he announced his decision to become a vegan. In a meat-loving country like the United States, the choice to not only drop all meat from your diet but also eliminate any products that come from animals — milk, cheese, eggs, etc. — can almost seem revolutionary.
But he’s not alone. Millions of people have also made the choice to move toward an animal-product-free diet — though not without facing some controversy.
It’s no secret that eliminating meat, dairy and other animal-associated products from a person’s diet can reduce the amount of nutrition consumed in a day — hence, health issues could quickly become a concern for a person switching to a vegan diet.
And though some rave about the cost effectiveness of going vegan, others argue that leading a veggie- and fruit-based lifestyle isn’t as inexpensive as believed.
So, what are the cost implications of becoming a vegan? Are vegans really saving money or are they blowing it all on organic food costs? And what health concerns should be considered before making the switch?
Keep Reading:Ditch Meat on ‘The Other Independence Day’ to Save Money on Groceries
What Does It Mean to Have a Vegan Diet?
Individuals who have watched Bill Clinton’s transformation in both health and appearance might want to consider switching to a vegan diet plan themselves. But many questions come with this lifestyle, including the most basic one: What is the difference between a vegan and a vegetarian?
According to WebMD, a vegetarian is a person who takes on a diet free of meat, fish and fowl. Categories of vegetarianism can include lacto-ovo vegetarians (people who avoid animal flesh but eat eggs and milk products) and pescatarians (people who eat fish and seafood).
Then there are vegans. Vegans are individuals who forgo eating all animal products and animal-based products, including honey, according to WebMD. Among vegans, you can also find raw foodists, who eat fruits, vegetables, legumes, sprouts and nuts.
According to a study published by Vegetarian Times, 3.2 percent of U.S. adults (7.3 million people) follow a vegetarian-based diet. Among that population, 0.5 percent (1 million) are vegans who consume no animal products at all.
So why are people switching to vegan diets?
A study conducted by Peter Cheeke, a professor emeritus of animal sciences at Oregon State University, revealed that people switch to vegetarian and vegan diets in opposition to killing or using animals for food, over concern about chemical and hormonal additives, and even to avoid acquiring mad cow disease.
But some, like Clinton, are simply seeking a healthier lifestyle.
Bill Clinton Adopts Vegan Lifestyle Following Health Crisis
Clinton publicly fought a number of health issues a few years after leaving office.
Following prolonged chest pain and shortness of breath in 2004, tests revealed some of Clinton’s arteries were well over 90 percent blocked. The remedy was a quadruple bypass surgery.
Though the surgery was deemed successful, the former president continued to suffer from health issues. In 2005, he underwent surgery for a partially collapsed lung. And in 2010, he had two coronary stents implanted in his heart after complaining of chest pain.
It was in the same year that Clinton announced he would be adopting a diet of plant-based whole foods, recommended to him by doctors Dean Ornish and Caldwell Esselstyn.
Ornish and Esselstyn told CNN’s Wolf Blitzer in 2010 that following their recommendations helped Clinton successfully return to his high school weight and reverse his heart disease.
The doctors have also stated that their plant-based, oil-free diet program has worked for other patients. Esselstyn stated that individuals who adopted the program saw their cholesterol levels, angina symptoms and blood flow improve dramatically.
So what’s in this special diet? Bill Clinton shared in an interview that he lives on “beans, legumes, vegetables, fruit.” More specifically, he said, “I drink a protein supplement every morning — no dairy, I drink almond milk mixed in with fruit and a protein powder so I get the protein for the day when I start the day up.”
Although Clinton stays away from all dairy, chicken or turkey, he said every once in a while he will eat “very little fish.” Although there seem to be plenty of benefits to adopting this type of diet, are there risks as well?
The Vegan Diet and Its Impact on Health
Most people who plan to switch to a vegan diet expect to see immediate improvements in their health, similar to Clinton. The good news is, for the most part, these improvements do occur for many who make the switch.
According to WebMD, a low-fat diet that is high in fruits, vegetables and nuts can provide major benefits to a person’s health, while reducing (or eliminating) red meat from the diet cuts the risk of heart disease significantly.
But not everyone supports the idea of completely eliminating animal-based protein and dairy products from a diet.
Nancy Rodriguez, professor of nutrition sciences at the University of Connecticut in Storrs, told The Wall Street Journal that eliminating these aspects of the diet means eliminating essential nutrients like calcium, vitamin D, protein, vitamin B12, zinc and iron — all of which must then be acquired through other means.
Rodriguez also argued that the commonly accepted idea that animal protein alone causes cancer is untrue. She stated that research shows other factors contribute to cancer, including smoking, alcohol consumption and being overweight.
Another issue in the debate iswhether the vegan diet is appropriate for individuals with diabetes. According to WebMD, research shows that individuals with Type 2 diabetes can benefit from a plant-based diet because it can help them lose weight and increase their insulin sensitivity, reducing the need for diabetes medication.
But while individuals with Type 2 diabetes benefit from lower caloric intake, Jack Norris, a registered dietitian, president and co-founder of Vegan Outreach, wrote on his website that Type 1 diabetics wouldn’t benefit as much from this kind of diet.
“I could see that the higher fiber content of a whole foods vegan diet could release carbohydrates more slowly into your blood and result in lower insulin needs, even if the carbohydrates are a higher percentage of your diet,” Norris wrote in a 2009 post on his website.
Related:Jenny Craig vs. Weight Watchers: Which Is the Cheaper Way to Lose Weight?
Is Becoming a Vegan Safe for Seniors?
Although well-known doctors made the recommendation for Clinton to alter his diet at age 63, many wonder whether the switch is safe for other seniors.
AARP says yes.
The senior advocacy organization has promoted the “Vitality Project,” which encourages seniors to switch to healthier lifestyles that include exercising and improving their diets.
According to a Seattle Times article, 69-year-old Leo Aeikens even went as far as switching to a vegan diet that helped him lose 25 pounds in 10 months.
Additional research seems to show that seniors do, in fact, benefit from a vegan diet.
According to the Vegan Society website, high fruit and vegetable intake can be beneficial for eyesight. And because vegans tend to be leaner and lighter, they can maintain mobility and suffer less pressure on joints later in life.
Safely Switching to a Vegan Diet
But before seniors switch to a vegan diet, certain factors should be taken into consideration.
Because weight loss tends to be easier for vegans, the Vegan Society strongly recommends that senior vegans maintain a healthy weight (a body mass index of greater than 18 kg/m2) to decrease the risk of osteoporosis.
It is also recommended that individuals switching to a vegan diet consume foods containing all of the essential nutrients (protein, carbohydrates, vitamins, fatty acids, minerals, etc.) while remaining active to help retain muscle mass and bone health.
Below is a summary of ways seniors can safely switch to a vegan diet, provided by the Vegan Society:
Maintain a varied vegan diet.
Be active and get at least 30 minutes of daily exercise.
Get adequate calcium for bone health.
Take vitamin D supplements if you’re not getting regular exposure to sunlight.
Take B12 regularly for bone health.
Drink six to eight cups of fluid per day to reduce thirst sensitivity.
Does Being a Vegan Save Money?
Anyone who tries to purchase fruits and vegetables (especially the organic variety) on a regular basis knows that it’s even harder to save money on groceries if you’re looking for healthy options.
But it has been argued that veganism saves money in the long-term due to lower health-care costs.
Although this isn’t really a worry for Bill Clinton, millions of seniors on a limited income might want to take a close look at whether the financial benefits of a vegan diet can outweigh the potential costs of purchasing vegan foods.
Let’s look at a breakdown of average costs associated with both the vegan and non-vegan diets, provided by USDA data.
As you can see, based on the dietary recommendations and estimated costs of food with a low-cost diet, the vegan diet costs a bit more than the non-vegetarian, non-vegan diet.
But most would argue that with a little creativity, including clipping coupons, visiting farmer’s markets and shopping generic whenever possible, avoiding meat doesn’t have to be expensive.
Do Vegetable-Based Dieters Save Money on Health Care?
A study released in 2013 by the American Journal of Clinical Nutrition revealed that individuals who stick to vegetable-based diets might actually be saving money on their health care by making fewer visits to the hospital.
In fact, vegetarians had a 32 percent lower risk of being hospitalized with or dying from ischemic heart disease during an 11-year period, the study revealed.
The reason for the reduced risk of heart troubles was a lower body mass index, lower “bad” (non-HDL) cholesterol and systolic blood pressure readings than meat eaters.
The average cost for an individual to spend one night in a hospital, as of 2010, is $1,625, according to Becker’s Hospital Review. Referencing the figures above, it becomes clear that one night in the emergency room could easily swallow the additional cost of shopping exclusively for vegan food.
Based on the potential health benefits a vegan diet could offer most individuals who make the switch, along with the chance to save money on health care long term, the initial costs of switching to a vegan diet shouldn’t be a deal breaker.
Keep in mind, however, that different individuals require unique dietary intake based on age, weight, height, gender and level of activity. No one — especially seniors — should switch to a vegan diet without first consulting a physician to determine current health conditions and any potential health risks.
That said, if you’ve visited your physician and have been given the green light, you might find that leading a vegan life not only improves your health, but spares your bank account in the long run.Latest software update, iOS 9.3, allows users to auto-switch between smartwatches, meaning you never have to be without a working one again
Apple has solved the problem of smartwatch battery life with its latest software update iOS 9.3 and WatchOS 2.2.
Users will now be able to pair more than one Apple Watch to an iPhone and automatically switch between them, which means the faithful can now replace a watch that has run out of battery by hot-swapping to a fresh one.
It will of course involve owning multiple Apple Watches.
This may suit some Apple Watch wearers, who could now have one for day and one for night – or perhaps one for every day of the week.
The hot-swapping feature will roll out in the latest version of Apple’s iPhone software iOS 9.3 and within the latest version of its Apple Watch software, WatchOS 2.2.
All a user needs to do is put a watch on and raise their wrist in order to activate a pre-registered Apple Watch.
Apple Watch Edition users will finally be able to quickly switch to their Apple Watch Sport, should they enter a less than desirable area or wish to go running with a slightly lighter, less gaudy version, without having to switch their iPhone too.New images from the EPOXI mission show that comet Hartley 2 is a cosmic snow globe. The first science results from the Deep Impact spacecraft's Nov. 4 flyby of the comet, presented in a press conference today, show the comet's drumstick-shaped nucleus is surrounded by chunks of ice ranging from as small a snowflake to as large as a basketball. "When we saw images come down, even in real-time in the raw data, and realized we had a cloud of snow around the nucleus, we were astounded," said planetary scientist Michael A'Hearn, leader of the EPOXI mission that sent the spacecraft to its icy encounter. "To me this whole thing looks like a snow globe you've shaken," said planetary scientist Peter Schultz of Brown University. Explore the comet's surprising snowy landscape in the slides that follow. Image: NASA/JPL-Caltech/UMD
This zoomed-in image from the spacecraft's high-resolution camera shows the snowstorm, which mostly comes from carbon dioxide jets spewing from the comet's knobbly ends, A'Hearn said. "That swarm of points around the nucleus? Those are not stars, they are all chunks of ice," A'Hearn said. The spacecraft flew within 435 miles of the comet at a speed of 27,000 mph, a potentially dangerous way to navigate an ice field. Initial data showed that the spacecraft made it through unscathed, but engineers monitoring the spacecraft's health found that some of these tiny particles smacked the spacecraft hard enough to knock it slightly, though not dangerously, off-kilter. There were 9 possible ice strikes by crystals that weighed between 0.02 and 0.2 milligrams, "about the weight of an eyelash," according to Tim Larson, a mechanical engineer and EPOXI's project manager. Despite their small size, such tiny particles could knock the spacecraft around because the probe was flying so fast. Image: NASA/JPL-Caltech/UMD
Follow-up observations showed that the large chunks of ice are "more like a dandelion puff that is easily broken apart, than an ice cube," said Jessica Sunshine, an astronomer at the University of Maryland and EPOXI's deputy principal investigator. "That might be why we didn't see hits on the spacecraft." Deep Impact's extreme speed also let scientists watch the ice particles zip by. In this animation, a star moving through the background is marked in red. The icy particles, marked green, blue and light blue, dance around randomly. "When we first saw this, our mouths just dropped," Schultz said. Image: NASA/JPL-Caltech/UMD/Brown
The scientists were able to construct a 3D image, called an anaglyph, of Hartley 2's entire nucleus and the cloud of particles surrounding it. Below: In case you don't have 3D glasses, here's a normal, monocular view. Image: NASA/JPL-Caltech/UMD/Brown
One of the biggest surprises from the flyby was that the comet seems to spew carbon dioxide, dust and ice from its bulbous ends, but not so much from the skinny smooth neck. Instead, a plume of water vapor sprays from the comet's midsection. "To our great surprise, there's a tremendous amount of water vapor coming out of the waist," Sunshine said. One explanation is that the comet's midsection is coated in small particles of dust, which is why it looks so smooth. On the bumpy lobes, carbon dioxide is heated by sunlight and boils off, dragging dust and water ice with it. But maybe the dust blocks sunlight from reaching the waist, Sunshine suggested. Water ice turns to water vapor and percolates through the dust. It's also possible that the midsection lost all its carbon dioxide long ago, or that it never had any to begin with. "We don't really know yet," she said. Image: NASA/JPL-Caltech/UMD
Scientists saw similar water vapor plumes in 2005, when the same spacecraft smacked a probe into the comet Tempel 1. "This comet is so different from Tempel 1," A'Hearn said. "They work differently because they have different compositions inside. Hartley 2 probably has more carbon dioxide than any of the comets for which carbon dioxide has been measured." Comparing the two comets can help give scientists a window into how the solar system formed. "We really want to understand how things got mixed up in the early solar system when the planets were being made," A'Hearn said. "We want to use this to constrain how the planets formed -- in other words, how we got here." Even though Hartley 2 is now behind it, the spacecraft's work is far from done. Deep Impact is still snapping photos every two minutes, and will have collected 120,000 images by Thanksgiving. "It will give an exhaustive view of this comet, more than we've ever been able to return from any other comet," Larson said. Image: NASA/JPL-Caltech/UMDWas Maggi hit in India to Launch and Create Space for Atta Noodles by Ram Dev Baba?? pic.twitter.com/3B9x9ABarn — Aarti (@aartic02) September 4, 2015
I am being fed with so much poison, negativity and pessimism that, #Maggi is a pure and pious product compared to them — Elephant Bird (@Restlessler) September 3, 2015
Baba Ramdev has launched his own version of #Maggi. Like his own version of pills that can cure AIDS, cancer and homosexuality. — lindsay pereira (@lindsaypereira) September 3, 2015
Smart decision by Reliance to launch its own #Maggi, if it sells well & good otherwise son Anant can consume at home pic.twitter.com/hMdP5qxssx — Sir Chetan Bhagat (@chetan_bhaqat) September 3, 2015
At a time when the instant noodles controversy was at its peak, Ramdev announced that he'd be launching his own brand of noodles pretty soon. He also said that these won't be made with maida but with a healthier alternative. He also said that the noodles won't be harmful to a person and won't be addictive.The time has come when claims become reality. On Thursday, baba Ramdev launched 'Atta Noodles' his new brand of noodles that are made with wheat. At the launch of the noodles in this Hindu holy city in Uttarakhand, Ramdev said the noodles "will not have any maida (flour) and they will provide a healthy alternative to Maggi for children." The yoga guru said the noodles were completely safe and healthy for consumption, and he was promoting swadeshi products because they were natural and caused no harm.The Patanjali group owned by Ramdev produces and markets various ayurvedic products. It had a turnover of Rs.1200 crores in 2014 and a projected turnover of Rs.2000 crores in 2015. Another product Patanjali plans to introduce sometime soon is Powervita, a health drink for children that will compete with brands like Complan, Horlicks and Bournvita.India is the world's 5th largest instant noodles market and worth approximately Rs.3000 crore. Of this huge chunk, Maggi Noodles sat on almost 60-65 per cent of it, and it's been the case for a little over three decades. While Nestle India is struggling to get them back on shelves by the end of the year after the product was banned due to high levels of lead, this huge market share might be up for grabs and gives other brands an opportunity to take over.But the question that arises here is how healthy instant noodles are even when you swap ingredients? Since these are made to bear a longer shelf life, they are highly processed. They are low on nutritive content and with processed food there is always a danger of artificial colors, preservatives, additives and flavourings. The biggest problem that we face with such convenience foods is that people have started replacing wholesome meals with them as they are easy to cook and take less time. While some are eagerly waiting for the new breed of instant noodles, most long for the good old Maggi noodles and others call it yet another marketing gimmick. Here's what people have to say -Republicans in the House of Representatives on Thursday threatened to strike a Democratic representative’s words from the record and then booed her after she shamed them for cutting food stamp funding from the farm bill.
“The Bible says, to whom much is given, much is required,” Rep. Corrine Brown (D-FL) observed during debate over whether funding for the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP) should be stripped from the farm bill. “And this is a |
his namesake firm, Draper Fisher Jurvetson, amid a sexual harassment investigation, according to Recode. He's the latest in a string of venture capitalist to be ousted from his firm amid allegations related to misconduct or sexual harassment.
The publication, citing unnamed sources, said an investigation by DFJ "uncovered behaviors by Jurvetson that were unacceptable related to a negative tone toward women entrepreneurs."
DFJ didn't immediately respond to a request for comment, but operating partner Heidi Roizen confirmed in a statement the firm had been "rocked by allegations about sexual harassment." Over the summer, DFJ launched an independent investigation into "allegations of misconduct by one (and only one) of our partners from a third party." The investigation is ongoing.
Jurvetson said in an email that he's leaving the firm "to focus on personal matters, including taking legal action against those whose false statements have defamed me." He also tweeted that statement.
I am leaving DFJ to focus on personal matters, including taking legal action against those whose false statements have defamed me. — Steve Jurvetson (@dfjsteve) November 13, 2017
Jurvetson is one of Silicon Valley's best-known venture capitalists. He was a founding investor in Hotmail, which was later bought by Microsoft, and serves on the boards of Elon Musk's Tesla and SpaceX. Earlier this year, SV Forum awarded Jurvetson its Visionary Award "for his role in fostering the spirit of entrepreneurship in Silicon Valley." In 2016, President Barack Obama named him a Presidential Ambassador for Global Entrepreneurship.
SpaceX and Tesla on Monday said Jurvetson was taking "a leave of absence from the SpaceX and Tesla boards pending resolution of these allegations."
Late last month, Keri Kukral, a female entrepreneur, wrote in a Facebook post that "women approached by a founding partner of Draper Fisher Jurvetson should be careful. Predatory behavior is rampant." She didn't name Jurvetson specifically.
Kukral didn't immediately respond to a request for comment Monday.
In her statement, DFJ's Roizen disputed the characterization of the firm.
"I don't need an investigation to state with certainty that this is patently wrong," Roizen wrote. "I am too grizzled and old to write bullshit about a company to please my boss. I'm writing this because I believe it to be true."
She added that she "would not work for DFJ if I felt the culture was not one of high integrity and opportunity for all -- including women."
Jurvetson isn't the only VC to have allegedly harassed women. Binary Capital co-founder Justin Caldbeck left his job in June after a story in The Information said he'd allegedly made sexual advances at female entrepreneurs. Chris Sacca of Lowercase Capital and Dave McClure of 500 Startups issued public apologies after being named in a report later that month by The New York Times about sexual harassment in the technology startup industry. In July, Frank Artale, a managing partner at venture capital firm Ignition Partners, resigned after a complaint of misconduct from an anonymous source.
Prominent blogger Robert Scoble and Amazon Studios head Roy Price also resigned from their positions following allegations of sexual harassment.
The departures have shined a light on difficulties faced by women in Silicon Valley. Women remain in the minority at many companies, despite efforts by organizations to seek more diversity. In recent months, many woman have come forward with complaints of sexual harassment and other issues in Silicon Valley, Hollywood and other areas.
To help encourage female entrepreneurs, a group of female venture capitalists on Monday started a new program, called Female Founder Office Hours.
"The idea is to host free, quarterly events that explore topics across the range of company stages," according to TechCrunch. The first event, slated for Nov. 30 in San Francisco, will focus on helping seed-stage female founders with their pitches. The group will offer 40 one-on-one office hour slots with 10 female VC partners from Benchmark, Canaan, Cowboy, Forerunner, Freestyle, Lux, Sequoia and Reach. Two female founders who are now VCs also will discuss fundraising.
"Our goal is for every female founder to walk away with a bit of advice from some female investors and a few new female founder friends that they can count on," the group said on its website. "We hope to use this to kick-start a virtuous cycle and community of women helping women."
First published Nov. 13 at 1:21 p.m. PT.
Update at 1:30 p.m.: Adds comment from Tesla/SpaceX. Update at 2:26 p.m.: Adds statement from DFJ operating partner Heidi Roizen.
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Oklahoma state law enforcement officials have pulled two vehicles from a lake that may contain the bodies of six people listed as missing for decades.
The Daily Elk Citian reported that the vehicles -- which were recovered from Foss Lake in western Oklahoma Tuesday afternoon -- appear to match a Camaro missing with three Sayre teenagers since 1970 and an older Chevrolet with two Canute residents missing since the late 1950s or early 1960s.
The Camaro was from 1969 and belonged to 16-year-old Jimmy Williams, KOKH reports. The car and Williams were last seen on Nov. 20, 1970, along with two of Williams' friends, 18-year-old Thomas Rios and 18-year-old Leah Johnson.
The second vehicle, a Chevrolet dating from the 1950s, may be linked to the disappearance of a couple from the town of Canute in the early 1960s. The couple were last seen heading to the lake, the Elk City Daily News reports, according to News9. A third body was found in the car, but authorities have not identified all of the remains.
Custer County Sheriff Bruce Peoples is asking for anyone who recalls any information about that cases to contact police, the Daily Elk Citian reports.
"It's just been under water for 40 years. It's a mucky mess," Peoples told KWEY radio.
The Oklahoma State Medical Examiner said could take anywhere from a few days to years to determine the identities of the remains, depending on the condition that the bodies are in, KFOR reports.
Debbie McManamman believes her grandfather, 69-year-old John Alva Porter, was among the bodies found in the Chevrolet vehicle.
“I mean, he was just gone, ” she told the station. “No trace at all. His money was in the bank, his house was intact and he was gone. So over 40 years we’ve been looking for him.”
Authorities discovered the cars by accident. Betsy Randolph, spokeswoman for the Oklahoma Highway Patrol, told the Associated Press dive teams were at Foss Lake conducting training with sonar when they came upon the vehicles last week.
"So they went back and did a scheduled dive today and were going to recover the cars. When they pulled the cars out of the water, the first one that came out they found bones in the car," she said.
When they pulled the second car out, another set of bones was discovered. The divers then went back in the water and searched around and found a skull, she said.
"We thought it was just going to be stolen vehicles and that's not what it turned out to be, obviously," Randolph said.
She said the Highway Patrol is hoping the discovery will offer some relief to families who may have gone decades wondering where a missing loved one was.
"We're hoping these individuals, that this is going to bring some sort of closure to some families out there who have been waiting to hear about missing people," she said. "If that's the case, then we're thrilled we were able to bring some sort of closure to those families."
The Associated Press contributed to this report.Standing in the doorway of 2016 it’s easy to spot a number of potentially great new technologies, new and promising genre defining games, and other gaming advances that this year could bring. While we wait in anticipation, lulls like these are best filled with a look back at what made the last year great.
The face of gaming has changed, there have been years where the best games around were always a list of AAA high budget titles. For years now, thanks to popular distribution platforms, and the bevy of bundles and inexpensive games available on the platform – indie games continue to filter in as some of the most creative and entertaining titles of the year. Also crowd funded games ensure that gamers are getting the games they really want to play, not what a publishing house believes we should play. This has revived old genres and game styles for the better.
GoneWithTheWin began in 2015, so it will always be a special year for us. We’ve learned a lot in the last few months, and know we have so much more to learn and adapt to. We’ve made new friends in the industry. Had a chance to play many games, and some stood out so brilliantly we simply had to list them all for you. These games are in no particular order, but comprise a listing of the absolute best 2015 had to offer on PC. These games are ones we have not let go of, and return to often to either replay or explore missed areas. If you are looking for something new to try out, we hope this article will help. So without further ado, we present the best gaming experiences on PC for 2015:
DARKEST DUNGEON
Leo’s take:
Beware weary travelers and adventurers, darkness is nigh! Ancestral tombs hold countless treasures and important heirlooms, but stay your hand – keep it planted on the hilt of your sword. Madness, despair, doom, cruelty, desolation and death are the prize of those that venture too far. Can anyone play Darkest Dungeon, without becoming hopelessly entwined in the the multiple aspects of this game? There can be no bravery… without madness. Should they possibly exist, I’d imagine they are disfigured mobile-exclusive gamers or other such vulgarity.
The game is drenched in a bold, Gothic motif. At times I wonder if Vincent Price was resurrected to lend his voice as narrator, regardless of whomever lent his voice, it is sublime and perfectly suited for the role. Can’t get enough of the narration, it’s a huge favorite of mine in this, or any game. Its distinct aesthetics set the stage, set the tone and without a manual or tutorial you will already know what is to come next. The cues are everywhere. You are delving into a foreboding and unforgiving world.
Darkest Dungeon’s core game mechanics are solid and cruelly dangles options like twisted eyeless harlequin marionettes. Hercules himself couldn’t punch a hole in these unforgiving rogue genre concepts. There’s a duality to the game that will keep you nervously sweating in your chair like a candle. There are many options in your estate to upgrade and invest in. The timing of which should come first is not even hinted at, though if you over invested in one feature you won’t understand why it was folly until your team is dying, but they need to head back. Recruiting adventurers and balancing your teams takes careful thought, not just in their class and abilities but also in their actual positions as your chosen four enter these dungeons. What supplies do you bring to ensure their survival? It’s so hard to know, and if you need to turn a profit, this team of heroes might have just become expendable – hope you weren’t attached.
Spending fifty hours in Darkest Dungeon means you are still a rookie in this robust multifaceted game. Characters have front line skills and long range ones, some specialize in one or the other. Others still have amazing healing and support abilities but only if they are in the back of the line. This could mean losing a devastating attack in exchange for helping poor Wilbur the Plague Doctor from succumbing to his injuries. Monsters and bandits are not your only concern, the greatest enemy of all is stress. Once inside the dungeons, injuries from traps or enemies will begin playing with the minds of your crew. You will watch hopelessly as lack of light, or dismaying strike from a giant, sends stress levels flaring. Will they become infused with courage, or succumb to their fears? It was gut wrenching, sitting there chewing my nails as my favorite highwayman gets pummeled by enemies… pulsating drums from the combat music, and the gongs as he holds onto “death’s door”. That sinking feeling of losing my guy, my buddy. The one who critical hit 18 fish fiends the last expedition, the one who single handedly saved countless missions, and the estate from bankruptcy is about to bite it. That’s just brilliant design. One of the most superb experiences I had all year. – Leo
Zach’s take:
Eldritch horrors, blood-mad proxies of the Elder Gods, an ancestral estate tainted with corruption, the only glint of hope shining off the rusted, dulled blades of a band of weary, compromised adventurers. Madness and long-lost treasure await in the fetid passageways and foul, blighted recesses of the Darkest Dungeon!
From the second the game starts, you are drawn into the best distillation of the core elements of Lovecraftian horror and excess to date. The narration, writing, soundtrack and art style are carefully intertwined to create a foreboding and palpable atmosphere that pulls you inexorably into an environment of despair and encroaching doom. The writing, art and sound in Darkest Dungeon are exemplary, and testimony that a carefully designed and lovingly crafted game does not have to max out a high-end video card to create a user experience that immerses you…or in this case, entombs you…fully into the designer’s world. Darkest Dungeon’s bleak, Victorian setting and flawed, damaged inhabitants draws inspiration from Lovecraft, Mike Mignola (Hellboy’s creator), and Warhammer’s Fantasy setting, among some notable examples, to create an original universe that boils over with madness, horror and the slimmest chance of redemption found this side of a Takeshi Kitano movie.
Darkest Dungeon compels you to delve deep, a theme that runs to the core of the excellent gameplay systems. Permadeath is an ever-present threat, with autosaves oblivating any sort of deus ex machina courtesy of a reloaded save or hard reset. Your characters WILL die, and as the game explicitly asks: what sacrifices will you make to keep your heroes alive? Darkest Dungeon creates the same sense of urgency, attachment and impending dread for characters found in the original X-Com. I’ve killed so many games and started over when a favorite character dies, not because there wasn’t a way to continue, but because I was too discouraged to press on without them.
The tactical combat is complex, perfectly paced and balanced between the focal points of overall group formation, individual positions, upgrades, ability choices, class choices and the fickle, arbitrary whims of RNG. The most compelling original mechanic is the stress system, which captures the sense of madness and fear your characters endure as they face the grim challenge of vanquishing the unspeakable horrors and labyrinthine passageways of your corrupted estate. Pyhrric victories are the norm, as a map is conquered, difficult battles overcome, your characters exiting the dank catacombs, alive but afflicted by various forms of madness, some more extreme, infectious and detrimental than others.
The RPG management segment of the game perfectly balances out the rigors and tension of combat, forcing you to decide who will find release from madness and fear, who will be relieved from negative personality quirks, who will get upgraded abilities and equipment, what new members will fill your party roster to replace those fallen in battle. Your ancestral village offers a number of structures that require careful management via upgrades, as do your characters, which are pulled from a spectrum of classes available to recruit. Who will join your party and what skills do you need? The veteran wiles of the Man at Arms, the ranged damage of the Arbalest, the reckless abandon of the Leper, the necrotic science of the Plague Doctor? Every choice you make, every upgrade you take, every character you heal means there was a character you had to forsake, an upgrade you desperately needed but couldn’t afford, a class you could not add into your roster. The wealth of options is directly countered by the paths you can’t take, and it creates a perfect tension that elevates Darkest Dungeon to one of the finest roguelikes ever made and my overall favorite game of 2015. – Zach
STASIS
Leo’s take:
My first look at STASIS (full review) and I thought for a moment, that this game had slipped out of 1998. It’s isometric view and graphical style, almost FMV movements overlaid on static photographic backgrounds is a dated approach. Ignore any apprehension, when I did I was in for quite a ride. From the start it asks “who are you without your family?”; then builds on that premise with meticulous pacing and climactic buildup. STASIS was clearly influenced by various science fiction horror works. Ridley’s impressive use of pacing and control in the original Alien, the insane “what the hell just happened” ending in Event Horizon, and other past games; the best of these elements are grafted together into a wholly terrifying story that felt new and fresh when completed.
Here’s how you know if a game has great writing, when you can’t help yourself but reflect on what just happened. In truth weeks after reviewing the game I found myself in web forums, reading comments and discussing in detail story aspects with other players. When you are left lingering about what you had seen and felt, when there is actually something meaningful to discuss when it is over then you transcended simple block pushing and nazi shooting to something much more laudable: art.
Being a father myself, I found the central character John Maracheck instantly relatable. With the game’s central theme resonating with my own values, and towards those I hold dearest. As he progressed into this nightmarish place, with each disturbing new element of what happened aboard this derelict space station, my heart sank with his. In between bleak clues, were intermixed well thought out and provoking puzzles. A few jump scares, but its more about keeping you on edge; the expectation of something horrific is just as bad as actually seeing it. The devil is in the details they say, so the methodical pacing, the low humming ventilation, shifting shadows, the occasional groaning of machinery (or was it a person?) builds up expectation. From there the story plummets over the edge, sliding down into a bleak chasm. It’s frantic final moments flying by at dizzying speeds, it will undoubtedly leave most gasping for air. The game drew out considerable emotions from me as I played, at one point my wife leaned over and asked me to close my mouth; but I just couldn’t. If you are looking for an experience in PC gaming, STASIS fits the bill in spades.
UNDERTALE
Echo’s Take:
Ever since its release back in September, Undertale has been an instant hit. As of now, 97% of 30,000 (and counting) user-submitted reviews are favorable, giving the game an Overly Positive rating on Steam. However, this almost-unheard of reception doesn’t answer why this gamer’s must-have has risen in popularity: only the player can find out themselves.
In Undertale, the player takes the place of the Fallen Child, a human child (whose gender and race are undetermined) who fell from the top of Mount Ebott. The fall is the only entrance to the Underground, where the world’s population of Monsters has been banished to. Unfortunately, there’s no way to leave except by breaking the seal. This is only accomplished by obtaining seven human souls, 6 of which are already possessed by the King of the Underground. After the fall, the player meets Toriel, a kind-hearted, motherly Monster, who offers to give the child a home. What happens next is solely up to the player’s decisions.
The playstyle is similar to that of Touhou Project’s: a sort of bullet hell, though given the option to “Spare” and “Act”. Acting is needed to Spare most enemies, through doing simple actions such as hugging or petting, usually accompanied by cute dialog. However, acting in some cases will cause the enemy to get angry, or in some cases, transform into something completely different (i.e. Moldsmal into Moldbygg). Sparing is exactly what it sounds like: ending the battle through mercy. However, Sparing won’t give you any EXP, which is the only way to increase levels and survive longer.
First things first: if you want to enjoy Undertale to its fullest, you’re going to need to invest plenty of time in it. See, a common trait amongst RPGs is giving players multiple endings and routes to play on. Usually, there aren’t a lot of these said ends; some of them have even been reduced to easter eggs (like Dangan Ronpa: Trigger Happy Havoc’s “bad ending”). But Undertale takes this concept and expands on it almost infinitely. Most of these playthroughs are quick and simple, though the most well-known ones can be painfully hard, time-consuming, or a mix of the two.
At the end of most runs, the player is rewarded with a phone call from a certain character (their name unlisted to avoid spoilers) telling them about what happened after they retreated to the surface (the goal of the game). Even neglecting one simple task can change the course of the rest of the route. If you were aiming at the affectionately nicknamed Genocide run, for example, and spared one single target, you’d have to start all over. Speaking of the Genocide run, if you attempt it before the Pacifist route, it’ll highjack the game and prevent you from correctly finishing it.
Another reason for players to love Undertale is the interactions. The characters are easy and simple to understand: not entirely complex, but they’re certainly realistic. Plus, characters breaking the fourth wall isn’t entirely uncommon. In fact, the game even goes so far as remembering your choices. At the beginning of each run, Toriel asks you which you prefer: cinnamon or butterscotch. Depending on which you choose, she’ll remember your choice when asking you in future runs.
Going back to where we started, the story line is superb. It’s complex to the point that players will need to datamine to put everything together. Let’s just say that a knowledge, however limited, of Webdings font is needed.
Finally, the music is another thing to love. Toby “Radiation” Fox, the game’s creator, is highly experienced with composing music. Working on the webcomic Homestuck has earned him fame and made him known among the internet. In fact, his alleged masterpiece “Megalovania”, introduced in his Earthbound hack (becoming widespread in Homestuck) has earned a place in Undertale. Even when working with simple sound fonts, Toby’s compositions can almost always be guaranteed a success.
But what’s not to like about Undertale? A large amount of players are nonplussed with the graphics, however, upon learning that the entire game was made by one guy (with some help from a character designer), many changed their mind. Some are dissatisfied by how short the game is (in their opinion), which most wouldn’t say is exactly true.
Undertale has been a success thus far, among all ages. Anyone can learn to enjoy it. From the storyline to the playstyle, every single bit of it is more of a reason to like it. If you haven’t played it, try it. You definitely won’t regret it. – Echo
Zach’s Take:
This is where I make an embarrassing dad disclosure: Echo’s my 13 year old daughter, as well as a GWTW specialist on certain games. I asked her to write the Undertale review because, while I do not disagree with her summation that Undertale is a game that can be enjoyed by every age, I think there is more to it when you consider its meteoric rise up the Steam charts and the very vocal fan base it has attracted, and I think most of its fan base is under 25.
I think Undertale represents one of those “changing-of-the-guard” moments in gaming; Undertale is a phenomenon where Echo’s generation has found a game truly their own. It’s themes of acceptance and alienation, the fierce possessiveness that various sub-fandoms have shown towards it (furries, Homestuck folks are two that come to mind), the way it seems to have become a banner for a very vocal group of gamers between the ages of 12-20…there is something special here that an old, veteran gamer such as myself can recognize but can’t truly be a part of…and that’s ok. There has been a public divide between Undertale fans and a backlash from those seemingly resentful of the lavish praise its fans heap up on it, and I suspect the detractors are mostly in their 20s and 30s. Give it a chance, it’s loved for a reason, and one of the best PC rpgs of 2015, regardless of your age.NEW YORK (AP) -- Mark Zuckerberg helped create the modern world by connecting nearly a quarter of its citizens to Facebook and giving them a platform to share, well, everything -- baby pictures and Pepe memes, social updates and abusive bullying, helpful how-to videos and live-streamed violence.
Now he wants to remake it, too, in a way that counters isolationism, promotes global connections and addresses social ills -- while also cementing Facebook's central role as a builder of online "community" for its nearly 2 billion users.
The Facebook founder laid out his thoughts on Thursday in a sweeping 5,800-word manifesto that hews closer to utopian social guide than business plan. Are we, he asked, "building the world we all want?"
In a phone interview with The Associated Press, Zuckerberg stressed that he wasn't motivated by the recent U.S. election or any other particular event. Rather, he said, it's the growing sentiment in many parts of the world that "connecting the world" -- the founding idea behind Facebook -- is no longer a good thing.
"Across the world there are people left behind by globalization, and movements for withdrawing from global connection," Zuckerberg, who founded Facebook in a Harvard dorm room in 2004, wrote on Thursday. So it falls to his company to "develop the social infrastructure to give people the power to build a global community that works for all of us."
CONNECTING IN FACEBOOK'S INTEREST
Zuckerberg, 32, told the AP that he still strongly believes that more connectedness is the right direction for the world. But, he added, it's "not enough if it's good for some people but it's doesn't work for other people. We really have to bring everyone along."
It's hardly a surprise that Zuckerberg wants to find ways to bring more people together, especially on Facebook. After all, getting more people to come together on the social network more frequently would give Facebook more opportunities to sell the ads that generate most of its revenue, which totaled $27 billion last year. And bringing in more money probably would boost Facebook's stock price to make Zuckerberg -- already worth an estimated $56 billion -- even richer.
And while the idea of unifying the world is laudable, some critics -- backed by various studies -- contend that Facebook makes some people feel lonelier and more isolated as they scroll through the mostly ebullient posts and photos shared on the social network. Facebook's famous "like" button also makes it easy to engage in a form of "one-click" communication that can displace meaningful dialogue.
Facebook also has been lambasted as a polarizing force by circulating posts espousing similar viewpoints and interests among like-minded people, creating an "echo chamber" that can harden opinions and widen political and cultural chasms.
COMMUNITY SUPPORT
Today, most of Facebook's 1.86 billion members -- about 85 percent -- live outside of the U.S. and Canada. The Menlo Park, California-based company has offices everywhere from Amsterdam to Jakarta, Indonesia, to Tel Aviv, Israel. (It is banned in China, the world's most populous country, though some people get around the ban.) Naturally, Zuckerberg takes a global view of Facebook and sees potential that goes beyond borders, cities and nations.
Equally naturally, he sees the social network stepping up as more traditional cultural ties fray. People already use Facebook to connect with strangers who have the same rare disease, to post political diatribes, to share news links (and sometimes fake news links ). Facebook has also pushed its users to register to vote, to donate to causes, to mark themselves safe after natural disasters, and to "go live." For many, it's become a utility. Some 1.23 billion people use it daily.
"Our next focus will be developing the social infrastructure for community -- for supporting us, for keeping us safe, for informing us, for civic engagement, and for inclusion of all," he wrote.
LONG VIEW
Zuckerberg has gotten Facebook to this position of global dominance -- one that Myspace and Twitter, for instance, never even approached -- partly thanks to his audacious, long-term view of the company and its place in the world.
Last fall, Zuckerberg and his wife, the doctor Priscilla Chan, unveiled the Chan Zuckerberg Initiative, a long-term effort aimed at eradicating all disease by the end of this century. Then, as now, Zuckerberg preferred to look far down the road to the potential of scientific and technological innovations that have not been perfected, or even invented yet.
That includes artificial intelligence, which in this case means software that's capable of "thinking" enough like humans to start making the sorts of judgments that Facebook sometimes bobbles. Last September, for instance, the service briefly barred the famous Vietnam War-era photograph dubbed "Napalm Girl" because it featured a nude child, and only reversed its decision after users -- including the prime minister of Norway -- protested.
AI systems could also comb through the vast amount of material users post on Facebook to detect everything from bullying to the early signs of suicidal thinking to extremist recruiting. AI, Zuckerberg wrote, could "understand more quickly and accurately what is happening across our community."
Speaking to the AP, Zuckerberg said he understands that we might not "solve all the issues that we want" in the short term.
"One of my favorite quotes is this Bill Gates quote, that 'people overestimate what they can get done in two years and underestimate what they can get done in 10 years.' And that's an important mindset that I hope more people take today," he said.Photo from a RadioShack ad that ran during the 2014 Super Bowl. (Photo11: RadioShack) Story Highlights About 20% of stores affected by planned closings
Revenues decline sharply in fourth quarter
Stock down 17%
RadioShack said Tuesday that it will close up to a fifth of its nearly 5,200 U.S. stores amid widening losses in an effort to remake itself for a more competitive era of electronics retailing
Up to 1,100 poorly performing stores are slated for closure, but the company did not identify their locations, set a deadline or say how many employees would be affected. The company must negotiate with landlords and seek approval from lenders before carrying out its plan. RadioShack has been trying to revamp its stores for the past year.
Yet some analysts say the retailer faces an uphill climb as it struggles to compete against larger big-box stores such as Best Buy.
RadioShack stock (RSH) fell 17% to close at $2.25 a share in regular trading Tuesday.
FIRST TAKE: Confessions of a RadioShack shopper
In the fourth quarter, the company lost $191.4 million, or $1.90 a share. Revenue fell 20% from the same period in 2012 to $935 million. Sales at stores open at least a year were down 19%, in part because of weak sales in the mobile phone business. For the year, the company lost about $400 million, vs. $139 million in 2012.
"We were trying to do too much too quickly" to turn around the company, RadioShack CEO Joseph Magnacca told analysts on a conference call. Among other problems, he said the company cut some product lines "too deeply" and didn't have enough in-demand products in stock.
Analyst Scott Tilghman of B. Riley & Co. estimated that 5,000 to 10,000 employees will be affected by the store closings, though some of those workers likely would be moved to other locations.
Magnacca said the closures will affect lower-performing stores that were expected to lose money over the next year. He said the company is "overstored" in some markets, with multiple outlets within miles of each other.
Tilghman agreed that the company had to shut down its worst-performing stores to stay afloat. But the closings will partly negate its chief competitive advantage — convenient locations. "You lose some of that convenience store aspect they've relied on," he says. "You have to pass a RadioShack on the way to the grocer. If all of a sudden that store is closed, I'm not going to another RadioShack."
Magnacca said the company's turnaround hinges largely on a knowledgeable sales force that big-box retailers typically lack who can guide customers through a bewildering array of new electronics devices. Over the past year, the retailer has opened about two dozen "concept stores" that sport open, gleaming designs and let customers interact with products. It plans to roll out such outlets more widely.
He said RadioShack wants to parlay such assets to sell solutions in an increasingly complex environment in which mobile phones, tablets and other devices are often linked. It also wants to roll out more private-label products, such as headphones and speakers.
"We're really dialing up the experience in our stores and differentiating ourselves from big-box retailers," Magnacca said. He added that the company's strength lies "in the power of our people."
"The RadioShack turnaround will take time, and results will vary," Magnacca said. "We believe our fourth-quarter" results do not reflect the progress the company is making.
Several years ago, RadioShack drew customers who sought one-stop-shopping for mobile phones. But Tilghman says Best Buy and others increasingly offer that. And, he says, Best Buy has upped the ante, improving its customer service with "store within a store" displays for brands such as Samsung and Microsoft.
Meanwhile, he says, RadioShack's average 2,400-square-foot outlets are too small to offer the wide product variety consumers seek. Its private label products, he said, will likely struggle as shoppers place a higher premium on branded offerings.
The chain traditionally has been able to charge higher prices for more personalized service. But Tilghman says the ability of consumers to find the lowest prices on the Internet has cast doubt on such a strategy.
"They need a traffic driver," he says, citing the need for consumers to buy converter boxes or digital TVs during the transition from analog to digital broadcasting several years ago.
Analyst Michael Pachter at Wedbush Securities is not bullish on the retailer. "I think they won't be in business in a year," he says, adding the company doesn't have the money to finance the kind of turnaround it needs to win back customers. "I think that they are doing everything right — they're just doing it 10 years too late."
The company made light of its stodgy image in Super Bowl ads that featured 1980s celebrities or characters including Hulk Hogan, Mary Lou Retton and Alf.
Magnacca called the ad "exactly the kind of disruptive marketing we need to change the conversation," noting it drew top ratings from USA TODAY's Ad Meter.
CLOSE A peppy Superbowl advertisement starring 80s legends was RadioShack's Hail Mary pass, because it is losing money at a rate no analyst expected. The electronics retailer will close 1,100, or one-fifth, of its stores following a rough fourth quarter. Newslook
Contributing: Hadley Malcolm
CLOSE Retro celebs want their stuff back.
Read or Share this story: http://usat.ly/1i2ZmcpLeave it to the Russians to return to Cold War-era document security tactics.
According to the Agence France Presse and the Moscow Times, the agency in charge of securing communications from the Kremlin now wants to spend 486,000 rubles (about $14,800) to buy 20 electric typewriters... as a way to avoid digital leaks.
The Russian newspaper Izvestia (Google Translate) noted that the government already favors (Google Translate) the German-made Triumph-Adler Twen 180 model. (Although if the Kremlin is paying $740 each, it might want to consult German shopping websites—at least one is only charging $162.)
"After scandals with the distribution of secret documents by WikiLeaks, the exposés by Edward Snowden, reports about Dmitry Medvedev being listened in on during his visit to the G20 summit in London, it has been decided to expand the practice of creating paper documents," the Russian newspaper quoted an unnamed FSO source as saying. Izvestia also noted that each typewriter can link a particular typed document to the machine that produced it.
But it’s unclear if the renewed interest is actually a response to recent events.
"This purchase has been planned for more than a year now," a source at the service, known by its Russian acronym FSO, told the AFP on Thursday.New York (CNN) -- Investigators in New York said Sunday they are looking into a report that four sanitation supervisors assigned to clean up after last week's monster blizzard instead bought beer and sat in their car.
"We urge all members of the public, most especially City employees, to call us with any information about this matter or with any provable information about deliberate inaction or wrongdoing relating to the snow storm," said Department of Investigation Commissioner Rose Gill Hearn in a statement.
She said the department "has been working 24/7 on this investigation and we continue to pursue leads about potential deliberate wrongdoing by action or inaction relating to the snowstorm."
Investigators responded to an article published by the New York Post on Sunday, which alleged that a group of on-duty sanitation supervisors bought beer and sat in their department car for hours last Monday night. Citing an unnamed witness, the paper said the four supervisors in Brooklyn later told their bosses they ran out of gas.
The DOI commissioner said a video that reportedly showed store surveillance evidence related to the allegation had been "over ridden."
"We are taking steps to try and reconstruct who was in the store," she said.
The New York City Department of Sanitation has drawn sharp criticism since last week's blizzard that blanketed much of the Northeast.
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the progress" (with copyright and patents) or to act as a form of consumer protection (with trademarks). Tragically, we've strayed far from those ideals, where the concept of locking up and shutting down ideas, expression and the like is considered a perfectly reasonable action under today's laws, in part because the pursuit of "intellectual property" for the sake of "intellectual property." It is this distortion that is such a big part of the problem in the various debates held on the topic. Moving us back to some basic principles of free speech and looking at what best promotes free speech, open expression and creativity seems like a very good idea, rather than automatically assuming that "intellectual property" itself is the goal.
Filed Under: article 19, world intellectual property dayTrump reportedly went 'ballistic' over Sessions recusal amid Russia firestorm
Click through to see previous Trump Today items and updates on the president's actions so far. Click through to see previous Trump Today items and updates on the president's actions so far. Image 1 of / 75 Caption Close Trump reportedly went 'ballistic' over Sessions recusal amid Russia firestorm 1 / 75 Back to Gallery
President Donald Trump was outraged Friday over Attorney General Jeff Sessions' recusal from investigations into Russian interference in the 2016 campaign, according to media reports.
Trump hauled his key advisers into the Oval Office on Friday afternoon before he departed for Palm Beach, Florida, and went "ballistic" over Sessions' recusal, ABC News reported, citing senior White House sources.
Sessions held a press conference the previous day to announce his recusal, acquiescing to growing, bipartisan calls to do so following revelations that he had not disclosed during his confirmation process that he had met with the Russian ambassador twice last year during Trump's election campaign.
Sessions said he had not met with Russian operatives to discuss Trump’s campaign, and said he could not remember much of what he had discussed with the ambassador.
Trump left WH in a fury on Friday, fuming about Sessions's recusal and telling aides that Sessions shouldn't have recused himself... — Robert Costa (@costareports) March 4, 2017
President remarked to staff that Sessions/WH/DOJ should have done more to counter Sessions story, that it was "bull," per aides familiar — Robert Costa (@costareports) March 4, 2017
A source close to Trump told me Friday, re POTUS mindset before Florida flight, “He’s in a very [expletive] bad mood today. He is a bear." — Philip Rucker (@PhilipRucker) March 4, 2017
Trump was "fuming" about the news on Friday, telling his aides Sessions shouldn't have recused himself, the Washington Post's Robert Costa tweeted Saturday.
Tweet Embed:
https://twitter.com/mims/statuses/838033859761618947
Trump left WH in a fury on Friday, fuming about Sessions's recusal and telling aides that Sessions shouldn't have recused himself...
Tweet Embed:
https://twitter.com/mims/statuses/838034203711242240
President remarked to staff that Sessions/WH/DOJ should have done more to counter Sessions story, that it was "bull," per aides familiar
Tweet Embed:
https://twitter.com/mims/statuses/838109346567421952
A source close to Trump told me Friday, re POTUS mindset before Florida flight, “He’s in a very [expletive] bad mood today. He is a bear."
Trump questioned the logic of Sessions' recusal, and emphasized to his advisers that the entire situation had been handled poorly, Politico reported.
Trump has previously said he has "total" confidence in Sessions and saw no need for him to resign or recuse himself.
The advisers present in the meeting on Friday reportedly included chief strategist Stephen Bannon, chief of staff Reince Priebus, press secretary Sean Spicer, White House counsel Don McGahn, communications director Mike Dubke, as well as senior adviser Jared Kushner and Ivanka Trump.
After the meeting, Bannon and Priebus offered to stay behind in Washington, rather than accompanying Trump to Florida as planned, according to ABC News. Trump reportedly agreed they should remain behind, and their names were removed from the passenger manifest.
Jeremy Berke contributed to this report.
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SEE ALSO: 'This is Nixon/Watergate': Trump alleges that Obama wire tapped his phones during the campaignCongress and the President have a great opportunity to show they can constructively help our economy and manage revenue and spending so as to control federal debt. I am optimistic the Democrats and Republicans understand the damage to our economy and the public’s faith in government if they allow the fiscal cliff to occur, and I believe they will find room to compromise and reach common ground. I hope I am not wrong.
Regarding tax matters, the first order of business should be the immediate approval of the higher Alternative Minimum Tax (AMT) exemptions for 2012. Better yet, Congress should also make the higher exemptions (subject to increases for inflation) permanent for future years. Although this will result in less revenue, we will avoid the potential negative economic affect of middle and upper-middle income households spending less for the remainder of this year and early next year. Because of its immediate economic effect, this legislation could be approved separate from other changes. A sign the Republicans are not cooperating may be if they hold this change hostage for other concessions.
In any event, it would be best to avoid the fiscal cliff by agreeing to compromises before the end of the year. Here are several federal tax compromises Congress and the President may want to consider.
- As a result of other changes discussed below, the federal tax treatment of “Carried Interests” should not be changed.
-Qualified dividends and capital gains should continue to be generally subject to a maximum tax rate of 15%. However, combined qualified dividends and capital gains in excess of a specified amount (i.e., $500,000 for a single person and $1,000,000 for a couple) should be taxed at a maximum rate of 20%. Substantially higher combined amounts (i.e., combined qualified dividends and capital gains in excess of $5,000,000) can be taxed at a rate of 25%.
-The estate tax and generation-skipping transfer (GST) tax should be repealed, but basis step-ups should be substantially more generous than those that were allowed under IRC Section 1022 for 2010. For example, basis step-ups (not to exceed fair market value) would include “acquisition indebtedness” (defined elsewhere in federal tax law) in excess of decedent’s basis plus up to $10,000,000, Debt as of the time of enactment of this legislation can be “grandfathered” as acquisition indebtedness. Income in respect of a decedent (IRD) rules will still be the same as under current law. Assets subject to IRD such as a qualified retirement plan, for example, do not receive a step-up upon death.
-If the parties cannot agree to the above, the estate and GST exclusion amount should be set at $3,500,000 with future increases based on inflation, and the maximum tax rate should be 35%. Of course, the current IRD and basis step-up rules would still apply.
-The 2% employee payroll tax break for 2012 should not be extended.
-Most other Bush tax breaks for individuals with taxable income above $200,000 and couples with taxable income over $250,000 should be allowed to expire, with such households subject to a maximum tax rate of 39.6% on ordinary income.
-Various tax changes established under the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act and the Health Care and Education Reconciliation Act of 2010 (Obama Care) should proceed as scheduled. This includes a.9% tax on personal earned income over $250,000 for married couples and $200,000 for single individuals. This also includes a 3.8% tax on the lesser of (i) net investment income or (ii) the excess of modified adjusted gross income over $250,000 for couples and $200,000 for individuals.
I believe the above will substantially raise revenue (we still need to deal with the deficit) mostly from high income taxpayers while making substantial concessions beneficial to wealthy families, financial markets, entrepreneurs and venture capitalists. If your initial inclination is to reject these suggestion, remember the Fiscal Cliff and that we only have a short period of time to proactively address these issues; public and international concern will increase exponentially over the next few weeks. Do you have any better suggestions?
Read more:If there’s a blueprint to recovery after a traumatic brain injury, Ben Fanelli is prototype.
Eight years after suffering a fractured skull as a 16-year-old rookie in the Ontario Hockey League — an incident that left him hospitalized and at risk of needing brain surgery — the former Kitchener Ranger is happy, healthy, and showing no signs of slowing down.
These days, Fanelli sits on the board of directors of the EMPWR Foundation, a charitable movement driven towards concussion recovery that he spearheaded in the two years after his 2009 injury. He’s an assistant coach with the University of Waterloo men’s hockey team, and in his spare time, he runs his own fitness company.
Remarkable, considering his odds of recovery all those years ago. After being checked into the boards behind his own net, the Rangers rookie’s helmet came off and his head hit the metal stanchion holding the panes of glass together. He went unconscious.
The hit sent shockwaves through the hockey community. Well-wishes came all the way from Coach’s Corner on Hockey Night in Canada. Fanelli was airlifted to the hospital and has no recollection of the 24-hours surrounding the injury.
“[The doctor] said that sports were completely out of the question for the rest of my life,” says Fanelli. “He said that if I did go to school, I would need two years off and would need a teaching assistant in all my classes. And the scariest thing he had for me was that I may not be the same person I was the first 16 years of my life.”
“When I came to in the hospital, I remember the doctor was standing to my right and my mom was sitting to my left, and as I started to come to, my mom asked, ‘Ben, do you know why you’re here?’ And instantly, I started to tear up, because I had no concept or idea why I was in that hospital bed.” – Ben Fanelli
So began a two-year recovery process during which Fanelli — undeterred — prepared himself for a shot at returning.
“What I came to realize was that if and ever I was able to play the game of hockey again, it would have to be step-by-step and [by] slowly chip[ping] away,” he says. “The concept I came to understand and that gave me hope was that each day’s an opportunity to bring yourself that much closer to whatever that goal is. So say my odds were very low to start with, each day you can add half a percent, and then the next day, another half percent.”
Newly motivated and energized, Fanelli eventually moved back to Kitchener to continue his recovery. In 2011, he launched Head Strong: Fanelli for Brain Injury Awareness (now EMPWR) and trained to compete in a triathlon.
“I walked into [head coach Steve Spott’s] office, and he said, ‘Ben, you’re a part of this team for the next five years if you want to be. We’re going to leave your stall there; that’s your spot. Your role’s going to be up to you.’ And that was just the beginning of an incredible two years of support.” – Ben Fanelli
“There were times I would go into [a coffee shop],” says Fanelli, “and people would stop and say, ‘Hey, I hope to see you playing again, but if not, I wish you the best with whatever you do with your life.’”
On September 23rd, 2011, that day finally came.
Fanelli made his return to the Rangers lineup to a standing ovation. The following year, he was named the OHL’s Humanitarian of the Year — the first Kitchener Ranger ever to win the award. Two years later, he was voted team captain.
As for the years to come, only time will tell.
“It’s amazing what you can overcome when you have the right people around you,” says Fanelli.If you’ve been unfortunate enough to reside within the general vicinity of this particular author over the past month or so, you’ll have been forced to suffer through an excited recount regarding Resogun. The spiritual successor to Super Stardust HD has been lighting chemical fireworks in our subconscious for several weeks now, leaving us spinning in circles Kylie Minogue-style at the mere prospect of getting some hands-on time with the PlayStation 4 exclusive recently. But did the retro shooter live up to our interstellar standards, or send our expectations plummeting back down to planet Earth?
There are a number of beautiful games in production for Sony’s next generation super machine, but none of them look as good as the Housemarque developed digital download. Titles such as Killzone: Shadow Fall and Assassin’s Creed IV: Black Flag sure look a step ahead of their current generation counterparts, but the Finnish studio’s arcade affair goes beyond even that. Built entirely out of voxels – essentially nifty volumetric pixels – the title’s cylindrical maps get canvassed with thousands of individually rendered cubes as you blast away at enemies and boost around the stage. Complete a level and you’ll be treated to an explosive shower of the said three-dimensional squares, as the arena self-combusts in celebration of your performance.
This all occurs in 1080p at 60 frames-per-second without a single hiccup along the way. It’s truly a sight to behold, and is easily the most technologically impressive piece of software that we've experienced on the PS4. But that wouldn’t count for much if the game wasn’t fun to play. Fortunately, it’s also one of the most enjoyable releases that we’ve sampled on the next generation console. The loop itself is simple: you target using the DualShock 4’s right analogue stick, and dodge patterns of lethal bullets with the left. Much like in Super Stardust HD, bombs can be deployed to momentarily clear the screen, while you can boost through enemies in order to obtain some breathing room. Lastly, a supercharged plasma attack allows you to go on a trigger-happy rampage, but only if you have the required resources.
Resogun will force you to scream in both frustration and euphoric elation
The controls are super responsive, making each miniscule motion register on the screen. And it’s for that reason – in addition to the explosive effects – that the shooter is already shaping up to be a seriously addictive intergalactic excursion. The score chasing aspect doesn’t hurt either, of course, rewarding you for keeping a single ship in the air for as long as possible. Each time you shoot down a robotic turret or space craft, you’ll be able to scoop up glitter which gradually increases your multiplier. Bite the moon dust, though, and you’ll be forced to restart, severely impeding your run’s final score. It’s one of those games that will force you to scream in both frustration and euphoric elation.
Adding to its retro leanings, you’ll be able to scoop up stray spacemen as you progress. These augment you with basic points bonuses when returned to docking stations, as well as simple power-ups such as shields and weapon upgrades. There is a sense of urgency attached to the collection of these characters, as they can be stolen away by the enemy. Fortunately, the cylindrical nature of the arenas makes them relatively easy to spot, as you can always see everything that’s on the playfield in the background. It’s a neat design decision, which prevents the need to include a map at the top of the screen like in retro releases such as Defender. It also adds to the constant clutter, which is part of the title’s visual appeal.
After making mincemeat of several hundred ships, our demo ended with a colossal spherical boss. This foe tries to crush you by rolling onto your aircraft, but fortunately you can shoot out the compartments around its edges to gain access to its interior. Once inside, the enormous enemy will attempt to wipe you out with inner-orange lasers. You need to shoot out its robotic defences – while avoiding the aforementioned hazards – to take the giant down and reap the rewards. It’s not exactly the most mechanically complex boss fight in the world, but weaving between swarms of projectiles and landing the all-important final blow feels satisfying nonetheless. It’s also accentuated by the ridiculous voxel-powered victory screen, which will make you believe in the PS4’s power.
Even after playing just one stage, we’re confident that this is the title that will consume the majority of your time next month. The controls are so slick and the visuals so breathtakingly glitzy that you'll want to show it to all of your family and friends. With the promise of online co-op, a full campaign, score-attack modes, and multiple ships, we’ve thought about little else since reluctantly backing away from our demo. Leave it to Housemarque to not only prove the potential of a new piece of hardware – but also threaten to utterly obliterate our productivity in the process.
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Are you worried that Resogun is going to leave your work and social life in tatters? Do you think that there’s a prettier game on the PS4? Pepper your opinions in the comments section below.OBJECTIVE:
Women with active sunlight exposure habits experience a lower mortality rate than women who avoid sun exposure; however, they are at an increased risk of skin cancer. We aimed to explore the differences in main causes of death according to sun exposure.
METHODS:
We assessed the differences in sun exposure as a risk factor for all-cause mortality in a competing risk scenario for 29 518 Swedish women in a prospective 20-year follow-up of the Melanoma in Southern Sweden (MISS) cohort. Women were recruited from 1990 to 1992 (aged 25-64 years at the start of the study). We obtained detailed information at baseline on sun exposure habits and potential confounders. The data were analysed using modern survival statistics.
RESULTS:
Women with active sun exposure habits were mainly at a lower risk of cardiovascular disease (CVD) and noncancer/non-CVD death as compared to those who avoided sun exposure. As a result of their increased survival, the relative contribution of cancer death increased in these women. Nonsmokers who avoided sun exposure had a life expectancy similar to smokers in the highest sun exposure group, indicating that avoidance of sun exposure is a risk factor for death of a similar magnitude as smoking. Compared to the highest sun exposure group, life expectancy of avoiders of sun exposure was reduced by 0.6-2.1 years.
CONCLUSION:
The longer life expectancy amongst women with active sun exposure habits was related to a decrease in CVD and noncancer/non-CVD mortality, causing the relative contribution of death due to cancer to increase.
© 2016 The Association for the Publication of the Journal of Internal Medicine.A young woman, wearing a traditional full-length Amish dress and white bonnet, stepped away from a farmer’s market, opened her palm and revealed a smartphone. She began to scroll through screens, seemingly oblivious to the activity around her.
Not far away, a man in his late 60s with a silvery beard, wide-brimmed straw hat and suspenders adjusted the settings on a computer-driven crosscut saw. He was soon cutting pieces for gazebos that are sold online and delivered around the country.
The Amish have not given up on horse-drawn buggies. Their rigid abstinence from many kinds of technology has left parts of their lifestyle frozen since the 19th century: no cars, TVs or connections to electric utilities, for example.
But computers and cellphones are making their way into some Amish communities, pushing them — sometimes willingly, often not — into the 21st century.On a bright day in late September, I woke up early to head to the middle of the Peak District for a secretive brew-day. The day in question came about due to the ‘Great British Homebrew Challenge’, a competition run by Waitrose and Thornbridge, which I was fortunate to have won with a watermelon gose, a homebrew inspired rather randomly by a salad.
Visiting breweries has become a fairly common occurrence for me over over the years, and I have even had a chance to brew at a few. Thornbridge, however, was on a much larger scale than any other brewery that had let me wield a mash paddle before, which added an extra level of intimidation and excitement.
Thornbridge, as you would expect, is a cathedral of steel and gadgets expertly positioned to make the best quality beer possible every time they brew. There’s a romanticism around getting messy digging out mash tuns, but it doesn’t particularly make better beer. Thornbridge’s mash tun is set from a computer and they self-clean after each brew. They step up their yeast in a kit bigger than some small breweries actually brew beer with. They have a lab to constantly check elements such as bitterness, colour and, most importantly, dissolved oxygen at each part of the process – not just when the beer is packaged. The team is constantly taking notes on all these aspects to make sure that the beers are as consistent as they can be from batch to batch.
This creates a foundation for quality that is hard to match by the smaller, newer breweries, giving consumers a lot less to worry about when purchasing one of their bottles, while being able to make beer at a price point that can see it sold in major supermarkets.
Surprisingly, for all of talk of note-taking and quality control, their whole team felt open and inquisitive. They have run the Great British Homebrew Challenge for years now to let in new ideas from all angles of the brewing community, even amateurs. The team took great lengths to try and accurately scale up my recipe, sourcing the same (quite expensive) watermelon juice and chatting to me about when it should be added. They even asked my preference of salt to use, and checked if 1kg(!) of it was enough (it was).
After the popularity of their now regular beer ‘Tart’, Thornbridge now has a dedicated souring tank that beers are inoculated in and held as they sour before they are boiled: a method by which they can be sure to keep the lactobacillus bacteria away from the other aspects of their brewhouse. They do however let everything get a lot more funky in their much smaller outbuilding that houses the sour and barrel aged beers. The amount of barrels there are modest, but the beers being made there are already bearing fruit, winning Thornbridge gold and silver in the World Beer Cup in 2016, a feat especially impressive because many of the established American mixed-fermentation focused breweries had entered.
We had some time to visit Thornbridge’s original, humble brew-kit that lives in the grounds of the impressive Thornbridge Hall. The kit and space is the antithesis of their bigger space. Rustic, well worn and fully manual, it’s where they still brew all the cask beers for their pubs around the area and knock out an incredible amount of seasonals and specials, which would be more difficult to do on their larger kit.
After the brewday finished, we visited a Thornbridge-owned pub in Sheffield to try a range of the beers. Thornbridge had never been a brewery I had connected strongly with before, but the dedication and openness of the team, and their commitment to both the quality of their beers and the quality of beer in general, hammered home why so many hold them in incredibly high stead.
Homebrewing as a hobby is fairly insular, with a small but dedicated community. By running a competition like this in partnership with Waitrose, Thornbridge does a great service in opening the hobby up to a much wider audience and giving it the exposure that it deserves. I’m obviously incredibly excited that a beer I had a small part in is now available in Waitrose, especially as it’s one of the first sours to appear on its shelves.
The beer is now available in selected Waitrose stores and available to buy online from the Thornbridge shop.White People, a documentary by Jose Antonio Vargas, was aired on MTV on 22 July and has caused much controversy online. The documentary portrays itself as a race-driven discussion, focusing on the education of white people on issues of race.
What really ensues is a long, unproductive white-guilt fostering session, in which Vargas asks whites to acknowledge their privilege and accept the wrongdoings of their ancestors. Vargas even retweeted a description of his documentary that said its purpose was to ‘make white people very uncomfortable’. He’s clearly pretty happy with that take. Critics argue that the documentary pushes an ‘us against them’ mentality. I can see why they would think that. The film encourages the idea that being white automatically puts you at an advantage over all other groups. At one point in the documentary, Vargas sounds almost excited when he presents statistics showing that America’s white population is declining.
Vargas strategically placed himself in environments where he would face little to no opposition to his narrative. The small sample group he brought in to be interviewed clearly felt they were in a biased setting, one which made them feel intimidated, hesitant to speak their minds. (I’d feel intimidated, too, if I were in a situation where I could be unfairly depicted as a racist in front of hundreds of thousands of people.) He also only cites studies that focus on the lack of white participation in the discussion of race. This sort of bias is not uncommon in documentaries. But that doesn’t make this approach okay or productive – certainly not when dealing with a delicate issue like race. Deep down, we all know that not all whites are privileged; not all Hispanics are illegal immigrants; not all Asians are good at maths. Regardless of how acceptable or even statistically accurate a stereotype might be, to apply it to every individual in a group is harmful and ignorant – including when that group is ‘white people’. Even if a person seems to fit into a racial stereotype, we still don’t know the full story about that individual. A rich white boy who appears to have all the privilege in the world might be facing frequent abuse. A young Asian girl who is good at maths could spend twice as much time studying as her peers do. An African-American man may be falsely accused and wrongly convicted for a crime. So we must even question supposed ‘confirmations’ of stereotypes, because every individual’s story is a complex one.
White People does not take this individualist approach, which is necessary for any nuanced, successful discussion of race; instead it makes sweeping generalisations, about all whites being privileged, through using comments and statistics that simply do not apply in every situation or across the board. Vargas keeps discussing the need for a conversation about race, despite the fact that race is already being discussed. What is really needed is a conversation about racial issues or divisions that doesn’t start with generalisations about, or the targeting of, one particular group.Summary
This lets you secure the cable of a Raspberry Pi camera (or any other ribbon cable) to a surface using 19 mm double-sided tape. I use it to route the cable along the side of my Printrbot Simple's bed. Rounded teeth on the inside surface of the clip grip the cable, making it easy to slide the cable lengthwise but harder to shift it widthwise. Here's the source model on Tinkercad.
Print Settings
Rafts:
No
Supports:
No
Resolution:
0.2
Infill:
10
Notes:
I printed this without a brim, but if you want to use one, be sure that it isn't going to close up the gap between the clip halves.
Post-Printing
The space between the halves of the clip may become fused together by strings. Simply grab a hobby knife and push the blade in from both sides to loosen it. Clean the back of the clip with alcohol, add a strip of double-sided tape, and off you go!
How I Designed This
Why document the design process?
Because there's a lot of resources on the net that tell you how to use design software, but fewer that actually show the process of design. Even write-ups for simple objects like this one would help new makers see what goes into a practical design.
Sizing
I measured the width of the camera cable (16 mm wide, 0.13 mm thick) and the height of the build platform (25 mm) to get an idea of the size of the final clip. Since my double-sided tape is 19 mm wide, it made sense to go for a final height of 20 mm.
Roughing-out
In Tinkercad I sized a box into a thin strip to act as a visual placeholder for the cable, and then used more boxes to rough out the size and shape of the clip around it.
Designing the grip
Now that I was looking at a rough approximation of the clip, it became obvious that it needed some grip. I wanted the clip to grab the cable firmly, but I didn't want to achieve that by making the spacing between the clip halves very small (0.12 mm); that would just make the model harder to print. Instead, I decided to use alternating teeth. The tips of the teeth could all occupy the same plane on the model (and even pass through that plane), but the space between the surfaces of all the teeth would be about 0.6 mm apart; perfect for my 0.4 mm nozzle. I used the Cremallera shape generator by alumnes to produce the teeth, replacing the placeholder boxes of the model.
Final shaping
I moved the top row of teeth down to create the alternating pattern, and also to make the front of the clip shorter than the back. I knew from previous designs that a clip is very hard to use if both halves are the same length; the user has to feel for the gap in order to insert the cable. A taller back portion means that you simply put the cable against the back and push down. I use 'Hole' boxes to cut off the unwanted lengths of material. I added more hole boxes to the front of the clip to create windows. These give the front more flexibility, let you see the cable inside the clip, and make the clip more interesting to look at when it's installed. The windows were kept narrow so that these overhangs would print cleanly. I used the MetaFillet shape generator by BobKrause to add fillets to the outer edges of the clip, mostly for aesthetics. Even on a small model like this, getting rid of those sharp corners helps the print look more finished. I left the bottom face unfilleted, however, because I wanted as much contact with the build platform as possible. And that's it! Honestly it took me longer to document the design process that it did to actually design the part. I hope it helps!
Version history
v1, 27 Sep 2015Jerusalem Mayor Nir Barkat and Transportation Minister Yisrael Katz are set to attend a cornerstone-laying ceremony on Wednesday evening for a new business district at the entrance to Jerusalem, flagged as a “game-changer” for the nation’s capital and one of the most prominent business projects in the country.
“This project we are initiating is a game-changer for Jerusalem. It is the biggest, most significant and essential project for the future of the city,” said Barkat in an emailed statement to The Times of Israel. “Jerusalem after the completion of this new business district will be different from before,” transformed from a city with stalled economic growth and a declining population to “an attractive city for young people,” competitive and empowered.
With an investment of NIS 1.4 billion (approximately $364 million) by the government and the Jerusalem municipality, the Jerusalem Gateway project district will spread out over an area of approximately 700,000 square meters (173 acres), starting from the Chords Bridge that greets visitors at the entrance to the city and leading to a renovated Binyanei Ha’uma – International Convention Center and right up to Ben Zvi Boulevard, where the popular Ima restaurant is located.
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“The project is huge and will create an area that will be completely integrated with the rest of the city and throbbing with cultural and commercial activities during the day and the night,” Lior Grunhaus, a vice president of Eden, the municipal company that is managing the project, said in an interview. “Today the entrance to Jerusalem is peppered with empty parking lots and bus lots that are not what you’d like to see entering the capital of the country.”
The approved master plan for the area, developed for the municipality by Israel’s Farhi Zafrir Architects, envisages 24 new office buildings, nine of which are 36-floor skyscrapers, with 60,000 square meters of commercial space, business centers, hotels, and 70,000 square meters of leisure and cultural spaces. This is to be connected to the rest of the city via new walking and cycling paths and two light railway lines.
“We are now working on the urban and landscape plans to make sure the essence of Jerusalem is preserved,” Grunhaus said. “We are investing a lot of money and time in planning the cycling and walking routes, to ensure that people will be able to pleasantly walk from the district to the city center and the old city.”
The construction of the district has been pushed for by Barkat with the support of Israel’s finance and transportation ministries, which have been also actively involved in both financing and managing the progress of the project, a source familiar with the project said. This emphasizes the government’s commitment to the city of Jerusalem, the source said.
Once the fast train from Tel Aviv to Jerusalem will be up and running — forecast for spring 2018 — the district will be just 28 minutes away from Tel Aviv and linked to the rest of Jerusalem by two light rail channels – the existing red line and a planned green line, Grunhaus said. With the public and private public transit routes and private and public areas for pedestrians, the new district also aims to become the largest integrated transportation hub in Israel.
High-tech and financial firms have already expressed an interest in renting spaces in the project, Grunhaus said. “They understand the importance of a center that will be just 28 minutes away from Tel Aviv, which they will be able to reach without sitting in traffic jams.”
The district is expected to add some 40,000 new jobs in the capital and alleviate the acute shortage of office space the city is experiencing. “We currently have a 95 percent office occupancy rate in Jerusalem,” Grunhaus said.
Cars entering Jerusalem from Route 1 will be channeled to an underground tunnel to progress toward the rest of the city, with the upper levels used for open spaces, pedestrians and some hop-on and drop-off buses and cars and the light railway. There will be also some 1,300 new parking spaces in the area.
As part of this project, the Jerusalem International Convention Center (Binyanei Hauma) will be expanded and renovated — transforming the center into the largest convention center in the Middle East.
The German architectural firm Topotek1 was recently chosen via an international architectural competition to lead the urban and landscape planning. The project will be implemented in stages, with the first buildings expected to be completed in three to four years, Grunhaus said.
The ground-breaking ceremony held by Barkat will also be attended by the minister of Jerusalem Affairs and Heritage, Ze’ev Elkin, on Wednesday evening at Shazar Boulevard at the entrance to Jerusalem.The Klaipėda Revolt took place in January 1923 in the Klaipėda Region (Memel Territory, Memelland). The region, located north of the Neman River, was detached from East Prussia, Germany by the Treaty of Versailles and became a mandate of the League of Nations. It was placed under provisional French administration until a more permanent solution could be worked out. Lithuania wanted to unite with the region (part of Lithuania Minor) due to its large Lithuanian-speaking minority of Prussian Lithuanians and major port of Klaipėda (Memel) – the only viable access to the Baltic Sea for Lithuania. As the Conference of Ambassadors favored leaving the region as a free city, similar to the Free City of Danzig, the Lithuanians organized and staged a revolt.
Presented as an uprising of the local population, the revolt met little resistance from either the German Police or the French Army. The rebels established a pro-Lithuanian administration, which petitioned to unite with Lithuania, citing the right of self-determination. The League of Nations accepted the fait accompli and the Klaipėda Region was transferred as an autonomous territory to the Republic of Lithuania on February 17, 1923. After prolonged negotiations a formal international agreement, the Klaipėda Convention, was signed in May 1924. The convention formally acknowledged Lithuania's sovereignty in the region and outlined its extensive legislative, judicial, administrative, and financial autonomy. The region remained part of Lithuania until March 1939 when it was transferred to Nazi Germany after the German ultimatum.
Background [ edit ]
Lithuanian and Polish aspirations [ edit ]
The German–Lithuanian border had been stable since the Treaty of Melno in 1422.[1] However, northern East Prussia had a significant Lithuanian-speaking population of Prussian Lithuanians or Lietuvninkai and was known as Lithuania Minor. The Klaipėda Region covered 2,848 km2 (1,100 sq mi), which included the Curonian Lagoon of approximately 412 km2 (159 sq mi).[2] According to contemporary statistics by Fred Hermann Deu, 71,156 Germans and 67,259 Prussian Lithuanians lived in the region.[3] The idea of uniting Lithuania Minor with Lithuania surfaced during the Lithuanian National Revival of the late 19th century. It was part of the vision to consolidate all ethnic Lithuanian lands into an independent Lithuania.[4] The activists also eyed Klaipėda (Memel), a major sea port in the Baltic Sea. It would become Lithuania's only deep-water access to the sea and having a port was seen as an economic necessity for self-sustainability. On November 30, 1918, twenty-four Prussian Lithuanian activists signed the Act of Tilsit, expressing their desire to unite Lithuania Minor with Lithuania.[5] Based on these considerations, the Lithuanians petitioned the Allies to attach the whole of Lithuania Minor (not limited to Klaipėda Region) to Lithuania.[4] However, at the time Lithuania was not officially recognized by the western powers and not invited into any post-war conferences.[citation needed]
The Second Polish Republic regarded the Klaipėda Region as possible compensation for Danzig. After World War I, the Polish Corridor provided access to the |
he can get off this godforsaken planet and join his records in space, Acoustic Recordings stockpiles a great American songbook that can endure even after we’re all forced to live off the grid.At the Boys and Girls Club in this rural city in southern Oklahoma, the director is unsure how he will stay open if President Donald Trump’s proposed budget goes through, eliminating money for several staff positions.
Similar conversations are happening at the Oklahoma Shakespearean Festival’s after-school arts programme, which relies on National Endowment for the Arts grants that Trump wants to eliminate. And at the county senior centre, which already lost its state funding and could lose all or most of its federal funding, too. And at the Farm Service Centre, which supports 1,200 local producers and is staffed with employees whose positions were targeted in the budget.
In this town of 16,000 – located near the Texas border in Oklahoma’s Bryan County, where Trump won 76 per cent of the vote – excitement for Trump’s presidency has been dulled by confusion over an agenda that seems aimed at hurting their community more than helping it.
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The President’s proposed budget would disproportionately harm the rural areas and small towns that were key to his unexpected win. Many red states like Oklahoma – where every single county went for Trump – are more reliant on the federal funds that Trump wants to cut than states that voted for Democratic nominee Hillary Clinton.
Durant has already undergone years of state budget cuts, as Oklahoma has been unable to balance its increasing costs with declines in the oil industry, tax cuts and generous corporate tax credits. That has made federal funds even more vital to the city, especially for programmes that serve the poor and working class.
“It’s very easy to look at a laundry list of things that exist and say, ’Cut, cut, cut, cut,’ and say, ‘Well, this is wasteful spending’ without really understanding the true impact,” said Durant city manager Tim Rundel, who grew up in poverty in northwest Arkansas. “The bottom line is a lot of our citizens depend on those programmes.”
Betty Harris, 77, gets choked up when she talks about her husband, who died in May, and her son, who died in February. Her two daughters live in Oklahoma City and visit once a month or so. There are two things that get her to leave her home: a quilting circle with friends and daily visits to the senior centre.
The centre offers lunch for two bucks, exercise classes, gospel singalongs, tax preparation help, monthly boxes of food for low-income seniors, a meal delivery programme and a staff that can patiently explain Medicare or how to operate a cellphone. If someone doesn’t show up, the others quickly figure out why.
“It’s the only bright spot,” said Harris, who used to work for AT&T. “It makes me get dressed and get out of the house.”
Harris voted for Barack Obama when he first ran in 2008 because she liked his promise of change. But he disappointed her in a number of ways, including being too sympathetic to Muslims. She voted for Republican Mitt Romney in 2012 and Trump last year.
She likes the President’s promises to crack down on illegal immigration, which she thinks has hurt the job market, and to bully manufacturing plants into staying in the country. She said both of her daughters were out of work for months because they worked for companies that moved overseas.
But Harris is upset by the President’s proposed budget, which would dramatically cut funding for the Robert T Davis Senior Centre, managed by the Bryan County Retired Senior Volunteer Programme. Harris said she gives each president 10 strikes before she withdraws her support.
“I have high hopes for Trump, but if he’s going to be cutting these kinds of programmes, that’s going to be one,” Harris said. “And we’ll see. I hope I don’t get up to 10, but I will give him one for that.”
Trump wants to eliminate the federal Corporation for National and Community Service, which provides the county volunteer programme with about $35,000 each year. This money goes to pay for supplemental insurance and mileage for volunteers who serve in the area, deliver meals to the county’s homebound and drive the elderly to medical appointments, including taking veterans to the closest VA medical centre, 100 miles away in Dallas. The centre also indirectly receives federal funds to pay for meals, which also could be cut.
The centre has already lost the $28,000 it used to receive each year in state funding, and United Way recently announced it would reduce its annual contribution from $10,000 to $7,500, said executive director Sheila Risner. She cut her salary, cut the hours of another employee and pared back some services, including reducing the number of trips to Dallas.
As lunch trays were cleared away one recent afternoon, a table of seniors debated the proposed cuts.
Bert Briedwell, a 74-year-old who is retired from an engineering consulting company and voted for Clinton, agrees with giving more funding to the military – but not at the expense of programmes such as this one.
“What would God say if you said, ‘I’m going to take all of this money away from the poor and give it to airplanes’?” said Briedwell, a member of the Choctaw Nation, which is headquartered in Durant. “We have enough of that already.”
Clyde Glenn, 79, responded that there is a lot of waste in social programmes.
“If North Korea shoots a missile and it hits the United States and knocks out our power grid, then you’ll be saying, ‘How come nothing works no more?’ ” said Glenn, a Navy veteran who owns rental properties in the area and voted for Trump.
“Look at all of the missiles we got – you don’t think we can take on North Korea?” Briedwell fired back. “My God, Clyde.”
One of the women at the table sighed: “You got him going now.”
Jackie Garner, a bookkeeper at the senior centre who volunteered to reduce her hours so it wouldn’t have to cut even more services, jumped in to say that the Christian community should be doing more to care for those in need, as God instructed his followers – not the government.
“At my house, if we don’t have that money, we don’t have that money. We don’t go out and spend money that we don’t have,” said Garner, 57. “We try to find alternative ways to make the things that are important happen. I expect the government to do the same. It’s our tax dollars. We need to be good stewards.”
“I see what you’re saying, hon,” Briedwell said, “But don’t you agree with me? Why take it and give it to the military that’s the strongest military in the world?”
As the debate continued, Glenn shook his head and said: “It used to be that when somebody won a sports game, a politic game, whatever, the loser must be gracious and let it go... He won. So let’s accept that and let it go and see what he can do.”
A drive along Durant’s Main Street reveals the problems facing many small towns – problems that Trump promised to fix.
“This is our Main Street, going right through the heart of Durant, and you’re going to quickly see why some of our citizens are somewhat frustrated,” said Rundel, the city manager, as his pick-up truck rumbled over potholes that often extend through layers of patches to a historic brick road below.
Four workers are assigned to patch the city’s near-200 miles of road, which Rundel compares to applying a temporary bandage to a gaping wound. There’s just never enough money left in the annual $30m budget to tear up and replace Main Street and other main roadways. It would take at least $20m to update the roads, he said.
“We just don’t have the resources,” Rundel said.
It would cost another $10m to $20m to update the city’s generations-old water treatment and sewer systems, the life of which has been extended by city workers willing to come up with creative fixes and build their own parts. Trump’s budget promises “robust funding for critical drinking and wastewater infrastructure”, but also would eliminate a $498m grant and loan programme that helps rural communities that are smaller than Durant upgrade their water and wastewater systems.
Heading east on Main Street – past the “world’s largest peanut” stationed outside City Hall – takes you over railroad tracks and into a deeply impoverished neighbourhood. One in four Durant residents lives in poverty.
In 2014, President Obama designated the Durant-based Choctaw Nation as a “Promise Zone” and the recipient of a rush of federal funds that enabled an expansion of Head Start programmes for young children and internet access for more than 425 public housing residents. An eco-friendly steel mill is slated to open this autumn, providing as many as 300 new jobs, thanks to a New Markets Tax Credit of $21m that encourages building in areas with a high unemployment rate.
Durant is already home to a number of industrial plants – including a Big Lots distribution centre and a glass factory – and has been growing. But to continue to add all of the jobs Trump promised, Rundel said the city has to strengthen its strained infrastructure.
Trump promised that within 100 days of taking office he would introduce legislation to “spur $1 trillion in infrastructure investment over ten years”. He has yet to do so. And when his aides discuss infrastructure, they talk more about toll roads, pipelines and major airports than crumbling Main Streets.
John Czwartacki, a spokesman for the Office of Management and Budget, pushed back at the idea that the budget hits rural areas especially hard.
“President Trump was elected to represent all Americans – rich and poor, rural and urban,” he said. “His administration and his budget prioritise American security and economic success, while at the same time recognising that we must be mindful of every tax dollar spent, given our nearly $20 trillion national debt.”
There is hope among many Trump supporters that the possible budget sacrifices will be worth it.
Rick Munholland, 64, owns a tyre shop near the train tracks on Main Street and said customers often ask to purchase tyres made in the United States, which are difficult to find. He wants to see more jobs in the area, fewer undocumented immigrants and a reduction in his monthly health-insurance premiums, as it costs $2,800 a month for a small-business plan that covers him, his wife and one employee.
“Working people like me can’t afford it. Now, if you’re low-income, they can get it for nothing – but the low-income gets taken care of regardless,” Munholland said. “God bless America, but it has gone to the dogs.”
When Crystal Tate was in middle school, she attended a week-long program that took her and other low-income students to visit college campuses in Oklahoma and Texas, introducing them to a world that can be foreign and intimidating.
The trip was organised by Talent Search, a programme offered through the decades-old federal programme TRiO, which helps first-generation, low-income students get into college and graduate by providing the support they may not be receiving at home.
Trump wants to cut TRiO and another initiative called GEAR UP (Gaining Early Awareness and Readiness for Undergraduate Programmes) by $193m, saying many such programmes are redundant and there is limited evidence that some of the initiatives work – assertions that Tate and university officials wholeheartedly reject.
Tate is now 21 and a junior at Southeastern Oklahoma State University in Durant, studying to become a teacher. She pays for college with a combination of Pell Grants, which the President has pledged to protect, and other scholarships. She lives with her grandparents in Boswell, about 30 miles away, so that she can coach girls’ sports teams there.
Out of Tate’s graduating high school class of 17, six attempted college or a trade school and only two stuck with it, including her. She plans to be the first college graduate in her immediate family.
Shape Created with Sketch. The controversial orders Donald Trump has already issued Show all 9 left Created with Sketch. right Created with Sketch. Shape Created with Sketch. The controversial orders Donald Trump has already issued 1/9 Trump and the media White House Press Secretary Sean Spicer takes questions during the daily press briefing Getty Images 2/9 Trump and the Trans-Pacific Partnership Union leaders applaud US President Donald Trump for signing an executive order withdrawing the US from the Trans-Pacific Partnership negotiations during a meeting in the Roosevelt Room of the White House in Washington DC. Mr Trump issued a presidential memorandum in January announcing that the US would withdraw from the trade deal Getty 3/9 Trump and the Mexico wall A US Border Patrol vehicle sits waiting for illegal immigrants at a fence opening near the US-Mexico border near McAllen, Texas. The number of incoming immigrants has surged ahead of the upcoming Presidential inauguration of Donald Trump, who has pledged to build a wall along the US-Mexico border. A signature campaign promise, Mr Trump outlined his intention to build a border wall on the US-Mexico border days after taking office Getty Images 4/9 Trump and abortion US President Donald Trump signs an executive order as Chief of Staff Reince Priebus looks on in the Oval Office of the White House. Mr Trump reinstated a ban on American financial aide being granted to non-governmental organizations that provide abortion counseling, provide abortion referrals, or advocate for abortion access outside of the United States Getty Images 5/9 Trump and the Dakota Access pipeline Opponents of the Keystone XL and Dakota Access pipelines hold a rally as they protest US President Donald Trump's executive orders advancing their construction, at Columbus Circle in New York. US President Donald Trump signed executive orders reviving the construction of two controversial oil pipelines, but said the projects would be subject to renegotiation Getty Images 6/9 Trump and 'Obamacare' Nancy Pelosi who is the minority leader of the House of Representatives speaks beside House Democrats at an event to protect the Affordable Care Act in Los Angeles, California. US President Donald Trump's effort to make good on his campaign promise to repeal and replace the healthcare law failed when Republicans failed to get enough votes. Mr Trump has promised to revisit the matter Getty Images 7/9 Donald Trump and'sanctuary cities' US President Donald Trump signed an executive order in January threatening to pull funding for so-called "sanctuary cities" if they do not comply with federal immigration law AP 8/9 Trump and the travel ban US President Donald Trump has attempted twice to restrict travel into the United States from several predominantly Muslim countries. The first attempt, in February, was met with swift opposition from protesters who flocked to airports around the country. That travel ban was later blocked by the Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals. The second ban was blocked by a federal judge a day before it was scheduled to be implemented in mid-March SANDY HUFFAKER/AFP/Getty Images 9/9 Trump and climate change US President Donald Trump sought to dismantle several of his predecessor's actions on climate change in March. His order instructed the Environmental Protection Agency to reevaluate the Clean Power Plan, which would cap power plant emissions Shannon Stapleton/Reuters 1/9 Trump and the media White House Press Secretary Sean Spicer takes questions during the daily press briefing Getty Images 2/9 Trump and the Trans-Pacific Partnership Union leaders applaud US President Donald Trump for signing an executive order withdrawing the US from the Trans-Pacific Partnership negotiations during a meeting in the Roosevelt Room of the White House in Washington DC. Mr Trump issued a presidential memorandum in January announcing that the US would withdraw from the trade deal Getty 3/9 Trump and the Mexico wall A US Border Patrol vehicle sits waiting for illegal immigrants at a fence opening near the US-Mexico border near McAllen, Texas. The number of incoming immigrants has surged ahead of the upcoming Presidential inauguration of Donald Trump, who has pledged to build a wall along the US-Mexico border. A signature campaign promise, Mr Trump outlined his intention to build a border wall on the US-Mexico border days after taking office Getty Images 4/9 Trump and abortion US President Donald Trump signs an executive order as Chief of Staff Reince Priebus looks on in the Oval Office of the White House. Mr Trump reinstated a ban on American financial aide being granted to non-governmental organizations that provide abortion counseling, provide abortion referrals, or advocate for abortion access outside of the United States Getty Images 5/9 Trump and the Dakota Access pipeline Opponents of the Keystone XL and Dakota Access pipelines hold a rally as they protest US President Donald Trump's executive orders advancing their construction, at Columbus Circle in New York. US President Donald Trump signed executive orders reviving the construction of two controversial oil pipelines, but said the projects would be subject to renegotiation Getty Images 6/9 Trump and 'Obamacare' Nancy Pelosi who is the minority leader of the House of Representatives speaks beside House Democrats at an event to protect the Affordable Care Act in Los Angeles, California. US President Donald Trump's effort to make good on his campaign promise to repeal and replace the healthcare law failed when Republicans failed to get enough votes. Mr Trump has promised to revisit the matter Getty Images 7/9 Donald Trump and'sanctuary cities' US President Donald Trump signed an executive order in January threatening to pull funding for so-called "sanctuary cities" if they do not comply with federal immigration law AP 8/9 Trump and the travel ban US President Donald Trump has attempted twice to restrict travel into the United States from several predominantly Muslim countries. The first attempt, in February, was met with swift opposition from protesters who flocked to airports around the country. That travel ban was later blocked by the Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals. The second ban was blocked by a federal judge a day before it was scheduled to be implemented in mid-March SANDY HUFFAKER/AFP/Getty Images 9/9 Trump and climate change US President Donald Trump sought to dismantle several of his predecessor's actions on climate change in March. His order instructed the Environmental Protection Agency to reevaluate the Clean Power Plan, which would cap power plant emissions Shannon Stapleton/Reuters
“School was a place where I felt at home, where I felt like I could be part of something bigger than myself,” said Tate, who did not vote in November. “And in order for me to further my ability to be something better than myself, I knew that college would have to happen.”
For students trying to break out of poverty, the cuts come from multiple directions.
The Durant public school system superintendent has seen state funding dramatically decline since 2009, and he is worried his classrooms will suffer if Trump directs more federal funds to school vouchers and urban charter schools.
The Durant-based Oklahoma Shakespearean Festival offers a summer theatre camp and after-school theatre, dance and music classes to local students, many of whom come from poor families. The festival used to receive $150,000 a year in state and federal funds, which have been slashed to $26,000 a year, including NEA grants that Trump wants to eliminate.
And the Boys and Girls Club of Durant watches over about 200 children and teenagers each day after school and during the summer in a former middle school that’s still undergoing renovation. More than half of the students are Native American and 20 per cent live with their grandparents or in foster care.
“From three o’clock to six o’clock in the evening is the worst time for kids – that’s when kids get in trouble, get into vandalism, when young ladies get pregnant,” said executive director Larry Long, 69, who attended a Boys and Girls Club in Missouri as a child. “We keep them busy.”
Long has to hustle to keep the club safe, clean and operating. About one-third of funding comes from the federal government, while the rest comes from donations, fees paid by families and other sources.
Long would lose three of his part-time employees if Trump eliminates the Senior Community Service Employment Programme, which pairs low-income people over the age of 55 with government-subsidised jobs at nonprofits and public agencies. The Trump administration says the $434m program has failed to transition enough of these workers into unsubsidised jobs.
Trump has also proposed cutting all federal funding for AmeriCorps Vista (Volunteers in Service to America), which provides staff during the summer, and reducing funding for the federal work-study programme, which pays some of the club’s college-aged workers.
One of the senior workers, Sharon Green, said she learned about the potential cuts while watching PBS, which could also lose federal funding.
“These things are vital,” said Green, 72, a retired accountant. “There’s no way that they should have cuts – I mean, there are many other places where they could cut, it looks like to me.”
Green will not say who she voted for but said, “I didn’t have any concerns along these lines for my party. I did vote, and I am proud of the way that I voted, and I don’t believe we would have seen the cuts coming. Who’s to know?”
On a recent afternoon, Long interrupted the students’ late-afternoon meal of pigs-in-blankets to introduce a reporter. A mention of the President prompted excited applause from the children, and a small group of boys at one table started chanting: “Trump! Trump! Trump!”
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Subscribe nowThe Free Press answers frequently asked questions about the road funding plan passed Tuesday by the Michigan Legislature.
The Legislature passed a plan to provide an extra $1.2 billion in road funding, phasing in a hike in fuel taxes and registration fees and shifting $600 million from the state’s general fund into roads. (Photo: Carlos Osorio, Associated Press)
Michigan motorists would typically pay about $20 more for their vehicle registration fees and spend about $1.17 more for a 15-gallon fill-up under fee and tax increases passed Tuesday by the Michigan Senate and House of Representatives, as part of a $1.2-billion road-funding plan.
The bills go to Gov. Rick Snyder for his signature.
Q: So should the roads significantly improve under this plan?
A: Not right away. Although it's called a $1.2-billion road-funding plan, the package doesn't actually raise that much extra money for transportation until 2020-21. According to a Senate Fiscal Agency analysis, the plan increases transportation funding by $452 million in the 2017 fiscal year, $608 million in 2018, $763 million in 2019, $944 million in 2020, and $1.2 billion in 2021.
Also, the plan puts the first $100 million each year in new road revenue into a "lock box." That money isn't intended to be spent until a committee comes up with plans for the Michigan Department of Transportation to buy better roads that will last 50 years.
Q: Why are Michigan Democrats so opposed to this plan?
A: Democrats say a greater burden of the higher taxes and fees should be borne by businesses who have benefited from about $2 billion in tax cuts since 2011, and by the commercial trucking industry, which enjoys the highest-in-the-nation truck weight limits. They also say that because the plan relies on $600 million a year from the state general fund and provides for an income tax rollback, the effects of which can't be predicted with certainty, it will take needed money away from priorities such as education and public safety.
According to the Senate Fiscal Agency, the plan would cut the state general fund by $356 million in 2019, $531 million in 2020, and $806 million in 2021. That's all prior to the start of the income tax rollback, in 2023.
Q: Once the plan is fully implemented, does the entire $1.2 billion go to roads?
A: No. The $600 million raised from the higher fuel taxes and registration fees gets funneled through a state formula under which about 10% of it is spent on transit and rail projects. Also, a provision in the bill allows the City of Detroit to spend up to 20% of its new transportation money on public transit, which is a great need in the city. The $600 million per year to be taken from the general fund would all go to roads.
Q: Is Gov. Snyder likely to sign the plan?
A: The plan relies on general fund revenue more than the governor would like, but Snyder has given every indication he intends to sign it as a compromise with Republican lawmakers.
Q: What's the main difference between the new Senate plan and the one the House passed earlier?
A: This plan hikes vehicle registration fees by 20%, or by about $20 per vehicle, starting Jan. 1, 2017. The original House plan hiked registration fees by 40%, with the increase taking effect one year earlier, on Jan. 1, 2016.
The plan passed Tuesday has a higher fuel tax increase, one of 7.3 cents per gallon, effective Jan. 1, 2017. The House plan increased taxes on regular fuel by only 3.3 cents per gallon, effective Oct. 1, 2018.
Both plans equalize the taxes on diesel and regular fuel and tie future increases to inflation.
And both plans provide for fee increases of between $30 and $100 for hybrid electric vehicles and between $100 and $200 for non-hybrid electric vehicles.
Q: Are the tax relief elements in the two plans also different?
A: Yes. The sweetening of the Homestead Property Tax Credit, expected to cost the state treasury about $200 million a year, is pretty similar under both plans, with the maximum credit increasing to $1,500 per year from $1,200. But the plan passed Tuesday allows more people to qualify for the credit over time, through a change in the eligibility threshold tied to inflation.
There's also a significant difference in the income tax rollbacks in the two plans.
The final plan provides for an income tax rollback starting on Jan. 1, 2023, with Michigan's personal income tax rate decreasing only if general fund growth exceeds the rate of inflation multiplied by 1.425.
That's more restrictive than the income tax rollback in the House's plan, which would have taken effect starting Jan. 1, 2019, as long as general fund growth exceeded the rate of inflation, regardless of by how much.
Contact Paul Egan: 517-372-8660 or pegan@freepress.com. Follow him on Twitter @paulegan4.
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Hero MemberActivity: 756Merit: 500 Bitcoin will be at CES2013 (Official Thread) December 27, 2012, 06:36:14 AM
Last edit: December 28, 2012, 12:21:04 AM by BitPay Business Solutions #1
January 8-11, 2013 - Las Vegas
We have an all new booth design, a corner aisle location, and many more exciting upgrades. Over 150,000 people attended this show in 2012, and 2013 should be just as big.
The Bitcoin booth is funded by BitPay, Butterfly Labs, and Bitcoin Magazine.
We will give plenty of payment demonstrations, help install bitcoin wallets, show some mining hardware, give away some Bitcoin Magazines, sell some Casascius bitcoins, and most importantly answer questions and educate people with accurate information about bitcoin.
Bitcoin booth # 70312
Map to our booth:
Photos of our booth:
Here's how you can help:
Jan 2-3-4 are the days to press every reporter you know, get them to put Bitcoin booth 70312 on their short list of booths to visit.
Jan 8-9-10 are the days to push creative Twitter campaigns using #CES2013 and #bitcoin and mention "booth 70312"
Also, if you remember the spokesmodel tryouts we held last year, we have hired Stephanie to help us in the booth. Stephanie is a licensed attorney in California with a background in Finance, and she can definitely talk a good bitcoin game!
Stephanie's audition:
Any REAL bigshots you can get on the hook, invite them to our private welcome party on Monday night at the Cosmopolitan. We have our own VIP space in the Library. Have them contact me for details.
Also, Crystal from Whiskey Dicks will be helping us with the payment demos. If you met Crystal at the Bitcoin Summit in Philadelphia, then you know she is a hard-core libertarian and she's stoked about bitcoin.
Tell reporters that the Bitcoin booth is not to be missed!!
Bitcoin will return to the Consumer Electronics Show (CES) in 11 days, bigger and better than last year!- Las VegasWe have an all new booth design, a corner aisle location, and many more exciting upgrades. Over 150,000 people attended this show in 2012, and 2013 should be just as big.The Bitcoin booth is funded by BitPay, Butterfly Labs, and Bitcoin Magazine.We will give plenty of payment demonstrations, help install bitcoin wallets, show some mining hardware, give away some Bitcoin Magazines, sell some Casascius bitcoins, and most importantly answer questions and educate people with accurate information about bitcoin.Map to our booth: http://www.mapyourshow.com/shows/index.cfm?Show_ID=ces13&exhid=T0009202&booth=70312&hall=O Photos of our booth:are the days to press every reporter you know, get them to put Bitcoin booth 70312 on their short list of booths to visit.are the days to push creative Twitter campaigns using #CES2013 and #bitcoin and mention "booth 70312"Also, if you remember the spokesmodel tryouts we held last year, we have hired Stephanie to help us in the booth. Stephanie is a licensed attorney in California with a background in Finance, and she can definitely talk a good bitcoin game!Stephanie's audition: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PoZmhAf0GKA Any REAL bigshots you can get on the hook, invite them to our private welcome party on Monday night at the Cosmopolitan. We have our own VIP space in the Library. Have them contact me for details.Also, Crystal from Whiskey Dicks will be helping us with the payment demos. If you met Crystal at the Bitcoin Summit in Philadelphia, then you know she is a hard-core libertarian and she's stoked about bitcoin.
https://bitpay.com
Does your website accept bitcoins? BitPay : The World Leader in Bitcoin Business SolutionsDoeswebsite accept bitcoins?by Michelle Dean
There’s really no delicate way to put this: at this year’s New Yorker Festival, Jonathan Franzen said that David Foster Wallace fabricated at least part of — and potentially a large part of — his nonfiction pieces. I wasn’t there, but after reading Eric Alterman’s summary Friday, and finding no mention of the incident in any other coverage of the festival, I watched the conversation online.
Here’s a rough transcript of the relevant exchange (with some “umms” and “uhhs” edited for reasons of intelligibility).
Remnick: Well, I was, I was fascinated to hear… that there are some people in this world who feel that it’s o — that to have a kind of hyper-postmodern view of nonfiction/fiction questions, that it’s all writing, and that questions of fact, facticity and, well, that’s kind of square and old-fashioned, and it’s okay that Kapuscinski does what Kapuscinski does and kind of makes this up because it’s really just a metaphor fo Poland itself. And other writers that one could name who have a different view of fact and fiction… You’re pretty strict about the dividing line. You see, you think that somebody who’s —
Franzen (interjecting): [unintelligible]
Remnick: — allegedly writing nonfiction and cheats it —
Franzen: Yeah.
Remnick: — is cheating the reader, is somehow in a way that should be kind of like admitting a false —
Franzen: David and I disagreed on that.
Remnick: David?
Franzen: Dave Wallace, yeah.
Remnick: So Wallace felt well —
Franzen: Yeah, cause he —
Remnick: He said it was okay to make up dialogue on a cruise ship?
Franzen: For instance, yeah. Uhhmmm…
Remnick: I’m heartbroken to hear it.
Franzen: I know, I know. No, those things didn’t actually happen. You notice he never published any nonfiction in your magazine.
Remnick: Not for want of trying but that’s another matter, but but…
Franzen: He would have had to, maybe he…
Remnick: He would have fell before the fact-checkers.
Franzen: I think the fact-checkers… and, to me, the fact-checkers, we, uh, I’m so afraid of fact checkers.
Remnick: Good. [laughs]
Franzen: But that’s, you know, that’s kind of like the boundary lines in tennis. That was a great shot, only problem was it was two feet behind the baseline. I will have crushed…
Remnick: But David called it in.
Franzen: Well, yeah, I mean… I love that cruise ship piece of Dave’s, so I’m not, I’m not… it was, yeah, two somewhat different approaches.
From this vantage, it’s very hard to say whether Franzen’s charge is (a) true (oh, what a fraught word in this context) or (b) new information. So much plainly depends on how you parse “Those things didn’t actually happen.” Franzen can’t possibly mean that all of the events recounted in “Shipping Out,” Wallace’s famous piece on cruise ships (later retitled “A Supposedly Fun Thing I’ll Never Do Again,” in the book of essays of the same name) never occurred? Or can he? He’s responding to a question about dialogue; is his answer limited to that? Is this only true of the cruise ships piece, or of his other essays as well? (“For instance” seems to indicate the latter.) In the video, Remnick appears taken aback by the admission, and perhaps that explains why he didn’t press the matter. Until Franzen decides to elaborate we are left to guess at what precisely he meant.
It’s possible Franzen thought that this wouldn’t surprise anyone. In interviews, Wallace admitted to massaging certain elements of his nonfiction. In a 1998 interview that Tom Scocca put up at Slate last year (a shorter version had previously run in The Boston Phoenix), Wallace said that he cleaned up quotes in the essay, for example, taking out “likes” and adjusting punctuation, without apology. Moreover, “The thing is, really — between you and me and The Boston Phoenix’s understanding readers — you hire a fiction writer to do nonfiction, there’s going to be the occasional bit of embellishment.” Wallace also told David Lipsky, in one of the 1997 conversations that make up Although Of Course You End Up Becoming Yourself, that he had, in “Ticket to the Fair” (later “Getting Away from Already Being Pretty Much Away From It All”), put “somebody else’s voice” into the person of the Native Companion, a figure who accompanies Wallace to the Iowa State Fair and plays the knowing commentator to Wallace’s bewildered straight-man persona.
On the other hand, Wallace was quick to reassure his interlocutors that he was committed to telling the truth. In the interview with Scocca, Wallace wrung his hands about the Janet-Malcolm-style betrayal he felt he’d commited toward two of the subjects of the cruise piece, a couple he’d met, the female half of which he infelicitously described as “Jackie Gleason in drag”:
That, that was a very bad scene, because they were really nice to me on the cruise. And actually sent me a couple cards, and were looking forward to the thing coming out. And then it came out, and, you know, I never heard from them again. I feel — I’m worried that it hurt their feelings…. I couldn’t just so worry about Trudy’s feelings that I couldn’t say the truth. Which is, you know, a terrific, really nice, and not unattractive lady who did happen to look just like Jackie Gleason in drag.
And in his conversation with Lipsky, Wallace continues: “Nothin’, nothin’ in there is made up. That’s so weird, I’ve never done something — well, maybe the baton twirling wasn’t quite the carnage that… Although it seemed awfully dangerous at the time.”
And, of course, both of the pieces in question — the cruise piece and the Fair piece — were published in Harper’s Magazine. They were edited by Colin Harrison, now at Scribner, who so far hasn’t commented on the matter (including to us; we contacted him by email but no reply so far). However, one former Harper’s editor, Donovan Hohn, who worked there after these essays were published, did offer this on Twitter:
@donovanhohn
Donovan Hohn @maudnewton, @alexheard Harper’s FC process in my experience (‘98-’11) was as rigorous as other mags I’ve experienced if not more
Oct 08 via webFavoriteRetweetReply
@donovanhohn
Donovan Hohn @maudnewton, @alexheard Which doesn’t mean it was foolproof.
Oct 08 via webFavoriteRetweetReply
So either all of Wallace’s affirmations are dissembling, and Harper’s was duped, or something else was going on.
My authority to comment, I must admit, comes only as a literary-gossip addict who probably needs to find better things to do with her time than obsessively track mentions of the Wallace-Franzen friendship. (I hear there’s a class war going on somewhere around here.) But in that fanatical mode, I find the most likely explanation for the gulf between “those things” not happening and “occasional bit of embellishment” resides somewhere in the rapidly expanding (if you’ll permit me) footnote of Franzen’s own relationship to Wallace.
Take, for instance, a few things about the exchange not captured in the transcript. Although it does follow a line of questioning about Wallace and Franzen’s friendship, and the influence they had on each other, the information above is volunteered as a quasi-non-sequitur: Remnick had already moved on to asking about Franzen’s own nonfiction. And as Remnick goes into that preamble, Franzen hunches over, fiddles with his glasses and his nose, and nods absently. When he starts in by saying “Dave and I disagreed on that,” he’s looking at his lap, and |
<timekeeper> and fill the world with their shitty spawn 13:21 <[joker]> interesting the perspective that nemesis has anyone who is a MRA is on par with a feminazi 13:21 <[joker]> absolutely explains a lot :) 13:21 <nemesis> christ 13:21 <nemesis> you again 13:22 <nemesis> just dont talk to me 13:22 <[joker]> mmhm 13:22 <[joker]> lol 13:22 <[joker]> just observing your hate of men 13:22 <nemesis> i dont hate men 13:22 <nemesis> at all 13:22 <[joker]> god forbid a man wants equal rights 13:22 <[joker]> mmhm 13:22 <nemesis> mra isnt for equal rights 13:22 <timekeeper> lawl 13:22 <nemesis> do mras include gay men 13:22 <nemesis> and men of color 13:22 <[joker]> and women 13:22 <[joker]> there are plenty of women MRAs 13:23 <[joker]> thankfully not all women are ignorant cunts 13:23 <nemesis> not being a mra is being an ignorant cunt? 13:23 <timekeeper> wait, so you dont like gay men and men of color? 13:23 <[joker]> wat? 13:24 <nemesis> from what i see from reddit mra's they excluded gay men who post there 13:24 <nemesis> ''go cry to lgtb subs'' 13:24 <nemesis> im sorry i offended your 'ideology' 13:24 <nemesis> but you dont have to insult me 13:24 <nemesis> you salty douche 13:25 <[joker]> just pointing out the ignorance in your statement when you compared feminazis to mras 13:25 <KDDLB> hi puddles 13:25 <nemesis> feminism and mra sounds good on paper, but it doesnt apply that way 13:25 <nemesis> people take it to extremes 13:25 <[joker]> you felt insulted when i pointed out your comparison of feminazis and MRAs 13:26 <nemesis> 13:22 <[joker]> just observing your hate of men 13:26 <[joker]> yup 13:26 <pipework> gparent: Is Thunderclock more believable? 13:26 <nemesis> 13:23 <[joker]> thankfully not all women are ignorant cunts 13:26 <[joker]> you want them to get married 13:26 <[joker]> yeah because there are WOMEN MRAs 13:26 <nemesis> there are feminist men 13:26 <pipework> I hate white men a lot more than other kinds of men. 13:26 <[joker]> you make it sound like MRAs are all men 13:26 <nemesis> there are feminist men also rofl 13:26 <nemesis> who gives a shit 13:26 <[joker]> feminist, and feminazi is quite different 13:27 <nemesis> there are feminazi men too 13:27 <[joker]> feminazi is the extreme feminists 13:27 <nemesis> lol pipework 13:27 <nemesis> do i hate men because i dont adhere to mra ideology? 13:27 <nemesis> bullshit 13:27 <[joker]> i think you just hate men because you arent one 13:27 <nemesis> i love men, i love penises 13:27 <[joker]> and you wish you can be all powerful 13:28 <nemesis> what? 13:28 — [joker] flex 13:28 <nemesis> nice armchair psychology you fedora cunt 13:28 <pipework> Men who call themselves feminists are just suffering from internalized misandry. 13:28 <pipework> I don't internalize mine, I just hate men. 13:28 <timekeeper> look at y'all armchair psychologists 13:28 <[joker]> so cute how it breaks out all the reddit insults 13:28 <nemesis> thats funny you claiming i want to be powerful 13:28 <pipework> timekeeper: self-taught psychiatrists, yeah? 13:28 <nemesis> when im submissive in bed :p 13:28 <nemesis> pipework fedora psychiatry 13:29 <pipework> nemesis: Everyone here knows you're a power-bottom 13:29 <nemesis> im female 13:29 <nemesis> thats why hes salty 13:29 <pipework> nemesis: Changes nothing. 13:29 <timekeeper> what is a power bottom 13:29 <nemesis> he cant tolerate FEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEMALES questioning him 13:29 <pipework> timekeeper: google image search these things. 13:29 <nemesis> power bottom ;) 13:29 <timekeeper> dudes in tshirts mostly 13:30 <nemesis> is there a.gis command 13:30 <pipework> nemesis: Maybe he just can't deal with inferior beings in his way. 13:30 <pipework> timekeeper: sorry, turn off safe search 13:30 <[joker]> you are just a man hating person, in general, i have no problems with actual women, and get along with them just fine 13:30 <nemesis> why do u keep insisting i hate men 13:30 <pipework> [joker]: I prefer imaginary people over real people. :( 13:30 <pipework> nemesis: Because you aren't throwing yourself at him, duh 13:30 <[joker]> why do you keep insisting im afraid of females? :0 13:30 <[joker]> ;) 13:30 <nemesis> you started 13:31 <pipework> [joker]: Because bitches be scary, yo 13:31 <nemesis> you neckbearded bitter, angry salty sad excuse of a person 13:31 <[joker]> well yeah, the feminazis are 13:31 — ^_^ raises eyebrow and looks at nemesis 13:31 <[joker]> being angry is part of normal life, nothing wrong with it 13:31 <nemesis> hi tim 13:31 <pipework> nemesis: Lol, salty. tumblr often? 13:31 <pipework> :D 13:31 <timekeeper> safe search IS off 13:31 <[joker]> im certainly not salty at you, you are like some little blip living in a shit hole 13:31 <nemesis> i dont browse tumblr 13:31 <[joker]> i live in the greatest nation on this planet 13:32 <nemesis> lol so youre also a racist douche 13:32 <nemesis> amazing 13:32 <timekeeper> http://image.spreadshirtmedia.com/image-server/v1/compositions/109026168/views/1,width=235,height=235,appearanceId=2,backgroundColor=f9f9f9,version=1439461515/KEEP-CALM-I-M-A-POWER-BOTTOM-Hoodies.jpg 13:32 <timekeeper> sfw 13:32 <timekeeper> i'll just urbandict it 13:32 <[joker]> racism huh, interesting :) 13:32 <timekeeper> nemesis: where do you live? 13:32 <nemesis> peru 13:32 <timekeeper> urbandict cleared it up 13:33 <pipework> timekeeper: :D 13:33 <[joker]> not sure how my country being better makes me a racist, but you like to play the victim 13:33 <nemesis> you said i lived in a shithole 13:33 <nemesis> you idiot 13:33 <[joker]> yah 13:33 <[joker]> how is that racist? 13:33 <nemesis> how isnt it discriminatory 13:33 <timekeeper> pipework helps me learn new things erry day 13:33 <[joker]> how is it racist? 13:34 <[joker]> you're such a little victim 13:34 <pipework> [joker]: Because some races associate themselves with being shit. 13:34 <pipework> Obvi 13:34 <[joker]> yeah i guess 13:34 <nemesis> you're the one using armchair psychology on me 13:34 <[joker]> stop using reddit buzzwords you dont comprehend 13:34 <nemesis> i do comprehend it 13:34 <[joker]> mmhm 13:34 <pipework> I believe that if a psychiatrist can't afford an armchair, you shouldn't be going to that psychiatrist 13:34 <[joker]> im not tryina physchology anything, just pointing out your obvious hate of men ;) 13:35 <nemesis> kThe area of text classification has attracted a lot of interest from both the machine learning research community and the industry. One popular application of text classification is sentiment analysis, whose objective is to guess the positive or negative attitude of a user towards a topic given a sentence. In this post I will give an overview of how to apply machine learning techniques to text classification and sentiment analysis.
Natural Language Processing
Natural Language Processing (NLP) is the area of machine learning that studies the generation and understanding of language, both in writing and speaking. Its main objective is to create machines able to understand and communicate with us in a natural way.
Some subareas of NLP are machine translation, speech recognition, topic modeling, Q&A, information retrieval, optical character recognition (OCR), text classification and sentiment analysis. Of all of them, machine translation is my favorite, it consists of automatic translation between different languages, like the Babel fish in a Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy. A technology like this will, hopefully, reduce the hate between people speaking different languages, but maybe I'm a dreamer. Speech recognition has to do with recognizing spoken language. In this area, there was an important advance in October 2016, when Microsoft Research achieved human parity in conversational speech recognition. Topic modeling is used to extract the topics in a document and it is generally used in text mining to discover similarities between documents. Q&A took a good deal of relevance thanks to IBM Watson and its victory in Jeopardy. Now this area is extensively used by companies in their customer services. Information retrieval is in the core of one of the most profitable business in the world, Google. OCR has the objective to provide a machine with reading capabilities.
Text Classification
In this post I will focus on text classification and sentiment analysis. Text classification, also called topic classification, is a methodology to categorize pieces of text into classes. It has a very interesting business application that some companies are taking advantage of. When a customer communicates with the company asking for a service or just for customer support, the system has to redirect the customer to the correct department (or even to the final solution). In that situation, a text classifier can save a lot of money.
A very interesting business application of text classification is sentiment analysis. It is a method to automatically understand the perception of customers towards a product or service based on their comments. The input text is classified into positive, negative, and in some situations, neutral. It is extensively used by companies to track the user behavior in Twitter. Sentiment analysis can strongly influence the marketing strategy of a company, improving the customer experience and defining the advertising roadmap.
In this notebook, I give a tutorial on how to quickly implement text classification in python using fastText library. Using DBPedia dataset we can classify a sentence like the following:
Sentence: One of my favourite tennis players in the world is Rafa Nadal.
Label: 4; label name: Athlete; certainty: 0.904297
As it can be seen, the model classifies the sentence as Athlete with a certainty of 90.429%.
We can perform a similar operation with a tweet, using the Amazon polarity dataset (in fact it would be probably better to use another dataset trained with Twitter data)
In this case, the model predicts that the tweet is positive with a certainty of 99.80% (and yeah, the hololens were really impressive).
Word Featurization
Most text classification techniques use some kind of word featurization. It transforms the text into a numeric representation. This numeric representation allows machine learning algorithms for easily computing models using the words or characters as inputs. Two notable techniques are bag of words and word embedding.
Bag of words consists of computing the frequency of each word in the text as an histogram. Sometimes, instead of getting the frequency of single words, you can compute the method for pairs of words, often referred as bi-grams, or triplets of words, referred as tri-grams. The general case is called n-grams. Once the text is mapped as an histogram, other techniques can be applied. One example is text comparison, the bag of words of two sentences can be computed and subsequently compared using a metric like quadratic difference or Kullback-Liebler divergence.
Word embeddings was an idea introduced by Bengio in 2001. Basically, the method maps each word to a high dimensional vector of perhaps 50 to 300 dimensions. The algorithm learns simultaneously a distributed representation for each word along with a probability function for word sequences. Therefore the method can understand that the sentence "the cat is playing with a toy" and "the cat is playing with an object" are equivalent and have a high probability to be consistent. However, in the sentence "the cat is flying with a toy", the method would produce a low probability. Of all word embedding algorithms maybe the most popular is word2vec created by Mikolov.
Another property of word embeddings is that we can compute the similarity between words, as we did in the notebook (in the word representations section). In the multidimensional space, the difference between king and queen, 12.58, will be smaller than between king and woman, 20.16. Makes sense, right? At the same time, the difference between king and queen will be similar to the difference between man and woman, 11.27.
Finally, we can represent the words in a reduced dimensional space. For that we used the t-SNE algorithm. The results can be visualized in the section word space visualization of the notebook. After the computation, we can see that the words bird and dove are clustered together, also sister and brother, and mother and father.
Curiosly, the word wolf is closer to man, than woman. Basically, t-SNE is saying that a man is more similar to a wolf that to a woman. That's the first time I was insulted by an algorithm!!! You suck t-SNE!In the wake of the failed Christmas Day airplane bombing and the killing a few days later of seven CIA operatives in Afghanistan, Washington is, as it was after the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks, obsessed with "dots" -- and our inability to connect them. "The U.S. government had sufficient information to have uncovered this plot and potentially disrupt the Christmas Day attack, but our intelligence community failed to connect those dots," the president said Tuesday.
But for all the talk, two key dots have yet to be connected: Umar Farouk Abdulmutallab, the alleged Northwest Airlines Flight 253 attacker, and Humam Khalil Abu-Mulal al-Balawi, the trusted CIA informant turned assassin. Although a 23-year-old Nigerian engineering student and a 36-year-old Jordanian physician would seem to have little in common, they both exemplify a new grand strategy that al-Qaeda has been successfully pursuing for at least a year.
Throughout 2008 and 2009, U.S. officials repeatedly trumpeted al-Qaeda's demise. In a May 2008 interview with The Washington Post, then-CIA Director Michael Hayden heralded the group's "near strategic defeat." And the intensified aerial drone attacks that President Obama authorized against al-Qaeda targets in Pakistan last year were widely celebrated for having killed over half of its remaining senior leadership.
Yet, oddly enough for a terrorist movement supposedly on its last legs, al-Qaeda late last month launched two separate attacks less than a week apart -- one failed and one successful -- triggering the most extensive review of U.S. national security policies since 2001. Al-Qaeda's newfound vitality is the product of a fresh strategy that plays to its networking strength and compensates for its numerical weakness. In contrast to its plan on Sept. 11, which was to deliver a knock-out blow to the United States, al-Qaeda's leadership has now adopted a "death by a thousand cuts" approach. There are five core elements to this strategy.
First, al-Qaeda is increasingly focused on overwhelming, distracting and exhausting us. To this end, it seeks to flood our already information-overloaded national intelligence systems with myriad threats and background noise. Al-Qaeda hopes we will be so distracted and consumed by all this data that we will overlook key clues, such as those before Christmas that linked Abdulmutallab to an al-Qaeda airline-bombing plot.
Second, in the wake of the global financial crisis, al-Qaeda has stepped up a strategy of economic warfare. "We will bury you," Soviet Premier Nikita Khrushchev promised Americans 50 years ago. Today, al-Qaeda threatens: "We will bankrupt you." Over the past year, the group has issued statements, videos, audio messages and letters online trumpeting its actions against Western financial systems, even taking credit for the economic crisis. However divorced from reality these claims may be, propaganda doesn't have to be true to be believed, and the assertions resonate with al-Qaeda's target audiences.
Heightened security measures after the Christmas Day plot, coupled with the likely development of ever more sophisticated passenger-screening and intelligence technologies, stand to cost a lot of money, while the war in Afghanistan constitutes a massive drain on American resources. Given the economic instability here and abroad, al-Qaeda seems to think that a strategy of financial attrition will pay outsize dividends.
Third, al-Qaeda is still trying to create divisions within the global alliance arrayed against it by targeting key coalition partners. Terrorist attacks on mass-transit systems in Madrid in 2004 and London in 2005 were intended to punish Spain and Britain for participating in the war in Iraq and in the U.S.-led war on terrorism, and al-Qaeda continues this approach today. During the past two years, serious terrorist plots orchestrated by al-Qaeda's allies in Pakistan, meant to punish Spain and the Netherlands for participating in the war on terrorism, were thwarted in Barcelona and Amsterdam.
Meanwhile, in Afghanistan, suicide bombers and roadside explosives target contingents from countries such as Britain, Canada, Germany and the Netherlands, where popular support for deployments has waned, in hopes of hastening their withdrawal from the NATO-led coalition.
Fourth, al-Qaeda is aggressively seeking out, destabilizing and exploiting failed states and other areas of lawlessness. While the United States remains preoccupied with trying to secure yesterday's failed state -- Afghanistan -- al-Qaeda is busy staking out new terrain. The terrorist network sees failing states as providing opportunities to extend its reach, and it conducts local campaigns of subversion to hasten their decline. Over the past year, it has increased its activities in places such as Pakistan, Algeria, the Sahel, Somalia and, in particular, Yemen.
Once al-Qaeda has located or helped create a region of lawlessness, it guides allies and related terrorist groups in that area, boosting their local, regional and -- as the Northwest Airlines plot demonstrated -- international attack capabilities. Although the exact number of al-Qaeda personnel in each of these areas varies, and in some cases may include no more than a few hard-core terrorists, they perform a critical force-multiplying function. Their help to indigenous terrorist groups includes support for attacks -- by providing weapons, training and intelligence -- and, equally critical, assistance in disseminating propaganda, such as by building Web sites and launching online magazines modeled on al-Qaeda's.
Fifth and finally, al-Qaeda is covetously seeking recruits from non-Muslim countries who can be easily deployed for attacks in the West. The group's leaders see people like these -- especially converts to Islam whose appearances and names would not arouse the same scrutiny that persons from Islamic countries might -- as the ultimate fifth column. Citizens of countries that participate in the U.S. visa-waiver program are especially prized because they can move freely between Western countries and blend easily into these societies.I recently wrote on my vision for the future of 3D printers, largely on their use for manufacturing. I wanted to expand more broadly on my thoughts on prototyping technologies, and particularly for rapid and lean prototyping for mechanical designs.
“Lean” started in the context of manufacturing automobiles, and has since been taken to describe prototyping and customer development for software start-ups. Many software/web start-ups do not win because of a science or technology invention. Instead, user experiences and marketing are what drive success. I think people are realizing that this can apply for hardware as well, and the increasing ease of prototyping is helping to drive the increase in hardware based projects and start-ups such as those seen on Kickstarter’s design section. Of course, hardware continues to have the challenge that production and distribution continues to be more difficult than for software.
I will outline here tools and methods I use in prototyping hardware. What do you do? (please post in the comment field below)
The Dollar Store
Duct tape, super glue, spray paint, and a dollar store full of imagination are possibly the best (and maybe least expected) prototyping tools. I’m a strong advocate of the super-alpha prototype: the more you can build quickly, the faster you can find what you don’t know. It’s also easier to get excited about a project when you have something tangible to show people (potential customers!)
Don’t forget the spray paint! A prototype that looks sketchy automatically throws off people you show it to. Civilians will discount even the best features on a prototype if it looks unprofessional, unfinished, and ugly.
Amazon, electronics stores, and hardware stores are also great resources, especially once you have enough of an idea what you are building so that you can specify a specific part. Before that, quick, cheap, and convenient should be the main criteria for finding parts and materials.
Pen and Paper
Very quick calculations can prove your idea violates the laws of physics. Save yourself embarrassment and make sure that you are the one to do these calculations, not someone else (like an investor) and that you do them before you invest too much time into a project. Such calculations can also help decide between design alternatives and optimize design choices.
Simple sketches can help realize ideas and form them to guide physical prototypes. There is often a lot of different ways to build or do something. Having different ways on paper can help deciding which direction to take. They can also express your ideas quickly to other people.
Computer Modeling
CAD Model and Development, Image courtesy Nikola LK
A tried-and-true method for professional mechanical designers, some computer aided design (CAD) programs have come down in price a lot recently. Alibre for instance is about the same price as Microsoft Office Home and Business, and gives probably 70-80% of the functionality of professional design software. Entry-level CAD systems often don’t have simulation applications to test the physics of parts, but some packages are available open source that do. Simulation also requires training to do make reliable models.
I’m not sure why CAD isn’t getting more publicity for maker, hacker, and hobbyist use – a physical model is often easy to make from a fully rendered CAD model. CAD models can be changed easier, quicker, and at less cost. Design iteration time on CAD can be as quick as modifying software code.
However, if the final widget uses parts that interact with one another, a CAD model may not be able to prove everything works together. This is especially true for moving parts or imbedded electronics.
2D Cutting
75mm thick steel, cut by waterjet, Image courtesy Fromthecorner
Waterjet and laser cutters etch or remove a pattern from sheet metal (and other materials). The sheet can then be folded to a 3D final shape. These can be very cheap and quick: for example a small part could be made in as little as five minutes and at a cost of $5. The size of the machines makes them practical for anything from smartphone to laptop size, with exceptions either way for certain applications.
The machines are not common in people’s houses, and take a bit of a different design approach: you have to think about your 3D project on a 2D sheet. Even if you don’t have one in your house, there should be several companies that will be able to cut your part in even a small city.
Additive Manufacturing
The fancy name for “3D printing”, additive manufacturing has become popular for hobbyists and the media. It is fascinating to watch a part grow in front of you, and a variety of metals, plastics, and rubber-like materials are available, but generally not on the same machine. Machines are also now small, cheap, and usable enough that they are no longer restricted to industrial use. Assemblies that would otherwise require serveral components can be built as a single part on a 3D printer. 3D printers allow for making parts that are impossible with other processes, for instance parts with internal holes and voids. They also can be used to make quick, inexpensive tooling for molds to make parts from. A prototype can be made for $20-$100+ depending what it is.
CNC
Computer numeric control (CNC) usually refers to a milling machine that cuts a big chunk of metal (or other material) into a finished part. It was probably the first type of “prototyping machine”, but is often used for production as well. Usually people don’t have these in their house (although the hobbyist and homemade CNC group seems to be growing), and CNC parts can be more expensive than other contracted parts. Usually parts are in the $150+ range.
Molding and Fibreglass
Carbon fibre aeroshell from a fibreglass mold, UBC Solar Car team
Molding and fibreglass are great for making irregular-shaped parts or if you need several copies of the same part. There can be a lot more initial work to make a mold than other processes, but quick molds using hobbyist and film-industry materials can be made pretty quickly. Some chemicals involved in fibreglass and some molds are toxic and require gloves and/or ventilation. Materials can be quite cheap, $50-$100 is enough to make most small-medium sized parts.
Welding
Welding allows the joining of metal. It is useful for many different parts including frames from metal tubes or making sheet metal into 3D parts. Like molding, there can be a lot of set-up time in making jigs to hold parts in place when they are being welded. Spot welders are good for quickly joining metal pieces and require much less skill to operate, and are particularly useful in joining 2D sheet metal projects that were cut on waterjet or laser to make 3D parts. Often, glues are easier to use and will suffice for a prototype.
Arduino
Arduino and other microcontrollers are an easy and cheap way to prototype and integrate electronics into a project. There are lots of examples and support for the platform: someone else has probably already solved the problem you are having and is willing to help. Sparkfun and others have good sensors and other electrical accessories that work with Arduino and other platforms.
User Feedback
If making something for more than a few people to use, you have to talk to people you hope will use it. Live demos or letting potential users play with your prototypes is important. But it’s also important in who you pick to ask for feedback and how you let them use it. With this feedback, you build improve the next round of prototypes, until the project is ready. I expect there are many parallels to Lean software development here.
How I (try to) pick people for feedback:
Open to Change
Don’t take away Milton’s stapler, Image courtesy Devinpoore
If someone is too happy with what they already have, they will be resistant to change. Even worse is if the user doesn’t want to change but they think their boss will force them to. These types of people will think of any reason your prototype won’t work, and it can be tough to convince them differently. Try to take away Milton’s stapler and he’ll burn the place down (reference to the movie Office Space).
Will Give a Fair Assessment
Like the above person who will only say negative things about your work, try to avoid people who will only say positive things. Your mother is not the person to get good feedback from, assuming she is supportive of everything you do.
Some people get excited about anything just for being new. Feedback from them can be motivating but may require coaching and interpreting to make the advice constructive.
Is Sympathetic to How Prototypes Are
Prototype for a hovercraft, Image courtesy Timothyrfries
Many people are never exposed to how things are made. Stuff comes from Amazon or Walmart, and it better be perfect. If it breaks, looks ugly, sounds funny, or crashes, it’s a bad product and the company that made it may never be trusted again. Unfortunately for people looking for feedback, I expect most people fall into this category.
These people need to have their hands held if you choose them for product feedback, as they are often disappointed with what you show them. You need to manage expectations and teach them what exactly your prototype is showing. If they understand the prototype is only testing a few features of a final product, they will be more understanding. These people are why spray paint and making your prototype look good is so important: for early stage design, discussion should be about ideas and features, not distracted by aesthetics.
Summary
Prototyping is cheaper and easier than ever. In my opinion, a prototype for many Kickstarter-ready design projects could be made for $1000 in parts and materials, some for even $100. Like software development, the larger investment is in time put in by the designers. Of course, several (or sometimes many) stages of prototypes are needed to arrive at a final design. Good user feedback is essential, and this feedback should guide making the next round of prototypes. It is an iterative cycle. The key to making good products is making mistakes early and learning from them. This is best done through prototyping and getting user feedback.
Acknowledgements
Many of my ideas and views on prototyping were formed in the University of British Columbia Mechanical Engineering program, and particularly from the design faculty. Some thoughts are inspired by work from the Center for Design Research group at Stanford and the Engineering Design Centre at Cambridge. Any of these three groups are great places to look more in-depth on these points.
Edits:
Start of some good discussion on HackerNews: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4790562Howard Stern would have plenty of options, including Netflix or Apple Music, if he were to leave Sirius XM when his contract expires next month, said Mel Karmazin, former CEO of the satellite radio service.
"I really have no idea as to what he's going to do," Karmazin, a longtime supporter of Stern, told CNBC's "Squawk Box" on Wednesday. "He's an extraordinary performer. I think that he would have a tremendous amount of alternatives."
Read MoreMel Karmazin: I've pulled my money out of stocks
One of Stern's options, according to Karmazin, could involve Stern's 30-year library of radio shows and other material.
"He owns it all. He could syndicate it. He doesn't have to work anymore. He could either sell his company or he could do a 'Law and Order,' a 'Friends,' a 'Seinfeld' and make a whole bunch of money because everyone is in need of content," said Karmazin.
"Howard could also do something, arguably a la Netflix-type," Karmazin speculated. "It's original content. He does the video... [and] it could be a TV show that could be available worldwide."
Karmazin also said he thinks Apple, which just started its own music streaming service, would be a good fit for Stern. In fact, he said he didn't see any reason why Apple wouldn't want to just buy Sirius.
But as a paying subscriber to Sirius, Karmazin said he hopes "The Howard Stern Show" doesn't go anywhere.
"I think Sirius would be in a position of paying him whatever it takes to keep him," he continued. "My bet would be he would stay, but I have really don't have an idea."
Stern decided earlier this year to leave his lucrative side job on primetime television as a judge on NBC's "America's Got Talent." (Simon Cowell, formerly of "American Idol" and "The X Factor," is taking Stern's place, and plans to continue as executive producer of "AGT.")
Analysts estimate that Stern's current Sirius XM contract is worth $80 million a year.
"I think Howard loves money. I don't say that in any pejorative way," Karmazin said. "He's working. He knows how much money other people are making off of that [radio] show. And I think he wants his fair share or unfair share."
Stern and Karmazin go way back.
In 1985, when Karmazin ran Infinity Broadcasting, he hired Stern after the shock jock was fired from WNBC radio. Their fortunes rose together as Infinity was purchased by CBS parent Westinghouse in 1996. Viacom then bought CBS in 2001. (Viacom and CBS in 2005 split into two companies). Along the way, Karmazin, who served as CEO of CBS and then president of Viacom, stuck with Stern despite steep government indecency fines.
Shortly after Stern took his terrestrial radio show in 2004 from Viacom to then-Sirius Radio, Karmazin followed to lead the fledgling satellite radio company. Karmazin, with Stern in his stable, oversaw the merger of Sirius and its larger rival XM, which took 17 months to get government approval.
In 2013, John Malone's Liberty Media took a majority ownership of Sirius XM. In anticipation of that move, Karmazin resigned as Sirius CEO.Chinese President Xi Jinping, center, President Obama, right, and U.N. Secretary General Ban Ki-moon shake hands during a joint ratification of the Paris climate change agreement in Hangzhou, China. (How Hwee Young/European Pressphoto Agency)
U.N. Secretary General Ban Ki-moon announced last week that the 2015 Paris climate change accords will, in all likelihood, go into effect this year. These accords commit the U.S. and dozens of other nations to try to lower greenhouse gas emissions to mitigate climate change.
But devising multilateral agreements is painstaking work. Typically, negotiators from hundreds of states deliberate for many years. Any agreement they reach often involves major compromises, which means provisions that experts consider important tend to be watered down
Nowhere is this more apparent than the case of the Paris Climate Change Accords. To break decades of multilateral gridlock on climate change, negotiators followed the mantra don’t let the perfect be the enemy of the good.
But is there a cost to being flexible?
Some researchers, including Rachel Brewster, caution that flexible agreement language can fail to commit states to anything substantial, turning stepping-stones into stumbling blocks. In contrast, Anne-Marie Slaughter and David Victor celebrate the more flexible strategy in the Paris climate change agreement.
[Wondering what’s different about the Paris climate change negotiations?]
It is hard to tell who is right here. Typically, states reserve flexible language for all the burdensome agreement provisions — the points that they expect will be hard to implement. So when states fail to comply with a flexibly worded provision, it is difficult to say whether this is because the language was flexible, or because the provision required burdensome changes in state behavior.
Here’s how we tested the impact of flexible language
In a recent article in International Organization, we put these ideas to the test by studying a different Paris accord — the Paris Principles on national human rights institutions. The Paris Principles offer a rare opportunity to assess the impact flexible language can have on compliance. Drafted in a haphazard and highly unusual way over just a couple of days in 1991 by a handful of practitioners with very limited information, the Paris Principles came into effect without governments watering down the final text. In 1993, governments adopted these standards wholesale in a nonbinding General Assembly resolution.
The Paris Principles call on all countries to establish national human rights institutions (NHRIs) and specify how to design these institutions. In the human rights field, where some question whether international agreements have any meaningful effect on the actions of states, it would be surprising to find that the principles had any effect, let alone effects traceable to the language of particular provisions.
[Yes, the TPP agreement is over 5,000 pages long. Here’s why that’s a good thing.]
But this is exactly what we do find. NHRIs across the globe are more likely to incorporate a provision when the Paris Principles use firm, as opposed to flexible, language.
Strong recommendations worked better
Despite the Paris Principles being nonbinding, we found a significant difference between strong and weak recommendations — i.e., provisions that state that NHRIs “shall” be given certain powers, as opposed to provisions that NHRIs “may” be given other prerogatives.
For example, a strong recommendation states that NHRIs “shall be given as broad as mandate as possible … set forth in a constitutional or legislative text.” A weak recommendation, in contrast, states that NHRIs “may be authorized to hear and consider complaints.”
We studied 22 such provisions in over 100 NHRIs, using a team of law students to help code NHRI charters, as well as diverse other sources. We found the probability that a country would adopt a particular provision increased greatly (from 55 percent to 74 percent) if the provision was strongly recommended. In contrast, the probability that a country would adopt a weakly recommended provisions either stayed constant or declined.
Some of our analyses are based on before/after comparisons; we found, for example, that the strongly recommended mandate to advise on legislation is included in 63 percent of NHRIs established before Paris and 79 percent of NHRIs established |
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(Visited 115 times, 1 visits today)Photo by Daniel Freel/New Jersey Herald State Sen. Raymond Lesniak, D-20, adds his signature as sponsor of a bill to prohibit logging within the Sparta Mountain Wildlife Management Area, on Monday, in Trenton. Looking on are Silvia Solaun, of the Friends of Sparta Mountain, Julia Somers, executive director of the Highlands Coalition, and Jeff Tittel, executive director of the New Jersey Sierra Club.
Photo by Daniel Freel/New Jersey Herald Silvia Solaun, right, of the Friends of Sparta Mountain, speaks alongside state Sen. Raymond Lesniak, D-20, at the State House in Trenton. Lesniak introduced a bill on Monday to ban logging within the Sparta Mountain Wildlife Management Area.
Posted: Feb. 28, 2017 12:01 am
TRENTON -- "Stop the Chop," a slogan adopted by those against any forestry work within Sparta Mountain Wildlife Management Area, moved from roadside signs and T-shirts to the state Legislature on Monday when state Sen. Raymond Lesniak, D-20, introduced a bill which literally "stops the chop."
The bill, which had not received a number by late Monday afternoon, amends existing state law on the Highlands, and subtracts by addition. In a clause which allows "activity conducted in accordance with an approved woodland management plan," the measure adds "on privately owned lands," which would ban activities on publicly-owned land within the state-designated Highlands.
Lesniak, whose district is four municipalities in Union County and who is an announced candidate for governor in this year's Democrat primary, said he found out about the year-long controversy last month in a Twitter message.
He made an appearance at a Jan. 26 meeting in Franklin, sponsored by Friends of Sparta Mountain, to discuss the latest on the state's proposed updated forestry plan. At the meeting, he promised he would take action.
In addition to the bill amendment which would stop forestry work on public property, Lesniak also introduced a bill which would "codify" a state initiative from 1994 known as the Landscape Project, which was designed to find and protect the state's biodiversity.
While the project was put into effect through state regulations and agency actions, it was never formally adopted.
In addition to adopting and folding the Landscape Project into the Natural Heritage Program, the bill would also require a thorough study of flora and fauna within any area of state-owned lands and ban any activity which would "negatively impact the natural habitat, functioning ecosystem or populations of species" which are of listed by the state as of special concern, rare, threatened or endangered.
At a news conference Monday morning, Lesniak, when asked about the cost to do the increased studies and surveys required under his proposal, said, "the cost is priceless, there can be no cost put onto it," adding that if the state really wants to do such a project it will, ending with the oft-used expression: "Where there's a will, there's a way."
At the end of December 2015, the state Division of Fish and Wildlife released its updated forestry plan for the next 10 years for the 3,461-acre Sparta Mountain WMA. The division had already done work within the area under an existing forestry plan developed under contract with the state by New Jersey Audubon.
But opposition to the updated plan came from the Sierra Club and spread quickly to the privately-owned lake communities within the management area. Through a series of meetings, both between the Department of Environmental Protection and local governing bodies and between those municipalities and citizens groups, such as Friends of Sparta Mountain, resistance to the plan grew.
The state twice extended a public comment period on the plan and has been working to incorporate comments from the public into an updated plan which has yet to be released.
John Cecil, project manager for New Jersey Audubon, said on Monday he expects the plan to be finalized within a couple of weeks. The state will then hold a meeting to discuss the final plan.
At Monday's event, Lesniak said Christopher Bateman, R-16, has signed on as a co-sponsor to the two bills while Assemblyman John McKeon, D-27, is sponsoring the bills in the Assembly.
In a news release following Lesniak's event, Cecil said he looks forward to working with the senator on preserving Sparta Mountain, but said, "This should not be a debate; the science is clear. States throughout the northeast safely and effectively use forestry to create wildlife habitat."
He noted that New Jersey forests lack the natural disturbances, such as forest fires, flooding, wind and ice, "which would allow them to naturally rejuvenate and provide habitat for rare and declining wildlife."
And that seems to be the crux of the debate even among environmental scientists, foresters and ecologists: should forests be "managed," such as the Young Forest Initiative which is being adopted in neighboring states which looks to man to create successional habitat; or should nature be allowed to manage forests itself.
Both sides have used the bird species, the golden-winged warbler -- a species which has been proposed for federal protection as threatened -- as a poster child.
Those looking at management note the species needs such successional (new growth) forests for breeding grounds which could also help other species of birds which use such young growth during its lifecycle.
Those who believe the forest should be mostly left alone, say other species that need the deeper forests will be harmed by the "doughnut-hole" effect of cutting down trees to create forest openings.
Appearing with Lesniak on Monday was Jeff Tittel, executive director of the New Jersey Sierra Club, who said the public lands in New Jersey were purchased with public funds "to be held as open space and to be preserved."
He said the contiguous forests of the Highlands serves as a green belt for wildlife and, importantly, as the headwaters for a natural water supply for six million people.
He also noted that forest stewardship plans, and resulting logging on private property within the Highlands will be allowed and called the Sparta Mountain forestry plan "a con job to take trees which have been around 120 years."
He went on to say the plan is a money-making plan to take New Jersey trees "to be milled in upstate New York or Canada and then shipped to China to be turned into furniture."
Both the state DEP and Audubon have said there has been no profit made on previous work within the management area and many of the projects have been done by volunteers.
Julia Somers, executive director of the Highlands Coalition, repeated the argument about the Highlands supplying water for much of the state's population, but also noted that those same Highlands and their forests draw more visitors each year than do the Yellowstone, Grand Canyon and Yosemite national parks, combined.
Dennis Miranda of Eastern Conservation Advisors, a proponent of the state's Landscape Project, said it should be made a matter of law, but it was "abandoned quietly."
The bills, once assigned numbers in the Assembly and Senate, will be sent to the appropriate committees for discussion and possible action. If no action is taken by the end of the session -- early January 2018 -- the bills will die, but could be resubmitted for consideration when the new Legislature convenes next year.
Lesniak said he doubted Gov. Chris Christie, who is term-limited, would sign the legislation if approved, "but we can delay until next year when I'm sure there will be someone more amenable in office."
He then said, "Gotta practice up," as he signed the proposed legislation as its sponsor, and handed pens to two supporters.
Bruce A. Scruton can also be contacted on Twitter: @brucescrutonNJH or by phone: 973-383-1224In an interview with The Real News Network Noam Chomsky says that people should vote against McCain and for Obama - but without illusions.
The question posed by ABC's George Stefanopolous "is not whether elites should rule, but which elite should rule?" It's a candid question that reflects the disillusioned reality of the looming American election. In an interview with The Real News, the renowned professor urges the voters in swing states to vote against McCain, therefore for Obama, while maintaining realistic expectations about the Democratic candidate.
Critics of American political options argue that the two prevailing parties are two halves of the same whole. Chomsky explains that there lies some merit in this belief, as the Democrats and Republicans formulate the "larger business party". This reality is highlighted as both parties hold to-the-right stances of public opinion on a host of issues, such as healthcare. For said reasons, it is imperative that the voting public sets attainable expectations for an Obama administration, while recognizing that the elevated 'change' rhetoric will dissolve into standard Democratic policy.
Americans are concerned about healthcare. In recent polls 95% of voters demonstrated an interest in the issue. Interestingly enough, the healthcare issue only surfaced in the public political agenda in 2004. In 2008, we witnessed both Democratic candidates approach the issue. Chomsky illustrates that this shift in focus is not a result of changing Democratic ideals, but a response to the emphasis of healthcare concerns from economic heavy hitters, such as the manufacturing industry.
Chomsky states that there is no shame in voting for the lesser of two evils, if one feel that the issues are reduced to this. The responsibility lies on the shoulders of the swing state voters to ask themselves, if the change they want to see will be achieved through voting for Obama or alternative political parties in order to strengthen their future political presence. At the end of the day, he reminds voters to keep illusions in check as they head off to the polls in November.The aunt of the suspected Boston bomber claimed Friday afternoon on CNN that her nephew Dzhokhar Tsarnaev was framed for the attack.
“I’m suspicious that this was staged,” Maret Tsarnaev said from Toronto, Canada.
Asked who she believes framed them and why, she responded, “Whoever needs this. Whoever is looking for those who need to be blamed for these attacks.”
“Who is interested in this case? When you are blowing up people, and you want to bring attention to something, for some purpose, you know, you do that math,” she said. “I’m used to being set up. Before I left former Soviet Union country, that’s how I lived. Always.”
The aunt said she found the FBI footage of Dzhokhar Tsarnaev and his brother Tamerlan walking yards apart to be “strange.”
“They are normal young men,” she insisted.
Maret Tsarnaev earlier spoke to Jenny Yuen of the Toronto Sun and voiced skepticism that her two nephews were responsible for the bombings this week during the Boston Marathon.Special Amazon Holiday Delivery by Sam Hurwitt Comics, Featured, Wonder Wednesday WONDER WEDNESDAY On Wednesdays I look at various chapters in Wonder Woman’s history. Click here for previous installments. What’s this? Wonder Wednesday?! It’s been MONTHS since I did that! Yeah, well, it’s been an insane year, and I had to cut way back on pretty much everything. But I didn’t want to let the year go by with at least one more installment, and when better than just in time for a Christmas story with everyone’s favorite pagan superheroine! I only wish I had a better one to give you, but I hear it’s the thought that counts. Read more
She’s a Sensation by Sam Hurwitt Comics, Wonder Wednesday WONDER WEDNESDAY On Wednesdays I look at various chapters in Wonder Woman’s history. Click here for previous installments. Readers of this space may recall that I was super excited (or maybe wonder excited—nah, that’s dumb) about Sensation Comics Featuring Wonder Woman, the anthology series of various writers and artists telling Wonder Woman stories that don’t have to fit at all into current continuity. I wrote up the first four issues here, but it’s up to #7 by now. Whatever happened to that? Read moreRichard Lugner and Kim Kardashian at the Opera Ball. Photo: APA/Georg Hochmuth
American reality TV star Kim Kardashian has called her trip to Vienna to attend the Opera Ball “a true nightmare,” adding that “it was so racist”.
Scenes from the trip were shown on Sunday night's episode of Keeping Up With The Kardashians, and Kim told her sister that “it's like we're honestly in a time warp. Racial insensitivity, everything from this trip, has just been a true nightmare.”
Kardashian was confronted by an Austrian comedian in full 'blackface' when she was a VIP guest of entrepreneur Richard Lugner at the ball, four months ago.
The TV cameras caught her shock at seeing him calling out “Kim, I'm here” - clearly pretending to be her husband, American rapper Kanye West.
“I don't get why him or anyone else would find this funny. This is supposed to be a really nice, upscale event. How did this guy get in? Is this just like a sick joke?” Kardashian said.
The culprit, Chris Stephan, who describes himself as the “naughtiest” society reporter in Austria said he wanted to get an interview with Kardashian, and mistakenly thought the ‘disguise’ would work, but that he never intended it to be an “act of racism”.
Kardashian said she had previously dismissed her husband Kanye's complaints about racism still being such a current problem. “I obviously understood it, but it's just such a different thing when you experience it yourself,” she admitted.
As her final commitment in Vienna Kardashian did a live TV interview with ORF host Mirjam Wechselbraun, and it was then that another comedian, German actor Oliver Pocher, left her visibly shocked and uncomfortable as he joked that he was only going to dance when “Ni**as in Vienna” was played - a reference to Kanye and Jay-Z's song, “Ni**as In Paris”.
Kardashian says her reaction was "Oh my God. Did he say what I think he just said?" Her mother, who was also there, added: "I get that he's a comedian but clearly that was incredibly inappropriate."
Kardashian said the Vienna Ball was “super glamorous”, but that she was suffering from anxiety as she found it “super claustrophobic”.
Expats working in Austria have also complained of being confronted with racism, and one wrote an Op-Ed for The Local about his experience.
ZARA (Zivilcourage und Anti-Rassismus-Arbeit), an NGO which monitors racism in Austria, identified 731 racist incidents in 2013, 53 of which were graffiti. The majority of these incidents occurred in the public sphere - a comment by a politician, an unjust arrest, or an indiscriminate attack.BHOPAL, India: Only three words were scrawled on the letter from her husband and posted to her parent’s home in central India, but they were enough to shatter Sadaf Mehmood’s life.
Using an ancient and controversial practice, Mehmood’s husband wrote “talaq, talaq, talaq” or “I divorce you” three times in Arabic, instantly ending his marriage of five years.
“I was completely shocked and shattered. We had differences soon after we wed but it never looked so bad,” the mother-of-three told AFP.
Mehmood, who is from Bhopal, is one of a number of Indian Muslim women whose husbands dissolved their marriage using triple talaq. The message delivered by everything from traditional letters to Facebook and Whatsapp.
Banned in many Muslim countries, India, which is officially secular, is one of the few nations that legally permits the practice.
“The talaqnama (divorce letter) came without any intimation or warning,” said Mehmood, 31, adding that she now struggles to make ends meet without her husband’s support.
Now another divorcee, Shayara Bano, has asked the Supreme Court to outlaw it, as a backlash against the practice gathers steam.
“I understand my marriage is over but something needed to be done so that other Muslim women do not suffer,” Bano told AFP of her petition filed in February, which has encouraged at least one other divorcee to follow suit.
‘Second-class citizens’
India’s religious minorities, including its 155 million Muslims, are governed by personal laws that are meant to enshine their religious freedom.
But women say the Muslim Personal Law Application Act, which is based on Sharia law and permits triple talaq, is being misused, allowing men to instantly walk away from their families.
“Women are generally treated as second class citizens in our society and they are further discriminated against by those misinterpreting religion,” Sadia Akhtar who works for Bharatiya Muslim Mahila Andolan, a charity helping to empower Muslim women.
A survey of Muslim women by the charity last year found an overwhelming majority favoured abolition of the practice, deeming it unIslamic. Some 500 of the 4,000 women surveyed said they had been divorced that way.
In recent weeks some 50,000 Muslims signed a petition organised by the charity as part of a campaign to ban it.
The Quran prescribes a procedure for divorce to be undertaken in 90 days, starting from the first utterance of talaq, followed by two more but with a 30-day gap in between each one.
Islamic scholars say this gives couples time to reflect on their marriage and possibly reconcile.
Most Muslim scholars say the instant talaq diverts from the Quran.
Akhtarul Wasey, a professor of Islamic studies, said it was only supposed to be used as a last resort when husbands were “traumatising their partners” by endlessly pronouncing talaq and then revoking it.
“(But) It has lost its essence and become an arbitrary law,” Wasey from New Delhi’s Jamia Millia Islamia university told AFP.
Many Muslim majority countries including neighbouring Bangladesh have already banned it, while legislation on the same is pending in Pakistan’s parliament.
Changes unacceptable
But India’s Muslim leaders are reluctant to amend the personal law, fearing an erosion of their religious identity. Some fear Hindu hardliners will use such changes as an excuse to push for the law’s entire abolition.
Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s government is committed to replacing personal laws for all religious minorities with a common civil code, to enhance national unity.
Kamal Faruqui, member of an influential Muslim body, said Muslims have a right to practise their religion according to Sharia law and that should be protected at all costs.
Faruqui conceded triple talaq was a “problem for Muslims” but changes to the personal law were “unacceptable to us”.
“We discourage Muslims to seek divorce and certainly triple talaq should never be used. Instead couples should go for the honourable exit route mentioned in the Quran,” said Faruqui, from the All India Muslim Personal Law Board.
Shaista Ali, also from Bhopal, said she appealed to clerics for assistance after her husband suddenly divorced her and she was shunted from the family home, but “they sided with my in-laws”.
Divorcee Mehmood accepts that her marriage is over, but she remains hopeful of change so that other women are spared her ordeal.
“We can’t stop talaqs but there should be some consequences so that men think ten times before uttering talaq, talaq talaq,” she said.Rep. Michele Bachmann (R-MN) is taking her refusal to fully fill out her Census form, which is a crime punishable by a $5,000 fine, to a whole new level: Invoking the memory of the Japanese internment during World War II, and the evil role that the Census played in it!
During an interview this morning on Fox News, Bachmann mostly focused on the danger of her personal information falling into the hands of the dreaded menace ACORN. But at one point, she made a very interesting appeal to history:
“Take this into consideration. If we look at American history, between 1942 and 1947, the data that was collected by the Census Bureau was handed over to the FBI and other organizations at the request of President Roosevelt, and that’s how the Japanese were rounded up and put into the internment camps,” said Bachmann. “I’m not saying that that’s what the Administration is planning to do, but I am saying that private personal information that was given to the Census Bureau in the 1940s was used against Americans to round them up, in a violation of their constitutional rights, and put the Japanese in internment camps.”
At this point even Megyn Kelly, who had been gladly dishing out the anti-ACORN talk along with Bachmann, had to take a step back and raise the point that the Japanese internment was a long time ago and we haven’t had such abuses since then.
For some context on how this fits into Bachmann’s overall worldview, keep in mind that she’s previously warned of the threat of “re-education camps” where young people would be indoctrinated into the government’s official philosophy.AAI Unmanned Aircraft Systems (UAS), an operating unit of Textron Systems, a Textron Inc. company, and KOR Electronics Defense Solutions, a subsidiary of Mercury Computer Systems, announced today a strategic alliance that combines AAI's expertise as a UAS systems integrator with KOR's signals intelligence (SIGINT) equipment. The organizations intend to integrate KOR's SIGINT products, focused on expeditionary tactical unmanned aircraft such as AAI's Shadow Tactical Unmanned Aircraft System, as a new addition to AAI's family of Multi-Mission Payloads (MMP). Each modular MMP 'pod' can be attached quickly to the Shadow aircraft to equip it for the mission at hand. "This technology provides warfighters actionable, time-sensitive data on the capabilities and activities of their adversaries," said Senior Vice President and General Manager Steven Reid of AAI Unmanned Aircraft Systems. "Equipping our Shadow aircraft -- a trusted and omnipresent asset for so many U.S. and allied customers -- for this collection mission can help deliver intelligence fast, and to a broader array of deployed forces and formations."I’ve always liked Kanye West. Not enough to buy those God-awful shoes of his, mind you, but I counted myself as a distant admirer long before I ever even listened to his music. What others perceive as arrogance, I regard as hilariously antagonistic chutzpah. He’s an entertainer whose entertainment value extends beyond his music, which is an undervalued commodity in an era defined by nondescript DJs, most of whom have about as much personality as an Acer laptop.
But after many years of defending him from the proverbial pitchfork-wielding mobs, my seemingly infinite capacity for contrarianism appears to have reached its limits. The recent unhinged Twitter tirades, ever-present gaggle of Kardashians and shows of support for Donald Trump have all swirled together to program me with a gag-inducing Pavlovian response to the shit that now dribbles out of his head via his mouth or fingers. I’m sick of him and can’t find any more excuses.
Many of his detractors will probably wonder why it has taken me so long to flee what has, in retrospect, been a long-sinking ship steered by a stubborn captain who arguably hasn’t changed very much over the years – I mean, it’s not like he’s gotten any more obnoxious than he was before – but back in the Golden Age of Kanye it felt like there was something there to defend.
When was the Golden Age of Kanye? I’m not going to try put an exact date on it, but it sits roughly between the release of The College Dropout, which marked the beginning of that mid-2000s period where he was one of the central innovating figures in popular music (I challenge anyone that has even a mild appreciation of hip-hop to contest this while listening to My Beautiful Dark Twisted Fantasy,) and 2012, when he began dating Kim Kardashian – a landmark that other people, not only myself, regard as the beginning of his decline.
‘Ye is very much a Marmite kind of guy. Most people will either describe themselves as lovers or loathers, and rarely have I heard anyone express a middling opinion about him; something he himself even references in “Bring Me Down” with the line, “Everybody feel a way about K but at least y’all feel something.”
But when the tide turned against him in 2009 after he interrupted Taylor Swift’s Video Music Awards acceptance speech, just so he could drunkenly tell the world that Beyonce had the better music video, it only made me like him more.
Now, I’m fairly indifferent to Beyonce, and the only tune of hers that I’ve ever played out of my volition is “Say My Name” (and it’s not even really a Beyonce tune), but I know enough about her to know that she is both a superior performer and an artiste to Taylor Swift, who, if we’re going to be perfectly honest, owes much of her success to being a bland, inoffensive blank canvas for white America to project itself onto like a department store mannequin.
I’m not going to take a stance over who should’ve won because, frankly, I have seen neither video and nor do I actually care. But I saw an ally in Kanye because he was landing blows to celebrity egos in a way that I could only dream of. Abusive tweets are just impotent rage, so Kanye gave me the proxy joy that comes with seeing famous feathers ruffled.
They’re undeservedly worshipped like Gods by the incoherent masses (a misplaced privilege that Kanye obviously enjoys as well), so I always viewed him as a cat amongst the pigeons. I see his prowling through Beverly Hills, lodging noses out of place as an important public service. Which other pop cultural figure of his stature is going to stand on live television and obtusely bark out “GEORGE BUSH DOESN’T CARE ABOUT BLACK PEOPLE” like a Tourette’s patient? No one. I’m not disputing that he was always an ass, but for a while he was an ass with a higher purpose, which made him worth defending.
The quality of his musical output has arguably been in decline since Watch the Throne (and this isn’t just my view, various commentators from across the internet have said the same), which is unfortunate, because it was always his main selling point. Instead of doing what he does best, he’s turned his attention to making ugly clothes and dropping trite tech industry platitudes about changing the world.
As I mentioned earlier, his egotism used to be amusing, but that was at a time when he defined himself as a musician, so he had something to back up his brashness. Now he’s a nauseating testament to one of the world’s inherent injustices: famous people are given artistic opportunities regardless of whether or not they’re any good at them.
Tom Ford is a poor screenwriter, but he is given the opportunity to make banal (although visually stunning) films because of his name. The same goes for Yeezy. It’s a crushing reminder that success in capitalism is defined by marketability rather than quality – if it wasn’t, Paris Hilton wouldn’t be booked as a DJ, or to do anything else except to stand there and look pretty, for that matter.
But all of these criticisms pale in comparison to his recent support of Donald Trump and his marriage to Kim Kardashian.
To some, these details may seem irrelevant but, as we’ve already established, Kanye West isn’t simply a musician so he can’t be judged on his music alone. The latter has been a growing source of antipathy for me because the Kardashians represent everything that is, in my eyes, wrong and ugly in the value system of the 21st century.
I’m not going to go into a lengthy diatribe, because I despise the Kardashian Klan for very obvious reasons: they embody the consistent triumph of culturally and intellectually bankrupt vapidity, which they help glamorize and frame as aspirational. They contribute to the dumbing down of humanity and are perversely adored for it. Kanye’s association to them dismays me because the company we keep and the choices we make say a lot about us as people.
When it comes to celebrities, it’s difficult to separate fact from myth. Few of us can say that we know Kanye, or any other public figure for that matter. We only know the constructed persona that they project. But choosing to share your life with someone as vapid as Kim K. is a thoroughly damning self-indictment.
If someone creates great music, it’s not unreasonable to conclude that they must have good taste. And good taste is widely regarded as a marker of intellect or broader depth as a human being. I had always assumed that people with good taste and those who contribute to human civilization have a critic’s aversion to people like the Kardashians who degrade it. Kanye appears to show that this isn’t the case, and that I was terribly naive to assume otherwise.
Maybe his musical talents aren’t the product of conscious good taste, but rather an intangible instinct that comes to him unconsciously through the body, like sporting talent.
Cristiano Ronaldo can do incredible things to a ball, but it’s unlikely that he’d be able to articulate even to himself how he does it – Harry Kane sure as hell can’t. This is why great footballers rarely make great coaches, and history’s great coaches – like your Alex Fergusons and Jose Mourinhos – were rarely ever elite footballers back in their playing days.
Either way, Kanye has shown his personal values to be closer to those of the trash culture that the Kardashians represent and that I so despise. His association to this cultural spam has made me despise him, too.
The Kardashians’ reality TV empire is the dregs of popular culture. ‘Ye might not be Steve Reich, but he’s still one of the most respected musicians in his personal field. The circles that he moves in are the vanguard of music and fashion and media. He validates the Kardashians by association, and if her makeover since her days as a valley girl feeding off the crumbs of Paris Hilton’s fame is anything to go by, his stylist dresses her, too. Had she married the guys from LMFAO she’d still be filthy rich and incredibly famous, but Kanye bestows her with a degree of cultural capital, thus validating her.
Sure, they’ve been married for nearly three years now and dating for even longer, so maybe I’m a bit late to the hate fest, but I endured his relationship with Kim in the hopes that they would get divorced. And considering all the acrimony between Kanye and his previous ex, Amber Rose, a KimYe breakup would’ve no doubt led to some highly entertaining mudslinging.
But then he strutted into Trump Tower to show his support for America’s demagogue-elect, and that was the final straw for me. In the case of his marriage to Kim Kardashian, you can put it down to that illogical aspect of love that drives people to act in unusual ways. Maybe there’s something to Kim that makes all her inherent trashiness irrelevant to Kanye. While I can’t endorse this I can understand it. But in regards to Trump, he has no excuse.
Kanye West is not a downtrodden, blue-collar Wisconsinite who feels abandoned by the Democratic Party and powerless against the lapping tide of globalization that threatens to take his livelihood away. Unlike the uneducated, he is not vulnerable to a snakeoil salesman like Donald Trump peddling false hope to the desperate. He’s either completely fucking stupid, or he truly believes in the Trump agenda. It doesn’t matter which one it is, because like with Kim K., his words and his actions validate Trump’s degeneracy.
We will probably never know if something has changed in Kanye, or if this is the person that he always was and it has only become apparent now, but Trump is the enemy. By standing with him Kanye is too, now.
The views and opinions expressed in this piece are those solely of the author, and do not necessarily reflect the position of Highsnobiety as a whole.
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1232 Shares Share Tweet Email WhatsAppChase Michael Hilgenbrinck McDonald (born April 2, 1982 in Quincy, Illinois) is an American former soccer defender. He is most notable for walking away from his professional career to become a Catholic priest.
Early life [ edit ]
His parents, Mike (a regional sales manager for a fertilizer dealership) and Kim (an accountant with State Farm Insurance), raised their children as Catholics. They brought him and his older brother, Blaise, to church each and every Sunday, where both sons served as altar boys at Holy Trinity Church in Bloomington, Illinois. Chase played soccer for University High School in Normal, Illinois.
Soccer career [ edit ]
Hilgenbrick made the United States Under-17 national team, before moving on to play for Clemson University, where he was a three-year starter, playing on the same defensive line as future U.S. senior national team fixture Oguchi Onyewu.
After graduating in 2004, Chase was undrafted by Major League Soccer (MLS) after a decent college career. Claudio Arias, the Chilean soccer coach at nearby Southern Wesleyan University, suggested going to Chile where he thought he could help Chase get a contract. Hilgenbrinck signed with Huachipato of Chile's top division, but was loaned out to lower division club Deportes Naval. He eventually moved on to second-division club Ñublense and helped them to achieve promotion to Chile's top flight. In all, he spent four seasons in Chile, with three clubs, and grew to become a star player.
He joined the Colorado Rapids in early 2008, but was waived during the pre-season without making a senior appearance after the Rapids needed to clear salary cap space for other acquisitions. Two weeks later the New England Revolution called, and after a two-day tryout, the Revolution signed him on March 28.[1]
Hilgenbrick's last game was on a Sunday, July 13, 2008, at Gillette Stadium in Foxborough, Massachusetts when the New England Revolution faced Mexican club Santos Laguna in a SuperLiga game.
Catholic priest [ edit ]
In the summer of 2007, the vocation director for the Catholic Diocese of Peoria, Illinois, sent him an extensive application packet. He had to write a 20-page autobiography and submit responses to a series of essay questions, in addition to a background check and fingerprinting. In December, the day after he returned to the U.S. following the end of the soccer season in Chile, he went through an entire battery of testing. He took five written exams in one day, and was evaluated by three psychologists.[2]
Hilgenbrinck retired from soccer on July 14, 2008 to enter the Catholic Mount St. Mary's Seminary at Mount St. Mary's University in Emmitsburg, Maryland in order to become a priest.[3] He was ordained a priest in the diocese of Peoria on May 24, 2014.[4] He served as a parochial vicar for St. Anne's Catholic Church in East Moline, Illinois,[5] as well as one of the chaplains at Alleman High School in Rock Island, Illinois.[6]
Since June 8, 2016, Chase has been assigned to St. John's Catholic Newman Center in Champaign, Illinois.
In May 2018, Father Chase visited Blessed Sacrament Parish, Liverpool, England where he held services at local schools during the Christian feast of Pentecost. |
, was convicted of first degree murder on May 9, 2012. He was sentenced to the death penalty.As fast as a Core i5-8250U but with more than double the graphics performance, the Ryzen 5 2500U is launching with just the momentum AMD needs in the notebook space.
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The HP Envy x360 15 and x360 13 were some of the first notebooks announced to ship with AMD's new Ryzen 5 and Ryzen 7 Mobile series of processors. While the Ryzen 7 SKUs are still nowhere to be found, the Ryzen 5 SKUs are now readily available as promised by the manufacturer. Our data below is a preview of the quad-core Ryzen 5 2500U in the new Envy x360 15 with the full review to come in the following week. The numbers represent our first set of in-house data for this particular processor and we were eager to get some direct comparisons against Intel's Kaby Lake and Kaby Lake-R family of processors.
Before diving into raw benchmark scores, we wanted to see if the Ryzen 5 processor will throttle when subjected to long periods of extreme processing load. Running CineBench R15 Multi-Thread in a loop results in no significant performance degradation over time to confirm that the processor shouldn't suffer from any temperature ceiling or TJMax alarms when gaming or browsing. The small-but-measurable 3 percent dip from the first run (579 points) to the second run (561 points) is a drop in the bucket compared to the 30+ percent decline from the i7-7660U in the Surface Pro tablet.
We are unable to provide core clock rates at this time since both HWiNFO64 and GPU-Z are outputting incorrect readings for the Ryzen 5 APU. We will continue to test out additional monitoring programs for the final Envy x360 15 review.THERESA MAY’S MISTAKEN PRECEDENT FOR A BREXIT BASED ON CHERRY-PICKING
As the start of Brexit negotiations with the EU-27 looms, the trickiest conundrum facing Theresa May is that of reconciling the need to agree continuing access to the single market for British business with her insistence on ending UK participation in EU free movement. Taken at face value, it is impossible to resolve. EU leaders have been consistently clear that Britain cannot have access to the single market without accepting free movement. If restoring control of our borders is so important, we will have to make do with a free trade deal from outside the single market – like the ones Canada or South Korea negotiated (after 8 and 7 years of discussions respectively).
But Theresa May thinks she has found a third way: a sector-by-sector approach. Her plan is for the UK to leave the single market en bloc, but renegotiate continued access to it on preferential terms for some key UK industrial sectors as part of a wider free trade agreement. According to this vision, these lucky sectors would continue to enjoy de facto membership of the single market, but without the requirement to be bound by decisions of the European Court of Justice. Problem solved, our Prime Minister thinks. We get our borders back, we ditch the ECJ’s jurisdiction, and the sectors most dependent on the European market continue to operate inside the single market, without the bits we don’t like. Simples.
This week, Ivan Rogers – Britain’s former Ambassador to the European Union – poured a gallon of scepticism over this plan. Asked whether Angela Merkel and other leaders would accept a sector-by-sector deal, Sir Ivan replied: “They’re saying, ‘fine, you have now accepted you are not in the single market… but you still want to have large elements of your cake and eat it’. People do say, did say to me repeatedly over months and years, that’s not on offer….[Merkel] and others will agree there will be no sectoral deals in either the single market or the customs union”.
A quick look at the mechanics of the Government’s sector-by-sector approach seems to vindicate Sir Ivan’s judgement. How could the aerospace or financial services industry still be in the single market yet not bound by the ECJ’s judgements that govern the sector? If the EU insists on free movement as a condition of single market access, why would they offer exemptions to a raft of the UK’s most important industries? Every EU leader’s utterance on the subject has stressed the indispensability of the integrity of the single market. To have a strategy based on not believing a core principle of what binds the member states of the EU together is somewhere between grossly naïve and delusional.
The truth is that a Brexit deal on a sector-by-sector basis is a fantasy. So how is it possible that Theresa May thinks this fantasy is in the land of the living? The answer, I think, lies in her time as Home Secretary, and in particular the lessons she learnt from the one key EU negotiation she undertook in her time there.
The decision point was set up for her by Tony Blair’s government in 2007. Article 36 of that year’s Lisbon Treaty gave the UK (and Ireland) the right to opt out of all the police and criminal justice measures adopted under the Maastricht treaty, before the European Court of Justice took over jurisdiction of them. Britain was given 7 years (until June 2014) to decide on whether or not to use this opt-out on an all-or-nothing basis. But if Britain chose to opt out en bloc, it could then apply to opt back in to individual measures that we considered to be in our national interest.
In 2014, Home Secretary Theresa May notified the European Commission that we would opt out of all 130 measures. As she put it at the time, “our guiding principle was that if there is no clear purpose for a European law, there shouldn’t be a European law”. At the same time, she made clear that we would seek to opt back in to 35 of the 130 measures that enabled trans-European cooperation in areas vital to UK security: such as the European Criminal Records Information System, Financial Intelligence Units, the Prisoner Transfer Framework, and (though this was on a separate legal basis) the European Arrest Warrant.
Apart from a procedural hiccup or two in the House of Commons, Theresa May had a successful negotiation. And she was very pleased with herself about it. As she wrote in the Daily Telegraph in November 2014:
“Many critics said that having sought to opt back into 35 measures, the European Commission and other member states would block us from doing so, or force us to opt into a higher number than we wanted. But they were wrong: our negotiation was a success and we have secured agreement.”
So here was a negotiation led by Theresa May in which Britain chose exit from EU cooperation, followed immediately by selective re-entry for cherry-picked dossiers that were central to the UK’s national interest. And it worked. Bingo. Theresa May’s biggest negotiation with the EU was a spectacular success for the cherry-picking strategy that she is now using to approach Brexit.
So it can work again, right? Wrong. The strategy of “exit then cherry-picking” worked with the JHA decision in 2014 for a simple reason: it was set up as an “exit plus cherry-picking” deal in the Lisbon Treaty itself. It is a colossal error to think that the same approach can work in the case of Brexit – a negotiation of phenomenally greater complexity, played on multiple chessboards simultaneously, where interests between the EU and the UK are nowhere near as simply aligned, and where opt-outs have not been negotiated by existing treaty provisions.
Of all the strands of wishful thinking this government is bringing to the Brexit process, this is perhaps the most damaging. Conceiving of Brexit as amenable to cherry-picking on a sector by sector basis is about to induce the mother of all lobbying operations inside Whitehall, as every industry seeks to make its case to be one of the chosen few. That will be a monumental headache in itself. But more fundamentally, it is an approach that has precisely zero chance of success, fuelled by a false analogy with Theresa May’s greatest EU negotiating moment three years ago. Listen out in the next few months for the sound of Britain’s Brexit plan crashing onto the rocks, with a Prime Minister at the helm convinced she can repeat the trick right up to the moment that the boat starts to run aground.Facebook faced withering criticism in the US for allowing fake news to spread during the 2016 presidential election. Now, the social network has come under similar scrutiny in Germany, amid concerns that widespread disinformation campaigns could impact upcoming elections.
False and misleading news articles have spread rapidly across Europe in recent months, prompting calls for new legislation and tougher regulations on social media companies. The reaction has been particularly aggressive in Germany, where authorities recently opened an investigation into the matter. The German government, which has traditionally taken a firmer hand than the US in regulating tech companies, is also considering measures that would impose fines on Facebook for publishing fake news. Yet some fear that government intervention could backfire in Germany, where memories of totalitarian rule and propaganda are still fresh, while others have downplayed the effect that fake news could have on the political landscape.
Under mounting pressure from lawmakers, Facebook announced this week that it will begin filtering fake news for users in Germany, marking the first expansion of an initiative that launched in the US in December. In a German-language post announcing the expansion, Facebook said it will work with Correctiv, a Berlin-based nonprofit media organization, to fact-check articles reported as dubious, and that it aims to bring other media groups onboard.
“Fighting fake news is essential for our society.”
“We think fighting fake news is essential for our society,” David Schraven, Correctiv’s publisher, said in an email. “People should make their decision on the basis of true information.”
But details on the partnership remain unclear. Schraven said that the Facebook project is still “in a planning phase,” and that Correctiv is unsure of how many people will be needed to work on it. He added that Facebook is not paying Correctiv during this phase, and that the organization will determine how to pay for it “after we know what needs to be done.” Facebook will not be paying fact-checkers, according to a person familiar with the matter. (It was previously reported that the company would not pay fact-checking organizations in the US, either.)
The scope of Germany’s fake news problem was detailed in a report from BuzzFeed News this week, which found that many fabricated and misleading news articles have targeted Chancellor Angela Merkel and her open-door policy toward refugees. Sites such as anonymousnews.ru, rapefugees.net, and noch.info regularly publish incendiary stories about refugees and Islam, as well as pro-Russia propaganda.
There is some evidence that such articles are gaining traction. An article falsely claiming that Merkel took a selfie with one of the terrorists involved in an attack on Brussels garnered more than 32,000 engagements on Facebook, according to BuzzFeed’s analysis. A factual account of the photograph, which was taken with a refugee, generated less than 13,000 engagements, the website reported. (The Syrian refugee who took the photo has also filed a lawsuit against Facebook for allowing the rumor to spread.)
Merkel has warned of the effect that fake news could have on upcoming elections, suggesting that Russia may be seeking to interfere with elections in Germany as it is believed to have done in the US. (Merkel is seeking re-election later this year.) Justice Minister Heiko Maas has also suggested that Facebook should be treated as a media company, which would make it liable for fake news or hate speech published to its site, while German lawmakers are considering a law that would fine social networks that publish fake news. Reuters reported this week that Facebook executives have been working to dissuade German politicians from adopting stricter regulations.
“The issue of fake news is, to most of us, very troublesome and worrisome,” says Christian Schemer, professor of communications at the University of Mainz. “It has reached a quality that keeps officials busy.”
False and exaggerated news stories in Germany have so far not led to violence, in the way the “Pizzagate” conspiracy did in the US. But there have been real-world consequences. Police in the city of Dortmund were recently forced to debunk a false report, published by Breitbart, which claimed that a “1,000-man mob” chanting “Allahu Akbar” set fire to a church on New Year’s Eve. Last year, reports of a Russian-German girl being kidnapped and raped by migrants led to far-right protests in Germany, prompting Russia’s foreign minister to criticize German authorities. The girl later admitted to making up the story, but not before it had been widely circulated in Russian media and right-leaning websites.
“I fear that this will only increase the distrust in media.”
German far-right leaders haven’t appropriated the term “fake news” in the way that Donald Trump uses it to belittle mainstream media in the US — something that has fueled calls to retire the term. But the far-right party Alternative for Germany (AfD) regularly describes mainstream newspapers as the “Pinocchio press,” while the anti-immigrant Pegida movement has revived the term “lying press,” which was used by the Nazis.
Some activists in Germany have taken it upon themselves to debunk false reports. A site called Hoaxmap, which launched in February of last year, maps instances of false reporting on alleged crimes committed by refugees across Germany, and includes police statements or other news reports that disprove them. To date, the site has documented 450 false reports on asylum-seekers, many of which contained allegations of rape and violence. Another watchdog organization, called Schmalbart, was created to keep tabs on Breitbart, which plans to launch in both Germany and France this year.
Karolin Schwarz, one of Hoaxmap’s co-founders, says she’s seen a steady stream of online hoaxes since the summer of 2015, when Germany saw an influx of asylum seekers. From March through December 2016, Hoaxmap actually saw a decrease in refugee-related hoaxes, but Schwarz says they’ve increased since the attack on a Christmas market in Berlin late last year. She also casts doubt on Facebook’s filtering initiative, saying that it may prompt allegations of censorship and further undermine confidence in the mainstream media.
“Trust in media is weak in Germany, so I fear that this will only increase the distrust in media, since people are framing this as an attempt of censorship,” Schwarz said in an email, adding that Facebook has not been in touch with Hoaxmap about a partnership. “Maybe this could work, but we sure need other ways to deal with this.”
“I take this as a sign of a healthy system that can correct itself.”
Some doubt that fake news will have much of an impact on upcoming elections in Germany, where propaganda and disinformation campaigns were widespread throughout the 20th century. According to Wolfgang Mühl-Benninghaus, professor of media studies at Humboldt University, recent history has made Germans more wary of misleading news reports. “We had a lot of fake news during the Weimar Republic, we had fake news in the Third Reich,” Mühl-Benninghaus says. “We have an understanding of our history.”
There are also concerns over government interference in the media in the run-up to German elections, which will be held in September. The government has reportedly considered setting up a press bureau to track and combat fake news, but there is reluctance among those who fear the institution being seen as a ministry of truth. Leaders in the Czech Republic created their own “anti-fake news unit” this year to counteract propaganda campaigns allegedly carried out by Russia.
Schemer acknowledges that Germany’s recent history may make media consumers more alert to propaganda and disinformation, though he says there is still a “small subculture” that continues to spread radical ideas. Social media has also made it easier for them to reach large audiences, he says, while making it more difficult for fact-checkers and law enforcement to identify them. Still, Schemer says he’s reassured by the speed with which many hoaxes have been debunked by the media and law enforcement.
“I take this as a sign of a healthy system that can correct itself,” he says, adding: “So to this extent I’m optimistic. But maybe we can talk after September this year. Maybe this impression will have changed.”Ritesh: "I am traumatised and my whole life is affected... I am scared of the dark now." Credit:Justin McManus He locked his wife and two young children in the bathroom and pleaded with the burglars not to harm his family. While one of the teens threatened him with a shovel, the others – he said some were as young as 15 – ransacked his home, stealing the keys to his Nissan Pulsar, the family's jewellery and electrical equipment. "I was thinking they were going to kill me because they weren't wearing any masks or gloves, and were walking around like it was their house," he said. The ordeal lasted 45 minutes, and he said the home invaders were pushing him around the entire time, as if goading him to retaliate.
The only mercy the thieves showed was leaving behind one of the family's two cars. He said the group were caught after a chase with police and the Nissan was recovered (he no longer wants it as it reminds him of that night), but the offenders were later released on bail by a magistrate. "They are now out walking freely. But I am traumatised and my whole life is affected," Mr Chandan said. "I'm scared of the dark now. I have never been scared of anything before. I am locking myself and my family in our bedroom at night so we don't have to go outside. It's like I am under house arrest in my own house." But he said the local community in Williams Landing had been supportive of him following the home invasion.
Mr Chandan's experience is not an isolated one. On Wednesday last week homes were broken into, residents were threatened and cars were stolen in Airport West and Essendon. On Friday last week, a car stolen from Truganina carrying nine people crashed on the West Gate Freeway. And on Tuesday this week, two cars were stolen from a Point Cook home in the early hours of the morning. Sick of crime in the area, a group of Wyndham locals are staging a protest in Werribee on Saturday, calling for more police officers to be stationed in the region. A spokesman for the protesters, Safwat Ali, said police numbers had not kept apace with population growth in the Wyndham area. "We want to make the government and authorities aware that we need more police," he said. Analysis in The Age two years ago found Williams Landing was one of the state's most burgled suburbs, with the equivalent of one in every 30 homes in the postcode hit by thieves in 2013/14.
But the situation appears to have worsened since then, with the number of break-ins or burglaries in this postcode reaching a five-year high of 88 in the 12 months to the end of March this year. The number of burglaries throughout the state also reached a five-year high over the past 12 months, with more than 51,000 – about 140 a day – showing up in Crime Statistics agency figures. This data includes aggravated and non-aggravated burglaries. Victoria Police Assistant Commissioner Steve Fontana said in a statement that the majority of burglaries were non-violent. But he said police were focused on the spate of aggravated burglaries and carjackings and assured Victorians they would get on top of the problem.
In many postcodes around Geelong, Bendigo, Ballarat and Melbourne's south-east, burglaries spiked to five-year record levels last year. Red areas on the map below recorded five-year highs in burglaries last year. Orange areas had no available data. This map shows the burglary rate in Victorian postcodes. The darker areas of the map correspond to areas with higher burglary rates. However, the most recent available population data for postcodes was released in 2011, so the burglary rates for areas that have undergone massive population growth since then may be overstated in this map.
Click an area to view the number of burglaries or break ins recorded there over the past five years.A U.S. Senate subcommittee approved its part of the annual defense bill without deciding on the fate of the A-10 attack plane.
The Air Force in its fiscal 2015 budget request proposed retiring its fleet of the Cold War-era planes, known officially as the Thunderbolt II and unofficially as the Warthog. The service estimates it will save about $4.2 billion over five years by divesting the almost 300 A-10s that remain in the inventory.
A bipartisan group of lawmakers, including Sens. Carl Levin, D-Michigan, Sen. John McCain, R-Arizona, and Kelly Ayotte, R-New Hampshire, oppose the idea because, they say, other aircraft as the F-35 fighter jet can't provide ground troops with the same kind of close air support.
Levin disagrees with counterparts in the House who proposed raiding the Pentagon's war budget to keep the gunships from being sent to the bone yard. Thus, it's likely the A-10 will stay in the fleet, at least for now, once lawmakers settle on an appropriate offset in the budget.
Sen. Richard Blumenthal, D-Connecticut, chairman of the Senate Armed Services Committee's Airland Subcommittee, on Tuesday led a vote in approving the panel's amended version of the Fiscal 2015 National Defense Authorization Act without specifying plans for the Warthog.
The closest he came was when he said the bill would "place temporary restrictions on the disposition of Air Force aircraft." A spokesman for the subcommittee referred questions about the aircraft to a spokeswoman for the senator, who didn't immediately respond to an e-mail and telephone call requesting comment.
The full Senate Armed Services Committee is expected to begin amending, or marking up, the defense legislation in a closed session on Wednesday.
The panel's senior Republican, Sen. Roger Wicker, R-Mississippi, said of the process, "There's still a ways to go to produce a defense budget that is based on our national security interests and the threats to those interests. We face no shortages of challenges with this budget."
Air Force Secretary Deborah Lee James and Air Force Chief of Staff Gen. Mark Welsh have repeatedly pressed the lawmakers to let the service retire the aircraft to better cope with automatic budget cuts known as sequestration.
The service considered other options to scale back fleets of other aircraft, including the F-15 and F-16 fighter jets and the B-1 bomber, Welsh said in a speech last month at the National Press Club. But ultimately, it determined that scrapping the almost 300 A-10s would be the least harmful to military operations, he said.
"We came very clearly with the conclusion that of all those horrible options, the least operationally impactful was to divest the A-10," said Welsh, who previously piloted the aircraft. "That how we got there. It's not emotional. It's logical. It's analytical. It makes imminent sense from a military perspective."MISSOULA, Mont. - Tuesday may be Election Day, but for the state of Montana, it's another important day. November 8th marks the 127th Birthday for the state.
"This is a significant town in Montana history being founded in 1841 it was the first pioneer settlement with the Europeans coming in among the Salish Indians," historian Colleen Meyer said.
"In all of the northwest area, this is one of the areas of first population, some of the first people that were very, very significant to Montana history came here to trade," historian Ruth Baker said.
The Stevensville area is home to two different significant landmarks that made Montana pivotal in pioneer times.
"This area of Fort Owen and St. Mary's mission both were a hub of trading and trapping and first settlers to come into this area," Baker said.
Fort Owen, just outside of present day Stevensville, was a major check point for trading while St. Mary's was a mission that helped establish the first pioneer settlement in Montana.
The mission had some big names involved with it including the man the county is named after.
"St. Mary cemetery is on the west end of the grounds, on the far west part of the cemetery are the Indian burial grounds and Father Anthony Ravalli for whom the county is named is also buried in St. Mary cemetery, so it is an old and very significant part of Montana history as well," Meyer said.
Other names like John Mullan, whom Mullan road is named after and Isaac Stevens, whom Stevensville is named after, also played roles at the fort and mission.
So after you cast your ballot on Tuesday make sure you wish Montana a happy Birthday.By Kelleigh Nelson:
Neil Gorsuch has never said or written anything pro-life
One of the reasons I changed — one of the primary reasons — a friend of mine’s wife was pregnant, in this case married. She was pregnant and he didn’t really want the baby. And he was telling me the story,” Trump told Brody. “He was crying as he was telling me the story. He ends up having the baby and the baby is the apple of his eye. It’s the greatest thing that’s ever happened to him. And you know here’s a baby that wasn’t going to be let into life. And I heard this, and some other stories, and I am pro-life.– Donald J. Trump
Our 45th President told us he would put pro-life judges on our Supreme Court. However, those who helped him with the list of conservative judges were both the Federalist Society, and the Heritage Foundation (called Heretic Foundation by many of my well-educated friends).
Neil Gorsuch is Not Pro-Life
The latest choice we’re now hearing is at the top of the list is Neil Gorsuch. Neil Gorsuch is NOT pro-life. His selection would violate Trump’s pledge to nominate a pro-life justice to the Supreme Court. Roe v. Wade would not be overturned for 40 years if the 49-year-old Gorsuch is picked. Forty million more babies would be murdered in their mothers’ wombs with this choice.
The pro-life movement has only a few hours or days to object, protest, criticize, and veto the nomination of this pro-choice candidate. Trump floats these trial balloons to see if people object. We must strongly object, and please speak out loudly now.
Gorsuch has never said or written anything pro-life. Andy Schlafly knew him in law school and afterwards, and has reviewed his opinions and his book. He’s written multiple opinions that demonstrate he is not pro-life.
For example, in the case of Pino v. U.S., Gorsuch discussed whether a 20-week-old “nonviable fetus” had the same rights as a “viable fetus.” Gorsuch, showing that he is not pro-life, indicated that his answer is “no” unless the Oklahoma Supreme Court specifically found rights for the “nonviable fetus.” Rather than render a pro-life ruling, Gorsuch punted this issue to the Oklahoma Supreme Court for it to decide. Gorsuch’s approach is similar to the unjust approach based on viability that underlies Roe v. Wade.
More information, including how Gorsuch opposes overturning precedent even when it is wrong, is here. He supports special rights for transgenders, too. And he is no Scalia, as Gorsuch was not even on the Law Review in law school.
We’ve been down this road before, and it doesn’t work for Republican presidents. Andy Schlafly recently spoke at a large conservative conference in Michigan, a state Trump carried by barely 10,000 votes based on immense efforts by pro-lifers there. That margin disappears if Trump is misled to break his pro-life pledge for the Supreme Court.
Evangelicals spoke out and vetoed the previous top choice, Bill Pryor. Now it is urgent that pro-lifers speak out immediately and veto Neil Gorsuch.
These choices are coming from the Federalist Society and Heritage Foundation. The Federalist Society is attempting to get a pro-Roe judge chosen instead of another Scalia.
Who is the Federalist Society?
The Federalist Society, is allegedly an organization of conservatives and libertarians seeking reform of the current American legal system in accordance with a textualistic or originalist interpretation of the U.S. Constitution. It is one of the nation’s most influential legal organizations, masquerading as something they are not.
The Federalist Society began at Yale Law School, (home of Skull and Bones), Harvard Law School (that bastion of higher liberal learning), and the University of Chicago Law School, (home of Bill Ayers and where protestors disallowed Trump rally). It originally started as a student organization which challenged what its members perceived as the orthodox American liberal ideology found in most law schools. Doesn’t this actually make you laugh when these three Ivy league schools are known as having a Marxist agenda?
Pro-Lifers Need to Respond
There are ways to respond, and as my friend Devvy Kidd said, “We have to flood the White House with calls, tweets, emails. This has worked in the past if enough people do it.”
The comment phone number is: 202-456-1111.
The caller simply needs to say:
I strenuously object to Neil Gorsuch as a supreme court justice nominee. He is not pro-life. I urge President Trump to nominate:
Justice Charles Canady – number one choice, or:
Judge Jennifer Elrod or Judge Edith Jones
You can also tweet Donald Trump, Kellyanne Conway, Jeff Sessions, Mike Pence, Mike Pompeo, Sean Spicer, etc. Simply tweet, “Gorsuch is not pro-life. Choose true pro-lifers…Charles Canady, Judge Elrod or Edith Jones.”
You can email the White House here.
You can comment on Face Book here.
Another option is to send a fax signed by as many people as possible. If people belong to a church or some group, just do a short letter with all the signatures and fax it. Phone calls can be ignored, but a pile of 50,000 faxes can’t. Time is of the essence.
WH fax: 202-456-7890
Conclusion
It is up to the American people to let our President know where we stand. Life is God given, and the Lord said in Deuteronomy, CHOOSE LIFE! Let President Trump know we want Pro-Life Justices!
© Copyright by Kelleigh Nelson, 2017. All rights reserved.Jakarta (CNN) -- Indonesia will impose a moratorium on sending workers to Saudi Arabia, effective August 1, the country said late Wednesday. The move comes after the Gulf kingdom beheaded an Indonesian worker without first informing the Indonesian government.
"The government has decided to impose a moratorium on the placement of informal Indonesian migrant workers to Saudi Arabia effective August 1, 2011, until an Indonesian-Saudi memorandum of understanding on the protection of migrant workers is signed and a bilateral joint task force is established," the Ministry of Manpower and Transmigration said on its website.
Public furor erupted after the beheading on June 16 of Ruyati binti Satubi, a 54-year-old migrant worker. Ruyati was executed for killing her employer's wife. Indonesia says it was in the process of seeking her clemency.
Late Wednesday, Indonesian Foreign Ministry spokesman Michael Tene told CNN that Saudi Arabia had apologized for not informing Indonesia before the execution was carried out.
Indonesia filed a diplomatic protest with Saudi Arabia and summoned its ambassador in Jakarta for clarification. It also recalled the Indonesian ambassador to Saudi Arabia.
On Tuesday, authorities scrambled to save another Indonesian migrant worker from execution in Saudi Arabia.
Through the Ministry of Foreign Affairs, it paid about $525,000 or Rp 4.7 billion, as compensation to the family of a Saudi man whom the migrant worker said she killed in self-defense. She said her employer tried to rape her. The family agreed to spare her life in exchange for the money, said Abdul Wahid Maktub, an adviser to the Indonesian ministry.
Prior to the announcement of the moratorium. Migrant Care Executive Director Anisa Hidaya had said it would represent "momentum for improvement" and emphasize "a firm stance on the part of Indonesia towards Saudi Arabia."
Twenty-three other Indonesians are on death row in the Arab kingdom and an estimated 345 have been condemned in Malaysia.
"It is important that Indonesia is sending a strong message to Saudi Arabia," Human Rights Watch Senior Women's Rights Researcher Nisha Varia told CNN. "That it is not acceptable for Saudi Arabia to execute one of its nationals without informing them."
However, Varia said the latest incident was not a surprise, given Saudi Arabia's treatment of its foreign workers. It also highlights, she added, that Indonesia needs to better protect its citizens who seek employment abroad.
Anger has been brewing in recent years over allegations of abuse of Indonesian workers by employers, particularly toward domestic helpers. Activists are demanding the Indonesian government review its policies and regulations in the recruitment and deployment of migrant workers.
But the moratorium will not stop Indonesians from illegally entering these countries and might expose them to more risks, Varia said. Indonesia would benefit from working with other countries like the Philippines, whose government sends representatives abroad to demand better employment conditions for its workers.
Of the 4.3 million documented Indonesians working overseas, some 1.2 million are in Saudi Arabia and another 1.2 million are in Malaysia. An estimated 3 million others are undocumented, according to the Indonesian Placement and Protection of Overseas Workers agency.
Indonesia had already begun negotiations with Saudi Arabia on a Memorandum of Understanding (MOU) that would stipulate better protection and employment conditions for its workers, Maktub said. The moratorium may speed the signing of the agreement, which had been expected by the end of the year.
"There is a huge reformation internally and the demand for Indonesian workers in Saudi Arabia is very high," Maktub said. Arrangements with other labor recipient countries will also be reviewed, he added. After a two-year suspension, Indonesia has just signed an MOU with Malaysia and resumed sending workers there.
The impact of the moratorium on Indonesia and on the millions of Indonesians looking for better paying jobs overseas is unclear. According the World Bank, remittances from migrants to the country exceeded $7 billion last year.Adult Swim stars Rick and Morty have set sights on their next sci-fi adventure: Pocket Mortys, a new mobile title developed by the cable network's gaming division.
Adult Swim Games announced the Jan. 14 release date for Pocket Mortys in a tweet, which included a gif that highlights the game's familiar inspiration.
Pocket Mortys. Mobile. January 14th. pic.twitter.com/tXAU07lzbR — adult swim games (@adultswimgames) January 5, 2016
Chris Johnston, a senior producer at the studio, later offered a few more details in tweets of his own. Pocket Mortys will be available as a free download, Johnston said. He also promised that it will be more substantial than the pair's previous interactive offerings, such as "balloon-popping simulator" Rick and Morty: Jerry's Game for iOS and Android.
Creator Justin Roiland is a noted gaming fan himself, having starred in ex-The Stanley Parable dev William Pugh's latest, Dr. Langeskov, The Tiger and The Terribly Cursed Emerald: A Whirlwind Heist on Windows PC. Roiland's also working on his own virtual reality game, of which he's shown off some concept art. The planned HTC Vive game won't be based on the Rick and Morty universe, however.
Update: Co-creator Dan Harmon confirmed that the game will launch on both iOS and Android. Adult Swim's product market manager Sean Baptiste also added in a tweet that Harmon did voiceover for the game.
Update 2: Pocket Mortys launched a day earlier than expected and is now available in both the App Store and Google Play Store.Toni Nadal believes there is one reason why the next generation have struggled to take over the likes of Rafael Nadal, Roger Federer, Novak Djokovic and Andy Murray.
What has become a major talking point in recent months is the lack of real challengers from the current youngsters to the traditional Big Four in tennis, who have won an impressive combined 50 Grand Slam titles.
Djokovic and Murray dominated 2016 while the recently concluded 2017 season has been all about the career resurgences of Nadal and Federer, who have split the four Grand Slams between themselves and won a combined 13 titles.
Uncle Toni praised the foursome along with David Ferrer for being consistently good compared to their previous generation.
"Rafael Nadal, Andy Murray, Roger Federer and Novak Djokovic and someone else, like David Ferrer, have been very focused with a very big ability of [being able to] sacrifice," Toni told El Mundo via Tennis World USA.
"For Federer, despite his age and all that he's won, tennis continues to be a priority. The same can be said for Rafa, despite all his injuries. There have always been very good players, but this [current] generation may have been more committed.
"Nadal, Federer and Djokovic won 47 Grand Slam titles combined. If we take as example Jimmy Connors, Bjorn Borg and John McEnroe's generation, (though) it was very brilliant as well, we see they only won 26. The [current] generation that was supposed to take over wasn't good enough."
While certain young players have impressed this year such as Alexander Zverev, who notably won five titles in 2017, the next generation have as a whole, underperformed, particularly in the Grand Slams.
It has begged the question for tennis fans on whether the youngsters can win a Grand Slam until the Big Four have retired, especially when one considers that the likes of Nadal, Federer and Djokovic all won their first major titles at very young ages.
However, Uncle Toni believes the reason the next generation have not taken over is because of today's society. He believes youngsters these days are over protected that results in less development.
"That's the reflection of society we live in, which is ultra protective with kids," he explained. "When we came to the Tour, the best players were aged 21-23.
"Now, at this age most of them on the Tour have't come of age. yet. Why? Because kids are more immature and they struggle to develop."ANC's Julius Malema apologises for Botswana remarks
Julius Malema is a powerful figure in the African National Congress with strong mass appeal
Continue reading the main story Related Stories
The head of South Africa's ANC Youth League, Julius Malema, has apologised to the ruling ANC party for urging regime change in Botswana.
Mr Malema said the league's remarks damaged its ties with "the mother body" and "we should have known better".
Last month, Mr Malema, 30, said the Botswana government was a puppet regime and a serious threat to Africa.
The ANC |
In the original C code, the C base float type was used to represent both angles and rates and the PID related code was also implemented using floats, allowing the developer to give angles or rates as inputs to the PID algorithm. In SPARK, things are more complicated: PID functions do some calculations over the inputs, like calculating the error between the measured angle and the desired one. We’ve seen that, without any information about input ranges, it’s very difficult to prove the absence of runtime errors on calculations, even over a basic one like an error calculation (Error = Desired – Measured). In other words, we can’t implement a general PID controller using the Ada Float type if we intend to prove it with SPARK. The good practice here is to use Ada generics: by creating a generic PID package using input, output and PID coefficient ranges as parameters, SPARK will analyze each instance of the package with all information needed to prove the calculations done inside the PID functions.Early life Edit
Panarin was born and raised in Korkino. He developed an early interest in ice skating.[1] His maternal grandfather, a former amateur hockey player, encouraged Panarin to play hockey when he was five years old.[2] He helped train Panarin and would often drive him to hockey tournaments in Tyumen.[2] Panarin attended the Traktor Ice Hockey school in Chelyabinsk, where he trained six days a week for six months a year.[2]
Playing career Edit
International play Edit
Personal life Edit
Panarin moved to the United States in August 2015 after joining the Chicago Blackhawks. He did not speak English at the time and moved in with a Russian-born family who were Chicago residents. The family helped Panarin transition to his new surroundings and culture. Panarin also has a personal translator who helps him conduct interviews before and after games.[27] His fellow Russian teammates, Viktor Tikhonov, who briefly played with the Blackhawks in 2015, and Artem Anisimov also helped Panarin understand English while playing in North America.[28] Panarin was affectionately nicknamed the "Bread Man", a reference to the Panera Bread restaurant chain, by his teammates and coaches on the Blackhawks, which was retained when he was traded to the Blue Jackets.[29][30][31]
Career statistics Edit
Awards and honours EditTonight after the GOP debate, CNN’s Anderson Cooper assembled a panel to review the high and low points of the evening. Among those in attendance was one of Donald Trump‘s cable news foes: Republican strategist Ana Navarro.
Navarro had a few observations to share when the topic turned to fellow Floridian Marco Rubio. When Gloria Borger brought up Rubio’s questionable authenticity and off-putting intensity, Navarro agreed that those aspects need refining, but said “that’s just his personality.”
“He’s not only trying to take votes from Jeb Bush; he’s also squarely going after the Evangelical votes,” she went on, being met with a chorus of variations on “yes” and “absolutely” from her fellow panelists. “It was all he could do but start speaking in tongues.”
Rubio found a way to turn many of his answers into poetic displays of faith tonight. With four days to go before the Iowa caucus, it is clear that he is ramping up his already-strong efforts to win the Evangelical vote.
Other pundits have taken notice of his strategy, too:
Invoking Christ as his savior in an earlier answer-speaking to faith just now- @marcorubio going right after @tedcruz base. #GOPDebate — David Axelrod (@davidaxelrod) January 29, 2016
I’ve seen plenty of naked pandering by pols in my time, but Rubio’s palaver about faith being his guide rises to the top. — Clyde Haberman (@ClydeHaberman) January 29, 2016
Rubio getting weird about “eternity with my creator.” Uh, shouldn’t that be between you and your creator? Why in a public debate? — Rick Newman (@rickjnewman) January 29, 2016
As debates over his credibility and too-rehearsed stump speeches rage on, only time will tell whether all of his efforts result in a caucus win on Monday.
[image via screengrab]
For more from Lindsey, follow her on Twitter.
Have a tip we should know? tips@mediaite.comOn Thursday three platforms were installed next to the pavement in C/ Marina for bar terraces to relocate to. The aim is to free up pedestrian space along the pavement in the Sagrada Família area, which has a high volume of tourists. If the pilot scheme is successful the formula will be applied in other areas, including the entrances to some schools in the Eixample district.
The space previously taken up by bar terraces at C/ Marina 252, 256 and 262 are once again for pedestrian use thanks to the wooden platforms erected in the adjacent street parking spaces. In September platforms will also be set up in the section between C/ València and C/ Aragó and later, in C/ Sardenya. The two streets are those most affected by the movement of tourists between bus stops and temple.
The Sagrada Família receives 3.2 million visitors a year. One of the measures already taken to prevent overcrowding and allow local residents to get around freely was to move queues of visitors inside the temple grounds, rather than in the street. The tourist bus route was also re-defined via a process involving local citizens. The installation of the platforms is the latest measure in pacifying the area.
It is estimated that the initiative will create roughly 30% more pedestrian space in the corresponding area. This measure and others mean that the overall seating capacity at terraces will drop from 193 to 92, less than half the current total.New Paradigm
Last week, the crypto market entered a new paradigm after the Segwit2x agreement fell through. The market reaction to the cancellation was sharp and dramatic, but to those who have observed the market’s behavior over the past year, it was actually quite predictable. It was predictable because this year we had already entered two new paradigms related to Bitcoin’s scaling problem.
The first new paradigm began in May when Bitcoin’s scaling issues became apparent and altcoins took Bitcoin’s market share down from 90% to 50%. The second began after the Segwit2x agreement was made and Bitcoin Cash announced its launch. Once it became apparent that these scaling issues would be resolved one way or another, Bitcoin began outpacing altcoins and started taking back its market share.
Now that the 2x part is out of the equation, we’ve entered a new paradigm where legacy Bitcoin STILL has the same scaling problem it had when the first paradigm started. However, this time around, it has a more formidable opponent. Instead of competing against altcoins, it is now competing against a more efficient version of itself: Bitcoin Cash.
Bitcoin Cash had been outpacing Bitcoin’s spectacular gains shortly before the Segwit2x agreement fell through, but once the agreement was officially canceled, its value skyrocketed in comparison. The market reaction was telling. It preferred the non-bottlenecked, low-fee, highly-scalable version of Bitcoin to the bottlenecked, high-fee, non-scalable version. The investors placed their bets, and they placed them on the version of Bitcoin that has scaling baked into the cake.
The writing’s on the wall. Scaling matters.
Don’t forget who wanted 2x
The Segwit2x agreement was significant because it had support from over 95% of the mining hashpower and some of the most well-known companies in the ecosystem. With a scaling debate raging on for quite some time with no end in sight, a resolution finally appeared in the form of a compromise. But compromise was not something legacy Bitcoin’s leadership team or followers were willing to do so they put up a huge fight and eventually got their way. Segwit2x would be canceled, and Bitcoin would be stuck with a 1MB blocksize and congested network for the foreseeable future. What they didn’t consider were the other, VERY IMPORTANT parties involved. That is, the parties that cared less about Segwit and sidechain networks, and more about on-chain usability and removal of network congestion that caused high fees. After all, what business or customer ever said, “ I want to pay more in fees?”
Without the compromise, the writing is on the wall for businesses, miners, and use-cases that have been involved with Bitcoin for some time. Bitcoin Cash is friendly towards their interests, and regular Bitcoin isn’t. Massive expansion in the number of users equates to a higher price for miners; and low cost with no backlog is better for businesses and use-cases. It’s a no-brainer as to why they wanted the blocksize increase, and now, they have that with Bitcoin Cash. Bitcoin Cash listened, legacy Bitcoin did not.
The writing’s on the wall. Businesses and entrepreneurs want a bigger blocksize.
Investors look for future growth potential
Investors invest in assets that offer future growth potential. If a company stops growing, so does its investment demand. Legacy Bitcoin is unlikely to be an exception; at least in the long term. In the short term, however, the market could remain irrational due to current momentum and name recognition; but sentiment can shift suddenly, especially if it becomes obvious that a more efficient, higher growth potential version is out there. Investors favor growth over no growth, and Bitcoin’s growth potential is limited whereas Bitcoin Cash’s is limitless.
Legacy Bitcoin has reached the upper limits of its growth potential. With significant transaction backlogs and fees that price-out most people in this world, the capability to add more users and use-cases is minimal. Unfortunately, the leadership of legacy Bitcoin doesn’t seem to mind. They don’t intend for Bitcoin to function as a currency, nor are they trying to share its benefits with everybody in the world. They are content with Bitcoin being used only by tech geeks and investors that are simply riding the “digital gold” wave. Their focus isn’t on adoption by the average, everyday person or turning it into a usable form of money; rather, their focus is on the highly technical user with efforts spent on building things that they might find cool. Things a normal person would never care about but a tech geek might salivate over.
Which is why the market reaction after Segwit2x was predictable. Investment dramatically funneled into the version of Bitcoin whose game plan includes not just tech geeks or rich investors, but everybody in the world. Demand funneled into the chain that can handle exponential growth and keep fees low enough to invite participation from everyone. It funneled into the version that unlocks cryptocurrency’s maximum potential, maximum number of use-cases, maximum number of users, and has the capability to bring a fair form of money to everyone in the world under one roof. When you break down what matters to each camp, the writing on the wall becomes crystal clear. Bitcoin Cash is the version of Bitcoin with the greatest growth potential.
BTC = The “Bitcoin as tech” camp that wants everyone to run a node, doesn’t care about fees rising during periods of high volume, makes complaints that transactions are spam, doesn’t plan on becoming money and aims only to be held as an investment, doesn’t care for it to be used in commerce, prices out most of the world population, intends on having a “fee-market” develop, aims to add additional steps to the process with sidechains, and is reliant on a theoretical, unproven method for scaling.
BCH = The “Bitcoin as money” camp that wants everyone to have it, is capable of handling immense transaction loads with fees remaining in the pennies, considers no transactions spam, plans to become the best form of money to ever exist and believes value comes from usage, intends to be used in commerce throughout the world, plans for fees low enough to be used by the world’s population, wants use-cases built off of it and embraces merchant adoption, desires to disrupt the current financial system, aims to make it easier for the average person to use, and plans on scaling to levels larger than VISA using Satoshi’s proven invention: The Blockchain.
Now ask yourself, “ What vision is better? What coin is more attractive to investors? Which coin is most likely to take market share away from the multi-trillion dollar gold and currency markets?”
The writing’s on the wall. Just open up your eyes.Submitted by Michael Snyder of The Economic Collapse blog,
Did you know that financial institutions all over the world are warning that we could see a "mega default" on a very prominent high-yield investment product in China on January 31st? We are being told that this could lead to a cascading collapse of the shadow banking system in China which could potentially result in "sky-high interest rates" and "a precipitous plunge in credit". In other words, it could be a "Lehman Brothers moment" for Asia. And since the global financial system is more interconnected today than ever before, that would be very bad news for the United States as well. Since Lehman Brothers collapsed in 2008, the level of private domestic credit in China has risen from $9 trillion to an astounding $23 trillion. That is an increase of $14 trillion in just a little bit more than 5 years. Much of that "hot money" has flowed into stocks, bonds and real estate in the United States. So what do you think is going to happen when that bubble collapses?
The bubble of private debt that we have seen inflate in China since the Lehman crisis is unlike anything that the world has ever seen. Never before has so much private debt been accumulated in such a short period of time. All of this debt has helped fuel tremendous economic growth in China, but now a whole bunch of Chinese companies are realizing that they have gotten in way, way over their heads. In fact, it is being projected that Chinese companies will pay out the equivalent of approximately a trillion dollars in interest payments this year alone. That is more than twice the amount that the U.S. government will pay in interest in 2014.
Over the past several years, the U.S. Federal Reserve, the European Central Bank, the Bank of Japan and the Bank of England have all been criticized for creating too much money. But the truth is that what has been happening in China surpasses all of their efforts combined. You can see an incredible chart which graphically illustrates this point right here. As the Telegraph pointed out a while back, the Chinese have essentially "replicated the entire U.S. commercial banking system" in just five years...
Overall credit has jumped from $9 trillion to $23 trillion since the Lehman crisis. "They have replicated the entire U.S. commercial banking system in five years," she said. The ratio of credit to GDP has jumped by 75 percentage points to 200pc of GDP, compared to roughly 40 points in the US over five years leading up to the subprime bubble, or in Japan before the Nikkei bubble burst in 1990. "This is beyond anything we have ever seen before in a large economy. We don't know how this will play out. The next six months will be crucial," she said.
As with all other things in the financial world, what goes up must eventually come down.
And right now January 31st is shaping up to be a particularly important day for the Chinese financial system. The following is from a Reuters article...
The trust firm responsible for a troubled high-yield investment product sold through China's largest banks has warned investors they may not be repaid when the 3 billion-yuan ($496 million)product matures on Jan. 31, state media reported on Friday. Investors are closely watching the case to see if it will shatter assumptions that the government and state-owned banks will always protect investors from losses on risky off-balance-sheet investment products sold through a murky shadow banking system.
If there is a major default on January 31st, the effects could ripple throughout the entire Chinese financial system very rapidly. A recent Forbes article explained why this is the case...
A WMP default, whether relating to Liansheng or Zhenfu, could devastate the Chinese banking system and the larger economy as well. In short, China’s growth since the end of 2008 has been dependent on ultra-loose credit first channeled through state banks, like ICBC and Construction Bank, and then through the WMPs, which permitted the state banks to avoid credit risk. Any disruption in the flow of cash from investors to dodgy borrowers through WMPs would rock China with sky-high interest rates or a precipitous plunge in credit, probably both. The result? The best outcome would be decades of misery, what we saw in Japan after its bubble burst in the early 1990s.
The big underlying problem is the fact that private debt and the money supply have both been growing far too rapidly in China. According to Forbes, M2 in China increased by 13.6 percent last year...
And at the same time China’s money supply and credit are still expanding. Last year, the closely watched M2 increased by only 13.6%, down from 2012’s 13.8% growth. Optimists say China is getting its credit addiction under control, but that’s not correct. In fact, credit expanded by at least 20% last year as money poured into new channels not measured by traditional statistics.
Overall, M2 in China is up by about 1000 percent since 1999. That is absolutely insane.
And of course China is not the only place in the world where financial trouble signs are erupting. Things in Europe just keep getting worse, and we have just learned that the largest bank in Germany just suffered " a surprise fourth-quarter loss"...
Deutsche Bank shares tumbled on Monday following a surprise fourth-quarter loss due to a steep drop in debt trading revenues and heavy litigation and restructuring costs that prompted the bank to warn of a challenging 2014. Germany's biggest bank said revenue at its important debt-trading division, fell 31 percent in the quarter, a much bigger drop than at U.S. rivals, which have also suffered from sluggish fixed-income trading.
If current trends continue, many other big banks will soon be experiencing a "bond headache" as well. At this point, Treasury Bond sentiment is about the lowest that it has been in about 20 years. Investors overwhelmingly believe that yields are heading higher.
If that does indeed turn out to be the case, interest rates throughout our economy are going to be rising, economic activity will start slowing down significantly and it could set up the "nightmare scenario" that I keep talking about.
But I am not the only one talking about it.
In fact, the World Economic Forum is warning about the exact same thing...
Fiscal crises triggered by ballooning debt levels in advanced economies pose the biggest threat to the global economy in 2014, a report by the World Economic Forum has warned. Ahead of next week's WEF annual meeting in Davos, Switzerland, the forum's annual assessment of global dangers said high levels of debt in advanced economies, including Japan and America, could lead to an investor backlash. This would create a "vicious cycle" of ballooning interest payments, rising debt piles and investor doubt that would force interest rates up further.
So will a default event in China on January 31st be the next "Lehman Brothers moment" or will it be something else?
In the end, it doesn't really matter. The truth is that what has been going on in the global financial system is completely and totally unsustainable, and it is inevitable that it is all going to come horribly crashing down at some point during the next few years.
It is just a matter of time.The References, officially:
Starlight Glimmer
Twilight Sparkle
Pinkie Pie
Fluttershy
Rainbow Dash
Rarity
Applejack
Spike
Happy Season Finale! This isn't getting any easier with each new season. The third in-succession MLP In A Nutshell nutshell is here! This was a brilliant season. All that sudden continuity.Things to note/not write me about: I couldn't cram each and every reference, because that would've given me a stroke. Also, I won't be doing those of the previous seasons before 5. And now, the cheatsheet.1. Teacup-swimmingMedals of Friendship2. Teacups, Cinnamon Nuts, Bottled-up Rage3.Shopping Cart, Whammy4.Pizza Suit, Kite-flying Starlight Glimmer, Jalapeño Red Velvet Omelette Cupcakes5. What-the-heckIntensive Care6., Majestic Statue7.Wonderbolt8.Feather Bangers Fan Club9. RageAs-if Big MacintoshStrawberry Basket10.Pineapple Breakfast, Pancakes, Ballerina Twilight Sparkle11., Honorary Yak Helmet12. Screaming Piñata, Gin-sing Tea, Flying Teapot13.14. Friendship Journals15. Twilight Glimmer,, Cutie Map16. Rockhoof, Mistmane, Flash Magnus17.18.Paw, Glowpaz19. Punk Rage Rarity20. Mage Meadowbrook, Flash Bee21. CMC-Protesting Rebel, Circles22. Seasick, Parachuting, Barrel o' Fun23. Ballooning Pie-throwing Pinkie Pie24., Star Swirl's Journal*25/26., Pony of Shadows (), Mysterious SirensPlease do not modify my work in any way."My Little Pony: Friendship is Magic" & Original Characters © HasbroPARIS - The French intelligence agency in charge of military and electronic spying is massively collecting data and monitoring networks of telecoms giant Orange, Le Monde newspaper reported in its Friday edition.
"The DGSE can read, like an open book, the origin and destination of all communications of Orange customers," the paper said.
Monitoring operations were being carried out without any external supervision with access "free and total" for spies at the General Directorate for External Security (DGSE).
Le Monde said its report was based on an internal British intelligence document made available by former US intelligence contractor Edward Snowden.
Contacted by AFP, an Orange spokesman said the company "like all (other) operators has relations with state agencies in charge of the country's and the French people's security."
"These relations strictly comply with the laws and are legal under the responsibility of the State and the control of judges," he added.
The DGSE and agents with military clearance have been working with Orange, formerly known as France Telecom, "for at least 30 years", said Le Monde.
The DGSE would not comment on the report.
Snowden, who has been charged in the United States with espionage, lives in exile in Russia.
He said earlier this month he had no regrets over his leaks about mass surveillance programs by the US National Security Agency (NSA), saying they sparked a needed public debate on spying and data collection.There are probably some regulars who would make for better part timers than Olivia. Sydney’s only known her since yesterday. Her half brother slash cousin (their dad made it with their twin sister moms for those of you haven’t been here since the beginning) would count as a regular but he wouldn’t be a good choice as she’d be flustered around him all the time. Honestly Sydney may be thinking of hiring Olivia just to ensure her conversion to the comic side.
Harem makes a pretty good supplemental communication system considering she can’t be disrupted or interfered with, at least as far as anyone up to and including Dabbler knows. You can even just tap on one of them to use morse code. She’d probably find that annoying though.
BTW, assume the picture in panel five has been up for a few hours to accrue that many notes. That’s “Vogue” in the picture. Before that Harem was Vogue she was “Cowgirl” and she decided to go retro today. Her closet is probably pretty big. I wouldn’t be surprised if it had multiple stories. (Her shirt says “Luck out with your duck out.” It’s her favorite selfie shirt.)
I’ve got a NSFW Dabbler fanart for you by Steven Stahlberg.
Here’s the link to the new comments highlighter for chrome, and the GitHub link which you can use to install on FireFox via Greasemonkey.I attended the "Campaign Trail" panel at last weekend's New Yorker festival, with Rick Hertzberg, George Packer and Ryan Lizza, moderated by Dorothy Wickendon. I live-Twittered it then, and have collected those bullet points here for posterity. (Keep in mind that this was all typed on a blackberry with a 140-character limit.) The full podcast is here, in case my shorthand doesn't do it for you (i.e. "RyLi" is Lizza, "Hertz" is Hertzberg, "Wick" is Wickendon. Packer you don't touch if you know what's good for you).
My takeaways: Packer saying that cable news culture has made us more ignorant; Hertzberg noting that usually people vote for the party or vote for the man, and in this case it seems like it might be a vote for temperament; Lizza on how cool, unflappable Obama got emotional when rehearsing his Invesco speech (according to aides), at the part where he referenced MLK; Wickenden cursing like a sailor; Lizza noting that there is a whole swatch of people this time around who are being missed by traditional polling; and Packer noting (archly) that the mere fact that we are talking about "lies" in the campaign is significant, because you used to not be able to say that word. Great panel, and particularly excellent questions from the audience following.
RyLi comments on McCain clip with green screen: "That's got to go in the Smithsonian after all this is over." Ha. 12:16 PM
Packer: They used to say the McCain brand was unshakable. Now not so sure. But he was the only brand the GOP had a chance with. 12:18 PM
RyLi points out all that had to happen for McCain to take it - Huck knocking out Romney in Iowa, Giuliani in Florida. 12:20 PM
RyLi: "Liberal" Obama revealed his conservative side in bailout crisis by being cautious and trying to return to normalcy. 12:24 PM
Packer mentions Kentucky and how Obama can't win there bc of race. Someone else mentioned Kentucky last night. 12:25 PM
Packer mentions the ridiculousness of the Manchurian Candidate idea, that he'd bring a secret agenda to the WH...what the NYer cov satirized 12:27 PM
Packer: Did not meet anyone who said that Sarah Palin had changed her vote. 12:27 PM
Wickendon quotes Chris Rock: "George Bush has fucked up so bad, he makes it hard for a white man to run for president." 12:32 PM
RyLi likens McCain camp to ship w/ hole in the hull - then there's a fire on deck (Palin), and they put it out - but there's still that hole 12:35 PM
Packer: The internet and the current media culture has made people more ignorant and monolithic. Everyone is a talking head. 12:39 PM
Clip of Obama dressing down McCain ("you act like the war started in 2007"). Packer says they both have points about each other's.... 12:41 PM
....lack of prescience. The fact is, it's about either staying in Iraq or getting out - and who will be a good Comm in Chief. 12:42 PM
Hertzberg: Voting choice is vote for party or for man? Voting party is voting for policy. This looks to be a vote for TEMPERAMENT. 12:44 PM
This has been going for almost an hour, and the name "Biden" has not been mentioned once. 12:48 PM
Packer: Afgh strategy isn't working, and a Surge there prob won't help. The U.S. may need to sit down with the Taliban. Why not? 12:52 PM
Okay now we get to Biden. Minute 53. 12:54 PM
Showed the Couric intvu question on the Supreme Court, Biden and Palin. The crowd ooooohed. 12:55 PM
Hertzberg: Palin was better in the debate because her syntax was better. (She passed the 'coherence' test.) 12:56 PM
Packer on Palin: "There are no verbs. There are gerundives, there are nouns - hockey mom, Joe SixPack...identity politics are about nouns." 12:59 PM (See his blog post on the subject here.)
Wick asks Hertz about the politics of tears on the campaign trail; Hertz talks about Obama. 01:02 PM
RyLi said Obama choked up rehearsing Invesco speech, at the part where he referred to MLK. Said it had been first time he'd [heard about] that from O 01:11 PM (update: I misheard this and assumed this was a first-person story from Lizza; it was actually one he recounted based on being told that by Obama aides).
Questions now - they are really sharp. Say what you want about the NYer elite readership, they do their homework. 01:12 PM
RyLi on first hundred days: It will be interesting to see if Obama or McCain will run the White House with the same top-down discipline. 01:17 PM
Packer: Even "the sainted" David Petraeus won't talk about victory. Obama talks like we can leave and leave it to the Iraqis. Not likely. 01:18 PM
Packer: Why is Iraq so important, and fragile? Look at a map. 01:19 PM
On lies in the campaign: The fact that we're now using the word "lies" is significant. You couldn't say that. 01:20 PM
RyLi: There's an entirely new class of likely voters that are not being detected by traditional polling. 01:21 PM
Wickendon: "You guys ask tougher questions than I do!" (Question on trade and globalization.) 01:22 PM
Question about demographics: Winning popular vote, losing the white vote? Hertz: "Democrats have lost the white vote for a long time!" 01:26 PM
Packer: The Republicans are captives of their base, cf hispanics. McCain knew it. 01:29 PMIn Revisiting the M3 Contraction I stated "consumers are saving, rather than spending their stimulus checks". Some found that statement hard to believe. Let's take a look.
Sev writes: "Mish, the argument that more people are saving is something I find hard to believe. Their bills are skyrocketing and "price" increases are eating into their monthly costs. Maybe some have paid down bills but I would bet the vast majority don't have the means. Now maybe ultra rich people are moving their vast sums into perceived safer investment vehicles but the thought that actual saving is increasing I don't think makes complete sense. I do buy that they are moving more money into checking accounts and are tapping their retirement early as well. As for seeing into what the dark pools of liquidity are doing I think that is the kernel."
What Is The Savings Rate?
Before we can state whether or not the savings rate is going up, we need to define it. The Federal Bank of San Francisco explains how the savings rate is calculated in a March 2002 article called What's Behind the Low U.S. Personal Saving Rate?
How is the personal saving rate measured?
The most frequently cited measure of the personal saving rate is based on the National Income and Product Accounts (NIPA). It is constructed by forming the ratio of Personal Saving to Disposable Personal Income (DPI), where DPI is defined as Personal Income (including wage and salary income, net proprietors' income, transfer payments less social insurance, income from interest and dividends, and net rental income) less tax and nontax payments to governments. Personal Saving is found by subtracting from DPI total Personal Outlays, 97% of which consists of Personal Consumption Expenditures (including consumer durables), with the remainder composed of Interest Paid by Persons (individuals, nonprofits, and trust funds) and Net Personal Transfer Payments to the Rest of the World.
Current low personal saving rate would not represent a problem that is overhanging the U.S. economy, but is instead a manifestation of a more efficient deployment of the economy's resources.
What's Behind The Soaring Savings Rate?
Congress enacted the tax rebate program earlier this year because it perceived a growing risk of recession. In addition, it feared monetary policy alone would not be effective because of the dysfunctional credit markets. As American taxpayers know, most of the rebate checks have now been mailed and cashed.
Those of us who supported this fiscal package reasoned that the program would boost consumer confidence as well as available cash. We hoped the combination would cause households to spend a substantial fraction of the rebate dollars, leading to more production and employment.
My Comment
Here's the deal. Consumers are tapped out. Confidence is in the gutter. Much of the stimulus will be used to pay down debt. Most of the rest of it will be to buy necessities that people were going to buy anyway. That is the easily seen, or at least should be easily seen.
My conclusion is there is not going to be a noticeable surge in spending in the second half of this year. Those banking on stimulus checks to carry a second half recovery just might wish to reconsider.
The evidence is now in and that optimism was unwarranted. Recent government statistics show that only between 10% and 20% of the rebate dollars were spent. The rebates added nearly $80 billion to the permanent national debt but less than $20 billion to consumer spending. This experience confirms earlier studies showing that one-time tax rebates are not a cost-effective way to increase economic activity.
These conclusions are significant for evaluating the likely impact of Barack Obama's recent proposal to distribute $1,000 rebate checks to low and middle-income workers at an estimated cost of approximately $65 billion. His plan, to finance those rebates with an extra tax on oil companies, would reduce investment in refining and exploration, keeping oil prices higher than they would otherwise be.
My Comment
Stimulus Plan Stymied
The graph plots monthly data from the Bureau of Economic Analysis’ personal income accounts spanning the years 2000-2008. It shows personal consumption, income, and saving for the 3 recent rebate periods:
1. 2001: Economic Growth and Tax Reconciliation Act of 2001
2. 2003: Jobs and Growth Tax Relief Reconciliation Act of 2003
3. 2008: Economic Stimulus Act of 2008
For the 2001 and 2003 rebate periods, personal saving rose sharply, but fell quickly thereafter. Real consumption grew in both periods, which contributed to economic growth. For the 2008 rebate period, personal saving rose sharply, and as in the previous periods, fell quickly thereafter. However, real consumption continued its previous downward trend. Most estimates expected consumers to spend at least 40% of the rebate checks, but in the end, they only spend 10%-20%. This has had negligible effects, if any, on economic growth.
Where To From Here?0 Court ruling allows convicted rapist to petition for visitation with biological daughter
BOSTON - A controversial court ruling has been handed down in a case FOX25 has been following for years. The man who impregnated a 14-year-old girl through rape can now continue his fight for his parental rights in family court.
via Fox25Boston.com The rape victim is now 21, her daughter is 7, and the lawyer representing them told Ted Daniel the decision blindsided her.
“We were shocked,” Wendy Murphy said.
In April, Murphy asked the state appeals court to block the convicted rapist from asserting any parental rights in family court. After eight months, the decision handed down was a four page decision that boiled down to one word - no.
“My client, a 14-year-old rape victim who became pregnant from rape, has to share parental rights with the man who attacked her,” Murphy said.
In 2011, Jamie Melendez pleaded guilty in criminal court to raping the victim at her family’s home in Dedham. He was sentenced to probation.
A year later in family court, Melendez was ordered to pay $110 a week in child support. That child support was a factor in the appeals court decision to not remove Melendez's parental rights.
According to the justices, it would "unfairly disadvantage the child by depriving her of the right to receive financial support from both parents.”
Another thing the appeals court cited is a state law passed in 2014 that Murphy calls severely flawed.
“There's almost an incentive in the law for rapists to leave DNA at the crime scene and cause pregnancy, because they know if pregnancy happens it will give them an advantage in court,” she said.
Murphy said she will seek further review from the supreme judicial court.
The last time Melendez petitioned for visitation with his biological daughter, a judge called the request insincere and denied it.
This ruling means Melendez can continue to fight for visitation until the girl is 18 years old.
© 2019 Cox Media Group.As Twitchy reported, Senior White House Adviser Stephen Miller got into it with CNN’s Jim Acosta at today’s White House press briefing, with critics As Twitchy reported, Senior White House Adviser Stephen Miller got into it with CNN’s Jim Acosta at today’s White House press briefing, with critics declaring Miller a Nazi and a white supremacist over his immigration policy, which would require prospective green card recipients to learn English.
For his part, Acosta paraphrased “The New Colossus” by Emma Lazarus as if it were U.S. immigration law, told Miller that his father had come to the United States as a Cuban immigrant in the 1960s, and suggested that the English language requirement would limit immigration to those from Great Britain and Australia.
NBC News’ Andrea Mitchell didn’t go so far as other journalists and tweet the entirety of the Lazarus sonnet, but she did call Miller “rude” for lecturing Cuban-American Acosta.
Trump aide Trump aide #Stephen Miller lecturing Cuban-American Jim Acosta of CNN on green card policy which his family lived 1st hand #Rude — Andrea Mitchell (@mitchellreports) — Andrea Mitchell (@mitchellreports) August 2, 2017
Since Acosta’s family lived it first-hand, Miller ought to have surrendered the podium and let Acosta dictate the administration’s immigration policy.
Today in why people hate the media Today in why people hate the media https://t.co/erziW6eqqh — Ben McDonald (@Bmac0507) — Ben McDonald (@Bmac0507) August 2, 2017
This gem from This gem from #AndreaMitchell, the most biased reporter at # |
Legendary Sniper Class Mod
+ Sniper Rifle Gun Damage
+ Sniper Rifle Critical Hit Damage - Shield Capacity
+5 Precision
+5 One Shot One Kill
+5 Headshot
+5 Kill Confirmed
+5 Velocity
Legendary Killer Class Mod
+ Team Critical Hit Damage
+5 Velocity
+5 Killer
+5 Ambush
+5 Headshot
+5 Two Fang
Gunzerker [ edit ]
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+ Team Bullet Regeneration
+5 Lay Waste
+5 5 Shots or 6
+5 Filled to the Brim
+5 Locked and Loaded
+5 Incite
Legendary Titan Class Mod
+ Health Regeneration
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+5 Hard to Kill
+5 Out of Bubblegum
+5 I'm The Juggernaut
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+5 Asbestos
Legendary Gunzerker Class Mod
+ Cooldown Rate
+5 Lay Waste
+5 Last Longer
+5 Yippie Ki Yay
+5 All In the Reflexes
+5 Incite
Mechromancer [ edit ]
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+ Team Elemental Effect Damage
+5 Wires Don't Talk
+5 Evil Enchantress
+5 More Pep
+5 Electrical Burn
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Legendary Anarchist Class Mod
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+5 Strength of 5 Gorilla
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Psycho [ edit ]
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+ Burn Damage
+5 Burn Baby Burn
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+5 Pain is PowerThe independent Liberal Party of the Netherlands (Vrijzinnige Partij) has promised to work up a national parliamentary motion in favour of a fully-fledged basic income for all Dutch citizens.
The political party formed in 2014 – which has a single parliamentary seat held by high-profile politician Norbert Klein – said that the growing number of local Dutch basic income initiatives represented no more than a welcome move toward condition-free benefits for claimants.
The party said it was high time that national politics took a serious look at a pure basic income for all citizens, adding that informal parliamentary channels to support the motion were already being established.
Norbert Klein, “De tijd is rijp voor het basisinkomen.” Trouw, 25 June 2015
Vrijzinnige Partij, “Tijd is rijp voor het Basisinkomen.” vrijzinnigepartij.nl 25 June 2015As President Donald Trump visits Saudi Arabia on the biggest foreign trip of his presidency, private equity giant Blackstone Group is unveiling a $40 billion infrastructure fund with the gulf nation, which will primarily invest in the United States. Saudi Arabia will commit $20 billion to the Blackstone infrastructure fund and another $20 billion will be raised from other limited partners, readying cash that could lead to $100 billion in total infrastructure investments on a leveraged basis.
Blackstone, co-founded by billionaire Stephen Schwarzman, head of Trump's business council, said on Saturday morning the fund effectively launches a new business line for the over $360 billion in assets firm. Already a powerhouse in private equity, real estate, hedge funds and credit investments, Blackstone has been preparing for a push into infrastructure, spotting an opportunity as large investors increasingly plant their money into the cogs of the global economy such as buildings, ports, wireless infrastructure, pipelines, railroads and airports.
Through its various funds, Blackstone has invested over $40 billion in such investments over the past fifteen years, however, those deals were not made inside a dedicated infrastructure business. With large institutional investors and sovereign wealth funds spotting trillions of dollars in necessary infrastructure investments in the U.S. and globally in coming decades, they now are looking to the sector as a greenfield area to earn stable double-digit returns. Firms like Global Infrastructure Partners, Macquarie, Brookfield Asset Management and BlackRock have already built weighty infrastructure businesses; now after lots of speculation Blackstone is entering the market in a major way.
Saudi Arabia's Public Investment Fund has agreed to commit $20 billion to the Blackstone infrastructure fund, which will be set up a permanent capital vehicle. Other outside investors will provide the rest of the fund's commitments. Though Blackstone says the vehicle "launches a new business" for the firms and is the culmination a year's worth of negotiation, it is being done on a non-binding basis, meaning talks continue and the structure has not been formalized.
“There is broad agreement that the United States urgently needs to invest in its rapidly aging infrastructure. This will create well-paying American jobs and will lay the foundation for stronger long-term economic growth," said Blackstone's billionaire president Hamilton E. James, in a press release announcing the deal. "Blackstone has the talent, scale and experience to be an effective private sector partner in filling the massive infrastructure funding gap," James said, before characterizing Saturday's deal as a "vote of confidence in our country and Blackstone."
H.E. Yasir Al Rumayyan, managing director of PIF, said Saudi Arabia's $20 billion commitment is a vote of confidence in President Trump's economic agenda.
“This potential investment reflects our positive views around the ambitious infrastructure initiatives being undertaken in the United States as announced by President Trump, and the strategic opportunity for the Public Investment Fund to achieve long-term returns given historical investment shortfalls," Rumayyan said. "We look forward to partnering with Blackstone, a recognized leader with a strong record of achievement across its extensive infrastructure projects," he added. On Friday, PIF formally closed its commitment to SoftBank's $93 billion technology fund, underscoring its appetite for major new investments as Saudi Arabia diversifies its economy.
Were one to count the $40 billion infrastructure fund towards Blackstone's assets under management, it would push overall AuM to over $400 billion, up roughly fourfold from its 2007 initial public offering. FORBES documented Blackstone's dramatic post-crisis rise in a May 2016 cover story on Schwarzman and the firm.
Read Forbes' Private Equity Coverage:
How Blackstone Became An Unstoppable Force
Brookfield: Toll Collector Of The 21st Century
Carlyle Group And The Kings Of Capital
How A Bet On Lyondell Became Wall Street's Greatest Ever Deal
How Apollo's Crisis-Era Bet On Annuities Turned Into A $72 Billion Business
Why Private Equity Stocks Can Double And Change Wall Street Forever Under President Trump
Some Of The World's Biggest Hedge Fund's Think Private Equity Stocks Are CheapStory highlights There have been no arrests, sheriff's department says
24 victims may have consumed synthetic THC candies
(CNN) Twenty-four people attending a music festival in Ohio were hospitalized Saturday from drug overdoses, according to the Richland County Sheriff's office.
No one lost consciousness and everyone seems to be OK, Sheriff's Capt. Donald Zehner said Saturday afternoon.
MORE: One to two pieces will get someone high, people here at #ESTFEST were eating the entire bag. @WEWS pic.twitter.com/6hl586mn7F — Tara Molina (@TaraMolinaTV) August 6, 2016
The initial sheriff's department report did not say what caused the onset of illnesses but patients were treated with Narcan, said Nikki Workman, spokeswoman for OhioHealth Mansfield Hospital. Narcan is used to counteract overdoses of opiates such as heroin or oxycodone.
Paramedics initially believed the overdoses were caused by opiates but when victims did not respond to the Narcan they had the candies tested and they came back positive for a high dosage of THC, the psychoactive ingredient in cannabis, WEWS reported.
Read MoreNASA's OSIRIS-REx spacecraft, on a return mission to the far-off asteroid Bennu, will pass by Earth on Friday, and you're invited to wave as it goes by.
OSIRIS-REx — which has been orbiting the sun for a year — is on a seven-year mission to the asteroid. While the spacecraft is scheduled to arrive there in August 2018, it must undergo some manoeuvres to adjust its trajectory without using fuel, one of which is a gravity-assist.
The spacecraft will use Earth's gravity to slingshot toward the asteroid. This is fourth trajectory correction engineers have made to OSIRIS-REx.
On Friday, the spacecraft will fly just 17,000 kilometres above Earth at about 12:52 p.m. ET, between Antarctica and Cape Horn. OSIRIS-REx has already travelled 965 million kilometres.
To calibrate its instruments, four hours after its close pass by Earth, OSIRIS-REx will make scientific observations of Earth and the moon.
Look up and wave
NASA and the mission partners are asking the public to participate in the Wave to OSIRIS-REx social media event by taking photos of themselves waving. They can post the pictures on Twitter using the hashtag #HelloOSIRISREx.
Canada has contributed a vital piece of instrumentation to the mission, called the OSIRIS-REx Laser Altimeter, which will fire a laser and create a 3D map of the asteroid. It will be the most detailed map of an asteroid and provide scientists with information on the asteroid's shape, rocks and topography.
The flight unit of OLA, the Canadian Space Agency's contribution to NASA's OSIRIS-REx mission. OLA consists of two parts: an electronics box (left) and the sensor head (right) housing two lasers that fire short laser pulses and a receiver to capture the beam that will bounce back from the surface of the asteroid Bennu. (NASA/Goddard Space Flight Center/Debora McCallum)
This is a unique mission: aside from mapping Bennu, OSIRIS-REX will also collect samples from the asteroid and deliver them back to Earth, a first for NASA.
Bennu was chosen in part for its relative proximity to Earth. It is also known as a carbonaceous asteroid, one that is carbon-rich and that has changed very little since the birth of our solar system 4.5 billion years ago. It's believed that asteroids like it could contain organic molecules and amino acids, some of the building blocks of life.
OSIRIS-REx will return to Earth on Sept. 30, 2025.Discover the sights, sounds and tastes of the Guelph & District Multicultural Festival!
Join us from June 7-9, 2019 for our 33rd annual Guelph & District Multicultural Festival at Riverside Park.
The 2019 Festival will bring you more performers, food, fun and of course – more opportunities to celebrate Multiculturalism
The annual Guelph & District Multicultural Festival is a free, three-day event held at Riverside Park in Guelph. Each year we welcome local craft vendors, performers and food vendors to share their passion for art, culture, and cuisine.
Our Festival is 100% sponsored by local businesses and grants. Each year, we rely on the generous support from our community to keep our Festival alive and free to the public. This approach ensures that everyone who comes to the Festival can discover and share in the tastes, sights, and sounds of the city’s diverse population.
Can you believe that in 2018, we welcomed over 25,000 visitors?! We even managed to catch the attention of Prime Minister Justin Trudeau.
Recognition from Prime Minister Justin Trudeau
Eligibility CriteriaSouth Africa's Wayde van Niekerk won the Men's 400m Final at the Rio 2016 Olympic Games, one of just two running world records broken at the games.
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Paris (AFP)
The Olympic motto is "Faster, Higher, Stronger", but what if we have reached the limits of the human body?
Some scientists have warned that when it comes to running -- from sprints to marathons -- the era of breaking records may be coming to an end.
That is, unless the next athletic evolution is artificial and it is doping, rather than human exertion, that breaches the next barriers.
Only one world record was broken at this year's athletics world championships in London, in the newly-recognised women's 50km race walk.
And at the 2016 Rio Olympics, just two running world records were bested -- South Africa's Wayde van Niekerk in the 400-metre men's event and Ethiopia's Almaz Ayana in the women's 10,000m.
After the great advances of the 20th century, "the rate of improvement is approaching zero for the majority of athletic trials," said Marc Andy, a researcher at France's Institute of Sport Biomedical Research and Epidemiology (IRMES).
In 2007, the institute analysed the history of Olympic records since the modern Games began in 1896 and calculated that athletes have reached 99 percent of what is possible within the limits of natural human physiology.
The most recent near breakthrough in the gruelling marathon occurred in May when Kenya's Eliud Kipchoge came agonisingly close to sporting immortality, nearly running the first sub two-hour marathon.
He missed the mythical mark by just 25 seconds.
But the race conditions at the Nike-sponsored event were so favourable -- Kipchoge ran behind a six-man pacesetting team and was trailed by a time-keeping vehicle on a racing circuit in Monza, Italy -- that the time was not recognised by the International Association of Athletics Federations (IAAF).
Fellow Kenyan Dennis Kimetto remains the world record holder for his 2:02:57 run in 2014.
- Imagining the perfect runner -
Coaches and scientists have long tried to figure out the optimal performance conditions for running the classic marathon distance of 42.195 kilometres (26.2 miles).
Beyond the ideal temperature -- around 12 degrees Celsius (53 degrees Fahrenheit) -- and the runner being small, "there are dozens of factors at play, from body type to physiological and biomechanical criteria," said Pierre Sallet, a performance expert from Athletes for Transparency, an organisation that promotes integrity in sport.
"How are we going to identify these parameters in these categories? How will we manage nutrition and altitude training as well as maximising form and energy to arrive on the day in the optimal psychological and physical condition?" Sallet asked.
Beyond environment and body shape, "three major physiological parameters come into play in marathons," Vincent Pialoux, deputy head of Lyon's Inter-University Laboratory of Human Movement Biology, told AFP.
"Endurance, the ability to create energy using oxygen," which is measured by a runner's VO2 max (Maximum Oxygen Uptake Capacity), and "motor efficiency", the body's ability to save energy, Pialoux said.
"Of these three factors, if we take the best data measured in the laboratory on different athletes, we arrive at times well below the limits predicted" by models based on the evolution of performance, he said.
- 'Human machine is complex' -
An athlete who combines all the optimal conditions has yet to be found. When Ethiopia's Haile Gebrselassie broke his own world record in Berlin in 2008 he was 35 years old. But Pialoux said that VO2 Max decreases over time.
Within all these very human constraints, could doping be the evolution the models did not predict?
Should we fear the scenario imagined by Belgian philosopher Jean-Noel Missa, in which genetically enhanced athletes compete for corporations at the 2144 Brussels Olympics?
It's not time to panic yet, but Xavier Bigard, scientific advisor to the French Anti-Doping Agency (AFLD) said there are several causes for concern, including exercise pills that could be used "increase the effects of training," and EPO doping, which increases oxygen absorption, allowing athletes to run harder and faster without tiring.
While stem-cell therapy may sound futuristic, it has already been used in some sports to help heal injuries.
It is genetic doping that seems to loom largest over the future of cheating in sports.
Doctors have for years been experimenting with ways to inject synthetic genes into patients, altering an individual's genome to enhance muscle recovery or stem muscle deterioration, among other benefits.
These techniques could hypothetically give athletes a huge advantage.
But "the identity card of a muscle fibre is based on thousands of genes, we cannot change them change them all," said Bigard, adding the "human machine is very complex".
"The transformation of man into an animal capable of running a marathon in one hour and 40 minutes would take a long time, if it is possible, and there are an incalculable number of scientific limits," said Sallet.
And, he added, "there will always be one limit: keeping the person alive."
© 2017 AFPThe steady expansion of the "surveillance society" risks undermining fundamental freedoms including the right to privacy, according to a House of Lords report published today.
The peers say Britain has constructed one of the most extensive and technologically advanced surveillance systems in the world in the name of combating terrorism and crime and improving administrative efficiency.
The report, Surveillance: Citizens and the State, by the Lords' constitution committee, says Britain leads the world in the use of CCTV, with an estimated 4m cameras, and in building a national DNA database, with more than 7% of the population already logged compared with 0.5% in the America.
The cross-party committee which includes Lord Woolf, a former lord chief justice, and two former attorneys general, Lord Morris and Lord Lyell, warns that "pervasive and routine" electronic surveillance and the collection and processing of personal information is almost taken for granted.
Although many surveillance practices and data collection processes are unknown to most people, the expansion in their use represents "one of the most significant changes in the life of the nation since the end of the second world war", the report says. The committee warns that the national DNA database could be used for "malign purposes", challenges whether CCTV cuts crime and questions whether local authorities should be allowed to use surveillance powers at all.
The peers say privacy is an "essential prerequisite to the exercise of individual freedom" and the growing use of surveillance and data collection needs to be regulated by executive and legislative restraint at all times.
Lord Goodlad, the former Tory chief whip and committee chairman, said there could be no justification for this gradual but incessant creep towards every detail about an individual being recorded and pored over by the state.
"The huge rise in surveillance and data collection by the state and other organisations risks undermining the long-standing traditions of privacy and individual freedom which are vital for democracy," he said. "If the public are to trust that information about them is not being improperly used there should be much more openness about what data is collected, by whom and how it is used."
The constitution committee makes more than 40 recommendations to protect individual privacy, including the deletion of all profiles from the national DNA database except for those of convicted criminals and a call for the mandatory encryption of personal data held by public and private organisations that are legally obliged to hold it.
But the report is silent on proposals from Jacqui Smith, the home secretary, for a "superdatabase" tracking everybody's emails, calls, texts and internet use and from Jack Straw, the justice secretary, to lower barriers on the widespread sharing of personal data across the public sector.
But the peers are critical of whether local authorities should continue to exercise their surveillance powers under the Regulation of Investigatory Powers Act 2000. They say examples of local councils using covert surveillance operations to stop fly tipping, reducing dog fouling, and investigate fraudulent school place applications led them to question how they acquired such powers. Ministers should examine whether local authorities, rather than the police, are the appropriate bodies to mount surveillance operations, the peers say. If they are, then their use should be confined to crime investigations that carry a minimum two-year prison sentence.
The peers say individuals targeted by such operations should be informed when it is completed, as long as no investigation is prejudiced.We just released a new patch for Heroes of the Storm, which brings a new Hero, a new Brawl, UI improvements, balance updates, and more to the Nexus! Check out today’s patch notes below.
General
The Nexus Challenge has Begun!
Take on the Nexus Challenge by partying up with a friend to play Heroes of the Storm from November 15 until January 4, and you’ll be handsomely rewarded!
Games must be completed in Ranked, Unranked Draft, Quick Match, or Co-op vs. A.I. modes in order to count toward Nexus Challenge progress.
Play 15 games while partied with a friend to earn the following in-game Overwatch and Heroes of the Storm rewards: Overwatch Rewards Oni Genji Skin Oni Genji Spray Oni Genji Player Icon Heroes of the Storm Rewards Zarya Oni Genji Portrait
Play 30 games while partied with a friend to receive the following additional in-game Heroes of the Storm rewards: Heroes of the Storm Rewards Auriel Greymane Kerrigan Li-Ming Orochi Hovercycle Mount 30 Day Stimpack
Learn more by reading our Nexus Challenge blog post.
New Brawl: Blackheart’s Revenge
Captain Blackheart has shoved off in his ghost ship, Blackheart’s Revenge, to blow the docks to smithereens! Attack Blackheart’s ship to stop his assault and send him to a watery grave, or clear the path of enemies to defend him as he carries out his mission.
Blackheart’s Revenge is a new Arena Battleground that introduces attack/defend-style mechanics and asymmetric gameplay to Heroes of the Storm. Only the attacking team has a Core, and they must stop Blackheart before sails across the battleground to destroy it. Shuffle Pick: Pick one of three randomly selected Heroes, and then duke it out against the enemy team to attack or defend Blackheart. Attack: The attacking team must gather cannonballs, load them into cannons that line the docks, and fire on Blackheart’s Revenge to sink the ship before it reaches their Core. Defend: Kill attacking Heroes to prevent them from firing the cannons and see to it that Blackheart’s ship reaches the Core in-tact.
Click the Brawl Info button in the lower-left corner of the screen to learn detailed information about the currently active Brawl.
Revamped Tutorial
The Heroes of the Storm Tutorial has been reworked and split into two categories: Tutorial and Battleground Training. The Tutorial covers the basics of how to play Heroes of the Storm, including combat, team leveling, Talents, and Mercenary Camps. Battleground Training acquaints players with the importance of Battleground Objectives.
Players can now play through the Tutorial and Battleground Training using three different Heroes: Jaina, Muradin, and Tyrande.
Revisit the Tutorials or Challenges at any time by opening the Main Menu (ESC) and clicking the Tutorials or Challenges buttons.
Free Hero Promotion Changes
Jaina, Muradin, and Tyrande in order to better accommodate new players who have just completed the Heroes of the Storm tutorial missions. The free Heroes offered by a promotion that began earlier this year have been replaced byin order to better accommodate new players who have just completed the Heroes of the Storm tutorial missions.
Returning players who did not already claim a free Hero prior to today’s patch will now be able to add Jaina, Muradin, or Tyrande to their collections. Those who already own all three of these Heroes, and did not claim a free Hero prior to today’s patch, will instead receive 4,000 gold. Players who already claimed a free Hero prior to today’s patch will not be able to pick a second free Hero.
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New Hero: Varian
Few would have expected that the gladiator known only as Lo’Gosh was in truth the missing ruler of Stormwind, Varian Wrynn. Now the High King of the Alliance, his every action shapes the destiny of Azeroth itself.
Trait
Heroic Strike Every 18 seconds, Varian’s next Basic Attack deals bonus damage. Each Basic Attack reduces this cooldown by 2 seconds.
Basic Abilities
Lion’s Fang (Q) Launch a shockwave that travels in a straight line, dealing damage and slowing enemies by 30% for 1.5 seconds.
Parry (W) Parry all incoming Basic Attacks for 1.25 seconds, reducing their damage by 100%.
Charge (E) Charge to the target enemy, dealing light damage and slowing them by 75% for 1 second.
Heroic Abilities
Taunt (R) Force the target enemy Hero to attack Varian for 1.25 seconds. Passive: Maximum Health increased by 50%. Passive: Attack speed reduced by 25%.
Colossus Smash (R) Smash the target enemy, dealing damage and making them Vulnerable for 3 seconds. Passive: Base Attack Damage increased by 75%. Passive: Maximum Health reduced by 10%.
Twin Blades of Fury (Passive) Basic Attacks reduce Heroic Strike’s cooldown by 9 seconds, and increase Varian’s movement speed by 30% for 2 seconds. Passive: Attack speed increased by 100%. Passive: Base Attack Damage decreased by 25%.
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Art
General
Alarak: The red and green icons for Alarak’s Sustaining Power and Negatively Charged Talents have been swapped.
Minions: Catapults have received updated minimap icons in order to better distinguish them from normal Minions.
Rexxar: Misha now has her own minimap icon.
Battlegrounds
Dragon Shire: Dragon Shire has received additional optimization improvements.
Heroes, Abilities, and Talents
Kharazim: Kharazim has received updated visual effects to coincide with re-worked Abilities and Talents.
The following Heroes, Abilities, and Talents have received updated visual effects: Mercenary Lord and Promote Talents Blood Elf Tyrande: Sentinel Johanna: Falling Sword Nova: Triple Tap will now appear team-colored. Raynor: Adrenaline Rush will now better visually indicate when its Healing effects are available.
The following Hero Abilities have received optimization improvements: Artanis: Purifier Beam Kerrigan: Maelstrom Malfurion: Tranquility Tracer: Basic Attack
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Shop
Bundles
New Bundles Lo’Gosh Varian Bundle – Available until November 29, 2016
Removed Bundles Masters of Magic Bundle Ultimate Masters of Magic Bundle
New Hero
Varian has been added to the in-game Shop.
Mounts
New Mounts Orochi Hovercycle – Available exclusively by completing 30 games with a friend during the Nexus Challenge, which starts the week of November 15 and lasts until January 4.
Returning Mounts Magic Carpet
Removed Mounts Butcher’s Beast
Skins
Lo’Gosh Varian
Master Varian
Price Reductions
Leoric’s prices reduced to $8.49 USD and 7,000 Gold.
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Sound
General
New sound effects have been added to coincide with the re-worked Tutorial experience.
Heroes, Abilities, and Talents
Kharazim has received updated sound effects to coincide with his re-worked Abilities and Talents.
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User Interface
General
AFK Detection Added to Heroes Brawl AFK detection has been added to Heroes Brawl. Players who become inactive during a Brawl will be disconnected from the match.
New Player Daily Quests Prior to reaching account level 10, players will now receive a “Play 3 vs. A.I. Games” Daily Quest instead of the “Play 3 Games” quest.
Auto Select
Players can now select their preferred roles when queuing as Auto-Select in Quick Match and Versus A.I. games.
Pick the Auto Select Hero, and then use the new row of Role buttons added to the Hero Select screen to choose one or more preferred Hero Roles. Instead of choosing by role, players may also queue for Auto Select as the Heroes they’ve selected as favorites. In order to queue as Auto Select in a preferred role or with favorites, the selection must total at least 5 Heroes.
MVP and Commendations
A number of additional Commendations have been added in order to help recognize a wider variety of in-game achievements.
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Design & Gameplay
Damage Mitigation Effects
Resistant and Vulnerable effects now stack additively with one another, up to a maximum of 75% Resitance and 25% Vulnerability.
Developer Comments: Lead Designer Matt Cooper posted the design team's thoughts on this change in the forums. Lead Designer Matt Cooper posted the design team's thoughts on this change in the forums. Click here to read his post.
Stealth
Abilities that reveal Stealthed/Cloaked Heroes will no longer remove the Stealth/Cloak effect, but will instead temporarily reveal the cloaked Hero.
The following talents now function while under the effects of Stealth granted by another player (ex: Tyrande’s Shadowstalk): Nova Tactical Espionage Advanced Cloaking Covert Ops Samuro Way of the Wind Harsh Winds
Developer Comments: Some revealers, like Oracle from Tassadar and now Scouting Drone, are very binary in their ability to reveal Heroes, by design. But their purpose is to provide scouting and position of the enemy, and not to negate the effects of Talents or Abilities that rely on Stealth to provide their benefit. While examining these conditional Talents, we decided that it would be more interesting to allow synergies between external sources of Stealth these Talents. We like that choices like Tyrande’s Shadowstalk or Medivh’s Invisibility become more interesting if you have allies that gain additional benefits from Stealth on your team.
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Battlegrounds
Dragon Shire
Dragon Knight Rubble Maker (Passive) now also reduces the duration of Blinds by 50%
Garden of Terror
Garden Terror Terror of the Garden (Passive) now also reduces the duration of Blinds by 50%
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Talents
Scouting Drone
Now also reveals Stealthed/Cloaked Heroes
Seasoned Marksman
Basic Attack damage can now be gained past the previous cap of 40 bonus damage
Activated Attack Speed bonus increased from 30 to 40%
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Heroes
Assassin
Alarak
Abilities
Lightning Surge (E) Range increased by roughly 10%
Return
Illidan
Talents
Level 1 Unending Hatred (Passive) Increased Basic Attack damage bonus upon quest completion from 10 to 20 Battered Assault (W) Added functionality: Now also increases the duration of Sweeping Strike from 3 to 5 seconds Increased the bonus damage gained from hitting 2+ Heroes with Sweeping Strike from 125 to 150%
Level 4 Unbound (W) No longer reduces the cooldown of Sweeping Strike Added Functionality: Quest: After hitting 30 Heroes with Sweeping Strike, gain a second charge of Sweeping Strike
Level 7 Thirsting Blade (Trait) Increases healing amount of 50 to 60%
Level 16 Marked for Death (Q) Damage reduced from 225 to 180
Developer Comments: We’re aiming to make a few of the earlier talent choices for Illidan more competitive options, and open up a greater variety of playstyles for Illidan players. By increasing the bonus of Unending Hatred, we think farming Minion waves and Hunting into fights will be enticing on certain Battlegrounds. By allowing Unbound to grant 2 charges of Sweeping Strike, we think that Talents like Battered Assault and Blades of Azzinoth will showcase an Illidan that can dance across an enemy team and do a lot of damage while doing so.
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Raynor
Abilities
Adrenaline Rush (E) Now displays a visual effect under Raynor's feet to indicate that Adrenaline Rush is off cooldown
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Thrall
Abilities
Earthquake (R) Added functionality: Now deals 50 damage to Heroes with each pulse (will now trigger Frostwolf Resilience)
Sundering (R) Stun duration reduced from 1.25 to 1 seconds
Developer Comments: We have mentioned before that sometimes we will stubbornly hold on making balance changes to some Heroic abilities because we believe they are actually very powerful in their current form, even if they are not currently seeing much play. This has been the case with Earthquake, but Sunder has consistently been the go-to pick since Thrall’s inception. We hope this change will help shake up the pick rates of Thrall’s Heroic abilities.
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Zeratul
Stats
Base Maximum Health increased from 1545 to 1622
Base Health Regen increased from 3.22 to 3.38
Abilities
Singularity Spike (W) Mana cost increased from 60 to 80
Blink (E) Mana cost reduced from 75 to 50
Talents
Level 1 Vorpal Blade (Active) Moved from level 4 New Talent: Shadow Hunter (Passive) Gather Regeneration Globes to lower the Mana cost of Blink by 2. After gathering 20 Regeneration Globes, your Basic Attacks reduce the cooldown of Blink by.75 seconds. Block (Passive) Removed Regeneration Master (Passive) Removed Rapid Displacement (E) Removed Seasoned Marksman (Passive) Removed
Level 4 New Talent: Combo Slash (Passive) After using an ability, your next auto-attack within 6 seconds deals 40% more damage. New Talent: Grim Task (Passive) Hero Takedowns increase Ability Power by 4%, up to a total of 40%. This bonus Ability Power is lost on death. Rending Cleave (Q) Moved from level 16 Damage is now dealt over 3 seconds from 5 Damage reduced from 50 to 40%
Level 7 New Talent: Slip into Shadow (E) Your Blink has 2 charges and its cooldown is increased by 8 seconds. New Talent: Seeker in the Dark (W) Your Singularity Spike takes 50% longer to explode, and can be reactivated while it is attached to an enemy to teleport to them. After reactivation, your Movement Speed is increased by 30% for 3 seconds. Wormhole (E) Moved from level 13 First Aid (Active) Removed Follow Through (Passive) Removed Shadow Spike (W) Removed Searing Attacks (Active) Removed
Level 13 New Talent: Shroud of Adun (Passive) You gain a shield equal to 15% of your Maximum Health over 5 seconds while under Permanent Cloak. Vigorous Strike (Passive) Renamed to Mending Strikes Moved from level 4 Healing amount increased from 25 to 40% Giantkiller (Passive) Removed Burning Rage (Passive) Removed Assassin’s Blade (Trait) Removed
Level 16 New Talent: Sentenced to Death (W) You deal 50% increased damage to enemies while they have a Singularity Spike attached to them. Master Warp Blade (Trait) Moved from level 4 Damage increased from 100 to 125% Void Slash (Q) New Functionality: Cleave deals 40% more damage and its cooldown is reduced by 3 seconds when it hits more than 1 enemy Hero. Moved from level 7 Double Bombs (W) Removed Stoneskin (Active) Removed
Level 20 Protective Prison (R) Renamed to Gift of the Xel'Naga New functionality: Enemies are slowed by 50% for 3 seconds once Void Prison Ends.
Developer Comments: There were two main goals behind this rework: Upgrade Zeratul’s talent tree and introduce some interesting new choices, and better sell the fantasy of being a Dark Templar. As always is the goal with our Hero reworks, we didn’t want to change the way he is played, but rather amplify and improve upon it. Overall, he has felt the same to play against in our internal testing, but with a couple new tricks up his sleeve. We hope that our current Zeratul fans will find some new toys to play around with, and that new users will feel more like the mobile shadow-assassin you’d expect from a Dark Templar Hero.
Level (Tier) Zeratul Talents 1 (1) Greater Cleave (Q) Vorpal Blade (Active) (!) Shadow Hunter (E) — 4 (2) (!) Grim Task (Passive) Rending Cleave (Q) Combo Slash (Passive) — 7 (3) Wormhole (E) Slip Into Shadow (E) Seeker in the Dark (W) — 10 (4) Shadow Assault (R) Void Prison (R) — — 13 (5) Shroud of Adun (Passive) Spell Shield (Active) Mending Strikes (Passive) — 16 (6) Master Warp-Blade (Passive) Void Slash (Q) Sentenced to Death (W) — 20 (7) Nerazim Fury (R) Gift of the Xel'Naga (R) Nexus Blades (Passive) Rewind (Active)
(!) indicates a Questing Talent.
Italic text indicates a NEW Talent.
Bold text indicates a MOVED Talent.
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Multiclass
Varian
Abilities
Taunt (R) Cooldown reduced from 25 to 16 seconds
Colossus Smash (R) Damage reduced from 187 to 160
Talents
Level 20 Vigilance (R) Cooldown reduction decreased from 1 to.75 seconds per Basic Attack
Return
Specialist
Abathur
Abilities
Toxic Nest (W) Abathur is now locked out of casting Toxic Nest for.5 seconds after exiting Symbiote
Return
Sylvanas
Talents
Level 7 Possession (Active) Can now be used on Catapult Minions
Return
Xul
Abilities
Skeletal Mages (R) Is now cast using vector targeting (Click+Drag)
Return
Support
Kharazim
Abilities
Breath of Heaven (W) Healing increased from 280 to 290
Talents
Level 1 Iron Fists (Trait) Added Functionality: Every third Basic Attack now also increases your Movement Speed by 30% for 2 seconds.
Level 4 New Talent: Spirit Ally (Active) Place a Spirit Ally that heals allies in a large area |
, ancient artifacts and other items from their collections. Last year alone, the institution crammed their images into more than 400 studies. Siddall worked with other scientists and designers to select, mount and display about 125 of the museum’s best images grouped into 20 printed collections. We show off our favorites here and some of the techniques behind their creation. Above: Scorpion Heads The heads of 10 different Opistophthalmus scorpion species are pictured here, photographed under ultraviolet light. Although transparent tissue called hyaline makes scorpions’ exoskeletons fluoresce under UV light, its benefit to the creatures isn't known. In any case, it serves as a useful identification tool to museum curators. Image: AMNH/L. Prendini and S. Thurston.
Tibetan Figures X-ray cameras help curators peer inside ancient objects such as the Tibetan figures shown here. The alternative to revealing their craftsmanship with radiation? Chopping them into pieces. See-through images of the bronze statue (above) reveal its hollow body was pounded out of sheet metal. They also show builders used molten metal to cast its hands and feet. A wooden deity (below), meanwhile, can’t hide its history of repairs or ritualistic objects tucked inside its body. Images: AMNH/J. Levinson and K. Knauer
Meteorites Before the electron microprobe (below) came along, researchers had to pulverize meteorite samples like the ones above into dust before they could know much about a sample's chemical composition. Electron microprobes work by shooting a beam of electrons at a sample. Compounds in the sample absorb the energy, then re-emit it as unique X-ray signatures. Such signatures can then reveal the meteorite’s chemical makeup. Images: 1) AMNH/D. Ebel 2) AMNH/D. Finnin
Armadillo Lizard Skin The bony plates of armor distributed within this armadillo lizard’s skin are crucial to understanding its place in the course of evolution. To see the lizard's plates (above), also called osteoderms, biologists put it into a computed tomography machine (below). The device slowly rotates a sample and exposes it to X-rays. Computers then build the image data into a full 3-D model and preserve a sample’s internal structure without so much as a scratch. Images: 1) AMNH/E. Stanley 2) AMNH/D. Finnin
Egyptian Blade When a museum anthropologist couldn’t safely pry a crumbling leather sheath off of an ancient Egyptian knife (above), he turned to computed tomography. The X-ray scans allowed him to see through the decorative cover and find ornate writing on the blade (below). Images: AMNH/A. Voogt
Broadnose Sevengill Shark Skull In another application of computed tomography, researchers digitally dissected the braincase of this modern shark. The 3-D scans show where dense tiles of calcium (gold) line the skull’s cartilage and strengthen it. Image: AMNH/J. Maisey
Extinct Rodent’s Teeth Paleontologists recovered the skeletal remains of a 16-million-year-old rodent from China but weren’t certain what they were looking at. To find out, museum anthropologists plopped the rodent’s teeth into a scanning electron microscope (below). This technology bounces electrons off of samples to magnify them up to 500,000 times, or about 250 more than the best visible light microscopes can. The scans, when compared to other rodents’ remains, showed the specimen was a new species. Images: 1) AMNH/J. Meng 2) AMNH/D. Finnin
Glowing Corals Tiny communal animals called polyps slowly build up coral reefs, and some of the creatures deposit fluorescent compounds that glow in ultraviolet light. Each coral has a unique pattern of fluorescence under UV light, including staghorn coral (above) and moon coral (below). Such glowing chemicals are crucial in biomedical research -- for example, in tagging genetically modified organisms. Images: AMNH/D. Gruber
Yellowjacket Antennae Some species of bugs are tough to tell apart, so entomologists and other bug researchers enlist the help of scanning electron microscopes. Scans show an aerial antenna of a yellowjacket (above) as well as individual sensors on the antenna of a tree yellowjacket (below). Images: AMNH/J. Carpenter
Peruvian Shore Bug Genitalia Often, what decides a species of a bug comes down to the numbers of hairs on its leg. Or, in the case of Peruvian shore bugs, its genitalia (scanning electron microscope image shown above). Image: AMNH/R. Schuh
Goblin Spider Parts Scanning electron microscope close-ups reveal the detailed carapace of a goblin spider (above) and its foot claw (below). Such scans have shaken up fields before by revealing structures and abilities hidden to normal microscopes — including silk-oozing spouts on the feet of tarantulas. Images: AMNH/N. DuperreTRUMP Announces MAJOR SPEECH on Clinton Corruption and Scandal Next Week
Businessman Donald Trump announced on Tuesday at his New Jersey victory speech that he will deliver a major speech on the Clinton history of corruption and scandal.
Trump teased next week’s speech Tuesday night in New Jersey.
The Clinton’s have turned the politics of personal enrichment into an art form for themselves. They’ve made hundreds of millions of dollars selling access, selling favors, selling government contracts. And I mean hundreds of millions of dollars… I am going to give a major speech probably Monday of next week. And we are going to be discussing all of the things that have taken place with the Clintons. I think you’re going to find it very informative and very, very interesting. I wonder if the press will want to attend?Product Details
"You have been sold a lie of prosperity, growth, and wealth, a phantasm of a happy world that is more fragile than you could believe. All it will take is a single spark, and it will all go up in flames."
-Omar Keung, the Flashpoint
Fantasy Flight Games is proud to announce the upcoming release of 23 Seconds, the first Data Pack in the Flashpoint Cycle for Android: Netrunner!
For twenty-three seconds, the world's largest bank and backer of the world's most important currency goes dark. Trillions of credits are lost, stolen, or simply erased. Each corp blames the others. Economies, industries, lives collapse. And that's just the beginning.
At the beginning of the Flashpoint Cycle, 23 Seconds provides us our first glimpses of the Android world after the Twenty-Three Seconds incident. Wounded and desperate, the corps act more aggressively than ever. Even as Runners try to take advantage of the chaos, the corps begin to implement extremely powerful-often hostile-ice and operations that come with trash costs. And as the bodies start piling up, they unleash new Terminal operations, like Hard-Hitting News (23 Seconds, 16), that are so powerful they immediately drain the Corp's remaining clicks once they're played.
Trillions of credits, millions of lives, and the survival of the world's largest megacorps-the stakes in 23 Seconds and the Flashpoint Cycle are as high as they've ever been. Amid the chaos, who will be the first to emerge with a semblance of control? Will it be you?CAIRO (AP) — The sister of a woman jailed in Egypt for alleged ties to the outlawed Muslim Brotherhood urged the Islamic State group on Friday not to kill a Croatian hostage they are holding.
The extremist group had earlier said it would kill the hostage, 30-year-old Tomislav Salopek, in the coming hours if the Egyptian government did not release jailed "Muslim women" — a reference to female Islamists detained in Egypt in the government's broad crackdown on Brotherhood supporters.
Salopek, a surveyor in the oil and gas industry working with France's CGG Ardiseis, was abducted last month.
Doaa el-Taweel, sister of jailed photographer and activist Esraa el-Taweel, said that her sister is innocent and that "her release should not come at the expense of another innocent person."
Extremists of the Islamic State released a video on Wednesday threatening to kill Salopek, a father of two, in 48 hours if authorities failed to respond to their demands.
Esraa el-Taweel disappeared in June for weeks before the Interior Ministry announced that they arrested her on charges of belonging to the Brotherhood, which had been declared a terrorist organization, and for spreading false information to tarnish the country's image. She is now awaiting trial.
Croatian President Kolinda Grabar-Kitarovic said Friday she would talk to her Egyptian counterpart, Abdel-Fattah el-Sissi, about the Salopek kidnapping, and that Croatian authorities were doing all in their power to resolve it.
She said she could not go into specifics because of Salopek's security and that of "all Croatian citizens who work in places where there is a danger of kidnapping."
A day earlier, Croatian state television said that Foreign Minister Vesna Pusic flew to Cairo together with Salopek's wife, Natasha.
An Egyptian security official said that forces were searching for the Croatian hostage across the country, in particular in the provinces of Matrouh, in the west bordering Libya; Beheira, in the Nile Delta; Wadi Gedid, in the southwest and also bordering Libya; and Giza, next to Cairo.
The official said Salopek's driver, who the kidnappers left behind, said that the gunmen who seized the oil and gas industry surveyor off a western Cairo highway had Bedouin accents.
That suggests they could have come from a variety of isolated places in Egypt, including the eastern Sinai Peninsula, where Egypt's Islamic State affiliate is based, or the vast Western desert that's the gateway to volatile and lawless Libya, home to its own Islamic State branch.
The Egyptian official spoke on condition of anonymity because he was not authorized to speak to journalists.
Another Egyptian woman, the mother of two jailed female Islamists arrested at protests who are appealing life sentences, Hind and Rasha Mounir, made a similar call to the IS extremists on Friday.
"My girls should be released but not with the blood of innocent people," the mother of two jailed Islamists," Fatma Ahmed said.
Egypt has seen an increase in violence since the 2013 military ouster of Islamist President Mohammed Morsi, with attacks by suspected Islamic extremists in both the Sinai Peninsula and the mainland, focusing primarily on security forces.
Foreign interests also have been targeted increasingly, including the Italian Consulate, which was hit with a car bomb last month.
But this is the first time the local Islamic State affiliate released a video showing a kidnapped foreigner in Egypt, a major escalation as the country tries to rebuild its crucial tourism industry after years of unrest following the 2011 revolt against autocrat Hosni Mubarak.
---
Associated Press writer Dusan Stojanovic contributed to this report from Belgrade.A top aide to 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 Friday said that former President Bill Clinton William (Bill) Jefferson ClintonInviting Kim Jong Un to Washington Howard Schultz must run as a Democrat for chance in 2020 Trump says he never told McCabe his wife was 'a loser' MORE’s affair with Monica Lewinsky is fair game against 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.
“I think that depends on Hillary Clinton,” spokeswoman Katrina Pierson said on “MSNBC Live” when asked about the former White House intern.
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“This came about because she called Donald Trump ‘a sexist,” she added. "It boggles my mind that if a woman is criticized, all of a sudden that makes you a sexist. That is simply not the case.
“If Hillary Clinton or her team wants to go after Donald Trump as a sexist, then he will absolutely bring up that topic because there’s a lot to discuss that was not brought out into the public.”
Earlier thsi year, Trump desbribed Bill Clinton as “one of the great woman abusers of all time” earlier this year after Hillary Clinton said he has a “penchant for sexism.”
“A lot of things happened that were very seedy,” he said on Jan. 4 of Bill Clinton’s presidency. "He was impeached for heaven’s sake.”
Bill Clinton admitted to an “inappropriate relationship” with Lewinsky during her White House internship between 1995 and 1996.
Pierson on Friday also accused Clinton of unfairly touting her gender as she campaigns to become America’s first female president.
“She is playing the gender card,” she said of the Democratic presidential front-runner. "She did it with [Sen.] Bernie Sanders Bernard (Bernie) SandersPush to end U.S. support for Saudi war hits Senate setback Sanders: 'I fully expect' fair treatment by DNC in 2020 after 'not quite even handed' 2016 primary Sanders: 'Damn right' I'll make the large corporations pay 'fair share of taxes' MORE [I-Vt.] and she’s going to continue to try to do it because that is all she really wants to run on.”
Pierson added that Sen. Ted Cruz Rafael (Ted) Edward CruzTrump unleashing digital juggernaut ahead of 2020 Inviting Kim Jong Un to Washington Trump endorses Cornyn for reelection as O'Rourke mulls challenge MORE (R-Texas) should abandon his battle against Trump for the Republican presidential nomination.
“The writing is on the wall. I understand that the Cruz campaign is trying to find a way to somehow magically find a way to force a convention even against the will of the people. It’s just not going to happen.”The Frenchman, who was a leading technical figure in Toyota's F1 programme and now works on its sportscar project, thinks that F1 has suffered because drivers are not thrilled by the cars.
He says that is in marked contrast to the World Endurance Championship, which is enjoying a rise in popularity – which he thinks is helped because drivers love competing in the cars.
"I think that the general lack of interest in F1 mainly comes from the lack of 'love' in F1 from the drivers themselves," Vasselon told Motorsport.com.
"Most of the drivers don't express their pleasure from being behind the wheels of these cars. This is what I feel, personally.
"The lack of interest from the drivers amplifies the lack of interest from the fans. If these new rules being back some fun for the drivers, this will translate in their comments and it may turn things around."
WEC love
Vasselon says that all he hears from sportscar drivers is how great WEC machinery is, and it's that enthusiasm which is captured by fans.
"[F1] drivers who come to race endurance events say, 'Wow. These cars are great. We can push them from the beginning to the end'.
"It's the complete opposite from that they have to do in F1. That's why I feel that the lack of interest in F1 comes from the comments of the drivers.
"It really strikes me to realise that the F1 drivers and their endurance colleagues don't express the same feeling of having fun behind the wheel."
Reverse thinking
Vasselon adds that the move to faster cars, with wider tyres and improved aerodynamic, is a dramatic U-turn from what the sport looked at several years ago.
"These new rules are almost in the opposite direction to those that governed F1 at the end of the 2000s when the objective was to slow down the cars and to help overtaking.
"It now seems that the people in charge are going in the reverse direction. It looks like a very stimulating challenge.
"I am not fully aware of all the details, but we're talking about major evolutions in terms of aerodynamics and tyres. The laptimes will drop significantly, that's a sure thing."
Interview by Basile DavoineThe Greenhouse Gas Effect All-Star Fan Club
Posted on 5 December 2012 by Daniel Bailey
The greenhouse effect is standard physics and confirmed by observations. We only have to look to our moon for evidence of what the Earth might be like without an atmosphere that sustained the greenhouse effect. While the moon’s surface reaches 130 degrees C in direct sunlight at the equator (266 degrees F), when the sun ‘goes down’ on the moon, the temperature drops almost immediately, and plunges in several hours down to minus 110 degrees C (-166F).
Since the moon is virtually the same distance from the sun as we are, it is reasonable to ask why at night the Earth doesn’t get as cold as the moon. The answer is that, unlike the Earth, the moon has no water vapour or other greenhouse gases, because of course it has no atmosphere at all. Without our protective atmosphere and the greenhouse effect, the Earth would be as barren as our lifeless moon; without the heat trapped overnight in the atmosphere (and in the ground and oceans) our nights would be so cold that few plants or animals could survive even a single one.
The most conclusive evidence for the greenhouse effect – and the role CO2 plays – can be seen in data from the surface and from satellites. By comparing the Sun’s heat reaching the Earth with the heat leaving it, we can see that less long-wave radiation (heat) is leaving than arriving (and since the 1970s, less and less radiation is leaving the Earth, as CO2 and equivalents build up). Since all radiation is measured by its wavelength, we can also see that the frequencies being trapped in the atmosphere are the same frequencies absorbed by greenhouse gases.
Disputing that the greenhouse effect is real is to attempt to discredit centuries of science, laws of physics and direct observation. Without the greenhouse effect, we would not even be here to argue about it.
Don't believe me? Here's some testimony from the side of the "skeptics" (a veritable "baker's dozen" Who's-Who):
The GHG Effect All-Star Fan Club Membership
1. Christopher Monckton
"Is there a greenhouse effect? Concedo [concedo / concede]. Does it warm the Earth? Concedo. Is carbon dioxide a greenhouse gas? Concedo. If carbon dioxide be added to the atmosphere, will warming result? Concedo."
http://jonova.s3.amazonaws.com/monckton/climate-freedom-hancock-background.pdf
and
"I am delighted that this simple and clear but authoritative statement of the reality of the “greenhouse effect” has been posted here. Too many inaccurate statements to the effect that there is no greenhouse effect have been published recently, and they do not deserve to be given any credence. The true debate in the scientific community is not about whether there is a greenhouse effect (there is), nor about whether additional atmospheric CO2 causes warming (it does), nor about whether CO2 concentration is rising (it is), nor about whether we are the cause (we are), but about how fast CO2 concentration will rise (for a decade it has been rising at a merely-linear 2 ppmv/year, against the IPCC’s projection of an exponential increase at today’s emission rates), how much warming a given increase in CO2 concentration will be expected to cause (around a third of what the IPCC projects), whether attempting to mitigate future “global warming” will make any real difference to the climate (it won’t: remember Canute), whether the cost of forestalling each degree of “global warming” will be disproportionate to the climatic benefit (it will), and whether focused adaptation to any change in the climate, where and if necessary, will be orders of magnitude cheaper than trying to prevent that change from occurring in the first place (yes)."
http://wattsupwiththat.com/2010/07/23/quantifying-the-greenhouse-effect/#comment-437657
2. Roy Spencer
"infrared-absorbing gases warm the surface and lower atmosphere"
http://www.drroyspencer.com/2012/03/slaying-the-slayers-with-the-alabama-two-step/
and
"I have not yet seen any compelling evidence that there exists a major flaw in the theory explaining the basic operation of the Earth’s natural Greenhouse Effect."
http://www.drroyspencer.com/2010/08/comments-on-miskolczi%E2%80%99s-2010-controversial-greenhouse-theory/
and
"Imagine you find yourself lost in outer space, floating aimlessly, with your warm skin exposed to the cold background of the cosmos. Sure, keep your clothes on. There is no sun or nearby stars to add much energy to your body. Your skin would gradually cool by losing IR radiation. (Of course, if the lack of air didn’t kill you first, you would freeze to death. Bear with me here…)
But now imagine you then surround yourself with a blanket. We won’t even use a fancy, NASA-invented, IR-reflective “space blanket”…just a woolen one. And let’s even assume the temperature of the woolen blanket was extremely low — just above absolute zero. Some of the IR radiation you emit, instead of being lost to the depths of space, would then be intercepted by the blanket. This would raise the temperature of the blanket. As that happened, the inside of the blanket would begin to emit some IR energy back toward your body, while the outside of the blanket would emit energy to outer space.
As a result, the temperature of your skin would remain higher than it would without the blanket — even though the blanket would remain at a lower temperature than your skin. So, contrary to what some would intuitively expect, the introduction of a cold object has made a warm object warmer than it would have otherwise been.
But it didn’t actually RAISE the temperature of your skin. In this example, all we have done is slow the rate of cooling of your body, and you would eventually freeze to death anyway. But if you had a continuous supply of energy available (like the Earth does with the sun), and had reached a steady state of shivering and discomfort and THEN added the blanket, your skin would indeed increase its temperature, compared to if the (colder) blanket was not there.
Of course, this example is just an analog to the Earth in space. The Earth has an energy source (the sun), and it has a “radiative blanket” (greenhouse gases) enveloping it.""
http://www.drroyspencer.com/2010/08/comments-on-miskolczi%E2%80%99s-2010-controversial-greenhouse-theory/
3. Richard Lindzen
"There is a greenhouse effect"
i.telegraph.co.uk/multimedia/archive/02148/RSL-HouseOfCommons_2148505a.pdf
4. Roger Pielke, Sr.
"The emission of CO2 into the atmosphere, and its continued accumulation in the atmosphere is changing the climate. We do not need to agree on the magnitude of its global average radiative forcing to see a need to limit this accumulation. The biogeochemical effect of added CO2 by itself is a concern as we do not know its consequences. At the very least, ecosystem function will change resulting in biodiversity changes as different species react differently to higher CO2. The prudent path, therefore, is to limit how much we change our atmosphere."
http://pielkeclimatesci.wordpress.com/2011/09/20/skeptical-climate-responses-to-my-questions-and-my-reply/
5. Fred Singer
"One of [deniers'] favorite arguments is that the greenhouse effect does not exist at all because it violates the Second Law of Thermodynamics...One can show them data of downwelling infrared radiation from CO2, water vapor, and clouds, which clearly impinge on the surface. But their minds are closed to any such evidence."
and
"Another subgroup simply says that the concentration of atmospheric CO2 is so small that they can't see how it could possibly change global temperature. But laboratory data show that CO2 absorbs IR radiation very strongly."
http://www.americanthinker.com/2012/02/climate_deniers_are_giving_us_skeptics_a_bad_name.html
6. Jo Nova
"Technically, strictly, greenhouse gases don’t “warm” the planet (as in, they don’t supply additional heat energy) but they slow the cooling, which for all pragmatic purposes leaves the planet warmer that it would have been without them. It’s a bit like saying a blanket doesn’t warm you in bed. Sure, it’s got no internal heat source, and it won’t add any heat energy that you didn’t already have, but you sure feel cold without one. Instead of calling it “global warming”, I guess they could have called it “less-global-cooling”. I can’t see it catching on."
http://joannenova.com.au/2011/05/overflow-thread-for-greenhouse-gases-dont-break-2nd-law/#comment-301912
7. David Evans
"The serious skeptical scientists have always agreed with the government climate scientists about the direct effect of CO2. "
http://wattsupwiththat.com/2012/02/26/the-skeptics-case/
8. John Christy
"carbon dioxide is a thermal gas so it will cause warming to some extent...that's one about which there really is a consensus about [with] most people."
http://socioecohistory.wordpress.com/2011/01/21/dr-john-christy-global-warming-where-is-the-alarm/
9. William Kininmonth
"The greenhouse effect is real, as is the enhancement due to increasing carbon dioxide concentration."
http://nzclimatescience.net/index.php?option=com_content&task=view&id=460&Itemid=32
10. Richard Tol
"The enhanced greenhouse effect is a plausible explanation for the observed global warming. Long term natural variability is another prime candidate for explaining the temperature rise of the last century. Analysis of natural variability from paleo-reconstructions, however, shows that human activity is so much more likely an explanation that the earlier conclusion is not refuted. But, even if one believes in large natural climatic variability, the odds are invariably in favour of the enhanced greenhouse effect."
http://www.fnu.zmaw.de/fileadmin/fnu-files/publication/tol/ccbayes.pdf
11. Judith Curry
"Tyndall proved in 1861 that both water vapor and CO2 were greenhouse gases."
http://judithcurry.com/2012/07/08/the-government-climate-complex/
12. Pat Michaels
"It's hardly news that human beings have had a hand in the planetary warming that began more than 30 years ago. For nearlly a century, scientists have known that increasing atmospheric carbon dioxide would eventually result in warming that was most pronounced in winter, expecially on winter's coldest days, and a cooling of the stratosphere. All of these have been observed."
http://usatoday30.usatoday.com/news/opinion/editorials/2007-02-01-oppose_x.htm
and
"Pretty much every serious student of climate change agrees that carbon dioxide, which is the product of the respiration of our civilization, is a "greenhouse gas." Everything else being equal (which never holds), increasing its concentration should result in some rise in temperature in the lower atmosphere."
http://www.cato.org/publications/commentary/throwing-cold-water-uns-fat-tail
13. Anthony Watts
"I suppose that because I agreed that global warming occurred over the last century, and that CO2 plays a role (though isn't the only driver) that he [Spencer Michels, PBS Newshour correspondent] was surprised that he didn't have a "denier" soundbite to work with."
http://wattsupwiththat.com/2012/09/17/ill-be-on-the-pbs-newshour-tonight/
and
"I'm saying that the data might be biased by these influences [urbanization's buildings and streets] to a percentage. Yes, we have some global warming, it's clear the temperature has gone up in the last 100 years. But what percentage of that is from carbon dioxide? And what percentage of that is from changes in the local and measurement environment?"
http://www.pbs.org/newshour/rundown/2012/09/why-the-global-warming-crowd-oversells-its-message.html
For any remaining hold-outs, Skeptical Science answers the most commmon objections that have been used by skeptics in opposition to basic GHG theory. Of more general interest, the history of climate science is largely the history of what we've learned about CO2.
Further Learnings
Skeptical Science
RealClimate
Science of Doom (Warning: for readers who enjoyed physics class)
Experiment showing the absoption of infrared radiation by carbon dioxide. From the BBC 2 program "Earth: The Climate Wars"XAlthough the 1978–81 Toyota Celica XX/Supra sold more than 100,000 copies, about half of them in the U.S., it would be easy to assume that the next generation, built from 1981 to 1985, was actually the first Supra. It wasn’t, but it was the first to be exported beyond Japan and the U.S. and the first Supra to be marketed as a performance car rather than just a posh coupe.
What follows is a short history of the 1982-1985 Celica/XX Supra, written by award winning automotive historian Aaron Severson of AteUpWithMotor.com. Enjoy!
Another Celica Spinoff
Like its predecessor, the Mk 2 Celica XX/Supra was a derivative of Toyota’s sporty four-cylinder Celica, which was redesigned in mid-1981. Unlike the previous generation, which was designed in California, the new Celica line was styled in Japan, trading smooth curves for an angular, self-consciously futuristic wedge shape. Some American reviewers found the look a little too busy, but it was definitely more aggressive than before, suggesting that the new model had taken a sportier turn.
Structurally, the XX was a Celica Liftback with a 4.5-inch (115mm) wheelbase stretch and a longer nose to accommodate an inline six-cylinder engine, topped off with a different grille/headlight treatment. The XX used the Celica’s MacPherson strut front suspension, but had four-wheel vented disc brakes and independent rear suspension with semi-trailing arms and coil springs. The independent suspension had been introduced on upper-series Japanese-market XX models in late 1980 and was shared with upper-series Celicas and the new Soarer, another Celica derivative introduced in February 1981 to assume the previous XX’s personal luxury coupe duties.
Because of hefty Japanese road taxes on cars with engines over 2,000 cc (122 cu. in.), the Japanese-market Celica XX initially offered two engines: the SOHC 1,988 cc (121 cu. in.) 1G-EU, with 125 hp JIS, and the 2,759 cc (168 cu. in.) 5M-GEU, a new DOHC version of Toyota’s familiar 5M six, with 170 hp JIS. Starting in 1982, there were two more choices, both based on the 1,988cc block: the turbocharged M-TEU with 145 hp JIS, offered only with automatic, and the normally aspirated 24-valve DOHC 1G-GEU with 160 hp JIS, co-developed with Yamaha and offered only with a manual gearbox.
Most export markets received only the 2.8-liter engine, although Australian buyers had to make do with the older SOHC 5M with only 140 hp. U.S. cars had the twin-cam 5M-GEU with 145 hp SAE, unexceptional for 2.8 liters, but much better than the 116 hp of the previous Supra (or the 96 hp of the U.S.-market Celica) and sufficient for 0-60 mph in around 9 seconds and a top speed of more than 120 mph. European cars had 168 hp, which shaved about a second off 0-60 mph times and brought top speed to more than 130 mph.
Bargain GT
While the new Supra wasn’t the fastest thing on the road, it was a respectable performer for its time. Some turbocharged rivals like the Mitsubishi Starion were quicker, but lacked the Toyota’s midrange flexibility; V-8 pony cars like the Chevrolet Camaro and Ford Mustang (and in Europe, the Ford Capri 2.8i) had comparable or greater muscle, but were far less sophisticated.
The six-cylinder Celica was well equipped — U.S. and British cars had standard automatic air conditioning, cruise control and power windows — and offered novel options like digital instrumentation, inflatable driver’s seat lumbar support and Toyota’s pioneering Navicom in-car navigation system (not offered in the U.S.). The XX/Supra was also quite refined for a GT car, had a high standard of build quality and was attractively priced, undercutting rivals like the Starion and Datsun Fairlady Z/280ZX Turbo.
That was enough for many buyers and quite a few critics: The new car sold well and was Motor Trend’s 1982 Import Car of the Year. However, there was room for improvement. In less-demanding Japanese or American conditions, the XX/Supra handled well, but British reviewers felt its shock absorbers were too soft for high-speed work and bemoaned the semi-trailing arm suspension’s nervous at-the-limit behavior and penchant for sudden oversteer. The Supra was also less than reassuring on slippery roads.
Fortunately, Toyota had a solution. In 1983, the company had acquired a stake in the English sports car maker Lotus, which was commissioned to refine the European Supra’s suspension tuning. The results, introduced in early 1984, were a slightly stiffer ride and much-improved handling, although British critics still complained that the steering was too numb.
Minor Evolution
While U.S.-market cars didn’t receive the same suspension treatment, American buyers did get progressively more power: All U.S. Supras were boosted to 150 hp SAE for 1983 and 1984–85 manually shifted cars were up to 160 hp, making them nearly as fast as their European counterparts. The Japanese Celica XX also got more power; by 1985, the base engine was up to 130 hp, the Turbo to 160 hp and the 2800GT to 175 hp JIS.
There were few cosmetic changes during this model’s four-year run, although 1984 and later models got new taillights and body-colored rather than black front spoilers, hatchbacks and rear bumpers. Some 1985 models also added a rear spoiler and a new rear sunshade that was smaller and less obtrusive than the original item, which had done the Supra’s otherwise-commendable aerodynamics no favors.
A New Direction
The Mk 2 Celica XX/Supra ceased production in the summer of 1985, although it remained on sale in some markets through the end of the year. This generation was quite successful for Toyota: Not only did the Mk 2 sell about 40 percent better than the original six-cylinder Celica, those sales were in addition to those of the mechanically similar Soarer, which did well in Japan.
Although the Celica was slated to switch to front-wheel drive in 1985, it was clear that Toyota was onto a good thing with the XX/Supra and Soarer. The next-generation models, introduced for the 1986 model year, would finally part ways with the Celica and receive their own dedicated six-cylinder/rear-drive platform — paving the way for the third-generation Supra, which would be the most popular of all.
Written by Aaron SeversonAddiction is something that touches almost every individual, directly or indirectly, and often is the ravaging menace of marginalized communities. The Anarchist community is not an exception, we’ve lost comrades in this struggle, and the void felt from their loss and subsequent rifts stay for longer than anyone wants to acknowledge. We are also no exception in reproducing and replicating systemic ableism. All too often, we exploit neurotypical privilege even amongst the most social justice-minded of us.
I am an addict, one whose struggle has not been easy. For the purpose of this essay however, I will refrain from sharing specifically on my own experience. I am first and foremost writing as an Anarchist. Also, when I’m speaking about addiction, understand I am also talking about alcoholism and behavioral addictions.
The Addict:
Even in the first world, the addict is one of the most vilified and marginalized voices. Navigating through the capitalist system as an addict is all too often a painful variable in the cycle of self-destruction. They are the recipients of a social disgust, a brutal police state and a draconian justice system. The addict is disowned, estranged, and disinherited. Some become lost vagrants or outcasts. They are what people picture when thinking that a different world might be impossible.
Everyone knows the addict. They are our siblings, comrades, parents, lovers, and idols. Their stories are not all the same, and surely the experience of the drug addicted sex-worker who faces abuse daily, is going to be different than that of the white collar executive, whose drinking problem is the family’s well-guarded secret. These “intersections” of systemic oppression reveal a striking conclusion which seems apparent but is all too often ignored. From the HIV and methamphetamine co-epidemic amongst the queer community, to the heroin dens serving child-soldiers in Liberia, addiction goes where oppression goes.
Whether you believe addiction to be a disease or a disorder, it most certainly is a disability and certainly is not a moral affliction. This is important to remember when talking about addiction in a social justice or Anarchist context. Under capitalism, the addict has an immediate adversity in their relationship to production, the same way other marginalized groups like people of color, women and queer people do. The state holds the same grudge as the ownership class, seeing mass-incarceration as the only viable solution.
Ableism: The addict’s struggle
As the addict ponders if another cure to their misery is possible, the neurotypical savior will always know the solution. The addict needs to grow up, the addict needs to be a productive member of society (which sounds Orwellian to any Anarchist), the addict needs to be punished, the addict needs medication, the addict needs authority, the addict needs |
it at once, and that I hand you this check for ten thousand dollars.”
With a show of bravado he waved the check aside. He would hold me to the letter of the contract if it were the last thing he ever did.
I told him he had that privilege, but I was sure he would see the futility of exercising it.
“Let me review the situation for a moment,” I continued: “You came to us as general sales manager on January 1st, 1922, at a salary of twenty-five thousand dollars. It was by far the largest salary we had ever paid in any executive position; but your record seemed to justify it.
“The letters you brought spoke in the highest terms of your sales genius. The only question which they did not answer to my satisfaction was why companies which had valued you so highly should ever have allowed you to get away! When I voiced this, you stated that they merely had been outbid by their competitors — and I accepted your statement. It wasn’t until you had been here a year that I learned the truth. You are a quick starter, but a poor finisher — no finisher at all, in fact.”
“Who told you that?” he demanded.
“Nobody needed to tell me. I found it out from your effect on our own organization.”
“Organization!” he sneered. “You haven’t got an organization.”
“So you have remarked to me frequently,” I answered; “and you may be right. Our folks have mostly grown up in our own business; they know comparatively little of the way in which things are done in other lines. That’s what we wanted you to teach us, and you were very sure that you could... We were all receptive.”
“Yes, you were!” he exclaimed scornfully. “Your folks were jealous from the day I arrived. They sat back and dared me to show results. I told you that six months ago.”
“I remember you did,” I replied, “and my answer is just what it was then. You claim to be a brilliant salesman, and yet you failed in the first essential. You never sold yourself to the people with whom and through whom you had to work. You say they were jealous, but a man of your intelligence ought to know that the answer to jealousy is modesty, hard work — and results. They would have jumped on your band wagon fast enough if you had made them see the advantage of it. But after waiting around for the band wagon to start, they concluded that it wasn’t going to start, and it never has.
“You brought your own assistants, and we paid them high salaries,” I went on. “You moved our offices away from the plant and took these expensive quarters in the center of town. You were given a sales and advertising budget more than twice as large as any we have ever had before. Every request you made I granted as whole-heartedly as I knew how, because I believed that your fresh ideas were what this business needed. But twenty months have passed, and the sales simply have not grown.
“That’s the stubborn fact which can’t be blinked; and now it’s come to a point where I must choose between you and my good old wheel horses who, in spite of their mediocrity, have somehow managed to build a very profitable business.
“You can stay here until your contract expires, but you will have no further responsibilities. The news will get around that you are merely hanging on; and when the end comes you will step out, discredited, to look for another job. Or you can leave now with ten thousand dollars, which is the additional penalty I am willing to pay for my mistake in judgment. If you go in the proper spirit, you are still young enough to profit by your failure.”
HE MADE a little further show of protest, but he took the check.
I wonder what old-line company will next be dazzled by his sales talk; and what I ought to say when the president writes to ask me why we were willing to let him go. If I tell the entire truth it may end his business career. And there is always the hope that, next time, he may enter modestly upon his opportunity and produce real results. For he has the talent; there is no doubt about that. He is undeniably a very brilliant man.
When I was a small boy my father bought me two pairs of shoes; one at two and one-half dollars and the other at five dollars.
“My son,” he said, “I want you to wear these two pairs of shoes on alternate days, and watch them carefully. Later on I will ask you to tell me about them.”
Without understanding at all what he had in mind I wore the two-and-one-half-dollar pair on Monday, the five-dollar pair on Tuesday, and continued to give them equal service for about six months. At the end of that period I reported that the cheaper shoes were worn out.
“How about the other pair?” he asked.
“Here they are,” I answered; “I’ve had them half-soled and they are as good as new.”
He nodded his head, as if he had expected this information.
“I bought those shoes for a special purpose,” he told me; “and I want them to be a lifelong lesson to you. There are just two grades of commodities in the world: the best — and the others. My experience is that it pays to buy the best; and what applies to things applies equally to men. Pick out the best men for employers; and when you get along in life pick out the best men for employees. never mind what the price mark may be; the question is, what service will they deliver, and how long will they wear?”
I NEVER forgot that homely incident; but not until years later did I understand its full significance. The five-dollar shoe has a lot more wear in it because there was a lot more work in it. Even fine material, carelessly put together, will not make a fine shoe; but if material which is of just average quality is fashioned with special care and attention, it will result in a quite superior article.
What my father was trying to teach me was this: God Almighty, in fashioning his most useful men, often works slowly with quite common stuff. Now and then He turns out a quick job of superfine materials — a genius who really delivers the goods. But most of His better grade line is ordinary in everything except the extra effort, and dogged determination, which have given it a finer texture and finish.
This knowledge, as I say, came much later. When I set out in life, it was with the idea that if I could attach myself to exceptional men, and exceptional men to me, my advancement would be assured.
In my sophomore year in college my father died. One of his insurance policies of twenty thousand dollars was paid to me; the balance of his estate went to my mother. It would have been far wiser if I had completed my college course; but I was ambitious to make an immediate record.
As it happened, I had come under the influence of the first of my costly collection of brilliant men. I will call him Carroll. He was five years older than I was and a member of my college fraternity. But he had dropped out at the end of his freshman year and was supposed to be making a great record with a wholesale grocery house in New York. We undergraduates were dazzled by the splendor of his visits. He wore fine clothes, smoked the best cigars, and talked with the assurance of a successful man of the world.
One night, following the initiation ceremonies at the fraternity house, he drew me into a corner and asked me about my plans. I had no plan, I answered, except to finish my course and to take the best job that came along.
“You’ll just be wasting two years,” he said decidedly. “You’ve got everything that college can give you, except a diploma. Look at me. I’m just as much a college man as though I had hung around here four years; and compared with my classmates I’ve got a three-years start in business. I’ve been watching you ever since you entered, and I think you have the stuff.
“I’ll make you a proposition,” he went on confidentially. “The big future in the grocery business is in chain stores.” (In which he was right, as has subsequently been proved.) “I know the business; you have twenty thousand dollars. I know a city where we can buy two good little stores for that amount in cash, and pay off the balance out of the profits. When we get those two going right, we’ll buy another, and another, until we have a big chain. It’s a sure-fire fortune. You think it over for a few days, and if you want to hook up with me, let me know.”
I was flattered by his interest, so I thought it over. That is, I indulged in what young men frequently mistake for thought. In imagination, I saw my name over the door and myself in a fine glass office looking out and watching clerks taking in money. I had, in anticipation, the thrill of buying one store after another and going from town to town on tours of inspection. I tickled my fancy with the idea of coming back to college and letting the boys consult me as an experienced man of affairs. And having finished this process of “thinking” I wired Carroll that I was ready to join him.
WE BOUGHT our two stores; there was no trouble about that. We hung out the signs which my imagination had pictured, washed the windows, rearranged the goods, painted the delivery wagons a bright red and worked like Trojans. We made progress — quite encouraging progress. One of the fine traits in human nature is the desire which almost every decent man has to help young men do well. The second month we broke even. The third month we began to show a small profit.
Everything might have gone well for us if it hadn’t been for Carroll’s brilliance. He walked into the office one night and sat down with an air of immense satisfaction.
“We’re on our way, Jimmy!” he exclaimed. “I’ve just been over to Booneville and got an option on the best store there.”
“How are we going to finance it?” I gasped. “We’re short of working capital as it is, and I don’t see how we can spread out our time any thinner.”
“Leave that to your Uncle Dudley,” he cried, with a wave of his hand. “I’ve been over to the bank, and they’re willing to take a chance on us. It will be a tight squeeze for a few months; but we’ll make it. And as for spreading ourselves too thin, don’t you ever make the mistake of tying yourself down to this desk. Nobody gets anywhere by doing all the work himself. We’ll take Ferguson” (referring to one of our clerks) “and make him manager here, while we step over to Booneville and breathe the breath of life into that dear old town.”
His enthusiasm was contagious. We sat up half the night figuring and planning, and by one o’clock we had already moved on, in imagination, from Booneville to the two adjoining towns.
If You Think Straight, You Can Speak Straight
“ONE of the five things I find out before I employ a man,” says the author of this article, “is whether he can talk and write effectively. This may seem a strange requirement, but it has been a very useful one. If we could unscrew the top of men’s heads and look in, many of our problems would be eliminated, for we could see what sort of thinking goes on there. “Lacking that privilege however, we have to judge by what comes out of the mind through the tongue and fingers. If you write and speak neatly and accurately, it is because your thinking is orderly; if your expression is forceful, the thought back of it must be forceful. But if you blunder for words, punctuate incorrectly, spell incorrectly, and express yourself clumsily, I’m sure to believe you mind is cluttered and ill-disciplined. “The continual use of slang expressions is an evidence of mental laziness, and I will not hire a man who depends upon slang to express his meaning. It is a substitute for exact thinking.”
For another six months the sun seemed to be shining in at all our windows. We put on more delivery wagons, took an option on more stores, laid in lines of goods which had never been carried before, and reveled in the joys of big business.
Then the thing happened which was inevitable; we came smash up against inventory time and found that we had been insolvent for weeks without knowing it. Plenty of money was passing through our hands; but not enough stuck.
We made an assignment, turned over every cent we had in the world and trailed sadly back to New York, where I found a job as a clerk for one of the jobbers from whom we had bought goods.
Carroll, crushed to earth, rose brilliantly again. I heard of him next as one of the promoters of a new process for treating rubber. It lasted a few months, and exploded. Various enterprises followed, and my latest information about him is that he is practicing the profession of “Industrial Management.” I should think it might be a good profession for Carroll. He is a bad employer for himself, but he could put a lot of ginger into somebody else’s business, if the other man knew the trick of handling and properly discounting brilliant men.
Well, I went to work behind a high desk copying orders. After a while I was given a chance to sell; and ten years later, at the age of thirty-five, I was general sales manager. At this time the owner of the business died and was succeeded by his son, a man about my own age. I will call him Adams. He announced immediately that I was to be vice president and general manager, and made a private arrangement with me by which I was able to purchase some of the stock.
“I don’t want to be tied down by details,” he explained. “You know that end of things. I want to be free to work on big deals and think out plans for the future of the business. Father was a darned good man in his day, but he got pretty conservative toward the end. You and I together will do big things.”
I OUGHT to have been warned; for while the voice was the voice of my new boss, the words were the words of my old partner, Carroll. Indeed, the two men were curiously alike — both handsome, magnetic chaps with a facility for making quick friendships.
I was still young in experience, however, and I entered into the new arrangement whole-heartedly. But disillusionment came swiftly. Our principal customer walked into the office one afternoon and asked for Mr. Adams.
“He hasn’t been in today,” I said. “He may come later.”
“May come,” repeated the big fellow with unpleasant emphasis. “He had a definite appointment with me, and I’ve traveled a hundred miles to keep it.”
I lied as nimbly as I could: Mr. Adams had been called away unexpectedly, I said. He told me about the appointment and would make every effort to get back. Probably he would come within the next half-hour.
But the customer refused to be mollified. He waited in Adams’s office for exactly thirty minutes; then he stalked out.
At five-thirty that evening Adams burst in and began to unfold some new and splendid plan. It was dramatic — a stroke of genius. But for two men in our circumstances it was impossible. When he had finished I poured the bad news of the Big Customer’s call over him like a bucket of cold water. At once, all his enthusiasm died out; he was so contrite that I couldn’t possibly be angry with him.
“That’s a rotten shame,” he exclaimed. “I forgot all about it. I’ll write the old bear a letter and lay myself humbly in the dust.”
And write a letter he did — a masterpiece — with delicate reference to the Big Customer’s years of dealings with his father, and a profound apology. Better than that, he took a train and arrived in the Customer’s office a half-hour after the letter, coming back with the best order we had ever shipped out.
He was brilliant, there was no denying it, and so lovable that I value his friendship to-day more than that of almost any other man in the world. But I couldn’t stand him in the business; I decided that within the first year, and we had a showdown.
“One of us should go,” I said in the course of the hardest interview of my life. “Either I’ll sell my interest, or you sell me yours.”
“I don’t see why,” he answered; and he had the look of a favorite puppy who has been scolded. “I thought you liked me.”
“Like isn’t a strong enough word,” I said. “I love you, and you’re brilliant. But I’m a commonplace plodder, and so are all our employees. Moreover, this is a plodding kind of business, where the money is made by pinching pennies. You’re about as much at home in it as J. P. Morgan would be running a barber shop.
“You conceive a big idea, get the whole organization on tiptoes to carry it out, and then you lose interest and go off on a new tangent. You think everybody else’s mind ought to function as swiftly as your own, so you are alternately overenthusiastic and over-depressed. One day you carry some poor devil up into a high mountain and make him think he has a chance to become general manager. The next day you blow him up for not doing something which you think you told him, but which you actually forgot. You are always living, in imagination, about six jumps ahead.
WITH Adams out of our business, it gradually settled down. That is a terrible phrase, I know, but it describes our situation. We no longer had the brilliant emotional moments which he had inspired; we didn’t attempt any very daring exploits; but at the end of every year we had more money in the bank than we had while he ran things.
After that, I never hired a brilliant man from one of our competitors, nor listened to the siren-tones of “experts” who promised to double our volume — until I encountered the twenty-five-thousand-dollar beauty I have mentioned at the start of this story. Every year I picked up a half-dozen live young fellows who seemed to have a capacity for hard work, and shoved them in at the bottom of the pile, letting them make their way up to the better air and sunlight at the top — if they had it in them to do it.
For a time I tried picking these youngsters out of the colleges. But my experience with college men was not fortunate. If I selected good students, I found too often that their leadership had been won by doing very well what their teachers had laid out for them. They had developed a fine capacity for taking orders, but not much initiative. If I hired athletes, too many of them seemed to feel that their life work was done; that the world owed them a living in exchange for what they had achieved for the grand old school. Also, there is not much social distinction in the grocery business. Young ladies — and their mothers — are much more thrilled by bonds than by butter and eggs.
So I took most of my raw material from our delivery wagons, or other places right at hand. Out of this hard-muscled, hard-headed stuff I have built a business that has made me rich according to the standards of our locality, and has built modest fortunes for at least twenty other men. More important than that, it has stood for clean dealing and a faithful adherence to the best business ethics. Even our hottest competitors, I think, are willing to grant us that.
READING back over what I have written I am quite conscious that it is an indictment of myself, as well as of the brilliant men with whom I have been associated. Any reader might fairly say, “He was too mediocre to appreciate anything better than mediocrity.”
That criticism may be justifiable, fo I am mediocre. But the point I have in mind is this: Business and life are built upon successful mediocrity; and victory comes to companies, not through the employment of brilliant men, but through knowing how to get the most out of ordinary folks.
I was talking not long ago with the president of one of the big insurance companies.
“There is not a single brilliant man in our organization,” he said. “I am not brilliant myself. I am just an average chap who started in peddling policies, and — knowing my own limitations — felt that I must put in a couple of hours’ extra work every day in order to hold my own against my competitors.”
In one of our largest cities is a newspaper which is said to earn nearly a million dollars a year. It was on the verge of bankruptcy when the present owner purchased it. He has made it practically a daily necessity to the business men of his city — complete, accurate, dependable.
One day a very talented journalist joined the staff in a position of considerable responsibility. He had been editor of a smaller newspaper noted for the brightness of its style; and in the first editorial counsel he volunteered a suggestion.
“You have made a marvelous success of this property,” he said to the proprietor. “Nobody would think of suggesting any change in the news policies. But won’t you let me hire two or three really brilliant editorial writers whom I have in mind? Even you must admit that there is room for improvement on your editorial page.”
“What’s the matter with the editorial page?” the proprietor demanded.
“Why, it’s so — so commonplace.”
The proprietor was silent for a moment. Then he said:
“My dear sir, the average business man is commonplace.”
There is a great deal of encouragement to me in that statement, and I find the same sort of encouragement in reading biography. Who have been the doers of important deeds?... Geniuses?... Yes, some of them. But not a majority, by any means.
No man contributed more to the winning of the World War than Lord Kitchener, who was one of the dullest boys that ever entered a school. All studies were hard for him, with one exception: he was remarkably good in arithmetic. Capitalizing that one point of strength, he learned to handle men in large numbers and to make accurate estimates of the strength of his own forces and those opposed to him. When brilliant men were talking about a six-months war, he bluntly prophesied a three-years war, and forced the Allies to prepare for it.
Charles Darwin, who revolutionized scientific thought, was so unpromising as a boy that his father predicted he would be a disgrace to the family. James Russell Lowell was suspended by Harvard for “continued neglect of his college duties.” Neither of them showed any youthful brilliance; they matured gradually into eminence by the slow process of diligent effort.
SIR ISSAC NEWTON sat one night at dinner beside a very attractive and voluble young lady.
“My dear Sir Isaac,” she exclaimed, “how did you ever happen to discover the law of gravitation?”
“By constantly thinking about it, madam,” her “dear Sir Isaac” muttered.
In that blunt answer lies the substance of my experience, and what I believe to be the real secret of business achievement.
So sure am I of the soundness of this philosophy that I have five very simple rules for hiring men, which are the outgrowth of it!
Has he good health? Some months ago a newspaper collected from a hundred young men a list of the qualifications they would seek in the girls they hoped to marry. The list differed widely, as may be imagined. But at the top of almost every one was written the asset which I put first in men — good health. Without it the best man in the world is likely to become pessimistic in his outlook, and to break when he is needed most. With it, even mediocrity can force itself by unusual effort into something fine and useful. Generally speaking, I would rather have a man who was born frail, and has overcome his frailty by careful living, than take one whose natural strength has never known its limits. The athlete, like the genius, frequently disappoints; while the man who has had to fight for his health knows how to value and preserve it. Has he saved some money? I don’t care how much, or how little, but he must have saved something. At times, this demand may seem harsh. A man will say, “I have had parents to look after,” or “I have had bad luck with an investment,” or, “I trusted a friend who failed me.” To all such excuses I am sympathetic, but I do not relent. I answer, “That is too bad, but think what it means. You have lived twenty-five or thirty years without making a profit on your life; how can I expect that you will be a profit-maker for me?” Does he talk and write effectively? This may seem a strange requirement, but it has been a very useful one. If we could unscrew the top of men’s heads and look in, many of our problems would be eliminated, for we could see what sort of thinking goes on there. Lacking that privilege however, we have to judge by what comes out of the mind through the tongue and fingers. If a man writes and speaks “neatly” it is because his thinking is orderly; if his expression is forceful, the thought back of it must be forceful. But if he blunders for words, and uses phrases which express his meaning clumsily, I believe his mind is cluttered and ill-disciplined. Does he finish what he starts? Geniuses almost never do. I look very critically into little things respecting the men I hire; the details of their dress, their handwriting, their record of tying up a job and leaving no loose ends. The biggest men of my acquaintance in business are “detail men” to an amazing degree. Often the president of a company is the only man in it who knows the little things about every department. Finally, of course, I look for courage. General Grant was a rather slow-witted man, and a failure in middle life. But he won the Civil War; and the principle on which he proceeded was that the enemy was probably just as much scared as he was. Napoleon’s motto was “When in doubt, attack.” I like to throw something rather hard at a young man, and see how squarely he meets it. For with courage and the habit of going forward he can travel a long way. He will pass many men more brilliant than he is. Their active minds can always see two sides to every question; and they stand still while the debate goes on inside.
THESE are quite simple rules. They eliminate the genius quite as surely as they eliminate the unfit. No Edison could ever qualify; no Lincoln, either, with his soiled linen duster and his habit of interrupting important business with funny stories. I am sorry to forego the companionship of such men in my rather dingy building here in the wholesale grocery district. But I comfort myself with the thought that Cromwell built the finest army in Europe out of dull but enthusiastic yeomen; and that the greatest organization in human history was twelve humble men, picked up along the shores of an inland lake.Vans' "Duct Tape Skate Jam 2018" Video Vans hit Oahu, HI, for the Duct Tape Festival and the concrete waves were firing! Coping was crushed, loops were looped, DJ Juan Love (Cardiel) killed the tables (and skated!) and stoke levels were off the charts. Click play; get hyped!
Sheepside 1-Year Anniversary The DIY spirit is alive in Hawaii and the Shitty Kids were there to capture the concrete-con-carnage! Aloha or die!
Independent's "The Farm" Video Invite the Indy crew to a backyard pit and you know they're gonna light that shit on fire. Literally!
5Boro's "5BNY" Video There’s nothing quite like footage from the concrete jungle of NYC. This video features great skating, an epic vibe, and three new members of the pro ranks. Congrats Jordan Trahan, Rob Gonyon and Silvester Eduardo!Bugatti Veyron v Rimac Concept One
We have as of now observed the Croatian electric hyper auto Rimac Concept One kill a portion of the world’s most praised super autos in straight on fights. Presently, in a private test, we compared the Bugatti Veyron and the Concept one.
So the Rimac, a 28-year-old business visionary who had a dream of what an extreme super auto ought to be and transformed that vision into reality with Rimac Concept One. It’s stunning, while all the goliath automakers are as yet scratching their heads how to think of a completely electric outlandish super auto that works, Rimac is out winning fights.
During test drive many new things we know about this super auto. there is a nice trick of switching button just pre one side of the mirror to opening the door. The attraction control have the perfect ring system So the perfect ring system tribute a power or torque to each Tyre to maximize the performance of car basically it can help you to turn the car to the Conners We ha perfect ring system to turn you don’t need to fighting the grip of the car its work for you. You also have the instant power and the best acceleration if you drive the car in first gear. it provides the shift of 1030 hp The drive is so smooth, the acceleration and speed is perfect it sounds well, it is the pretty branded car.
Bugatti Veyron, it is the very fast car it changes gare very fast and the steering gear is very lite Attraction control is very smooth, it controls the car well. Petra engine of 20 century is used in this super auto. But this car is away from covering system and the Concept one has ultimate cornering system.Here’s a 4th of July message from Joe Bastardi of WeatherBell regarding this idiotic piece in the NYT. Click the image at left for the story. He’ll be on Fox News tomorrow morning to talk more about it.
Then there’s the always dependably irrational Brad Johnson of ThinkProgress.org (you know, the guy that shamelessly and without anything other than his own irrational thought processes blamed tornadoes on “climate pollution deniers -voting states who challenged climate legislation) who writes:
Firework shows from Texas to Massachusetts have been canceled because of the deadly climate conditions…
Oh noes! Deadly climate conditions. Lock your doors, bar your windows, don’t let your children look at the sky! Yeah, I guess Brad has never heard colloquialism “hot as a firecracker on the Fourth of July”. Of course what is missing is historical context. How many Forth of July fireworks displays were canceled in 1934 during the drought, or 1988 during the California drought? Or has the trend in fireworks cancellation been accelerating (cuz it’s the trend that is important you know) with CO2 increase? But I digress, they aren’t interested in anything but the politically expedient moment.
Here’s one for Brad:
Climate doesn’t kill people, weather does.
But enough of the defective thinking over at TP.
Joe writes via email:
I will be on Fox and Friends tomorrow morning (6:52AM ET) to debunk the notion that outdoor grilling is a cause of global warming.
First of all, mans yearly contribution to the atmosphere of CO2 results in an increase the size of a hair on a 1km bridge. If we take the whole atmosphere, ocean system together, and realize most of the energy is in the oceans anyway, the amount man contributes is so small, its probably the width of a hair on a trip to a galaxy light years away. In addition CO2 is loved by plants, so I have a new motto for the fourth, Grill a steak, Help a Tree!!!!
But there is something more behind this. Not only is this another foolish global warming idea, but it’s an attack on a cherished 4th of July American ritual (summer too) and an American tradition that lasts into other season (tailgating) but its targeting meat eaters too. And when one looks at that, one sees why this should be interesting tomorrow morning since I am supposed to be on a set where we are grilling up some meat and I am going to make darn sure the adage bulk up or leave town is applied. I will bulk up, then leave town.
Now if you want to eat something different, be my guest. I am not going to stop you. But if you want to help green the planet, there is probably some tree out there that would take the greenhouse gasses that your grilling is adding and use them for its own purpose… so go on you red blooded American.
Grill that steak and help that Tree. Its the patriotic thing to do.
ciao for now
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RedditHow Birthday Parties Started The tradition of birthday parties started in Europe a long time ago. It was feared that evil spirits were particularly attracted to people on their birthdays. To protect them from harm, friends and family would to come be with the birthday person and bring good thoughts and wishes. Giving gifts brought even more good cheer to ward off the evil spirits. This is how birthday parties began. At first it was only kings who were recognized as important enough to have a birthday celebration (maybe this is how the tradition of birthday crowns began?). As time went by, children became included in birthday celebrations. The first children's birthday parties occurred in Germany and were called Kinderfeste. The Greeks believed that everyone had a protective spirit or daemon who attended his birth and watched over him in life. This spirit had a mystic relation with the god on whose birthday the individual was born. The Romans also subscribed to this idea. This notion was carried down in human belief and is reflected in the guardian angel, the fairy godmother and the patron saint. The custom of lighted candles on the cakes started with the Greeks. Honey cakes round as the moon and lit with tapers were placed on the temple altars of (Artemis). Birthday candles, in folk belief, are endowed with special magic for granting wishes. Lighted tapers and sacrificial fires have had a special mystic significance ever since man first set up altars to his gods. The birthday candles are thus an honor and tribute to the birthday child and bring good fortune. These birthday celebrations also involve imitation of the Jews and Christians in their birthday celebrations. The Prophet (peace and blessings of Allah be upon him) said, warning us against following their ways and traditions: You would follow the ways of those who came before you step by step, to such an extent that if they were to enter a lizards hole, you would enter it too. They said, O Messenger of Allah, (do you mean) the Jews and Christians? He said, Who else? (Reported by al-Bukhari and Muslim). The Prophet (peace and blessings of Allah be upon him) also said: Whoever imitates a people is one of them. (Fataawa Islamiyyah, 1/115) Shaykh al-Islam Ibn Taymiyah (may Allah have mercy on him) said in his commentary on the ayah (interpretation of the meaning), And those who do not witness falsehood (al-zoor) (al-Furqan 25:72): As regards the festivals of the mushrikeen: they combine confusion, physical desires and falsehood, there is nothing in them that is of any religious benefit, and the instant gratification involved in them only ends up in pain. Thus they are falsehood, and witnessing them means attending them. This ayah itself praises and commends (those who do not witness falsehood), which has the meaning of urging people to avoid taking part in their festivals and other kinds of falsehood. We understand that it is bad to attend their festivals because they are called al-zoor (falsehood). It indicates that it is haram to do this for many reasons, because Allah has called it al-zoor. Allah condemns the one who speaks falsehood (al-zoor) even if no-one else is harmed by it, as in the ayah forbidding zihaar (a form of divorce in which the man says to his wife you are to me like the back of my mother), where He says (interpretation of the meaning): And verily, they utter an ill word and a lie (zooran) (al-Mujadilah 58:2). And Allah says (interpretation of the meaning): So shun the abomination of idols, and shun lying speech (false statements) (al-zoor). (al-Hajj 22:30). So the one who does al-zoor is condemned in this fashion. In the Sunnah: Anas ibn Maalik (may Allah be pleased with him) said: The Messenger of Allah (peace and blessings of Allah be upon him) came (to Madinah) and they had two days in which they would (relax and) play. He said, What are these two days? They said, We used to play (on these two days) during the Jahiliyyah. The Messenger of Allah (peace and blessings of Allah be upon him) said: Allah has given you something better instead of them: Yawm al-Duha (Eid al-Adha) and Yawm al-Fitr (Eid al-Fitr). (Reported by Abu Dawood). This indicates clearly that the Prophet (peace and blessings of Allah be upon him) definitely forbade his ummah to celebrate the festivals of the kuffar, and he strove to wipe them out by all possible means. The fact that the religion of the People of the Book is accepted does not mean that their festivals are approved of or should be preserved by the ummah, just as the rest of their kufr and sins are not approved of. Indeed, the Prophet (peace and blessings of Allah be upon him) went to great lengths to command his ummah to be different from them in many issues that are mubaah (permitted) and in many ways of worship, lest that lead them to be like them in other matters too. This being different was to be a barrier in all aspects, because the more different you are from the people of Hell, the less likely you are to do the acts of the people of Hell. The first of them is: The hadith Every people has its festival, and this is our festival implies exclusivity, that every people has its own festival, as Allah says (interpretation of the meaning): For every nation there is a direction to which they face (in their prayers) (al-Baqarah 2:148) and to each among you, We have prescribed a law and a clear way (al-Maaidah 5:48). This implies that each nation has its own ways. The laam in li-kulli (for every, to each) implies exclusivity. So if the Jews have a festival and the Christians have a festival, it is just |
for each state gives prohibited hours, prohibited days and restrictions to persons served,” the article reports. “The attendant judges from landmarks, his own watch or advice from pilots whether—and to whom—he can serve drinks.” (That includes refusing drinks to “spendthrifts” when flying over South Dakota, for some reason.) The attendant also knew that drinks couldn’t be served on Sundays, election days, certain other holidays, and specific hours in some states.
Intoxicated passengers soon became a problem on some flights. By the mid-1950s the FAA imposed a two-drink limit that some passengers skirted by intimidating flight attendants into giving them more drinks, or wrangling the drinks of other passengers. Congress stepped in, looking to ban the serving of liquor on all domestic flights. Six U.S. airlines agreed to limit hard liquor, but declared they wouldn’t restrict beer and wine service. Writes Daniel Rust: “After being accosted by a drunken passenger on a domestic flight, Speaker of the House Sam Rayburn pushed for a bill forbidding alcohol service on airliners, only to see it die in the Senate.”
Banning alcohol on flights won’t happen anytime soon. According to figures collected from five U.S. airlines over a four-month period in 2014, alcohol sales brought in more than $43 million. And just a few weeks ago, KXAN reported that “passengers on a Southwest Airlines flight from Oakland, California, to Kansas City, Missouri, managed to drink all the plane’s alcohol, prompting the pilot to go on the overhead speaker and congratulate the fliers.”Bitcoin in the Headlines is a weekly analysis of bitcoin media coverage and its impact.
The fires of one of bitcoin’s hottest recurring debates raged on this week, with the digital currency’s potential use case as a safe haven asset during times of economic crisis taking the forefront amid continued struggles in the eurozone.
The focal point of the media’s attention, as with last week, was Greece, a beleaguered nation suffering the effects of economic uncertainty, with reports attempting to discern if and how the digital currency was playing a role in this larger narrative.
Not up for debate was the fact that bitcoin’s novel status as a fiat currency alternative was highlighted by the struggles. Complicating matters, however, were reports that often confused the expected usefulness of a more mature digital currency ecosystem with its current market.
Arguably more problematic were attempts to tie the issues in Greece to seemingly tangential events, such as the increase in the digital currency’s price and issues with its payment network, that ventured into speculation while providing little, if any, plausible conclusions.
Bitcoin, the new safe haven?
Though little evidence was found that Greek buyers were behind bitcoin’s rising price, some commentators noted that the perception of the digital currency’s utility as a hedge for the euro was convincing investors of its potential.
Nasdaq‘s David Floyd offered a truly relatable description of bitcoin’s current market position, asserting that bitcoin is “growing up” in the eyes of investors as a result of its association with the crisis.
Floyd wrote:
“People are beginning to acknowledge that the kid [bitcoin] has a point.”
Still, he suggested that bitcoin perhaps isn’t a practical solution for currency crises today. “Bitcoin’s identity crisis,” he said, can’t last for ever. “It’s high time the cryptocurrency found a niche and made a productive contribution to the financial ecosystem. In short, bitcoin, get a job.”
Floyd also adddressed the digital currency’s potential in Greece, pointing to how the underdeveloped bitcoin ecosystem was holding back its utility in the current crisis.
“Some observers have called the price move purely coincidental. Others have suggested that the increased demand is coming not just because of Greece, but from within Greece, as panicked citizens move their savings into the digital currency. Greece’s one bitcoin ATM, however, has seen zero activity since capital controls were imposed on June 28: no one who’s managed to get euro bills is about to convert them,” he said.
Reports from on the ground differ from this conclusion, as Greek ATM owner Vedran Kajić estimates his ATM conducted €800 worth of business on Friday alone.
Still, drawing the connection between market movements and the media’s coverage, he added, is an exercise in armchair psychology. He argued the hypothesis that a potential Greek default would drive nervous capital into bitcoin is “perfectly plausible”.
“Bitcoin is the new safe haven,” he added.
The comments did much to boost the validity of many in the bitcoin community, who trumpeted how the price of gold, a traditional safe haven asset, has moved little over the course of the Greek crisis.
Why bitcoin?
Less convinced of the usefulness of such debate was FT Alphaville’s Izabella Kaminska, who instead put forth the opinion that the attention given to bitcoin made little sense given that the country was not experiencing a currency crisis.
Her argument, put simply, seemed to imply that as a non-government currency, bitcoin or another blockchain-based money, while potentially helping individual citizens, would do little to solve the problems a government would face during a crisis.
She asked:
“Why on earth would Greece want to replace the euro, a currency it already thinks too restrictive, with another which would be even more constraining and give Greeks even less control over monetary affairs!?”
In her argument, Kaminska cited FTCoin, a cryptocurrency-based solution proposed by Greece’s former Finance Minister Yanis Varoufakis. Using this concept, he had attempted to find a way to normalise Greece’s tax evasion issues – sometimes branded a national sport.
Kaminska, however, attacked the argument that a digital currency would solve tax collection issues in Greece, stating:
“If and when this [adopting a parallel currency] happens, the parallel scrip will remain a highly politicised form of money whose true value will be linked to the government’s democratically-approved authority to extract taxes and spend funds on the public’s behalf. Whether that coupon comes as FTCoin or drachma makes little to no difference.”
Cited in a CNBC piece by Kalyeena Makortoff, Garrick Hileman, an economic historian at the London School of Economics put things into perspective, agreeing it was unlikely that the Greek government would officially adopt bitcoin.
Search for answers
Finally, the narrative propagated in sometimes problematic ways in stories that sought to connect more specific issues with the technology to Greece.
Reporting for Bloomberg, Olga Kharif picked up on the surprise bitcoin fork that took place over the Independence Day celebrations in the US, leading to the validation of some transaction blocks meant to be invalid.
This fault, caused by the delayed implementation of a bitcoin core update by a small part of network participants, seemed to cause some concern among mainstream journalists, though it was written off as regular activity by many steady market observers.
Kharif led her piece with the Greek economic crisis, describing bitcoin’s price movements in relation to events in the European country but soon took to reminding people that the digital currency was flawed, suggesting it was not an ideal solution for the debt-ridden economy.
“Over the weekend, bitcoin’s software provided a well-timed reminder of why it’s not the perfect financial system, either.”
Given the attention Greece has driven to the technology, however, it remains to be seen whether next time there is a macro-level crisis, the ecosystem will be more prepared.
Pete Rizzo co-authored this report.
Girl image, beach image, man image and clock image via Shutterstock.Stojan Jankovic will now have two weeks to challenge his deportation to Serbia, thanks to Labour MP
A popular shop worker who has lived in the UK for 26 years and was detained by immigration officers the day after article 50 was triggered will have two weeks to challenge his deportation following an intervention from the Labour MP Keir Starmer.
Thousands sign petition against London shop worker's deportation Read more
Stojan Jankovic, 53, known as “Stoly”, who fled former Yugoslavia in 1991, was detained without warning on Thursday, and faces the possibility of deportation to Serbia as early as 4 April.
An online petition has attracted more than 22,000 signatures in 48 hours and a #savestoly campaign is running on Twitter, with supporters including Match of the Day presenter Gary Lineker.
Jankovic was released from detention on Monday, according to Starmer.
Jankovic had worked at the Earth Natural Foods shop in Kentish Town, north London, for 15 years, paying national insurance and tax, according to his employers.
In an interview from the Verne immigration removal centre in Dorset, before his imminent release, Jankovic, who said he saw himself as “completely assimilated” in UK life, and who has not left the UK since his arrival, blamed his “sticky situation” on his failure to properly understand the bureaucracy surrounding his applications for indefinite leave to remain.
His detention has been met with dismay in his local community in Kentish Town, where a campaign to prevent his deportation is under way.
Holborn and St Pancras MP Starmer said Jankovic will now be given two weeks to challenge his deportation. In a statement, the MP said: “I am pleased to report that, after discussions with immigration minister Robert Goodwill’s private office, it has been agreed that no removal direction in the Stoly Jankovic case will be set until 14 days from today. That provides time for proper representation to be made, and legal advice to be given.”
The MP tweeted:
Keir Starmer (@Keir_Starmer) Pleased to further report that Home Office has now confirmed the release of Stoly Jankovic from detention & he should be heading home soon.
Jankovic was detained without warning on Thursday with just the clothes was wearing at the time, at an immigration reporting centre in London Bridge, where he had been required to sign in each month for several years.
Starmer told the Guardian that while his imminent release was good news, “it does call into question the whole procedure”.The Detroit Lions selected Eric Ebron with the 10th overall pick in the 2014 NFL Draft, and upon hearing of this selection, I must admit that I was VERY disappointed in Detroit’s choice. I mean, did the Lions really need another TE? They just resigned Brandon Pettigrew to a $16 million contract and Joe Fauria has shown he can be a player maker, so why draft another end? In fact, I was so convinced the Lions wouldn’t draft a tight end this year, that I didn’t take a strong look at any of them.
As I watched Sammy Watkins and Mike Evans come off the board I assumed that Mayhew would trade down to bolster their defense by taking a corner (Darqueze Dennard) or defensive tackle (Aaron Donald), but that never happend. Instead, they took Eric Ebron and I was left thinking ‘same old Lions.’
I was mad, but somehow convinced that Mayhew had to be smarter than me, and that he must know something I don’t. I started researching Eric Ebron and instantly realized that Mayhew did know something I didn’t. He knew that Eric Ebron wasn’t a tight end at all, but a versatile receiver, perhaps best used in the slot.
Ebron, hails from the University of North Carolina where he played tight end and broke Vernon Davis’ ACC record for yardage. His strengths are in route running, catching the ball away from his body, and exceptional speed. His weaknesses are blocking and his smaller muscle mass for the TE position.
So, if he’s fast, great at catching the ball, but struggles with blocking, I see no reason to actually put him on the offensive line in the tight end position. I say put him in the slot and give Matthew Stafford another weapon.
Another TE turned slot receiver comes to mind when I think of Ebron, New Orleans’ Jimmy Graham. Graham considers himself a receiver and is in fact going through a process to have his classification changed from tight end to receiver so that can use his franchise tag to be paid as such. And now that Joe Lombardi, who came from New Orleans, is Lions new offensive coordinator it seems obvious that Ebron will be used in much the same way as Graham.
I must admit that though my initial reaction to the pick may have been one of anger and fear that the Lions had slipped back into the Matt Millen era, I now see that Detroit has picked up a great receiving threat that was given the wrong job title.This is a transcript of a I talk I gave yesterday at the LSE Literary Festival. My thanks to Arthur Bradley who also took part and responded to many of the themes I raised here and to Danielle Sands of the Forum for European Philosophy for organising the discussion.
‘If we in the West do not understand the moral depth of our own tradition, how can we hope to shape the conversation of mankind?’
That is the arresting final line to intellectual historian Larry Siedentop’s new book Inventing the Individual. For Siedentop, the notions that underlie modern liberalism – individualism, equality, agency, secularism – all derive from Christianity. It is, he insists, important to recognize liberal secularism as the child of Christianity because it is under threat from non-Christian traditions – Islam in particular. Without recognizing that Christianity provides the moral and cultural foundations to ‘Western civilization’, the threat modern liberal values cannot be repelled.
It is an argument that has received a widespread hearing. Cardinal Miloslav Vlk, the Archbishop Emeritus of Prague, has argued, for instance, that in denying its Christian roots, Europe is undermining its ability to withstand the challenge to its values. ‘At the end of the Middle Ages’, he suggested, ‘Islam failed to conquer Europe with arms… Today, when the fighting is done with spiritual weapons which Europe lacks while Muslims are perfectly armed, the fall of Europe is looming.’ Non-believers and non-Christians too – from the historian Niall Ferguson to the Jewish writer and broadcaster Melanie Phillips – make similar arguments. Christianity, as Phillips has put it, ‘is under direct and unremitting cultural assault from those who want to destroy the bedrock values of Western civilization.’
Christianity has certainly been the crucible within which the intellectual and political cultures of Western Europe have developed over the past two millennia. But the claim that Christianity embodies the ‘bedrock values of Western civilization’, and that the weakening of Christianity inevitably means the weakening of liberal democratic values, is a Janet and John reading of history. The philosophical, cultural and moral roots of modern Europe are highly diverse. And while the idea of ‘Christian Europe’ may make sense from a certain perspective, it serves also to ignore that diversity.
The discussion about Christian Europe takes place in the context of the debate about the ‘clash of civilizations’, an idea popularized by the late US political scientist Samuel Huntingdon. Past conflicts in Europe, Huntington wrote, were mainly ‘conflicts within Western civilization’. The ‘battle lines of the future’, on the other hand, would be between civilizations. Huntingdon identified a number of distinct civilizations, including Confucian, Japanese, Buddhist, Hindu, Orthodox, Latin American and African. The primary struggle, however, would, he thought, be between the Christian West and the Islamic East. It is, as part of the ‘war on terror’ that the thesis has primarily been deployed over the past decade.
The idea of singular, homogenous, fixed ‘civilizations’ is deeply problematic. What we call ‘civilizations’, whether European, or Islamic or Chinese, are complex constructions. They are ‘civilizations’ precisely because they are porous, fluid, open to wider influences.
Not only are ‘civilizations’ culturally and conceptually diverse, but ideas and concepts are historically malleable. The meanings of many of the values which modern Europe supposedly draws from Christianity – such as equality, democracy, universality and tolerance – are significantly different today than they were 500, 1000 or 2000 years ago, within the Christian tradition, let alone beyond it.
Consider, for instance, two of the concepts for which advocates of a Christian Europe often claim that Europe is indebted to Christianity: that of moral equality and of a universal humanity, on the one hand, and of human agency, on the other. These values lie at the heart, for instance, of Siedentop’s argument, and of his insistence that modern liberalism is a child of Christianity.
It is true that, historically, Christianity played a major role in developing these notions. But, inevitably, the story is far more complex than the simple argument for a Christian Europe allows. The concepts of equality, universality and agency developed not merely within Christianity but within a number of traditions, both Western and non-Western, and through the interactions between them.
The idea of God as having created Man in his own image helped Christian thinkers enlarge the meaning of ‘humanity’. The dignity of the individual derived not from his or her participation in a specific community but through their God-created nature. Yet what God giveth with one hand, he taketh away with the other. Within the Christian tradition, the idea of a universal humanity was constrained by the very nature of faith. Equality was equality in the eyes of a Christian God. Hence the long and fractious debates, well into the early modern period, about whether non-Christians were equal, or even possessed souls.
Other premodern traditions, the Greek Stoics, for instance, faced no such constraints. In his famous Elements of Ethics the Stoic philosopher Hierocles imagines very individual as standing at the centre of a series of concentric circles. The first circle is the mind, next comes the immediate family, followed by the extended family, the local community, the community of neighbouring towns, the country, and finally the entire human race. To be virtuous, Hierocles suggested, is to draw these circles together, constantly to transfer people from the outer circles to the inner circles, to treat strangers as cousins and cousins as brothers and sisters, making all human beings part of our concern. Or, as another Stoic philosopher Epictetus put it,
Never in reply to the question, to what country you belong, say that you are an Athenian or a Corinthian but that you are a citizen of the world.
It is a cosmopolitan vision that would be startling today, let alone two thousand years ago, a vision far more revolutionary than that of Christian theologians and one that came to influence many Enlightenment and post-Enlightenment thinkers.
Ideas of social hierarchy and of inequality remained central to the Christian tradition. ‘It is in the natural order of things’, Augustine, the greatest of Christian theologians, certainly before Thomas Aquinas, preached, ‘that women should serve men, and children their parents, because this is just in itself, that the weaker reason should serve the stronger.’ As with the family, so with society. It was given by nature for the lower orders to serve the upper orders, and for all to serve the Emperor. Slavery, too, was ‘ordained as a punishment by that law which enjoins the preservation of the order of nature, and forbids its disturbance.’ While the rulers of a society could take punitive action – including even the torture of innocent men – to defend social peace, individuals had no such right. In Augustine, as the theologian John Rist observes, ‘the powers of ordinary citizens are almost non-existent.’ Plato and Aristotle, Rist adds, who themselves worried about the ‘mob’, ‘would have shuddered at such an empty concept of citizenship.’
Such beliefs were not, of course, specific to Christianity. Difference and inequality were stitched into the social fabric in the premodern world. Not till the coming of modernity, and the social possibilities it forged, could equality take on new meaning.
Similar problems attend the claim that modern notions of agency and will derive primarily from the Christian tradition. Siedentop argues that the new vision of God established in the Christian worldview led to new thinking about human agency. For the Ancients, he suggests, gods were constrained by the rational structure of reality. The monotheistic God, whether Jewish, Christian or, later, Islamic, was all-powerful and constrained by nothing. He could act as He chose. This allowed for radically new concepts of agency and will.
It is true that the Christian tradition developed new ways of thinking about the individual and about human agency, just as it had developed notions of equality and universalism. But just as faith constrained the ways in which Christians could conceive of equality, so it constrained the ways in which they could imagine agency and will. ‘Will’ in the Christian tradition could be understood only in the context of belief in the Fall and in Original Sin, the insistence that all humans are tainted by Adam and Eve’s disobedience of God in eating of the fruit of the Tree of Knowledge. The doctrine of Original Sin is perhaps the most original and profound contribution of Christianity to the ‘Western’ tradition. It is also perhaps its most pernicious. It is a doctrine that has led to a bleak view of human nature; in the Christian tradition it is impossible for humans to do good on their own account, because the Fall has degraded both their moral capacity and their willpower. Only through God’s grace could humans achieve salvation. ‘It is through the grace of God alone’, the modern theologian Alister McGrath explains ‘that that our illness is diagnosed (sin) and a cure made available (grace)’. If the all-powerful, unconstrained monotheistic God had introduced a revolutionary notion of agency, the Christian concept of the Fall and of Original Sin ensured that human agency was viewed in a very different way.
The story of Adam and Eve, and of the serpent in the Garden of Eden, was, of course, originally a Jewish fable. But Jews read that story differently to Christians. In Judaism, as in Islam, Adam and Eve’s transgression creates a sin against their own souls, but does not condemn humanity as a whole, nor does it fundamentally transform either human nature or human beings’ relationship to God.In the Christian tradition, God created humanity to be immortal. In eating the apple, Adam and Eve brought mortality upon themselves. Jews have always seen humans as mortal beings. In the Garden, Adam and Eve were as children. Having eaten of the Tree of the Knowledge of Good and Evil, they had to take responsibility for themselves, their decisions and their behaviour. This is seen not as a ’fall’ but as a ‘gift’ – the gift of free will.
The story of Adam and Eve was initially, then, a fable about the attainment of free will and the embrace of moral responsibility. It became a tale about the corruption of free will and the constraints on moral responsibility. It was in this transformation in the meaning of the Adam and Eve’s transgression that Christianity has perhaps secured its greatest influence, a bleak description of human nature that came to dominate Western ethical thinking as Christianity became the crucible in which that thinking took place.
Not all Christians were willing to accept this desolate, guilt-ridden view of human nature. A major theological debate erupted within Western Christendom in the fifth century when a Welsh monk, Pelagius, challenged Augustine’s vision. Pelagius argued that it was possible for humans to achieve salvation independently of God’s grace through the power of reason and the exercise of free will, though he accepted that God’s grace assisted every good work. It is the responsibility of human beings to follow the Gospels, and to suggest that ‘the frailty of our own nature’ makes us incapable of doing so was, in Pelagius’ view, ‘to indulge in pointless evasions’.
At the heart of the debate between Pelagius and Augustine was the question of whether humans are to be defined by depravity and sinfulness or by reason and the capacity for good. Are humans moral agents? Or are we so crippled by sin that it is impossible for us to have a clear idea of right and wrong? Augustine won the dispute. Pelagius, and those who supported him, were declared heretics.
In the struggle between Augustine and Pelagius we can see two threads of Christian thought, two contradictory views of God, salvation and human nature that Christianity has never truly resolved. Augustine’s victory set the tone for how Christians came to see what it was to be human. Not for another millennium did a truly new vision of human nature and of human agency begin to develop.
What are now often called ‘Western values’ – democracy, equality, toleration, freedom of speech, etc – are the products largely of the Enlightenment and of the post-Enlightenment world. A complex debate has arisen about the relationship between the Enlightenment and the Christian tradition. As the notion of the Christian tradition and of ‘Western civilization’ have become fused, and as the Enlightenment has come to be seen as embodying Western values, so some have tried to co-opt the Enlightenment into the Christian tradition. The Enlightenment ideas of tolerance, equality and universalism, they argue, derive from the reworking of notions already established within the Christian tradition. Others, more ambiguous about the legacy of the Enlightenment, argue that true liberal, democratic values are Christian and that the radicalism and secularism of the Enlightenment has only helped undermine such values.
Both views are wrong. For a start, the historic origins of many of these ideas lie, as we have seen, outside the Christian tradition. It is as apt to describe a concept such as equality or universalism as Greek as it is to be describe it as Christian. In truth, though, contemporary ideas of equality or universality are neither Greek nor Christian. Whatever their historical origins, they have become peculiarly modern concepts, the product of the specific social, political and intellectual currents of the modern world.
The crumbling of belief in a God-ordained order helped, in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, to develop a new, radical, inclusive form of egalitarianism. Having dispensed with God, there was, as the historian Jonathan Israel has put it, no ‘meaningful alternative’ to grounding morality in a ‘generalized radical egalitarianism extending across all frontiers, class barriers and horizons.’ The new egalitarians drew upon radical strands of Christian thought. But they transformed the very meaning of equality.
Not only are modern concepts of equality or universality distinct from historical ones, but what today we describe as ‘Western’ values would have left the great figures of the Christian tradition Aquinas and Augustine, for instance, bewildered. On the other hand, Aquinas, at least, would have understood the Islamic values of Muslim philosophers such as Ibn Sina or Ibn Rushd. There is, in other words, no single set of European values that transcends history and binds together ‘the Christian tradition’ in opposition to a single corpus of timeless set-in-stone Islamic values.
What is particularly ironic, given the way that the defence of Christian Europe is today often seen as a necessary bulwark against the encroachments of Islam, is that not only are there no historically transcendent civilizational values, but Islam has been central to the creation of the so called Judeo-Christian tradition. To understand why we have to go back to early days of the Christian era, to the destruction of the Roman empire in the middle decades of the first millennium CE. The collapse of Roman imperial institutions left the Church as almost the only body capable of maintaining some semblance of social order in Western Europe. It also left the clergy as the sole literate class in the Western world and the Church as the lone patron of knowledge and the arts.
But if the Church kept alive elements of a learned culture, Church leaders, particularly in Western Europe, were ambiguous about the merits of pagan knowledge. ‘What is there in common between Athens and Jerusalem?’, asked Tertullian, the first significant theologian to write in Latin. So preoccupied were devout Christians with the demands of the next world that to study nature or history or philosophy for its own sake seemed to them almost perverse. Augustine came to see uninhibited curiosity as an evil, in his Confessions condemning as a ‘disease’ the yearning to discover ‘the hidden powers of nature… which to know profits not’.
The Greek philosopher upon whom theologians most leaned was Plato; Timaeus, a work that Plato wrote late in his life, became particularly important to Christian thinkers. It is among Plato’s more obscure works, the down-to-earth dialectical investigation characteristic of most of his dialogues giving way to grandiose cosmic theorizing. In Timaeus, Plato creates a new conception of God, as a craftsman who has sculpted the universe, transforming it ‘from a state of disorder to order’. It became highly influential in the early Middle Ages, probably because it was more mystical than philosophical.
The most significant casualty of the Christianising of learning, and of the rise of what came to be called Neoplatonism, was Aristotle, whose empirical, this-worldly approach to knowledge was most at odds with the dictates of faith. In the Name of the Rose, Umberto Eco’s beguiling philosophical whodunit, the Franciscan friar William of Baskerville and his novice, Adso of Melk, investigate a series of murders at a Benedictine monastery in Northern Italy. They uncover a plot to keep hidden a single book in the abbey’s library, the greatest in Christendom. In the novel’s denouement, amidst the ruins of a burning library, William asks the blind librarian Jorge of Burgos why he has devoted his life to protecting the world from any knowledge of this single work. ‘Because it was by the Philosopher’, replies Jorge. ‘Every book by that man has destroyed a part of the learning that Christianity had accumulated over the centuries.’ The Philosopher was Aristotle. Despite the Book of Genesis revealing ‘what has to be known about the composition of the cosmos’, Jorge bemoans, ‘it sufficed to rediscover the Physics of the Philosopher to have the universe reconceived in terms of dull and slimy matter.’
Not until the thirteenth century did Christian Western Europe truly rediscover its Greek heritage, and Aristotle in particular, a rediscovery that helped transform European intellectual culture. It did so primarily through the Muslim Empire. In the early Middle Ages, an intellectual tradition flowered in the Islamic world as lustrous as that of Ancient Athens before or Renaissance Florence after. Arab philosophy and science played a critical role not just in preserving the gains of the Greeks but in genuinely expanding the boundaries of knowledge, both in philosophy and in science.
The Rationalist tradition in Islamic thought, culminating in the work of Ibn Sina and Ibn Rushd, is these days barely remembered in the West. Yet its importance and influence, not least on the ‘Judeo-Christian’ tradition, is difficult to overstate. Ibn Rushd especially, the greatest Muslim interpreter of Aristotle, came to wield far more influence within Judaism and Christianity than within Islam, his commentaries shaping the thinking of a galaxy of thinkers from Maimonides to Aquinas himself.
Christians of the time recognized the importance of Muslim philosophers. In The Divine Comedy, Dante places Ibn Rushd with the great pagan philosophers whose spirits dwell not in Hell but in Limbo ‘the place that favor owes to fame’. One of Raphael’s most famous paintings, The School of Athens, is a fresco on the walls of the Apostolic Palace in the Vatican, depicting the world’s great philosophers. Among the pantheon of celebrated Greek philosophers including Aristotle, Plato and Socrates stands Ibn Rushd.
Today that debt has been almost entirely forgotten. There is a tendency to think of Islam as walled-in, insular, hostile to reason and freethinking, a view that has helped cement the idea of the clash of civilizations, Much of the Islamic world certainly came to be that way. But the fact remains that the scholarship of the golden age of Islamic thinking helped lay the foundations for the European Renaissance and the Scientific Revolution. Neither happened in the Muslim world. But without the Muslim world, it is possible that neither may have happened in Europe, at least in the fashion that they did.
To argue all this is not to deny the distinctive character of the Christian tradition (or traditions), nor the important role that Christianity has played in incubating what we now call ‘Western’ thought, nor yet the significant philosophical advances made within that tradition. But the Christian tradition, and Christian Europe, is far more a chimera than a pure-bred beast. The history of Christianity, its relationship to other traditions, and the relationship between Christian values and those of modern, liberal, secular societies is far more complex than the trite ‘Western civilization is collapsing’ arguments allow.
The reason for challenging the crass alarmism about the decline of Christianity is not simply to lay to rest the myths and misconceptions about the Christian tradition. It also because that alarmism is itself undermining the very values – tolerance, equal treatment, universal rights – for the defence of which we supposedly need a Christian Europe. The erosion of Christianity will not necessarily lead to the erosion of such values. The crass defence of ‘Christian Europe’ against the supposed barbarian hordes may well do.
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The paintings are, from top down, a Byzantine icon of St George, Tintoretto’s ‘Constantinople Under Siege’, Jaume Huguet’s ‘The Consecration of St Augustine’, Caravaggio’s ‘St Jerome Writing’, Masaccio’s ‘Expulsion of Adam and Eve’ and Raphael’s ‘School of Athens’Backpacking around Donner Summit Backpacking around Donner Summit offers hikers a variety of wilderness destinations. The most popular backpacking areas along the Donner Summit corridor are Grouse Ridge (trailheads off Bowman Lake Road), the Pacific Crest Trail (stretching north and south from Donner Summit), Granite Chief Wilderness (west of Squaw Valley and Alpine Meadows), and a number of short hikes with trailheads along Interstate 80. Anderson Peak (center left), the Pacific Crest Trail follows the ridge
Grouse Ridge Destinations Grouse Ridge is closed to motorized vehicles, but it is not a wilderness area. Lakes abound in the Grouse Ridge area, making it an interesting place for backpackers to explore. Trails connect most of the lakes and none of the hikes is especially difficult. Good maps and a compass or GPS make route finding easier. We offer some of the best Grouse Ridge outings here. Island Lake Distance: 1.5 miles one way
Elevation changes: +200 feet (6,675' - 6,875')
Trailhead: Carr Lake
Island Lake is an easy overnight backpack trip, great for introducing children to the activity. Because of the ease of reaching the lake, it can be a popular camping destination during the height of the summer. The trail leads from Carr Lake past Feeley Lake and then up a short climb. At the trail junction turn left. Camping sites can be found all around the lake. Upper Rock Lake Distance: 3 miles one way
Elevation changes: +550 feet (6,200' - 7,750')
Trailhead: Lindsey Lakes
This easy hike takes you past a number of nice lakes on your way to Upper Rock Lake. Start at the Lindsey Lakes trailhead and climb a gentle grade to a viewpoint looking down on Culbertson Lake. After a short dip crossing Texas Creek begin a somewhat steeper climb to the Rock lakes. Find a secluded campsite on the southeast shore of Upper Rock Lake. Glacier Lake Distance: 5.5 miles one way
Elevation changes: +900 feet (6,700' - 7.600')
Trailhead: Carr Lake
Follow the trail past Feeley Lake and Island Lake, continuing east. At about mile 2.5 you will reach a trail junction (not shown on all maps). The Sand Ridge Trail will take you to Glacier Lake, but stick to the Glacier Lake Trail and save the other route for the trip out if you like. A stiff climb finishes the hike to the Glacier Lake. Campsites are along the northwest side of the lake. Fish for golden trout. Experienced cross country hikers might want to explore Five Lakes Basin to the north.
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Pacific Crest Trail Trailhead: Donner Summit (I-80) or Donner Pass (Highway 40) Northbound (see Southbound below) Popular Northbound Backopacking Destinations: Paradise Lake (8.5 miles), White Rock Lake (10 miles), Jackson Meadows Reservoir (24 miles) From Donner Summit, the PCT climbs over Castle Pass with Castle Peak rising to the east. After dipping into Round Valley, the trail ascends to its highest point, 8,400 feet, and then drops into Paradise Valley, a nice stopping place for backpackers (mile 7.5). Near mile 10 the PCT intersects the Mt. Lola Trail. White Rock Lake is just half a mile up the Lola trail. At mile 18 begins a long descent to Jackson Meadows Reservoir (6,000'). Lasier Meadow Horse Camp is only a mile east of the lake.
Southbound Popular Southbound Backpacking Destinations: North Fork American River (9.5 miles), Five Lakes (16 miles)
If heading south on the PCT, make Donner Pass on old Highway 40 your starting place. Carry lots of water, because it's a long way to the first reliable stream. The trail begins immediately with steep switchbacks up to a ridge by Mount Judah. Sugar Bowl Ski Area is off to the west. Once above the switchbacks, the trail is much easier, climbing gradually up past Mount Lincoln and along the ridge to Anderson Peak (mile 6). The trail follows the ridge to distinctive Tinkers Knob and then makes a 1,200-foot descent to the American River. Then the PCT climbs to Granite Chief, enters the Granite Chief Wilderness, and drops down to Five Lakes (mile 16). TOP
Granite Chief Wilderness
The 25,680-acre Granite Chief Wilderness lies west of Lake Tahoe, north of Desolation Wilderness. The area is known for its spectacular 9000-foot granite peaks, lush valleys, and secluded trails. The easiest access for backpacking into the wilderness area is via the Squaw Valley Aerial Tram, saving nearly 2000 feet of vertical climbing and 3½ miles of trail. Round Trip Tram Rates: Adults (23-64) $29, Young Adults (13-22) $22, Children (5-12) $10, Seniors (65+) $22 At the top of the Tram is High Camp with ice skating, a swimming pool and hot tub, a fine dining restaurant, and an Olympic Museum. Five Lakes Distance: 2 miles one way
Elevation changes: +1,100 feet (6,500' - 7,600')
Trailhead: Alpine Meadows Because of their ease of access, Five Lakes are a popular destination for weekend backpackers. The trail leading from the community of Alpine Meadows near the ski resort climbs steadily over 1,000 feet to reach the lakes in only two miles of trail. Whiskey Creek Distance: 4 miles one way
Elevation changes: +600 feet and -1,500 feet (8,100' - 8,700' - 7,200')
Trailhead: Top of the Squaw Valley Aerial Tram From the top of the Aerial Tram hike up to the top of the ridge and cross into the Granite Chief Wilderness. Head south on the Pacific Crest Trail, descending quickly to Whiskey Creek. Water is scarce along this portion of the PCT, so there will likely be other campers in the area. Using Whiskey Creek as a backpacking base camp, set out on the day hike |
tells him. Simpson is then promoted to junior executive and given a key to the executive washroom.
The oddity is that 25 per cent of men at age 25 are already losing their hair. By age 50, half the population are. By 60, we're up to 75 per cent. I started going bald in my twenties. I remember looking in the bathroom mirror at university and thinking "Uh-oh" — the first signs of widow's peak. Men commonly report feeling traumatised and threatened by hair loss and I suppose I was no different. Then came the baseball cap years. The problem with being a bald man wearing a hat is that you look like a bald man wearing a hat. No one thinks The Edge, that Coldplay guitarist or Garth Brooks are secretly harbouring long flowing locks. Plus, not everyone can wear a Stetson to work. So what's a man to do? If Elton John's hair is the best that money can buy, it seems pointless to even consider artificial options. In 2016, we can put a man on the International Space Station but we still can't manufacture a decent head of hair.
Still, we're happy to spend our money trying. The various pate-covering technologies (weaves, plugs, creams) are estimated to be worth $3.5bn (£2.44bn) every year in America alone. Yet it remains a furtive business. In an age where Pelé can front adverts for erectile dysfunction and actors speak openly about plastic surgery, wearing a wig may be the last cosmetic taboo. In this regard, gender equality still has some way to go. Women are always complimenting one another on their fake nails, hair extensions, tans, waxes, whitened teeth, boob jobs, high heels, make-up etc, but it's an unusual kind of man who'll shout about his new hairpiece. Yet male pattern baldness is more than a condition in need of cosmetic correction: it's a disease, classified as such by the World Health Organisation in 1992. Why do wigs and toupees remain a joke? A source of mirth from Laurel and Hardy to Seinfeld, they're always getting yanked off some unsuspecting and pompous (they're always pompous) wearer's head, usually to the sound of a swannee whistle. George Cruikshank was an early proponent of the war on rugs: one of his 1837 illustrations shows a toupee-wearer being embarrassed by a strong gust of wind.
"The problem is that historically, male vanity is seen as a weakness," says Mark Simpson, a journalist and writer who specialises in masculinity. "And when it comes to men and weaknesses, whether it's hair or sex, we like to snigger. It's an opportunity for banter and insult. Also, we're coming out of
a period where masculinity had to be authentic, it had to be the real thing. By contrast, femininity was masquerade. So many Hollywood films are based on the idea of femininity as masquerade and masculinity as action: men who impose themselves on the world, rather than submitting to it. The thing about wigs is they're the height of artifice."
Simpson, who happily labels himself "slapheaded", cites the rise of the shaved head as a method for minimising the effects of baldness as a turning point for men. "It became an acceptable way for a mature male to present himself. To own the fact he was balding and make it into a style. It marked the end of the combover. Gay culture and youth culture converging in the Eighties is where it started, but actually I think Bruce Willis did a lot to popularise it."
It wasn't always the way. Business was booming for men's wigs back in the day, even if that day ended in the 18th century. The earliest recorded toupee was found in a tomb near the ancient capital of Egypt and dates from 3100BC. King Louis XIV of France — bald at 27 — ushered in the European craze for men's wigs when he employed 48 personal wig makers. Wearing a wig became a mark of status (hence the term "bigwig"), so much so that men started powdering their own hair to get in on the act. William Andrews, a 19th century English writer, tells us that wig theft on the streets was not uncommon. One method involved a boy carried over a butcher's tray by a tall man; the boy would then reach out and snatch hairpieces from the heads of unsuspecting owners.
By the mid-Fifties, a Hollywood survey indicated that 10 per cent of male actors over 35 wore a toupee. In the Hollywood Museum today, there exists a toupee hall of fame displaying hairpieces that once belonged to Frank Sinatra, Fred Astaire, James Stewart and Gene Kelly. In New York there existed a barber specifically for bald men: customers would have their hairpieces tended to while sitting behind a discreet screen. By 1970, Time magazine estimated that toupees were worn by 2.5m men in the US.
On the one hand, you imagine the wig's glory days are behind it, petering out sometime in the Seventies. On the other, perhaps the reason they're not as noticeable today is because they've got better. When it comes to my own head, I've long since given up caring. I'm 44 with two kids. My wife says she's glad I'm bald. I already spend too long getting ready, she says: if she had to add hair time too she'd have walked out the door and met someone else. And yet… wouldn't it be nice to feel some hair on my head again? So that my daughter stopped calling me "Gru" in front of her friends? So that people at work no longer got me mixed up with "the other one" in the office (if we were Asian, surely HR would want to hear about this?). So that I'd be back on a level playing field with everyone else, socially and economically, if all those surveys are to be believed? If there was some easy fix, something to turn back the clock, where I had new hair that really looked like my old hair, hair that no-one could tell wasn't mine… wouldn't I take it? No one wants to be bald.
So I came up with a challenge. I would find the best toupee money could buy. I would spend a fortnight wearing it. And I would see what difference it made to my life.
'I'm not getting a wig! It's like a woman wearing false pretences.'
Eric Morecambe to Ernie Wise, Two of a Kind (1963)
The fanciest toupee maker I can find is Mandeville Wigs in London. Its website says it produces "the UK's finest bespoke real European human hair wigs". Its prices are reassuringly expensive. I get in touch and explain the idea. Come and see us, I'm told.
Mandeville's offices are in a collection of studio spaces in Fulham. Its neighbours are yacht designers, luxury travel companies and publishers. It's a discreet operation, just Mandeville on the door. Inside, I meet Robert Frostick, one of the company's directors. He's a hairdresser who used to work in the film and music business. He did Peter Sellers and Julie Christie's hair, and the mod cuts on The Jam's first album.
"It's going to be a bit of a transformation," he says, examining my shaved head.
He explains I have two options. They can make me a full wig, or they can make me a hairpiece that would blend in with what's left of my own hair. Their preference is the latter. But it comes with consequences. It would mean I'd have to grow my hair — the back and sides. Initially so they can get a good colour match to make the wig, and then so the two will join together. This means cultivating the Friar Tuck-style haircut you rarely see these days: like the singer James Taylor or Bill Dauterive from King Of The Hill. Given that I shave my head with clippers every couple of days, this is not news I welcome.
"How long for?" I ask. "Couple of weeks?"
"Average hair growth is half an inch a month," Frostick says. "So, two months?"
"We're going for realism," Frostick continues. "We want you to walk into a hairdressing salon and a hairdresser will say, 'What can I do for you?' That's what the response should be."
The first stage is to make a template of my head. "I'm going to take him upstairs," says Frostick. At the top of the building is the studio. I sit in a barber's chair facing the mirror.
"I'm going to wrap your head in clingfilm," Frostick says. Then he covers my clingfilmed head in Sellotape, pulling it tight to better make an impression. "We tried lots of things but the old clingfilm is the best way to do it," he explains.
At this stage, with Frostick and his co-director Joanna Pickering sitting either side of me, and my head encased in plastic wrap and taped, it crosses my mind that they're about to do me in. I try and remember who knows I'm here.
"Everything is handmade from start to finish," Frostick explains. Unlike male wigs of the Seventies that were so big they came with metal support bands that would set off metal detectors at airports, the foundation of the wig is a superfine microfibre mesh that weighs less than a gram. Into this approximately 40,000 human hairs will be knotted, each one by hand. It's something like 250 hours' work. The cost: £2,770 plus VAT. (Unlike treatments for female pattern baldness, which come VAT exempt, men have to pay — more discrimination.) Then I'll need a wig block to store it on, a special brush and some shampoos; another couple of hundred quid. The piece should last 18 months, depending on how well it's treated.
Of the origins of their hair, Mandeville are vague. "It's northern European hair," says Frostick. "We get a lot of hair from the northern Baltic states."
Many of Mandeville's clients come for medical reasons such as alopecia, or they've been diagnosed with cancer. "Really, the next step on from their oncologist is to come here," says Mandeville's general manager Rick Cunningham. "Basically, they've only just found out about their condition. So one has to be really sensitive. It's a huge thing."
Whatever the reason, people tend to leave Mandeville happier than when they went in. "It's amazing," Cunningham says. "The lady who sits on reception remarks on the difference between people coming in here for the final fitting and going out. They come out with their head held higher, a big smile on their face."
When I return two months later, back and sides grown out, Frostick spends some time examining my hair. "It's that old English mousey colour," he decides. They fetch some stock hair and start comparing samples, eventually settling on a blend of two shades. "That's spot on," approves Pickering.
It'll take another two-and-a-half months to make the piece, then I'll be asked back for a fitting. "Don't cut your hair," Frostick calls after me.
According to Baldness: a Social History, bald prejudice dates back at least as far as The Bible, where it was directed at the prophet Elisha. From the second Book Of Kings, Chapter 2: "And he went up from thence unto Bethel: and as he was going up by the way, there came forth little children out of the city, and mocked him, and said unto him, 'Go up, thou bald head; go up, thou bald head.' And he turned back, and looked on them, and cursed them in the name of the Lord." Egyptian kings retained bald jesters, the better to poke fun at them.
The Romans were notable baldists. Bald slaves had their duties restricted to cleaning toilets, stables and gutters: anything more was considered above them. Julius Caesar was so sensitive about the image of frailty his thinning hair supposedly projected he took to wearing his famous laurel leaves in disguise. "You collect your straggling hairs on either side, Marinius," wrote the Roman poet Martial, to a friend. "Endeavouring to conceal the vast expanse of your shining bald pate by the locks which still grow on your temples. Why not confess yourself an old man? There is nothing more contemptible than a bald man who pretends to have hair."
Samuel Johnson argued bald people were unintelligent, writing in 1778: "The cause of baldness is dryness of the brain, and its shrinking from the skull." Then after Napoleon's army froze to death following its disastrous 1812 offensive against Russia, his chief surgeon reported that it was the bald soldiers who succumbed to the cold first: promoting the idea bald men are weaker than others.
The first recorded "cure" for baldness dates back to 1500BC and was a paste comprising the fat of a lion, hippopotamus, crocodile, cat, serpent and goat, to be rubbed into the bald scalp. Another involved the toes of a dog, a "refuse" of dates and the hoof of an ass. Sunlight, water, eating meat, indigestion, alcohol and tobacco, ice cream, lack of faith, anxiety, sex, hats, the wrong sort of breathing and maternal grandfathers have all been held responsible for baldness over the years.
In fact, baldness is down to a combination of hereditary factors and hormones, one that we still don't fully understand. It is most likely that multiple genes contribute to male pattern baldness, the most important of which is located on the X chromosome and inherited from the mother. However, both parents contribute to their offspring's likelihood of hair loss, in conjunction with the hormone dihydrotestosterone, a derivative of testosterone, known as DHT. In genetically-prone scalps, DHT shrinks hair follicles until they eventually go dormant and give up producing hair completely.
There is only one guaranteed way of ensuring you don't go bald, but it's not for everyone. Before puberty, you need to have your testicles removed. Men who fail to mature sexually do not go bald. This was evidenced by a series of 1942 experiments on eunuchs by the anatomist James Hamilton. He noted that adult eunuchs castrated before puberty never went bald, while adult eunuchs castrated in adulthood had their hair loss halted. (The castrated, balding eunuchs were then injected with testosterone, with the result that their hair loss continued.) Like I said, it's not for everyone.
'Good looks can open doors. Good hair blows them off the hinges.'Sam Malone, Cheers (1990)
Robert Frostick had asked me to bring some old photos with me when I went back to Mandeville. He wanted to see what I looked like with hair. That way he could fit the wig as realistically as possible. I was aged 19 in the first one.
"You're like that geezer in Friends!" he says. "Chandler! When he lost weight."
There are a couple more in my mid-twenties. "God, that's really sad, actually," he says. He means how much hair I've lost. "It's such a short time," he explains.
He produces the finished hairpiece, a floppy mesh of locks in the aforementioned old English mousey colour. It really does look like my hair.
"Brilliant match, isn't it? The colour," he says. "We put a few white ones in there for you as well."
He shows me how to wear it. A thin strip running round the underside is where you attach a dozen-or-so half-inch pieces of double-sided tape. "You find your hairline then you literally peel it on," he says.
We try it out. I had expected it to have a weight to it, imagining a dressing-up wig from a joke shop. In fact, it's only as heavy as hair, ie, not heavy at all. I'm just about aware of the tape pressing on my head but only in the same way I'm aware of wearing socks. I think I look totally different. I certainly look younger. "It takes a few years off you," Frostick says. "I hate to say it, but it just does."
It's hard to work out how to have the hair sit and I keep pushing it from one side to the other. But then it still needs to be cut and styled. Frostick gets his scissors out.
"It would be more dramatic to keep it long than whack it all off," says Frostick. I agree. Now that I've got hair it seems a shame to get rid of it.
As he snips away I ask him about some famous wig-wearers. He's a fan of the late Terry Wogan ("He's cleverer than a lot of them in the sense he has them different lengths, so it looks like he's had a haircut"). The opposite technique to the one employed by Bruce Forsyth ("I hate his piece!"). He bats away the idea that toupees can be whisked off the head by a stronger-than-average gust of wind, as sitcom law suggests. "A load of rubbish," he tuts. "It can't happen."
I settle back and enjoy the last haircut I'll ever have.
The 19th century was the boom time for sales of hair restorers and baldness cures, a fixture of America's travelling medicine shows. By the early 1900s, the wholesale production worth of the hair tonic industry in the US was $11.6m. Chemists such as Massachusetts man John Breck became millionaires by hawking various tonics, though he still died bald. One popular treatment was Yuccatone, developed from the yucca plant which was often consumed by the American Indian. "Have you ever seen a bald Indian?" asked the advertisements.
Next came supposedly more advanced treatments, such as the technique employed by Los Angeles doctor Charles Jenson in the Forties. As detailed in Gersh Kuntzman's book Hair! Mankind's Historic Quest to End Baldness, that involved injecting a substance similar to paraffin around the scalp, leaving some patients suffering continuously from pain and swelling, others horribly disfigured and requiring surgery, and all with their hair still falling out.
Implanting artificial hair directly into the scalp, transplanting follicles from the back of the head to the front and Hair in
a Can followed, none of them especially convincing. Two drugs, Minoxidil and Finasteride, appearing as mega-brands Rogaine and Propecia, have recently been shown to provide limited improvement in hair loss, effective only as long as the treatment continues. They were discovered as bi-products of research into hypertension and intersex children respectively, and appear to work by opening up blood flow to the hair follicles, though even the makers aren't entirely sure.
Most recently, researchers at the University of Pennsylvania have discovered there are two types of follicle stem cells: a mother stem cell and its daughter stem cell. While the daughter stem cell is lost in male pattern baldness, the mother is still present. The hope is that soon they'll work out how to stimulate these into producing hair again.
"I think it's very likely that by the end of your lifetime, there will be a pill or a cream, kind of like there is for Viagra… yeah, it'll keep your hair growing," Professor Luis Garza told American Esquire in 2011. The article went on to ponder whether men who harvest a new crop of hair are setting themselves up for public marginalisation, or widespread support. "Is the 65-year-old with a mohawk going to seem any different than the 65-year-old woman with Dolly Parton additions?" it wondered.
'It's not phoney. It's real hair. Of course, it's not mine, but it's real.'
John Wayne on being asked about his "phoney hair", 1974
Stepping out of Mandeville carrying a bag of shampoos and my head-shaped plastic box, I assume I'm going to be rumbled. Surely someone's going to wind down their van window and shout, "Nice wig, mate!" I walk to a supermarket and buy a sandwich. The cashier doesn't look twice. Growing more confident, I catch the train back home. It's packed, but no one gives me funny looks. In fact, no one looks at me at all. (A vanity lesson for us all: we should get over ourselves. Nobody really cares what we look like. Nobody's really looking.) I catch sight of myself in the train window. I'm smiling.
Test one: picking my daughter up from school. She's four. At the school gates, one of the mums I'm friendly with does a double-take and avoids me altogether. Another dad, Chuck, happily chats to me about this and that without mentioning the fact I've grown a full head of hair since he saw me this morning. (This becomes a theme with people I know but not very well, and it's the reaction I find most interesting: as though I've got a huge spot on my nose or lunch down my shirt and they're too polite to mention it. "I thought perhaps you'd had an accident," Chuck later explains.)
Then the classroom door opens and there's my daughter.
"Why have you got hair?" she says.
I explain it's a wig.
"I don't like it."
But it's fun. It's like dressing up, I say: like when you put on your princess dresses.
"Take it off, daddy. Take it off." Then she bursts into tears. "I don't like it. I want you to look like daddy."
Test two: the work reunion. Every year, a bunch of old colleagues meet up and reminisce about working together a decade ago. There's usually a good turnout but it's a bit of a revolving cast. Most people I haven't seen all year. It seems the perfect place to try out the new wig. We meet in a pub on Friday night. The first person I speak to can tell something's different. "You've grown your hair out," he says at the bar. "Nice one."
Others burst out laughing. You look like the fat one off Peep Show, someone tells me. Andy Warhol. Hitler.
Test three: my mum. If you want an honest reaction to a new look, it seems reasonable to ask the person who's known you longest. My mum is 80 and is a bit forgetful, but still her reaction is not one I could have confidently predicted.
"You've changed your glasses," she says, ushering me inside her house. Eventually, after we've had lunch and she still hasn't said anything, my wife asks what she thinks of my hair.
"In what way?"
"Johnny's wearing a wig."
"You're joking!"
"I could have sworn it was the glasses," says mum. "It's so like how you used to have it." If nothing else, this is a compliment to Mandeville. I haven't had hair since 1997.
Portrait of author as a young man, with a full head of hair, in the early Nineties
Since this experiment is taking place over Christmas, the final test is wearing it to work, when we're back after the holidays. Here I get the full compliment of reactions: from admiration to laughter to no reaction at all. People want to know what it feels like. Everyone agrees it's a remarkable match and if they didn't know me, they wouldn't suspect. The person I sit next to initially thinks I'm the new intern. (He's not known for being observant, to be fair.)
"It's very good," says Catherine, Esquire's fashion director. "They've colour-matched it perfectly. And grey hair is a different texture so they've matched the texture perfectly, too."
One reasonable issue, given Esquire is a men's style magazine, is the cut. Some people wonder why I opted for Nineties indie curtains: a style, despite what my mum thinks, I never had.
"It's a bit down-on-his-luck Irish comedian," someone says.
"Sean Hughes," specifies someone else.
Brian Matthew: 'You proved that you don't wear wigs, I hope.'
Ringo Starr: 'Yeah.'
Matthew: 'What did you do?'
Starr: 'We took them off.'
Ringo Starr interviewed by BBC reporter Brian Matthew, after The Beatles landed in the US, 1964
I liked wearing my wig. But I can't imagine it becoming an everyday feature. I'm back to being bald. I just don't have enough of a problem with it to change my ways now.
I guess I'll never make CEO.
Still, I wonder what my female friends think. Would they ever date a man who wore a wig? Phil Spector, no one's idea of a good advert for wig wearers, always denied he ever wore one. Even in bed, according to wife Ronnie Spector's autobiography. "If it made him happy, why not?" says my friend Diana. "It wouldn't bother me at all."
My wife is equally equivocal. "I think you looked lovely in it," she says. "Anything that makes you happy makes me happy."
I put this to John Capps. He's the founder of the Bald-Headed Men of America, a self-help volunteer organisation. Every year in the appropriate setting of Morehead, Kentucky, he organises a bald men's convention. Prizes are awarded for Sexiest Bald Head, Best All Round Bald Head, Smoothest Bald Head and so on. Capps was denied employment back in the Sixties, being told his baldness did not fit the image of the dynamic young executive the company was looking for. He's been on a crusade ever since.
"A large percentage of people are not happy with who they are and because some of them are bald or thinning, they tend to blame it on that," Capps says. "The underlying idea of our club is really 'accept yourself'."
I tell him about my wig experiment, and how I enjoyed it, but I couldn't see it being a permanent fixture.
"That's because you and I are happy with who we are," he says. "I'm sure you've been the butt of many bald-headed jokes. We've been singled out and ridiculed. And you know what? Most of the time standing out from the crowd is a good thing."
He really means it. "It's a damn good feeling."The home secretary Amber Rudd was quoted on Andrew Marr’s Sunday show saying “…we need to make sure that our intelligence services have the ability to get into situations like encrypted WhatsApp.” Since then a major debate has erupted over whether the tech giants should be handing access to their software to the security services.
Of course, I totally understand this reaction given the events of last week but we should be very careful before we go down this road. We do not want to live in a surveillance state and we certainly should think though the ramifications before we give up our rights to privacy. The revelations last month that the CIA and GCHQ had developed the ability to spy on us through our TV sets was very scary (yet to be denied).
As well as allowing the security services to intercept messages, weakening the security of such platforms opens us up to hackers and others with malicious intent, this for me is where I have most concern. One must bear in mind that the end to end encryption which protects WhatsAPP messages means even the firms itself cannot listen in on our messages.
People in public life or in positions of power need to be able to communicate with each with frankness and openness. There is in doubt in mind that this power will be used with malicious intent. It isn’t farfetched to want to guard against handing over more power to MI5 in the belief that we do not know who is in charge and whether their intentions are always going to be for the greater good. It also won’t work, there are plenty of options now for people who want to communicate with each other in private. It would be impossible for any government to open all the different messaging apps available. You would be chasing shadows with no end. All would end up doing is infringing on the liberty of ordinary people who use the service.
The other issue is this misses the real problem. We need to promote better integration and deal with the problems in the country’s prisons. Prisons which seem to have become colleges of crime. The re offence rate is truly shocking, the rate for those who have served under twelve months stands at fifty-eight percent. A massive figure. To put it another way almost six out of ten inmates who spend less than a year behind bars go on to re-offend. Incidentally it looks as though this is where the lunatic behind lasts weeks’ attack was radicalised.
Clearly there is an issue here. We have become too soft on crime. Redemption clearly isn’t possible for everyone and where it isn’t possible we should lock people up and throw away the key. We need to stop this madness around making prisons nice. In fact, we need to make them worse. Think less holiday inn more Shawshank Redemption. Prison is supposed to be a serious punishment which deters criminals from committing more crime when they are released.
In short to conclude we are missing the tech firms are not the real problem. We do not defeat terrorism by giving up the very liberties that they seek to destroy.Hours before he was set to face Congress to explain why he had filed a criminal complaint against Argentine president Cristina Fernandez de Kirchner, Foreign Minister Hector Timerman, and others regarding the bombing of the AMIA Jewish community center in Buenos Aires that left 85 people dead in 1994, Prosecutor Alberto Nisman was found dead inside his locked apartment. The cause of death, according to government authorities, was a single bullet wound to the head, presumably self-inflicted.
Within hours tens of thousands flocked to the streets of Buenos Aires and every other major Argentine city, marching for justice and the end of impunity in a case that has extended for over two decades. Nisman, who had accused top Iranian authorities of orchestrating the brutal terrorist attacks—two years before AMIA, the Israeli Embassy in Buenos Aires was bombed, leaving another 29 victims—and counted with a 10-person personal police protection team, was regarded by many as the latest victim of a criminal attack that remains unresolved.
The story goes back more than 20 years and includes all of the typical components of a Hollywood spy thriller: from internal struggles between different groups within Argentina’s intelligence services, a nuclear technology deal involving Iran and maybe even Syria that went sour, and the allegation that Argentina’s acting president was part of a “secret pact” to cover up terrorist attacks in exchange for a geopolitical and commercial relationship with the perpetrators. Nisman, who claimed to have wide-ranging evidence including wiretaps proving Kirchner’s involvement, was the key to the puzzle and many in Argentina are very skeptical of his apparent suicide.
The situation remains fluid. Nisman was found dead in the early hours of Monday after his security attache reported he hadn’t been answering phone calls. He was found dead in his bathroom after a locksmith picked the lock to his apartment in the affluent Buenos Aires neighborhood of Puerto Madero; a reporter for daily Clarin claims to have exchanged WhatsApp messages with Nisman Saturday afternoon, while the vice-president of Jewish organization DAIA received this picture of Nisman's desk as the Prosecutor told him he was hard at work preparing for his Congressional testimony. His body was laying in his bathroom floor, with a.22 caliber handgun and a single bullet casing next to him; the gun, investigators indicated, had been given to him by a close associate, Nisman had at least one weapon registered under his name. Almost immediately, Security Secretary Sergio Berni told the press all evidence led to the presumption of suicide; on Tuesday, initial tests for gunpowder in his hands came out negative. Hours later, President Kirchner herself cast doubt in a public later published on Facebook which read “The case of the'suicide?' of AMIA prosecutor Alberto Nisman has left us in stupor and questions unanswered, there’s a story here that’s gone on for too long, it’s too heavy, too hard, and overall too sordid. It’s a tragedy regarding the largest terrorist attack in Argentina.”
Last week, Nisman shocked the world filing a criminal complaint against Kirchner and Timerman, along with associates including Congressman Andres Larroque, political foot solider and well-known anti-semite Luis D’Elia, Iranian-Argentine community leader Jorge “Yussuf” Khali, and Fernando Esteche, head of Marxist group Quebracho also known for its protests against Israel. They were accused of setting up a “parallel diplomacy” to sign a “secret pact” with Iranian authorities, pinpointed as the intellectual and operational perpetrators of the attacks, that would render Tehran innocent and lead to the exchange of grains for oil, and even an arms deal, that would help ameliorate Buenos Aires’ intensifying energy crisis and lack of hard currency. In 2006, Nisman had formally accused Tehran and Hezbollah of planning and executing the attacks, getting Interpol to issue Red Notices for five Iranian nationals including former head of intelligence Ali Fallahijan, ex-Revolutionary Guard chief Mohsen Rezai, and Hezbollah boss Imad Mugniyah.
People close to Nisman report he appeared extremely confident over the past few days, claims backed by the intense media appearances he gave over the past few days to explain his accusations. On a major news network last week, Nisman stood by his convictions, revealing he’s received constant death threats for years but he felt it was his to duty to come forward with his investigation. “I could come out of this one dead,” he told one reporter, “regardless of whether Nisman is here or not, the evidence is there,” Nisman said to another.
Nisman decided to cut his vacations short last week, returning to Buenos Aires from Spain where he was with his daughter to present a criminal complaint of more than 300 pages directly to Federal Judge Ariel Lijo. In building his case, Nisman claims to have worked for over two years, using extensive wiretaps provided to him by ranking members of Argentina’s intelligence services, which, along with other evidence, proved that Kirchner instructed Foreign Minister Timerman and other members of the intelligence services to negotiate with Tehran, which would ultimately sign a Memorandum of Understanding with Buenos Aires in early 2013 that sought to create a “truth commission” to resolve the case. Timerman and other political operatives of the President dealt directly with Mohsen Rabbani, seen as the mastermind behind the attacks, to get Interpol to drop the outstanding arrest warrants. They were looking to “fabricate a new perpetrator” tied to unidentified ultra right-wing groups, “sacrificing justice in the AMIA case to quench commercial, political, and geopolitical interests of both countries, but fundamentally of Argentina.”
It remains unclear why Argentina suffered the twin attacks against the Israeli Embassy in 1992 and AMIA, a Jewish community center, two years later. One hypothesis raised by Argentine prosecutors has to do with a failed nuclear technology transfer agreement between Argentina and Iran, another one included nuclear technology and the Condor missile program developed by Buenos Aires. What is crystal clear, though, is Nisman’s conviction that Kirchner was behind a plan to plant evidence that would clear Tehran of any wrongdoing and jumpstart relations between both countries.
Adding one more layer of complexity to the whole ordeal is the involvement of Argentina’s infamous intelligence services. Jaime Stiusso, a former spy, was working closely with Nisman on the AMIA case. Stiusso is Argentina’s former chief spy, and part of a power struggle within the intelligence services caused by a rift that in 2013 left one of his men dead at the hands of an elite anti-drug unit of Buenos Aires' Provincial Police Department.
At the end of the day, Nisman’s death adds another terrifying twist to a long story of murder, corruption, terrorism, and impunity. Beyond the families of the victims of the brutal terrorist attacks on 1992 and 1994, now it will also be Nisman’s family that will have to carry the burden of injustice amid every-decreasing transparency. Along with millions or Argentines, who Monday night hit the streets looking for an explanation they don’t expect to get, as they target their ire against President Kirchner in an environment of escalating inflation, crime, and recession.SOAP is useful from a tooling perspective because the WSDL is so easily consumed by tools. So, you can get Web Service clients generated for you in your favorite language.
REST plays well with AJAX'y web pages. If you keep your requests simple, you can make service calls directly from your JavaScript, and that comes in very handy. Try to stay away from having any namespaces in your response XML, I've seen browsers choke on those. So, xsi:type is probably not going to work for you, no overly complex XML Schemas.
REST tends to have better performance as well. CPU requirements of the code generating REST responses tend to be lower than what SOAP frameworks exhibit. And, if you have your XML generation ducks lined up on the server side, you can effectively stream XML out to the client. So, imagine you're reading rows of database cursor. As you read a row, you format it as an XML element, and you write that directly out to the service consumer. This way, you don't have to collect all of the database rows in memory before starting to write your XML output - you read and write at the same time. Look into novel templating engines or XSLT to get the streaming to work for REST.
SOAP on the other hand tends to get generated by tool-generated services as a big blob and only then written. This is not an absolute truth, mind you, there are ways to get streaming characteristics out of SOAP, like by using attachments.
My decision making process is as follows: if I want my service to be easily tooled by consumers, and the messages I write will be medium-to-small-ish (10MB or less), and I don't mind burning some extra CPU cycles on the server, I go with SOAP. If I need to serve to AJAX on web browsers, or I need the thing to stream, or my responses are gigantic, I go REST.
Finally, there are lots of great standards built up around SOAP, like WS-Security and getting stateful Web Services, that you can plug in to if you're using the right tools. That kind of stuff really makes a difference, and can help you satisfy some hairy requirements.NASA/H. Lammer
In the last 20 years, the search for Earth-like planets around other stars has accelerated with the launch of missions like the Kepler space telescope. Using these and observatories on the ground, astronomers have found numerous worlds that at first sight have similarities with Earth. A few of these are even in the “ |
raised doubts over security for the game on Thursday evening in the central Albanian town of Elbasan.
Tomislav Karadzic, the president of Serbia’s football federation, commended the Albanian police for securing the route from the airport to the hotel.
But, he said, “several rocks were hurled from the crowd towards the bus. A sizeable one landed in the vicinity of the second or third row of seats, where our players were sitting.
“If this level of security remains unchanged, there will be problems. But they (Albanian police) have guaranteed that this will not happen again. We are waiting to see what happens next.”
Serbia’s foreign ministry said it had summoned Albania’s ambassador, Ilir Bocka, but that he had refused to receive Serbia’s protest note. There was no immediate word from the Albanian embassy.
Albania has fielded 1,800 policemen to ensure security at the match. The man behind last year’s drone incident was arrested on Wednesday in Albania in possession of a pistol and 36 match tickets despite himself being banned from the game.
Like their Albanian counterparts in the first game, Serbian fans are barred from attending Thursday’s tie, with the exception of 70 students.
“We know that there is tension, that all eyes are on this game, that some want to turn it into something that is not football,” Serbian caption and Chelsea defender Branislav Ivanovic told reporters. “We know we face a cauldron; we don’t expect the applause of the Albanian fans.”UPDATE: The Regina Police have located 15-year-old Neebinas Wilma Pascal, also known as Summer and Summer Sixx
REGINA – The Regina police are asking for the public’s help in trying to locate a missing 15 year-old girl.
Neebinas Wilma Pascal, who is known as ‘Summer’ or ‘Summer Sixx’, has been missing from her home since June 13th – but she was last seen on June 17th at the 1200 block of McTavish Street.
Pascal is an aboriginal female, approximately 5’2” tall, 125 pounds, with dyed blonde hair (naturally brown) and brown eyes.
Pascal has one piercing in each ear and typically wears hooped earrings.
There is no reason to believe that Pascal has come to harm, but because of her age police need to locate her.
If anyone has seen Pascal, they are asked to call the Regina Police at 306-777-6500 or Crime Stoppers at 1-800-222-8477.Beer league player savagely celebrates goal by taking out burger, offering it to goalie he scored on
NFL players were given a ton of freedom in regards to touchdown celebrations during the offseason and so far, they've certainly taken advantage of the freedom.
Furthermore, in the past we've seen football players use props to enhance their celebrations, and this beer league hockey player seems to have taken a page out of the book of Joe Horn or Terrell Owens.
After scoring a goal, this beer league player took out a burger, took a few bites out of it and even offered it to the goalie he just scored on.
Savage to say the least.
Obviously you'd never see a celebration like this in an NHL game, but beer league hockey is all about the celebrations and living the dream again one game at a time, so the burger routine is acceptable in our eyes.
(H/T: Beer League Talk/YouTubeHello everyone, and welcome back to retrospective week! As we prepare to enter into a new era of janky brews, it seems like a good time to look back at where we’ve been – not least of which because it might provide some insight to where we’re going. Kinda like how we planned a retrospective week just before the launch of a set called Omens of the Past.
When open beta officially opened up, the Empty Throne set got one last massive overhaul, which cut or reworked a pile of cards and reduced the set to a slimmer, more focused version of itself. We lost a few good designs, a lot of bad ones (like filler colorless cards that are now only played by AI’s), and quite a lot of cards that, well… let’s just say they were interesting.
As the preeminent “everything is good if you try hard enough” brewer here at RNGEternal, I played with pretty much all of these in some context or another, and I loved them all like they were my children (I did not, however, love all my children equally). Because I’m excited about card design and because this week is retrospective week, I thought it would be a good time to talk about some of the old designs. I won’t enter the way-way-back machine here, but we will look back to the point after the NDA was lifted – which, lucky us, also happens to be when card gallery sites started saving images.
Now, most of these cards are never coming back, but in card games, assets and ideas rarely disappear forever. So, in addition to being a look at the wayback machine, we might be able to get a few speculative spoilers out of these cards for future sets – at the very least, expect to see some of the cooler art return. For each card, we’ll have three focuses – what it did, why it died, and where, how and whether or not it will return. These are just my best guesses, of course.
TL;DR: Psst. Hey. Wanna see some weird cards?
Retribution
Let’s start with one of the simplest – and also, one of the strangest.
What Did It Do?
Retribution is a fast spell, direct damage card in Justice, and I think the thing it really shines at is establishing Eternal’s unique take on that factions identity. Justice in Eternal is a faction of law but not lawfulness, and order through tyranny as well as peace. The result is that it pretty well recognizes that balance in the force can be achieved by killing all the Jedi and that the words Vengeance and Revenge usually mean exactly the same thing. So a card that takes that full on attack into a Flame Blast, glares balefully at you from its two health position, and then murders you right back is a pretty good example of what you might call Justice. Poetic Justice, even.
Why Did It Die?
While it’s flavorful as heck, Retribution is mechanically somewhat of a cheaty card, co-opting one of Fire’s shticks and then, er, Justifying it through the lens of the aggrieved. In MTG terms, it’s almost a Desert Twister – the cards just not supposed to do what it does, but it can because the faction’s flavor leans heavily into it. Such a card is not good for showing off a first set.
In addition, it was clunky to play – requiring you to have six power, 3 justice influence, and to have recently taken a massive amount of damage without dying was a bit of a stretch. Once you got up to speed, the card could be used aggressively with relic weapons – which was fun, especially if you were ramming your face into a monster creature with a Lifedrinker and then firing off a huge lifestealing burn spell out of nowhere. For the most part, I think the card had eyes too big for its stomach. So it went.
Will It Be Back?
Well that art for sure will be. It’s one of the most gorgeous cards in Eternal, and I’d expect that art to pop up in Omens of the Past somewhere. Retribution itself probably won’t reappear – too weird to predict for certain – but it’s interesting enough the design might be reworked into a much later set.
Crownwatch Commando/Sparring Partner
[insert joke here about how glad you are Rakano’s not good anymore]
What Did It Do?
Crownwatch Commando upended draft environments. Sparring Partner upended ranked.
Why Did It Die?
Rakano has a lot of kit in The Empty Throne, and it wasn’t really looking for a lot more help. Partner had a lot of issues, including playing well with Jito, being crushingly hard to kill for a 1 drop, and generally being a 5/3 with no additional card expenditure on turn 2. Crownwatch Commando sort of had the opposite problem – it wasn’t amazing by itself, and in a field of good two drops like Overseer, Paladin and Outlaw, he just didn’t stand out enough. Neither are bad designs, but they just didn’t play very nice with others in the Empty Throne.
Will It Be Back?
Crownwatch Commando is one of my biggest bets for a set 2 card, because he’s Argenport through and through. Those abilities are relevant on an Argenport card, he’s got good synergies with current Argenport cards (for example, he’s a lovely carrier for Beastcallers Amulet), and if Rilgon is any indication, Hooru decks will care about weapons too. I don’t know if Sparring Partner will return, but if he does, it might be with a point or two less in potential stats.
Slagmite Swarm
Who can forget Slagmite Swarm? The vermintide rises.
What Did It Do?
Probably one of the favorite cards axed for the Open, this wonky beast nommed up anything it could kill and incorporated it into its superstructure. While buggy at first, it did eventually get to the point where suicidal attacks boosted it as it went to the void, meaning you could trade even with smaller targets and then Dark Return for some sick eats. With the proper resurrection utilities, Slagmite Swarms grew to dominating sizes, often towering over the rest of the battlefield and eating Carnosaurs for breakfast.
Why Did It Die?
So why’d this one get axed? Well, it wasn’t great for a start – hard to get it up and running, low on stats and not blessed with an abundance of recursion to get it going. With more cards, it might have flourished, but it rarely graced most Stonescar decks in practice.
However, I think the primary reason Slagmite Swarm might have slipped this mortal coil was color identity – the Killer skill, as shadowy as it may sound, has actually changed hands to give Primal the hint of savagery its faction name implies (With the nixing of Avalanche Stalker, Shadow appears to have picked up Ambush in return).
That leaves Killer in two colors, both of which aren’t really Stonescars beat. While the mechanics could spread out again in set two, it seems more likely that the ‘mites ain’t right for their color pair.
Will It Be Back?
Because of the appeal of its design, I think Slagmite Swarm will resurface again in set two – but if it does, my bet would actually be a Xenan take. If that’s the case, we may see it again in Set Two, making Xenan Cultist a lot more appealing.
Let’s move on to some jankier designs. Heals plox.
Force Field/Cocoon
What Did It Do?
Force Field is one of the weirder cards to exist, although it pretty clearly demonstrates a central conflict between opposing color pairs. Note that its relationship to Refresh closely mirrored that of Magma Javelin and Charchain Flail, one offering bog standard stats at a lower influence requirement and the other requiring a slightly deeper cost for a flexible gain spell. It’s an imperfect mirror, but it certainly creates a dichotomy. The central weakness of this card is pretty obvious: if you use it just to gain life, you have no board presence, and if you use it to enhance your board presence, you’re likely to commit to a 2 for 1. Still, if you ever wanted a wall of meat with a dozen toughness or more, Force Field was the card! Cocoon also feels like a fun counter to Flame Blast after the fact.
I ignored both of these cards right up until the very end, when burn Queen decks suddenly became the most prevalent archetype and having some semblance of lifegain in your deck could actually be a solid option for the New Tomorrow ramp I often come back to in ladder. Playing Ironthorn or Ascendant into a power, then Force Fielding to defend against Obliterate or Flame Blast, offered a permanence of invulnerability against Burn and Armory that Protect could not. The card could also be used in the late game on yourself to scale out of multiple burn finishers, and, as a personal favorite, cast at end of turn on a unit before following up with a Healer’s Cloak for entertaining numbers.
Why Did It Die?
Direct life gain is typically quite bad due to its lack of board advantage built, and this card generally lacked the flexibility of Protect for solving other problems. Like most health gain cards, it proved to be a bit of a trap, and almost no decks wanted it.
Will It Be Back?
I think Cocoon has more of a chance of coming back than Force Field (and again, that art is terrific), but both seem unlikely. It really depends on whether Set Two does in fact have a strong lifegain mechanic and how it interacts with big life spells (if it interacts with gaining lots of life, then maybe. If it interacts when you gain life, then less so). At the moment, there is already a gamut of health gain in Time, and that wasn’t even the last heal card to be axed!
Nomad Healer
What Did It Do?
You may recognize the art from this one as the art for Amber Acolyte. You’ll probably also recognize what this design eventually changed into – Slumbering Behemoth, the laggardly midrange bomb of Jekk’s Bounty. I’m not sure if I’ve given Behemoth due diligence yet – it ranks up with Hone in terms of cards that just haven’t found their potential – but Nomad Healer did see some play. It was a perennial favorite for Crown of Possibilities decks due to its fate effect being a slightly more powerful version of the big dino’s. In those games where you were stalled out and digging for answers with Second Sight, Nomad Healer could keep you above-board and come down every now and then to block tokens and Ronins.
Why Did It Die?
Lifegain cards being the traps they are, Nomad Healer was not terribly different. It didn’t work in most decks and even in the decks it did it needed some love. The statline was pretty oddball – Behemoth’s is certainly better – but a little incidental healing goes a long way, and I recall some entertaining bronze league games versus monofire burn where I’d start at 31 health.
Will It Be Back?
Nomad has already been fully subsumed, which is a pity, but new designs could take its place some day. I like Nomad’s fate effect a lot, and I’m kinda hoping someday that the lackluster Behemoth gets a boost up to 3. But since we’re fairly certain there will be life gain interaction in Set Two it may end up being valid in other ways.
That’s enough timey-wimey nonsense, though. There’s some Feln cards I want to top the list off with. Let’s talk about Di-
Unexpected Arrival
What Did It Do?
It made Scourge of Frosthomes.
Why Did It Die?
Unexpected Arrival is pretty playable fun, so I suspect this one might be a factor of space. The card may also have been a bit too Hearthstone in design, relying on pure randomness in a way that, while fun, allowed only a slight level of control in terms of what you wanted to summon. Burning an opponent to death with a 9 cost Unexpected Arrival for 6 damage was usually a high point in these matchups.
Will It Be Back?
I’d rate this one as low odds to return, but it was a favorite of LSV’s streams so it’s possible it could come back. There’s nothing inherently wrong with the design, and with a bigger card file the chaos is less controllable and thus would make this card less likely to be a dominant RNG-only card.
I give it 0% odds. That way it’s unexpected.
Push Onward
What Did It Do?
Bizarrely predict key scenes from Dr. Strange with alarming prescience. I was freaking out in the theater.
Why Did It Die?
Faction identity seems to be the key look here. Spell cost reduction is now a Fire card ability, and Shadow appears to have all the selective digging, leaving Primal with looting and raw card draw. Not a bad deal, but we’ll be excited for Set Two to shore up the faction’s loss, as this card was so good as to be a four of in almost every Primal deck.
Will It Be Back?
Nope! Scheme and Quarry now completely occupy this cards design space. Quarry’s pretty much just as rad though.
Cabal Mastermind
What Did It Do?
The worst card to hardcast and the best card to Unstable Form, Cabal Mastermind was the greatest and grandest of the 7-drops, and responsible for many a concession by players facing down my Funstable form decks. Shamanic Trancing (now Trail Stories) into Levitate into North-Wind Herald turn 1 and then Unstable Forming and stealing my opponents hand turn 2 was pulling from the dirtiest lucksack in Eternal, and while we only dipped into that well a few times over the course of our Eternal career, it was magnificent to watch every time.
One of the first Eternal Brews articles I ever wrote was Ironthorn Impossible, a four color monstrosity with an absurdly high winrate (I can claim this because no one can play it anymore). The deck ramped up to 9, ate the opponents Harsh Rule or other attempts to kill Ironthorn, and then played an Accelerated mastermind to seal a game with style. It also featured a notably expensive ten drop that we’re going to finish out on. One day after I published the article, it ceased to exist. C’est la vie.
Why Did It Die?
This was another card that interacted poorly with most cards in the set, and the ones that it did interact with it cheated horribly. A lot of legendaries are also on this list just to simplify the set; anything that didn’t fit well went away.
Will It Be Back?
As a card that trolls other players heavily with the right combos, I’d say its chances are low. It’s another card that was negatively affected (in design terms) by the lack of other cards of its power cost.
I’ve saved the best (or at least, the most expensive) for last:
What Did It Do?
Kill two Temple Scribes, pretend to stun two Sandstorm Titans, draw a Lethrai Ranger from the void…
Just kidding, it does everything. Dimensional Rift is a bananas card advantage card representing a total reversal of board and hand advantage for ten power. It also has a cute obsession with twos.
Why Did It Die?
Feln already had two expensive, cool finisher cards in The Last Word and Channel The Tempest, and usually just wasn’t playing Rift. The card also feels a little close to MTG’s Cruel Ultimatum, which didn’t make it a great representative of Eternal’s style. Though, to be honest, I think the design might be even cooler. You decide:
Will It Be Back?
I certainly think so! The design was solid, it played pretty well, and it’s flashy and fun as heck. I’m waiting eagerly for Rift’s return, in whatever form it takes. The world needs more multicolored ten drops with abhorrent amounts of text.
That’s it for now – thanks for reading! Assuming Set Two doesn’t drop immediately, our next article will be a Scion’s School expanding on the concepts of color identity we talked about in brief here. When Brews next returns, we’ll likely have some exciting Set Two brews for you!
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FacebookIn his second "insider blog" about the New Horizons mission, principle investigator Alan Stern offers a look at what we might find at Pluto.
It sounds like science fiction, but it's not: NASA's New Horizons spacecraft is on final approach to the Pluto system! After 112 months in flight, the fastest spacecraft ever launched is now barely 60 days from its destination. It will be closest to Pluto on July 14th at 11:49:58 Universal Time.
So what might we find when the spacecraft finally gets there?
Before answering that, I have to admit that this kind of speculation is both dangerous and oftentimes wrong. Remember: New Horizons is a "first-reconnaissance" mission to a wholly new kind of planet. As history has shown, that just increases the opportunity for me to be wrong!
After all, consider: No one expected to find large numbers of dry riverbeds and fluvial features on Mars when it was first explored by NASA's Mariner spacecraft. Few expected either volcanoes or internal oceans on the satellites of Jupiter, or geysers on Triton, or a planet stripped of its mantle at Mercury. The hallmark of first-reconnaissance flybys has been their tendency to surprise and make advance predictions look quaint — usually because we underestimate the richness and variety of expressions that nature presents in our solar system. I hope, and I bet, that the same will be true when the Pluto system is revealed in July.
And revealed it will be. New Horizons is a highly capable, 21st-century spacecraft, and it carries an amazing battery of advanced scientific instruments to conduct the first close-up reconnaissance of the planet and its five already known moons. This payload includes:
Ralph: a color and panchromatic imager and infrared spectral composition mapper to map the surfaces, surface compositions, and temperatures across Pluto and its satellites.
a color and panchromatic imager and infrared spectral composition mapper to map the surfaces, surface compositions, and temperatures across Pluto and its satellites. LORRI: a long-focal-length visible panchromatic imager to make both distant and hi-res maps (including stereo topography) of Pluto and all its satellites.
a long-focal-length visible panchromatic imager to make both distant and hi-res maps (including stereo topography) of Pluto and all its satellites. Alice: an ultraviolet imaging spectrometer to determine the composition and density of Pluto's atmosphere and to search for an atmosphere around Charon.
an ultraviolet imaging spectrometer to determine the composition and density of Pluto's atmosphere and to search for an atmosphere around Charon. REX: two radio-science payloads to probe the vertical pressure and temperature profile of Pluto's atmosphere and to make thermal measurements of both Pluto and Charon.
two radio-science payloads to probe the vertical pressure and temperature profile of Pluto's atmosphere and to make thermal measurements of both Pluto and Charon. SWAP and PEPSSI: charged-particle detectors to sample material from Pluto's escaping atmosphere and to detect any magnetic fields associated with Pluto or Charon.
charged-particle detectors to sample material from Pluto's escaping atmosphere and to detect any magnetic fields associated with Pluto or Charon. Venetia Burney Student Dust Counter: to assay the dust density in the Pluto system; built by students at the University of Colorado.
Having worked toward getting to the Pluto system explored since 1989, I can tell you that I often think of Pluto and its moons as holiday presents under a tree I've been waiting to open and reveal for a very long time — but, this year, the holidays come in July!
Pluto: Frigid and Mysterious
Since its discovery 85 years ago, we've learned surprisingly little about Pluto (and, in time, its moon) from afar. About all we know is as follows:
Pluto has very distinct surface markings, including apparent polar caps, and it has an atmosphere (mostly nitrogen). We know that Pluto's interior is primarily made of rock — about 70% by mass. Also, Pluto-Charon constitute a true binary planet, with a barycenter (center of mass) situated in the open space between them. We know Charon is a "rising star" among the solar system's icy bodies, with evidence for recently created surface ices, possible internal activity (hinted at by the spectroscopic discovery of ammonium hydrates a few years ago), and some likelihood of an atmosphere itself — perhaps gas that was siphoned off Pluto! As for the small satellites — Styx, Nix, Kerberos, and Hydra — we know very little about them beyond their orbits and crude colors. Soon all six of those points of light, planet and moons, will be real worlds thanks to NASA's New Horizons.
So, we're just two months out — it's nearly show time. What will we find? Not to tweak you, but I don't know. No one does. That's what makes this distant exploration so very exciting, so suspenseful, and so wonderful!
But even if we don't know, what might we look out for? I'd say: look for more moons, possibly even rings, and look for a complex geology story on Pluto that perhaps involves the migration of ices and gases from one place to another. You might even seek evidence of liquids — inside or just possibly on — the surfaces Pluto or Charon or both. Clouds in Pluto's atmosphere? Maybe. What about impact basins and fresh craters, revealing new insights into the Kuiper Belt's history and population? I'd say that's a good bet. What about aurorae, geysers, or volcanoes? Perhaps. All of these are possible. But who knows whether we'll find most or very few of them... or even something more wonderful?
What I do know is this: We haven't done any interplanetary exploration like this since Voyager 2 reached Neptune in 1989 — and nothing like it is planned, ever again, by any space agency.
So tell your friends, your family, your neighbors, and your coworkers to come witness historic exploration in the making. Tell them to tune in and turn on to "The Last Picture Show." It's coming, in mid-July, to a screen near you.
Planetary scientist S. Alan Stern of the Southwest Research Institute is the Principal Investigator of NASA's New Horizons mission to Pluto. He is writing a series of blogs for Sky & Telescope before and during the spacecraft's historic encounter.Bobby Roode made his final NXT appearance on Friday night from St. Catharines, Ontario. Roode competed in the triple threat main event, but came up short against NXT Champion Drew McIntyre in a match that also involved Andrade “Cien” Almas.
Roode lost the NXT Championship to Drew McIntyre over SummerSlam weekend back at NXT Takeover: Brooklyn III, joined SmackDown Live the following week and has been finishing up his remaining dates for NXT.
Here are full results from the show:
Johnny Gargano defeated Killian Dain
Ember Moon defeated Nikki Cross
NXT Tag Team Champions SAnitY (Eric Young and Alexander Wolfe) retained against Tino Sabbatelli and Riddick Moss
Aliyah and Lacey Evans defeated Mandy Rose and Vanessa Borne
Aleister Black defeated Hideo Itami
Tye Dillinger defeated The Velveteen Dream
NXT Champion Drew McIntyre retained over Bobby Roode and Andrade “Cien” Almas
WWE released the following video of Bobby Roode delivering a ‘glorious’ farewell message to the live crowd:The Stanley Tucci/Kelsey Grammar drama Transformers: Age of Extinction scored the biggest single day of the year yesterday earning a strong $41.6 million. That includes $8.75m worth of Thursday previews for the fourth Michael Bay robot-smashing adventure, which also means that the film scored the biggest "normal business hours" Friday of the year ($31.25m) as well. That the film had a lower Thursday number than Captain America: The Winter Soldier ($10.5m) and Godzilla ($9.3m) but a higher opening day than both ($36m for Captain America 2 and $38m for Godzilla) means that the film is indeed playing to general and casual audiences at a slightly higher level than those comparably fanbase-driven properties. The Paramount Pictures (a division of Viacom, Inc.) release is still looking at potentially being the first $100m debut of 2014, although an opening around $90m-$95m wouldn't exactly be cause for shame and disgrace either.
For the record, the biggest Fri-Sun debut of the year as of today is Captain America: The Winter Soldier with $95m. The weekend multiplier is tough to figure out because, stop me if you've heard this one before, this is the first Transformers film to open on a Friday. The other three entries all debuted on Tuesday or Wednesday, meaning that much of the "must-see" demographic was on to other things by Friday. As such, Transformers had a sky-high 3.11 weekend multiplier ($70.5 million Fri-Sun/$22.6m Fri), Transformers: Revenge of the Fallen had a 2.9x weekend multiplier after scoring a near-record $62m Wednesday ($108.9m/$36.7m), and Transformers: Dark of the Moon had a 2.9x as well ($97.8m/$32.9m). I'll happily admit being incorrect tomorrow if need-be, but I would be shocked in this front-loaded era if Transformers: Age of Extinction pulls anywhere near a 2.9x weekend multiplier (which would be $120 million by the way).
More likely we're looking at a 2.4x-2.7x weekend multiplier, giving the Mark Wahlberg adventure a probable weekend of between $99m and $112m. The film played 64% male and 58% 25 years-and older. The film played just 27% under 18 years old, which is amusing for a big-budget film based on a toy line about robots that turn into cars. The film is also doing well overseas, having earned $30m in China alone, a record opening day for a foreign film playing in China. The film was a Chinese co-production and featured a China-set finale and a supporting role for Bingbing Li, so big business in China was all-but-guaranteed. All-told, the (depending on who you ask) $165m or $210m-budgeted film's worldwide total after two days of international play is $121.6m, with $80m overseas. So yeah, the addition of Mark Wahlberg and those Dino Bots seems to have fended off much of the franchise fatigue for the moment.
There were no other new wide releases set to open against Transformers: Age of Extinction, although there were a few limited releases. Begin Again, a Mark Rufallo/Keira Knightley directed by John Carney (Once) debuted on five screens courtesy of the Weinstein Company and earned $43,304 for its trouble. Figure a probable $140,000 Fri-Sun haul for a solid $28k per-screen average.
Lionsgate also debuted Dinesh D'Souza's America: Imagine the World Without Her, a documentary/editorial from the guy who brought us 2016: Obama's America. The film earned $12,350 on three screens, but it will be interesting to watch as it expands wide over the July 4th weekend. Variety's Joe Leydon reviewed it here. The best film of the weekend is Snowpiercer, Bong Joon-ho's superb post-apocalyptic adventure film. The Radius-TWC release, starring Chris Evans, Octavia Spencer, Tilda Swinton, and John Hurt, debuted on eight screens nationwide this weekend. The film earned $38,500 yesterday, which is good but not indicative of any breakout potential. Mark Hughes reviewed it for Forbes here.
The rest is holdover news, and there actually is some this weekend despite the Transformers domination. Of note, Sony's Amazing Spider-Man 2 will finally be dragged, kicking and screaming in protest, across the $200 million mark this weekend. The film has earned $704m worldwide. Heaven Is For Real will cross $90m domestic this weekend, a stunning achievement for the $12m Greg Kinnear religious drama. And 22 Jump Street earned around $5m on its third Friday, setting the stage for a $15m weekend (-45%), which will put it over the $138m domestic total for 21 Jump Street in just 17 days.
Also crossing $200 million by weekend's end is Walt Disney's Maleficent, as the Angelina Jolie fantasy earned $2.59m yesterday, setting the stage for an $8.5m weekend (down just 33%) and a $202m domestic total. X-Men: Days of Future Past, which crossed $700m worldwide yesterday and will soon be the biggest global grosser of 2014 until Transformers 4 knocks it down, earned $950k yesterday and should bring in around $3m for the weekend for a $223m domestic cume. Warner Bros.' (a division of Time Warner, Inc.) Jersey Boys earned $2.25m, down a troubling 52% on its second Friday. Expect a $7.5m second weekend and a new $27m cume for the $40m Clint Eastwood musical drama.
Edge of Tomorrow took a Transformers hit, earning $1.55m (-48%) and bringing its cume to $80m. The Tom Cruise sci-fi actioner should be at around $4m for the weekend and $84m total by tomorrow. Godzilla earned $0.23m (-59%) and should be at just under $197m domestic by tomorrow. Last weekend's box office champ, Think Like A Man Too, earned $3.4m on its second Friday, down a horrible 72% from last Friday's $12.1m debut. The bleeding will level off a little over the weekend but we're still looking at a $10m second frame, down 65%. Still, the $24m Kevin Hart-and-ensemble romantic comedy should reach $48m tomorrow, doubling its budget. It's a quick-kill, but it's still a hit.
The Fault in Our Stars crossed $100m early last week and pulled in $1.8m on its fourth Friday for a probable $5.5m weekend and $109m domestic total. Finally, DreamWorks Animation's How to Train Your Dragon 2 earned $4.1m on its third Friday (-48%), which will likely lead to a $14m third weekend and $121m domestic total (it's at $112m today). It's still running about 4% behind Kung Fu Panda 2, which "disappointed" with $165m domestic before earning $665m worldwide. How to Train Your Dragon 2 is still looking at $155m-$160m domestic, but we'll see how it flies overseas.
That's it for today. Join us tomorrow for the weekend estimates and more holdover news. In the meantime, if you like Transformers go see Transformers. You'll get no judgment from me. But if you don't like Transformers films, go find something better (Edge of Tomorrow, How to Train Your Dragon 2, Fault in Our Stars, Snowpiercer, etc.) instead of whining about the state of cinema.Parking checkers shot at twice this week on Milwaukee's south side
Three Milwaukee Department of Public Works parking ambassadors have been shot at this week on the city's south side. Police told WISN 12 News the first shooting happened at 4:50 a.m. Tuesday near 13th Street and Bolivar Avenue. Police said two people were trying to break into a storage unit. Two parking checkers saw what happened and began following them when they left the scene. One person fired shots from a vehicle at the checkers. No one was hit.The second incident happened about 3 a.m. Wednesday near 13th and Orchard streets. "The parking checker was told by this thug, 'Don't ticket my car,'" Milwaukee Alderman Bob Donovan said. Police confirmed a man shot at a parking checker as she ticketed his car.That man, 25, was arrested."(She) attempted to put a ticket on it, and she was shot at for her efforts. That's the kind of craziness we've got going out on our streets. It's just very very frustrating," Donovan said.Get breaking news alerts with the WISN 12 mobile app or with our email newsletters.
Three Milwaukee Department of Public Works parking ambassadors have been shot at this week on the city's south side.
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Police told WISN 12 News the first shooting happened at 4:50 a.m. Tuesday near 13th Street and Bolivar Avenue. Police said two people were trying to break into a storage unit. Two parking checkers saw what happened and began following them when they left the scene. One person fired shots from a vehicle at the checkers. No one was hit.
The second incident happened about 3 a.m. Wednesday near 13th and Orchard streets.
"The parking checker was told by this thug, 'Don't ticket my car,'" Milwaukee Alderman Bob Donovan said.
Police confirmed a man shot at a parking checker as she ticketed his car.
That man, 25, was arrested.
"(She) attempted to put a ticket on it, and she was shot at for her efforts. That's the kind of craziness we've got going out on our streets. It's just very very frustrating," Donovan said.
Get breaking news alerts with the WISN 12 mobile app or with our email newsletters.San Francisco police Officer Elia Lewin-Tankel, shown with his wife, was critically injured. San Francisco police Officer Elia Lewin-Tankel, shown with his wife, was critically injured. Photo: SFPD Photo: SFPD Image 1 of / 5 Caption Close Driver accused of ramming SF officer pleads not guilty to attempted murder 1 / 5 Back to Gallery
A man accused of running down a San Francisco bicycle patrol police officer with a sport utility vehicle and then speeding away, prompting an hours-long manhunt, pleaded not guilty Friday to attempted-murder charges.
As Officer Elia Lewin-Tankel remained in critical condition in San Francisco General Hospital’s intensive care unit, the man booked into custody as Maurquise Johnson made his first court appearance, at which he appeared belligerent and insisted on a name change.
The 50-year-old suspect, who has a long criminal history of reckless driving and evading arrest under several aliases, asked to be identified as Willie Flanigan, and the court agreed to the name change.
Lewin-Tankel was on his bicycle, riding to assist officers in a gun-related case when Flanigan, a suspect in that case, ran him down in a stolen Lexus SUV about 12:30 p.m. Wednesday on Turk Street, just a few blocks from City Hall, police said.
Flanigan then drove off and abandoned the car |
Rights Watch, a nonprofit organization that monitors conditions around the world, says on its website that “Kazakhstan heavily restricts freedom of assembly, speech, and religion, and torture remains a serious problem.”Surprise move: Virginia AG to ask Supreme Court to review marriage equality case
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Attorney General Mark R. Herring announced Tuesday that he will file a petition on Friday for a writ of certiorari with the Supreme Court of the United States asking it to hear Virginia’s marriage equality case and definitively settle the constitutional issues for the Commonwealth and the rest of the country.
Virginia’s petition will be one of the first in the nation, after Utah filed its petition earlier today, allowing the Court to consider accepting Virginia’s case at their September conference. The Commonwealth signaled its intention in a filing today with the 4th Circuit Court of Appeals, which last week agreed with Attorney General Herring’s position that Virginia’s same-sex marriage ban violates the U.S. Constitution. That filing requests that the Court stay its mandate pending the Supreme Court’s decision whether to hear the case. The Prince William County Clerk of Court announced last Friday that she intended to file a petition for certiorari. Attorney General Herring’s filing ensures that no delay arises during the available 90-day window to petition for certiorari.
“Throughout this case, I have fought for the fundamental rights of Virginians and the quickest possible resolution,” said Attorney General Herring. “I believe the district and appeals courts ruled correctly in striking down Virginia’s discriminatory marriage ban, but it has long been clear that the Supreme Court will likely have the final word. I want that decision to come as soon as possible and I want the voices of Virginians to be heard. This case has moved forward at an incredibly swift pace, and I look forward to a final resolution that affirms the fundamental right of all Virginians to marry.”
Virginia’s case presents a number of legal questions that could be settled by the Supreme Court, including whether states can prevent same-sex couples from marrying and whether states can refuse to recognize valid marriages performed in other states.
As it has done throughout the case, the Commonwealth has asked the 4th Circuit for a stay of its ruling until all appeals are final. The motion notes that the Supreme Court has already issued stays in similar cases, the complexity of unwinding marriages and transactions that depend on them–like adoptions, inheritance, tax filings, or filings of birth or death certificates– and the fact that this case has moved extremely quickly and can be resolved in the very near future.
The Commonwealth’s motion concludes as follows:
“This case has moved with unusual speed. It was argued in the district court in February and in this Court in May, and it is now ready for review by the Supreme Court. Speed is warranted, for it is unjust for Virginia’s same-sex couples to have to wait even a little while longer for the promise of the Fourteenth Amendment to be fulfilled. As this Court observed, across the Commonwealth, more than 2,500 same-sex couples are raising more than 4,000 children. They are our fellow Virginians. And the Attorney General is committed to ensuring that the government stops treating them as second-class citizens.
“It is with great reluctance, therefore, that the Attorney General agrees that a stay is warranted. The unintended consequences that will befall the Commonwealth and its people if the injunction takes effect prematurely, and the clear signal sent by [the Supreme Court] in Evans and Kitchen II, show the necessity of staying the mandate until the Supreme Court can conclusively resolve what may well be the most important civil rights issue of our time.
“We are nearly there.”
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Shop GoogleJust over a week since Adafruit Industries announced you could pay for their products with bitcoin, the DIY electronics merchant has raked in tens-of-thousands of dollars in the cryptocurrency.
“We can say it’s in the multiple tens-of-thousands of USD,” Adafruit founder Limor Fried told CoinDesk.
The company’s sales were boosted by Bitcoin Black Friday (bitcoin’s answer to the discount-shopping holiday that follows Thanksgiving), which generated a record day of transactions for bitcoin payment processor BitPay, the service Adafruit uses.
Furthermore, in a curious twist, at least one customer who decided to pay with bitcoin used the very same coins they mined using Adafruit’s bitcoin mining tutorial. Fried said:
“The coolest thing for us is a customer told us they made a bitcoin miner using our tutorial, mined coins and then spent them on Adafruit.”
The company first entered the bitcoin world six months ago with the PiMiner, a Raspberry Pi-powered bitcoin miner. From there, the decision to implement bitcoin payments was a natural progression for Adafruit’s team.
“We all considered mining coins a fun math puzzle and hobby,” said Fried.
Volatility
Like other businesses that have adopted bitcoin payments, Adafruit was concerned by the volatility of the currency due to the risk of bitcoin’s price plummeting shortly after a sale.
“The big challenge for us was how [to] sell physical goods with a ‘currency’ that changes so often,” said the entrepreneur.
BitPay was crucial to solving that challenge, she said. The payments processor, which transacted a $1m order in October, does the currency exchange into dollars at the point of sale.
“We never touch the bitcoins, each day BitPay does a daily bank transfer in USD to us. This was perfect for us,” she added.
According to Fried, the most popular bitcoin purchase on Adafruit’s website, which has over 1,600 products, is the humble Raspberry Pi model B.
“The average order [with bitcoins] is over $100. Many orders were over $1,000 and we have a few over $8,000. The most popular item people purchase with bitcoins is the Raspberry Pi model B,” she said.
Bitcoin frenzy
Bitcoin Black Friday, bitcoin’s answer to the ‘frenzied consumerism’ that follows Thanksgiving celebrations in the US, returned for a second year in 2013. The day was set up by Jon Holmquist in retaliation to claims that bitcoin has been fuelled by speculation rather than its potential as a global payment system.
This argument was made rather forcefully in a recent Wired article that suggested bitcoin’s irreversibility was a “fatal flaw” that ensures it “won’t ever achieve widespread adoption as a currency”.
Bitcoin Black Friday saw a range of sites offer discounted products. Alongside BitPay’s bigger merchants, it seems the deals at Adafruit won consumers over.
“During our recent Bitcoin Black Friday, Adafruit was one of our top selling merchants,” said Stephanie Wargo, VP of Marketing at BitPay.
BitPay processed just over 6,000 bitcoin transactions on Bitcoin Black Friday – up from just 99 during the inaugural event last year.
“The bitcoin space is growing each and every day; as more people acquire bitcoins, and more merchants accept them,” said Wargo.
Featured image: Collin CunninghamVANCOUVER - Austin Collie is heading to the CFL, but with the B.C. Lions.
The veteran receiver signed as a free agent with the Lions on Thursday, two days after published reports said the former Brigham Young University star had come to terms with the Montreal Alouettes.
Collie took to Twitter on Wednesday to deny the reports.
The six-foot, 204-pound Collie spent five seasons in the NFL — four with the Indianapolis Colts, another with the New England Patriots. He was a fourth-round pick of the Colts in the 2009 NFL draft.
Collie appeared in 42 games over four seasons with the Colts, registering 173 catches for 1,845 yards and 16 TDs. He signed with New England in 2013, playing in seven regular-season games and recording six catches for 63 yards.
"Austin has an established football resume and will add depth, speed and experience to our roster," Wally Buono, the Lions vice-president of football operations, said in a statement. "He's an exciting player that I know our fans will enjoy watching this season."
Collie, 29, is a Hamilton native and joins the Lions as a national — or Canadian — player. But he comes with issues — he suffered at least three concussions during his NFL tenure.
"I'm excited to be joining the Lions and very much look forward to playing in the CFL," said Collie. "The wide-open play of the Canadian game and the passion of fans across the league is going to be a lot of fun to experience."A federal judge has ruled that a lawsuit brought by environmentalists over the Trump administration's approval of the Keystone XL pipeline can proceed.
The decision comes just two days after Nebraska regulators lifted the final regulatory obstacle to the project. It creates a potential roadblock for pipeline operator TransCanada's long-stalled project to transport heavy Canadian crude to U.S. refining hubs.
On Wednesday, U.S. District Judge Brian Morris rejected efforts by the Trump administration and TransCanada to have the lawsuit dismissed. The administration argued that no further environmental reviews were necessary when President Donald Trump approved construction of Keystone XL.
The environmentalists said the State Department and other agencies relied on outdated environmental reviews for the Keystone XL pipeline and did not consider relevant information when Trump issued his executive action in January.
"Once again, the courts are serving as a critical backstop against this administration's attempts to flout the law for the benefit of corporate polluters," said Doug Hayes, senior attorney at Sierra Club, in a statement.Congressman Jared Polis is scheduled to deliver remarks at an event for bitcoin ATM company Robocoin at the United States Capitol where they will demonstrate their hardware. While companies visiting with congress is nothing new, the wild, wooly world of bitcoin makes this definitely an interesting development.
The company will bring its hardware to a capitol office where it will demonstrate the gear and hold a Q&A. Rep. Polis will speak as well.
“We’re honored to be the first Bitcoin company welcomed with open arms to demo on Capitol Hill,” said Robocoin CEO Jordan Kelley.
The meeting will allow Robocoin to tell its side of the bitcoin compliance story and allow congressfolks the opportunity to buy a little bitcoin of their own. Writes Kelley in the invitation:
You are cordially invited to a demonstration of Robocoin, the world’s first bitcoin kiosk for buying and selling the popular and controversial digital currency. Come see a Robocoin demo, hear a brief bitcoin talk from Congressman Jared Polis, try buying bitcoin yourself and ask your burning bitcoin questions. This will be fun, plus you’ll see how Robocoin is raising the bar on KYC / AML compliance in bitcoin. Welcome to the future of anti-fraud, anti-identify theft and anti-money laundering – this is customer protection built for the 21st century.
The event will be held on April 8, from 4:00-7:00 p.m. in the Rayburn House Office Building. It is an interesting wrinkle in the long bitcoin story and should be, at the very least, one of the first steps towards general acceptance of the currency.A hidden city called Leviathan lies deep within the dark trenches of the Pacific Ocean. The city is home to a community of immortals that sought to create a utopia over 1,000 years ago. For a millennia, they lived in peace and secrecy, gently influencing world events to aid the advancement of mankind. But a terrible secret has been kept deep within the catacombs of Leviathan that threatens the existence of the immortals, and quite possibly the entire world.
One woman named Macallan Orsel, a young genetic scientist in New York, discovers she is descended from a group of immortals that rebelled against Leviathan and are now waging a civil war around the globe. As the immortal war spills into the realm of mortal man, Macallan realizes that she holds the key to stopping the battle and bringing peace to Leviathan. But a clandestine government agency called The Blackdoor Group is trying to exterminate the immortal population and has identified Macallan as their critical target.
The Leviathan Chronicles is a revolutionary science fiction audio drama podcast featuring the voices of over 60 actors, professional sound effects and an original music soundtrack. For more information and additional audio content, visit our website at www.leviathanchronicles.com.The savage drug war in Mexico. Crumbling state budgets. Weariness with current drug policy. The election of a president who said, �Yes � I inhaled.�
NEW YORK | The savage drug war in Mexico. Crumbling state budgets. Weariness with current drug policy. The election of a president who said, �Yes � I inhaled.�
These developments and others are kindling unprecedented optimism among the many Americans who want to see marijuana legalized.
Doing so, they contend to an ever-more-receptive audience, could weaken the Mexican cartels profiting from U.S. pot sales, save billions in law enforcement costs, and generate billions more in tax revenue from one of the nation�s biggest cash crops.
Said a veteran of the movement, Ethan Nadelmann of the Drug Policy Alliance: �This is the first time I feel like the wind is at my back and not in my face.�
Foes of legalization argue that already-rampant pot use by adolescents would worsen if adults could smoke at will.
Even the most hopeful marijuana activists doubt nationwide decriminalization is imminent, but they see the debate evolving dramatically and anticipate fast-paced change on the state level.
�For the most part, what we�ve seen over the past 20 years has been incremental,� said Norm Stamper, a former Seattle police chief now active with Law Enforcement Against Prohibition. �What we�ve seen in the past six months is an explosion of activity, fresh thinking, bold statements and penetrating questions.�
Some examples:
Numerous prominent political leaders, including California Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger and former Mexican presidents, have suggested it is time for open debate on legalization.
Lawmakers in at least three states are considering joining the 13 states that have legalized pot for medical purposes. Massachusetts voters last fall decided to decriminalize possession of an ounce or less of pot; there are now a dozen states that have taken such steps.
In Congress, Rep. Dennis Kucinich, D-Ohio, and Sen. Jim Webb, D-Va., are among several lawmakers contending that marijuana decriminalization should be studied in re-examining what they deem to be failed U.S. drug policy. �Nothing should be off the table,� Webb said.
National polls show close to half of American adults are now open to legalizing pot � a constituency encompassing today�s college students and the 60-something baby boomers who popularized the drug in their own youth. In California last month, a statewide Field Poll for the first time found 56 percent of voters supporting legalization.
That poll pleased California Assemblyman Tom Ammiano, a San Francisco Democrat who introduced a bill in February to legalize marijuana in a manner similar to alcohol � taxing sales to adults while barring possession by anyone under 21. Ammiano hopes for a vote by early next year and contends the bill would generate up to $1.3 billion in revenue for his deficit-plagued state.
Ammiano, 67, said he has been heartened by cross-generational and bipartisan support.
�People who initially were very skeptical � as the polls come in, as the budget situation gets worse � are having a second look,� he said. �Maybe these issues that have been treated as wedge issues aren�t anymore. People know the drug war has failed.�
A new tone on drug reform also has sounded more frequently in Congress.
At a House hearing last month, Rep. Steve Cohen, D-Tenn., challenged FBI Director Robert Mueller when Mueller spoke of parents losing their lives to drugs.
�Name me a couple of parents who have lost their lives to marijuana,� Cohen said.
�Can�t,� Mueller replied.
�Exactly. You can�t, because that hasn�t happened,� Cohen said. �Is there some time we�re going to see that we ought to prioritize meth, crack, cocaine and heroin, and deal with the drugs that the American culture is really being affected by?�
In a telephone interview, Kucinich noted that Obama and former President Bill Clinton acknowledged trying marijuana.
�Apparently that didn�t stop them from achieving their goals in life,� Kucinich said. �We need to come at this from a point of science and research and not from mythologies or fears.�
Gil Kerlikowske, chief of the Office of National Drug Control Policy, has not endorsed the idea of an all-options review of drug policy, but he has suggested scrapping the �war on drugs� label and placing more emphasis on treatment and prevention. Attorney General Eric Holder has said federal authorities will no longer raid medical marijuana facilities in California.
Nonetheless, many opponents of pot legalization remain firm in their convictions.
�We�re opposed to legalization or decriminalization of marijuana. We think it�s the wrong message to send our youth,� said Russell Laine, police chief in Algonquin, Ill., and president of the International Association of Chiefs of Police.
Marijuana � though considered one of the least harmful illegal drugs � consumes a vast amount of time and money on the part of law enforcement, accounting for more than 40 percent of drug arrests nationally even though relatively few pot-only offenders go to prison.
According to estimates by Harvard University economist Jeffrey Miron, legalization of marijuana could save the country at least $7.7 billion in law enforcement costs and generate more than $6 billion in revenue if it were taxed like cigarettes and alcohol.
Pot usage is pervasive. The latest federal survey indicates that more than 100 million Americans have tried it at some point and more than 14 million used it in the previous month.
Testifying recently before Congress, Arizona Attorney General Terry Goddard said U.S. demand for pot is a key factor in the Mexican drug war.
�The violence that we see in Mexico is fueled 65 percent to 70 percent by the trade in one drug: marijuana,� he said. �I�ve called for at least a rational discussion as to what our country can do to take the profit out of that.�
The U.S. Drug Enforcement Agency remains on record against legalization and medical marijuana, which it contends has no scientific justification.
�Legalization of marijuana, no matter how it begins, will come at the expense of our children and public safety,� says a DEA document. �It will create dependency and treatment issues, and open the door to use of other drugs, impaired health, delinquent behavior, and drugged drivers.�
The DEA also says marijuana is now at its most potent, in part because of refinements in cultivation.
Even in liberal Vermont, with the nation�s highest rates of marijuana usage, many substance-abuse specialists are wary of legalization.
Annie Ramniceanu, clinical director at Spectrum Youth and Family Services in Burlington, Vt., said her agency deals with scores of youths each year whose social development has been hurt by early and frequent pot smoking.
�They don�t deal with anything,� she said. �They never learned how to have fun without smoking pot, never learned how to deal with conflict.�
Legalization proponents acknowledge that pot use by adolescents is a major problem, but contend that decriminalizing and regulating the drug would improve matters by shifting efforts away from criminal gangs.
�The notion that we have to keep something completely banned for adults to keep it away from kids doesn�t hold up,� said Bruce Mirken, communications director of the Marijuana Policy Project.
As for Obama, the activists don�t expect him to embrace the cause at this point.
�Obama�s got two wars, an economic disaster. We have to realize they�re not going to put this on the front burner right now,� said Allen St. Pierre, executive director of NORML, or the National Organization for the Reform of Marijuana Laws. �But every measurable metric out there is swinging our way.�Five Edmonton men are facing more than 100 charges in connection with a major gun-trafficking bust in Alberta’s capital, according to police.
On Thursday, Alberta Law Enforcement Response Teams (ALERT) announced a two-month investigation involving the Edmonton Police Service, RCMP and National Weapons Enforcement Support team resulted in a significant weapons seizure.
@tedgbauer very concerning to police. Full auto with silencer and serial number defaced. — ALERT (@ALERT_AB) October 27, 2016
On Sept. 23, ALERT officers seized three rifles, five handguns, body armour, silencers and a crate of various rounds of ammunition as a result of executing four search warrants in west Edmonton.
ALERT alleged the guns were being legally acquired before being “fraudulently” supplied to Edmonton-area criminal networks. They said in some instances, the guns were being altered or had their serial numbers removed before hitting the black market.
Silas Armich, 38, Adrian Barnes, 38, Desmond Rock, 36, and Justin Shipowich, 38, were arrested on the same day the search warrants were executed. James Pike, 38, was arrested last week.
VIDEO: Guns seized in #yeg firearms trafficking investigation; Norinco had silencer and converted to full auto pic.twitter.com/D18kB2hT4p — ALERT (@ALERT_AB) October 27, 2016
Altogether, the accused face 107 charges ranging from a variety of firearms offences – including firearms trafficking – to providing a false statement.
ALERT said Barnes has a lifetime firearms prohibition because of a previous conviction for importing prohibited firearms. They said he was arrested in 2009 while trying to enter Canada with 10 semi-automatic handguns.Media playback is not supported on this device 'Trapped' footballer thanks Wenger
Zahir Belounis had reached breaking point when the call finally came.
The 33-year-old French-Algerian footballer had hatched an incredible plan to escape Qatar illegally, considered suicide and then turned to alcohol to maintain his crumbling sanity but at 2pm last Wednesday, the news he had been waiting 19 months for finally arrived. He was free.
I didn't believe I would really get out, even as I went to the airport. I didn't believe it until I heard the noise of the stamp. When I heard that, I knew I was free
"The voice said, 'tomorrow you have to leave. You have an exit visa,'" he says, before a smile as wide as the Seine spreads over his face.
As we stand on a balcony overlooking Paris, lit by warm winter sunshine, there is a sense that Belounis still can't believe what has happened.
He had spent most of the past two years fighting a battle to free himself from Qatar after a dispute over unpaid wages with El Jaish, the club he captained to silverware.
During our interview he recalls the battle he fought against the authorities in Qatar, talks about his darkest moments and explains why he is still willing to support the 2022 World Cup in Qatar despite his ordeal.
"They have destroyed my life," he says. "By the end I was crying every day. When you think about suicide and killing yourself, it is difficult."
Qatar's controversial employment laws had trapped Belounis in the country against his will. Every foreign worker is bound to their employer. They are not allowed to leave their job, or even leave the country to go home, without their permission. It is known as the Kafala system.
Belounis, along with thousands of others, have fallen foul of it. When the footballer stopped receiving his wages he wanted to know why. He took the dispute to court. In return, his club refused to grant him an exit visa. The club refused to comment when contacted by the BBC.
"I still don't know who made the decision to free me," he says. "All I know is that when I got the call I grabbed my wife and my two daughters and we went to the airport.
"I will never forget that 24 hours. I didn't sleep. I held my daughters close. It was so intense and I didn't believe I would really get out, even as I went to the airport. I didn't believe it until I heard the noise of the stamp. When I heard that, I knew I was free."
Belounis has been back in Paris for six days when we meet near the Champs-Elysees. We have spoken frequently over the past week. His wife Johanna picked up the phone on Wednesday, her children could be heard in the background - home, happy, normal, ready for Christmas.
And yet there has been no time for parties or celebrations. When Zahir has not been with his family, he has been telling his story, spreading the word, fighting for those who remain in Qatar. He remains too humble to see himself as a symbol for those left behind. But that is the reality.
Zahir Belounis was met at the airport by his mother
He says he had planned to flee Qatar illegally and be home for Christmas, whatever the consequences. He had laid out a plan. He could no longer go on.
"What nobody knows was that I prepared an escape," he says. "I will not say how I was going to do it, because I don't want to give bad ideas to some people. But I had taken that decision. I had no chance. I said 'I will be home before Christmas'. That was the choice I made."
When asked about the moments he considered suicide, he finds it hard to explain how and why he reached rock bottom. "My brother and friends will tell you I am a strong man," he says.
"But after this fight I had no choice. The only way I was able to stop doing something bad to myself was to drink. Alcohol was a help to me, I thought about something else until the morning. It was the only way I had."
Human rights issues continue to embarrass and undermine Qatar's attempts to win over a sceptical football public, but Belounis does not want to see the World Cup taken away from the Gulf state.
He sees the tournament as an opportunity to change the country for the better and tackle the problems that bubble away under the surface.
Last month, Amnesty International produced a report that claimed workers were being treated like cattle. Others have likened the Kafala system to modern-day slavery. Belounis says his story is not unusual in Qatar.
"There are people suffering there, they need to change the [working] rules," he says. "Everybody in Qatar is happy they have the World Cup. But change the rules. Maybe the government didn't know about this. But I will tell you, there are people suffering a lot. They need help."
Belounis is already seeing the wider issues. There is no bitterness towards Qatar as a country, only the club and those who "destroyed" his life. He says, rather incredibly, that he would be willing to act as an ambassador for the Qatar World Cup if the Kafala system is scrapped.
Belounis does not expect to play professional football again
"I heard that maybe Qatar will change the rules for footballers and maybe they will cancel the Kafala system. But for me, the value of a football player and a worker is the same. If you cancel the system for a football player, you need to cancel it for everybody," he says.
"Qatar will host something amazing. It will be like no World Cup we have seen before. I wish all the best for the Qatari people. But I tell you my life was a disaster, I did nothing wrong. But the system destroyed me, it destroyed me."
Belounis still harbours hopes of returning to training with a club in France, but deep down he believes his experiences in Qatar have ended his playing career.
"Now I have to spend some time with my family, I don't believe someone will say 'Zahir come and train again'. I don't believe the story will come full circle, but it would be nice."
If nothing else the story of Zahir Belounis is a cautionary tale.
He is not, despite his experience, willing to cast Qatar as the bad guys, as a nation unfit to host a World Cup.
What he sees is an opportunity, a chance to make a lasting change, a chance to help others avoid falling into a trap.
He concludes: "I have come back home to my mother at the age of 33 years with nothing. But what is important is the future. Qatar needs to change."http://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/EarWorm
This is based on opinion. Please don't list it on a work's trope example list.
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This is the song that doesn't end... Yes, it goes on and on, my friend... in your head.
"Ear Worms" (from the German phrase Ohrwurm) are those songs that weasel their way into your head like uninvited guests and then proceed to stink up the inside of your cranium by playing themselves there over. And over. And over. And over. They're those songs that just get stuck in your head, and no amount of screaming, pounding, protesting, and banging your head into your desk will get them out. They will check out any time you like, but they will never leave. Someone infected with an Ear Worm may find themselves prone to bursting out into the song in inappropriate places, tugging at their ears in fury, and can end up distracted in the middle of conversation (or other important activities) by the continuous snatches of song wavering between their ears. And it's only a matter of time before, like Darryl Revok, they drill a hole in their forehead to let the voices out.
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You may find relief by hunting down the lyrics and learning the words, but this is more effort than most people are willing to expend on a briefly-heard ditty. Worse, if the song is in a language you don't speak, this becomes pretty much impossible. And when the song is an instrumental... Some people also claim that just listening to the song in question from beginning to end could help, because as their theory goes, an Ear Worm really is a fragment of the song stuck in your head, while your mind attempts to resolve how it continues — in vain. Actual success of this method varies (from person to person and from song to song) though, so it might only serve as a temporary release or none at all. And even worse is the fact that some Ear Worms are songs that were made cyclic to begin with (say, video game soundtracks). Therefore, listening the song through will just complete the loop, rendering the Worm Nigh Invulnerable. Naturally, you can always distract yourself with another Ear Worm, but you might find it just as annoying as the first, and some people even develop a "playlist of Ear Worms" this way, being able to switch from one song to the other, but unable to silence them. As a general rule of thumb one could say: The more you care, the worse it gets.
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The Internet is a particularly notorious supplier of Ear Worms; lots of music memes tend to be irrationally catchy. (This is probably how they got to be memetic in the first place.) Other prime offenders include commercial jingles, Broadway musicals, whatever Top 40 hit is being overplayed right now, video game music (including licensed music), one-hit wonders, and songs with chipmunk voice. Let's not go into show theme music, especially when they repeat and shout the name of the series over and over and over again.
Rhythm Games deserve a special mention, since these sorts of games are chock full of catchy tracks by design, and some of the tracks available are That One Boss. Expect to have a given "boss" song echo in your head for weeks if you're struggling to beat it!
Just because a song is listed here as a particularly bad Ear Worm doesn't mean it's not awesome. In fact, an awesome song can be just as catchy as a... uuhm... not as awesome one. In fact, a song may even be awesome because it's an Ear Worm, and a song may be an Ear Worm in part because it's awesome.
In fiction, Ear Worms are frequently the tool used to produce Psychic Static. Especially powerful ones can also serve as a Brown Note.
Not to be confused with the mind-warping parasites from Star Trek II: The Wrath of Khan or mind-controlling parasites from Animorphs or Earwig in Real Life.
Compare The Tetris Effect, the video game equivalent, or its visual cousin (Brain Bleach). Also compare Can't Un-Hear It, which applies to specific voices.
TV Tropes would like to apologize to any readers susceptible to these things who, getting reminded of a song on this page, feel compelled to hear it again. For your convenience and further suffering, links will be provided whenever possible. (And sometimes this isn't possible, for various reasons; if you find a broken link, please remove it or fix it. Thanks!)
Note: When posting links to YouTube here, make sure to strip their URLs of all unnecessary fragments, such as "feature=..." — the "?v=oHg5SJYRHA0 or whatever"; parameter is the only one needed, really.
Also, unless it seems to have been posted with the copyright holder's blessing (look for one of those little marks like "director video" or "contains content from") or songs released under free license (e.g. Creative Commons), it probably shouldn't be linked here — it's very likely to be taken down. And also, for US users, the rest of the world may not see what you do. Links to video game soundtracks and demoscene productions are OK most of the time, though.
Please mention the work the example comes from. Simply typing out "Lalalalala (link to Youtube video)" will not be a good idea, because a) the link might get deleted, b) not everyone can play videos, and c) "Lalalalala" looks like gibberish to the average viewer.
Important Note: Examples of Ear Worms go into one of the sub-pages below. Do not put them on the main page, unless the Ear Worm trope is referenced within the story or lyrics.
Examples:
References to, and stories involving, Ear Worms:
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Anime & Manga
Comic Books
Adam "Empowered" Warren did a short arc for Gen¹³ which featured Caitlin as the Only Sane Woman in the face of an unnaturally infectious and insane pop song.
In Sandman: At Death's Door by Jill Thompson, Delirium deals with the demons that crash Death's party by infecting them with Ear Worms.
In a Justice League story, the League encounters a created being that sucks up memories. Once they manage to reverse the effects, the Atom leaves it one memory: the Ear Worm that's been stuck in his head the whole issue. "Ziggy Stardust". The kicker: he couldn't remember the whole song.
In Harley Quinn's own comic, an Ear Worm is an actual worm that hibernates for 363 days a year; the two days it is awake — Christmas Eve and Christmas Day — it curls up in a human's ear and sings very, very annoying Christmas songs like "Jingle Bells" and "The Twelve Days of Christmas". Harley is its latest victim, but she is cured by — who else? — Santa Claus.
Comic Strips
Rat does this to mess with Pig in a Pearls Before Swine strip by singing John Denver's "Country Roads, Take Me Home" near him. Rat even admits that he's doing it to plant an Ear Worm in his friend's head.
Tom Tommorrow's This Modern World once introduces a superhero named Anagram Man, but for the purposes of this entry we must take note of his sidekick, Song-In-Your-Head Boy.
One Nemi strip features an Ear Worm taking over a bus. Much to the annoyance of the main character. Cyan: [humming away] Hey, do you hear it too?
Nemi: [visibly straining] No! I'm hearing " Raining Blood " by louder! [humming away] Hey, do you hear it too?[visibly straining] No! I'm hearing "" by Slayer! Louder, and louder and
Norm from My Cage once got a song stuck in his head; when pressured to tell what song it was he finally admitted it was the FreeCreditReport.com jingle. Norm: Advertising has salted my soul. Nothing good can grow there again.
A Sunday strip of Zits has Hector confessing to Jeremy that he has a show tune stuck in his head. After much pestering from Jeremy, it is revealed to be "How Do You Solve a Problem Like Maria" from The Sound of Music, at which point Jeremy gets it stuck in his head as well.
One Sunday strip of Garfield had Jon whistle a very odd tune (shown in a musical staff), which gets stuck in Garfield's head as a result. He ultimately gets rid of it by passing it onto Odie.
Fan Works
Films — Animation
Films — Live-Action
In the movie Thoughtcrimes, Brendan doesn't believe in Freya's telepathic abilities until she mentions that he'd had the Scooby-Doo theme song stuck in his head all day.
In Wayne's World, Wayne has the song "Hey Mickey" stuck in his head. He and his girlfriend sing it to expel it.
In the movie Pontypool, the Ear Worm comes in the form of infected phrases in the English language that spread through understanding.
In The Night They Saved Christmas, "Jingle Bells" is such an annoying one that even Santa Claus himself is sick of it. ("Sing any other Christmas song you want," he yells to his elves. "Frosty the Snowman, Rudolph the Red Nosed Reindeer, White Christmas, any of those! But NO MORE JINGLE BELLS! "
" In Eurotrip, Scotty's ex-girlfriend Fiona's new boyfriend's song, "Scotty Doesn't Know" (about Fiona cheating on Scotty), becomes something of an Ear Worm for the entire cast — starting with Scotty's best friend. Not only that, but it becomes a major hit all over Europe.
"Pocket Full of Sunshine" becomes an Ear Worm for the main character, Olive, of Easy A.
The catchy song from Three Magic Words, a short riffed on by RiffTrax, is declared an ear worm by a despondent Bill Corbett after it continues on past the short itself.
In Deep Rising, Joey starts singing the elevator's music under his breath while the group is sneaking along a corridor. Everyone stops and points flashlights and/or guns at him, so he sheepishly explains that it's stuck in his head. Amusingly, even the hardened mercenaries don't push the issue and simply resume walking.
Jokes
You can find a few. For example: Patient: Doctor, doctor! I keep getting these two songs stuck in my head: "The Green, Green Grass of Home" and "Delilah"!
Doctor: Oh, you've got
Patient: Is that rare?
Doctor: It's Not Unusual. Doctor, doctor! I keep getting these two songs stuck in my head: "The Green, Green Grass of |
planetary travel. Some kind of physical or magnetic shielding would be required to protect the astronauts. Most proton storms take at least two hours from the time of visual detection to reach Earth's orbit. A solar flare on January 20, 2005 released the highest concentration of protons ever directly measured,[14] giving astronauts as little as 15 minutes to reach shelter.
Observations [ edit ]
Flares produce radiation across the electromagnetic spectrum, although with different intensity. They are not very intense in visible light, but they can be very bright at particular atomic lines. They normally produce bremsstrahlung in X-rays and synchrotron radiation in radio.
History [ edit ]
Optical observations [ edit ]
Richard Carrington observed a flare for the first time on 1 September 1859 projecting the image produced by an optical telescope through a broad-band filter. It was an extraordinarily intense white light flare. Since flares produce copious amounts of radiation at Hα, adding a narrow ( ≈1 Å) passband filter centered at this wavelength to the optical telescope, allows the observation of not very bright flares with small telescopes. For years Hα was the main, if not the only, source of information about solar flares. Other passband filters are also used.
Radio observations [ edit ]
During World War II, on February 25 and 26, 1942, British radar operators observed radiation that Stanley Hey interpreted as solar emission. Their discovery did not go public until the end of the conflict. The same year Southworth also observed the Sun in radio, but as with Hey, his observations were only known after 1945. In 1943 Grote Reber was the first to report radioastronomical observations of the Sun at 160 MHz. The fast development of radioastronomy revealed new peculiarities of the solar activity like storms and bursts related to the flares. Today ground-based radiotelescopes observe the Sun from c. 15 MHz up to 400 GHz.
Space telescopes [ edit ]
Since the beginning of space exploration, telescopes have been sent to space, where they work at wavelengths shorter than UV, which are completely absorbed by the atmosphere, and where flares may be very bright. Since the 1970s, the GOES series of satellites observe the Sun in soft X-rays, and their observations became the standard measure of flares, diminishing the importance of the Hα classification. Hard X-rays were observed by many different instruments, the most important today being the Reuven Ramaty High Energy Solar Spectroscopic Imager (RHESSI). Nonetheless, UV observations are today the stars of solar imaging with their incredible fine details that reveal the complexity of the solar corona. Spacecraft may also bring radio detectors at extremely long wavelengths (as long as a few kilometers) that cannot propagate through the ionosphere.
Optical telescopes [ edit ]
Two successive photos of a solar flare phenomenon. The solar disc was blocked in these photos for better visualization of the flare's accompanying protruding prominence.
Radio telescopes [ edit ]
Space telescopes [ edit ]
GOES-17 captures a C2-class solar flare on May 28, 2018 across different spectral bands
The following spacecraft missions have flares as their main observation target.
In addition to these solar observing facilities, many non-solar astronomical satellites observe flares either intentionally (e.g., NuSTAR), or simply because the penetrating hard radiations coming from a flare can readily penetrate most forms of shielding.
Examples of large solar flares [ edit ]
Short narrated video about Fermi's observations of the highest-energy light ever associated with an eruption on the Sun as of March 2012
Active Region 1515 released an X1.1 class flare from the lower right of the Sun on July 6, 2012, peaking at 7:08 PM EDT. This flare caused a radio blackout, labeled as an R3 on the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administrations scale that goes from R1 to R5.
The most powerful flare ever observed was the first one to be observed,[27] on September 1, 1859, and was reported by British astronomer Richard Carrington and independently by an observer named Richard Hodgson. The event is named the Solar storm of 1859, or the "Carrington event". The flare was visible to a naked eye (in white light), and produced stunning auroras down to tropical latitudes such as Cuba or Hawaii, and set telegraph systems on fire.[28] The flare left a trace in Greenland ice in the form of nitrates and beryllium-10, which allow its strength to be measured today.[29] Cliver and Svalgaard[30] reconstructed the effects of this flare and compared with other events of the last 150 years. In their words: "While the 1859 event has close rivals or superiors in each of the above categories of space weather activity, it is the only documented event of the last ∼150 years that appears at or near the top of all of the lists."
The ultra-fast coronal mass ejection of August 1972 is suspected of triggering magnetic fuses on naval mines during the Vietnam War, and would have been a life-threatening event to Apollo astronauts if it had occurred during a mission to the Moon.[31][32]
In modern times, the largest solar flare measured with instruments occurred on November 4, 2003. This event saturated the GOES detectors, and because of this its classification is only approximate. Initially, extrapolating the GOES curve, it was estimated to be X28.[33] Later analysis of the ionospheric effects suggested increasing this estimate to X45.[34] This event produced the first clear evidence of a new spectral component above 100 GHz.[35]
Other large solar flares also occurred on April 2, 2001 (X20),[36] October 28, 2003 (X17.2 and 10),[37] September 7, 2005 (X17),[36] February 17, 2011 (X2),[38][39][40] August 9, 2011 (X6.9),[41][42] March 7, 2012 (X5.4),[43][44] July 6, 2012 (X1.1).[45] On July 6, 2012, a solar storm hit just after midnight UK time,[46] when an X1.1 solar flare fired out of the AR1515 sunspot. Another X1.4 solar flare from AR 1520 region of the Sun,[47] second in the week, reached the Earth on July 15, 2012[48] with a geomagnetic storm of G1–G2 level.[49][50] A X1.8-class flare was recorded on October 24, 2012.[51] There has been major solar flare activity in early 2013, notably within a 48-hour period starting on May 12, 2013, a total of four X-class solar flares were emitted ranging from an X1.2 and upwards of an X3.2,[52] the latter of which was one of the largest year 2013 flares.[53][54] Departing sunspot complex AR2035-AR2046 erupted on April 25, 2014 at 0032 UT, producing a strong X1.3-class solar flare and an HF communications blackout on the day-side of Earth. NASA's Solar Dynamics Observatory recorded a flash of extreme ultraviolet radiation from the explosion. The Solar Dynamics Observatory recorded an X9.3-class flare at around 1200 UTC on September 6, 2017.[55]
Flare spray [ edit ]
Flare sprays are a type of eruption associated with solar flares.[56] They involve faster ejections of material than eruptive prominences,[57] and reach velocities of 20 to 2000 kilometers per second.[58]
Prediction [ edit ]
Current methods of flare prediction are problematic, and there is no certain indication that an active region on the Sun will produce a flare. However, many properties of sunspots and active regions correlate with flaring. For example, magnetically complex regions (based on line-of-sight magnetic field) called delta spots produce the largest flares. A simple scheme of sunspot classification due to McIntosh, or related to fractal complexity.[59] is commonly used as a starting point for flare prediction.[60] Predictions are usually stated in terms of probabilities for occurrence of flares above M or X GOES class within 24 or 48 hours. The U.S. National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) issues forecasts of this kind.[61]
See also [ edit ]
References [ edit ]
SourcesOptimal Playable Settings
The best way to automatically configure and apply Neverwinter’s game options for your specific system configuration is through GeForce Experience, our new application that optimizes your games, updates your drivers, and streams PC games to your Project SHIELD handheld. Taking into account your GPU and CPU, as well as many additional factors, GeForce Experience’s recommendations can be applied with a single click and will be updated over time should developer updates and NVIDIA drivers improve performance further still. On that note, make sure to download and install the recent GeForce 320.49 WHQL drivers through GeForce Experience or our site, to improve performance and stability in Neverwinter.
For manual configuration, look below to our recommendations for each of the heaviest settings. Be sure to reduce as few as possible for the best balance between performance and graphics; which you reduce should be based on the screenshots in this article and your personal preferences.
Anti-aliasing: 2x
Shadows: Medium
Max Shader Quality: High
World Detail Distance: 50
Terrain Detail Distance: 80
Show High Detail Objects: Off
Post-processing: Off
SSAO: Off
Cinematic Focus (Depth of Field): Off
Note: Show High Detail Objects, Post-Processing, and SSAO drastically affect performance, while the rest do significantly but not as obviously; Character Detail Distance and Lighting Quality also drastically affect performance, but greatly hurt visuals when reduced, so look to them as a last resort.
You may interested to know Neverwinter also supports 3D Vision. We haven't run performance data on 3D Vision and Neverwinter, but it's safe to assume you'll need a high-end system if you want to make use of it while running maximum graphics settings.
Conclusion
Neverwinter features strong performance for high-end users and great scaling across a very long list of graphics options, so even users on much less powerful setups will be able to enjoy the game. The long list of options show their effect in-game everywhere: players will find a lot to feast on visually, including richly detailed landscapes, stunning sunsets, in-depth lighting and shadowing, and much more. Again, GeForce Experience is recommended to find a great balance of strong visuals and enjoyable performance.
Equipped with a GTX 660 Ti, we were able to achieve at least 60 frames per second -- and often much higher -- in almost all of our performance tests with Neverwinter, maximizing all settings and benchmarking in a variety of different in-game environments.
Neverwinter is a strong example of what an online RPG can do technically. On the gameplay front, the title proves addictive very quickly, something only furthered by the constant stream of new content: right now you can try new end-game PvP and PvE content dubbed “Gauntlgrym”, and the new Alchemy profession, and later this summer the free Fury of the Feywild expansion will add even more things to see and do.Three months ago—jeebers, has it really been that long?—I posed the following homework assignment: Do a stack trace of the human cognitive algorithms that produce debates about “free will.” Note that this task is strongly distinguished from arguing that free will does or does not exist.
Now, as expected, people are asking, “If the future is determined, how can our choices control it?” The wise reader can guess that it all adds up to normality; but this leaves the question of how.
People hear: “The universe runs like clockwork; physics is deterministic; the future is fixed.” And their minds form a causal network that looks like this:
Here we see the causes “Me” and “Physics,” competing to determine the state of the “Future” effect. If the “Future” is fully determined by “Physics,” then obviously there is no room for it to be affected by “Me.”
This causal network is not an explicit philosophical belief. It’s implicit— a background representation of the brain, controlling which philosophical arguments seem “reasonable.” It just seems like the way things are.
Every now and then, another neuroscience press release appears, claiming that, because researchers used an fMRI to spot the brain doing something-or-other during a decision process, it’s not you who chooses, it’s your brain.
Likewise that old chestnut, “Reductionism undermines rationality itself. Because then, every time you said something, it wouldn’t be the result of reasoning about the evidence—it would be merely quarks bopping around.”
Of course the actual diagram should be:
Or better yet:
Why is this not obvious? Because there are many levels of organization that separate our models of our thoughts—our emotions, our beliefs, our agonizing indecisions, and our final choices—from our models of electrons and quarks.
We can intuitively visualize that a hand is made of fingers (and thumb and palm). To ask whether it’s really our hand that picks something up, or merely our fingers, thumb, and palm, is transparently a wrong question.
But the gap between physics and cognition cannot be crossed by direct visualization. No one can visualize atoms making up a person, the way they can see fingers making up a hand.
And so it requires constant vigilance to maintain your perception of yourself as an entity within physics.
This vigilance is one of the great keys to philosophy, like the Mind Projection Fallacy. You will recall that it is this point which I nominated as having tripped up the quantum physicists who failed to imagine macroscopic decoherence; they did not think to apply the laws to themselves.
Beliefs, desires, emotions, morals, goals, imaginations, anticipations, sensory perceptions, fleeting wishes, ideals, temptations… You might call this the “surface layer” of the mind, the parts-of-self that people can see even without science. If I say, “It is not you who determines the future, it is your desires, plans, and actions that determine the future,” you can readily see the part-whole relations. It is immediately visible, like fingers making up a hand. There are other part-whole relations all the way down to physics, but they are not immediately visible.
“Compatibilism” is the philosophical position that “free will” can be intuitively and satisfyingly defined in such a way as to be compatible with deterministic physics. “Incompatibilism” is the position that free will and determinism are incompatible.
My position might perhaps be called “Requiredism.” When agency, choice, control, and moral responsibility are cashed out in a sensible way, they require determinism—at least some patches of determinism within the universe. If you choose, and plan, and act, and bring some future into being, in accordance with your desire, then all this requires a lawful sort of reality; you cannot do it amid utter chaos. There must be order over at least those parts of reality that are being controlled by you. You are within physics, and so you/physics have determined the future. If it were not determined by physics, it could not be determined by you.
Or perhaps I should say, “If the future were not determined by reality, it could not be determined by you,” or “If the future were not determined by something, it could not be determined by you.” You don’t need neuroscience or physics to push naive definitions of free will into incoherence. If the mind were not embodied in the brain, it would be embodied in something else; there would be some real thing that was a mind. If the future were not determined by physics, it would be determined by something, some law, some order, some grand reality that included you within it.
But if the laws of physics control us, then how can we be said to control ourselves?
Turn it around: If the laws of physics did not control us, how could we possibly control ourselves?
How could thoughts judge other thoughts, how could emotions conflict with each other, how could one course of action appear best, how could we pass from uncertainty to certainty about our own plans, in the midst of utter chaos?
If we were not in reality, where could we be?
The future is determined by physics. What kind of physics? The kind of physics that includes the actions of human beings.
People’s choices are determined by physics. What kind of physics? The kind of physics that includes weighing decisions, considering possible outcomes, judging them, being tempted, following morals, rationalizing transgressions, trying to do better…
There is no point where a quark swoops in from Pluto and overrides all this.
The thoughts of your decision process are all real, they are all something. But a thought is too big and complicated to be an atom. So thoughts are made of smaller things, and our name for the stuff that stuff is made of is “physics.”
Physics underlies our decisions and includes our decisions. It does not explain them away.
Remember, physics adds up to normality; it’s your cognitive algorithms that generate confusion.POLL: Are you concerned about internet privacy? Yes
No Submit Results Yes: 73.28 % (85) No: 26.72 % (31) Total Responses: 116
Chattanoogan Adam McElhaney wants to know what U.S. House Speaker Paul Ryan does when he logs onto his computer and surfs the web.
And he's raised more than $200,000 to find out.
McElhaney is a web privacy advocate, and he was upset after Republicans in Congress struck down an Obama administration regulation to prevent internet service providers (ISPs) from selling their customers' browsing his histories without their permission. He was upset enough, in fact, he started a campaign on GoFundMe.com to raise $10,000 to purchase the browsing history of Ryan, leader of the Republican majority.
As of Sunday afternoon, 12,835 people had donated $201,389 to McElhaney's campaign.
"I plan on purchasing the internet histories of all legislators, congressmen, executives, and their families," McElhaney said in his fundraising pitch. "Help me raise money to buy the histories of those who took away your right to privacy."
Whether McElhaney can do what he is proposing is uncertain, web experts agree, but he is clearly channeling anger from many consumers over the way the privacy regulation was struck down with little opportunity for debate.
"$10 is not a lot to pay for a little stick-it-to-'em feeling to start my day," one person noted on McElhaney's Twitter feed.
McElhaney's challenge is that privacy laws now in effect prohibit a company that collects web browsing information from selling individuals' data. So an advertiser might be able to ask Google to target an ad at all the 40-and-older white males in Wisconsin who read conservative websites, but would not get raw browser history data that would identify a specific 47-year-old man from Wisconsin who also used Twitter on the specific days Ryan sent out tweets.
McElhaney said he believes he has a way to get around these limitations, and promises to either refund his donations or give them to a web privacy group if he fails.
But the speed with which he and others with similar campaigns have exceeded their initial fundraising goals seems to reflect widespread concern about how much information is being collected and sold without users' permission.
The Electronic Frontier Foundation, one of the leading internet privacy groups, said in a statement that the 215-205 vote in Congress will "give our personal information to an already highly profitable cable and telephone industry so that they can increase their profits with our data.
Big internet providers "will be given new powers to harvest your personal information in extraordinarily creepy ways. They will watch your every action online and create highly personalized and sensitive profiles for the highest bidder. All without your consent," the EFF statement said.
The region's two city-owned ISPs — the Electric Power Board in Chattanooga and Dalton Utilities/Optilink in Dalton — were both quick to tell customers they would not sell browsing data.
"We will never use, monitor, control, share or sell any customers' website browsing information, Internet usage history, email messages or other content generated from the use of our Internet service," EPB officials said on the utility's Facebook page.
Critics cited campaign contributions as a reason for the vote. Among Tennessee Republicans, Sen. Lamar Alexander received $84,000 from telecommunications companies in his last election campaign, according to figures compiled by the National Institute on Money in State Politics (www.followthemoney.org). Sen. Bob Corker received $43,000 and Rep. Chuck Fleischmann got $18,000. In North Georgia, Republican Rep. Tom Graves got $33,000.
But the legislators argued they were merely insuring ISPs had the same rules as companies such as Google, which also collect users' browsing data.
"I voted to make sure the Federal Communications Commission can start over and write a new rule that both protects consumers' personal information and makes sure there is a level playing field between companies that provide access to the Internet and companies that do business on the Internet," Alexander said in a statement.
"Privacy protections are very important, however, these FCC rules would treat internet service providers differently than the rest of the internet ecosystem, creating an unnecessary patchwork of confusing regulations," Fleischmann said.
And Corker added: "The rule would have created an uneven playing field for internet companies. The Federal Communications Commission and the Federal Trade Commission have stated that they will work together on new privacy protections, and I look forward to reviewing their proposals and working with my colleagues to ensure that there are appropriate safeguards for consumers."
***
The problem with keeping what you do on the internet private is that the websites you browse are scattered on hard drives (called servers, because they serve up data) all across the U.S. and around the world.
When you type in the address of a website in a browser such as Google Chrome, Firefox, Safari or Internet Explorer, the browser stores that address in its "history" folder. Then your browser sends the address to your computer's network software, and then through the router that connects to your ISP. If you are at work or at school, the signal will first go to your school or company servers, which may or may not be located in your building, and then on to your ISP.
The largest ISPs in the U.S. include many of the major telephone and cable TV companies, such as Comcast, Verizon, Cablevision or AT&T. They're the people you pay each month for your internet service.
At your ISP, your web browser's request to find a specific webpage will be routed to the computer hard drive that holds files for the site you want to reach. But that request may go through several other computers along the way.
Each of those computers — your company's, your ISP's or those along the way, and the computer that holds the site you want to reach — all store the address your request came from (so they can send the information back to you) and the address of the website you are searching for.
That includes the address of each webpage you visit, how long you spent there and what you did, including whether you downloaded files. Web privacy advocates worry that as more and more companies collect such data, it becomes more vulnerable to hackers who could use it for electronic theft or blackmail.
The information is incredibly valuable to advertisers, however, because it allows them to target their advertising specifically at people who may actually want to buy the product or service they are selling. Or if they know you have bought an item online, they can offer to sell you things that might logically go with that product, such as new sheets or pillows if they know you have just bought a mattress.
That is why you may see ads on a webpage reflecting something you searched for or purchased only a few hours or even minutes earlier.
Online advertising networks already have sophisticated tools to track your browsing. One of the arguments in favor of blocking the Obama administration rules was that Google and other web browser companies already had access to this information, as did many advertisers, so it was unfair not to allow ISPs to get into the business themselves and sell the data they collect.
Internet privacy advocates say they have no problem allowing advertisers, ISPs and browser companies to have access to this data, if consumers give permission first. That was the gist of the Obama administration's proposed rule.
But ISPs (and Google and advertisers) argued it would be time-consuming and expensive to obtain permission and would interfere with their ability to conduct their businesses.
Currently, ISPs do allow consumers to opt out of having their data collected.
Browser companies such as Google offer a very limited ability for web users to browse anonymously. If you select that option, your browser software will not record the addresses of the websites you visit, and it will delete any tracking software (often called cookies) those web sites add to your computer.
But private or incognito browsing only affects your own computer. Your company's server, the ISP's computers and those along the way to your destination site still keep track of where you go and what you do there.
A more sophisticated way to hide your browsing data from everyone is a virtual private network, or VPN, which disguises your computer's address. But VPNs usually charge a small monthly fee, in the $5 to $12 range, and they can be difficult to set up if your home has several desktop, laptop and tablet computers plus several smartphones.
Contact staff writer Steve Johnson at 423-757-6673, sjohnson@timesfreepress.com, on Twitter @stevejohnsonTFP, and on Facebook, www.facebook.com/noogahealth.In the fall of 1993, in a village near the US–Mexico border, an American photographer named Annie met a Mexican woman named María. María was eight months pregnant at the time, and walking up a steep hill in the noon heat—with two young daughters at her side—to take lunch to her husband, Jaime. He was digging clay to make bricks. The girls had just found an empty sketchpad. Annie gave them her pencils.
Because Annie was a photographer, she asked if she could take some photos. Because she felt drawn to María’s warmth—and to her family, and to the land where she lived—she asked if she could come back and take some more. María said yes. Annie ended up coming back more than twenty times over the course of the next twenty years.
These were two decades of flea bites and bellyaches and fevers; two decades spent sleeping on floors and napping with babies and learning slingshot strategy from four-foot experts; two decades of road trips and plane flights and time off her day job; two decades of counseling María through two abusive relationships, taking her sons to street festivals, registering her kids for schools that said they had no room. These were two decades of finding the right moment, the right dusk light, the right gaze between mother and child; or else not finding the right moment, or not being sure, and releasing the shutter anyway.
Annie always carried the same three cameras: all Nikon, all fully manual—one color, two black-and-white, one wide-angle—no zoom lenses, no telephoto. If Annie wanted a close-up, she had to get close. She never used a flash, only ambient light, because she didn’t want to disturb the scenes she was capturing, which meant she had to keep herself absolutely still for long exposures in the dim adobe where Jaime and María often lived without electricity, illuminating their nighttime talking and drinking with candles. Annie never cropped images after the fact, in the darkroom, which put pressure on each composition: She had a vision for what each shot would capture. She says beginning photographers are always moved by her work, but have no idea what moves them. She suspects it has to do with these formal constraints she employs: Always the same camera, the same kind of film, 35mm—never digital, never zoom, never flash.
Over the course of those two decades, Annie took 21,000 frames of film. She made twenty-two trips. María started calling her Anita. María started calling her a sister. Annie got to know María’s mother, her children, her siblings, their children. She learned and relearned the tangled dynamics of their family, witnessed decades of caregiving, the knotted strings of feuds, the vagaries of puberty, the threat and residue of violence, the exhaustion of labor, the demands of poverty. But the more Annie saw, the more she felt aware of what she didn’t know. Mainly, she felt humbled. She started to keep a journal of her trips, hundreds of pages of observation and reflection. Nine years into the project, she wrote: I understand nothing.
The first time Annie came back, María and Jaime were surprised that she’d returned. Someone had assured them she wouldn’t; that she’d be just like the last white woman who took snapshots and never came back. María greeted Annie at the doorway of their adobe by saying that the baby, Carmelita—whom she’d been carrying when she and Annie first met—had fever and diarrhea and wasn’t responding to her medicine. It was like that, whenever Annie returned over the next twenty years: She was plunged right into the stream of their lives.
On that first visit, Annie watched the kids do their homework by candlelight after the neighbor cut their illegal electricity. She bartered photos to coax the neighbor to restore it. She woke up at 3:30 in the morning to take photos with Jaime when he started laying bricks at four. She took photos when the cops arrested him as he helped her jump her car, an Oldsmobile they called “The Red Donkey.” Taking photos was the only way she knew to protest his arrest, but her photos didn’t keep the police from hauling him away. “Don’t take pictures of us, little bird,” the cops told Annie over their car speakers, as they drove past the edge of her frame. But she took them anyway.
Proof sheets from Annie’s early visits show the world she found so gravitationally powerful in all its humble particulars, like microscope slides sharpened into focus to reveal mysteries in plain sight: a wheelbarrow full of dirty dishes; a stripped mattress box spring propped up as a fence; two girls sitting on a tower of bricks as tall as a two-story house; a mother laughing and—once in a blue moon—showing the rotten teeth she is ashamed of. Those early proofs show a box of cornflakes tucked into an alcove near the ceiling; a heart-shaped stencil in a plot of soil; a boy at a market table full of screwdrivers; a man lighting his cigarette against the ocean wind; the same man bathing himself, sheepish, with a mug and a plastic bucket of water, in a shack draped with a cloth that his wife is holding open—and the same man, punchdrunk with love, nuzzling his infant daughter’s neck.
One of Annie’s earliest photographs, from that first return, shows María holding Carmelita on a beach. Wet sand and smooth stones glisten in the background, where her son plays by the edge of the water. Carmelita is just an infant, with her head resting against her mother’s chest in a primal posture of intimacy. The force of the photograph is concentrated in María’s face: focused, steady, unsmiling, determined, deeply protective of the daughter in her arms. Her grip is secure. The photo turns the pietà on its head: There is no death here, no martyr to be pitied or mourned—only life, and the living, and continuance, more ordinary days.
Over the years, Annie’s photos track this baby becoming a sullen schoolgirl standing in front of arithmetic sums on a chalkboard, and then a woman putting up an orange tent at market, at her first paying job. The tent looks like flesh or tissue: the tarp filtering the sunlight like a bodily organ built from tent flaps and metal rods. In a shot taken fifteen years after they first met, Carmelita is a young woman in burgundy corduroy pants, standing in a field of flowers under swollen clouds—defiant, radiant.
Annie Appel grew up in El Paso, Texas, during the sixties and seventies, directly across the border from Ciudad Juárez. She describes it as being “born and raised in twin cities divided by a river.” From the house where she lived on Thunderbird Drive—way up the mountain on the west side of town, in one of the wealthiest parts of the city—she could see Mexico as a distant horizon. Nana, her family’s live-in housekeeper, went back across the border on weekends to be with her own family. Whenever Nana got detained at the border, she’d be gone for days. Annie watched her duck into the house whenever the green immigration car cruised through their neighborhood.
It was already known, back then, that girls were disappearing in Juárez—but Annie didn’t know that when she accompanied high-school friends across the border as a fourteen-year-old tomboy to get drunk on tequila, in bars without a drinking age—where you just had to be tall enough to reach the counter—or when she walked over the bridge with her brother to buy a bag of what turned out to be locoweed, the stuff gringos got tricked into buying. Whenever Annie’s father’s family visited from the East Coast, they went across the border to buy embroidered dresses and cheap liqueur.
The border was always there, and Annie was always aware of what side of it she was on. She had the guilt of growing up rich, what she calls “my age-old apology for being born into a well-to-do household in El Paso.” As soon as she turned sixteen, Annie started driving the housekeepers of her neighborhood to the bus stop so they could get across the border for the weekend. She would often see them walking down the streets in the neighborhood, streets where no one else was walking. It was the classic model of a rich neighborhood without sidewalks—no need, because everyone drove. Annie had been told that El Paso had the highest traffic fatalities in the nation, because of immigrants running across the highway.
Whenever her family drove down I-10, Annie would squint at Juárez across the river, hoping to see someone—an actual human person—amid its cardboard-roofed shacks. But it was too far away. The scale wasn’t right. “At night, without electricity,” she wrote, “the darkness on their side of the river was complete. It was [as] if I were staring into the empty horizon over open seas.”
But it wasn’t darkness, and it wasn’t an empty horizon. Annie knew that as a kid, and spent twenty adult years—twenty-two trips, 21,000 frames—rejecting the delusion of that empty horizon. She forced exposures instead.
Her project doesn’t make the border crossing frictionless, and doesn’t want to. The two decades of her project neatly spanned the turning point of 9/11, when the border tightened and passage became even harder. Annie’s Mexico photos find a visual language for the friction and passion of her passage from one world to another—from her life north of the border to the lives of others living south of it. Her photos achieve something close to the ethical opposite of the promise to build a wall that spans the border: They find the glorious, vexed complexity of human consciousness—and make it visible in states of glee and boredom, curiosity and familiarity—where political rhetoric finds only statistics and scapegoats.
Because she kept coming back, kept showing up, kept snapping shots, Annie granted her subjects the liberty of evolution and multiplicity. No one was ever trapped in a single frame. They were always granted the dignity of contradiction: In one early photo, Jaime pores over an encyclopedia in front of a junk heap; in another, he raises one finger in the middle of a drunken monologue; in another, he is covering a pile of bricks to protect them from the rain—in the midst of a rage, about to strike his wife. Annie’s photos aren’t seeking objectivity. They are saturated by the range of her feelings: Admiration at the fact of Jaime’s curiosity, shock and anger at his drunken violence.
In Annie’s photographs, her subjects are neither removed from their circumstances nor reduced to them. She lets their faces occupy her frames in radically different ways: sometimes so large that their particular features blur the background entirely, or crowd it from view; sometimes pushed partially out of sight, or vaguely illuminated by dim lighting—so contoured and filtered by context they barely emerge from it.
The language of photography often conjures aggression or possession: You take a photograph, or capture an image or a moment. It is as if life—or the world, or the lives of others, or time itself—has to be forcibly plundered, or stolen. But Annie’s photographs feel responsive, rather than assertive: They aren’t insisting upon objectivity, claiming the truth as their own. They haven’t conscripted anyone into the service of a single moralizing thesis about inequality or guilt. They haven’t forced anyone to inhabit a single note of meaning.
A single note of meaning would feel too resolved, somehow—too much like stillness, or conclusion—while Annie’s photos feel anything but static. They aren’t done. They aren’t done because they bristle with unresolved feelings— discomfort and awkwardness and yearning—and they aren’t done for a simpler reason: Annie kept going back.
The lens was a relationship; not a retaining wall. Over the decades, María confided in Annie about Jaime’s abuse, the time he struck her across the face with the buckle of his belt, and his transition from booze to heroin, when he started hitting the kids. Annie talked to María about her dying father, back in El Paso, wrecked by his chemo; and a lover’s rejection after twelve years together. When Annie took María’s sons to a street festival, or to a hypnotist show at the Teatro de las Estrellas, she felt “so much more of the me in me,” and this was something she would keep feeling, across the years—encountering herself, in new ways, with them.
It can be easy to think about documentary works in terms of an imperative of absence—the writer or photographer or filmmaker stepping out of the frame to leave more room for her subjects. And over the course of her Mexico project, Annie sometimes fantasized about this kind of absence: “relinquishing self 100% so as to become a blank canvas of sorts, on which I can record the true colors of the situation at hand.”
But to me, the tremendous force of Annie’s project comes from the fact that this relinquishment—for her—was never possible. She was never a blank canvas. She was always a woman, and a friend, and a lesbian, and an American, and a photographer, and a daughter, and a lover—sometimes heartbroken—and a god |
a forthcoming Zappa documentary by Alex Winter, which (like “Eat That Question”) has the full cooperation of the Zappa Family Trust.
While the archival materials (much shot in now-archaic video formats) are variable in quality, assembly is first-rate.Confession: I have been working on this post for months. Writing. Reviewing. Scrapping. Writing a new one. Reviewing. Scrapping it, too. The truth is that this is a really simple and exquisitely complicated subject all at the same time. What is it? Personal labels, namely, my dislike of the labels “nudist” or “naturist”.
Every previously completed iteration of a post on the subject was scrapped because I read another tidbit online. Another opinion from another person about another subject, or the same, but that opinion gave me pause enough to toss out yet another past version of this post. The most recent opinion I saw was someone frustrated that the subject of “to shave or not to shave” was still being brought up in the clothes free circles. Their beef was that whether or not people decide to shave (or wax) was a personal preference and it had nothing at all what-so-ever to do with anyone else. Why did people care!?
Sweetie, I feel your pain.
The fact is that much in life that people form very intense opinions about, myself included, have zero impact on any other person until or unless we begin to impose those opinions on them.
I think my dislike of labels in general is similar to my dislike of bumper stickers and decals on cars or clothing blasting a brand name (looking at you Abercrombie & Fitch). What I choose to call myself on any given day, at any given moment is for me alone to determine. That doesn’t mean other people won’t come up with some sort of label they feel is fitting to slap on my chassis, but as openly private a person that I am (that’s correct: “openly private”), I know that a good deal of the labels aren’t accurate. Labels like nudist and naturist, despite my calling myself the “Accidental Nudist” for an article, have never felt appropriate to me.
Yes, I have spent a fair share of time running around in my birthday suit, but so have a lot of other people. People have attempted to argue with me that because I’ve been to a nude beach I am a nudist. No, it makes me someone who has been to a clothing free beach and took advantage of it to sun my buns.
So, what does it take to label yourself a nudist/naturist? I think that’s up to you, and you alone. I believe that non-sexual nudity is a great thing, but I don’t hang out at resorts, clubs, events, meetings, etc., with other like-minded individuals. Mostly, because I’m somewhat of a hermit, but also because I’m busy with other interests that I am passionate about, interests that take priority to clothes free anything. Having labels we want is entirely up to us – like bumper stickers and decals on our cars (or bikes, or laptops, whatever). Just as we’d all (most of us??) be upset to find some stranger put a Justin Bieber sticker on our car, I think we all get upset when a label is applied to us from people who don’t really know us, that isn’t an accurate representation of who we are.
Labels have baggage, no matter what they are. We’re all advised to travel lightly when we take a trip. I think the same applies for personal labels. Make sure that what you take fits and that you are willing to carry the baggage that comes along with it.
The Amusing Muse is a writer, blogger, gardener, and beekeeper living in Southern Wisconsin. She’s allergic to most sunscreens and bug sprays, which makes summers interesting (and itchy), but did lead to her and her husband buying a pool which is off limits to both items.Using [sic] Properly
Sic is a Latin term meaning “thus.” It is used to indicate that something incorrectly written is intentionally being left as it was in the original. Sic is usually italicized and always surrounded by brackets to indicate that it was not part of the original. Place [sic] right after the error.
Example: She wrote, “They made there [sic] beds.”
Note: The correct sentence should have been, “They made their beds.”
Why use [sic] at all? Why not just make the correction? If you are quoting material, it is generally expected that you will transcribe it exactly as it appeared in the original.
The word sic is also a command to attack (used especially in commanding a dog). The past tense is either sicced or sicked.
Examples: Sic ‘em, Fido. Fido sicced (or sicked) the burglar.
Note: With this meaning, the word is not italicized or enclosed in brackets.
Be careful, however, because the word sick, meaning ill, is also a homonym of sic.
Example: Ananda felt sick with the flu yesterday.
Pop Quiz
Place [sic] where needed.
1. I can lend you no more then ten dollars.
2. Who’s turn is it to speak?
3. I don’t know witch way to turn.
4. How did the weather effect your vacation plans?
5. Don’t you think that every one should attend the meeting?
Pop Quiz Answers
1. I can lend you no more then [sic] ten dollars. (than)
2. Who’s [sic] turn is it to speak? (Whose)
3. I don’t know witch [sic] way to turn. (which)
4. How did the weather effect [sic] your vacation plans? (affect)
5. Don’t you think that every one [sic] should attend the meeting? (everyone)
Posted on Sunday, October 7, 2007, at 11:17 pm
If you wish to respond to another reader's question or comment, please click its corresponding "REPLY" button. If the article or the existing discussions do not address a thought or question you have on the subject, please use the "Comment" box at the bottom of this page.
on Using [sic] ProperlyI have been about ten days at the front when it happened. The whole experience of being hit by a bullet is very interesting and I think it is worth describing in detail.
It was at the corner of the parapet, at five o'clock in the morning. This was always a dangerous time, because we had the dawn at our backs, and if you stuck your head above the parapet it was clearly outlined against the sky. I was talking to the sentries preparatory to changing the guard. Suddenly, in the very middle of saying something, I felt -- it is very hard to describe what I felt, though I remember it with the utmost vividness.
Roughly speaking it was the sensation of being at the center of an explosion. There seemed to be a loud bang and a blinding flash of light all around me, and I felt a tremendous shock - no pain, only a violent shock, such as you get from an electric terminal; with it a sense of utter weakness, a feeling of being stricken and shriveled up to nothing. The sandbags in front of me receded into immense distance. I fancy you would feel much the same if you were struck by lightning. I knew immediately that I was hit, but because of the seeming bang and flash I thought it was a rifle nearby that had gone off accidentally and shot me. All this happened in a space of time much less than a second. The next moment my knees crumpled up and I was falling, my head hitting the ground with a violent bang which, to my relief, did not hurt. I had a numb, dazed feeling, a consciousness of being very badly hurt, but no pain in the ordinary sense.
The American sentry I had been talking to had started forward. 'Gosh! Are you hit!' People gathered round. There was the usual fuss - 'Lift him up! Where's he hit? Get his shirt open!' etc., etc. The American called for a knife to cut my shirt open. I knew that there was one in my pocket and tried to get it open, but discovered that my right arm was paralyzed. Not being in pain, I felt a vague satisfaction. This ought to please my wife, I thought; she had always wanted me to be wounded, which would save me from being killed when the great battle came. It was only now that it occurred to me to wonder where I was hit, and how badly; I could feel nothing, but I was conscious that the bullet had struck me somewhere in the front of my body. When I tried to speak I found that I had no voice, only a faint squeak, but at the second attempt I managed to ask where I was hit. In the throat, they said, Harry Webb, our stretcher-bearer, had brought a bandage and one of the little bottles they gave us for field-dressings. As they lifted me up a lot of blood poured out of my mouth, and I heard a Spaniard behind me say that the bullet had gone clear through my neck. I felt the alcohol, which at ordinary times would sting like the devil, splash on the wound as a pleasant coolness.
They laid me down again while somebody fetched a stretcher. As soon as I knew that the bullet had gone clean through my neck I took it for granted I was done for. I had never heard of a man an animal getting a bullet through the middle of the neck and surviving it. The blood was dribbling out of the corner of my mouth. "The artery's gone," I thought. I wondered how long you last when your carotid artery is cut; not many minutes, presumably. Everything was very blurry. There must have been about two minutes during which I assumed I was killed. And that too was interesting -- I mean it is interesting to know what your thoughts would be at such a time. My first thought, conventionally enough, was for my wife. My second was violent resentment at having to leave this world which, when all is said and done, s me so well. I had time to feel this very vividly. The stupid mischance infuriated me. The meaninglessness of it! To be bumped off, not even in battle, but in this stale corner of the trenches, thanks to a moment's carelessness! I thought, too, of the man who had shot me -- wondered what he was like, whether he was a Spaniard or foreigner, whether he knew he had got me, and so forth. I could not feel any resentment against him. I reflected that as he was a Fascist I would have killed him if I could, but that if he had been taken prisioner and brought before me at this moment I would merely have congratulated him on his good shooting. It may be, though, that if you were really dying your thoughts would be quite different.
They had just got me on to the stretcher when my paralyzed right arm came to life and began hurting damnably. At the time I imagined that I must have broken it in falling; but the pain reassured me, for I knew that your sensations do not become more acute when you are dying. I began to feel more normal and to be sorry for the four poor devils who were sweating and slithering with the stretcher on their shoulders. It was a mile and a half to the ambulance, and vile going, over lumpy, slippery tracks. I knew what a sweat it was, having helped to carry a wounded man down a day or two earlier. The leaves of the silver poplars which, in places, finger our trenches brushed against my face; I thought what a good thing it was to be alive in a world where silver poplars grow. But all the while the pain in my arm was diabolical, making me swear and then try not to swear, because every time I breathed too hard the blood bubbled out of my mouth.For the eleventh year in a row, Deschutes Brewery will be releasing The Abyss.
This year’s incarnation of the imperial stout comes in at 11 percent ABV and is brewed with black strap molasses, licorice and dry-spiced with both cherry bark and vanilla beans. In addition, 21 percent of the beer was aged in oak bourbon barrels, while 21 percent was aged in oak wine barrels and eight percent was ganged in new oak barrels sourced from Oregon.
Last year, the Bend, Ore.-based brewery celebrated ten years of The Abyss by releasing three different versions of the imperial stout: The Abyss 2015, an 11 percent ABV imperial stout brewed with blackstrap molasses and brewer’s licorice with vanilla beans and cherry bark added before being partially aged for six months in bourbon, Oregon oak and pinot noir wine barrels; Cognac Barrel-Aged The Abyss, an 11.5 percent ABV aged for 12 months in “incredibly old Cognac barrels…from France” and Rye Whiskey Barrel-Aged The Abyss, an 11.5 percent ABV imperial stout aged for 12 months in rye whiskey casks sourced from Bardstown, Ky.-based Willett Distillery.
The Abyss 2016 will be packaged in 22-ounce bottles and will be bottled on Sept. 12. In an email, Jason Randles, digital marketing manager for Deschutes told Tenemu that the imperial stout is scheduled to be shipped to retailers in November.
Update (Aug. 25, 2016) — This post was updated to include details on the release date. It was originally published on Aug. 24, 2016.When Abdel Hameed al-Youssef regained consciousness after a chemical weapons attack on his hometown in northern Syria, the husband and father awoke to a nightmare.
His 9-month-old twins, his wife Tallulah and more than 20 other family members were dead.
"When I came to, I asked for them," Youssef, a farmer, told ABC News on Saturday. "All dead."
The morning of April 4 began like any other for residents of Khan Sheikhoun in Syria's Idlib province. Youssef and his wife woke up to an airstrike that hit just 20 meters from their home, and the children were frightened.
"We're bombed constantly," Youssef said.
With the twins, Ahmad and Aya, clinging to his neck, Youssef and his wife stepped outside their home to assess the situation. Rubble surrounded the house, he said.
They continued walking through the neighborhood when two more airstrikes hit nearby. But there were no sounds of explosions, Youssef said.
Then, they smelled a strange odor and people around them began to collapse.
"At this moment, I felt something was wrong. So I handed over Ahmad and Aya to my wife and I told her to get away from here," Youssef said. "I told her to get to safety."
Tallulah took the twins and four of their neighbors' children to find a safe place, while Youssef rescued several neighbors who had collapsed and were foaming at the mouth.
"I covered my mouth with my hand as much as possible," he said.
Youssef ran to his parents' home in the town, which was about 100 meters away from the poisonous airstrike. There, he found some of his brothers, their wives, their children and a cousin –- all nonresponsive and foaming at the mouth.
Youssef hurried to another family member's home nearby, where he found one of his nieces also dead. As he tried to pick up her small body, his eyes went hazy and he had trouble breathing.
"I was conscious for only a few seconds and then I fainted," Youssef said.
It wasn’t until Youssef awoke that he learned the fate of his wife and children.
First responders told Youssef that they found his wife with the twins and the neighbors' kids in a shelter near his house. Tallulah was still holding the children close but she was so ill from the toxic gas that she was unable to walk.
The twins, Ahmad and Aya, were still foaming at the mouth when Youssef saw their bodies. He wiped the foam from their mouths and took them in his arms.
"I told them, 'Hello darlings. I took too long. I rescued everyone else but I couldn't rescue you,'" Youssef told ABC News, in between tears. "I was expecting them to hug me back."
Harrowing images of this anguished father cradling the lifeless bodies of his twins captured the international community's attention and galvanized the United States to retaliate.
At least 87 civilians, including 31 children and 20 women, were killed in the April 4 chemical attack, according to the Britain-based Syrian Observatory for Human Rights, making it the worst chemical attack in the war-torn country since 2013.
After conducting autopsies on victims who were brought to Turkish hospitals for treatment, Turkey's health ministry confirmed that the patients had been exposed to sarin gas, a banned nerve agent.
A U.S. official also said the symptoms exhibited by the victims pointed to sarin gas.
The U.S. official told ABC News that a Syrian military fixed-wing aircraft dropped the chemical weapons on what was an underground hospital in the town run by an al-Qaeda affiliated rebel group formerly known as Al-Nusra Front.
In response, the United States, which blamed Syrian President Bashar al-Assad’s regime for the deadly attack, launched airstrikes against the Syrian government two days later.
U.S. warships in the Mediterranean Sea fired a barrage of Tomahawk missiles at the Shayrat Air Base in Homs province, where an aircraft carrying the chemical weapons in the April 4 attack is believed to have taken off.
President Trump said Thursday the airstrikes were in the "vital national security interest" of the United States.
Nikki Haley, U.S. ambassador to the United Nations, on Friday warned that the United States is "prepared to do more" in Syria.
"The United States took a very measured step last night. We are prepared to do more, but we hope that will not be necessary," Haley said during a special open session of the U.N. Security Council devoted to discussing Syria.
Story continuesCredit: The CW
The dawn of the Reverse Flash, and the end of new episodes in 2014 for The Flash, is getting a few extra seconds, likely for an extra surprise or two.
The episode, “The Man in the Yellow Suit,” introduces the character of the Reverse Flash in an official fashion - he’s been teased already, of course, as Barry saw him kill his mother in the pilot episode. Later, as Barry’s surrogate father Detective West started to get into more investigation, this yellow-suited Flash duplicate ran in for a little evidence theft and a warning to stop looking into it.
Now his full debut is hitting on Tuesday, December 9, with an episode that will feature Barry coming face to face (but not knowing what face he’s seeing). The trailer showed Reverse Flash in a confrontation with Detective West as well as two of the top candidates of fan speculation as to the villain’s identity: Detective Eddie Thawne and Dr. Harrison Wells.
So why the extra minute and forty-five seconds? It’s likely for a post-credits scene that will deliver a clue to one or both of the two big character identity meetings: Reverse Flash and Dr. Wells. Will we find out definitively who one or both of them are? Probably not, but the extra time should give fans more to think about during the winter break.The stray dogs, no longer culled following a recent change to the law, were shown kindness and compassion
With whatever small change they earned the boys and girls fed their dogs, who were often abused on the streets
children had no-one to turn to but had formed incredible bonds with the stray dogs
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They say dogs are a man's best friend, but sometimes they are their entire family too.
For the children of Dhaka, a terrifying and desolate life on the streets has been made bearable because of unconditional love - and not from their parents but from their dog companions.
Orphaned and thoroughly alone, the children, all from impoverished families, had no one to turn to and were surviving day to day, feeding themselves when they could, reported Bark Post.
Photographer Sam Edmonds found the orphaned children living in Dhaka, Bangladesh, had created a family with their dog companions
For the children of Dhaka, a terrifying and desolate life on the streets has been made bearable because of unconditional love they get from their dog companions
But when photographer and animal rights activist Sam Edmonds visited the area in Bangladesh he found something remarkable.
A makeshift family had been formed between the youngsters and dogs who had drifted into the Robindra Shorbod park in Dhaka.
With whatever small change they earned - sometimes from scavenging for plastics to trade for small coins - the boys and girls fed their dogs and those who did not return to their tin shacks, stayed with the animals overnight, keeping warm.
This unconventional relationship has been made possible since the country's former practice of dog culling - where stray animals are inhumanely killed for fear of spreading rabies - has been made illegal as of November last year.
Animal welfare group Obhoyaronno controls the stray dog population through a Catch-Neuter-Vaccinate-Release program, says Bark Post.
Life for stray dogs in Dhaka is difficult and, used to neglect and abuse, they grow timid and frightened.
With whatever small change they earned - sometimes from scavenging for plastics to trade for small coins - the boys and girls fed their dogs and those who did not return to their tin shacks, stayed with the animals overnight, keeping warm
This unconventional relationship has been made possible since the country's former practice of dog culling - where stray animals are inhumanely killed for fear of spreading rabies
Life for stray dogs in Dhaka is difficult and, used to neglect and abuse, they grow timid and frightened
But for the dogs living in Robindra Shorbod, they were shown kindness and gratitude.
In a culture where stray dogs were cast aside, these young children had become their guardians and friends and each child shared a special bond with his or her own dog.
And for the street children who don't attend school, Robindra Shorbod has become a place they can call home, where they can play and laugh and feel protected when they go to sleep, says Bark Post.
One such 'family' was Osman and her little tawny dog Tiger. Osman traipsed the streets daily, scavenging for plastics to trade for small coins - but Tiger was by her right by her side.
Now, it seems, the 'families' have dispersed and when Edmonds checked in on their progress last month, a friend told him that most the children are no longer living in the park.
But the story is still a reminder of the powerful bond between man and dog - even in the face of intense adversity.
For the street children who don't attend school, the park of Robindra Shorbod has become a place they can call home
In a culture where stray dogs were cast aside, these young children had become their guardians and friends(Reuters) - The U.S. Drug Enforcement Administration (DEA) on Friday proposed a 20 percent reduction in the manufacture of certain commonly prescribed opioid painkillers as well as other controlled substances for next year.
A pharmacist counts tablets of Hydrocodone at a pharmacy in Portsmouth, Ohio, June 21, 2017. REUTERS/Bryan Woolston
The proposal comes as U.S. regulators and lawmakers take steps to limit the supply of opioids - a class of drugs that include prescription painkillers and heroin - to combat the epidemic of abuse, overdose and addiction.
Under the Controlled Substances Act, which organizes drugs into groups based on risk of abuse or harm, most opioids come under the Schedule II category. The higher the category, the smaller the risk.
Demand for certain Schedule II opioid painkillers including morphine, fentanyl, oxycodone and hydrocodone has dropped after the imposition of measures such as prescription-drug monitoring programs, the DEA said.
Still, opioid overdose kills 142 Americans a day, and drug overdoses now surpass deaths caused by gun homicides and car crashes combined, according to a White House commission formed to combat drug addiction and the opioid crisis. bit.ly/2hutFTZ
The DEA’s proposed production quotas for Schedule I and II substances reflect the amount needed to meet the United States’ medical, scientific, industrial, export and reserve requirements, the agency said.
Members of the public can comment on the proposal over the next 30 days. bit.ly/2fg7Cjj
The DEA recommendation comes about two months after the U.S. Food and Drug Administration took the rare step of asking a drugmaker to withdraw its opioid painkiller from the market, citing the public health crisis. Endo International Plc in early July agreed to pull the drug, Opana ER.
Earlier this week, U.S. Attorney General Jeff Sessions unveiled a plan to go after doctors and pharmacies suspected of healthcare fraud by over-prescribing opioids.
Purdue Pharma - the maker of one of the most commonly abused long-acting oxycodone painkillers called Oxycontin - was not immediately available for comment.LAS VEGAS – Anthony Johnson gave it everything he had in his UFC 187 main event against Daniel Cormier but his power shots were not enough to overcome the chin and grinding game of Cormier.
Johnson (20-4 MMA, 10-5 UFC) came out firing heavy shots and connected repeatedly. Cormier (16-1 MMA, 5-1 UFC) was forced to fight through an absolute onslaught that seemed as though it might not stop. Cormier tried to make Johnson carry his weight in a body lock against the cage and that seemed small at the time but set things up for later in the fight.
By the end of Round 2, Cormier had managed to utilize his wrestling and Johnson seemed badly fatigued in his corner. A tired Johnson was there for the taking in Round 3 as Cormier again put the fight on the floor but this time managed to take the back and sink in a rear-naked choke for the victory.
With the win, Cormier became the new UFC light heavyweight champion.
Check out the video highlights of the fight, which aired on pay-per-view from MGM Grand Garden Arena in Las Vegas.
Also see:
For complete coverage of UFC 187, check out the UFC Events section of the site.Cory Brooks said he wants answers as to why his dog Smoke was shot twice by Odessa police officers during an alarm call Wednesday morning.
“Smoke is the most loyal dog ever. He is at your side at all times. He is just a really good dog,” Brooks said. “It was more joy than anything when they told me he was going to probably live. I understand they have a job to do and I am not trying to make OPD look bad.”
Odessa Police Department officials said that sometime around 9 a.m. officers were called to 4650 Lemonwood Lane about an alarm going off at the home.
When they arrived a black Labrador, known as Smoke, jumped on the side gate of the home causing it to come unlatched, officers on scene said.
“The dog exited the gated area and went towards officers in what they reported to be in an aggressive manner and the officers defended themselves by shooting the canine,” Sgt. Pedro Gonzalez said at the scene.
A dash-cam video provided by the OPD shows the two officers backing up in the front yard as the dog approaches them. The officers fired multiple times in the front yard; however, there is no video showing the backyard or how the gate originally came open.
Gonzalez said that both of the officers shot the dog once; the dog had a bullet wound in its jaw and its leg. OPD spokesman Cpl. Steve LeSueur said officers Lindsay Waychoff and Joel Smith were the officers who shot the dog.
Originally it was reported that only two shots were fired, but Brooks said Gonzalez returned to his home later in the day and reported that four shots were actually fired at the dog.
LeSueur said that Waychoff and Smith were checking to make sure the home was secure when the dog “charged through” a gate and chased officers through the front yard before the shooting took place.
“We do have the right to defend ourselves when we are dealing with an aggressive animal, including deadly force,” LeSueur said.
Brooks said he wanted to see the video and also find out how a bullet ended up in his backyard. “I want to make sure that all of those officers were out here (in the front yard) when those shots were fired,” Brooks said before the dash-cam video was released. “He is saying that they shot him in the front yard. Regardless, if they are standing out here how did that bullet get on my back porch?”
Brooks said his next step is to try and see the video from the shooting to figure out what happened.
“I am definitely going to file a complaint. The thing is, if they show me evidence that they didn’t shoot him in the backyard and they did their job then that’s one thing,” Brooks said. “It is not about me trying to get back at someone for shooting my dog. I just want to know the truth about what happened.”
Brooks said initially that police changed their story more than once while explaining the shooting to him. When he arrived at the house he asked police if someone entered his home and the police said no. It was at this point that Brooks said he knew his dog was shot.
“I said, ‘So you shot my dog then?’ and they didn’t really answer the question and I just said, ‘Tell me if he is alive or dead because if he is alive I’m going back there to try and get him to the vet,’” Brooks said.
The dog was taken to an emergency veterinarian clinic by Odessa Animal Control and is expected to survive, Gonzalez said. Police also transported Brooks to the veterinarian clinic to check up on the dog.
Brooks said he also asked the officer why a stun gun wasn’t used but the officer told him that sometimes it doesn’t bring the animals down.
“I have a 6-year-old boy who lives in the house and my girlfriend so what if the bullet comes through my house and kills a kid. That’s ridiculous,” Brooks said.
Gonzalez said that police would continue to investigate the shooting and that the two officers would not be placed on administrative leave.
Brooks said he is happy that his dog is going to survive the shooting and hopefully make a full recovery.NICOLAS ASFOURI/AFP/Getty Images
The waiting list for organ transplants could be shortened in two years, but not without permission from authorities.
Scientists are waiting for the green light to conduct clinical trials transplanting genetically modified pig organs into humans, the South China Morning Post reported.
If the government allows the trials to go ahead, pig organ transplants will be added to a growing list of new surgeries pioneered in China. This year, a man received an ear transplant from a ear grown on his arm. And in April, Italian surgeon Sergio Canavero said the first human head transplant could be less than a year away.
The proposed trials are part of a national xenotransplantation project funded by the central government and participated by more than 10 research institutes. A successful test could be big news for China, where health authorities quoted by SCMP say more than 1.5 million people require a transplant every year (Chinese media says there are more than 300,000 patients) but fewer than 10,000 organs are donated. The country is also home to the world's biggest pig-cloning farm, BGI, which could eventually provide pigs bred for organs for transplants.
Pig organs are preferred for xenotransplantation, because it is deemed most similar to human organs in terms of size and physiology. Scientists have also seen positive results when tests are conducted on animals -- a baboon that received a pig's heart at the National Institutes of Health in the US survived more than two years. And in China, 400 cornea transplants have been performed from pigs to humans with a 95 percent success rate after the government permitted it in 2015,.
CNET has reached out to participating research institutes for comments.
iHate: CNET looks at how intolerance is taking over the internet.
It's Complicated: This is dating in the age of apps. Having fun yet?The U.S. Court of Appeals for the D.C. Circuit’s opinion today in Klayman v. Obama is highly disappointing and, worse, based on a mistaken concern about the underlying facts. The court said that since the plaintiffs' phone service was provided by one subsidiary of Verizon—Verizon Wireless—rather than another—Verizon Business—they couldn't prove that they had standing to sue. The court sent the case back to U.S. District Judge Richard Leon to give the Klayman plaintiffs an opportunity to prove that their records were in fact collected. The appeals court did not rule one way or the other of the constitutionality of the mass collection program.
As an initial matter, recent releases by the government make clear that the plaintiffs' records were in fact collected. Earlier this month, in response to a Freedom of Information request from the New York Times, the government released documents confirming that it does indeed collect bulk telephone records from Verizon Wireless under Section 215. Specifically, the formally-released documents reference orders to Verizon Wireless as of September 29, 2010, when they had to report a problem to the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court.
This should mean that the plaintiffs records were collected, at least as of 2010, but likely long before and after. The government should give up its shell game here and admit the time frame that it collected the Klayman plaintiffs records, along with all other Verizon Wireless customers.
But more importantly, the government’s telephone records collection was, by design, a mass collection program. Famously, then NSA Director Keith Alexander told Congress that "you need the haystack to find the needle." Admittedly then, the records of millions of innocent Americans were collected.
Yet despite this, the court allowed itself to be blinded. The court declined to consider the critically important questions of whether the U.S. Constitution allows the government to secretly shift from targeted to mass surveillance of the telephone calls (and associations) of Americans. It surrendered its role to ensure that the law is justly interpreted and applied and that the government act within the Constitution. Instead, it endorsed the government’s argument that no public, adversarial court can review its actions unless those seeking review can prove with some certainty that they were one of the millions whose records were collected. The court thus joined the government in requiring that one challenging the mass collection perform an almost impossible task—proving the still secret details of an admitted mass surveillance program in order to have a court determine whether it is constitutional.
The ruling is a letdown, especially since the court seemed interested in addressing the underlying questions about the government's ability to collect the records during the oral argument in November 2014, in which I was allowed to participate on behalf of EFF and the ACLU. We'll have a later post explaining likely future steps in the case and how this fits in with the passage of USA FREEDOM Act. EFF will continue to fight to hold the NSA accountable for mass collection of Americans' private information. Our phone and Internet networks should be protected from unfettered government spying.Managers, Employees, and HR Professionals are Willing and Open to Working Alongside Individuals with a Criminal Record Managers, Employees, and HR Professionals are Willing and Open to Working Alongside Individuals with a Criminal Record Learn More Read the Report
Why is civil discourse important? It is conversation that looks to find shared opportunity, not conflict. In 2017, some of the greatest minds in criminal justice reform convened in Washington, DC, to chart a new course to reform our criminal justice system. Read More
New Survey: 17 Years on Americans, Including Veterans, Want Out of Afghanistan Learn More
Occupational Licensing Reforms Remove Roadblocks In a new survey by the Charles Koch Institute and Real Clear Politics, Americans and South Koreans overwhelmingly agreed that they do not want to pursue military action against North Korea, whether or not the June 12 summit is successful in securing denuclearization of the Korean Peninsula. Read MoreApril 9, 2017
Jim Wendler has a new book on the way: 5/3/1 Forever.
April 9, 2017
The site now is now served securely with https using Let’s Encrypt.
October 13, 2015
Added the Building the Monolith template.
March 22, 2015
Added a 0.75 pound/kilogram plate input.
January 16, 2015
A generous donation supported the addition of the Full Body, Full Boring template from Wendler’s book Beyond 5/3/1: Simple Training for Extraordinary Results.
December 23, 2014
I've moved the Assistance Template selection to the top of the form and renamed it just Template because with Wendler’s newer templates even which main lifts are used is controlled by your template choice. For example, the Beach Body Challenge has hang cleans but no other template does. It isn't a world of just press, dead, bench, squat anymore.
December 22, 2014
A generous donation supported the addition of a bodybuilding template from T-Nation Blood and Chalk 8 and Wendler’s Blog.
December 21, 2014
It’s the shortest day of the year. Time to start thinking about your beach body! I’ve added the Beach Body Challenge template. This template is not really 5/3/1 at all but it’s from Wendler and definitely reflects his way of thinking.
December 18, 2014
Fixed the Simplest Strength template. Now you can enter your maxes for the big assistance exercises: incline press, close-grip bench press, front squat, and stiff-leg deadlift. Simplest Strength is a great template that Wendler has promoted heavily. I hope these changes to the calculator encourage more people to try it for a few cycles.
December 17, 2014
Thanks to Rippetoe’s lectures, we’ve all grown up and know that “Press” means “Standing Overhead Barbell Press” or “Military Press”. Even Wendler calls it just “Press” these days. Now this calculator does too.
November 23, 2014
Added Boring But Big deload options from the Beyond 5/3/1 book.
November 22, 2014
Added Boring But Big 5 × 5, 5 × 3, and 5 × 1 variations from the Beyond 5/3/1 book.
November 20, 2014
Added four more deload week options from the Beyond 5/3/1 book.
November 19, 2014
Added two warm-up options: DeFranco Agile 8 and |
Beijing University and the Beijing University of Aeronautics and Astronautics (BUAA) began a program to train national defense students. These students reportedly will spend four years at the civilian universities and then two years at AFAU for flight and command training (China Military Online, June 28; July 27; September 20, 2011; Xinhua, June 28; PLA Daily, May 24, 2012).
Building on the PLAAF plan, the General Staff Department (GSD), General Political Department (GPD), and the MOE expanded the effort this year by initiating a joint pilot training program to allow high school graduates to study in both military educational institutes and civilian universities. The program seeks an innovative military-civilian integration model in order to maximize resources to optimize training of student pilots. The first 87 candidates will train in military educational institutes such as the Naval Aviation College and AFAU, and Beijing University (25 students), Tsinghua University (32 students) and BUAA (30 students). The civilian universities will provide a basic education with the military educational institutes providing specialized education and flight training. Qualified graduates will be sent to aviation units in the ground forces, PLAAF and PLA Navy (PLAN) (China Military Online, July 5; Xinhua, July 5).
This year the MOE and the four General Departments (Staff, Political, Logistics and Armaments) began targeting juniors from top universities to join the military upon graduation to become military engineers as part of the “3+1” program. Select students undergo a 6-12 month study in military academies and schools, research institutes, high-tech units and armament production enterprises. The program will provide military and academic education and training, as well as possible eligibility for post-graduate study. The government notice stated that over 300 students will be selected this year for the new engineering program (China Military Online, July 10; Xinhua, July 10).
Conclusion
Taiwan and China represent two volunteer recruitment programs moving along opposite trajectories. The Taiwanese volunteer force program has been launched with a shorter preparation and implementation period, and a lack of funding to increase pay and other benefits for servicemen, combined with a general disregard for military service by civilians, resulted in failures to achieve recruitment goals even before the current uproar over Corporal Hung’s death.
Hung’s death in detention is further souring public opinion regarding military service and competence of the armed forces. This inability to reach recruitment goals leaves the status of the volunteer program in doubt, and operational readiness will continue to decline as active duty authorized strength cannot be met. Not all of the fault lies with the Taiwanese military for the, as legislators have failed to meet the military’s stated minimum budgetary requirements. It is difficult to envision how the volunteer system can be saved without significant increases to volunteer pay and benefits and a successful public relations campaign. A return to the old conscription system would appear equally difficult, considering the current state of public opinion regarding military service. Declining operational readiness and an increasingly hollow military will make it difficult for Taiwan to execute its stated defense strategy, will place Taipei in a position of weakness in its dealings with Beijing, and could leave Taiwan’s defense reliant on the U.S. military.
Moving in the opposite direction, the PLA has chosen a gradual, multipronged approach to attract high quality volunteers. The slower approach, supported by adequate funding for increased pay, benefits and other inducements, also allows for reassessments and readjustments to improve the initiatives. The recent moves to recruit highly qualified students, with an emphasis on college students and graduates, appear to be achieving some success. Limited employment opportunities combined with inducements should allow the PLA to recruit better-qualified talent to support a growing high-tech force and complex operational theories. Increasing PLA capabilities will provide a greater range of options against Taiwan, whether coercive or direct military actions.
It is not clear whether recruitment goals for college students and graduates are being met, and poor student physical fitness is hurting recruitment, but it does appear that the PLA is moving forward as it relies to a greater extent on volunteers to man high-tech units, while the Taiwanese program appears to be in deep trouble.
Notes:
1. There are variations such as “2+2” and “4+1” programs combining military and civilian education.Donald Trump was right: The election was rigged. What Trump got wrong (and, boy, does he get things wrong) is that the rigging worked in his favor. The manipulations took three monumental forms: Russian cyber-sabotage; FBI meddling; and systematic Republican efforts, especially in swing states, to prevent minority citizens from casting votes. The cumulative effect was more than sufficient to shift the outcome in Trump’s favor and put the least qualified major-party candidate in the history of the republic into the White House.
Trumpist internet trolls and Trump himself dismiss such concerns as sour grapes, but for anyone who takes seriously the importance of operating a democracy, these assaults on the nation’s core political process constitute threats to the country’s very being. Let’s look at each of these areas of electoral interference in detail.
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Gone phishing: the drone of info warfare
Suppose one morning you receive an email from your internet service provider telling you a security breach has put your data at risk. You are instructed to reset your password immediately. In keeping with the urgency of the situation, the email that delivers the warning provides a link to the page where your new password can be entered. Anxiously you do as instructed, hoping you’ve acted soon enough to prevent a disaster.
Congratulations: You have successfully reset your password. Unfortunately, you have also provided it to the hackers who sent the original, entirely bogus warning about a breach of security. This kind of ploy is called phishing. It’s exactly how the email account of John Podesta, Hillary Clinton’s campaign chair, was penetrated. His assistants fell for the ruse.
Alternatively, a phisher might send dozens of intriguing offers to employees of a certain organization over the course of weeks. Each message provides a link for more information, and as soon as someone in a moment of boredom or confusion clicks on it, presto change-o, the hacker is inside that person’s computer, free to worm through the network to which it’s connected. This is how hackers got into the computers of the Democratic National Committee (DNC) and downloaded not just emails but strategic planning documents and other confidential information.
At this point no one aside from Trump die-hards and maybe Trump himself — he has said so many contradictory things on the subject, it’s difficult to tell what he actually believes — denies that the hackers were Russian and acted under some kind of official instruction, even possibly from the highest levels of Kremlin authority, including Russian President Vladimir Putin. Moreover, it’s clear that the harvest of stolen material was used to help Trump and hurt Clinton. This is the unambiguous conclusion of a National Intelligence Community report released on Jan. 6 and representing the shared conclusions of the CIA, the FBI and the National Security Agency, which stated: “Russia’s goals were to undermine public faith in the U.S. democratic process, denigrate Secretary Clinton and harm her electability and potential presidency. We further assess Putin and the Russian Government developed a clear preference for Trump. We have high confidence in these judgments.”
None of the meddling was as blatantly subversive as taking electronic control of voting machines and altering vote counts. Nor did the Russian hackers disable vote-tallying computers, as they did in Ukraine in 2014, but they achieved the next best thing. In our information-drenched world, the drumbeat of background noise can be as powerful as what one hears in the foreground. The Russians and their allies, in part through WikiLeaks, parceled out the juiciest tidbits from the stolen material over the course of the summer and fall, and the news media ate it up.
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The Democratic dirty laundry they aired showed that Debbie Wasserman Schultz, chair of the DNC, favored Hillary Clinton over Bernie Sanders. In the ensuing flap, Wasserman Schultz resigned and the public was left with the message that the DNC was both untrustworthy and in disarray — and indeed, following the chair’s departure, the disarray couldn’t have been more real. When other emails were released in which Podesta and various colleagues second-guessed Clinton’s decisions, the message that lingered in the public mind was that even her closest associates had doubts about her, never mind that candid, water-cooler criticism is normal in any undertaking.
The Russians did more than merely steal computer information. They also planted false news stories, both with state sanction (according to the national intelligence report) and without it. One of the upshots of the faux-news business is that, amid intense click-bait competition for advertisers, only sites and articles pandering to the far right make money. Disseminating made-up stories favorable to Hillary Clinton or Bernie Sanders returned nothing to the bottom line of the freelance hackers operating in what has become one of the Russian-speaking world’s newest cottage industries. Evidently a suspension of critical thinking — or its complete absence — is easier to exploit among those disposed to hate liberals and love Trump.
That this kind of gullibility is more than just politically dangerous became clear in December when Edgar Welch of Salisbury, N.C., stormed into Comet Ping Pong, a pizza joint on Connecticut Avenue in Washington, D.C., filled mainly with parents and children. Welch was carrying a handgun and an assault rifle, which he fired. He later explained that he intended to “self-investigate” reports that had been ricocheting around the internet asserting that Hillary Clinton and John Podesta operated a child trafficking ring out of that restaurant. Fortunately, no one was hurt.
The hoax that fooled the benighted Edgar Welch first appeared on the internet in late October, shortly before the election. Via Twitter, Reddit, Facebook and other platforms, users subsequently clicked it onward several million times. Among the enthusiastic retweeters of this sort of claptrap (if not the specific Comet Ping Pong story) was retired Lieutenant General Michael Flynn, whom Trump has named his national security adviser, a position for a modicum of probity, if not honesty, used to be a requirement. (Flynn’s son did, however, promote the Comet story on social media.)
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In the echo chamber of the internet, the drone of half-truths and lies blurs the edges of the real. Eventually, it imparts a kind of lazy, unevaluated validity to memes of all kinds: Hillary is a crook, immigrants are criminals, Muslims are terrorists. In such a world, Trump’s chronic mendacity becomes unremarkable. This is political branding, advertising and product definition in the twenty-first century. It’s part of what the spinmeisters call "seizing the narrative," and the more you seize it for your side, the harder it becomes for your opponents to make their case. Truth is beside the point.
Russian faux-news stories, purloined emails and “exfiltrated” documents dogged the Democratic campaign. They were like gnats that packed a painful bite, buzzing continually wherever Clinton went. They distracted the media and the public from Trump’s much more substantial sins and reinforced the memes that he and his proxies chanted at every opportunity. They built toward a death by a thousand cuts. That was the background. Then, into the foreground stepped FBI Director James Comey.
Out of line
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On Oct. 28, 2016, only 11 days before the election, with early voting already underway in many states, Comey delivered a letter to Congressional leaders stating that, “in connection with an unrelated case, the FBI has learned of the existence of emails that appear to be pertinent to the investigation” of Hillary Clinton’s private email server. They were, devastatingly enough, on a computer that scandal-ridden former Congressman Anthony Weiner had shared with his wife and Clinton aide Huma Abedin. At the time, Comey did not have a warrant to inspect those emails or any idea what the emails specifically contained. He released his letter in violation of longstanding Justice Department procedures and contrary to direct advice from Attorney General Loretta Lynch.
The most sympathetic thing that might be said about Comey’s rogue gambit was that he felt a muddle-headed sense of obligation to keep the public and, more particularly, Republican members of Congress informed about developments in an investigation that he had declared resolved nearly four months earlier. A darker interpretation is that he dropped his bomb intending to help the Trump campaign, which, if true, would constitute a violation of the Hatch Act and entitle him to an extended stay in a facility populated by people he used to prosecute. We may never know his motives in full, but it is rumored that he will offer some kind of statement soon.
Motives aside, Comey’s letter detonated across the late-stage election landscape. Predictably the media went into overdrive, as did Trump. With his usual bombast he proclaimed that “this is bigger than Watergate,” and the spinning went on from there. Clinton’s polling numbers nosedived. On Nov. 5, Comey issued a follow-up letter in which he conceded that, um, well, the trove of emails added absolutely nothing new to the previously dormant investigation. This 11th hour admission did little to mend the damage already inflicted on Clinton and may, in fact, only have deepened the injury by keeping the item in the news and underscoring the suspicions many voters felt toward her.
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Nate Silver at FiveThirtyEight suggested that the flap may have cost Clinton a three-point swing among the electorate and calculated that, after the Comey bombshell hit, the probability of her winning the presidency plunged by 16 percent. He also suggested that Comey’s letter may have influenced down-ballot races, especially in the all-important struggle for control of the Senate. Bloomberg reported even more dramatic numbers, finding that Clinton’s 12-point lead eroded to a single percentage point, making the race essentially a dead heat.
Digging deeply into the “Comey Effect,” Sean McElwee and his colleagues at Vox found that it correlated with sharp downturns for Clinton in both national and state polling, probably accounting for a surge toward Trump that was particularly pronounced among “late-deciders” — people who made up their minds only when they were at the brink of going to the polls. Moreover, the surge was likely shaped by an astonishing “peak” in the negative news coverage of Clinton, centering on her emails. In the last week of the campaign, 37 percent of all coverage of Clinton was “scandal”-related, far higher than had been the case for months.
These are powerful statistics. Three percentage points in an election in which nearly 129 million ballots were cast for the top two candidates amounted to 3.87 million votes. Add them to the 2.86 million by which Clinton beat Trump in the popular vote, and you have a victory margin more than a million and a half votes larger than that by which Obama beat Romney in 2012. You also have a big win in the Electoral College. People would have been talking about a landslide.
As things turned out, Trump’s victory in the Electoral College was determined by fewer than a combined 100,000 votes in the swing states of Pennsylvania, Michigan and Wisconsin. You can massage the numbers many different ways, but if Comey’s letter accounted for only 2 percent of Trump’s votes in those states, then without the letter Clinton would have won all three of them — and the presidency.
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Elections are always contingent: Weird stuff happens. In 1960, Richard Nixon hit his knee on a car door moments before the first-ever televised presidential debate. He’d just had surgery on the knee to combat a staph infection, and the pain from the swelling bump undermined his performance.
It’s an old story: For want of a nail, a shoe is lost, for want of a shoe, a horse, and the rest is history. But the intervention of a high government official on a completely politicized hot-button issue at the apex of a presidential campaign is unprecedented in American history. It exceeds by orders of magnitude the contingencies of elections past.
Voter suppression
In the last year or two did you receive a postcard from election authorities asking you to confirm your present address? I did. Those postcards originate from Operation Crosscheck, a brainchild of Kris Kobach, the Republican secretary of state in Kansas, in which 27 states collaborated to uncover the identities of citizens registered to vote in multiple states. That’s a common enough occurrence since people rarely bother to cancel old registrations when they move from one state to another. Sounds benign, right?
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Not so. As Greg Palast detailed in Rolling Stone last August, this purge of voter rolls was methodologically inept and had the effect of disproportionately disenfranchising minority voters.
The crosschecking frequently matched only first and last names, ignoring middle names and suffixes like junior or senior. As a result, common surnames — Jones, Washington, Garcia and the like — generated huge numbers of matches. The intent of the program was to prevent double voting, a form of voter fraud that the right has frequently decried as widespread, but for which no one has found substantial evidence. (As The New York Times reported in the wake of election 2016, no significant evidence of voter fraud of any sort was found.) This fake issue has, however, been used as a smokescreen for implementing voting restrictions that inhibit poor people, students and minorities, who usually vote Democratic, from exercising their franchise.
Poor people, as Palast points out, are “overrepresented in 85 of 100 of the most common last names. If your name is Washington, there's an 89-percent chance you're African-American. If your last name is Hernandez, there's a 94-percent chance you're Hispanic. If your name is Kim, there's a 95-percent chance you're Asian.”
Crosscheck sent 7.2 million matches to the 28 originally participating states. (Oregon dropped out when its officials realized the extent of Crosscheck’s flaws.) Nearly all of them with Republican secretaries of state then handled matters as they saw fit, eliminating an estimated 1.1 million voters from their rolls. Virginia, for instance, dropped more than 41,000 registrations as “inactive” shortly before the election. In many cases, state authorities sent voters cryptic, small-print postcards like the one I received.
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Undoubtedly, many students and poor voters, who move frequently from apartment to apartment, never even got their postcards, and when they failed to respond, their voter registrations were canceled. In Michigan, which Donald Trump won by 10,704 votes, Crosscheck provided a purge list of 449,922 names. How many of these people were prevented from voting? How many voted but had their ballots disallowed? No one knows for sure, but the situation cries out for sustained and aggressive investigation.
At least 14 states compounded the problems of Operation Crosscheck by creating new, additional obstacles for voters, including eliminating early voting on weekends, reducing polling place hours and mandating the use of photo IDs. In Wisconsin, a new voter ID law was sold to the public with promises that the state’s motor vehicles department would issue appropriate IDs to non-drivers within six business days of application. In actual fact, the process often took six to eight weeks. Even an order from a federal court (that found as many as 300,000 voters may have been affected) failed to speed up the turgid Wisconsin bureaucracy.
In the November election, voter turnout in Wisconsin, which Trump won by 22,748 votes, was the lowest in 20 years. It fell 13 percent in Milwaukee, where most of the state’s black voters live. Part of the problem was undoubtedly the unpopularity of the major candidates, but voter suppression seems to have played a significant role too. As Ari Berman of the Nation points out, the active discouragement of poor and minority citizens from voting — not just in Wisconsin, but in Virginia, North Carolina and many other states — was undoubtedly the most underreported story of 2016.
Alas, poor Hamilton
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The last kind of man whom Alexander Hamilton and James Madison, as architects of the new American republic, saw as a fit head of state was someone modeled on the character of a medieval prince: narcissistic, volatile, cruel, deceitful and as vulnerable to manipulation by flattery as by insult. But Hamilton and Madison were hardly naïve. They fully understood that no democracy could be completely immune from such men. In fact, they expected that the House of Representatives, in particular, would ultimately open its doors to a fair share of lunatics, demagogues and nincompoops. History has more than validated this view.
Hamilton and Madison, however, believed that the presidency of the new United States had to be protected from unqualified men at all costs, and so they came up with a plan. They invented the Electoral College. Writing in the Federalist 68 in March 1788, Hamilton extolled their creation and explained,
“The process of election affords a moral certainty, that the office of President will never fall to the lot of any man who is not in an eminent degree endowed with the requisite qualifications. Talents for low intrigue, and the little arts of popularity, may alone suffice to elevate a man to the first honors in a single State; but it will require other talents, and a different kind of merit, to establish him in the esteem and confidence of the whole Union, or of so considerable a portion of it as would be necessary to make him a successful candidate for the distinguished office of President of the United States.”
The inauguration of Donald J. Trump looms. If the old saying about “rolling over in one’s grave” has any substance, Hamilton and Madison should be spinning like turbines.
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In truth, our electoral process is broken. Key protections provided by the Voting Rights Act of 1965 were gutted in 2013 by a Supreme Court more blatantly political than any in living memory. Right-wingers in North Carolina thereupon ginned up a suite of voting restrictions that, in the words of a federal judge, targeted black Democratic voters “with almost surgical precision.” The judge struck down the most egregious provisions of that law, but repressive efforts in North Carolina, Wisconsin and other Crosscheck states will continue to be advanced, as opportunity permits. The vital task is to deny the opportunity.
Meanwhile, James Comey has shown that a lone, rogue public official can interject himself into the most sensitive of national moments in a way that not even his roguish predecessor J. Edgar Hoover would have countenanced. And Vladimir Putin has evidently found the cheapest of methods, using electrons instead of sanctions or guns, to undermine the political institutions of his adversaries and befuddle their people.
The extent to which Trump campaign functionaries maintained links, if any, with Russian operatives remains unknown. On Jan. 11, a 35-page document consisting of memoranda on Trump’s Russian connections, compiled by a researcher hired by his opposition, became public. That document contains allegations ranging from the salacious to the treasonous. Although none of them has been verified, the leaked release of the memoranda has intensified public pressure on Trump to offer a full accounting of his relationship with Russian business interests and the Putin regime. Irrespective of whether these lines of inquiry produce information of substance, the fact remains that a foreign, hostile power used subterfuge to interfere with the domestic electoral politics of the United States.
On that last count, many an Iranian, Guatemalan or citizen of any of scores of countries might justifiably say that turnabout is fair play, for the United States has a long and well-documented history of meddling in other countries’ elections. The consequences of a breakdown of democracy in the United States, however, are costly for the entire world. Missiles and nuclear codes are at stake. So, too, is the ever-narrowing window for meaningful global action on climate change, not to mention the clout of the world’s largest economy and most powerful military. All of these things, by hook and by crook, have now been entrusted to a man very much like a medieval prince.Never mind decades of failed trickle-down economic policies on a national level, the talking heads at Fox want to pretend what happens in our cities takes place in a vacuum.
From this Saturday's Cashin' In on Faux "news," the usual suspects were on there bashing liberals, our social safety nets, and pretending that liberals running our big cities in America are solely responsible for all of the economic woes in communities across the United States, and with impoverished areas that haven't seen the same sort of recovery as a lot of the country following the financial crisis that took place just as President Obama was being sworn into office.
BOLLING: More protesters getting ready to hit the streets in Baltimore and some Democrats now blaming the media and the police for inner-city problems, but should they be pointing the finger at forty years of liberal policies instead? […] Now Wayne, maybe they should be looking in the mirror? ROGERS: Well I think so Eric in the following sense. Poverty and despair are results. They're not causes and the economics here and the racial questions here are not pertinent unless you go back and figure out what is the cause of all of this, and most of this is cultural. Eighty percent of black kids in the United States are born out of wedlock. Now that creates a problem that results in this despair and poverty in the black communities in a lot of the major cities. And the other part about this is no leadership. You've got somebody like Al Sharpton, I mean, the worst, instead of Martin Luther King. That makes a bid difference and that will ultimately cure this problem, but it's going to take a long time.
If this sounds eerily familiar to some of the arguments made on one of their other Saturday "business block" shows and blaming those who are living in poverty for not doing more to change their own situation, don't be surprised, since they're all reading off of the same set of talking points Roger Ailes sent them in the morning.
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Bolling continued and made sure he got in the GOP talking point where you say "Democrat" instead of "Democratic" because we all know they hope all their viewers hear is "rat."
BOLLING: Okay, we're going to get to Al in one second, but Jonathan, forty years of Democrat policies, redistribution, high taxation, poverty levels in Baltimore are almost double the national average. HOENIG: Yeah, I mean Eric, what have the liberal economic policies been over the last forty years? The welfare state and the entitlement mentality, not just for inner-city, but for a lot of folks of meager means. And what has that done? It's inculcated dependency. It's retarded the growth in a lot of these communities, and most importantly, it's destroyed these peoples' self esteem over now many, many generations. So there's not one factor, but certainly, these policies are a big part.
After continuing their bitching about Baltimore Mayor Stephanie Rawlings-Blake refusing to respond to their correspondent shoving a microphone in her face when she was about to appear at Sharpton's event this Thursday, host Bolling asked regular Michelle Fields to weigh in.
FIELDS: Well, if the people of Baltimore want to know why their city is the way that it is, all they have to do is look at the Democratic party. These are the people who have been calling the shots for decades. Police abuse is just a breaking point right now, but the reason why the people of Baltimore are upset is because they've been living under liberal policies for decades. We're talking about the state of Maryland that's ranked number ten in the country for the highest taxes. Baltimore since the 1920's have only had two Republican mayors ever, since the 1920's. I mean, if they want to see what the problem is, all they have to do is look at the fact that they're living under these liberal policies that are preventing them from living up to their full potential.
So what did Fields and the rest of them have to offer when asked what their solutions were for Baltimore's problems when asked. I'm sure you all will be shocked... or maybe not.
School "choice" or in other words, privatizing public education.
Taking shots at Republicans for being too "liberal" by accepting that we've got a minimum wage.
More attacks on the "cultural" problems with the residents of Baltimore and attempting to blame single mothers having children when they're not married as the cause of all of our economic woes across the country.
Rogers repeated his praise of MLK at the end of the segment. Who wants to take dibs that the right wing media would not be treating Dr. King just as badly or worse as they have Al Sharpton and Jessie Jackson if he were still alive today and had not been assassinated?An executive of defunct cheese companies that sold “real parmesan cheese” containing wood pulp instead of parmesan to stores nationwide for three years entered guilty pleas Friday for herself and the companies in federal criminal cases. Michelle Myrter, daughter of Castle Cheese Co. co-CEO George Myrter, pleaded guilty to one misdemeanor criminal count in U.S. District Court for the Western District of Pennsylvania. District Judge Mark Hornak released her on a personal recognizance bond pending sentencing. She faces up to one year in prison and/or up to $100,000 in fines. She admitted to “aiding and abetting the introduction of adulterated and misbranded cheese products into interstate commerce, in violation of provisions of the Federal Food, Drug and Cosmetic Act.” The Justice Department filed criminal charges against Michelle Myrter and two corporate entities — Universal Cheese & Drying Inc. and International Packing LLC of Slippery Rock, PA — in October 2015. Two years and eleven months before that, George Myrter told inspectors from the Food and Drug Administration he knew the companies’ cheeses were being made with fillers. That admission in November 2012 came after a fired plant manager tipped FDA that the companies were using recipes he conceived as part of the conspiracy, according to Bloomberg News. Universal Cheese & Drying Inc. and International Packing LLC produced the imitation cheeses at Castle Cheese Co. and sold them to retailers and wholesalers nationwide under a variety of brands from January 2010 through January 2013, according to the FDA. The brands included Always Save and Best Choice, which are sold by Associated Wholesale Grocers Inc. to 3,400 retail locations in 30 states. On behalf of the two cheese companies, Michelle Myrter entered guilty pleas to one count each of “conspiring to introduce misbranded and adulterated cheese products into interstate commerce and to commit money laundering.” Each company will forfeit half a million dollars to the federal government, which is the maximum allowed by law for the misdemeanor charges. Feds on a roll The guilty pleas mark the latest in a string of criminal prosecutions by the federal government related to adulterated foods. Those cases include brothers Eric Jensen and Ryan Jensen whose cantaloupe caused a deadly listeria outbreak in 2011 and brothers Stewart Parnell and Michael Parnell whose Salmonella-contaminated peanut butter products killed at least nine and sickened thousands in 2008-09. “The Department of Justice prosecutes people and companies who introduce adulterated or misbranded food into interstate commerce,” U.S. Attorney David Hickton said in a news release about the criminal cheese charges. “In this case, the fraud was perpetrated on consumers who purchased parmesan and romano cheeses that were inferior to what they believed they were buying.” Cheese may have had Listeria as well as wood pulp Although the Pennsylvania cheese cases did not cite food safety issues, inspectors with the Food and Drug Administration found listeria problems at the production facilities according to a July 2013 warning letter that also referenced the imitation cheese products. “We note that on Nov. 11, 2012, our investigators reviewed records for your environmental listeria monitoring tests from March 22, 2012, through Nov. 9, 2012. These records … show positive Listeria test results,” according to the FDA warning. “Your firm did not perform speciation testing as a follow-up to these results, to determine if Listeria monocytogenes was present in your facility. Further, from March 22, 2012, to Nov. 9, 2012, your firm continued to manufacture imitation and real cheese products in the area where Listeria was detected. “… your response states that no undesirable microorganisms have ever been detected in your products. FDA questions this assertion since your firm does not conduct any finished product microbiological testing.” When the whistle blew That same warning letter referenced the firing of the plant manager. “We acknowledge your response to the Form FDA-483, dated Dec. 21, 2012, which states that your previous plant manager was responsible for the substitution of ingredients without authorization, and that this individual’s employment with your firm was terminated in September 2012,” the letter states. “However, all of the products noted above were manufactured between the dates of October 2012 through December 2012, after the termination of your plant manager. On Nov. 14, 2012, our investigators asked Mr. George L. Myrter, CEO and Co-owner if he was aware that the firm is substituting a mixture of different cheese products and/or imitation cheese products for real cheese. Mr. Myrter acknowledged that he was.” The FDA noted in the July 2013 warning letter that company officials said they would not recall the misbranded and adulterated products that had been sold and distributed. (To sign up for a free subscription to Food Safety News, click here.)Almost one-quarter of freehold land in the Muswellbrook Local Government Area and large chunks of other parts of northern NSW are now owned or occupied by coal companies, a survey of land records by Lock the Gate shows.
The holdings, amounting to 284,093 hectares across eight local government areas, include 20,470 hectares of leases in state forests and other public lands.
Prize land: Mining at Muswellbrook in the Hunter Valley. Credit:Rob Homer
Mining also accounts for significant shares of agricultural land in those two areas, with 23-27 per cent of the Biophysical Strategic Agricultural Land held by the coal companies. The tally includes areas to be set aside to offset mine destruction of threatened vegetation.
"Some people will get a big shock when they see these figures," said Stewart Mitchell, a long-time resident of Bulga near three big coalmines in the Singleton area.Nicolas Roche will ride for BMC Racing Team in 2017 after completing a move away from Team Sky on Monday, the opening day of the transfer window. Related Articles Second Irish time trial title for Roche
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Nicolas Roche: New team and new ambitions at BMC Racing
The 32-year-old, who has 16 Grand Tours under his belt, has been a key support rider for Chris Froome at Sky and Alberto Contador at Tinkoff-Saxo in the last few years, and adds experience to BMC's Grand Tour set-up, spearheaded by Richie Porte and Tejay van Garderen.
Roche held the role of road captain for Froome at last year's Tour de France but was left out of the squad this year, and he was first linked with BMC last week. Signings can only be made official as of August 1 and the American squad did not delay in unveiling their first acquisition for next year, though the length of the contract was not disclosed.
"I'm super excited because BMC Racing Team is a team that rides with a lot of the characteristics that I like. They're always up the front, riding with aggression and trying to make an exciting race. I think I'll enjoy the aggressive style of racing," Roche said in a statement.
"Looking ahead to the 2017 season, my main role will be to really support Richie Porte and Tejay van Garderen in their General Classification ambitions, and hopefully I'll have a good go at the Vuelta a España."
Roche, who spent bulk of his career at French teams, will leave Sky after two seasons - the same amount of time he spent at Tinkoff-Saxo before that. The move to BMC will mark his 13th season as a professional.
He was fifth overall at the 2013 Vuelta a España, seventh in 2010, and won a stage there last year, while his best result at the Tour de France was 12th in 2012. This year he won both the road race and the time trial at the Irish national championships and finished the Giro d'Italia, where Sky's plans were derailed by the early abandon of leader Mikel Landa.
"Nicolas Roche is a fantastic addition to BMC Racing Team. Nicolas brings a wealth of experience and is exactly the sort of rider we are looking for to support our Grand Tour ambitions and work for his own personal objectives," said BMC manager Jim Ochowicz. "A lot of our goals are centered around Grand Tours and we felt we needed an additional rider who could bring us experience in that field.
"We are looking forward to a big season again in 2017 and I think Nicolas will be an asset for us, as he has proven in the past. Nicolas is a rider who brings a lot of dimensions with his portfolio, including Grand Tour stage wins and top ten finishes in the General Classification, so we are thrilled to welcome him to the BMC Racing Team family."Reading Peter Mandelson’s ludicrously red-baiting article about the new leader of the Labour party, the first question that comes to mind is: what part of “Jeremy Corbyn won” does he not understand?”
Peter Mandelson: Labour is a broad church – Jeremy Corbyn is turning it into a narrow sect bound for the abyss Read more
Nobody reading the Mandelson diatribe would know that Jeremy Corbyn has won a bigger personal mandate than any other leader of the Labour party. And nobody would guess either that the Labour party membership has doubled since Jeremy actually became leader. And this in the face of the most concerted campaign of denigration any Labour leader has ever endured in such a short space of time.
Mandelson has suggested elsewhere that Labour is losing members in numbers equal to the new joiners. There is not a scintilla of evidence for this. Certainly, no local party that I have any knowledge of is seeing anything but a surge of new members.
Nor is it true to imply, as Mandelson does, that Jeremy won only because of new members or registered supporters. Jeremy won decisively in every section of the leadership electorate: new members, old members, registered supporters and affiliated members.
Mandelson’s characterisation of Jeremy as an “intentionally divisive figure” “pursuing his own far-left agenda”, “surrounded by far-left fellow travellers” and determined to “crush rebellion” is ludicrous. On the contrary, the thousands of ordinary people who have rejoined Labour under Jeremy would argue that he stands |
pay to see.
25. San Jose Sharks: Adrian Kempe, LW, Modo (SWE)
Adrian Kempe is a well-rounded power forward who would do well with the Sharks. He's a pretty safe prospect whose ceiling may not be as high as others, but his floor appears to be higher at the moment. He skates well and, combined with his size and a nasty wrister, uses that to keep defensemen on their heels.
26. Colorado Avalanche: Brendan Lemieux, LW, Barrie (OHL)
Patrick Roy and Joe Sakic are in Colorado already—why not bring aboard Claude Lemieux's son? Brendan Lemieux can put the puck in the net, but like his father, he's not afraid to play the role of enforcer and spend his fair share of time observing the game from the penalty box.
27. Anaheim Ducks: Ivan Barbashev, LW, Moncton (QMJHL)
The Russian loves to play aggressively, both in terms of being physical and his ability to quickly reach top speed and put defenders on edge. There aren't any glaring weaknesses in Ivan Barbashev's game and he can also be utilized on special teams.
28. St. Louis Blues: Nick Schmaltz, C, Green Bay (USHL)
A center who does a little bit of everything and seems just as comfortable digging the puck out of the boards and making a play in a tight space as he is attacking on the rush. His older brother, Jordan, was also a first-round pick, so the hockey bloodlines are strong here.
29. Boston Bruins: Marcus Pettersson, D, Skelleftea Jr. (SWE-JR)
What do you get the team that just dominated the NHL's regular season? How about one of the top European defensemen in this draft? The rich get richer...
30. New Jersey Devils: Roland McKeown, D, Kingston (OHL) **
Physical? Check. Balanced? Check. Intelligent? Check. The first round won't end with the sexiest player on the ice, but he checks off all of the main boxes you'd like to see for a defenseman.
*Pick traded to Sabres but Islanders have the right to defer trade until 2015 if pick is in the top 10 of draft.
**Automatically the 30th pick due to NHL ruling and altered penalty on Ilya Kovalchuk cap situation.In This Podcast: The Director of the North Dakota Division of Medical Marijuana, Kenan Bullinger.
We spoke with Kenan about the timetable for getting medical marijuana into the hands of people who need it for their health.
We asked about the 2 proposed "grow sites," and the 8 distribution centers.
We asked if the federal regulations might impede the progress of MM in ND.
Also, a reminder of how, when it finally is available, how one goes about getting it. No prescriptions, only recommendations from your North Dakota healthcare provider.
As we mentioned in the headline of this podcast, it looks like we're looking at 2018 before it'll be available.
If you're interested in being a "grower" or "distributor," send an email medmarijuana@nd.gov. You can also inquire by calling 701-328-1311.
(Jack Sunday & Amy Iler are talk-show hosts at 790 AM KFGO in Fargo-Moorhead. "It Takes 2 with Jack & Amy" can be heard weekdays 11am-2pm. Follow Amy on Twitter @AmyKFGO. Follow Jack on Twitter @nodakjack.)It’s one of several shows in recent history that was one of the best on TV… and yet no one watched it. Arrested Development has one of the most loyal followings I’ve ever seen for a show. It re-introduced us all to Jason Bateman and showed us his true potential for being able to lead and carry a project, and it was the coming out party for Michael Cera who has since exploded (catch him in the new film that’s already getting some serious Oscar buzz “Juno”).
Ever since the show went off air, the fans have hoped for, prayed for and speculated about the chance for an Arrested Development movie. Thus far all rumors and hopes have been pretty much dashed. BUT NOW… Jason Bateman is flaming those hopes and prayers. MTV talked with Bateman who said this past week he spoke with Arrested Development director creator Mitchell Hurwitz and said that the hopes for a movie are still quite alive and well.
The angle was, that since the writers strike prevents all WGA members from writing things they’re getting paid for, it is leaving Hurwitz with the time to start developing an Arrested Development movie.
Instead of trying to describe it all… just check out Bateman talking about it himself:FORT BEND COUNTY - The man police said shot his estranged wife on the campus of Katy ISD's Obra D. Tompkins High School was found dead of a self-inflicted gunshot wound inside his Brookshire home.
The Fort Bend County Sheriff's Office said the initial shooting occurred happened around 6 a.m. Friday in the parking lot at Obra D. Tompkins High School.
Police said the shooter gunned down his estranged wife, 46-year-old Valerie Robinson.
Robinson, who worked in the school's cafeteria, was found with gunshot wounds behind the school near the practice fields.
Officials said two coaches performed CPR on her until emergency crews arrived.
A spokesperson with Katy ISD said Robinson was transported to Katy Memorial Hermann Hospital, but later died.
Witnesses told police they saw a man with a shotgun get into a truck and drive off.
Police said the suspect barricaded himself in his Brookshire home. Authorities surrounded the home for nearly three hours and after attempts at negotiating failed, a search warrant was obtained.
SWAT officers moved in at around 10:30 a.m. found the suspect, 55-year-old Gregory Robinson, dead of a self-inflicted gunshot wound inside the home.
Family and friends said they are overwhelmed with shock and grief.
"She was a very beautiful person she didn't deserve what happened to her today," said Janice Floyd.
Valerie Robinson was affectionately known as 'Peaches' and adored by everyone who knew her, friends said.
"She would help anybody and anytime," said her sister, Veranda House. "She was always there when people needed her. To us she was the life of the party. You couldn't ask for a better person."
The family said the estranged couple had been married for 28 years. They had one daughter together and Gregory Robinson had two sons.
Katy ISD officials said Tompkins High, the district's newest high school in only its third week, is open and secure.
"What we want parents to know is that the students are safe, we are in session," said Katy ISD PIO Steve Stanford. "This is a domestic violence issue. There was no threat towards anybody else besides this cafeteria worker."
Since the incident happened before school started, the school was never put on lockdown. Students arrived for class as scheduled and school officials said there was never a security breech.
"We understand that parents are concerned about safety," said Stanford. "We are a safe campus right now, but we also want the parents to know that if they want to pick up their child, they can certainly do so and take them home if they feel they need to do that."
The district said about 120 students were pulled out of class for the day.
Katy ISD released the following statement:
"The estranged husband of a cafeteria worker shot his wife in the back parking lot of Obra D. Tompkins High School before 6:11 a.m. this morning. Unfortunately, we have just learned that the shooting was fatal. School has started as usual this morning and the campus is not on lockdown. Parents are allowed to pick up their student if they feel they need to. Currently, Katy ISD Police Department is working with the Fort Bend County Sheriff's Department and the suspect is barricaded at his home in Brookshire."
"It worries me a little bit because you always hope your children are going to be safe at school, you never expect anything to happen at school," said parent Angela Schmidt.
"I have confidence in the staff that they're doing everything they can to keep the students safe. It's just too close to home," said parent Melissa Choate.
She pulled her child out of school after hearing about the shooting.
Local 2's Gianna Caserta spoke with a mother who said her daughter is on the cross country team and was coming back from her run when they heard a gunshot. The students hid inside the locker room for several minutes. The student texted her parents and told them that there was a shooting on campus. The student athletes stayed in that locker room until it was safe to come out.
Parents dropping their children off couldn't believe something like this could happen at their children's school.
"At least I was relieved to know the guy left and isn't on campus, a little bit of relief, but still sadness and disappointment of why these things happen," said parent Tory Roberts.
A Katy ISD spokesperson acknowledged that an alert to parents wasn't released as quickly as the district intended. Steve Stanford said the district intended to send an alert to parents before school began but a default setting on the notification system prevented the message from being sent in a timely manner.
"We apologize to the parents that they did not receive that first message. We understand the importance and the urgency of getting these types of notifications," said Stanford.
Stanford said the district will be changing those default settings to make sure another delay doesn't happen in the future.
Katy ISD said they brought in additional help from around the district to serve lunch at the school. The district said one cafeteria worker met with a counselor and then left for the day. The other stayed but worked on food preparation.
Copyright 2013 by Click2Houston.com. All rights reserved. This material may not be published, broadcast, rewritten or redistributed.Every hospital executive wants to keep healthcare costs down which is why as hospitals are integrating provisions of healthcare reform into their care model, affiliating with and developing primary care clinics is of growing interest.
The plan to lower costs, improve quality and increase access begins with primary care physicians.
Seen as a renewed beacon in this time of healthcare reform, primary care providers are viewed in a heightened sense as gatekeepers to a healthier population. People who have a physician are more likely to take preventive health measures, health risk assessments, and participate in wellness programs according to an ‘08-’09 Watson Wyatt study. Likewise, IBM’s study of their $2 billion spent annually on healthcare globally found that increased primary access paved a way toward a healthier country and in turn, lower per capita healthcare spending.
Hospitals are already increasing access, especially as competition and reimbursement pressures grow. Patients need to be catered to which is why health systems nationwide are going to the patient, developing and acquiring practices in new locations to afford those community member the same level of access as others.
Primary care practices provide the capability to help hospital executives not just manage overall costs, but reduce them. As a life force for many hospitals, reimbursements continue to dwindle so decreasing healthcare costs throughout the system is something of great value. Primary care practitioners are especially helpful as hospitals are transitioning from the traditional fee-for-service model and embracing value-based purchasing.
Reimbursing hospitals on a quality versus quantity basis, value based purchasing rewards providers for keeping patients out of the hospital. Based on 25 quality measures and how much the hospitals’ performance improves from a baseline measurement, value based purchasing puts the primary care physician in a key role linking the hospitals’ quality and the patient experience. The greater the patient’s experience and hospitals performance is, the higher the incentive payment will be.
I believe hospitals partnering with primary care providers and operating around a health delivery model that rewards quality and accountability will prove to be advantageous as a method to control healthcare costs.
James Ellis, CEO, Health Care Realty Development Company, is a real estate investor and developer of medical office properties.
Aaron Razavi is Associate Marketing Director at Health Care Realty Development.
Visit their blog at http://www.hcrealty.com/medicalrealestatedevelopment/In case you missed it, an Annapolis, MD high school now requires students to sign a contract promising to abstain from “sexually explicit” dancing before attending school-sponsored dances. Everyone’s talking about the school that banned twerking, but is this really that shocking? This isn’t the first moral panic-induced dance craze directed towards teens (and it certainly won’t be the last). In fact, it’s just the latest in a long lineage of teenagers accidentally or on-purpose pissing off their parents in the name of dancing.
Volta (Renaissance)
Oh yes, there were scandalous dances in the 1500s. The volta was popularized in the mid-16th century, and caused a bit of ruckus because it required men and women to dance very close together. In order to achieve the leaps and turns required for the dance, men had to grip women by their waists and lift them up with their thighs. While women kept one hand free to “protect their modesty,” it was still deemed indecent and lewd in some circles.
The Waltz (1800s)
In 1816, The Times of London alerted parents about an “indecent foreign dance” called the waltz, which featured “the voluptuous intertwining of the limbs” and “close compressure of the bodies.” This “obscene display” sparked a panic that caused the Times to “warn every parent against exposing his daughter to so fatal a contagion” that previously remained the territory of “prostitutes and adulteresses.” Yes, this was written about the waltz.
The Charleston (1920s)
Coupled with its association with the flapper — an icon of short skirts, drinking, and a more casual attitude towards sex — the Prohibition-era Charleston dance got older generations all up in a tizzy. The dance was faster and more frenzied than the waltz and the foxtrot of previous generations, so it was seen as much wilder. (A 1920 issue of the Atlantic Monthly compared flappers’ dancing to “a moving-picture of a fancy ball in bedlam.”) The mayor of Bradley Beach, NJ even banned the dance from the city’s municipally owned dance floor in 1925 after several young people received shin injuries. “‘I have no objection to a person dancing their feet and head off,” he said, ”but I think it best that they keep away from the Charleston.”
Jitterbug (1930s-1940s)
Though some members of the older generations deemed swing dancing too sexual, this variation was considered especially vulgar. With its faster, unrestrained pace, ballroom dancing master Alex Moore proclaimed that he had “never seen anything uglier.”
Elvis Presley’s Hip Thrusts (1950s)
The King of Rock and Roll’s dancing repertoire included gyrating hip thrusts and twitching legs, which almost got him banned from The Ed Sullivan Show. The ensuing frenzy surrounding his first television appearance had the press calling him “Elvis the Pelvis” and comparing his dancing to a striptease. You know how this equation works. Hip thrusts = sex = PARENTAL PANIC MODE.
The Bump (1970s)
Call this the horribly tame frontrunner to grinding, but the hip bump was once a cool new fad instead of a cheesy dance move you only do to be ironic. Yes, the moral danger came from bumping all parts of your body against a member of the opposite sex’s body. But also, if you bumped your partner too hard, they would go flying across the room. Total danger.
Slam Dancing (1980s)
An early form of moshing, slam dancing emerged from the new age punk and heavy metal scene. True to its name, this type of dance involved participants slamming into each other. The University of Minnesota banned slam dancing in 1983 after a Dead Kennedys concert led to 23 student injuries.
The Soulja Boy (2007-2008)
Soulja Boy’s eponymous Soulja Boy dance came with the music video for “Crank That.” The dance was just composed of many steps that required little coordination, so the controversy didn’t really concern the dance. Instead, it was the song’s sexually charged lyrics (“superman that ho”) that upset people. But since you couldn’t do the dance without the song, or vice versa, parents still went up in arms over Soulja Boy. Maybe it worked, because he hasn’t had a real hit since.
Freaking (2000s)
While the so-called freaking and grinding epidemic received a lot of press when the term was first coined, one of the best reports on the controversy was the 2007 Wall Street Journal article, “Freaked Out: Teens’ Dance Moves Split a Texas Town,” which pretty much establishes the dramatic soap opera effect that one controversial dance craze can wreck on one town. Freaking hasn’t fallen out of favor — you can still find it at any high-school prom — but all of the pitchfork-wielding hullabaloo has been heaped on to…
Twerking (2013)
Though she didn’t invent twerking, Miley Cyrus undoubtedly put it on the mainstream cultural radar. Now we live in a world in which every mention of the word “twerk” has become blatant click-bait. Who knows how long twerking’s cultural cachet will last, but it has already caused enough controversy. From the high school in San Diego that suspended over 30 students for making a twerking video to the aforementioned “no twerking allowed” high school dance contract, 2013’s crazy controversial dance fad is undoubtedly twerking. Sorry, Harlem Shake. You never quite got it going.“Adventures are all very well in their place, but there's a lot to be said for regular meals and freedom from pain.” ― Neil Gaiman, Stardust
(Title from this post is also a quote from Stardust--which is a gift I received from my more than generous Secret Santa).
The first gift arrived a week before Christmas with note that said "I hope these gifts make you smile." (Before I tell you what it was or anything else, I want to say: Secret Santa, you don't know what you have done for me. I just went through the worst Christmas of my life, and your gifts have been some of the few moments of happiness in the last two weeks.) I tore the package open to find a red leather journal. Now, I collect journals, I was ecstatic. The journal is beautiful--with a a golden key and charm with a phrase is french (I assume this is because I said The Little Prince is my favorite book).
Now before I continue let me explain where I have been. I haven't had the best year and all the consequences of relationships lost, family disconnections, and financial struggles came crashing down on me on the week before Christmas. I usually can control my emotions, but that week, everything hurt because I felt like I had failed as human being. I have never felt more alone or unwanted. I am not going to explain how shattered I felt, but lets just say: it sucked.
Anyways, second gift arrived and it came with its own note "I know you love John Steinbeck, but I love Neil Gaiman" and inside was the book 'Stardust' by Neil Gaiman. And for the first time that week, I smiled. A huge smile, because this book has been on my to read list for almost two years! I read it in one sitting, and I absolutely love it! It didn't fix what I was going through, but it was definitely a welcomed distraction.
Last, on Christmas Eve (the worst day this year, "thanks loving and supportive family," says the girl sarcastically) I received the last gift which is now my FAVORITE thing in the world. It's a cup and it says "PLEASE do not annoy the writer. She may put you in a book and kill you." I actually laughed out loud. You don't know me personally SS, but I am always telling people they are going to end up in a story.
Thank you, thank you, thank you, thank you so much SS. If you were standing in front of me, I would hug you.We live in a world today where social media and the court of public opinion determines who is noteworthy in our society. We are a short-term people. What is hot today is old news tomorrow. We are driven by what the media tells us, right and wrong. Our icons today are reality TV stars, grossly overpaid sports figures, musicians that can’t play an instrument, or people who covet fame from YouTube.com. Our heroes are defined by pixels, their income, and their momentary popularity, more than by their accomplishments.
We weren’t always like that. In 1927 we chose our heroes differently – by their actions and deeds rather than TV ratings. Charles Lindbergh was such a man. He wasn’t the first person to fly the Atlantic, but he was the first to do it solo. He helped design the airplane for the journey, on that would take him across an ocean and into the history books.
Making such a flight alone was akin the madness. Several aviators, some of much greater repute, had already died making such attempts. In the Spirit of St. Louis, he didn’t have a life raft or radio to call for help. If he ran into trouble he was going to die.
Lindbergh was the antithesis of today’s public icons. He shunned publicity. The man merely wanted to achieve the goal, not bask in the glory. That was a big part of his great appeal. He was a boy from next door – everyman. In many respects he represented America at its best. He was a man that challenged nature and fate and won. Lindbergh harkened back to the American ideal of a pioneer and trailblazer.
One of my favorite movies is The Spirit of St. Louis starring Jimmy Stewart. Yes, there are some factual errors with the film, but it is the best representation we have of what that flight was like and the challenges that this supreme aviator faced.
In crossing the Atlantic solo, Charles Lindbergh changed forever the way we viewed aviation. Suddenly, overnight, the world became much closer, more connected.
Every time I visit the NASM I make a point to pause and look at The Spirit hanging in the main gallery. For a fleeting moment, I remember Charles Lindbergh and the daring he exhibited. In that second of time I wonder if we will ever again have such men in our nation, men that we don’t seek to bring down, but instead bring out the very best of us. In find myself longing for standards of men and women and go beyond the internet. I know I am a romantic at heart, longing for a sense of something that is intangible yet wondrous.
I wonder where our heroes are…
AdvertisementsMemory barriers for TSO architectures
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Developers — even kernel developers — like to think of access to memory as a nice, predictable, deterministic thing. If two memory locations are written in a given order, one would hope that any other processors would see those writes in the same order. The truth of the matter is rather murkier; compilers and processors are both happy to take liberties with the ordering of memory accesses in the name of performance. Most of this playing around is invisible to programmers, but it can interfere with the correct operation of concurrent systems, so developers must occasionally force things to happen in the right order through the use of memory barriers. The set of available barrier types looks like it will get a bit larger in the 3.14 kernel.
Introduction to memory barriers
A memory barrier is a directive that prohibits the hardware (and compiler) from reordering operations in specific ways. To see how they might be used, consider the following simple example, taken from a 2013 Kernel Summit session. The lockless insertion of a new element into a linked list can be performed in two steps. The first is to set the "next" pointer of the new item to point to the item that will follow it in the list:
Once that is done, the list itself can be modified to include the new item:
A thread walking the list will either see the new item or it won't, depending on the timing, but it will see a well-formed list in either case. If, however, the operations are reordered such that the second pointer assignment becomes visible before the first, there will be a period of time during which the structure of the list is corrupted. Should a thread follow that pointer at the wrong time, it will end up off in the weeds. To keep that from happening, this sort of list operation must use a memory barrier between the two writes. With a proper barrier in place, the pointer assignments will never be seen in the wrong order.
The kernel offers a wide variety of memory barrier operations adapted to specific situations, but the most commonly used barriers are:
smp_wmb() is a write memory barrier; it ensures that any write operation executed after the barrier will not become visible until all writes executed prior to the barrier are visible. A write memory barrier would be the appropriate type to use in the linked list example above.
is a memory barrier; it ensures that any write operation executed after the barrier will not become visible until all writes executed prior to the barrier are visible. A write memory barrier would be the appropriate type to use in the linked list example above. smp_rmb() is a read memory barrier; any reads executed before the barrier are forced to complete before any reads after the barrier can happen. Code traversing a linked list that is subject to lockless modification would want to use read barriers between access to subsequent link pointers.
is a memory barrier; any reads executed before the barrier are forced to complete before any reads after the barrier can happen. Code traversing a linked list that is subject to lockless modification would want to use read barriers between access to subsequent link pointers. smp_mb() is a barrier for both read and write operations; it can be thought of as the combination of smb_wmb() and smp_rmb().
Memory barriers almost invariably come in pairs. If one of two cooperating threads cares about the order in which two values are written, the other side must be equally concerned about the order in which those values are read.
Naturally enough, the full story is rather more complex than described here. Readers with sufficient interest and free time, along with quite a bit of excess brain power, can read Documentation/memory-barriers.txt for the full story.
The primary reason for the proliferation of memory barrier types is performance. A full memory barrier can be an expensive operation; that is something that kernel developers would prefer to avoid in fast paths. Weaker barriers are often cheaper, especially if they can be omitted altogether on some architectures. The x86 architecture, in particular, offers more ordering guarantees than some others do, making it possible to do without barriers entirely in some situations.
TSO barriers
A situation that has come up relatively recently has to do with "total store order" (TSO) architectures, where, as Paul McKenney put it, "reads are ordered before reads, writes before writes, and reads before writes, but not writes before reads." The x86 architecture has this property, though some others do not. TSO ordering guarantees are enough for a number of situations, but, in current kernels, a full memory barrier must be used to ensure those semantics on non-TSO architectures. Thus, it would be nice to have yet another memory barrier primitive to suit this situation.
Peter Zijlstra had originally called the new barrier smp_tmb(), but Linus was less than impressed with the descriptive power of that name. So Peter came up with a new patch set adding two new primitives:
smp_load_acquire() forces a read of a location in memory (in much the same way as ACCESS_ONCE() ), but it ensures that the read happens before any subsequent reads or writes.
forces a read of a location in memory (in much the same way as ), but it ensures that the read happens before any subsequent reads or writes. smp_store_release() writes a value back to memory, ensuring that the write happens after any previously-executed reads or writes.
These new primitives are immediately put to work in the code implementing the ring buffer used for perf events. That buffer has two pointers, called head and tail ; head is where the kernel will next write event data, while tail is the next location user space will read events from. Only the kernel changes head, while only user space can change tail. In other words, it is a fairly standard circular buffer.
The code on the kernel side works like this (in pseudocode form):
tail = smp_load_acquire(ring_buffer->tail); write_events(ring_buffer->head); /* If 'tail' indicates there is space */ smp_store_release(ring_buffer->head, new_head);
The smp_load_acquire() operation ensures that the proper tail pointer is read before any data is written to the buffer. And, importantly, smp_store_release() ensures that any data written to the buffer is actually visible there before the new head pointer is made visible. Without that guarantee, the reader side could possibly see a head pointer indicating that more data is available before that data is actually visible in the buffer.
The code on the read side is the mirror image:
head = smp_load_acquire(ring_buffer->head); read_events(tail); /* If 'head' indicates available events */ smp_store_release(ring_buffer->tail, new_tail);
Here, the code ensures that the head pointer has been read before trying to access any data in the buffer; in that way, head corresponds to the data the kernel side wrote there. This smp_load_acquire() operation is thus paired with the smp_store_release() in the kernel-side code; together they make sure that data is seen in the correct order. The smp_store_release() call here pairs with the smp_load_acquire() call in the kernel-side code; it makes sure that the tail pointer does not visibly change until user space has fully read the data from the buffer. Without that guarantee, the kernel could possibly overwrite that data before it was actually read.
The ring buffer code worked properly before the introduction of these new operations, but it had to use full barriers, making it slower than it needed to be. The new operations allow this code to be optimized while also better describing the exact operations that are being protected by barriers. As it happens, a lot of kernel code may be able to work with the slightly weaker guarantees offered by the new barrier operations; the patch changelog says "It appears that roughly half of the explicit barriers in core kernel code might be so replaced."
The cost, of course, is that the kernel's complicated set of memory barrier operations has become even more complex. Once upon a time that might not have mattered much, since most use of memory barriers was deeply hidden within other synchronization primitives (spinlocks and mutexes, for example). With scalability pressures pushing lockless techniques into more places in the kernel, though, the need to be explicitly aware of memory barriers is growing. There may come a point where understanding memory-barriers.txt will be mandatory for working in much of the kernel.4 Things Democrats Need To Do (Plus 1 They Shouldn't) To Rebuild In 2017
Enlarge this image toggle caption Patrick Semansky/AP Patrick Semansky/AP
The Republican Party heads into 2017 with more power than it has had for a long time.
For the Democrats, it's a different matter.
Hillary Clinton's loss in the presidential race and Democratic failures further down the ballot have the party searching for a way forward.
Here are five things Democrats need to do, as they look for a path out of the political wilderness:
1. Be clear about how bad things are — and are not — for the Democratic Party.
Democrats are clear-eyed about the size of the hole they're in. It's deep. Every president loses seats for his party, but no president in U.S. history has presided over bigger losses than Barack Obama. In the eight years he's been in office, Democrats have lost so many seats at every level of government that they now have fewer elected officials nationwide than at any time since the 1920s.
Not only are they in the minority in every branch of government in Washington, but beyond the beltway Democrats have a "trifecta" — control of both state houses and the governor's mansion — in only 6 states. Republicans have total control of state government in 25 states.
Democrats are facing even more headwinds in 2018. The party in power usually loses seats in midterm elections, so Democrats should expect to pick up some seats. But while they may defeat a handful of Republicans in the House, the Senate map looks terrible for them — 25 Senate Democrats are up in 2018, and 10 of them are defending seats in states Donald Trump won. Republicans, on the other hand, have only eight senators up for reelection — mostly in safe red states.
But there is a silver lining for Democrats, sort of. They have 48 seats in the Senate. They can still filibuster at least — unless Republicans change the rules altogether. Hillary Clinton also did win the popular vote by around 2.1 percentage points and almost 3 million votes. This election was not a repudiation of Democrats' ideology. Their base is the rising American electorate — young people, African-Americans, single women, Hispanics, all parts of the voting population that are growing.
The Republican base is older, whiter, non-college educated, more rural — groups that are declining in relative numbers. Trump won by squeezing more out of a shrinking piece of the electoral pie. Democrats may be limping out of the 2016 election, but they have long-term advantages if they can figure out how to harness them.
2. First things first: Get a message on the economy.
As Democrats form the circular firing squad that is the time-honored tradition of losing parties, they have many different scapegoats — James Comey? Vladimir Putin? Bernie Sanders? Bill Clinton and Loretta Lynch? Anthony Weiner?
But most Democrats agree on one thing: They need an economic message.
Hillary Clinton didn't have one. The Democrats' dilemma is sometimes described as a choice between appealing to their young, multicultural base or to white, working-class voters. But most Democrats believe that's a false choice.
They need a message on the economy that cuts across class and racial lines, that can appeal to the young person saddled with college debt and the union worker (or former union worker) whose plant has moved to Mexico.
Many Trump supporters were once Obama voters, and Democrats say they can win enough of those voters back if they focus their message on bread-and-butter issues. As one Democratic operative summed it up, "More emphasis on jobs, less on transgender bathrooms."
Democrats need to develop their own nationalist economic message without the nativism.
3. Figure out how to resist Trump in Congress.
House Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi of California and Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer of New York have a choice — they can take a page out of Mitch McConnell's playbook and commit themselves to total obstruction. (The Senate Republicans' leader famously said in a 2010 National Journal interview, "The single most important thing we want to achieve is for President Obama to be a one-term president.")
Or they can pick and choose their fights, working with Trump where he supports their long-held goals — on a big infrastructure program, for instance.
For now, Democratic congressional leaders seem to have settled on drawing a bright line of resistance when it comes to tax cuts for the rich or Medicare privatization. That kind of fight unites the Bernie Sanders-Elizabeth Warren wing of the party and red-state incumbents up for reelection like Joe Manchin of West Virginia and Heidi Heitkamp of North Dakota.
Right now, Democrats don't seem too worried about Obamacare. They're just sitting back and watching while Republicans try to figure out how to repeal it without forcing millions of people to lose their health insurance. Democrats are convinced the Republicans' strategy of "repeal and delay" (putting an "expiration date" on Obamacare of two or three years into the future to buy time for replacing it) won't work.
And Democrats in the Senate need to prioritize their confirmation fights. That might mean energizing their base with a big fight against climate change skeptic Scott Pruitt for EPA, rather than Exxon Mobil CEO Rex Tillerson for secretary of state.
And all along the way, Democrats will be trying to convince Trump's working-class supporters that they've been played — by an administration stocked with Wall Street bankers and plutocrats.
4. Rebuild your farm team.
One of the consequences of losing big in the midterm elections of 2010 and 2014 is that the Democratic bench is decimated.
Midterm elections are the time when the majority of elected offices in the country are filled. While Republicans are able to turn out their voters every two years, Democrats seem only able to turn out their voters every four. That needs to change.
Democrats need to restock their pipeline with candidates for city council, mayor, state legislature and governor — and they need to do it all across the country. It's true that Democratic voters are inefficiently distributed geographically for the purposes of electing members of Congress or the Electoral College.
Democrats' advantage in the national popular vote is just a consolation prize. There are too many Democratic voters massed together in urban areas on the East and West coasts. But as Obama said in his last press conference, the Democratic Party can't just be "coastal, liberal, latte-sipping, politically correct, out-of-touch folks."
Obama has indicated that electing down-ballot Democrats will be a priority of his post-presidential years. (It's also something many Democrats think he neglected for the last eight years.)
He will be working with Eric Holder, his former attorney general, on the National Democratic Redistricting Committee to help Democrats reverse their losses in the states. This is urgent if Democrats hope to have any say in how congressional and legislative district lines are drawn by governors and state legislatures after the next census in 2020.
5. Don't even think about the next presidential race.
One of the big consequences of Hillary Clinton losing the 2016 election is that the Democratic Party has no natural national leaders after Obama leaves office next month.
But that's OK.
Right now, the party needs a message and a permanent infrastructure that can turn out its voters every two years — more than it needs a field of ready candidates to take on Trump in 2020.Senator Debbie Stabenow addressed two possible threats to the state of Michigan last Wednesday, July 12 - and only one of them was Kid Rock.
The same day the singer formerly known as Robert James Ritchie announced his intention to unseat Stabenow in the 2018 election, Stabenow and her fellow Michigan senator Gary Peters sent a letter to the acting chairwoman of the Federal Energy Regulatory |
what the heck are we going to do?"
An apparent protester caused a ruckus in the crowd about four minutes into the speech. Cameras did not show what occurred. But Trump, as he began his speech, praised the police.
-- Richard Ruelas
10:45 a.m.: In line 14 hours early
The first person in line at the Trump rally Saturday, Diana Brest of Phoenix, said she got in line at 2 a.m., 14 hours before Trump was scheduled to speak.
Brest, interviewed outside the west gates of the state fairgrounds before they opened, listed why she favored Trump.
“I love him because he’s honest,” she said. “He says what he means. He doesn’t back down and he’s not politically correct.”
Brest said she hoped that when Trump spoke at 4 p.m. inside Veterans Memorial Coliseum he would address his plans to combat terrorism.
“I like when he says there is terrorism in the U.S. and we need to get rid of terrorism and ISIS,” she said, referring to the Islamic State.
Brest also favored Trump’s stand on illegal immigration.
“We need to build a wall and put the illegals out and keep the legals in,” she said. “Too much of that is taking over the U.S.”
Toward the front of the line, were a mother and daughter who’d attended Trump’s previous Arizona visit for a Fountain Hills rally.
The mother, Lynn Hrabik, said she supported Trump because of his stance on limiting immigration. Her daughter, Lynette, said she likes Trump because “he’s not filtered. He tells the truth.”
-- Macaela Bennett
10:30 a.m.: Headed to the rally? Bring cash
An important detail for those planning to rally for Trump. Bring $8 in cash.
Parking at the state fairgrounds complex will be $8 for all lots, cash only.
Gates to the fairgrounds opened at 10:30 a.m. The rally, inside Veterans Memorial Coliseum, was scheduled to start at 4 p.m.
-- Macaela Bennett
10:00 a.m.: Quiet morning before gates open
About a dozen people, some carrying U.S. flags, stood near the west entrance of Veterans Memorial Coliseum at about 9:15 a.m., an hour and fifteen minutes before gates were set to open to the public. A sign out in front of the entrance announced that no weapons would be allowed.
A sign tells entrants to the Donald Trump rally on June 18, 2016, at the state fiargrounds that no weapons are allowed (Photo: Dianna Nanez)
Two roadside businesses, under the banner Trump Shop, set up on corners near the fairgrounds. Each touted T-shirts for sale. Signs said they accepted cash, credit and debit.
There were no signs of crowds at Encanto Park just before 9:30 a.m. A man wearing a donkey costume and sitting on an adult tricycle waved to cars along 15th Avenue.
Read or Share this story: http://azc.cc/24XTGrlA street prostitute talking to a potential customer.
Here are the simple rules that apply for picking up streetwalkers (SW's), street prostitutes and street hookers in United States of America and Canada. In European, African, Asian or South American countries some of these rules do not apply as the law and culture is a bit different.
WikiSexGuide doesn't incite anyone to make illegal actions. If you're picking up a street prostitute in the area where it's not legal, that's your own choice and there's always a risk involved.
13 Rules
1) Only carry as much money as you are willing to lose. Stash all valuables (wallet, extra cash, cell phone, etc.) in a hidden spot. Carry a nearly empty monger's wallet with you.
2) Be very cautious if the street hooker on the street looks too good i.e., in most cities, street hookers do not dress in stilettos, leopard prints, or other obvious hooker outfits. It smells of a sting. Caution is the watchword.
3) Do not call attention to yourself by making a show out of the stop (no U turns or no flagrant traffic moves). Catch her eye (she will be looking) and pull just around the corner onto the next side street and let the prostitute come to you. Do not keep your foot on the brake, because you do not want everyone to see your flashy lights. Once having caught the street whores eye, go smoothly around the block, and keep looking out for law enforcement.
4) When you pull up to her (have the doors locked), be willing to drive away if your close up impression of her through the window is not good enough (sores, too thin, wired, dirty, stinky, sullen or "dead" eyes etc.). Street hookers are never as good as your first drive by impression. You can tell her you thought she was someone else and drive away.
5) Ask her if she needs a ride. She should immediately say "Yes" and hop right into the vehicle. Do not negotiate through the window. The monger's first test for LE: stinging decoys will not get into the car. However be cautious. It is difficult to guard against busted streetwalkers who in order to stay out of jail may be forced to serve as decoys. They might get into your car. But if you refrain from discussing business until you are out of the neighborhood and make certain you are not being tailed, you should be OK. If she insists on negotiating through the window, tell her you thought she was someone else and split. Watch out for tailing LE- Another variation is to say, "I'll give you some cash to let me take nude photos of you back at my room." as nude photography is not a crime. Any streetwalker will be happy to take cash and not have to participate in anything illegal. A decoy will obviously say "No thanks" as they don't want to waste time with someone they can't bust.
6) Once the street girl is in the car, immediately get out of the neighborhood. Local LE may stop and hassle you if they see a known hooker in your car. Get permission to feel her bare breasts to be sure she is not LE. She may grab your crotch to ensure that you are not LE. Then get a crystal clear understanding of exactly what you want (covered or no, catch or no, swallow or no, etc) and for exactly how much (plus tip if satisfied). Extensive bargaining is a warning flag of a troublesome hooker and another reason to turn her out. Warning flags should go up if the girl is willing to do full service uncovered.
7) Go to your location unless given a good reason not to. Her location may include a male friend of hers who will rob you. If she refuses your place, you have another reason to turn her out. Be especially cautious of locations where you have no easy exit. Be very leery of taking them to your home! You know the phrase “They will come back to haunt you…”
8) Never give up money before you are finished. You can pay a small token up front, but never the whole amount. If she refuses, then say “Thanks, but no thanks.” Once she has your money, she is in control. This includes fronting money so they can buy some "butter." Money in their hand may mean you will never get to have fun with them.
9) Streetwalkers drug use can be a problem, but try to read what it might be. Crack (butter) leaves them still cogent, able to reason, and may make them more enthusiastic. On the other hand, heroin (dog food) addiction leads either to very dangerous situations, or makes them semiconscious—hardly satisfying. Crack creates a dependency, but does not cause the kind of withdrawal that becomes an emergency for them. Crack can make them very horny - do not have direct experience. If they seem really drugged up, it is another reason to turn them out. The difficult truth is that the vast majority of streetwalkers do so to support some habit.
10) Do not let outside people get involved. No answering doors, no second girls, no nothing. You are just asking for serious problems.
11) If confronted with a dangerous situation, do not get hostile or seriously argumentative. Tempers flair quickly, to what extent, you may not want to learn. You are in the underworld. Give it up. After all, you stashed your wallet, extra money and valuables elsewhere, right?
12) If you are ripped off, publicize it to our discussion forum with as much descriptive detail as you can. Educate the rest of guys about what mistakes you might not make again. Give a detailed description of the hooker, her name, exactly where, when, how you connected. If you got a picture, post it!
13) Finally, try to get to know those hookers who are dependable. They can, and often are willing to advise you about dangerous, drugged out or HIV positive hookers. Remember however, even long-time dependable hookers should not have too much temptation placed in front of them - even they can "grab and run."
Stay safe - even if the thrill of the hunt is part of the deal!
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Extras
Prostitution laws: Some states and cities have "loitering with intent solicit prostitution" (California, Detroit and Cincinnati). So when you are picking up a SW be extra careful and aware of your surroundings. These days many people limit their contact with SW's. It's smart only stop if you are interested in them. When stopping to pick up a SW do not use any language that has any connotation of sex or prostitution. These can include the terms "date" or even the word "fun". These words have been used as the basis for a arrest. If you are new to area try to get a feel if the cops are cracking down. Sometimes it's a good idea to park somewhere and watch and see what LE is up to.
Locations to take SW's: When you pick up a SW drive at least 10 blocks and or a minimum of 3/4 to 1 mile away. It is also a good idea to try and find an area where you can enter only from one direction. This cuts down on the amount of traffic passing by.
See AlsoREUTERS - Shots erupted outside a party for teenagers at a Florida nightclub early on Monday, killing two people and wounding as many as 17 others in the latest burst of gun violence to wrack the state this summer, according to authorities.
The shooting in Fort Myers took place just after 12:30 A.M. EDT in the parking lot of Club Blu, where officers found "several victims suffering from gunshot wounds," the city police department said in a statement.
Besides the two fatalities, a local hospital said there were 17 other victims, ranging between ages 12 and 27. Police put the number of wounded at 14 to 16, with their injuries ranging from minor to life-threatening.
skip - Club Blu, Fort Myers
Investigators had yet to determine a motive and were trying to identify the two people who were killed, the statement said. Police said three people had been detained for questioning and that the area was deemed safe, although roads in the vicinity remained closed.
The shooting came six weeks after a massacre at a nightclub in the Florida city of Orlando, where a lone gunman who sympathized with Islamist extremist groups killed 49 people in the deadliest mass shooting in U.S. history.
Club Blu, located about 150 miles southwest of Orlando in the Gulf Coast city of Fort Myers, was hosting a "swimsuit glow party" for people all ages, according to a flyer posted on Twitter by local television station WINK. To enter, patrons were not required to show proof that they were the legal age to drink alcoholic beverages.
The nightclub said on its Facebook page that the shooting occurred when the venue was closing and parents were picking up their children.
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"We tried to give the teens what we thought was a safe place to have a good time," the statement said, pointing out that armed security guards were posted inside and outside the club. "It was not kids at the party that did this despicable act."
Cheryl Garn, a spokeswoman for Lee Memorial Hospital in Fort Myers, said victims arriving there were as young as 12 years old. One of them died at the hospital, she said in a statement, while three others were admitted, one of them in critical condition and one in serious condition. The second victim died at the scene of the shooting.
Police said shots were also fired at a nearby residence, where there was one minor injury.
Fort Myers police and the Lee County's Sheriff's Office were canvassing the area for other people who may have been involved, the statement said.
Representatives of the law enforcement agencies could not immediately be reached for further comment.
The night before the Orlando nightclub shooting, a man thought to be a deranged fan fatally shot Christina Grimmie, a rising singing star, while she was signing autographs after a concert in that city.The idea is pretty simple. By gathering all of this information, Exterion Media can show advertisers the types of people that make particular journeys. Knowing that large swathes of fashion-conscious Instagram lovers stand on the platform near Covent Garden, for instance, could inspire ASOS or Urban Outfitters to take out an ad. Similarly, knowing when certain users descend on a station -- Stratford is normally a place for shoppers, but the Olympic Park occasionally attracts sports fans -- could help companies figure out when to debut a highly targeted poster.
O2 has 25 million customers and expects to track roughly one million journeys each day. If you're worried about your privacy, there's an obvious solution -- switch off your phone's Wi-Fi connection and do something else while you're sitting on the Tube. Sure, you'll have to wait a little longer to check Twitter or Facebook, but there's always an alternative, like listening to some podcasts or ploughing through your Pocket queue.He photographed Janis Joplin wearing nothing but beads. He also once captured the members of the Grateful Dead looking jaunty in black as they stood in front of a row of cookie-cutter houses in a Bay Area suburb.
Bob Seidemann, a photographer and art director known for his iconic images of ‘60s era rock stars, and for producing a controversial album cover featuring a partially nude pubescent girl for the band Blind Faith, died at his Bay Area home on Mare Island on Nov. 27. He was 75.
The cause was Parkinson’s disease, according to Belinda Seidemann, his wife of more than 30 years.
“The graphics of the era were framed by the photos Bob took,” says Douglas Brian Martin, a photographer and longtime friend of Seidemann’s who has shot album covers for record labels including Virgin and A&M Records. “He gave a regal purity to hippies like the Grateful Dead. He made it look natural. They weren’t posing.”
Janis Joplin, seated, with Big Brother and the Holding Company in the 1960s — as photographed by Bob Seidemann. Bob Seidemann / Michael Ochs Archives
The natural quality of Seidemann’s images could be attributed to the bond with his subjects — he was simply photographing his friends.
Drawn to San Francisco from his native New York in the 1960s by the burgeoning beatnik scene, Seidemann befriended the poets, artists, writers and musicians of the city’s North Beach neighborhood. Those acquaintances included David Getz, the drummer for Big Brother and the Holding Company, the group fronted by Joplin.
“He just fell in with these people — it was just the crowd,” says Belinda Seidemann. “So he began taking some pictures, and those were some of his very early pictures, of Janis Joplin and the Grateful Dead.”
Photography led him to shoot and art direct album covers for The Grateful Dead, Randy Newman and Cheap Trick. But one of his most memorable and contentious covers was his first: the 1969 self-titled album for Blind Faith, a supergroup composed of Eric Clapton, Steve Winwood, Ric Grech and Ginger Baker.
Clapton asked Seidemann to devise the cover art, and he responded with an image that featured a shirtless 11-year-old girl holding a model airplane. (The girl, Mariora Goschen, was photographed with her parents’ consent.) The image caused a sensation, with some critics describing the plane as a phallic symbol. In the United States, Goschen’s image was replaced with a photo of the band.
The members of Blind Faith are photographed by Bob Seidemann in 1969. From left: Steve Winwood, Ric Grech, Ginger Baker and Eric Clapton. Bob Seidemann / Michael Ochs Archives / Getty Images
Seidemann insisted that the Blind Faith cover was not intended to be sexually interpreted.
“To symbolize the achievement of human creativity and its expression through technology, a space ship was the material object,” he once wrote of the cover. “To carry this new spore into the universe, innocence would be the ideal bearer, a young girl as young as Shakespeare’s Juliet. The space ship would be the fruit of the tree of knowledge and the girl, the fruit of the tree of life.”
“It wasn’t meant to be the titillating piece that everybody read,” says Belinda. “He described the airplane as science and the future, and he wanted an innocent to be carrying that into the future.”
Seidemann's portrait of Rick Griffin, an artist known for his underground comics and psychedelic music posters. RB / Redferns
Seidemann was born Robert Seidemann in New York City in 1941. He was raised in Woodside, Queens, near LaGuardia Airport, and as a boy, was fascinated with planes.
An undiagnosed learning disability made it difficult for him to read, so he attended a vocational high school, the Manhattan High School of Aviation Trades. After graduation, he got a job delivering film for a laboratory, a gig that turned him on to the possibilities of photography.
“He always described being on the street in New York, walking over to some studio, and delivering the film,” says Belinda. “He’d get in the elevator and the elevator would open up and he’d see this glamorous scene — it was the late ’50s, early ’60s — this beautiful photo shoot. He’d deliver the film, get right back on the elevator and then be back on the street.”
He soon landed a job as a photo assistant for Tom Caravaglia, who was then a commercial photographer, but would ultimately become known for his documentation of modern dance. One of Seidemann’s assignments for Caravaglia was staging shoots for kitsch calendars featuring baby chickens and hay bales.
But even as Seidemann wrangled baby birds, his passion was beatnik culture and jazz. He moved in the 1960s to San Francisco, because, as Belinda says, “he started hearing that all the beatniks were going to the coast.” (It was in San Francisco where he met the young Belinda Bryant, whom he would marry in 1983.)
His commanding presence — “he was 6’2” and his mouth was as big as he was,” says Belinda — made him a natural to shoot unruly rock bands: “He could walk into a room and he could get their attention. They all liked him, and he liked them.”
The graphics of the era were framed by the photos Bob took. He gave a regal purity to hippies like the Grateful Dead. Douglas Brian Martin, photographer
Bob Seidemann as a young man in 1967. Stanley Mouse
In the 1970s, the Seidemanns relocated to Los Angeles — where Bob would create work for the record labels and where Belinda would ultimately become an Emmy-nominated make-up artist.
Seidemann’s album covers for Warner Bros., Columbia Records and A&M Records often included wry references to culture, both high and low. His design for Jackson Browne’s 1974 album “Late for the Sky” contained a stark image of a single burning light underneath a cloud-filled sky and was inspired by a painting by Belgian surrealist René Magritte.
In the 1990s, he returned to one of his youthful passions — airplanes — in a series titled “Airplane as Art.” The collection consisted of artfully framed black and white images capturing the sculptural aspects of aircraft, as well as their designers and pilots. Photos from the series are now part of the permanent collection at the Getty Museum.
Martin says Seidemann never lost his ability to craft an artful image.
“About 15 years ago, I did an installation in Marina del Rey,” he recalls. “I wanted to take pictures of it. Bob said, ‘I’ll take the pictures.’ He showed up with a Hasselblad and no light meter. I thought, ‘Seidemann has lost his mind!’ He said, ‘I don’t need a light meter.’ And every shot was perfect. He knew what he was doing.”
Seidmann was diagnosed with Parkinson’s roughly half a dozen years ago, after which he and Belinda retired, and left Los Angeles for Mare Island.
The photographer is survived by his younger brother, Donald Seidemann, who lives in Seattle, and Belinda. The couple had no children.
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carolina.miranda@latimes.com
Twitter: @cmonstah
ALSO
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More unreleased Jimi Hendrix studio recordings coming via 'Both Sides of the Sky'Android Auto is a focus of Google, with recent news that Android M might be a more robust Android Auto offering, designed specifically for car integration.
The report from Reuters, citing unnamed sources, says that Google's plan is to step beyond integration with an Android smartphone and in-car entertainment, and may have access to the car's other information systems, such as sensors, gauges and so on.
This report was rapidly followed by something of a retort from Bloomberg, stating that German car companies were uneasy about this level of integration.
"The data that we collect is our data and not Google's data," Audi CEO Rupert Stadler is reported to have said, "When it gets close to our operating system, it's hands off."
Google has some German car manufacturers like Volkswagen Audi on-board its Open Automotive Alliance - announced in early 2014 - but VAG has said it wants to limit what Google gets access to. BMW and Mercedes, however, aren't part of the plan, leaving some premium marques outside of Google's plans.
That might rain on Google's parade a little and in Germany, Bloomberg reports, politicians are looking to protect its strong car industry against Google's influence.
Google's play towards cars, however, is something that will be popular with consumers, presenting an experience that transfers directly from browser to smartphone to automobile.
On a surface level, accessing your existing apps, music and services has plenty of appeal. Being able to search Google Maps and have access to your locations or history on your car makes things easy, as would having Google Now present the directions to your next appointment when you start the ignition.
Google is said to be in discussion with car manufacturers around things like accident avoidance, emissions and efficiency of transport routes, which may well depend on the sorts of data that car companies want to keep control of.
"We see ourselves as partners rather than someone who turns the whole business upside down," said Jens Redmer, Google's director of business development EMEA.The publisher of Nova Scotia's largest newspaper apologized on Monday after one of its stories ignited a firestorm with unverified allegations that young Syrian refugees had attacked fellow students at a Halifax elementary school.
The Halifax Chronicle Herald story, which alleged numerous acts of playground abuse at Chebucto Heights Elementary School – including an incident in which one "refugee boy" choked a girl in Grade 3 with a chain while yelling "Muslims rule the world," and another in which "refugee students" threatened others on the soccer field – was published online late Friday and in the paper's Saturday edition. It suggested school administrators had responded weakly to the alleged abuse.
After criticism on social media, editors removed some details from the online story, including the religious reference and the mention of the chain, and softened the original headline, prompting some critics to complain the paper was bowing to "political correctness." But on Monday the entire article was removed from the site and replaced with a lengthy editor's note, which also ran in the paper, saying the piece had "needed more work."
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"Bullying is a sensitive subject. So is the integration of newcomers, particularly those who have faced challenges, even trauma, on their way here," the note read.
"Our story was incomplete and insufficiently corroborated, given the serious nature of the allegations."
It added: "Reaction to the story was all over the map, from thoughtful to downright scary."
The paper's publisher, Sarah Dennis, apologized to Elwin LeRoux, the superintendent of the Halifax Regional School Board.
Insiders at the Chronicle Herald noted the paper's staff has been on strike for 12 weeks, with many inexperienced reporters taking their place. They suggested managers may have missed the holes in the story's reporting because of overwork and exhaustion. In a Facebook post, Martin O'Hanlon, the president of CWA Canada, the union representing the paper's staff, said, "This would never have happened if real journalists were on the job instead of scabs."
In an e-mail to The Globe and Mail, Ms. Dennis played down the role of the strike in the retracted story. "Humans make mistakes. There have been errors before the union walked off the job and unfortunately there have been errors during the labour disruption."
The story's heady cocktail of refugee politics, ineffectual bureaucrats, and whiffs of schoolyard jihad and religious imperialism proved irresistible to websites that traffic in anti-Muslim sentiment – such as those belonging to commentator Ezra Levant, whose upstart Rebel Media outlet has been one of the most persistent critics of the federal government's Syrian refugee policy, and Pamela Geller, the New York-based activist whose star rose with her successful campaign against the so-called Ground Zero Mosque.
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The story was also picked up by an Australian news site, which teased the article from its front page with a photo of Prime Minister Justin Trudeau.
In an interview, Mr. LeRoux said school board staff had investigated the allegations and, though they had not conducted an exhaustive review, had so far come up empty-handed. "They reported there was nothing they could connect from an incident that happened at school that was related to what was in the paper," he said. "They were quite shocked at the details of what was in there. Some of it was quite sensational."
Mr. LeRoux estimated that "upwards of 35 to 40 students, and maybe even 50" newcomers have joined the student population, which numbered 299 last September, and he cautioned that sensational or flawed reporting can damage and stereotype a school community.
"Even if there's conflict in our schools, what we're talking about … are young kids, kids who are between the ages of five and 12. We're talking about kids who are learning what it means to get along with other members of society, no matter how they came to be in the classroom."A week or so ago, we posted up a video of ‘AirDog: The World’s First Action Sports Drone’ and talked about what the tech behind the project might consist of. Well Helico Aerospace Industries US LLC, the company behind the drone, have sent ADAPT a press release and we now know a lot more about it.
First off, AirDog have launched their Kickstarter Campaign today and need $200,000 to move the AirDog into production. By the looks of it though, they are going to absolutely smash that target – they are already almost half way there!
Helico describe the auto-follow drone as “a simple to use personal drone for every surfer, snow-skate-wake-kite-boarder, MX or BMX rider.” The engineering team behind the drone are all passionate about action sports and had a clear vision about what they wanted to achieve:
“You’re doing the very thing you were born to do — You’re surfing a mammoth wave, pulling off a flawless cutback. It’s breathtaking. You’re on your snowboard, whooshing over fresh powder in the backcountry. It’s exhilarating. You’re executing a perfect crankflip on the BMX course. It’s mind blowing”
“Now imagine that your GoPro is soaring overhead, capturing the entire performance in pro quality video. Every move of your body, every droplet of water, every flake of snow, and every clod of dirt — everything captured in exquisite detail…The camera matches your pace, flying down the slope at 40 mph. The camera dips and hovers to photograph your movement through the curl of the wave. The GoPro gradually rises as your bike ascends a roller.”
“You’ve got video proof of your exploits, accomplishments, and achievements. The camera — super stable, incredibly smooth, precisely framed, and perfectly balanced, — is recording with flawless accuracy. It’s your airborne sidekick, flying along wherever you go.”
While not so long ago, this would sound like a complete pipe-dream, the AirDog brings this fantasy to life using some pretty neat tech. AirDog was designed to be a small, agile, foldable quadcopter, especially designed for video shooting action sports with the GoPro camera. It is also, necessarily, constructed to be super durable so that it can follow you in any conditions, through “pelting rain, freezing temps, massive waves, or freaking insane places.”
The AirDog’s design has the following features:
Foldable arms
Impact-resistant body
Collapsible body
Fold-down props
Weather resistant
Lightweight
Collision-sensitive motor shutdown
Prop guard (will be released later as an accessory)
Easy repair
This all means that you can fold up the drone and stuff it into your backpack for easy transport, before letting it loose in the most tough conditions as it tracks and captures your sport or activity.
So how does the drone work. Helico say that you just need to strap a wearable tracker, that they call an AirLeash, to your wrist or helmet in order for the drone to track and follow you. AirDog will follow a signal from this programmable tracker. As well as the drone itself, the AirLeash is also designed to be small and durable. It’s waterproof and consists of a computerized tracker with intelligent software and sensors built inside. It sends signals to the AirDog, indicating exact movement trajectory. The drone performs in-flight calculations to correct its flying pattern, and points the camera at the user wearing an AirLeash – awesome!
As mentioned in ADAPT’s first post about the drone, the AirDog can takeoff and land completely autonomously. This will free you to focus on your performance. Helico say that AirDog will land at the end of your track, or return to the takeoff spot when the battery begins to run low (another important and cool feature). An alarm on the AirLeash tells you when AirDog’s battery is too low to continue.
AirDog has three main flight-modes to choose from. These are: an ‘Auto-Follow’ mode, with many submodes for different sports (probably the most used mode); a manual remote control flight for first person view (FPV) or indoors (useful if you want a mate to control the drone with increased precision) and a handheld ‘Steadicam’ mode, to be used when the drone is not in the air.
There are six ‘Auto-Follow’ submodes to choose from. These are:
1. ‘Auto-follow’ – Will work with almost any sports. In this mode AirDog will follow you repeating exactly your movement trajectory while maintaining its position in preset distance and altitude from you.
2. ‘Relative position’ – In this mode AirDog will maintain constant offset relative to magnetic north from the rider. For example, you can set it to keep a 10 meter distance at 4 meters high to the east from your position. Even when you change your direction, the AirDog will stay at the same preset angle from you. We suggest this mode for straight line wakeboard cable parks, surfing, and some other sports.
3. ‘Follow track’ – This is the safest way to operate AirDog. Simply go for one lap with AirLeash and it will record your track. Then adjust AirDogs trajectory to your liking in smartphone app. AirDog will repeatedly fly over the exact set trajectory and the camera will be continually adjusted to aim at the rider.This is the most creative mode where you can become a true director of your movie. Adjust AirDog’s trajectory to avoid obstacles like buildings or trees. You can even make it to shoot you from different angle on different spots/kickers in the track. It might sound complicated, but its a simple few tap process in AirDog smartphone app.
4. ‘Hover and Aim’ – The Hover and Aim setting allows AirDog to stay in one position above the ground, but constantly directing the camera at the AirLeash. This setting is perfect for tight places such as smaller skateparks, narrow forest trails, or for activities such as bungee jumping or base jumping, where clearance from equipment is important.
5. ‘Circle’ – In this setting, AirDog makes circular rotations on a set radius and altitude, keeping the camera aimed at the AirLeash. This for slow speed or static shots to show impressive view around you.
6. ‘Look down’ – The most simple mode but can produce very stunning results. Simply “walk” your AirDog above a ramp or kicker where you are about to throw some epic tricks and with push of a button it will freeze its position and aim camera straight down. Now make sure you don’t go too high.
Helico also say that they will be adding further modes in the future, so there will be no shortage of settings to select for your chosen sport/activity.
In order to produce professional-grade footage, the camera, GoPro in this case, needs to be kept stable during flight. To achieve this, the AirDog uses a 2 axis gyro-stabilized gimbal with the features listed in the image above, to house the camera.
As well as using the tracker to guide the AirDog in Auto-mode, Helico have also developed a smartphone app to provide additional options. With the app, you can control the distance, height, and angle. You can create custom flight paths of your favorite tracks and map out shooting presets, sounds really cool, right?
If you are as excited about the AirDog as well are, check out the Kickstater campaign for more info.The group finally made their way to team RWBY dorm room. Weiss held a breath before opening the door, knowing that her mother especially probably wouldn't approve of the bedding. Alas, it was too late to change anything, so she opened the door wide and made a gesture to her mother and sister to enter. There was an audible gasp not even a second later and Weiss cringed a little, fearing what would inevitably follow.
"What in the name of dust is this, Weiss?" Her mother's finger was pointed at the precariously tied Ruby's bed, of course. Not like Yang's book-supported bunk is any better, she reminded herself. Winter, on the other hand, was more than mildly intrigued. As it appeared, she was actually admiring the bed that was suspended by rope.
"Umm…", Weiss started. "The room felt cramped, so we improvised."
"And you improvised by creating two death traps?"
"Mother, I actually think it's ingenious. They are huntresses-in-training and they need to learn to live dangerously."
Weiss thought about her sister's words. I have never thought of it this way. She actually has a point. Clearly, her mother did not share the sentiment.
"Winter, a hunter is less in danger while sleeping than when in action. Sleeping on death traps is not fighting Grimm." She then turned to Weiss. "So, dear daughter, would you care to tell me which one is your bed?"
Weiss swallowed. "The… The one under the roped one."
Her mother's face tensed. "Well, I guess it is better than sleeping under the one that is supported by books. And who, if I may ask, sleeps on the bed above yours?"
Before Weiss could answer, she heard the excitable team leader answer. "Umm… I do, Miss… Mrs Schnee," she corrected herself after receiving a jab from Yang. Weiss' mother looked at her with suspicious eyes, measuring the girl from head to toe. Weiss felt uncomfortable at the sight, but Ruby seemed even more nervous, her knees wobbling again, as if she was cold or something.
"Your name was Ruby, am I correct?", the matriarch demanded, her tone icy. Ruby nodded. "Weiss tells me you're her partner and also two years younger." Ruby nodded again. "And Miss Belladonna told me your weapon is something different." Ruby's eyes flared and Weiss got scared a little, as she knew what was coming next. "Would you mind elaborating on that?"
Ruby lit up like a lightbulb and jumped to the centre of the room, taking Crescent Rose from her belt. She held the folded weapon to show it to the two Schnee newcomers. Mrs Schnee looked at it, not understanding what was going on. "This is your weapon? It doesn't look like much."
Ruby took a breath, not believing what she heard. "It's Crescent Rose. A scythe," she said with slightly offended voice and unfolded it. Mrs Schnee jumped backwards at the loud sound of unfolding weapon while Winter remained in place and Weiss noticed her sister was slightly in awe of the spectacle.
The weapon unfolded and when the clicking stopped, it was taller than Ruby. Then the word avalanche let loose from Ruby's lips.
"It was designed by myself and custom made especially for me. It's a high-impact sniper scythe, with a blade at least as sharp and hard as titanium…"
Weiss drowned the babbling as she was used to it from earlier times Ruby started losing her composure while talking about her weapon, and fixed her gaze on her mother and Winter. Mrs Schnee looked quite interested in the weapon and listened intently, which was surprising for the heiress, as she never before saw her mother listening to someone as below her as Ruby.
But |
registration and increasing early voting opportunities. Modernization would add 50 million new voters to the rolls, reduce costs, and curb the potential for fraud. Here's how it works.
1. Revamp voter registration.
The system relies heavily on pen-and-paper forms, which lead to typos and errors in registration records. Adding more electronic options would help get more voters on the rolls and keep them there by increasing accuracy and efficiency.
For instance, online registration allows eligible citizens to register -- and to more easily check and update their records -- through a secure online portal. New York offers online registration to those with a Department of Motor Vehicles identification, but that should be expanded to include more eligible citizens. If voters can bank and shop online, it makes no sense that they cannot register to vote online, too.
2. Undergo a tech face-lift.
We can upgrade technology at government offices to help citizens register to vote. When voters interact with the Department of Motor Vehicles and other agencies, those offices should transfer registration information electronically to election officials.
This would create a seamless experience for the voter, since the registration would take place as part of an underlying transaction. Although many state agencies are required to offer this opportunity under federal law, they still rely on analog systems.
In New York City, for example, voters are supposed to be offered the opportunity to register when they interact with 18 city agencies.
But according to a review by the Brennan Center for Justice and other nonprofits, that seldom happens. In 84 percent of interactions, agency officials failed to give citizens the opportunity to register.
The groups issued recommendations, including implementing electronic registration and other reforms.
3. Implement same-day registration.
State laws need to be changed to include more time to register. Most states cut off registration weeks before an election -- before many voters are even paying attention. That leaves too many citizens outside the democratic process. Instead, voters should be allowed to show up on Election Day to register or to update their registration status and cast a ballot. This turnout-boosting reform would provide much-needed flexibility for today's mobile society.
4. Bring about early voting.
We need to create more options to vote early, something even President Barack Obama did earlier this month. Confining voting to a single day does not account for the realities of modern life. New York is one of only 18 states nationwide that does not give every eligible citizen a chance to vote in person before Election Day. Early voting helps election officials by reducing stress on the system and shortening lines on Election Day, and it helps voters by improving access.
It's time to modernize
Modernizing our antiquated system would help voters and election officials alike. Hopefully, when legislative sessions begin next year, leaders in New York and other statehouses will take steps to modernize our laws to ensure voting is free, fair and widely accessible to all eligible citizens.
(Photo: Flickr/davidjdalley)1 of 15 View Caption
Scott Sommerdorf | The Salt Lake Tribune SPEAR, (San Juan Public Entry & Access Rights), member Brent Johansen talks to anot Scott Sommerdorf | The Salt Lake Tribune SPEAR, (San Juan Public Entry & Access Rights), riders ride their atvs to the BLM h Scott Sommerdorf | The Salt Lake Tribune The "Great Old Broads for Wilderness" counter protest as the SPEAR group arrives at the Scott Sommerdorf | The Salt Lake Tribune Closely watched by a BLM officer, Marc Thomas (left), with "The Great Old Broads" group Scott Sommerdorf | The Salt Lake Tribune Some of the "Great Old Broads" group hikes up "Lem's trail" in Recapture Canyon near Bl Scott Sommerdorf | The Salt Lake Tribune Chairman of the County Commision, Bruce Adams speaks in favor of the SPEAR position dur Scott Sommerdorf | The Salt Lake Tribune County commisioner Phil Lyman speaks to the SPEAR members rallying in a snowstorm at th Scott Sommerdorf | The Salt Lake Tribune Shelley Smith, the BLM district manager for the Canyon Country area spoke with SPEAR me Scott Sommerdorf | The Salt Lake Tribune Larry Sorrell, President of SPEAR, (San Juan Public Entry & Access Rights), speaks Scott Sommerdorf | The Salt Lake Tribune An Anasazi ruin near "Lem's Trail" as the group "The Great Old Broads" hikes in Recaptu Scott Sommerdorf | The Salt Lake Tribune Ronnie Egan of "The Great Old Broads" steps over a stile that was built in Recapture Ca Scott Sommerdorf | The Salt Lake Tribune Ronni Egan (center) points out one of the Anasazi ruins close to the "Lem's Trail" in R Scott Sommerdorf | The Salt Lake Tribune A hiker hikes past a culvert that was placed along "Lem's Trail" in order to improve th Scott Sommerdorf | The Salt Lake Tribune Part of the "Great Old Broads" group hikes past a rock formation with what they call "BWhen the biggest high street music shop chain is in trouble, you know there’s a problem. Today 90year old music chain HMV was refused a £300m lifeline to keep its doors open and may be going into liquidation as soon as tomorrow.
It’s been the move of consumers to online rental and streaming services that seems to be the reason for the possible closures. Verdict reports that HMV’s share of the music and video market in retail was 22.2 per cent in 2012. Up to 4,500 jobs are also at risk now with store closures throughout the UK.
There have been subtle hints throughout the year that you may have noticed when you go into HMV. The decrease in Vinyl on sale, the increase in audio equipment stock on display in store and the constant bargain sale’s in music and dvd’s have all been the store’s efforts to change their sales technique and get back some of their losses. Even now if you go to their website they’re having a huge blue cross sale.
It’s worrying for physical music as a whole but this news comes a couple of weeks after the news that UK vinyl sales are up 15.3% since last year. Which was an improvement on the year before.
[UPDATE] HMV called in the administrators over night and did not open for business today. They said they will not be accepting or issuing gift vouchers any longer and the board of the shop had this to say : “The board regrets to announce that it has been unable to reach a position where it feels able to continue to trade outside of insolvency protection and in the circumstances therefore intends to file notice to appoint administrators to the company and certain of its subsidiaries with immediate effect.“Tens of millions of American consumers have clauses in their credit card, checking account, student loan, and wireless phone contracts that take away their rights to sue those companies in a court of law, and more than 93% of these people have no idea they’ve had this right taken away from them. The companies involved are presumably quite happy about this lack of awareness, as it results in millions of dollars in savings that aren’t being passed on to you.
This is all according to a new report on arbitration from the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau, which found, among other things:
• 53% of credit cards currently have arbitration clauses.
• Only 8% of banks and credit unions use the clauses, but those few institutions are so large that they represent 44% of all insured deposits.
• 92% of prepaid debit cards are subject to arbitration.
• 86% of the largest private student loan lenders include arbitration clauses in their contracts.
• 99% of payday loans in California and Texas include the restrictive clauses.
• 88% of wireless phone providers in the U.S., representing 99% of phones on the market, use arbitration.
• 75% of consumers don’t know whether their financial and credit accounts have arbitration clauses.
• Fewer than 7% of those with arbitration clauses understood that these few paragraphs of text take away their right to sue.
DIVIDE AND CONQUER
For those unfamiliar with arbitration it’s a process for resolving disputes outside of the legal system. Rather than have your case heard before a judge, a private arbitrator is responsible for the ultimate decision.
Even arbitration advocates have acknowledged that the process is often unbalanced in favor of the business that’s familiar with it.
Of greater concern for consumer advocates is the fact that most forced arbitration clauses include a ban on class actions, meaning that even if a substantial number of customers were harmed in exactly the same way, each of those customers would have to enter into arbitration on his/her own rather than joining together into a single complaint.
Because the rewards of an individual arbitration case are, at best, only a fraction of what they could be in a class action, it can be impossible to mount cases that require extensive research and resources.
In that way, some companies have been accused of using forced arbitration to get around federal laws; if the consumer can’t afford to prove her case, companies can keep on violating laws.
And according to the CFPB report, financial services companies rarely try to compel individual consumer complaints into arbitration, but when there is a potential for a class action involving multiple plaintiffs, it’s quite common to force the case into an arbitration process. The report found that when credit card companies faced class action claims, they turned to arbitration 65% of the time in order to prevent the joined complaints from being heard together.
SMALLER CASES, SMALLER REWARDS
In 2013, the Supreme Court gave credit card companies more of a reason to use arbitration clauses, with a divided SCOTUS ruling that these clauses could be used to preempt class-action lawsuits, even in cases where class actions are the only economically feasible way for the plaintiff to make its case.
The CFPB attempted to compare the awards for arbitration cases versus those able to pursue a claim in court. That’s not as easy as it sounds, given that many civil complaints end up being settled before trial and those settlements may not be part of the public record.
In 1,060 arbitration cases filed in 2010 and 2011, the total amount of damages awarded was less than $175,000 with another $190,000 in debt forbearance. During the same period of time, the few individual (i.e., non class-action) cases that were actually decided by a judge totaled around $1 million in awards.
Meanwhile, class actions are resulting in significantly larger awards than either arbitration or individual lawsuits. Over the five-year period studied by the CFPB, settlements in the Bureau’s relevant markets added up to $2.7 billion, covering a total of 160 million class members.
“Further, these figures do not include the potential value to consumers of class-action settlements requiring companies to change their behavior,” explains the Bureau.
SAVING MONEY FOR SOMEONE; BUT NOT YOU
One of the arguments used by proponents of arbitration is that it saves companies money by preempting expensive and lengthy class action litigation. But the CFPB’s analysis found no evidence that the existence of an arbitration clause had any impact on prices.
“Tens of millions of consumers are covered by arbitration clauses, but few know about them or understand their impact,” said CFPB Director Richard Cordray in a statement. “Our study found that these arbitration clauses restrict consumer relief in disputes with financial companies by limiting class actions that provide millions of dollars in redress each year. Now that our study has been completed, we will consider what next steps are appropriate.”Mother Nature does not care where USA Ultimate decides to host Club Nationals.
When USA Ultimate decided to move Nationals to Frisco, Texas, before the start of this season, I wondered how much last year’s weather in Sarasota, Florida, affected that decision. Persistent wind and the threat of more, perhaps a cancellation or postponement of the tournament had the tropical storm fueling the gusts off the coast of Florida last year been more threatening, may have forced USA Ultimate’s hand for this year’s event and future events. After all, the product was now being streamed live by niche ultimate sites like Ultiworld and, perhaps more importantly for the future of the sport, mega-sports site ESPN.
Not that the change in geography mattered all that much to Mother Nature. She still wreaked havoc on the field at Nationals this year in Frisco, with blustery conditions — again, sans tropical storm this time — on Sunday during finals play.
We had a saying in college ultimate, that wind and rain are the great equalizers of this sport. It’s even true at the elite level, apparently. Turnovers and long points plagued teams this weekend, as elite throwers across all three divisions struggled with the elements. It affected the product on the field which, in turn, affected the product seen by anyone watching on ESPN3. Knowing that decision-making people at ESPN likely were tuning in as well had to make USA Ultimate a little uneasy.
A friend and I had a brief conversation on the topic of weather and ultimate yesterday and he made an interesting point: Wind doesn’t seem to affect NFL quarterbacks much in the same way it affects ultimate players, even these elite ultimate players. Now, granted, there’s a significant difference in the receptacle used by each sport, but the statement begs the question: Why aren’t our elite players able to overcome the elements like, say, an elite football player?
Because maybe it’s not about the players at all. Maybe it’s about the sport itself, specifically the product used to play ultimate — the disc.
I’m not a scientist or a physicist, but I know a few things about footballs from playing and watching the sport. Footballs have a good deal of weight to them. Their flight pattern is much different in the air and they don’t tend to float. A football has a much shorter flight, which means less time aloft and less time for wind to affect that flight. Not to say wind doesn’t affect quarterbacks at all, because it certainly does particularly on longer throws. But the effect is less noticeable on television for football players, as opposed to ultimate.
The thin, light plastic disc used to play ultimate is at the mercy of the elements. Slippery when wet, volatile in the wind. And it’s obvious when you watch ultimate online how much the elements are affecting the players, who are all essentially “quarterbacks” at some point during a game. The on-field product and the actual skill level of these elite players are being diminished by Mother Nature.
When football decided to start playing games in domed stadiums, many argued it would change the game. Football traditionalists said football should be played outside in the elements, like it’s always been played.
Playing football games inside did, indeed, change the game. The game became faster, stream-lined, offense-friendly and more exciting to fans. Playing indoors made football more watchable on television.
That’s exactly what USA Ultimate wants to do with ultimate.
Ultimate, like football, also was born outside, on a grass field with the elements in play. But when the eyes of the world are watching online on a site like ESPN, USA Ultimate needs to put on a show. It needs the sport to look as appealing as possible to old fans and new alike. It needs the elite players of the sport to actually look elite, both as throwers and as athletes. It needs better watch-ability, because the better the product looks on the screen the more fans, players, advertisers, investors and, subsequently, money USA Ultimate can generate from the sport.
Perhaps, then, it’s time for USA Ultimate to consider moving championship level games indoors.SWAT Anti terrorist unit policeman during the night (Shutterstock)
Police mistakenly shot a man who called 911 last month to report he had spotted a Washington fugitive wanted in the shooting of a neighbor.
The man, who asked that his identity not be publicly released, called Oct. 31 to report he had seen 59-year-old John Kendall, who was the subject of a manhunt after shooting a woman in the face as part of an ongoing property feud.
Abigail Mounce, 33, is expected to lose her right eye after her neighbor fired into a vehicle with what appeared to be an AK-47 rifle.
SWAT officers who arrived at the scene spotted a man matching Kendall’s description and opened fire – unaware that he was the 911 caller.
“Law enforcement personnel watched as the citizen (believed to be Kendall) exited his vehicle and circled behind his trunk,” police said. “Fearing that he armed himself, law enforcement fired multiple shots at the individual in order to stop the perceived threat before the citizen could enter the woods.”
The man was shot in the leg and took cover behind a gravel pile, where he fired a gunshot in return.
His gunshot hit no one, police said.
The man then called 911 again to report he had been shot.
Police made contact with the man and treated his wound until he could be taken to a hospital for treatment.
The police who shot at the man – identified Tuesday as Cpl. Chris LeBlanc, 47, Officer Brian Frances, 38, of Vancouver police, and Clark County Deputy Anthony Spainhower, 39 – have been placed on paid administrative leave.
Authorities are still trying to determine how many shots they fired and whose bullet hit the 911 caller.
Investigators found Kendall’s body nearby a short time later, dead from an apparent self-inflicted gunshot wound.
Police said there was no apparent connection between Kendall and the man who called 911.
Watch this video report posted online by The Oregonian:SAN JOSE –A string of downtown fires, including an early Saturday morning blaze that burned an elderly couple out of their Victorian home, is now thought to be the work of an increasingly brazen arsonist who is targeting San Jose as the city sleeps.
Ten fires have erupted across downtown San Jose since Wednesday: at a church, a warehouse, a commercial building and six homes. And fire officials announced Saturday that at least eight of the 10 fires were set intentionally, while two remained under investigation. All the fires occurred between the hours of 2 a.m. and 6 a.m.
Authorities released a police artist’s sketch of a “person of interest,” and the firefighters’ union announced a $10,000 reward aimed at capturing the man before he kills someone.
“These fires have targeted San Jose residents in the darkest hours of the night when they are most vulnerable,” said Robert Sapien, president of San Jose Fire Fighters IAFF Local 230, at a news conference Saturday. “We have been very fortunate that these fires have not resulted in serious injury or death to our residents. Should these fires continue, I fear this good fortune may run out.”
The latest blaze, which scorched a Victorian home on East St. John Street, began at 4:23 a.m. Saturday. The retired residents of the home, Sharon and Vincent La Vigna, were asleep when the fire broke out and were likely saved by their next-door neighbors.
“We saw the whole roof on fire. My dad and I were banging on the door, and no one woke up,” said Jose Lara, 25. “We broke a window and tore off a screen to get them out. My father and I were screaming ‘Come on, get out, your house is on fire!’ I grabbed the woman by the hand, and my father grabbed the man. They wanted to go back and get their cats. At first they didn’t understand how bad it was.”
San Jose Fire Station 8, on East Santa Clara Street, has responded to most of the blazes. At the solemn news conference held at Station 8 Saturday, fire officials urged the public to be on high alert. They said the police sketch was based on numerous tips, including video footage from home security cameras and an eyewitness who saw the man leaving the scene of one of the fires.
The man is believed to be a white or Hispanic man, age 25 to 40, who is at least 6 feet tall and weighs between 160 and 180 pounds. He has been spotted wearing baggy clothes and large frame glasses.
“We’re not sure what’s making this person tick,” said Capt. Chris Murphy, head the San Jose Fire Department’s arson unit. “It could be revenge, spite or mental illness.”
Murphy, who said he had slept just four hours in the last 48, noted that most of the blazes were remarkably similar in many ways.
“The fires have been in the same geographic area, they are similar in nature and they’ve occurred in the same time frame,” Murphy said. “In some cases papers or a newspaper was lit on fire and put through a mail slot. There’s no evidence of an accelerant, like gasoline, being used.”
The arsons began early Wednesday at Greater St. John Baptist Church on East San Antonio Street. On Thursday, there were five fires, including three at homes. On Friday, there were three fires. Saturday morning’s blaze was the 10th.
The arsonist tried to set one building on fire two nights in a row. The building at 1165 Peach Ct.is the home of a MGM Drywall. Early Thursday morning, someone stuck a burning object through the company’s mail slot, sparking other documents to catch fire. Early Friday morning, someone tried to pull a plywood panel off the side of the shop, stuffed newspapers inside, and lit the newspapers on fire.
Residents are urged to keep the exterior of their homes free of any debris that could quickly ignite — dry leaves or bundles of newspapers, for example — and are advised to make sure that all their smoke detectors are working.
Contact Dana Hull at 408-920-2706. Follow her at Twitter.com/danahull.The personal is the political. I experienced a dose of both in the heated exchange on “The Sunday Talk” segment of CBC’s The National Nov 8. My son Jon was, as usual, on the panel, this time to discuss one of my niche subjects, men’s awareness groups, and their struggle for official recognition on several Canadian campuses. Watching, I reeled internally between maternal pride for Jon’s objectivity and incredulity at the politically-willed ignorance and prejudice he was up against.
The two opposing panelists were BuzzFeed writer Scaachi Koul and lawyer Adam Goldenberg, both ardent feminists who approve denial of official status to men’s groups. But the reasons they gave were gobsmackingly subjective. “You don’t want to feed these trolls,“ Adam opened with. Startled, Jon asked on what ground he’d passed such a comprehensive judgment (“Am I a troll?” threw Adam a bit). That set the tone.
Scaachi opined that it “would make me nervous” to live “right next door” to a men’s group centre, as though any gathering of more than two men must be evidence of a patriarchal plot to commit some nameless horror on any passing female. These groups, she went on, have not formed out of a wish to discuss real male concerns, they have grown out of “anxiety about women having something to say.” They are “often a lot of straight white men talking to other straight white men about straight white issues.” Adam insists they are simply “out for attention,” although they should be allowed (unofficially) to “have their say,” upon which Scaachi jumped in with “But their say has been bad.”
Wow. Adam and Scaachi seem to know a lot for people who have obviously never met a men’s group member or been to a men’s awareness event. I have rarely seen such an exquisitely compressed display of arrogance, casually unsupported demonization and bullying self-satisfaction. Neither Adam nor Scaachi offered a remotely credible rebuttal to the list of concerns Wendy Mesley read out as the entirely legitimate topics of concern for which men’s groups seek information and support: high male suicide rates, boys’ education, family law bias toward mothers, due process in alleged crimes against women, and men’s specific health issues (and fatherlessness should have been on the list).
Jon pushed back hard, and with reason — their claims were “projections,” he rightly pointed out, not facts — and then he pushed back with appeals to fairness and, when these failed to make a dent, well-deserved sarcasm. But the two ideologues ploughed blindly forward, making up in evangelical fervour what they lacked in logic or objectivity. Finally, Jon summed it all up beautifully when he responded to Adam’s escalatingly desperate ramblings with, “Everything you’ve said is ridiculous.” And it was.
What viewers witnessed in microcosm in those 12 minutes is the despotism of the left exercising its tyranny over straight white males, the only group in Western culture upon which any and all collective slanders may be heaped with impunity. If directed at women (except for Christian pro-lifers), blacks, aboriginals, Muslims, or gays, some of the erroneous claims Adam and Scaachi adduced as settled truth would be deemed hate speech.
The greatest whopper of the segment, responding to the issue of “due process” that men rightly feel is denied them by campus tribunals judging rape claims, was Scaachi’s airy denial that women ever lie about their victimhood. Women lie frequently, have been proved to lie frequently, and as Jon pointed out, Americans have seen a growing list of lawsuits — some successful ones resulting in seven-figure payouts by the respective universities — launched by young men whose education, future careers and social lives have been thrown into jeopardy by demonstrably false allegations of rape.
Civility is our watchword, even when our events are disrupted or shut down by protestors screaming hateful slogans and vandalizing property
For the record: I sit as one of several women on the advisory board of a responsible men’s educational and support group. I have spoken at their events. The board is politically non-partisan, contrary to Adam and Scaachi’s belief that all men’s groups are “conservative.” The group is also diverse in terms of members’ cultural provenance and sexuality. Nobody in the group expresses hostility to women. The talks we sponsor are informative, well-researched and intellectually stimulating. Civility is our watchword, even when our events are disrupted or shut down by protestors screaming hateful slogans and vandalizing property.
To be fair to Scaachi and Adam, they come by their uninformed, misandric views honestly enough. It’s systemic, part of the cultural air we breathe. White male privilege? Former Liberal cabinet minister Hedy Fry, responding to the criticism that there are no funded resources for male victims of domestic violence, took offence, riposting that she was perfectly willing to fund any program that had “a clearly demonstrated benefit to women.” Hedy, say hello to your love children, Adam and Scaachi.
National Post
kaybarb@gmail.com
Twitter.com/BarbaraRKayOwners of stores at Landmark Mall in Alexandria, Virginia, confirmed to News4 they've been given notice to vacate their spaces by Jan. 31 to prepare for the long-awaited renovation. (Published Monday, Jan. 9, 2017)
Owners of stores at Landmark Mall in Alexandria, Virginia, confirmed to News4 they've been given notice to vacate their spaces by Jan. 31 to prepare for the long-awaited renovation.
Howard Hughes Corporation, which owns the mall, did not confirm it.
Alexandria leaders told News4 Thursday they anticipated the closing of the mall's Macy's store to expedite plans to renovate the mall.
It's not clear how soon after the tenants leave the renovation will begin.
Store Owners Say They've Been Asked to Vacate Landmark Mall
Owners of stores at Landmark Mall in Alexandria, Virginia, confirmed to News4 they've been given notice to vacate their spaces by Jan. 31 to prepare for the long-awaited renovation. (Published Monday, Jan. 9, 2017)
For years, the once iconic mall has sat largely barren with only a few stores open and an increasingly desolate parking lot.
More than three years ago, the Alexandria City Council approved redevelopment plans made by the Howard Hughes Corporation to transform the mall into a mixed-use property with apartments, shops and restaurants, but there have been delays in getting the redevelopment going.Ever read a book so amazing it all but overtook your logical sense? What if that book opened up a door to some other, foreign existence? What if it completely shattered the reality you’ve come to know? Professor Borylin is about to be able to answer those questions!
Planet Dromelin
The tattered mass market paperback had changed hands several times in the last month and a half and now it lay alone, despondent, like a strange alien artifact, on Professor Borylin’s desk. The book had been published in the year 1994 (the year presently was 2015) and it was 599 pages long. Its condition was such that the professor was fairly certain the book had been read hundreds of times by multiple readers, one having gone so far as to underline passages and to write, in red ink, non-sensical, excitedly written notes on the margins. Its paper-board cover had been creased multiple times in multiple places and the lower right hand corner had been bent and unbent one too many times and had long ago fallen off. Its pages were brittle and yellow, they were foxing, and it was at present being held together by two lime green rubber bands.
The professor spoke on the telephone with a strange (unlikeable) man he’d met years ago named Cluny. Cluny had told the professor about the book in question only a few days ago and the words he used to describe it (“Should I have been prohibited from reading another book again for the rest of my life after this one, Borylin, I would not have minded. The entire contents of several self-contained universes are clapped together between those paper covers, sir.”), compelled the professor to read it on the same day it was given to him.
The professor spoke to Cluny thusly: “My god, all you said about it is absolutely true. I…I’m truly flabbergasted, Cluny. I just, I’ve been unable to think of anything else besides that book for three days straight.”
Cluny’s voice, inaudible to your narrator, responded and the professor listened, his small, bloodshot eyes, unblinking. The professor said, “Yes, the never ending layers and the futility, the downright hopelessness, of Pantunfla’s mission! Cluny, that chapter where The Wrapped Man tinkers with Pantunfla’s ship thereby forcing the showdown they have in the final chapters!” The professor’s voice trembled slightly as he spoke and nervous twitches played around his thin lips. “I kid you not, Cluny, I laid the book down then and wept. It took me several hours to compose myself. Were I not speaking on the phone with you now, I’d be weeping again this instant. Blubbering like a baby, I tell you.”
Cluny’s voice in the heavy matte black receiver again mumbled something.
“Yes, you’re speaking of the labyrinths of planet Dromelin,” the professor said. He laughed and his prominent adam’s apple bobbed in his long crane-like neck. “Could you imagine how he felt? The author doesn’t specify but you get the sense that he was in there for days and days. Perhaps months and that bastard Sonjay waiting for him up top like that, undamaged! That blue and orange suit of his glimmering in planet Dromelin’s triple suns!” Saliva had flung from the professor’s mouth upon him pronouncing the words, ‘triple suns.’
Cluny’s voice droned on again and your narrator will here point out that the professor’s large hand, as it gripped the phone’s large double antannaed ear piece, shook like the limb of one suffering from Parkinson’s Syndrome. In an attempt to stifle the trembling, to smother it, he held the piece tightly against his long chimpanzee-esque ear. This resulted in your narrator, perched inconspicuously beside the ornate stained glass lamp several feet from the professor and the book in question, to lose, almost altogether, the ability to hear even faint mumbling from Cluny, that strange unlikeable gentleman, on the other line.
“Do you really think the name Isak is unisex? Well, yes, I suppose it’s possible. But, so, nobody knows who this person, this Isak J. Farmer, is? Yeah, well, it certainly sounds like a pseudonym.”
The professor knelt to pick the book up. “And it’s the first of a series. No one’s been able to track them down. We don’t even know if they were even published or not. No other volumes have ever been tracked down.”
The professor here gazed intently at the book’s cover.
The Space Chunkers
by Isak J. Farmer
Book One in the Planet Dromelin Saga
based on the best selling Play Station game
The front cover’s illustration showed a dilapidated gunmetal-grey craft rocketing through space amidst floating asteroids and poorly aimed blue and red laser beams.
The professor sighed loudly and said, “To top it off, Cluny, it’s a novelization of a video game for crying out loud. I’ve read it three times now since you handed it to me and I am, I’m an emotional wreck. I exaggerate not in the least when I tell you that I don’t think I’ll ever look at the world the same way again.” The professor sat heavily in his chair, he had been standing until then, and he listened intently to what Cluny, goddamn him, had to say. The left corner of his mouth trembled and his small, wrinkled eyes, magnified slightly by the bifocals on them, appeared glassy, unfocused. They were the eyes of a man who had seen wonders, horrors, beauty, filth and had since grown jaded. They were the eyes of a man who wished not to see anything else anymore.
While listening to Cluny, whose thick monotone voice poured unemotionally from the receiver, the professor re-read for the 283rd time the back cover’s short synopsis:
The Space Chunkers 1,2,3, and 4 have all been brutally assassinated by the seemingly invincible, “Wrapped Man,” Sonjay Pinkin, reality manipulator extraordinaire. Now the 5th and final “Space Chunker,” Tatluco Pantunfla, is on the run and on his way to the dread planet Dromelin in hopes that its strange mind altering caves and tunnels will supply him with even a small advantage over the deadly and menacing, “Wrapped Man.” But can our favorite multi-lived video game hero deal with a malfunctioning space suit, a sabotaged space craft, a planet that seems turned against him, and the deadly Sonjay Pinkin, all at the same time?
Acclaimed author, Isak J. Farmer, brings The Space Chunkers to life (and death) in this fabulous novelization of America’s favorite new video game sensation, Tatluco Pantunfla!
“What I want to know,” the professor’s voice sounded hollow in his head and although he suddenly wished he could just hang up the phone, he continued, “is what the hell possessed you to even pry the book open to begin with? I mean, there seems nothing special about it at all.” Cluny responded but the professor thought to himself: how pointless was living life now, after reading this (a sad, gut wrenching sob escaped from the professor’s throat), this, The Space Chunkers video game novelization. What more was there to learn about the strange universe that he didn’t already know thanks to that disintegrating, mass market paperback there on his bland, oaken desk?
Goddamned Cluny’s voice on the phone murmured something else and the professor’s stomach turned. The two pronged fork of his black wireless phone’s antenna shook and it was all the professor could do to keep it from tumbling to the padded carpet from his trembling hand. “I’ve got to go, Cluny. We’ll speak about this some other time.” But the professor knew they wouldn’t or, rather, they would but not in this time stream. They would in an infinite number of others but not this one.
There is, reader, a strange valve, a spigot of sorts inside earthbound organismic brains that turns open upon it glimpsing, if only for a fraction of a second, vast and never ending infinity. The strange neural hub can never, it seems, recover from the severe shock, the unprepared-for wallop, that occurs when one perceives the unbounded, the never-ending. It begins to, the brain, of its own accord, consider the strange, the eerie, implications of the limitless. The conglomeration of self-aware atoms will begin to malfunction and warp its owner’s view of reality in such a manner that living in a normal fashion becomes impossible. One cannot go about one’s day to day routines while half immersed in (a) dimension(s) wherein exist limb eating monsters and sinister shadow beings that follow you home to and from work.
Beholding the terrifying insanity that lay before them, said glimpsers of the impossible will often opt, wisely, to cut their lives short.
Professor Borylin, sobbing quietly in his office, his family asleep in the rooms beside him, chose, albeit reluctantly, this last option. But he would go down swinging like Tatluco Pantunfla, that brave video-game character turned fully fleshed novelistic protagonist. He would, in his very own cave of insanity and delusion, stare Sonjay Pinkin (infinity) in the brown, indifferent face and spit defiantly…or he would sob, he would grimace, he would fall to his bony 56 year old knees and scream quietly into the room’s thick and luxuriant carpet so as not to awaken his sleeping family. He would do all these things and more, he knew, over and over and over again and Sonjay Pinkin would just stare on indifferently, as if he stood proudly, in that skin fitting orange and blue outfit of his, separated from this universe and all of its strange implications. The “Wrapped Man” would simply choose the time stream or dimension which he deemed safest and then he (or was it the caves of planet Dromelin?) would stir again the chemicals in your head and your self would once more glimpse teeth gnashing infinity.
The professor remembered what Sonjay had told the Space Cruncher in his thin, menacing voice: “But you yo’self gallop about forever and ever, Tatluco, even mo’ so dan a nomal person because there were five of you. Now only one, soon none, but at same time infinite number of you. You should be happy, Space Cruncher, here on planet Dromelin. You were right coming here, you know. You can beat me here many times if you wish. Look, tell you what: I let you be. I let you live.” The “Wrapped Man” had opened his gloved hand in Tatluco’s, and the professor’s, direction. The professor noted that the villain’s blue gloves appeared to have pale blue fingernails on them. Were they gloves at all or just Sonjay’s strange skin made to look like gloves? “C’mon,” said |
ox took the fake news to a whole new level with an article called "Certain doctors are more likely to create opioid addicts. Understanding why is key to solving the crisis." The Vox reporter provides a quote from the lead author of the study:
“'For patients, Barnett said the message is clear: “Patients should ask their physicians, ‘What are the side effects of me taking this opioid and do you think my pain could be treated effectively [another way], because I know how dangerous these medicines can be."
Opioids have now become dangerous medications.
Now imagine that the first headline from The New York Times had said “Medicare Patients Receive Different Amounts of Pain Medication depending on ER Physician.” That would be a fair a description of what was reported in the original NEJM article.
And consider this alternate interpretation of The Chicago Tribune quote about happy patients: These patients are elderly, at low-risk of addiction, and being treated successfully with a well-known medication. This is not something to worry about, especially since the opioid crisis is being driven by illicit substances used primarily by younger people and outside of medical settings.
Forgotten in all of this reporting is the data from the CDC and other government agencies, which clearly shows that opioid prescribing is down considerably compared to just a few years ago, while at the same time the number of overdoses and deaths involving opioids used illicitly has risen.
The data also shows that most people who abuse opioids are young, not elderly. In other words, physician prescribing is not a major driver in the opioid crisis and Medicare patients are not representative of substance abusers at all.
In a matter of days, an article in a respected medical journal describing a retrospective study of the Medicare population has morphed into some doctors being more likely than others to create opioid addicts and unlucky patients are getting hooked.
This is an epidemic spread of fake news, of a dangerous meme, and of a new challenge for chronic and intractable pain patients. Accurate information is the best defense, but that takes work."Change is but Chaos finding Order in itself. Perfect Chaos would, in the end, become but Madness frozen within itself. A delicious irony if it were not for the fact that countless have died in the name of some vast cosmic joke."
Contents show]
New Legion Rules and Statistics
Mechanic Changes
It should be noted that many changes will be later added, especially in the equipment Tables. As time goes on I will add variants and new weapons including Legion Specific Items. For now, all I have listed is that which has appeared in the game so far.
Critical Chart System
Mechanic
The Critical Chart System was initially implemented in my earlier 40K games in order to simulate reality more effectively. It worked in that Wounds were no longer a Mechanic and that whenever damage was applied, it would be taken straight to the Critical Damage Chart. Once the effect had been applied, the Critical Damage would be reset back to 0 and so on.
However, in this Great Crusade Game we are using normal Wounds rules, though they start with half. This is to try and preserver some realism within the Game Mechanics while also allowing for acts of heroism and general awesomeness. The rules above are mentioned as an alternate system for those of you who wish a harder and/or more brutal setting.
Example: Lysha ducks underneath a hail of fire, avoiding the majority of the shells but wincing in pain as the last autogun round tore through armour and flesh. Rolling the damage dice, after deducting Armour and Toughness, Lysha suffers 4 Wounds. The Player then consults the Chart and looks up the 4 Result on the Impact (Arm) Chart. After applying the effects, Lysha once more returns to a 0 on the Critical Damage.
Medicae Changes
Mechanic
The Medicae Skill in our game undergoes a number of changes, in order to bring some semblance of Balance and Realism to our game (sorry Tim but seriously... this skill was f*****). As such, the Medicae has been changed to the Second Wave Version (Only War, Black Crusade and Dark Heresy 2nd Edition). This, more than anything else, has been done to provide some uniformity amongst the rules as there have been many changes taken from those editions.
Secondly, Medicae now relies upon Narthecium Reloads, with each use of Medicae using up a one of the supply. Each Narthecium Reload has a clip of 8 and only 3 additional Reloads may be acquired and fitted onto the Gauntlet. This makes the Apothecary and other Medic Characters less trigger happy when it comes to healing and means that Super-High Intelligence Characters cannot keep healing everyone back up to full, as if they had been completely unscathed (looking at you here, Igorek).
Lastly, the Medicae Skill can only be used in combat as an Extended Action that takes up to 5 turns to complete (1/3rd Total Damage taken in turns). This is in order to stop a Medic from keeping the Squad in tip-top condition throughout lengthy fights. Overall these rules allow Combat to feel far more brutal without entirely negating the use of the Medic.
Alternate Note: For those who still want to use the Medicae Rules from First Wave (Deathwatch, Rogue Trader and Dark Heresy 1st Edition) then another rule you can implement is that ability to use up one Reload for each Point of Critical Damage healed (2 with the Narthecium and then 4 with Master Chirugeon). This does mean that the Apothercary/Medic can heal Critical Damage which usually they can't but it uses up a lot of their supplies and may prove dangerous in the long run.
Second Wave Adaptations
Mechanic
1: We are using the Combat rules from Second Wave, so all Combat Modifiers have been changed to fit these rulesets.
2: We are using the Medicae rules from Second Wave.
3: Swift Attack and Lightning Attack have been changed to Second Wave to make them more in line with Ranged Combatents
4: Not technically Second Wave but we are using Errata Damage Tables for Astartes Weaponry.
5: Legacy Weapon Rules will be utilized as the game progresses to represent equipment that may be regarded as Relic Equipment in the near future.
Requisition Changes
Since the Legiones Astartes is, quite obviously, drastically different from the Deathwatch, there have, and certainly will be, large changes made to many rules. One of the biggest is the introduction of Outfit Requisition.
Outfit Requisition is provided to Astartes upon Promotion and upon Renown Bracket Changes. This represents the acquiring of personal equipment from the Legion stockpiles and from requesting items crafted to their own tailored tastes. Items bought with such Requisition are permanently acquired and are not lost at the end of the mission. This should be treated with caution however, and all purchases should be vetted by the GM as some items are obviously impossible to acquire as personnel equipment.
Lastly, weaponry recovered from the dead and items personally crafted by the Player Characters should be free to keep and GM's should remember that Legion Equipment does not operate in the same way as Deathwatch Gear, Characters are going to end up with their own personal armories and if anything, this should be encouraged.
Cohesion and Squad-Mode Tactics
Again, Cohesion changes though only slightly. First of all, all Members of the same LEGION provide a bonus of +1 Cohesion. Secondly, with the removal of general Oaths (since Oaths of the Moment were highly specific), all Squad Mode Tactics have been made available (not Chapter-Specific ones though).
Fighting in the presence of the Squad Leader's Primarch provides a +5 bonus to Cohesion and negates the need to make a Willpower Check in order to activate a Squad Mode Ability as a Free Action. Traitor Legions also have their own Unique Table seen in the links above.
New Gear and Requisition Changes
Narthecium Reloads
Narthecium Reloads contain the various tinctures, drugs and other items that allow the Apothecary to heal with such ease. Each reload contains 8 Charges, one of which is expended upon each use of the Medicae Skill used to Restore Wounds.
Bolter
The iconic weapon of the Space Marines actually underwent many changes throughout the Great Crusade. In all, there were three Marks of Bolter used and their statistics are listed in the Table below.
Volkite Weaponry
Volkite Weapons were widely used by the mortal and immortal warriors of the Imperium during the early days of the Great Crusade. As time went on, their complexity saw them replaced with other weapons but since this is taking place from the beginning, their statistics are listed in the Table Below.
Power Armour
All Variants of Power Armour are listed in the Rites of Battle Sourcebook. For the purposes of the Campaign, we will be using Marks II through VI as the timeline progresses.
Jump Pack
Older Marks of Jump Packs operated differently from their modern equivalents, including how frequently they were supplied and how effective they were. Crusade Era Variants can double the Movement of the Wearer each turn or provide them with the Flyer (15) for one turn. Using the second ability forces the Jump Pack to recharge for 5 Minutes, negating either of the effects from occurring during this time.
Plasma Weapons
Plasma Weapons in the Great Crusade were fairly new and as such, the initial versions of these will all Overheat. Later, this will be removed though, like Bolters, various Marks of these Weapons exist.
Lascannons
As of the current timeline, Lascannon's are too bulky to be used by infantry and as such they have to be mounted,
Assault Cannons
These weapons are still in Prototype and as such, beta equivalents have been handed out. These are referred to as Rotary Cannons, and still operate to the same effect. Statistics are listed in the Table below.
Name Class Range RoF Dmg Pen Clip Rld Sepcial Wt Req Renown Astartes Mark I Bolter Basic 150m S/3/- 1D10+9 X 4 15 Full Tearing 18 5 - Astartes Mark II Bolter Basic 120m S/2/- 1D10+10 X 4 16 Full Tearing, Reliable 18 10 - Astartes Mark III Bolter Basic 100m S/2/4 1D10+10 X 5 30 2Full Tearing 18 15 - Combi-Bolter Basic 100m S/2/4 1D10+10 X 5 32 2Full Tearing, Twin-Linked 26 35 Famed Volkite Charger Basic 150m S/-/- 1D10+12 E 8 15 Full Tearing, Accurate, Maximal 15 10 - Volkite Caliver Heavy 250m S/2/- 1D10+16 E 12 5 2Full Tearing, Maximal, Blast (2) 50 40 - Astartes Mark I Plasma Gun Basic 100m S/2/- 1D10+9 E 8 40 4Full Volatile 27 20 - Astartes Mark II Plasma Gun Basic 120m S/2/- 1D10+12 E 9 40 4Full Volatile 30 30 Respected Barrage Plasma Gun Heavy 120m S/3/5 1D10+7 E 8 30 4Full Overheats, Volatile 35 30 Distinguished
New Elite Advances
The Atramentar (Night Lord Unique)
The Justaerin (Luna Wolf Unique)
Sergeant (General)
Company Commander (General)
Mournival (Luna Wolf Unique)
Lord-Apothecary (General)
Wraith-Born (Night Lord Unique)This Entire Town In Nevada Was Abruptly Abandoned And Nobody Knows Why
Coaldale—a small town in Esmeralda County that lies 30 miles west of Tonopah—sprang to life in the 1880’s due to an increase in coal mining (hence its name.) During its heyday, this now-abandoned town boasted a market, general store, post office, gas station, railroad depot, hotel, and small residential area. By the 1930’s, this small town was more of a roadside stop than an actual destination. After EPA testing in 1993 found the service station’s underground fuel storage tanks were leaking, the town’s residents quickly “closed house” and abandoned their homes and businesses. The real story remains a mystery.
Even with the gas leakage from the service station (which could have been addressed given that the problem was identified in 1993), why the entire town of Coaldale up and left so abruptly—and so recently— remains a mystery. One can only wonder if Coaldale will ever come back to life. Only time will tell.
Have you been to this modern day abandoned “ghost” town? Please share your experiences below.Accidentally Killing Birds Isn't A Crime, Says Trump Administration
Enlarge this image toggle caption Justin Sullivan/Getty Images Justin Sullivan/Getty Images
The Trump administration says it will no longer criminally prosecute companies that accidentally kill migratory birds. The decision reverses a rule made in the last weeks of the Obama administration.
A legal memo from the Department of the Interior posted Friday declares that the Migratory Bird Treaty Act applies only to purposeful actions that kill migratory birds, and not to energy companies and other businesses that kill birds incidentally.
"Interpreting the MBTA to apply to incidental or accidental actions hangs the sword of Damocles over a host of otherwise lawful and productive actions, threatening up to six months in jail and a $15,000 penalty for each and every bird injured or killed," the memo says.
The memo is written by Daniel Jorjani, Interior's principal deputy solicitor, a longtime adviser to libertarian billionaire Charles Koch.
The U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service estimates more than 30 million birds die each year in collisions with power lines and communications towers, and hundreds of thousands more in oil pits and wind turbines.
In its final weeks, the Obama administration issued a legal opinion stating that the law does include the incidental killing of birds, but in February, the Trump administration suspended that opinion pending review.
The National Audubon Society said the Trump administration's interpretation guts the treaty and runs counter to decades of legal precedent and conservation principles. "The Migratory Bird Treaty Act is one of the most important conservation laws we have," the group says.
The law protects more than 1,000 bird species, according to the society, because it requires industries to take certain steps to protect them, like covering tar pits and marking transmission lines.
"We just don't want to lose any incentive for the industry to come to the table and work through this with us," David O'Neill, the society's chief conservation officer, told The Washington Post. "And the solutions are out there."
At least one industry group praised the administration's decision.
"Over the last few years, the management of 'take' under MBTA has been riddled with flawed decisions that have created massive uncertainty," Tim Charters, senior director of government affairs for the National Ocean Industries Association, told the Post. "This common-sense approach ensures that lawful activities are not held hostage to unnecessary threats of criminalization."
BP pleaded guilty to violating the act with its actions related to the 2010 Deepwater Horizon oil spill. As part of its settlement, the oil company agreed to pay $100 million to the North American Wetlands Conservation Fund, money that was used for wetlands restoration and conservation well beyond the Gulf region where the spill occurred.
Renewable energy projects have also been found in violation. In 2013, Duke Energy pleaded guilty to violating the act in connection with the deaths of two golden eagles at its wind projects in Wyoming, in what the Justice Department said was the "first ever criminal enforcement of the Migratory Bird Treaty Act for unpermitted avian takings at wind projects."
The utility company was sentenced to pay fines, restitution and community service totaling $1 million. It was also placed on probation for five years. It is required to implement an environmental compliance plan aimed at preventing bird deaths at the company's four commercial wind projects in the state.
Collin O'Mara, president of the National Wildlife Federation, told the Post that neither administration had gotten it right: The interpretation was too broad before, and now it is too narrow.
"We're seeing the whipsaw from one extreme to the other," he told the newspaper, saying that in terms of Interior's energy policies, "one year in, there's been no balance. If the choice is between energy and conservation, energy always wins."McDonald’s has been an official sponsor of the Olympic Games since 1976. (Photo: Santo Chino)Foreclosure giant Wells Fargo sponsors Habitat for Humanity?
A couple of years ago, Susan G. Komen for the Cure raised some ire when the breast cancer organization teamed up with Kentucky Fried Chicken. It was an unlikely partnership between a health advocacy organization and a fast food corporation, and considering the research on the health effects of fatty foods, many thought it was highly inappropriate.
Sadly, these kinds of fiscal arrangements are not an anomaly. Many non-profits and other charities rely on corporate sponsorships to keep them afloat – and some of those partnerships seem as counterproductive as KFC’s and Komen’s “pink bucket” campaign.
See, corporations and these “do good” organizations have a harmful yet cyclical relationship. As corporations continuously strive for more customers to increase profits, many non-profit organizations, which often struggle financially, rely on corporations to sponsor them in exchange for lots of advertising. Corporations often jump at the chance to sponsor popular causes and events in order to enhance the corporation’s public image and increase its customer base.
People may argue that these organizations need money to help others, so it doesn’t matter where the money comes from. But it does matter if the organizations accept money from corporations that generate revenue by undermining the public good, and if corporate financial success comes at the expensive of the rest of us, especially those being served by hardworking nonprofits.
What would our world look like if we broke free from corporate power? Imagine, for instance, if the American Cancer Society and its millions of donors stormed the fortress of the dirty gas, oil and coal industries, which have caused cancer rates to soar, and forced them to shut down. A pipe dream? Not if we start realizing just how far corporate dollars have penetrated our lives and begin working to pressure organizations to cut harmful corporate ties.
The following are my top five most dangerously ironic corporate sponsorships. It’s important to note that numerous corporations sponsor these organizations, not just the ones I list. But these are especially hypocritical (and really piss me off).
1. Walmart Sponsors American Cancer Society
Nothing annoys me more than seeing the Walmart logo on the bottom, right-hand corner of every Relay for Life sign I come across. Relay for Life is the American Cancer Society’s annual fundraiser, which has raised more than $3 billion since 1985. I’ll never forget first seeing the logo as I was walking around the track at my local Relay for Life event — I was furious. As someone whose family has been deeply affected by cancer and who has raised a significant amount of money each year for the event, I was shocked that the American Cancer Society would allow such a disgraceful corporation like Walmart to be one of the main sponsors of its event.
Cancer growth parallels the growth of industrialization and has been proven to be linked to polluted environments. Despite the reality that industries are antithetical to the environment from the start, Walmart, no matter how much it tries to greenwash its reputation, is especially unsustainable. In fact, in an investigative series produced by Grist, the journalist found that Walmart destroys habitats, produces an annual 3.5 million metrics tons of CO2, donates money to anti-environment candidates, and its cheap products have increased the amount of items we buy. Walmart’s practices also undermine two crucial elements of good public health: a good diet and access to healthcare. Walmart sells not only processed foods, but has such rotten produce that not even its poor workers buy it. Speaking of workers, many don’t have access to health care, as Walmart offers plans its employees can’t afford as well as continues to cut their health benefits.
2. Wells Fargo Sponsors Habitat for Humanity
If Habitat for Humanity, a non-profit organization dedicated to building “simple, decent, affordable housing,” wanted to build a house for every family kicked out of theirs due to foreclosure, they would have to build fast. Very fast. In fact, between 2007 and early 2012, about 4 million families lost their homes to foreclosure. And in April it was estimated that around 9.5 million homes are at risk for default. Who’s to blame? Well, a lot of corrupt banks, but especially Wells Fargo, the nation’s largest mortgage servicer.
Wells Fargo has continuously participated in fraudulent procedures that have resulted in thousands of people being illegally forced out of their homes. The corporation has practices robo-signing, a process in which foreclosures are approved without properly reviewing cases and then fabricating documents in court, as well as dual tracking, which offers homeowners loan modifications while simultaneously pushing them toward foreclosure. Recently, Wells Fargo was even caught targeting minority groups and just recently paid a $175 million settlement of mortgage discrimination complaints for steering African American and Latino mortgage borrowers into subprime loans with higher rates and fees.
Foreclosures have devastated families nationwide. One man even committed suicide two days before Wells Fargo was going to foreclose his house after a long battle.
3. McDonalds and Coca-Cola Sponsor London Olympics 2012
Across the pond, a controversy has sparked on whether or not McDonalds and Coca-Cola should be allowed to sponsor the 2012 Olympics in London. The London Assembly, an elected body, stated that one of the Olympics’ goals was to promote health by encouraging physical activity. But unhealthy food corporations sponsoring the Olympics, corrupts that message. Meanwhile, a projected 60.8 percent of adults and 31.1 percent of children in the U.K. are overweight.
The Children’s Food Campaign authored a recent report called the Obesity Games, which calls for a ban on junk food brands sponsoring sporting events. The report stated that these corporations were given an “unrivalled platform” to market their unhealthy food. Yet, these corporations only contribute 2 percent of the International Olympic Association’s income. The report stated that taxpayers thus have to fund the majority of the Olympics and the increased healthcare costs due to obesity issues.
Malcolm Clark, campaign coordinator, said to The Independent: “The Olympics have become a celebration of big. For the junk food companies who sponsor the Games that means big restaurants, big audiences, big brand value, big profits. But for children that could also mean bigger waistlines and bigger health problems later in life.”
Despite the on-going debate, McDonalds and Coca-Cola are still sponsoring the Games. On the day before the opening ceremony, London’s mayor Boris Johnson responded to the criticism by telling reporters, “This is all just bourgeois snobbery about McDonald’s … It’s classic liberal hysteria about very nutritious, delicious, food — extremely good for you I’m told — not that I eat a lot of it myself … Apparently this stuff is absolutely bursting with nutrients.”
4. United HealthGroup and WellPoint Sponsor American Red Cross
Health insurance corporations funding an organization dedicated to providing medical assistance to those in need — sounds nice right? Until you learn that United HealthGroup and WellPoint, the two largest health corporations, are more concerned about profit than the wellbeing of their patients.
In fact, the two corporations met with other health insurance giants last year to discuss ways they could weaken the Affordable Care Act and have continuously lobbied for loopholes in the law. Just recently, they all joined up to donate $100 million to the Chamber of Commerce, which will use the money for election advertising in an attempt to take down Democrats who supported the Affordable Care Act.
5. ConAgra Foods Sponsors Feeding America
Feeding America is the country’s leading hunger-relief charity, consisting of more than 200 food banks nationwide. Why do they need to provide this service? Because, simply put, some people can’t afford to buy food. Including, perhaps, the workers at ConAgra, one of Feeding America’s largest corporate sponsors. Workers in starting positions at the corporation can make as low as $18,000 a year.
ConAgra customers may also have trouble affording food. Recently, when the multi-billion-dollar corporation was faced with rising costs for raw materials and was afraid to lose any profit, it chose to pass on costs to consumers.
Besides not caring about whether or not people can afford food, ConAgra also doesn’t care if the food it serves is healthy. Meanwhile, Feeding America has stated that one of its top priorities is “increasing the access of nutritious food to struggling Americans.” In addition to selling a variety of unhealthy, processed foods, ConAgra has also been found to have salmonella in its facilities and products.
ConAgra has also been sued for bribing consumers by putting fraudulent labels on its products. It is also one of the main food corporations the American Farm Bureau Federation invests in and lobbies for. The Bureau just recently spent $1.2 million lobbying for cuts to food aid and large handouts to industrial agriculture and pesticide corporations. ConAgra Foods once spent $400,000 in lobbying to preserve French fries and pizza on school lunch menus.Canadians from coast to coast have suffered through power outages and extreme cold snaps of late. (Evan Mitsui/CBC)
Manitoba settled into a dangerous deep freeze, powerful windstorms swept across B.C., and pounding snow caused a messy commute in P.E.I. as regions across Canada suffered through punishing wintry extremes Wednesday.
Here's a coast-to-coast look at the wild weather systems pushing through several regions.
Powerful winds down power on B.C.'s South Coast
BC Hydro's outage map shows areas hit by strong winds that knocked out electricity to people in the Gulf Islands and South Vancouver Island. (BC Hydro)
BC Hydro crews worked overnight to restore power to thousands of homes, following a powerful storm on Tuesday evening.
As many as 8,277 households in the Gulf Islands, and 2,600 in Surrey and the Fraser Valley were affected.
Residents in Vancouver braced for more snow and the chance of freezing rain forecast for Thursday evening. Environment Canada meteorologist Matt MacDonald also warned of a possible storm on Sunday.
"It's a pretty complicated pattern setting up for the weekend," he said. "We've got one storm coming in from the north bringing the cold air. We've got another storm coming from the southwest bringing heat and moisture and again it's going to be a clash of these two air masses."
Cold snap sends shivers over southern Manitoba
Manitoba's deep freeze is expected to ease by the weekend. (Geoff Howe/The Canadian Press)
The bragging rights for the coldest place in Canada went to Wasagaming, Man., which recorded a temperature of –34.2 C at 8 a.m.
Environment Canada issued an extreme cold warning alert for areas across the province, including Brandon, Neepawa, Carberry and Treherne. Temperatures dipped below –30C, which feels colder than –40C with the windchill.
The deep freeze is expected to ease by the weekend.
Thousands in Ontario, Quebec left in the dark
Quebec City got over 15 cms of snow overnight and there's more on the way. 1:13
A freezing rainstorm caused power outages to homes and businesses across eastern Ontario and Quebec.
As of 11 a.m. ET, 57,000 Quebec homes and businesses were without power with the Laurentides, Outaouais and Monteregie regions being the hardest hit.
Heavy snow measuring 15 cm also fell in Quebec City, with another five to 10 forecast. Residents in Trois-Rivières and the Gaspé coast are bracing for a snowfall of between 5 and 25 cm.
Tens of thousands of hydro customers were also without power in Ottawa, neighbouring regions and the Outaouais, owing to freezing rain and downed tree branches.
"Yesterday [Tuesday] we had some ice on branches of trees, and the branches that broke touched the grid, so we had some power failures," said Eric Moisan, a Hydro Quebec spokesman, early Wednesday morning.
Low-pressure system causes havoc in New Brunswick
Snow mixed with freezing rain and ice pellets fell in Northern New Brunswick Wednesday morning. Forecasts estimated between 15 to 20 cm. 0:44
Residents in New Brunswick woke up to a mess of freezing rain, ice pellets, snow and strong winds Wednesday morning.
Motorists in Miramichi were asked to stay off the roads, owing to dangerous conditions. Ferry service to Nova Scotia was cancelled and delays were reported at the airport.
Crews worked to restore power outages to about 300 homes and businesses, most of which were situated in the Kennebecasis Valley and Sackville Port Elgin areas.
Winds to reach 90 km/h in P.E.I.
Snow, ice pellets and rain fell over P.E.I., making for a messy commute Wednesday. (Andrew Vaughan/The Canadian Press)
Officials closed public schools as powerful winds reached speeds of 70 km/hr by 8 a.m. AT.
Gusts were expected climb to 90 km/h later in the day. Snow and ice pellets later turned to rain as the temperatures climbed above freezing.
High wind warnings issued in Nova Scotia
Winds are expected to hit 90 km/h along parts of the Atlantic Coast. (Paul Palmeter/CBC)
Wet weather and strong winds doused much of Nova Scotia, causing some schools to close for the day.
An estimated 15 to 25 mm of rain is expected to fall along the Atlantic Coast, with a rain warning issued for Guysborough County.
Wind warnings have also been issued for the Sydney area for Guysborough, Richmond, Victoria, Cape Breton, Inverness and Halifax counties.I crafted a Horde inspired key hanger for my friend. Without hooks, it could also be awesome wall decor.
The dimensions are 25x16cm (9.8x6.2in).
Tools used:
- Drill
- Drill bit
- Angle grinder
- Jigsaw
- Jigsaw blade
- Woodworking clamp
- Sandpaper
- Safety glasses
- Safety gloves
- Screwdriver
Materials used:
- Cherry wood
- White pine wood
- Carbon paper
- Copy paper
- Nails
- Screws
- Keyhole hangers
- Woodstain
STEP1: Find a template
If you don't have a printer nearby, all you need is your laptop, one copy paper and a pencil. But please, be careful and patient and do not damage the display.
Copy the template onto the piece of wood using carbon paper and pen. Attach the papers using nails.
Make several drill holes which you'll use them as starting points and for easier cutting.
STEP2: Cut it out
First, cut the smaller piece of the logo and after that continue with the other part.
I used small and thin jigsaw blade because there is a lot of curves.
Also, you should cut the background for the logo. I used white pine wood for the background. The wood for the logo is cherry.
STEP3: Shaping and sanding
I shaped and sanded all three pieces with angle grinder with sanding flap disk wheel 80 grit.
Do not forget to use safety glasses and gloves.
Finished handly with sandpaper 150 and 240 grit.
STEP4: Apply finnish and mounting hardware
I used walnut colored stain for the logo and semi transparent stain for the background.
I attached the logo onto background using glue and screws.
Finally, I screwed in the hooks and keyhole hangers into the pre-drilled holes.
That's it! Hope you like it. :)
If you like this key hanger, please support me and share it on social networks.
Please subscribe to my blog and stay tuned for new handmade geeky crafts.
More from this blog:Alberto Moreno: Not a target for Spurs
Reports in the media on Wednesday claimed Spurs had made a £14million offer for the defender, who is also wanted by Liverpool, with striker Roberto Soldado moving to the Spanish club on loan as part of the deal.
But Sky Sports understands that no such offer has been made, and Tottenham are highly unlikely to let Soldado, a £26m signing from Valencia last summer, leave the club on loan.
New manager Mauricio Pochettino, technical director Franco Baldini and chairman Daniel Levy held a meeting on Monday in which a list of transfer targets was agreed and drawn up.
And Moreno, who just missed out on Spain's World Cup squad despite three previous caps, is not on that list.
Sevilla's president Jose Castro revealed on Tuesday that Liverpool were interested in the 21-year-old but they had not yet received a formal offer.
He said: "It's true that there's interest from Liverpool and we're waiting to see if that turns into a reality, which right now it isn't.
"Whoever wants to leave can do so, but we'll be the ones setting the prices."
Meanwhile, Tottenham are also understood to have no interest in England and Southampton forward Adam Lallana, another reported target for Liverpool.An Ottawa father is calling for better signage at Britannia Park after he and a dozen other parents were ticketed for parking infractions in what he called “bylaw enforcement out of control” during a Little League baseball game this week.
James Gilbert, 49, said he and others were parked in a grassy area behind one of the baseball diamonds at the west-end park on Monday evening when two bylaw officers showed up, told owners to move their vehicles and handed $65 tickets to 13 of them as they left.
Gilbert said he parked in the lot because it was a large, open space at the end of a gravel road with many other cars there already.
“I see a road, I see cars parked there, I figure that’s where I’m going to park,” he said.
He said parents were upset that the bylaw officers decided to ticket the parents in what he described as a “sting” or a “shakedown,” rather than simply ask them to move and give a warning, especially since there are no signs telling motorists not to park there.
The city did not immediately respond to the Citizen’s request for comment, but a city official told Gilbert in an email that “all vehicles are expected to park in designated areas which are clearly defined at Britannia.” Gilbert said a “no parking” sign or a warning would have sufficed.
“If you feel that strongly about it, put up a sign. But instead it seemed more about the tickets,” he said.
The city official said in his email that the area had been marked with a chain and curb stops, but they have been vandalized or removed by people other than city staff.
He said the city’s parks and recreation department have been informed of the complaint and will “endeavour to install some form of notification at their maintenance access to warn users.”
Bay Ward’s councillor, Mark Taylor, told the Citizen it should be “common sense” that people ought not to park their cars in the grassy area behind the diamond.
He said the gravel path is “clearly not a road,” although city vehicles will occasionally drive through to access different areas of the park, and it narrows to “what could charitably be called a cow path.”
Taylor said it’s a hazard because the area is at the top of a steep hill above a residential neighbourhood where children routinely access the park via the path on the hill.
“You can put up a sign there, but it’s kind of like putting up a ‘no parking’ sign in the middle of your front lawn,” he said. “At that point, it’s somewhat of a common sense issue that you really shouldn’t be here with a car.”
However, Taylor said he’d be happy to work with city staff to more clearly mark the area off limits if the community believes it’s necessary.
Gilbert said he feels a warning would have done the trick, but he said ticketing “hard-working parents,” many of whom were volunteer coaches and had to interrupt the game to move their cars, was overkill.
afeibel@ottawacitizen.com
twitter.com/adamfeibelWe propose stronger halo effects in trait assessments from positive information relative to negative information. Due to positive information’s higher similarity, positive information should foster both indirect (from a global impression to traits) and direct halo effects (from traits to traits). Negative information’s relative distinctiveness should foster only direct halo effects, leading to weaker halo effects overall. Four experiments support these predictions using agency traits and communion traits and behaviors. Further supporting the predictions, halo effects from positive information were visible both within (i.e., from communion/agency information to communion/agency traits) and across (i.e., from agency/communion information to communion/agency traits) these fundamental dimensions of social perception. Halo effects from negative information were visible only within dimensions. The study thereby explains why halo effects from negative information are usually weaker; it supports different processes underlying halo effects; and it provides a case in person perception where positive information has more impact than negative information.
Abele, A. E., Uchronski, M., Suitner, C., Wojciszke, B. ( 2008 ). Towards an operationalization of the fundamental dimensions of agency and communion: Trait content ratings in five countries considering valence and frequency of word occurrence. European Journal of Social Psychology, 38, 1202 - 1217.
Google Scholar Crossref | ISI
Abikoff, H., Courtney, M., Pelham, W. E., Koplewicz, H. S. ( 1993 ). Teachers’ ratings of disruptive behaviors: The influence of halo effects. Journal of Abnormal Child Psychology, 21, 519 - 533.
Google Scholar Crossref | Medline | ISI
Alves, H., Koch, A. S., Unkelbach, C. ( 2016 ). My friends are all alike—The relation between liking and perceived similarity in person perception. Journal of Experimental Social Psychology, 62, 103 - 117.
Google Scholar Crossref | ISI
Alves, H., Unkelbach, C., Burghardt, J., Koch, A. S., Krüger, T., Becker, V. D. ( 2015 ). A density explanation of valence asymmetries in recognition memory. Memory & Cognition, 43, 896 - 909.
Google Scholar Crossref | Medline | ISI
Anastasiow, N. J. ( 1963 ). “Success” in first grade as seen by teachers: Gough’s Adjective Check List and teachers’ ratings. Psychological Reports, 13, 403 - 407.
Google Scholar SAGE Journals | ISI
Anderson, N. H. ( 1965 ). Averaging versus adding as a stimulus-combination rule in impression |
ready to prove his mettle.
“Stellar Gestalts 4 through 18 are keeping the invaders at bay for now,” Hegrek thought to the others briskly. “The enemy is studying us, however. They are making adaptations to their weaponry that can hurt us more effectively.”
“And what of the fact-finding operation,” replied Erafi. “What has your Covert Gestalt discovered, Nour?”
“They are called Tzenkethi,” she replied, her thoughts clear and confident. “Class 4 bioforms of a carbon base, incompatible with Uulian environments.”
“And the mission? Was it successful?”
“The Covert Gestalt was able to infiltrate a Tzenkethi starship and acquire the contents of its computer systems before the crew…”
“What?”
“They committed a suicidal act and triggered the destruction of their vessel. Fortunately, our people were able to evacuate before the detonation occurred.”
“Barbaric,” Hegrek responded forcefully, his disgust briefly shifting his cloud tone from grey to brilliant red and back again. “They’d sooner kill themselves than concede a battle lost.”
“Nevertheless, we have acquired a great deal of information about them,” Nour thought in even tones most likely intended to calm the seething Hegrek. “A great deal. We have data on their biology, their vessel, their weapons and defenses. I have tasked a full century of Science Gestalts to analyze this information and present a combat plan to the assembled Uuli within the cycle.”
A gossamer thought-beam streaked into Hegrek’s cloud, causing his essence core to pulse brightly for a moment. “We may not have a full cycle. The Tzenkethi have broken the outer defense line. The remaining Stellar Gestalts there have withdrawn to the mid-range line.”
“Casualties,” asked Erafi reluctantly, knowing full well that any response other than ‘zero’ would be too many. “How many Gestalts were lost, Hegrek?”
“Eighteen in total. Four damaged units were able to merge into new Gestalts and withdraw before the enemy could eliminate them.”
A thousand souls in each Gestalt, working as one. Eighteen thousand Uuli, now lost forever. Erafi’s mood became somber, and he joined his comrades in color-shifting his cloud to the dark shade of memorial for a moment.
“Nour,” he thought after collecting himself. “Have your people learned why the Tzenkethi are attacking us without provocation? What could possibly drive such blind savagery?”
“We’re still assembling a profile,” Nour replied calmly. “Preliminary analysis indicates a strong interest in this substance, found both on the homeworld and five of the thirteen moons.” Nour projected images of a crystal formation, along with various facts about its composition.
“Rocks,” raged Hegrek, his thoughts broadcasting with furious intensity. “They’re killing us over rocks?!”
“As I stated, Hegrek, this is a preliminary analysis. We haven’t gleaned why these crystals are of such import to them, but we have learned that they intend to eliminate them… and how they intend to do so.”
New imagery emitted from within Nour, filling the chamber. “This recording was taken from their computer systems earlier. It is one of many.”
The assembled Uuli watched the image of a blue-green orb, seen from space. A sudden bright burst of light on its surface gave way to a field of brilliant energy radiating outward from the blast site in all directions.
In the energy’s wake, lifelessness.
“Uuli preserve us,” thought Erafi, his essence shaken to its core. “They mean to kill us all.”
“Not going to happen,” Hegrek broadcasted, his tone cold and hard. “I’ll call the Grand Gestalt and turn each and every one of their ships into starborne tombs first.”
“Companions,” thought Nour once more, her tones ever calm and even. “I believe I have a solution to this dilemma, one that should not require any further loss of life… for either side.”
“Let’s have it,” Erafi thought determinedly. “Tell us, while we still have time to pursue this sensibly.”
***
“Was the transmission successful,” Erafi asked as Nour and Hegrek floated into his chamber. “Did we reach them?”
“Yes,” Nour thought in response. “The message was received. We transmitted in a format their universal translator systems would understand.”
“So they heard us… did they reply?”
“They did,” thought Nour solemnly. “They said, and I quote - ‘Your compliance is acknowledged.’”
“I suppose hoping for apologies or diplomacy was too optimistic,” Erafi thought. “Hegrek, have they withdrawn as we requested?”
“They have not,” Hegrek thought grimly. “Their shielding systems are still active, and their weapons are still charged. Our Stellar Gestalts remain at full readiness, as ordered… in case they decide we need to die again.”
“So it’s not over,” Erafi thought, dejected. “The threat remains.”
“Why would they attack us now,” Nour thought, incredulous. “We eliminated all of the crystals, as we promised! We took away their reason for violence here!”
“They’re primitives, Nour,” rumbled Hegrek. “They’ll always have a reason for violence, wherever they may be.”
“We’ll need to prepare for the worst,” Erafi replied solemnly. “Study the files we acquired. Perhaps we can find a means to defeat them, before it is too late.”
He hovered to a point where he could see the Uulian horizon. “After untold eons of peace, the Uuli are now at war.”
Paul Reed
Content Writer
Star Trek Online1:21 p.m. Update:
Talked to a couple of Big 12 administrators in the past couple of hours and found out a few things to follow up on all of this supposed hot talk regarding realignment.
For starters, today's teleconference is nothing out of the ordinary. It's been scheduled for a while now and is merely an indication that the Big 12 is doing everything possible to stay out in front of things this time.
As one source put it, "That committee is going to stay in tact for at least the next decade... It’s going to think and talk and think and talk, but it doesn't necessarily mean anything's happening."
Another source told me flat out: “We’re not in expansion mode.”
Meanwhile, a couple of folks I talked with at KU said the committee is constantly in contact with representatives from all members of the Big 12 and the committee is well aware of how KU and the rest of the institutions feel about expansion.
Couldn't find out for sure who was on the Big 12's expansion committee but I know it's a list of around 5 people and it includes Texas AD DeLoss Dodds, Oklahoma AD Joe Castiglione and a couple of university presidents or chancellors from schools other than OU and Texas. I want to say Iowa State and Baylor may also be involved.
As for the West Virginia news, still trying to track down more on that, but I'd say if the Big 12 seriously is going to have its 2012 football schedules released by next week, that would be a good sign that WVU is going to be in the Big 12 next year.
I'll make a few more calls and see what else is out there, but, at least for now, it seems like the expansion news may have been a little overblown. Shocking, isn't it?
Stay tuned...
11:08 a.m. Update:
Serious conference realignment talk regarding the Big 12 Conference appears to be back on the table, although it’s unclear at this point to what extent the expansion talk may or may not be reaching.
Chuck Carlton of the Dallas Morning News Tweeted this morning that he had confirmed that a Big 12 teleconference of the league’s expansion committee would take place sometime today. That call will be the first since league officials last met to finalize plans to admit West Virginia into the league.
The general consensus now — as it was then — is that Louisville and BYU remain at the top of the Big 12’s wish list. While that may be true, it doesn’t change the fact that many of the concerns that prevented the Big 12 from moving forward on this months ago still exist.
Louisville appears to be a sitting duck in all of this, and it’s possible that it’s just a matter of time before the Cardinals join the league. As many of you probably know, many Louisville coaches recently were telling recruits that they would be in the Big 12 very soon. That’s a bold statement and it certainly makes sense. The biggest problem for Louisville continues to be finding a suitable partner to join the league to prevent the Big 12 from having to move forward with an odd number. Although 11 worked for the Big Ten for years, sources have said that many in the Big 12 would prefer to avoid having 11 teams and would ideally like to move back to 12 or be content staying put at 10.
Here’s a link that discusses the idea of adding Louisville:
http://chronicle.com/blogs/players/big-12-conference-reopens-expansion-talk/29477
One possible reason the Big 12 could consider moving ahead with a serious look at Louisville would be the ramifications such a move would have in the Big East. With the battle still raging to set West Virginia free, another blow to the Big East’s current lineup certainly would make a move for WVU more feasible.
As for BYU, certain issues remain here, as well — travel, play on Sundays and the ability to move seamlessly into a new league without penalty chief among them — but it has been believed all along that BYU would be a solid pick up for the Big 12 because of its national brand and impressive standing in the major revenue sports.
While the latest buzz surrounding Big 12 expansion has centered around Louisville and BYU, another report — actually, a blog — surfaced recently regarding possible interest between the Big 12 and a handful of unhappy ACC schools.
Here’s a link to that blog, for your perusal:
http://www.eerinsider.com/2012-articles/january/big-12-to-target-acc.html
You should know that KU athletic director Sheahon Zenger told me yesterday that he had not heard a thing about the ACC talk.
In addition, it should be noted that many of those same ACC schools included in the blog above have been linked to expansion rumors in the SEC.
That’s a quick view of what’s happening now. We’ll have more as this story develops.... if it develops.
Stay tuned...Here is a picture of the nine-dot problem. The task seems simple enough: connect all nine dots with four straight lines, but, do so without lifting the pen from the paper or retracing any line. If you don’t already know the solution, give it a try – although your chances of figuring it out within a few minutes hover around 0 percent. In fact, even if I were to give you a hint like “think outside of the box,” you are unlikely to crack this deceptively (and annoyingly!) simple puzzle.
The Nine Dot problem: connect the dots by making four lines, without lifting your pencil from the paper
And yet, if we were to pass a weak electric current through your brain (specifically your anterior temporal lobe, which sits somewhere between the top of your ear and temple), your chances of solving it may increase substantially. That, at least, was the finding from a study where 40 percent of people who couldn’t initially solve this problem managed to crack it after 10 minutes of transcranial direct current stimulation (tDCS) – a technique for delivering a painlessly weak electric current to the brain through electrodes on the scalp.
How to explain this?
It is an instance of the alleged power of tDCS and similar neurostimulation techniques. These are increasingly touted as methods that can “overclock” the brain in order to boost cognition, improve our moods, make us stronger, and even alter our moral dispositions. The claims are not completely unfounded: there is evidence that some people become slightly better at holding and manipulating information in their minds after a bout of tDCS. It also appears to reduce some people’s likelihood of formulating false memories, and seems to have a lasting improvement on some people’s ability to work with numbers. It can even appear to boost creativity, enhancing the ability of some to make abstract connections between words to come up with creative analogies. But it goes further, with some evidence that it can help people control their urges as well improve their mood. And beyond these psychological effects, tDCS of the part of the brain responsible for movement seems to improve muscular endurance and reduce fatigue.
It’s an impressive arsenal of findings, and it raises the obvious question: should we all start zapping away at our brains? That certainly seems to be the conclusion reached by the growing DIY community experimenting with home-made tDCS headsets.
But, while the list of supportive studies is far longer than those linked to here, the overall state of the evidence nevertheless continues to occupy that frustrating scientific limbo of being ultimately ambiguous – especially when we take into account all those comparatively boring, non-headline grabbing studies that found no significant effect from tDCS. In fact, a meta-analysis of tDCS studies – one of those laborious studies that study the findings of other studies – found the technique had no effect at all on a wide range of cognitive abilities. Yet that review in turn has been criticized as being too conservative and potentially biased in its own analysis.
More to the point, few of these studies have yet to be replicated, and most of them rely on a handful of unrepresentative people (US undergrads) who are asked to undertake the kind of lab-controlled tasks that usually share a questionable (at best) relationship with real world activities. And as for the long-term effects of tDCS use, or even how it affects brain function exactly? It’s not clear.
Yet none of this haziness has deterred start-ups from developing a slew of commercial tDCS headsets targeting home-users. Primary among those is Foc.us, which started off with a headset that allegedly enhances gaming ability before expanding to ones that improve learning speed as well as athletic endurance. There’s also Thync, a mood-enhancing headset that’s been described as a “digital drug” that can help users “energize or relax without drinks or pills.” While not quite based on tDCS, it uses pulses of electricity to target cranial nerves just under the skin to supposedly induce various moods.
Another such start-up, Halo Neuroscience, recently introduced its own headset, which stimulates motor neurons in a way that supposedly accelerates the strength gains and skill acquisition of athletes.
The firm reports on its own unpublished “preliminary results” with elite Olympic ski jumpers showing a 31 percent improvement in their propulsion force, with significantly less wobble when airborne. Even if a far more modest result than 31 percent turned out to be true, these sorts of findings could mean that tDCS is set to become a significant performance enhancer in the sporting world. Will its use in competitive settings be considered cheating?
In academic contexts, some universities are already trying to curb the off-label use of prescription drugs to enhance academic performance, with Duke University explicitly considering such use as “cheating.” Similarly, the Electronic Sports League, which holds massive gaming tournaments with million dollar prize pool s, has started randomly testing players for so-called “smart drugs” that may give e-athletes an edge over their non-doping opponents.
Would using Foc.us’s GoFlow to “learn faster” be considered a similar instance of academic dishonesty by Duke University? Or what about using Foc.us’s gaming headset in the context of shooting down virtual enemies? If these devices give any sort of a boost, it’s not clear why their use should be considered any different from drugs like Adderall or Ritalin, at least in regards to cheating.
In non-virtual sport, the World Anti-doping Agency (WADA) prohibits substances and methods when they satisfy any two of these three criteria: 1. they confer a performance enhancement; 2. they pose an actual or potential risk for athletes; and 3. they violate the “spirit of sport.”
If the preliminary findings from Halo Neuroscience on ski jumping are even remotely valid, the first criterion would certainly be met. On the other hand, it’s not yet clear if tDCS poses a noteworthy potential risk for athletes – though any such risk would almost certainly be smaller than the one involved in soaring over 100 meters through the air, as in the case of ski jumping. But does it violate the difficult to define “spirit of sport”? It’s a question that WADA may wish to avoid: to answer yes may commit it to trying to ban the unbannable. As far as we can tell, tDCS leaves no uniquely detectable impact in the brain: a ban would not be enforceable.
On the other hand, tDCS may simply be construed as not “artificial” enough to threaten our (often arbitrary) notions of fairness, whether in sports or academic settings. Unlike injecting or ingesting a synthetic drug, many may have the intuition that a weak electric current is comparatively “natural” or “clean.” For instance, even though the effects are similar, WADA currently tolerates athletes who increase their red blood cells (and therefore, presumably, their performance) by sleeping in a tent that simulates high altitude, but not those who do so by blood doping or EPO. Something about sleeping in a tent to enhance performance does not strike us as suspect in the way that drugs or blood transfusions do. Perhaps tDCS will be occupy the same corner as altitude tents: for the rule makers, both can be convenient inconsistencies in the rules, as both elude detection anyway.
An yet, while we can question the evidence for the actual efficacy of most performance enhancers currently used, tDCS in particular stands out in calling for more data. Unlike Adderall or anabolic steroids, at the moment anyone can get their hands on a tDCS headset by legally ordering one online. And even if these headsets become more closely regulated, people can still cheaply make their own using common items found at electronics stores, stimulating any part of their brain, or their children’s. Given the current hype around it, it would be good to know more about how exactly it impacts the brain — and the long term consequences.Stage Striking
Players play best-of-one RPS. Winner may choose to have port priority or the first stage strike. Port priority can be ignored if neither player brings it up. The player with first stage strike shall strike one of the 5 starter stages. The other player then strikes two, and then the first player strikes one more to leave one (1-2-2-1 order).
Stage Bans
(Best-of-3 only) After each game of the set, before counterpicking, the player who won the previous game may ban one stage from the stage list. Stage bans last 1 game, therefore a player who banned a stage may counterpick that stage themselves later in the set, unless banned by their opponent.
There are no stage bans in best-of-5 sets.
Neutral Ports
Some relative spawn points in some stages are significantly advantageous to one player/team. Either player/team may request, before a match begins, to have controller ports to be switched to avoid these situations. This request cannot be turned down. Port priority must be maintained through the switch. A list of neutral ports for each stage will be available on request.
Neutral Start
Players may NEVER ask for a "neutral start" where both players move to the opposite side of the stage after the game start and then countdown to 'officially' start the game. If anyone does ask for this, use neutral ports rule instead. Players that neutral start on stream will be removed from the stream. A player that has been warned about this rule but asks the other player anyway will forfeit the game of the set about to be played.
Double Blind
A player requests double blind to the opponent This player calls over a pool captain or other tournament official (must be approved by the other player), and tells them their character selection in secret. The other player selects their character. The official then announces the first player's pick and that player must select that character for the first stage. Set procedure continues from step 2 as described above.
Stage Clause
Players may not pick ANY stage they have won on in the set previously except by agreement of the opponent. This is also known as Modified Dave's Stupid Rule. Can be circumvented by Gentleman's Clause.
Gentleman’s Clause
This rule can only be used to allow an opponent to go to a stage they already won on in the set, or to agree on a legal stage instead of stage striking. It cannot be used to pick a stage off the stage list or to agree to different game/set rules or settings, etc. Playing a game contrary to this rule may result in a forfeit of that game by the player who asked to do so.
Pausing
In the event that pause is not turned off, pausing the game is only legal while a player remains upon their OWN respawn platform AFTER notifying the other player, and only for the purpose of summoning a tournament organizer, or in the event of a controller malfunction. In the case of an accidental pause, the other player has the option to cause the other player to forfeit their current stock upon unpausing. If a pause causes an opponent to lose a stock, the offending player may be required to forfeit two stocks. If such stock loss would reduce the player to zero stock, they lose the game regardless of the result of the match on screen. If the opponent lost their last stock of the game, and the offending player was not reduced to zero stock, the game may be replayed. All judgments are up to the TO’s final discretion.
Stalling
The act of stalling, or intentionally making the game unplayable, is banned and at the discretion of the TO. Stalling tactics include but are not limited to becoming invisible, infinites, chain grabs, or uninterruptible moves past 300%; or abusing a position in which one player’s opponent can never reach them. Any action that can prevent the game from continuing (e.g. freeze glitches, disappearing characters, game reset, etc.) will result in forfeiture of that match for the offending player. Players are responsible for knowing their own character, and must be wary about accidentally triggering these effects.
Timeouts, Ties, and Sudden Death
In the case of the time reaching zero, the player with the higher stock wins the match. If players are tied in stock, lower percent wins. If players are tied in percent, or two players/teams lose all their last stocks simultaneously, players play a 1 stock game with a 3 minute timer to determine the result of the match. If this was a doubles game, all players play in the game.
No Grab ‘n’ Go
Teammates may not touch each other’s controllers during games.
Stock sharing is allowed in doubles.
Colorblind Clause
Players may request that their opponent change colors to accommodate colorblindedness, or if their color is indistinguishable from either the other team color or the stage background. This request must be made before the first game of the set.
Warm-ups
Warm-up periods, button checks, and “handwarmers” may not exceed 60 seconds on the game clock. Violation of this rule may result in an automatic forfeit at the discretion of the TO.
Misinterpretation
Coaching
There will be no coaching allowed between or during games of a set. Players may having coaching between sets, including after a reset of grand finals, or any other time when the bracket is such that only one set may be played at a time. Players are always allowed 3 minutes between sets for this purpose in addition to ordinary time constraints.
Collusion
Any collusion or results manipulation with competitors is forbidden. If the TO determines that any competitor is colluding to manipulate results or intentionally underperform, the colluding players may be immediately disqualified. This determination is to be made at the sole discretion of the TO. Anyone disqualified in this manner forfeits all rights to any titles or prize money they might have otherwise earned.
Wireless Controllers
Only wireless controllers licensed by Nintendo are allowed. All use of wireless controllers must be reported to the pool captain before their use.
Malfunctions
Any controller malfunctions are entirely the player’s responsibility. Players are responsible for using the correct settings BEFORE the set begins. Both parties need to agree if a match is to be paused or restarted because of a controller problem.
Players will eliminate stages from the starter stage list until one remains. Procedure is as follows:In order to avoid being character counterpicked by another player after one player selects theirs, they may call for a double blind pick. They must request this before stage striking begins. The procedure is as follows:Games or sets are not to be replayed due to a misinterpretation of the rules; it is the players’ responsibilities to ask the TO for any clarification of the rule set in the event of a disagreement, and the outcome of a game or set will not be changed after the fact except under extreme circumstances.Posted on -
Header image by Thomas Tolkien, Creative Commons
The erosion of civil liberties and our right to a private life has been well-documented over recent years, yet there is no real sign of this war on privacy abating. Privacy has become the enemy of governments, regimes and corporations seeking to increase their power and position in our new global society. This attack on our individual agency is comprehensive and shocking in its totality. We are experiencing a World War on Privacy that rivals any of our dystopian literature and techno-mythologies warning us of the generational consequences should we fall.
These issues are moving so quickly that it’s hard to keep up. New legislation keeps pushing its way through intense public protest, sometimes pausing for brief moments before attempting again in another direction. Beyond the legal battles being fought, there are private and government initiatives that are advancing regardless of democratic process or legality of their programmes.
This series of posts on World War Privacy will give a snapshot of the current issues, in the hopes that by seeing different pieces outlined together a greater sense of the magnitude of the challenges we face can be understood. Over the coming weeks, each post will look at different geographic areas and provide the signposts and links necessary for you to delve deeper to see what it is that you are facing in your local area and who you might be able to turn to for support.
Five Eyes: United States, United Kingdom, Australia, New Zealand, Canada
Awareness of the assault on our collective privacy really began with the revelation of the ECHELON programme that came to light towards the end of the 1990s. Originally created to spy on the Soviet Union and its allies during the Cold War, the programme brought on board five major Western countries that had banded together since the end of WWII (called Five Eyes) and quickly developed an agenda of “a global system for the interception of private and commercial communications.”
The USA/PATRIOT Act that followed the 911 attacks sealed the deal, undoing almost instantly years of Congress and public opposition to previous attempts to reduce the checks and balances around surveillance of criminals, potential criminals and citizens alike. This coincided with the boom in internet and computer technology that brought all of us (and our personal lives) online and ready to be profiled en masse behind a veil of intelligence agency secrecy and hidden courts.
Culminating in revisions to the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act, this deep-state intelligence boom in the United States was mimicked throughout the Five Eyes countries. Each taking their own path against the dignity of their citizens, the co-operation also allowed for many national laws to be circumvented by the shared use of data collected across borders.
Much has happened in the decade since. With this first part in the World War Privacy series, we’ll be jumping ahead to take a (brief) look at some of the things happening today in the United States…
United States
Following massive whistle-blowing leaks from the likes of Mark Klein, Edward Snowden and anonymous sources through WikiLeaks (including the recent trove of CIA hacking materials), the true extent of the modern intelligence apparatus in the United States has come to light and is shocking in its scope and capability.
Most recently, it has become clear that many of the tools developed for agencies such as the NSA and CIA have been obtained by other nation states and criminal organisations. The recent spate of ransomware attacks has been directly attributed to unintended blowback from these secretive programmes, as underworld figures distribute NSA technology to anybody willing to pay just a nominal sum for it.
Beyond the world of cybercrime, the invasion of privacy has begun to extend further into the physical world. The expansion of mandatory face-scanning at the borders, sophisticated biometric tracking such as iris recognition, and a resurgence in the infiltration of ‘subversive’ movements, shows a steady increase of surveillance techniques being used by local law enforcement agencies. Behind this is an ever-growing and highly secretive industry of predictive behaviour algorithms (i.e. pre-crime profiling) that is transitioning from military to domestic use.
Combine this citizen compliance obsession with lightweight drone technology and a worrying picture begins to emerge that was previously the domain of (supposedly) exaggerated oppression found in cyberpunk novels. With the policies around drone surveillance being revised as part of the authoritarian sounding National Defense Authorisation Act, it seems that this is the next step in bringing the total view of citizen activity out of cyberspace and into the real world. On the more extreme end, the sale of US military-grade surveillance drones has become a new industry as the availability of these technologies is expanded to nation states around the world.
All of this, and plenty more, is wrapped in a constant wave of legal revision and obfuscation that ensures all of this is essentially unchallengable in the courts. Indeed, when it comes to the secrecy under which these surveillance programmes are operating it has become almost impossible to find out where the boundaries of the law even exist. Forthcoming debate around re-authorisation of the FISA Amendments Act and amendments to the Electronic Communications Privacy Act look like an opportunity for something positive to emerge – a key moment for citizen lobbying of representatives to ensure that a more even-handed approach is taken regarding the legality of surveillance programmes.
And this is just from the US government… the other serious concern is the extent to which the corporate sector is exploiting consumers not just for profit, but for the accumulation of power and predictive control. There seems to be a tension between wanting to reassure the public that their privacy concerns are being heard, and working closely with government to maximise revenue potential and market access. The extent to which tech companies are at the cutting edge of privacy invasion deserves continuous and detailed scrutiny, as even a cursory glance shows that almost every aspect of our lives is being exploited without much accountability.
From the emotional vulnerabilities you display on social media, through to highly targeted profiling based on your shopping habits, a worrying increase in profiling potential medical conditions, digitally surveilling your home with robot vacuums and omniscient smart TVs, right down even to the ownership of your DNA. What you do, how you do it, and why you want to is all fair game in the eyes of our new techno-capitalist billionaire class, a large proportion of which have emerged from the United States.
Thankfully there are many organisations in the United States fighting the good fight. The two key players are the long-standing American Civil Liberties Union and Electronic Frontier Foundation; alongside efforts such as the highly organised Electronic Privacy Information Center and the grassroots United States Pirate Party.
If you’re interested in resisting any of the problems outlined above, it’s worth starting with these four organisations to see how you can take action and help fight for our collective right to privacy and dignity.
Next time in our exploration of World War Privacy, we take a look at the United Kingdom and the worrying trend towards the legalisation of total surveillance without accountability or oversight…
This outline missed many important items, what other privacy updates do you know of regarding the United States? Leave a comment below and help create a better picture.CLEVELAND, Ohio -- If you pay attention to television commercials, you may be seeing ads touting the life-changing properties of Axiron, a testosterone-replacement therapy that is applied under the arm like deodorant, and Androgel, a clear gel that comes in a pump.
Treatment for low testosterone in men -- the condition is also called hypogonadism -- has been around for decades. But in recent years, the therapy has shifted from injections in the doctor's office to topical gels that can be used at home.
Androgel, the first topical gel, was approved by the Food and Drug Administration in 2001. Testim followed in 2002, then Axiron came along in 2010. The first testosterone skin patch was approved in 1995. A new lower-dose version of the Androderm patch, which is changed daily, was approved in October 2011.
More younger men -- men in their 30s and 40s -- who are bothered by fatigue, loss of libido and less-than-virile sexual function are turning to medication to treat "Low T." Some of them view the condition as some sort of deficiency. Take more of what's missing and everything will be OK.
And that concerns Dr. Bryan Hecht.
A reproductive endocrinologist and fertility specialist at University Hospitals Fertility Center West on Crocker Road, across from Crocker Park, Hecht works with couples who have fertility challenges.
The majority of the men he sees do not have low or nonexistent levels of sperm.
But for those who do, Hecht says, testosterone-replacement therapy is to blame more and more.
Testosterone improves libido and sexual function. But in large doses, it also can suppress the body's ability to produce sperm. That's just one of the many side effects that in recent years have prompted the Food and Drug Administration to spell out all of the possible side effects.
"Historically, the majority of men [treated for low testosterone] tended to be somewhat older," Hecht said. "That's why I think the impact on fertility hasn't gotten a whole lot of emphasis."
In fact, Hecht said, he and his colleagues have noticed that some review articles that appear in scientific journals don't mention infertility as a possible side effect or complication.
As part of the safety information on the Axiron website, a lower sperm count is listed as a possible side effect, but a 41/2-minute video on applying the gel doesn't mention the risk until 3 minutes, 53 seconds.
What Hecht says alarms him is that there is no recognition on the part of men that they should avoid testosterone therapy, at least while they're dealing with fertility issues.
Recently Hecht met with a man in his early 30s who, tests showed, had no sperm. When Hecht found out that the man had been taking Androgen, prescribed by his primary physician, to boost his libido and lessen fatigue, he told him to discontinue taking it. Within a few months, the man's sperm count was normal and his wife became pregnant.
Testosterone injections are more potent than topical products in disrupting sperm production, Hecht said. Not all men have adverse effects, but it can take several months to regain normal sperm levels in those who do.
"While the treatment may be perfectly appropriate in certain men, it could potentially have an impact on fertility," he said. "The prescriber should at least be cognizant."
When patients are referred to Dr. Edward Cherullo, a urologist at UH Case Medical Center, it's often because the man has suggested to his primary physician that he might have "Low T."
Unless a man has profoundly low testosterone levels, Cherullo says he's slow to supplement testosterone in his patients without looking into various potential causes.
If a blood test shows a moderately low testosterone level just under the reference range of "normal," adding testosterone to get it within that "normal" range is not necessarily the answer to address a nonspecific problem, Cherullo said.
Some of the symptoms of extremely low testosterone levels include profound weakness, loss of muscle mass and general confusion. But those symptoms usually don't happen in men in their 30s, 40s and 50s, who may instead have more-general complaints like fatigue, loss of libido and weight gain.
"I need to know why it's low," Cherullo says. "I actually see a number of guys where that's not flushed out [by their primary care physicians]."
Because diagnosing low testosterone is not an exact science, it's important to find out the cause first. It could be any number of things, from low hormone levels caused by an underactive pituitary gland to obesity, diabetes, sleep apnea or even low vitamin D levels.
Before he writes a prescription for testosterone therapy, Cherullo says, he has the fertility talk with his patients. It's something that most men haven't given a thought to, he said.
Surprisingly, Cherullo said he's not annoyed by the explosion of "Low T" direct marketing.
"It raises the issue, which makes it easier to talk about," he said.Arguing that Senator Ted Cruz (R-TX) had “lost ground” from his defunding position over the summer, Meet the Press host David Gregory asked Cruz to demonstrate the success of his strategy to defund ObamaCare via the continuing resolution.
“It is the Democrats who have taken the absolutist position,” Cruz said. “Even now what the House of Representatives has done is a step removed from defunding, it’s delaying. That’s the essence of the compromise. On the other side, what have the Democrats compromised on? Zero.”
“You make this argument as if there’s no broader context here,” Gregory said, noting the law had been passed through every branch of government, and that Mitt Romney had run in 2012 on a platform to repeal it and lost. “There are not protests in the streets arguing to do away with this law in the way that you’d like. 56% in one poll said let’s uphold the law. I’m focusing on results. Where have you moved anything?”
Cruz responded by saying that even unions were asking out of the law, but Gregory stopped him.
“I asked you a specific question based on the facts on the ground,” Gregory said. “You’ve made all these arguments. My goodness, you went and spoke for twenty-one hours to make these arguments. You haven’t moved anyone.”
“The American people overwhelmingly reject ObamaCare,” Cruz said. “They understand it’s not working. The only people who aren’t listening to the argument are the career politicians in Washington. It’s Harry Reid, who wants to use brute political force.”
Watch the full clip below, via NBC News:
[Image via screengrab]
——
>> Follow Evan McMurry (@evanmcmurry) on Twitter
Have a tip we should know? tips@mediaite.com'Puts an end to your life' says man who must tell police 24 hours before sex BelfastTelegraph.co.uk A man who has to give police 24 hours' notice before he has sex despite being cleared of a rape charge has said: "It puts an end |
read that and said, 'Holy crap, that's true.'"
After finishing up her career at Santa Clara as a third-team All-American, the Chicago Red Stars drafted Huerta in 2015. In Chicago, Huerta has found the perfect environment to hone her national team ambitions.
Huerta makes it 2-0 for the Red Stars. We see you, Sofia. #NCvCHI pic.twitter.com/hiyirQ48Qc — Our Game Magazine (@OurGameMagazine) May 21, 2017
In addition to the opportunity to play with U.S. veterans like Christen Press, Alyssa Naeher, Julie Ertz, and Casey Short on a daily basis, Chicago has a host of players who have earned call-ups into the national team for shorter stints—like Danielle Colaprico, Arin Gilliland, and Vanessa DiBernardo. Huerta says they've all played a part in her improvement.
"You have the girls on the national team who you look up to naturally because they've made it," she noted. "They're doing it and you get to watch their work ethic and their competitive nature and their focus every day. I strive to be like Julie and Press and Casey and Alyssa. I look up to them so much.
"But then you also have Vanessa, Arin, Dani, and a lot of other players who I'm in the same position as. Just watching them continue to chase their dreams and to continue to have confidence is something that I learn from every day. We're all really close and it's a hard dream to have. It's competitive and there are so many talented girls in this league. Just being surrounded by strong women and confident women is something I think influences me and inspires me every day."
Her Chicago teammates have noticed Huerta's effort and are excited to see her get a chance with the national team.
"Sofia has worked so hard," said Christen Press. "She came into the season super fit and I've seen her growth over the last two years. I'm just really excited for her to have the opportunity."
"She's been really focused this year and put in a lot of time and effort and energy into really working on her craft," added Alyssa Naeher. "I'm happy for her to get the opportunity and I think she's ready for it."
Although Huerta won't be game-eligible during this camp as her one-time FIFA transfer is processed, she's still excited about the chance to train with the U.S.
"I think every girl who has this dream will understand that it means everything," she observed. "It's a surreal feeling because you've been working so hard toward this. Just to get a call-up is such an opportunity."
John D. Halloran is an American Soccer Now columnist. Follow him on Twitter.NEW DELHI: The steady decline in infant deaths in Indian states appears to be faltering in some while progressing well in others, according to fresh data for 2014 released by the Census office based on an annual sample survey.Some of the more backward states like Assam, Jharkhand and Chhattisgarh did well in bringing down infant deaths, but Gujarat, Madhya Pradesh, Odisha, Rajasthan and Uttarakhand showed an alarming slowdown. Infant mortality is a key measure of people’s health and the health delivery system’s efficacy. Most such deaths occur occur in the absence of equipped delivery rooms and doctors or when mother and child are weak.Oddly, for the first time, information for all the states has not been released in the annual Sample Registration System (SRS) Bulletin. Out of the 36 states and union territories, information for only 23 has been put out.Left out are all southern states and some others like Maharashtra and West Bengal. Rohit Bharadwaj, Deputy Registrar General, told TOI that data for all states is yet to come in, ascribing the delay to preoccupation with a baseline survey released recently.This latest SRS Bulletin for 2014 was due in December 2015 but has been released six months late.Parsing the rural-urban and male-female data confirms that there is something going wrong in many states. For instance, Rajasthan and Bihar show an increase in infant mortality in rural areas, while Gujarat and Madhya Pradesh show no change over the previous year.Gujarat, Jharkhand and Rajasthan show a worrying increase in female infant mortality in rural areas.In urban areas, Bihar and Gujarat show increase in infant death rates, while female infant deaths increased in UP. This reflects the growing share of population which cannot afford access to otherwise plentiful healthcare facilities in India’s cities and towns.Among the smaller states, infant mortality has increased in Manipur. In Meghalaya, female infant mortality has increased. Nagaland, Sikkim and Tripura show healthy declines in infant death rates.The predominantly urban union territory of Chandigarh has shown an increase in infant deaths, driven by a rise in female infant mortality. Delhi, also largely urban, has shown a decline.An all-India picture will emerge only after the system data for other states is released, which Bharadwaj assured would happen in the coming weeks.Russian President Vladimir Putin on Thursday slammed Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu for the “unfounded accusations” from Israel over the “incident with chemical weapons” in Syria.
In a phone call between the two leaders on Thursday, Putin “underlined that it’s unacceptable to make unfounded accusations against anyone until after a thorough and unbiased international investigation,” the Kremlin said.
“There was an exchange of opinions over the incident with chemical weapons that took place in the Syrian province of Idlib on April 4,” Moscow said in a statement.
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“Putin in particular underlined the unacceptability of making unfounded accusations against anyone before a thorough and impartial international investigation is carried out,” it said.
Netanyahu’s office confirmed he spoke with Putin, but didn’t comment on the reported scolding he received.
Earlier on Thursday, in an interview with the Yedioth Ahronoth daily, Defense Minister Avigdor Liberman accused Syrian President Bashar Assad of being directly responsible for the chemical attack on Tuesday that left scores dead and spurred international outrage and calls for action against Damascus.
Liberman said that he has “100 percent certainty” that Assad himself was directly responsible for the attack, but also said Israel would not become involved militarily to stop the bloodshed.
“The murderous chemical weapons attacks on citizens in Idlib province in Syria and on a local hospital were carried out on the direct order and planned by the Syrian president, Bashar Assad, using Syrian planes,” he said.
According to the Prime Minister’s Office, during the call, Netanyahu told Putin that the international community needs to “complete the effort to remove chemical weapons from Syria, as was agreed upon in 2013.”
The prime minister also expressed sympathy for the bombing of a subway in Saint Petersburg, Russia, earlier this week.
After the chemical attack Netanyahu said he was “shocked and outraged,” yet did not make any mention of Assad, possibly to avoid irking Russia. Israel has worked hard to foster strong relations with Moscow in order to maintain its ability to carry out on airstrikes in Syria to thwart weapons transfers to the Hezbollah terror group, which is fighting alongside Assad’s forces.
Putin’s spokesman, Dmitry Peskov, had earlier warned the West against rushing to blame Assad for the attack on Khan Sheikhoun. He said the West lacks objective evidence against Assad, adding that materials presented by local activists can’t serve as a proof.
Moscow has sought to deflect blame from its Syrian ally over the incident and says Syrian jets struck a rebel arms depot where “toxic substances” were being put inside bombs.An explosion in a school’s grounds in the Turkish city of Kilis has reportedly killed two people, Turkish media are reporting on Twitter. It’s believed a mortar shell hit the affected area, in south central Turkey, near the Syrian border.
The bomb is believed to have struck the Eyup Gokce secondary school at 9:30am local time. It is reported that two people were killed and a further four injured as a result of the blast.
However, Reuters says the blast occurred in a medical center, near the school.
2 killed & and atleast 4 injured following shelling that struck a school in #Kilis#Turkeypic.twitter.com/LrTABy59s6 — Hassan Ridha (@sayed_ridha) January 18, 2016
Emergency crews are at the scene, while the injured have been taken to the local hospital. Nearby schools have been evacuated following the blast.
A Turkish government official said that local authorities are investigating whether the mortar shell was fired from Syria.
#SONDAKİKA #Kilis'te okul bahçesine havan topu düştü! 2 kişinin öldüğü ve 4 kişinin yaralandığı olduğu öğrenildi. pic.twitter.com/Sh2wS1kqwO — Aksam.com.tr (@Aksam) January 18, 2016
First pictures of blast in Kilis... pic.twitter.com/4rakF5ZDWz — ÇapaMagENG (@CapaMagENG) January 18, 2016
Cleaner worker killed, 2 wounded in mortar #shelling hit school garden in kilis, bordering #syria, mayor says — sevim songun (@SevimSongun) January 18, 2016
Sevim Songun, an editor at Hurriyet Daily News tweeted that a cleaner is amongst those killed, as the shell struck the school playground.
Kilis'te okulda patlama: Yaralılar var... Olay yerinden ilk görüntüler... https://t.co/t8rgahnpP5pic.twitter.com/ZgasU0djam — Doğan Haber Ajansı (@dhainternet) January 18, 2016
Kilis Mayor Hasan Kara told A Haber TV that mortar shells from across the nearby border had hit parts of the town in the past, Hurriyet Daily News reports.
“We believe the mortar shells came from Syria. One of them hit the grounds of a school. Fortunately, others did not hit any buildings,” Kara said.
Speaking to NTV, Kara urged the residents of Kilis to remain calm following the blast.
“Our people should remain calm. They shouldn’t allow any provocation,” he said.
Breaking: explosion in a school in Kilis,main gate for entering in Syria. Reports of many wounded pic.twitter.com/1N7PXmdv5x — Cahit Storm (@cahitstorm) January 18, 2016
Kilis is on the western edge of a roughly-100km strip of Syrian border territory, which is controlled by Islamic State (IS, formerly ISIS/ISIL). Turkish towns in the area have frequently seen artillery fire spill over the frontier since Syria’s civil war erupted.
The US has urged Ankara to do more to try and seal off this stretch of border with Syria, which is used by IS for the transportation of fighters and supplies into the Syrian war zone. However, Turkey says it would need around 30,000 military personnel to do this.Washington, DC – Today, Lambda Legal and 40 other national, state, and local LGBT organizations sent a letter to the United States Senate urging members to oppose the confirmation of Gregory Katsas to the U.S. Federal Court of Appeals for the D.C. Circuit, citing his central role in the anti-civil rights efforts of the Donald Trump administration, including “morphing the trans military ban from tweet to policy,” as well as his record outside the administration of “litigation seeking to dismantle legal protections for LGBT people,” all of which together make it impossible for him to be viewed as a fair and impartial judge.
The full letter, below, outlines his positions and record, illustrating how his nomination “poses a grave threat to the communities” that the organizations serve, specifically as deputy counsel in Donald Trump’s White House Counsel’s office. In this position, “Mr. Katsas has been a legal architect behind several of the Trump administration’s most odious actions and policies targeting the LGBT community,” including implementing the trans military ban and helping Jeff Sessions and Betsy Devos revoke federal guidelines that protect transgender students from discrimination.
The organizations also note that “while his recent anti-LGBT legal work has been prolific, Mr. Katsas is not new to opposing LGBT rights.” He is notably anti-marriage equality, having defended the so-called “Defense of Marriage Act” that defined marriage as a union between one man and one woman and was declared unconstitutional in 2013. He also has suggested that same-sex couples are lesser parents than different-sex couples, saying that “it seems to me pretty self-evident, but at least a debatable point, that the other things equal the best arrangement for a child is to be raised by both of the child’s biological parents which by definition have to be one man and one woman.”
The letter also emphasizes the fact that Donald Trump has nominated one of his own deputy counsels to the D.C. Circuit, and in doing so “the President has made the startling leap of attempting to place a member of his own legal team on a court that historically has played a critical role in checking Executive excess.”
The letter was sent to the entire United States Senate today ahead of the Chamber likely voting on his nomination early next week. The full text can be found below and here: https://www.lambdalegal.org/in-court/legal-docs/dc_20171120_41-lgbt-groups-oppose-gregory-katsas
November 20, 2017
To the Honorable Members of the United States Senate
Washington, D.C. 20510
RE: 41 LGBT Groups Oppose Confirmation of Gregory G. Katsas
Dear Senator:
We, the undersigned 41 national, state and local advocacy organizations, representing the interests of lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgender (LGBT) people and everyone living with HIV, urge you to oppose the nomination of Gregory G. Katsas to the United States Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia. After a comprehensive review of Mr. Katsas’s record, we have concluded that his views on civil rights issues are fundamentally at odds with the notion that LGBT people are entitled to equality, liberty, justice and dignity under the law.
As deputy counsel in the White House Counsel’s office, Mr. Katsas has been a legal architect behind several of the Trump administration’s most odious actions and policies targeting the LGBT community. We wish to call your attention to aspects of his record that illustrate why he poses a grave threat to the communities that our organizations serve and is not an appropriate candidate for the bench.
Mr. Katsas provided legal advice to the President on the ban on transgender individuals serving openly in the U.S. military. Indeed, the White House Counsel’s office appeared to play a central role in morphing the trans military ban from tweet to policy. It was reported that the White House Counsel’s office signed off on a “guidance” for implementation of President Trump’s tweets announcing the ban. Additionally, it was reported that the guidance on the transgender service ban went back to the White House Counsel’s office for “adjustments” in response to public statements by organizations after news broke that the 2½ page memo implementing the tweets was on its way to Defense Secretary Mattis. Mr. Katsas confirmed that he “provided legal advice on many of these issues.”
Mr. Katsas also provided legal advice in the February 2017 decision by Attorney General Sessions and Secretary of Education Devos to revoke federal guidelines intended to assist schools in protecting transgender students from discrimination and complying with their obligations under Title IX. At a time when transgender students are less likely to graduate and more likely to suffer violence and severe physical and emotional injuries, the withdrawal of the Title IX guidance invites schools to believe that transgender students are not entitled to access bathrooms or other single-sex facilities consistent with their gender identity, or that the law or their obligations under Title IX to protect transgender students have somehow changed, which is simply not the case.
In addition to the Trump administration’s anti-civil-rights policies and actions, Mr. Katsas’s fingerprints can be found on litigation seeking to dismantle legal protections for LGBT people. In July 2017, the Justice Department intervened in Zarda v. Altitude Express, a private employment lawsuit, to argue that the ban on sex discrimination in the Civil Rights Act of 1964 does not protect workers from discrimination on the basis of their sexual orientation. In August 2017, the Justice Department filed an amicus brief in support of the petitioner in Masterpiece Cakeshop, Ltd. v. Colorado Civil Rights Commission, arguing that First Amendment guarantees of freedom of expression preclude application of Colorado’s general antidiscrimination law to a bakery that objects to providing custom-made wedding cakes to same-sex couples. Mr. Katsas has confirmed that he was involved in both these efforts.
While his recent anti-LGBT legal work has been prolific, Mr. Katsas is not new to opposing LGBT rights. While he worked at the Justice Department, Mr. Katsas defended the so-called Defense of Marriage Act (“DOMA”) that defined marriage for federal purposes as excluding same-sex couples, and between 2004 and 2006, he served as counsel in two different cases attempting to uphold the statute. While speaking before the Federalist Society in 2011, he was critical of the Obama administration’s decision not to defend the legality of DOMA. Mr. Katsas argued that same-sex couples are not optimal parents, stating that government had a legitimate interest “in facilitating the ideal relationships for having and rearing children” and that “it seems to me pretty self-evident, but at least a debatable point, that the other things equal the best arrangement for a child is to be raised by both of the child’s biological parents which by definition have to be one man and one woman.” When recently asked whether he understands why same-sex parents may be concerned that they will not get a fair hearing in his courtroom in light of these comments, he responded: “I do not believe that any such concerns would be warranted.”
Not only do these words demonstrate Mr. Katsas’s complete and categorical disregard for any families other than those formed by heterosexual, gender conforming individuals, they are also in deep tension with the Supreme Court’s decision in Obergefell v. Hodges, which recognized marriage equality as the law of the land. The majority of the Court in Obergefell was concerned that “[w]ithout the recognition, stability, and predictability marriage offers, [same-sex couples’] children suffer the stigma of knowing their families are somehow lesser.” In arguing that same-sex couples cannot provide “ideal relationships for having and rearing children,” Mr. Katsas seems to be suggesting precisely that same-sex parents are “somehow lesser.” Nowhere does Mr. Katsas share the Supreme Court’s concern for the children of same-sex couples being subjected to “the stigma of knowing their families are somehow lesser” and the “material costs of being raised by unmarried parents.
On the contrary, in describing the 2014 Supreme Court term as “grim” and “a very bad year for conservatives,” Mr. Katsas specifically highlighted the Court’s decision in Obergefell. He lamented that Obergefell prohibits every state in the country from adhering to the traditional definition of marriage between one man and one woman. Mr. Katsas has criticized Justice Kennedy’s LGBT rights jurisprudence generally for being “long on rhetoric and short on what one might think of as traditional legal reasoning,” even though Justice Kennedy spoke for Supreme Court majorities in Obergefell, United States v. Windsor, Lawrence v. Texas, and Romer v. Evans. Through his words and actions, Mr. Katsas has left no doubt that he would seek to restrict and roll back these landmark decisions protecting the liberty, equality, and dignity of LGBT people.
While the above examples focus on the threat that Mr. Katsas poses to the LGBT community, we share the concerns expressed by The Leadership Conference on Civil and Human Rights and other groups about his approach to civil rights generally. Mr. Katsas’s record demonstrates that his appointment to the bench would cause grave harm to the LGBT community, as well as many other communities who rely on the federal judiciary to administer fair and impartial justice. Quite simply, Gregory Katsas is not the kind of judge that this country wants, needs or deserves. We urge you to reject his nomination.
It bears emphasis that in nominating Mr. Katsas to the D.C. Circuit, the President has made the startling leap of attempting to place a member of his own legal team on a court that historically has played a critical role in checking Executive excess. While all court of appeals positions are important, this particular nominee being selected for this particular court runs a profound risk of merging the judiciary with the executive. In rejecting Mr. Katsas’s nomination, we request that you make clear to the President that appointing his lawyer to become his judge is not a viable path to victory in court.
Thank you for considering our views on this important issue. Please do not hesitate to reach out if we can provide additional information throughout the confirmation process. You can reach us through Sharon McGowan, Director of Strategy for Lambda Legal, at smcgowan@lambdalegal.org.
Very truly yours,
Lambda Legal
Advocates for Youth
Alaskans Together for Equality
Bend the Arc Jewish Action
BiNet USA
CenterLink: The Community of LGBT Centers
Equality Alabama
Equality California
Equality Federation
Equality Illinois
Equality North Carolina
Equality Texas
Equality Utah
Family Equality Council
Freedom for All Americans
FreeState Justice
FORGE, Inc.
GLAAD
GLBTQ Legal Advocates & Defenders (GLAD)
Los Angeles LGBT Center
Mazzoni Center
National Black Justice Coalition
National Center for Lesbian Rights
National Center for Transgender Equality
The National Coalition of Anti-Violence Programs
National Coalition for LGBT Health
National Council of Jewish Women
National LGBT Bar Association
National LGBTQ Task Force Action Fund
National Partnership for Women & Families
OutServe-SLDN
People For the American Way
PFLAG National
Pride at Work
Sexuality Information and Education Council of the United States (SIECUS)
Transcend Legal
Transgender Law Center
Transgender Legal Defense & Education Fund
The Trevor Project
URGE: Unite for Reproductive & Gender Equity
Whitman-Walker HealthThe tide of drug prohibition is turning. With the decision of voters in Colorado and Washington state last year to not just decriminalize but legalize marijuana outright, I believe the nation arrived at a tipping point.
Polling shows people are increasingly open to the notion that not all drugs should be outlawed. A survey by Pew Research Center back in March found a majority of Americans - 52 percent - now say marijuana should be legal. More strikingly, 72 percent agreed that government efforts to enforce marijuana laws cost more than they are worth, and three in four agreed the drug has "legitimate medical uses."
[Check out our gallery of political cartoons.]
Last night, a uniquely credible voice joined the growing cacophony calling for the U.S. to rethink its drug policies. In a documentary special, neurosurgeon and CNN chief medical correspondent Sanjay Gupta offered what amounts to a mea culpa for his previous opposition to medical marijuana. "We have been terribly and systematically misled for nearly 70 years in the United States, and I apologize for my own role in that," he wrote in an accompanying op-ed.
In both the TV special and the column, Gupta shares the story of little Charlotte Figi, whose severe form of epilepsy was subjecting her to as many 300 life-threatening seizures a week – until, at the age of five, she began to take medical marijuana, and the seizures all but ceased completely.
Desmond Tutu once said that "the texture of our universe is one where there is no question at all but that good and laughter and justice will prevail." But there's no justice in keeping a drug on the schedule 1 narcotics list that has the potential to reduce the suffering of millions like Charlotte Figi. There's no justice in perpetrating a "war" on drugs that puts hundreds of thousands of nonviolent, victimless offenders in jail.
[Weigh in: Is Sanjay Gupta Right About Medical Marijuana?]
Today in America, one in every 15 black men is behind bars. According to the Prison Policy Initiative, that means an African-American male is more likely to be incarcerated here, in the land of the free, than in South Africa during Apartheid when Tutu spoke those famous words. Human Rights Watch says people of color are no more likely to use or sell illegal drugs than whites, yet they're arrested far more often. There's no justice in that.
Which is why it's no surprise the tides are changing.An employee of JPMorgan fell to his death in Hong Kong Tuesday, the second apparent suicide at the bank in a matter of weeks.
Police said the 33-year old man jumped from the top of JPMorgan's regional headquarters in the city's central business district. He was pronounced dead at a nearby hospital at 2:30 p.m.
The death of the Hong Kong resident was being treated as a suicide, police said, adding that they were investigating pressure of work as a possible motive.
JPMorgan (JPM) confirmed that a "tragic incident" had taken place at its offices in Chater House, where it occupies the top 10 floors.
"Out of respect for those involved, we cannot comment further," the company said in a statement. "Our thoughts and sympathy are with the family that's involved at this difficult time."
A source at the bank said the man -- identified by police only by his surname, Li -- was a junior employee.
Late last month, the U.S. bank confirmed an employee died after falling from its 33-story tower in London's Canary Wharf financial district.
Related story: Making 6 figures on Wall Street, but life stinks
Gabriel Magee was 39 and worked at the investment bank's technology arm.
London police said at the time that they were treating the death as "non-suspicious." An inquest has been set for May.
A third JPMorgan employee suffered an untimely death earlier this month.
Ryan Crane, 37, an executive director in the Global Equities Group in the bank's New York office, was found dead in his suburban home on Feb. 3.
A spokeswoman for the chief medical examiner of Connecticut said the cause of death was still under investigation.
-- CNNMoney's Chris Isidore and CNN's Vivian Kam contributed reporting.On 16 August 2017, Joshua Witt, 26, posted on his personal Facebook page a photograph of a bloody wound on his left hand, which he alleged was the result of being attacked by a man with a pocket knife who assumed he was a neo-Nazi. Since sharing his story with his Facebook friends, the post has gone viral and his story has become the subject of several blog posts and news stories.
Witt said on Facebook he was getting out of his car at a Steak ‘n Shake restaurant in Sheridan, Colorado, when a man approached and asked him if he a neo-Nazi while simultaneously swinging a small blade at him. Witt said he threw his hands up in response, which blocked the weapon from hitting his head but resulted in a laceration to his hand that required three stitches. Witt reported the incident to police and described the attacker as an African-American man who ran toward a nearby bike path inhabited, known to be inhabited by transient people. On his Facebook pager, Witt wrote:
Sooooooo apparently I look like a neo-nazi and got stabbed for it … luckily I put my hands up to stop it so he only stabbed my hand…. please keep in mind there was no conversation between me and this dude I was literally just getting out of my car … So I went to get a shake after the chiropractor and as I got out of my car all I hear is “you one of them neo-nazi?” As the dude was swinging a small pocket knife over my car door …. then he took off running and I was just sitting there in shock like what the heck dude I have no tattoos that would indicate anything like that. There is nothing on the car that I am aware of that might suggest it. My head is not shaved
However, on 28 August 2017, Sheridan police reported that Witt had not in fact been attacked, but had in fact purchased a small knife at a sporting goods store, which he accidentally cut himself with. He subsequently called police to the parking lot and fabricated a story about being attacked. In a statement to the media, Sheridan police Chief Mark Campbell said:
Sheridan Police became suspicious of his story for various reasons which included the following:
Video surveillance in the area did not show anyone running from the scene of the attack as Witt claimed. Sheridan Police detectives located a person who matched the description provide by Mr. Witt. This person who is a transient and lives in the area was cleared as a possible suspect. Based on the above facts and new information learned from Witt in his interview Sheridan Police reviewed video from a nearby sporting goods store. That video revealed the following additional information: Store video showed Mr. Witt shopping in the store minutes before the alleged attack. Store video showed Mr. Witt purchasing a small knife in the store. On August 24, 2017 Sheridan Police, re-interviewed Mr. Witt. Where he was confronted with all the information listed above. Mr. Witt subsequently admitted to accidentally cutting himself with the knife while parked in his car in front of the sporting goods store and admitted making up the story about being attacked.
In the days since Witt wrote the post, it had been shared thousands of times and became the subject of sensationalized reports claiming the person who attacked him was an “anti-fascist” or “antifa,” often masked, black-clad far-left activists that have gained notoriety in recent months for violently opposing white supremacist rallies in places like Berkeley, California. For example, Breitbart.com reported:
Joshua Witt, 26, was leaving his car to enter a Steak ’n Shake in Sheridan, Colorado, and claims his long-on-top, buzzed-on-the-sides haircut was the reason for the stabbing as a confused anti-fascist accused him of being a neo-Nazi.
Fox News reported a similar story. As of 28 August 2017, both stories are still live on those respective web sites. However, no one from “antifa” attacked Witt, and the man he claimed attacked him was cleared of wrongdoing by police.
This is hardly the first time a hoax gained popularity by blaming violent attacks on members of the black community. In early March 2017, Breana Harmon Talbott, an 18-year-old Texas woman, was arrested for filing a false report claiming she had been abducted and sexually assaulted by three black men. In 2015 a Texarkana woman used make-up to mimic injuries and falsely claimed on social media she was attacked at a Wal-Mart by three black people.
If convicted, Witt could face up to one year in jail and a fine of up to $2,650 for falsifying a police report.STI President says he wants more STI models – including a powered up BRZ
The man in charge of Subaru’s go-fast division, Subaru Tecnica International (STI), Yoshio Hirakawa, says he wants more… More standalone models, more aftermarket parts sales and more differentiation between STI products and their Subaru donor models.
Speaking ahead of the launch of the latest standalone STI model, the WRX STI-based S207 at this week’s Tokyo Motor Show, Hirakawa told motoring.com.au that extra product was key to his focused of growing the brand.
“My dream is to make STI a truly global brand,” Hirakawa told motoring.com.au.
“To do this we need more cars, more models. We will launch two new models per year” the STI President said.
According to Hirakawa, STI’s new models will be a mix of standalone STI specific models such as the S207 and Forester tS, just announced for Australian introduction, and a widening of the STI-developed cars built on Subaru’s own production lines.
Currently only one series production model exists, the WRX STI. But Hirakawa says this number could soon be tripled. In fact, he suggests four models could be in the offing – including a long-awaited powered-up BRZ STI.
The first of the new STI models is likely to be a fettled turbocharged four-cylinder version of the Liberty. Subaru’s recently introduced WRX-based Levorg wagon is also another likely candidate, Hirakawa concedes.
Both models could be on sale during 2016 in some markets, he hinted.
“We are studying the possibility. Not just on paper but with advanced development. These [models] will not be decided as a project only on paper,” he told motoring.com.au.
Hirakawa ruled out Outback as a potential STI target but controversially confirmed his team was working on potential “advanced technology” that could make a BRZ STI a reality.
Subaru has to date ruled out a turbocharged version of the sportscar because of turbo, intercooler and plumbing packaging and crash test incompatibilities.
Hirakawa says an electrically powered turbocharger is “one option to overcome these challenges”.
“This is a sensitive subject. But it [electric turbocharging] is under study for the STI model,” Hirakawa revealed.
But power will not be the only measure of future STI models, the 30-year veteran of Fuji Heavy Industries (FHI), Subaru’s parent company, insists.
“We must not be only power, but also quality; feel on the road. Better sound. Better ride,” he explained.
Just one area in which he sys he will seek to improve both donor and STI models is Subaru’s Lineartronic CVT automatic gearbox, now a core technology for the company,
“I want it to feel more like a manual gearbox,” Hirakawa explained.
“It should launch faster and have a more positive shift feel.
“It is not necessarily to change the hardware. [But] we must work on the algorithms and programs [that control the gearbox],” he explained.Two decades of mystery shrouding the fate of three Iranian Jews who disappeared in 1997 have come to a close, after the Mossad confirmed that they were killed by Iranian authorities while attempting to emigrate to Israel.
The Mossad did not immediately say how they were killed, however, or by whom.
Nourollah Rabi-Zade, from Shiraz, and brothers Syrous and Ibrahim Ghahremani, from Kermanshah, were instructed by Israeli agents to approach the Iran-Pakistan border to meet a smuggler who would sneak them out of the country. However, the three men never turned up to the meeting point, and were never heard from again, the Yedioth Ahronoth daily reported Monday.
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The announcement comes a year after the intelligence agency announced that a separate botched emigration attempt, orchestrated by Israel and overseen by Mossad and Jewish Agency officials, resulted in the deaths of eight Iranian Jews en route to Israel in 1994.
In light of the new information, an Israeli rabbinical court said the Mossad’s findings were reliable, and ruled that the wives of the victims were eligible to remarry.
Under Jewish law, women whose husbands have gone missing are barred from marrying again until their death are confirmed. Then-Sephardic chief rabbi Shlomo Amar made a similar ruling regarding the widows of the eight who were determined killed last year.
According to a Channel 10 report last year, the eight who disappeared in 1994 had been told by Israeli contacts to travel eastward to cross the Pakistani border in three groups. In what appeared to be a case of mistaken identity, two of the groups were confused with anti-government insurgents and killed by Iranian forces, while the third group was detained by the government, the report said. They were later released and killed by local tribesmen.
A number of years ago, Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu asked the Mossad reopen the investigation into the fate of missing Iranian Jews. Last March, the PMO confirmed the death of the eight Jews, stating they “were caught during the escape and murdered.”
While the PMO did not detail when or where the eight were killed or by whom, it said the Mossad had received the information from a “reliable source.”
At the time, some family members expressed anger at the state for not revealing its role in their disappearance, and for withholding information that could have released the victims’ wives from their bonds of marriage.
Yoel Ram, the son of one of the eight victims, told Channel 10 at the time that only intense pressure from the families had led state officials to release the information on their deaths. Yehuda Kassif, an activist who campaigned on behalf of the families, accused the state of planning and directing the men’s escape attempt and then “shirking responsibility the moment something went wrong.”
Yehuda Kasif, a longtime representative of the victims’ families, told The Times of Israel that the silhouette of a twelfth man seen in the composite photograph of the missing men was an Iranian Jew who was likely killed in Iran in an unrelated incident around the time of the disappearance, and was not a part of those trying to escape the Islamic Republic.
Times of Israel staff contributed to this report.An Indian fisherman was killed when his boat came under fire from an unmarked vessel off the Gujarat coast, the Coast Guard said Friday.
Fisherman Iqbal Abdul Bhatti, 40, succumbed to his injuries after being hit by a bullet on the right collar bone.
Coast Guard officials said the crew on board two Indian fishing boats, Premraj and Ramraj, were fired upon by a slightly bigger vessel about ten nautical miles across the notional International Maritime Boundary Line (IMBL).
About 5-6 rounds were fired from the unmarked vessel which was carrying about 40 people, officials quoted the fishermen as saying.
Initial reports suggested the involvement of Pakistan's Maritime Security Agency (MSA), but the Coast Guard later clarified that the identity of the attackers was not yet established.
"There was no number or name written on the boat and it was carrying blue and green colour flags. There is no indication to pinpoint that the boat belongs to any particular organisation or country," Coast Guard inspector general VSR Murthy told ANI.
Pakistan media reports quoted sources in MSA as saying that none of its vessels were in the area when the incident happened.
Two ships Vijit and Meera Behn - which were on patrol duty, were immediately diverted towards the location to investigate and render assistance. A Dornier aircraft was also pressed into action to carry out aerial surveillance.
The fishing boats had set sail from Okha town of Dwarka district on September 8. They will be towed back to Okha by the Coast Guard vessels.
India and Pakistan share a disputed maritime boundary in the waters off the Gujarat coast and the region is patrolled by vessels from both sides. Dozens of fishermen are arrested in the area every year for allegedly violating the boundary.
( With inputs from agencies)
First |
evidence of the relationship between diet and health and effective actions to change behaviour.
We must also communicate the evidence to policymakers, industry and the public. They need instruments to create a virtuous circle where consumers demand healthier food and industry competes to respond, offering and promoting food and drinks in a way which further drives healthier choices. The challenge for government is to put in place the conditions which make this more likely for science, for industry and citizens.
This presentation will consider the strength of evidence relating diet to health outcomes particularly for saturated fat and sugar, drawing on data from prospective cohorts and dietary intervention studies.
The Queen's Lectures are supported by the British Embassy and the British Council Germany.
The lecture will be held in English.
About Professor Susan JebbDEEP STATE UPDATE: Senior Most Intel Officials Leaked Flynn Phone Call Transcripts (VIDEO)
FOX News analyst Catherine Herridge went on with Tucker Carlson to discuss the unprecedented Deep State leaks on General Mike Flynn.
Herridge said this was a top level Deep State leak. Only a select few had access to this information.
Catherine Herridge: The claim that they (Obama administration) never interfered with with a federal investigation, I would argue is patently false because throughout the Clinton email campaign what we saw from Mr. Obama were multiple public statements where he seemed to put his hand on the scale of justice… …I think it is important for the people at home to know is some of the intelligence we talk about such as these transcripts between the former National Security Adviser, Mike Flynn, and the Russian ambassador, I know some people who have gone 30 years in the intelligence community and they will never see an NSA transcript. That’s because it’s so closely held. So this was information at the senior most levels of the intelligence community that was leaked for what I would say was partisan purposes… The fact that that was leaked to reporters, that’s a threshold we have not crossed before.
Via Tucker Carlson Tonight:View full size
Oregon is poised to adopt the strictest standard for toxic water pollution in the United States, driven by concerns about tribal members and others who eat large amounts of contaminated fish.
The
proposed the new standard Thursday, nearly two decades after concerns about contamination in fish prompted studies that showed tribal members along the Columbia River eat far more fish than the general population.
The new rule, scheduled for approval in June, would dramatically tighten human health criteria for a host of pollutants, including mercury, flame retardants, PCBs, dioxins, plasticizers and pesticides.
Industry and cities worry about the costs of complying with the new rules and controlling pollution, likely to run in the millions.
"There are potentially a lot of manufacturing jobs being put at risk," said John Ledger, an
vice president. "It could put (businesses) in a terrible position, where they can't locate here or expand."
Environmental groups say the change is long overdue, but exceptions built into the proposed rules and a lack of focus on pollution from farms, timberlands and urban stormwater mean they might not reduce pollution significantly.
"We can change standards on paper, but how it plays out on the ground and whether we're really ratcheting down pollution is what matters," said Brett VandenHeuvel,
s executive director.
The proposal presses some big hot buttons: regulating industry in a down economy; DEQ's authority over farms and forests; protecting tribal members who have seen their health compromised and their traditional diet degraded by pollution.
Oregon's current water quality standard is built on an assumption that people eat 17.5 grams of fish a day, about a cracker's worth. The proposed standard boosts that to 175 grams a day, just shy of an 8-ounce meal.
That could boost cost for industry such as paper mills and for sewage treatment plants, increasing rates.
It could also lower the health risks for those who eat a lot of local fish -- an estimated 100,000 Oregonians, including 20,000 children, according to a committee set up to consider the health effects of the new standard.
Two years ago, sewage treatment and business groups predicted millions in costs for industry and potentially billions for sewage treatment plants if they had to install state-of-the-art treatment systems.
A more recent study commissioned by DEQ came up with much lower estimates, about $400,000 a year in incremental compliance costs statewide. DEQ officials say they've built in a variance to make sure polluters can cut releases over time at a reasonable cost.
Measures could include public education campaigns, implementing "best management practices" to reduce pollution and pursuing sewer users who put pollution into sewer systems.
Janet Gillaspie, executive director of the
, said she thinks DEQ has underestimated the impact of the changes, including the costs and paperwork necessary to comply with the new rule.
Kathryn VanNatta, governmental affairs manager for the
said variances are likely to be hard to get: "Oregon has never issued a variance," she said, "and this proposal does not make a variance any easier."
The variance provision could also be modified by the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency, which has to approve the new standard, or challenged in court, business advocates warn.
Environmental groups, including some that have filed lawsuits over implementation of the federal Clean Water Act in Oregon, say the proposal doesn't go far enough.
Variances and other exemptions could water down the rules to the point "there may not be much there," said Nina Bell, executive director of Northwest Environmental Advocates.
The proposal is out for
through Feb. 18, with seven hearings scheduled statewide Feb. 1-10. Oregon's Environmental Quality Commission is scheduled to approve a final standard in June.
led the move for a tougher standard. Carl Merkle, acting manager of the tribes' environmental rights and protection program, said he's still evaluating the draft.
"We don't want to see exceptions swallowing up the rule," Merkle said. "But we also understand that, for some dischargers, meeting these heightened standards is not going to happen overnight."NEW DELHI: India would be open to giving asylum to Hindus from Pakistan if they ask for it. Some 250-odd Hindus have arrived recently and most are keen on seeking permanent residence in India as they fear persecution in Pakistan.India is “surprised” at the sudden influx of Hindus from Pakistan who have indicated that they will ask for asylum after arriving here for an annual pilgrimage or tourism visit, said government sources. In the past week, at least three batches of Hindus have come to India from Pakistan.Although they were made to sign documents promising to return before being allowed to cross into India, many of them have said they would ask for asylum here.If these Hindus approach the government — sources said they had not yet done so — it would be an inter-ministerial decision. However, sources said “India does not generally turn away asylum seekers.”The plight of Hindus in Pakistan has figured in Parliament with BJP leader Rajnath Singh forcefully raising the religious and human rights violations the community faces in the neighbouring country. He found the support of other parties with BJD’s Bhartruhari Mahtab saying India should offer shelter to Hindus migrating from Pakistan. Mahtab said Pakistan has been unable to protect its minorities.The plight of Hindus in Pakistan figured in Parliament on Tuesday with BJP leader Rajnath Singh forcefully raising the religious and human rights violations the community faces in the neighbouring country.Punjab Congress has written to Prime Minister Manmohan Singh asking for government intervention to provide Hindus refuge from Pakistan. Mulayam Singh Yadav of SP said the issue should be dealt with on a humanitarian level and India should not stay silent.The latest group of 14 Hindus came via Attari on Monday, after 250 came over last week. They bring harrowing tales of harassment, violence and death at the hands of Islamists.These migrations are embarrassing to Pakistan. In his Independence Day speech, Pakistan army chief General Kayani made a pointed reference to the security of minorities. He recalled that in the original mandate, Pakistan was to be an Islamic welfare state. Without a specific reference to the Hindus, Kayani said minorities in Pakistan should be free to live and work and practice their faith without fear.The Hindus who crossed the border on Monday said they would flout their promise to return and would stay on in India. They alleged severe persecution, harassment, forced conversion, extortion and abduction and forced marriages of young girls by Islamist groups in Pakistan. The groups are mainly residents of Sindh and Balochistan. About 250 Hindus were briefly detained at the border by Pakistani authorities. They were allowed to enter India after signing a commitment to return, and told not to criticize Pakistan while in India.Government sources said these Hindus had been given visas like other regular Pakistanis, as this is generally the time of the year when they arrive on pilgrimage around Janmashtami.The issue is certain to feature in the discussions when foreign minister S M Krishna travels to Islamabad for talks with his counterpart Hina Rabbani Khar. In May, Krishna had told Parliament, “It is the responsibility of the government of Pakistan to discharge its constitutional obligations towards its citizens, including those from the minority community.” But the migrations might change the issue.The trials and tribulations of Pakistani Hindus came into limelight when a 14-year-old girl, Manisha Kumari, was kidnapped, forced to convert to Islam and married off. Earlier this year, Pakistan’s Supreme court heard the case of three women, Rinkie, Asha and Lata, who allegedly faced the same fate. Last month, a 20-year-old, Sunil “converted” to Islam on TV, during Ramzan, to the delight of a cheering audience.The chair generated favorable comment at the International Contemporary Furniture Fair in New York in 2012, and was honored the next year by the Red Dot awards, an international competition.
Charles Randolph Pollock was born in Philadelphia on June 20, 1930, and moved with his family to Toledo, Ohio, as a child. As a boy, he made a motor in his basement using odds and ends. The family settled in Detroit, where Mr. Pollock attended Cass Technical High School and won poster contests. At 16, when his family moved again, to Muskegon, Mich., he chose to remain in Detroit, living in a boardinghouse, working on Chrysler’s assembly line and going to school.
After graduation he received a scholarship to Pratt Institute in Brooklyn, where he used wire to fashion his furniture designs. George Nelson, considered a founder of American modernism in design, admired one of his sculptures when he came to lecture. Mr. Pollock went to his office and presented it to him as a gift, telling him he would like to work for him when he graduated.
But first he served in the Army, teaching art classes and working as art director of Infantry magazine. After his discharge, he went back to Mr. Nelson, who hired him. Together they developed the “Swag Leg” collection of chairs, characterized by four elegantly curved metal legs.
Mr. Pollock then approached Florence Knoll, a celebrated designer who studied under Mies van der Rohe. She initially refused to meet with him but relented after an interior design magazine published an article about him. On the day of his interview with her, he brought along a prototype of a lounge chair he was working on and collided with her as she was coming out of the elevator, knocking her down with the chair. She hired him anyway.
He soon talked Mrs. Knoll into paying $20 a month for a studio in a run-down part of Brooklyn, where he worked on the executive chair for five years, making it over and over again, improving it each time. He rigged the basement wiring to steal electricity from a drugstore in the building to help defray the costs.The Del Monte Apple Store in Monterey, Calif., was evacuated on Wednesday after a dozen people in the store were nauseated by a chemical-contaminated package delivered by FedEx.
Around 12:50 p.m. Pacific, several workers from the Apple Store went to pick up a delivery near a Macy's Furniture Gallery, Monterey Fire Chief Gaundenz Panholzer told the Monterey Herald. The smell from the package soon began to make people feel sick, and four people —primarily Apple workers —were hospitalized. The Apple Store was closed and evacuated, but only as a precaution.Once it was determined to be dangerous, the package was dropped into a dumpster near a P.F. Chang's. The restaurant's patio was closed, but the inside remained open. The parking lot near the Macy's Furniture Gallery was also blocked off.Panholzer said that the package was ultimately found to have been contaminated by a clear liquid, organic peroxide, used by a regional FedEx distribution center. The chemical is a disinfectant and can be toxic in higher concentrations. In this incident, no one is thought to have become sick because of direct contact.In a statement, FedEx said it was "cooperating with authorities" looking into the cause of the contamination. Panholzer noted that the truck that carried the Apple package made three more deliveries in Monterey before it could be stopped, although no other packages appear to have been splashed with organic peroxide.About The Jubilee Download Directions The Jack-O-Lantern Jubilee is an annual, family-oriented festival held in beautiful downtown North Augusta on Georgia Avenue. Activities include live entertainment on two stages, an awesome variety of great food, arts and crafts vendors, car show, corn hole tournament, amusement rides and plenty of activities for the kids including a costume contest, face painting, clowns, kiddie rides & inflatables. This year is the 34th Jubilee in City's history and will be a two day event starting on Friday, October 26 from 6:00 PM -10:00 PM and Saturday, October 27 from 10:00 AM - 10:00 PM. NO Tents and NO coolers will be allowed.
Musical Entertainment Download The Parking Map Download Directions Every year the Jack-O-Lantern Jubilee has great musical entertainment for our patrons and this year is no exception. This year will feature FREE concert events Friday and Saturday nights. We went big last year with The Charlie Daniels Band on Friday night and then on Saturday night Robert Randolph and The Family Band rocked a crowd of 10,000 right on the street of Georgia Avenue. This year we will be featuring Loverboy. For more than 30 years, LOVERBOY has been “Working for the Weekend” (and on weekends), delighting audiences around the world since forming in 1978, when vocalist Mike Reno was introduced to guitar hot shot Paul Dean – both veterans of several bands on the Canadian scene – at Calgary’s Refinery Night Club.
After being rejected by all the major U.S. record companies, LOVERBOY signed with Columbia Records Canada, entering the studio with producer Bruce Fairbairn and engineer Bob Rock to record their self-titled debut album, which went on to sell more than 700k records in Canada. Columbia U.S. released the album in Nov. 1980, which went on to sell more than 2 million albums in the States and four million worldwide. Check out the Loverboy Official Website
Also performing for the free gala will be Diamond Rio. After assuming the name Diamond Rio, the band was signed to Arista Nashville and debuted in 1991 with the single "Meet in the Middle", which made them the first band ever to send a debut single to No. 1 on the Billboard Hot Country Songs charts. The band charted 32 more singles between then and 2006, including four more that reached No. 1: "How Your Love Makes Me Feel" (1997), "One More Day" (2001), "Beautiful Mess" (2002), and "I Believe" (2003).
Check out the Diamond Rio Official Website
In addition, we managed to get one of Country's true musical treasures, Mark Chesnutt performing on Friday, October 26 and will be opening for Diamond Rio. Mark Chesnutts stature is easily gauged; he has 14 No. 1 hits, 23 top ten singles, four platinum albums and five gold records. Check out Mark Chesnutt's Official Website
Events In addition to our awesome musical entertainment, we also have our fan favorite annual events which include a car show, cornhole tournament, kids costume contest and amusement rides. Download The Parking Map Download Directions
Craft Vendors Download The Parking Map Download Directions Have an interesting craft, product or information that you would like to sell or distribute to our Jubilee patrons? Online Registration & Pick Your Spot New This Year: Register Online & Pick Your Spot We have made it easier than ever to become a craft vendor at the Jack-O-Lantern Jubilee. Our new custom registration system allows craft vendors to select a spot that best fits their needs from our festival map and if it's available, they can select it, register and pay online reserving their spot instantly. No more mailing an application in and hoping for the best... Food vendors can fill out an online application, but the application will have to be reviewed by the Jubilee staff. Food vendors will be notified by our Jubilee staff if they have been selected to participate. 'Pick Your Spot' is an online feature only, so if you choose mail in an application, you will get a random spot from the available pool.Piketty believes a Grexit would be a catastrophe for the euro and could "spark the beginning of the end" for the single currency.
The author of the acclaimed work Capital in the 21st Century has been a stern critic of how Europe has tried to handle the country's debt crisis and on Tuesday he laid into Germany, blasting it as the “country which has never repaid its debts”.
In an interview with France Info on Tuesday – the same day Eurozone leaders meet in Brussels for an emergency summit – Piketty repeated a point he has been making in recent days.
“What struck me was while I was writing my book is that Germany is truly the best example of a country which throughout its history has never paid its foreign debt,” he said.
“Neither after the First World War or the Second. Germany is the country that has never repaid its debts so it's not legitimate to lecture other countries,” said the economist.
“Europe was founded on debt forgiveness and investment in the future, not on the idea of penance,” said Piketty, whose best-selling book on the widening gap between rich and poor earned him a visit to the White House.
Piketty admitted the Greeks have made mistakes, but said “we cannot ask younger generations to pay for the mistakes of their parents for decades.”
Piketty's pleas are likely to fall on deaf ears on Tuesday as European leaders meet in Brussels for what's seen as the last chance to find a deal to prevent Greece from crashing out of the euro.
But Germany and France have made it clear so far that the ball was in Greece's court and various Eurozone leaders seem more and more convinced that Greece needs to dumped.
Piketty had words of warning for those in favour of cutting Greece a drift.
“Those who think that we will stabilize the eurozone and encourage discipline by expelling a country are dangerous sorcerer's apprentices," he said, suggesting that if Greece leaves Europe could face even deeper crises to come.
The economist has been heavily critical of the way the eurozone has been run since the debt crisis in 2008.
He recently told The Local and other members of the Anglo-American Press Association that if Greece was allowed to leave the eurozone it would spark "the beginning of the end" for the single currency.
“It would be a catastrophe for the eurozone if Greece were pushed out. It would be the beginning of the end of the single currency,” he said.
"People every morning would be asking ‘who will be the next to leave?' That would be the beginning of the end. And the governments of France and Germany have not prepared public opinion for such an eventuality; they would have to do that very quickly.”
Piketty has also slammed the way the talks over the Greece crisis have been held in almost secrecy.
"This is a perfect example of why we need some political involvement in the economic policy surrounding the single European currency,” he said.The New York Times’s Moscow bureau was the target of an attempted cyberattack this month. But so far, there is no evidence that the hackers, believed to be Russian, were successful.
“We are constantly monitoring our systems with the latest available intelligence and tools,” said Eileen Murphy, a spokeswoman for The Times. “We have seen no evidence that any of our internal systems, including our systems in the Moscow bureau, have been breached or compromised.”
On Tuesday, citing United States officials briefed on the matter, CNN reported that The Times, along with other news organizations it did not identify, had been the victims of computer breaches by hackers thought to be working for Russian intelligence.
The Federal Bureau of Investigation is looking into the attempted attack on The Times, a government official briefed on the inquiry said, but has no investigations underway of such episodes at other news organizations. Kelly Langmesser, a spokeswoman for the agency, said the F.B.I. had no comment.Teams in the National Football League (NFL) retire jersey numbers of players who either are considered by the team to have made significant contributions to that team's success, or who have experienced untimely deaths during their playing career. As with other leagues, once a team retires a player's jersey number, it never issues the number to any other player, unless the player or team explicitly allows it.
Since NFL teams began retiring numbers, 139 players have had their jersey number retired. The Chicago Bears have the most retired numbers of any team with 14. Only one player, Reggie White, has had their number retired by two teams. Three teams – the Oakland Raiders, the Atlanta Falcons,[1] and the Dallas Cowboys – traditionally do not retire jersey numbers, and two others – the Washington Redskins and the Pittsburgh Steelers – only do so in extremely rare circumstances.[citation needed] Also without a retired jersey number are the Baltimore Ravens, the Houston Texans, and the Jacksonville Jaguars, although those teams are less than 25 years old (although some numbers have been placed out of circulation).[2]
Unlike Major League Baseball (which retired Jackie Robinson's number) and the National Hockey League (which did so for Wayne Gretzky), the NFL has never retired a jersey number league-wide in honor of anyone. Numbers 0 and 00 are no longer allowed, but were not retired in honor of any particular player, since the NFL's positional numbering system, imposed in 1973, does not allocate a position for players wearing those numbers (the NFL allowed those numbers in the past; Johnny Olszewski, Obert Logan, Jim Otto and Ken Burrough all wore 0 or 00). The numbers can be, and rarely are, used in the preseason when no other numbers for a player's position are available.[3]About This Game Vector is an exciting, arcade-style game featuring you as the exceptional free runner who won’t be held down by the system. The game opens with a view into a totalitarian world where freedom and individually is nothing more than a distant dream. But the heart of a freerunner is strong, and you so break free. Run, vault, slide and climb using extraordinary techniques based on the urban ninja sport of Parkour all while being chased by “Big Brother” who’s sole purpose is to capture you and bring you back.
Inspired by the practice and principles of Parkour, Vector’s intuitive controls please players of all levels, and sophisticated level designs challenge the most demanding players with fast-paced timing puzzles as the traceur “flows” over the rooftops.
- Hunter Mode : Tired of being chased? Start fighting on Big Brother’s side and hunt down opponents to shock them with your trusty taser!
- Controller Support : Enjoy the run with your favorite gamepad!
The best parkour-inspired action game! Vector lets you break free and run! Don’t get caught!The geniuses who analyze NFL teams report that one of the many weaknesses of the 2011 Vikings is at receiver, a notion the team's outstanding wide receivers coach, George Stewart, disagrees with 100 percent.
One reason some experts have that opinion is because of the loss of Sidney Rice, who had one great season in 2009 for the Vikings with 83 catches and eight touchdowns, but he left via free agency to sign with the Seattle Seahawks for a five-year, $43 million deal (with $18.5 million guaranteed), a price Vikings owners weren't going to come close to matching.
One reason Stewart is high on his group of receivers is the presence of Michael Jenkins, who Stewart was instrumental in drafting out of Ohio State when he was on the Atlanta Falcons staff in 2004.
"I drafted Michael Jenkins. He's a blessing in disguise," Stewart said. "He comes here, he brings leadership, he brings veteran experience, he's able to catch the ball, he's able to stretch the field, he's a great run-blocker. All those things combined into one. We're glad to have Michael Jenkins here."
The 6-4 wide receiver had 276 receptions, 3,512 receiving yards and 20 touchdowns for the Falcons over seven seasons.
After the Falcons drafted wide receiver Julio Jones with the sixth overall pick in April's NFL draft, Jenkins became available to the Vikings as a free agent. The Falcons' decision to not keep Jenkins was mostly because of cap reasons, but Stewart is all the happier for it.
"We have Percy Harvin, we have Bernard Berrian, so we needed a guy like Michael Jenkins to have a chance to be successful," Stewart said.
"Our scouting department and [vice president of player personnel] Rick Spielman have done a great job of providing us with depth," Stewart said. "You talk about a Juaquin Iglesias, Devon Aromashodu, Manny Arceneaux, Jaymar Johnson, Greg Camarillo... we have some guys competing for that last spot on our roster that are good football players. So hopefully the way this thing will shake out, hopefully we end up with two good football players."
As for Rice, Stewart said: "Sidney was hurt and the injuries that he had were legitimate injuries. He had a knee, he had an ankle, he had a hip, legitimate injuries, they were not tic-tac injuries and those can happen to anyone. He was snakebit, so to speak. He did have a great year [in 2009], and I wish him well in Seattle."
One ability Rice had was to get open deep and catch the long ball. The big question is whether any of the current Vikings receivers can replace Rice in that regard.
Shortell produces
One thing Jerry Kill and his Gophers football staff can thank former coach Tim Brewster and his coaches for is recruiting freshman Max Shortell, who was ranked the 21st-best quarterback in the country and the fifth-best football player in the state of Kansas by Rivals.com.
To date Shortell, who is the second-team quarterback behind MarQueis Gray, has lived up to all of his recruiting buildup.
"First of all, it's hard to recruit 6-6, and he's 225 pounds and he moves much better than I thought he would, to be honest with you," Kill said the other day. "He's been able to handle the heat of competition and that's in him all the time, too, because I want to find out if he can handle it and handle the pressure.
"It's hard to learn quarterback. And if his steps don't go the right way, the wrong way or whatever, he's hearing about it. And he's handled it well. He studies the game, he works hard at it, and again he's got 'want to.'
"And if you take a kid who has 'want to' and wants to put the extra time in at quarterback, you better put the extra time in. If he wants to do it, he can do it. I think his arm is a little bit tired. We've thrown a ton of balls now, a ton of balls, but I've been pleased with his progress to this point."
Shortell must be pretty good because Michigan, with great scouting reports on him, tried hard to get him to change his mind and become a Wolverine.
Fortunately, he enrolled in summer school and kept his commitment to the Gophers despite pressure from Ann Arbor.
Jottings
• The Baltimore Orioles had won 18 road games coming into their series with the Twins this week, then won four in a row at Target Field. Their pitching staff had a 5.03 ERA on the road but posted a 1.00 ERA against the Twins, allowing only four runs in four games. The last time the Orioles swept a four-game series was against the Texas Rangers on July 8-11, 2010.
• According to the Los Angeles Times, Timberwolves basketball star Kevin Love has turned to volleyball and recently played some in the Manhattan Beach Open, a pro tournament that is dubbed the Wimbledon of sand. He lost his first match in straight sets. But Love was quoted as saying that playing volleyball is "addicting" and wants to try it again.... Love, whose four-year, $14.8 million contract ends after this season, hasn't forgotten basketball and is working out daily with the Bulls' Derrick Rose and the Thunder's Russell Westbrook in Los Angeles.In the overwhelming number of sexual harassment and assault complaints being revealed en masse, it's easy to overlook. We often miss what we can't see.
But if you're a woman of colour, you notice.
Since allegations surfaced against disgraced movie mogul Harvey Weinstein, provoking a landslide of more high-profile perpetrators including James Toback, Kevin Spacey, Brett Ratner and Louis C.K., few minority voices have come forward. And when they have, the response can sometimes be different.
If you are more powerless, more vulnerable, it can hurt your job opportunities, your reputation, your chances in the job market - Yunxiang Gao, Ryerson University professor
"That there are obstacles due to race and gender are still a surprise, a shock to a lot of people," says Phani Radhakrishnan, a professor of organizational behaviour and human resources at the University of Toronto.
"Whenever visible minorities claim that they were harassed due to their gender and race, they have to establish that they perceived the situation accurately. It's compounded with the attribution of race. It doesn't just add, it multiplies in its effects."
Radhakrishnan says she wasn't surprised to see that of the about 80 women who have come forward accusing Harvey Weinstein of sexual misconduct, Kenyan-Mexican actress Lupita Nyong'o got a direct and public response from Weinstein after she wrote an op-ed in the New York Times.
After actress Lupita Nyong'o came forward about an unsettling encounter with Harvey Weinstein, the disgraced media mogul immediately fired back. Before that, he had remained predominantly silent against his many white accusers. (Mario Anzuoni/Reuters)
Power dynamics
Weinstein said he had a "different recollection of events" after Nyong'o claimed he wanted to give her a massage on one occasion and on another, propositioned her during a meeting. He had remained silent in the days following accusations from dozens of white women.
"Clearly he felt even more powerful so he had the standing to disparage her claim," said Radhakrishnan. "He felt in a relatively more powerful state to react against that compared to the other women."
Power dynamics like these ones are something Yunxiang Gao has been researching for years. Gao, who specializes in cultural history and gender studies at Ryerson University, says every sexual assault victim is in a vulnerable position. But those with less power are even more so. And more often than not, women of colour are those with less power.
New York authorities are investigating claims from actress Paz de la Huerta that Weinstein raped her twice in 2010. He has denied charges of non-consensual sex with any woman. (Chris Pizzello/Associated Press)
Coming forward can hurt already precarious positions
"You have very few high-profile non-white actresses anyway," she says. "If you are higher up, no one can punish you for speaking up. If you are more powerless, more vulnerable, it can hurt your job opportunities, your reputation, your chances in the job market."
Voices belonging to those more powerful can also de-legitimize those lower in the hierarchy.
Girls creator and star Lena Dunham apologized Saturday after defending a writer on her show, Murray Miller, against assault accusations by actress Aurora Perrineau. Her original post sparked backlash online.
"Every woman who comes forward deserves to be heard, fully and completely," she wrote, after initially releasing a statement saying she had "insider knowledge" that the claim was false.
Aurora Perrineau's sexual assault claim against Girls writer Murray Miller was discredited by the show's star, Lena Dunham, who later apologized. (Hasbro via Associated Press)
Stakes are higher
Because many minorities are already on the "outskirts of power" or the "margins of their industry," the stakes are higher to come forward, says U of T sociology professor Ellen Berrey.
"The few who have made it into these majority-white workplaces are so often running into discrimination or micro-aggression and they're trying to hold on," said Berrey.
Some women might also be more reluctant to accuse one of their own.
"There's an additional pressure not to air the dirty laundry of their community," said Berrey. "When they already know men of colour are facing discrimination of some sort, they already feel an obligation to protect their community."
Gao explains that in China, there is an "unspecified rule" that female actors will exchange jobs for sex. Everyone accepts and plays by these rules, she says.
"Women in the Chinese entertainment industry who came forward were punished. These women's careers were destroyed because no other film actors or producers would touch them. It broke the unspoken rule."
Tarana Burke, who first started the MeToo campaign 10 years ago, says women of colour have historically always had to push through barriers to have a voice: 'Movements haven't been started for us,' she said. (Kim Brunhuber/CBC)
Joining the movement
But the more who come forward, the more difficult it becomes to ignore.
"Historically we've had to insert ourselves into movements," said Tarana Burke, who started the MeToo movement a decade ago before actress Alyssa Milano popularized it as a hashtag in October. "Movements haven't been started for us."
"Yes, the attention paid to this moment started clearly because these are rich actresses and people in the Hollywood spotlight and white women," Burke told CBC News in Los Angeles. "But that's not where it's going to end."Speaking in Ripon on April 4, Republican Lt. Governor Rebecca Kleefisch explained that the income tax cut proposed by Gov. Scott Walker in his latest budget will enable citizens to buy 40 Little Caesers pizzas.
“I think the average family understands this is just a down payment on the future. Also, if you saw a $100 bill on the sidewalk, would you walk by it? I’m a mother of two. That would mean 40 Little Caesars pizzas. That makes a tangible difference.”
Using Lt. Gov. Kleefisch’s “logic,” the anti-union policies enacted by Gov. Scott Walker shortly after he was inaugurated in 2011 have kept 160 Little Caeser’s pizzas per year off my family’s table, so the income tax cut proposed by Gov. Walker and supported by Lt. Gov. Kleefisch won’t put all those lost pizzas back on my family’s table.During our announcement on Aug. 23, one of the items we talked about was a new version of Veeam Endpoint Backup which will be renamed Veeam Agent for Microsoft Windows and today I am happy to announce that the public beta is now available!
You may wonder, why rename the most successful free Veeam product ever – the product that has been downloaded over 1 million times since its release less than two years ago, the de-facto standard and universally recommended solution in all major technical communities? Indeed, it was a tough decision. As the original product name implies, our initial focus with this solution has been mainly on endpoints. This is no longer the case now that we’re expanding to providing full support of physical and cloud instances running server workloads, so we needed the new universal name that would cover both Windows-based workstations AND servers!
Veeam Agent for Microsoft Windows 2.0
This next version of Veeam Endpoint Backup will expand on the current free offering by providing a more robust and enhanced business feature set by adding two new paid editions. However, not to worry, we’re still maintaining and even expanding the functionality of our FREE offering as well to address your most common feedback.
For example, new functionality of the free edition includes Windows Server 2016 support, source-side encryption and the ability to schedule periodic active full backups for better reliability of backups to consumer-grade storage. All of these features were very frequently requested in our forums.
Additionally, on the recovery side, via the integration with Veeam Backup Free Edition 9.5, you receive new abilities to perform instant recovery of free agent backups to a Microsoft Hyper-V VM (including free Hyper-V) – or even directly to Microsoft Azure! This gives you additional restore options and opens a lot of interesting usage scenarios. For example, I know I will be restoring my older endpoint backups to a Microsoft Azure VM so I can boot them there whenever I need something.
Restore options available from within Veeam Backup & Replication 9.5
Introducing two new paid editions!
One of the biggest requests for our free offering has been technical support! This non-technical feature will be available for both of the new, paid editions; Workstation and Server – enabling users to enjoy industry-leading, enterprise-class 24.7.365 support.
Which edition you choose depends on what type of workload the protected instance runs. The agent will automatically detect which type of license is required based on the operating system you are running, but of course you will be able to override that on every agent manually, via remote management API, or – when backing up to a Veeam repository – via the centralized license management available directly through your Veeam Backup & Replication 9.5 console!
Veeam Backup & Replication 9.5 console can be used to manage Veeam Agent for Microsoft Windows licenses
But, there is much more to paid editions than technical support alone. Adding full server support was the biggest priority of this release and we had a lot of work to do – starting from something as basic as a server-focused job scheduler and up to full application-aware processing for all Windows enterprise applications: Microsoft Exchange, Active Directory, SQL Server, SharePoint, Oracle and file servers. Yes, you guessed it right – the exact same, proven guest processing engine from Veeam Backup & Replication (including transaction log backup for low-RPO protection of databases) is now available within the server edition of the agent.
Application-aware image processing for Windows applications
There is also good news for mobile users. You need to ensure their backups can complete even when they're away from the corporate network – and we’ve delivered the same functionality in the best way possible! The new functionality called Backup Cache will allow for scheduled incremental backups to complete to a local folder even |
inside the civil service, the media and the business community. The movement, some of them say, has become a state within a state.
Formerly one of Erdogan’s most stalwart allies, the Gulen community has recently become a major thorn in the Prime Minister’s side. Last year, prosecutors said to be close to the movement tried to subpoena his intelligence chief. This year, media organs run by its followers criticized his clumsy handling of the Gezi Park protests. Finally, prominent Gulenists have taken the Prime Minister to task for his government’s restrictions on press freedoms, policies towards the Middle East, and the post-Gezi crackdown.
Erdogan has now decided to hit the Gulenists where it hurts. In mid-November, the prime minister announced that he would close down the country’s private exam prep schools, or dershanes, roughly a quarter of which are run by Gulen’s followers. The schools, he said, are perpetuating social inequalities between those who can and cannot afford them, creating a parallel system of education. The government has since moderated its tone, emphasizing that dershanes would be allowed to operate until 2015, at which point they would be “transformed” into private schools.
For young Turks, the dershanes are a necessary fact of life, offering hours of daily tutoring for the tortuous high school and college entrance exams, both of which, given the amount of stress and cramming involved, make the SATs seem like a pop quiz. For the Gulenists, the schools are also a major source of financial revenue and a way to attract young followers. The decision to close them, they say, is an attack on private enterprise. Usak himself acknowledges that the dershane system might be an anomaly, but it’s the flawed educational system that needs fixing first, he says, and not its byproduct.
(MORE: Amid Explosions and Clashes, Volatile Turkey-Syria Border Gets More Dangerous)
With the controversy in full swing, the Gulenists and the Erdogan faithful, once wary of allowing tensions between them to boil over, are now trading blows on an almost daily basis. The movement’s leader, Fethullah Gulen, known for speaking in abstruse parables, has resorted to ones that are less difficult to decipher. “If people concerned with mundane interests in every realm are against you, if the Pharaoh is against you, if Croesus is against you, then you are walking on the right path,” he told supporters in a statement posted online, almost certainly likening Erdogan to ancient, tyrannical potentates.
The latest bombshell landed last week, when a Turkish newspaper leaked a 2004 document in which Erdogan’s government and the top army brass signed off on a decision to go after the Gulen movement and its interests. (The movement is said to boast several million supporters, many of them in influential positions.) AKP officials do not deny the document’s authenticity. They insist, however, that the decision, signed at a time when the generals still breathed down the government’s neck, never entered into force.
They might have a point. For much of the past decade, the Gulen movement appeared to be working hand-in-glove with the AKP, much to its own benefit. Its sympathizers filled key positions in the bureaucracy. Its newspapers cheered the prime minister through thick and thin. Gulen followers also found plenty of common ground with the government during a series of controversial coup trials that eventually landed many of Turkey’s top military officials behind bars. The trials not only neutralized Turkey’s meddlesome army as a force in domestic politics, critics say, but also allowed the Gulenists and the AKP to silence a handful of outspoken critics.
Even if the movement’s marriage of convenience with Erdogan had recently been on the rocks, why the Prime Minister should file for divorce just months ahead of local elections remains anyone’s guess. “Mr. Erdogan feels that has the power to do whatever he wants, to control everything in the country,” says Sahin Alpay, a lecturer at Istanbul’s Bahcesehir University. Perhaps, he says, having won nearly 50 percent of the vote in 2011, having brought the army to heel, and having made some inroads with Turkey’s Kurdish minority, “Erdogan does not care whether the Gulen movement will oppose him or not.”
Even so, the AKP’s polling numbers aren’t expected to budge significantly, at least in the short term. Continued economic growth, though down from 2010 and 2011 when it approached double digits, is one reason. Another is that with the opposition unable to mount a credible challenge to Erdogan, AKP supporters upset with the government’s reaction to the Gezi Park protests and its handling of the dershane issue have practically nowhere to turn. “As long as the AKP performs to satisfy the economic and social wishes of its constituency, Turkish voters are not going to look for an alternative,” says Atilla Yesilada, an Istanbul-based political analyst with Global Source Partners. Some might vote for the nationalists, he says, and some might turn to the social democrats, but overall “there aren’t too many addresses that could accommodate them.”
The same goes for the Gulenists. For all its recent criticism of Erdogan’s government, the movement can ill afford to jump ship. “It has nowhere to go politically,” says Joshua Hendrick, a professor at Loyola University Maryland. The ruling party, he says, is its only home. “There is no opposition that can create and implement policies that are as favorable to the movement’s political interests.”
The Gulenists’ only available recourse, Hendrick says, is to try to reshape the AKP. They appear to have started already – mainly by championing the only man capable of mounting a challenge to Erdogan—Turkish President Abdullah Gul.
Erdogan, who has promised to stand down as Prime Minister at the end of his current third term, is said to have his eyes on the presidency, which he hopes to use to continue steering the ship of state. Gul, who has hinted at running for reelection, appears to be the only man in his way. He may, of course, make way for Erdogan, but in exchange for becoming prime minister. However he positions himself, the sitting president, who projects the image of a much more conciliatory, inclusive leader, can count on the Gulenists’ backing. “There is very vocal support for Gul inside the movement,” says Hendrick. “They are strongly pushing for him to take up the mantle.”
Usak, though guardedly, appears to acknowledge that the movement’s main grudge is not with the AKP, but with Erdogan. “He seems too overconfident compared to his previous terms,” he says of Erdogan, so much so “that he does not even discuss the issues with his own team.” It remains to be seen how much Erdogan’s team will suffer from losing the loyalty of Usak’s movement.
MORE: From Atatürk to Erdogan — TIME Covers TurkeyThis week on DineSafe there are no closures to report, but restaurants like Asian Legend and Tortilla Flats came close with eight and 10 infractions, respectively. Also of note, Sashimi Island is back on the list with its fourth conditional pass since the beginning of the month.
See which other restaurants landed on DineSafe this week.
Asian Legend (418 Dundas Street West)
Inspected on: February 16, 2016
Inspection finding: Yellow (Conditional)
Number of infractions: 8 (Minor: 3, Significant: 4, Crucial: 1)
Crucial infractions include: Operator fail to ensure food is not contaminated/adulterated.
Diamond Pizza (1349 Danforth Avenue)
Inspected on: February 16, 2016
Inspection finding: Yellow (Conditional)
Number of infractions: 7 (Minor: 3, Significant: 3, Crucial: 1)
Crucial infractions include: Operator fail to maintain hazardous food(s) at 4C (40F) or colder.
Far Niente (187 Bay Street)
Inspected on: February 16, 2016
Inspection finding: Yellow (Conditional)
Number of infractions: 5 (Minor: 1, Significant: 4)
Crucial infractions include: N/A
The Bar With No Name (1430 Queen Street West)
Inspected on: February 17, 2016
Inspection finding: Yellow (Conditional)
Number of infractions: 4 (Minor: 3, Significant: 1)
Crucial infractions include: N/A
Tortilla Flats (458 Queen Street West)
Inspected on: February 18, 2016
Inspection finding: Yellow (Conditional)
Number of infractions: 10 (Minor: 4, Significant: 6)
Crucial infractions include: N/A
Fernando's Hideaway (591 Yonge Street)
Inspected on: February 19, 2016
Inspection finding: Yellow (Conditional)
Number of infractions: 2 (Minor: 1, Crucial: 1)
Crucial infractions include: Operator fail to ensure food is not contaminated/adulterated.
Sashimi Island (635 College Street)
Inspected on: February 19, 2016
Inspection finding: Yellow (Conditional)
Number of infractions: 5 (Minor: 1, Significant: 4)
Crucial infractions include: N/A
Note: The above businesses each received infractions from DineSafe as originally reported on the DineSafe site. This does not imply that any of these businesses have not subsequently corrected the issue and received a passing grade by DineSafe inspectors. For the latest status for each of the mentioned businesses, including details on any subsequent inspections, please be sure to check the DineSafe site.SANTA CLARA — Tuesday was less about Colin Kaepernick and much more about a brighter future that awaits the San Francisco 49ers.
Trent Baalke, move to the side. Better yet, start packing your belongings.
The 49ers are Chip Kelly’s football team moving forward and the clever coach watched Baalke as he dug his own grave.
Kelly named Kaepernick his Week 6 starting quarterback on Tuesday and with it came a passing of the torch. Completely out of options because of Baalke’s hatchet job of the roster, Kelly is no longer scared to admit the truth.
“It was really one of the only maneuvers we could make, based on our depth,” Kelly said.
That’s a damning quote generally reserved for December. That’s a damning quote that makes you wonder if Baalke will last the entire season. And the translation is clear to anyone whose watched the 49ers this season: No quarterback, especially our pair of mediocre ones, can succeed in an offense without playmakers.
Of course, it’ll stir some memories seeing No. 7 sling the rock on the field Sunday against Buffalo. And as much as he likes him, Kelly has zero reasons to believe Kaepernick is going to come in a succeed. It’s exactly why the coach has been constantly warning the media this isn’t the 2013 version of the quarterback.
So instead, by bailing so early in the season on Baalke’s choice, Blaine Gabbert, Kelly has sent a message loud and clear to team owner Jed York: Baalke has no idea what he’s doing. The change is out of necessity, because our first choice is arguably the worst quarterback in the NFL.
We’re not privy to private meetings Kelly’s had with York, but we can go ahead and start hypothesizing where the head coach and owner stand. The 49ers simply cannot afford another offseason where Baalke is in control of player personnel. Gabbert is just one of a dozen examples where Baalke led the franchise closer and closer towards destruction.
Here’s the kicker of it all, and why many call Kelly a mastermind: Kelly knew all along a marriage with a GM who doesn’t value skill players was not going to work. So he sat there quietly while Baalke insisted on drafting more defensive linemen instead of pass rushers, more cornerbacks instead of wide receivers. Kelly sacrificed one offseason of roster debauchery in order to rid himself of Baalke. Because had the 49ers splashed in free agency for Marvin Jones and Josh Norman, the team could’ve been good enough to save Baalke’s job. Now? Baalke’s 49ers tombstone is already being etched.
There’s a reason Tuesday’s quarterback change has been anticipated since Kelly was hired in January. Kaepernick was the ace up Kelly’s sleeve all along. It was a domino that the reformed Kelly was going to present as a cry for help.
Humbled after his firing in Philadelphia, Kelly has wisely been slow playing his cards in San Francisco. He won over the locker room, he handled the Kaepernick’s protest with grace, he even let the Baalke charade play itself out long enough so he didn’t come off as the asshole.
How could anyone feel bad for Baalke? He aligned himself with Blaine Gabbert of all people. Aside from making mundane acquisitions to the practice squad, the 49ers GM might not make another major move on this roster.
Where they go after Baalke is anybody’s best guess. Assistant GM Tom Gamble makes a lot of sense, so does bringing in an entirely new set of eyes. York won’t be naive enough to give Kelly full control over the 53-man roster.
Whoever is making roster transactions in 2017, 49ers fans should be saying hallelujah. Chip Kelly’s Kaepernick card has painted Trent Baalke as a fool. Keeping him for another year now seems utterly impossible.You too can be a winner! (A loser!)
The recent and ongoing drop in oil prices is good for you! (There is a sense of edgy uncertainty that this may not be true.) With lower prices at the pump everyone can rush over to the nearest car dealer and purchase a new, gas-guzzling SUV or giant pickup truck … or fly the family to Disney World in Orlando! This is good for the economy, right? (No, it’s insane!)
We’re all consumers, right? (No, we all work for finance, we are paid whatever we can borrow.)
For the past six months there has been uncertainty (lies) regarding the causes- and effects of reduced prices and the petroleum industry. (Managers are loathe to admit it,) the trend is deflationary with prices being a consequence of above-ground factors that reduce the ability of petroleum consumers to pay … the number-one above ground factor being the high price of petroleum.
Analysts discuss the rousing success (challenges) of the petroleum supply industries; none of them discuss the (abject) failure of consumption as a business endeavor. Because consumption does not earn anything, all returns must be borrowed. The result is an economy dependent upon finance issuing exponentially expanding debt to fund new consumption as well as to retire- and service maturing legacy loans … in the amounts of hundreds of trillions of dollars.
Oil prices are declining because consumers are insolvent! They cannot borrow any more nor can their governments borrow more in their place. Without loans there is insufficient support for higher prices. This is true for all kinds of goods not just petroleum … as well as for credit itself!
The multiyear reflationary efforts on the part of the world’s central bankers (theft of the citizens’ savings) has been undone in a matter of a few days. The price of fuel is embedded in almost every good if only the shipping component. As the fuel price declines, so must asset prices. While the fuel itself cannot be the collateral for finance industry loans, the companies themselves and their properties certainly are. The last few weeks of plunging oil prices have crushed banks’ collateral holdings by 30% and more. Some form of retrenchment (margin call) is indicated … nothing good for the fuel extraction industry.
All the talk of ‘energy boom’ and ‘revolution’ have served only to make us complacent and ignore risks: underway is an oil shock but we do not recognize it. Unlike 1974 when there were gas lines, odd-even days and the hated ‘double-nickel’, the shock in 2014 takes the form of a credit crisis.
Figure 1: (chart by Euan Mearns with additions). When is a glut not a glut? Consider stock vs. flow: since 2005 conventional crude and condensate extraction has remained more or less flat. Increased output (flow) has come from expensive unconventional sources such as tar sands and ‘shale’ by way of fracking. Our recent, historically high prices are the result of diminished flow rates relative to consumption rate particularly within Asia. Customers there have been willing to pay more (globalization has given them access to Western credit markets).
At the same time, there is inventory buildup (stock) in North American terminals and elsewhere. Oil in the ground isn’t where it’s needed and the distribution infrastructure is insufficient to move it to potential customers. From the standpoint of flow, there is a shortage, from the standpoint of stock, there is a glut … the result of which is another cyclical bust that has tormented oil business in the past, (Byron King, Daily Reckoning):
American Association of Petroleum Geologists (AAPG) has about 30,000 members now, about half the number that it had back in the early 1980s. This is another way of saying that things were booming in the oil biz back then. But many people who worked in the geology business were laid off during the mid- to late-1980s and throughout the 1990s, due to what we look back and call the “oil bust.” From its high price of about $50 per barrel back in 1980 (using the dollars of that era, and it would be over $100 per barrel today in our inflated U.S. dollars), oil crashed in price to near $5 per barrel by the mid-1980s, a 90% fall in price.
The difference between eras: the increased flows in the past were due to new production from Alaska and the North Sea. There were also left-over conservation efforts in the West; China was communist and backward, the developing world was not a significant oil consumer. There was a large inventory build along with increased relative flows. Fast-forward to the present, there are sub-mediocre flows against ballooning worldwide demand and the black-swannish consequences of excess leverage needed to obtain any flows at all.
How high is too high? A lot lower than you think.
Citizens expect oil shocks to be accompanied by very high prices but this can be misleading. The rationing mechanism works identically at high- or low prices. During 2008, prices skyrocketed to a record $147/barrel, consumption fell because customers refused to pay the high price. A few months later price of oil had fallen to $34; another inventory-driven bust.
When customers are broke, even low prices will ration consumption … prices will decline to lower levels. The assumption is that at some (low) price consumption offers an organic return, once the oil price declines sufficiently oil consumption will begin to pay for itself and the economy will return to growth. This assumption is foundationally incorrect: consumption is purely waste, it offers zero return. What matters is credit availability and cost. With world credit leveraged to the solvency of fly-by-night energy companies the availability of credit becomes more and more … iffy.
Economists assume consumption will increase to the upper bound created by available supply … yet this is clearly not so. The upper bound is available credit rather than available fuel. Economists assume there is unlimited credit because interest rates are low, which implies pent-up demand. In reality, low interest rates are the product of central bank bond-buying and rate manipulation. At the finance level there are billions available to firms in the international credit markets, at the same time, customers are unable- or they sensibly refuse to borrow. Within the credit marketplace, customers compete vs. energy companies for funds. At the same time, the amounts the companies must borrow in order to extract fuel, must be borrowed by the customers in their turn to retire the drillers’ loans … plus interest. Drillers can only succeed by ‘out-borrowing’ their customers: the consequence of success is catastrophic! The customers are broke: when companies are unable to lay off their exposure onto their customers, the companies collapse.
Customers can only out-borrow the companies for a little while, they exhaust their own credit along with the resource which increases the funding burden of the companies. Invariably, the customers bankrupt themselves by cannibalizing their capital; this is the fundamental nature of the extract-to-consume regime … that economists don’t seem to grasp.
Energy Commodity Futures
Commodity Units Price Change % Change Contract Crude Oil (WTI) USD/bbl. 69.31 -4.38 -5.94% Jan 15 Crude Oil (Brent) USD/bbl. 73.17 +0.59 +0.81% Jan 15 RBOB Gasoline USd/gal. 192.12 -11.39 -5.60% Dec 14 NYMEX Natural Gas USD/MMBtu 4.24 -0.11 -2.62% Jan 15 NYMEX Heating Oil USd/gal. 229.32 -10.33 -4.31% Dec 14
Precious and Industrial Metals
Commodity Units Price Change % Change Contract COMEX Gold USD/t oz. 1,185.70 -11.80 -0.99% Feb 15 Gold Spot USD/t oz. 1,187.71 -4.96 -0.42% N/A COMEX Silver USD/t oz. 16.14 -0.47 -2.84% Mar 15 COMEX Copper USd/lb. 289.30 -6.35 -2.15% Mar 15 Platinum Spot USD/t oz. 1,214.38 -3.62 -0.30% N/A
Analysts suggest with a straight face that conventional oil producers such as Saudi Arabia (and Iran) are now engaging in a ‘price war’ vs. the marginal barrel producers in North America. This is part of the narrative that denies the possibility of an energy shortage, (Telegraph):
World on brink of oil price war as OPEC set to keep pumping Andrew Critchlow Saudi oil minister suggests Opec oil cartel would keep its production ceiling at 30m barrels per day Some Opec members want producers outside the cartel to shoulder some of the responsibility for balancing the oil market by essentially cutting their output. Crude traded in the US fell to as low as $74 per barrel $69 as traders bet that Opec will allow the price to fall further amid growing signs of a global price war amid producers. “There remains little prospect of any production cut being agreed at [Thursday’s] Opec meeting,” said brokers at Commerzbank. “Opec will merely agree to comply better with the current production target of 30m bpd.
Price war sounds sexy but it is misleading. Nobody in the energy business wants lower prices as diminished output losses cannot be made up with volume. As it is, every energy company is bringing every possible barrel to market …
Figure 2: Saudi oil ‘production’ since 1973, (Oil Price.com, source data by EIA). The Saudis have not increased their output so they have not affected the price. It would be more accurate to accuse shale- and tar sands companies for starting a price war against themselves. Oil analysts can look to the shale gas industry, (Deborah Rogers):
Shale and Wall Street: Was the Decline in Natural Gas Prices Orchestrated? – The price of natural gas has been driven down largely due to severe overproduction in meeting financial analysts’ targets of production growth for share appreciation coupled and exacerbated by imprudent leverage and thus a concomitant need to produce to meet debt service. – Due to extreme levels of debt, stated proved undeveloped reserves (PUDs) may not have been in compliance with SEC rules at some shale companies because of the threat of collateral default for those operators. – Industry is demonstrating reticence to engage in further shale investment, abandoning pipeline projects, IPOs and joint venture projects in spite of public rhetoric proclaiming shales to be a panacea for U.S. energy policy. – Exportation is being pursued for the differential between the domestic and international prices in an effort to shore up ailing balance sheets invested in shale assets.
As with the gas industry, overproduction is relative: unconventional natural gas plays are landlocked, the wells deplete before pipeline distribution networks to new consumers can be installed. Increased gas (stock) fed into legacy distribution systems = crashing natural gas prices. North America’s shale- and syncrude companies’ reserves are landlocked and dependent upon costly railroad distribution to terminals and refineries rather than pipelines.
Inaccessible supply and higher transport costs = discounted well-head price = reduced cash flow. This has left drillers dependent upon Wall Street junk bond financing and increased debt which in turn requires companies to misstate reserves.
As with natural gas, the Ponzi-incentives are for companies to flip acreage in the US and elsewhere. Finance offers more returns than actual physical output. Meanwhile, the debt- straitened companies look to Washington for permission to export (a bailout).
The price war argument is nonsense. Saudi Aramco has been selling 9 million barrels per day @ $108/barrel earning (borrowing) almost a billion dollars per day. At today’s price the same barrels earn roughly $650 million @ $78/barrel. The reduction in revenue implies the Saudis have put onto the market an additional 3 million barrels per day … if they could actually increase output by that much. Otherwise, the Saudis stand to lose hundreds of millions of dollars per day.
Conversely, producers would need to cut production by 3 million barrels in order to push the price back to $105/barrel. This would make sense only if there is an actual excess of supply. Instead, an output cut of that magnitude would cause a shift from an implied shortage (diminished flow relative to consumption) to an actual, physical shortage. So far, the implied shortage has affected customers’ ability to borrow. Further diminishing supply would the crash credit system altogether, this would certainly impact drillers including Saudi Arabia, which is just as dependent upon credit as any driller in the Bakken.
Less credit => less consumption => more of a ‘glut’ => lower prices => less output => less (high-yield) credit for drillers in a vicious cycle.
The claims of energy independence have served to obscure the price signal. Fuel constraints are evidenced by +$100 per barrel prices. Our grim- and nasty ‘auto-habitat’ has been built assuming sub-$20 per barrel into infinity and beyond, any price above that is too high. At the same time: sub- $20 per barrel petroleum = bankruptcy of the entire petroleum industry … along with finance which makes use of petroleum ‘assets’ as collateral.
What is underway is ‘Conservation by Other Means™’. Customers are rendered insolvent faster than lower prices can bail them out … which renders the current state of affairs resistant to management efforts. Central banks cannot reduce the physical costs of drilling even as they manipulate interest rate cost. Subsidies attempt to shift costs from drillers to their already insolvent customers. ‘Marginal Man’ — who sets the falling price for the rest — can be anyone in the world, not necessarily an American; he can be an (ex)motorist in Japan, or a busted tycoon in China.
Any bailout is a temporary reprieve. Accelerating the rate of consumption is stupidly counterproductive; customers are simply ruined, faster. Tepid attempts at mandated conservation will fail from the start: mandated efforts will compound those driven by events. Managers are chasing their tails: the pet theory that at some very-low price, consumption will offer a return. There is no such price! Consumption offers nothing at all but waste.
Conservation mandates only work at levels of consumption far lower than current rates; Euan Mearns’ missing 7 million barrels per day. The alternative solution is to find those missing barrels … too bad, they have already been burned up for fun. The barrels themselves are a moving target as depletion never quits! After 7 million come 8 million … 10 million then 20. We humans needed to make significant program changes starting in the early 1970s but we surrendered to liars and gamblers. Just because we refuse to recognize our oil shock for what it is does not mean it isn’t real.
I wonder how many people will scratch their heads as they’re filling up their tanks this week and wonder how much of a mixed blessing that cheap gas is. They should. They should ask themselves how and why and how much the plummeting gas price is a reflection of the real state of the global economy, and what that says about their futures. — Raúl Ilargi Meijer
Future = less.About This Game ARAYA is a first person adventure/horror game. Players will get a new thrilling experience inside a Thai hospital.
The story will be told from the perspective of 3 different characters. Players will explore different areas of the hospital in order to piece together the mysterious circumstances and solve the murder case of Araya. Virtual Reality Support
This game can be play without Virtual Reality headset.
This game supports the Oculus Rift headset with keyboard and mouse or XBOX controller.
This game supports the HTC VIVE headset with keyboard and mouse or XBOX controller. FAQ
Q. Who are we?
A. MAD Virtual Reality Studio is game studio dedicated to making the most out of VR technology. We are also serious horror fans. The view outside our window is a cemetery.
Q. Do I need a VR Headset to play this game?
A. Araya was optimised for a VR experience but can be played with or without VR Headset.
Q. What language will this game be in?
A. We are initially releasing ARAYA in English and Thai. We are also considering other languages depending on the feedback and amount of interest shown by the the community.Story highlights Authorities have cleared about 110 tons of dead fish from the Fuhe River
Officials believe they were poisoned by ammonia from a chemical plant
The company has been ordered to suspend operations
The dead fish were found over a 40-kilometer stretch of the river in Hubei province
After the thousands of dead pigs, come the tons of poisoned fish.
The Fuhe River is the scene of the latest disturbing example of river pollution in China.
Authorities cleared about 110 tons of dead fish from a 40-kilometer section of the river in the central province of Hubei, the state-run news agency Xinhua reported Wednesday.
Images taken at the scene this week showed thousands of silvery fish carcasses blanketing large expanses of the river and its shore.
The cause of the deaths, provincial environmental officials said, was the discharge of high levels of ammonia into the water by a local chemical plant in Yingcheng, outside the city of Wuhan.
JUST WATCHED Pollution causing cancer in this village? Replay More Videos... MUST WATCH Pollution causing cancer in this village? 03:00
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Samples taken at a water outlet from the plant on Tuesday indicated that ammonia density reached 196 milligrams per liter, a level "far in excess of the national standard," Xinhua reported, citing the provincial environmental protection department.
The World Health Organization says that natural levels of ammonia in groundwater are normally below 0.2 milligrams per liter and that surface waters can contain as much as 12 milligrams per liter.
The Hubei environmental authorities ordered the company that runs the plant, Hubei Shuanghuan Science and Technology Stock Co., to suspend operations at the plant and sort out its pollution controls, Xinhua said.
CNN made repeated calls for comment Thursday, but the company's office line was busy. Its stock was suspended from trading on the Shenzhen stock exchange Wednesday.
In an update Thursday, the environmental protection department said that a recent drought in the area had "caused (a) significant drop in water level, which decreased the river's capacity to hold pollutants."
Domestic sewage mixed with untreated waste from the chemical plant and a paper mill "have caused the biological crisis" in the river, the department said in a statement.
Photos: Swimming in slime Photos: Swimming in slime Swimming in slime – Tourists swim in seawater covered by a thick layer of green algae on July 3, 2013 in Qingdao, China. A large quantity of non-poisonous green seaweed, enteromorpha prolifera, hit the Qingdao coast in recent days. Hide Caption 1 of 6 Photos: Swimming in slime Swimming in slime – For the seventh year in a row, monstrous quantities of green algae have sprouted in the coastal waters near Qingdao. Hide Caption 2 of 6 Photos: Swimming in slime Swimming in slime – This year's growth, covering 28,900 square kilometers (11,158 square miles), is the biggest outbreak ever recorded, state-run news agency Xinhua reported. Hide Caption 3 of 6 Photos: Swimming in slime Swimming in slime – Tourists play at a beach covered by a thick layer of green algae on July 3 in Qingdao. Hide Caption 4 of 6 Photos: Swimming in slime Swimming in slime – Chinese officials have blamed past algae outbreaks on unusually warm seas. But scientists say that agricultural waste, industrial pollution, and human sewage are often to blame. Hide Caption 5 of 6 Photos: Swimming in slime Swimming in slime – A file photo from the 2008 cleanup. A researcher says that algae does not typically cause health problems, but skin inflammation may be a risk. "If you were stupid enough to go in, I wouldn't go in naked," said Dr. Christopher Bolch, of the University of Tasmania. Hide Caption 6 of 6
'Serious' pollution problems
A villager who lives near the river, Li Songqing, told the local newspaper Chutian Metropolitan that the dead fish had been piling up since early Monday.
"Nearly all fish died out in this section, no matter if they were big or small," he said.
Environmentalists said this added to other problems in the area.
"The environment of this region is already under extreme stress," said Ma Tianjie, who manages Greenpeace's campaign against toxic chemicals in East Asia. "The addition of these incidents will definitely worsen the situation."
People on China's Twitter-like microblog service, Weibo, reacted to the news with a mixture of anger and sarcasm.
"Why can't we solve these problems and stop them from happening beforehand?" asked the user @Kanfangzu.
"The water quality must be fine, and this is just a mass suicide of the fish," quipped another user, @Niyaobuyaolianguidouhaipa.
The poisoning of the fish is the most recent pollution scandal in China, which has many rivers and lakes with water quality problems.
In a 2009 report, the Ministry of Environmental Protection said pollution of surface water "remained serious."
In the ministry's most recent report, it said that about 30% of the rivers that it monitors are considered to be polluted.
Earlier this year, the discovery of thousands of bloated pig carcasses in a river near Shanghai caused widespread alarm.
At the time, officials blamed local pig farmers for dumping the dead animals in the river.The Measure of a Moneyless Man
In Mark Sundeen’s latest book, The Man Who Quit Money, we meet Daniel Suelo, a man who has chosen to live a radically austere life.
Throughout his writing, Mark Sundeen seeks out what makes a Man of men, particularly, as he puts it, “in this age of talking toasters and the programmable toothbrush.” His essays, articles, and books to date are populated by manifestations of romantic super-male types—swashbucklers, wanderers, political crusaders, and stupid-brave adventurers—backdropped by the comedy of now. Accordingly, in his newest work, The Man Who Quit Money, Sundeen has ferreted from the caves of the Utah desert this biography of a bum.
Diverging from the canon of books about great men, this one fleshes out the story of Daniel Suelo, who considered the state of the world and his place in it and imposed extreme austerity measures upon himself. Over a decade ago, at the peak of the U.S.’s “affluenza,” Sundeen’s current candidate for model male-dom deposited his last thirty bucks in a phone booth and broke with the capitalist system. He doesn’t use money, doesn’t barter if he can help it, doesn’t even accept coerced charity. Instead, Suelo subsists on excess, unwanted goods—not excluding roadkill, and that which is freely given. As such, Daniel Suelo is a veritable hobo-guru: a trash-scavenging, train-jumping, locust-and-wild-honey-eating freegan prophet for the Occupy era.
While not heroic in the glorious vein of mainstream biography subjects whose ships have docked, or even Sundeen’s bawdy machos of the Hemingway ilk, historical precedence abounds for the physically and spiritually enlightened as the true über-man. Revered beggars span the holy spectrum of ancient faiths from Hindu sadhus and Buddhist bhikkus, to Muslim fakirs and Sufi dervishes. Siddhartha sought and found enlightenment with little more than a begging bowl. And of course Jesus lived among the poor. “If you want to be perfect,” challenges Mathew 19:21, “go, sell your possessions and give to the poor.” But really, who wants to be perfect?
In the U.S., top of the global food chain, capitalism trumps asceticism. There is no such thing as an American sadhu. Poverty—even when it asks nothing in return for its presence—is not holy, but wholly cringe-worthy. Even Sundeen, whose early writing career required him to live on less than $5 a day, approaches Suelo with something akin to the shallow breathing that keeps out stink:
The sight of his teeth, dark and crooked, rotting right there in his mouth—it chilled me. As much as I supported a person’s right to voluntary poverty, here at the height of America’s greatest prosperity, I drew the line at bad teeth. I should not be forced to look at such a sorry mouth. The sight made me ashamed—of my own excellent dental condition, my disposable income, my rental property—as if he had accused me directly. My shame made me mad. It was a free country, I concluded, and Suelo had every right to sleep in the dirt and lasso grasshoppers or whatever, but how dare he sit in judgment of me?
It is this same knee-jerk aversion, to questionable hygiene and the suggestion of a moral hierarchy, which initially repels the reader—or this reader, anyway |
it has been pretty explicit that we want to work together with the Muslim community.
'This was about reassurance, it was about recognising, as Theresa May said only yesterday, that a Britain without Muslims, a Britain without Jews, Hindus, would not be the Britain we want to see.'
The letter slams far-right groups like the English Defence League (pictured), but some Muslims say ministers appear to use the same language as such groups by suggesting British and Muslim identity is distinct
Mr Pickles has previously written to Muslim leaders to offer support after arson attacks on mosques by far-right groups, but the latest letter is the first time he has challenged them to tackle extremism.
The letter emerged the day after the Metropolitan Police announced it is reviewing how to keep its officers safe amid fears of a terror plot to kidnap or kill a policeman or woman.
Home Secretary Theresa May also promised to increase the Government's efforts to tackle the terrorist threat and a 'chilling' rise in anti-Semitism.Looking for news you can trust?
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Hollywood is betting big on Alison Lundergan Grimes, the Democratic challenger to Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-Ky.).
Jeffrey Katzenberg, the movie mogul and Democratic kingmaker, raised more than $1 million for Grimes at a recent fundraiser at the Spago restaurant in Beverly Hills, according to the Hollywood Reporter. Katzenberg, who marshaled more than $30 million to reelect President Obama, has trained his sights on the McConnell-Grimes race for 2014 election season.
In an email to potential donors sent earlier this month, Katzenberg said of the Kentucky Senate race, “There is no more important election being held next year in this country.” Katzenberg wrote that he sees McConnell as an obstructionist who has crippled the US Senate and hurt the democratic process in Congress. “Alison is the antidote to McConnell and all he represents,” Katzenberg wrote. “She can win, and she will win if she gets the support she needs.”
Here’s more on Katzenberg’s fundraiser from the Hollywood Reporter:Back in late May, I revisited a favorite roster assessment mode, which is to rank all the players, regardless of position. As you know, most standard roster assessment posts look at the top players by each position group. This is a reasonable methodology, but it doesn't offer the clearest of pictures about the talent distribution across the team. For example, as the most recent camp has shown us, the fifth tight end can be better than, say, the backup left tackle. And, while organizations certainly look at the various position groups as they prepare for difficult roster cut decisions, they must also rank the entire roster if they are to, as Jason Garrett says, "keep the best 53."
Ranking all the players currently on the Cowboys roster not only shows us how strong our Beloved 'Boys are at some positions but also where they will need be relying on duct tape, baling wire and a few hosannas. More importantly, it offers insight into the disparity that exists between the various position groups.
This is a good time to conduct this experiment; back in May, I allowed that ranking 2012's major contributors was easy, but slotting the newcomers and draft picks was much more difficult, largely because we had seen little to nothing of them. As a result, all I could offer then were educated guesstimates; now, after two weeks at camp and a thorough re-watch of each of the three preseason games that have been conducted thus far, I have a much better handle on the newbies.
A note before we begin: my rankings reflect the players on Ourlads' depth charts as of Monday, with a quick cross-check of the Mothership's most recent roster. My calculations show the Cowboys roster currently has 87 players, including Tyrone Crawford, who will be designated injured reserve at the end of the month - hence the asterisk next to his name. Okay, here we go:
Thoughts: the top ten has remained firm, with the exception of Jason Hatcher, who joins the top tier after being arguably the best defensive player in camp not named DeMarcus Ware. Hatcher is playing with speed and power, and is going to thrive in Monte Kiffin's 4-3 front. As before, this section of the roster is populated by Pro Bowl caliber players...and a couple of future Hall of Famers. Not a bad place to start.
Thoughts: the offseason's biggest surprise has been Dunbar, who seemed a down-roster afterthought at the end of 2012 but has emerged as the team's number two running back, displaying startling speed and quickness. So, I've placed him at #20, which admittedly might be an over-ranking. So sue me.
Also noteworthy is that Tyron Smith falls out of the top ten after a solid but unspectacular camp. Admittedly, he was going up against Ware, who makes the very best tackles look bad, so Smith's ranking may soon rise if he shows he can dominate mortal competition. Until then, he sits in the second tier. He's not alone: like Smith, high picks Murray and Claiborne have been merely okay; they need to make bids for the top ten if this team is to fulfill its potential.
Thoughts: as was the case in May, this is where the roster is softest. Ideally, this tier would be populated by recent draftees who were pushing the older guys for playing time. While there are a couple of those types on the above list, the standout names are those of three vets - Allen, Sims and Hayden- who had surprisingly good camps, playing their way to the positions at which you've found them. Hopefully, some of the youngsters in the next tier will begin to push them by midseason.
And: despite all the injuries the team has suffered, the only one of any real consequence was Crawford's torn Achilles on camp's first day. Its particularly painful given that he was likely to be one of the cats making a bid for top-ten status.
Finally: after making some questionable free agent signings in 2012, look where 2013's two FAs are located. As they say, simpler is better.
Thoughts: here is where we see several recent draftees who are on the rise. Leary, Wilber, Wilcox, WIlliams, and Holloman have all flashed periodically in camp and in the preseason skirmishes. All, however, remain inconsistent, and are therefore works in progress. As they begin to clean up their games, they can exert some much-needed upward pressure on the roster.
And: one of the reasons Hayden has risen so sharply is the dropoff in Lissemore's play. Yes, Hayden has been a pleasant surprise, but Lissy certainly left the door open for him. In the offseason, I wrote that Lissemore might be one of the players who is a bad fit for Kiffin's scheme (the other was Alex Albright, who was waived/ injured yesterday). While Crawford's injury (which might necessitate SDE snaps for Ben Bass) will help to keep Lissemore on the roster, I wouldn't be surprised if he gets cut; he looks ponderous next to the rest of the defensive linemen.
Also: Dante Rosario debuts at #33. When I did this exercise back in May, the player he replaced, Paul Freedman, sat at number 81. That's a significant upgrade, and some mighty fine work by the Cowboys pro personnel guys.
Thoughts: a mixture of disappointing 2012 free agent pickups (Bernadeau, Orton, Livings) and youngsters with upward pointing arrows (Escobar, Bass, Randle). The old guys inhabit positions where the team has yet to upgrade through the draft; indeed, this is one of the benefits of this exercise: it reminds us that the team is still one good draft away from being complete (with both lines and backup QB being the targets). Best case scenario: the team gets the players it wants and none of the three above-named greybeards is on the roster in 2014.
And: speaking of fine personnel work: George Selvie has been superb. He flew in, jumped right in to practice that day, and has been acquitting himself with aplomb ever since. He may not make the team (he's looked better at RDE, where Kyle WIlber is entrenched as Ware's backup), but he's done everything he can to show the coaches he deserves to.
Thoughts: as I wrote in May, its in this tier where Jason Garrett's roster overhaul is most evident. There are a lot of good players here, and in the next tier. As a result, there has been (and will continue to be) fierce competition for the final eight roster spots. I can envision any of the guys I've ranked 55-62 making the team - and could just as easily imagine each of them being cut.
Thoughts: a lot of guys here who fought valiantly but just weren't good enough (Dominguez, Cook, Cochart), or got caught in a nasty numbers game at a deep position (Reed, Benford). To be clear: I think Matt Johnson makes the roster. I've ranked him here because that's what he's shown us. Also, Jeff Heath has done a really nice job in working himself up from roster obscurity to a place where he may have earned a practice squad spot.
Thoughts: a collection of guys who didn't ever really have a chance, with a couple of exceptions: keep an eye on Thaddeus Gibson, a recent pick-up. Reports are that he's flashed some professional pass rush moves, good burst and the all-important bend. Look for either Tanney or Stephens to be on the practice squad.
And: don't be surprised if the team keeps Demetress Bell. Yes, he looks like an over-inflated dirigible. But he was good player as recently as 2011; because of this, I wonder if the team sees another Marc Colombo in him: a long-term restoration project that could pay big dividends if Mike Woicik can work his magic.
Player Ranking in May 81 Cam Lawrence, LB 76 82 Deon Lacey, LB 80 83 Jakar Hamilton, S 53 84 Jabari Fletcher, DE N/A 85 Kendial Lawrence, RB 60 86 Dennis Godfrey, OG N/A 87 Brett Maher, K N/A
Thoughts: a collection of disappointments (oh, Jakar, when has a pet cat fallen so far, so fast?) and guys who were all-but invisible in Oxnard. To their credit, all competed hard. But in their cases, it didn't really matter; they just weren't good enough.
Okay, that's it for now. I'll do a version of this exercise again at the end of the preseason, as we gear up for final cut-downs. In the meantime, what rankings do you like? With which ones do you vehemently disagree? Go to the comments section and let it all hang out, people!
More from Blogging The Boys:'... Obama asked me to tell you: If you like your rented tuxedo, you can keep it.' —John Kerry Gridiron Dinner: Top 10 lines
Here are some of the best lines from Saturday’s annual Gridiron Dinner at the Renaissance Washington Hotel.
1. “Canadians are so polite, mild-mannered, modest, unassuming, open-minded. Thank God my family fled that oppressive influence before it could change me.” — Texas Sen. Ted Cruz
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2. “Al Hunt asked me if I was nervous about tonight. I said, ‘Hell, no. If my jokes bomb, the Gridiron Veterans for Truth will just tell the world that I was never here.” — Secretary of State John Kerry
( Also on POLITICO: 9 jokes from Obama's Gridiron speech)
3. “I know what you’re thinking: Why Charlie Crist? Simple: The Gridiron wanted someone of color.” — Former Florida Gov. Charlie Crist
4. “The Gridiron always pokes fun at candidates from both parties. You could have saved time and just invited me.” — Crist.
5. “Is Charlie Crist still here? I had to check – he’s always so quick to leave a party.” — Kerry
6. “No one was harder to follow than Hillary Clinton. Not since J. Edgar Hoover has a presidential appointee left such high heels to fill.” — Kerry
7. “President Obama asked me to tell you: If you like your rented tuxedo, you can keep it.” — Kerry
( Also on POLITICO: Obama pokes fun at Woodward, press grumbles)
8. “I’ve been watching the second season of ‘House of Cards.’ It’s very realistic, very lifelike. But I was a little worried when I got a late-night call from Mitch McConnell. He said, ‘Uh, Ted, why don’t you meet me at the Metro station?’” — Cruz
9. “The simple truth is that for a very brief time my family lived on the plains of Calgary. That does not make me a Canadian. Although Elizabeth Warren says that it does make me an Algonquin Indian.” — Cruz
10. “Terry is the Virginia governor who buys his own Rolexes.” — journalist Al Hunt, introducing Virginia Gov. Terry McAuliffe.
This article tagged under: Gridiron ClubFile sharing lawsuits involving the movie the Hurt Locker have been big news in the United States for months as tens of thousands of lawsuits have been filed against individuals alleged to have illegally downloaded the movie. The lawsuits have now made their way into Canada as the Federal Court of Canada has ordered the identification of subscribers at Bell Canada, Cogeco, and Videotron who face similar copyright infringement claims.
Late last month the court ordered the three ISPs to disclose the names and addresses of subscribers linked to IP addresses alleged to have copied the movie. The ISPs complied last week as lawyers for the Hurt Locker copyright owner moved to have their case treated as a “specially managed proceeding” that would put the case on a rocket docket.
My weekly technology law column (Toronto Star version, homepage version) argues the lawsuits hurt seemingly everyone.
The dozens of targeted Canadians will feel the greatest pain given the prospect of paying thousands of dollars in copyright damages, settlement fees, or legal costs for downloading a single movie. Canada is in the distinct minority of countries worldwide since it has statutory damages that allow a court to impose damages as high as $20,000 per infringement irrespective of the actual damages (most countries require evidence of the actual damages).
The targeted individuals will therefore face two unappealing options: settle the lawsuit for thousands of dollars (U.S. cases typically settle for approximately US$4000) or spend thousands in legal fees to fight the claim with the risk of a $20,000 damage award looming at the end. Even if a court awards far less (or the defendant wins), the legal costs will still likely be larger than simply settling the case.
The movie industry also comes out a loser in this case since file sharing lawsuits have done little to curb copyright infringement. Indeed, the experience in other jurisdictions demonstrates that offering reasonably priced, legal alternatives is a far better method of persuading the public to move from free to fee.
Moreover, the lawsuits now make the industry look untrustworthy given its earlier insistence that it had no plans to launch file sharing claims in Canada. At a House of Commons hearing earlier this year, NDP MP Charlie Angus specifically asked industry representatives about the prospect of Hurt Locker lawsuits migrating north. Their response: “We’re not interested in sweeping up the John Does.” Despite those assurances, months later dozens of Canadians have had their personal information disclosed and face thousands in liability.
The Internet providers look bad here as well. Bell Canada, Videotron, and Cogeco have acknowledged revealing their subscribers’ information, maintaining that they simply complied with a valid court order. Yet when the music industry launched similar lawsuits several years ago, providers such as Shaw and Telus raised concerns before the court could issue the order. In doing so, they ensured that the court considered the privacy implications of mandated disclosure and gave the individuals an opportunity to challenge the industry’s demands. In this instance, the three providers stood quietly on the sidelines, leaving their subscribers without representation.
Finally, the government now finds itself in a bind. Already facing Wikileaks disclosures that demonstrate U.S. influence over its copyright bill, it must now also address public concern that current Canadian law could lead to thousands of similar lawsuits.
Bill C-32 tried to address the issue by creating a $5,000 cap on liability for non-commercial infringement, yet the Hurt Locker case suggests that does not go far enough. A better approach would be to eliminate statutory damages in non-commercial cases altogether. That change, which would bring Canada into line with most of its trading partners, would allow for full $20,000 per infringement liability for commercial infringement, while requiring claimants to offer evidence of actual damages in non-commercial cases.Donald Trump has made clear that he wants his presidency to be about jobs — more specifically, his "bold plan to create 25 million new American jobs in the next decade" and "bring good-paying jobs to our shores and support American manufacturing, the backbone of our economy."
Nobody knows exactly how that will work — and many believe part of it is simply not going to happen. "The idea that somehow there will be this big employment surge in manufacturing is a myth," economist Jeffrey Sachs told BuzzFeed News. The claim that manufacturing is still the backbone of the US economy is wrong, he said — it only employs about 8% of the workforce.
Could it employ more Americans? As the Trump administration pushes to bring factories back to the US, many of the manufacturing jobs overseas are currently being replaced by machines — meaning bringing them home won't do much for workers.
In his new book Building the New American Economy, Sachs lays out his argument for where new jobs will come from, and whether they can sustain a good quality of life for American workers. Here's an edited version of his interview with BuzzFeed News.
On the jobs that aren't coming back to America
"Most of the manufacturing jobs we exported are being automated away very quickly, even in China. American manufacturing isn't doing bad, it just doesn't employ that many people.
"What Trump has done is basically sold a lie to these American workers. It's a convenient lie because it takes the attention away from our domestic situation, which is we have income inequality run wild. All of this is the continued inability of the United States to talk about taxes, income redistribution, basic minimum income, and other kinds of policy that are rather natural in other countries. The solutions being proposed aren't real solutions."
The robots are coming, and that's not a bad thing
"We can have more productivity, and more leisure time, and a higher quality of life, so we should look forward to automation. This is not some dire disaster. This is exciting and promising — machines that can do things that humans used to do.
"We've been at that for two centuries and we've had a big improvement of quality of life, of life expectancy, of leisure time, of retirement possibilities throughout that period, and this is another phase of that."
There will still be jobs, but far from the factory floor
"Lots of jobs are being created in home care, personal care, care for the elderly. One could imagine lots of jobs being created in helping young kids, sports, entertainment. We are a luxury economy in one sense. We have a lot of leisure, a lot of elderly who can retire, and a lot of demand for personal services.
"Those jobs will continue, but they won't be high-paying jobs. The issue isn't the number of jobs, it's the wages those jobs will command."
The gig economy isn't going away
"I am a fan of Uber. I think there are some labor issues, but the idea of a shared driving service is a great idea, and the need for individual car ownership, especially for young people living in cities, should diminish. Airbnb, the same thing. The idea of moving to a shared economy is a good one.
"The thing is, these companies don't provide a social safety net for their workforce, but that would be okay if society did. If we had a government that did what a government should do, then we wouldn't feel like Uber is somehow exploiting its workers.
"The problem in part is the government isn't doing the basics, so we look to the companies, but the companies are not set up to do that either.... Right now, we end up with no safety nets and this kind of casual employment relationship. That's not satisfactory.
"I am not keen on the absence of responsible government, and having these incredibly winning companies that don't pay taxes."
The need for a social safety net
"Every time we've had new machines, some part of society pays a price for that. People are unemployed, they find their jobs completely eliminated, and the decent part of our politics should be to make sure that no one gets badly hurt in this and everyone is able in the end to be a beneficiary of these big improvements.
"There will always be new jobs and new skills needed, so we need to make sure that retraining, re-skilling, change in education takes place. It's just smart anyway, but it also makes sure that the losing side is kept to a minimum.
"The other thing is income redistribution, to make sure that when winners win big, part of those winnings are shared broadly. We do that through social security, or Medicare and Medicaid, and other kinds of public policies, but in the Unites States, we don't do it as much as other countries do.
"I think that's one of the biggest failings of our society, that the rich have basically taken income redistribution out of the political discourse for the last 40 years and some people aren't aware of how normal it is. For almost four decades, the rich have run the show, never more vulgarly than in this new government."
Should everyone get a guaranteed minimum income?
"The better way to do it is social democracy, like in northern Europe. What that means in a sense is there is a'minimum' in terms of health, education, infrastructure, education, maternity leave, child care. Everyone gets that. After that you're on your own, but you're never completely on your own. People are expected to work but there is some margin of difference. The guaranteed minimum comes in the form of services that people need, not a check handed to you."Not to be confused with Catgirl
Woman feeding cats
A cat lady is a cultural archetype or a stock character, often depicted as a woman, a middle-aged or elderly spinster, who owns many pet cats. The term can be considered pejorative,[1] though it is sometimes embraced.[2]
Usage and association [ edit ]
Women who have cats have long been associated with the concept of spinsterhood. In more recent decades, the concept of a cat lady has been associated with "romance-challenged (often career-oriented) women".[1] Specifically, it has also been embraced by lesbian and queer women.[3]
A cat lady may also be an animal hoarder who keeps large numbers of cats without having the ability to properly house or care for them.[4] They may be ignorant about their situation, or generally unaware of their situation. People who are aware of it are not normally considered cat ladies.
Some writers, celebrities, and artists have challenged the gender-based "Crazy Cat Lady" stereotype, and embraced the term to mean an animal lover or rescuer who cares for one or multiple cats, and who is psychologically healthy.[5][6][7]
Documentary [ edit ]
The documentary Cat Ladies (2009) tells the stories of four women whose lives became dedicated to their cats. The film was directed by Christie Callan-Jones and produced by Chocolate Box Entertainment, originally for TVOntario. It was an official selection at the 2009 Hot Docs Festival, Silverdocs Festival, and San Francisco's DocFest.[8][9]
Naftali Berrill, Ph.D., Director of the New York Center for Neuropsychology and Forensic Behavioral Science told AOL Health, "These may be people who have a very hard time expressing themselves to other people. They may find the human need for affection is met most easily through a relationship with a pet." This devotion can sometimes signal mental or emotional issues such as depression.[10]
Toxoplasma gondii [ edit ]
Recent research indicates a link between the parasite Toxoplasma gondii, which sexually reproduces exclusively in cats, and numerous psychiatric conditions, including obsessive compulsive disorder (OCD) and schizophrenia.[11][12] The compulsive hoarding of cats, a symptom of obsessive compulsive disorder (OCD), has long been associated with "crazy cat ladies".[13] Mass media has drawn on this stereotype to coin the term crazy cat lady syndrome to refer to the association between T. gondii and psychiatric conditions.[11]
Notable examples [ edit ]
Cultural references [ edit ]
Cat ladies in popular culture include:
Television [ edit ]
Film [ edit ]
Music [ edit ]
On Venetian Snares's album Songs About My Cats he features a song called "For Bertha Rand." The album features many samples of cats which are worked into Aaron's distinct breakcore style of Oldschool jungle.
Games [ edit ]
The Cat Lady (2012) is a psychological horror graphic adventure game developed by Remigiusz Michalski.
Events [ edit ]
CatCon [17] an event described as "The convention with cattitude" hosted seminars featuring actor Ian Somerhalder [18] and actress Mayim Bialik, [19] meet and greets with celebrity cats Lil BUB [20] and Nala, [21] and an adoption village where visitors can meet and adopt a cat or kitten. CatCon's mission is to 'Debunk the Cat Lady Myth by changing the negative perception of the ''crazy cat lady'' and proving that it is possible to be hip, stylish, and have a cat, simultaneously.' [22]
an event described as "The convention with cattitude" hosted seminars featuring actor Ian Somerhalder and actress Mayim Bialik, meet and greets with celebrity cats Lil BUB and Nala, and an adoption village where visitors can meet and adopt a cat or kitten. CatCon's mission is to 'Debunk the Cat Lady Myth by changing the negative perception of the ''crazy cat lady'' and proving that it is possible to be hip, stylish, and have a cat, simultaneously.' National Cat Lady Day is celebrated April 19, as a way to debunk the myth that cat ladies are dowdy spinsters. "Now it's chic to be a cat lady!" said CatCon creator Susan Michals.
See also [ edit ]Christianity Today has put its two cents in on the “Kill the Gays” bill in Uganda, telling gays and lesbians to unwad their knickers over the law and instead exercise “patience as Ugandan leaders sort out among themselves the best way to preserve their culture’s sexual mores.” Instead of strongly condemning this legislation, which President Barack Obama has called “odious,” CT tells us we need to understand the culture and give the Ugandans a fair hearing on their homophobia, reasoned arguments against gays and lesbians:
For American Christian leaders, both silence and open condemnation end up violating important missional and human-rights principles. There is no escaping this dilemma, but several points are worth reflection. First, when American media reported on the proposed legislation, they assumed an inordinate amount of American influence. Media outlets tried to “expose” the power of American evangelicals who had spoken about gay issues in Uganda. Such assumptions were racist, said Scott Lively, one of the speakers. If anything, Ugandan legislators did not follow his advice: He had urged them to favor rehabilitation rather than imprisonment in crafting a new law on homosexuality. There is American and European influence in Uganda, Anglican bishop David Zac Niringiye told Christianity Today. The liberationist sexual politics exported from the West are the true cultural imperialism. Indeed, the member of Parliament who introduced the bill hopes that Uganda will lead the world in fighting moral decadence.
So, working to block this bill is both racist and imperialist, as Western gays and lesbians attempt to point out the worth of every human life, even if the large majority of the population finds those lives offensive.
Let’s put the shoe on the other foot, though, shall we? If this were a law threatening Christians with death or imprisonment for exercising what they believe is their God-given right to proselytize without restrictions, they’d be loudly condemning the bill and not counseling “patience as Ugandan leaders sort out among themselves the best way to preserve their culture’s” religious mores. No, they would be trying to quash or change this pending law. How are their current efforts to change laws in other countries that discriminate against Christians any less racist or imperialist than gays and lesbians working to save the lives of other gays and lesbians in another country?
In Kazakhstan, for instance, individuals and religious groups who practice “missionary activity” without registering with the country are punished with fines and deportation.
A Baptist jailed there told one news outfit: “What we want is simple: to be left alone to pray to God and speak to others of God without any obstruction. We don’t want any privileges or any discrimination in our favor.”
The gays and lesbians of Uganda could say the same thing. They simply want to be left alone to form the adult, consensual relationships that they seek, and to speak of their lives and live their lives without any obstruction. They seek no privileges or discrimination in their favor – they seek simply to be allowed to live openly and with dignity.
Open Doors’ Web site lists the top countries where Christians are persecuted like North Korea, Iran, Saudi Arabia, and Somalia. Everywhere they are persecuted, Christians are working to change the system, through prayer, protest, or other actions. Yet, they would deny this kind of action to gay and lesbian people simply because we should take our time and stop and “listen” to why the people in Uganda want to kill or imprison us? Believe me, we’ve heard their reasons and they smack of misunderstanding, hatred, and downright meanness.
When conservative Christians don’t have any skin in the game, they counsel “patience” and cultural understanding, but let a conservative Christian get locked up in a foreign country for passing out Bibles or talking about Jesus, and their tune changes pretty quickly. Then, they want to be “left alone” to do what they want.
There’s a word I’m looking for here – ah, yes, a familiar one when conservative Christians speak: hypocrisy.Arsène Wenger will stick to his policy of picking David Ospina in the Champions League after the Colombian goalkeeper’s inspired display frustrated Paris Saint-Germain and ensured Arsenal emerged from the trickiest trip of the group with an encouraging point.
Ospina’s excellence frustrated PSG, and their striker Edinson Cavani in particular, and justified what had appeared to be a risky selection in place of Petr Cech after his toils in this competition at the same stage a year ago. Yet, despite the visitors trailing to Cavani’s header after 42 seconds, they clung on to the contest courtesy of their goalkeeper and Alexis Sánchez’s equaliser 12 minutes from time secured the draw.
Arsenal behind after 42 seconds but Alexis Sánchez rescues point at PSG Read more
Olivier Giroud and the hosts’ Marco Verratti were sent off in stoppage time but, while the Hungarian official’s decision to flash second yellow cards at both those players prompted widespread bemusement, Wenger could rejoice in Ospina having proved his pedigree.
Asked whether he thought that was the former Nice goalkeeper’s most influential appearance for the London club, Wenger said: “Maybe. At decisive moments, in one‑on‑ones, or when he came out with a good header at the start of the second half.
“David played very well and showed his detractors, those who doubted him, that he is a very good goalkeeper. Last year he made a mistake in the Champions League [against Olympiakos] and everyone jumped all over him. He showed what he’s about tonight. I have two world-class goalkeepers. I can give them both games. If they do not play, you can’t keep two world-class goalkeepers.
“But we have an in-house rule that the keepers know. It’s important to have clear rules like that. They know what the rules are for the season and, if they change, I’ll tell them. It’s down to performances whether he stays in the team but, on what he delivered tonight, David has the right to stay in the team for the next Champions League game.”
Giroud will be absent for that match, against Basel at the Emirates Stadium in two weeks’ time, following his dismissal after he squabbled with Marquinhos and Verratti near the touchline in stoppage time. The incident did not appear serious and Marquinhos, who shoved the Arsenal striker, escaped without any sanction at all. Giroud intimated on television post-match that he thought the referee, Viktor Kassai, had taken the decision to book the two players despite not having seen the incident. “The ball was on the other side so I didn’t see, but the first yellow card shown to Olivier was very harsh, and not even a foul,” said Wenger, whose decision not to start with Granit Xhaka in midfield actually ended up feeling more significant than the omission of Cech, given the dominance PSG enjoyed in that area over the first hour.
“For the second, he tells me he has done nothing at all. Olivier is honest so I believe him. Verratti also told me he did nothing. I told them both to go to the referee and tell him they’d done nothing.
“But, overall, we played against a good PSG team who started much stronger than us. We have experience in the Champions League and were resilient. When you start so badly against a team of that quality, if you have no experience or too young you can be caught. We didn’t panic. Overall we were resilient enough, and the resilience is linked to experience. I told the players at half-time that if we kept the ball, we’d come back because we were dangerous when we had good possession of the ball. That is what we did. We got a good point.”As I mentioned yesterday, ex-Muslim Maryam Namazie spoke at London’s Goldsmiths College on the topic “Apostasy, blasphemy and free expression in the age of ISIS,” and her talk was repeatedly disrupted by Muslim students. You can see the interruptions below, and they’re serious, severe, and extremely rude.
Namazie has worked tirelessly for human rights and against their abrogation by some Muslims, concentrating especially on Islamic oppression of women. It’s thus ironic that her talk at Goldsmith’s was opposed by the college Feminist Society, which aligned itself with ISOC, Goldsmith’s Islamic Society.
Here’s a post from the Goldsmiths College tumblr site:
If anybody is creating a “climate of hatred,” it’s these free-speech opposers and professional “I’m offended-ites,” who clearly hate Namazie and want to keep her from speaking. And it’s reprehensible that a feminist society would ally itself against Namazie, calling her a “known Islamophobe”, and also stand against her invitation by the Atheist, Secularist and Humanist society. Instead, they ally themselves with the Islamic Society, which stands for a religion famous for oppressing women—oppression encoded in sharia law.
This unholy alliance between feminists and Islamists is symptomatic of the cancer eating away at the Left, whose sympathy for the supposed underdog (especially those who aren’t white) all too often outweighs their support of feminist and Enlightenment values. It’s beyond me how any feminist society can support a Muslim group unless that group is outspokenly devoted to the equality of women and the dismantling of sharia law.
If you want to see how “hateful” Namazie is, here’s a long video of her speech at Goldsmith’s, which shows not only that she’s temperate but passionate, and far being strident or anti-Muslim. You can also see the bad behavior of the students—many appearing to be Muslims—who repeatedly disrupt her talk by whistling, standing up and shouting, interrupting her, and even turning off her Powerpoint presentation. How can one give a talk under such circumstances? I would have given up! It’s a testimony to Namazie that she keeps her cool through the whole thing, even as security expels some of the disruptive students:
I haven’t watched this in its entirety, but here are several instances of disruption:
7:40
8:06 (whistling)
11:38
14:00 all hell breaks loose
Then more whistling, Muslims walk out of the room
35:21 Projector turned off by student
etc.
The silence of atheists and Leftists about this kind of behavior is deafening.ES News Email Enter your email address Please enter an email address Email address is invalid Fill out this field Email address is invalid You already have an account. Please log in or register with your social account
Sadiq Khan today announced he was pressing ahead with one of Boris Johnson’s most controversial cycle superhighways.
The new Mayor ordered Transport for London to continue work on the CS11 route between Swiss Cottage and Oxford Circus that would involve the closure of four of eight gates in Regent’s Park during the day.
It came as TfL published the official results of a consultation that attracted 6,277 responses, with 53 per cent supporting and seven per cent part-supporting the plans.
A total of 37 per cent were opposed. The longer delays expected to result from the proposed removal of the Swiss Cottage gyratory were said to be “of particular concern”.
There was also concern among cyclists about plans to install raised “speed tables” - possibly using cobbles - to slow speeds around the Outer Circle in Regent’s Park.
Mr Khan’s move means that TfL’s officials will continue to work with councils and campaigners to resolve as many concerns as possible before a final decision is made later this year. TfL today made clear that Mr Khan “wants to see the scheme proceed”.
He said: “Making cycling easier and safer benefits all of us. Cycle superhighway 11 will play an important role improving the quality of our toxic air, improving Londoners’ health, and make thousands more people feel comfortable cycling.
“I am determined to learn the lessons from previous cycle superhighway schemes and I’ve asked TfL to continue to work closely with the local councils and stakeholders to ensure we minimise any disruption to motorists and other road users, both during the construction of the scheme and after it’s completed.
“This includes ensuring changes around Swiss Cottage gyratory benefit car-users who use that busy junction every day.”
Val Shawcross, deputy mayor for transport, said today's announcement was a clear indication of the Mayor's commitment to deliver improvements on cycling.
It is part of a week of cycling announcements capitalising on the success of the Ride London festival at the weekend.
Vowing to address the concerns of residents |
goal that followed one of the fracas.
"Andrew Swallow was really disappointed with his reaction," Scott said on Wednesday.
"Immediately after the Hodge incident, we gave away a free kick which resulted in a centre-bounce goal.
"We conceded the lead we had at the time. We conceded the momentum because we were supposedly flying the flag.
"Flying the flag is just crap."
Scott suggested there was an easy way for fired-up players to prove their toughness on the field - rise above it.
"Push and shove is not tough. It's not brave. It's rubbish... it's cowardice," he said.
"What is tough and courageous is copping something that's a bit untoward, getting up and staying in control and then attacking the next contest with ferocity.
"When I started playing footy, if somebody said they're going to belt you there was a fair chance they'd do it.
"Now a lot of players say that, but they never do it apart from a few very rare cases."
Hodge, who was referred directly to the tribunal and given a three-game ban, took the unusual step of contacting Scott to explain the incident and express remorse.
"It was certainly unexpected. Luke didn't need to do that," Scott said.
"He offered an apology that was accepted.
"It was largely out of character and it shouldn't tarnish his reputation in any way."
The Kangaroos next face Richmond in Hobart on Saturday, when they will regain key defender Lachie Hansen and key forward Jarrad Waite.
Hansen is yet to play this season due to a hip surgery, while Waite was a late withdrawal from the loss to Hawthorn due to a hamstring niggle.
Daniel Wells's return remains less clear, with the veteran playmaker still restricted by an achilles tendon injury.
"We're not going to put him at risk," Scott said.
"We think it's going to be something that is going to be resolved fairly quickly.
"He's better than he was... but we can't put a timeframe on it."THE images beaming from the screens of Cameroon’s state television channel, CRTV, show a country riding on a wave of glory. In February the national football team, “The Indomitable Lions”, beat Egypt to win the Africa Cup of Nations trophy for the first time in 15 years. In January a Cameroonian teenager became the first ever African winner of the Google coding challenge, an international programming competition.
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But turn away from the goggle box and the country is troubled. When the footballing trophy was brought to Bamenda, Cameroon’s third-biggest city, placard-carrying protesters joined the crowds of onlookers. And for almost two months the country’s young Google prodigy, along with hundreds of thousands of others, has been unable to surf the web because the government has shut it down in two English-speaking regions (see map). The plug was pulled as part of a clampdown on Anglophone activists in which more than a hundred people have been arrested and pressure groups have been outlawed. At least six people have been killed and scores more injured since December by policemen and soldiers who have opened fire on demonstrators.
The protests initially began as a series of strikes by the country’s English-speaking lawyers, who took to the streets in their wigs and gowns in October 2016 demanding English translations of the country’s key legal texts and better treatment by the authorities. Since then many others have joined in, including teachers. The conflict between the government and the Anglophone minority is escalating.
The roots of Cameroon’s linguistic rift date back to 1919, when Britain and France divided the country between them, having taken it from Germany after the first world war. After both parts gained their independence in 1960 and 1961, they reunited to form a bilingual, federal republic. But English speakers, who are less than fifth of the population, feel hard done by. They say that their regions get less than their share of public money and that it is too hard to interact with the state in English.
President Paul Biya, who has been in power since 1982, is sub-Saharan Africa’s second-oldest ruler, after Robert Mugabe of Zimbabwe. Yet despite his age, he has mastered social media, in the sense of figuring out how to silence digital dissent. After young Arabs used smartphones to organise the uprisings of the Arab Spring, despots everywhere grew nervous. But then they found the off-switch. Last year 11 African governments, including Zimbabwe and the inaptly named Democratic Republic of Congo, interfered with the internet during elections or protests.
The government cut off the internet to a part of the country known for its technology start-ups, which probably hasn’t done much for economic growth. Before the crackdown internet usage in Cameroon had been soaring, with penetration rising to 18% in 2016, from 4.3% in 2010. Phones are also ubiquitous, which may be why the communications ministry has been sending text messages, sometimes several times a day, warning of prison sentences of up to 20 years for anyone “found guilty of slander or propagating false declarations on social media”.
Journalists have been arrested and a popular radio station has been taken off the air. Although the conflict in Cameroon has mainly affected the English-speaking minority, the government’s heavy-handedness suggests that worse may lie ahead. Next year the country’s 84-year-old leader is expected to run for a seventh term. With no clear successor or challenger in sight, Mr Biya probably has no need to ratchet up repression. But meddling with the internet can be addictive, like the internet itself.Originally Posted by Deejay Originally Posted by
We recently added one of our most popular player requested features to Heroes of Newerth, match confirmations. The goal of this was to improve match quality by reducing the amount of games started with players being AFK, effectively ruining any strategic aspect of the picking phase. As always, whenever we add a large feature, we monitor feedback and statistics.
The statistics show that the amount of time in queue until a player joins a game has increased ~50%, with ~39% of matches not being accepted. Both of these numbers are unacceptably high.
We've heard your feedback on this issue as well. While most players understand what we were trying to accomplish with this feature, they don't like the increased length in queue times.
Given both of these, we've decided to disable match confirmations for now.
We'll continue trying to improve Heroes of Newerth, and we always appreciate your feedback.Navy officials have repeatedly downplayed the risks of radiation exposure to current and former residents on Treasure Island. But data from the US Navy shows that measurements taken in former residential areas of the island revealed pockets of alarmingly high radiation levels. The data, which the Express obtained as a result of a public records request, also raises questions as to whether former residents were, in fact, exposed to high amounts of radiation and whether soil on the island can be sufficiently cleaned up for the massive "eco-friendly" housing and commercial development planned for the former Navy base.
"That's a surprisingly high measurement," said physicist Steve Fetter of the University of Maryland School of Public Health in response to the Navy's disclosure of the highest yet surface radiation reading measured on the island — 0.08 rem/hr. (Rem/hr is a measurement, known as a dose rate, of the biological effects of being exposed to radiation.) "If you were standing above that spot for a long time, it would be hazardous. But the [radiation] dose rate would drop off pretty quickly as you moved away — unless there were other nearby objects also emitting radiation."
A 2009 Navy document called the Radiation Protection Plan also revealed troubling data on the concentration of radionuclides in the soil: readings of "up to 9,000 picocuries per gram" were taken on the island, but were limited to certain hotspots. For some perspective, closed military installations in California that had been contaminated with radioactive elements typically must be cleaned to a standard of two picocuries per gram in order to be considered safe. "If there was a high concentration of radionuclides in the dirt, and people were inhaling or ingesting it," Fetter said, "that would be very hazardous."
Despite the newly released data, much is still unknown about the radiation levels on Treasure Island. For example, very little information has been publicly released on the eight hundred-plus truckloads of radiologically contaminated soil that were shipped off the island in recent years. Shaw Environmental, the Navy's lead private contractor, has received a Notice of Violation from the California Department of Public Health for its failure to properly collect and record this data.
David Brenner, director of Columbia University's Center for Radiological Research, reviewed the Navy's Radiation Protection Plan, which was prepared by Shaw Environmental. He noted the high toxicity of radioactive disks that have been found all over Treasure Island. According to the Navy, these octagonal disks emit contact radiation dose rates of up to 10 rem/hr, but more typically 0.1 to 0.7 rem/hr. "Had someone got hold of one of the metal disks and put it in his pocket for a few days," Brenner said, "the outcome could have been very bad — significant radiation sickness or even death within a few weeks."
The origin of these disks is still a mystery, but they may have been used in nuclear detection and decontamination trainings during the Cold War. The disks were disposed of in four pits on the island. Condominiums that housed military families in the Seventies, Eighties, and Nineties were then built atop these pits. These areas were only recently fenced off to protect the island's 2,000 current residents, many of whom are low-income.
Brenner cited one silver lining in the radiation data: only a "comparatively small area of the island" had "highish dose rates." But a key question, he said, is, "How many hours did anyone spend in this region near Building 1321?"
Building 1321 is a former condominium complex for military families located in the scenic seaside area on Westside Drive. During excavations in 2009, the 0.08 rem/hr reading was taken just west of this building about one foot from one or more of the radioactive disks. The reading appears to have been taken in the building's front yard. The highest concentrations of radioactive soil were also found here.
Brenna Summers, who grew up on the island, believes that she may have played in this soil. Summers was about two years old when her parents and three siblings moved to Treasure Island from Hawaii. They lived on the island from about 1972 to 1976, and again from 1981 to 1985. During both periods, her family unknowingly lived atop the site of the former mock-up nuclear decontamination-training ship called the Pandemonium and alongside one of the pits where the radioactive disks were buried. Her family resided in Buildings 1315 and 1316 — just a couple doors down from Building 1321.
Summers remembers that there used to be a playground and a park with picnic benches adjacent to Building 1321. "We were all digging in there, and eating the sand, and doing everything that little kids do," she said. The playground featured a turtle sculpture that kids could crawl underneath.
Two weeks ago, Summers read previous Express investigations of contamination on Treasure Island (see "A Radioactive Isle," 9/5 and "Contamination Destination," 10/31). She wonders if the combination of radioactive and chemical contamination on the island might explain the health nightmares that she and her family have suffered over the years. "We've been sick with all these different, random, weird things for so long," she said, "and we've just been looking for answers."
According to Summers, her sister Misty, who was seven when their family came to Treasure Island, had an emergency hysterectomy at age eighteen to remove a pre-cancerous mass from her uterus, fallopian tubes, and ovaries. Her other sister, Heather, was pregnant while living on the island; Heather's son was born with birth defects. Summers' children were later born with birth defects as well. Summers' mother and sister Misty survived skin cancer; her brother Brian had a pre-cancerous growth removed from his face. Everyone in the family has suffered some form of autoimmune disease. All the pets the family owned or took care of while living on the island — including eight dogs and three cats — died of cancer. With the exception of one cat, all the pets died between the ages of one and six years old.
At least thirteen cancer survivors and at least two people who died of cancer lived in homes atop or bordering the pits where the radioactive disks were buried. Breast cancer survivor Kim Kellner (who is featured in the video accompanying this article) grew up next door to the Summers family at 1317 Gateview Avenue. Kellner and her childhood friends are currently tracking down their former neighbors and classmates in an effort to determine exactly how many of them developed cancer. Many other past residents are likely unaware of contamination discoveries on Treasure Island, as the Navy has not contacted any of them.
Current residents, unconvinced by public officials' repeated assurances that they are safe, have recently formed the Treasure Island Health Network (TIHN2012.org). Summers completed one of the group's surveys designed to assess health trends among past and current residents. She said that current residents have some of the same early health issues that her family suffered — including bizarre rashes, breathing trouble, and bald spots. These particular problems dissipated after the Summers family left the island.
Many types of non-radioactive chemicals — including at least 24 chemicals of present concern on Treasure Island — can cause both minor and serious health effects. Additionally, cancers, genetic mutations, and birth defects are all linked to radiation exposure. However, even if an epidemiological study of Treasure Island residents were conducted, causality would be extremely difficult to establish because all these health problems also occur among people who are not exposed to contamination.
For example, about 45 percent of the general population will ultimately develop some form of cancer, irrespective of radiation exposure. Brenner, of Columbia University's Center for Radiological Research, said that a very rough rule of thumb is that each 100 rem of total long-term radiation exposure will add an additional 8 percent risk of cancer in one's lifetime. Individuals exposed at younger ages are at greater risk. To get a rough estimate of the risk to people exposed as children, Brenner advised increasing that risk estimate to about 15 percent per 100 rem. Thus, assuming that Summers and her siblings were exposed to a total of 100 rem of radiation over their eight years on the island (which is unknowable with current data), Brenner said they would have a "very approximately 60 percent chance of developing cancer during their lifetime — the normal 45 percent plus an additional, radiation-related 15 percent." This risk would be greater if Summers inhaled or ingested a concentrated amount of radioactive dirt.
Without more information from the Navy, it's impossible to know if the playgrounds, parks, and yards atop the disposal pits posed serious dangers. The Navy has vaguely indicated that higher readings were found in "limited locations where radioactive material was co-located and buried below ground or where individual commodities lay near the surface." ("Commodities" is the Navy's preferred term for solid radioactive objects.)
Meanwhile, Summers is redoubling her efforts to monitor her own health, including getting her moles removed at the earliest possible sign of pre-cancerous cells. "If we were to find out that all these different illnesses that we had could be traced back to [Treasure Island], it would be kind of bittersweet — because we would finally have an answer, which is nice, but then the answer is not so nice," she said.
"I'd like to know what I can expect in my future."The Fayetteville Police Department is investigating the death of a 24-year-old Fort Bragg, North Carolina, soldier after he was found dead of a gunshot wound on Sunday.
Authorities responded to a 911 call from Sgt. Jason Wiens' ex-wife after she discovered his body in his off-post apartment around 1:00 p.m., Fayetteville police Sgt. Shaun Sterepay told Army Times on Tuesday.
The police are investigating the death as a suicide, he said.
Wiens had been a combat medic with 1st Squadron, 73rd Cavalry Regiment, 2nd Brigade Combat Team, 82nd Airborne Division since January 2016, according to an Army release.
"Sergeant Jason Wiens was a valued member of the 82nd Airborne Division's Falcon Brigade over the last fifteen months," said deputy brigade commander Lt. Col. Jeremy Mushtare. "He not only volunteered to serve as a paratrooper during a time of war, but he also deployed to combat twice."
Wiens enlisted in October 2011 and served as an ambulance driver and emergency care sergeant with 4th Squadron, 4th Cavalry Regiment at Fort Riley, Kansas, before coming to Fort Bragg, the release said.
His awards and decorations include the Army Commendation Medal with "C" device for combat, the Army Achievement Medal, the Global War on Terror Expeditionary Medal and the Inherent Resolve Campaign Medal.Introduction
As we know charts are a very popular and important tool in ASP.Net technology. A chart is nothing but a pictorial or graphical representation of data. There are two coordinates present in a chart, one is the X axis and the other is the Y axis. In the chart we represent the data using the bar lines, bar charts or the slice of the pie charts. Using the chart control we can represent the data and also we can compare the data from the various charts like compare the previous year's revenue and the current year's revenue. There are many types of charts like bar charts, line charts, slice charts, column charts, combo charts and so on.
This article shows how to make charts in ASP.NET and how to represent the data. So first I will show how to make a simple chart in ASP.NET with C#.
Procedure for Simple Chart
Step 1
Open Visual Studio, go to the File menu, go to the new website and add an "ASP.NET Empty Web Site".
Step 2
Now go to the Solution Explorer, right-click on the website and go to the add new item and then add a new form.
Step 3
Now go the toolbar, right-click on the standard, click on choose item in the.Net Framework Component. We will see two chart options; click on them and save.
Step 4
Now in the toolbar go to the data. Here you will see a chart option. You can drag and drop the chart from the toolbar to your page.
Step 5 Open Visual Studio, go to the File menu, go to the new website and add an "ASP.NET Empty Web Site".Now go to the Solution Explorer, right-click on the website and go to the add new item and then add a new form.Now go the toolbar, right-click on the standard, click on choose item in the.Net Framework Component. We will see two chart options; click on them and save.Now in the toolbar go to the data. Here you will see a chart option. You can drag and drop the chart from the toolbar to your page.
When you drag and drop a chart control onto your page then there is an entry automatically generated in your web.config file.
< appSettings > < add key = "ChartImageHandler" value = "storage=file;timeout=20;dir=c:\TempImageFiles\;" /> </ appSettings >
< httpHandlers > < add path = "ChartImg.axd" verb = "GET,HEAD,POST" type = "System.Web.UI.DataVisualization.Charting.ChartHttpHandler, System.Web.DataVisualization, Version=4.0.0.0, Culture=neutral, PublicKeyToken=31bf3856ad364e35" validate = "false" /> </ httpHandlers >
< controls > < add tagPrefix = "asp" namespace = "System.Web.UI.DataVisualization.Charting" assembly = "System.Web.DataVisualization, Version=4.0.0.0, Culture=neutral, PublicKeyToken=31bf3856ad364e35" /> </ controls >
< assemblies > < add assembly = "System.Web.DataVisualization, Version=4.0.0.0, Culture=neutral, PublicKeyToken=31BF3856AD364E35" /> </ assemblies >
< %@ Page Language = "C#" AutoEventWireup = "true" CodeFile = "ExamChart.aspx.cs" Inherits = "ExamChart" % > < %@ Register Assembly = "System.Web.DataVisualization, Version=4.0.0.0, Culture=neutral, PublicKeyToken=31bf3856ad364e35" Namespace = "System.Web.UI.DataVisualization.Charting" TagPrefix = "asp" % > <!DOCTYPE html PUBLIC "-//W3C//DTD XHTML 1.0 Transitional//EN" "http://www.w3.org/TR/xhtml1/DTD/xhtml1-transitional.dtd" > < html xmlns = "http://www.w3.org/1999/xhtml" > < head runat = "server" > < title > </ title > </ head > < body > < form id = "form1" runat = "server" > < div > < asp:Chart ID = "ScoreChart" Width = "600" Height = "320" runat = "server" BackColor = "Silver" BackGradientStyle = "LeftRight" BorderlineWidth = "2" TabIndex = "2" > < Titles > < asp:Title Text = "Runs" /> </ Titles > < Series > < asp:Series Name = "RunSeries" ChartType = "Column" > </ asp:Series > </ Series > < ChartAreas > < asp:ChartArea Name = "ChartArea1" > < Area3DStyle Enable3D = "true" WallWidth = "10" /> < AxisY Title = "Runs" > </ AxisY > < AxisX Title = "Players Name" > </ AxisX > < Area3DStyle Enable3D = "True" WallWidth = "10" > </ Area3DStyle > </ asp:ChartArea > </ ChartAreas > </ asp:Chart > </ div > </ form > </ body > </ html >
using System; using System.Collections.Generic; using System.Linq; using System.Web; public class run { public string Name { get ; set ; } public int Point { get ; set ; } public string PictureUrl { get ; set ; } }
sing System; using System.Collections.Generic; using System.Linq; using System.Web; using System.Web.UI; using System.Web.UI.WebControls; using System.Web.UI.DataVisualization.Charting; public partial class ExamChart : System.Web.UI.Page { protected void Page_Load( object sender, EventArgs e) { if (!Page.IsPostBack) { BindData(); } } private void BindData() { var runs = new List<run>() { new run() { Name = "Sachin", Point = 200, PictureUrl= "Images/sachin.jpg" }, new run() { Name = "Dhoni", Point = 32, PictureUrl= "Images/dhoni.jpg" }, new run() { Name = "Yuvraj", Point = 78, PictureUrl= "Images/yuvraj.jpg" }, new run() { Name = "Kohli", Point = 50, PictureUrl= "Images/kohli.jpg" }, new run() { Name = "Raina", Point = 32, PictureUrl= "Images/raina.jpg" }, new run() { Name = "Dhawan", Point = 155, PictureUrl= "Images/dhawan.jpg" }, new run() { Name = "Rahane", Point = 22, PictureUrl= "Images/rahane.jpg" } }; var series = ScoreChart.Series[ "RunSeries" ]; foreach (var exam in runs) { var point = new DataPoint(); point.SetValueXY(exam.Name, exam.Point); point.MarkerImage = exam.PictureUrl; point.Label = exam.Point.ToString(); series.Points.Add(point); } ScoreChart.DataSource = runs; ScoreChart.DataBind(); } }
There is also one more tag generated in the web.config file named httpHandlers in the code like this.Another tag is also added, that tag is known as the control-definition tag.In the web.config finally one one more tags are known as the Data Visualization assembly.These four basic tags will be present in your web.config file. Then in your Default.aspx page you will see a normal chart.Right-click on your chart and go to the property. In the property window go to the data source and select a data source and add that data source.After adding the data source successfully, go to the chart properties again and click on the series, explore the series and you will see a window like this.Now in the series, go to the data source and make the Xvalue member as you need to. Here I created a Xvalue member name and Yvalue member age depending on my needs. You can choose as you desire. If we want to provide a name for the X and Y axis in the chart then go again to the property window and click on the chart area; here you will see an Axes property.In the axes property now click on the axes collection and open the title in the X Axes. I select the title Name and in the Y axes I select the title Age.Now when you run your application you will see the output like this.As I said there are many types of charts available in ASP.NET, like Bar Chart, Line Chart, Column Chart, Pie Chart and so on. So here I will show you those types.If you want to see all the types of charts available in ASP.Net then it is not very tough, it is easy. Just go to your chart and right-click on it. Here you will see a list of all the charts available in ASP.Net.Now we will discuss how to make 3D charts in ASP.NET.First go to Visual Studio, go to the file, website and add a new website, then drag and drop a normalchart onto your aspx page. When you do that there are some tags added to your web.config file as I explained above. Then only in our aspx page we have a chart area tag. In the chart area tag we enable 3D (3D=true). We can also do this using the wizard simply. Right-click on the chart and go to its property, go into the charts area property, then go to 3D chart settings and make the Enable 3D true, by default it is false.We make properties for this form so add a class file and write this code in the class file.After this we simply make a Bind method and call it on the page load event. The code for the Bind Method is the following:Now when you run your application you will see a 3D chart like this.
As you know, enable the 3D and then we can create a 3D chart, it is a Boolean type so it may be true or may be false but by default it always false. The angle is available for the 3D chart. In ASP.NET it is between -90 degrees to 90 degrees, if you choose -90 then it takes you fully below and if you choose 90 then it takes you fully above. There is a property known as the "Is clustered" property that is also a Boolean value that provides the benefits of using the many charts that are the same type and the same nature for making the the chart view more effective. LightStyle is an option for Realistic, Simplistic, or None based on which lighting you wish to have on your chart. If you want to show the percentage as a 3D chart then there will be the three axis X,Y and Z in the x axis we have marks for the axis totals Marks and the Z axis represents the percentage so we can also represent the percentage from the chart.
Summary
Charts play a very good role to represent a report or data. As we know charts are a pictorial representation of data and everyone is familiar with them. A picture is more powerful than a thousand of words. Charts make comprehenssion very easy compared to any other method. 3D charts look very effective and beautiful and they have more clarity and effectiveness compared with simple charts. I hope using this article you can learn both types of charts, simple charts and 3D effect charts.The Angels made a run at Toronto’s Michael Saunders in the recently-collapsed three-team Jay Bruce trade talks, and MLB.com’s Alden Gonzalez reports that they’ve also recently made a one-year offer to free-agent outfielder Austin Jackson. According to Gonzalez, the Halos offered Jackson a one-year deal worth $5-6MM, but Jackson’s camp has passed on the offer.
Per Gonzalez, Jackson’s agent, Scott Boras, sought more money in the deal, though I’d also note that Gonzalez said Jackson would’ve factored into a left field platoon. If that’s the case, Boras and Jackson may have been turned off by a possible lack of playing time; if Jackson is to settle for a one-year deal, he’d probably prefer one that comes with the promise of everyday at-bats in order to rebuild some stock in advance of next year’s open market.
Notably, even that modest commitment to Jackson would’ve put the Angels over the luxury tax threshold — a concept to which the Halos have previously been reported to be averse. The Angels currently sit about $2-3MM below the $189MM tax barrier, Gonzalez and others have noted, so any significant addition would put them over the top, barring subtraction from the payroll with a subsequent maneuver.
The Angels have taken a considerable amount of flak for their projected left field platoon of Craig Gentry and Daniel Nava; while each has strong career marks when holding the platoon advantage, each also suffered through a dismal 2015 campaign and will be looking for a rebound in Anaheim. Jackson has struggled somewhat, as well, since a trade to the Mariners and the pitcher-friendly Safeco Field, though he’s still delivered solid marks in the eyes of defensive metrics. Jackson’s.261/.310/.364 slash over the past two seasons doesn’t stand out as impressive, though it’s about nine to 10 percent below the league average when adjusted for park (per OPS+ and wRC+). The extent to which Jackson would’ve been an upgrade over the incumbent platoon is largely a moot point, however, as Gonzalez writes that the team now appears likely to head into the season with Nava and Gentry in left.If you're the type of driver who doesn't think twice about parking in the bike lane, your car might get bombed with an "I Parked in a Bike Lane" sticker, which a group of guerrilla cycling advocates hope will help to curb this unfortunate and quite frankly dangerous behaviour. The Instagram account affiliated with the stickers has been up and running since late August, and while it doesn't boast too many photos, spottings have been frequent enough on social media with the tag #IParkedInaBikeLane.
The best part, if you're into these sorts of things, is that the people behind the sticker campaign will send interested parties their own set so they can tag perpetrators as they see them and then post the evidence to social media. It's a clever way to leverage the crowd in a sort of mass shaming ritual. Will it work? That's another story. I suspect some people would be mortified to make an appearance with the sticker while others would just shrug it off. Either way, I expect this tactic to get plenty of attention.As any Sega fanboy will tell you, Sega has usually been ahead of the pack when it comes to technological advances. The Sega Saturn was leaps and bounds ahead of the competition in terms of hardware, and the Sega Dreamcast was on the cutting edge of technology when it first came out.
The Dreamcast, in addition to playing host to catalogue of numerous kick ass titles, was also a platform for strange and exciting peripherals. Most will recognize the Visual Memory Unit (VMU), the motion sensitive Fishing Rod, and the Dreamcast Gun. (Though the Sega brand version of the latter was only released in Japan and US gamers had to make do with 3rd party light guns.) These types of peripherals are commonplace now, with at least half a dozen variations on fishing rods for the Nintendo Wii, and many more to come for Xbox 360 Kinect and PlayStation Move.
But the peripheral I'd like to talk about today was called the Sega DreamEye, pictured below.
Only released in Japan, Sega began developing the DreamEye in 1998, and if you take a look at the PlayStation Eye, you can tell that Sega was thinking in the future. Designed for video chat over the Dreamcast's Internet hookup and still pictures, the DreamEye was the first real console-based camera, with resolutions up to 640x480, JPEG compression, and Flash Ram storage.Like so many other aspects of the Dreamcast, it was ahead of its time.A gunman opened fire on a crowd waiting for a concert outside the TLA on South Street in Philadelphia Friday night, fatally wounding a man, police said. (Published Saturday, Sept. 5, 2015)
Police on Saturday morning continued to investigate a deadly shooting outside a popular music venue on Philadelphia's South Street.
Gunfire erupted as a crowd waited outside the Theater of Living Arts -- commonly called the TLA -- concert hall on South Street between 3rd and 4th about 8:20 p.m., police said. Rapper Lil Durk had a concert scheduled at the venue at 7 p.m., but the show had not started yet. One man, whom police have not yet identified, was badly wounded.
That man died of a gunshot wound to his abdomen a short time later at Hahnemann University Hospital. Police estimated that the victim was in his 20s.
Chief Inspector Scott Small tells NBC10 officers heard a scuffle happening near the theater before the gunfire. Witnesses said they heard three gunshots and saw the victim lying on the ground bleeding.
Shots Outside TLA Concert Hall on South Street
South Street was jam packed with shoppers and music fans when gunfire broke out. It all happened just outside the TLA Theater where a rap concert featuring Lil Durk was set to begin, but instead one man was found shot in the torso and later pronounced dead at the hospital. (Published Friday, Sept. 4, 2015)
Small said the suspected shooter jumped into a limo and fled the scene. Officers caught up with the vehicle a few blocks away along Christopher Columbus Boulevard. Three men were taken into custody for questioning by homicide detectives, Small said. A handgun was also recovered. No official charges had been filed Saturday morning.
An often popular section of South Street, the thoroughfare was packed with people when the shooting happened.
Police said the tour bus belonging to rapper Lil Durk was struck by gunfire, but it was unclear if the shooting had anything to do with the concert. Small said hundreds of people were on the sidewalk when bullets began flying. Videos posted to social media sites show people hiding in shops nearby following the shooting.by Adrian Mouat
You can get by running Docker containers with shell scripts, or with Docker Compose (if you don’t mind ignoring the “don’t use in production” warnings), but for some use cases, it’s preferable to take advantage of the host init system/process manager. It seems that every major distro is moving to systemd these days, so that’s what I’ll look at in this post.
Using systemd or an equivalent is particularly useful if you have another, possibly non-containerized service that is dependent on the container. However, even developers of pure container applications may find advantages in using systemd and it’s worth noting that CoreOS is built around systemd and Docker.
If you follow the official Docker documentation for using systemd, you’ll see that they advise creating the containers manually with docker create and only using docker start and docker stop in the service file. I’m not a huge fan of this advice, as it makes it more difficult to migrate the setup between hosts or to restart the service with a fresh container — it would be better if the service file included all its dependencies. This is the approach taken by CoreOS, and the one I want to show in this blog post.
As an example, we’ll consider systemdizing a dockerized redis. I’ll be using a CentOS 7 distro for this, but it should be very similar on other systemd distros. Pretty much all you need is the following service file:
[Unit] Description=Redis Container After=docker.service Requires=docker.service [Service] TimeoutStartSec=0 Restart=always ExecStartPre=-/usr/bin/docker stop %n ExecStartPre=-/usr/bin/docker rm %n ExecStartPre=/usr/bin/docker pull redis ExecStart=/usr/bin/docker run --rm --name %n redis [Install] WantedBy=multi-user.target 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12 13 14 15 [ Unit ] Description = Redis Container After = docker. service Requires = docker. service [ Service ] TimeoutStartSec = 0 Restart = always ExecStartPre = - / usr / bin / docker stop % n ExecStartPre = - / usr / bin / docker rm % n ExecStartPre = / usr / bin / docker pull redis ExecStart = / usr / bin / docker run -- rm -- name % n redis [ Install ] WantedBy = multi - user. target
There’s a few things worth pointing out:
The container is clearly dependent on having Docker running, hence the Requires line. The After line is also needed to avoid race conditions.
line. The line is also needed to avoid race conditions. Before we start the container, we first stop and remove any existing container with the same name and then pull the latest version of the image. The “-” at the start means systemd won’t abort if the command fails.
This means that our container will be started from scratch each time. If you want to persist data then you’ll need to do something with volumes or volume containers, or change the code to restart the old container if it exists.
We’ve used TimeoutStartSec = 0 to turn off timeouts, as the docker pull may take a while.
If you save this file to /etc/systemd/system/docker.redis.service and run systemctl start docker.redis, systemd will start up the Redis container (remember that this may take some time if it needs to pull the redis image). We can then access it manually, or set up another service that is dependent on it. For example, if we have an application foo which is running in a container and dependent on the redis service, we can use the following service file:
[Unit] Description=Foo Service After=docker.service Requires=docker.service After=docker.redis.service Requires=docker.redis.service [Service] TimeoutStartSec=0 Restart=always ExecStartPre=-/usr/bin/docker stop foo ExecStartPre=-/usr/bin/docker rm foo ExecStartPre=/usr/bin/docker pull foo ExecStart=/usr/bin/docker run --name foo --link docker.redi.service:redis --rm foo [Install] WantedBy= |
popular cooking competition series has finally found its way to Charleston, S.C., one of the country's top food destinations, for Season 14, debuting Dec. 1 on Bravo.
This Southern city boasts a deep bench of kitchen talent and a prolific pantry that capitalizes on its coastal location and mild climate, which means long growing seasons at fertile farms. Its complicated past combines centuries of Caribbean, African and European influences into the region's beloved Lowcountry cuisine, rendering a rich backdrop for a food show — not to mention a mouthwatering vacation getaway.
"It really reflects America much more than, say, California or New England," chef Graham Elliot said about Charleston's culinary scene, shaped in no small part by the ingredients and cooking style of the many slaves who passed through Charleston Harbor. "You can't help but feel the history of the place and taste it in the food."
RELATED: TRENDING LIFE & STYLE NEWS THIS HOUR
The Chicago-based restaurateur and television personality joins the "Top Chef" cast this season as a recurring judge, helping the likes of Padma Lakshmi and Tom Colicchio (no stranger to nearby Kiawah Island) cull the herd of 16 cheftestants as they compete in culinary challenges and vie for a $125,000 grand prize. The gig led Elliot to spend several weeks in Charleston earlier this year filming the upcoming season and eating his way around town.
"My favorite was Dixie Supply Bakery & Cafe," he said about the tiny eatery at 62 State St. (www.dixiecafecharleston.com). "It has maybe 10 seats, just two or three people back there cooking food. There's no fuss to it. It's just dirty Southern food — fried egg, gravy biscuit, fried chicken on top of that. It's very non-chefy."
Another non-chefy spot Elliot liked is The Wreck, a no-frills joint on Shem Creek in Mount Pleasant, a suburb on the other side of Charleston's iconic Ravenel Bridge. Think paper plates piled with deep-fried oysters, doughy hush puppies and fresh-as-it-comes fish (www.wreckrc.com).
"It's right there on the water, and you can watch the shrimping boats coming back in — just a ton of character," Elliot said. "We did a challenge there."
The cameras also rolled at some of the most revered restaurants in the Southeast, such as FIG and McCrady's, both helmed by James Beard Award winners. FIG founder Mike Lata and McCrady's high bar-setter Sean Brock were doing the whole farm-to-table thing before it was, well, a thing. They're both masters at making the most of what's in season, and both of their eateries are worth the extra effort it takes to snag a reservation well in advance of a visit to Charleston.
"If you just walk in off the street, you won't get a table," warned a friendly Charlestonian seated on the banquette next to me during a recent dinner at FIG, an acronym for Food Is Good (www.eatatfig.com). In a Southern drawl reminiscent of Kevin Spacey in "House of Cards," he insisted I get the pureed potatoes. Glad I listened; the spuds were smushed into submission until they were silky and divine.
Upon the server's sage counsel, I ordered a menu item that sounded like a dish that goes uneaten in a high school cafeteria: cottage cheese and burnt eggplant toast. Sure enough, the homemade cottage cheese was like a fluffy, creamy cloud. The subtle sweetness partnered perfectly with the smoky eggplant and thick slices of crisp brown bread.
More surprises awaited at McCrady's (www.mccradysrestaurant.com), a Charleston institution that reinvented itself into two concepts a few months ago: McCrady's Tavern and, attached via a back door, an intimate, 18-seat dining room revolving around a worth-every-penny $125 tasting menu.
The highly sophisticated food at McCrady's — kept secret until each dish is placed in front of you — is served in an unstuffy atmosphere, where diners can wash down their delicacies with expertly chosen wine pairings ($85) or, in the case of a guy in jeans sitting at the communal counter, a bottle of Miller High Life. No judgments here. Just darn good food. And a nice souvenir: Customers walk out with a small packet of heirloom seeds from Brock's collection. (Can't wait to see if Sea Island red peas survive on the terrace of my Chicago condo.)
Brock, a Virginia-native, made a name for himself at McCrady's before opening his game-changer of a restaurant, Husk, a half-dozen years ago.
"If it doesn't come from the South, it's not coming through the door," the renowned locavore Brock writes on the website of Husk (www.huskrestaurant.com), where magical things happen to Carolina Gold rice, heirloom kale and fried chicken skins.
"Southern cuisine was always considered a lesser style of food until Sean elevated it," said "Top Chef" contestant Jamie Lynch, a newcomer to the city's dining scene.
Last year, Lynch opened a Charleston outpost of his Charlotte, N.C., restaurant 5Church (www.5churchcharleston.com). The hip, buzzy spot — Sun Tzu's "Art of War" is written on the vaulted ceiling — sells everything from lamb burgers and gnocchi to "60 second steak," where slices of New York strip are seared to a crispy bark on one side only.
"Top Chef" contestant Jamie Lynch talks about Charleston's history and the role it plays in the city's culinary scene. Lynch is the executive chef and a partner at 5Church Group, which has restaurants in three cities, including Charleston. (Lori Rackl / Chicago Tribune) "Top Chef" contestant Jamie Lynch talks about Charleston's history and the role it plays in the city's culinary scene. Lynch is the executive chef and a partner at 5Church Group, which has restaurants in three cities, including Charleston. (Lori Rackl / Chicago Tribune) SEE MORE VIDEOS
"The steak actually takes 12 to 15 minutes," Lynch confessed during an interview at the Charleston location, housed in a century-old church.
Lynch and his partners opened a third 5Church in Atlanta this year.
"The menus are similar, but we're a little more fish-heavy here since we're two blocks from the ocean," he said.
Fellow "Top Chef" hopeful Emily Hahn has called Charleston home for the better part of a decade. She oversees the kitchen at another edgy eatery called Warehouse (www.wearewarehouse.com), whose menu features a Walk of Shame Burger with dry-aged beef from Southeast Family Farms and a garlic shrimp congee dish made of locally grown long-grain rice and white shrimp plucked off the nearby coast.
"We really embrace our local purveyors," Hahn said about her Charleston colleagues. "Over the past 10 years, I'd say there's more emphasis on the farmers than on fine dining."It's tough to stay in our homes when many don't have air conditioning in the Pacific Northwest. The bad news is that many stores have sold out of portable air conditioners, but the good news is that you can make your own for less than $35 and in less than an hour.
It's not the same as having a high powered unit but making a small, portable AC is as easy as having some ice, elbow pipes, a fan and a cooler. It could make a world of difference in a small space. Michelle Li and her sister Hyun Jung gave it a try:
We used a three dollar styrofoam cooler because it was easy to cut and inexpensive. You can use a more environmentally-friendly cooler, but you'll probably need power tools to cut those holes.
Trace and cut out two holes on your cooler for your elbow pipes. We used 3-inch pipes that can be found in the roofing section at a home improvement store. They each cost $3.58.
TIP: Cut inside your traced lines at first to avoid cutting a hole that's too big. You can always trim more away later.
After that, trace and cut out a hole for your fan on the lid of the cooler. The bulk of this project's cost is the fan so if you have one, use it! Our fan cost $18 at a home improvement store. (We wanted a solar-powered fan so we could take it out, but we couldn't find one in the store.)
If you're using styrofoam, vacuum out all of the little pieces!
Now you're ready for your ice. You can also use freezer packets, frozen water bottles or ice water. Ice water will be your coldest bet, but it could potentially be your messiest! We also had some old raffia laying around and taped it to our vents to see the air flow.
Michelle Li tries to make a homemade air conditioner.
Now you've got a small, homemade AC unit. Good luck! - Michelle
via GIPHY
I just made a portable air conditioner with my sister. 👌 pic.twitter.com/RnSg1BGsLT — Michelle Li (@MichelleLiTV) August 2, 2017
Copyright 2017 KINGReaders recently joined in a lively debate about the use of medicinal marijuana. In Clinical Decisions,1 an interactive feature in which experts discuss a controversial topic and readers vote and post comments, we presented the case of Marilyn, a 68-year-old woman with metastatic breast cancer. We asked whether she should be prescribed marijuana to help alleviate her symptoms. To frame this issue, we invited experts to present opposing viewpoints about the medicinal use of marijuana. J. Michael Bostwick, M.D., a professor of psychiatry at Mayo Clinic, proposed the use of marijuana “only when conservative options have failed for fully informed patients treated in ongoing therapeutic relationships.” Gary M. Reisfield, M.D., from the University of Florida, certified in anesthesiology and pain medicine, and Robert L. DuPont, M.D., a clinical professor of psychiatry at Georgetown Medical School, provide a counterpoint, concluding that “there is little scientific basis” for physicians to endorse smoked marijuana as a medical therapy.
We were surprised by the outcome of polling and comments, with 76% of all votes in favor of the use of marijuana for medicinal purposes — even though marijuana use is illegal in most countries. A total of 1446 votes were cast from 72 countries and 56 states and provinces in North America, and 118 comments were posted. However, despite the global participation, the vast majority of votes (1063) came from the United States, Canada, and Mexico. Given that North America represents only a minority of the general online readership of the Journal, this skew in voting suggests that the subject of this particular Clinical Decisions stirs more passion among readers from North America than among those residing elsewhere. Analysis of voting across all regions of North America showed that 76% of voters supported medicinal marijuana. Each state and province with at least 10 participants casting votes had more than 50% support for medicinal marijuana except Utah. In Utah, only 1% of 76 voters supported medicinal marijuana. Pennsylvania represented the opposite extreme, with 96% of 107 votes in support of medicinal marijuana.
Outside North America, we received the greatest participation from countries in Latin America and Europe, and overall results were similar to those of North America, with 78% of voters supporting the use of medicinal marijuana. All countries with 10 or more voters worldwide were at or above 50% in favor. There were only 43 votes from Asia and 7 votes from Africa, suggesting that in those continents, this topic does not resonate as much as other issues.
Where does this strong support for medicinal marijuana come from? Your comments show that individual perspectives were as polarized as the experts' opinions. Physicians in favor of medicinal marijuana often focused on our responsibility as caregivers to alleviate suffering. Many pointed out the known dangers of prescription narcotics, supported patient choice, or described personal experience with patients who benefited from the use of marijuana. Those who opposed the use of medicinal marijuana targeted the lack of evidence, the lack of provenance, inconsistency of dosage, and concern about side effects, including psychosis. Common in this debate was the question of whether marijuana even belongs within the purview of physicians or whether the substance should be legalized and patients allowed to decide for themselves whether to make use of it.
In sum, the majority of clinicians would recommend the use of medicinal marijuana in certain circumstances. Large numbers of voices from all camps called for more research to move the discussion toward a stronger basis of evidence.
Supplementary Material
Reference (1) 1. Medicinal use of marijuana. N Engl J Med 2013;368:866-868 Close ReferencesA radical left-wing group in Greece has claimed responsibility for the December attack on the Israeli Embassy in Athens.
An organization called Group of Popular Rebels said it committed the attack, Greek police said Wednesday, according to The New York Times, which cited an unnamed police official. Gunmen opened fire with Kalashnikov rifles on the embassy, damaging the building but causing no injuries.
The claim came in a 19-page statement found by police on a portable digital storage device left in a trash bin in southern Athens, according to the newspaper.
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The two rifles used in the embassy shooting spree were used in a similar attack in December 2013 on the German ambassador’s home in the Greek capital.
Greek anarchist groups have attacked several foreign embassies in Athens in recent years.GAZA CITY (CNN) -- Israel bombed a Hamas government compound early Tuesday, leveling at least three structures, including the foreign ministry building, eyewitnesses and Hamas security sources told CNN.
Relatives mourn three boys from the same family who were killed in an Israeli airstrike Monday in Gaza. more photos »
A Gaza-based journalist, whose name was withheld for security reasons, told CNN he heard 18 blasts in the area and that two fires were burning at the compound early Tuesday. More bombs continued to drop over Gaza through the morning.
With Tuesday's bombs, Israel appeared to extend its airstrike campaign in Gaza to a fourth day. The strikes -- which Israel says are aimed at stopping the firing of rockets from Gaza into southern Israel -- have killed more than 375 Palestinians, most of them Hamas militants, Palestinian medical sources said Tuesday.
At least 60 civilians have been killed in Gaza, U.N. officials said. About 650 people have been wounded there, according to the Palestinian medical sources.
Monday, Israel's defense minister said the nation was in an "all-out war" with Hamas, the Palestinian militant group that rules Gaza.
"We have stretched our hand in peace many times to the Palestinian people. We have nothing against the people of Gaza," Defense Minister Ehud Barak told Israel's parliament. "But this is an all-out war against Hamas and its branches."
Israel continues to strike Hamas targets in Gaza, an Israel Defense Forces spokesman told CNN.
Mortar fire along the Gaza border late Monday killed one Israeli soldier and wounded four others, he said.
Earlier Monday, columns of smoke rose over Gaza City as warplanes carried out strikes. Though there was no indication of an Israeli military ground operation in Gaza, Israeli tanks cruised along the territory's edges. Watch rocket fire force a reporter to take cover »
Iyad Nasr, a spokesman for the International Committee of the Red Cross, said the streets of Gaza were largely empty during airstrikes Monday morning.
Despite the airstrikes, militants fired more than 40 rockets and mortar shells into Israel on Monday, according to Israeli police spokesman Mickey Rosenfeld. More than 150 rockets have been launched into Israeli territory since the campaign began, Israel Defense Forces said. Watch damage in Sderot »
Six Israelis have died over the past three days, five of them civilians.
One of the rocket strikes killed an Israeli at a construction site in Ashkelon, 6 miles (10 kilometers) north of Gaza, and wounded eight others, a hospital spokeswoman said. Rocket strikes killed an Israeli and wounded two others at Kibbutz Nahal Oz, according to Israeli police and hospital spokespersons.
Rocket attacks also wounded two people, one seriously, in Ashdod. One woman who was critically injured during the attack died later during an operation, according to Israeli medical sources.
The White House on Monday called on Hamas to halt rocket fire against Israel, so calm can be restored in Gaza. Watch the White House blame Hamas »
Israel has struck more than 300 Hamas targets since Saturday, its military said. The Israeli air force carried out at least 20 airstrikes on Gaza on Monday, Israeli military sources said.
Hamas security sources said the targets included the homes of two commanders of Hamas' military wing, the Izzedine al-Qassam Brigades, in the Jabalya refugee camp just north of Gaza City. Neither commander was among the seven people killed in those strikes, the sources said.
The Israeli military had no immediate comment on a report by Dr. Mu'awiya Hassanein that a strike near a mosque in Jabalya killed five children in a nearby home.
The situation triggered protests in Iran, Greece, Britain and Lebanon, and the Iranian government declared a day of mourning for Palestinians in Gaza.
Iran's Supreme Leader Ayatollah Seyed Ali Khamenei urged the world's Muslim populations to unite against Israel's attacks on Hamas in Gaza. Watch a demonstration in London »
"All true believers in the world of Islam and Palestinian fighters are duty-bound to defend the defenseless women and children in Gaza Strip and those giving their lives in carrying out such a divine duty are'martyrs,' " Khamenei said through Iran's official news agency IRNA.
U.S. and Israeli officials told CNN that Hamas militants in Gaza have received support from Iran in the past in the form of weapons, training and cash.
"We know of Hamas operatives, commandos and soldiers who were trained in Iran itself. We know that. So there is a close cooperation and exchange of know-how and activities," said Isaac Herzog, a member of the Israeli Security Cabinet.
Iran denies any involvement with Hamas. But an Iranian official told CNN Iran has ties to Shiite groups such as Hezbollah, a political party in Lebanon with alleged terrorist roots.
U.N. Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon condemned Hamas for the rocket attacks, but also had strong words for Israel.
"While recognizing Israel's right to defend itself, I have also condemned the excessive use of force by Israel in Gaza. The suffering caused to civilian populations as a result of the large-scale violence and destruction that have taken place over the past few days has saddened me profoundly," he said in a prepared statement.
The U.N. Security Council called for both sides to immediately end the violence, but Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Olmert said Sunday that the campaign could last "for some time," and his Cabinet voted to call up 7,000 reservists.
So far, about 2,000 reservists have been activated, according to the government. Read analysis of what may happen next
Hamas pledges it will defend its land and people from what it calls continued Israeli aggression. Each side blames the other for violating an Egyptian-brokered cease-fire. The truce formally expired December 19, but it had been weakening for months.
Mustafa Barghouti, a Palestinian parliament member, flatly blamed the violence on the Israeli "occupation" of the Palestinian territories and dismissed Israeli claims that it is targeting only Hamas. Watch why one Palestinian lawmaker blames Israel »
"This is not a war on Hamas; it is a war on the Palestinian people," he said. "The Israeli politicians are using this bloodbath, which is the worst since 1967, for their election campaigns. This is insane." Watch Barghouti warn "violence breeds violence" »
Both Barak and Israeli Foreign Minister Tzipi Livni will be vying in February for the prime minister's post against Likud Party leader Benjamin Netanyahu. Both Barak and Netanyahu have previously held the post.
The ongoing assault and threat of Israeli military ground incursion caused panic in Gaza City, the territory's densely populated capital, a U.N. humanitarian official told CNN on Monday.
"It's very bad, people are running in all directions because of the bombings that are happening everywhere," Karen AbuZayd said from Gaza City.
AbuZayd is the commissioner-general of the U.N. Relief and Works Agency, which provides assistance to about 80 percent of Gaza's 1.5 million residents.
Israel allowed more than 50 trucks carrying relief aid into Gaza on Monday -- in addition to 40 on Sunday -- Israeli military sources said. The U.N. is expecting 100 trucks Monday, but a U.N. official said it will not be enough to alleviate the worsening humanitarian situation.
In the West Bank, Saeb Erakat, adviser to Palestinian Authority President Mahmoud Abbas, urged Israeli and Hamas leaders to put another cease-fire in place.
The power base of Abbas' Fatah party is in the West Bank. The party is locked in a power struggle with Hamas, which won parliamentary elections in January 2006 and wrested Gaza from Fatah in violent clashes last year. Abbas, a U.S. ally, wields little influence in Gaza. Learn more about Gaza's political history »
CNN's Paula Hancocks and Shira Medding contributed to this report.
All About Gaza • Israel • Hamasby Erik B. Karlsson*
What Is Physics?
Physics is considered to be the most basic of the natural sciences. It deals with the fundamental constituents of matter and their interactions as well as the nature of atoms and the build-up of molecules and condensed matter. It tries to give unified descriptions of the behavior of matter as well as of radiation, covering as many types of phenomena as possible. In some of its applications, it comes close to the classical areas of chemistry, and in others there is a clear connection to the phenomena traditionally studied by astronomers. Present trends are even pointing toward a closer approach of some areas of physics and microbiology.
Although chemistry and astronomy are clearly independent scientific disciplines, both use physics as a basis in the treatment of their respective problem areas, concepts and tools. To distinguish what is physics and chemistry in certain overlapping areas is often difficult. This has been illustrated several times in the history of the Nobel Prizes. Therefore, a few awards for chemistry will also be mentioned in the text that follows, particularly when they are closely connected to the works of the Physics Laureates themselves. As for astronomy, the situation is different since it has no Nobel Prizes of its own; it has therefore been natural from the start, to consider discoveries in astrophysics as possible candidates for Prizes in Physics.
From Classical to Quantum Physics
In 1901, when the first Nobel Prizes were awarded, the classical areas of physics seemed to rest on a firm basis built by great 19th century physicists and chemists. Hamilton had formulated a very general description of the dynamics of rigid bodies as early as the 1830s. Carnot, Joule, Kelvin and Gibbs had developed thermodynamics to a high degree of perfection during the second half of the century.
Maxwell’s famous equations had been accepted as a general description of electromagnetic phenomena and had been found to be also applicable to optical radiation and the radio waves recently discovered by Hertz.
Everything, including the wave phenomena, seemed to fit quite well into a picture built on mechanical motion of the constituents of matter manifesting itself in various macroscopic phenomena. Some observers in the late 19th century actually expressed the view that, what remained for physicists to do was only to fill in minor gaps in this seemingly well-established body of knowledge.
However, it would very soon turn out that this satisfaction with the state of physics was built on false premises. The turn of the century became a period of observations of phenomena that were completely unknown up to then, and radically new ideas on the theoretical basis of physics were formulated. It must be regarded as a historical coincidence, probably never foreseen by Alfred Nobel himself, that the Nobel Prize institution happened to be created just in time to enable the prizes to cover many of the outstanding contributions that opened new areas of physics in this period.
One of the unexpected phenomena during the last few years of the 19th century, was the discovery of X-rays by Wilhelm Conrad Röntgen in 1895, which was awarded the first Nobel Prize in Physics (1901). Another was the discovery of radioactivity by Antoine Henri Becquerel in 1896, and the continued study of the nature of this radiation by Marie and Pierre Curie. The origin of the X-rays was not immediately understood at the time, but it was realized that they indicated the existence of a hitherto concealed world of phenomena (although their practical usefulness for medical diagnosis was evident enough from the beginning). The work on radioactivity by Becquerel and the Curies was rewarded in 1903 (with one half to Becqurel and the other half shared by the Curies), and in combination with the additional work by Ernest Rutherford (who got the Chemistry Prize in 1908) it was understood that atoms, previously considered as more or less structureless objects, actually contained a very small but compact nucleus. Some atomic nuclei were found to be unstable and could emit the or radiation observed. This was a revolutionary insight at the time, and it led in the end, through parallel work in other areas of physics, to the creation of the first useful picture of the structure of atoms.
In 1897, Joseph J. Thomson, who worked with rays emanating from the cathode in partly evacuated discharge tubes, identified the carriers of electric charge. He showed that these rays consisted of discrete particles, later called “electrons”. He measured a value for the ratio between their mass and (negative) charge, and found that it was only a very small fraction of that expected for singly charged atoms. It was soon realized that these lightweight particles must be the building blocks that, together with the positively charged nuclei, make up all different kinds of atoms. Thomson received his Prize in 1906. By then, Philipp E.A. von Lenard had already been acknowledged the year before (1905) for elucidating other interesting properties of the cathodic rays, such as their ability to penetrate thin metal foils and produce fluorescence. Soon thereafter (in 1912) Robert A. Millikan made the first precision measurement of the electron charge with the oil-drop method, which led to a Physics Prize for him in 1923. Millikan was also rewarded for his works on the photoelectric effect.
In the beginning of the century, Maxwell’s equations had already existed for several decades, but many questions remained unanswered: what kind of medium propagated electromagnetic radiation (including light) and what carriers of electric charges were responsible for light emission? Albert A. Michelson had developed an interferometric method, by which distances between objects could be measured as a number of wavelengths of light (or fractions thereof). This made comparison of lengths much more exact than what had been possible before. Many years later, the Bureau International de Poids et Mesures, Paris (BINP) defined the meter unit in terms of the number of wavelengths of a particular radiation instead of the meter prototype. Using such an interferometer, Michelson had also performed a famous experiment, together with E. W. Morley, from which it could be concluded that the velocity of light is independent of the relative motion of the light source and the observer. This fact refuted the earlier assumption of an ether as a medium for light propagation. Michelson received the Physics Prize in 1907.
The mechanisms for emission of light by carriers of electric charge was studied by Hendrik A. Lorentz, who was one of the first to apply Maxwell’s equations to electric charges in matter. His theory could also be applied to the radiation caused by vibrations in atoms and it was in this context that it could be put to its first crucial test. As early as 1896 Pieter Zeeman, who was looking for possible effects of electric and magnetic fields on light, made an important discovery namely, that spectral lines from sodium in a flame were split up into several components when a strong magnetic field was applied. This phenomenon could be given a quite detailed interpretation by Lorentz’s theory, as applied to vibrations of the recently identified electrons, and Lorentz and Zeeman shared the Physics Prize in 1902, i.e. even before Thomson’s discovery was rewarded. Later, Johannes Stark demonstrated the direct effect of electric fields on the emission of light, by exposing beams of atoms (“anodic rays”, consisting of atoms or molecules) to strong electric fields. He observed a complicated splitting of spectral lines as well as a Doppler shift depending on the velocities of the emitters. Stark received the 1919 Physics Prize.
With this background, it became possible to build detailed models for the atoms, objects that had existed as concepts ever since antiquity but were considered more or less structureless in classical physics. There existed already, since the middle of the previous century, a rich empirical material in the form of characteristic spectral lines emitted in the visible domain by different kinds of atoms, and to this was added the characteristic X-ray radiation discovered by Charles G. Barkla (Physics Prize in 1917, awarded in 1918), which after the clarification of the wave nature of this radiation and its diffraction by Max von Laue (Physics Prize in 1914), also became an important source of information on the internal structure of atoms.
Barkla’s characteristic X-rays were secondary rays, specific for each element exposed to radiation from X-ray tubes (but independent of the chemical form of the samples). Karl Manne G. Siegbahn realized that measuring characteristic X-ray spectra of all the elements would show systematically how successive electron shells are added when going from the light elements to the heavier ones. He designed highly accurate spectrometers for this purpose by which energy differences between different shells, as well as rules for radiative transitions between them, could be established. He received the Physics Prize in 1924 (awarded in 1925). However, it would turn out that a deeper understanding of the atomic structure required a much further departure from the habitual concepts of classical physics than anyone could have imagined.
Classical physics assumes continuity in motion as well as in the gain or loss of energy. Why then, do atoms send out radiations with sharp wavelengths? Here, a parallel line of development, also with its roots in late 19th century physics, had given important clues for interpretation. Wilhelm Wien studied the “black-body” radiation from hot solid bodies (which in contrast to radiation from atoms in gases, has a continuous distribution of frequencies). Using classical electrodynamics, he derived an expression for the frequency distribution of this radiation and the shift of the maximum intensity wavelength, when the temperature of a black body is changed (the Wien displacement law, useful for instance in determining the temperature of the sun). He was awarded the Physics Prize in 1911.
However, Wien could not derive a distribution formula that agreed with experiments for both short and long wavelengths. The problem remained unexplained until Max K.E.L. Planck put forward his radically new idea that the radiated energy could only be emitted in quanta, i.e. portions that had a certain definite value, larger for the short wavelengths than for the long ones (equal to a constant times the frequency for each quantum). This is considered to be the birth of quantum physics. Wien received the Physics Prize in 1911 and Planck some years later, in 1918 (awarded in 1919). Important verifications that light comes in the form of energy quanta came also through Albert Einstein‘s interpretation of the photoelectric effect (first observed in 1887 by Hertz) which also involved extensions of Planck’s theories. Einstein received the Physics Prize for 1921 (awarded in 1922). The prize motivation cited also his other “services to theoretical physics,” which will be referred to in another context.
Later experiments by James Franck and Gustav L. Hertz demonstrated the inverse of the photoelectric effect (i.e. that an electron that strikes an atom, must have a specific minimum energy to produce light quanta of a particular energy from it) and showed the general validity of Planck’s expressions involving the constant. Franck and Hertz shared the 1925 prize, awarded in 1926. At about the same time, Arthur H. Compton (who received one-half of the Physics Prize for 1927) studied the energy loss in X-ray photon scattering on material particles, and showed that X-ray quanta, whose energies are more than 10,000 times larger than those of light, also obey the same quantum rules. The other half was given to Charles T.R. Wilson (see later), whose device for observing high energy scattering events could be used for verification of Compton’s predictions.
With the concept of energy quantization as a background, the stage was set for further ventures into the unknown world of microphysics. Like some other well-known physicists before him, Niels H. D. Bohr worked with a planetary picture of electrons circulating around the nucleus of an atom. He found that the sharp spectral lines emitted by the atoms could only be explained if the electrons were circulating in stationary orbits characterized by a quantized angular momentum (integer units of Planck’s constant divided by ) and that the emitted frequencies corresponded to emission of radiation with energy equal to the difference between quantized energy states of the electrons. His suggestion indicated a still more radical departure from classical physics than Planck’s hypothesis. Although it could only explain some of the simplest features of optical spectra in its original form, it was soon accepted that Bohr’s approach must be a correct starting point, and he received the Physics Prize in 1922.
It turned out that a deeper discussion of the properties of radiation and matter (until then considered as forming two completely different categories), was necessary for further progress in the theoretical description of the microworld. In 1923 Prince Louis-Victor P. R. de Broglie proposed that material particles may also show wave properties, now that electromagnetic radiation had been shown to display particle aspects in the form of photons. He developed mathematical expressions for this dualistic behavior, including what has later been called the “de Broglie wavelength” of a moving particle. Early experiments by Clinton J. Davisson had indicated that electrons could actually show reflection effects similar to that of waves hitting a crystal and these experiments were now repeated, verifying the associated wavelength predicted by de Broglie. Somewhat later, George P. Thomson (son of J. J. Thomson) made much improved experiments on higher energy electrons penetrating thin metal foils which showed very clear diffraction effects. de Broglie was rewarded for his theories in 1929 and Davisson and Thomson later shared the 1937 Physics Prize.
What remained was the formulation of a new, consistent theory that would replace classical mechanics, valid for atomic phenomena and their associated radiations. The years 1924-1926 was a period of intense development in this area. Erwin Schrödinger built further on the ideas of de Broglie and wrote a fundamental paper on “Quantization as an eigenvalue problem” early in 1926. He created what has been called “wave mechanics”. But the year before that, Werner K. Heisenberg had already started on a mathematically different approach, called “matrix mechanics”, by which he arrived at equivalent results (as was later shown by Schrödinger). Schrödinger’s and Heisenberg’s new quantum mechanics meant a fundamental departure from the intuitive picture of classical orbits for atomic objects, and implied also that there are natural limitations on the accuracy by which certain quantities can be measured simultaneously (Heisenberg’s uncertainty relations).
Heisenberg was rewarded by the Physics Prize for 1932 (awarded 1933) for the development of quantum mechanics, while Schrödinger shared the Prize one year later (1933) with Paul A.M. Dirac. Schrödinger’s and Heisenberg’s quantum mechanics was valid for the relatively low velocities and energies associated with the “orbital” motion of valence electrons in atoms, but their equations did not satisfy the requirements set by Einstein’s rules for fast moving particles (to be mentioned later). Dirac constructed a modified formalism which took into account effects of Einstein’s special relativity, and showed that such a theory not only contained terms corresponding to the intrinsic spinning of electrons (and therefore explaining their own intrinsic magnetic moment and the fine structure observed in atomic spectra), but also predicted the existence of a completely new kind of particles, the so-called antiparticles with identical masses but opposite charge. The first antiparticle to be discovered, that of the electron, was observed in 1932 by Carl D. Anderson and was given the name “positron” (one-half of the Physics Prize for 1936).
Other important contributions to the development of quantum theory have been distinguished by Nobel Prizes in later years. Max Born, Heisenberg’s supervisor in the early twenties, made important contributions to its mathematical formulation and physical interpretation. He received one-half of the Physics Prize for 1954 for his work on the statistical interpretation of the wave function. Wolfgang Pauli formulated his exclusion principle (which states that there can be only one electron in each quantum state) already on the basis of Bohr’s old quantum theory. This principle was later found to be associated with the symmetry of wave functions for particles of half-integer spins in general, distinguishing what is now called fermions from the bosonic particles whose spins are integer multiples of. The exclusion principle has deep consequences in many areas of physics and Pauli received the Nobel Prize in Physics in 1945.
The study of electron spins would continue to open up new horizons in physics. Precision methods for determining the magnetic moments of spinning particles were developed during the thirties and forties for atoms as well as nuclei (by Stern, Rabi, Bloch and Purcell, see later sections) and in 1947 they had reached such a precision, that Polykarp Kusch could state that the magnetic moment of an electron did not have exactly the value predicted by Dirac, but differed from it by a small amount. At about the same time, Willis E. Lamb worked on a similar problem of electron spins interacting with electromagnetic fields, by studying the fine structure of optical radiation from hydrogen with very high resolution radio frequency resonance methods. He found that the fine structure splitting also did not have exactly the Dirac value, but differed from it by a significant amount. These results stimulated a reconsideration of the basic concepts behind the application of quantum theory to electromagnetism, a field that had been started by Dirac, Heisenberg and Pauli but still suffered from several insufficiencies. Kusch and Lamb were each awarded half the the Physics Prize in 1955.
In quantum electrodynamics (QED for short), charged particles interact through the interchange of virtual photons, as described by quantum perturbation theory. The older versions involved only single photon exchange, but Sin-Itiro Tomonaga, Julian Schwinger and Richard P. Feynman realized that the situation is actually much more complicated, since electron-electron scattering may involve several photon exchanges. A “naked” point charge does not exist in their picture; it always produces a cloud of virtual particle-antiparticle pairs around itself, such that its effective magnetic moment is changed and the Coulomb potential is modified at short distances. Calculations starting from this |
that if things went wrong, Matt would need her more than ever. So did she come through for her boy after Jack got gunned down? If so, it was in a hands-off way that Matt, with all of his heightened senses, seemed to have no clue about. Again, like with Karen, there's so much stuff to explore here. A rich landscape ready to be farmed for Season 2.
Exit Theatre Mode
Get Him to the Greek
Okay, enough about tone and various character histories, let's bring in freakin' Elektra! There were a ton of fun Easter Eggs all throughout Season 1, but this was the one that got the most succinct "squees" out of the fandom.
Obviously, Matt had to spend some time fighting in between his lessons as a young boy and his first outing as a masked vigilante. Foggy even asked him as much in "Nelson v. Murdock," though Matt never quite answered fully. So bringing the character of Elektra Natchios back into Matt's life would not only upend his whole world, but it would also come with its own set of flashbacks designed to help us explore a new area of his life. Plus, it would help fill in/explain the whole "Sexual Rain Main" label that Foggy's given to Matt due to his attraction to "stunning women with questionable character."
13 Best Daredevil Easter Eggs
We could list off all the cool villains and characters we'd love to see pop up on Season 2 based on all the Easter Eggs we saw during the first 13 episodes. Gladiator, Stilt-Man, the Owl (It'd have to be Owlsley's son), but Elektra would be the big get. Plus, with Elektra comes The Hand, who've already been established. And also Bullseye, who we may or may not have caught a quick glimpse of in "Condemned." And given the patience the show's already displayed, she wouldn't even have to get killed off in the same season she debuted in a rush to blow through an "Elektra arc." She could stick around and help keep the series feeling fairly Frank Miller-era.
Exit Theatre Mode
Crime and Punishment
I know most everyone's itching to get into Elektra and Bullseye, but with all of Season 1's focus on morality, mortality, and Matt's limits when it comes to killing, Frank Castle's lethal, blood-spilling vigilante would make a superb addition to Daredevil. Perhaps even as a means to get him his own series.
After fans saw how dark and violent Daredevil was, many people immediately thought "This - THIS - is the right way to go with Punisher." As a particularly off-brand Marvel hero, Punisher's severely struggled over the course of three movies to to gain any sort of traction with viewers. But in the Netflix/Marvel-verse, he could thrive. And offer up a really interesting obstacle for Matt on both a physical and ideological level.
Exit Theatre Mode
Matt Fowler is a writer for IGN. Follow him on Twitter at @TheMattFowler and Facebook at Facebook.com/Showrenity.God or godless? It probably depends on your age and where you live
Updated
Australians are losing their religion, the headlines tell us, but digging deeper into the 2016 census tells a more complex story about how closely faith and geography are linked in modern Australia.
More non-believers live in the inner city
The census shows that for the first time, Australians who have 'no religion' outnumber believers in any single religion.
Non-believers have grown by 10 per cent in the past decade, with Christians falling by about the same proportion.
But 14.1 million people still identify with a particular religion — that's 60 per cent of the population.
The number of people with no religion is highest in the inner regions of Australia's capital cities.
Take Brisbane for example. When you map the city by the most common religion in each suburb, the inner city sticks out; 'no religion' is the most common census response in inner areas, which are surrounded by a sea of suburbia where Christianity is more common.
For example, in the trendy suburb of West End in inner-city Brisbane, 44 per cent of people say they have no religion.
But just 20 minutes drive away in Hendra, that proportion halves to 22 per cent.
The same is true in the inner-city areas of Sydney, Melbourne, Hobart and Adelaide.
In Clifton Hill in Melbourne's inner north, 55 per cent of the population has no religion. Fifteen minutes away across the Yarra in Bulleen, the proportion of non-believers halves to 24 per cent.
In South Hobart, 53 per cent have no religion, compared with only 33 per cent 20 minutes away in Glenorchy.
In the foothills of the Adelaide Hills, a quarter of the population of Springfield has no religion, compared with more than double that number just a 20-minute drive up to Crafers West in the hills.
Age is a big factor in that geographic divide
Glenn Capuano, a demographer with ID The Population Experts, says some of this trend is age related: more young people are more non-religious, and lots of young people live in inner-city areas.
More than one-third of 25 to 34-year-olds say they have no religion, compared with just 19 per cent of 65 to 74-year-olds.
'Tree-change' and'sea-change' areas also attract non-believers
Some regional areas also have a high proportion of people with no religion, but these regions typically have something in common.
They are known either as 'tree-change' or'sea-change' locations where people choose to live when they leave cities, or are known to attract people interested in alternative lifestyles.
In Victoria, these regions include the Dandenong Ranges around Belgrave and Emerald in Melbourne's east, the sea-changers along the Great Ocean Road, and the alternative lifestyles in the Goldfields region of Central Victoria, centred on Castlemaine and Daylesford.
These join Melbourne's inner-city suburbs as non-believer hotspots.
Other regional centres with high proportions of people with no religion include:
the area around Byron Bay on the NSW north coast;
the Adelaide Hills; and
the south coast of Western Australia around Denmark, which Mr Capuano calls the "Byron Bay of WA".
Non-Christians are drawn to Sydney and Melbourne
In Sydney, Islam is the dominant faith in the suburbs around Lakemba and Auburn in the west, while the majority of the population in the suburbs around Parramatta are Hindu, and Buddhists live in Cabramatta and surrounding suburbs.
These religious clusters reflect the dominant migrant groups in those areas, including Lebanese, Indian and Vietnamese people.
Liz Allen, a demographer at the ANU Centre for Social Research Methods, says Sydney and Melbourne are the biggest target destinations for new migrants, whereas other capital cities like Adelaide and Perth have historical population flows from the UK and Europe.
This means their populations are not only older but more likely to be from Christian countries.
Sydney is actually a religious hotspot
Mr Capuano says Sydney actually has one of the highest rates of religious belief Australia-wide, despite its cluster of inner-city areas where 'no religion' is the most common response.
The proportion of people in Greater Sydney who identified with any religion was 66 per cent, compared to 61 per cent nationwide.
Aboriginal religions are growing
About 8,000 people in Australia say they practise Aboriginal traditional religions, up from 5,224 10 years ago, making it proportionally one of the faster-growing religions.
In six communities, all in the Northern Territory, including Yarralin, Belyuen and Daguragu, it is the majority religion.
But in many other Indigenous settlements, Christian religions dominate.
Dr Allen says the association with Christianity is a legacy of the early colonisation and assimilation practices of Europeans.
"It is not surprising that a lot of these missions were established by religious orders, primarily Catholics and Anglicans."
About 82 per cent of 1,000 residents of Kowanyama in the Gulf of Carpentaria in Queensland are Anglicans.
The Anglican Mitchell River Mission was established there in 1905 and was run by the Church of England until 1967.
Similarly, 91 per cent of the 1,500 people who live in Wurrumiyanga in the Tiwi Islands are Catholic, and a third of the 750 people in Yuendumu in the middle of the Northern Territory, are Baptist.
These settlements were home to Catholic and Baptist missionaries, respectively, during the 20th century.
Notes:
In the maps, NA represents suburbs where no census forms were submitted.
In areas with very small populations, some percentages may add to more than 100 owing to data adjustments the ABS makes to preserve confidentiality.
Topics: population-and-demographics, religion-and-beliefs, australia
First postedConsider it medicare’s unfinished chapter — a never-delivered reform originally conceived as part of Canada’s publicly funded health-care system. Hospital procedures are included and so is the work of doctors, but the architects of medicare fell short in covering the cost of medicines. People across the country pay for that failure every day through unnecessarily high prescription drug costs. They shell out an average 50 per cent more per capita than residents of other developed countries. It’s a burden that results in millions of prescriptions going unfilled, with an estimated one in 10 Canadians lacking money to buy medicine they need. They pay for medicare’s unmet promise through aggravated illness and needless suffering.
Canadians shell out an average 50 per cent more per capita for prescription drugs than residents of other developed countries. ( Dreamstime )
What’s missing is a national pharmacare plan that would assume the bulk of prescription drug costs for all Canadians, just as medicare covers doctors’ fees and hospital bills. Such a plan was envisioned as Justice Emmett Hall released the final volume of his Royal Commission on Health Services on Dec. 7, 1964. Concepts laid out by the Hall Commission shaped medicare as we know it today. But now, almost 50 years later, pharmacare remains little more than a pipe dream. That’s not the case in other countries. Indeed, Canada is alone in having a universal health-care system while at the same time neglecting to cover the cost of prescription drugs. The result of this inaction is an inefficient and expensive mishmash of private drug plans and disjointed federal, provincial and territorial systems, all providing different levels of coverage.
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Universal access is a hallmark of medicare. But researchers Steven Morgan and Jamie Daw, writing in the journal Health Policy, note that provincial pharmacare programs are designed instead as a subsidy to people considered to be in need, such as welfare recipients and the elderly. About 60 per cent of other Canadians are enrolled in private drug plans, largely through the workplace. But that coverage is expected to drop as the cost of these programs rises and an increasing portion of the labour force is engaged in “precarious employment,” without full benefits. Properly used prescription medications can keep people healthy, help patients cope with difficult symptoms, avoid trips to the hospital and even save lives. They’re fundamental to modern health care. Yet today in Canada, coverage for prescription drugs very much depends on where a person lives, their age, the place where they happen to work, their medical condition and whether or not they’re on welfare. Many have no protection at all, especially the young, the self-employed and people working for small businesses. They’re left exposed to high prices for the medicines they need. That’s not how Canadian health care is meant to work. The logical way to provide equitable access is to cover prescription drugs through a publicly funded system. And there’s strong evidence it would be cost-effective, too.
Universal pharmacare would save up to $11.4 billion each year, according to an August report commissioned by the Canadian Federation of Nurses Unions. The Canadian Centre for Policy Alternatives has pegged savings at $10.7 billion. And the C.D. Howe Institute has estimated that a single-payer system would save $1 billion a year simply by eliminating the duplication of legal, technical and administrative costs associated with Canada’s tangle of public and private drug plans.
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National pharmacare’s largest financial impact would come through bulk buying. By concentrating the purchasing power of the entire country — public and private plans together — Canadian authorities would have a much stronger bargaining position when ordering drugs from pharmaceutical giants. Steps have been taken in this direction. Provinces set up a bulk buying effort called the Pan-Canadian Pharmaceutical Alliance in 2010 and it has produced some savings. Expanding this approach to encompass all the country’s drug needs would generate even more. That’s how other nations obtain significantly lower costs. Yes, a national pharmacare system would require some government investment. But experts note this would be more than offset by savings to Canadians at large. According to the C.D. Howe Institute’s 2013 study, titled Rethinking Pharmacare in Canada, if per capita spending on prescription medicine could be reduced to that of Germany (the country with the next-highest level among comparators) Canadians would spend $4 billion less per year. And if per capita costs were brought in line with those of the United Kingdom or New Zealand, Canadians would save at least $14 billion annually. There are other benefits, too. Marc-André Gagnon, assistant professor with the school of public policy at Carleton University, notes that employers would enjoy lower labour costs with the burden of a drug plan lifted from their benefits package. “It would have the same effect as a significant tax cut.” What’s lacking is political will, especially at the national level, to make pharmacare happen. Complexities loom. Vested interests are heavily committed to Canada’s dysfunctional system. Drug companies, in particular, can be counted upon to resist reform. But transformative change is never easy. The framers of this country’s medicare system faced greater challenges, and stiffer resistance, but managed to push forward to the benefit of all Canadians. Bold leadership is needed to complete their work. A national pharmacare program would surely save money. But, more important than that, it would give Canadians comprehensive, universal access to the medicines they need. That’s medicare’s promise — and it still waits to be fulfilled.Media playback is not supported on this device All aboard for the Four Nations road trip
Four Nations Venue: Ricoh Arena, Coventry Date: Saturday, 5 November. England v Scotland 17:30 GMT New Zealand v Australia 20:00 GMT Coverage: Live on BBC Two, plus highlights; live commentary on BBC Radio 5 live sports extra; text commentary on BBC Sport website and app
International rugby league expands into unchartered territory in Coventry on Saturday - with the help of one of England's top rugby union sides.
By taking the Four Nations to the Midlands, Wasps - a club with a previously nomadic existence and now owners of the Ricoh Arena - helped England win the right to host rugby league's World Cup in 2021.
Rugby league thrives along the 127-mile stretch of the M62 between Liverpool and Hull, but the Four Nations is being showcased on a truly national stage - seven games at six venues in six regions, culminating in the final at Anfield.
Jon Dutton, the Four Nations' tournament director, said: "As we put the bid in for the 2021 World Cup, this international tournament was incredibly important in terms of moving on from 2013 World Cup and working towards that next one here in five years' time.
"We had a strategy in building the schedule - it was about visibility and profile, using a mixture of iconic venues new to the sport and staging games in core rugby league markets."
That includes taking England to London Stadium, where victory over Australia - according to retired rugby league great Martin Offiah - is vital if the game is to get renewed life in the capital.
BBC Sport looks at the potential impact of the year's biggest international tournament, as the Rugby Football League boldly tries to showcase the game across England.
Media playback is not supported on this device Highlights: England 16-17 New Zealand
A magic place to be?
When Wasps were plotting to relocate from London to Coventry in 2014, rugby league was already part of the grand plan.
Surprising, if you consider them a rugby union club. Logical, if you take into consideration that they were to buy a full share of a 32,500-seater stadium that comes with a 9,000-capacity indoor arena.
Of 777 events in 2015, 16 of them were rugby union matches. Just 35% of their revenue came from the game.
"We knew we had to get the venue working hard all year round and it wouldn't just be about rugby and football," said Wasps Group chief executive David Armstrong.
"We need as many uses as we can, so rugby league was in the thinking at the time."
The Ricoh Arena is home of Premiership side Wasps, League One club Coventry City and will now host international rugby league
The Ricoh Arena has only staged one previous rugby league match - an English third-tier game between Coventry Bears and Keighley Cougars, which attracted a crowd of 1,097.
However, they were showcased as a potential host city for the 2021 World Cup and have bid to stage Super League's Magic Weekend in the future, which feature six top-flight matches over two days.
"We were pipped at the post by Newcastle for Magic Weekend in 2017," Armstrong said of St James' Park's successful attempt to host the event for a third successive year.
"We hope it will come here in the future and allow fans in the West Midlands the chance to watch all the Super League clubs.
"We would be disappointed if we didn't have rugby league being played here every year."
'JT will open eyes'
Australia's Johnathan Thurston is a two-time NRL Premiership winner, World Cup winner and Queensland State of Origin representative, and has also collected all of rugby league's top individual honours
Coventry, it seems, is where the rugby league-mad north meets the rugby union stronghold in the south - a romantic notion considering that almost 200 years ago in the nearby town of Rugby, William Webb Ellis picked up a football and ran with it to effectively invent the game of rugby union.
The codes were split in 1895, but Armstrong says any existing divide between the sports is now exaggerated.
"We are not developing a competitor, we are developing a companion," he said.
The two sports are most closely integrated through the 'City of Rugby' initiative, under which the development and promotion of both codes is streamlined from grassroots to elite level.
League side Coventry Bears have their roots in rugby union, organising bucket collections at Coventry Rugby matches so they could buy their first kit in 1998.
Alongside Wasps and Coventry City Council, the Bears worked on the Four Nations bid.
Alan Robinson, Bears founder and managing director, said: "There is no better opportunity than this to open people's eyes to rugby league, as people are a little blind to it here.
"It's not rugby union. It's different, it's explosive, it's fast.
"They might not know who Johnathan Thurston is, but if they see him and see what he can do, and see Shaun Johnson and what he can do, they won't be able to deny that skill and respect it for what it is."
What the players say...
Ryan Hall scored England's second try in their opening Four Nations defeat by New Zealand in Hull
England winger Ryan Hall: "It will be interesting down there. I know they have a team, Coventry Bears, and that is something that the RFL want to develop - they see an opportunity there and I'm more than happy to see rugby league spread its wings and get about a bit and we are doing that in the international game."
Australia front-rower Aaron Woods said: "It's an honour to get tasked to play in those sorts of places. It's really good for the international game to grow - you have to grow. I look at rugby union and how big it is worldwide and if we can get rugby league as half as good as that it would be good for the game."
Star lights need to shine bright in London
Martin Offiah admits he is recognised more in London for his appearances in reality TV shows than for his rugby league exploits
Rugby league sits on the fringes in London but at its sporting heart at the same time. The game's greats are immortalised outside Wembley Stadium alongside a statue of England's 1966 World Cup-winning captain Bobby Moore.
Offiah, one of the most prolific try scorers in rugby league history, is one of the five players represented, celebrating his most famous try, an 80-metre dash against Leeds in the 1994 Challenge Cup final.
He also had spells playing for London Broncos in Super League, was part of the England side that lost the 1995 World Cup final to Australia and is now a trustee of the London Rugby League Foundation.
"To have big international rugby league matches is important as it keeps the light on for the game in London," said the 50-year-old.
Wayne Bennett's England side, he stressed, will be shouldering that responsibility when they play Australia in the capital on Sunday, 13 November (14:00 GMT).
"England needs to win," said Offiah, who was injured the last time the national team beat Australia in 1995.
"This is sport, not a drama film. There is no script written, so if people go to a sporting event and feel they have seen it before, it will lose its appeal."
The London Rugby League Foundation was started in January 2015 with the aim of helping to grow the game in the south east of England, where there are 1,500 junior players at 19 clubs in the region - twice the number compared to a decade earlier.
And, with the charity delivering coaching to 5,000 primary and secondary school students in the 2015-16 academic year, while also working extensively with community clubs in the region, Offiah proudly says the game has "a hold" at grassroots level.
But since the Broncos' relegation from Super League in 2014, London has not been represented in the top flight.
And, while the England v Australia game is just the second elite match hosted in the city in 2016, after August's Challenge Cup final at Wembley, it is expected to attract the biggest crowd of the Four Nations.
'Building on the World Cup legacy'
Derwent Park is the Four Nations' most northern outpost
Workington Town's Derwent Park home, the smallest Four Nations venue, stands as a testament to its pedigree as an international rugby league destination, having been upgraded in order to host two World Cup matches in 2013.
When the world's top-ranked team New Zealand face Scotland there on Friday 11 November (20:00 GMT), hopes are high that the game will inspire greater interest in rugby league and a club recently relegated to League One and facing hard financial times.
Malcolm Allison, director of Workington Town, said: "That is the legacy you want the game to leave behind. We already have the facility legacy and now a fantastic spin-off would be having youngsters from the area getting involved, participation to grow and interest to increase.
"There's no doubt that relegation in isolation is a massive disappointment for the club and the fans.
"However, what it has done is allow us to reassess things, bring together a wider board of directors and review the structure of the club both on and off the field.
"The fact that we can look forward to an international match between Scotland and New Zealand is a real tonic for the fans of the local area."
Subscribe to the BBC Sport newsletter to get our pick of news, features and video sent to your inbox.In the latest version of America's long-running culture wars, conservatives (and even some liberals) have zeroed in what once might have seemed like an unlikely target. While all the usual suspects still find themselves in reactionary cross hairs -- Hollywood, "lamestream"-media elites and the LGBT community to name a few -- another group, the scientific establishment, has emerged as one of the most polarizing institutions in American political culture.
Climate change, vaccination and evolution -- each of these are things that the scientific establishment overwhelmingly agrees on. But the anti-intellectual fury of climate deniers, anti-vaxxers and creationists is such that any empirical consensus gets overshadowed.
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For better or worse, comedy has emerged as one of the most visible platforms for laying bare the insanity of anti-science reactionaries. Jon Stewart and his "Daily Show" correspondents, for example, have been scrutinizing such people for years, while John Oliver has emerged in recent months as a veritable pro-science powerhouse. Stephen Colbert has interviewed Neil deGrasse Tyson at least 10 times!
There's never been a shortage of qualified experts to debunk anti-science, but few have generated the kind of heat that comedians have of late. Perhaps is the viral-friendly nature of social media, or the intrinsic advantage that satire enjoys over the cut-and-dried recitation of facts. Whatever the case, let's take a lesson from these witty minds. Below are 10 sterling examples of comedy as an antidote to science-denialism.
1) John Oliver takes on climate skeptics
Many comedians have done a bang-up job showing that climate deniers are ridiculous, but nobody has done it better than John Oliver. On his HBO show, "Last Week Tonight," Oliver hosts a statistically accurate mock debate between Bill Nye and climate skeptics.
2) Samantha Bee destroys anti-vaxx nuts
When celebrities give anti-vaccination hysteria a platform -- and, as a result, we get outbreaks of measles and whooping cough -- it feels like the nation is crawling backward. Despite the fact that research has conclusively shown that vaccinations are not linked to autism, many still refuse to vaccinate their kids. In this clip, Samantha Bee takes anti-vaxxers to task for their dangerous campaign.
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3) Stephen Colbert mocks creationism
Creationists believe that the Earth is only 6,000 years old, and that humans roamed the world with dinosaurs. (Spoiler: Scientist Clair Patterson found that the Earth is actually 4.5 billion years old, and humans evolved long after dinosaurs became extinct.) Though it sounds ridiculous, a recent Gallup Poll found that 42 percent of Americans believe in a creationist human origin. The most problematic issue is when their views infiltrate the education of children. Stephen Colbert proves this point in the great interview below:
4) John Oliver destroys Dr. Oz's "cure-alls"
In June of 2014, TV personality and physician Dr. Oz testified at a congressional hearing that his "miracle" cure-alls "don't have the scientific muster to present as fact." Following this admission, John Oliver took him to task over his false science, and taking advantage of doctor-patient trust.
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5) Lewis Black throws fossils at creationists
"I would love to have the faith to believe that [creation] took place in seven days," Lewis Black says in the hilarious clip below. "But I have thoughts. And that can really fuck up the faith thing."
6) Bill Maher: "Science is made by scientists not idiots"
In the clip below, Maher adroitly points out that science isn't a two-way debate between scientists and non-scientists. You tell 'em, Bill.
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7) Jessica Williams and Jon Stewart roast Donald Trump
"Daily Show" correspondent Jessica Williams doesn't appear until the end of this skit, but when she does, she plays the role of science-denier, taking advice from Donald Trump, to perfection.
8) Eddie Izzard on creationism (spoiler: humans didn't live with dinosaurs)
Creationism is a hot topic for comedians -- including Eddie Izzard, who can't wrap his brain around why folks believe that the Earth is only 6,000 years old.
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9) Louis C.K. can't understand why the religious aren't environmentalists
Here Louis C.K. looks at a specific sub-group of climate change deniers: the religious right. After all, why wouldn't you want to take care of the Earth, if you believe that God gave it to you?
10) Sarah Silverman satirizes climate deniers
In 2016, Sarah Silverman will only have to spend $108 a year on sweaters. Climate change is the best!Looking for news you can trust?
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Editor’s note: Read Kat Aaron’s companion piece on the decades-long conservative crusade against a crucial anti-poverty lifeline: “The GOP Plot to Destroy Legal Aid.”
Marilyn Hopper learned the hard way what happens to people who can’t afford a lawyer.
Back in 2009, Hopper, a pleasant, diminutive 57-year-old from Detroit, was sued by a company called Midland Funding over a $1,700 credit card debt, which grew to $2,400 with fees and interest. She missed the initial court hearing at Michigan’s 36th District Court and in her absence, the judge gave the company permission to take $700 a month from her paycheck.
That got her attention fast. When she showed up in court this past November to contest the judgment, she explained that the hearing notice had been delivered to her old address—a home she’d lost to foreclosure. Over the objections of Midland’s pink-suited young attorney, Hopper convinced the judge to reduce the garnishment from her paycheck to $200 a month, but the company’s past withdrawals had left her nearly destitute. “I was subjected to undue hardship because they were taking such a large chunk,” she told me. When I asked whether she’d considered hiring a lawyer, Hopper sighed. “Most of them want $4,000 up front, and who has $4,000 lying around?”
Thanks to a landmark 1963 Supreme Court ruling, criminal courts must assign a lawyer to any defendant who can’t afford one. But there’s no such safety net for the hundreds of thousands of cash-strapped Americans who, like Hopper, find themselves embroiled in civil litigation, from employment and custody battles to foreclosures and bankruptcies—cases that often have serious consequences. “You’re not going to go to jail, but you may lose your home, you may lose your kids, you may lose your job,” says Linda Perle, director of legal services at the Center for Law and Social Policy in Washington, DC. “There’s very important interests at stake.”
Traditionally, people with little money could turn to Legal Services Corporation (LSC), the federally mandated nonprofit that supports free legal-aid programs in hundreds of communities. But over the past few years, a perfect storm of conservative attacks, shrinking budgets, and recessionary demand for legal services has left those who can least afford it fending for themselves against the financial behemoths.
The corporation lawyers “are here every day, and they pretty much bank on people not showing up, or not having an attorney to represent them,” says Alison Folmar, a Detroit attorney who spends much of her time here in the 36th District Court, defending everyday clients in anything from traffic disputes to domestic-violence cases. “The playing fields are not even.”
The courts themselves are reeling from having more and more people showing up as their own lawyers. Unfamiliar with the process, these solo flyers require hand-holding from judges and bailiffs who already are dealing with overstuffed dockets. Nearly 80 percent of judges in a 2010 American Bar Association survey said that pro se litigants harm the delivery of justice, primarily by bogging down the system. “The amount of time that gets spent to assist a self-represented person through any kind of litigation really expands for court staff, as well as for judicial hearing time,” says Lorraine Weber, director of access and fairness for the Michigan Supreme Court.
Numbers are hard to come by, but what little research that exists on the topic supports the notion that going it alone is a losing proposition. Tenants represented by lawyers, for instance, were three to nineteen times more likely to beat their landlords in eviction cases. And a study of women seeking restraining orders found that 83 percent of those with lawyers secured an order while only 32 percent of those without lawyers prevailed.
I witnessed this disparity firsthand one morning in one of the 36th District’s windowless, linoleum-floored courtrooms. Judge Roberta Archer presided over two foreclosure cases, three eviction cases, and three debt-collection cases, and only one of the defendants had a lawyer in tow. He was the only defendant who didn’t lose his case. “For some people, it makes a world of difference,” says Archer’s colleague, Judge Katherine Hansen. “Some people have a defense, but they don’t really know how to put the words to a defense.”
An unschooled defendant would certainly have a tough time explaining flawed mortgage paperwork to a judge—if the defendant even makes it that far. In Michigan and 26 other states, foreclosures seldom go to court without a proactive move by the borrower’s lawyer. In Michigan, most foreclosures are conducted “by advertisement”—the bank runs a legal notice in a local newspaper for four weeks stating its intent, and then initiates a sheriff’s sale. A homeowner’s day in court is by no means guaranteed.
Nor, of course, is a lawyer. To qualify for free legal aid, a family must earn no more than 125 percent of the poverty threshold—about $27,500 for a family of four. That’s not much, to be sure, but more and more people have been qualifying. In 2009, the most recent year for which numbers are available, nearly 44 million Americans were living in poverty, up from about 40 million in 2008.”There are only about 180 legal aid lawyers for the state of Michigan,” says Linda Rexer, executive director of the Michigan State Bar Foundation, which funds legal aid grants. “Now, in Michigan, a third of our 10 million population would qualify for legal aid.” That’s about 18,500 potential clients per legal aid lawyer.
Across the nation, pro bono and legal aid lawyers have been facing a crisis of numbers. In 2009, the 136 independent legal aid groups backed by Legal Services Corporation saw a dramatic rise in recession-related cases: Their collective foreclosure caseload more than doubled from the previous year, and cases involving unemployment compensation jumped by 63 percent. This explosion of demand has forced grantees to turn away half of the people who come to them with eligible cases.
These numbers, of course, only take into account people who step up and ask for help. Many never make the phone call to legal aid in the first place, or give up when their calls go unanswered by harried local staff. “Program after program will tell you, they are just flooded with new need,” says Rebekah Diller, deputy director of the justice program at the Brennan Center for Justice at New York University School of Law.
Last June, the Brennan Center reported some striking local stats. One office in Orange County, California, reported a 337 percent jump in requests for foreclosure help. In Las Vegas, where 1 in every 76 housing units had a foreclosure filing in December—more than 43,000 homes—there were fewer than 10 legal aid lawyers for the entire city. According to the Oregon state bar, requests for help in landlord-tenant cases had more than tripled. And Cleveland’s Legal Aid Society reported a 56 percent increase in employment-related cases. The list goes on.
The crisis hasn’t gone unnoticed. In 2008, as foreclosures slammed the state, Maryland’s Pro Bono Resource Center launched a program to train pro bono lawyers in foreclosure prevention and defense. Last March, the Justice Department launched an initiative called Access to Justice, aimed at improving indigent defense in civil and criminal cases.
Other states are looking at recruiting retired lawyers and allowing them to represent low-income clients. And Michigan is building an online resource for people who plan to represent themselves in court—similar to websites launched in Illinois, Wisconsin, and elsewhere. “There are some problems that can be effectively resolved with self-help,” explains Rexer of the Michigan State Bar Foundation, who is spearheading the effort. “There are other problems that require full representation and the help of a lawyer.”
But none of these initiatives are likely to make much of a dent in meeting the legal needs of the poor. That would require more money, and state lawmakers are loath to pass laws guaranteeing people a lawyer in civil cases—a budget-busting proposition for deficit-plagued governments.
At the federal level, the GOP resurgence has made matters worse. Prior to the midterm elections, congressional lawmakers were mulling the Civil Access to Justice Act, which would loosen restrictions on groups receiving money from the LSC. The changes would once again let legal aid lawyers file class-action lawsuits and engage in policy advocacy—both of which are now forbidden—allowing them to bundle together cases against unscrupulous lenders, for instance, and alert elected officials to emerging problems. (For more on the decades-long conservative crusade to neuter legal aid, click here.)
But the act didn’t make it out of committee before the November elections. “That thing is kind of dead in the water at this point,” says Ken Boehm, chairman of the National Legal and Policy Center, which opposes the changes.
Earlier this month, the House unveiled its latest appropriations bill, which would slash the LSC’s budget by another 18 percent. (The corporation had asked for a 23 percent increase to keep pace with the overwhelming demand for its services.) The House conservative caucus, meanwhile, aims to do away with the LSC entirely as part of its Spending Reduction Act of 2011—”a $2.5 trillion head start in the race to resolve the growing debt crisis and preserve the American Dream.”
The upshot, says the Brennan Center’s Diller, is that most low-income people are basically stuck with two choices when they are faced with foreclosures, evictions, debt collections, custody battles, or employment-related problems. “You give up and you don’t even show up in court,” she says. “Or you try to go it alone.”Pin 9 32 Shares
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actual truths.” He goes on:
Consider the first idea, that a strengthened Chinese currency would increase the growth rate of American exports to China. From 2005 to 2008, the renminbi appreciated nearly 20 percent against the dollar. Yet, American exports to China over those three years grew at a slightly slower pace than in the previous three-year period when the renminbi did not appreciate at all (71 percent versus 89 percent). This is because many of America’s top exports to China are for capital-intensive goods like aerospace and power-generation equipment. Price is but one of several factors for these purchases, along with technology, quality and service. In addition, American companies in those industries are usually competing against European and Japanese firms rather than Chinese manufacturers. …Second, I recently did an analysis of the top American exports to our 20 leading foreign markets, and found little evidence that an undervalued Chinese currency hurts American exports to third countries. This is mostly because there is little head-to-head competition between America and China. …By and large, we are going after entirely different product markets. …Finally, it is unlikely that a stronger renminbi would bring many jobs back home. Instead, companies would most likely shift labor-intensive production to Vietnam, Indonesia and other low-wage countries.
His first argument, that if the currency mattered to the trade balance, a rising RMB after 2005 should have caused an increase in the growth rate of US exports to China, is broadly correct only if the wage-productivity growth differential, real interest rates, and credit growth were constant. But they weren’t. This is the problem with looking at individual factors within an economy without an overall model that shows the relationship between different factors.
Remember that an undervalued currency creates upward pressure on the trade surplus because it reduces the real value of household income while subsidizing production in the tradable goods sector. This causes production to grow faster than consumption (which is normally constrained by the level of household income), forcing the balance to be exported.
But the wage/productivity growth differential and very low interest rates do the same thing. By constraining the growth of real household income and subsidizing production, they too increase the gap between what is produced and what is consumed.
So raising the value of the currency would only have resulted in a positive impact on trade rebalancing – by reversing the flow of wealth from households to producers of tradable goods – if real interest rates and credit growth had stayed constant and workers wages had kept pace with productivity growth. In fact they moved in the wrong direction after 2005 – making Chinese products more, not less, competitive. As with Japan after the Plaza Accord, policies aimed at unwinding the employment effect of currency appreciation more than compensated for the appreciation.
In other words, the exchange rate appreciation after 2005 may very well have caused a relative improvement in the trade balance between the two countries, but the widening differential between wages and productivity and, more importantly, the reduction in real interest rates and the forced expansion of credit would have had the opposite effect.
So while it is true that China’s trade surplus increased after the RMB started revaluing in 2005, that doesn’t mean the currency appreciation had no impact. There is a big difference between saying that the RMB exchange rate is not the only thing that matters to the US trade account and saying that the RMB exchange rate doesn’t matter at all. The former statement is almost certainly true, while the latter statement violates common sense and nearly all historic precedent.
The rest of Wu’s arguments are implicitly based on the second fallacy, that international trade can only settle on a bilateral basis. He says that because there is little overlap between what China produces and exports and what the US produces and exports (a claim about which I have already expressed my skepticism), changes in China’s balance of trade will have no effect on the US balance of trade. It can only matter if when China sells one fewer widget to the US or Mexico, American widget makers immediately take up the slack.
This is only partly true. In fact trade almost never settles bilaterally. It settles multilaterally. It doesn’t matter whether or not China and the US produce the same thing for currency appreciation to have an affect on the two countries’ trade balances.
So even if Wu is right in saying that a revaluation of the renminbi would directly reduce Chinese exports to the US without directly stimulating production in the US, so what? If Americans weren’t producing what China used to sell, that just means that the US purchased those products from another country, let’s say Mexico.
But aside form the fact that this is not such a terrible outcome for Mexico, it will still affect US production. After all if Mexico suddenly increases its exports to the US by a very large amount, wouldn’t that cause Mexican wages, interest rates and the peso to rise. And wouldn’t Mexicans begin to import more, from the US for example?
Remember that Mexico’s current account (which is mostly the trade account) is exactly equal to the excess of domestic savings over domestic investment. It is hard to imagine that a massive surge in Mexican exports would be perfectly matched, dollar for dollar, by a surge in Mexican savings, and no increase in Mexican investment. Wouldn’t Mexican workers consume at least part of their higher income? Wouldn’t Mexican exporters increase capacity at least a little? Both of these would cause imports to rise.
How to make Chinese capital goods more competitive
I have written in the past, in fact Mexico’s trade surplus wouldn’t change much, and it certainly wouldn’t change by the full value of the increase in exports. This means that Mexican imports would rise, perhaps by the same amount as Mexican exports. Those imports have to come from somewhere, and if they didn’t come at least in part from the US, the other country that saw its exports to Mexico increase would undergo the same process as Mexico, and its imports in turn would rise, mutatis mutandi, until someone somewhere purchased something from the US.
I would argue that in fact there is a very different reason why the US should not push China so hard on revaluing the currency, and this reason in implicit in my response to Wu’s New York Times article. What would happen if the US were indeed able to force China to raise the value of its currency faster than China could tolerate?
The good news for China is that raising the RMB shifts income from the tradable goods sector to households, and so lowers the trade surplus. The bad news is that if this happens too quickly, and results in an increase in domestic unemployment, as export companies experience financial distress or move abroad, gross household income might actually decline. The rebalancing would still take place, but it would take place very painfully.
So how would China respond? Almost certainly by stepping up investment and lowering real rates. This effectively shifts wealth from households to borrowers, and allows the capital-intensive sector to take up the slack created by the contracting tradable goods sector (and of course there is a lot of overlap between the two).
So would the world be better off? No, China would be worse off because not only has there been no meaningful rebalancing, but of China’s two vulnerabilities, it has exchanged some reliance on the lesser of the two evils (export growth) for greater reliance on the greater of the two (overinvestment).
The US also would be worse off. Not only will there have been no Chinese trade rebalancing, but there would have been a shift in the composition of Chinese trade that would more directly harm the US.
This is because all Chinese exporters would suffer, but at the same time all Chinese capital-intensive industries would benefit. The net result would be a shift in Chinese exports away from labor-intensive exports (shoes, lighters, toys, etc.) and towards capital-intensive exports (steel, ships, chemicals, cars, etc). In other words Chinese exports will become more directly competitive with US-produced goods.
So of course the level of the RMB matters, and of course the US is right to be very impatient with the glacial pace of China’s rebalancing attempts, but by focusing only on the currency the US may actually make things worse for both countries.
Back to trade tension
On a related topic Monday’s People’s Daily has this article:
China has no need to revalue the yuan for trade reasons, as export growth will slow to a 10 percent this year and its surplus is set to contract by 2015, its trade chief said. Imports from the world’s second largest economy will probably grow faster than exports this year, Commerce Minister Chen Deming said at the Davos forum. Chen dismissed calls for China to strengthen the yuan to tackle the trade surplus, and called instead on countries with reserve currencies – a reference to the United States – to prevent their currencies from weakening. “It is not a sound argument to ask China to appreciate the yuan for trade reasons,” Chen told Reuters on Friday in an interview during the World Economic Forum in Davos.
Chen Deming, as Minister of Commerce, has always opposed RMB revaluation, so there is no need to read too much into these statements. But if Chinese imports do rise faster than exports, it doesn’t follow that the RMB is not undervalued and that the world is correctly rebalancing.
It may have far more to do with very anemic demand growth in the rich countries. According to the article Minister Chen also said that he “saw little prospect of a currency or trade war, but it was necessary to remain alert over exchange rate tensions.”
I am not sure I agree with the first part of his statement. Monday’s Financial Times had two very interesting, related articles about just that topic. In the first one, it says:
Trade tensions between Brazil and China are expected to increase after the Asian country emerged last year as the biggest foreign direct investor in Latin America’s largest economy. Analysis of data from Brazil’s central bank shows that China accounted for about $17bn of Brazil’s total FDI inflows in 2010 of $48.46bn, up from less than $300m in 2009, according to Sobeet, a Brazilian think-tank on transnational companies. “This is the first time we have had so much investment from China,” Luis Afonso Lima, president of Sobeet, told the Financial Times. Exports of commodities, such as iron ore and the “soya complex” of beans, oil and meal, to China helped to keep Brazil’s economy afloat during the financial crisis. However, tensions have surfaced after China last year also emerged as one of the biggest sources of cheap imports into Brazil, helped by a surge in the value of the real, which is undermining the competitiveness of domestic industry.
My friends in Brazil tell me that the anger arises from the perception that with all the difficulty Brazil has had in preventing its currency from revaluing excessively, the surge in Chinese investment has made the process all the more difficult. More Chinese investment requires more central bank intervention, and so more monetary expansion.
This hurts partly because of inflationary pressure and partly because a rising real reduces the value to Brazil of its commodity exports and makes it more difficult for Brazilian manufacturers to survive. And that difficulty is the topic of the second Financial Times article:
Brazil’s new government has warned [of] a looming “trade war” between Latin America’s biggest economy and its main trading partners, including China. Brazil has until recently viewed China as a crucial market for its exports and a close ally in the “Brics” club of fast-growing, large developing countries, which also includes India and Russia. But a growing flood of cheap Chinese manufactured goods into Brazil is testing the relationship. “The relationship with China is important but, from an industrial perspective, it is extremely negative,” said a statement from the São Paulo Industrial Federation, known as Fiesp. While Brazil reported a trade surplus with China of $5.2bn last year, this was due to commodity exports, Fiesp said. On the industrial front, imports of manufactured goods from China rose a “devastating” 60 per cent last year. The deficit in manufactured goods was a record $23.5bn, up from only $600m seven years ago.
I am often asked about the shifting balance of global power relations, away from the traditional West and towards the BRICs. I am skeptical. BRICs are a great marketing concept with which to sell emerging market paper, but the idea that they have the same global interests requires that you squint ferociously when you look at them. Four countries with more diverse and even opposed global interests, economic as well as political and geopolitical, it would be hard to find than Brazil, Russia, India and China.Moving the convection to the west has huge impact on the rest of the atmosphere, even outside of the tropics. This is the source of long-range forecast skill with El Nino/La Nina.
Let's look at the change in tropical Pacific sea surface temperatures for the Nino 3.4 region (see map below)
Examining a map of anomalies (differences from normal) reveals that during the past few months, the Nino 3.4 area ocean temps have dropped below normal (blue color).
Just as important, the temperatures BELOW the surface have also cooled. Here are a series of views below the surface at the equator (the x axis in longitude across the Pacific, and the y axis is depth below the surface) for July through now. Cooler than normal temperatures (blue) have developed.
I am always nervous about predicting the character of the upcoming winter's weather for a number of reasons. Seasonal forecasting skill is not good, with our long-range numerical models having very little skill past three weeks. Furthermore, our main seasonal forecasting tool with any skill, the relationship between El Nino/La Nina and local weather, only explainsof the interannual (between years) variation. In addition, the state of the tropical Pacific (which determines whether we are in El Nino, La Nina or La Nada) often changes during the spring/summer.Earlier in the year it appeared that we would have a neutral (or La Nada) winter, but recently the waters of the tropical Pacific have cooled and the National Weather Service has released asee below)La Nina is associated with cooler than normal waters in the central and eastern tropical Pacific Ocean, with enhanced easterly trade winds near the equator and the shifting of convection (thunderstorms) westward in the Pacific.Atmosphere/ocean coupled models, such as the National Weather Service CFS, are predicting the tropical Pacific will cool further this winter (see graphic below of several of their predictions in time).And with all this input, the official NOAA/NWS Climate Prediction Center forecast for this winter is that La Nina will be observed (see below).Generally cooler and wetter than normal. More snow than average in the mountains.Here are some statistics from the National Weather Service for the region encompassing western Washington and the western slopes of the Cascades. The eastern side of the State is similar.For precipitation, two plots are shown, one for fall (OND) and the other for mid-winter (JFM). The red line is the mean and 50% of the years are within the blue boxes. The extremes are shown by the "whiskers". La Nina years tend to be wetter than normal (neutral) and El Nino years.What about temperatures? A bit cooler in the autumn, but much cooler during mid-winter.The implications for snow is clear, especially after January 1.... a higher probability of the white stuff, particularly in the mountains.The strength of this relationship depends on the amplitude of La Nina, and at this point the models are only going for a modest one. And the La Nina/El Nino connection is not dominant, with natural variability being larger. Finally, one should NOT expect more precipitation than last winter, which was the wettest on record by several measures.But after the smoke and heat of last summer, I suspect many Northwesteners are breathing a sigh of relief. And the upcoming week promises plenty of clouds and rain to get us in the mood.Had to retouch this one recently for a purpose that I'll reveal later this summer, but I thought to update the image here as well. Did the original drawing in 2012.Black & white version over here: ullakko.deviantart.com/art/Yav… Yavanna Kementári from Tolkien's Silmarillion.Ink drawing + copics + photoshop.From The Silmarillion by J. R. R. Tolkien:"The spouse of Aulë is Yavanna, the Giver of Fruits. She is the lover of all things that grow in the earth, and all their countless forms she holds in her mind, from the trees like towers in forests long ago to the moss upon stones or the small and secret things in the mould. In reverence Yavanna is next to Varda among the Queens of the Valar. In the form of a woman she is tall, and robed in green; but at times she takes other shapes. Some there are who have seen her standing like a tree under heaven, crowned with the Sun; and from all its branches there spilled a golden dew upon the barren earth, and it grew green with corn; but the roots of the tree were in the waters of Ulmo, and the winds of Manwë spoke in its leaves. Kementári, Queen of the Earth, she is surnamed in the Eldarin tongue."Two textbooks given out to Jordanian school children caused an uproar among anti-Zionist groups in the Hashemite Kingdom recently by listing Israel on the map of the Middle East – but failing to include Jordan and Palestine.
The textbooks, which were distributed by the Jordanian education ministry among students in grades one through 12, teach students about health; but a drawn map featured on some of the pages seems to relay a skewed lesson in geography: While Israel, Syria, Lebanon, Saudi Arabia and Iraq are all marked, Jordan isn't. However, cities in the Hashemite Kingdom, including Amman, Irbid and Zarqa are listed.
Related stories:
"In effect, the exclusion of these names annexes Palestine to Jordan," the West Bank Association said in a statement. "Anyone who recognizes the Zionist entity eliminates Jordan and Palestine."
One of the images
According to the association, one of the books that feature the map warns students against smoking, while the other deals with proper eating habits. The books were part of a series financed by the American foreign assistance agency USAID.
"This step intentionally and offensively misleads children under the guise of imparting health awareness," the group said.
The Jordanian Association against Zionism echoed the sentiment, claiming that the exclusions were not made unwittingly. The fact that the map does list the Golan Heights as an occupied territory, the group argued, but does not specify other occupied regions – referring to Palestine – indicates the omission was intentional.
Intentional attempt to'misguide' students?
The group called on all "respectable teachers" to refuse to give out the books, and "warn the students about the dangers that they contain."
Professional groups in Jordan were also enraged by the inclusion of Israel in the map, faulting the books with perpetuating "new terms" that Jordanians oppose.
"If it wasn't for our students and teachers' vigilance, these books would have continued to be distributed and to pollute our pupils' sensibilities by imbuing the word 'Israel' – an oppressive entity – and excluding Jordan from the map."
Dissent under the guise of health education?
The chairman of the Jordanian agronomists' association, Mahmoud Abu Ghanima, said the books should be pulled out, and those who helped distribute them should be indicted.
In an interview with the Ad-Dustour newspaper, the chairman of the teachers' association, Mustafa Rawashdeh, further called for the indictment of those responsible for the mishap.
The education ministry, in turn, told the newspaper it has established a committee to probe the allegations.
Follow Ynetnews on Facebook and TwitterParquet Courts Live at Third Man Records to be Released March 3rd
Third Man Records is excited to announce the March 3rd release of Parquet Courts: Live At Third Man Records--the latest addition to the Live At Third Man series.
Parquet Courts brought a sweltering performance to the hallowed grounds of Third Man’s Blue Room on June 5th of last year--and very fortunately, TMR was able to lovingly capture it with their one-of-a-kind, direct-to-acetate recording process. The set included a dynamic selection of songs from last year’s critically acclaimed album Sunbathing Animal, as well as the 2013 EP, Tally All The Things That You Broke. The end result? A record that will have your feet stompin’ and body rockin’ as soon as the needle hits. Track listing included below for your perusal.
1. Duckin & Dodgin
2. Bodies
3. Black & White
4. Vienna II
5. Always Back In Town
6. Dear Ramona
7. Descend
8. Instant Disassembly
9. Raw Milk
10. Into the Garden
11. Sunbathing Animal
For a tasty sample, check out clips of “Sunbathing Animal” and “Vienna II”below:Three nonprofit workers investigating labor conditions at a Chinese factory making shoes for Ivanka Trump’s eponymous fashion brand have been arrested or gone missing.
Police arrested labor rights activist Hua Haifeng on suspicion of illegal surveillance, the man’s wife told the Associated Press yesterday (May 30). Hua and two colleagues lost contact with their employer China Labor Watch this past weekend, said Li Qiang, who heads the New York-based NGO. He believes authorities are holding all three men incommunicado. The Ivanka Trump brand declined to comment on the matter when contacted by the newswire.
The activists were investigating a Jiangxi province-based factory owned by Ganzhou Huajian International Shoe City, a subsidiary of the Huajian Group and one of the suppliers for Ivanka Trump’s fashion brand. According to Li, the men had documented excessive overtime and a base salary below minimum wage at the factory, and were attempting to confirm evidence of the illegal use of student interns. One of the activists, Su Heng, had been working undercover as an employee at the factory for a month.
The arrest and disappearances came amid an ongoing crackdown against foreign NGOs deemed a threat to China’s stability and national interests. A law enacted in January requires any such organization operating in China to find a government sponsor, register with the police, and submit annual reports on its financing, among other requirements. As a result, some foreign groups have closed their operations in China, while others are still struggling to navigate the red tape.
“Under president Xi Jinping, the Chinese government has promulgated new laws, as well as increased surveillance, to tighten control over these groups,” said Maya Wang, a China researcher at Human Rights Watch. “The fact that they were investigating Ivanka Trump’s brand likely add to this heightened level of official scrutiny.”
According to Li, CLW has not been registered in China under the new law. Before this past weekend some of the group’s undercover investigations had been stopped by police after being reported by factory owners, but such instances hadn’t led to arrests.
The Huajian Group makes 10,000 to 20,000 pairs of shoes a year for Ivanka Trump’s brand, a fraction of the 20 million pairs it produces every year, AP noted. Repeated calls to Huajian made by Quartz went unanswered today (May 31).
Advocacy groups, foreign or not, are having a rough time in China. An LGBT event in the western city of Xi’an was forced to cancel this past weekend, with the organizers being held by police for eight hours. Last week Lee Ming-cheh, a Taiwanese human rights activist detained a few months ago in the southern city of Zhuhai, was formally arrested on the charge of subverting state power.
Visen Liu contributed reporting.J. Robert McClure III
In recent years thousands of Americans have moved from states plagued by high taxes and stifling regulations to states such as Florida and Texas, where entrepreneurship is encouraged and residents get to keep more of what they earn.
Even so, as highlighted in a study newly released by the Institute for Justice (IJ) and the James Madison Institute (JMI) titled "Florida's 'Dirty Dozen': Twelve Repealers That Can Boost Business, Create Jobs, and Change Florida's Economic Policy for the Better," there's one important arena — occupational licensing and regulation — where Florida could change course to truly benefit job-seekers and consumers.
Consider, for instance, the plight of an ambitious young woman we'll call "Maria." She's a recent high-school graduate. Her goal in life is to pursue a craft that she has learned to love: doing hairstyling and makeup.
Maria's ambitious, too; her goals include eventually opening her own salon. Yet she's also realistic. Although she has practiced her craft, cutting hair and giving makeup tips to friends and family, she knows she'll need more training.
But imagine her surprise when she learns that she must undergo 1,200 hours of instruction at a "beauty school," where the cost for tuition, fees, books and supplies — at one of Florida's least expensive providers — tops $16,425. Pursuing her dream means going into debt to pay for training far in excess of what reasonably should be required.
Preserving such obstacles is probably quite popular among those already working in that career field, because it excludes potential competitors. No doubt it's also popular among the schools that provide the requisite hundreds of hours of instruction.
At the same time, however, it's a disadvantage not only to aspiring cosmetologists, but also to consumers, who see prices inflated and their choices diminished.
Unfortunately, in Florida these kinds of career-entry obstacles are not unique to cosmetology. In fact, they extend across a wide array of occupations. This new study highlights a "dirty dozen" that IJ regards as among the worst.
JMI, which for many years has battled against the kinds of regulatory overkill that mar Florida's otherwise excellent business climate, agrees that the issue deserves immediate attention from the Legislature.
Mind you, neither JMI nor IJ opposes reasonable laws, rules and regulations to protect the public's health and safety. Nobody's freedom is unreasonably impaired, for instance, when dangerous substances are banned from use in our everyday products.
Unfortunately, governments too often go far beyond what's necessary to protect the public's health and safety. Nowhere is this more evident than in the regulation of various occupations.
Indeed, public officials too often use "safeguarding the public health" or "protecting consumers" as a pretext for allowing entrenched interests to create obstacles for potential competitors, thereby gaining an unfair advantage in what ought to be a free marketplace.
Other groups are monitoring Florida and are keenly aware of the negative impact of these types of regulations. The Mercatus Center at Virginia's George Mason University recently published a paper outlining such issues in Florida. The report highlights a need to reassess Florida's regulatory processes to ensure that new regulations don't inhibit our state's attractiveness to individuals and businesses. As the Mercatus study notes:
"If a regulatory action does not address a clear problem, then the action is unlikely to fix any problem (and may create more problems). And if alternatives are not formally considered, it is difficult to conclude that the chosen regulatory approach will accomplish the intended outcome and will do so at the least cost."
The Mercatus analysis includes more than a dozen studies of occupational licensing and regulations. In nearly every case, the prices of goods or services supplied by the profession increased — sometimes as much as 100 percent — as a result of regulation.
This strongly suggests a need to reassess the processes that lawmakers currently use in dealing with occupational licensing and regulations. Too often the current processes lead to overreaching regulations that stifle entrepreneurship, raise the cost of living, and makes it harder for ambitious young people such as "Maria" to achieve their goals.
J. Robert McClure is the president and CEO of The James Madison Institute, a nonpartisan policy center headquartered in Tallahassee (http://www.jamesmadison.org). Contact him at bob@jamesmadison.org, and follow him on Twitter @DrBobMcClure.
Read or Share this story: http://on.tdo.com/1ieuaak© Sputnik/Andrey Stenin
Washington Outmaneuvered in Syria
© The PeoplesCube.com
'Hot war' between US and Russia
© Sputnik/Alexander Vilf
"Any missile or airstrikes on the territory controlled by the Syrian government will create a clear threat to Russian servicemen. Russian air defense system crews are unlikely to have time to determine in a'straight line' the exact flight paths of missiles and then who the warheads belong to. And all the illusions of amateurs about the existence of 'invisible' jets will face a disappointing reality."
the shooting down of even one US warplane would be a severe psychological blow to America
The Empire has no clothes
"Have no doubt, the US Navy is prepared to go wherever it needs to go, at any time, and stay there for as long as necessary in response to our leadership's call to project our strategic influence."
Washington must reduce its military presence in NATO member-states to the number they were at the moment of signing the plutonium disposal agreement on September 1, 2000.
to the number they were at the moment of signing the plutonium disposal agreement on September 1, 2000. Repeal of all sanctions against Russian regions, persons and companies introduced by the US over Russia's response to the Kiev coup, while also paying compensation for damages caused by them, including the damages caused by the counter-sanctions that Russia was forced to impose on Western governments and companies.
If you happen to be a member of the 'international community' - i.e., if you live in North America, Europe or Australia/New Zealand - you may have noticed a subtle shift in recent years in what you 'know' about Russia and its president, Vladimir Putin. From being just another country that you might like to visit one day, Russia and its leader have been transformed into the source of much of the world's problems.From 'Russian aggression in Europe' to 'annexing Crimea and fomenting civil war in Ukraine' to'shooting down passenger planes' to 'hacking American democracy' to 'bombing innocent civilians and hospitals' (and bunny rabbits) to 'creating the European refugee crisis' to having a monopoly on'state-sponsored doping' and'supporting terrorists in Syria', there doesn't seem to be much that Russia hasn't done to royally screw up the planet.Of course, the astute reader will have noticed that most of these allegations come from American politicians, political pundits and newspapers.In recent weeks, the level of anti-Russian vitriol coming out of places like the US State Department has reached such a pitch that we all might be excused for taking up yoga in anticipation of the moment when we must perform the necessary maneuver to kiss our collective arse goodbye in a global nuclear conflagration.But the existential threat of a 'hot war' between Russia and the USA is more the stuff of nightmares and propaganda than reality.Over the course of the last 70 years, the USA and its allies have expanded their control (by one means or another and in one form or another) over most of the planet, with the notable exception of Russia and China. When the Soviet Union 'fell' in 1991, there was much jubilation and anticipation in the halls of power in America - jubilation that capitalism had triumphed in the 'clash of civilizations', and anticipation of a boon for American multi-national corporations as Russia's vast energy resources would be 'opened up'. During the 1990s, determined efforts were made by Western agents to seize control of Russia's resources. But then along came Vladimir Putin.Elected president in 2000, Putin spoiled the West's looting spree, kicked out or assimilated the Russian oligarchs and their Western buddies, and progressively took back control of Russia, its resources and people. But securing the homeland was only the first step for the president with the'gunslinger's gait '. Putin also embarked on a quiet but profound modernization of the Russian military, all the while highlighting Russia's interest in cooperating with the West and making nice with its politicians.But Western predatory, militarized capitalism still had its sights on Russia, and the assumption in Washington was that Russia would eventually capitulate to the fait accompli of the New American Century. After all, US-led 'globalization' had made it all but impossible for any country to forge an independent path; even Russia with its vast oil and gas resources (on which Europe depends) couldn't ignore the political reality of Washington's imposing control.If Russia needed a reminder, that was available in the form of 'destabilization' efforts by Western-backed 'open society' NGOs inside Russia and the obvious fact of Europe's complete subservience to American dictates. In addition, US military prowess was being consistently shoved in Putin's face with the continual expansion of NATO in Eastern Europe.By 2013, and much to Washington's frustration, Putin still held to the outdated concept of national sovereignty and Russia's right to expand its influence and partnerships abroad, in particular in Syria and Iran. So Washington decided that a clear message to 'get with the program' was needed. That warning came in early 2014, in the form of a Western-backed coup d'état in long-term Russian ally An embarrassingly pro-Western client regime in Kiev was installed with the clear implication that Russia would soon be denied access to its historical Black Sea port in Sevastopol which facilitated Russian naval access to the Mediterranean., which had just a few months previously brokered a diplomatic deal to dispose of Syrian stockpiles of chemical weapons, thus preventing'shock and awe' in Syria at the eleventh hour The Ukraine coup was a 'bridge too far' for Russia and when millions of ethnic Russians in Crimea recoiled at the idea of being ruled and abused by neo-Nazi stooges in Kiev, Russia facilitated an independence/accession referendum and Crimea, along with the Black Sea port of Sevastopol, became part of Russia with the support of 96% of voters. When ethnic Russians in eastern Ukraine reacted the same way as Crimeans, and demanded their independence and potential accession to the Russian Federation, the Russian government ensured that, at the very least, they had the means to defend themselves from Kiev's onslaught.Washington, of course, was outraged at the idea that any nation-state would dare challenge its 'exceptional' right to act globally as it sees fit, even when it meant royally screwing over that nation.. When you have complete control of the airwaves, it's easy to spin a turkey shoot against an inferior army, and the subsequent resource grab against a defenseless population, as liberating people in a war for freedom against a 'brutal dictator'.But even those few countries that avoided being turned into vassals of Empire, like Russia, were never expected by Washington to be in a position (or have the temerity) to directly challenge America's 'national interest' in controlling the world. When Russia did so in Ukraine, the world got its first glimpse of the truth behind American supremacy, andFaced with being checkmated in Ukraine and loudly denouncing Russia's 'annexation' of Crimea, you might think that this was the opportunity for the USA to 'nuke Russia', or at least begin to prepare the ground for such. But apparently that wasn't an option. Surely a more conventional military confrontation was possible and would succeed in putting Russia 'back in its place'? A fleet of warplanes and ships sailing up the Black Sea to liberate Crimea should have solved the issue, right? It seems that that wasn't 'on the table' either.No indeed, what the brilliant minds in the Pentagon - with every fiber of US military muscle at their disposal - came up with in response to being slapped in the face over Ukraine, was lots of name-calling baseless accusations and slander of every imaginable type against Russia. They even went so far as to shoot down a Malaysian airliner over eastern Ukraine and blame it on Putin himself, a desperately despicable move aimed at generating grist for the anti-Russia black propaganda mill.By mid-summer 2015, relative calm had been restored in eastern Ukraine, but the conflict in Syria was still raging. Launched in 2011 by armed'rebels' aiming to overthrow the Syrian government, the outbreak of this 'civil war' had nothing to do with the Syrian people. Instead, within a year, Syria was flooded with foreign mercenaries from dozens of countries, all very well-armed and organized.Who, exactly, facilitated their move into Syria is still unknown, although it is known that many came from Libya which had been destroyed by NATO forces in 2011, and it seems rather coincidental that the'refugee crisis', involving the transit of hundreds of thousands of people across the Syrian border, exploded around the same time.In one of the most transparently farcical episodes of American foreign policy interventions (at least since 1979 in Afghanistan), the US State Dept. - which had been calling Assad a 'brutal dictator' for at least 2 years - declared the foreign jihadi army to be 'freedom fighters'. free, fair and transparent, the fully formed and battle-ready 'ISIS' appeared and joined the US' war against Syria and its people.Born out of 'al-Qaeda in Iraq' under al-Zarqawi, which itself was partly a creation of the US military, 'ISIS' and 'al-Nusra' (aka 'al-Qaeda in Syria'), all united under the black banner of pirated 'Islam', have been armed and protected by US forces in Syria and used to achieve the US imperial goal of taking control of the country. Mindbogglingly, fighting these same terror groups has been given as the reason for the US military presence (covert initially, but now overt) in Syria.So it was not surprising that, throughout 2014 and most of 2015, as ISIS rampaged westwards across Syria and claimed responsibility for a string of brutal mass murders in Europe and the Middle East,As a result, by the summer of 2015, the Syrian army was being hard-pressed by Washington's terrorists, and the future of the Assad government was in doubt.With a NATO bombing campaign (a rerun of Libya in 2011) to depose Assad looking increasingly likely, Russia chose to intervene to protect its strategic interests in the region and rid Syria of America's jihadis. In doing so, Russia both called the US' bluff that it was 'fighting terrorists' in Syria andSo how far will this go? The suggestion that the Syrian conflict could'spiral out of control' and end in a nuclear war between the USA and Russia is not credible, for several reasons. The people who direct US foreign policy are fundamentally sick people. Their overriding and insatiable lust is for wealth and the illusion of power it affords them.The only plausible scenario in which the US would launch a nuclear strike against Russia, i.e. where Russia could not strike back. It is widely accepted, even in the halls of power in the US, that this is not possible. But even if it were, the prelude to such an attack would undoubtedly involve severe aggression by the US against Russia because it would do so safe in |
in Cairo on February 18, 2003, the same day that the radical Egyptian cleric Abu Omar arrived in Cairo after being abducted in Italy, leading reporters to speculate that the Gulfstream IV may have been the plane used to render Abu Omar.[10] American and Italian intelligence officers were later charged with Abu Omar's abduction.[11]
In addition to the trip to Cairo, between June 2002 and January 2005, the aircraft made 51 trips to Guantánamo Bay, as well as 82 visits to Dulles International Airport and Andrews Air Force Base. It also visited U.S. air bases at Ramstein and Rhein-Main in Germany, Afghanistan, Morocco, Dubai, Jordan, Italy, Japan, Switzerland, Azerbaijan and the Czech Republic.[10]
See also [ edit ]
References [ edit ]According to a report by Young Journalists Club (YJC), as translated by IFP, Saudi King Salman bin Abdulaziz Al Saud has cancelled all financial concessions given to princes of the royal family, and is paying only their monthly salaries.
He might also reconsider the staggering salaries of the Royal Family, the Arabic-language Ray al-Youm newspaper reported.
Earlier, due to the oil price slump, the Saudi King had decided to shrink the salaries of ministers and senior staff within the framework of austerity measures to tackle the costs of the war in Yemen and support for the terrorists in Syria.
He also called for a stop in foreign investments and started firing foreign workers.
Informed sources say the King has decided to cancel all financial concessions of the Princes and will only pay their monthly salaries.
According to the sources, it is not unlikely that the Saudi King decides to cancel paying the salaries to senior Saudi princes who have big plans of investment and hold bank accounts of hundreds of millions of dollars, as some of the princes’ money go beyond $1bn.
It is also stressed that Saudi Princes avoid any financial and political scandals in western countries, particularly in the US, because Riyadh is not ready to defend them due to dire foreign policy and relations.
According to this report, Saudi princes are accustomed to commit financial and sexual scandals in the West.
Riyadh is facing a critical situation, because, on the one hand, it has concerns about escalating domestic dissatisfactions, and on the other hand, its foreign relations, particularly with Egypt, are getting into crisis.
Also the relations between Riyadh and Washington have faced a severe crisis due to the approval of JASTA (the bill that allows the prosecution of Saudi Arabia in US courts over 9/11 attacks).
Saudi authorities are concerned about the loss of hundreds of billions of dollars in the US as Washington might freeze the assets as compensation for the victims of 9/11 attacks.Shortly after the Moon formed, an asteroid smacked into its southern hemisphere and gouged out a truly enormous crater, the South Pole-Aitken basin, almost 1,500 miles across and more than five miles deep.
"This is the biggest, deepest crater on the Moon -- an abyss that could engulf the United States from the East Coast through Texas," said Noah Petro of NASA's Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt, Md. The impact punched into the layers of the lunar crust, scattering that material across the Moon and into space. The tremendous heat of the impact also melted part of the floor of the crater, turning it into a sea of molten rock.
That was just an opening shot. Asteroid bombardment over billions of years has left the lunar surface pockmarked with craters of all sizes, and covered with solidified lava, rubble, and dust. Glimpses of the original surface, or crust, are rare, and views into the deep crust are rarer still.
Fortunately, a crater on the edge of the South Pole-Aitken basin may provide just such a view. Called the Apollo Basin and formed by the later impact of a smaller asteroid, it still measures a respectable 300 miles across.
"It's like going into your basement and digging a deeper hole," said Petro. "We believe the central part of the Apollo Basin may expose a portion of the Moon's lower crust. If correct, this may be one of just a few places on the Moon where we have a view into the deep lunar crust, because it's not covered by volcanic material as many other such deep areas are. Just as geologists can reconstruct Earth's history by analyzing a cross-section of rock layers exposed by a canyon or a road cut, we can begin to understand the early lunar history by studying what's being revealed in Apollo."
Petro presents his result March 4 during the Lunar and Planetary Science meeting in Houston, Texas.
Petro and his team made the discovery with the Moon Mineralogy Mapper (M3), a NASA instrument on board India's Chandrayaan-1 lunar-orbiting spacecraft. Analysis of the light (spectra) in images from this instrument revealed that portions of the interior of Apollo have a similar composition to the impact melt in the South Pole-Aitken (SPA) basin.
As you go deeper into the Moon, the crust contains minerals have greater amounts of iron. When the Moon first formed, it was largely molten. Minerals containing heavier elements, like iron, sank down toward the core, and minerals with lighter elements, like silicon, potassium, and sodium, floated to the top, forming the original lunar crust.
"The asteroid that created the SPA basin probably carved through the crust and perhaps into the upper mantle. The impact melt that solidified to form the central floor of SPA would have been a mixture of all those layers. We expect to see that it has slightly more iron than the bottom of Apollo, since it went deeper into the crust. This is what we found with M3. However, we also see that this area in Apollo has more iron than the surrounding lunar highlands, indicating Apollo has uncovered a layer of the lunar crust between what is typically seen on the surface and that in the deepest craters like SPA," said Petro.
The lower crust exposed by Apollo survived the impact that created SPA probably because it was on the edge of SPA, several hundred miles from where the impact occurred, according to Petro.
Both SPA and Apollo are estimated to be among the oldest lunar craters, based on the large number of smaller craters superimposed on top of them. As time passes, old craters get covered up with new ones, so a crater count provides a relative age; a crater riddled with additional craters is older than one that appears relatively clean, with few craters overlying it. As craters form, they break up the crust and form a regolith, a layer of broken up rock and dust, like a soil on the Earth.
Although the Apollo basin is ancient and covered with regolith, it still gives a useful view of the lower crust because the smaller meteorite impacts that create most of the regolith don't scatter material very far.
"Calculations of how the regolith forms indicate that at least 50 percent of the regolith is locally derived," said Petro. "So although what we're seeing with M3 has been ground up, it still mostly represents the lower crust."
It's likely Earth wasn't spared the abusive asteroid bombardment experienced by the Moon. Giant craters on other worlds across the solar system, including Mercury and Mars, indicate the rain from the heavens was widespread. However, on Earth, the record of these events was rubbed out long ago. The crust gets recycled by plate tectonics and weathered by wind and rain, erasing ancient impact craters.
"The Apollo and SPA basins give us a window into the earliest history of the Moon, and the Moon gives us a window into the violent youth of Earth," said Petro.
The research was funded by NASA's Discovery program, which conducts lower-cost, highly focused planetary science investigations designed to enhance our understanding of the solar system. M3 is managed by NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory, Pasadena, Calif. Petro's team includes researchers from NASA Goddard, the University of Maryland, College Park, Brown University, Providence, R.I., Analytical Imaging and Geophysics, LLC, Boulder, Colo., the University of Tennessee, Knoxville, the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency, Arlington, Va., and the Johns Hopkins University Applied Physics Laboratory, Laurel, Md.The FBI and at least two congressional committees are investigating any ties or possible collusion between President Trump's campaign and Russian intelligence services believed to have tried to help Trump win the election. Americans favor an independent investigation of these allegations 52 percent to 23 percent, according to an Associated Press/NORC poll released Saturday. On Sunday, Trump reiterated what he believes the real story is here:
The real story turns out to be SURVEILLANCE and LEAKING! Find the leakers. — Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) April 2, 2017
The president and his allies have been trying to make the story about how the press learned of damaging information about Trump's aides and Russia — a process story. But here's the thing: The leakers may be a story, but they are not the story. The "real story" is that the president of the Unites States and his associates are under active federal investigation for possibly helping a foreign power interfere in a U.S. presidential election. No amount of wishful thinking will make "leaking" the story. You can ask Hillary Clinton's campaign.
In late August, WikiLeaks chief Julian Assange hinted that he would be releasing election-changing information on Clinton. Nobody (except maybe Roger Stone) knew what Assange had — John Podesta's stolen private emails. Clinton allies noted Fox News used to hate WikiLeaks; Clinton critics on Fox News were giddy. Greg Gutfeld had reservations, and he had a panel of five people on his show to discuss whether what Assange was doing was okay. They were split, but comedian Jeff Dye made an inconvenient, newly relevant argument.
When hackers release nude selfies of celebrities, "everybody felt that that's a violation," Gutfeld said, "but we're okay with Hillary because we don't like Hillary." Dye disagreed: "No, we're okay with it because it's much bigger information, like huge news." He gave an example of a woman finding out her boyfriend was cheating by searching his phone: "The guy will be like, 'That's an invasion of my privacy,' they're like, 'That's not really the point anymore.'"
"When something bigger comes out, you don't get to go, 'That's an invasion of my privacy,'" Dye said. "Now you've got to deal with the bigger thing that they've found."
Like it or not, "we live in a world where we think because nobody caught us, that it's okay," Dye said. "What you do in private is what you are as a human being. That's the real you." Peter WeberIt’s located about 2,000 miles north of Bray’s Point, but local UFO “watchers” here feel a special kinship with those in Nome, Alaska, because both places sit on the very edge of the continent and both remote sites have experienced a rash of alien abductions; with Nome now more famous thanks to real life imitating art with the recent re-lease of the 2009 film “The Fourth Kind” that’s set in real-life Nome. The horror of a close encounter of the fourth kind – experienced by people both here at Bray’s Point and in mass up in Nome -- say those who’ve been abducted by non-human intelligences is memories are so buried in one’s mind that it creates another compartment in one’s head. “The people I’ve talked to have this hidden current of memory about their abduction that’s similar to a film rolling on; with their memories so vivid, so close, that you don’t dare challenge them it’s not true,” explains Oregon UFO “watcher” Errol from his home at Bray’s Point where he hosts those who feel the need to look for UFOs and remember, unwillingly, their close encounter of a forth kind.
Real life and film’s 3:33 connection
“If they want proof, than ask ‘why is it that each and every one who’s been abducted stops and notices the clock when it reads 3:33?’ I can talk to someone here at Bray’s whose repressed memories of their abduction, and they tell me about waking up at 3:33 a.m. each night or, for whatever reasons, they stop and look at a clock during the day at 3:33,” adds Errol.
In turn, when one listens to the Nome, Alaska, radio station KNOM or reports from Fairbanks or watch cable TV and broadband in Nome, or even read reports over the past 20 plus years in Alaska’s oldest newspaper, the “Nome Nugget,” there’s plenty of references to “disappearances."
Moreover, there's almost "regular UFO sightings" in the Nome region throughout the year, with ufologists thinking this may be a region for a sort of command center for alien life on Earth.
And, if you listen and read between the lines, explains Errol of the e-mails he’s received from ufologist now studying Nome abductions, “there’s this 333, or someone mentioning they awoke after seeing a white owl and noted it was 3:33 a.m.”
At the same time, Nome’s new claim to fame is that this secluded community of about 4,000 residents – who live on a remote area of Alaska “on the southern Seward Peninsula” – has experienced a large number of “unexplained disappearances,” with recent “possible abductions by non-human intelligences” as recent as Jan. 29 when a husband and wife “tourists” disappeared.
FBI called to Nome to find missing
Also, the FBI continues to decline comment about either a rash of disappearances back in 2000 and “continued disappearances ever since,” state local media.
And, both CNN and other national and international media have descended upon Nome after this so-called “string of disappearances” have increased to a sort of Bermuda Triangle effect where people living or visiting this region that’s not far from the ancient civilization unearthed along the Bering Strait have vanished, and “who can hear their screams,” said the family of one man who was reported “missing” in early 2012 “when we’re so remote in this small town on the West Coast of already remote Alaska.”
In turn, the documentary-drama “The Fourth Kind” points to this epidemic of disappearances getting so bad that the FBI started visiting Nome in 2005 to investigate; while CNN and the Anchorage Daily News reported how the “victims were largely native men” and also “Nome women and their children.”
Officially, “nine bodies were never found,” according to reports in the Anchorage Daily News; while other local “word of mouth citizen journalists” estimate “many hundreds have disappeared over the past 10 years.”
Fourth Kind mirrors real life a bit too real
While the film “The Fourth Kind” was not well received by critics in 2009, “it’s gotten better with age because much of what it presents is not fiction but actual real life interviews. This is not a Hollywood special effects film, but a documentary with actors filling in the gaps,” explains Errol who said he’s seen the film “a dozen or more times” at informal meetings of Pacific Northwest area UFO watcher groups that “get together in those non-descript motel rooms for meetings and discussions.”
In turn, "The Fourth Kind” relies on “the found footage technique,” where the film makers use a split screen of “real footage” and re-enactments starring Milla Jovovich playing the real life doctor who recorded people who claimed they were “abducted by non-human intelligences.”
While senior officials in Nome, where the film is based, deny any claims of “UFOs” or “aliens” or “abductions” per say, other city officials who are no longer in public office assert “this is not science fiction,” but “real when a child goes missing and you never find him or her.”
Moreover, the mayor of Nome has recently compared this 2009 film – that’s gained a new following in Europe and Asia where it was re-released last summer – with the “Blair Witch Project,” and stated that it’s not true, while still not explaining why so many people in the Nome area have gone missing.
Fourth Kind shares just the facts
Those who’ve viewed either the theater release or the recent DVD release of "The Fourth Kind” -- with deleted scenes of the actual interviews with adducted Nome locals who rise in the air in uncontrollable fits when re-living their abduction at the hands of “hostile aliens” – claim “it’s powerful because all you need is one on camera interview to be real to shake your world forever.”
And, the actual footage of real people being interviewed is shocking; say those who’ve recently re-visited the film on DVD for a close look at the deleted scenes from the actual police camera footage and doctor interview footage.
In turn, the film does not worry “if you believe” because it tells viewers up front that it’s up to you to decide.
For example, the title itself is derived from a "scale of measurement" that was "developed in 1972" to categorize alien encounters, best known through its use in Steven Spielberg's "Close Encounters of the Third Kind." Thus, the film explains that on the scale, the first kind of encounter is defined as a UFO sighting; the second, collected evidence of extraterrestrials; and the third kind is contact; while the “fourth kind” is actual alien abduction and it’s not pretty when viewing actual victims re-living the horror while noticing those numbers 333 that you too who are reading this may also notice in your day-to-day lives?
“That’s why the Fourth Kind it rings true for me and many others,” adds Errol at Bray’s Point.
Alien abduction is hard to prove
While Errol says it’s hard enough to “prove” a UFO sighting “because everybody and their brother has seen strange lights in the sky, an alien abduction is viewed by ufologists such as Errol as the most difficult to prove because “the victim either becomes a bit crazy afterwards, and nobody seems to believe them, or they simply vanish.”
Errol then points to page after page of “missing children” posters that he’s downloaded from the FBI and various missing children police reports nationwide.
“What’s happened to all these missing children? If just one out of the more than 300,000 or more that are currently went missing since last year is a ‘forth kind’ alien abduction than that’s all you need.”
Fourth Kind director releases theories
NBC Universal, parent company of distributor Universal Studios, stated in a press release after the initial release of “The Fourth Kind” in 2009 that it’s not fiction.
In turn, rookie writer/director Olatunde Osunsanmi was unavailable for comment, stated NBC Universal, but according to a fact sheet handed out at early screenings of The Fourth Kind, Osunsanmi stated that he “discovered the disappearances that plagued Nome in 2004 when a friend told him of a Dr. Abigail Tyler.”
During sleep studies "in fall 2000, the therapist's patients, under hypnosis, exhibited behaviors that suggested encounters with nonhumans," explained the Fourth Kind press statement; while also explaining how Doctor Tyler “recorded footage depicting disturbing scenes, which director Osunsanmi uses alongside re-enactments starring Milla Jovovich and Will Patton in a split screen.”
The press statement also explains why Jovovich informs the audience right up front that she "plays the role of Dr. Abigail Tyler, and that the images they are about to see are very disturbing.”
Image source of the movie poster for "The Fourth Kind,” a 2009 film that mirrors real life testimony of people from Nome, Alaska, who say they were abducted by “non-human intelligences.” The “fourth kind” denotes “alien abductions” that’s become the elephant in the room for many ufologists who fear that people already don’t believe those “lights in the sky are UFOs,” and those who are abducted either become a bit crazy or simply vanish. Photo courtesy Wikipedia http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Fourth_KindThe Fire trained for the final time in Tucson Friday morning under perfect skies and 80 degree temperatures, a far cry from the weather bound to meet them at the home opener just over 3 short weeks away.
After training, Fire manager Frank Yallop granted Fire Confidential an exclusive interview, covering a variety of topics. He addressed the introduction of Mike Magee back to preseason training after a two week absence, as well as discussion of the salary cap, the Austin Berry trade, and the release of Federico Puppo. Here's a blow-by-blow from the Fire gaffer:
FC: Talk about having Mike Magee back in camp for the close of preseason. How important is it to have him back for morale and his leadership?
FY: It's huge. The success Chicago had once Mike came on board last year was a big part of why they had a great run. I'm really looking forward to working with Mike to get him game sharp since he's had a few weeks off, but he looked pretty good this morning.
FC: With what you've seen offensively up to this point of the preseason, what is that going to do to your plans offensively, and how do you think his game will change if any?
FY: I think what I've liked about our group thusfar is we've had a ton of movement, and it's not just been static and guys stuck in their spots. Mike's one of the best in the league at finding space and drifting to spots and he's a good soccer player, and he's a very good finisher. We've got to make sure he lands on the ball in the box. Having said all that, the way we set up is good defensively. I think we've got to make sure we are nice and compact, and that will help guys like Mike to get his chances close to goal. Hopefully we're not dropping off, but we're squeezing the play in their half and winning the ball back in good spots.
FC: There's been a lot of speculation about Mike's absence from camp. Contractually, is he coming in under the same contract he ended 2013 with for the Fire?
FY: He is, yes. It was all personal reasons anyway, so everything's above board. We've said it all along, that whenever people are not in camp, everyone gets the wrong idea of that. There's never been an issue between the club, the league, and Mike, so it's been dealt with, he's back here, and everything's fine.
FC: Is Magee going to be match fit in time for the season opener against Chivas USA?
FY: We'll see. It's going to be tough, but he'll be involved. We'll have to see how he gets on over the next few days, but this team's been working pretty hard and pretty good for a little while. Obviously it's never a punishment for any player, but Mike needs to get himself game sharp and game ready, but knowing him he'll be pretty close.
FC: Earlier this week you sent Austin Berry to Philadelphia for allocation money. Your first priority when coming in to Chicago was to shore up the backline. Can you give some of the team's reasoning and rationale for trading away a former Rookie of the Year, as well as someone who played every minute of the 2013 season?
FY: We were still over the cap. For us to get allocation money and move some salary, people were interested in Austin. He was the only one we could really move, to be honest. I like him, but when you're over the cap, something's got to give. We have certain players we can move. I've tried to move a number of players, but it's not because I want to move them, it's because I had to move them. Austin was the one that made sense, because we did pick up Ianni and Hurtado, so it was the only spot I felt we could probably get away with it. Having said all that, I like the kid but something had to give.
FC: This week you also moved Federico Puppo off the books. Was that another move where Chicago was able to free up some cap space, or did the club take a hit with terminating his contract?
FY: We still have no cap space, so I think what gets out there is a bit of a myth, as if all the sudden now we've got room. These moves just get us cap compliant. With everything we've done so far, we're still over the cap a little bit. All the things we're doing are moves to get ready for March 1st. I think we've done a nice job with that, and now we're getting right down to the wire, but I think with what we have we won't be over the cap, and we've got to start again once that's done. We start to look at what we have and work through this season. Hopefully we have a great year, and we'll have a bit of flexibility in next year's end of the season. I'm not making excuses, but it's just the way it is. I never make excuses, but I'm excited about working with this group.
FC: You talked last week about hoping to bring in Grant Ward after he returned to Tottenham Hotspur. He's obviously someone you want to bring back over via a loan. Is there any updates on Ward's status?
FY: Yeah, we're trying to do something with Tottenham at the moment. Nothing's secured, the talks are still going on. I can't really say if they're positive or negative, we've got to work a lot of things out, but I think we saw enough in Grant that I'd love to have him back, we're just hoping Tottenham see it the same way. He's their player, they get to loan him to us, so we've got to make sure they're happy with everything, but we're hoping to have an answer pretty soon.
FC: Is part of that working under the cap and limitations?
FY: A little bit, yeah. He won't be on a big salary, I'll put it that way. Stuff like that, it's just working with teams and our relationship. With Tottenham, they've been really good to me and things we've done together, with Simon Dawkins mainly, so hopefully it gets ironed out and whether it's yes or no, we'll make an announcement real soon.
Weekly conference call notes
Frank Yallop and Brian Bliss addressed the media via conference call this afternoon and things got a bit testy when asked why Mike Magee wasn't made available as originally planned. When a suggestion was made that Magee himself should clear up public concerns about his situation and his absence Yallop seemed to take a bit of exception. "What's there to clear? He's practicing. You'll get to speak to him," he responded. "Like I said before it's a personal matter and that's what it is. There's no holding out nor is he getting shopped around. Mike's had certain thing he had to care of and since then he's back in town, he looks sharp and he's ready to go. He needs to catch up in his fitness."
Bliss added, "We don't believe it's a necessity to have Mike answer questions about his personal issues just like we're not delving into it either. He's going to be made available at some point."
Bliss said he has been in touch with (Magee's agent) Richard Motzkin "over the last week and half about 3 or 4 times" but there has been no discussion about contracts. "We were just checking in to see where Mike was at and how he was doing. Frank has had a little more contact with Mike himself while he was out and I had contact with the agent. It all hinged around that and not anything about a new deal," added the Fire's Technical Director.
Magee was involved in a second training session specifically for him while the conference call was taking place. Yallop expressed some concern about Magee's recovery from a hamstring injury and rushing him back into action sooner than he is ready to. "He's trained two days now. He's a fit kid but needs to catch up to speed missing two and half weeks, with a hamstring injury by the way, he's just getting over that. He looked pretty good today, we'll see how he gets on in the next week. There's no rush to get Mike back as soon as we can. I just want to make sure we don't push him too quickly and he re-injures anything."
While they weren't sure to what extent Magee would be available for the final game of preseason they also didn't want to commit to a starting spot for the season opener on March 9. "I would think he'll be available," said Yallop. "Whether or not he's in the right shape to start, we'll see. If Mike's fitness is good he'll be considered but I'm not saying definitely yet that he's going to play because that's not known at the moment." They will decide later in the coming week how much he plays against Chivas USA.
Budget work to doWASHINGTON - The United States plans to sell nearly $1 billion worth of warplanes, armored vehicles and surveillance aerostats to Iraq.
The deal includes 24 AT-6C Texan II light-attack aircraft, a turboprop plane manufactured by Beechcraft that has.50 caliber machine guns, advanced avionics and can carry precision-guided bombs, the Pentagon said.
The aircraft and related equipment and services are valued at $790 million.
The Pentagon's Defense Security Cooperation Agency informed Congress on Tuesday of the planned sale, which will go ahead unless lawmakers block the deal.
"The proposed sale of these aircraft, equipment and support will enhance the ability of the Iraqi forces to sustain themselves in their efforts to bring stability to Iraq and to prevent overflow of unrest into neighboring countries," the agency said in a notice.
The sale is the latest in a series of US weapons deals with Iraq as Baghdad seeks to bolster its armed forces amid rising violence linked to Al-Qaeda militants and sectarian divisions between the Shiite-led government and disgruntled Sunnis.
Iraq has previously agreed to purchase 36 US F-16 fighter jets.
This week's deal also included 200 "up-armored" Humvee vehicles with machine gun mounts, worth $101 million.
The vehicles will help "Iraq's ability to defend its oil infrastructure against terrorist attacks," the agency said.
And Iraq purchased seven aerostats, airships or tethered balloons that rely on a buoyant gas, to provide surveillance for military installations and key infrastructure, it said.
The aerostats and deployment towers were worth about $90 million.Advocates for the critically endangered species fear that if a hunter who posted to Facebook about killing them is not prosecuted, they will continue to be targeted.
Macaques are considered a delicacy in Sulawesi, where the local Minahasan people have a reputation for eating just about anything that moves.
The hunter defended himself on his Facebook page, arguing that he only killed a few of the animals, while forest concessionaires that destroy their habitats are responsible for the deaths of far more.
Eight months after a lecturer at an Indonesian university posted to Facebook about hunting and killing a pair of black macaques for his Christmas dinner, advocates for the critically endangered primates are wondering why the case, which was reported to the police, has yet to be processed.
They fear that if the man, Devy Sondakh, is not prosecuted, hunters will continue to target the Celebes crested macaque (Macaca nigra), whose population has declined dramatically due to habitat loss and the bushmeat trade. The creature is considered a delicacy on the predominantly Christian island of Sulawesi, where the local Minahasan people have a reputation for eating just about anything that moves.
The species is the same one that caught the limelight last year when a female took the famous “monkey selfies” that became the center of a copyright dispute.
Yunita Siwi of the Save the Yaki Foundation – “yaki” is what the macaques are called in Indonesian – said the delay indicates a lack of commitment by the police to crack down on wildlife crime.
Stephan Milyoski Lentey of the Macaca Nigra Project, which studies the creature out of a research station in North Sulawesi province, also urged the authorities to act.
“If nothing happens with the case, there is a chance that hunting of the yaki will increase, because the perpetrator has a doctorate in law,” Stephan said. “Don’t forget this case.”
A spokesman for the North Sulawesi Police told Mongabay-Indonesia the case would be processed under the 1990 Conservation Law.
Devy’s photo has been widely circulated online, drawing condemnation but also sparking a debate about traditional hunting practices and wildlife consumption. Devy has defended himself, responding in the comments of the photo to critics who accuse him of animal cruelty.
In one post, Devy argued that killing a monkey is no different from killing a cow or a pig. He also pointed out that the animals are often seen as pests by farmers who try to keep them away from their crops.
He argued that he only shot a few of the creatures, while habitat destruction from logging, plantation and mining operations is responsible for the deaths of far more.
“If I kill three animals and they kill a thousand, I’m the one who is blamed,” he wrote. “It’s not fair.”On Monday, the Secret Service announced there will be no firearms at the Republican National Convention in Cleveland, Ohio.
Yesterday, I wrote about a petition that had 40,000 signatures (now its closer to 50,000) demanding open carry at the Republican convention. It turns out, it doesn't matter how many people sign on to the demands, the Secret Service has put its foot down, something I predicted: "Not only would Quicken probably have some liability issues with so many people carrying firearms on their premises, the Secret Service provides security to the candidates and they would certainly not approve of a room full of attendees and malcontents armed up."
Ohio is an open-carry state, although the Quicken Arena forbids firearms on its premises.
“Title 18 United States Code Sections 3056 and 1752 provides the Secret Service authority to preclude firearms from entering sites visited by our protectees, including those located in open-carry states,” Secret Service spokesman Robert K. Hoback said in a written statement. “Only authorized law enforcement personnel working in conjunction with the Secret Service for a particular event may carry a firearm inside of the protected site.”
Would you feel more secure with an armed crowd at the event or would you prefer attendees attend without their firearms?Figure 1. A modern packrat (Neotoma cinerea) surrounded by midden material in a cave in northwestern Nevada. Click to view a larger image.
Figure 2. A massive complex Pleistocene packrat midden (in the alcove in the center of the image) in a cave in eastern Nevada. Click to view a larger image. What are packrat middens and what do they tell us about past environments? Dry caves and rockshelters in the American West host a unique and valuable paleobotanical resource - plant macrofossil remains preserved in middens composed of desiccated packrat (Neotoma spp.) urine. Middens are waste piles that packrats construct out of fecal matter and urine (Figure 1). Packrats incorporate pieces of plant material, bone, and other items they habitually collect from their environment into their middens. The packrat's sticky, viscous urine acts like a cement which binds the midden material together into a solid mass. Middens constructed in dry caves and rockshelters where they are protected from moisture may be preserved for tens-of-thousands of years (Figure 2). Fossil plant remains recovered from ancient midden deposits are often perfectly preserved, can be identified to species-level, and provide excellent material for radiocarbon dating. Radiocarbon-dated fossil midden assemblages provide detailed inventories of the plants and animals that lived in the vicinity of the collection site during past time periods. A series of dated middens from neighboring sites can provide a long-term record of changing plant communities and climate for a local area.
Figure 3. Middens have been studied throughout western North America from southern Canada to central Mexico. Click to view a larger image.
Figure 4. Radiocarbon ages on midden materials range from latest Holocene to 50,000 years B.P. Click to view a larger image. Methods of Quality Control and Data Standardization This dataset aims to preserve original data as it was published by each midden analyst, therefore the quality of the data is only as good as the original published data. The use and comparison of midden data produced by multiple sources is complicated by the fact that midden analysts use many different methods to record the relative abundance of plant macrofossil taxa in middens. This dataset preserves original relative abundance data as published; however this dataset also translates all original data into a standardized presence-absence scale (2=present and common, 1=present but rare [and thus could be a contaminant of a different age], 0=absent) according to the relative abundance scheme(s) used and defined by each midden analyst.Under the guise of “anti-bullying,” thirteen and fourteen year old girls have been bullied and forced to ask for a “Lesbian Kiss.”
“During the workshop for girls, the 13 and 14-year-olds were told to ask one another for a lesbian kiss. They were also taught words such as ‘pansexual’ and ‘genderqueer.'”
Unsurprisingly, the schools gave the parents “no warning about the presentations, nor an opportunity to opt out” and that “college students were granted the right to come into the classroom and encourage her daughter to be sexually active.”
Which is worse: Schools bringing in horny college students to “encourage,” thirteen and fourteen year old girls to become sluts, or that yet again the state has usurped the role of parent? Perhaps neither, since “during the workshop for the adolescent boys, the students were counseled to keep a condom in their pocket at all times, and were taught how to identify a woman who is a ‘slut.'” So much for the so-called “War on Womyn” being waged by evil right wingers.
Subsequently, the school has claimed that “the sessions were rather about saying no to unwanted advances as opposed to encouraging homosexual acts.”
But then, we’ve heard that line before…
A little mood music:
Hat Tip: Blazing Cat Fur.
Update: The veritable Ace, over at the Ace of Spades HQ, pretty much hits the nail on the head when it comes to the modus operandi of the left and the so called “equality” movement:
“There is a very real suspicion, held for good reason, that anything that is not illegal in a socialist state will be mandatory. That is, there are only two categories of actions: the illegal and criminal, and the mandatory and coerced. Only What the State For |
too small. Approximately 101 million households in the U.S. buy television, and HBO has penetrated less than a third of that customer base. And the people who watch HBO are the people who tend to watch more TV in general—the average household in America watches 241 hours of TV a week, while the average HBO household watches 287 hours of TV.
Plepler said HBO would rather focus its energy on marketing to the 70 million households that buy TV but don’t yet have HBO, as the infrastructure costs of marketing to broadband-only users “is not particularly compelling.”
There’s something incredibly patronizing about a CEO telling me, “I know you think you want my product, but you don’t want it as much as you think you do because you’re not my target demographic.”
Part of the issue comes down to the way HBO is promoted and packaged by its cable partners. Plepler likened it to being a soft drink company and selling your drink on the shelves with all the other soft drinks, as opposed to partnering with the grocery store to have your soft drink promoted at the front of the store in a giant soda pyramid.
More likely, HBO has worked out a deal with its partners: they devote their resources (customer service reps) to aggressively promoting HBO, and HBO will make sure that its content is wholly inaccessible outside of cable subscription packages.
Currently, viewers in Nordic countries are the only ones in the world who can watch content via HBO GO without having to subscribe to a bigger cable package. And Plepler admitted at Nomura’s Media & Telecommunications Summit last week that the stand-alone streaming strategy is actually working out well in the Nordic countries. But he said that markets are different and what works in one might not work in another.
That didn’t stop Plepler from hinting at the possibility of a stand-alone option some time in the future. While he didn’t give any concrete details, he suggested that HBO was working with engineers on HBO GO to ensure consumer “flexibility” and “optionality.”
But a report from Wall Street analyst Craig Moffett points to an unsustainable future for pay TV on its current track. Pay TV penetration is now “unmistakably shrinking” while programming costs are growing at an unsustainable rate. Moffett writes in the report that the struggle between Web TV proponents and content providers is a battle between the “technologically possible” and the “economically optimal.”
“Those who expected revolution were willfully blind to the economics of the content providers, for whom the current model, where every Pay TV subscriber pays for every channel whether they watch it or not, is virtually impossible to top online.”
Nevertheless, says Moffett, cord-cutting is real, and Pay TV subscriber growth went from 1.8 million additions in 2009 to zero in 2012.
Cord-cutters are still in the minority, but they’re a growing population. The Convergence Consulting Group estimates that by the end of the year, 4.7% of U.S. households will have cut the cord in favor of a mix of Netflix, Over The Air, Online, and more.
As more people cut the cord—or never get a cord to begin with—operators are raising their prices, which in turn causes more customers to cut the cord.
Meanwhile, Moffett says that operators’ flirtations with online distribution has become “a massive game of chicken”:
Each operator has gladly accepted a bit of extra revenue by licensing just a little more content to Netflix or fill-in-the-blank, all the while hoping that their peers would pursue a path of rectitude that would ensure that a critical mass of content would never be available outside the garden walls. Little by little, they have become hooked.
So where does that leave you, little cord-cutter with no HBO, as the Game of Thrones season finale looms closer? It leaves you either downloading the episode illegally through a torrent site, or borrowing a friend’s HBO GO password. I actually do a little of both.
Image source: forbes.comPerth Glory coach Ian Ferguson has confirmed the club are targeting an overseas replacement for departing striker Billy Mehmet.
Mehmet, 29, is set to pen a two-year deal with Thai Premier League side Bangkok Glass on Monday, freeing up an international spot on Glory’s roster, which Ferguson has already taken steps to fill.
“Obviously the January window is now open, and we’ve got one or two irons in the fire overseas,” he said.
“We’re waiting to see what happens with those, whether they are still progressing.
“We have put a couple of things to certain players and hopefully if it comes off, it’ll be great for Perth Glory.”
Ferguson went on to reveal that a desire to play regular first-team football was behind Mehmet’s surprise decision to jump ship, having made nine starts and five substitute appearances this season, scoring three goals in the process.
“I can’t guarantee anyone a first team place, and Billy is 29 and he wants to be playing regularly,” Ferguson said.
“It’s disappointing, but we don’t want unhappy players here either and if anyone wants to move on and head overseas, we won’t stand in their way.
“And we’ve got good attacking cover.
“Travis Dodd can play up there, as can (Steven) McGarry and we’ve got (Chris) Harold and (Ryo) Nagai as well.
“Hopefully the players we bring in will do a good job for us.”
Ferguson went on to confirm that he expects marquee man Shane Smeltz to be fit enough to start the nib Stadium clash despite picking up a groin injury in training earlier this week.
“We pulled Smeltzy out of training yesterday just a precautionary measure,” he said.
“He was a little bit tight, but he’s back in full training today and at this moment, he’ll be fine for tomorrow.
“The physios have checked him over and we’re happy with where he’s at.”Con Colbert was not an intellectual nor an orator, but he was shot after the Rising for his love of country.
By John O’Callaghan
Born on October 19, 1888, in west Limerick, Con Colbert was executed by firing squad in Kilmainham Gaol on May 8, 1916.
He had commanded rebel forces during the Rising, before surrendering and being sentenced to death. Colbert was a mid-ranking, conservative, cultural and militant nationalist.
He was not one of the seven signatories of the Proclamation. He was not a renowned orator, ideologue, or statesman. There were a dozen figures more senior than him in his Irish Volunteer battalion.
He was not a bohemian or intellectual. He was a small farmer’s son, one of 13 children, who became a bakery clerk: he was representative of the majority, petty bourgeoisie cohort of the revolutionary generation. Frequently, rebels entered the independence movement through the Gaelic League, which offered self-improvement to those with limited opportunities for upward mobility. Colbert was no different.
While the traditional focus on his gallantry is warranted, there were ambiguities in his behaviour and character.
Venerated as a martyr, he came to be defined by his favourite phrase, ‘for my God and my country’.
He was an ordinary man, however, worried about his family, his finances and his romantic relationships, even if the end love of country trumped all other concerns for Colbert the patriot.
A resident of Dublin from his early teens, Colbert always pined for rural west Limerick. But it was by assuming overlapping roles in the revivalist and republican networks of the capital that he contributed most to the cause.
As a member of the Gaelic League, the Irish Republican Brotherhood, Na Fianna Éireann and the Irish Volunteers, he bridged the transition between cultural renewal, separatist conspiracy and public declaration of force.
In Patrick Pearse’s Scoil Éanna, he ran a militaristic programme of physical drill. Of the 16 men put to death in the wake of the insurrection, five had taught in some capacity at Scoil Éanna, the others being Patrick Pearse and his brother, Willie Pearse, Thomas MacDonagh and Joseph Plunkett.
Scoil Éanna and the Na Fianna youth movement, both Irish-Ireland organisations, were not unique in their concentration on values of social responsibility, self-respect, self-discipline and masculinity.
Na Fianna operated in a Gaelic nationalist rather than an imperial context, but had its roots in contemporary international fears about the perceived moral and physical decline of the next generation, so many of whom were to be sacrificed in the 1914-1918 war.
Colbert’s boyish and innocent looks should not disguise the gravity of his actions. He was without scruples in his recruiting practices and, like many of those he trained, he was willing to kill and be killed.
He soldiered harmoniously with Catholic, Protestant and dissenter alike, but Colbert had little tolerance for alternative political perspectives. Like many nationalists, moderates and militants, he failed to appreciate the Ulster unionist position.
He envisioned independent Ireland as a Gaelic utopia and could be accused of being a Little Irelander. He saw no distinction between culture, politics and independence.
His poetic portrayal of the ultimate Irishman was heavily autobiographical. ‘Conchobar Dubh’ was a fine, physical specimen, a champion hurler, a scholar of national history and an idealist who struggled for freedom, with the gospel as his sword. It is safe to assume that Conchobar Dubh would also have been an Irish language, music, dance and dress enthusiast.
Colbert identified the union with Britain as an imperialist imposition, the primary source of Ireland’s economic and social woes, and assumed its sundering would be a cure-all.
Rebellion, for Colbert, was about the assertion of national sovereignty and liberation from colonisation, rather than any specific political programme.
Important questions about the democratic credentials of the Rising,and the appropriateness of the use of physical force, remain, but to dismiss Colbert as nothing more than a man of violence would be to do an injustice to him and his ideals.
His influence was intellectual and psychological, as well as military, focusing not only on how to fight for freedom, but emphasising the value of ethical citizenship, the Irish capacity for self-government, the right to self-determination and the legitimacy of the claim to independence.
He fought bravely during Easter Week, first in Watkins’ brewery, on Ardee Street, and then in Jameson’s distillery, on Marrowbone Lane. Only one witness testified against Colbert at his court-martial, namely Major James Armstrong, an Irishman home on leave from the western front. His evidence was inaccurate, but it mattered little in what was a show trial.
Alongside the other men shot in Kilmainham, Colbert was buried in Arbour Hill military prison cemetery, without a coffin, in quicklime, in a trench that constituted their common grave.
It is probably wishful thinking to suggest that Colbert might have found a way to avoid the errors that his comrades made when in power. There is little chance that he would have pushed for the greater separation of Church and State in the first half-century of independence, or for more enlightened social policies.
A more likely scenario is that Colbert himself would have been alienated politically from the Free State that emerged from the revolution.
John O’Callaghan is author of Con Colbert in the 16 Lives biography series from O’Brien Press. He lectures in St Angela’s College, Sligo. His other publications include The Battle for Kilmallock (Cork, 2011); and Plassey’s Gaels: GAA in the University of Limerick (Cork, 2013).I'm not sure anybody within the Minnesota Timberwolves organization knew that the three-point line existed last season. The team finished 29th out of 30 teams in three-pointers made as well as attempted and finished 25th in three-point field goal percentage. The Wolves only had three players who saw significant playing time - Zach LaVine (38.9%), Nemanja Bjelica (38.4%), and Karl-Anthony Towns (34.0%) - finish around the league average for three-point field goal percentage (35.4%, according to Basketball-Reference).
With the way NBA teams place so much emphasis on three-point shooting and how it is increasingly becoming such an integral piece in every team's arsenal as each season passes, it only seems natural to assume that the biggest need the Wolves have this offseason is to improve in this facet of the game. The fact of the matter is that three is greater than two and, therefore, winning games comes by way of the three.
It is at least somewhat reasonable to expect the young Wolves' players to improve on their three-point shooting with more experience and a greater volume of attempts. I don't think it is out of the realm of possibility for LaVine and Bjelica to reach the 40.0%-mark next season with an improved offensive system that places a greater emphasis on three-pointers, especially from the corners. Also, if Towns and Wiggins can improve their shot enough this summer so that they can convert at a league average clip or slightly below next season, and Thibodeau adds another player or two who can extend beyond the arc, all of the sudden, Wolves' fans would be staring at the face of an average three-point shooting team.
But can the same expectations be had in regards to the Wolves improving on defense? Ricky Rubio is already an elite point guard defender and Karl-Anthony Towns is on track to becoming an elite rim protector, but other than those two, who else currently on the Wolves' roster is an average or above average defender? I think Andrew Wiggins will make a giant leap this coming season and will progress towards becoming the wing defender many thought he would become coming out of Kansas, but the only other player on the roster that has any projectability on the defensive end is Zach LaVine, and he's only projectable because of his physical tools, not because of previous results like the ones Wiggins produced mostly during his rookie campaign.
The Wolves were absolutely abysmal defensively last season, finishing with a defensive rating (Def Rtg) of 110.1, which placed them 28th in the league, according to Basketball-Reference. While the hiring of Thibodeau will undoubtedly help improve the team's defense (especially with rotations and in transition), expecting a jump from league bottom to even league average, with the way the roster is currently constructed, seems nearly impossible. To put this into context, last season the league average Def Rtg was 106.4. That means for the Wolves to improve to league average from their 110.1 mark, they would have to improve by 3.7 points. A jump of that caliber would be the equivalent of a league average defense making the leap to a top three defense (think this years' Chicago Bulls making the leap to becoming an ever so slightly less suffocating version of the San Antonio Spurs or Atlanta Hawks).
However, even that doesn't quite do justice to just how bad the Wolves were defensively last season. To point out just how inept Minnesota was last season, let's look at opponent field goal percentage as well as the Wolves' defensive statistics against four common and important offensive strategies: off-ball screens, transition, handoffs, and the pick-and-roll. According to NBA.com, the Wolves finished 28th in opponent field goal percentage (47.1%), in the 6.9th percentile in defending off-ball screens (1.04 PPP), in the 10.3rd percentile in defending in transition (1.16 PPP) and off of handoffs (.94 PPP), and in the 34th percentile in defending the roll man after a screen (1.04 PPP). Woof.
Now this isn't to say that three-point shooting isn't a major need (it most definitely is), but targeting and acquiring players that excel at defense via free agency, the draft, and/or trades should be Thibodeau's top priority this offseason. Bolstering the defensive presence on the roster in combination with Thibodeau's philosophy and gameplan could be enough to propel the Wolves toward becoming at least a league average defense next season.
But why is having a league average defense so critical? Being league average isn't THAT good, right? Well, over the last five seasons, only two teams missed the playoffs after producing a league average defense and a top 12 offense (a feat the Wolves recorded last season despite their aversion to the three-point line): the 2014-15 Oklahoma City Thunder and the 2013-14 Minnesota Timberwolves. In both instances, pretty unique circumstances kept the teams from making the playoffs; the Thunder were beset by major injuries to Kevin Durant and Russell Westbrook, while the Wolves posted an abysmal record in close games.
Two free agents that come to mind right away that would fit what the Wolves need are Courtney Lee and Marvin Williams. Both players would improve the team's defense drastically, while also improving the team's three-point shooting. As for the draft, Dragan Bender, Kris Dunn, and Jaylen Brown fit the bill defensively, though only Bender and possibly Dunn project to be threats from beyond the arc. And for trades, how about a certain Chicago Bull?
At any rate, improving the team's defense is the key to getting the Wolves back to the playoffs after their over-a-decade-long drought. The addition of Tom Thibodeau and his defensive wizardry will be the force that makes this happen; however, his roster will need a little push before the momentum can take over. Adding players that only add three-point shooting, while it is a great need, won't be enough to get the Wolves over the hump. What they need are players who can defend first, and add scoring second.SPRINGFIELD, Mass. (WWLP) - The MassMutual Center will be holding their third Red Cross Blood Drive of the year on August 17, 2016 from 11 a.m.- 4 p.m.
There is a significant shortage of blood for hospital patients. The American Red Cross has issued an emergency request for people eligible to schedule a blood donation as soon as possible.
The Red Cross currently has less than a five-day supply on hand. That is the minimum requirement to meet the needs of hospital patients and be prepared for any emergencies that might require lots of donated blood products.
The first 50 people to come in and donate blood will get a pair of tickets to a Springfield Thunderbirds pre-season game. Every person that donates throughout that day will have a chance to win a pair of tickets to see the Boston Red Sox.
"The MassMutual Center is proud to hold our third Blood Drive of the year in support of the Red Cross. As always we are committed to serving the Springfield community and working with partners such as the Red Cross whose mission is to provide compassionate care to those in need." said Stacey Church, General Manager of the MassMutual Center.
To schedule an appointment you can call 800-REDCROSS or visit RedCrossBlood.org. Walk-ins are also welcome.By Karl Widerquist, co-chair BIEN, and Louise Haagh, co-chair BIEN
BIEN has made great strides in the last few years. Two years ago, our main goals were to charter BIEN as a legally recognized non-profit organization, to organize the 2016 Congress in Seoul Korea, and to expand Basic Income News. We succeeded in all three. The Seoul Congress will be our first in Asia, and it will bring together hundreds of Basic Income supporters from around the world. Official non-profit status will be completed if and when it is ratified at the 2016 Congress. This status will allow us to raise and spend money more easily in the coming term.
Our biggest success of the last two years has been Basic Income News (along with its accompanying email NewsFlash). Basic Income News has grown both in how much news it reports and how many people it reaches. Before the creation of Basic Income News, BIEN produced one NewsFlash (with perhaps twenty news stories) every two or three months, most of them excerpted from elsewhere. Today BIEN’s all-volunteer news team produces an average of two or three news stories every day, most of them original. Thanks mostly to Basic Income News, BIEN’s website has grown from 60 unique visits per day in June of 2013 to 1,365 unique visits per day in May of 2016. Some articles have reached more than 45,000 people. NewsFlash subscriptions have more than doubled in the last ten months, from 2,100 subscribers in August 2015 to 4,300 subscribers by June 2015.
BIEN’s growth has coincided with an enormous growth in the Basic Income movement around the world. New groups are forming. People are taking action. And people in power are taking notice. Government-funded pilot projects are going to take place in at least two countries and possibly several more over the next few years.
Major international institutions such as the Council of Europe and the Economic Commission for Latin America of the UN, have funded research, conferences and reports that endorse basic income and seek to connect it with other contemporary progressive movements and ideas. BIEN representatives have been instrumental in these developments, which is evidence of the influence BIEN is having in official organizations. An important objective for the coming term is to continue and extend these efforts to engage with these organizations, and we currently have activities and plans in the works to do so.
With BIEN’s Congress and General Assembly approaching, now is a good time for BIEN to set some goals for what it can do to strengthen the movement in the following year. This article proposes some priorities for the coming year—our “vision” for BIEN if you will. We speak for ourselves, but we hope others will agree.
We begin with one thing that BIEN should not do. It mustnot to dictate a grand strategy to the worldwide movement for Basic Income. The movement has gotten as far as it has by different people in different places attempting very different strategies. Some have worked better than others, but they have all made their contribution, and the combined result has been enormous growth in the political prominence of Basic Income. Any effort to force that diverse movement to follow one central script would be arrogant and divisive.
BIEN’s charter calls on us to serve that movement, “as a link between individuals and groups committed to, or interested in, basic income … to stimulate and disseminate research and to foster informed public discussion.” BIEN. How can BIEN serve that movement better?
We suggest two board objectives: our news service (Basic Income News) and our efforts to improve our outreach and networking with Basic Income groups and sympathetic individuals. In pursuit of these two broad objectives, we suggest the following priorities:
Expand Basic Income News. Start holding yearly congresses. Improve BIEN’s outreach to affiliates and nonaffiliated organizations. Set up the website to take online donations and determine a crowdfunding strategy. Improve BIEN’s website including an effort to create a depository of research and expertise Increase BIEN’s presence on social media. Attempt to obtain representation on international bodies Create better democratic institutions within BIEN
This is an ambitious agenda for next year (and the coming years). This op-ed is the third in serious arguing for this vision. Louise Haagh and I argued in two previous op-eds for yearly Congresses, and for the importance of these taskforces (and others our supports might create) in improving our outreach and networking.
With those goals of BIEN already discussed, this article makes a special case for expanding Basic Income News—the only website in the world specializing solely in news about Basic Income. This service provides a badly needed source of just-the-facts reporting on Basic Income by well-informed writers. This kind of news reporting is something that we do well. It is something that no one else is doing. It is something that few other groups could do or are likely to do. Basic Income News provides an important way for BIEN to inform and to the influence debate over Basic Income. Basic Income News provides a mouthpiece for BIEN’s members and affiliates by reporting and publicizing their activities. Basic Income News provides information that our affiliates and other groups need to work together to build the movement.
In this way, Basic Income News supports BIEN’s other certain objective: outreach and networking with other groups and individuals interested in Basic Income. BIEN is able to do the other things it does because it reaches out to people daily on the web and monthly by email.
Basic Income News is BIEN’s principle strength. We need to build on this strength.
Basic Income News has done all this on a budget of less than $100 a month for webhosting and emails services. It has no paid labor. Everything Basic Income News does, it does with an all-volunteer workforce, and is unlikely to move to a paid labor force anytime soon. We have too many other things that we need to do with the money we raise before we can start paying our volunteers.
So, what do we do to expand? We suggest, four things.
First, BIEN’s Executive Committee (EC) has agreed to dedicate four of its members to Basic Income News as their specified task for the coming term. (Every EC member commits to work several hours per month on a specified task.) Dedicating four EC members to the news reflects its high priority, but it is not out of line with BIEN’s other priorities. The list of EC functions for next year provides for two Co-Chairs, two Co-Secretaries, and four people working together on outreach and communication.
The four news editors share the joint responsibility of keeping Basic Income News up-to-date, ensuring that it has regular features, trains volunteers, and so on. With oversight from the whole EC, they divide those functions among themselves as they think best. Typically one member acts as lead editor, taking overall responsibility for the news service. One takes on the role of “features editor,” recruiting guests to write reviews, Op-Ed, interviews, and so on. One or more trains new volunteers. We need several EC members to take charge of these very different roles.
Second, Basic Income News needs to recruit more volunteers. Although we publish a lot of stories, many more stories go unreported because we don’t have enough writers to cover them. Very often we are asked, “why didn’t Basic Income News cover this…” and the answer is almost always the same: “We wanted to, but we didn’t have enough volunteers.” This is our principle limitation. We need to have one scheduled reporter online every day of the week, every week of the year, so that we can cover news stories as they come in. We also need reporters to clear out our backlog of story ideas on our website. We also need to find reporters who are fluent in German, French, Spanish, and other languages to improve our reporting from non-English sources and perhaps to translate some of our content into other languages. We need copyeditors to review the work of our reporters. Maintaining and improving quality is a constant struggle in any all-volunteer organization. All of these things require us to recruit a lot more volunteers.
Third, Karl Widerquist has made the following motion to the General Assembly: “BIEN encourages all affiliates to provide at least one person to work with Basic Income News to report on their news and the news from their region.” We make this request to improve our reporting of each affiliate’s activities, to improve our reporting of local events around the world—especially those in non-English-speaking countries. The relationship between Basic Income News and its affiliates should be a two-way street. We should not only gather news from our affiliates, but we should also provide a platform for them to publicize their activities and to discuss their concerns with a worldwide audience. If at least one person from each network learns to use Basic Income News’s system, they can directly use it to broadcast their events and concerns. We can also offer to our affiliates using our news stories in their newsletters and on their websites, if that is a help to them.
Fourth, Basic Income News has to increase—not only its hard news reporting—but also its opinions, reviews, analysis, interviews, audio, video, and so on. One strength of Basic Income News is a clear separation between just-the-facts news reporting and opinions. With this separation, people in and out of the movement can learn how the movement for Basic Income is progressing without being distracted by propaganda or by uninformed reporting. The “Features” side of Basic Income News has been minimal, publishing perhaps one feature per week. Yet, there is no limit to how many features we can publish. In this effort, Basic Income News has appointed a features editor who is in charge of contacting our affiliates, other organizations, and individuals to contribute occasional features.
None of this means that BIEN should promote Basic Income News to the exclusion of everything else we do, but we have to have priorities, and Basic Income News should be our top priority or very close to it. We have done a lot, but we can do a lot more, and we can do it better.
In sum, over the coming years, we see BIEN improving its efforts to serve as a link between individuals and groups that support Basic Income by having yearly congresses, raising funds, creating a web depository of research, increasing our social media presence, working more closely with our affiliates and other Basic Income groups, creating ties with appropriate institutions, and by creating a larger and more professional news service that will provide news about Basic Income and a mouthpiece for Basic Income supporters around the world.
-Karl Widerquist, co-chair BIEN (Karl@Widerquist.com)
-Louise Haagh, co-chair BIEN (louise.haagh@york.ac.uk)It’s interesting some of the little things you could take for granted and figure out while digging in the Android source code. If you’ve ever created your own custom views in Android you’ll note that sometimes you might require to make your own custom element attributes to style the appearance of your view when its defined in an XML file/element. Did you know though that instead of recreating some common attribute you could reuse the built-in defined element attributes?
Instead of:
<resources> <declare-styleable name = "MyAwesomeLabelView" > <attr name="malv_text" format="string|reference"/> <attr name="malv_icon" format="reference"/> </declare-styleable> </resources>
you could :
<resources> <declare-styleable name = " MyAwesomeLabelView " > <attr name="android:text" /> <attr name="android:icon" /> </declare-styleable> </resources>
Pretty cool huh!? Just don’t get carried away with this by “overriding” all the native attributes in your custom views styleable declaration.I moved to Osaka in April which is very recently but I am leaving Kansai （関西）soon in less than 2 weeks. Time flies when you’re having fun! I have ended things with my company peacefully and about to move back to Tokyo before moving…again. But that is another story for later.
In Osaka, I live one station from Universal Studio. Believe it or not, it is even within a walking distance. So, I saved this place for last.
My coworker has a platinum year pass (year pass = nenkan pasu年間パス） for Universal Studio Japan (USJ), a pass that allows unlimited entrance for a year with some exceptions of New Year count down or additional fees for some special shows. With this pass, he can reserve seats for shows or new attractions before other people and receive some other privileged deals. That day, he was also able to get us discount tickets for 1 day pass (400 yen off – better than nothing!). The normal price for 1 day pass is 6,600 yen so in case you live in Osaka area, a year pass is much better than a 1 day pass. Gold year pass (スタジオゴールドパス） is 15,800 yen and platinum year pass (スタジオプラチナパス) is 22,800 yen (adult price). The differences between these two are the limitation and privileges. There are also express passes for attractions so you do not have to wait hours to ride on one attraction. However, it is an addition from the regular entrance fee.
Details on year pass -> Here!
Details on 1 day, 2 day and express passes -> Here!
For those coming from abroad, some travel companies do offer cheaper day pass. For example, this website offers discount tickets with further credit on their app download (Apple, Android – Input L2AI9 when downloading the app for bonus credits). For details of the pass, click here!
We got there early in the morning. USJ opens at 9 am but they would usually open the gate about 30 minutes before. Since we live close by, we were able to get there very early and got our tickets. It was an extremely HOT day in Osaka! The sun was so bright I knew I was going to burn in the day out there.
We got in and played a few fun attractions such as Jaw, Jurassic Park、and Back to the Future.;) There were not that many people since everyone were lining up for the newest attraction called ‘Back Drop’ (バックドロップ) which is a roller coaster in which you ride backward! The waiting time there was about 260 minutes so we gave up on that one.
Then, we walked around and took lots of pictures. The whole place was lively and fun despite the sun. I got my kiss with Spiderman! 😛 This and many other sets are scenes for people to take picture by the staff and if you like it, you can buy the picture, mostly for 1,500 yen each.
There were shows scheduled for many times of the day. We got to see so many fascinating outdoor shows! The staff told us to put our UV umbrellas away. …NOOO! My coworker’s phone was even too hot to be used. We were so surprised to see a message on his phone saying something like ‘気温が高すぎる’ (the temperature is too hot).
Besides attractions and shows, there are arcades and game booths all over the place. We all played lotto game for souvenirs. Each draw is 500 yen for one item. My poor lovely friend got an outdoor mat two times in a row! They wrote in the lotto as ‘レジャーシート’ which literally translates to ‘leisure sheet’. What a great way to make it sound better! 😛 For me, I got a small mascot doll and a bath towel.
Besides our fun times playing games, I went around observing and cheering on little kids determined to win a prize. 🙂
We also got to see Kitty! This was very funny. We went into Hello Kitty house full of little kids. They taught us to say ‘Kitty’ when they say ‘Hello’ = HELLO -> KITTY! They made the scene as if we were meeting a Hollywood star in her house which is a huge privilege…in this case, it was Kitty-chan. 😀
After walking till noon, we had lunch at Jurassic Park restaurant. It was great but not exactly what we thought dinosaurs would eat. We had so much food throughout the day: caramel popcorn, churros, pretzels, etc.
My friend got sick after eating so much and took a ride. Luckily, there is a first aid room so we got her to lie down for an hour while we went on a roller coaster called ‘Hollywood Dream’. After a bit of rest, she was fine after. 🙂
There are just so many fun attractions inside USJ. We also got to see WaterWorld show, Rock n Roll show, The Terminator, some 4Ds attractions like Shrek and many others. All day till the night parade, we went on every attraction except the Snoopy and some kids’ ride.
The night parade was pretty awesome! So many characters we all familiar with. Some were Disney characters…yes, I was surprised as you all probably are right now, too. 🙂
After that, we had a few more snacks and walked home! Had a great time.
Universal Studio website:
http://www.usj.co.jp/e/ (English page)
http://www.usj.co.jp/ (Japanese page)For anyone who has the "black pupil-less eyes" issue with some costume mods, please try this fix below (confirmed to be worked)UPDATE (20-01-2018):1. Include the missing eyelens files for Kolin & Menat C1.2. Include Urien's C4 eyelens file which I missed to see in the first place.3. For future countermeasure, now I also include every characters' C1 eyelens file whether they are actually missing or not in SFVAE.I make the "fix mod" by compiling every eyelens material file from every costumes (except C1) for every characters (except Dhalsim and also Sakura ofc) into one big mod.How to use: Install the AIO or any individual char fix mod first before any costume mod (eg. in PMM enable and put this mod above any costume mod; in MM activate this mod before any costume mod)Hosted by
LeahSay’s Views and Planet Weidknecht
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Kobert International – Waterproof Case (Deluxe Pro Edition) & Exercise Armband
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This giveaway is in no way endorsed, affiliated, or associated with Facebook, Twitter or any other Social Media Networking Site. You are not eligible if you have won a prize from the sponsor in the last 12 month.This Giveaway is valid in the Continental United States Only and Entrants must be 18+ years of age to enter. This giveaway event will end at 11:59 PM (EST) 8/15/15. The winners will have 48 hours to email their information back to las93063 at gmail dot com or a new winner will be drawn, you may want to put this email address as safe as it could go to spam. The sponsors are each responsible for shipping of the above prizes. No blog associated with this contests are responsible for prize fulfillment. If you would like to be a sponsor in a giveaway like this please email Laura Smith at las930 (at)gmail (dot) com.
Check out all of these other great giveaways.Ethics controversy ahead of Bratušek’s confirmation hearing Former Slovenian prime minister has delayed publication of an ethics investigation into her nomination as European commissioner.
Alenka Bratušek, the former Slovenian prime minister who nominated herself as a European commissioner after she lost an election in May, has used "cunning manoeuvring" to delay publication of a report into her actions until after her confirmation hearing today in |
as the company’s agent. Arcadia denied that.
“We have had no advantage on prices. There is an open and clear bidding process. Official selling prices have applied to us and everyone else who lifts crude from Yemen,” said Gibbons.
Located on the southern tip of the Arabian Peninsula, Yemen is a relatively small oil producer and exporter relative to its neighbors in the Middle Eastern Gulf. But oil sales are the lifeline of the economy, making up 75 percent of government financing and more than 90 percent of export earnings, according to the Department of Energy.
MONOPOLY PLAY
Al-Ahmar and Arcadia allegedly did not stand idly by. In July 2009, “Arcadia sought to wipe out its competition by buying Yemeni oil at an artificially high price designed to temporarily scare away competitors,” the cable said.
Arcadia allegedly bid $1.02 per barrel above the world-market price for Brent crude, when it had previously bid 2 to 3 cents below world prices, according to the cable.
The trade generated an extra $3.4 million profit for the Yemeni government that month. The London-based company was pushed into the spotlight earlier last week when the U.S. Commodity Futures Trading Commission sued it, along with two other firms owned by Fredriksen and two oil traders, in federal court in Manhattan, for allegedly manipulating the U.S. oil market in 2008.
Arcadia is among the world’s largest private oil trading firms and typically markets around 800,000 barrels per day of crude and oil products worldwide. Its Yemen crude “book” has been among the company’s most prominent trading positions, along with Nigeria, where Arcadia has long-term contracts.
Arcadia has continued to bid for and buy Yemen crude from the government since the change in policy in early 2009, most recently buying 3 million barrels last month.
However, Yemen has awarded most of its recent monthly export tenders to oil refiner Unipec, a unit of China’s state-run oil giant Sinopec.Children in Somalia to receive new vaccination against deadly diseases
Mogadishu/Garowe/Hargeisa– The Somali authorities launched a new five-in-one-vaccine against several potentially fatal childhood diseases on Wednesday, which could save thousands of lives.
From today, Somali children will receive the pentavalent vaccine, a combination of five vaccines in one against diphtheria, tetanus, pertussis (whooping cough), hepatitis B and Haemophilus influenzae type B (Hib) – the bacteria that cause meningitis, pneumonia and other illnesses, all of which are highly prevalent. The vaccine will be part of Somalia’s routine immunisation programme.
More than 1.3 million doses of pentavalent vaccine have been provided to Somalia for 2013 and will be used to immunise children under one year of age. Pentavalent vaccines will be delivered to the 425,000 children born each year in Somalia through existing health structures as well as community health workers at district level. Each child will require three doses of the vaccine.
Every child deserves to be protected
The launch of the new vaccine takes place in Mogadishu, Garowe (Puntland) and Hargeisa (Somaliland) and will be attended by government leaders and representatives from the GAVI Alliance, UNICEF and WHO.
“Somalia has one of the lowest immunisation rates in the world,” said Dr Seth Berkley, GAVI CEO. “The country’s health system has been destroyed after more than 20 years of conflict and thousands of children are not protected against killer diseases. This situation is unacceptable – every child deserves to be protected – and that’s why GAVI and its donors have committed substantial funding to Somalia until 2016.”
We urge all parents, community, traditional and religious leaders to participate in the immunisation activity, to ensure all children of Somalia can benefit from the protection offered.
Sikander Khan, UNICEF Somalia Representative
Outreach campaign
The launch of the vaccine is being accompanied by an outreach campaign to make parents aware of the importance of the new vaccine which replaces the DTP vaccine for diphtheria, tetanus and pertussis (whooping cough).
A recent household survey carried out by UNICEF and the relevant Ministries, found only 7% of children in Puntland and 11% of children in Somaliland had received the required three doses of DTP by their first birthday.
“It is crucial that this vaccine reaches every Somali child in the country,” said Sikander Khan, UNICEF Somalia Representative. “We urge all parents, community, traditional and religious leaders to participate in the immunisation activity, to ensure all children of Somalia can benefit from the protection offered.”
1:5 children dies before their fifth birthday
Continued conflict in Somalia has resulted in the country having child and maternal mortality rates among the highest in the world; one in every five Somali children dies before their fifth birthday.
The introduction of pentavalent vaccine means that for the first time Somali children will be protected against one of the causes of pneumonia, which is one of the leading causes of child deaths. It is the first time in 35 years that children in Somalia are being offered a vaccination that protects them against additional diseases apart from diphtheria, pertussis (whooping cough), tetanus, measles, polio and tuberculosis which they already receive.
“Both Hib and hepatitis B are of public health importance,” said Dr Marthe Everard, World Health Organization Representative in Somalia. “There is little data on the epidemiologic burden of hepatitis B and Hib disease, or on the burden of diseases from meningitis or pneumonia, but data from neighbouring countries and the developing world indicate that Hib is a leading cause of acute bacterial meningitis and an important cause of severe pneumonia.”
71st GAVI-eligible country to introduce pentavalent
Somalia is the 71st GAVI-eligible country to introduce the pentavalent vaccine – others include Afghanistan, the Democratic People’s Republic of Korea, East Timor, Pakistan and Yemen. By the end of 2014, all 73 GAVI-eligible countries will have introduced it.
The launch of the five-in-one pentavalent vaccine in Somalia takes place on the eve of the Global Vaccine Summit in Abu Dhabi, co-hosted by His Highness General Sheikh Mohammed bin Zayed bin Sultan Al Nahyan, Crown Prince of Abu Dhabi; Bill Gates, co-chair of the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation; and Ban Ki-moon, United Nations Secretary-General. In partnership with GAVI, the Summit will celebrate progress in immunising children against polio and other life-threatening diseases.
The launch coincides with World Immunization Week as well as the African Vaccination Week. During this week, UNICEF and WHO will conduct a nationwide polio immunisation campaign in Somalia to protect children from life-long paralysis caused by the disease.
GAVI is funded by governments [Australia, Canada, Denmark, France, Germany, Ireland, Italy, Japan, Luxembourg, Netherlands, Norway, Republic of Korea, Russia, South Africa, Spain, Sweden, United Kingdom, United States], the European Commission, the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, as well as private and corporate partners [Absolute Return for Kids, Anglo American plc., The Children’s Investment Fund Foundation, Comic Relief, Dutch Postcode Lottery, His Highness Sheikh Bin Zayed Al Nahyan, JP Morgan, “la Caixa” Foundation, LDS Charities and Vodafone].
Click to view the full donor list.
Related downloads:
Children in Somalia to receive new vaccination against deadly diseases [Somali]
Media Contacts:
Frédérique TISSANDIER
Frédérique Tissandier
GAVI Alliance
+41 78 681 1852
+41 22 909 2968
Dan Thomas
Dan Thomas
GAVI Alliance
+41 79 251 8581
+41 22 909 6524
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Susannah Price
UNICEF
+254 722 719867
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Raffaella Vicentini
WHO
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Mogadishu/Garowe/Hargeisa, 24 April 2013 – The Somali authorities launched a new five-in-one-vaccine against several potentially fatal childhood diseases on Wednesday, which could save thousands of lives. From today, Somali children will receive the pentavalent vaccine, a combination of five vaccines in one against diphtheria, tetanus, pertussis (whooping cough), hepatitis B and Haemophilus influenzae type B (Hib) – the bacteria that cause meningitis, pneumonia and other illnesses, all of which are highly prevalent. The vaccine will be part of Somalia’s routine immunisation programme. More than 1.3 million doses of pentavalent vaccine have been provided to Somalia for 2013 and will be used to immunise children under one year of age. Pentavalent vaccines will be delivered to the 425,000 children born each year in Somalia through existing health structures as well as community health workers at district level. Each child will require three doses of the vaccine. Every child deserves to be protected The launch of the new vaccine takes place in Mogadishu, Garowe (Puntland) and Hargeisa (Somaliland) and will be attended by government leaders and representatives from the GAVI Alliance, UNICEF and WHO. “Somalia has one of the lowest immunisation rates in the world,” said Dr Seth Berkley, GAVI CEO. “The country’s health system has been destroyed after more than 20 years of conflict and thousands of children are not protected against killer diseases. This situation is unacceptable – every child deserves to be protected – and that’s why GAVI and its donors have committed substantial funding to Somalia until 2016.” We urge all parents, community, traditional and religious leaders to participate in the immunisation activity, to ensure all children of Somalia can benefit from the protection offered. Sikander Khan, UNICEF Somalia Representative Outreach campaign The launch of the vaccine is being accompanied by an outreach campaign to make parents aware of the importance of the new vaccine which replaces the DTP vaccine for diphtheria, tetanus and pertussis (whooping cough). A recent household survey carried out by UNICEF and the relevant Ministries, found only 7% of children in Puntland and 11% of children in Somaliland had received the required three doses of DTP by their first birthday. “It is crucial that this vaccine reaches every Somali child in the country,” said Sikander Khan, UNICEF Somalia Representative. “We urge all parents, community, traditional and religious leaders to participate in the immunisation activity, to ensure all children of Somalia can benefit from the protection offered.” 1:5 children dies before their fifth birthday Continued conflict in Somalia has resulted in the country having child and maternal mortality rates among the highest in the world; one in every five Somali children dies before their fifth birthday. The introduction of pentavalent vaccine means that for the first time Somali children will be protected against one of the causes of pneumonia, which is one of the leading causes of child deaths. It is the first time in 35 years that children in Somalia are being offered a vaccination that protects them against additional diseases apart from diphtheria, pertussis (whooping cough), tetanus, measles, polio and tuberculosis which they already receive. “Both Hib and hepatitis B are of public health importance,” said Dr Marthe Everard, World Health Organization Representative in Somalia. “There is little data on the epidemiologic burden of hepatitis B and Hib disease, or on the burden of diseases from meningitis or pneumonia, but data from neighbouring countries and the developing world indicate that Hib is a leading cause of acute bacterial meningitis and an important cause of severe pneumonia.” 71st GAVI-eligible country to introduce pentavalent Somalia is the 71st GAVI-eligible country to introduce the pentavalent vaccine – others include Afghanistan, the Democratic People’s Republic of Korea, East Timor, Pakistan and Yemen. By the end of 2014, all 73 GAVI-eligible countries will have introduced it. The launch of the five-in-one pentavalent vaccine in Somalia takes place on the eve of the Global Vaccine Summit in Abu Dhabi, co-hosted by His Highness General Sheikh Mohammed bin Zayed bin Sultan Al Nahyan, Crown Prince of Abu Dhabi; Bill Gates, co-chair of the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation; and Ban Ki-moon, United Nations Secretary-General. In partnership with GAVI, the Summit will celebrate progress in immunising children against polio and other life-threatening diseases. The launch coincides with World Immunization Week as well as the African Vaccination Week. During this week, UNICEF and WHO will conduct a nationwide polio immunisation campaign in Somalia to protect children from life-long paralysis caused by the disease. GAVI is funded by governments [Australia, Canada, Denmark, France, Germany, Ireland, Italy, Japan, Luxembourg, Netherlands, Norway, Republic of Korea, Russia, South Africa, Spain, Sweden, United Kingdom, United States], the European Commission, the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, as well as private and corporate partners [Absolute Return for Kids, Anglo American plc., The Children’s Investment Fund Foundation, Comic Relief, Dutch Postcode Lottery, His Highness Sheikh Bin Zayed Al Nahyan, JP Morgan, “la Caixa” Foundation, LDS Charities and Vodafone]. Click to view the full donor list. Related downloads: Children in Somalia to receive new vaccination against deadly diseases [Somali] Media Contacts: – See more at: http://www.gavialliance.org/library/news/press-releases/2013/children-in-somalia-to-receive-new-vaccination-against-deadly-diseases/#sthash.TdA2Rf9L.dpuf
Children in Somalia to receive new vaccination against deadly diseases – See more at: http://www.gavialliance.org/library/news/press-releases/2013/children-in-somalia-to-receive-new-vaccination-against-deadly-diseases/#sthash.TdA2Rf9L.dpufY. Beletsky/ESO
Lindsay France/University Photography
Hunting from a distance of 27,000 light years, astronomers have discovered an unusual carbon-based molecule – one with a branched structure – contained within a giant gas cloud in interstellar space. Like finding a molecular needle in a cosmic haystack, astronomers have detected radio waves emitted by isopropyl cyanide. The discovery suggests that the complex molecules needed for life may have their origins in interstellar space.
Using the Atacama Large Millimeter/submillimeter Array, known as the ALMA Observatory, a group of radio telescopes funded partially through the National Science Foundation, researchers studied the gaseous star-forming region Sagittarius B2.
Astronomers from Cornell, the Max Planck Institute for Radio Astronomy and the University of Cologne (Germany) describe their discovery in the journal Science (Sept. 26.)
Organic molecules usually found in these star-forming regions consist of a single “backbone” of carbon atoms arranged in a straight chain. But the carbon structure of isopropyl cyanide branches off, making it the first interstellar detection of such a molecule, says Rob Garrod, Cornell senior research associate at the Center for Radiophysics and Space Research.
This detection opens a new frontier in the complexity of molecules that can be formed in interstellar space and that might ultimately find their way to the surfaces of planets, says Garrod. The branched carbon structure of isopropyl cyanide is a common feature in molecules that are needed for life – such as amino acids, which are the building blocks of proteins. This new discovery lends weight to the idea that biologically crucial molecules, like amino acids that are commonly found in meteorites, are produced early in the process of star formation – even before planets such as Earth are formed.
Garrod, along with lead author Arnaud Belloche and Karl Menten, both of the Max Planck Institute for Radio Astronomy, and Holger Müller, of the University of Cologne, sought to examine the chemical makeup of Sagittarius B2, a region close to the Milky Way’s galactic center and an area rich in complex interstellar organic molecules.
With ALMA, the group conducted a full spectral survey – looking for fingerprints of new interstellar molecules – with sensitivity and resolution 10 times greater than previous surveys.
The purpose of the ALMA Observatory is to search for cosmic origins through an array of 66 sensitive radio antennas from the high elevation and dry air of northern Chile’s Atacama Desert. The array of radio telescopes works together to form a gigantic “eye” peering into the cosmos.
“Understanding the production of organic material at the early stages of star formation is critical to piecing together the gradual progression from simple molecules to potentially life-bearing chemistry,” said Belloche.
About 50 individual features for isopropyl cyanide (and 120 for normal-propyl cyanide, its straight-chain sister molecule) were identified in the ALMA spectrum of the Sagittarius B2 region. The two molecules – isopropyl cyanide and normal-propyl cyanide – are also the largest molecules yet detected in any star-forming region.Since the Premier, Barry O’Farrell’s, announcement last week that Sydney’s iconic — and largely useless — monorail would finally be scrapped, there has hardly been an outpouring of grief.
The system, which links parts of the CBD with Darling Harbour and the south end of Chinatown, has ‘‘never been truly embraced by the community”, as O’Farrell noted, and it seems few will lament its passing.
Comedian Dan Ilic spoofing the Monorail. Credit:Nick Moir
But that doesn’t mean we should just let it be dismantled and drift off into the pages of history without notice, decided comedian Dan Ilic, who organised a flashmob-style film this morning to recreate the much-loved musical episode of The Simpsons starring (as it did for Homer and co) a monorail.
Ilic and co-conspirator Brendan Maclean took the role of Lyle Lanley, the conman who sold an overhead transport system to the Simpsons’ home town of Springfield, roping in passers-by to play whatever roles needed filling.Almost 70 killed in month of Rakhine violence: Myanmar army
Myanmar's security forces have killed almost 70 people since taking control of northern Rakhine state last month, the army said, adding that media reports of widespread destruction in the area were "false news".
Troops have poured into a strip of land along the border with Bangladesh, an area largely home to the Muslim Rohingya minority, since deadly raids on police border posts on October 9.
Clashes escalated over the weekend when troops killed more than 30 people in two days of fighting that saw the military use helicopter gunships for the first time.
The swell of violence in Rakhine state has posed the biggest challenge so far to Aung San Suu Kyi's government ©Ye Aung Thu (AFP/File)
A hunt for the attackers has seen a total of "69 Bengalis (Rohingya) killed and 234 arrested" between October 9 and November 14, according to a Facebook post by the army chief's office late Monday.
"Seven soldiers, including one commanding officer... and 10 police sacrificed their lives", it added.
Myanmar's army has tightly-controlled information about their operations in the region and denies reports from activists that troops are killing civilians, raping women and torching homes.
Heavy restrictions on access to the area has made it difficult for foreign journalists and independent observers to verify the government reports or allegations of army abuse.
The army chief's office also hit out at figures from Human Rights Watch, which released satellite images they said showed more than 400 razed buildings in three Rohingya villages where clashes have taken place.
The army statement said only 227 buildings had been burnt down and accused Rohingya "terrorist arsonists" of setting fire to houses in a bid to discredit the military.
The statement, titled "Countering false news released by some news agencies in connection with area combing in Maungtaw area, Rakhine state," said army "officials are carrying out further scrutiny" of media reports.
The swell of violence in Rakhine has posed the biggest challenge so far to Aung San Suu Kyi's government and raised questions over her civilian administration's ability to control the army.
Rakhine has sizzled with religious tension since violence between the majority Buddhist population and the Muslim Rohingya left more than 100 dead and pushed more than 100,000 into squalid displacement camps in 2012.On Saturday, Mary Beth Williams, a writer for the rabid left-wing Salon, accidentally revealed the left’s racist views on illegal immigrants with a tweet in which she presupposes that all Republicans have Latino immigrants cleaning their toilets.
“I wonder if the GOP has asked itself who will clean their toilets & nanny their children & drive their limos when we’re all dead & deported,” she said.
https://twitter.com/embeedub/status/878618454311526400
It’s difficult to say what’s worse — her idiotic assumption that all Republicans have Latinos slaving for them or her racist notion that Latino immigrants are only good for menial household chores.
Trending: Video of the Day: UCLA Students Sign Petition to put Conservatives in Concentration Camps
So, what’s good for Salon is good for the rest of us. Williams just revealed herself to be an idiotic racist.
Naturally, her tweet didn’t sit too well with many:
Everything about this tweet is what caused the backlash that led to Trump. https://t.co/ZYnYvB7OGp — RBe (@RBPundit) June 25, 2017
I'm a Republican who cleans my own toilets, raises my own children, and drives my own car. Who do you imagine the Republicans are? — Eileen M. Jahn (@EileenMJahn) June 25, 2017
Williams actually revealed what she thinks Republicans are, and it’s basically the same stupid stereotype held by so many on the unhinged left.
GOP isn't interested in enslaving illegal immigrants. They want to hire (legal) employees and pay them a fair wage and this bothers you? — Nikki (@Tinynikki) June 25, 2017
Yes, it does.
Does she even recognize how racist this is? — Comey Comey’s Gnomey (@ann_gop) June 25, 2017
Obviously not. After all, she writes for Salon…
You've never America'd much, have you? — David Smith ~ [ ✝ 🇺🇸 ☕ ] (@d4v1d5m1t6) June 25, 2017
Apparently not. Again, she writes for Salon…
Ah. A racist Salon writer. — Mimsymom (@Mimsymom_1) June 25, 2017
Is there any other kind?
And here I go thinking the left hated stereotyping. Next, you're going to say that I'm not a conservative either. pic.twitter.com/1leyjmr7sQ — Mrs_Pinky Thoughts 🤔 (@mrs_pinky85) June 25, 2017
That was before Trump. Now, stereotyping is what the left does. Anyone who supports Trump, the U.S., or freedom in general is a Nazi slaveholder. Got it?
Please do go on… who drives your limo and cares for your children? pic.twitter.com/yDr6NszgOt — 𝐇𝐨𝐧𝐤𝐲 𝐓𝐨𝐧𝐤 𝐉𝐞𝐰 (@HonkyTonkJew) June 25, 2017
Good question.
I have a limo? Why didn't someone tell me. — Long little doggie (@54Doggie) June 25, 2017
Don’t feel bad… No one told us, either.
https://twitter.com/BlueStaterDemoc/status/878836778454720513
Don’t expect Williams to believe you, though.
Hmmm, who is the "we" to whom you refer…the elitist white Lefty that is you? — Concerned American (@LUVofCountry) June 25, 2017
What else do you expect from someone who writes for Salon?
What REAL racism looks like; pic.twitter.com/wPvX94MD1z — Alex Debruyne (@TwittBot001) June 25, 2017
We agree. And it’s a healthy dose of stupid as well.
In other words, everything we’d expect from a Salon writer.
“We already knew the Left were the real racists, guess we should thank Mary Beth here for admitting it,” Twitchy said.
Again, we agree.
Related:
If you haven’t checked out and liked our Facebook page, please go here and do so.As the justice committee takes evidence on the impact of legal aid reforms the figures already show dramatic changes
Figures from the first year of civil justice reforms show that access to civil legal aid has fallen by more than half and some categories of law have already become almost entirely inaccessible for state funding.
In April 2013, the Legal Aid, Sentencing and Punishment of Offenders Act 2012 (LASPO) came into force. The justice select committee is now taking evidence on its impact, but figures from the first year since its introduction already show dramatic changes.
Over the same period, the number of civil cases granted funding for representation and/or legal advice has dropped by 62%. Social welfare and family law have been most affected, with drops of 80% and 60% respectively.
LASPO reverses the position whereby legal aid is accessible for all civil cases other than those excluded by the Access to Justice Act 1999. Whole categories of law have been taken out of scope for legal aid; others only qualify if they meet certain criteria. The categories now out of scope include:
Family cases where there is no proof of domestic violence, forced marriage or child abduction. There has been a 60% fall in family cases granted funding and two thirds of cases in the family court now feature somebody representing themselves.
Immigration cases that do not involve asylum or detention
Housing and debt matters unless they constitute an immediate risk to the home
Welfare benefit cases; except appeals to the upper tribunal or high court
Almost all clinical negligence cases
Employment cases that do not involve human trafficking or a contravention of the Equality Act 2010
Mental health cases remain in scope. Prior to LASPO there was no specific category for discrimination law; most cases were included under employment law. It is rare for people to identify themselves that they have a discrimination case; they usually present to lawyers as having a problem at work.
Facebook Twitter Pinterest Legal aid reforms have seen barristers walkout for the first time in history Photograph: ANDREW COWIE/AFP/Getty Images
On top of LASPO, the government is making significant changes to criminal law. The budget for criminal legal aid is being cut by £215m, but this did not start to take effect until April 2014. The proposals prompted barristers to withdraw their labour for the first time in history.
Legal aid provides funding for legal assistance to those who cannot afford to pay a lawyer to give them legal advice or represent them in court. It was first established 65 years ago in England and Wales as part of wide reforms to build a welfare state. It is not possible to breakdown the statistics to the number of individuals helped; only the number of legal aid certificates granted. This covers both legal advice and representation in court.
The full set of government statistics on legal aid from 2013/14 can be viewed here.
• The graphic with this article was amended on 10 September 2014. The labels for housing and employment were switched in an earlier version. The article was also amended to clarify the timing of legal aid budget cuts.Federal Reserve Chair Janet Yellen said the central bank is concerned with growth get out of hand and thus is committed to continuing to raise rates in a gradual manner.
"We don't want to cause a boom-bust condition in the economy," Yellen told Congress in her semiannual testimony Wednesday.
While Yellen did not specifically commit to a December rate hike, her comments indicated that her views have not changed with her desire for the central bank to continue normalizing policy after years of historically high accommodation.
Markets widely expect a move next month but are not on the same page with the Fed when it comes to 2018. Current fed funds futures trading indicate only one or two hikes expected for next year, while the Fed has penciled in three for the year ahead.
"We are not seeing undue inflationary pressure in the labor market, so our policy remains accommodative," Yellen said. "But we do think it's important to gradually move our policy rate toward what I'll call a neutral level, which would be consistent with sustainably strong labor market conditions," she said.
The Fed currently targets its benchmark rate between 1 percent and 1.25 percent. Yellen's successor, Jerome Powell, told a separate congressional panel Tuesday that he sees the longer-run rate around 2.5 percent.
Yellen said the Fed does not want to stifle growth but feels strongly about keeping consistent with a labor market that is nearing full employment.
"We want to do this gradually, because if we allow the economy to overheat, we could be faced with a situation where we might have to... raise rates and throw the economy into recession," she said. "We don't want to cause a boom-bust condition in the economy."
This is likely Yellen's final address to Congress. She has indicated she will leave the Fed when Powell is sworn into office in February.Der Spiegel reported that the US spy agency sent Germany's foreign intelligence agency, the Bundesnachrictendienst (BND), huge numbers of “selectors” – computer addresses, mobile phone numbers and other identifying information – which are used to target people's digital communications.
Die Zeit reported that the NSA asked for a total of 800,000 people to be targeted for surveillance.
The BND simply plugged the personal details into their own systems and carried out the intimate surveillance on behalf of their American allies.
BND officers had noticed several times since 2008 that some of the selectors directly contradicted the rules on how the agency is supposed to work, and its co-operation agreement for the “War on Terror” Germany signed with the USA in 2002.
The Americans reportedly asked for information on arms manufacturer EADS, the Eurocopter helicopter company and the French government.
But this was not seen by their superiors as a reason to regularly check the lists of selectors for irregularities.
It was only after leaks by NSA whistleblower Edward Snowden began in summer 2013, revealing the extent of the surveillance by the American spies against the entire world's communications, that the BND began checking in detail.
By October 2013, they had discovered that around 2,000 of the selectors were definitely targeted at western Europe and even Germany.
Politicians were among the people picked out for the illegal spying.
But the true extent of the scandal wasn't revealed until the Bundestag's (German parliament) NSA Inquiry Committee submitted a request for evidence to the BND.
A fresh check of the selectors supplied by the NSA showed that 40,000 of them identified western European and German targets.
Chancellor Angela Merkel's office, to which the BND is directly responsible, was not informed about the spying on friendly targets until after that parliamentary question was asked, in March 2015.
Chancellery Minister Peter Altmaier informed the members of the Parliamentary Oversight Committee, which is supposed to keep a leash on the intelligence services, on Wednesday evening, as well as the members of the NSA Inquiry Committee.
BND director Gerhard Schindler was excluded from the meeting and may be asked to retire.
SEE ALSO: Net company takes German spies to courtFootball Federation Australia chairman Frank Lowy has avoided a potential life-threatening injury as a result of landing on his head after a stage fall at the 2015 A-League Grand Final.
The 84-year-old was feared to have suffered a serious injury when he slipped off the presentation stage and landed head first into the turf at AAMI Park before presenting Melbourne Victory players with their winners' medals after beating Sydney FC 3-0.
Lowy missed a step on the stage when he tumbled and was treated by paramedics for several minutes. An FFA spokesman confirmed Lowy did not suffer any serious injury as a result of the fall.
"Mr Lowy received treatment from paramedics on the scene and was cleared of any serious injury. He has soreness in the shoulder from the fall but is otherwise ok."Communications Minister Malcolm Turnbull has foreshadowed deeper cuts to the ABC and SBS in coming years, warning the ''age of entitlement'' for the public broadcasters is over.
Mr Turnbull said the broadcasters, whose funding has been cut by $43.5 million over four years, should be relieved the axe did not fall harder on them in the budget.
"Cuts have been made to the ABC in the budget which we have said are a down-payment on the review.": Malcolm Turnbull. Credit:Alex Ellinghausen
The government's efficiency review into the ABC and SBS has identified tens of millions of dollars worth of potential savings and will be presented to the ABC board for consideration this week.
The heads of ABC and SBS s argued in Senate hearings last week the broadcasters should be allowed to reinvest savings identified through the review into programs and services, an argument Mr Turnbull dismisses as ''ridiculous''.Copyright by WNCN - All rights reserved Colonial Pipeline Co. conducts testing and analysis on the failed section of the pipeline. Photo from Colonial Pipeline.
Copyright by WNCN - All rights reserved Colonial Pipeline Co. conducts testing and analysis on the failed section of the pipeline. Photo from Colonial Pipeline.
RALEIGH, N.C. (WNCN) - Colonial Pipeline Company announced Saturday that crews began repair work Friday afternoon in Alabama -- but then said Saturday evening that they would instead need to build a bypass line, which they have not even started construction on by Sunday.
Copyright by WNCN - All rights reserved CLICK HERE TO VIEW PHOTOS OF HIGHER PRICES, CLOSED GAS STATIONS AND THE PIPELINE
Copyright by WNCN - All rights reserved CLICK HERE TO VIEW PHOTOS OF HIGHER PRICES, CLOSED GAS STATIONS AND THE PIPELINE
The Alpharetta, Georgia-based company said crews began excavation work to unearth and repair the damaged section of "Line 1" around 3:30 p.m. Friday and continued efforts intermittently throughout the night and into Sunday.
But, now, Colonial must conduct testing and analysis on the failed section of the pipeline, according to the U.S. Transportation Department, which is investigating the spill in rural Alabama.
Colonial gave no timetable as to when that bypass line would be completed or what path it would take -- until then, prices could soar and supplies could run out.
According to a release from Colonial, "...engineers continue to explore alternatives, including the construction of a temporary segment of pipeline around the leak site to allow Line 1 to return to service as rapidly and safely as possible."
Late Sunday afternoon, photos from the company showed some bypass pipes were delivered to the site.
The leak surfaced last week on the pipeline and it provides fuel to this state, as well as other eastern states.
Colonial Pipeline Company doesn't expect to fully reopen its primary gasoline pipeline, which has spilled more than 250,000 gallons near Birmingham, Alabama, until next week.
The company said the top priority of all the groups who have responded to the leak, including the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) and other federal, state and local agencies, is the safety and protection of nearby residents, crews on scene and the environment.
Safety is also the first priority here in North Carolina.
"Our first priority is maintaining public safety. To that end, we are asking first responders to double check their vehicles to ensure they have adequate fuel supplies on hand to run their operations," said Public Safety Secretary Frank L. Perry. "We've seen fuel disruptions like this before and want to reassure people that there's no need for alarm at this time."
Colonial said that in addition to around-the-clock repairs, they're now shipping gasoline to their second line to "help mitigate the impact of the service interruption to Line 1."
The company said they have been able to make limited deliveries to western Alabama on Line 1.
Colonial Pipeline said that in their statement that "Under normal circumstances, the Colonial Pipeline system transports approximately 2.6 million barrels of refined products each day with Line 1 accounting for half of this volume. Colonial is currently shipping as much gasoline as possible on Line 2…to help mitigate the impact of the service interruption to Line 1. These changes have allowed all origins and delivery markets to be served along the entire system, albeit in a more reduced capacity."
The leak is already having an impact in North Carolina, specifically at Sheetz locations.
"The primary issue is beyond our control and we do not know when this situation will be resolved. In the meantime, our Sheetz team is working diligently to locate fuel from other sources and our stores will remain open 24/7/365 to service our customers with everything we offer inside the stores," said Tarah Arnold, Sheetz spokeswoman.
Around a dozen Sheetz in the Triangle are affected by the disruption.
Colonial said that supply disruptions would be felt first in Georgia, Alabama, Tennessee, North Carolina and South Carolina.
Gov. Pat McCrory issued an executive order Thursday temporarily waiving hours of service restrictions for fuel vehicles traveling in and through the state.
"We are working with state and national officials to make sure North Carolina is not impacted by this leak," said McCrory.
The move will help prevent disruptions and backups at major fuel distribution hubs, the Department of Public Safety said in a release.A SELF-confessed sex demon who raped an unconscious 14-year-old girl chose the most horrible way to try to dispose of his victim when he poured petrol over her stricken body and set her alight, a judge said today.
Supreme Court Justice Paul Coghlan said Michael Hermogenes, told police "self preservation'' was behind his attempt to murder the teenager and it was difficult to think of a worse case.
Justice Coghlan said Hermogenes had caused horrific lifelong injuries to the girl, who had trusted him and called him "brother'' in Filipino.
Justice Coghlan jailed Hermogenes for 21 years with a 16 year minimum.
The judge said the church youth leader arranged through an internet chat site to go the victim's home, calling her school and pretending to be her father before saying she would not attend that day.
Hermogenes purchased two four packs of mixed alcoholic drinks and two shot glasses and when he got to the house he plied the girl with alcohol and took |
't enough, Spieth went back to No. 1 in the world.
At 22, Jordan Spieth became the youngest player to capture the FedEx Cup and its $10 million bonus. Jason Getz/USA TODAY Sports
The first person to greet him was his little sister, Ellie, who keeps Spieth and the entire family so grounded in light of so much success. His parents, girlfriend, grandfather and a tight group of high school friends from Dallas were there to watch another amazing performance in a year filled with him.
Spieth became the youngest player since Horton Smith in 1929 to win five times in a season, and the youngest to claim the FedEx Cup title.
"It's been a phenomenal year for him," Stenson said. "I watched it firsthand at the first two rounds at Augusta, and he played phenomenal and putted phenomenal. And it was the same putting display, really, today -- just an exhibition on the greens, to be honest.
"His putting and mental focus is the best in the world. It's hard to argue that."
This was a nice year for the team — Jordan Spieth (@JordanSpieth) September 28, 2015
And there's no longer an argument for PGA Tour Player of the Year.
Jason Day had five victories, including his first major at the PGA Championship, and there was talk a sixth win and the FedEx Cup might put the Australian in the discussion. Not anymore. Spieth made a spirited bid for the Grand Slam and joined Jack Nicklaus and Tiger Woods as the only players to finish no worse than fourth in all the professional majors. Along with the money title, he won the Vardon Trophy for the lowest adjusted scoring average.
The only question he couldn't answer was what he will do for an encore.
"This is one I cannot wait to celebrate," he said.
Stenson made a $1 million putt of his own, though it was the least he could do. He was 3 shots behind when he shanked his shot from the 17th fairway and made double bogey. That dropped him into a four-way tie for fourth and cost him a spot in the FedEx Cup ranking. But he bounced back with a 60-foot birdie putt on the 18th to go back to No. 2 in the FedEx Cup to earn a $3 million bonus (instead of $2 million for third).
Stenson had three runner-up finishes in the postseason, and he has five for the year without winning. He still has events left on the European Tour.
But this week -- and year -- was all about Spieth.
"It's the greatest season I've ever had, obviously," Spieth said. "But it's one where I believe we took our game on course and off course to a level that I didn't think would be possible at different times in my life."There is an inherent conflict between individuals and authority throughout multiple areas of our daily lives. I’ll steer clear of specific examples, but suffice it to say that for crypto, the industry has its roots in a strong libertarian vibe that can still be felt within the industry – this energy powers creativity and innovation, but it can also run afoul of traditional authority and established rules.
When it comes to the United States (my own country), it’s wise for those of us in the crypto community to keep in mind that the United States reserves the right to regulate all commerce – and this by definition would loosely include innovations like blockchain commerce.
In fact, it’s written into our constitution:
(the United States Congress shall have power) “To regulate Commerce with foreign Nations, and among the several States, and with the Indian Tribes.”
Granted, this was written 1 hundreds of years ago, but it is a right that is still reserved, and I highly doubt that the US government is ready to concede this authority purely based on the power of an innovative new technology like blockchain.
How Does this Apply to Crypto-currency?
Well, up until early September of this year, the possibility of one of the world governments stepping in to try and regulate Bitcoin commerce was just theoretical. Did anybody really think a government would try and regulate what many in the crypto world had thought was completely censor-proof?
Some might have anticipated it, but when the ICO warning was issued 2 by the United States’ SEC, the thought of another government actually weighing in with tangible sanctions against Bitcoin trading seemed like a remote possibility – one that many people thought was an unlikely scenario.
But it happened. And it happened fast.
China issued guidance 3 that all crypto-currency trading from CNY to … any crypto-currency … must stop. People are still trying to grasp exactly what the sanctions mean in total; some say that all Bitcoin and crypto-currency trading has been outlawed in China, while others believe that over-the-counter exchange of crypto-currency might still be legal. 4 Regardless, the Chinese government has shut off the pipeline of value going from CNY to Bitcoin… or any crypto, for that matter.
Yes, this could happen here.
And where is here? For me, it’s the United States. For you, perhaps it’s the United Kingdom, or Australia. Or France, Germany, India or Japan. In fact, any countries’ commerce regulators could decide to move against Bitcoin or another crypto-currency. Wasn’t this stuff supposed to be resistant to all governmental control? Isn’t that contained in the Bitcoin manifesto 5 itself? (yes, they call it a ‘manifesto’)
What Will it Take to Truly Make Crypto Censor-Proof?
If you’re truly interested in what it takes to make crypto censor-proof, you have to ask yourself if Bitcoin’s manifesto is really a call to action or if it’s just a blatant marketing ploy to get a specific demographic to invest their crypto-currency.
The reason I might sound cynical is because I’ve seen the trite responses I get when I talk to some in the crypto community about what it truly means to be ‘decentralized’. Does it mean where the processing power is located geographically to validate transactions?
Is proof-of-work the only legitimate way to secure a crypto network? Vitalik Buterin doesn’t think so. 6 In his blog, he talks about the differences between consensus algorithms and indicates that the usage of penalties might be a way forward for a new Ethereum consensus using proof-of-stake instead of an ostensibly decentralized proof-of-work algorithm.
Crypto-currency Decentralization is Not a Boolean. It’s a Continuum.
If you’re an XRP investor, you might be familiar with the obtuse responses from rival Bitcoin supporters that still believe crypto is a win-lose type of marketplace. They challenge XRP investors to prove that the XRP Ledger is truly decentralized, and then XRP investors respond by pointing out the diverse validator list 7 and the steps that Ripple is taking towards higher levels of decentralization. 8 9 The inevitable response is a ‘gotcha’ type of reaction 10 by the Bitcoin fan; usually gloating accompanied by disparaging statements about XRP being the ‘banking coin.’
What’s the truth? XRP is heading towards a responsible, stakeholder-led version of decentralization that will be more robust and redundant than Bitcoin or Ethereum when it’s fully realized. 11
Ethereum has serious problems of its own when it comes to decentralization; currently two mining pools control up to 50% if the processing power on the network. 12 If you’re new to crypto-currency, this should concern you, because once a miner (or a mining pool) obtains more than 50% of the processing power, they could in theory submit transactions against any account and approve them, in essence stealing the crypto-graphic tokens from one account and stashing them in another account. It’s called a “51% attack” for that reason.
Bitcoin suffers from its dependence on Chinese mining pools. 13 From what we’ve just seen, that’s very problematic, because if China wants to shut off Bitcoin at some point in the future – a future that is looking a lot less theoretical by the day – they could influence the Chinese mining pools to accomplish this task. While I don’t personally believe this would happen, I will note that I also didn’t believe that China would shut off crypto trading within its borders, either.
But these conversations pick away at details; the point is this: Decentralization is not a ‘yes’ or ‘no’. It’s a ‘how much’ type of question.
In programming, this is the difference between a Boolean variable and a quantitative variable. Despite the arguments that some crypto-anarchists might make, all of the top crypto-currencies – Bitcoin, Ethereum, and XRP – are decentralized, but all of them have not yet achieved the absolute goal of self-sustaining decentralization.
And that’s a weak point for true censorship resistance.
Dominant ISPs
Concentration of Bitcoin, Ethereum, or XRP nodes within one ISP could also be problematic. A government might actually resort to attempting to influence the way that a dominant ISP routes traffic. Concentration of crypto-currency validation on one ISP is a topic that has not been discussed or focused on in many forums; but if true censorship-resistance is what is desired, it should definitely be a topic of the conversation. Note that hackers have used this technique successfully against Bitcoin in the past. 14
Pipeline Security
Bitcoin transactions are communicated over HTTP un-encrypted. 15 While the end result of any tampering should be detectable by any Bitcoin nodes receiving a corrupted message via a ‘man in the middle’ type of attack, it begs the question;
“if Bitcoin transactions can be identified on a network, can they be essentially shut off in mid-stream by routers within a specific country?”
If the answer is yes, then we’ve just identified another weak point in crypto-currency censorship resistance.
I will take a moment to point out that the XRP Ledger’s transactions are encrypted. This means that, in theory, XRP transactions should be considered “noise” by any monitoring software. 16 17
While some developers may point out that changes could be made to alter a protocol to prevent detection, it serves to illustrate the difference between the perception of a censor-proof, decentralized network, and the reality of one operating within a country, resistant to those that might try to prevent transactions from even being communicated.
Centralized Exchanges Are the Weakest Point
In its recent proclamations, China pursued the weakest points in the crypto-currency ecosystem – the exchanges where fiat value is exchanged for crypto-currency value.
If you want to set up a crypto-currency exchange in the United States – or any other country for that matter – it involves setting up a business that utilizes modern technology housed on reliable, fast servers. Users demand some basics from an exchange:
An easy way to transition their fiat value into crypto value A way to trade one crypto-currency against another A way to withdraw their crypto-currency A way to withdraw their fiat value
If an exchange can provide those four things, they’re in business! And it’s quite a business – billions of dollars change hands each day now in the crypto markets, which is a phenomenal increase from just one year ago.
The Problem with Centralized Exchanges
When a user sends their money to a centralized exchange, they’re sending their fiat money to a company, ordinarily, that is registered in a specific country and subject to the laws of that country. This normally means that users can depend on basic business-like activity without unnecessary fear of their fiat money being stolen or misplaced.
Most exchanges now offer secondary authentication, which further reduces a user’s risk of account theft.
Security
But they offer a stationary target for hackers…and the government!
One type of hack is the “inside job” which seemed to happen on a regular basis in crypto’s early years. Bitcoin’s recent price surge has also resulted in a new wave of centralized exchange hacking, ostensibly from a variety of external actors. 18 Social engineering hackers will employ a variety of tactics to obtain access or trust from their victims; phishing emails is one technique. 19
Users of centralized exchanges are targeted for phishing scams because of the prevalence of personal data that may be transmitted un-encrypted. In other words, while the exchange worries about keeping your private keys secure, they may not have enough safeguards around information such as your email, name, or even government identification.
Government Reporting
If we’re focused on what would improve the censorship-resistance of crypto trading, we need to talk about the influence of the government. I’m not talking about any one specific government here, but just its general influence no matter where you happen to reside.
We know that the government has been learning about crypto slowly but surely – they know enough to work with centralized exchanges as a choke point when it comes to regulation. In the United States, this means KYC, or ‘know your customer.’ It’s done for a number of reasons, whether you agree or disagree with them; a centralized exchange is usually required to obtain identifying information on all purchasers of its financial products like crypto-currency.
Okay, so the centralized exchange knows me. So what?
This is the controversial part. It happened last year when the United States government asked Coinbase for a list of all of its US customers. 20 To many, this request set a disturbing legal precedent, because there was no evidence of wrongdoing on the part of Coinbase’s US customers. It was a “John Doe” summons on the part of the US Government, and the implication was that now the IRS had a list of all US citizens who had an account at Coinbase.
The irony was not lost on most of us in the crypto community in the United States. Those of us that went through a centralized exchange were probably also the portion of the crypto trading community that was the least likely to avoid taxes; there are plenty of other untraceable ways to move value into the crypto world.
This move reminded me that governments may be ‘in over their head’; I started to have my doubts that they should even be trying to regulate this market: Perhaps they’re going about it the wrong way – perhaps trying to control flow of money is not the right approach for enforcing policies?
In the end, it’s not a matter of me personally believing that any particular method of enforcement is right or wrong, despite what I feel about Coinbase being forced to give up its member data. The next part of the discussion is about what is technically possible. Enter the decentralized exchange.
Decentralized Exchanges
This wasn’t my idea, but this idea was inevitable. And it serves as a herald of things to come for governments around the world. While some government policymakers might be sympathetic to China’s new policies against trading CNY for crypto-currency, the truth is that the time is quickly approaching where that ability – the ability for governments being able to restrict this – is going to cease to exist.
How Does it Work?
A decentralized exchange is just that – normally software that runs on somebody’s smart phone or personal computer. It may be a browser application, or it may be a desktop application – either one will do.
Each user serves as their own ‘fiat-to-crypto’ converter and must agree (somehow) to provide fiat value to others on the decentralized platform in exchange for crypto-currency. And that’s it – now they’re ready to trade.
It’s not too much to ask – popular smart phone applications like Venmo have similar concepts that users have become accustomed to, like hooking up a funding source – it’s just a matter of the decentralized exchange figuring out their own way of moving fiat and crypto-currency around in a direct peer-to-peer fashion.
Of the key differences between decentralized and centralized exchanges, governments will probably not like the first two:
The end-user controls the funds
End-users can be anonymous
Low(er) risk of hacking
Based on what I’ve seen, I think decentralized exchanges are now going to step into the role that centralized exchanges used to play, and – slowly – take over the market.
Again, what I think personally of them doesn’t have any bearing on the trend – governments will eventually have to come to terms with the decentralization – and control – of money by their citizens, regardless of the legacy laws that were based on paper-based currency and centralized bank databases.
New Government Enforcement Methods?
There are several short and long-term scenarios for government reaction to the rise of decentralized exchanges. In my analysis of the various scenarios for new approaches to AML and KYC enforcement, I’ve made several conclusions:
The sheer number of decentralized exchanges and methods of fiat conversion will make detection of use infeasible by governments
infeasible by governments Governments will attempt new approaches to AML (i.e., they won’t just “give up”)
Governments will have to collaborate on AML enforcement – i.e., they can’t “do this solo”
Governments will focus on any central authority for each crypto-currency (including non-profit foundations)
central authority for each crypto-currency (including non-profit foundations) Rise of the importance (and career field) of crypto forensic analysis
Crypto Market Analysis & XRP Impact
Even as you’re reading this, I believe that various governments are contracting with businesses to develop forensic analysis tools for tracing movements of crypto-currency. It’s not just about being able to view a transaction on the blockchain anymore, or unmask who owns a wallet. Those things are possible currently, but I predict the development of advanced AI algorithms that can detect and flag specific transactions and accounts for further investigation by enforcement organizations.
I do not believe that XRP will specifically be exempt from any of these rules or enforcement actions; it is through the behavior of the company that gave birth to XRP that XRP investors will see benefits. I predict that world organizations, central banks, and various government financial organizations will all be utilizing Ripple technology in the very near future – it’s happening already, as we can see from the banking adoption numbers and from the fact that Ripple is hosting the ‘blockchain’ equivalent of SIBOS (at the same time as SIBOS).
Ripple has a history of working with standard organizations 21, central banks 22, the IMF 23, national policy-makers 24, and the United States Faster Payments Task Force. 25 No other company with a digital asset can boast about these types of high-level associations or business alliances. My educated guess is that when it comes time to craft meaningful new legislation at a national – or international – level, Ripple will be able to help steer the thought process in the right direction.
Ripple’s real-world experience grappling with regulatory conformance will help governments approach the new world of decentralized currency in ways that make sense and are more effective than coloring all crypto-currency-using citizens with the same paintbrush.
From its earliest start, Ripple took the pragmatic approach of working with established business and governments, along with banks and regulatory agencies. This experience bodes very well for the company as the SWELL conference approaches; banks and other financial institutions curious about the regulatory landscape for blockchain in the wake of the China pronouncements will be hungry to learn about the smartest path forward in anticipation of future trends like decentralized exchanges.
Sources
AdvertisementsSaturday, November 25th, 2017
LOS ANGELES (KABC) -- The man who appears as Bailey, the Los Angeles Kings mascot, is being sued for allegedly groping the buttocks of a dishwasher in a Staples Center elevator in 2016.Plaintiff Maso Griffin also claims that he was fired from his job after complaining to his human resources director - who happens to be married to the man who plays Bailey.Griffin says that while riding on an elevator at Staples on Dec. 8, 2016, the costumed Bailey put a hand on one of his shoulders and with the other hand squeezed his buttocks.He is suing Tim Smith, the man who plays Bailey and who was allegedly in the mascot costume at the time.Smith is married to Melissa Smith, the human resources director for Levy Restaurants.The suit says Griffin complained the next day to Melissa Smith, but she became angry. He says he was later taken off the schedule and then fired during a meeting with Melissa Smith on Dec. 21.The suit also names Kings' owner Anschutz Entertainment Group Inc., as well as Levy Restaurants Inc. and Compass Group USA, which both provide food services to Staples Center.The suit also says Griffin's coworkers made fun of him after the incident, with comments such as asking "Was his hand furry?"The Kings issued a statement disputing the lawsuit's claims, saying they were investigated and found to be "without any merit.""We are aware of the lawsuit filed by Mr. Griffin against AEG, Levy Restaurants, Compass Group and Tim Smith," said Michael Altieri, senior vice president of communications and broadcasting for AEG Sports and the Kings. "The allegations which are the subject of that lawsuit were thoroughly investigated nearly a year ago when they were first raised by this plaintiff.""Those allegations were then - just as they are now - without any merit. Mr. Smith is an active figure in this community and a positive representative of our organization. We will vigorously defend ourselves in this matter."Which prospects could rise (and fall) in Indianapolis this week? Here's who scouts will be watching the closest.
Idaho freshman wide receiver Collin Sather has died at age 19 after a brief battle with cancer, the school announced.
Trevor Lawrence and a dynamic offense return for Dabo Swinney, but the Tigers will need to replace a lot of talent on defense.
Let the Tua vs. Trevor Heisman debate begin now. Plus, a look at some sleepers and long shots who could make some noise.
Alex Hornibrook, Wisconsin's starting quarterback for the past three seasons, is transferring. Hornibrook was 26-6 as the Badgers' starter.
The Clemson Tigers opened spring practice Wednesday, a day after celebrating their national title at the South Carolina State House. Coach Dabo Swinney said it's time for the team to focus on winning another title, not celebrating past accomplishments.
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Filmed at a Penn Hills dance studio, Maddie now spends all day here dancing, filming and being tutored, starting with private ballet lessons at 9:30 a.m. until rehearsals wrap up at 9:30 p.m.
That’s when she’s not in L.A. or New York, on shows like Saturday Night Live, Jimmy Kimmel, Disney’s “Austin and Ally” or her biggest show yet — the Grammys.
“It’s just crazy,” Maddie tell’s KDKA’s Kristine Sorensen. “I never thought I’d be doing all this, performed on so many shows, the Grammys, not even in a year.”
It has been a wild year. Her fame exploded when singer Sia saw Maddie on “Dance Moms” and plucked her to be the only performer in the music video for her song “Chandelier.”
The video has since gotten more than 500 million views, was named “Top video of 2014” by “Rolling Stone,” and was nominated for video of the year at the Grammy’s where she performed live.
“It was just amazing,” Maddie said, “especially because this was my first time at the Grammy’s and I got to perform. And I look out in audience and Kim and Kanye were just sitting there, like oh my god, they were just watching me. So it was really cool.”
Kristine asked if she was nervous, and she said she was very nervous.
On the red carpet, Maddie wore a custom Armani junior, standing next to Sia who apparently doesn’t like to show her face.
Maddie has essentially become the face for Sia.
Maddie says she feels like “Hanna Montana,” recognized when she wears the wig, even by famous people.
“It was amazing, because everyone knew who I was,” she says, referring to backstage at the Grammy awards. “Gwen Stefani was like, ‘Oh, I remember you.’ I was like, “Oh my god, that’s amazing.'”
Maddie’s being called the “it” girl.
Elle Magazine featured her in a spread, shot at her Murrysville home, and she’ll be their correspondent at New York Fashion Week next week, where she’ll report on fashion and her favorite hobby — doing hair and make-up.
Maddie also hopes to break into movies and scripted TV shows and is working on her singing and acting skills in addition to her dancing.
She even took time to teach Kristine, who’s a dancer herself, some of the music video dance from “Chandelier,” which you can check out in the video.
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Advertisement Editor’s Picks Inside the Plastic Electronics Revolution
In the UK’s concerted efforts to become a hub for graphene commercialization, one of the key partnerships between academic research and industry has been the one between the Cambridge Graphene Centre located at the University of Cambridge and a number of companies, including Nokia, Dyson, BaE systems, Philips and Plastic Logic. The last on this list, Plastic Logic, was spun out originally from the University of Cambridge in 2000. However, since its beginnings it has required a $200 million investment from RusNano to keep itself afloat back in 2011 for a time called Mountain View, California, home.
Nonetheless, it seems the connections to the old alma mater are still strong. Plastic Logic has developed in partnership with the Cambridge Graphene Centre for what it claims is the first graphene-based flexible display ever produced.
Research around the world has been looking at different avenues for applying graphene to flexible displays, where it offers a potential alternative to the relatively scarce indium tin oxide (ITO), which is used as a transparent conductor to control display pixels.
In this latest work, the pixel electronics, or backplane, employs an electrode made from solution-processed graphene. Here, the graphene-based electrode replaces a sputtered metal electrode layer that Plastic Logic uses in its conventional devices.
The video below provides a recipe of sorts of how the graphene backplane is produced:
The prototype uses an electrophoretic film, which is similar to the screens used in today’s e-readers with the added benefit of being flexible. In future iterations of the device, the research team will look at using liquid crystal (LCD) and organic light emitting diodes (OLED) technology to produce color images.
It would seem based on the press release accompanying the research that the collaborative arrangement between Cambridge and Plastic Logic is just as important as the technology they produced. In the press release, Professor Andrea Ferrari, Director of the Cambridge Graphene Centre said:
We are happy to see our collaboration with Plastic Logic resulting in the first graphene-based electrophoretic display exploiting graphene in its pixels’ electronics. This is a significant step forward to enable fully wearable and flexible devices. This cements the Cambridge graphene-technology cluster and shows how an effective academic-industrial partnership is key to help move graphene from the lab to the factory floor.
Indro Mukerjee, the CEO of Plastic Logic, piled on with:
The potential of graphene is well-known, but industrial process engineering is now required to transition graphene from laboratories to industry. This demonstration puts Plastic Logic at the forefront of this development, which will soon enable a new generation of ultra-flexible and even foldable electronics
Editor's Note: Plastic Logic did have its head office in Mountain View for a period, but it has always been headquartered in Cambridge, UK. The Mountain View office was closed back in late 2011.Thank you for supporting the journalism that our community needs!
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A little more than a year later, in April of this year, Saskatchewan made stripping in bars illegal again. Premier Brad Wall said the government made “a mistake” in 2014 and cited concerns about human trafficking. Many critics of the law — including dancers — say the decision has less to do with exploitation than it does to do with conservative moralizing.
First, some background: in 2014, Saskatchewan lifted its longtime ban on striptease in licensed establishments. Total nudity would still be a no-no, but performers could wear pasties.
Well, bit, more accurately. The Victoria, B.C.-based burlesque performer — who is bringing her show, Stories of Love and Passion, to the Winnipeg Fringe Theatre Festival this week — was kicked offstage Friday night after doing a minutes-long opening set that criticized the Saskatchewan government.
Hey there, time traveller! This article was published 14/7/2015 (1324 days ago), so information in it may no longer be current.
Hey there, time traveller!
This article was published 14/7/2015 (1324 days ago), so information in it may no longer be current.
The Lyric Theatre in Swift Current, Sask., has an issue with Rosie Bitts’ bits.
Well, bit, more accurately. The Victoria, B.C.-based burlesque performer — who is bringing her show, Stories of Love and Passion, to the Winnipeg Fringe Theatre Festival this week — was kicked offstage Friday night after doing a minutes-long opening set that criticized the Saskatchewan government.
First, some background: in 2014, Saskatchewan lifted its longtime ban on striptease in licensed establishments. Total nudity would still be a no-no, but performers could wear pasties.
A little more than a year later, in April of this year, Saskatchewan made stripping in bars illegal again. Premier Brad Wall said the government made "a mistake" in 2014 and cited concerns about human trafficking. Many critics of the law — including dancers — say the decision has less to do with exploitation than it does to do with conservative moralizing.
There is one loophole in the legislation: striptease entertainment is legal in Saskatchewan if it’s for a once-a-year charity event in a "limited special-use facility."
Not unlike the women of Instagram who are brilliantly Photoshopping men’s acceptable nipples over their own unacceptable nipples to highlight the hypocrisy of that social media network’s photo-sharing polices, Bitts’ piece — which was recorded — questioned the Saskatchewan government’s ban on the female nipple, as well as what the law says about men and their ability to control themselves.
It was a gentle ribbing, honestly, but a nervous woman from the Lyric Theatre quickly pulled the plug. The woman is hard to hear on the recording but, after thanking Rosie for her dance and asking if she had another, she said something like, "We have support from different areas, and I didn’t realize we’d be doing this tonight." One of those supporters is Saskatchewan Lotteries, which the woman thanked after promptly moving on to the raffle.
It took Bitts a second to wrap her mind around what was happening: her piece on censorship was being censored.
"I was shocked. I was absolutely shocked," Bitts tells me over coffee Tuesday morning. Bitts’s show had gone over well with the audiences during its run at Swift Current’s Chautauqua Theatre Festival, though one performance was protested by a street preacher who was eventually told to stop by police. When she was tapped to be an opener for a different show Friday night, she figured some topical, regional humour would be appropriate.
Evidently, she was mistaken.
Bitts wasn’t the only one who was shocked. The audience, too, couldn’t believe what was happening. "People afterwards said they thought I had actually set it up because it was such a great illustration of censorship," Bitts says. "This law has just been changed; I was standing there in my pasties and G-string — which I was allowed to perform in but not allowed to strip down to. The rules are just that ridiculous, and I’m apparently not allowed to talk about it. I was just allowed to do another one of my lovely little dances."
And that’s one of the most galling things about Friday night’s incident: Bitts was essentially told to shut up and dance. "That killed me," she says. "Let us just sexualize you, but we don’t want to actually hear from you."
As a burlesque performer, Bitts is all too used to having constraints placed on her body via rules that are as blurry as they are varied. "I understand that as women in Canada, we actually don’t have agency over our bodies 100 per cent," she says. "But to have my words limited? I didn’t think that existed here."
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Bitts was simply doing what all good artists do: she was using her art to challenge the status quo; to ask why things are the way they are. What she was saying wasn’t even particularly incendiary and has been echoed elsewhere. For body parts society insists are "private," female breasts — nipple inclusive — are sure are up for public debate a lot.
When women’s bodies, and what we can and cannot do with them, become a matter of government policy, we should absolutely be asking questions. For Bitts, this is bigger than striptease laws in Saskatchewan. This is about Canadian women having agency over their own bodies. All Canadian women.
As a Canadian woman and an artist, Bitts should be able to express her concerns and criticisms without fear of censorship or reprisal.
"The arts is where we are freely able to express what we, as a people, are thinking about," she says. "When we shut down the art and censor what can be said there, we’re in a really scary place in Canada. It seems like a little thing, me getting kicked offstage, but it’s not."
She’s right — it’s not. And it’s a scary place, indeed.
jen.zoratti@freepress.mb.caWhat You Lose When You Forget That Beer Is Fun
July 5, 2016
Standing in Washington. D.C.’s gorgeous National Building Museum for “SAVOR: An American Beer and Food Experience,” I was having a blast representing CraftBeer.com and pouring attendees samples alongside delicious pairings. For those who have never been, SAVOR is the Brewers Association’s “don’t call it a beer festival” beer festival, aimed at elevating craft beer as a worthy companion to high-level cuisine. Attendees are treated to dozens of small and independent craft breweries who serve their craft beers alongside a menu of carefully curated bite-sized foods.
SAVOR is truly an experience — a beer experience, one of many that beer presents.
(How to Pick the Right Beer Glass)
While engaging with attendees, a gentleman asked me about the event. He wondered why so many breweries chose to participate in SAVOR when the vast majority of them would likely never distribute in the area. I explained that the event had become known nationally as a stellar food event and a wonderful opportunity to showcase their beers alongside some of the best breweries in the country.
The attendee offered his own theory. “I think they’re looking to get bought,” he said.
The statement hit me as misguided, and caught me off-guard. It is concerning to me that in light of a few small brewer acquisitions, the independent and authentic nature of craft brewers existing for the fun of beer might have been muddied to this man. I stammered to assure him that I did not think that the large, vaulted room held up by massive columns was filled with Big Beer scouts sliding their cards across the table with a wink. I decided to find out for myself why brewers from out of the DC area wanted to participate in SAVOR.
I used the rest of my time at SAVOR tasting the pairings, but being sure to ask the brewery representative why they had wanted to join us. With the exception of the 16 supporting breweries in the center of the room, all of the other breweries had entered a lottery and needed to be selected in order to have the opportunity to pour at SAVOR. Many of the breweries that I talked to said that they had entered the lottery as many as four times for the chance to pour at SAVOR, and that they were honored to be a part of the event. Others I asked noted that it was nice to serve their beers outside of their own markets to simply gauge the response.
(Beer Lovers Can Learn a lot from Dr. Seuss)
Overwhelmingly brewers told me that they wanted to participate in SAVOR because it was a fun experience.
“Any of us can do this sort of thing in our home markets,” said Adam DeBower, owner-operator for Austin Beerworks in Texas. DeBower, with a smile on his face, happily poured his Pearl-Snap pilsner, a beer that he had probably poured thousands of times before at other events. He proudly talked to people about the brewery, even though they may never visit or |
tightening, somehow we have to know how to open up the space without getting hooked into our habitual pattern.
If we can see shenpa just as we’re starting to close down, when we feel the tightening, there’s the possibility of catching the urge to do the habitual thing, and not doing it. Without meditation practice, this is almost impossible to do.
In practicing with shenpa, first we try to recognize it. The best place to do this is on the meditation cushion. Sitting practice teaches us how to open and relax to whatever arises, without picking and choosing. It teaches us to experience the uneasiness and the urge fully, and to interrupt the momentum that usually follows. We do this by not following after the thoughts and learning to come back to the present moment. We learn to stay with the uneasiness, the tightening, the itch of shenpa. We train in sitting still with our desire to scratch. This is how we learn to stop the chain reaction of habitual patterns that otherwise will rule our lives. This is how we weaken the patterns that keep us hooked into discomfort that we mistake as comfort. We label the spinoff “thinking” and return to the present moment. Yet even in meditation, we experience shenpa.
Let’s say, for example, that in meditation you felt settled and open. Thoughts came and went, but they didn’t hook you. They were like clouds in the sky that dissolved when you acknowledged them. You were able to return to the moment without a sense of struggle. Afterwards, you’re hooked on that very pleasant experience: “I did it right, I got it right. That’s how it should always be, that’s the model.” Getting caught like that builds arrogance, and conversely it builds poverty, because your next session is nothing like that. In fact, your “bad” session is even worse now because you’re hooked on the “good” one. You sat there and you were discursive: you were obsessing about something at home, at work. You worried and you fretted; you got caught up in fear or anger. At the end of the session, you feel discouraged—it was “bad,” and there’s only you to blame.
Is there something inherently wrong or right with either meditation experience? Only the shenpa. The shenpa we feel toward “good” meditation hooks us into how it’s “supposed” to be, and that sets us up for shenpa towards how it’s not “supposed” to be. Yet the meditation is just what it is. We get caught in our idea of it: that’s the shenpa. That stickiness is the root shenpa. We call it ego-clinging or self-absorption. When we’re hooked on the idea of good experience, self-absorption gets stronger; when we’re hooked on the idea of bad experience, self-absorption gets stronger. This is why we, as practitioners, are taught not to judge ourselves, not to get caught in good or bad.
What we really need to do is address things just as they are. Learning to recognize shenpa teaches us the meaning of not being attached to this world. Not being attached has nothing to do with this world. It has to do with shenpa—being hooked by what we associate with comfort. All we’re trying to do is not to feel our uneasiness. But when we do this we never get to the root of practice. The root is experiencing the itch as well as the urge to scratch, and then not acting it out.
If we’re willing to practice this way over time, prajna begins to kick in. Prajna is clear seeing. It’s our innate intelligence, our wisdom. With prajna, we begin to see the whole chain reaction clearly. As we practice, this wisdom becomes a stronger force than shenpa. That in itself has the power to stop the chain reaction.
Prajna isn’t ego-involved. It’s wisdom found in basic goodness, openness, equanimity—which cuts through self-absorption. With prajna we can see what will open up space. Habituation, which is ego-based, is just the opposite—a compulsion to fill up space in our own particular style. Some of us close space by hammering our point through; others do it by trying to smooth the waters.
We’re taught that whatever arises is fresh, the essence of realization. That’s the basic view. But how do we see whatever arises as the essence of realization when the fact of the matter is, we have work to do? The key is to look into shenpa. The work we have to do is about coming to know that we’re tensing or hooked or “all worked up.” That’s the essence of realization. The earlier we catch it, the easier shenpa is to work with, but even catching it when we’re already all worked up is good. Sometimes we have to go through the whole cycle even though we see what we’re doing. The urge is so strong, the hook so sharp, the habitual pattern so sticky, that there are times when we can’t do anything about it.
The work we have to do is about coming to know that we’re tensing or hooked or “all worked up.” That’s the essence of realization.
There is something we can do after the fact, however. We can go sit on the meditation cushion and re-run the story. Maybe we start with remembering the all-worked-up feeling and get in touch with that. We look clearly at the shenpa in retrospect; this is very helpful. It’s also helpful to see shenpa arising in little ways, where the hook is not so sharp.
Buddhists are talking about shenpa when they say, “Don’t get caught in the content: observe the underlying quality—the clinging, the desire, the attachment.” Sitting meditation teaches us how to see that tangent before we go off on it. It basically comes down to the instruction, “label it thinking.” To train in this on the cushion, where it’s relatively easy and pleasant to do, is how we can prepare ourselves to stay when we get all worked up.
Then we can train in seeing shenpa wherever we are. Say something to another person and maybe you’ll feel that tensing. Rather than get caught in a story line about how right you are or how wrong you are, take it as an opportunity to be present with the hooked quality. Use it as an opportunity to stay with the tightness without acting upon it. Let that training be your base.
You can also practice recognizing shenpa out in nature. Practice sitting still and catching the moment when you close down. Or practice in a crowd, watching one person at a time. When you’re silent, what hooks you is mental dialogue. You talk to yourself about badness or goodness: me-bad or they-bad, this-right or that-wrong. Just to see this is a practice. You’ll be intrigued by how you’ll involuntarily shut down and get hooked, one way or another. Just keep labeling those thoughts and come back to the immediacy of the feeling. That’s how not to follow the chain reaction.
Once we’re aware of shenpa, we begin to notice it in other people. We see them shutting down. We see that they’ve been hooked and that nothing is going to get through to them now. At that moment we have prajna. That basic intelligence comes through when we’re not caught up in escaping from our own unease. With prajna we can see what’s happening with others; we can see when they’ve been hooked. Then we can give the situation some space. One way to do that is by opening up the space on the spot, through meditation. Be quiet and place your mind on your breath. Hold your mind in place with great openness and curiosity toward the other person. Asking a question is another way of creating space around that sticky feeling. So is postponing your discussion to another time.
At the abbey, we’re very fortunate that everybody is excited about working with shenpa. So many words I’ve tried using become ammunition that people use against themselves. But we feel some kind of gladness about working with shenpa, perhaps because the word is unfamiliar. We can acknowledge what’s happening with clear seeing, without aiming it at ourselves. Since no one particularly likes to have his shenpa pointed out, people at the Abbey make deals like, “When you see me getting hooked, just pull your earlobe, and if I see you getting hooked, I’ll do the same. Or if you see it in yourself, and I’m not picking up on it, at least give some little sign that maybe this isn’t the time to continue this discussion.” This is how we help each other cultivate prajna, clear seeing.
Once we see how we get hooked and how we get swept along by the momentum, there’s no way to be arrogant. The trick is to keep seeing.
We could think of this whole process in terms of four R’s: recognizing the shenpa, refraining from scratching, relaxing into the underlying urge to scratch and then resolving to continue to interrupt our habitual patterns like this for the rest of our lives. What do you do when you don’t do the habitual thing? You’re left with your urge. That’s how you become more in touch with the craving and the wanting to move away. You learn to relax with it. Then you resolve to keep practicing this way.
Working with shenpa softens us up. Once we see how we get hooked and how we get swept along by the momentum, there’s no way to be arrogant. The trick is to keep seeing. Don’t let the softening and humility turn into self-denigration. That’s just another hook. Because we’ve been strengthening the whole habituated situation for a long, long time, we can’t expect to undo it overnight. It’s not a one-shot deal. It takes loving-kindness to recognize; it takes practice to refrain; it takes willingness to relax; it takes determination to keep training this way. It helps to remember that we may experience two billion kinds of itches and seven quadrillion types of scratching, but there is really only one root shenpa—ego-clinging. We experience it as tightening and self-absorption. It has degrees of intensity. The branch shenpas are all our different styles of scratching that itch.
I recently saw a cartoon of three fish swimming around a hook. One fish is saying to the other, “The secret is non-attachment.” That’s a shenpa cartoon: the secret is—don’t bite that hook. If we can catch ourselves at that place where the urge to bite is strong, we can at least get a bigger perspective on what’s happening. As we practice this way, we gain confidence in our own wisdom. It begins to guide us toward the fundamental aspect of our being—spaciousness, warmth and spontaneity.Cynthia Freeland (Philosopher Queen) says: My neighbor rang my doorbell one night and had in her arms a mama cat and kitten that had been trying to find shelter under her house. She has two big dogs and knows I'm a cat person so she brought them over to me. I gave some food to Mama, who was ravenous, and put them in my laundry room. Baby Socks, as my neighbor called him, kept screaming the most piercing meows. It was hard to believe that anything so tiny could emit such loud, piercing, piteous wails! When I checked on them later I was so happy to find Mama relaxing and feeding little Socks.
The next day plot thickened. I learned from my friend at the local county animal control of two new kittens in need of bottle feeding. I thought maybe I could get mama kitty to adopt them, so I drove 40 miles each way to pick them up. I brought these TINY newborns into the house, and after about 20 seconds of sniffing Mama accepted them and began happily nursing all the babies. What a lovely lady. I decided to call her Sylvie because I felt she needed an elegant French name. :-) I hoped I could find her a good home.
Sylvie, her son Socks, and adopted sons Itsy and Bitsy became a family. The laundry basket was a good holding pen for the kittens and they seemed to feel comfortable and safe in it. One morning I found Socks out of the laundry basket, running around, trying to tear up a loose piece of paper towel. In the next few weeks he turned into quite a comical little adventurer, full of mischief and desperate to play with his little brothers or his mother. But Sylvie was just annoyed by his jumping on her head and often batted him away, and the little ones were too small and frail to play. So I tried to divert his attention and keep him entertained. He cracked me up, running around in uncoordinated bursts of energy and chasing his toys. One day I found a small basket unused in a closet and had an intuition that Socks might like it. Boy was that right -- he was one wild and crazy guy playing in (and out and under) it!
Itsy and Bitsy started developing into fun little kittens -- boisterous Itsy with his darling round body and head and tummy spots, and Bitsy with his darker, fluffier face and sweet, shy nature. Socks was constantly trying to get Mama, Itsy, and Bitsy to play with him. Sometimes Mama played but, being still young herself, she could get a bit rough. So Socks more often played with little Itsy, repeatedly knocking him down while Itsy batted away at Socks. It was hilarious to watch. Itsy was a fighter and Bitsy was a lover.
One day I went to a party at work and one of our graduate students, Wade, told me he was interested in adopting Socks. He came to visit, met my house guests, and the deal was done. When it was time for Socks to go, I sent his purple basket along with him to remind him of home. I was so happy he was going to have his own home where he would be the center of attention and cared for, but I knew I would miss him a lot. It was rough at first and Socks cried because he missed his mommy, but he adjusted and began enjoying his new surroundings and making new friends. Wade kept me updated with stories about how Socks settled in, growing into a very outgoing cat who liked to play with visitors. He continued to love his purple basket and liked tipping it over so he could “hide” underneath it and grab things through the holes. One day I went to visit and was so happy to find that Wade had replaced Socks’s little basket with an identical but much larger laundry basket. Socks loves it! He is so handsome now, all grown up and looking a lot like his mama.
I'm also very happy to report that Itsy and Bitsy have found a forever home together! I miss them like crazy. As for Sylvie, I couldn’t give her up. She is now my beautiful, long-haired, semiferal-but-slowly-learning-not-to-bite black beauty. I think she’s very happy.Former presidential candidate Ron Paul is taking heat for a tweet he sent out Monday afternoon about the Navy SEAL who was killed at a Texas gun range over the weekend.
Chris Kyle, 38, a decorated Iraq war veteran, a former SEAL and author of “American Sniper,” was shot and killed Saturday. Police arrested Eddie Ray Routh, 25, a veteran authorities say may have a mental illness related to his military service.
In response to the news, Paul tweeted: “Chris Kyle’s death seems to confirm that ‘he who lives by the sword dies by the sword.’ Treating PTSD at a firing range doesn’t make sense.”
The tweet set off a chain reaction of criticism online.
Aaron Worthing (@AaronWorthing) responded: “What the Hell, @RonPaul? Are you actually blaming Chris Kyle for his own death?”
More On This... Former Navy SEAL Chris Kyle fatally shot at Texas shooting range
Michelle Lancaster (@SkiGarmisch) added, “Very disrespectful commentary to this man, his memory and his family. Shame on you.”
Razor (@hale.razor) wrote, “So all veterans, once done serving our nation with honor, deserve to be murdered as civilians? Wow.”
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Calls and emails to Paul for comment were not immediately returned. He averages about two tweets a day, typically about policy issues ranging from immigration to the Federal Reserve. Paul, who is known for his anti-war views, retired as a long-time Texas congressman earlier this year.
Kyle, the most lethal sniper in the U.S., had 160 confirmed kills. He enlisted in the Navy in February 1999 and was discharged in November 2009. He had four tours in Iraq under his belt and received 14 different awards and decorations, including two Silver Stars, five Bronze Stars with Valor and two Navy and Marine Corps Achievement Medals. After leaving the Navy, he wrote his biography, “American Sniper.”
Last year, Kyle told the Fort Worth Star-Telegram that he didn’t go into the service for the money or awards.
“I did it because I felt like it was something that needed to be done and it was honorable,” Kyle said. “I loved the guys.”
Routh, a former corporal in the Marines, is being held on $3 million bond. He is also accused of killing Chad Littlefield, 35, who was at the gun range with Kyle. Routh has been charged with one count of capital murder and two charges of murder. Routh served on active duty from 2006 to 2010. He fought in Iraq in 2007 and was sent to Haiti in 2010.
The Associated Press contributed to this report.There is speculation that CCSVI may contribute to the symptoms experienced by MS patients, but what do the data tell us so far?
Multiple sclerosis (MS) is a chronic disease of the central nervous system characterized by inflammation and demyelination.1 It is estimated that MS is diagnosed in more than 10,000 patients every year in the United States alone.2 MS can lead to a wide range of neurologic symptoms including fatigue, headaches, decreased cognition, optic nerve dysfunction, diplopia, decreased balance, extremity weakness, and bladder and bowel dysfunction. The etiology of MS is unknown, although most point to an autoimmune basis at present.3 Many patients with MS receive disease-modifying drugs to prevent relapse and slow disease progression.
Chronic cerebrospinal venous insufficiency (CCSVI) is a recent theory put forth to explain the pathogenesis of MS and its associated symptoms.4 The early work of Charcot and Putnam laid the groundwork for this theory by suggesting the possibility that a relationship existed between the venous drainage from the central nervous system and the lesions associated with MS.5,6 The CCSVI theory states that extracranial venous outflow obstruction (Figure 1A) can lead to venous hypertension and dilatation, which can result in chronic venous reflux,7 prolonged circulatory transit time,8 lower net flow of cerebrospinal fluid,9 and blood brain barrier disruption.10 The latter can potentially cause an infiltration of immune cells (which can cause an autoimmune reaction) and/or red blood cells (which can cause perivenous iron deposition and inflammation) into the central nervous system, both of which may contribute to the development or progression of MS.11
Zamboni et al have described success with treating this condition with angioplasty of the internal jugular (IJ) (Figure 1B) and azygous veins.12 Given the significant motivation on the part of patients suffering from MS to actively seek out treatment options that may address both symptoms and the underlying etiology of this condition, it is not surprising that so much attention has been paid to CCSVI. The purpose of this article is to review the data that are currently available regarding CCSVI and the potential role it may play in the care of patients with MS.
DIAGNOSING CCSVI
The diagnosis of CCSVI using noninvasive imaging has been one of the challenges associated with this condition. The ultrasound technique described by Zamboni et al has been the most commonly used imaging modality for this purpose.13 This technique involves the evaluation of five different parameters to assess venous flow: reflux in the IJ or vertebral veins, reflux within the deep cerebral veins, evidence of a stenosis within the IJ vein on grayscale images, undetectable flow in the IJ veins, and the absence of the normal decrease in cross-sectional area of the IJ vein when moving from a supine to an upright position.
In a study of 109 MS patients and 177 controls, Zamboni et al found that 47% of measurements were abnormal in the MS patients and only 2.7% were abnormal in the control population. When at least two criteria were used to define a positive examination, the positive and negative predictive values were 100%. Other authors have found an increased prevalence of CCSVI in MS as well, although not to the same extent as Zamboni et al.14-16 This, however, has not been a consistent finding among investigators. For example, Doepp et al found no differences in venous flow between MS patients and healthy controls.17
Although this has led some researchers to conclude that CCSVI is not a true pathologic entity, it has led others to recognize that not every patient with MS has an ultrasound examination consistent with CCSVI. It has been suggested that ultrasound may not be the most effective way to diagnose CCSVI, particularly when specialized training appears to be necessary to optimize the diagnostic accuracy and reproducibility of this technique.18
Magnetic resonance imaging is the standard imaging modality used to both diagnose and follow patients with MS.19 It effectively shows the lesions associated with MS and is a prominent part of the McDonald criteria used to diagnose MS.20 Magnetic resonance venography has been used to detect evidence of venous insufficiency in this population.21 It is believed to be a useful modality for this purpose because it can visualize the actual extracranial venous stenoses while also assessing brain perfusion and iron content within the brain. However, it too has been found to be an inconsistent way to diagnose CCSVI in this patient population.22,23
Most interventionists consider selective venography to be the gold standard for diagnosing CCSVI. Bartolomei et al studied 65 patients and found that all patients had multiple and significant extracranial venous stenoses involving the IJ and/or azygous veins.24 Interestingly, four patterns of extracranial disease were found in these patients: type A (stenosis of the proximal azygous vein with a stenosis of one IJ vein), type B (stenosis of the azygous vein and both IJ veins), type C (stenosis of both IJ veins and a normal azygous vein), and type D (stenosis of the azygous vein with normal IJ veins). These patterns were shown to correlate with the type of MS and the presenting symptoms at the time of MS onset.
At the first meeting of the International Society for Neurovascular Disease held in March 2011 in Bologna, Italy, Denislic reported the results of a study evaluating 65 MS patients with venography and compared the findings with the Expanded Disability Status Scale (EDSS), which is an overall measure of neurologic impairment ranging from 0 (normal neurologic examination) to 10 (death due to MS).25,26 They found that patients with an EDSS score > 6 had significantly more treatable lesions on venography than patients with a lower EDSS score, indicating that the severity of venous disease increases with the severity of the patient’s neurologic condition.
TREATMENT AND RESULTS
Once diagnosed, it is of course important to know whether or not treatment of this condition leads to a significant change in the clinical condition of the patient. In the initial pilot study Zamboni et al performed venography on 65 MS patients with CCSVI diagnosed on ultrasound.12 Patients with a stenosis > 50% in severity were treated with angioplasty using 10- to 12-mm balloons in the IJ veins and 8- to 10-mm balloons in the azygous vein. The relapsing-remitting patients in this group had sustained clinical improvement based on the Multiple Sclerosis Functional Composite; only limited improvement was seen in patients with primary and secondary progressive MS.
The Multiple Sclerosis Functional Composite tests upper extremity dexterity with a timed 9-hole peg test, leg/walking function with a timed 25-foot walk, and cognitive function with a Paced Auditory Serial Addition Test.27 In addition, all of the relapsing-remitting patients with continued venous patency at 18 months were relapse free, leading some to conclude that angioplasty may affect disease progression. Unfortunately, the primary patency rate at 18 months was 53% in the IJ vein, but it was 96% in the azygous vein.
Since this initial study, other reports have emerged about the outcomes after angioplasty in this patient population. Malagoni et al studied 35 MS patients with significant fatigue and found sustained improvement in fatigue and a greater ability to perform daily activities after angioplasty.28 At the International Society for Neurovascular Disease meeting, Zarebinski reported on the results from a study of 420 MS patients treated with angioplasty and found significant improvement in fatigue but no significant improvement in EDSS score or the MS Impact Scale-29.29 Mehta also reported the results from a study of 150 patients with MS. They found significant improvements in quality of life and fatigue after angioplasty.30 In addition, they reported a technical success rate of 77% (defined as < 20% residual stenosis) and a reintervention rate of 9%.
In the original study by Zamboni et al, the reported complication rate was extremely low, with only six patients reporting a self-limited postprocedure headache.12 Since that time, two other studies have specifically reported the complications associated with venous angioplasty and stent placement to treat CCSVI. Ludyga et al retrospectively reviewed 344 procedures performed in 331 patients and Mandato et al retrospectively reviewed 257 procedures in 240 patients.31,32 The complications reported in these papers are outlined in Table 1. Severe complications that have been reported include cardiac arrhythmias, stress-induced cardiomyopathy, adverse drug events (including an intracerebral hemorrhage secondary to anticoagulation), and intracardiac stent migration in the setting of stent placement.31-33
SUMMARY
At the present time, anecdotal reports continue to surface about the positive changes reported by patients after endovascular treatment of stenoses within the IJ and azygous veins. However, one can in no way state that enough research has been done to conclude that CCSVI is a true pathologic entity occurring with an increased frequency in MS patients, that this entity is responsible for the symptoms and disease progression seen with MS, and that treatment significantly improves the quality of life in these patients. As a result, additional research is going to be critically important moving forward.
This sentiment was echoed in the recent report from the Research Consensus Panel convened by the Society of Interventional Radiology Foundation, which supported the need for additional well-designed studies in areas including basic science work to better understand the relationship between venous stenoses, hypertension, and CCSVI; single-center studies to define appropriate patients to treat and develop standardized procedural technique; and multicenter, prospective, randomized trials to demonstrate efficacy.34 Ongoing studies include registries in Europe and the United States as well as several prospective single-arm and randomized, blinded studies. Ultimately, these studies will help grow our understanding of CCSVI and help determine what role treatment of this entity can and should play in the care of patients with MS.
Gary Siskin, MD, is Professor and Chairman, Department of Radiology at Albany Medical Center in Albany, New York. He has disclosed that he holds no financial interest related to this article. Dr. Siskin may be reached at (518) 262-2397; sisking@mail.amc.edu.
Kenneth Mandato, MD, is Assistant Professor of Radiology, Department of Radiology at Albany Medical Center in Albany, New York. He has disclosed that he holds no financial interest related to this article.
Meridith Englander, MD, is Assistant Professor of Radiology, Department of Radiology at Albany Medical Center in Albany, New York. She has disclosed that she holds no financial interest related to this article.(Image: © Cindy Moorhead)
One key to becoming a more versatile blues soloist is learning to combine the minor pentatonic and major pentatonic scales to create guitar lines that go beyond the minor pentatonic scale.
As a prerequisite to this lesson, you should have a basic understanding of the finger positionings for the minor pentatonic and major pentatonic scales, particularly the first and second positions of both scales.
Stepping back, I should note that learning to play within both of these scales at the same time opened new doors for me as a guitar player.
Before combining them, I remember first learning to solo over the standard 1-4-5 blues progression, and my teacher at the time gave me a quick trick for alternating between the minor and major pentatonic solos: Use the minor pentatonic for the sections on the “1” and the major pentatonic for the sections on the “4," and alternate back in forth in this manner in the way that sounded best.
While this approach can work to give you a more varied sound beyond merely the minor pentatonic scale, this trick is by no means a hard and fast rule, and moving beyond it to learn to combine both scales makes you a more versatile player.
A quick point of reference to understand about these scales is that, in respect to physical finger positioning, they are identical, with one scale simply falling three frets below the other on the fretboard. That is to say, in any given key: (i) the finger position for the major pentatonic scale falls three frets down from the minor pentatonic scale, and (ii) the root note is the same for both scales.
So, for example, let’s focus on the key of A. The A on the fifth fret of the first string is the root note of both the A minor pentatonic and A major pentatonic scales.
This means that, in the A minor pentatonic scale’s first position, the A on the fifth fret of the first string is played with your index finger. And, three frets down playing the same positions for the A major pentatonic scale, the same A is played with your pinky (and your index finger is on the F#—you may also notice at this point that you are in the F# minor pentatonic scale’s first position). The below tabs illustrate this point.
So, first visualize both major and minor pentatonic scales, and practice them up and down the neck, focusing on their first and second positions for the purposes of this lesson. You can practice them with all downstrokes and/or alternate picking, and in doing so, keep in mind the locations of your root note A’s, which are relevant for playing blues in the key of A.
As you will notice, the first position of the A minor pentatonic scale and the second position of the A major pentatonic scale are both within easy reach of the first position of the A minor pentatonic scale (index finger beginning on the fifth fret of the first string, and proceeding on from there). And, as you see below, these scale positions can be overlayed into a hybrid scale that encompasses all of their notes. And, what we want to learn how to do is visualize the first position of the minor pentatonic scale and the second position of the major pentatonic over the same position on the neck, and use the notes from both scales to play blues licks and riffs.
So, to make a riff using both scales, let’s focus on the top two strings starting at the fifth fret. The A minor pentatonic scale uses the notes at the fifth and eighth frets on these strings, while the A major pentatonic uses the notes at the fifth and seventh frets on these strings. So, to combine the scales and see what it sounds like, let’s play the following lick No. 1.
And you can already hear the blues element present when you mix these scales. After you are comfortable with lick No. 1, you can move to lick No 2, which further explores this principle. And at this stage, I would encourage you to start exploring further and have some fun coming up with new licks using the notes from both scales in this position.
Another common lick that combines these scales using a hammer-on is shown below in lick No. 3, and you have probably heard this combination of notes in many country and blues songs.
So, bringing a lot of these elements together, you can play something like the following.
You can always play the scales separately to give your soloing their different flavors. And soon, taking this lesson into account, and with some practice, you will be able to bring these two scales together into a hybrid scale to further expand what you can play, and allow you to play modern blues and some old-school blues in what may be a new way for you.
The first step is to be able to see the two scales and then put them together, seeing the minor pentatonic and major pentatonic scales at the same time. As you’ll see, if you know all five positions of the pentatonic scale, you can apply this very same principle all over the guitar neck. And pretty soon the new notes from scale to scale will begin to stick out, giving you new notes to play all over the neck in your blues solos.
Steve Stine is a longtime and sought-after guitar teacher who is professor of Modern Guitar Studies at North Dakota State University. Over the last 27 years, he has taught thousands of students, including established touring musicians, and released numerous video guitar lesson courses via established publishers. A resident of Fargo, North Dakota, today he is more accessible than ever before through the convenience of live online guitar lessons at LessonFace.com.LessonFace.com offers live online music lessons via videoconference, allowing you to access top teachers in a wide variety of instruments from anywhere with a broadband connection. Steve is offering a live online group class for intermediate players this summer called “The Players Series” via the LessonFace.com platform. More information about live online lessons with Steve is available at lessonface.com/player.from R.C. Sproul Jr. Category: Articles
Cyberspace is not only infinite, but eternal. No matter how silly, foolish, embarrassing our thoughts might be, they will be allowed to merge onto the information superhighway. But, all the off-ramps are closed. Believing the best defense is a, well, great defense, here are five things we ought to ask ourselves before posting anything on social media.
1. Ask yourself: If my mother, pastor, spouse, children were to read this, would they be ashamed of me?
The point is not that our calling in life is to be certain no one is ever embarrassed by us. Indeed your mother, pastor, spouse, children could be wrongly embarrassed, embarrassed when they ought not to be. The point is instead to be deliberate. Don’t embarrass by mistake.
2. Ask yourself: Where is this coming from?
Posts that are fueled by anger are almost never good. Posts fueled by pride never are. Both anger and pride tend to muddy our thinking, and to expose our own self-righteousness. Perhaps nothing should call us to hit delete instead of send more than those posts that combine pride and anger. That is, the really clever, snarky comeback that shows off my literary panache against someone who has made me angry is really just me smearing egg all over my face.
3. Ask yourself: Have I practiced a judgment of charity toward the person I am writing about/responding to?
Practicing a judgment of charity is always a good thing. How much more so in the context of a medium that allows for virtually no non-verbal communication? Without facial expressions, tone, volume it is all too easy to misread. Emoticons will not solve this problem. Before writing a rant asking how a friend, or an enemy, could possibly believe x, why not first ask them, do you really believe x, or have I misunderstood you?
4. Ask yourself: Am I seeking to serve Jesus with this post, or am I seeking my own?
There has been a great deal of heat on the interwebs lately, sparks spreading from the recent Strange Fire conference. The issue of continuing sign gifts is an important one. Someone is wrong on this. But if we could look into our hearts, chances are we will see less a concern that our brothers enjoy the blessings of biblical fidelity on the issue, more a concern that my feelings were hurt, or a concern that those who dare to disagree with my understanding be put in their place.
5. Ask yourself: Am I casting pearls before swine?
Well that’s not a very nice question, is it? It is, however, a biblical one. Jesus Himself tells us not to do this (Matthew 7:6.) The NIT, New Interwebs Translation, of Matthew 7:6 is “Don’t feed the trolls.” Feeding trolls is bad for the food, bad for the trolls, and bad for you. Trolls are those who delight to raise our blood pressure, all the while not caring a whit for the issue at hand. To interact with them is to communicate, ironically, that you also don’t care about the issue at hand. Trolls are also tar babies. Once you engage, it’s tough to disentangle.
Okay, 6. Ask yourself: Am I being a troll?
I’m not sure which is worse, self-conscious trolls, or not self-aware trolls. The former know they are being nasty, the latter don’t even know themselves.
Before you fire off a reply, please understand that I am not writing as one who has mastered these six questions. (Which reminds me, let’s make it ten-ask yourself, have a I read the whole piece? Have I at least made an effort to read through the comments? Is the question I’m about to ask one that google can answer? Do I know the difference between to, too and two, there, their and they’re? Arminian and Armenian?) I am, however, going to, by God’s grace, try harder. I hope you will too.
Bonus Suggestion—Every now and again my spiking blood pressure upon reading someone else’s wisdom on the web actually sets off a helpful alarm. I think, “Boy, I’m awful mad. Better be careful. Though I ought to always do this, there have been times where I sat down, and asked myself this—are you able to write a reply that is both helpful and gracious? Let |
Columbia, skillfully untangles the apocalyptic “mytho-histories,” “just-so narratives,” and “political bedtime stories” favored by the modern right, in Europe and America. For him “reactionary” is not an insult. It is a taxonomic term. It describes an organic response to political and social revolution, and the quite sensible fear that the shared common life of a people has been wrenched out of its cherished patterns. Nor is the phenomenon limited to the ideological right. The left has reactionaries, too—including progressives in the nineteen-nineties who, Lilla wrote at the time, were convinced that Americans did not grasp the disastrous truth about the Reagan Revolution, “since if they did, they would overturn it.” But reactionaries on the right far outnumber those on the left. “The enduring vitality of the reactionary spirit even in the absence of a revolutionary political program,” he writes, arises from the feeling that “to live a modern life anywhere in the world today, subject to perpetual social and technological changes, is to experience the psychological equivalent of permanent revolution.” In the six decades since Buckley and company took their stand, conservatives still speak the same militant language. We’re just more used to it now. “All this damage that he’s done to America is deliberate,” Marco Rubio, as a Presidential candidate, said of Obama, which sounds almost like an accusation of treason. The G.O.P. warns that, as President, Hillary Clinton, despite her long record as a moderate-to-slightly-left Democrat, would try to lead us down the road to socialist perdition. Where do these passions come from? Lilla’s answer is bracingly direct. They come from the place that conservatives themselves often point to as the root of all ideological evil: Europe.
The best pages in “The Shipwrecked Mind” are elegant, concise portraits of refugees from Weimar Europe who fled to America after the Nazi takeover and brought with them “some very large and very dark ideas about the crisis of the age.” These ideas reached maturity in the first years of the Cold War. We often think of the nineteen-fifties as the decade of complacent conformism: a robust economy, a beloved war hero in the White House, slow but important progress on civil rights. But it was also “High Noon,” the doomsday thermonuclear clock ticking loudly even as a dangerous storm was brewing abroad: anti-American governments in Asia, Africa, and the Middle East, ungrateful semi-socialist regimes in Europe living under the protection of our troops and dollars, Soviet leaps in missile and aerospace technology, and a shooting war in Korea. There were even overtones of Weimar “stab in the back” conspiracy lore in Senator Joseph McCarthy’s accusation that Democrats were guilty of “twenty years of treason.” In most accounts of the period, including Mark Greif’s recent book “The Age of the Crisis of Man” (2015), the dominant refugee is Hannah Arendt, whose “Origins of Totalitarianism” (1951) depicted the rise of Hitlerism and Stalinism as twin modernities, engines of mass terror built to effect “the transformation of human nature itself.” Its blend of history, philosophy, and intellectual drama—a postwar addendum to Spengler’s “The Decline of the West”—was keyed to the mood of chastened leftists. But conservatives had their own pantheon of foreign-born exotics, who dispensed very different lessons and left a deeper and more lasting imprint on our politics. Friedrich Hayek’s “The Road to Serfdom,” a potent critique of centralized government planning, was a best-seller in 1944 (and again in 2010, at the zenith of the Tea Party revolt). His mentor Ludwig von Mises, dean of the Austrian School of economics, gave the N.Y.U. seminars—extensions of the celebrated “private” seminars he had convened in prewar Vienna—that planted the seeds of the libertarian movement still flourishing today. And the Russian émigrée Ayn Rand and her young “collective,” including Alan Greenspan, gathered at her Murray Hill apartment on Saturday nights to hear fresh pages of her novel in progress, “Atlas Shrugged.” (It remains a sacred text on the American right, a favorite of Paul Ryan, although Gary Johnson prefers her previous novel, “The Fountainhead,” and Rand Paul “cut his teeth” on her entire œuvre.) Lilla enlarges and subtilizes the picture by working through the legacies of two other refugees, the political philosophers Eric Voegelin and Leo Strauss. Voegelin was born in Cologne but grew up in Vienna and, in the nineteen-twenties, spent two years in America, where he heard John Dewey lecture at Columbia. He returned to Vienna to teach. (He also attended Mises’s private seminars there.) When Hitler rose to power, Voegelin bravely published an attack on biological racism. After the Anschluss, he escaped by train to Switzerland while Gestapo agents were searching his apartment. In America, he bounced from Harvard and Bennington to Northwestern and Alabama, before finding a longer-term berth at Louisiana State University. In the fifties, he wrote a backward-looking prophecy that had a Vico-like sweep and title, “The New Science of Politics.” Its argument was elegant and powerful. The decline of the West had its origins in the early days of Christianity, “the first world religion to offer theological principles for distinguishing divine and political orders.” It filled men with thoughts of divinity, but its promise of final deliverance, or “eschaton,” bred impatient dreams of secular cities of God, built here and now. Voegelin, who had a weakness for odd coinages, called this “the fallacious immanentization of the Christian eschaton”—Heaven on earth, achieved through “political religion.” Secular ideologies were all “gnostic” creeds, each a perversion of the old faith but curiously like it, with its own mythology, its prophets and priests, its holy scripture spelled out in Diderot and D’Alembert’s Encyclopédie, Marx’s “Das Kapital,” and other “new korans.” Science and technology were the new gnostic faiths. Voegelin’s “secularization thesis,” as it was later called, emphasized family connections between the radical left and liberalism. “How indignant a humanistic liberal will be when he is told that his particular type of immanentism is one step on the road to Marxism,” he wrote. This was more or less what American conservatives had been saying since the New Deal, but now the argument had philosophical heft and had been updated for the twilight struggle. Voegelin’s thesis excited intellectuals at National Review. “Immanentization of the eschaton” became a catchphrase for Buckley, who adored baroque locutions. Grimmer minds, like that of Frank Meyer, the magazine’s—and later the conservative movement’s—chief ideologue, grabbed Voegelin and made him a cudgel. The Cold War could not be won by middle-of-the-roaders in the Eisenhower Administration, who didn’t see how “the bloody terror of the Lubyanka cellars” converged with “the dry terror of social-engineered conformity” in Washington. Meyer was one of many on the right who were all but unhinged by the Sputnik launch, in 1957. The Soviets, supposed to be enslaved automatons, had emerged as sorcerers who conquered the mysteries of the booster rocket while American scientists were still firing duds. Voegelin offered spiritual balm. Sputnik was just a metal capsule, after all, a false image spinning in pointless orbit through the godless wastes. To be dazzled was to join the fallen world in which “technology becomes the god by which we live,” and the Communists would win because they chase “to its logical conclusion the positivistic glorification of control and power as the end of man’s existence.” Voegelin’s books were not meant to be entries in the Cold War ideological ledger, Lilla notes. But conservatives read Voegelin attentively, and set about trying to spread his arcane message to the masses. The Conservative Rally for World Liberation, held in March, 1962, at Madison Square Garden, drew a crowd of eighteen thousand, with picketers and protesters gathered outside. Organized by a new rightist group, the Young Americans for Freedom, the event was greeted as evidence that the “silent generation” might be shaking off its apathy and finding a political voice. (The Times published a front-page report on the “spectacular” rally, and followed up with a four-part series on campus activism.) The star of the event was L. Brent Bozell, the ghostwriter of Barry Goldwater’s best-selling manifesto “The Conscience of a Conservative.” Bozell gave a speech that unpacked Voegelin’s thesis, equating the “heresy of gnosticism” in Kennedy’s liberalism with Khrushchev’s Communism, and then summoned conservatives to reject both in order to “build a Christian civilization.” Its divine mission was to harry Communists across the globe—in Africa, in Cuba, in Europe. One of Bozell’s marching orders, addressed “to our commander in Berlin,” was “Tear down the wall.” [cartoon id="a20105"]
Voegelin inspired the first wave of conservative intellectuals, who rose to prominence in the nineteen-fifties and sixties, but it was Leo Strauss, with his backward-looking prophecies, who dominated the movement’s next phase. Unlike Voegelin, Strauss is still famous, thanks to his position at the University of Chicago, the intellectual citadel of neoconservative thought in the seventies and eighties. Less a grand theorist than a scholar, he was a wizard of “esoteric” reading who extracted rich ore from a spectrum of thinkers—the ancient Greeks but also Jewish and Islamic scholars, and secular moderns such as Thomas Hobbes, John Locke, and Max Weber. For Strauss, it was all part of a massive clearance project, meant to return philosophy to its ancient founders, Plato and Aristotle. Exemplars of the life of reason, they made philosophy “the humanizing quest for the eternal order, and hence it had been a pure source of humane inspiration and aspiration,” until the moderns came along and debased it, making it a utilitarian “instrument” and an ideological “weapon.” The culprits were largely social scientists, who had lost sight of reason and confused it with the fetish for knowledge, data, and quantifiable facts, which they separated out from “ultimate values.” What looked like the road to progress, from the ancient world of superstition up to the sunstruck heights of the Enlightenment, had been the opposite, a descent from Olympian reason to the quicksand of modernity: liberal “relativism,” “nihilism.” Reading Strauss “produced the kind of shock that is a once-in-a-lifetime experience,” Irving Kristol recalled in 1995. Voegelin had readers; Strauss had apostles. And they spread the gospel to “another generation of political theorists, many of whom have relocated to Washington, D.C.,” Irving Kristol noted with satisfaction. Among them was his son, William, who studied at Harvard with the Straussian Harvey Mansfield before going to Washington and becoming a major player in the G.O.P. This history appalls Lilla. His normal approach is that of a courtly sommelier, decanting his intellectual elixir and then stepping back to enjoy our pleasure in it. But not when it comes to the neocons. “The path that led from the seminar rooms in Chicago to the right-wing political-media-foundation complex in Washington,” he writes, “has transformed American politics over the past five decades,” and very much for the worse. Elsewhere, he has written unsparingly of “the remarkable transmutation of neoconservatism from intellectual movement to rabble-rousing Republican court ideology.” He has his reasons. In the nineteen-eighties, while he was in his twenties, he was himself a neoconservative princeling, the managing editor of The Public Interest, under its editor Irving Kristol (who was also, briefly, Lilla’s father-in-law). By his account, the movement’s combination of belligerence and intellectual sloppiness set him on the path of moderation he urges in so much of his work. Meanwhile, the Straussians were honing their “political catechism” and imparting their own hand-me-down message of Weimar-inflected Kulturpessimismus, complete with images of brown-shirted hordes. “Whether it be Nuremberg or Woodstock, the principle is the same,” Strauss’s disciple Allan Bloom thundered in his best-seller “The Closing of the American Mind.” It wasn’t remotely the same, of course, and the overstatement rebounded against Strauss, who had never said anything of the kind but was soon being held accountable for the rashest words of his admirers. The peak moment came during George W. Bush’s Presidency. Journalists and writers, their blades whetted, accused Strauss, who had died in 1973, of being the secret cabalist or “master thinker” of the Iraq invasion, acting through the deputy secretary of defense, Paul Wolfowitz, who had studied with Bloom. It was intellectual libel. A new book, “Modernity and Its Discontents,” by the Yale political philosopher Steven B. Smith, concludes that Strauss had no appetite for ideological combat. Strauss, Smith says, was an Anglophile, who cherished “the English ideal of the gentleman.” In an earlier book, Smith reports, with touching hopefulness, “I have heard that he voted twice for Adlai Stevenson during the 1950s.”
The fixation in the Bush years on the Chicago-Cambridge-Washington axis of Straussianism obscured a more enduring line of influence, which is only now getting the attention it deserves. This was a new conservative politics that celebrated the “American regime,” with the Founders cast as ancients betrayed by successive generations of liberals and progressives as they contrived to eat away at the nation’s moral core. It’s a preachment we hear today from many on the right. The argument begins with Strauss’s observation that the Declaration of Independence, with its assertion of “self-evident” truths and “unalienable Rights,” was a classic statement of natural right, in keeping with Aristotle and Plato. Up-to-date moderns, heads stuffed with the dogmas of social science, might allow that humans were endowed with “urges and aspirations, but certainly with no natural right.” But, Lilla notes, Strauss’s hope for returning philosophy to its classical beginnings could—with a little “esoteric” stretching—be read into a messianism “wrapped up with American destiny.” This was the strategy employed by one of Strauss’s first and most gifted disciples, Harry Jaffa, who studied at the New School for Social Research, in Manhattan, where Strauss taught for a decade before he went to Chicago. In the fifties, Jaffa distilled Straussian textual analysis into a pioneering book, “Crisis of the House Divided,” which ingeniously reframed the Lincoln-Douglas debates as a nineteenth-century Platonic dialogue. Lincoln emerges from it as a serious moral philosopher, and the book remains a touchstone in the vast Lincoln literature. It is a high instance of Straussian thought. Jaffa was not just a political philosopher. He was also a “politics fanatic,” as he later said, a Kennedy Democrat who switched parties after the Bay of Pigs and then got involved in Goldwater’s Presidential campaign. At the Republican National Convention in 1964, Jaffa witnessed bitter platform debates between Goldwaterites and moderate Republicans. The moderates, having lost the brutal nomination fight, were now trying to keep the Party closer to the center. After one session loud with “constant drum-drumming against extremism,” Jaffa recalled, he drafted a memo and gave it to anyone who was interested. “I had no idea that Goldwater would ever see it or anybody near him would see it,” he said in 2010, when he was ninety-two. (He died last year.) Goldwater set aside the speech he had and let Jaffa compose a new one, much of it lifted from his memo, including two blunt sentences: “I would remind you that extremism in the defense of liberty is no vice. And let me remind you also that moderation in the pursuit of justice is no virtue.” These remain Goldwater’s best-known, and most reviled, words. But Jaffa stood by them and the speech until the end of his life. “I wrote it in such a way that there was nothing there that I didn’t believe was true, and you can see places which reflect Aristotle,” he told me. This is not far-fetched. Strip away the emotions of the moment—the raw memory of Kennedy’s assassination, the controversies surrounding the ultra-right John Birch Society—and the formulation becomes a homily on the moral logic of political decision-making. The statesman, facing a dire threat, has two choices: To embrace extremism is to acknowledge the magnitude of the danger in absolute terms. To embrace moderation implies weak commitment and potential compromise with the enemy. Jaffa’s speech can be read as a Strauss-inflected affirmation of “ultimate values.” Variations of Jaffa’s either/or have recurred in the election this year. Why, we’re asked, are President Obama and Hillary Clinton so squeamish about the phrase “radical Islamic terrorism”? Don’t they see that, in Strauss’s words, “historical objectivity” requires “calling a spade a spade”? In 1964, Jaffa began teaching at Claremont McKenna College, in California, and in the next decades nurtured a new school of “West Coast Straussians,” who devoted themselves to “vindicating the Founders” and itemizing the full record of liberal treason against them. Strauss had carefully distinguished reason from revelation. Jaffa’s “Claremonsters”—as they came to be known, sometimes affectionately—blended the two. The Declaration’s parchment was touched, if you angled it correctly, with theological fire. It adduced “Nature’s God” and also the “Creator.” Jaffa disciples took these hints and ran with them and are still at it, in Claremont and on other campuses, such as Hillsdale College, in Michigan, and the University of Dallas. When Clarence Thomas was the chairman of the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission, he hired two Jaffa disciples, Ken Masugi and John Marini, to be “special assistants”—that is, ideological tutors. (Thomas has since cited Jaffa’s influence on his juridical thinking.) In the past two decades, the Claremont colony has been a hotbed of “constitutional conservatism.” In its best-known just-so story, the demiurge of modern decline was Woodrow Wilson, who in his pre-Presidential days, when he was a political scientist, argued that the Constitution wasn’t engraved national scripture but a flexible living document open to interpretation and amendment as American democracy evolved. Attacks on Wilson became a major theme on the right during Obama’s first term, seized on by Tea Partiers and their ideological preceptors. R. J. Pestritto, a Hillsdale professor and the author of a critique of Wilson’s scholarly writings, made several appearances on Glenn Beck’s Fox News show in the past decade. So did the National Review writer Jonah Goldberg, who popularized Claremont doctrine in his 2008 best-seller “Liberal Fascism.” In a 2012 book, “I Am the Change,” the Claremont McKenna professor Charles Kesler accused Wilson of not only diverting the republic from its founding principles but then lying about it, making him—like progressives ever since—guilty of both “crime” and “cover-up.”But when her throat was cleared at last, Ms. Palin had something considerably more substantive to say.
She made three interlocking points. First, that the United States is now governed by a “permanent political class,” drawn from both parties, that is increasingly cut off from the concerns of regular people. Second, that these Republicans and Democrats have allied with big business to mutual advantage to create what she called “corporate crony capitalism.” Third, that the real political divide in the United States may no longer be between friends and foes of Big Government, but between friends and foes of vast, remote, unaccountable institutions (both public and private).
In supporting her first point, about the permanent political class, she attacked both parties’ tendency to talk of spending cuts while spending more and more; to stoke public anxiety about a credit downgrade, but take a vacation anyway; to arrive in Washington of modest means and then somehow ride the gravy train to fabulous wealth. She observed that 7 of the 10 wealthiest counties in the United States happen to be suburbs of the nation’s capital.
Her second point, about money in politics, helped to explain the first. The permanent class stays in power because it positions itself between two deep troughs: the money spent by the government and the money spent by big companies to secure decisions from government that help them make more money.
“Do you want to know why nothing ever really gets done?” she said, referring to politicians. “It’s because there’s nothing in it for them. They’ve got a lot of mouths to feed — a lot of corporate lobbyists and a lot of special interests that are counting on them to keep the good times and the money rolling along.”
Because her party has agitated for the wholesale deregulation of money in politics and the unshackling of lobbyists, these will be heard in some quarters as sacrilegious words.
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Ms. Palin’s third point was more striking still: in contrast to the sweeping paeans to capitalism and the free market delivered by the Republican presidential candidates whose ranks she has yet to join, she sought to make a distinction between good capitalists and bad ones. The good ones, in her telling, are those small businesses that take risks and sink and swim in the churning market; the bad ones are well-connected megacorporations that live off bailouts, dodge taxes and profit terrifically while creating no jobs.
Strangely, she was saying things that liberals might like, if not for Ms. Palin’s having said them.
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“This is not the capitalism of free men and free markets, of innovation and hard work and ethics, of sacrifice and of risk,” she said of the crony variety. She added: “It’s the collusion of big government and big business and big finance to the detriment of all the rest — to the little guys. It’s a slap in the face to our small business owners — the true entrepreneurs, the job creators accounting for 70 percent of the jobs in America.”
Is there a hint of a political breakthrough hiding in there?
The political conversation in the United States is paralyzed by a simplistic division of labor. Democrats protect that portion of human flourishing that is threatened by big money and enhanced by government action. Republicans protect that portion of human flourishing that is threatened by big government and enhanced by the free market.
What is seldom said is that human flourishing is a complex and delicate thing, and that we needn’t choose whether government or the market jeopardizes it more, because both can threaten it at the same time.
Ms. Palin may be hinting at a new political alignment that would pit a vigorous localism against a kind of national-global institutionalism.
On one side would be those Americans who believe in the power of vast, well-developed institutions like Goldman Sachs, the Teamsters Union, General Electric, Google and the U.S. Department of Education to make the world better. On the other side would be people who believe that power, whether public or private, becomes corrupt and unresponsive the more remote and more anonymous it becomes; they would press to live in self-contained, self-governing enclaves that bear the burden of their own prosperity.
No one knows yet whether Ms. Palin will actually run for president. But she did just get more interesting.
Join an online conversation at http://anand.lyWall Street is the target of Occupy Wall Street protesters for the role it played in the economic meltdown of 2008, say the activists, by engaging in risky lending practices of mortgage-backed securities. When several brokerage firms and financial institutions were bailed out by the government – and in some cases later handed out bonuses – a sense of propriety was breached.
Moody Investors Service and Standard and Poor's gave AAA ratings to hundreds of thousands of subprime mortgage securities that ultimately proved to be worthless.
Many of the protesters say that Wall Street blatantly and recklessly abused the credit default swap market. The protesters say that the unstable nature of the credit default swap market must have been known to those involved and that the guilty parties should be prosecuted.A record setting 5100 admissions recommended by #SmritiIrani in Kendriya Vidyalayas this year.last known high-1200 https://t.co/XiLmJspLez
— Anubhuti Vishnoi (@anubhutivishnoi) November 23, 2015
HRD minister can usually recommend 1200 admissions to KVs under minister quota. #smritiirani did 5100. I report https://t.co/XiLmJspLez
— Anubhuti Vishnoi (@anubhutivishnoi) November 23, 2015
@anubhutivishn All admissions r recorded as per requests frm MPs across parties+Bpl families. Ur source based lie as usual ignores facts.
— Smriti Z Irani (@smritiirani) November 23, 2015
@anubhutivishnoi I recognise ur source based agenda n have made public my contempt for it.
— Smriti Z Irani (@smritiirani) November 23, 2015
@smritiirani utmost respect as minister for you ma'am.Have been requesting your ministry's view & version since Friday but none came.
— Anubhuti Vishnoi (@anubhutivishnoi) November 23, 2015
For the record the HRD ministry's view and version was repeatedly sought and not given on the KV story.
—Anubhuti Vishnoi (@anubhutivishnoi) November 23, 2015
@anubhutivishnoi it is bcoz of journalists like u dat a reader like me has stopped subscribing to ET.
— Smriti Z Irani (@smritiirani) November 23, 2015
@anubhutivishnoi 2 line humari aur baaki ka version aapka. N by d way respect aap na bhi kare to koi farak nai padta.
— Smriti Z Irani (@smritiirani) November 23, 2015
@smritiirani Ma'am we would publish all that the ministry would say regardless of no of lines. We didn't get anything after several requests
— Anubhuti Vishnoi (@anubhutivishnoi) November 23, 2015
@samirkumar_ her agenda is to do a source based headline n then put in 2 lines depicting dat she carried our version.
— Smriti Z Irani (@smritiirani) November 23, 2015
@sundarbandar not in a spot Sir. As Chairperson of the board I followed procedure. This is not d 1st time Ms Vishnoi has followed an agenda
— Smriti Z Irani (@smritiirani) November 23, 2015
@smritiirani Ma'am not everyone has an agenda. I never received a response for my swacch vidyalaya story. You never respond
— devanik saha (@devanikindia) November 23, 2015
@ruhitewari criticise all u want, don't lie
— Smriti Z Irani (@smritiirani) November 23, 2015
@smritiirani sure. But that the reporter is lying each time they criticise is an unfair allegation @anubhutivishnoi
— Ruhi Tewari (@ruhitewari) November 23, 2015
@Joydas Sir since u want disclosure even Hon MPs like Jyotiraditya Scindiaji requested for 27 poor children to be admitted n v helped.
— Smriti Z Irani (@smritiirani) November 23, 2015
A real reader would have gone with 'that' #justsayin' https://t.co/ezscEpufTP
— Veena Venugopal (@veenavenugopal) November 23, 2015
Because, not 'bcoz', and that, not 'dat'. Please do read more. Reading really helps. https://t.co/FcmwNztmh4
— Karuna John (@karunajohn) November 23, 2015
Waiting for the day when a PM/HRD min will abolish all discretionary admission quotas with MPs rather than carry on an Arjun Singh tradition
— Shekhar Gupta (@ShekharGupta) November 23, 2015
Have to say, @anubhutivishnoi article on KV admissions seems to have stung @smritiirani. Such polite response.
— Manu Pubby (@manupubby_ET) November 23, 2015
And because of ministers like you many school kids don't want to study beyond 12th. pic.twitter.com/HVAaU90QzG
— BB (@brownbrumby) November 23, 2015
Seems there has been some Vikas after all, the Vikas of arrogance. "Koi Fark Nahi Padta" is the narrative, it seems https://t.co/peVpLbtIWr
— thakursahab (@65thakursahab) November 23, 2015
When you ask @smritiirani about transparency & accountability, such brazen reply you get. Education is important. pic.twitter.com/v0GrpX0gLO
— Altruism (@Altruism___) November 23, 201
talk about bad faith. pic.twitter.com/c5ZtLSuRuX
— Rosie Roti (@supriyan) November 23, 2015
The response 1 can get from an HRD minister who disagrees with a story.Not counter w/ facts but contempt&arrogance. pic.twitter.com/gVcHCatBg5
— Priyanka Chaturvedi (@priyankac19) November 23, 2015
When the minister in charge starts trolling you, you know you have done a good story. https://t.co/u4JesDw39B
— Divya Rajagopal (@rdivia) November 23, 2015
Aap respect na bhi karen to koi faraq nahi padta. No less than a union minister saying so.
— Aman Sharma (@AmanKayamHai) November 23, 2015
Too often, reporters complain about their stories not getting the notice they deserve or for being ignored by the powers that be. It’s a completely different ballgame, however, when the minister in-charge of the department one writes about, ends up responding to you directly on social media and not only rubbishes the story but also trolls you as being "agenda driven".This is what transpired on Twitter on Monday morning when Anubhuti Vishnoi, an Economic Times journalist, tweeted her story about the Minister of Human Resource Development Smriti Irani proposed close to 5,100 admissions to Kendriya Vidyalayas in the current academic year. The number stands in contrast to her predecessor’s tally which was less than 25% of the current number.The minister responded soon thereafter.The article said that as per an official who attended the meeting, the Kendriya Vidyalaya administration was looking into why only 3,000 of the 5,000-odd admissions recommended by the minister materialised.The paper editorialised that the minister's recommendation bonanza were undermining the prime minister's "promise of striking at the roots of corruption" in an "ET View" titled Expel Ad Hocism From Schools, and that her action only served to promote a culture of patronage."Irani could well argue that she was trying to ensure more children from disadvantaged backgrounds find a place in the Kendriya Vidyalayas," the newspaper said. "But for that she should set up a system that will enable the most disadvantaged the same opportunity as their more affluent counterparts. Without a proper system, all we have is ad hocism, something India can do less of, not more."The reporter pointed out that the ministry's response was solicited but not given.But the minister chose to get more and more personal."Two lines of ours and the rest of the version would be yours," the minister responded, insinuating that it did not matter what the ministry said as the reporting would in any case be biased. And that it didn't matter even if the reporter did not show any respect.But the reporter remained respectful and spelt it out once again that simply no response had been forthcoming, and that in case the ministry had answered her queries, regardless of length, it would have been published.When others also questioned her about the ministry not responding, Irani merely repeated that the reporting would in any case have been biased.Irani claimed that all the records of admissions were on file.As the minister accused the journalist, others too stepped in to point out that Irani and her ministry did not respond to questions,In her defence Irani said that among those recommended by her were also students who came in with the references of Congress leaders.While many supported Irani, here's a selection of responses joining issue with Irani's tweets:Requirements: Must be Level 74+ (Alliance or Horde)Pay Out: ~21,000 XP + ~6G Per Turn In1. Head to Zul'Drak Zone.2. Accept "Infiltrating Voltarus" quest from Stefan Vadu.Quest Pre-requisites listed here: Quest: Infiltrating Voltarus - Thottbot: World of Warcraft3. Head to Coordinates 29,47 (Voltarus floating overhead)4. Teleport Up to Voltarus5. Talk to Drakuru, accept "Dark Horizon" (Quest: Dark Horizon - Thottbot: World of Warcraft).6. Turn left (if still facing Drakuru), talk to Gorebag and Ask for the Tour7. When you return, turn in the "Dark Horizon" quest.8. Teleport back down to ground.9. Use 'Stefan's Horn' to summon Stefan10. Open Quest Log, and ABANDON the "Inflitrating Voltarus" quest.11. Talk to Stefan, and re-accept the "Inflitrating Voltarus" quest.12. Teleport back up to Voltarus.13. Accept quest "Dark Horizon" and keep repeating from step 5.You can keep repeating the same "Dark Horizon" quest over-and-over by summoning Stefan and re-accepting the quest. DO NOT COMPLETE the quest called "Inflitrating Voltarus" though.If you accidentally abandon the quest and lose 'Stefan's Horn', he's usually sitting down near the teleport pad area (underneath in the gooey liquid.) There are 3 copies of this NPC - one back at camp, one in the goo, and the one you can summon. If you make a mistake, you can re-accept from any one of those guys.Flight is approx. 4 minutes long. So you're looking at 5-6 minutes for every Quest Turn in. Not exactly the most efficient, but it works.Because of the type of quest-linking Blizzard did for this, I'd say this is simply working as intended and uses normal gaming mechanics.For More World of Warcraft Exploits cheats, strategies and more, I recoment mmOverload subscribe to our RSS feed! or follow us on TwitterOverview
I’ve seen this issue a few times over the past months & most recently this past week with a customer. Luckily there’s a fairly simple fix to the issue published by Microsoft, but realizing not everyone remembers every Microsoft KB that gets released I thought I’d shine a spotlight on this one.
Scenario
As part of the migration process, when customers move their namespace from either Exchange 2007 or 2010 to 2013, HTTP connections start proxying through 2013 to the legacy Exchange Servers and some users will experience failures. The potential affected workloads are:
AutoDiscover
Exchange Web Services (Free/Busy)
ActiveSync
OWA
Outlook
Test or new mailboxes may not be affected.
Resolution
The cause of this is the age old problem of Token Bloat. Users being members of too many groups or having large tokens.
The fix is to implement the changes in the below Microsoft KB article
“HTTP 400 Bad Request” error when proxying HTTP requests from Exchange Server 2013 to a previous version of Exchange Server
https://support.microsoft.com/en-us/kb/2988444
The interesting thing in this scenario is that the issue was not experienced in the legacy version of Exchange & even if you look at the tokens themselves, they may not seem overly large. It seems that the process of proxying Exchange traffic is much more sensitive to this issue. Also, in a recent case that went to Microsoft, even if you increase the recommended values to a value higher than your current headers it may not have the desired effect. In our case we had to set the MaxRequestBytes & MaxFieldLength values to exactly match the values in the Microsoft KB (65536 (Decimal)).
For further reading, please see the below articles.
Complimentary Articles
“HTTP 400 – Bad Request (Request Header too long)” error in Internet Information Services (IIS)
https://support.microsoft.com/en-us/kb/2020943
How to use Group Policy to add the MaxTokenSize registry entry to multiple computers
https://support.microsoft.com/en-us/kb/938118
Additional Note
As an FYI, another issue I commonly see when namespaces get transitioned to 2013 is authentication popups when connections proxy to the legacy Exchange Servers. Please see the below KB for that issue
Outlook Anywhere users prompted for credentials |
thought I broke my neck.” Ware’s head collided violently with a Chargers offensive lineman’s hip, and he lay on the ground, and he had to be carted off the field on a backboard. “They took my face mask off, and the helmet, and they were so careful. And after the game, my guys were there, telling me my health is important and You don’t have to play.
“So we go to New Orleans, I was in the locker room, and I could just feel it. In football, you’ve got to understand—you don’t play for yourself. You play for your teammates. That’s how I’ve always been. And no one said anything to me, but I could feel it. D-Ware, we need you to play. I hadn’t had pads on the whole week. We needed this game to have a chance to make the playoffs. Before the game, I go up to [fullback Deon Anderson] with my helmet on. We bump heads, just to test it, and I feel fine. That gave me confidence.”
Two sacks, two forced fumbles, two Saints turnovers. Dallas 24, New Orleans 17. The Cowboys went on to win the NFC East.
“That day was big for me,” Ware said. “I was captain of the defense, but I gained even more respect from my teammates. Like, This guy’s the warrior we knew he was. And respect is everything to me. I put my team first.”
And today? “Now, I put myself first. I put my family first. And look out world. Here I come.”
Now for your email:
• A FREE AGENCY FREE-FOR-ALL: In Monday Morning QB, Peter King examines the first frenzied days of signings, trades and much more
* * *
If the Texans want to get their hands on Tony Romo, patience likely is the best policy. Ronald Martinez/Getty Images
A ROMO TRADE
Please explain how it makes sense for Rick Smith to not trade for Tony Romo. The window for his championship-level defense and bona fide No. 1 wide receiver in DeAndre Hopkins will not be open forever. It is madness for the Texans to enter 2017 with Tom Savage as their top QB. I get that it is not smart to pay for something that will be available for free soon (or at least before the first week of the season). But will Romo really be free? Your MMQB article this week hints about how much Denver will pursue Romo if he is on the street. Why not trade a conditional 2019 draft pick that would be no higher than a third-round pick based on health and success criteria? At this point in time, the Cowboys and Romo would jump on this deal. With the Texans trying to emulate everything the Patriots do, isn't trading for players the it thing?
—Brian S.
Trading a draft pick for a 37-year-old quarterback and paying him at least $14 million this year, after you’ve already surrendered a second-round pick to get rid of the last quarterback you erred on, is not good business. Also, guaranteeing Romo’s big salary this year after he hasn’t been able to stay healthy is not smart when your team is in a tight cap situation already. Have some patience. Opening day is 25 weeks away. Training camp is 19 weeks away. The first day Romo could work out with teammates in Houston is five weeks away. There’s no reason to rush this.
• TEN THOUGHTS ON FREE AGENCY: Andrew Brandt on the Moneyball trade, the Romo situation, the D.C. mess and much more
UNDER-THE-TABLE-GATE?
I’ve always wondered about Tom Brady accepting a reduced salary in order for the Patriots to be able to pay other players. After Spygate, Deflategate and other ‘gates,’ has nobody ever considered a possible ‘Under-the table-gate’ for Tom?
—Greg M.
I’ve heard that floated before. My reaction to that is the same as my reaction to all forms of cheating in every sport: Give me some evidence, and then we’ll talk about it. No one’s ever proved the existence of under-the-table payments or agreements with star players to keep their cap numbers down. It’s convenient to do with New England, because the Patriots have been whipping boys by the league, and I get that. But I’ve never heard anything more than bar talk about it with Brady, and not any other player.
WASHINGTON’S CIRCUS
In regards to Dan Snyder, to paraphrase you, can anyone stop this runaway train before it’s too late? I think Washington fans would love the NFL to force Snyder to sell. Can it be legally done?
—Benoit P., Laval, Québec
No. Not unless he violates the law, or league bylaws.
• THE EMERGENCE OF DAVIS WEBB: Emily Kaplan on the latest draft quarterback to enter the Round 1 conversation
KYLE JUSZCZYK
Not sure one solid play warrants San Francisco’s huge signing of Kyle Juszczyk. To me it really sounds like John Lynch made a HUGE mistake and he might be in over his head, if his first dip in the pool is a harbinger of things to come. Being smart with your money is part of a GM’s job. So far his record isn’t that good.
—Murray G.
We’ll see. How interesting is it that another team actually offered more; I’m told $6 million a year.
CUTLER AS A JET
As a Jets fan … Jay Cutler: Why bother? So Bowles can keep his job. Ugh! They will win at most seven games with Cutler. Why would he choose the Jets, other than the money? They have NO offensive line and the team probably is bottom five in overall talent.
—Andy, Philadelphia
Every year, musical chairs happen for veteran quarterbacks, and some passers go to places that seem to make no sense. If he gets an offer, Cutler would choose the Jets if he wants to keep playing and if it’s his best option to start in 2017. Pretty simple.
ON TERRELLE PRYOR
If letting Terrelle Pryor walk was as dumb of Cleveland as you seem to think, why couldn’t his ‘top-notch’ agent do better than a one-year deal for $6 million (with $2 million in incentives classified as ‘not likely to be achieved’)? Maybe the Browns made a mistake, but maybe not as obvious as your analysis implies, eh?
—Peter G.
My point about Pryor: We can think of all the reasons why it’s not Cleveland’s fault that he is not a Brown anymore. He was unreasonable in his demands, yes. He left significantly more money on the table in Cleveland, yes. But Taylor Gabriel, Mitchell Schwartz and Terrelle Pryor are winning players in any NFL program. The Browns need winning players. In my opinion, the fans of the Browns need to stop knee-jerk defending their team every time one of these players leave and wonder why above-average to very good NFL players are developed in Cleveland and go on to star in other places. It’s getting to be a trend.
MAISON DU WAFFLE
Longtime reader here, and I loved the shoutout to Waffle House this week. Went on a dream trip from Nashville to Austin last October with three buddies through five southern states. Loved every minute of it but what pains me most is that I may never eat at Waffle House again. What a place.
—Alan O., Ireland
Crazy thing about my affection for Waffle House: I really like the waffles, but I rarely order one. It’s the scrambled eggs with cheese, with raisin toast and the hash browns, that I get every time.
STOP WITH THE POLITICS
We really don’t care about your political opinions. Please stick to sports. When I’m reading or listening to sports, I want to be an ostrich. I want to stick my head in the sand and concentrate on sports.
—Wilford W.
I have explained this before, and I will do it here again. I have just finished my 20th year writing this column. At the start of it, my editor, Steve Robinson, asked me to use it as a way to empty out my reporter’s notebook from the week, and then—because at the time Sports Illustrated wanted its magazine writers to steer clear of opinionated copy—put my own opinions, about everything, in the column. I liked it, and the responses I got suggested that readers liked it. Some readers do not like me opining about politics. Here’s a factoid for you: In my past four columns, I’ve written 29,946 words, and 362 were my opinion of what’s happening in Washington. So 1.2 percent of my words in the past month have been about politics. I get it that you and many others would like that to be 0.0 percent. I am respectful of your wishes, but I’m not going to stop giving an opinion about politics in a column that for two decades has had more words about football than any other writer in America. It’s easy to skip the parts of the column you don’t like.
• Question or comment? Email us at talkback@themmqb.com.CLOSE Detroit Pistons coach Stan Van Gundy addresses the media during the team's media day Sept. 25, 2017. By Vince Ellis, DFP.
Pistons' Andre Drummond is photographed at media day Sept. 25, 2017 at the Palace in Auburn Hills. (Photo: Kirthmon F. Dozier, Detroit Free Press)
Detroit Pistons center Andre Drummond can now experience the full pleasures of a properly functioning nose.
But there are some disadvantages, too.
"Things smell better, things smell worse," Drummond, speaking at Monday's media day at the Palace, said of his off-season surgery to repair a deviated septum, an injury he suffered at Connecticut. He had been breathing through a closed left nostril the past four seasons.
"Having two nostrils is definitely a blessing. Being able to breathe has been great. My workouts have been great. I'm able to sleep better."
More Pistons:
Happy, healthy Reggie Jackson set on bounce-back year for Pistons
Pistons mailbag: What are chances that Avery Bradley re-signs?
Along with the surgery, Drummond lost about 30 pounds, which he hopes can help him regain All-Star form.
Last year, he averaged 13.6 points, 13.8 rebounds and 1.1 blocks per game, down from 16.2 points, 14.8 rebounds and 1.4 blocks the previous season. His minutes per game also declined from 32.9 to 29.7.
"I feel fantastic," Drummond said. "Right now, I'm at 285. I lost 30-something pounds, ballpark. I'm moving faster, jumping higher. I feel great overall. A lot of conditioning this summer to really get myself in tip-top shape."
Pistons point guard Reggie Jackson believes Drummond will have a big season, as the team transitions to Little Caesars Arena in downtown Detroit.
"That will definitely help, with his ability to breathe and stay on the court," Jackson said Monday. "Losing that weight, and being able to attack both ends of the court, is going to be tremendous for us. He's our engine. The car can only go as far as your engine takes you.
"When it comes around this league, there's only a few teams blessed to have 'that' guy, (who) can take you to another level. And he's that guy."
Pistons' Andre Drummond talks with reporters at media day Sept. 25, 2017 at the Palace in Auburn Hills. (Photo: Kirthmon F. Dozier, Detroit Free Press)
Drummond was expected to participate at training camp this week, although coach Stan Van Gundy said he may be limited.
"Andre sprained an ankle last week, Thursday maybe, in a one-on-one thing with Eric Moreland," Van Gundy said. "(Drummond) landed wrong, no major damage. He's planning to go, at least in the morning, in the non-contact practice. Don't know if he'll be available the first couple days we go five-on-five at night."
Breakout Boban: Van Gundy spoke highly of backup center Boban Marjanovic, a 7-foot-3 native of Serbia in his second year with the Pistons. He played one previous NBA season with the Spurs.
Although Marjanovic was not part of last year's rotation, appearing in 35 games and averaging 5.5 points and 3.7 rebounds, his role should be bigger this season.
"Sort of a wild card, and it's incumbent on us to find the best way to use him, but Boban Marjanovic can be one of the most indefensible offensive forces in the game, in the time he's on the floor," Van Gundy said.
"If you watched the European championships (this summer), and he was playing against NBA guys, big NBA guys, (Kristaps) Porzingis and (Timofey) Mozgov, guys like that. He's tough to guard. We've got to take advantage of that."
Marjanovic is looking forward to a larger role with the Pistons.
"I'm excited, really," he said. "When you start to play basketball, you dream about that. This is my dream."
Bradley fitting in: Pistons guard Avery Bradley, who was acquired in an off-season trade from Boston, has been happy with the team's early chemistry.
"It's been good," he said. "We have a great group of guys. Anything is possible. We're all able to buy into what Stan's trying to do. He's a really passionate person, and he's going to prepare us every single game."
Jackson is happy to play alongside Bradley — not against him. The former Celtic has consistently been a top defender and two-way player in the league.
"To be lining up against him every day (in practice) is going to make me better, but not having to play against him, when the lights are on and the fans are watching, I'm loving it," Jackson said of his new backcourt mate. "He's going to be an S.O.B. for everybody else in the league."
Injury update: Van Gundy said combo guard Langston Galloway will be monitored at the beginning camp because of a knee bruise.I hate deleting tweets. It gives people the wrong idea that I might be back tracking. CC: @MyNameIsMachine
I'm small potatoes and didn't think anything I said, right or wrong, would ever cause a stir. It's a rather uncomfortable position to be in. I was wrong. Maybe not for what I said, but for saying anything at all.
First, I feel the need to apologize to the CS community. It's likely going to be perceived as disingenuous. How many times has someone fucked up and apologized just to satiate the wrath of a community? I never want to be that person.
I am sorry, though (and if any of this sounds like bogus PR, I'm sorry for that as well). I'm not apologizing because I woke up at 4 AM to let my dog out and instead of going back to sleep I started a shit storm. I'm sorry that people think I was seeking attention by making a bold claim. My tweet was supposed to be anecdotal to the discussion about cheating in eSports and the recent revelations about PRIME - one player made a comment about match fixing in CS, I was stating that there is an issue I believe is far worse than match fixing. I have no ax to grind with players, teams, organizers, etc. and I'm not looking to get big/gain attention by saying stupid shit on twitter. For those who feel I was attacking CS, I wasn't.
To touch on the attention seeking comments - I may not have all my wits about me, but I do have self-respect. I have never, and will never, seek attention by being the dick head who says dumb, inflammatory shit on twitter. I see why they do it - I have had a bump in followers and now a lot more people know my name than three hours ago. That's not the attention I want. There are enough idiots in eSports who make a living off their stupidity and it's not a niche I want to try and fit into.
My thoughts on CS:GO and Cheating
Pro players have been banned for using very sophisticated cheats. Now you have majors taking steps to ensure peripherals and other possible methods for cheating are inspected and monitored. Either they're paranoid and doing unnecessary work, or it's because they know people still find ways to cheat at high-level events. Aside from protecting their business and the integrity of the game, they're on alert because whispers spread. I've been around eSports long enough to hear things said behind closed door. Most of the time I would hear something and say "Bullshit, there's no way that's true" until it comes out in an article a few months later. Lately, I've stopped calling bullshit as much as I used to and instead started trusting people who are right more often than not.
Now that this is on CS:GO reddit and blowing up, I'm really not sure how to go from here, so I'll keep the rest simple:
1. Not every LAN checks peripherals.
2. If history serves as a lesson, hackers in any industry are constantly working to make their software undetectable and bypass current security measures. Checking peripherals won't always prevent cheating.
3. My words were too hyperbolic. Though, if 3 pro players attending a LAN use cheats, that (to me) is "a lot of players at a high level."
4. I swear that I thought this was a common sentiment. I didn't realize it was a hot button issue.
5. (Another PR sounding statement) If I had evidence, I'd release it. One of my biggest attractions to CS is the history of the game - match fixing, hacking, etc. are all detrimental to the game's future. Unfortunately, I have nothing but the word of people I trust. Hindsight being 20/20, I wish I hadn't said anything (I shouldn't have said anything).
6. I enjoy CS:GO. One might say we've been dating for a while and I'm starting to fall in love. Now I feel like I told my buddies about our bedroom conversations, she found out, and we're currently not speaking. I know we're going to have a few awkward dinners ahead, but I hope she knows I didn't mean to upset her.
Reply · Report Post"Even as we celebrate the 40th anniversary of the passage of Title IX, we must still remain vigilant in our efforts to ensure equal opportunity for girls in education," said Russlynn Ali, assistant secretary for the Office for Civil Rights, in a statement. "The agreements reached in these four cases are representative of the important Title IX work that OCR continues to do, and should provide assurance to the thousands of girls in these school districts and across the nation that fundamental fairness on the playing field and in all areas of education is within their reach. OCR will continue to vigorously work to ensure equal opportunity."
The NWLC, using data submitted by the four school districts to the Education Department, determined there was an 11 to 14 percentage point gap between how many girls were enrolled and the share of athletic opportunities available to them. As part of the agreements, the four districts will conduct assessments to determine how to correct the inequities, including surveying students to identify areas of athletic interest that are not being met, and adding opportunities accordingly.
The announcement of the agreements comes at an interesting time. The London Olympics start later this month, and for the first time the United States' delegation will likely have more females than males. In an interesting twist, the June 23 anniversary date of Title IX is also known as "Olympic Day," marking the start of the modern Olympic Games.
As of Monday, it was expected there would be 10 more women than men among the athletes, although the qualifying events are not yet complete, said Patrick Sandusky, chief communications officer for the U.S. Olympic Committee. Also for the first time, the United States will have women competing in every sport at the Summer Games.
The increase in female athletes is the result of a combination of factors, including new sports for women being added, such as boxing, as well as more events being added to existing competitions including cycling, Sandusky said. Additionally, some women's teams, such as field hockey, qualified for the London Games. At the same time, some of the men's teams that had qualified in the past, such as soccer, fell short this time around.
Adding more spots on the teams is only part of the equation. Girls and women also have to be encouraged and supported in their efforts to reach for those athletic goals. While the playing field isn't yet level, the increase in participation and interest in girls' and women's sports nationally is a direct result of the impact of Title IX.
Regardless of their gender, the overwhelming majority of students will obviously never reach elite athlete status. But that doesn't negate the benefits - academic, social and societal - of playing sports. And it also doesn't undercut the reality that for millions of children, public school athletics programs are often their only opportunity to participate in organized sports of any kind.
"The many benefits of girls' participation in sports go beyond even the playing field and lead to higher academic achievement and graduation rates, lower teenage pregnancy rates, and overall better health," said Marcia D. Greenberger, the NWLC's co-president said in a statement Monday. "Our findings and OCR's investigation underscore the urgency to treating girls fairly and putting these schools on the path toward compliance with Title IX."Sean Spicer, the White House press secretary, appears to be bearing most of the blame for the media firestorm caused by FBI Director James Comey's termination.
Politico reported Thursday that President Donald Trump was holding an audition for Spicer's replacement on Wednesday when he had the deputy White House press secretary, Sarah Huckabee Sanders, perform the daily press briefing.
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According to The Washington Post, Trump has been irate with his communications team, which, he believes, fumbled the rollout over Comey's abrupt firing. Since Comey discovered he was fired via a breaking news broadcast, media outlets have run wall-to-wall coverage speculating whether the president inappropriately fired his FBI director in order to impede an investigation he was leading against him.
According to the Post, Trump sat down for dinner and TV on the night of Comey's firing and noticed that no one on cable news was defending him. The president somehow landed on Spicer as the person responsible for all the negative coverage.
“This is probably the most egregious example of press and communications incompetence since we’ve been here,” one West Wing official told The Post. “It was an absolute disaster. And the president watched it unfold firsthand. He could see it.”
It likely did not help Spicer's job prospects when his first public briefing with reporters after Comey's dismissal came outside of the White House, in the dark, among the bushes.
One White House official told CNN that the reason Sanders performed the press briefing Wednesday was because Spicer had been benched this week.
Another official disputed this, noting that Spicer has Navy Reserve duties this week and, therefore, he could not be on the White House grounds to brief reporters.People seem mystified by Dick Cheney. What on earth is he doing, popping up with such regularity defending a wholly discredited position, as he did again Monday at a Politico forum? Why would he continue to say things like invading Iraq was “absolutely the right thing to do”? The track record of utterances he compiled as vice president—all of them collected on video for our present-day delectation, like his famous “weeks rather than months” prediction to CBS’ Bob Schieffer right before we started the Iraq war—would have a person of decency and modesty hiding in self-imposed exile in the Pampean Andes.
I contend that there’s nothing mysterious about him at all. Incredible as it may seem, he does still think he was right. The tactical mistakes, if there were any, were mere details. But the invasion of Iraq was the right thing to do, he still undoubtedly believes. And it’s important that we understand the real reason he thinks it was the right thing to do, because Iraq failure or no Iraq failure, Rand Paul or no Rand Paul, Cheney’s view will always be dominant in the Republican Party’s higher echelons.
There were always a lot of misperceptions about the Iraq war, in the mainstream media and among liberal opponents of it. Oversimplifying a bit, the media bought that it was about 9/11; that we had to strike back. It was also, in this narrative, about Saddam Hussein’s alleged weapons of mass destruction and his even more alleged nuclear capabilities. These were the reasons the Bush administration put forward to scare the public, and the media, to their everlasting dishonor, bought those arguments.
On the broad left, people tended toward the fundamental explanations of political economy: that it was about oil, or Halliburton, or, in Michael Moore’s interpretation, the Carlyle Group. Oil was a factor, a side benefit. But it wasn’t about oil, and it certainly wasn’t about Halliburton or Carlyle.
It was about establishing global American hegemony. To get this fully you have to go back to 1992, when Cheney was the secretary of defense. Cheney’s world view was wholly formed by the Cold War. The bipolar world of U.S. v. USSR, good v. evil, was all he’d known. It was the rubric under which all thought was organized. Then, suddenly, the USSR was gone! Now what?
Cheney’s Pentagon—including figures such as Paul Wolfowitz and even Colin Powell, who may be a good guy now but was fully implicated in all this at the time—set to pondering that question, and by the spring of 1992, it came up with an answer: the Defense Planning Guidance (DPG), a white paper outlining future U.S. defense policy. Now that we were the only superpower in the world, it said, our main job was to make damn sure things stayed that way.
Remember: This was precisely the moment, the end of the Cold War, when most Americans were thinking that maybe we could relax a little, step back from the war footing that had characterized the previous 45 years. But the DPG said the opposite. The new posture would require a certain new tough-mindedness. We might have to thumb our noses at traditional allies. We certainly would have to expand our global reach (and keep spending new billions). And most crucially, the DPG introduced, for the first time ever in American history, the idea that preemptive war should be an official part of our policy. (Yes, it’s been unofficial policy plenty of times, but this was different.)
The DPG was enormously controversial at the time. Amid some media tumult, the first President Bush had to come out and say in essence, hey, kidding. But Cheney & Co. certainly weren’t. (For a lot more on this history, read the great Harper ’ s magazine piece by David Armstrong from 2002, “Dick Cheney’s Song of America,” still one of the finest pieces of Iraq war journalism we have.)
The Republicans lost the White House in 1992, of course, and were out of power for eight years. So they didn’t have a chance to act on their scheme. But then they got back in. And then came 9/11. Lo and behold! What a gift! Of course I’m not saying they were happy it happened, but imagine: If ever there were an event that could frighten the American people into embracing an aggressive foreign-policy posture that set out to establish the United States as the single global hegemon, 9/11 surely was it. It still didn’t frighten the people enough, quite, which is why the Bushies had to lie about WMD and nukes and “weeks rather than months,” but the hegemonists knew that this was their only shot to act on those 1992 schemes, and bam, they took it.
That’s why we went to war in Iraq. (We chose Iraq because of the “unfinished work” of the Gulf War, because it looked ripe for the taking, and because it was a medium-size dog whose quick whipping would scare the larger ones.) It wasn’t about terrorism or anything like that. It was about, as James Bond once sighed to Dr. No, “world domination, the same old story.”
It’s important to understand that history today because the dream of establishing global American hegemony is much more enduring and powerful on the right than all the stated reasons. Al Qaeda has receded; terrorism too; WMD was just a handy thing lying around. But the idea that the United States must maintain its hegemonic status in a unipolar world—on the right, that has staying power. And modern conservatism is organized in such a way that thousands of people are paid millions of dollars to make sure the staying power stays.
The Tea Party base, as we know, is less than enamored of these ideas. Sen. Paul articulates their views. So the feud between Paul and Cheney—and John McCain and others—is really a feud between the base and the elites. Paul is a savvy politician, and I certainly don’t count him out as the possible 2016 nominee, but we all know that in both parties, especially the GOP, the elites usually win such feuds. So Cheney will keep at it as long as he draws breath. And someday, something awful will happen, and the Cheney wing will step up to the plate and swing for the fences again.The Bengals roster is going to look remarkably different than it did in 2016 with the infusion of free agency and the draft. There will be a plethora of training camp battles for the last few spots and players who made an impact last season may draw the short stick.
Bold: Lock
QB (3): Andy Dalton, A.J. McCarron, Jeff Driskel
The only question among the quarterbacks is if they keep 3, as they did all of last year following claiming Driskel off waivers from San Francisco. They were preparing themselves for trading McCarron this offseason, but that hasn’t happened. If they decide to send Driskel to the practice squad and risk him getting claimed, it would open up a spot, possibly for the offensive line.
RB (4): Jeremy Hill, Giovani Bernard, Joe Mixon (R), Cedric Peerman
These four are going to make the team. They will have a three-headed attack with Hill, Bernard, and Mixon, while Peerman will continue to anchor special teams. The only thing that could change this is if Bernard is not fully recovered from his ACL injury and starts the season on PUP.
WR (6): A.J. Green, Brandon LaFell, Tyler Boyd, John Ross (R), Josh Malone (R), Cody Core
The wide receiver group has some new names into the mix putting two second year players on the block. They have kept six in the past and I don’t expect that to change. Green, LaFell, Boyd, Ross, and Malone are going to make it. The last spot will come down to Core and Alex Erickson. They drafted three players who returned kicks and punts in the draft, and Core contributed on offense last season. This gives Core an edge and some team will benefit by claiming Erickson.
TE (4): Tyler Eifert, Tyler Kroft, C.J. Uzomah, Ryan Hewitt
I considered Hewitt a TE for this roster, but it doesn’t matter how they see him. He signed a 3-year contract extension last season and is a lock. With the injury history of Eifert, Kroft and Uzomah are going to be on the 53 as well, unless rookie 7th round draft pick Mason Schrenk has an unbelievable preseason. He seems destined for the practice squad though.
OL (9): Cedric Ogbuehi, Clint Boling, Russell Bodine, Andre Smith, Jake Fisher, Eric Winston, J.J. Dielman (R), T.J. Johnson, Christian Westerman
The first five are the projected starters at this point, so they are all going to make it. Winston is the veteran leader, Johnson was signed this offseason, they have high hopes for second year guard Westerman, and Dielman was a 4th round pick that has starter potential. The only possible change would be that they keep a 10th lineman, like they did in ’16.
DL (8): Carlos Dunlap, Geno Atkins, Andrew Billings, Ryan Glasgow (R), Jordan Willis (R), Michael Johnson, Pat Sims, Will Clarke
The defensive line will be the most competitive battle in camp this year. They have a lot of bodies and drafted more last week. The obvious ones are Dunlap, Atkins, Billings, Glasgow, and Willis. I also included Michael Johnson, as he is still the projected starter on the right side. This leaves anywhere from 2-3 more spots. The Bengals lean toward players who have been with the club and in this case, Sims and Clarke. I think Sims’ job is much more in the air though. Wallace Gilberry, Marcus Hardison, and Brandon Thompson will get plenty of consideration. The reason for only eight spots is that Lawson is listed as a linebacker. While that may be an early down spot for the rookie, he can easily put his hand in the ground and rush the edge on third down, acting as the 9th defensive lineman.
LB (6): Vontaze Burfict, Kevin Minter, Vincent Rey, Carl Lawson (R), Nick Vigil, Jordan Evans (R)
Come cut time, I don’t see any surprises in the linebacker group. Burfuct, Minter, Rey, and Vigil are the top four returnees from last season. Lawson is a LB/DE hybrid that slipped to them in the 4th round. The last spot goes to Evans, who will have a big impact on special teams early and could potential play the Emmanuel Lamur spot in nickle sets. His ability to cover has already been lauded over from LB coach Jim Haslett.
CB (5): Adam Jones, Dre Kirkpatrick, Darquez Dennard, William Jackson III, Josh Shaw
The cornerback competition is one of the more interesting ones come training camp time with all of the high draft picks. Pacman and Dre will the presumptive starters at this point. They exercised Dennard’s 5th year option and hopefully he will be healthy this season. Jackson III missed his entire rookie year and he is my projection to start in the slot. This leaves two spots up in the air. I gave Shaw the first one, as he was the nickle corner last season, and has the versatility to play corner and safety. Lastly, I included Wilson in the specialist category as the 6th round selection played both offense and defense in college. He was mainly a CB, but is listed on the Bengals roster as a RB. His real potential impact though will be special teams. He is my projected return man as he score 8 touchdowns in 6 different ways during his time at Houston.
(4): George Iloka, Shawn Williams, Derron Smith, Clayton Fejedelem
Barring a Alex Erickson type training camp from an undrafted rookie, these four are the locks to be the safties on the roster. Josh Shaw also can play safety, which gives them another option.
Specialists (4): Jake Elliott (R), Kevin Huber, Clark Harris, Brandon Wilson (R)
Even though the Bengals insisted Elliott will compete with Bullock for the kicking job in camp, you don’t spend a 5th round pick on a specialist and not keep him. Huber and Harris are locks are their respective positions. Wilson, who I talked about under CBs, is the my surprise to make the 53. His versatility allows him to effect the game in all three phases.
Notable Cuts/Practice Squad: Alec Erickson, Bene Benwikere, P.J. Dawson, Jake Kumerow, Mason Schrenk (R), Marcus Hardison, Wallace Gilberry, Brandon Thompson
Currently, I see 10 of the 11 draft picks making the team, as the final pick, Mason Schrenk, on the practice squad. This would be the highest number of first year players in a long time. There will be big decisions at every position, but I see WR, OL, DL, and CB as the most competitive spots. Also, the choice to keep 2 or 3 quarterbacks will impact the entire roster. Obviously, this could all be thrown up in smoke with injuries. Last year, the Bengals lost three impact players to IR and Eifert was on PUP to start the season opening up four spots.Adam Curtis, the BBC documentarian of "The Century of the Self" and "The Power of Nightmares" returns to the Middle East by exploring the history between Afghanistan, the United States and Saudi Arabia in "Bitter Lake".
Where the story bounces back and forth in time. Starting with The Quincy Agreement.
A secret agreement signed between President Franklin Delano Roosevelt and the King of Saudi Arabia in 1945 ensuring US aid for assisting them in the modernization of infrastructure--as well as military security in exchange for the United States having secure access to their oil supply.
The title "Bitter Lake" is based on the name of the Egyptian lake in middle of the Suez Canal. Where salt water from the Mediterranean and Red Sea meet--as well as where this agreement between FDR and the King of Saudi Arabia took place.Description
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While initially built as a go to streaming spot for soccer matches, fuboTV has made major strides both within and well beyond the sports world. As more and more people cut the cable cord to save money, fuboTV has filled the gap, offering affordable plans to view your favorite HD channels live. From major networks like NBC and FOX, to cable channels like A&E and FXX, to a range of sports channels including FS1, NBC Sports Network, and NBA TV, fuboTV marks the glorious intersection between live television and affordability.Danville, VA - A judge will soon decide whether a pit bull many call dangerous will be put down. This comes after what witnesses call a bloody attack in a Danville neighborhood.
They say it all happened last Monday on Winstead Drive. Neighbors tell ABC-13 the pit bull came after several of the neighbors and eventually had to be tazed by police officers.
The victim, Lisa Hairston, remains at Danville Regional Medical Center this evening, fighting complications from her injuries.
"She was screaming, |
everyone.
While the words ‘freely sharing’ certainly display a positive connotation, nothing in life is free. You will end up paying for the mistakes that are made.
You can save time by doing it right the first time, instead of backtracking and having to fix mistakes that could have been prevented by hiring a Professional Translation Service Provider. Crowdsourcing eliminates the quality that a TSP can ensure.
The way crowdsourcing for translations works is that people submit translations and other under-qualified translators can vote on the “best” translations. These people are typically not professional translators, meaning they did not go to school or receive certification in linguistics. Not everyone can be a professional translator. Many businesses are not willing to take the risk of allowing under-qualified translators, translate their private documents or even their public websites. The time and money that could be spent fixing a translation disaster (that could have been easily prevented by hiring a professional) is certainly not worth the hassle. One example where crowdsourcing may work is Wikipedia. While you may not be able to cite Wikipedia for academics and it is typically not known for its quality, it is a good place to get a general sense of knowledge on a given topic. The reason why crowdsourcing works for Wikipedia is the same reason why it doesn’t work for translation. Businesses aren’t looking for a general translation that may capture the gist of the original document. Rather, accurate, high-quality translation is required to recreate a document in another language that relays the same message as was intended in the language it was originally written in.
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Is the Language Translation Industry Hurting Because of Machine Translation?Today's car infotainment systems offer drivers and passengers an array of state-of-the-art features that can dazzle even the most savvy techno-geek. (Unfortunately, these same high-tech systems can be complicated to use and prone to technical problems, as we detailed in "High-Tech Automotive Headaches.") On the audio front, the listening options are vast, including AM/FM, satellite, and Internet radio, CDs and DVDs, and audio files you play via plugged-in or Bluetooth-enabled smart phones, music players, and off a built-in hard drive. Cars have long had music players beyond radio. Anyone of a certain age will remember 8-track and cassette players. And record players. Record players? Yep.
A new technology came on the market in the mid-1950s and early 1960s that freed drivers from commercials and unreliable broadcast signals, allowing them to be the masters of their motoring soundtrack with their favorite pressed vinyl spinning on a record player mounted under the dash. Consumer Reports covered three auto record player units of the day.
The “Highway Hi-Fi” was the first on the scene, available from the Chrysler Corporation as an option on the 1956 Chrysler, Desoto, Dodge, and Plymouth. CBS Labs developed the technology that played records specifically designed for the system, with 7-inch discs in 16⅔ rpm format, available exclusively from Columbia Records. The format was chosen because 33⅓ rpm records at 12 inches in diameter were too big for the car and the smaller 45 rpm size didn't play as long. The 7-inch size developed for the "Highway Hi-Fi" fit in the car and played for about an hour per side.
Chrysler started the auto audiophile's collection with six records from Columbia that presented mellifluous motoring tracks such as “I'll Take Romance” from Percy Faith and His Orchestra. Additional recordings were available for order. The Great American Songbook was represented with picks such as Cole Porter's score for the Broadway show “Kiss Me, Kate” and "My Old Kentucky Home" played on a Wurlitzer organ. And there were talk selections, too, including recordings of the CBS radio series “You Are There” featuring historical topics such as “The Signing of the Magna Carta” and “The Battle of Gettysburg.” (You can listen to CBS' classic “You Are There” series on the Internet Archive.)
The Highway Hi-Fi was short-lived as Chrysler only offered it for two years. Consumer Reports did not test it, but we did report its demise, suggesting that the price tag of nearly $200 (over $1,700 today) and the constraint of buying proprietary records from Columbia were probably reasons for the player's short run. Chrysler did eventually add an option to play 45 rpm records on the Highway Hi-Fi, but perhaps that choice came too late.After a man in Brazil was accused of sexually abusing a 3-year-old girl, community members apparently decided to take action.
According to local media outlets, the accused was found on the side of the road with his penis severed less than 24 hours after the alleged abuse. The man, who police in Severínia identified as 66-year-old Francisco de Souza de Castro, also lost three fingers in the incident, Estado reports.
Police are now trying to determine the identities of the people involved in the attack.
An investigation has also been launched into the alleged rape of the 3-year-old, reports note. The girl's mother reportedly noticed that something was amiss when she arrived home Sunday evening. Castro, who works on a farm where the child was staying with her grandparents at the time, was accused of sexually abusing the girl.China has been moving to overhaul its state-owned sector following last year's decision to diversify ownership to give equal political and legal status to state and private companies. In recent months, the government has launched a series of pilot programs aimed at experimenting with new management and ownership structures.
The central government, which directly controls 113 enterprise groups, has also been trying to reduce corruption and waste at its biggest companies, and pushing them to pay higher dividends.
Among the reports released on Friday, the auditor said China Metallurgical Group Corp - one of the country's biggest engineering contractors - lacked offshore feasibility studies and failed to obtain government approval for three investments alongside Pakistani, Australian and U.S. companies, which led to cumulative losses of more than 3 billion yuan ($483.17 million).
Read MoreChina's economy is at a 'tipping point'
At China South, poor management of foreign investment in 17 overseas companies resulted in accumulated losses at seven firms of $138 million, the auditor said.
For CNPC, a loan by subsidiary Bank of Kunlun Ltd of 570 million yuan to a Xinjiang-based company without proper due diligence or post-loan management was at risk of total loss, as of July 2013, the auditor said.
Some 190 company officials at the 11 conglomerates "were dealt with severely", including 32 bureau-level cadres, the audit office said in a separate posting on its website.
Golf coursesBlack and white filters let you control how colours are converted to shades of grey. Use them to get the right contrast and mood in your photos.
A common problem in black and white photography is that certain colours look very similar when converted into greyscale. For example, some shades of red, green, and blue look completely different in colour, but almost identical in black and white.
This can cause objects in a black and white image to blend into one another, leaving you with a photo which is flat and lifeless, and lacking in contrast and definition.
Coloured lens filters offer a solution to this problem because they affect the way colours are "converted" to black and white. This allows you to control the way they appear in the final image, ensuring that objects are well separated and clearly defined.
Black and White Filter Basics
There are 5 filter colours that are commonly used in black and white photography - red, orange, yellow, green, and blue. Each lets through its own colour of light and blocks other colours to varying degrees. For example, a red filter will let red light through, but block most green and blue.
The result is that colours matching the filter colour appear brighter in the final image, while other colours appear darker. In black and white photography this means that objects appear as lighter or darker shades of grey.
This image shows how different filters affect the way colours are converted to black and white:
Using Black and White Filters
Because of their different effects, each colour filter tends to be used in a different way.
Red Filters
Red filters produce a very strong effect and greatly increase contrast. They're often considered too "harsh" for most types of photography, but can be used to produce striking creative effects.
In landscape photography, a red filter will turn a blue sky almost black and make clouds really stand out, giving the scene a dramatic feel. They're also excellent for increasing visibility in haze and fog.
When shooting plants they help increase definition between flowers and foliage. This is particularly useful when shooting red flowers, as they have a similar tone to the surrounding leaves.
Red filters produce such an extreme effect that they can make your photo look like it's been shot through an infrared filter. This makes them a popular, cheaper alternative to true infrared photography.
Orange Filters
Orange filters sit between red and yellow filters, giving a nice balance of each one's properties. This makes them a popular general purpose filter.
In portrait photography, an orange filter reduces the appearance of freckles and blemishes, giving the skin a healthy, smooth look.
When photographing buildings and cityscapes, they give bricks a pleasing tone, and increase contrast between different materials to add depth and texture to the image.
Similarly to red filters, they can be used to reduce the appearance of fog and haze, and to darken skies and emphasise clouds.
Yellow Filters
Yellow filters produce the most subtle effect of the 5 coloured filters. In some cases the difference is barely noticeable, but it can help to lift a photo just enough. They're a popular choice for beginners as they can be used in virtually any type of photography.
When snapping landscapes a yellow filter darkens the sky slightly, helping to balance its exposure against the darker ground. They also bring out clouds nicely, resulting in more interesting skies.
In portrait photography, they produce warm, natural, pleasing flesh tones, like an orange filter but less intense.
Yellow filters are good for separating shades of green, and can be used whe photographing plants to increase the contrast of foliage.
Green Filters
Green filters are less popular than the others but are useful in some circumstances.
A green filter is mainly used for photographing plants as it helps separate the green foliage from the brightly-coloured flowers and buds.
They can also be used in landscape photography to boost the appearance of grass and trees, but they also lighten the sky so you need to be careful not to lose detail there.
Blue Filters
Blue filters are rarely used for black and white photography. They darken most colours and reduce contrast across an image.
When used correctly, this reduced contrast can be useful for giving a shot a calm, soothing atmosphere. A blue filter also increases the appearance of haze and mist, making it handy for enhancing the mood of an early-morning scene.
If you're serious about black and white photography then a selection of coloured filters is a great addition to your kit. They'll give you much more control over the way your photos appear, helping you to create mood, balance contrast, and emphasise the most important parts of a scene.
Did you enjoy this article? Please share it!Athens, Greece - It's an early September evening, and people are trickling into the half-basement of an old grey apartment block in the Greek capital, Athens.
Once inside, they remove their shoes and disappear into locker rooms before re-emerging to take their spot on the padded blue and red floor.
A punk song blares from the speakers.
A black flag hangs beside the bathroom door. "The genuine anti-fascist fighting club," it reads.
This is the White Tiger Muay Thai Camp, one of the first anti-fascist gyms in Athens, and Ilias Lamprou, a 39-year-old anarchist, is its founder and instructor.
Barefoot and wearing a grey hoodie with cut-off sleeves over a faded black shirt, he directs his 40 or so novice students as they warm up.
"Faster," he urges them, speaking over a litany of grunts as fists and legs thud against punch bags.
His hair is short, neat and peppered with grey. A scatter of tattoos on his arms and legs; he stands cross-armed as he issues directions.
Earlier in the day, Lamprou sits at his cluttered desk in the gym's office. On the wall are photos of him competing in Muay Thai tournaments, fists raised as he poses with fellow fighters and students.
Started four years ago, White Tiger, he says, applies the political philosophies of self-organisation and anti-authoritarianism to martial arts.
He recalls how, when he was 20 years old, a friend advised him to start Muay Thai training. But what began for "practical reasons" - a need to defend himself from the police ("ACAB" - the acronym for "all cops are bas****s" is emblazoned on a banner that hangs from the gym's ceiling) and Golden Dawn, a neo-fascist party that currently holds 17 seats in the Greek parliament and whose members have been known to attack refugees, migrants and antifascists - became a passion.
READ MORE: Greece mourns slain anti-fascist rapper Pavlos Fyssas
"I started Muay Thai, and I loved it," he recalls, adding that the martial art was still relatively unknown in Greece at the time. "You can't avoid falling in love with it... I tried and loved it from the first time. So, I continued."
Lamprou has been involved in anarchist activism for more than two decades. In Greece, he has participated in rallies in solidarity with political prisoners worldwide and against the far right, police brutality and economic austerity.
In 2010, along with other solidarity activists, he sailed towards the Gaza Strip in a fleet of six civilian ships that hoped to break Israel's ongoing siege of the coastal enclave where nearly two million Palestinians reside. During that incident, Israeli forces raided the flotillas, killing nine activists on the Mavi Marmara, one of the ships, in the confrontations that ensued.
During the raid, Lamprou was aboard the Free Mediterranean ship, which was boarded by Israeli soldiers who used rubber-coated steel bullets, tear gas and electric shocks before detaining the passengers.
In 2001, he attended massive anti-globalisation protests in Genoa, Italy, and has joined solidarity trips to Palestinian refugee camps in Lebanon, where tens of thousands of people live in squalid conditions and endure institutional discrimination.
Lamprou has also travelled to Thailand several times for Muay Thai training.
Searching for a way to combine his activism with his passion for Muay Thai, Lamprou decided to establish White Tiger by drawing on the popular tradition of anti-fascist sports clubs and training spaces in other European countries.
"I have a long history in the [anarchist] movement," he says. "I couldn't keep those [political commitments] outside the gym."
Far-right violence
At the time White Tiger was established, the country was in the midst of a sharp surge in far-right violence, much of which targeted refugees and migrants, who the far right blames for the country's economic woes.
That uptick in bloodshed reached its pinnacle in 2012 with the rise of Golden Dawn.
In the run-up to that year's elections, after which the neo-fascist party first entered parliament, the Greek economic crisis fuelled street battles between anti-fascists and Golden Dawn.
After the elections, the violence did not subside. Golden Dawn carried out anti-migrant raids across the country. In some instances, their attacks on migrants and political opponents - such as those on 26-year-old Pakistani labourer Shahzad Luqman and Greek anti-fascist rapper Pavlos Fyssas in 2013 - were deadly.
In October 2012, the United Nations refugee agency (UNHCR) said that 87 racist attacks had been recorded between January and September of that year. Often equipped with clubs, crowbars and attack dogs, they targeted undocumented migrants and refugees from places including Afghanistan, Bangladesh, Pakistan and Somalia. In many cases, the assailants reportedly wore Golden Dawn insignia.
Lamprou says there was an urgent need for gyms that provide practical training in self-defence while reflecting the political world view of the anti-fascist movement.
Although far-right violence has decreased since then, it has not stopped. As Greece absorbed tens of thousands of asylum seekers in recent years, Golden Dawn has targeted camps in both mainland Greece and on islands like Kos and Chios, among others.
'We own the streets'
"After the big boom of Golden Dawn, it was a necessity in Greece [to create] self-organised gyms, and gyms that keep out fascists and the cops," Lamprou says, explaining that many other gyms are frequented by police officers and far rightists.
Clasping his hands together as he recalls those turbulent times, he continues: "There was a purely practical [reason]: We own the streets, and we want to keep them ours."
Lamprou also argues that martial arts demand respect for opponents and those who are different from you. "That's why we cannot give martial arts to the fascists."
The White Tiger has more than 120 students who are spread across three skill levels - beginner, novice and expert - many of whom participate in competitions as a team and attend training sessions several times a week.
Among them are Greeks, internationals from across Europe and North America, and migrants and refugees from places like Syria, Iraq and Afghanistan.
The top level includes some 30 people, known as the fighting team, who participate in competitions in Greece and abroad twice a month.
Thannasis K, a 22-year-old Greek, is a Muay Thai novice. Like many anti-fascists who do not want to be identified by police or Golden Dawn, he declines to provide his surname.
READ MORE: From NATO to Antifa - One Afghan's journey to Greece
"I'm living in an area of Athens that has had a lot of racist attacks and attacks against anarchists," he says, wiping sweat from his brow as he stands outside the gym after practice.
"So, I wanted to start an art of fighting... and know how to defend [myself] in the street in a fight."
Thannasis explains that he left his previous gym after he learned that Lamprou refused to put his fighters in the ring against an opponent who was being cheered on by Ilias Kasidiaris, a Golden Dawn member and parliamentarian.
"You must have solidarity [and] anti-fascism in your whole life, so it's very important to have this also in a place where you learn martial arts," he says.
Back in the gym, a group of students spar in the boxing ring.
For Lamprou, one of the most important features of White Tiger's approach to athleticism is the rejection of patriarchy, which he says is prevalent in mainstream gym culture. Attendees who engage in sexist or patriarchal behaviour are kicked out. "Anti-sexism is part of our life," he says. "It's not an ideology; it's a way of life."
Around half of the White Tiger's weekly participants are female, and Lamprou says his female competitive squad is "the best in Greece".
"If any macho guy comes, he'll see that the environment isn't good for him," he continues.
Drawing on the anti-fascist notion of denying platforms for racists and fascists, Lamprou says he will not put his fighters in the ring to compete with opponents who are known Golden Dawn affiliates or supporters. "We can't compete with [fascists]," he explains.
"In Muay Thai, there is a lot of respect for the opponent. You can't pay respect to a fascist."
The streets, he says, are where the far right ought to be confronted.
'Collective memory of literal fascism'
White Tiger is part of a broader culture of anti-fascism in Greece, specifically in the Athenian neighbourhood of Exarchia where it is located.
Nicholas Apoifis, author of Anarchy in Athens, explains that the "collective memory of literal fascism" in Greece has fostered a long tradition of anti-fascism that places a special emphasis on direct confrontation.
In 1941, during the Second World War, Nazi Germany, Mussolini's Italy and fascist-allied Bulgaria occupied Greece. By the time they were expelled in 1944, nearly 60,000 Greek Jews had been killed. Anti-fascist resistance was widespread during that period.
Between 1967 and 1974, Greece was ruled by far-right military juntas. A mass uprising at the Athens Polytechnic school led to a series of events that resulted in that regime's collapse.
"There is a history of anti-fascism more broadly in Greece because of the history of fascism: the massacres of communists, the torture of anarchists and the massacres of social democrats," Apoifis explains. "There is a rich history in the face of fascism and resistance to that."
READ MORE: Greek anarchists organise for refugees as'state fails'
Apoifis points to a 1984 incident as one of the most crucial historical moments in the contemporary anti-fascist movement in Greece.
In December of that year, thousands of anarchists and far-leftists assembled in Athens and employed black bloc tactics during confrontations at the Hotel Caravel, where a far-right conference headlined by French populist Jean-Marie Le Pen was taking place.
Black bloc is a strategy in which demonstrators wear all black and scarves, masks or padded helmets to conceal their identities to hinder prosecution by authorities and identification by the far right.
While researching his book, Apoifis says he observed a commitment among anti-fascists to defending by force areas where they maintain a strong presence. "It's a calculated political project. It's another form of direct action. They're having discussions about it, but they are also going out and implementing their politics."
Although Lamprou has yet to personally use his Muay Thai skills to confront Golden Dawn members, he says it has often come in handy at demonstrations where clashes with riot police break out.
"Twenty years ago, you couldn't find fascists in Athens," he recalls. "But the necessity became real because we all of the sudden had fascists outside doing patrols."
Lamprou rejects the idea that gyms should be apolitical spaces. "The mentality here is that we can't divide athleticism from politics," he concludes.
"I've been in the anarchist movement for the last 20 years. I've been in Palestine, Lebanon, Genoa, Athens... in all the big [protests]. Anti-sexism, anti-fascism - we couldn't live any other way, whether it's in the gym or in our workplace."
Follow Patrick Strickland on Twitter: @P_Strickland_In the wake of widespread protests against police brutality and discrimination, law enforcement departments across the country are instituting new rules and policies to ensure safer practices. Here are some of the ways departments are reforming their training, tactics, and management in light of scrutiny:
Improved training to ensure that combat-ready assault rifles are not misused in the course of community policing
Armored vehicles to be decorated with murals celebrating the communities in which they are deployed
Switching to new all-organic tear gas blend
New funding for outreach programs to encourage better relationships between officers and their fathers
Officers to de-escalate tense situations by drawing progressively smaller firearms
iPads somehow incorporated
Disgraced law enforcement officials to be given even smaller desks than normal
Cops encouraged to report the misdeeds of their fellow officers, thereby sabotaging their own careers
Ensure this can all legally be thrown out the window if a cop feels threatenedESPN, surrender your cool credentials.
You do not interrupt an indie rock hero just named the most-valuable player in the NBA All-Star Celebrity Game, especially to redirect him to talk about “celebrity stuff, not politics.”
While being interviewed after winning the 2016 NBA All-Star Celebrity Game, Arcade Fire’s Win Butler used the opportunity to launch into a political speech lauding Canada’s health care system. But ESPN reporter Sage Steele was having none of it.
While holding a massive gold trophy, Butler, whose Montreal-based band has won numerous awards and international praise, brought up health care and the U.S. presidential election.
“The U.S. has a lot it could learn from Canada," said Butler, who was born in the U.S. and moved to Montreal for college. "Health care, taking care of people.”
Bad look for ESPN/Sage Steele to short-circuit Win Butler and draw a bright line between "celebrity stuff"/politics. pic.twitter.com/e5TLIzZV4u — Andy Hutchins (@AndyHutchins) February 13, 2016
Steele swooped in for the steal.
"We’re talking about celebrity stuff, not politics," Steele interrupted as ESPN cut away. "Congratulations on your MVP!"
Team Canada beat the U.S., 74 to 63, in the celebrity game, which kicks off All-Star weekend. Butler scored 15 points and collected 14 rebounds for team Canada.
Vaughn Ridley via Getty Images
Canada has a socialized health care system that provides care to all of its 31.5 million citizens. All “medically necessary and hospital physician services" are covered, with no money out of pocket for citizens. The government covers about 70 percent of all medical expenses, the remaining covered by private spending, as Indiana University's Aaron Carroll explains. The plans are financed and managed by each of Canada's ten provinces and three territories, and share many characteristics and standards of coverage.
CORRECTION: This article has been updated to state that it is Canada's ten provinces and three territories that finance and manage statewide health insurance programs. The programs are not managed at the federal level.
Also on HuffPost:This mosaic of images from the Mast Camera (Mastcam) on NASA's Mars rover Curiosity shows Mount Sharp in a white-balanced color adjustment that makes the sky look overly blue but shows the terrain as if under Earth-like lighting. The component images were taken during the 45th Martian day, or sol, of Curiosity's mission on Mars (Sept. 20, 2012). Image released March 15, 2013.
The mysterious Martian mountain that beckons NASA's Curiosity rover was likely built primarily by wind rather than water, as previously believed, a new study suggests.
Many scientists suspect that the 3.4-mile-high (5.5 kilometers) Mount Sharp formed primarily from layers of lakebed silt, which is one of the main reasons that the mountain was selected as Curiosity's ultimate destination. But the new study holds that wind probably did most of the heavy lifting.
"Our work doesn't preclude the existence of lakes in Gale Crater, but suggests that the bulk of the material in Mount Sharp was deposited largely by the wind," study co-author Kevin Lewis, of Princeton University, said in a statement. [Latest Mars Photos from Curiosity]
A mysterious mountain
The Curiosity rover landed inside 96-mile-wide (154 km) Gale Crater last August, kicking off a two-year surface mission to investigate Mars' past and present potential to host microbial life.
The 1-ton robot has already checked off its main goal, finding that a spot near its landing site called Yellowknife Bay was once capable of supporting life billions of years ago. But the mission team is still gearing up to send Curiosity on a 6-mile (10 km) trek to the base of Mount Sharp, which was identified before launch as the rover's main science target.
Observations from NASA's Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter (MRO) suggest that Mount Sharp's foothills were exposed to liquid water long ago. And as Curiosity climbs up through the mound's many layers, the rover will be able to read the Red Planet's environmental history like a book, mission scientists reasoned.
In the new study, researchers used other MRO observations to devise a new theory of Mount Sharp's formation. The team determined that the mound's layers aren't flat-lying stacks, as would be expected in lakebed deposits. Rather, they fan outward in an odd radial pattern from Mount Sharp's center, researchers said.
This finding is consistent with results from the team's computer model, which suggested that wind blowing down Gale's slopes could build a mound in the crater's center while leaving areas near the rim relatively bare.
So Mount Sharp may not be the eroded remnant of an even bigger mound that once filled Gale from rim to rim.
"Every day and night you have these strong winds that flow up and down the steep topographic slopes. It turns out that a mound like this would be a natural thing to form in a crater like Gale," said Lewis, who is a participating scientist on Curiosity's mission. "Contrary to our expectations, Mount Sharp could have essentially formed as a free-standing pile of sediment that never filled the crater."
Mars' Mount Sharp could have been built by wind-borne sediments, researchers say. Wind would have flowed up the rim of Gale Crater (red arrows) and the flanks of Mount Sharp (yellow arrows) in the morning when the ground warmed and reversed in the cooler late afternoon. Blue arrows indicate the more variable wind patterns on the floor of the crater, which includes the Curiosity landing site (marked by the "X"). Image released May 6, 2013. (Image: © NASA/JPL-Caltech/ESA/DLR/FU Berlin/MSSS)
Testing the theory
Curiosity team member Dawn Sumner, who was not involved in the new study, said it presented interesting ideas that the rover should be able to test out in the future.
"This paper provides a new model for Mount Sharp that makes specific predictions about the characteristics of the rocks within the mountain," Sumner, a geology professor at the University of California-Davis, said in a statement. "Observations by Curiosity at the base of Mount Sharp can test the model by looking for evidence of wind deposition of sediment."
However Mount Sharp formed, the huge Mars mountain should be a productive hunting ground for Curiosity, Lewis said.
"One way or another, we're going to get an incredible history book of all the events going on while that sediment was being deposited," he said. "I think Mount Sharp will still provide an incredible story to read. It just might not have been a lake."
The new study was published in the May issue of the journal Geology.
Follow Mike Wall on Twitter @michaeldwall and Google+. Follow us @Spacedotcom, Facebookor Google+. Originally published on SPACE.com.By Arthur Brice
CNN
(CNN) -- President-elect Barack Obama met Monday afternoon with Mexican President Felipe Calderon in the first face-to-face talks of the incoming U.S. leader with a foreign head of state.
Mexican President Felipe Calderon discussed immigration and trade issues with Barack Obama.
The meeting at the Mexican Cultural Institute in Washington fulfilled a tradition in effect since 1980 of U.S. presidents talking with their Mexican counterparts before being sworn in, to underscore the special relationship between the two nations. Obama takes the oath of office on January 20.
Speaking to the press afterward, Obama said the tradition is "appropriate" because of the "extraordinary relationship" between the two countries.
"My message today is that my administration is going to be ready on Day One to build a stronger relationship with Mexico," he said.
Calderon and Obama said the two leaders discussed a wide range of issues, including security, the economy and immigration.
Security is a primary concern for Mexico, where drug-fueled violence reached record levels last year. The nation recorded around 5,400 slayings in 2008, more than double the 2,477 reported in 2007.
Former House Speaker Newt Gingrich characterized the battle among drug cartels and with government authorities as a "civil war" on a news program Sunday.
"The more secure Mexico is, the more secure the United States will be," Calderon said, first in Spanish and then in English, to make sure no one missed the point.
Peter Hakim, president of the Inter-American Dialogue, attended a three-hour private dinner Calderon hosted Sunday night for non-governmental U.S. specialists and experts on Mexico. Security was a prime topic.
Watch how the meeting will highlight the two countries' special ties » "Both countries share a long border," Hakim told CNN on Monday. "They are terribly worried about the violence from organized crime in Mexico and slipover into the U.S."
That's a message Calderon wanted to make sure Obama heard.
"This common problem of organized crime, terrorism, drug trafficking, which is an international problem, we can fight together," Calderon said after the meeting, again in both Spanish and English.
"Mexico wants to make clear what they are doing about this," Hakim said. "They're investing a lot of money into it and the extensive reforms they are going through now."
Those reforms include revamping police and judicial systems, trying to root out corruption and using new technology, Hakim said.
"The message he has is that Mexico is investing its heart and soul into this," Hakim said.
Obama will likely be receptive to that message, said Michael Shifter, a vice president at the Inter-American Dialogue.
"I think Obama is going to understand that Mexico is very important to the United States," Shifter told CNN last week. "This isn't an issue that he has focused a lot of attention on up until now. But he's going to understand that if Mexico really deteriorates or if the violence spills over into the border states, this is a war that he really has to deal with."
Mexico is also concerned, Hakim said, because of the vast number of firearms being smuggled from the United States into Mexico. Many of those weapons end up in the hands of drug traffickers.
Robert Pastor, a former National Security adviser to President Jimmy Carter and now a professor of international relations at American University in Washington, said weapons sales are a thriving business along the 2,000-mile border with Mexico.
"There are 7,600 gun shops within 50 miles of the Mexican border, and they're selling primarily to drug lords," Pastor told CNN recently. "We are part of this problem and we haven't been significantly supportive."
Calderon probably told Obama Mexico does not want U.S. money but does want the United States to help curb that flow of lethal firepower, Hakim said.
"Mexico wants the U.S. to be helpful where it can be most helpful," he said.
The economy is another area of concern to Mexico, and Calderon would like the United States "to get its economy back in shape," Hakim said.
"Mexico has done everything right and is suffering the U.S. meltdown," he said, noting that Mexico has kept budget deficits and inflation down and its banks are in good shape.
"They come with a clean bill of health," said Hakim. "It's the U.S. that overborrowed, overspent and ran up huge trade deficits. Mexico had none of that."
Obama and Calderon said they also discussed immigration, though Hakim noted that Mexico understands that issue is not a top priority right now for the United States.
Asked how he sensed the mood of Mexico's leaders toward the incoming administration in Washington, Hakim said, "They're very hopeful."
But he noted that there are some concerns, especially with trade issues and the North American Free Trade Agreement that the two countries and Canada signed in late 1993. Obama has said he would like to renegotiate the pact.
"It's no secret they're a little bit concerned about his statement during the campaign about redoing NAFTA," Hakim said. "But my suspicion is that this is less of a concern than the other issues I mentioned."
In addition to Hakim, Calderon's office said other participants at Sunday night's dinner meeting included Sidney Weintraub of the Center for Strategic and International Studies; Andrew Selee, director of the Mexico Institute at the Woodrow Wilson International Center for Scholars; Eric Farnsworth, vice president of the Council of the Americas; former U.S. Rep. James Thomas Kolbe, now a fellow at the German Marshall Fund public policy institute; and Demetrios Papademetriou, president of the Migration Policy Institute.
Calderon is scheduled to meet with President Bush on Tuesday.A New Jersey superintendent has apologized for a school menu that served recently served fried chicken for Black History Month.
The lunch menu at Hopewell Valley Central High School for the week of February 16 included chicken, sweet potato casserole, sautéed spinach, mac and cheese, cornbread and peach or apple crisp:
School apologizes for fried chicken menu for Black History Month https://t.co/7BcT8azPU0pic.twitter.com/KUZcajYCW7 — NJ.com (@njdotcom) February 20, 2017
Superintendent Thomas A. Smith apologized for the incident in an emailed message to the school. "The decision to include these items without any context or explanation, reinforces racial stereotypes and is not consistent with our district mission and efforts to improve cultural competency among our students and staff," he wrote.
The school's food service provider, Pomptonian, apologized as well. According to Pomptonian Vice President Cathy Penna, one of Pomptonian's directors worked with an administrator in one district's school to create a Black History Month menu.
While the intention was to celebrate soul food, "Pomptonian deeply regrets that, out of context, this menu may have been perceived by individuals as insensitive or in poor taste," she wrote NJ.com in an email.
It's unclear who complained about the menu.
More from :
Seventy-five years ago, an executive order sent 120,000 Japanese-Americans into internment
For Black History Month, black second graders at LA school receive math homework about slavery
Student Republican group apologizes after handing out anti-Semitic Valentine's Day cardMany teachers say they strive to teach their students to be critical thinkers. They even pride themselves on it; after all, who wants children to just take in knowledge passively?
But there is a problem with this widespread belief. The truth is that you can’t teach people to be critical unless you are critical yourself. This involves more than asking young people to “look critically” at something, as if criticism was a mechanical task.
As a teacher, you have to have a critical spirit. This does not mean moaning endlessly about education policies you dislike or telling students what they should think. It means first and foremost that you are capable of engaging in deep conversation. This means debate and discussion based on considerable knowledge – something that is almost entirely absent in the educational world. It also has to take place in public, with parents and others who are not teachers, not just in the classroom or staffroom.
The need for teachers to engage in this kind of deep conversation has been forgotten, because they think that being critical is a skill. But the Australian philosopher John Passmore criticised this idea nearly half a century ago:
If being critical consisted simply in the application of a skill then it could in principle be taught by teachers who never engaged in it except as a game or defensive device, somewhat as a crack rifle shot who happened to be a pacifist might nevertheless be able to teach rifle-shooting to soldiers. But in fact being |
15 people, including nine students and three teachers.
A partial list of mass shootings in Europe from 2000 to early 2010 is available here.
Obama also claimed: "The idea, for example, that we couldn't even get a background check bill in to make sure that if you are going to buy a weapon you have to go through a fairly rigorous process so that we know who you are so that you can't just walk up to a store and buy a semi-automatic weapon makes no sense."
Obama ought to try purchasing a gun himself. He will realize it is not as easy as he thinks to buy a gun. No store in the entire United States can legally sell a semi-automatic gun without conducting a background check. Indeed, That has been the federal law for two decades now, since 1994.
"The combination of the NRA and gun manufactures are very well financed and have the capacity to move votes in local elections and congressional elections and so if you are running for election right now that's where you feel the heat."
Gun control advocates have plenty of money to get their message across. Thus last year, gun control advocates outspent their opponents by a ratio of 7.4 to 1 on television advertisements.
This year is shaping up to be just as lopsided. While the NRA spends about $20 million annually on political activities, former New York City Mayor Michael Bloomberg is spending about $50 million per year. And Gabreille Gifford's anti-gun organization is putting up another $20 million. Still others are putting in tens of millions more dollars. On top of that gun control advocates have a very sympathetic media that gets their points across.
“Our levels of gun violence are off the charts. There’s no advanced, developed country on earth that would put up with this.”
The U.S. doesn't have the most gun murders among developed countries.
In any case, the total number of murders is the more important comparison and the U.S. murder rate is less than the average murder rate for the world. Nor is it close to having the highest murder rate among developed countries.
"...but that we are going to put some commonsense rules in place that make a dent, at least, in what’s happening -- until that is not just the majority of you -- because that’s already the majority of you, even the majority of gun owners believe that."
The surveys that Obama references by Michael Bloomberg are misleading. Asking if people support background checks on the "sale" of guns is not the same as asking them if they support background checks on transferring guns within families or the actual bills being put before congress. Clear majorities of Americans were actually happy that the gun control bill that Obama backed last year was defeated.
"Australia just said, well that is it, we aren't seeing that again and basically imposed very strict, tough gun laws and they haven't had a mass shooting since."
Pointing to one single country doesn't prove very much. For example, I could point to neighboring New Zealand, another isolated island nation that is demographically and economically similar, that appears to prove the exact opposite. From 1980 to 1996, New Zealand actually had a slightly higher mass murder rate (0.0050 incidents per 100,000 people versus Australia’s 0.0042).
But while Obama points to Australia not have mass shootings since its gun regulations in 1997, New Zealand, which has remained a heavily armed country, has also not had any more mass shootings.
What needs to be done is a systematic study of many different areas to see whether changes in gun laws cause statistically significant differences in mass shootings. And that type of study is exactly what Bill Landes and I did for all the mass shootings in the US from 1977 to 1999, and we found clear evidence that the only type of gun law that made people safer was one that increased gun ownership.
If Obama had a stronger case for gun control, he wouldn't have to make up so many facts and distort others. But with policies such as background checks, which would have done nothing to stop any of the attacks, Obama has little choice but to make things up. However, getting policies right requires accurate facts.It’s been a yearly tradition in Canada since the turn of the century: The Montreal Impact and Vancouver Whitecaps gunning for the Voyageurs Cup.
When the clubs face off on Wednesday as the two-legged final of the Amway Canadian Championship kicks off (7:30 pm ET; Sportsnet World in Canada, MLS LIVE in the USA), they’ll be fighting not just for the right to hoist that trophy, but also for a berth in the 2016-17 CONCACAF Champions League.
That Champions League berth may dominate the headlines surrounding the games, but it is the Voyageurs Cup – which predates the Canadian Championship tournament and even MLS’s arrival in Canada – that carries with it the weight of years of shared history between the two clubs.
The cup also carries the name of the Canadian national team's supporters' group that created, paid for and still owns the trophy to this day.
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After the collapse of the old Canadian Soccer League in the early 1990s, fans yearned for some sort of domestic cup competition to determine a champion among the few Canadian clubs remaining on the North American soccer pyramid.
“For years, the [Canadian Soccer Association] promised a domestic Canadian cup,” says Dwayne Cole, a long-time Voyageurs member. “We were promised and promised, and it never came to fruition.”
So the group – buoyed by a spike in interest after Canada’s surprise win at the 2000 CONCACAF Gold Cup – decided to do it themselves.
The idea was first pitched on the Voyageurs’ message board in March 2002, and interest quickly grew. After some discussion, it was decided the trophy would be awarded to whichever of the four Canadian clubs in the USL A-League – the Impact, Whitecaps, Toronto Lynx and Calgary Storm – collected the most points against each other during the season.
Then came the question of what the trophy would look like – and how it would be paid for.
“We had a vote on what kind of trophy we should have,” recalls Cole. “A number of things came up; it was actually my trophy idea that won.”
Cole, who had been responsible for much of the group’s fundraising since its inception in 1996, took on the task of collecting funds for the Voyageurs Cup. In all, approximately 45 members sent in donations ranging from a few bucks to several hundred dollars; Cole estimates the fundraising total at between $3,500 and $4,000.
That bought the cup — made at a shop in Cole’s hometown of Winnipeg — and a solid oak case, meant to protect the trophy over the years.
“Originally, the big thing was, ‘How is this thing going to survive going back and forth across the country?’, because that’s what we envisioned,” says Cole. “But that never came into play.”
Indeed, the trophy simply stayed in Montreal, as the Impact won the first edition of the Voyageurs Cup in 2002 and just kept on winning, year after year.
--
In 2007, Toronto FC entered MLS but were not eligible for the Cup, since only the Impact and Whitecaps played each other head-to-head in the USL First Division.
“When MLS came into play, that was the next chapter,” says Cole. “Then, suddenly, the CSA were going to do something.”
With the new-look CONCACAF Champions League starting up in August 2008, the CSA needed a competition to determine its entrant (the Canadian Championship), and a trophy to award to that tournament’s winner. Though the Voyageurs Cup would have seemed like a natural fit, Cole says CSA officials weren’t keen on using the fan-made trophy at first. So he got to work on changing their minds.
“The first thing I did is I got the different fan groups on board, then I got the clubs on board. And really at that point, the CSA was in a bit of a bind,” says Cole. “We made an agreement, and we went with it. I think it was a win-win. The CSA got to borrow the Voyageurs Cup, they got the history and the credibility.”
The deal stipulated that, starting in 2008, the CSA would manage the trophy and award it to the winner of the Canadian Championship. But the trophy itself remains the property of the Voyageurs and, continuing a tradition that began in 2002, one of its members is the one who actually presents the Cup to the winning team.
No one knew what to expect in terms of attendance or interest in that first year of the Canadian Championship. But games in all three cities were either sellouts or close to them. When all was said and done, the Impact claimed the Voyageurs Cup for the seventh consecutive year – and parlayed it into an exciting run to the quarterfinals of the 2008-09 CONCACAF Champions League.
“There is the pride and sense of accomplishment that [the Voyageurs Cup] has lasted, that there is a significance to it,” says Gordon Twigg, a Saskatoon-based health care manager who contributed $200 to the Cup’s formation. “My wife is getting bored of hearing the story of how I was involved in the creation of the cup every year!”
The cup continued to gain significance as the years went on, as a team other than the Impact finally claimed it (Toronto FC won four straight years, from 2009-12), and as the number of eligible teams eventually climbed to five (with FC Edmonton and the Ottawa Fury joining the NASL).
“Did anyone think this would become a nationally broadcast tournament? Not in a million years,” says Cole. “I can guarantee you, all of those original donors are very happy. Good God, all the games are on television. In many ways, it’s one of the few success stories of Canadian soccer.”
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These days, Cole is largely silent on the Voyageurs’ message board, and he stepped back from his organizational involvement with the group several years ago. But another original donor, Jamie MacLeod, has stepped up to provide much of the organizational work that makes the ongoing presence of the Voyageurs possible.
To him, the cup is emblematic of what can be accomplished in the Canadian game.
“A lot of people probably don’t even know we have a national team, let alone a supporters' group, let alone a cup developed by the supporters,” he says. “The culture is there. It isn’t about creating it; it’s about growing it and getting people to be a part of it.”
MacLeod also took over Cole’s job of identifying, on a yearly basis, a Voyageurs member in the appropriate city and asking them to present the trophy. While handing out a national title in front of a big crowd would seem like a great experience for any fan, it doesn’t always turn out that way – as Whitecaps fan Ben Massey found out back in 2013.
The Whitecaps had come close to claiming the Voyageurs Cup before, most famously in 2009 when Toronto FC posted a 6-1 win over the Impact – the so-called “Miracle in Montreal” – to deny Vancouver the trophy on goal difference.
But things were looking good in the second leg of the 2013 Canadian Championship final. After a 0-0 draw against Montreal at Stade Saputo in the first leg, the ’Caps held a 2-1 lead at BC Place heading into the game’s final minutes.
“When Jamie asked me [to award the trophy], I thought, ‘Well, what if Montreal wins? It might suck,’” recalls Massey. “But if I say no, I’d regret not doing it forever. It’s just the way the game wound up going that was particularly grueling.”
With just six minutes left in regulation, the Impact leveled the score at 2-2, which was enough to give them the aggregate win on away goals. Massey, just minutes after believing his club was about to finally win their first Voyageurs Cup, had to instead walk out and present it to their long-time rivals.
His displeasure was crystal clear to anyone watching on television.
“With great effort and great concentration, it’s possible to be neutral in a situation when you’re emotionally invested,” he says. “But I don’t think it can be done mere minutes after being emotionally shattered by the one team in the world you’d least like to get shattered by.”
Even so, Massey says he’d do it all over again. To him, the Voyageurs Cup is a representation of all that’s good, and all that’s possible, in Canadian soccer.
“If 45 fans could get a few A-League teams together and turn that into a real, legit Canadian championship, what can’t we do?” he says. “That’s amazing.”
--
What’s next for the Voyageurs Cup? Starting this year, the finals of the Canadian Championship are being played in August, a format change that could theoretically open the door to a longer competition involving more teams. In fact, CSA president Victor Montagliani has said that an open Canadian Cup – the sort of competition that the Voyageurs Cup’s creators envisioned all those years ago – is “a must” over the long term.
MacLeod says the group is exploring the potential of a women’s Voyageurs Cup as well: “I really don’t know how to do it, but we want to do it.”
Whatever the long-term future holds for the Voyageurs Cup (or Cups), the next chapter in its ongoing history will be written this month. Can the Impact claim the trophy for the third straight time and 10th time overall? Or can the Whitecaps finally break the curse and lift the national cup?
Either way, the trophy presentation will be one more round of validation for a group of supporters who wanted to make change in the Canadian game — and put their money where their mouths were.Germnay win 2014 FIFA U-20 Women's World Cup after beating Nigeria 1-0 in the final
Ed Ran FOLLOW ANALYST News 8.55K // 25 Aug 2014, 11:50 IST SHARE Share Options × Facebook Twitter Flipboard Reddit Google+ Email
Germany’s U20 team that won the Women's World Cup
Germany have added to their tally of international tournament wins in 2014, this time the FIFA U20 Women’s World Cup.
They beat Nigeria 1-0 in the final at Montreal's Olympic Stadium with Lena Petermann scoring the solitary goal in extra time. This is the third time they have won the trophy, equalling the United States of America who also won it three times.
The player of the match was goalkeeper Meike Kamper who kept the Germans in the game despite being outplayed for majority of the game.
Nigeria dominate game but fail to convert chances
Nigeria had dominated proceedings, always creating chances but failing to convert them. They were also the physically better side in this match. Germany also missed a couple of good opportunities to score through set pieces.
But Germany scored the winner eight minutes into extra time thanks to their captain Pauline Bremer. She stole the ball from Nigeria left-back Gladys Abasi, made her way to the byline before cutting it back for Petermann to score from the edge of the six-yard box.
Germany coach Maren Meinert was over the moon after the result: “The players and I spent the whole summer cheering on the men's team and their success definitely motivated us.
“We didn't necessarily expect to follow them and be standing here as champions, but we're very proud - and the quality of teams we've beaten along the way makes us especially proud.”
Match highlights
AdvertisementThere are 927 days between today and Jan. 1, 2016. And yet, Missouri Sen. Claire McCaskill chose today to announce her support for former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton's potential presidential bid in three years time.
Missouri Sen. Claire McCaskill endorses Hillary Clinton for president today. AP Photo.
“It’s important that we start early, building a grassroots army from the ground up, and effectively using the tools of the Internet – all things that President Obama did so successfully – so that if Hillary does decide to run, we’ll be ready to help her win," McCaskill said in a release sent Tuesday morning from "Ready for Hillary", a super PAC supporting a Clinton bid in 2016.
The question isn't why McCaskill endorsed Hillary -- there's no one else you would even think about endorsing at this point -- but rather why she did it now. Here's two possible reasons:
1. McCaskill was one of the leading -- and most effective -- spokespeople for then Illinois Sen. Barack Obama in 2008. That was a good thing for McCaskill then, but less so now -- particularly because of her history with the Clintons. Remember that in the fall of 2006, McCaskill went on "Meet the Press" and said this about Bill Clinton: "I think he’s been a great leader but I don’t want my daughter near him." Oomph. By endorsing Clinton so early, McCaskill is saying "I wasn't with you then but I am, big time, now." She's trying to heal the wound created by her endorsement and advocacy of the man who beat Clinton five years ago.
2. McCaskill knows that her political future in Missouri is a difficult one. She almost certainly would not be in the Senate right now if Republicans hadn't nominated Todd "legitimate rape" Akin in 2012. Missouri has moved from a swing state to a GOP-leaning one in the last decade and there's no reason to believe, demographically speaking, that it will move back toward Democrats any time soon.
That means that McCaskill will face a VERY difficult race in 2018. She knows that and may well be looking at her other political options -- one of which would be to serve in a Clinton Cabinet. The best way to set yourself up for that possibility is to pick a candidate as early as possible -- see Tim Kaine's endorsement of Obama in 2007 -- and then work like hell to try to get them elected.
It's also worth noting when analyzing McCaskill's calculation that she undoubtedly believes that Clinton is the person best equipped to handle the rigors of the presidency in the 2016 field. But, politicians never -- repeat: never -- do things without thinking of the impact on them and their careers. And McCaskill is a politician.Chair of Jehovah’s Witnesses branch fined for distributing extremist literature
© flickr.com/Ian Crowther
11:30 25/01/2017
MOSCOW, January 25 (RAPSI, Diana Gutsul) – Chairman of the Jehovah’s Witnesses branch in the town of Dzerzhinsk has been fined 4,000 rubles ($67) for keeping and distributing extremist literature banned in Russia, the Nizhny Novgorod Regional Court announced on its website on Tuesday.
According to case papers, local prosecutors during a field check at the organization’s premises found two booklets declared extremist and added to the list of prohibited literature.
The booklets were seized by court.
Jehovah’s Witnesses have had many legal problems in Russia.
On October 12, a court in the Jewish Autonomous Region ruled to ban a branch of “The Jehovah’s Witnesses” in Birobidzhan because of distributing extremist literature by the organization.
On June 16, Russia’s Supreme Court declared “The Jehovah’s Witnesses of Stary Oskol” in the Belgorod Region an extremist organization and ruled to liquidate it.
On June 9, the Jehovah’s Witnesses of Belgorod was banned as extremist organization.
In March 2015, a court in Tyumen fined the organization 50,000 rubles ($792) and seized prohibited literature.
In January 2014, a court in Kurgan ruled to ban the organization’s booklets as extremist. The books talk about how to have a happy life, what you can hope for, how to develop good relations with God and what you should know about God and its meaning.
In late December 2013, the leader of the sect’s group in Tobolsk, Siberia was charged with extremism and the prevention of a blood transfusion that nearly led to the death of a female member of the group.
In 2004, a court in Moscow dissolved and banned a Jehovah’s Witnesses group on charges of recruiting children, encouraging believers to break from their families, inciting suicide and preventing believers from accepting medical assistance.
Jehovah's Witnesses is an international religious organization based in Brooklyn, New York. Since 2004 sever branches and chapters of the organization were banned and shut down in various regions of Russia.The MBTA is considering body cameras for its police officers.Watch reportThe Transit police superintendent said he supports the idea of officers wearing body cameras.Richard Sullivan told Boston Herald Radio that he raised the issue with his police chief about how a body camera program could work on the MBTA force.Sullivan also said he'd like to see surveillance cameras inside every train car on the MBTA. He adds that could begin when the new Red Line trolleys come online.As for the body cameras, the superintendent said they would not roll out any program without talking to union leaders."Transit Police leadership will be discussing the topic with the MBTA General Manager, the Fiscal & Management Control Board, and the police unions before making any final decisions," the MBTA said in a statement.
The MBTA is considering body cameras for its police officers.
Watch report
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The Transit police superintendent said he supports the idea of officers wearing body cameras.
Richard Sullivan told Boston Herald Radio that he raised the issue with his police chief about how a body camera program could work on the MBTA force.
Sullivan also said he'd like to see surveillance cameras inside every train car on the MBTA. He adds that could begin when the new Red Line trolleys come online.
As for the body cameras, the superintendent said they would not roll out any program without talking to union leaders.
"Transit Police leadership will be discussing the topic with the MBTA General Manager, the Fiscal & Management Control Board, and the police unions before making any final decisions," the MBTA said in a statement.
AlertMeGetting prepared for a new form of democracy!
Less than three weeks left until the launch of the first real European Citizens’ Initiatives (ECI) on April 1st all relevant stakeholders – citizens, institutions and media – are getting prepared for the start of the first transnational instrument of participatory democracy in world history. Please find an up-date on ECI related events, how to prepare an ECI Campaign and about some courageous citizens who are just about to run an ECI.
On 26 January 2012 the EU Commission has set up its new official website and register for the European Citizens’ Initiative. There you will find the official ECI guide by the Commission which is available in all 23 official EU languages.
Soon you will find more useful information there such as your official national contacts and information on the online collection system. The whole warming up event from January 26 has been webstreamed and can also be viewed afterwards. We especially recommend to watch the presentation by Mário Tenreiro from the Commission. He explains concretely how to register an ECI.
We also invite you to join the large ECI conference March 20. This ECI event is organized by ECAS and Democracy International. At this meeting The ECI Campaign and its partners plan to present its results on the screening project about the implementation of ECI at national level, which refers to the certification of online collection systems, signature verification procedures and other important practical questions.
Want to organize your own ECI?
If you are serious about organising an ECI, you should calculate sufficient time to prepare your campaign. We advise you to consider the ECI check-list before you really decide to start your ECI campaign. As several ECI campaigns are already in preparation, some of them are looking for exchange with other ECI organizers in order to share infrastructure and costs for online collection system. For more information check the The ECI Campaigns Facebook-site.
Many potential ECI organizers are still exploring their resources and the practical feasibility. Other ECI organizers have already decided to go public. Potential ECIs include environmental issues such as: renewable energy and against atomic energy – the protection of water rights and against the privatisation of public water systems – actions for the landscape convention. Social issues include ECIs for an unconditional basic income as well as an ECI for eliminating homelessness in the EU. Moreover the request to legalise gay marriage throughout the European Union. Educational issues include ECIs for a European education trust, and to make the EU exchange programs more attractive. Electoral issues: granting EU citizens residing in another Member States the right to vote. Consumer protection issues include ECIs for fair roaming, for a European transaction tax and for a free and open internet.
So far there have been five informal successful 1 million signature campaigns before the ECI regulation had officially entered into force. Check our ECI Handbook for more information on earlier campaigns. This refers to Stop Long Animal Transports, the ELIANT action, the Avaaz-Greenpeace GMO campaign, the One-Seat-Campaign and the 1million4disability campaign. Some are expected to re-launch their campaigns. However no informal ECI, not the One Seat, not the ELIANT action, not the GMOs has ever followed such STRICT signature collection and verification rules as are foreseen now. Even huge NGOs such as Greenpeace and Avaaz needed 9 months to collect 1 million signatures — under ideal conditions. They did not collect sensitive data such as ID card numbers and their signatures were not verified by national ministries.A District Court judge in Denver has reversed a ruling, paving the way for a new homeless community center to open in the Ballpark neighborhood.
Opening of the Denver Rescue Mission’s Lawrence Street Community Center was denied Sept. 3 when Judge R. Michael Mullins ruled in favor of the Ballpark Neighborhood Association.
The association had sued the city and the rescue mission, claiming the building was an expansion of the men’s overnight shelter and therefore improperly zoned.
The court issued a new order Tuesday in response to a motion of reconsideration by the defendants — the rescue mission and the city.
The court initially found the center was an “improper expansion” of the shelter based, in part, on briefs submitted in the case.
“However, after hearing oral argument from the parties, as well as the parties supplemental briefing on the Motion for Reconsideration, the defendants provided information … based on competent evidence in the record,” according to Tuesday’s order.
“At oral argument, the Defendant DRM explained the Center and the Shelter were in fact two distinctly separate buildings on two distinct lots,” the order said. “However, in the briefs of the parties, there was no clear explanation that the buildings were in fact completely separate.”
The rescue mission will not place any additional beds in the community center and will not house additional residents, according to the ruling.
“Accordingly, Defendants motions for reconsideration are granted,” Mullins ruled. The order issued Sept. 3 is vacated.
The city issued a statement Tuesday night saying the reversal will afford homeless people with “critical service for daytime use.”
“When we committed to creating the Lawrence Street Community Center, it was a promise to provide a safe, dignified place for those in need of basic services and to wait for assistance at the Rescue Mission,” said Mayor Michael Hancock.
“I’m very pleased with the judge’s ruling, as it means we can get this vital service back on track to opening before the winter months are upon us.”
The plaintiffs in the lawsuit will meet and decide how to proceed, said Dennis Ryerson, an association spokesman.
“Our main interest is ensuring that the homeless population in our neighborhood is not expanded,” Ryerson said.
“We are not interested in closing any of the missions that are here now; we want to make sure the largest concentration of homeless people in the metro area isn’t expanded beyond what it is now.”
The association will continue to encourage the city to “disperse services” and “assure there are good solutions,” Ryerson said.
Kieran Nicholson: 303-954-1822, knicholson@denverpost.com or @kierannicholsonWho doesn’t love Paris? This city has it all. While it may be crowded it is easy to see why throngs of people spill into the city year-round. The artistic spirit is more present here than anywhere in the world. From Renaissance at The Louvre, Impressionism at The Orsay, and contemporary alternative at Palais de Tokyo, Paris is filled to the brim with art. And the best part is even the streets are filled with incredible murals and graffiti. From lowbrow pop to politically-motivated and everything in between. The street art in Paris is stunning!
The 5th arrondissmeent and the 13th arrondissement are the mostly heavily painted of all the neighborhoods. You can’t turn a corner without seeing spray paint, paper cut-out plasters and mosaics. These neighborhoods are replete with art. Lots of which is hidden down little alleyways or in otherwise inconspicuous places. Be sure to keep an eye out.
One thing that makes street art so amazing is its anonymity. Very few of these artists actually sign their name to their work. This creates a certain mystery to the art that keeps you guessing. This street art is often times socio-political and its anonymous nature makes you wonder the back story of all these artists. In fact, it is said that the Les Halles green market in Paris is the birth place of street art. In the 70’s this market was an urban construction site that artists would use as an outdoor canvas. Gérard Zlotykamien was supposedly the first to enter and decided to spray paint images that evoked a nuclear destroyed Hiroshima. From then on out street art grew and grew throughout Paris. Today, it is all over and more moving than ever.
The Paris Metro is also a good spot to see some art. Since the underground is constantly crowded, seeing some exotic public art helps make the commute easier to swallow. Let’s face it, crowds in Paris suck. But, there’s always a silver lining. And masterful public art is a good one.
Paris is most definitely a socially and politically aware city. One of it’s best features to me. The city blends the upper crust with the starving artist too. They live within blocks of each other. And this blend (which being a New Yorker I am all too familiar with) is apparent down every block. Part of its charm however is that there does seem to be a peaceful co-existence. Most of the time.
Le Mur Des Je T’Aime or “Wall of I love you” in Montemarte is one of the city’s best. On 40 meters of tile the words “I love you” appear in 250 languages. It truly is romantic up close. After all, Paris is for lovers.
Some of the dirtier graffiti is just as cool as the immaculate building-high pieces. Paris has a little grit to it. But, it wouldn’t be Paris without it. You’ve got to take a little grime to give a city some authenticity. Paris is certainly unapologetic about each and every street. When visiting you’ll have to learn to appreciate it.
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My name is Shannon. I am a travel photographer and I have made it my mission to spread my joy of wanderlust to the masses. Through my lens I see the world and all its beauty and want to inspire others to get on that plane and fly. It's just me and my camera. My name is Shannon. I am a travel photographer and I have made it my mission to spread my joy of wanderlust to the masses. Through my lens I see the world and all its beauty and want to inspire others to get on that plane and fly. It's just me and my camera.In the immortal words of Shakespeare, "What’s in a name? Would that which we call Illmatic, by any other name, sound as dope?"
That's a direct quote, look it up, and Shakespeare raises an interesting question. Just how much do names matter?
A lot. Names matter a whole damn lot. To keep using Nas as an example, do you think that if he had decided to call his debut album Sremm Life instead of Illmatic we'd be talking about it today? No, you see a title like Illmatic and you think to yourself, goddamn, whoever came up with that title obviously has a way with words, I bet the album is dope. You see a title like Sremm Life and you think, what the fuck's a Sremm?
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It's odd then that some rappers, even the best rappers, are so bad at naming their own albums while others seem fully capable of carrying over their emcee skills to their titles. Once the world thought that Kanye was going to stick with WAVES as an album title, I thought it'd be the perfect time to review some of hip-hop's best and worst album titles. The crucial thing to remember here is to separate the music on the album from the title itself. There are classic albums with bad titles, and trash albums with great titles, the two overlap but aren't necessarily one in the same.
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And with that in mind, let's review the album title abilities of some of hip-hop's biggest names, because this is really what you should be spending your day thinking about.
Kanye West
SPECIAL UPDATE:
Once Kanye announced the official title for his upcoming album (again) to The Life of Pablo I immediately got requests to update this piece, and who am I to deny the will of the people? It's going to take some time to truly come to grips with TLOP, most prominently we don't know how well the title reflects and encapsulates the music, but we can make some immediate snap judgments.
First, this will likely fade with the passage of time, but right now it's impossible to think of TLOP without thinking of all the names that came before it - circumstances matter. Let's say you're named Pablo, and your parents told you that they named you Pablo because it felt strong and as soon as they heard it they knew it was the right name for their son. Now let's say you're named Pablo and your parents told you that actually they had picked out three other names but when you were born they kind of panicked and started doubting their previous choices and went with Pablo because at the time it seemed like the least-worst option. See, same name, totally different feeling.
Second, out of all of Kanye's album titles so far it's the most immediately confusing. Obviously the College trilogy followed an easy to follow storyline, 808s was about heartbreak, My Beautiful Dark Twisted Fantasy was exactly that and Yeezus was meant to shock. But The Life of Pablo? What did you say??? Who's Pablo? Pablo Picasso? Pablo Escobar? Famed Argentinian field hockey player Pablo Lombi? It could have actually been a dope idea for Kanye to make an album that followed the life of a fictional character, Pablo as some sort of everyman traveler seeking adventure and enlightenment, but we know that's not the case. The Life of Pablo isn't the title of a concept album, it's a title that suggests concept that got attached to the album after the fact like a whale barnacle.
Again, I reserve the right to update this again if by some miracle I hear the album and that title makes perfect, brilliant sense, but in the spirit of this article, based only on the title as a title in-and-of-itself, it's Kanye's worst album title yet. And yet if there's any good news here it's that it's still better than SWISH or WAVES - can you even in your life imagine if the real, actual, final title of this album was SWISH? The Life of Pablo feels misguided, but SWISH would have been a Chernobyl of an album title. So at least we've got that going for us, which is nice.
And now, back to the original article....
--------------------------
Kanye doesn't need any more accolades, but he's inarguably one of the greatest album titlers of all-time. The College Dropout to Late Registration to Graduation trilogy was perfect, establishing a theme that paralleled his trajectory through music, and even better, he let go of that theme before it started feeling too forced. Another college-themed title past Graduation would have been like those wack couple seasons of Saved By The Bell: The College Years when the show was making too much money to stop, but it didn't make any sense for the characters to still be in school when everyone in the cast looked like they were 25-years-old.
Regardless of what you thought about 808's and Heartbreak as a musical project, he nailed that title too, it described both the sound and concept of the album perfectly. Watch the Throne? What better title could there be for a Jay Z and Kanye collab album? And then Yeezus was at the very least solid. To use a quote from the Watch the Throne days, nobody knows what it meant, but it was provocative. And then...
Oh no. Oh no no no no no. On the plus side WAVES is better than SWISH, but that's like saying that being punched in the stomach is better than being kicked in the balls, and both are far worse than the album's original name, So Help Me God. Only time will tell if WAVES' music matches the name, but it almost doesn't matter since it's a word that's been used so many times by so many other people it's almost cliche now - Free Max B. When you get sucked into a petty fight with Wiz Khalifa over an album title, it's not a great album title. It was a legendary album-title streak for Mr. West, but it's over. Still, on the whole I'm perfectly willing to call Kanye one of the greatest.
Jay Z
Now that I'm looking at Hova's complete discography, for a guy who's the most successful rapper of all-time, his album title skills are highly questionable. He came out of the gate strong with Reasonable Doubt, and then the following trilogy was solid, although he lowkey fucked it up because he couldn't decide on a consistent format. It was In My Lifetime, Vol. 1, followed by Vol. 2...Hard Knock Life and Vol. 3...Life & Times of S. Carter. According to the format he set up with the first album, they all should have been formatted like In My Lifetime, otherwise they're not volumes at all, they're completely separate things. And what's with the ellipses? Now that I really think about it, the copyeditor in me now hates all these album titles with a passion.
The Dynasty: Roc La Familia? Eh, it's fine, a little too "the whole Mafia thing is really popular in hip-hop right now" though. The KRS-One-inspired The Blueprint was fire flames, he was laying down the blueprint for how to find success in modern rap (get it?!?!) and then at least he learned his lesson from the |
actual per-channel cost for all the channels we don't watch. Broadcasting distributors are really selling us access; the bigger the bill, the more choice is offered. Complaining about unwatched channels is a bit like complaining about the fancy elliptical machine at the health club. You may never use it, but somebody else does and their fees are helping pay for your treadmill.
Not that small players aren't going to fall by the wayside here. Some smaller channels, especially those that aren't owned by the big broadcasting groups, are probably going to expire. It's no judgment on their programming to suggest that niche offerings like Cottage Life or Vision TV may not survive these changes.
CRTC chair Jean-Pierre Blais acknowledged as much as he took questions at a press conference following Thursday's announcement, but rejected doomsday scenarios that suggested $1-billion in economic activity and thousands of jobs would be lost. Recognizing that power in the industry lies with vertically integrated conglomerates, the decision includes some requirements that the distributors offer channels other than those owned by their own groups, but how effective will that prove if nobody chooses to buy those channels? And if it's the independent channels that go under, yet more pricing power will be concentrated in the hands of the big guys.
Blais talks about a more competitive market in which producers will have to consolidate and innovate to thrive, but the pick-and-pay decision is actually an odd mix of free-market talk and interventionist action. After deregulating cable prices in the 1990s and then maintaining for years the fanciful proposition that we have competition in broadcasting distribution in this country, the CRTC is now effectively regulating prices again.
How much will you get for your $25? My bet is that most Canadians will find themselves piecing together a smaller cable package that will cost just about the same as the old behemoth. I wait with bated breath to hear what I am going to have to pay for the NFL Network.One wonders whether there could be a copyright issue with producing Russian weapons in America without a license, though Russian and Chinese spies haven’t been reticent about helping themselves to U.S. technology. Either way, it seems like a sensible and economical idea to produce foreign weapons in America, rather than having to procure them from unreliable or unsavory international arms merchants.
Why would U.S. special forces want to manufacture Russian machine guns?
Just watch any video of a conflict such as Iraq and Syria, and the answer becomes clear. Many of the combatants are using Russian or Soviet weapons, or local copies thereof, from rifles to rocket launchers to heavy machine guns mounted on pickups. Which means that when U.S. special forces provide some of these groups with weapons, they have to scrounge through the global arms market to buy Russian hardware as well as spare parts.
So U.S. Special Forces Command, which oversees America’s various commando units, has an idea: instead of buying Russian weapons, why not build their own? That’s why USSOCOM is asking U.S. companies to come up with a plan to manufacture Russian and other foreign weapons.
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The goal is to “develop an innovative domestic capability to produce fully functioning facsimiles of foreign-made weapons that are equal to or better than what is currently being produced internationally,” according to the USSOCOM Small Business Innovation Research proposal.
More specifically, USSOCOM wants American companies to explore whether it is feasible to “reverse engineer or reengineer and domestically produce the following foreign-like weapons: 7.62×54R belt fed light machine gun that resembles a PKM (Pulemyot Kalashnikova Modernizirovany), and a 12.7×108mm heavy machine gun that resembles a Russian-designed NSV (Nikitin, Sokolov, Volkov).”
Applicants for the research project must produce “five fully functional prototypes, to include firing of live ammunition, of a foreign-like weapon that resembles the form, fit, and function of a Russian-designed NSV 12.7×108mm heavy machine gun.”
However, USSOCOM won’t make the process easy by providing assistance such as technical drawings. Interested companies will have to make their own drawings of foreign weapons, acquire the appropriate parts and raw materials, and create a manufacturing capability.
Companies will also have to “address the manufacture of spare parts to support fielded weapons.” In addition, they must be prepared to start up and shut down production as needed, as well as provide varying quantities of weapons.
USSOCOM also emphasizes that foreign weapons must be strictly made in America. Manufacturers “will employ only domestic labor, acquire domestically produced material and parts, and ensure weapon manufacture and assembly in domestic facilities.”
Though USSOCOM is starting with a pair of Russian machine guns, the research proposal speaks of foreign-made weapons in general. “Developing a domestic production capability for foreign-like weapons addresses these issues while being cost effective as well as strengthens the nation’s military-industrial complex, ensures a reliable and secure supply chain, and reduces acquisition lead times."
One wonders whether there could be a copyright issue with producing Russian weapons in America without a license, though Russian and Chinese spies haven’t been reticent about helping themselves to U.S. technology. Either way, it seems like a sensible and economical idea to produce foreign weapons in America, rather than having to procure them from unreliable or unsavory international arms merchants.
Michael Peck is a contributing writer for the National Interest. He can be found on Twitter and Facebook.
This first appeared in May.
Image Credit : Creative Commons/WikiCommons.James Talley, co-owner of White Horse Tavern and Cask Café, is ready for a new phase of his life to begin. White Horse Tavern, open for less than six months and well-reviewed in Style and other publications, will close in the next two weeks.
He was having dinner with the Roosevelt, Garnett’s Café and Ipanema Café’s Kendra Feather. “I’ve always wanted to work with her and [I asked] if she’d be interested in coming in and doing a piece of White Horse.”
That led to more discussions — and rebranding seemed the logical course of action. “I thought I was going to retire when I sold the [Commerical] Taphouse,” he says. That didn’t happen — the landlord was a friend and the White Horse project was too tempting for Talley to resist.
Despite the good reviews, however, the restaurant hasn’t done the evening business that he’s hoped for, and that was frustrating. “The community is awesome,” he says. “I never would have pulled the trigger like this on the Taphouse, but now I just don’t feel the same about [changing the concept] — White Horse isn’t part of my identity like the Taphouse was.”
Talley’s new plan may be surprising to some, although not those who’re close to him. “I don’t talk about it much, but I’ve been marrying people and preaching for the past seven or eight years,” he says. He plans to open Stream Vineyard Church with services at the Maymont Elementary School. “People say they feel like they’re called. … I feel like I’ve been led to do this with my wife.”
Talley will still be involved with the business.
“I’m excited,” says Feather.
“We’ll be celebrating what we’ve started out here [at White Horse], the customers and the community until we close,” he says. Both he and Feather aren’t providing details about the new concept yet.
“This is about opportunity,” says Talley. “I don’t need all the control.” He’s looking forward to working with someone with new ideas who’s fully capable of executing them without his help, he says.Circle, founded by Jeremy Allaire, has received a license from the State of New York to deal in bitcoin.
ALBANY, N.Y. — State regulators have approved their first license to a company dealing in virtual currency such as bitcoin.
Circle Internet Financial, based in Boston, has outlined security, capitalization, controls against money laundering and other measures intended to protect consumers and root out illicit transactions, the Department of Financial Services said Tuesday.
State regulators are reviewing applications from 24 other companies under final rules adopted in June, department spokesman Matt Anderson said. The licenses are now required for companies that want to do business with New Yorkers, he said.
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‘‘Issuing the first BitLicense is an important milestone in the long-term development of the virtual currency industry,’’ department Superintendent Anthony Albanese said. ‘‘Putting in place rules of the road... is vital to building trust in this new financial technology.’’
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Bitcoin, a virtual currency created by computers that run complex algorithms, can be used to buy and sell some goods and services without government-issued money. It has been gaining the backing of investors and mainstream businesses, including major online retailers.
In May, New York regulators granted their first charter under the state’s banking law for a commercial exchange for virtual currency to itBit Trust Company LLC in New York City.
Circle Internet Financial, which has offices in San Francisco, New York, Dublin and London, has 65 employees and customers in more than 100 countries, spokeswoman Sarah Mitchell said. The company won’t disclose exact transaction and volume data, but they are seeing ‘‘significant consumer demand’’ globally for its product, which currently enables transactions in US dollars and in bitcoin, she said.
‘‘Our goal is to make sending and receiving money instant, secure and free for people around the world, including New Yorkers,’’ said Sean Neville, co-founder and president.
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Mitchell described Circle Internet Financial as a consumer payments company. Its primary use is for sending and receiving US dollars. They plan to add the euro and pound sterling next, followed by other currencies such as the Chinese yuan in the future, she said.I guess because I run a highly ranked blog (that does not specialize in cars...) Ford decided I would be a good person to test drive a Lincoln MKS for a week. To give them credit they did not ask me to write about it, nor did they ask me about my cars or opinions about cars in general.
I've been avoiding writing about my experience because... well I knew it would be a long post and include more than a cursory review of the car.
The car they gave me was LOADED. The base price was $37,665, but the one I got was $45,255. It had all the optional equipment... The ultimate package (nav, double sunroof, etc...etc..etc...oh and THX audio).
But first of course you need my history... because without it the review would not be much use to anyone.
My first car was a Chrysler 1985 LeBaron GTS (Turbo). It was loaded for its day which meant that the Turbo was just OK and it had an onboard computer that kept track of all the stats of my gas and mileage etc... it was cool for 1985. It was a nice red color and I have to say that one thing that Chrysler knows how to do is paint a car - it looked new until the day I sold it. Now back to reality - the paint job was the best part of the car by leaps and bounds. Every part of the Chrysler broke in the 4-5 years I owned it - multiple times. I'm not exaggerating... every part. The automatic window track would break every week on both sides. I had them fixed over 10 times and eventually gave up and never opened them. The radio had to be replaced several times. The AC stopped working just in time for the windows to break in the up position. The steering had a problem multiple times. Even the open and close containers to hold my stuff would break. I had my radiator re-dipped twice because of leaks (which didn't seem to help). Then one day I was driving down the street and the bolt that held the drivers seat broke and I found myself in the back seat trying to stop the car without killing myself. To say that EVERY part broke on this car is a gross under-exaggeration. I cannot remember every single thing but if you name a part on the car it had problems. Oh, and it burned oil so I had to constantly re-fill it. Yes it was under warranty... but it spent a HUGE amount of time at the dealers and they were totally unable to fix anything permanently. Not to mention they were rude and just plain didn't care. I had one episode where the engine was sputtering constantly and dying at lights and I took it in and they could not re-produce the problem. After taking it in for the third time I left it running and got the manager outside (while the car was running) and we yelled at each other about it until of course the car decided to make my point for me. The final straw was the grey smoke that filled a courtyard from the tailpipe. It was out of warranty and that point and I took it to a service station who couldn’t tell me why it happened but it had stopped...so I took it as quickly as I could and traded it in to Ford for a new Ford Probe.
Before I get to the Probe let me just say that my 5 year experience with Chrysler was so terrible that I will NEVER buy a Chrysler again. If they offered me one for free I'd take it and sell it. The horrible car plus the completely bad customer experience was such that they lost me for life. I don't care if they are someday ranked number one (unlikely considering the recent bankruptcy) I will never buy one again.
I got the Ford Probe because I was still a student and had only so much money - but I wanted something sportier than the LeBaron. My experience with the Ford Probe was not as bad as with Chrysler. It didn't break all the time - but when it did I do have to say that I had a similar customer experience - they just sucked and didn't care. The dealerships were filthy and old and the people there were glassy eyed and just went about their day. The Probe was an OK car for about 4 years and then things started to break that were expensive and it started making noises that Ford couldn’t fix (buzzing, vibrating... basically the car was made out of plastic molding). I can't recall if I was engaged or married at the time but we decided to upgrade to a foreign car at this point.
I sold the Probe and moved up to my first foreign car - the Lexus ES300. Yes it was the low end model - but it was fantastic. The only fault we found in our entire time with the car was the two tone color on the outside (grey on the bottom white everywhere else... yuck). The car never had any major problems and spent little time at the shop. When we did go to the dealer we were treated like gold. They took us into a nice room and asked us what was wrong and made sure they had it completely correct. Then before giving the car back the service manager would drive it and make sure the problem was solved. The dealership was clean and comfortable and everyone there couldn't have been more helpful. It was like I had entered paradise after being stuck on an island called American cars for my entire life. (and they washed it every time)
Eventually we added our second car and it was the Lexus RX300 (which was my car - my wife kept the ES300). I LOVED it and Lexus continued with their great service and the car never had a problem.
Of course as you can expect after my experiences with cars at this point THERE WAS NO WAY IN HELL I WAS EVERY GOING TO BUY AN AMERICAN CAR AGAIN IN MY LIFE.
Well, then something happened that made me give up my beloved Lexus RX300... children were born - twins. So suddenly I woke up one day to find baby seats in the back of my RX300... (seriously - I had no idea it was coming) and I found out it was no longer mine... my wife had taken it over.
This worked out OK though... because I was nearing 40 years old and there was no way I was taking her two tone car after all this time... so I traded her car in and bought the car I always wanted when I was a teenager... which by luck had JUST come out... the Nissan350Z Roadster. I went there and bought it the first week they were out - I think I got one of the first 200 in the US... a beautiful sunset colored convertible that rocked. My experience with Nissan was similarly very good. There were some problems with the car because it was a new model. The soft roof had to be replaced and some other minor things had to be fixed.. but they did it all at their cost and gave me a car to drive while it was being fixed. The service was excellent and after that the car gave me no problems. I loved it. I kept this car for about 4-5 years and didn't dream of replacing it.
Of course being a man I really had no idea of what it meant to have twins... no less a girl and a boy... it meant that when they reached 4-5 years old we needed two cars that could handle them... and my Z was a two seater that couldn't handle a child. This meant I had to sell my Z and get a sedan (gasp!).
Oh, and I forgot - my wife had traded the RX300 in fairly quickly to get a Toyota Minivan, so we had the Toyota for almost 4 years at the time. The minivan was a great car for kids and we never had any serious problems with it. When there was a problem it was fixed. We still own it and it's still humming along like it will last forever.
Back to my problem. I had to pick a sedan that I wanted but I didn't want to spend a ton on one. I ended up doing a TON of research and found that I loved the look of the Nissan Altima (post 2007 model). There was a problem though - I wanted the car loaded - I wanted the 3.5 v6 engine that my Z had, the Nav, the Sports Package, and the sound system... basically every option that I could have. To get that new would have cost me about32k and I had sold the Z for about 23k. What was I to do? Well I did something brand new to me and looked for a USED Altima with those specs. It took me a long time looking through EBAY, Craigslist, AutoTrader and every other possible place. Oh and it had to be black...Now the problem is that 90% of all Altima's are 2.5 V4's. That left me with a VERY hard project to get ALL of the options plus BLACK and have the 3.5V6. Well I got lucky and found one in New Orleans with just 13,000 miles on it (2007) and owned by the son of an Acura dealer (so it was taken care of). I got it for about 23k and now have had it for two years and I LOVE it. It's not as fast as my Z of course because it weighs more and isn't made to be a sports car - but its close. It's all leather, NAV, Sports, Bose Stereo, etc... I was very happy needless to say. And I had the same good experience when I had to take it to the dealer (which was totally rare because the car had already been broken in). I have to say that I am completely satisfied with the Altima and it's sitting outside my window as we speak.
So out of nowhere I get this email offering to let me test drive either some boxy new minivan or the high end Lincoln MKS... so I picked the latter. My wife and I both made it our main car for the five days they gave us. We put the booster seats in it and both drove it for the entire 5 days. My wife’s first impression was that it drove like butter. It was very smooth in turning and it took bumps and railroad tracks like they weren't there. However after driving it for a few days problems became apparent. The back window is very small - my wife says as small as my350Z (very small). Further everything on the inside of the car is thick - including seat belts which made it hard to view back and to the side. The car was designed very poorly for viewing traffic. Other thing was that when the car was turned off it didn’t require that it be in park... which once let the car drift back until my wife realized what was going on... another safety issue. The turning radius of the car was horrible. But she did like the car. By chance both the Lincoln MKS and my Altima were nearly clones as far as features went. Both were black with the same exact features including NAV etc... so it was like comparing two very similar cars. The difference was that the Lincoln was MUCH heavier and made up for it with a slightly bigger engine than my Altima. Ever the doors felt heavy in the Lincoln. It wasn't a bad car... but I had a 23k Altima that was perfect and I was test driving a Lincoln MKS for 45k that was very very similar. In the end I decided that it came down mostly to looks. My Altima looks terrific from front to back. The Lincoln looks great from the front but the back is the typical huge grill that every Lincoln has - and it's completely ugly. For some reason American carmakers seem to think that they must make all of their cars look like their "brand". However who are they marketing this Lincoln MKS to? 40 year olds like me or 60 year olds who might like the grill... Based on the features I'd say they want people like me so why the old man look? Of course there were a few more things about the Lincoln I must mention. Of course the engine had some serious kick to make up for the weight of the car. If I stuck it in my Altima I might even be able to beat my Z. The other thing that I'd take from the Lincoln and put in my Altima was the sound system. They had a THX sound system. When I got in the car and saw THX I thought to myself - how stupid - THX is a movie sound system and this is a car. I still think that and that they are just using THX as a marketing device... but when Pink Floyd came on and I felt my entire backside rumble I decided that yes I'd swap out my sound system for this one. Oh, and one last thing that is somewhat major in my book – the NAV system. For those who don't have a NAV system it's usually integrated with the sound system and all the other electronics. My Altima's NAV is great and placed perfectly in my car so I can press the screen for everything. The Lincolns was high up and under it had real buttons to press that were completely unnecessary. I couldn't fathom why they would put the NAV screen so high up to make room for those buttons... and then I figured it out... down below there was a little emblem... "By Microsoft". Well that did it for me - all I need is the Blue Screen Of Death in a car! My god what a scary thing to see in a car. Oh also this car had TWO sunroofs - one for the front and one for the back... why? WHY? Who really uses a sunroof and who needs two?
My conclusion is that like my Chrysler the Lincoln threw in a bunch of WOW features like THX, double sunroofs, a NAV system and then ignored what's most important - the overall appearance of the car, the visibility when driving, the comfort of the seats (I preferred my Altima seats), oh and by the way - my Altima could fit three boosters in the back seat while the Lincoln could only fit two. I found that my Altima was designed to death to work for the customer from every angle - from my cup holders to everything else the Altima rocks. The Lincoln tried to be flashy but failed in most other regards. Being heavier it took railroad tracks and bumps smoother. It was quieter in the inside while driving.... all weight issues. And then there is as far as I'm concerned one thing they will never get someone who reviews a car for a few days... service. It's an American car and my experience with American car companies is that their service sucks the big one.
We've been bailing out our American Car Companies every 10 years because they simply don't get it. Here we are again with our car companies being partially bailed out. Do you ever see Foreign car company needing money from a government to exist? We need a huge overhaul of American Car companies - fire the execs, hire some young people to do design and forget the stupid branding - just make a good car. We can have Toyota making cars IN THE US, and they are better than our cars... why? It's the company, not the workers who build the cars.
Until this happens and I see press about how great an American car is and how terrific the service is... I will remain one of those Americans who say "never again".San Miguel Island, closed by the Navy in 2014, will be reopened to the public on May 17. The remote island—visited by fewer than 200 people per year when open to tourists—boasts beautiful views, scenic hikes and a huge sea lion rookery.
San Miguel Island is the westernmost island of the eight Channel Islands, about 55 miles from Ventura, according to the National Park Service (NPS). It's eight miles long and four miles wide, consisting of 9,379 acres. Despite the fact that 18 million people live within 100 miles of the park, the island feels very removed from civilization, Yvonne Menard, Channel Islands National Park Chief of Interpretation & Public Information Officer, tells LAist.
"It's like taking a trip back in time to go back to California like it was many years ago," she said.
The Channel Islands are owned by a number of different agencies. San Clemente and San Nicholas are also owned by the Navy, while Catalina is managed by the Catalina Island Conservancy. The Channel Islands National Park consists of five islands: Santa Rosa, Anacapa, Santa Barbara, Santa Cruz and San Miguel. San Miguel, though within the Park, is also owned by the Navy and managed by NPS via an agreement. In 2014, the Navy decided to close the park over concerns of pubic safety. In particular, they were worried about possible unexploded ordnance (UXO), or any sort of explosive weapon—such as bombs, grenades, land mines and the like—that did not explode when they were used and could possibly later detonate and cause harm.
"San Miguel was an active bombing range in WWII and through to the '70s, so for the past two years, the Navy has been working to ensure public safety by conducting a risk assessment and survey of the island," Menard said. "They also established new agreements with the park service so visitors, as of May 17, can go back to the island."
As before, guests will need to be joined by a ranger beyond the ranger station. This is a policy that's been in place for several decades, Menard said. If rangers are not available, the island will be closed, though NPS works diligently to make it accessible.
Visitors will also have to sign an access permit and liability waivers, which can be found at the boat and air concession offices. Private boaters may self-register at a station at the trailhead on the beach.
Most visitors choose to come by boat. If you do so, you will land at Cuyler Harbor, which Menard described as a mile-long beach with gorgeous, blue waters. From there, guests will climb up a sand dune to the trailhead and ascend through Nidever Canyon, which Menard said is full of wildflowers.
There is a campground where 30 people can camp at a time, and while the grounds offer pit toilets and tables, you'll want to pack everything else. Menard said that people who camp out generally use the second day of their trip to hike a 14-mile loop trail to Point Bennett on the westernmost point of the island.
"It's a long hike, but not a lot of elevation gain," she said. You will also hike through the caliche forest, where sand-casting occurred around old tree trunks and the old tree system. It looks like this:
At Point Bennett, you'll find the a huge sea lion and seal rookery, used by over 100,000 animals to breed, pup and feed. You can observe the animals using a spotting scope the ranger usually brings with them as you sit behind a dune. Other animals found on the island include the island fox, a species that is currently being considering for delisting from the endangered species list, after it was added in the 90s. There are about 500 such foxes on the island. This is in addition to the marine life that surrounds the islands, which includes whales and dolphins, and the numerous plant species endemic to San Miguel Island.
You may also find the Cabrillo memorial. Juan Rodriguez Cabrillo was a Portuguese explorer who decided the island belonged to the Spanish Crown in 1542, though the Chumash were already living there, as they had for 12,000 years. Some believe that Cabrillo died on the island and is buried there, but no one is sure where. Still, a memorial to him remains on the bluff overlooking Cuyler Harbor. The island is still home to 600 mostly undisturbed archeological sites, according to NPS. The oldest is believed to be 11,600 years old. After the Chumash were sent to missions and other towns, San Miguel was mostly left alone until sheep ranchers took over in 1850, remaining until the '40s.
If you want to visit the island for yourself, Menard suggests you begin by booking your campsite and boat or air concessions online first. You can find information for how to do those two things here. Then, you'll just have to prep for your time on an island. There isn't a lot of shade, so be prepared to spend time in the sun. At night, the island can get windy and cold, so be sure to dress in layers and pack accordingly. Find more information on camping and what to bring here.
Related: Day Tripping: San Miguel Island at Channel Islands National ParkWest Virginia has offered its athletic director position to Alabama deputy AD Shane Lyons and Lyons is expected to accept, reports the Charleston Gazette.
Lyons would be replacing Oliver Luck, who announced last month that he was leaving to become the NCAA's vice president of regulatory affairs. Luck had been West Virginia's AD since June 2010.
The Gazette reported that Lyons and his wife met with West Virginia president Gordon Gee on Sunday and that a formal announcement of Lyons' hiring is expected Monday.
A native of Parkersburg, W.Va., and an alumnus of West Virginia, Lyons has held a variety of roles in his professional career, though he's never worked as an athletic director.
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Lyons has been in his current role as Alabama's deputy AD and chief operating officer since 2011. Before joining the Crimson Tide, Lyons worked as the associate commissioner of the ACC for 10 years.
Lyons has also worked as an associate athletic director for compliance at Texas Tech, as a membership services representative for the NCAA and as assistant commissioner for compliance and championships for the Big South Conference.
Under Luck's watch, West Virginia joined the Big 12 in 2012 after 22 years in the Big East.
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- Ben EstesDeMarcus Ware will go down as one of the all-time great pass rushers in NFL history. Many forget that he almost wasn't drafted by the Cowboys. Then head coach Bill Parcells wanted to draft LSU defensive lineman Marcus Spears with the first of two first-round draft picks. Fortunately for the Cowboys, owner Jerry Jones intervened on behalf of the franchise in the war room.
As scary as it is to even contemplate Ware not being drafted by Dallas, there is the possibility of losing him for an extended amount of time. Football is a physical sport, injuries happen. Obviously you cannot be stocked full of talent at every position on the depth chart, but you can prepare for a impact players hole in the starting lineup.
Tony Romo is just as important as Ware is to the team, but the Cowboys finally have a reliable option in Kyle Orton. In case Romo were to go down with another injury, Orton could somewhat hold the pieces together. The same can be said for DeMarco Murray and Felix Jones. They both can step in for each other and pickup where the other one left off. Miles Austin and Dez Bryant are another example of having quality players at the same position. Last year Laurent Robinson capitalized due to various injuries at the wide receiver position. A talented player deep on the depth chart can make a big contribution.
There are some areas on the depth chart that have quality players behind them who can possibly step into the starters role. The one area the Cowboys really don't have an answer for in case of long term injury is outside linebacker. Losing Ware would be a catastrophic event that would change the shape of the football team for the worse.
Ware Would The Cowboys Be Without #94?
Every single time I play the situation out in my head, I end up with nightmares. Ware is just so valuable to this defense, a 3-4 scheme that is built around his strengths. Frankly, the Cowboys have done a poor job assembling a defense around him. You would think after all of these years with Ware as the centerpiece, the defense built around would be a better unit. That is a whole other topic, but anyone who watches the Cowboys can tell you Ware is what makes their defense click.
Without him, who knows just how ugly it would get. He already plays almost every snap on defense and accounted for almost 50 percent of the sacks last year. How long can you rely on that type of production? Ware is the identity of the Cowboys defense, and a lot of the pressure comes from him. It's just going to be hard for him to continue producing almost half of the teams sacks. At some point, they will need to upgrade the pass rush.
The Ryan And Ware Combination
He has played for some great defensive coaches. Bill Parcells, Wade Phillips and Rob Ryan all at one point were at the top of the league as defensive masterminds. Ware has had great coaching, but now he has a chance to team up with Ryan for a second year. Ryan knows that he has one of the best pass rushers in the game at his disposal, but he must continue building around Ware. That solely relies on Jerry Jones and Jason Garrett actually allowing Ryan to get in some input in the war room this year.
Is it any surprise that he had one of the best seasons of his career with 19.5 sacks last season under Ryan as defensive coordinator? Wade Phillips became somewhat lazy his last two years coaching Ware, he never moved him around to confuse the opposing offense. Ryan is getting creative, allowing Ware to line up all over the field to generate mismatches.
Ware is looking forward to another year working with the fiery defensive coordinator for the 2012 season.
And I think there's going to be a big improvement having Rob Ryan for a whole another year, knowing his system, knowing what's really going on. Having Jason Garrett the leader, that motivational guy for us. I think it's going to all just pan out next season.
While Cowboys continue to build their defensive line up, their personnel will become more comfortable with the scheme. Next year we could finally see an improved defense ready to take the next step. It will be interesting to see another year with Ware in Ryan's pressure based attack.
Finding A Pass Rusher Behind Ware
He definitely is in his prime, but Ware does turn 30 years old this July. Fortunately we don't have to even begin considering replacing Ware, we just have to add a good pass rusher to back him up. Adding a quality linebacker behind him would do a few things.
Having Ware get a breather occasionally might be a good idea. I saw him out of gas far too many times at the end of games, but it wasn't due to a conditioning problem, he was just flat out tired. That tends to happen when you play almost every snap. Allowing him to rest maybe 10-15 snaps earlier in games by replacing him with a capable player from the sideline would keep him fresh later on in crunch time.
Watching him go down against the Chargers during the 2010 season was a scary sight. Having someone behind him who could generate a pass rush would at least give us some relief in case of an injury. I don't know if Anthony Spencer and Victor Butler could be enough to win football games.
Adding a better pass rusher would allow Antony Spencer to play running situations, where he is great against the run. Then on passing situations, you could pair Ware with the better pass rusher and create more chaos.
Preparing and developing a player behind Ware also allows the Cowboys to potentially groom his replacement. If a young and talented pass rusher could learn under him, he would be learning from one of the best to ever suit up. I can't think of a better teacher than DeMarcus Ware.
Will The Cowboys Draft A Pass Rusher?
What has concerned me during the Cowboys draft preparation is the lack of focus on a outside linebacker. I wish there were more prospects invited to Valley Ranch, but it is what it is. The team has only invited Courtney Upshaw, Ronnell Lewis, Braylon Broughton and Adrian Hamilton. Upshaw is the only player invited who will be in play with the 14th overall pick. Many folks here on BTB are not fans of his, but I wouldn't mind the Cowboys drafting him because they would be getting a good football player.
Broughton is the type of conversion kit the team would be interested in the late rounds of the draft. He does look the part, but is clearly a project at this point. The same can be said for small-school prospect Adrian Hamilton. He does look intriguing, and he would be the type of project that makes sense for the team long term.
South Carolina defensive lineman Melvin Ingram has been one of my preferred targets for a very long time. I must admit I was very disappointed the team didn't bring him in for a visit. Ingram is the type of versatile player that I believe would be a great fit for Rob Ryan and his unique defensive scheme. He is also the type of draft pick at 14 that would give the Cowboys a situational pass rusher with the upside to be a starter down the road.
The 49ers drafted Aldon Smith with the 7th overall pick. He didn't start for them, but he made a huge impact with 13.5 sacks. The Giants drafted Jason Pierre-Paul with the |
rank higher). The same trend does not apply to the United States, where soccer is truly a unisex pursuit. This is especially true through school into college: in 2008, 48% of registered youth soccer players were female. By getting in at grassroots level, the women’s game in America has a grounding that England and the UK as a whole doesn’t.
“Most girls grow up playing soccer so all these girls are possibly looking up to the USWNT as role models,” says Caitlin Murray, who is covering the Women’s World Cup for the Guardian US. “Time zones also make a difference to ratings, but Americans care more about women’s soccer than other countries anyway. Americans don’t have antiquated and long-held views about women playing soccer the way countries with long footballing histories do. We’re not entrenched in the idea that soccer is a man’s sport.”
Perhaps the most fundamental – and most common – criticism of the women’s game, and by an extension this summer’s World Cup, is the quality of play. That point is debatable (and was brilliantly skewered by the Norwegian team in a parody video earlier this week) But even if those stereotypes were true, when it comes to international competition, where patriotism and tribalism are driving factors, the quality of football isn’t always a driving factor for fans. For instance, fans still support substandard national teams in the men’s game: look at Scotland and the long-suffering yet committed Tartan Army.
Of course, finding flaw with the Women’s World Cup doesn’t make you a sexist, but the deep-rooted disregard for the women’s game in the United Kingdom has origin in antiquated ignorance. It will take more than just a BBC One primetime broadcast for that culture to change, however, with the grassroots structure of the British women’s game lagging generations behind North America
The Three Lionesses (as they are dubbed, in reference to the men’s Three Lions nickname) face Norway in a crunch round of 16 tie on Monday (the same day as USA face Colombia), although the result will probably be bumped off the back page for another tedious Raheem Sterling transfer tale – or perhaps some paparazzi pictures of a holidaying Premier League star at a Dubai pool party. Because in England that is still considered football – while the Women’s World Cup is not.For the second consecutive time, a Seattle Sounder has been voted MLS Etihad Airways Player of the Month.
Seattle defender Chad Marshall was named MLS Player of the Month for September, it was revealed on Thursday. His award comes one month after midfielder Nicolas Lodeiro won the August honor.
Marshall took home 30.66 percent of the vote, beating New York City FC forward David Villa (29.94 percent) by less than one percentage point to win the award. New York Red Bulls forward Bradley Wright-Phillips finished third in the fan voting (18.43 percent). He was followed by LA Galaxy star Giovani dos Santos (14.74 percent) and Columbus Crew SC striker Ola Kamara (6.23 percent).
The veteran defender was huge for Seattle in September, teaming with Panamanian international Roman Torres to lead a backline that registered two shutouts and allowed just three goals in four matches as the Sounders climbed back above the red line with a 3-0-1 record. Marshall also got involved in the attack, scoring the game-winning goal in Seattle’s 1-0 win against Chicago on Sept. 28.
The five Etihad Airways Player of the Month finalists are selected at the end of each month by the MLSsoccer.com editorial staff. The winner is then determined by a fan vote.
Marshall and the Sounders, who moved to fifth place in the West with Sunday’s win at Vancouver, will return to action next Wednesday, when they host the Houston Dynamo at CenturyLink Field (10:30 pm ET; MLS LIVE).Sustainable Seafood week
June 24–30
Sustainable Seafood Week is a Madison Area Chef’s Network initiative in partnership with Sitka Salmon Shares, Sea to Table, and many others to raise awareness on the importance of supporting sustainable fishing practices. From June 24–30 over 30 Madison restaurants will be featuring $10 dishes on their menus that highlight sustainable seafood. There will also be several events throughout the week to celebrate our fine purveyors and their fishermen.
Signature Event #1
OYSTERS AND BEERS KICKOFF PARTY
June 24th, 4-6PM
Graze
1 South Pinckney Street
BUY TICKETS HERE
Signature Event #2
MACN presents a traditional
DOOR COUNTY FISH BOIL
June 27th, 5-8PM
The East Side Club of Madison
3735 Monona Drive
BUY TICKETS HERE
Participating Restaurants
Sustainable Seafood Week 2018 Featured Restaurants and their $10 Dish(es):“Only Donald Trump can save humanity,” says Hindu Sena Founder Vishnu Gupta.
Jantar Mantar, one of the greatest historical places in India, last Wednesday, witnessed an unusual hawan or homa (a Sanskrit word that refers to a Hindu ritual), for the victory of Donald Trump in the United States 2016 Presidential election. The hawan was performed by the Hindu Sena, a right-wing Indian Hindu group. A dozen or so of the group's members chanted mantras (a sacred group of words in Sanskrit that the practitioners believe have spiritual and psychological powers) around a ritual fire, asking their Gods to make Donald Trump, one of the most hated persons in the whole world right now, the President of the United States of America.
The fact that Donald Trump, during his campaign, made fun of India and accused the nation of stealing jobs, did not deter them from praying for Trump. Either the group has been ignorantly blind or they have been blind with Islamophobia when they conducted the hawan. The words of Vishnu Gupta, founder of the Hindu Sena, points to the latter. According to him: "The whole world is screaming against Islamic terrorism, and even India is not safe from it. Only Donald Trump can save humanity."
Vishnu Gupta, a person known for his radical Hinduism and his intolerance towards people belonging to other religions, speaking about humanity, would most probably be seen as an advocate for humanity only by Donald Trump himself.
The Sena had a picture of Donald Trump along with pictures and statues of Hindu Gods during the ritual. Offerings such as grass, seeds, and ghee were thrown into the ritual fire. They also had a huge banner hung above them with Trump’s face on it. The banner read: “Hindu Sena supports Donald Trump: Hope for humanity against Islamic Terror.”
Right after the hawan, the Hindu Sena took to social media to announce the hawan they conducted for Donald Trump. They also endorsed their full support to the presumptive nominee of the Republican Party for President of the United States in the 2016 election via the post. The post also read that they are all are victims of Islamic terror. To fight against the evil, the world needs a brave leader, and that brave man is Donald Trump.
After the news about the hawan broke, social media exploded with posts ridiculing the Hindu Sena. Gupta replied to those posts saying that he does not care. He is supporting Trump because Trump is against Islamic terror.
In another tweet, Gupta said unemployment is not India's biggest problem, but Islamic terrorism is. He signed off by proclaiming his undying love for Donald Trump.
Resources
Follow the Conversation on TwitterDear mr. Rolland, dear Jean-Christophe,
We, the signatories of this petition, would like to draw your attention to the situation of the Belgian Hannes Obreno (men single scull) and the Belgian Niels van Zandweghe and Tim Brys (lightweight men’s double sculls). Both boats won at the Continental Olympic Qualification Regattas but existing rules only allow one of these Belgium boats to start at the Olympic Games in Rio de Janeiro.
The qualification rules are in place to stimulate diversity within the rowing sport and we fully support this intention. The rules however have the opposite effect and a country that already has five rowing boats qualified (Denmark) profits from this situation. Needless to say, contrary to the intention behind the rules in place, this does not stimulate diversity within the rowing sport.
For this reason, and with urgent appeal, we want to ask the Board of FISA to do whatever is necessary to make it possible for Belgium to send two boats to Rio de Janeiro for the Olympic Games. Sportmanship and fairness are more important then rules that do not function.
We wish the Board of FISA all the best with solving this problem. It is within the spirit of the Olympic Games that the best boats are able to enter the Games and challenge each other!
Yours sincerely,
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- Wedge Length: 35 1/4 InchesThis post has been a long time coming, and with the Duggar scandal all over the news, its been on my mind again. First off, let me say that what Josh Duggar did was wrong, and how the media has handled this story has been pretty awful too. Tabloids have been flippant about sharing police documents with the victims names on them, and since the Duggar family has been very vocally against LGBTQ people who they claim are child-molesters, there are a lot of people eager to point out the hypocrisy of covering up the deeds of a child molester in their midst. I think there is plenty out there on what happened, and how it was “handled”, I want to talk about the why. So many people are shocked and horrified that this happened in a “good christian family” like the Duggars, but it didn’t surprise me at all. I grew up in this movement, along with 10 siblings.
Sibling incest is not young similarly aged siblings curiously looking at each others genitals. It is initiated by one sibling, and there is usually a 3 (or more) year age gap. Risk factors for sibling incest include power imbalances, parentalized siblings, lack of sex education, and other forms of abuse already occurring in the home. Judging by the general information we have about the Duggars, a lot of these factors are present. The sheer amount of children dictates that the older children care for the younger ones. And in the police report interviews, none of the children interviewed even knew the correct names for the human anatomy when it came to genitals.
In a large homeschooling family, older siblings are often in charge of the younger ones. Younger children are expected to obey their older siblings as they would a parent, and may face punishment from the parents or even the siblings if they do not obey. This creates a hierarchy where the younger children are basically powerless, and have already come to expect that they do not have a say in how they are treated. Sexual actions initiated by the older sibling are not likely to be resisted or talked about in this sort of relationship.
If a parent is physically or emotionally largely unavailable such as would be the case for anyone with 19 children, parenting younger children can often fall to the older ones.The older child is often experiencing the parental neglect as well, and since they are not emotionally mature enough to handle being a parent, they end up relying on the younger child for whom they have parental responsibilities, for emotional fulfillment. Sometimes this leads to sexual actions as well. Other abuse existing in the home greatly increases the likelihood of sexual abuse occurring. If children are used to being emotionally abused, or physically abused, they do not have healthy boundaries or understandings of their rights as a human being.
In the conservative christian homeschool worldview, sex ed is extremely lacking. We are talking about no knowledge of what sex is, human anatomy, etc. I grew up in this movement. My parents did not allow books in the house with such information. I remember when an art book from my grandparents included a nude sketch, my parents stapled several thick sheets of paper over it. I was told when I was 10 about menstruation, and that babies grow in a womb inside a woman’s belly with help from a seed from her husband. I was at several of my siblings home births. But that was it. When I was 17, I found a book in the library filled with pictures of fetal development, on one page it showed 2 thermal images of a penis showing how flaccid = cool, and erect/engorged = warm. This was the first time I was aware of the fact that erections were a part of (penis-in-vagina)sex. I went to a different section and found “Seventeen magazine’s girls guide to sex” and I put it inside of a large history book so no one could see what I was really reading and sat in the back corner on the floor reading as fast as a could. This was how I finally figured out that sex (the thing that only married people were supposed to do when they love each other very much, and was sinful and dirty otherwise) did not magically happen while 2 people slept in the same bed., and I was 17. I was 20 and married before I learned what a clitoris was. I had several children before I finally heard of the concept of “consent”.
This sheltering did not keep me from being a sexual person, It just left me with a complete lack information about it. I had no understanding of boundaries, or consent or even that masturbating was a sexual (albeit normal) act. My point is, that it is entirely possible to be a teenage conservative homeschooled kid, and have no idea what is sexual and what is not, or what is appropriate and what is not.
So no, given the circumstances of the home, combined with their belief system, I am not surprised by sibling incest. In fact, I think this happens in large conservative families far more than anyone thinks it does. What is truly horrifying, is that after setting their kids up for this to happen, Josh Duggar’s parents pushed it under the rug, kept things in house, and didn’t get help for either the molester or the children who were molested. Several of the headlines have claimed that Josh was turned in by his dad, this wasn’t true either. The investigation did not occur until over 3 years after, and only because an outsider got wind of it and called the abuse hotline. Jim Bob and Michelle did their best to cover up and move on. They claim because of god’s grace, the slate is wiped clean, as if it never happened. Except it did. It happens precisely because of the family system that has been paraded on TV for too long.
And it isn’t just the Duggars; this is basically the tip of the ice berg of what is out there in the conservative christian homeschooling movement. Despite the smiling wholesome-looking exterior, ignorance and repression and isolation creates this kind of set up again and again. When a system teaches that the victim is to blame, refuses to educate on or even talk about sex, treats children as property with no rights, and requires unquestioning obedience, it is not surprising when dysfunction comes to light.Obama says the administration will continue working with Congress to address the issue. W.H. sets deadline on assault reform
President Barack Obama gave the Pentagon an ultimatum Friday: Clean up its act on sexual assault over the next year, or get ready for some big changes that military leaders have long resisted.
It’s a safe move for the White House, giving the brass room to keep working on the high-profile issue without setting up an immediate and direct confrontation.
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But it also leaves Obama with a critical decision just after the 2014 mid-terms, and he could still follow the well-worn path he’s taken in bucking the generals on gays in the military and putting women into combat roles. Even if the military isn’t ready for social change, the commander in chief can order it.
( Also on POLITICO: Senate sends defense bill to Obama)
On sexual assault, Obama will soon sign into law a defense authorization bill that requires more than two dozen reforms to Pentagon policy. No longer will commanders have the authority to overturn jury convictions or reduce sentences. Military members convicted of a sexual crime will be discharged or dismissed. Victims are also about to get new legal protections and counseling after they report a crime.
In a statement released Friday morning, Obama directed Defense Secretary Chuck Hagel and Joint Chiefs of Staff Chairman Martin Dempsey to immediately get to work implementing the law’s provisions, giving them until Dec. 1, 2014, to “make substantial improvements with respect to sexual assault prevention and response, including to the military justice system.”
“If I do not see the kind of progress I expect, then we will consider additional reforms that may be required to eliminate this crime from our military ranks and protect our brave service members who stand guard for us every day at home and around the world,” Obama said.
Obama’s statement also name-checked Sens. Kirsten Gillibrand and Claire McCaskill, two Democratic female senators who have been spearheading the sexual assault debate this year while sharply disagreeing over whether to remove the commander from prosecution decisions.
For Gillibrand, Obama’s warning to the military that he may push for more changes offers the best public signal yet for where the president stands on her campaign to overhaul Pentagon’s World War II-era military justice system.
( Also on POLITICO: Six questions for Obama)
The New Yorker has already won over more than half the Senate, including tea party leaders like Rand Paul and Ted Cruz and Majority Leader Harry Reid. But she’s also faced fierce resistance from Hagel, Dempsey and many other Pentagon leaders. And the White House, until now, had remained silent.
Gillibrand, who spoke to Obama about the sexual assault issue Thursday, issued a statement welcoming the president’s “deep commitment to solving the sexual assault crisis in the military.”
But she also said she would still push for a Senate floor vote early in 2014.
“I do not want to wait another year to enact the one reform survivors have asked for in removing commanders with no legal training and conflicts of interest from the decision of whether or not to prosecute a rape or sexual assault,” Gillibrand said. “We have the best fighting force in the world and they deserve a first class justice system.”
McCaskill, a Missouri moderate, said Obama “should be commended for treating this scourge with the seriousness it deserves, and for fully backing the historic, comprehensive reforms we pushed across the finish line last night.”
“I agree with him that we should give these significant reforms the time they need to succeed,” McCaskill added. “And I too, plan to spend the next year holding commanders accountable, and ensuring that these historic reforms are implemented forcefully and effectively.”
But McCaskill is a long way from linking up with Gillibrand’s effort. In an interview with POLITICO earlier this week, McCaskill said the reforms in this year’s defense bill are what’s needed to solve a problem that has plagued the Pentagon for decades. “The shiny object of the disagreement over one part of this policy needs to fade,” she said.
Key House members at the center of the sexual assault debate also argue that the Pentagon should get some time to implement this year’s reforms.
“If the DoD rises to the occasion and implements this in a way that does fix the problems that it’s targeted, I think that’ll answer whether or not another approach is necessary,” Rep. Michael Turner (R-Ohio) said in an interview. “Until that occurs, it’d be incredibly premature to create a whole new system, when the problems that were identified we believe were being fixed by this legislation.
“Now if DoD fails in its implementation, then obviously we have to look at something else,” Turner added.
Turner’s partner on the issue, Rep. Niki Tsongas (D-Mass.), said she also wanted to give the Defense Department some room to enact the historic changes that Congress ordered up in this year’s bill.
“I do think the services still have a ways to go to make the case that their good order and discipline is dependent on retaining their disposition authority,” she said. “I don’t think that has been achieved quite yet. But I also think we’ve put many more tools in the tool box that they should put to good use and by doing so demonstrate their willingness and ability to deal with this issue in a substantive way.”
Tsongas added that she’d be keeping tabs on the work of an expert outside panel studying the sexual assault issue that was ordered up in last year’s defense bill. The group, led by retired federal judge Barbara Jones, plans to issue recommendations to Hagel by June.
In a prepared statement, Hagel said the defense law headed to Obama’s desk would “provide much-needed authorities that will help strengthen our sexual assault prevention and response efforts, and we are committed to implementing them effectively and without delay.”
“Eliminating sexual assault in the military is one of DoD’s highest priorities,” Hagel added. “We welcome President Obama’s continued leadership on this issue, and we share his commitment to doing whatever it takes to solve this problem.”
The Pentagon is already busy working on the issue. In November, it cited data showing a nearly 50 percent increase in sexual assault complaints – including both civilians on service members and service members on civilians — in the first three quarters of fiscal year 2013. Defense Department officials said the increase stemmed from victims who are feeling more comfortable coming forward to report sexual assaults thanks to reforms it has instituted.
Hagel and Dempsey will have several new people in place next year to work on the defense bill’s requirements. Air Force Secretary Deborah Lee James got confirmed by the Senate earlier this month, and a vote is expected soon for Jessica Wright to be the under secretary of Defense for personnel and readiness. Major Gen. Jeffrey Snow also takes over in January as head of the Sexual Assault Prevention and Response Office.
Military sexual assault-related court proceedings are also sure to keep the issue in the spotlight, with two high-profile cases next month. Arguments start Jan. 7 at Fort Bragg in a case against Army Brig. Gen. Jeffrey Sinclair, only the third Army general in a half century to face a court martial. And the first of two former Navy football players accused of rape goes to court martial Jan. 27.In 2004, Utah received about 8,000 applications for the permits. Last year, 73,925 applications were submitted — with nearly 60 percent coming from nonresidents.
Laws for carrying concealed firearms vary widely by state, as do issuing standards for permits. New York, New Jersey and Connecticut do not honor other states’ permits. Some states, like Florida, allow nonresidents to qualify for permits. Utah stands out because its permit is relatively inexpensive and is broadly accepted, and the requisite safety class can be taken anywhere.
By passing the class and the background check, and paying a $65.25 fee, the applicant receives what many consider to be the most prized gun permit in the country. Permits are good for five years and cost $10 to renew.
Some Second Amendment proponents argue that people with permits are more likely to be law abiding because they have undergone at least some form of background check.
“The spirit of self-defense should not stop at a state’s border,” said Clark Aposhian, a Utah gun lobbyist who sits on the state’s Concealed Firearm Review Board, which helps regulate the permitting process. “Not once has there been a pattern of problems with Utah permit holders in other states.”
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But Utah’s permit program has its critics. Peter Hamm, a spokesman for the Brady Campaign to Prevent Gun Violence, asserted that Utah’s policy was dangerous because many states were lax in submitting felony and mental health records to the federal database used for background checks.
“I think it’s absolutely shameful and ludicrously irresponsible to say that anybody anywhere who wants one of our concealed-carry permits, and thus will be able to carry legally in dozens of states, can just log on to our Web site and pay 60 bucks and that’s all she wrote,” Mr. Hamm said.
As more people have turned to Utah for permits, the demand for instructors who teach Utah’s gun safety class in other states has increased. Of the 1,097 instructors certified by Utah, 706 are in other states. Advertisements for classes held throughout the country appear widely on the Internet.
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Another source of contention is that the class does not require any actual shooting. One could conceivably obtain a Utah permit without ever having fired a gun. Nevada and New Mexico recently stopped honoring Utah permits because the class does not meet its live-fire requirements.
“Residents of other states should be aware that people who have a Utah concealed-weapon permit may not have actually fired a weapon,” said Dee Rowland, chairwoman of the Gun Violence Prevention Center of Utah. “I think that would be quite shocking to members of the public.”
Supporters of Utah’s policy counter that the state’s 50-page curriculum on gun safety, and background checks that are updated every 24 hours, ensure that the system is safe.
“We teach passive defense in Utah,” said State Representative Curtis Oda, a Republican from Clearfield.Published by Steve Litchfield at 13:24 UTC, March 14th 2014
This is both horribly controversial and also horribly subjective - and I know it's a popular meme to hate Microsoft's new 'tiles', especially on the desktop. But, regardless of their shape, the Windows Phone Start screen elements make me more efficient - I'm comparing it all to trying to live with Android, iOS, Symbian and Blackberry OS 10 - and Windows Phone is the one I keep coming back to with a sigh of satisfaction. And yes, that surprised me too...
I should make it clear that the shape of the Start screen components is irrelevant here - yes, I know Microsoft keeps making a big thing of them being square, and is matching the whole UI in the big Windows 8 transition that's currently causing controversy in desktop circles* - what's important is the density, flexibility and activity.
* for what it's worth, Windows 8's UI makes a lot of sense on tablets, but is a stretch too far on non-touch laptops - but that's just my tuppence worth....
You see, I've been bouncing around between half a dozen different smartphone UIs and so have had plenty of opportunity to get to grips with the pros and cons of each UI:
Android - there's certainly massive customisability here, with variously shaped live widgets, a dock of shortcuts, app folders if needed, a swipe down notifications pane. But there are also usability issues in comparison to Windows Phone. For starters, most people need at least three (and often four or five or more) homescreens to fit in all the bits and pieces they want, then they have to remember which thing is where. Then you swipe down the notifications, only to discover that you're getting quite a few items there from things you weren't that interested in, in the first place. Each has to be side swiped away in order for you to be left with the notifications you really wanted.
Switching between applications can also be done using the'recent apps' list, but this contains items in the order you used them, even if they're now closed again. And navigating this rich list is time consuming - it's faster to find the shortcut or app in the main app menu.
Even Google Now, clever though it is, has started to introduce stuff that all has to be swiped away, and I can't help but feel that the whole 'notifications' culture isn't becoming too all-consuming. Do we really need information pushed from every single source?
Swipe, swipe, swipe....
- there's certainly massive customisability here, with variously shaped live widgets, a dock of shortcuts, app folders if needed, a swipe down notifications pane. But there are also usability issues in comparison to Windows Phone. For starters, most people need at least three (and often four or five or more) homescreens to fit in all the bits and pieces they want, then they have to remember which thing is where. Then you swipe down the notifications, only to discover that you're getting quite a few items there from things you weren't that interested in, in the first place. Each has to be side swiped away in order for you to be left with the notifications you really wanted. Switching between applications can also be done using the'recent apps' list, but this contains items in the order you used them, even if they're now closed again. And navigating this rich list is time consuming - it's faster to find the shortcut or app in the main app menu. Even Google Now, clever though it is, has started to introduce stuff that all has to be swiped away, and I can't help but feel that the whole 'notifications' culture isn't becoming too all-consuming. Do we really need information pushed from every single source? Swipe, swipe, swipe.... iOS - Apple's iPhone interface has evolved a little since 2007, but not hugely. The main swipeable pages of icons and now icon folder remain - almost all of which are completely static. There's now a swipe down calendar and notifications pane, Android-style, but I still find getting around iOS requires more taps and swipes than in other mobile OS.
In fairness, the regularly spaced iOS front page has up to 24 application shortcuts - some of which may be to folders and thus a lot more can be only one extra tap away - so provided you've spent the time to customise the order of all your icons/folders, it's possibly to make iOS pretty productive.
Switching between 'running' applications is similar to on Android, using in this case the home button double press, but again it's quite time consuming swiping left and right to find the app you want among the last 80 things you ran since a week last Tuesday....
- Apple's iPhone interface has evolved a little since 2007, but not hugely. The main swipeable pages of icons and now icon folder remain - almost all of which are completely static. There's now a swipe down calendar and notifications pane, Android-style, but I still find getting around iOS requires more taps and swipes than in other mobile OS. In fairness, the regularly spaced iOS front page has up to 24 application shortcuts - some of which may be to folders and thus a lot more can be only one extra tap away - so provided you've spent the time to customise the order of all your icons/folders, it's possibly to make iOS pretty productive. Switching between 'running' applications is similar to on Android, using in this case the home button double press, but again it's quite time consuming swiping left and right to find the app you want among the last 80 things you ran since a week last Tuesday.... Blackberry OS 10 - the idea here is that your main front screen is composed of thumbnail views of (up to) the last eight applications you ran/are running. It's a nice approach (and mirrored to a degree by Jolla's Sailfish OS, which I've also played with at length), but it suffers from usability problems in that the thumbnails often look very different for each application, depending on what you were last doing in it - plus the actual positions of the thumbnails vary from moment to moment, so you've got to keep playing 'hunt the thumbnail'.
Your main source for notifications is the 'hub' view, off to the left and peekable from anywhere with a gesture. The system works quite well, but it's easy for this to get cluttered and my heart often sank as I headed there, to be faced with a barrage of Twitter mentions and Facebook events. Yes, it's possible to work towards filtering and customising this view, but it's not trivial.
- the idea here is that your main front screen is composed of thumbnail views of (up to) the last eight applications you ran/are running. It's a nice approach (and mirrored to a degree by Jolla's Sailfish OS, which I've also played with at length), but it suffers from usability problems in that the thumbnails often look very different for each application, depending on what you were last doing in it - plus the actual positions of the thumbnails vary from moment to moment, so you've got to keep playing 'hunt the thumbnail'. Your main source for notifications is the 'hub' view, off to the left and peekable from anywhere with a gesture. The system works quite well, but it's easy for this to get cluttered and my heart often sank as I headed there, to be faced with a barrage of Twitter mentions and Facebook events. Yes, it's possible to work towards filtering and customising this view, but it's not trivial. Symbian - it's worth mentioning Nokia's 'old' smartphone OS here too, in that in some ways it represented the best of all worlds. At least, it used to - the classic Nokia N97 (for all its other faults) interface, with three pages of six fixed size widgets each, any of which could be set to a panel of four application shortcuts, backed up by an application menu that could be completely and utterly customised, still represents for many people an almost perfect front end in terms of notifications and information.
Sadly, the temptation to enlarge widgets and generally tinker with things got the better of the Symbian folk at Nokia - and then the company dropped the OS altogether, making the comparisons with Windows Phone somewhat moot...
Against this background of UI whinges from yours truly, there is, I contend, the relative wonder that is a well configured Windows Phone 8 Start screen, modelled here by Rafe on his Lumia 1520:
Density
Again, don't fixate on the square nature of the elements. Add in imaginary rounded corners if you must - though don't get sued by Apple in the process! But the square interface does represent perfect efficiency in terms of layout. In Rafe's layout above there are 24 applications or widgets ('live tiles' in Microsoft parlance) and as you can see from the photo, Rafe wasn't even trying. In turns out, if you do the maths, that you can fit 60, repeat SIXTY, application shortcuts on a single Windows Phone Start screen without swiping at all. Add in another screen's full and you double that. In a real world layout like Rafe's above, add in about 1.5x extra screens full and you've got 60 or 70 items, some with large rich live tiles with active content, some with less and some just shortcuts.
Flexibility
The sheer possible density of shortcuts and information also gives rise to extra flexibility. Even more so than Android, every person's Start screen is likely to be totally different to every other's. And you can tweak positioning and tile sizes without having to remove them and re-add them (e.g. picking a different widget size à la Android). Plus I'd mention that the 'flipping' (animating) of live tiles means that they can shown two different sets of relevant information each, if programmed to do so - so in many cases you really do get two for the price of one (e.g. in weather forecasts, with today vs the rest of the week).
Activity
Finally, and possibly controversially, given the clamour for a notifications system in Windows Phone 8.1, there's the numeration of new 'things' on many live tiles. The original concept for the UI was that you could take in the status of your smartphone/life with a single glance ("Two new app updated, will look at them later, five new emails, will check them soon, no Twitter DMs, ooh, a new SMS, will just tap through to see that one" and so on. Plus the information delivered by the live tiles themselves, in terms of upcoming appointments, weather, stock prices, flight delays, etc.
(The'recent apps' list on Windows Phone is - famously - limited to seven thumbnails - this is often quoted as limiting, though in view of what I complained at above with iOS and Android, being only able to go back seven apps does completely get round the'swiping and swiping until you get to what you wanted' issue - either the app is there in the first couple of screen's worth or it's not there at all!)
____________
In short, the single Start screen which often doesn't need swiping at all, the notifications which just appear and thus don't need to be swiped down and then swiped away, plus the sheer density of application shortcuts/information, all mean that - utterly to my amazement, as a long time 'Microsoft doesn't do good UI design' thinker - I'm more at home now on Windows Phone's Start screen than in any other smartphone OS front end.
Is it just me? Have I been drinking too much Redmond kool-aid? Or do you think I'm making valid points about Windows Phone's Start screen UI |
money on their investments is indistinguishable from a person who is high on cocaine or morphine. The brain of a cocaine addict who is expecting a fix and people who are expecting to make a profitable financial gamble are virtually the same. The danger in allowing a bull market to increase your confidence as an investor is that it can lead you to take unnecessary or avoidable mistakes to continue to get that high.
Why would I ever own bonds or foreign stocks? The S&P 500 is obviously the only game in town.
Risk management gets thrown out the window by many during a bull market. You begin to forget how you reacted the last time stocks got crushed. You assume that the good times will last forever, or at the very least, you’ll surely be able to sidestep the next downturn.
Who cares about risk management and diversification? I’m making money!
Bull markets can force investors to abandon a good process. Signals, guidelines, and policies that were put in place before stocks began their upward climb get pushed to the wayside because it feels dumb to manage risk when things just keep going up.
I know I put this system in place to protect myself in the event of something going wrong but risk management doesn’t seem to work anymore. What’s the point?
The temptation from the markets to change your strategy when things are going well can become intense if you don’t have the discipline to stay the course. During a bull market, you’ll never want to sell anything just like you’ll never want to buy anything during a bear market. It’s the Murphy’s Law of investing.
Every time I sell or rebalance, the investments I trimmed continue to run higher. It makes no sense!
One of the hardest parts about investing is staying true and disciplined to a consistent process when others around you aren’t. The fear of missing out during a bull market can quickly turn into the fear of being in during a bear market. Both of these feelings can get you into trouble as extreme stances in the markets rarely end well.
*******
I have no idea when this bull market will end. Intelligent people have been calling for a top for some time now. Predicting the future is damn-near impossible. I’m not trying to diminish anyone’s skills as an investor. If you’ve been able to hang on as we’ve climbed this wall of worry for the past few years you deserve a pat on the back. There are many investors who sold out and went to cash a long time ago or never had the courage to buy during the last crisis in the first place.
But don’t confuse a bull market for increased brain power.
Personally, I like to remind myself of my past mistakes; keep in mind that I have no idea how the future will play out; prepare for a wide range of outcomes that could include either another leg or two higher in the markets from here, a slow sideways churn or even a correction or brutal bear market. You really never know with these things what could set people off in terms of panic or euphoria. There’s also something to be said for being comfortable with your investment strategy in any market environment.
And above all, it’s important to stay humble. While not always easy, humility may be one of the most useful traits you can develop as an investor during a bull market to remind yourself that the good times won’t last forever and you’re not as intelligent as rising markets may make you feel.
Further Reading:
Perma-Arguments
Now here’s what I’ve been reading this week:Holy Anointing Oil and Holy Shit.
Hi ya’ll, please doooo try this at home because the results are beyond impressive! They are startling.
Not only does it provide psychoactive free rapid pain relief used as a topical, but with slight modifications, switch hits sublingually to combine pain relief, with a general uplifting to the spirits and relaxing of the body.
Head effect varies from noticeable in high tolerance patients to blasted in low tolerance patients.
Body effect varies from relaxed, to couch locked, depending on tolerance and dosage.
Who knows how old the recipe actually is, because the surviving recipe is from Exodus 30, verses 22-30:
22 Then the LORD said to Moses, 23 "Take the following fine spices: 500 shekels of liquid myrrh, half as much (that is, 250 shekels) of fragrant cinnamon, 250 shekels of fragrant cane, 24 500 shekels of cassia - all according to the sanctuary shekel - and a hin of olive oil. 25 Make these into a sacred anointing oil, a fragrant blend, the work of a perfumer. It will be the sacred anointing oil....
30 "Anoint Aaron and his sons and consecrate them so they may serve me as priests."
First Church of the Magi has since risen, who considers the Holy Anointing Oil a sacrament, and more of their thoughts may be found at:
http://diversesanctuary.over-blog.com/article-35008225.html
From the standpoint of process, the perfumers of the time, would have put cinnamon bark, cinnamon leaf, and cannabis bud in olive oil and water. Boiled the water away, strained the oil, and used it in that form.
Eloquentsolution discovered Holy Anointing Oil on another forum pre skunk pharm, and did the math, discovering that the formula called for about 15 ounces of land race cannabis per liter of olive oil, regardless of what else was in it. Whoa!
After reading her post on the subject, how could I resist corroborating with making a batch and checking it out? Since they were using the landrace cannabis of the time, its actual potency is of course conjecture, but there are some clues in the process that they used and the MSDS on cinnamon oil, which says that greater that a 1% solution will burn our skin.
Cutting to the chase, we needed essential oils of the additives to maintain continuity of formula, since we were already using essential oils of cannabis. I found the cinnamon bark oil, cinnamon leaf oil, and myrrh gum from http://www.newdirectionsaromatics.com/ and we have been happy with their service ever since, though they aren't certified as food grade. That doesn't mean that they are not food grade, only that it isn't assured, and they are of course suitable for topical Holy Anointing Oil.
Alternative bulk sources for food grade essential oils for use in oral medications are:
http://www.lalaessentialoils.com/natural-essential-oils.html#A
and right here in Portland, Oregon http://www.essentialoil.com/.
I made a batch with olive oil, but Eloquentsolution switched her formula from olive oil, to coconut oil, because of coconut oils other salubrious qualities, among them medium chain triglycerides for faster absorption and more rapid passing of the blood brain barrier. Another thought provoking coconut attribute, is that coconut milk is the only natural substance discovered thus far, that can double as blood plasma in humans.
Both of our first batches were impressive, but as Eloquentsolution's was better, we've used coconut oil ever since. She also continued to experiment and developed our current formulas for both Holy Anointing Oil Oral, and Holy Anointing Oil Topical, which have different ratios, and the topical also contains Emu oil.
The combination of the cannabis oil and the other ingredients seems to speed up and intensify the results and the whole appears greater than the sum of the parts.
At about the same time, I was also working on my cinnamon Cannapop lollypop recipe, and used a 50% mixture of cannabis oil and Cinnamon candy flavoring oil, from https://www.lorannoils.com/p-8313-cinnamon-flavor-cinnamon-oil.aspx
Because the mixture was so tasty, some of the skunk pharmers, who dropped by, started asking for a taste, and asked for it by the name of, "that good shit." I therefore named the mix GS, for "Good Shit."
One day I decided to see if Cinnamon candy flavoring oil would ameliorate the slight after taste of HAO sublingual, and when it was successful, I named the mix, "Holy Shit", or HS.
Here are the formulas, both fractionally and in decimals.
Holy Anointing Oil Oral:
1 Part Cannabis Oil
1/3 Parts virgin unrefined Coconut oil
1/15th Part Cinnamon Leaf oil
1/15th Part Cinnamon Bark oil
1/30th Part liquid Gum Myrrh
IE:
1/3 =.3 (.33333333333)
1/15 =.07 (.066666666666)
1/30 =.03 (.033333333333)
Therefore:
10 grams BHO Cannabis oil
3 grams Coconut oil
.7 grams Cinnamon Bark oil
.7 grams Cinnamon Leaf oil
.3 grams Myrrh Gum
Holy Anointing Oil Topical:
10 grams BHO Cannabis oil
8 grams Coconut oil
.7 grams Cinnamon Bark oil
.7 grams Cinnamon Leaf oil
.7 grams Myrrh Gum
1 grams Emu oil
* Optional Arnica Montana and/or Jojoba oil
Holy Shit:
10 grams BHO Cannabis oil
3 grams Coconut oil
.7 grams Cinnamon Bark oil
.7 grams Cinnamon Leaf oil
.3 grams Myrrh Gum
1 gram Cinnamon candy flavoring oil
We make these oils, by adding the other ingredients to the decarboxylated cannabis oil, while the oil is above 82C/180F, and stirring until well mixed. Bottle and use as is. For decarboxylation instructions, check out the tab on our home page, under that name.
Bon appetite!The $100 million question this offseason: Who is Eric Hosmer? Here are 14 things about the free agent to consider:
1. Hosmer is 28 years old. This is fact and not for dispute, although maybe somebody from the Flat Earth Society will disagree. He will play all of the 2018 regular season at 28 years old. This makes him young for a free agent, and a six-year contract would take him through his age-33 season, so a favorable aspect of signing Hosmer is you at least don't have to worry as much about paying for the decline phase of his career.
2. Hosmer won the Silver Slugger Award in 2017. Again, this is fact. You can argue whether he deserved the honor -- it could have just as easily gone to Jose Abreu or Justin Smoak or Logan Morrison -- but Hosmer won even though he didn't slug.500, and good luck finding another first baseman who won the Silver Slugger while slugging less than.500. Hosmer did have his best season at the plate, however, and that's a boost as he heads into free agency.
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3. On the other hand, Hosmer has been wildly inconsistent in his career. Over the past five seasons, his OPS ranged from.801 to.716 to.822 to.761 to.882. His season WAR totals since 2013 are 3.5, 0.8, 3.6, 1.0 and 4.0. His value has ranged from barely above replacement level to above average. He hit nine home runs in 2014 but has hit 25 each of the past two seasons. He hit.318 in 2017 but just.266 in 2016. His numbers suggest a player susceptible to the baseball. When offense cratered in 2014, Hosmer's power also cratered. As the ball became more juiced the past two seasons, Hosmer's home run rate increased. Are you buying a consistent 25-homer guy who can hit.300, like he did in 2017? Or are you potentially paying $100 million for a player who may never again match his 2017 output?
4. Hosmer hits a lot of balls on the ground. This is the big conundrum about Hosmer. Few players hit as many grounders as he does. Among regulars in 2017, only Dee Gordon, David Freese, Hunter Pence and DJ LeMahieu had a higher rate of balls on the ground than Hosmer's 55.9 percent. Joey Gallo, the most extreme fly ball hitter in 2017, had a fly ball rate of 48.6 percent; Hosmer was just 20 percent.
5. When he does hit the ball in the air, Hosmer has power. His home run rate on fly balls was 15.8 percent, 14th best among regulars, right below Cody Bellinger and a higher rate than some sluggers like Gary Sanchez, Nelson Cruz and Mike Trout. He just doesn't hit enough balls in the air.
6. He also doesn't pull the ball when he does hit it in the air. Here's his hit chart from 2017. Look at the fly ball outs to left field and left-center. The vast majority of his doubles are to the opposite field:
TruMedia
7. All of this is to suggest that Hosmer would be a huge beneficiary if he joins the swing change revolution and learns to hit the ball in the air more often. This would be similar to what J.D. Martinez, Daniel Murphy and Justin Turner did to turn into elite hitters. That's easier said than done, of course.
Martinez before (2011-2013): 45.9 percent ground ball, 34.3 percent fly ball
Martinez in 2017: 38.3 percent ground ball, 38.3 percent fly ball
Murphy before (2011-2014): 45.5 percent ground ball, 31.0 percent fly ball
Murphy in 2017: 34.3 percent ground ball, 36.7 percent fly ball
Turner before (2011-2013): 47.5 percent ground ball, 30.1 percent fly ball
Turner in 2017: 31.8 percent ground ball, 43.8 percent fly ball
Hosmer 2015-2017: 56.2 percent ground ball, 21.9 percent fly ball
The point here: The changes Hosmer would have to make to his swing would be much more drastic than what Martinez, Murphy and Turner did. To maximize his power, Hosmer would also have to start pulling the ball more often. That may not be in his nature, or it may be very difficult to change.
8. Maybe he'd benefit from leaving Kansas City. Kauffman Stadium did rate as the toughest home run park in the American League in 2017, with a park factor of 83, and it has a factor of 80 over the past three seasons, according to "The Bill James Handbook 2018." On the other hand, Hosmer hit 16 of his 25 home runs at home in 2017 and over his career has hit 60 at home, 67 on the road (with a nearly identical OPS). In general, hitters have a home-field advantage, so it's certainly possible that Hosmer would benefit from playing in a different park -- and there is a team looking for a first baseman that plays in a park that seems tailor-made for Hosmer's swing.
9. Hosmer is or isn't a good defensive first baseman. Maybe you like defensive metrics or maybe you don't, but the metrics almost always match the reputation of a player. Those with good defensive reputations usually rate well in the metrics. Hosmer is an outlier in this area. He won his fourth Gold Glove in 2017, his fourth in five seasons, so the obvious consensus is he's been the best defensive first baseman in the American League.
The metrics disagree with that assessment. He rated at minus-7 defensive runs saved in 2017 -- that's seven runs below average. He rated minus-6 in 2016 and plus-1 in 2015. That's one system. UZR graded him at minus-0.3 runs in 2017, minus-8.4 in 2016 and plus-1.0 in 2015. His supporters point out that he has good hands and scoops everything in the dirt; well, all major league first basemen scoop pretty much everything in the dirt. The systems agree that Hosmer simply lacks the range of the better glove guys, and they've been consistent with this evaluation throughout his career.
10. Hosmer is "Playoffville Federal Express." So says Scott Boras! That how Boras described his client at last week's general manager meetings. Nobody gives a hyperventilated sales pitch quite like Boras, and this was one of his better ones. "Eric Hosmer has a very dynamic market," Boras said. "When a guy has just finished his 27-year-old season, and you've won a Gold Glove, Silver Slugger, you have a [World Series] ring on your finger, you've been to the World Series twice, you led the WBC [team] to the championship, you're the All-Star MVP -- who in their right mind does that at 27 years of age?"
Editor's Picks Olney: Orioles face a tough reality with Zach Britton The timing might not be right to get a big return for its star closer, but Baltimore could be left with no choice but to trade him this winter.
11. If you're buying Hosmer, you're buying the intangibles. That seems to be part of Boras' sales pitch. Hosmer was viewed as a clubhouse leader in Kansas City, although apparently he was a better leader in 2014 and 2015, when the team had better pitching. Still, he has charisma, and that's worth a little something, and maybe a team like the Red Sox -- speaking of the team with the home park perfect for Hosmer -- could use somebody like Hosmer. The Red Sox lacked a strong clubhouse guy last season.
12. He's durable. That's important. Other than missing a few weeks in 2014 with a fracture in his hand, he's played 150-plus games every season, including all 162 in 2017.
13. Some teams need a first baseman. But not that many.
Don't need one: Reds (Joey Votto), Braves (Freddie Freeman), Diamondbacks (Paul Goldschmidt), Cubs (Anthony Rizzo), Dodgers (Bellinger), Nationals (Ryan Zimmerman), White Sox (Abreu), Brewers (Eric Thames/Jesus Aguilar), Blue Jays (Justin Smoak), A's (Matt Olson), Astros (Yuli Gurriel), Orioles (Chris Davis), Pirates (Josh Bell), Yankees (Greg Bird), Padres (Wil Myers), Tigers (Miguel Cabrera), Marlins (Justin Bour).
They aren't spending the money anyway: Rays, Indians. Both teams have openings with Morrison and Carlos Santana hitting free agency, but they'll fill the slot with a prospect -- Jake Bauers in Tampa Bay -- or a less costly free agent.
Probably don't need one: Cardinals (Matt Carpenter), Mets (Dominic Smith), Giants (Brandon Belt), Phillies (Rhys Hoskins), Mariners (Ryon Healy), Twins (Joe Mauer). The Cardinals could move Carpenter to third base, but for a team that doesn't like to give big contracts, Hosmer probably isn't a guy it gambles on. The Mets should give Smith a chance, and the Phillies probably keep Hoskins at first rather than left field. The Giants need outfield help and have talked about moving Belt there before, but he probably stays at first. The Mariners just traded for Healy, and while he's not got great, he's cheap, and they will spend the money they do have available on pitching. Mauer has just one more year left on his contract, but Miguel Sano is probably the first baseman of the future, and they need pitching help more than hitting.
That leaves five teams: Royals, Red Sox, Angels, Rockies, Rangers.
Would you call five teams a dynamic market? In the Rangers' case, they have Adrian Beltre signed for one more year, so that slides Gallo over to first base for at least one season. If Shin-Soo Choo is the DH, does that mean they pass on Hosmer? Maybe. Or do you sign him and keep Choo and/or Gallo in the outfield? The Angels have C.J. Cron and Albert Pujols at first base and DH, but they ranked 29th in wOBA at first base in 2017 (ahead of only the Mariners). They should upgrade, but if they do, it's more likely they go to one of the secondary free agents like Morrison or Yonder Alonso. The Rockies could use a better player here, but after spending big on Ian Desmond last offseason and getting burned, they may be reluctant to dip into big contracts again, especially when they have to try to re-sign Nolan Arenado before he hits free agency.
14. So that seems to leave the Red Sox bidding against the Royals. The Royals would like Hosmer back, but they face an obvious rebuilding period that Hosmer may not want to play through. Is Hosmer to Boston inevitable? Nothing is inevitable, but that's the prediction here for Hosmer's landing spot. With a market that is clearly less dynamic than Boras would suggest, I'm not completely convinced Hosmer gets that nine-figure contract. If you buy his 2017 performance, six years at $120 million ($20 million per year) is reasonable. If you get his 2016 performance, that's a lot of money to replace Mitch Moreland with Mitch Moreland. What would you do?Maybe it’s finals season and maybe you need something to unwind. Or maybe you’re out of college like me, but when the chill of winter subsides, the instinct to get loose still remains. After about three drinks, your ability to discern some of the deeper subtleties of your beer will have evaporated. Still if you’re in a hurry, you can get there in a single glass provided the right choice of craft beer.
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‘INSANITY’ – WEYERBACHER – English Barleywine aged in oak bourbon casks – 11.10% ABV (Eye Choir’s Choice)
Appearance: Poured a dark reddish-brown with amber highlights and a one-finger, medium tan head. Despite the relative lack of translucence, some sediment and a mild carbonation can be seen in the body. 4/5
Smell: Strong spicy bourbon aroma that has a raw touch of fusel alcohols. This is rooted in a base of rich, varnished oak and spices like vanilla. This wooden inclination continues into the malt, where maple syrup notes flit over a heady toasted caramel base. A few fruit flavors peek through, though not excessively dark ones, with notes of cherry cordial and caramel apples complementing the standard fig aromas. Hard-hitting, with an ethereally sweet aesthetic that isn’t too simple or cloying. 5/5
Taste: Moderate to strong sweetness amply highlights the slightly burnt sugar qualities of the sticky malt, though this only plays into the strong toasty quality underlying the oaky bourbon. Mild to moderate to tartness further unlocks the spicy vanilla and coconut creme behind the raunchy, peppery booziness, as well as port-wine like dark fruits. Eventually this transitions to a mild to moderate bitterness which fades back into the raw earthy oak, with lingering traces of blackstrap molasses supporting some toned-down sweetness. Well-balanced for such a strong selection of flavor, with a refined sense of dynamics that never abandons the woody, spicy core of this beer. 4.5/5
Mouthfeel: Medium bodied, with a fairly smooth but not especially thick mouthfeel that keeps the strong flavors from feeling too weighted. In the finish, a moderate to strong alcoholic heats kicks up the astrigency of the wood, though it is far from being harsh. 4.5/5
Overall: Great depth, with a lot of interesting flavors that are integrated behind a central theme that doesn’t overpower the finer details of the beer. Aggresively powerful though, which makes this one a definite slow drink. 4.5/5
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‘MONSTER’ (2012) – BROOKLYN – English Barleywine – 10.10% ABV
Appearance: Poured a robust orange bronze with slightly lighter peach highlights and a two-finger, light beige head. The body is transparent, revealing a moderate to strong carbonation. 3.5/5
Smell: Rich malt quality is most prominent, with a toffee flavor that rises out of a grainy biscuit, and meets up with a slightly spicy honeyed quality. A mild dark fruit quality works its way in, with notes of dates and raisins that summon the vaporous quality of oaky brandy. Some lighter fruit flavors such as baked apple come in as well and match with the malts as well as a creamy vanilla note. A little bit of leafy herbal hops take of the rear. 4/5
Taste: Moderate sweetness highlights the caramel malt with notes of brown sugar, as well as the flat sugary quality of apple juice. Mild to moderate tartness highlight the toasty oak, while also adding depth to the boozy fruit character. The mild bitterness accentuates the earthiness of the finish, with a combination of spicy and woody notes that also inform a slightly burnt character to the toffee malt. 3.5/5
Mouthfeel: Medium body, with a sticky quality derived from the syrupy malt quality. A brief burst of carbonation hits initially, but quickly fades to a thick mouthfeel that benefits from a moderate to strong alcoholic heat that highlights the aged liqueur qualities. 3.5/5
Overall: Certainly well-balanced, with a few interesting details, though on the whole a little bit straightforward and not particularly inventive. A satisfying drink, nonetheless, and perhaps an additional year of cellaring may bring out some more details. 3.5/5
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‘IMMORT ALE’ – DOGFISH HEAD – English Strong Ale brewed with maple syrup, peat smoked barley, and vanilla – 11.00% ABV
Appearance: Poured a deep copper-red with a one finger, light tan head. There is a fair amount of carbonation visible and (surprisingly) no sediment. 3.5/5
Smell: Strong heavily caramelized malts intertwine with hints of molasses and toffee, as well as a subtle, counterpoint of vinous raisin with a hint of cassis. This is wrapped up in the context of a strong, smoky maple aroma that integrates well with hints of spicy vanilla and earthy peat. Very complex, despite a distinct heavy-handedness in the malt category. 4/5
Taste: Strong sweetness, which surprisingly brings out some real earthy smoky flavors along with the maple syrup malt. The combination of these flavors with the cakey vanilla give a purposeful dessert-like impression. There is a strain of moderate tartness as well though, which prevent the raisin and fig flavors from being totally overwhelmed. A mild bitterness finally combines with an astringent booziness in the long, still sweet finish. 4/5
Mouthfeel: Medium to heavy body, augmented by some intense syrupy creaminess which goes perfectly with the malt character. There is also a strong yet smooth (though slightly puckering) alcoholic heat which gives this beer a very rich mouthfeel. The carbonation doesn’t bite, but rather lends volume. 4.5/5
Overall: Rich and intense yet extremely complex, with a mouthfeel which perfectly complements the flavors and aromas. Definitely a sipper though, almost more due to the sugar content rather than the alcohol. 4/5
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‘OLD STOCK ALE’ – NORTH COAST – Old Ale – 11.90% ABV
Appearance: Poured a moderate reddish-amber with fiery vermillion highlights and a one-finger, light beige head. The body has a moderate quantity of sediment, and between this and the slightly dark color, mild carbonation can only be seen as the beer is held up to the light. 4/5
Smell: Rich malt aromas that begin with toasted biscuits but delve deeper into toffee and treacle. Dark fruits such as from fig and raisin bread come in as well, which complement a distinct spiciness which includes and earthy nutmeg to powdered licorice root, as well as a creamy vanilla. These spices sit on a base of buttered rum booziness. Very precisely, with detail that is noticeable despite the powerful malt backbone. 4/5
Taste: Moderately sweet, with a big hit of malt that stops well short of roasted, with caramelized grains and light molasses that feature hints of butterscotch. This sweetness also adds a syrupy liqueur angle to the plummy dark fruit, even with slightly lighter fruits like dates or red currants peeking through, with the help of a mild tartness. Mild to moderate bitterness highlights a spice profile which borders between earthy dessert spices and a fragrant toasted tobacco. As the palate dries, a bright note of spicy cognac coats the finish. Really great depth of flavor, with a strong malt that doesn’t rely on punchy roasted flavors to display strength. 4.5/5
Mouthfeel: Medium to heavy body, with a very syrupy mouthfeel whose creaminess is only barely offset by a mild, drawn-out tactile carbonation. A mild to moderate alcoholic heat in the finish helps cut through the creaminess a bit more though. Good parallel to the strong but not dark malt character. 4/5
Overall: Really well-balanced beer that packs a lot of detail in around the central malt theme without being too distracting, yet not totally conventional either. Definitely worth trying to cellar. 4/5
AdvertisementsBELFAST’S HIGH COURT has awarded £48,750 in damages to former Ulster Unionist leader Tom Elliott over a defamatory tweet posted by Sinn Féin MLA Phil Flanagan.
The tweet was posted after Elliott appeared on a BBC radio programme in May 2014. Though the tweet was removed from Twitter within an hour of being posted, it was still accessible online on other websites.
In his ruling today, Justice Stephens described Flanagan’s tweet as “a most serious libel and is grossly defamatory”.
It was an outrageous libel in relation to an individual of considerable standing attacking his integrity at a most fundamental level.
He said it affected a core aspect of Elliott’s life with implications as to his trustworthiness in public life and as a representative for all the members of the constituency which he had represented and which he was seeking to represent in the future.
He said the comments merited £75,000 in damages, but reduced the figure by 35% to reflect steps, like an apology, taken by Flanagan.
The judge also put a stay on the payout until the Sinn Féin MLA resolves a legal action with insurers over their refusal to indemnify him.After two hours away, the woman returned to her apartment to find blood on the kitchen floor and her husband wanting to continue fighting about the same thing that made her leave for a breath of fresh air that Friday afternoon in the first place: the dog.
But when she called to the little 5-year-old Maltese and Yorkie mix named Geela – a Hebrew name meaning eternal joy – suddenly 60-year-old Luis Perez, aka Juan Perez, acted in a hurry to leave the apartment.
When the woman found the 3-pound dog covered in blood and feces and unable to move in the bathtub, she knew why.
On Friday, a week after the woman discovered her dog severely injured, Allen County prosecutors formally charged Perez with one felony count of cruelty to an animal, accusing him of beating the dog to the point it needed to be put to sleep.
Perez, who resides in the 3600 block of Brooklyn Avenue, was initially arrested after police were called to the apartment Jan. 15 but posted $2,500 bond shortly after being booked into Allen County Lockup, according to court records.
"(Expletive) that dog," he said while being taken to the Fort Wayne Police Department’s detective bureau for questioning, according to court documents. "She loves that dog more than me."
The woman told police Geela was a therapy dog used to sooth her post traumatic stress disorder and that Perez had been jealous of the animal for a long time. He had chased the dog in anger previously, and she even said she called Animal Care & Control because she feared for the dog’s safety, according to court documents.
She also told police Perez frequently hits things when he’s upset.
The day Perez is accused of injuring the dog, the pair got into a heated argument about Geela.
His wife said she left the apartment at noon to de-escalate the argument.
She returned at 2 p.m. to find the dog in the bathtub, its right leg mangled and a purple bruise on its head. Perez was out the door before police could arrive.
A veterinarian examined the dog and found its leg had a compound fracture and there was bruising on its head, shoulders and other areas.
The dog also exhibited a low body temperature and a high pulse. Then the veterinarian found an abnormal amount of blood in an area around the heart.
That, the vet told police, could have been the result of a tear in the dog’s heart.
Due to the injuries and the dog’s level of pain, the decision was made to euthanize Geela, according to court documents.
When talking to police, Perez’s wife told officers he knew how much the dog meant to her and how devastating it would be to her if the dog came to any harm.
"I should have killed that little (expletive)," he said to an officer en route to the detective bureau, according to court documents.
jeffwiehe@jg.net2011: The Year Of The Tax Increase
Unless the U.S. Congress acts, there is going to be a massive wave of tax increases in 2011. In fact, some are already calling 2011 the year of the tax increase. A whole host of tax cuts that Congress established between 2001 and 2003 are set to expire in January unless Congress chooses to renew them. But with Democrats firmly in control of both houses that appears to be extremely unlikely.
2011: The Year Of The Tax Increase
These tax increases are going to affect every single American (at least those who actually pay taxes). But this will be just the first wave of tax increases. Another huge slate of tax increases passed in the health care reform law is scheduled to go into effect by 2019. So Americans that are already infuriated by our tax system are only going to become more frustrated in the years ahead. The reality is that the U.S. government will soon be digging much deeper into our wallets.
The following are some of the tax increases that are scheduled to go into effect in 2011....
1 - The lowest bracket for the personal income tax is going to increase from 10 percent to 15 percent.
2 - The next lowest bracket for the personal income tax is going to increase from 25 percent to 28 percent.
3 - The 28 percent tax bracket is going to increase to 31 percent.
4 - The 33 percent tax bracket is going to increase to 36 percent.
5 - The 35 percent tax bracket is going to increase to 39.6 percent.
6 - In 2011, the death tax is scheduled to return. So instead of paying zero percent, estates of $1 million or more are going to be taxed at a rate of 55 percent.
7 - The capital gains tax is going to increase from 15 percent to 20 percent.
8 - The tax on dividends is going to increase from 15 percent to 39.6 percent.
9 - The "marriage penalty" is also scheduled to be reinstated in 2011.
It is being estimated that the total cost of these tax increases to U.S. taxpayers will be $2.6 trillion through the year 2020.
Ouch!
But wait, there are even more tax increases coming.
The "health care reform law" contains over a dozen new taxes that will be implemented in stages over the next decade. When you add all of these taxes to the taxes that were mentioned earlier, the result is going to be absolutely devastating. According to an analysis by the Congressional Joint Committee on Taxation the health care reform law will generate $409.2 billion in additional taxes by the year 2019.
Double ouch!
So is it any wonder why the public has such a low opinion of the U.S. Congress?
Every single major poll done on the topic shows that approval ratings for Congress are at record lows.
For example, Gallup's 2010 Confidence in Institutions poll found Congress ranking dead last out of the 16 institutions rated this year.
Of course there are a whole host of reasons why the American people are upset with Congress, but one of the big ones is the fact that we are literally being taxed to death.
However, it is not just federal income taxes that are killing us.
In a previous article entitled "Taxed Enough Already!", we listed just a few of the taxes that Americans have to pay each year....
Accounts Receivable Tax
Building Permit Tax
Capital Gains Tax
CDL license Tax
Cigarette Tax
Corporate Income Tax
Court Fines (indirect taxes)
Dog License Tax
Federal Income Tax
Federal Unemployment Tax (FUTA)
Fishing License Tax
Food License Tax
Fuel permit tax
Gasoline Tax
Gift Tax
Hunting License Tax
Inheritance Tax
Inventory tax IRS Interest Charges (tax on top of tax)
IRS Penalties (tax on top of tax)
Liquor Tax
Local Income Tax
Luxury Taxes
Marriage License Tax
Medicare Tax
Payroll Taxes
Property Tax
Real Estate Tax
Recreational Vehicle Tax
Road Toll Booth Taxes
Road Usage Taxes (Truckers)
Sales Taxes
School Tax
Septic Permit Tax
Service Charge Taxes
Social Security Tax
State Income Tax
State Unemployment Tax (SUTA)
Telephone federal excise tax
Telephone federal universal service fee tax
Telephone federal, state and local surcharge taxes
Telephone minimum usage surcharge tax
Telephone recurring and non-recurring charges tax
Telephone state and local tax
Telephone usage charge tax
Toll Bridge Taxes
Toll Tunnel Taxes
Traffic Fines (indirect taxation)
Trailer registration tax
Utility Taxes
Vehicle License Registration Tax
Vehicle Sales Tax
Watercraft registration Tax
Well Permit Tax
Workers Compensation Tax
Are you dizzy yet?
The reality is that the American people are being drained in dozens and dozens of different ways.
But what did you expect?
Did you think that our politicians would pile up the biggest debt in the history |
9 and 2000 when it won its class in the series.
We posted this video in last week's Car Videos to Brighten Your Weekend showing the top 5 Viper victories in American Le Mans.
And this one showing a lap from 1999 of the Viper at Le Mans.The Toronto Zoo has announced the name of its three-month-old polar bear cub ahead of her public debut on Saturday. Her name is Juno.
The zoo said the cub was initially given the nickname in honour of Juno Beach in France, as the cub was born on Remembrance Day in 2015.
“Zoo staff have made this name official as it embodies Canadian pride and is representative of polar bears, one of Canada’s national treasures,” the zoo said in a statement.
The Canadian Army also adopted Juno as its “live” mascot and promoted her to rank of Private.
Juno will be “promoted” every year on her birthday, the army said.
"I believe that Pte. Juno will have a long and successful career with us,” Brig.-Gen. David Patterson, Deputy Commander, 4th Canadian Division, said in a zoo statement. “Like all good soldiers, I’m sure she will work hard and advance in rank over the years.
“Eventually, she could be known as Sgt. Juno or Cpt. Juno Perhaps, one day, even as Gen. Juno.”
On Thursday morning, media received a sneak preview of the three-month-old female polar bear cub in her maternity area and outside den.
In early February, Juno marked a milestone when she was introduced to snow for the first time.
Her public debut on Saturday will coincide with International Polar Bear Day.
You can meet our polar bear cub starting this Saturday February 27 for #InternationalPolarBearDay ❄️ pic.twitter.com/gW3eTmRrDp — The Toronto Zoo (@TheTorontoZoo) February 22, 2016Satire The Empire Wants Ms. Clinton, The Conqueror! By Andre Vltchek September 02, 2016 " Information Clearing House " - What a fine race it has become! Both Hilary Clinton and Donald Trump are competing in it as a who is the ‘tougher guy/gal’ in what could be easily described as a 21st Century Tarantino-style (or Scorsese-style) political pulp fiction gore. What they both utter, may often sound like some staged bluff: “Are you talking to me? Hey, there’s nobody else here… Are you talking to me?” But just think for a moment what would really happen if one of them sticks to his or her ‘promises’ and ‘principles’, after getting elected! (The bullets would be flying, the nukes exploding, and millions of immigrants pushed off some cliff). Let’s face it: unless there is any intervention from outer space, one of them will actually ascend to the throne very soon! And they both may actually mean, at least partially, what they say! Donald Trump is promising to deport some 11 million illegal immigrants from the United States. Now, that is quite a number of people, isn’t it! Can you imagine the mess: the US regime would have to snitch on foreigners, to round them up, pull them out of bed (children and wives screaming, dogs barking, windows and doors being kick-opened, like in some movie about the WWII era), to handcuff them, throw them into vans and buses, and eventually dump them across the border (but ‘across the border’ where, in Mexico? They wouldn’t be taken to Canada, right? Or to some fatal frontier cliff, as was done by the Thai military, when it decided to ‘deport’ illegal Cambodian migrants). That would be quite a sight, no? Would some also be shot, or at least bayoneted? You know, certain exemplary actions here and there could stir patriotic feelings in at least certain sectors of the American society… Of course, there is one simple and great way of how to stop immigration, at least from Latin America (but Mr. Trump still has not discovered it, so let’s tell him): if the US and Europe would stop terrorizing people “South of the border”, overthrowing their legitimate and progressive governments (as recently happened in Honduras, Paraguay and Brazil), if they’d stop plundering and stealing from Latin Americans, then, of course, there would be no need to emigrate from ‘down there’ to the North! Or, as happened in Chile (after it actually managed to get rid of the US-backed fascist dictatorship of General Pinochet) – after it became a socially-oriented and extremely attractive country, there has actually been more Westerners trying to settle there in the last decade than the other way around. But I am aware how difficult it would be to stop stealing from the South, as the entire Western culture has been based, for centuries, on plunder and theft. The renaissance of a McCarthy-style approach mixed with the lowest grade Hollywood gore action and ‘gambits’: that is much easier, and also that’s what the politicians think ‘the public expects them to deliver’. Now let’s move onto the camp of Ms. Clinton. She is not as ‘petty’ as Mr. Trump; she is ready to go global. She would not be bothered much by some ‘tiny local issues’! Her mission is clear and huge, let’s even say monumental: to save, to even expand the Empire. She served well under the Obama administration, which was actually much more ‘successful’ in subjugating the colonies than any other administration in modern history. Just look at the Middle East, but especially at Latin America! Just several years ago, almost the entire south of the Western Hemisphere seemed to be crossing the point of no return, marching proudly and confidently away from servitude and towards socialism. And look at it now, after those joint Obama/Clinton efforts! Honduras and Paraguay are in ashes, Brazil’s elites are raping their country’s democracy, Argentina had been manipulated into the anti-progressive camp, Bolivia has been struggling against violent coup attempts, and Venezuela is forced to fight (heroically) for its bare survival. Bravo, Mr. Obama! Bravo Ms. Clinton! You achieved the impossible – you are now ‘successfully’ re-conquering, re-colonizing the entire Latin America! And were she to be elected (as she definitely will be elected, because the regime decided that she and no one else but she should be soon leading the Empire), Ms. Clinton would definitely not be satisfied with a few ‘minor’ trophies like the Middle East and Latin America. After all, to control these two parts of the world (as control of Africa) are undeniable and inherited rights of the Western Empire! She is apparently ready to go ‘all the way’. It is Russia and China that she is ready to confront! It is the entire world that she wants to place under her medium-height heel! That’s not Tarantino or Scorsese, anymore! Those guys look bantam, lightweights, suddenly, compared to that reincarnated and slightly altered Lady Macbeth. That’s Shakespeare and Chaplin (we all know which film I am talking about) meet the Godfather! “Now you all shut up and listen to me fratelli: The entire world does as I say, or we break your legs, and cut off your balls, capisce?” Oh, just think about that iconic statement of hers, regarding the pan-African leader and (murdered) President Muammar Qaddafi of Libya, “We came, we saw, and he died!” Now you see what I mean: Scorsese would have managed to come close to this, when at his best, but never, never really would he define the acts and language of mafia with such brilliant perfection! It really takes an insider… Now Ms. Clinton is in an excellent company! She is supported; she is actually admired by so many great personalities of the leg-breaking culture. Behind her and around her, there are big names – the leaders who have spilled the blood of millions of (to borrow from Orwell’s terminology) ‘un-people’. Among those leaders are Paul Wolfowitz and Henry Kissinger. And let’s not forget about her husband, Bill, a close chum and supporter of Paul Kagame (Rwanda’s dictator and the ‘Butcher of Congo’). Bill Clinton, the destroyer of socialist Yugoslavia. Bill Clinton… oh, the list of his heroic deeds is endless… Mr. Wolfowitz is a phenomenal mind, a real and unapologetic imperialist warrior, the author of the so-called “Wolfowitz Doctrine”, a pamphlet leaked to the New York Times several years ago (It is all about the interventions of the United States in the internal affairs of other countries; all about exceptionalism). Support from people such as Wolfowitz or Kissinger would be extremely embarrassing to any semi-decent (even mainstream) politician, even in the not so distant past. Not anymore. And perhaps, Ms. Clinton is not just an ordinary politician. According to some analysts, she has risen above belonging to any political party, her own (abstract) party now being “Party of War”. Therefore, both Wolfowitz and especially Kissinger are her natural allies. As reported on August the 9th, 2016, by The Slate: “When it comes to Kissinger, however, Clinton should know better. Yet rather than distance herself, Clinton has wooed him with unrestrained enthusiasm. She has often spoken of his wisdom and the value of his “insight” and “expertise.” She reviewed one in the seemingly endless supply of his books with fulsome words of praise. (A taste: “Kissinger is a friend, and I relied on his counsel when I served as Secretary of State. He checked in with me regularly, sharing astute observations about foreign leaders and sending me written reports on his travels.”) She defended him in a debate with Bernie Sanders during which the latter attacked Kissinger’s record on foreign policy. She has even chosen to spend holidays with him.” Several months earlier, on February 5th, 2016, Salon commented: “Hillary Clinton boasted in the fifth Democratic presidential debate Thursday night that she is supported by former Secretary of State Henry Kissinger, an accused war criminal who oversaw policies that led to the deaths of millions of people. “I was very flattered when Henry Kissinger said I ran the State Department better than anybody had run it in a long time,” she said.” She did; she really did! If seen from the moral perspective of Henry Kissinger, who, during his Machiavellian career made sure that several millions of human beings were slaughtered in the name of the Western ‘democracy’ (for which he was, very logically, knighted and awarded Nobel Peace Price). But it is not just about Henry Kissinger and those like him – people who had already committed numerous crimes against humanity. There are also others who would actually like to do more, to bathe the Planet in even more extreme gore: people like Robert Kagan, Victoria Nuland, and Bill Kristol. In brief, the Neo-Cons! And many of them are now lining-up behind their new heroine, Ms. Clinton! Oh Ms. Clinton, there is something in your eyes, in your smile, in your laughter that makes them trust you, lean towards you, even embrace you, as George W. Bush recently did, literally, and in public. Oh yes, that restlessness which illustrates how much she cares, how much more she is still willing to do! There is a clearly detectable longing on her face: so many lands that still have to be conquered; so many ideals and thoughts dangerous to the Empire that have to be discredited and censored. Like the captain of a ship heading towards the lands to be colonized and civilized by the white Christian culture, Ms. Clinton is at the forefront, standing proudly on the captain’s bridge, with a cross, cannons and several basic instruments of torture hidden under the deck. That image is so precious; it warms the many hearts of both the neo-cons, and old-fashioned conservatives. Mr. Trump cannot compete. He has already lost! A Republican or not, he is lacking that grand ‘global vision’. The regime does not care about some “America first” concept (“America first” is something that is already taken for granted). The regime is not interested in one country only (or how are the ordinary people faring in that country), or in one only Hemisphere. It needs the world, the entire Planet. And that is why it has already decided. It has elected Ms. Clinton. Ms. Clinton the Conqueror! Andre Vltchek is a philosopher, novelist, filmmaker and investigative journalist. He covered wars and conflicts in dozens of countries. His latest books are: “ Exposing Lies Of The Empire ” and “ Fighting Against Western Imperialism ”.Discussion with Noam Chomsky: On Western Terrorism. Point of No Return is his critically acclaimed political novel. Oceania – a book on Western imperialism in the South Pacific. His provocative book about Indonesia: “ Indonesia – The Archipelago of Fear ”. Andre is making films for teleSUR and Press TV. After living for many years in Latin America and Oceania, Vltchek presently resides and works in East Asia and the Middle East. He can be reached through his website or his Twitter. See Also - Clinton says could not recall all briefings due to concussion: FBI report: "In December of 2012, Clinton suffered a concussion and then around the New Year had a blood clot," the FBI's summary said. "Based on her doctor's advice, she could only work at State for a few hours a day and could not recall every briefing she received." FBI Releases Documents in Hillary Clinton E-Mail Investigation : View documents on The Vault: We are making these materials available to the public in the interest of transparency and in response to numerous Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) requests.In the 2009 Defense Authorization Bill, it included language in response to criticism about the promotion of propaganda that has been going on with the media military analysts, the Pentagon and the defense contractors – according to Media Matters. The bill has been sitting on President Bush’s desk since Monday, any word from the media on this important matter “crickets” or is the media saying move along – nothing to see here folks.
The Congressional Members responsible for the inclusion of this provision are Rep. Paul Hodes (D-NH), Sen. John Kerry (D-MA), Sen. Hillary Clinton (D-NY), Rep. Rosa DeLauro (D-CT), Rep. Peter DeFazio (D-OR), Sen. Frank Lautenberg (D-NJ), Sen. Robert Menendez (D-NJ), and Sen. Byron Dorgan (D-ND)-which was brought to the forefront by an article in The New York Times.
A subsequent analysis by Media Matters documented more than 4,500 appearances of military analysts in the media, many of whom worked for or had clients with companies that have an interest in obtaining Pentagon contracts. The bill includes the following provisions: 1.) Prohibits taxpayer money from being used for “publicity or propaganda purposes” by the Department of Defense. 2.) Requires the Department of Defense Inspector General to investigate the media analysts program and report the findings back to Congress 90 days after the bill is enacted. 3.) Directs the Comptroller General of the GAO to issue a legal opinion to Congress on whether the media analysts program violated the law within 120 days of enactment. Since the report was released in April, there has been little if any response from the major broadcast and cable news networks whose analysts were implicated in the reports.
The FCC put on notice, several media military analysts – this inquiry was prompted by complaints that these experts are not disclosing their affiliation with the DOD while on the air.
“By letting these spin merchants — many of whom have ties to military contractors vested in the very war policies they are asked to assess on air — act as if they’re unfettered to any agenda, the networks have demonstrated a clear lapse in credibility,” said Media Matters National Press Secretary J. Jioni Palmer. “What little we know about the military analyst programs has raised serious questions, and further scrutiny is certainly needed.”
The American people deserve better than to listen to lies and half-truths. President Bush better get this bill signed and the media needs to stop spreading this propaganda on the nation.. It’s time for a change to have some transparency and accountability back in the government.CI Games has announced a super special incentive for people who pre-order Sniper Ghost Warrior 3, containing a load of extras at no additional cost. Players can take advantage of this valuable season pass offering beginning today on the PlayStation®4 Computer Entertainment System and PC.
“We have a long-term investment in our community and believe that this season pass is a huge value to them”, said Marek Tymiński, CEO of CI Games. “The content within the season pass has variety to it, and we’re committed to provide support and additional content throughout 2017 for our largest game to date. The major part of the edition will be the single player campaign ‘The Sabotage’. This is one we’re quite proud of where players will follow the story of the separatists and experience everything from the other side of the conflict making the story more being in the grey zone than black and white.”
In addition to the highlighted extras below, CI Games plans to roll out exclusive content drops and special events that will enhance the game throughout 2017.
The season pass on PS4™ and PC includes the following:
Two major single-player expansions:
– The Escape of Lydia
– The Sabotage
– The Escape of Lydia – The Sabotage Two multiplayer maps
An exclusive all-terrain vehicle
Two exclusive weapons:
– The McMillan TAC-338
– Compound Bow
The season pass is a $29.99 value and is available for free for those who preorder the game. Players can pre-order the game at their local retailers or at sniperghostwarrior3.com/pre-order.
Sniper Ghost Warrior 3 will launch on PC, PlayStation®4 Computer Entertainment System
and Xbox One on April 4, 2017.
To learn more about CI Games and Sniper Ghost Warrior 3, visit:
CI Games webiste: www.cigames.com
Sniper Ghost Warrior 3: www.sgw3.com
Facebook: www.facebook.com/SniperGhostWarrior
Twitter: www.twitter.com/SGW3Game
Buy nowChocolate Chip cookies are my absolute favorite. After being diagnosed with Celiac Disease many years ago, I couldn’t find a flour or recipe to make a good cookie. I have tried so many kinds of really bad gluten free flour and made dozens of crumbly cookies. Then, I finally found exactly the right combination of ingredients and the perfect flour. These cookies are crisp on the outside and gooey on the inside. They are so good that my boys’ teammates have eaten them for years without knowing they were gluten-free. (Surprise!) I’m no chef I just really love cookies!
When you’re baking gluten free it is more important than ever to follow the steps, or the cookies won’t be exactly as you would like them. Here are some tips:
-I only recommend gf Jules Gluten Free Flour.
-Never use margarine, it spreads too much for gf baking.
-Whipping the butter and sugar very well helps set the cookies.
-The parchment paper prevents the cookies from breaking when you’re taking them off the tray.
-Refrigeration helps set the cookies. However if you’re impatient like me you can put the dough in the freezer for an hour and they will be good, too.
5.0 from 2 reviews Save Print Gluten Free Chocolate Chip Cookies Author: Heather @centsiblechateau.com Recipe type: Dessert Cuisine: American Prep time: 10 mins Cook time: 10 mins Total time: 20 mins Serves: 48 cookies Gluten Free Chocolate Chip Cookie Recipe- As Good As Toll House! When shopping for the ingredients make sure all ingredients, not just the flour, are labeled gluten free. Ingredients 2¼ cups Jules Gluten Free Flour
1 teaspoon baking soda
1 teaspoon salt
½ cup butter (do not use margarine)
½ cup shortening
¾ cup granulated sugar
¾ cup packed brown sugar 2
2 teaspoons vanilla extract
2 large eggs
2 cups Gluten Free Semi-Sweet Chocolate Chips Instructions Preheat oven to 375 degrees F. Combine flour, baking soda and salt in small bowl. Beat butter and shortening together until they are whipped and a fluffy consistency. Add granulated sugar, brown sugar and vanilla extract in large mixer bowl and beat two minutes or until creamy. Add eggs, one at a time, beating well after each addition. Gradually beat in flour mixture. Stir in chocolate chips. Cover and refrigerate overnight. Drop by rounded tablespoon onto ungreased baking sheets lined with parchment paper Bake for 9 to 11 minutes or until golden brown. Cool on baking sheets for 2 minutes; remove to wire racks to cool completely. 3.5.3226
I really hope you enjoy these cookies. Being gluten free doesn’t have to mean giving up yummy desserts. I’ll be posting more of my own cookie and cake recipes, so please sign up for my newsletter below.
Inspiration in your Inbox! Sign up for our newsletter here! We’ll send DIY décor and design ideas right to your mailbox
Success! Now check your email to confirm your subscription. Want to share your projects, get exclusive DIY and Decor tips, and see our FB tutorials? Join Our Facebook Share Group Here: https://www.facebook.com/groups/CentsibleChateauDIYCommunitySeveral scientists are reportedly planning a march on Washington and have taken to social media to garner support for the movement.
A Twitter account that started on Monday has periodically sent out updates and requests for people to get involved.
The date of the March will be announced officially next week! Do not believe any rumors of a date until then! — ScienceMarchonDC (@ScienceMarchDC) January 25, 2017
It has never been more important for scientists of all stripes to come together and have their voices heard in government. — ScienceMarchonDC (@ScienceMarchDC) January 25, 2017
Thank you so much to everyone who volunteered today. We have hundreds of volunteers! If you don't hear back immediately, don't worry. — ScienceMarchonDC (@ScienceMarchDC) January 25, 2017
The idea began from a subreddit, The Washington Post reported, where scientists discussed a way to respond to the Trump administration’s skepticism of climate change and other science-focused policy issues.
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Seeing the size of the Women’s March on Washington following President Trump’s inauguration, someone suggested a “Scientists’ March on Washington."
”Please arrange this. it won't change trump-mans mind, but by all that is sacred, it needs to be done. Show the governing body you won't just do nothing,” one Reddit user said.
"I'd go in a heartbeat,” said another.
One postdoctoral fellow at the University of Texas Health Science Center took action, the Post reported, creating a Facebook and Twitter account, a website, and a Google form to solicit volunteers. The Twitter account noted that hundreds of volunteers had so far signed up.
The Twitter account had more than 79,000 followers by 7 p.m. Wednesday night.
"Although this will start with a march, we hope to use this as a starting point to take a stand for science in politics,” reads a statement on the website. "Slashing funding and restricting scientists from communicating their findings (from tax-funded research!) with the public is absurd and cannot be allowed to stand as policy.”
"This is a non-partisan issue that reaches far beyond people in the STEM fields and should concern anyone who values empirical research and science.”
The Trump administration has issued a ban on employees of the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) from posting updates on social media and speaking with members of the press. However, that didn't stop the Badlands National Park from tweeting out multiple messages on Tuesday promoting climate science.
“Today, the amount of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere is higher than at any time in the last 650,000 years. #climate," read one of the since-deleted tweets.
Trump also reportedly asked the EPA to take down the climate change webpage from its website.
The site, which includes basic information about the effects of climate change and details of greenhouse gas emissions, was still up as of Wednesday morning, though it reportedly may go dark the same day.
Caroline Weinberg, a health writer, told the Post that reports of the gag orders issued by the Trump administration on scientists from federal agencies, including the EPA and the research arm of the Department of Agriculture, “lit a fire under us."
We are absolutely planning on organizing sister science marches. We'll have much more information for you next week! — ScienceMarchonDC (@ScienceMarchDC) January 25, 2017
A statement on the website alludes to the “alternative facts” phrase coined by Trump aide Kellyanne Conway when defending a statement by White House press secretary Sean Spicer.
"There are certain things that we accept as facts with no alternatives,” the Scientists March on Washington website reads. “An American government that ignores science to pursue ideological agendas endangers the world.”CORAL GABLES — This was a quiet time for Miami a year ago. Preseason award watch lists didn't have many Hurricanes on the radar.
With only a handful of starters returning, the hype was minimal. Click here for the list of hopefuls from a year ago.
Much, of course, can change in a year.
Award watch list season is underway again and there's already more discussion involving coach Al Golden's team. Keep in mind these are massive lists that catch nearly every returning starter in major college football, but Miami is represented in nearly every one released so far.
RB Duke Johnson:
Maxwell Award watch list
Paul Hornung watch list
Doak Walker Award watch list
Walter Camp Award watch list
QB Stephen Morris
Maxwell Award watch list
Davey O'Brien watch list
AFCA Good Works Team nominee
Manning Award watch list
TE Clive Walford:
John Mackey Award watch list
C Shane McDermott:
Rimington Award watch list
OL Brandon Linder
Outland Trophy watch list
P Pat O'Donnell
Ray Guy Award watch list
WR Phillip Dorsett
Biletnikoff Award watch list
We will be updating the list as more awards make their lists available in the coming weeks.
This is also a good sign football is close to returning. The ACC Kickoff media days start next week and practices are less than a month away.
Follow our UM coverage on Twitter at @ByCasagrande and Facebook and click here for text message alerts.Story highlights Mueller has hired 17 prosecutors for his probe so far
Release of finances is unlikely to lead to a successful effort to curb his budget
Washington (CNN) The Justice Department is expected next week to release a report providing the first public details on the cost of Special Counsel Robert Mueller's investigation into Russian meddling in the 2016 US elections.
DOJ is preparing to release the first expense report connected to Mueller's probe next week, according to Justice Department spokeswoman Sarah Isgur Flores. The report will be made public and will also be provided to Congress, she said.
While the report is expected to show only toplines of Mueller's costs and not get into great detail, it will be the first glimpse of the budget he is using for the investigation into potential collusion between Trump associates and Russian officials, as well as possible obstruction of justice and financial crimes. The plan is to release information every six months.
So far, Mueller has hired 17 prosecutors for his probe, which has led to the indictments of former Trump campaign chairman Paul Manafort and his deputy Rick Gates, as well as the guilty plea of former Trump foreign policy adviser George Papadopoulos for lying to the FBI.
The expense report will provide an opportunity for Republicans who are critical of Mueller's probe -- including President Donald Trump -- to scrutinize his spending and the scope of his investigation.
Read MoreWith Creative Commons now being used by people all over the world to openly license over a billion pieces of content, a good working knowledge of what Creative Commons is and how it works is critical.
Creative Commons is developing a series of certificates to provide organizations and individuals with a range of options for increasing knowledge and use of Creative Commons.
The Creative Commons Master Certificate will define the full body of knowledge and skills needed to master CC. This master certificate will be of interest to those who need a broad and deep understanding of all things Creative Commons.
In addition, custom certificates are being designed for specific types of individuals and organizations. Initially Creative Commons is focusing on creating a specific CC Certificate for 1. educators, 2. government, and 3. librarians. The CC Certificate for each of these will include a subset of learning outcomes from the overall CC Master Certificate along with new learning outcomes specific to each role.
All certificates will include both a modular set of learning materials that can be used independently for informal learning, and a formal, structured and facilitated certificate the can be taken for official certification.
CC is grateful for initial support from the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation and the Institute for Museum and Library Services who have provided funding for the development of the CC Master Certificate and specialized versions for educators, government, and librarians.
Creative Commons is seeking to engage the entire open community in the development of these certificates.
Sandcastles by Neil Turner CC BY-SA
We plan to design and develop the certificates openly on the web in a way that allows for public input and contribution. We currently are experimenting with making all the certificate designs available for review and edit through GitHub and other tools.
In addition we are looking to tap into as much subject matter expertise as possible through the formation of certificate working groups. A working group of Creative Commons staff has been formed to provide subject matter expertise on the CC Master Certificate. We’re also reaching out through our networks to form working groups with librarians, educators and government to ensure the specialized certificates are relevant and appropriately targeted to each group.
A Creative Commons Certificate librarian working group is being formed through coordinated outreach in consultation with organizations like the American Library Association, Digital Public Library of America, and SPARC.
The government and educator versions of the certificate are being created to satisfy needs that emerged out of the US Department of Labor Trade Adjustment Assistance Community College Career Training (TAACCCT) grant and the 700+ community colleges who are grantees. Creative Commons is reaching out to these and others for expertise on the government and educator versions of the certificate.
A working group of participants from across Creative Commons global affiliate network has also been formed to help ensure initial work takes into consideration internationalization and localization.
If you’d like to be actively involved in any of these working groups let us know.
Certificates will be created as Creative Commons licensed Open Educational Resources reusing and remixing as many existing openly licensed resources as possible. We’re looking to aggregate, adopt, and adapt existing materials as much as possible and only develop new content for areas where nothing already exists. We’ll be inviting you to identify all materials you’re aware of and map them to certificate learning outcomes.
Rather than focusing our initial efforts on content development we’ll instead focus on defining learning outcomes along with associated activities and assessments that effectively test those outcomes. Our aim is to have assessments be 100% performance-based, testing people on their ability to use Creative Commons in applied and practical ways. One form of activity and assessment will include having certificate participants create actual certificate content as OER. Co-creation with participants will build up a pool of community created Creative Commons Certificate content, targeted to learning outcomes, in many different languages, localized to different parts of the world, and curated by Creative Commons.
If you have thoughts, resources, or interest in helping out please let us know.
We currently have a submission in to the Knight Foundation’s “How might libraries serve 21st century information needs?” challenge brief. If successful, we plan to engage working groups of librarians in multi-day sprint workshops to do everything from co-defining learning outcomes, to identifying existing CC related openly licensed curricula, beta testing curricula, and defining optimal modes of delivery and duration. If you think that is a good idea or want to be part of those sprints we invite you to express interest by sharing your comments here Creative Commons (CC) Certificate for Librarians.
In future development, Creative Commons is planning for a train-the-trainer certification which will authorize others to deliver Creative Commons certificates on its behalf in different parts of the world. We welcome expressions of interest from other organizations wanting to work with us on this.
As CC embarks on its strategy to “foster a vibrant, usable, and collaborative global commons”, Creative Commons certificates will play a critical role in ensuring participation scales in informed and skilled ways.SAN DIEGO - The San Diego Padres announced today's scheduled 1:40 p.m. series finale against the Los Angeles Dodgers has been postponed due to unstable, inclement weather including prolonged rain showers and possible thunder and lightning throughout the afternoon. The game has been rescheduled for Saturday, September 2 at 12:40 p.m. The regularly scheduled game on September 2 against the Dodgers will be pushed from 5:40 p.m. to 7:10 p.m. to better accommodate a double-header.
This is the first rainout at Petco Park since Sunday, July 19, 2015, a span of 134 games. Prior to the 2015 rainout, there had been 820 games played at Petco Park since the previous rainout (April 4, 2006).
Tickets for today's game are valid for the same seats at the new game time, and should be used for ballpark entry on September 2. Fans with tickets to both games on September 2 will be asked to exit the ballpark after the first game and reenter for the evening game. There are no refunds for rescheduled games, but tickets may be exchanged prior to the rescheduled game at the Advance Ticket Windows at Petco Park for any remaining game during the 2017 regular season, subject to availability.When you look at the Shadow Hand, a skeletal array of metal limb and muscle, it may not immediately bring to mind the subject of sex. But the robotic hand can touch, sense, move and grip almost as well as a human hand might. It can detect force, micro-vibrations and variations in temperature. Encased in its bundles of sensors and circuits is all of the delicacy and precision of human touch. It’s the kind of invention that could make sex with robots feel like the real deal one day.
What gives the Shadow Dexterous Hand its tactile abilities is haptics, which allows a piece of technology to communicate through touch. The Force Touch feature on your iPhone? That’s haptics at work. The way your phone vibrates when you catch a Pokémon in Pokémon Go? That’s haptic, too. These things may already turn you on. But trust us, that’s only just the beginning. Haptics are what will power the coming sex machine revolution.
Already there’s lots of kinky stuff on the market that relies on tactile technology to make sex more stimulating. The Vibease, for example, is a vibrator that vibrates in sync with the climactic moments of an erotic audiobook. Companies like OhMiBod and LoveSense make teledilonic sex toys that allow partners to stimulate each other from far away. Last year, Lovense partnered with porn producer VirtualRealPorn to integrate its Bluetooth-enabled sex toys into VR porn.
“The basic idea is to allow the brain to be tricked into thinking the experience is real,” Eddy Olivares, Lovense’s marketing manager, told Mashable at the time.
The future of haptics, though, means virtual sex that’s far more realistic. And it won’t require a human to operate the remote.
In April, a viral video circulated of “full body virtual interface”—a haptic sex suit complete with crude silicon boobs to give a user the full experience of sexual pleasure while immersed in VR. Though many outlets reported that the suit was a real prototype designed by Japanese sex toy company Tenga, it was actually an April Fool’s hoax by another company, Japanese developer Illusion. Prank or not, the Illusion VR suit is not all that far from where sex toy manufacturers are betting that sex will go.
In 2013, Illusion unveiled a cobbled-together contraption that allows users to participate in a simulation in which they receive sexual favors from an anime character in VR. The company took a haptic device originally designed create vibrations from gunfire in first-person shooter games, and repurposed it so that it holds a Tenga sex-tube instead of a gun. When someone wearing an Oculus Rift watches the simulation, the device makes the sex-tube thrust at the appropriate moments. (Tenga gave Illusion permission to use their device, but contrary to other news articles, didn’t actually help them develop the product.)
Illusion’s sex-simulation game isn’t available on the market, but it’s clear that’s the direction the company sees itself headed.
“I think in the future, the virtual real will become more real than actual real sex,” Illusion developer Naoyuki Ootsuru told Motherboard* in 2014.
Lovense, too, has been working on creating sex toys to make its VR porn experience even more realistic, using magnetic technology to create male sex toys that move themselves in sync with a video and toys for women that mimic thrusting. For now, when users pair a Lovense sex toy with compatible videos, the device will vibrate or contract in sync with the porn actor’s speed. But eventually, the idea is to create a more immersive experience with toys that move themselves.
Olivares told me that at this point the “bones” of the new toys are “essentially done.” Development of the “brains”—testing different sensors to see which syncs with the VR videos best—is expected to be done in another four to six months.
You can see a prototype of the male toy here, via the company’s Instagram account:
The biggest advancements in haptics, though, are likely to come from outside of the adult industry. The Shadow Hand, for example, uses some of the most sophisticated haptic technology available, allowing a hand to not just move like a human hand but to sense temperature and the force of touch. The Shadow Hand, the flagship product of U.K.-based Shadow Robot Company, wasn’t designed with any specific industry in mind; founder Rich Walker just wanted to give robots better hands. Allowing a robot to feel what it touches has uses in all kinds of industries—think bomb-disabling bots that can feel the textures of wire in their hands, and surgical bots that can not just see but feel a person’s insides.
For now haptic sex toys rely mainly on movement—mimicking the vibrating, thrusting and convulsing of sex. But haptic technology is already much more advanced. Companies like SynTouch (which the Shadow Hand uses) allow machines to feel texture as humans do. Ultrahaptics uses ultrasound emitters to allow users to ‘feel’ virtual worlds. It won’t be long before haptic sex toys incorporate these advances to mimic other sensory aspects of sex, like |
order that provided for refugee health care. The government had repealed that measure when it made the changes in 2012.
Government appealing 'flawed' ruling
The Canadian Association of Refugee Lawyers and the Canadian Doctors for Refugee Care, however, say the government re-repealed that measure on Nov. 6, 2014, only two days after it was supposed to restore the health coverage.
The advocates first pointed out the return to the repealed measure in December, but the Canadian Medical Association Journal drew attention to it in an article published Wednesday.
Waldman said the Federal Court was clear the government was supposed to restore the pre-2012 coverage. He's filed a motion to the court asking for a finding that the government has breached the court order.
A spokesman for Immigration Minister Chris Alexander declined an interview request and responded by email. He called the court ruling "flawed."
"Our government is defending the interests of Canadian taxpayers as well as the integrity of our refugee determination system," Kevin Menard wrote.
"We have implemented temporary health-care measures as per the Federal Court’s ruling on Nov. 5. Regrettably, the Federal Court’s ruling is costing taxpayers an extra $4 million a year."
Government showing 'contempt'
Dr. Philip Berger, one of the founders of Canadian Doctors for Refugee Health, says the government showed contempt for refugee claimants and doctors and is now extending that contempt to the Federal Court.
"There's nothing the federal government says about refugee health that can be believed," he said.
"The costs have simply been downloaded to the provinces and to hospitals who must see people in emergency departments and doctors who are prepared to provide coverage for free."
The lack of early intervention also costs more as problems get worse, said Berger, the medical director of inner-city health at St. Michael's Hospital in Toronto.
The original Federal Court case covered a number of specific examples of refugee claimants being denied health care, including a woman in labour who was denied an epidural.
"What the government underestimates is that we, the doctors, are more stubborn than they are, but our cause is just and theirs is not," Berger said.Kentucky resident David Ermold found himself at the epicenter of a media firestorm in 2015 when he and his now-husband, David Moore, were denied a marriage license by Rowan County Clerk Kim Davis. More than two years later, Ermold says he’s “ready to move on” from the disappointment he experienced that day by unseating Davis as county clerk in 2018. The 43-year-old, who is an assistant professor of English at the University of Pikeville, formally announced his candidacy Wednesday after weeks of speculation. The Democrat told HuffPost he sees the role as an opportunity to help bring people together from both sides of the political aisle in a community that’s been splintered since Davis’s anti-marriage equality crusade made global headlines.
Two years ago, Kim Davis denied David Ermold a marriage license because he was gay, despite it being legalized.
Today, she had to watch as he signed up to run against her in the next election. pic.twitter.com/y6HSoThcNi — Cole Ledford (@ColeLedford11) December 6, 2017
David Ermold “If I’m going to point out something that’s wrong, then I want to be a part of the solution, too," said David Ermold, left, with husband David Moore.
“The trip to Romania... I think that’s what really triggered me,” he said. “Our county clerk needs to be focused more on our people, and not so much on trying to spread a message of divide across the world.” Seeing Davis embraced by former Republican presidential hopefuls Ted Cruz and Mike Huckabee in 2015 after she was released from jail was similarly infuriating, Ermold recalled. “Those despicable acts of those politicians are almost more hurtful than the denial of the marriage license itself,” he said. “Those are the people that our children are supposed to be looking up to.” Ermold is aware, of course, that his bid comes at a time when many in the queer community are concerned for their future in America’s political climate. In recent months, President Donald Trump has taken a hard line against LGBTQ rights, while politicians like Alabama Senate candidate Roy Moore have run on an anti-queer platform.
“Some... have said I need to avoid the word ‘LGBTQ.’ They say I need to avoid the word ‘gay,’ and I can understand that. But here’s the thing: it’s a part of my identity. And it’s a little dishonest to avoid that.”
He’s already faced some criticism, too. Speaking to The Associated Press, Mat Staver, Davis’ attorney, blasted Ermold for being “a single-issue” candidate who would have “no idea how to run a clerk’s office.” “All David has is one issue,” Staver told the AP. “Much of what the clerk does has nothing to do with wedding licenses. It’s a broad service to the public.” Ermold didn’t seem too vexed. “Some... have said I need to avoid the word ‘LGBTQ.’ They say I need to avoid the word ‘gay,’ and I can understand that,” he said. “That’s not the central focus of our campaign. But here’s the thing: it’s a part of my identity. And it’s a little dishonest to avoid that.” Ultimately, he added, his bid for county clerk would be about looking to the future rather than rehashing controversies of the past. “The people in our community are ready to move on, and they don’t want Kim Davis out there making announcements, going to other countries and dragging us through the dirt over and over and over again,” he said. “And that’s what she keeps doing. They want it to stop, and we’re going to make it stop.”LaVar Ball on Trump Tweets: 'If You Helped, You Shouldn't Have to Say Anything'
Tomi Lahren's Final Thoughts: New York Times' Race Bait
Tomi Lahren takes on the outrage over President Trump's tweet toward LaVar Ball, the father of one of the UCLA basketball players arrested in China.
Okay, it’s time for Final Thoughts and breaking news: Trump tweets and the mainstream media falls all over itself.
Imagine that. It all started when 3 UCLA basketball players decided to steal designer sunglasses from a Louis Vuitton store while their team was in China.
Now that’s just pathetic on its own, but instead of rotting in a Chinese prison, they are back in cushy California.
How? Donald Trump is how.
But basketball equivalent of a Kardashian-Father of the Year - LaVar Ball - didn’t see it that way.
See, LaVar Ball doesn’t seem to think Donald Trump was much of a help and LaVar Ball also doesn’t think shoplifting is a big deal. Well Mr. Ball, maybe not in cushy California but in China, it is.
I guess LaVar Ball is not familiar with the case of Otto Warmbier, an American student in North Korea who was tortured and later died after being detained on charges that he tried to steal a poster from his hotel.
Mr. Ball, your klepto kid doesn’t have to worry about that because Donald Trump personally stepped in and made sure he got home.
I know it would absolutely kill you to give the president some credit, but he saved your son’s butt, so just a little bit of gratitude would be awesome.
I guess that’s too much to ask though, right? This is just another instance in a series of BS where Donald Trump is damned if he does and damned if he doesn’t.
Can you imagine what they would have said if Trump hadn't stepped in?
Oh, the race card would’ve been slapped down so hard our ears would still be ringing.
But he did, and y’all are still not happy and you’re still slapping down the race card! Why? Because Trump sent off another mean tweet.
Get over it. It’s a freakin’ tweet. What are you gonna do about it? Scream at the sky again? Make a sign and stand outside of Trump tower during traditional working hours, again? Wear a dumb hat and resist, again?
Go for it!
His tweets offend you, we get it. It’s not “presidential,” we get it.
Well here’s the cold hard truth, we had a “presidential” president for 8 years and it got us nowhere.
Look at diplomatic relations under Obama. All of our enemies got stronger and we kicked our allies, especially Israel, square in the face.
That was President Obama being “presidential. That’s what 8 years of bowing to the world and apologizing for America looks like.
Well the apology tour is over and if your biggest issue with Trump is what he tweets, I think your little snowflake heart will be just fine.
Trump is Trump and I’ve got news for you, he’s not changing. He's effective and quite frankly, he gets a kick out of watching mainstream leftist media hacks lose their minds each time he lays down 280 characters.
If the American people wanted a limp noodle in office we would have voted for low-energy Jeb or full-blown Democrat John Kasich.
Yet, here we are. If Trump didn’t tweet, half of you “journalists” would have to research real stories so thank your lucky stars you just get to sit back and scroll through Twitter and wait to be offended.
Those are my Final Thoughts. From LA, God Bless and take care.
More from Tomi...
Tomi Lahren: Simple Advice, Don't Touch People Who Don't Want to Be Touched
'Self-Righteous Liberals' Use TX Tragedy to Push Gun Control
Corrupt Politicians Wasting Our Time and Money on Russia ProbeMarch 4, 2017
Slow-Motion Disaster Movie Unfolding Before Our Eyes As MSM Remains Silent While Mass Animal Deaths Continue Unabated
The stories over the past several days linked to on the front of SteveQuayle.com out of Fukushima, Japan and the West Coast of the US read like a slow-motion disaster movie unfolding before our very eyes. While most Americans heads remain 'buried in the sand' about the ongoing dangers of Fukushima, at least we're getting some truth, and as we learn below, from a most unusual source.
From the horrifying story published March 1st on ENENews warning a mysterious cancer is now killing sea lions along the US West Coast, turning their bones to'mush' and leaving'masses of yellow, cancerous tissue' that is leaving the animals dying at 'alarming rates' to their March 3rd story warning'many at Fukushima now have brain damage'. They share with us news of a secret hospital being used to treat those sickened by radiation exposure, yet we see our mainstream media has failed us once again. Neglecting to report upon practically anything of significance coming out of Fukushima, why has the MSM seemingly censored a topic that could have profound impacts upon the health of us all?
As we learn from ENENews February 28th story, at least one so-called expert has the eyes to see what we've all been witnessing, claiming outright that the mass die-offs on the US West Coast are due to Fukushima radiation. Meanwhile, a mind-numbing number of 'experts' continue to claim they have NO IDEA what has been causing the mass die-off's we've been witnessing and reporting on for several years now.
As we hear in the 1st video below, "the blob" has also been responsible for some absolutely bizarre United States weather recently and as the previously referenced Nat Geo story tells us, in some places, ocean temperatures have been more than 10 degrees above average in the ocean waters affected by 'the blob'.
Might 'the blob' be due to Fukushima and could it be playing a role in the mass deaths that have been ongoing for several years now as have been steadfastly documented by the End Times Prophecy Blog
According to Professor Emeritus Charles Perrow (from Yale University of all places) and a Stanford U visiting professor, there is no way that what we're now witnessing in the Pacific Ocean is going to be stopped - in fact, the invisible, tasteless, poison that has been gushing into the Pacific Ocean for nearly 6 years now is only getting worse we've learned in recent weeks. From Professor Perrow
Could I just make an observation thats been missing from this interesting discussion? Fukushima accident is not over not by any means The cancer rate in Japan is going to rise steadily. Its going to be denied by the government because theres no transparency on this issue in Japan.
Theres a particular example of the problem that intrigues me is when they put the plant in, they not only dug it out so itd be closer to the water source the sea but they put it where there was a river flowing underneath that area. They went up the hill and they diverted the river so that it flowed down on the sides of the large area there and that was no problem. They never anticipated an earthquake could wreck their diversion.
So now we have a strong underground river flowing directly under the plant where three huge globs of molten fuel are sitting on the bottom, giving off radiation, and sending that radiation into the water through the river thats underneath the plant. And its going out into the ocean and were seeing damage in the marine life in the West Coast of the U.S. and British Columbia.
Theres no way thats going to be stopped, until they get the molten cores out of there, and they have no way that they know of of doing that. Nobody has any idea what to do about the continuing Fukushima contamination.
For several years now we've been regularly reporting upon the damage that radiation from Fukushima is doing to our oceans and the plant and animal life within them that have been suffering cruel, unimaginable deaths due largely to what the mainstream media and government's across the planet are still ignoring - the compounded effects of the radiation from Fukushima.CALIFORNIA ELECTIONS Bipartisan big names say no to 5
Schwarzenegger, four predecessors denounce proposition that would divert drug offenders from prison to care.
Most of the measure's financial backing has come from wealthy philanthropists in New York, including billionaire George Soros, a financier whose Open Society Institute has supported efforts to soften drug laws across the country. Of nearly $8 million raised by supporters, only about $350,000 has come from California donors, records show.
"Tell the prison guards the party's over," Proposition 5 supporters say in a television ad unveiled this week, telling viewers that correctional officers are "taking overtime pay right out of your pocket."
Supporters of Proposition 5, whose heavy fundraising advantage has been whittled down, have cast opponents as shills for the California Correctional Peace Officers Assn. and its alleged effort to keep the state prison system overcrowded. The union has spent $1.8 million to fight the initiative.
SACRAMENTO — The battle over an initiative that would divert drug offenders from prison into treatment and loosen state parole policies has intensified heading into Tuesday's vote, with a bipartisan coalition of elected officials joining the state prison guards union to fight the measure.
Opponents have raised about $2.7 million but have won broad endorsements from elected and law enforcement officials.
Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger, a Republican, was the target of an aborted recall effort by the guards union and has criticized it as a special interest group. But he found himself on the union's side Thursday when he joined former governors -- Democrats Gray Davis and Jerry Brown, and Republicans Pete Wilson and George Deukmejian -- to oppose Proposition 5.
"It is a great threat to our neighborhoods," Schwarzenegger said at a news conference outside the Criminal Courts Building in downtown Los Angeles. "It was written by those who care more about the rights of criminals."
Davis said the measure "will cost dollars and it will cost lives." Proposition 5 would cost the state hundreds of millions of dollars a year initially, but a nonpartisan legislative analysis said it might save money in the long term by reducing prison overcrowding. Los Angeles County Dist. Atty. Steve Cooley, also a Republican, said he opposes the measure because it shows "compassion" for identity and car thieves.
"These are the types of people who will benefit from Prop. 5," he said.
Sen. Dianne Feinstein, a Democrat, and Brown, the current state attorney general, recently taped television commercials against the initiative.
"Say no to drug dealers," Feinstein says in her ad, while Brown -- whose spot was paid for by the prison guards union -- calls it "a complicated measure" that would "limit court authority over drug dealers and addicts who refuse treatment."
Meg Whitman, the former chief executive of eBay who has been mentioned as a possible Republican candidate for governor in 2010, also contributed $250,000 against the measure.
In a statement Thursday, Proposition 5 proponents called the governor and his predecessors "disgraceful" for refusing to help alleviate a prison crisis they created.
They said Schwarzenegger has "failed to reform the prison system"; they blamed Davis' recall in part on his acceptance of $3 million in political contributions from the guards union; and they accused Brown of "cozying up" to the union in anticipation of another run for the state's top job in 2010.
--
michael.rothfeld@latimes.com
Raja Abdulrahim contributed to this article from Los Angeles.Ric Elias: 3 things I learned while my plane crashed
This is a video about Taking Action – and how we just settle for 2nd best. How we don’t do the things we know we should do.
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If you would like specific help with your business, or you would like a ‘point’ in the right direction, then come and have a chat – we offer a Free 1 hour Business & Marketing Strategy Session (Valued at £147) – it’s application only (we don’t just give them to anybody of course) – but if you complete the form properly, chances are you’re in – so click the LINK, and lets have a chat and see where we can help you specifically.
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Author : Daniel Latto
(Visited 71 time, 3 visit today)Dressed as Thomas Jefferson, 18th century Revolutionary War patriot, lawyer Ira Dennis Hawver faced the Kansas Supreme Court on Friday to answer disciplinary findings he provided ineffective assistance of counsel to a defendant sentenced to death.
The Ozawkie-based attorney was Phillip D. Cheatham Jr.’s defense attorney when Cheatham was convicted and sentenced to death in 2005 in the slaying of one woman, the "Hard 50" in the killing of a second woman and lengthy prison terms for wounding a third woman and two other convictions.
Cheatham is being tried a second time after the Supreme Court overturned his convictions and death penalty sentence in 2013, ruling Cheatham received ineffective assistance of counsel. Following a disciplinary hearing, the disciplinary administrator recommended disbarment of Hawver.
Wearing a white powdered wig, a dark 18th century suit and long white stockings, Hawver sat in the Supreme Court listening to two earlier cases before his disciplinary case was called.
Hawver represented himself during the hearing before the Supreme Court and before the disciplinary administrator's office in November 2013.
Before Hawver spoke to the court, deputy disciplinary administrator Alexander Walczak gave a lengthy list of violations by Hawver when he represented Cheatham.
Hawver knew of a potential alibi defense that allegedly would place Cheatham in Chicago at the time of the two killings in Topeka but did nothing to develop it as a defense, Walczak said.
Hawver didn't know how to trace the location of Cheatham's cellphone calls to establish he might have been outside Topeka when the shootings occurred, Walczak said.
Hawver thought that an agreement signed by Cheatham would release him from any disciplinary action, Walczak said. Walczak urged the justices to disbar Hawver based on intentional violations of his duty to Cheatham.
Hawver said he dressed as Jefferson, his personal hero, to see whether the Kansas Supreme Court would protect his constitutional rights.
"Am I going to get you to protect my rights to defend my client" as I see fit? Hawver said. The First Amendment protects his actions with his clients, and the Sixth Amendment protects the rights of his client, he said.
Hawver said he might not have jumped through every "American Bar Association hoop" but he believed Cheatham was innocent. He referred to ABA guidelines for lawyers defending someone in a death penalty case.
"Phillip Cheatham didn't complain about my performance. You did," Hawver said, referring to the justices.
"I am incompetent!" Hawver said, banging the lectern with his hand. "Anybody who thinks they are representing an innocent person and can't convince a jury is incompetent or ineffective."
Hawver said his constitutional rights and the rights of Cheatham are more important than the lawyer and defendant are individually.
"Our constitutional rights are being eroded, and I ask you to stop," Hawver said, sitting down.
This isn’t the first time Hawver has worn a powdered wig.
When campaigning during unsuccessful bids for U.S. Congress as a Libertarian in 2000 and 2004 and for governor in 2002, Hawver often showed up for campaign events dressed as Jefferson, the primary author of the Declaration of Independence and the third president.
Cheatham is facing retrial in the shooting deaths of two women and the severe wounding of a third. At the first trial, Hawver has said he was following a strategy developed by Cheatham when he described his client as a drug-dealing killer who wouldn’t have needed to fire so many shots to kill the women and who wouldn't have left the third woman alive to identify him.
Cheatham has said he felt Hawver forced him into approving the strategy after the attorney failed to submit an alibi defense.
At the end of his disciplinary hearing in November 2013, Hawver asked the panel to order him not to handle any murder cases but to allow him to handle other cases in his rural Jefferson County law practice.
Earlier this week, Hawver filed a federal lawsuit against the Kansas Supreme Court seeking damages and a court order blocking his possible disbarment.
The Supreme Court took the disciplinary action under advisement.New Version Published! Don Dale has published a new version of IEA! The new version includes Solutions to Exercises now included at end of text
Numbering system for figures and tables rationalized, compared to the Flat World pdf version
Improved typesetting and layout, particularly with regard to equations
Exercises edited
Many small edits for consistency of notation and for clarity. In 2006, I produced Introduction to Economic Analysis, a free, open sourced, creative-commons-licensed textbook spanning introductory and intermediate microeconomics. There were few adoptions. That there were several high profile adoptions like NYU and Harvard convinced me that the lack of adoptions was not due to the material itself, or even my exposition of the material, but instead to two factors. First, the book isn't traditional: it is aimed to be more like economists actually practice economics, analyzing interesting issues with models and a modicum of data. Second, there were no supplemental materials. In 2007 I went to work for Yahoo! and ceased teaching. At this point progress on the project stalled. To address the lack of supplemental materials and to continue progress on the creation of low cost, high quality materials, I enlisted Tracy Lewis of the Fuqua School of Business at Duke University, to co-author a new text built on IEA, and joined with Flat World Knowledge. Flatworld has an "online free, modestly-priced printed" creative-commons model. The second version is a substantial rewrite. The material is re-ordered and the 7 substantive chapters broken into 20 more manageable chapters. The material is rewritten to make it more accessible to a standard intermediate audience. There were many bug-fixes. Professors considering the text should choose likely prefer this version. Mathematically adept independent readers, especially engineers, wishing to learn about economics may prefer the 2006-7 version.
) but you will likely prefer Don Dale's (Note: permanent link to my last version is http://www.mcafee.cc/Introecon/IEA.pdf ) but you will likely prefer Don Dale's new version 2009 2007 Help create a Chinese version of the free text here!I really wanna cosplay Pearl from your occult au, but she is hardly in any panels, and the only clear picture is when she is dying ahh, do you have any doodles or sketches of possible designs for her? (＞人＜)
first of all omg you want to cosplay her??? go right ahead and tag me so i can see and also thank you?! second, you are absolutely right that pearl has not had the attention she deserves mostly because i find her the most difficult to draw, but the next occult au comic will be hers. until then here are some vampire pearls for you.
to help with your cosplay, i mainly put pearl in outfits worn by lauren drake in Being Human (the show i base the au on). to save you combing through episodes, here is a collage of lauren’s outfits (tw for blood).Turkish intelligence reportedly tipped off Germany about the terror attack plot which caused a security alert in two metro stations in the Bavarian capital Munich on New Year's Eve.
Turkey reportedly shared information with Germany, France, Austria, Italy and Belgium that a group of five Daesh militants had crossed into Europe and would carry out simultaneous attacks on New Year's Eve.
The warning notice said the group, who were linked to Syrians Hasan Al Talab and Muhammed El Suri, crossed into Europe via the Mediterranean and Aegean seas, had fake passports as of October and were plotting to carry out major simultaneous attacks in various cities.
It also added the extremist group had targeted churches in Europe and entertainment locations as part of a suicide bombing plot.
On New Year's Eve, German police cleared Munich's central Pasing stations after a tipoff that Daesh militants were plotting terror attacks. The two stations were reopened a few hours later.
Munich Police Chief Hubertus Andrae had said the intelligence had come from the secret service of a friendly nation.
Meanwhile, Daesh militant Aine Leslie Junior Davis, known as the assistant of Jihadi John, was captured in Turkey through joint intelligence sharing among Turkey's National Intelligence Organization (MİT), the American Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) and the British MI-6. Davis had closely been followed through Raqqa, Kilis, Gaziantep and Istanbul.
German Interior Minister Thomas de Maiziere urged on Jan. 2 for closer cooperation among foreign security services after the security alert in Munich.REAL ESTATE Downtown L.A. building set to go from drug den to luxury inn
A former insurance salesman and his partners plan to transform a boarded-up apartment house they bought last year near Staples Center into a hotel with as many as 60 rooms.
City officials later hoped to raze the building at 1130 S. Hope St. to make a public park, but also had difficulty figuring out who held its title as competing parties claimed control. The picture was complicated by more than a dozen liens from contractors, developers, lawyers and others who did work involving the building.
"The problem was figuring out who owned it," said Homer Williams, one of the developers of the 19-story Luma residential high-rise next door.
The boarded-up building is a conspicuous ruin in a neighborhood decidedly on the upswing, alongside a trio of top-drawer condominium towers built in the real estate boom of the 2000s. The condo developers tried to buy the three-story derelict at the time but were unsuccessful.
A century-old brick apartment house and former drug den near Staples Center is slated to be reborn as a luxurious inn as demand for hotel rooms grows in downtown Los Angeles.
Enter Kevin Burke, a retired life insurance salesman from Manhattan Beach who managed to work through the title disputes and negotiate a complex $2.1-million transaction last year that got him the keys.
The acquisition was the first big hurdle in an ambitious plan Burke put together with three of his friends: The group wants to build a boutique hotel with a creative sensibility where they would enjoy hanging out with worldly guests.
It would cost an additional $25 million or so to make a proper hotel, he said, and architects are working on visions of how it might look. The developers hope to preserve the exterior brick walls while gutting and rebuilding the rest of the structure into an inn with 45 to 60 rooms, depending on how high they are allowed to build.
The interior, damaged by neglect, water leaks and vandalism, is probably beyond repair, Burke said. There are holes in the roof, the walls are cratered and the place — which reeks from the excrement of its many resident pigeons — may be structurally unsafe.
The partners have never developed a hotel but have the money lined up to get to work, Burke said. He acknowledges the development might not be a profitable business venture in the end, though.
"We might be too early to the market and we might overspend, but if the community keeps evolving as an urban hub, we hope we are perfectly placed on the slope as this curve moves upward."
He likened the process to painstakingly restoring the rusted-out wreck of a classic car. Buying a fully restored old auto at auction might make more financial sense, but the new owner wouldn't get the pleasure of bringing an old car back to life.
"We might be like the guy who builds that car and sells it to another operator — but we will leave a beautiful building in the space of a current crack house," Burke said.
English musician Antony Genn was swept up in the process when he and Burke met at a dinner a few years ago.
"He is very interested in art and we just got talking," Genn said of Burke. "He explained that he had this dream to own a hotel."Ancient shrimp had a cardiovascular system 520 millions years ago, earlier than any other living creature ever did.
According to Reuters, a team of researchers discovered the oldest known cardiovascular system thanks to a pristine fossil of the shrimp's heart and blood vessels. The team named the arthropod Fuxianhuia protensa and determined the invertebrate would be a relative of crabs, lobsters and shrimp.
The research team published their findings in the journal Nature Communications.
"It is an extremely rare and unusual case that such a delicate organ system can be preserved in one of the oldest fossils and in exquisite detail," study researcher Xiaoya Ma, a paleontologist at the Natural History Museum in London, told Reuters. "However, under very exceptionally circumstances, soft tissue and anatomical organ systems can also be preserved in fossils."
Found in the Yunnan Province southwestern China, the fossil dates back to a period when the "Cambrian Explosion" marked the expansion of a vast majority of the species on Earth.
"Fuxianhuia is relatively abundant, but only extremely few specimens provide evidence of even a small part of an organ system, not even to speak of an entire organ system," Nicholas Strausfeld, director at the University of Arizona Center for Insect Science, said in a press release. "The animal looks simple, but its internal organization is quite elaborate. For example, the brain received many arteries, a pattern that appears very much like a modern crustacean."
In F. protensa's fossil, the researchers found a tubular heart in the middle of the creature's body and vessels connecting it to its eyes, antennae, brain and legs. Not all animals have a cardiovascular system, such as the jellyfish and earthworm. The researchers were excited to find how ancient creatures bore several similarities to animals alive today.
"It appears to be the ground pattern from which others have evolved," Strausfeld said. "Different groups of crustaceans have vascular systems that have evolved into a variety of arrangements but they all refer back to what we see in Fuxianhuia.
"Over the course of evolution, certain segments of the animals' body became specialized for certain things, while others became less important and, correspondingly, certain parts of the vascular system became less elaborate."
Now the researchers plan to analyze the specimen closer and possibly even recreate how F. protensa would have behaved.
"With that, we can now start speculating about behavior," Strausfeld said. "Because of well-supplied blood vessels to its brain, we can assume this was a very active animal capable of making many different behavioral choices.
"This is another remarkable example of the preservation of an organ system that nobody would have thought could become fossilized."
(The author of this article fixed an incorrect statement made about the Cambrian Explosion).With six months left in the race for private missions to land a rover on the moon and win a $20 million Google Lunar X Prize, an Indian team, which is among four remaining in the fray, is yet to get final approval for launching its rover on board a PSLV XL rocket of the Indian Space Research Organisation.
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Team Indus, a Bengaluru start-up aspiring to be the first Indian private space company, signed a contract with ISRO’s commercial arm Antrix Corporation for a launch but is now awaiting clearance for the launch ahead of a December 31 deadline. The competitors to be the first private mission to the moon has dwindled from 34 in the early days — after the Google Lunar X Prize was announced in 2007 — to a mere four Tuesday as teams have dropped out for various reasons including many over the last year for failing to clinch a viable launch contract with private or government space agencies with launch capabilities.
Team Indus and a Japanese team, Hakuto, are contracted to fly on ISRO’s PSLV XL rocket on December 28, 2017, three days before the closure of the deadline for the Google X Prize contest. The two teams will share the nearly $30 million commercial cost for the launch.
“The necessary approvals for launch of the Team Indus moon mission has not yet concluded. An MoU was signed last year by Antrix Corporation and Team Indus. The launch service has to be authorised by the government and the approval process is going on,” Antrix chairman and managing director Rakesh Sasibhushan said. Sources in ISRO said the MoU is under scrutiny and various questions are being asked about the nature of the launch, the Google Lunar X Prize competition and intellectual property issues involved.
“We have not heard of any questions being raised by the government. We have a launch contract that was signed last year,’’ Team Indus leader Rahul Narayan said when contacted. A private company, Axiom Research Labs Ltd, is the start-up that created Team Indus.
The mission is expected to cost Team Indus in the range of $ 70 million to build its moon rover and spacecraft from scratch and to launch it to the moon. The venture has received the backing of the likes of Ratan Tata, Infosys co-founder Nandan Nilekani, Flipkart founders Sachin and Binny Bansal, TVS Group’s Venu Srinivasan, stock market investor Rakesh Jhunjhunwala and many tech sector start-up investors. The final launch deal in the Google Lunar X Prize contest has been the Achilles heel of teams that have been in the fray until now even as they have worked on engineering and building spacecrafts and rovers that can traverse 500 metres on the moon after landing.
Asked how they were going about securing a launch deal, prior to their late 2016 MoU with Antrix, a Team Indus member told a Reddit forum that their formula was “Love. Hope. Pray — repeat”.
The Google Lunar X Prize, when announced in 2007, was scheduled to conclude in 2012. However the contest has undergone many rule changes and extensions of deadlines to enable contestants to take a shot at sending a private spacecraft to the moon. One of the biggest challenges faced by all start-up teams has been in finding agencies to carry out the expensive launch. Israeli start-up SpaceIL was the first to sew up a commercial space launch deal in 2015 to fly their 500 kg spacecraft aboard the Falcon 9 rocket of the private space firm SpaceX. That deal renewed interest in the contest. There are however reports now indicating that the Israeli team has deferred its moon shot to 2019 on account of scheduling issues.
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Two other teams with verified launch contracts, Moon Express from the US and the international team Synergy Moon, are still in the race to be the first private venture on the moon, alongside Team Indus and the Japanese team Hakuto. The Moon Express and Synergy Moon missions are set to be launched in the second half of the year by space companies whose rockets are not tried and tested. As many as seven global teams that have dropped out of the race to be the first private mission to the moon, meanwhile, continue efforts to travel to the moon in due course.oshThe first two of Israel's Lockheed Martin F-35I "Adir" fighters are scheduled to land in the nation on 12 December, with another six to be delivered in 2017.
Immediately following their arrival, the lead aircraft will have unique systems installed that have been developed to meet the Israeli air force's operational requirements for the stealthy type. Further details of the enhancements have not been disclosed.
Israel has committed to 33 conventional take-off and landing F-35s and intends to increase the number as part of an effort to increase the level of Foreign Military Financing (FMF) made available to it by the USA. Further examples would enable it to fully populate two frontline squadrons with the Adir, and sources suggest an increase will occur regardless of the result of ongoing bilateral negotiations linked to FMF provisioning for the next 10 years.
As part of its acquisition, the Israeli air force will establish facilities to enable it to perform all maintenance on its bases. The service's 22 maintenance unit is already making preparations with dedicated centres, including one related to supporting the use of composite materials.Stick a fork in the federal NDP. They’re done.
These New Democrats, no longer Thomas Mulcair’s NDP as of 3:15 p.m. EDT Sunday, have responded to last October’s electoral disappointment in a classically Liberal-party way; first, by casting aside years of careful strategy in a desperate lunge for something they hope will be shiny and better; second, by dragging the losing leader out behind the barn and ignominiously putting him out of their misery, without so much as a thank you.
The process was inept, curt and callous. It left Mulcair, who drew kudos from all his colleagues when he was winning, without a shred of dignity.
The former opposition leader’s agonizing, day-long execution, including the keynote address during which he |
of the season for everybody and his uncle trying to claim the mantle of the guy “the establishment” hates – as if the GOP establishment was a monolith rather than a loose confederation that couldn’t organize a potluck supper, much less a political campaign (lest we forget, we got to this point in large part because people lost faith that the party establishment was even competent at doing the things we expect party establishments to do). But if you want to know which candidate everybody else in the race truly fears, which candidate people are willing to invest donor money in attacking, follow the money. It’s not Trump. It’s not Cruz. It’s Rubio.With its signature move the "Naki Swipe" perfected, Team Nakibots is ready to take on the world.
The Nakibots' custom-built robot, designed to scoop up orange balls and dump them in a goal inside a small course, the team will compete against 100 other teams at the world championships in Kentucky, USA, next week.
After cleaning up at the national competition in Palmerston North in December Team Nakibots, consisting of Conor Eager, 10, brothers Marco Kraayenhof, 10, and Theo, 8, and Austin Pollard, 9, will be represented by drivers Conor and Austin at the world champs.
To win the competition their robot, Nakibot One, must scoop as many orange balls from the course as possible within one minute, and dump them in a goal at the end.
READ MORE: * Junior robot designers on top of their game
Teams score one point per ball for getting them over the end barrier and three points for getting them in the goal.
The balls float freely in the course but a stand opposite the goal also houses 12 of the balls. Nakibot One has been programmed to perform the "Naki Swipe," which turns the robot's scooper sideways, knocking the balls on to the course so they can be scooped up and dumped in goal.
Nakibot driver Conor Eager reckons Nakibot One, which has been laboured on since August 2015, is capable of scoring roughly 80 points but said other robots he's heard of could score over 90.
"I'm pretty nervous but I think we can make it to the finals," he said.
Conor said the robots came in a kit-set, sort of like Lego, but teams could assemble their robot however they wanted to maximise its goal scoring potential.
"We wanted a big scooper on the front while also maintaining a lot manoevrability," he said.
"We've been practicing for a while now and can score around about 88 in a minute."
Conor and Austin must take turns driving Nakibot One and will have only 30 seconds each to prove their mettle. They also aren't allowed any help from their fathers who will be travelling over with them.
Conor said it had taken a fair bit of fundraising to get them to Kentucky and they had several sponsors as well as a Givealittle page to help them on their way.The Guardian via AFP-Getty Images file A still frame grab recorded on June 6 and released to AFP on June 10 shows Edward Snowden speaking during an interview with The Guardian newspaper at an undisclosed location in Hong Kong.
When Edward Snowden stole the crown jewels of the National Security Agency, he didn’t need to use any sophisticated devices or software or go around any computer firewall.
All he needed, said multiple intelligence community sources, was a few thumb drives and the willingness to exploit a gaping hole in an antiquated security system to rummage at will through the NSA’s servers and take 20,000 documents without leaving a trace.
“It’s 2013 and the NSA is stuck in 2003 technology,” said an intelligence official.
Jason Healey, a former cyber-security official in the Bush Administration, said the Defense Department and the NSA have “frittered away years” trying to catch up to the security technology and practices used in private industry. “The DoD and especially NSA are known for awesome cyber security, but this seems somewhat misplaced,” said Healey, now a cyber expert at the Atlantic Council. “They are great at some sophisticated tasks but oddly bad at many of the simplest.”
As a Honolulu-based employee of Booz Allen Hamilton doing contract work for the NSA, Snowden had access to the NSA servers via "thin client" computer. The outdated set-up meant that he had direct access to the NSA servers at headquarters in Ft. Meade, Md., 5,000 miles away.
In a “thin client” system, each remote computer is essentially a glorified monitor, with most of the computing power in the central server. The individual computers tend to be assigned to specific individuals, and access for most users can be limited to specific types of files based on a user profile.
But Snowden was not most users. A typical NSA worker has a “top secret” security clearance, which gives access to most, but not all, classified information. Snowden also had the enhanced privileges of a “system administrator.” The NSA, which has as many as 40,000 employees, has 1,000 system administrators, most of them contractors.
As a system administrator, Snowden was allowed to look at any file he wanted, and his actions were largely unaudited. “At certain levels, you are the audit,” said an intelligence official.
He was also able to access NSAnet, the agency’s intranet, without leaving any signature, said a person briefed on the postmortem of Snowden’s theft. He was essentially a “ghost user,” said the source, making it difficult to trace when he signed on or what files he accessed.
If he wanted, he would even have been able to pose as any other user with access to NSAnet, said the source.
The “thin client” system and system administrator job description also provided Snowden with a possible cover for using thumb drives.
The system is intentionally closed off from the outside world, and most users are not allowed to remove information from the server and copy it onto any kind of storage device. This physical isolation – which creates a so-called “air gap" between the NSA intranet and the public internet -- is supposed to ensure that classified information is not taken off premises.
But a system administrator has the right to copy, to take information from one computer and move it to another. If his supervisor had caught him downloading files, Snowden could, for example, have claimed he was using a thumb drive to move information to correct a corrupted user profile.
“He was an authorized air gap,” said an intelligence official.
Finally, Snowden’s physical location worked to his advantage. In a contractor’s office 5,000 miles and six time zones from headquarters, he was free from prying eyes. Much of his workday occurred after the masses at Ft. Meade had already gone home for dinner. Had he been in Maryland, someone who couldn’t audit his activities electronically still might have noticed his use of thumb drives.
It’s not yet certain when Snowden began exploiting the gaps in NSA security. Snowden worked for Booz Allen Hamilton for less than three months, and says he took the job in order to have access to documents. But he may have begun taking documents many months before that, while working with the NSA via a different firm. According to Reuters, U.S. officials said he downloaded documents in April 2012, while working for Dell.
Snowden is thought to have made his initial attempt to offer documents to the media in late 2012, while at Dell. According to published accounts, he tried to contact Guardian journalist Glenn Greenwald in December and started talking to filmmaker Laura Poitras in January.
He began working for Booz Allen in March. In May, he told his supervisor he needed to take time off to deal with a health issue, and then flew to Hong Kong, where he met with Poitras and Greenwald, on May 20. He later told the Guardian that he was downloading documents on his last day at work. The revelations based on his documents started appearing in the Guardian and the Washington Post within weeks.
Snowden is currently living in Russia, where he’s been granted temporary asylum. The U.S. government has charged him with theft and violations of the Espionage Act.
U.S. intelligence officials said recently that they plan to significantly reduce the number of individuals with system administrator privileges.
“U.S. intelligence has invited so many people into the secret realm,” said an intelligence official. “There are potentially tons of Edward Snowdens. But most people aren’t willing to vacuum everything up and break the law.”
The NSA did not immediately respond to a request for comment.
Richard Esposito is the Senior Executive Producer for Investigations at NBC News. Matthew Cole is an investigative reporter at NBC News. He can be reached at matthew.cole@nbcuni.com.
More from NBC News Investigations:
Follow NBC News Investigations on Twitter and FacebookSPRINGFIELD, Mo. — Senator John McCain said Wednesday that he wanted 45 new nuclear reactors to be built in the United States by 2030, a goal that he called “as difficult as it is necessary.”
In his third straight day of campaign speechmaking about energy and $4-a-gallon gasoline, the presumptive Republican nominee told the crowd at a town hall-style meeting at Missouri State University that he saw nuclear power as a clean, safe alternative to conventional sources of energy that emit greenhouse gases. He said his ultimate goal was 100 new nuclear plants.
Mr. McCain has long promoted nuclear reactors, but Wednesday was the first time that he specified the number of plants he envisioned. Currently, there are 104 reactors in the country supplying some 20 percent of the electricity consumed. No new nuclear power plant has been built in the United States since the 1970s.
“China, Russia and India are all planning to build more than a hundred new power plants among them in the coming decades,” Mr. McCain said in this pocket of Missouri that is reliably Republican. “Across Europe, there are 197 reactors in operation, and nations including France and Belgium derive more than half their electricity from nuclear power. And if all of these nations can find a way to carry out great goals in energy policy, then I assure you that the United States is more than equal to the challenge.”
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Although there has been a shift in opinion in the industry and among some environmentalists toward more nuclear power — it is clean and far safer than at the time of the Three Mile Island nuclear accident in 1979 — most environmentalists are skeptical of the latest claims by its advocates. They also contend that no utility will put its own money into building a plant unless the federal government lavishly subsidizes it.The Conservatives today criticised the government for failing to support proposals from a number of African countries to impose a 20-year ban on any legal sales of ivory.
The plan, led by Kenya, is being discussed at the meeting of the Convention on International Trade in Endangered Species (Cites) in a bid to tackle the poaching of elephants and rhino.
It counters a bid by Tanzania and Zambia to hold one-off sales of their legally held ivory and "downlist" their elephants from the highest level of protection.
The UK government said it was initially "sympathetic" to the Kenyan proposals, subject to a review after 10 years of the scheme, but the EU, which votes as a bloc at Cites, decided not to back it. But on a Cites vote this week on whether to ban the international trade in bluefin tuna, the UK acted alone rather than as a bloc with Europe and chose to support the Monaco proposal of opposing the ban.
There are concerns that, if the one-off sales of ivory from four African countries in 2008 results in a lower demand for illegal ivory, a 20-year moratorium would not be a positive step.
But conservationists have raised fears over a rise in illegal trade and poaching following the sales, which they believe stimulate the market and provide a cover for traders to offload illegal stocks.
Shadow environment secretary Nick Herbert said the government had "shamefully" refused to support the Kenyan proposal for a ban on sales and continued to back stockpiling of legal ivory - for example from animals which had died naturally.
"Instead of flooding the market with more ivory and legitimising the trade, these stockpiles should be destroyed. We should be choking demand for ivory, not stoking it," he said.
The UK opposes the bids by Tanzania and Zambia to have one-off sales of their ivory, but EU countries are still considering their requests to "downlist" their elephants from Appendix I to Appendix II of the convention.
Such a move would not allow a trade in ivory, but could let other elephant body parts be traded internationally and the sale of live elephants, for example to safari parks elsewhere, could go ahead.
It could pave the way for a potential ivory sale in the future.
A Department for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs (Defra) spokeswoman said: "The EU has agreed with the UK's position to vote against the proposals from Tanzania and Zambia to sell ivory stocks in a one-off sale.
"The EU has decided not to support Kenya's proposal for a moratorium of ivory sales for 20 years."
She said that, regardless, the UK would not consider other sales of ivory until the effects of the 2008 one-off sale of ivory, which was intended to reduce demand for illegal poached ivory, had been fully analysed.
That would take at least another six years, she said.
The 20-year ban would extend an existing nine-year moratorium, agreed at the time the four African countries were given the go-ahead to sell their legal ivory stocks, on any further sales.
Yesterday efforts to increase protection of polar bears and Atlantic bluefin tuna were defeated at the international meeting."Triple H" Paul Levesque's nutritionist Dave Palumbo said WWE's drug policy allows wrestlers to take human growth hormone (hGH) and human chorionic gonadotropin (hCG). Those performance-enhancing drugs are supposedly banned by WWE's wellness policy.
Palumbo did an interview with Matt Riviera, posted to YouTube today, where Riviera asked Palumbo what "supplements" Levesque took to get in shape for WrestleMania. The relevant comments start at about 29:45 into the YouTube clip.
Palumbo insinuated all WWE wrestlers are tested, saying "If you’re getting on that stage to wrestle, you’re gonna be tested. The good thing about wrestling is it’s not a professional sport, per se, it’s more entertainment."
WWE CEO Vince McMahon's interview before a congressional subcommittee in 2007 made it pretty clear the company's drug testing policy only applied to full-time performers.
"[WWE's drug policy] only governs those talents that are regularly scheduled to compete in the ring. I say 'compete,' perform in the ring," McMahon said in 2007.
Palumbo's comments in the interview with Riveria went on to more clearly contradict WWE's wellness policy, claiming wrestlers were allowed to use human growth hormone (hGH) and human chorionic gonadotropin (hCG). He called those drugs "acceptable" and noted "a lot of wrestlers do do it."
Palumbo: The good thing about wrestling is it’s not a professional sport, per se, it’s more entertainment. They’re allowed to take hormone replacement. They can go to an HRT [hormone replacement therapy] place and get, ya know, testosterone replacement, ya know, 100mg a week, whatever they prescribe nowadays. They can get hCG [human chorionic gonadotropin], ya know, hGH [human growth hormone] if they want. Those are acceptable. A lot of the wrestlers do do it, and it’s not for me to say who’s using what, but they’re very minimal doses.
Section 4 of WWE's drug policy, available on its corporate website, provides a list of prohibited substances. It clearly states hCG and hGH are banned.
"The non-medical use of Human Growth Hormone (hGH), Human Chorionic Gonadotropin ((hCG), Luetenizing Hormone (LH) and Insulin-like Growth Factor (IGF-1) is prohibited."
Riviera went on to press Palumbo on whether Triple H used large doses of steroids to get in shape for WrestleMania. Palumbo said Triple H was not taking large doses of steroids, adding Triple H would "love to" be able to do so, but can't.
Riviera: So for Triple H, for him to achieve that physique he was not on large doses of anabolic steroids. Palumbo: No, no they can’t do it. Believe me. I’m sure he would love to do it but ya know they can’t do it. So that’s why diet and supplementation become so important and how you train.
Brock Lesnar failed a drug test in 2016 related to his fight at UFC 200, testing positive for clomiphene: a drug often used when coming off of anabolic steroids. Lesnar was under WWE contract at the time of the drug test failure but received no known punishment from WWE, lending more credence to the notion wrestlers who don't work a full schedule, such as Lesnar and Triple H, aren't subject to drug tests like full-timers are.
In 2004, Palumbo pled guilty and was sentenced to do time in federal prison over selling counterfeit hGH in San Diego, California.
In addition to being Levesque's nutritionist, Palumbo is an accomplished former bodybuilder and YouTuber.
"Roid gut" or "hGH gut" is commonly called Palumboism, named for Palumbo himself.
WWE issued a statement on the matter to Fightful, saying "WWE’s comprehensive Talent Wellness Policy, which is administered by an independent, third-party, clearly states hGH and hCG are among a long list of banned substances, however, due to certain medical conditions, there are a variety of therapeutic exemptions that account for approximately 7% of our contracted talent.”This story is being featured as part of our “Yahoo Best of 2015” series. It was originally published on April 24, 2015.
We, the people, have made it clear that we don?t want smartwatches. They, the watches, have been available for more than a year, courtesy of titans like Google, Samsung, and LG. But so far, the only wrists bearing them belong to former members of high-school A/V clubs.
Apple has the nerve to think it can do better. It believes it can make the smartwatch a mass-market phenomenon, much as it did with digital music players, tablets, and touchscreen phones.
A lot more is riding on the arrival of the Apple Watch than how you?ll use it to check your incoming text messages. The Apple Watch is the first truly new product from Apple since Steve Jobs died. Millions of people have been asking since then,?Can Apple still make hits without Jobs??
We?re about to find out.
The Apple watch is many things. It?s a timepiece, a fitness tracker, and a compact billboard for incoming messages, mail, and phone calls. If you have the right credit card and you?re at the right kind of shop, you can pay for things by waving your wrist with it. It runs very, very tiny apps and games.
READ: 9 Other Apple Watch Reviewers? Opinions
And, of course, it sells iPhones. You can?t use an Apple Watch without an iPhone, just as you can?t use an Android Wear smartwatch without an Android phone.
Once you get to know the watch, you realize that Apple carefully observed its rivals? failures and adjusted its product accordingly. Three things about the Apple Watch are very different:
* It descends from watches. Apple has put as much effort into the style of this device as the electronics. (That?s definitely not true of many Android Wear watches. Wearing some of them is like sporting a VCR on your wrist.)
The Apple Watch is available in three models? all identical except for the metal that forms the case. There?s aluminum alloy (Apple Sport, $350 and up); stainless steel(Apple Watch, $550 and up); and hardened 18K gold (Apple Watch Edition, $10,000and up).
(Did a word get lost in that name? Apple Watch what Edition? Gold Edition? Pricey Edition? Sucker Edition?)
Each comes in two sizes, referred to by jeweler-standard measurements, 38mm and 42mm (1.5 inches and 1.65 inches diagonal); the 42mm size is usually $50 more.
Story continues
The Apple Watch is much smaller, sleeker, and more beautiful than any other smartwatch. Small is so important. It?s the difference between wearing jewelry and strapping on a little phone.
The front glass of the two higher-end models is made of sapphire, which Apple identifies as the second-hardest material on earth, second only to diamond. (Apple probably played with using diamond, but figured a $100,000 watch would be pushing it.)
For each model, furthermore, you have a choice of six watchband styles, made of plastic, leather, or metal. Some offer a choice of color. Some are technological marvels. Some cost more than the watches themselves, like the $450 Link Bracelet.
What was Apple thinking with these breath-catchingly high prices? Is it hoping to depict these as exclusive, rarefied, aspirational products? By offering a $10,000 model, is it hoping to make the $350 and $550 watches look like bargains?
In any case, the watch and its bands are bristling with Apple-esque innovation. You can detach a band, to swap in a new one, just by pressing a button on the underside of the watch. Some of the bands have powerful magnets instead of a buckle or a clasp, which makes slipping the watch on and off delightfully easy.
* The Apple Watch answers the question,?Why?? Why would anyone want a smartwatch, if all it does is duplicate information that?s on your phone?
The Apple Watch makes clear that at least one company has put a good deal of thought into this matter. The back of the watch, for example, is filled with sensors (two LEDs and two cameras) to track your heart rate? something the phone in your pocket can?t do.
And instead of vibrating like a phone, the Apple Watch taps. When it wants your attention? an alarm, an incoming text or call? it actually taps you on the wrist. It?s the wildest, strangest thing. It?s subtle but unmissable, especially when accompanied by the silvery audible pings and chimes that designate different notifications.
Then there?s the more general answer to the?Why?? question. It?s the fact that the average person pulls out his phone 100 times a day. This watch, like all smartwatches, serves as a gatekeeper, a filter. You can glance at your wrist, discreetly and briefly, to see why your phone is trying to get your attention. When you?re in a meeting or in transit, a lot of communiqués aren?t so urgent that you have to deal with them now. With a smartwatch, you can take a peek before committing to hauling out your phone.
On that topic, Apple?s notification management is excellent. You have total control over which kinds of messages tap you on the wrist. You can choose?the same ones I?ve set up on my phone? or override those settings for the watch.
And if some call or alert starts ringing at an inopportune moment, you can shut the watch by pressing your palm against its screen, as though to say,?QUIET!? That?s handy in libraries, churches, or chess matches.
* It?s light-years more sophisticated. Apple?s third strategy for making smartwatches: making them really, really great.
The designers have obsessed over the details of this teeny-tiny operating system to an almost absurd degree. They created a new operating system that?s intended for human interactions that last only seconds. They made a new font whose letter spacing tightens as the size changes? because that?s what looks best on a tiny screen. They created animations that make information glitter and leap. On the Mickey Mouse watch face, they designed the curvature of the little rodent?s hands to match the curves of the font.
On the iPhone, you use a new Apple Watch app to adjust the watch?s brightness, type size and boldness, sound volume, wrist-tapping violence, Do Not Disturb hours, and so on. Here, too, is where you choose which music (up to two gigabytes) you want loaded onto the watch, so that you can listen when you?re away from your phone, and which photos you can see on its tiny screen. And here?s where you indicate that you intend to wear the watch upside down because you?re a lefty. Changes that you make in the app are transferred instantly to the watch? there?s no Save button.
Now, plenty of people probably care less about finesse and more about things like price. But in time, at least some percentage of that effort will make you grateful. You might not care about the cool way the bars of your fitness-goal progress grow around a circular path, but you will certainly appreciate that the Apple Watch never tells you,?Can?t open this data type; view on your phone,? the way Android Wear watches do.
Telling the time
Most of the time, the screen of the watch is dark, to save power. When you lift your arm, it wakes quickly, showing the time. It goes dark again the instant you drop your arm.
When you?re lying down, that arm-lifting bit doesn?t always work, but you can also tap the screen to wake it up.
Unless you change the settings, the watch always wakes up showing you its watch face. You get a selection of 10 watch faces to choose from, and there are hints that someday you?ll be able to install others.
They are stunning, these watch faces.
In Solar, you see a sine wave of the sun?s progress over 24 hours; you can see where it is right now, or you can turn the digital crown to make the little sun speed through the sky to its sunrise or sunset moment.
In Astronomy, you see the Earth from space, correctly illuminated as it appears at this moment. If you tap the tiny Moon icon in the corner, you fly through space, the moon looming larger as you approach, until you?re viewing it as it?s currently illuminated.
In some faces, like Chronology, Utility, Color, and Simple, you can customize the complications that appear in the four corners. (In the watch industry, a complication is actually a desirable feature. It?s information beyond time telling, like a date display or a moon calendar.) You might decide to display the sunset time, battery level, fitness goal, day/date, or stopwatch.
On some faces, you can choose to have numbers or just tick marks? and which numbers, and which tick marks. And what color you want the sweep second hand to be. And what timescale you want the Chronograph to display.
And Mickey Mouse taps his foot once a second, bopping to some little mouse tune that only he hears.
Navigation
Apple has concluded that not all the conventions it developed for the iPhone are usable on a screen this tiny. For example, scrolling with your finger means you?re blocking the screen with your own flesh. And forget about two-finger gestures. If you have only an inch to pinch, there?s no room to zoom.
So in the end, Apple has designed three different physical controls for interaction with the watch:
* The digital crown. You can scroll with your finger on the touchscreen. But Apple has also provided a knob on the side? a digital crown, they call it? that you can use for zooming and scrolling. It?s like the winding crown on a traditional watch, or, if you?d rather, a tiny, knurled descendant of the clickwheel on the old iPods.
You turn it when you want to zoom into a photo or map, when you want to scroll through a message or list, and when you?re choosing complications on those watch faces. Here, for example, is how your photos first appear (left)? and what you see when you?ve zoomed all the way in to one (right).
You also use the crown as a button. Clicking it once backs you out to the previous screen. Holding it in triggers Siri, which works impressively well.
The watch communicates with the iPhone over Bluetooth? and Wi-Fi, which is something Android Wear watches can only dream about. So even if your phone is out of Bluetooth range from your watch, as long as both are on the same Wi-Fi network the phone can still be the comm center for the watch.
And here?s a surprising feature that Apple hasn?t said anything about previously: When the watch is in a known Wi-Fi hotspot, the watch can perform the most essential online functions even when your phone is completely dead, turned off, or absent. It can query Siri, for example, send and receive texts, and send/receive drawings and tap patterns to other watch owners. That?s impressive.
* The side button. Below the crown, on the side of the watch, there?s a relatively jumbo metal button, which Apple wittily calls the side button. Pressing it brings up a circular display of your most-contacted contacts; turn the crown to choose one for calling or messaging (below, left).
Once you?ve selected a person, you have three options (below, center). First, you can place a call.
Yes, this watch has a speaker and microphone. The audio is fine in a quiet room, but hard to hear if there?s background noise. You do look a little demented talking with your wrist held up to your head. And you have to pity the state legislatures all across America that have just finished passing?no cellphones in the car? laws. Now you can make calls from your wrist. Is that breaking the law?
Second, you can send a text message. You can scroll through a list of canned messages like?OK? and?I?m on my way,? which you can send with one tap. You can customize these in the phone app? change them to say?You light up my life, wife!? or??Sup, Daddy-O?,? for example. You can dictate a message using Siri. Apple made no attempt to add a keyboard on the watch, thank goodness.
If someone texts you with a question, by the way, the watch sometimes makes an attempt to offer the logical responses as pretyped buttons, like this:
When it works, it?s absolutely amazing.
And? I swear, this will sell more Apple Watches than any other feature? you can dial up an animated emoji. This is incredibly hard to describe, but here goes:
You start with a smiley, or a heart, or a white-gloved hand. As you turn the crown, that face/heart/hand changes, moving through hundreds of frames, hundreds of variations. The face goes through every shade of human emotion; the heart sprouts wings or an arrow; the hand holds up a finger, or three, or five, or makes a fist. When you find the frame you like, you can send it to the other guy?s phone? where it will animate that frame. The hand will twitch a little, the face will nod, whatever.
Or this: If the recipient also has an Apple Watch, you can draw on your screen. A little heart, house,?forbidden? symbol, face? anything. That drawing appears instantly on the other person?s watch screen, animating as though you?re a ghost drawing it right now, from thousands of miles away.
You can also send your current heartbeat, which the other person feels as thump-thump taps on the wrist, accompanied by an animated heart.
And you can send Morse code-like patterns, watch to watch. You tap your screen, and the recipient feels it on her wrist. You might, for example, have a prearranged code that means?Thinking of you? or?Coming home!? or?This party?s dead. Can we go now??
Talk about reaching out to touch someone! These features create a long-distance intimacy that?s never been possible before. It?s really freaking cool.
Oh? and if you?ve set up Apple Pay on your phone, pressing the side button twice lets you pay with the watch if you?re in a shop or restaurant that has the right kind of wireless terminal.
(And what?s to stop a bad guy from stealing your watch, and thereby buying stuff on your Apple Pay account? Easy: The instant the watch comes off your wrist, it requires a password before you can use it again. Nice.)
* The touchscreen. You tap buttons and icons on the screen. You can also force-press things, which means tapping hard. Clever, really, and also new in the tech world? on some devices you can long-press, but that?s for people with time on their hands.
Force-pressing is like right-clicking: it opens up additional options, like the Flag, Unread, and Trash buttons for an email message you?re reading.
There?s a lot of swiping, too. From the main clock screen, you swipe down to view all the notifications that have piled up? messages, calls, email, Facebook, Twitter, and so on.
You swipe up to view a sideways-scrolling parade of what Apple calls Glances. These are single-screen dashboards for other apps on the watch: Stocks, Weather, Fitness, Battery Life, Twitter, World Clock, your next Calendar appointment, where you are on the Map, and so on. You can tap one of these glances to open the corresponding app.
The truth is, navigation is a big watch weakness. There aren?t any visual clues that more options are waiting if you force-press, or that anything will happen when you turn the knob. You eventually learn, but only by trial and error. And every time you force-press or turn the knob and nothing happens, you feel like a dolt.
Apps
Yes, there is an app store, and there are preinstalled apps on this watch. If you press the crown clicker enough times, you wind up at the launcher screen, which looks like this:
It?s very cool-looking? you drag your finger around to shift this display, fluidly and easily, and you can organize the icons just the way you can on the iPhone?s Home screens.
But it?s hard to believe that whoever designed this was the same person who lost sleep over Mickey Mouse?s finger curvature. How on earth are you supposed to know what those microscopic icons are? There are no labels, and the icons themselves are about the size of carbon molecules.
Again, you learn in time. But picking out an app is not nearly as fluid on the watch as its other features.
So what are these apps? Here are some of the best:
* Maps. As you drive, your watch is a tiny GPS screen. (The watch doesn?t have GPS of its own, but your phone does.) When it?s time to make a turn, the watch taps you twice on the wrist and displays a big arrow. It?s fantastic.
If only it could work with the phone?s Google Maps app instead of the still-hobbled Apple Maps app!
* Camera. The watch can be a remote screen for your phone?s camera, complete with a shutter button and a three-second-delay shutter button (below, left). That means that, for the first time, you can use the good, high-resolution camera on the back of your phone for selfies, instead of the crummy one on the front; you use the watch to frame up the shot.
That also bodes well for anyone who wants to capture interesting angles? put the phone in the crook of a tree, for example? or anyone who?s a spy.
* Passbook. Once you?ve stored your boarding pass in the iPhone?s Passbook app, you can access it and display its barcode, for the TSA?s benefit at the airport, right on the watch (above). Yes, I tried it. Yes, it was awesome. Yes, I got looks from people.
* Remote. You can control your phone?s music playback from one of the Glances (play, pause, skip). But the Remote app lets you control your computer?s iTunes playback, or navigate an Apple TV.
* Mail. You can read, delete, and flag messages on the watch, but you can?t compose new ones or reply.
* Workout. Health tracking is a huge, beautifully implemented aspect of the watch. All day long, the watch watches. It generally tracks three statistics: how much time you?ve spent moving (i.e., not sitting); how much time you?ve spent exercising (moved more vigorously? for example, a brisk walk); and how many times you?ve stood up from your sedentary position.
At your option, it can suggest that you get up and walk around for a minute after each hour you?ve spent rotting in a chair.
The graph of your progress is available in a Glance, on some of the watch faces, and on the iPhone in a corresponding Activity app. It also shows up in the iPhone?s Health app, which you can use to further slice and dice your fitness graphs.
There?s also a separate Workout app on the watch. It offers buttons for various workouts: Outdoor Walk, Outdoor Run, Indoor Walk, Outdoor Cycle, Elliptical, Rower, Stair Stepper, and so on.
During a workout, the watch tracks your heart rate continuously? sometimes you can even see the eerie green light from the sensor spilling out on your wrist. (The rest of the day, it checks your heart rate every 10 minutes.) It uses the other sensors from the watch and the phone to track as much as it can about your workout.
Now, even if you leave your phone at home, the watch can track your runs. But it doesn?t have its own GPS, so how is that possible?
Get this: The watch?s motion sensor (accelerometer) knows every time you take a step, but it doesn?t know how far that step has taken you. But if you start out your watch ownership by going for a run with your phone, which does have GPS, the watch correlates your number of steps (and frequency) with the distance you?re covering.
In other words, the watch soon learns how much distance you cover with each footstep? it even differentiates between quicker footsteps and slower ones. Thereafter, it can calculate the distance you?ve run all by itself. That is slick.
And, of course, while you?re out running, you?re listening to music on Bluetooth headphones. Without your phone.
And now the bad news
According to Apple, the watch?s battery runs about 18 hours on a charge. In typical Apple fashion, that?s being modest; in two different tests, I tried to see how long it could go without a nightly charging. Both times, it lasted well into the afternoon of the second day? more than 24 hours.
And when your Apple Watch does approach the end of its battery power, it enters a Power Reserve mode with no functions except timekeeping? it?ll go another week like that.
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and who gets what capital project."
During her sabbatical, she plans to brush up on teaching and instructional technology to properly return to the classroom. This could include going back to El Colegio de Mexico where she received her Ph.D to sit in on classes and possibly guest teach, plus some fun things like traveling, reading, playing music and spending time with family.
After her sabbatical, her current plan is to return to SU as a faculty member for the 2019-2020 academic year. Dudley-Eshbach became a teacher at age 25 and planned to stay as a college or university faculty member throughout her career.
But, after teaching for about seven years, she quickly moved into administration, starting in a part-time role at Goucher College, she said. Now, with the opportunity to get back into the classroom, Dudley-Eshbach is excited to work with students teaching her passion: Spanish.
"I miss that. I love interacting with students," she said.
Read or Share this story: http://www.delmarvanow.com/story/news/2017/09/27/su-president-dudley-eshbach-stepping-down-spring-2018/707870001/These decadent chocolate bites are completely dairy-free, but still smooth and creamy thanks to all the coconut oil, and they’re easy to tweak exactly to your tastes. They’d be the perfect low-carb Halloween treat: with just 2 tablespoons of sweetener for the whole batch, the calories in this recipe come out to 79% fat, 18% carbs, and 3% protein. And most of that fat is coming from coconut oil, which is a very ketogenic fat if you’re interested in ketosis as a dietary goal.
You can use your favorite shape of candy mold to make these, and you can add in whatever goodies you like – berries, nuts, coconut flakes, cacao nibs, dried fruit, or whatever you can think of. The one thing to be aware of is that they don’t last very long out of the freezer: if you leave them out to get warm, they’ll quickly melt again and you’ll end up with chocolate puddles.
If you want more of this recipe, just double the amount of everything and go to town. Kids will love them, and especially if you’re strictly dairy-free, they’re a great way to enjoy chocolate on Paleo without any potential dairy issues.
Chocolate-Coconut Bites Recipe
SERVES: 4 PREP: 15 min. Freeze: 20 min.
Protein: 2g / % Carbs: 25g / % Fat: 28g / % Values are per portion. These are for information only & are not meant to be exact calculations.
Ingredients
1/2 cup coconut oil, melted;
1/2 cup raw cocoa powder;
2 tbsp. raw honey or maple syrup;
1/2 tsp. pure vanilla extract;
Your choice of toppings (nuts, dried fruit, etc.)
Sea salt;
PreparationAn NBN rematch for Conroy?
The moment when the apparently dead mistress – memorably played by Glenn Close – bursts back to life from the bath tub and tries to stab her estranged lover in 'Fatal Attraction' shocked and terrified millions of cinema-goers all over the world.
The audience for last night’s edition of Richo on Sky News may have been smaller but their shock would have been just as great when the former communications minister Stephen Conroy announced that he was coming back from the political wilderness; and re-nominating for the party’s front bench.
When Conroy bowed out of the ministry following the restoration of Kevin Rudd as Prime Minister, it seemed likely that after spending six years in the political trenches as the standard bearer for the National Broadband Network (NBN), Conroy would now be taking a backseat role.
Conroy has been at the epicentre of ALP federal politics for 15 years since joining the shadow front bench in 1998. Few could have blamed him for taking the easy option and letting others do the hard yards, but Conroy is raging furiously against the dying of the light.
Given his political power-base it is a certainty that Conroy will win that seat on the shadow front bench – the question is which one?
In his interview on Richo, Conroy attacked the plans of incoming Communications Minister Malcolm Turnbull to radically re-shape the NBN, setting the scene for a scenario where he and his NBN nemesis could possibly swap roles in the next parliament.
Some insiders say that Conroy might be looking for a more senior role on the opposition front bench but the mere possibility of a Turnbull-Conroy re-match in the next parliament makes the Ali-Frazier ‘Thriller in Manila’ epic re-match in 1975 look like a tiff between two grannies at the Murwillumbah RSL.
NBN "snakes and honey"
There is absolutely no love lost between Turnbull and Conroy with their relationship seeming to get increasingly bitter as the NBN project itself veered further off the rails – much to Turnbull’s delight and Conroy’s huge frustration.
Nobody on the Labor benches knows the NBN project like Conroy and – to use the words of one of his ex-staffers - nobody knows where the “snakes and honey” are on the project better than Conroy, so there is little doubt he would be formidable in the role.
However, the problem for Conroy is that there is a gentleman impatiently pacing the doorway of NBN Co HQ at 100 Arthur Street, North Sydney like an alcoholic hovering on the doors of the Kings Arms just before opening time – his name is Malcolm Bligh Turnbull.
It would be under-statement of the century to say that Turnbull and his team are keen to get access to the books at NBN Co – not least the latest Corporate Plan that outgoing Communications Minister Anthony Albanese controversially refused to release before the election.
NBN Co was a huge part of the story of the outgoing Labor government and yet with the party’s defeat at last week’s election they have been forced to leave the company – whose staff includes ALP luminaries such as Mike Kaiser - on the battlefield completely at the mercy of its political enemies.
A dangerous legacy
This is the obvious danger for Conroy if he returned to defend his legacy as shadow communications minister, the fact that his opponents are now in possession of the precious prize – NBN Co – and will be able to uncover even the most minor mistakes made by the company these last four years – and then pin them all right on his forehead.
Turnbull and his team will no doubt find enough material at NBN Co HQ to fill hundreds of pages of content in their post-election review of the project and it is very doubtful that Conroy will be getting called to the front of the class and given a gold star for his handiwork when the reviews are published.
So, even if Conroy wants to lace up the gloves and defend his legacy it might make a lot more sense for the ALP to gently persuade him that his talents would be better used elsewhere in the shadow ministry – although that will be no easy task if he really wants the role.
However, even if someone else did take the shadow communications portfolio – with the admirable Ed Husic seemingly a prime contender –Conroy is such a powerful figure in ALP ranks (especially now Kevin Rudd has been sidelined - for now at least) that his spectre will inevitably loom over their shoulder.
In the election campaign this was not a significant problem for Anthony Albanese because the goal was simply to back in the existing all-Fiber-to-the-Premise (FTTP) model and repeat ad nauseam ‘Fraudband’ and ‘Mr Copper’ whenever engaging with Turnbull.
However, although the ALP will almost certainly maintain their all-FTTP model in the next parliament the shadow communications minister may eventually have to start making some compromises to the party’s rival NBN policy – but that won’t be easy to get past Conroy in shadow cabinet.
Judging by his complete and utter disdain for Kevin Rudd’s attempts to allow party members a vote in electing the federal leadership it seems that getting Conroy to change his mind on anything – let alone the NBN - is like trying to persuade Rev. Ian Paisley to take his summer holidays in Vatican City.
So, whether he takes the shadow communications minister role or something else Stephen Conroy is going to be playing some sort of role in the great NBN drama for a while yet – it takes more than a thumping election loss to kill this bloke off.
Tony Brown is a senior analyst with Informa Telecoms & Media. He is a key member of the Broadband and Internet Intelligence Centre team, covering the broadband and Internet markets of the Asia Pacific region.
Setting the agenda for Australia's $150BN agribusiness sector The program for Australia's premier agribusiness conference - The Global Food Forum - is set. Hear from more than 30 industry leaders including PepsiCo's CEO, Danny Celoni, Jayne Hrdlicka, CEO of A2 Milk Company, Barry Irvin, Executive Chairman, Bega Cheese and Costco's Managing Director, Patrick Noone. Sheraton Grand Sydney Hyde Park Book NowThis spring, the United Arab Emirates is expected to close a deal for $7 billion dollars' worth of American arms. Nearly half of the cash will be spent on Patriot missiles, which cost as much as $5.9 million apiece.
But what makes those eye-popping sums even more shocking is that some of the workers manufacturing parts for those Patriot missiles are prisoners, earning as little as 23 cents an hour. (Credit Justin Rohrlich with the catch.)
The work is done by Unicor, previously known as Federal Prison Industries. It's a government-owned corporation, established during the Depression, that employs about 20,000 inmates in 70 prisons to make everything from clothing to office furniture to solar panels to military electronics.
One of the company's high-tech specialties: Patriot missile parts. "UNICOR/FPI supplies numerous electronic components and services for guided missiles, including the Patriot Advanced Capability (PAC-3) missile," Unicor's website explains. "We assemble and distribute the Intermediate Frequency Processor (IFP) for the PAC-3s seeker. The IFP receives and filters radio-frequency signals that guide the missile toward its target."
The missiles are then marketed worldwide – sometimes by Washington's top officials. Last year, Secretary of Defense Robert Gates pitched the Patriots to the Turkish government last year, a diplomatic cable released by WikiLeaks reveals: "SecDef stressed that 'nothing can compete with the PAC-3 when it comes to capabilities.'"
Patriot assemblers Raytheon and Lockheed Martin aren't the only defense contractors relying on prison help. As Rohrlich notes, Unicor "inmates also make cable assemblies for the McDonnell Douglas/Boeing F-15, the General Dynamics/Lockheed Martin F-16, Bell/Textron’s Cobra helicopter, as well as electro-optical equipment for the BAE Systems Bradley Fighting Vehicle’s laser rangefinder."
Unicor used to make helmets for the military, as well. But that work was suspended when 44,000 helmets were recalled for shoddy quality.
Government agencies – with the exception of the Defense Department and the CIA – are required to buy goods from Unicor, according to a Congressional Research Service report (.pdf). And no wonder: the labor costs are bordering on zero. "Inmates earn from $0.23 per hour up to a maximum of $1.15 per hour, depending on their proficiency and educational level, among other things," the report notes.
Last year, Unicor grossed $772 million, according to its most recent financial report (.pdf). Traditionally, inmate salaries make up about five percent of that total.
Unicor insists that the deal is a good one for inmates – and for the government. The manufacturing work offers a chance for job training, which "improves the likelihood that inmates will remain crime-free upon their release," the company says in its report. (Some reports suggest that Unicor prisoners are as much as 24% less likely to return to crime.)
The work also keeps the inmates in check, Unicor insists. "In the face of an escalating inmate population and an increasing percentage of inmates with histories of violence, FPI’s programs have helped ease tension and avert volatile situations, thereby protecting lives and federal property," the company says. "Prisons without meaningful activities for inmates are dangerous prisons, and dangerous prisons are expensive prisons."
Photo: U.S. Army
See Also:EDMONTON – After battling through leukemia, six-year-old Halle Popowich was asked by the Children’s Wish Foundation what her greatest wish was. Halle’s answer surprised and touched many, and has brought the community together to see her wish become a reality.
Halle was diagnosed with a rare form of leukemia in June 2012. She lived in the hospital for months; undergoing treatment, and finally, a life-saving bone marrow transplant.
The Children’s Wish Foundation approached Halle and her family and asked her if there was a wish the organization could grant her.
“I’d probably ask for something for me,” admits Noah Giordano, a boy who attends Halle’s school in St Albert. “I would have asked for a trip to Disney world or something, but that just amazes me what she asked for.”
Halle requested new playground equipment for her school.
“The piece that she was looking at was $20,000 so the Children’s Wish covers $11,000 and her family decided to match it,” explains Jennifer Doucette-Giordano, a J.J. Nearing Elementary School parent.
“The kids are so excited,” says Jan Maslyk, the school’s principal. “It was such a gift for her to do this and think of the playground… it was great, we really need it.”
“If Halle’s little dream comes true what would happen is we would have her big structure right over there. We would then have a couple little pieces here,” adds Maslyk pointing to the school yard. “Her dream to add to that is a rock kind of climbing rope thing, but that’s a pretty expensive piece.”
Now, the community is helping the cause by raising money for the project and the construction work needed to install the playground equipment.
“Her mom came in one council meeting, and told us how Halle was doing and about her wish. And it just touched all of our hearts,” adds Doucette-Giordano.
She went home that night and told her husband about Halle and her wish.
“I told him about this wonderful little girl, and this selfless thing she asked for. Really, she could have asked for anything, and she asked for playground equipment for her school.”
“What can we do? We can’t excavate, we can’t afford to buy the equipment ourselves. And that’s when we decided: we can fundraise.”
Doucette-Giordano has four children of her own, all of whom were impressed with Halle’s wish and wanted to help in their own way.
“I gave $25 for the fundraiser from my piggy bank,” says eight-year-old Isabella. “I wanted her wish to come true. If I were her I’d just pick Disneyworld…I thought it was amazing that it’s not just for herself but for everyone.”
The fundraising campaign is now picking up steam. Along with the support of the Children’s Wish Foundation and the Popowich family, members of the school community – and even strangers – are joining the effort to make Halle’s playground wish become a reality.
“They meet her and right away they want to help her,” says Maslyk. “She’s an adorable child.”
“This little girl just beams with gentleness, kindness…She’s just a little ray of sunshine. You hear that, well Halle is that.”
People are contributing funds to cover the remaining funds needed to expand the playground area in a number of ways, including on Facebook, through the school, and in partnership with seven Save-On-Foods locations.
“It’s been an amazing and overwhelming response already,” says Sara Scott, Assistant Store Manager with Save-On-Foods.
“We have a program, corporately driven, that if you donate a thousand points, it’s worth a dollar, and then our company will match that dollar. So every thousand points is worth two dollars,” she explains.
“We had a customer donate 168,000 points just because they saw a poster and wanted to be involved.”
“When you see something that you can make better by something so insignificant like a thousand Save-On-More points, you want to be a part of that,” says Scott.
Given the huge response, the fundraiser organizers are hoping they’ll be able to surpass Halle’s original wish.
“What we would love to give her is more than what she’s asked for. We would like to give her her own little addition to the park with three or four pieces on it. That would be our dream. That would be an amazing little gift for her I think,” says Doucette-Giordano.
The group hopes to excavate an area large enough to allow for additional pieces of playground equipment, which can be installed now or in the future, depending on how much money is raised.
“I hope to see this whole area filled in with Halle’s pieces and just her playing on it with all the other kids, that’s the most important thing.”
Follow @Emily_MertzIf you follow the field of neuromarketing, you may be aware that what we report liking or finding most effective is often very different from what our brains tell us we really like. This has again been reported in a new study by researchers at UCLA who looked at both self reported preference and brain responses to public service announcements in relation to smoking cessation. Showing smokers three different anti-smoking campaign videos, the researchers recorded the verbal responses as to which the participants considered to be most effective, as well as submitting the participants to fMRI scans to record brain activity in response to the ads. While most participants verbally reported videos A and B to be most effective, their brains told a very different story. For most participants, increased activity in the prefrontal cortex, an area considered important for persuasion according to previous studies, was apparent during the viewing of video C.
The effectiveness of video C was also backed up external to the study. When the campaigns aired on television, the National Cancer Institute recorded greater response and calls to their 1-800-QUIT_NOW telephone line in areas where campaign video C was shown.
Which ads are winners? Your brain knows better than you do
Study on smokers’ brains may mark dawn of a new age in advertising
Advertisers and public health officials may be able to access hidden wisdom in the brain to more effectively sell their products and promote health and safety, UCLA neuroscientists report in the first study to use brain data to predict how large populations will respond to advertisements.
Thirty smokers who were trying to quit watched television commercials from three advertising campaigns, which all ended by showing the phone number of the National Cancer Institute’s smoking-cessation hotline. They were asked which commercials they thought would be most effective; they responded that advertising campaigns “A” and “B” would be the best and “C” would be the worst.
The UCLA researchers also consulted experts who work in the anti-smoking field and who have been involved in creating anti-smoking advertisements. These experts agreed that campaigns “A” and “B” were the best and “C” was the worst.
While the smokers watched the advertisements, they underwent functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) brain scans at UCLA’s Ahmanson–Lovelace Brain Mapping Center, and the neuroscientists focused on part of the medial prefrontal cortex — located in the front of the brain, between the eyebrows — a region that they have found to be especially important in previous persuasion studies.
The researchers found that activity in the medial prefrontal cortex increased much more during advertising campaign “C” than it did during campaign “A,” and somewhat more than it did during campaign “B.”
“The medial prefrontal cortex predicted ‘C’ would be the best, ‘B’ would be second best and ‘A’ would be the worst — essentially the opposite of what the experts and the participants told us they thought would happen,” said the study’s senior author, Matthew Lieberman, a UCLA professor of psychology and of psychiatry and biobehavioral sciences.
“We didn’t expect how radically different people’s predictions would be from the predictions we made based on their brain activity,” said Lieberman, one of the founders of social cognitive neuroscience. “We had people telling us one thing and this brain region telling us something diametrically opposed.”
Initially, Lieberman and first author Emily Falk, an assistant professor of communication studies and psychology at the University of Michigan–Ann Arbor, were concerned when they saw the results from the medial prefrontal cortex.
“We were hoping the brain data would add something to the self-reports of our participants,” Lieberman said. “Given how different they were from one another, we were afraid our brain data might not end up predicting the real-world outcomes at all.”
A few months later, after the advertisements had been broadcast, the authors received the call-volume data from the National Cancer Institute’s 1-800-QUIT-NOW hotline. They compared the number of people who called the hotline the month before and the month after each of the advertising campaigns was run. All three advertising campaigns were successful in increasing the number of phone calls to the hotline. Campaign “A” more than doubled the number of calls, “B” increased the number of calls more than ten-fold and “C” boosted the number of calls a remarkable thirty-fold. (The advertisements were shown in Michigan, Massachusetts and Louisiana.)
Activity in the medial prefrontal cortex predicted which ads persuaded more people to call the hotline significantly better than the smokers’ own thoughts about how successful the ads would be.
The research is published this month in the online edition of the journal Psychological Science, the premier journal for psychological science research, with print publication to follow.
What are the implications for the advertising industry, which often relies, at least partly, on unscientific focus groups?
“If people are making decisions based on what focus groups tell them, here’s an important brain region saying, ‘No, spend your money a different way,'” Lieberman said. “If I were deciding on an advertising campaign, I would want to know which ads are activating this region the most — that is where I would want to spend my money.”
This new research represents “the first thing you could call a neural focus group,” Lieberman said.
One reason focus groups can be misleading, he said, is that people often do not know what motivates their own behavior.
“Our brain is built to generate reasons for our actions,” Lieberman said, “and we think the reasons we come up with must be true. We believe our own reasons with an intensity that is out of proportion to their accuracy. In this study, we are bypassing people’s self-reports and getting at a form of hidden wisdom in the brain.
“We wanted to determine what kind of brain activity serves as the catalyst between people seeing a message and whether they actually change their behavior,” he said. “This is the region we identified. We have tested it multiple times, and each time, it has been successful.”
John Wanamaker, a 19th-century U.S. department store pioneer, famously said he wasted half the money he spent on advertising, but “the trouble is I don’t know which half.” Many people since Wanamaker have hoped to predict which advertising campaigns will succeed or fail before committing their advertising dollars.
“We’re too late for Wanamaker, but now we have a method for figuring out which ads will succeed,” Lieberman said.
The 30 smokers in the study were between the ages of 28 and 69; half were female.
Brain regions associated with thinking analytically have not been consistently associated with whether people change their behavior in these studies, Lieberman said. The medial prefrontal cortex is associated not with analytical thinking but with self-reflection — thinking about our own identity as well as what we like and do not like.
“Persuasive advertising seems to be about getting to people’s hearts and their identity,” Lieberman said. “We are just at the beginning of this line of research. There are many more questions than answers, but the initial results have been promising.”
In research Lieberman and Falk published in the Journal of Neuroscience in 2010, greater activity in the same medial prefrontal region was predictive of who would increase their sunscreen usage after seeing persuasive messages about daily sunscreen use.
“We knew from prior studies that this brain region predicted people’s behavior change in response to a persuasive message,” Lieberman said.
With the new study, Lieberman and his colleagues wanted to know whether they could predict not only people’s own behavior but use these brain responses to predict how effective advertisements would be throughout the country.
Persuasion research has many applications, Lieberman noted, “including how teachers can communicate better so their students won’t tune out and how doctors can convince patients to stick to their instructions. We all use persuasion in some form or another every day.”
About the research:
Elliot Berkman, a former UCLA graduate student of psychology in Lieberman’s laboratory who is currently an assistant professor of psychology at the University of Oregon, was a co-author of this new study. Falk earned her UCLA doctorate in psychology, conducting research in Lieberman’s laboratory, in 2010.
Video A:
Video B:
Video C:
To view samples of anti-smoking ads, please visit:
www.youtube.com/watch?v=lf01Ti6bH8U
www.youtube.com/watch?v=dR6odVmNTlw
www.youtube.com/watch?v=weVp5FXVyqM
Contact: Stuart Wolpert
Original Press Release Source: University of California – Los AngelesOfficers want to speak to this man (Picture: PA)
Police have released CCTV images of two men they are seeking in connection with two rapes on the same teenage victim.
The 14-year-old girl was approached outside Witton railway station in Birmingham, before being led to a secluded area and raped.
Someone hammered a pick axe through the bonnet of a car
She was attacked again after flagging down a passing vehicle for help a few hours later.
After climbing into the car she was raped a second time by a man described as having large biceps.
In a bid to find the suspects, officers have released these images of two men they want to speak to in relation to the first rape.
This man is also wanted in connection with the attack (Picture: PA)
One man is described as Asian, in his early twenties, slim, about 6ft tall with light skin and brown eyes. He was wearing a grey tracksuit top and bottoms, and black trainers.
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The second man is believed to be in his early twenties, Asian, 5ft 6ins to 5ft 7ins, of large build, with a tight beard. He was wearing a blue jumper and black jeans.
A third man wanted over the sex attack in the car is described as thick set, about 5ft 6ins with large biceps.
Senior Investigating Officer DCI Tony Fitzpatrick, said: ‘Our investigation is moving at a fast pace and today we are releasing multiple CCTV images of men we wish to speak with in connection.
‘I would like to hear from anyone who might know who these men are. Likewise, if you saw these men between Tuesday evening and Wednesday morning then please get in touch. Your information could prove vital in our enquiries.
‘In particular, I would like to hear from anyone who might have seen a teenage girl walking near to Witton station at approximately 2am on Wednesday morning. If you were in the area at the time or live locally to Witton station then please contact us if you heard or saw anything out of the ordinary.’Career officials are in open revolt over at the Office of Special Counsel.
The underlings are outraged at their boss, Scott Bloch, who is under investigation by the FBI. The one man in the Bush Administration who is supposed to investigate whistle blower complaints is himself accused of retaliating against whistle blowers.
“We’re trying to deal with this by decapitation,” one official told TPM. “The big question is: Why isn’t the White House letting him go?”
Meanwhile, Bloch is desperately trying to improve morale.
Against the advice of career officials in the office — some of whom have been subpoenaed in the investigation — Bloch is convening a day-long “retreat” in Alexandria, VA, flying in officials from offices in Dallas, Oakland and Detroit, for a pep talk.
During the training session, Bloch himself will give a talk entitled: “Training on Accountability, Efficiency, OSC’s Independence, and “What a Whistleblower is.”
The meeting was scaled back from Bloch’s original idea of a multi-day retreat out in the Shenandoah Valley.
“He brought up the idea and said, ‘What does everybody think? And everybody just kind of sat there,” the official said.
We’ll post the agenda for next week’s retreat shortly.
Late Update : One former OSC official points to the afternoon session on “E-Discovery Training” and says it’s “ironic in the extreme, given the accusations of his own attempted destruction of computer files that were requested in connection with the investigation of him!”
Bloch reportedly hired Geeks on Call to erase his email files.
Late Update: Here’s the agenda.Meditation is a popular subject that comes with many different connotations. For many, it is seen as a type of magical or esoteric tool that connects you with a supreme force of the universe.
However, according to The Mindful Geek: Secular Meditation for Smart Skeptics, meditation is simply a type of technology for your mind.
We often associate the word “technology” with machines and computers, but technology is any type of process, skill, or method that is designed to improve our lives and how we navigate through the world. In this sense, meditation is no more magical than a computer or cellphone.
Throughout the book, Michael Taft does an excellent job breaking down the basics of meditation in a realistic and practical way that doesn’t involve any type of religious or spiritual doctrine. It’s a technology that anyone can use without any supernatural belief.
Taft compares meditation to other types of technology – like a telescope or microscope – which are ultimately designed to extend our awareness toward sensations that we are otherwise unable to detect with the naked eye.
Just like a telescope can extend our sensory experience to distant stars and planets, or a microscope can extend our sensory experience to cells or atoms, meditation too can extend our sensory experience to our inner world of sensations, thoughts, and feelings.
Here Taft explains how meditation is an “awareness-extending” technology:
“Meditation is a kind of awareness-extending technology, like a telescope or a microscope. When you begin the practice of mindfulness, you are training your awareness on present-moment sensory experience. At first this will feel pretty normal. But after awhile, you’ll be able to greatly increase your ability to detect finer and finer qualities of sensation at ever smaller scales. Your brain just gets better at detecting the sensations in finer and finer areas of the body. This aspect of meditation is called ‘sensory clarity,’ where you use your awareness like a telescope or microscope to ‘see’ subtler sensory experiences. Sensory clarity takes awhile to develop and requires that you attempt to make ever-finer sensory distinctions in your meditation practice.”
Thinking of meditation as a type of technology helps to strip away the “magical” or “esoteric” connotations that often come with it. It’s not anything special, but it’s a technique for how to better use what our minds are already equipped to do.
The 3 main components of meditation
Meditation can be broken down into three main components that have nothing to do with magic or supernatural forces, but are simply different aspects of how our minds work.
These 3 components of meditation include:
Concentration – Our ability to focus on one object of our awareness for an extended period of time (like the sensations of our breathing).
– Our ability to focus on one object of our awareness for an extended period of time (like the sensations of our breathing). Sensory Clarity – Our ability to detect subtle sensations in our body with greater and greater clarity (like noticing a small ache in your back that you hadn’t noticed before).
– Our ability to detect subtle sensations in our body with greater and greater clarity (like noticing a small ache in your back that you hadn’t noticed before). Acceptance – Our ability to sense an experience without judging it as “good” or “bad,” but just noticing it as is (like focusing on the sensations of an emotion like fear, without wanting to ignore or run away from it).
This, in essence, is all that meditation consists of. It can seem almost too simple, yet being able to harness these three aspects of meditation can have life-changing effects.
The metaphor of meditation as a video screen
One great metaphor throughout the book is comparing meditation to a video screen. Thinking of meditation in this way can help give you a clearer idea of what it is each of these three components are in the human mind.
For example, imagine you are watching a movie on a big screen TV.
“Concentration” means you can direct your attention to any part of the screen you want without getting distracted. “Sensory clarity” is like switching the screen from low-resolution to high definition, giving you a clearer picture of what you’re viewing. And “Acceptance” is how the screen displays whatever signal it gets, without judging or controlling the content (not wanting to change the channel).
This metaphor can be very helpful for understanding meditation in a commonsense way. Most of us are familiar with how TVs work, so simply applying these same principles to meditation can give you more comfort and familiarity with how these 3 components of meditation work.
Because meditation is a technology of the mind, it helps to think of it in terms of other technologies to help de-mystify the process and not make it seem too esoteric or “out there.”
At its core, meditation is a very intuitive and easy-to-understand phenomenon, although it does take time and effort to improve at it and begin seeing its benefits.
The Mindful Geek: Secular Meditation for Smart Skeptics is a very educational and practical guide on meditation that doesn’t require any belief in a religious or spiritual tradition. Drawing upon decades of research and experience, Michael Taft breaks down what meditation is in an easy way that anyone can understand and begin applying to their daily life. The book does a great job sharing research in psychology and neuroscience to help de-mystify the meditation process. It also includes simple exercises so you can begin a steady meditation practice of your own.
What is the purpose of this technology?
The purpose of all technology is to improve our lives in a measurable way, so what are the benefits of meditation? What is the purpose of learning how to use this technology?
The book covers many different studies showing how meditation can improve focus, stress relief, emotional intelligence, and general well-being.
Overall, meditation is a process of self-discovery and self-awareness. It teaches your mind how to be more attuned to your bodily sensations – which are often designed to guide you and your behaviors in some way.
As Taft mentions in the book, the trouble is most of us don’t pay much attention to what our bodies are saying and how they are influenced by our momentary experiences.
One of the key benefits of meditation (and paying more attention to our bodily sensations) is that it improves our emotional intelligence. Emotions play a huge role in how we think, act, and make choices in our daily lives – and they are often experienced as subtle body sensations that are outside of our awareness.
“This is an obvious problem, and is one of the unconscious things that meditation can help by bringing into conscious awareness. When you use meditation to become more aware of what you’re feeling, the unconscious or semi-unconscious flavors of emotional experience begin to come into focus. Your own motivations and drives become clearer. Not just in a conceptual way, but in a way you can physically detect, moment by moment, throughout your day. This is the essence of emotional intelligence, and it’s life changing.”
When you meditate on your body and mind, it teaches you more about the inner workings of the self. You learn more about your own impulses, preferences, and tendencies – and this can be very useful knowledge to help guide your life.
Many say the goal of meditation is “enlightenment,” but this esoteric goal can often blind us to what meditation is really about and the small insights it can provide to us on a daily basis.
“Not all insights are huge or significant, however. For example, did you notice anything at all about yourself or your experience that you hadn’t noticed before? Many people in their first meditation come into direct contact with the fact that they have a hard time sitting still. That is an insight. Or you may have noticed that your mind was constantly spinning the whole time. That’s another insight. You may have noticed that you have an awful pain in your back you hadn’t felt previously. You guessed it: another insight.”
Simple insights like recognizing the restlessness of your body and mind are in-themselves very powerful lessons that can come out of meditation.
Our minds are always craving stimulation and novelty, and it’s inherently difficult for the body and mind to just sit still – especially in our busy culture of constant productivity, entertainment, and consumerism.
In today’s world, we don’t often give ourselves the time to just “sit back” and analyze our bodies and minds, so by engaging in this process we become more familiar with the everyday processes that are going on inside us.
Taft lets his readers know that the goal of meditation isn’t about “clearing your mind” completely – which is a difficult, if not impossible goal – but to give us more awareness of how our bodies and minds actually work (even when they are filled up with thoughts, feelings, and sensations).
If you are attuned to your body, you can notice feelings of anger, sadness, or fear as they are bubbling up, and that can give you much more control over these emotional reactions before they get out of control.
This can have a tremendously empowering effect on all areas of our lives, whether it’s how we talk to others in a heated argument or how we choose to respond to a mistake at work.
Experiencing a tree as a tree
Anything that you experience in your life can become an object of meditation.
One of the most common objects of meditation is following your breathing. Another common form of meditation includes a “body scan” meditation where you scan your body and make note of any sensations you feel starting with your feet and moving your way up to your face.
Everything you experience can be considered a part of your consciousness, including experiences that start from outside your mind and body (like observing an external object, such as a flower or a tree).
One interesting passage in The Mindful Geek: Secular Meditation for Smart Skeptics asks, “When was the last time you actually encountered a tree as a tree?”
“When was the last time you actually encountered a tree as a tree? It’s possible to see a tree as a sensory phenomenon: the rich texture and scent of the bark, the luscious colors of the leaves, the sound it makes as the wind passes through it, and so on. This is the sensory experience of a tree |
7 ink illustration images that I have done for Inktober, as examples of what I am capable of doing for you.
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If you have any questions feel free to email me: krystinem [!at] outlook.comIt’s not easy being a feminist of colour.
There’s this presumption that we as minority women can divorce our feminism from our race advocacy, and — more importantly — that we should. Among White feminists, the sticky issues of race and racism are rarely addressed; or when the existence of race is acknowledged, it is treated with such appalling clumsiness as to render theoretically feminist safe spaces decidedly unsafe for women of colour.
Among communities of colour, aspersions are also sometimes cast against WOC feminists. Sidelong glances are thrown in our direction because we understand that race oppression does not occur in a vacuum, and we dare to include within our race activism an integrated focus on the twin spectres of misogyny and male privilege. We present an intersectional politic that intermixes race and gender privilege with oppression, but we are often asked to mute our feminism and decenter ourselves in the name of blind racial solidarity. Talking about White patriarchy is okay, they say, but patriarchy in communities of colour must be taboo. The Movement, they say, requires a unified front. Feminism, they say, is a distraction from the Cause. Those of us who refuse to divorce our feminism from our race advocacy, they say, are misandrists and sellouts. Never mind, of course, that some of Asian America’s most dedicated civil rights legends — including Grace Lee Boggs, Yuri Kochiyama, Helen Zia and Patsy Mink — were self-identified Asian American feminists whose feminist work is treated as completely compartmentalized from their other advocacy.
To ask that feminists of colour be only feminist in feminist spaces, and only POC in POC spaces, is to ask the impossible: I cannot sometimes be only a woman and sometimes only be Asian American. I am both these things at all times; so too, therefore, are my politics.
Five years ago, long before Fresh Off The Boat became a runaway ABC sitcom hit, I wrote my first post on Eddie Huang. This was before Eddie was a star of Vice TV. This was before he was the author of a hit Asian American memoir. This was before Eddie Huang was a household name.
This was also way before Eddie Huang fucked up royally on Twitter last week.
My piece, a reaction to a CNN Eatocracy profile on one of Eddie’s first restaurants Xiao Ye, praises Eddie for being a rising Taiwanese American restauranteur. I celebrated how he put his own hyphenated twist on traditional Taiwanese cooking. My piece largely commends Eddie as an example of a visibly unconventional Asian American, and five years later I continue to respect Eddie for his brash anti-assimilationism.
But that piece was also a foreshadowing of things to come. In my post, I comment on the bizarre and unnecessary sexism of Xiao Ye‘s menu which featured such items as “Poke-Her Face Prawns”, “Concubine Cucumbers”, “Poontang Potstickers”, and “Taiwanese Flat Booty Cake. At the time, I called the menu “a little offensive” and “borderline sexist”, and i said that it made me “antsy”.
What was I thinking? Why was I was being so damned nice? What I should’ve said was that this shit is misogynistic as fuck, and no amount of wanting to shatter anti-Asian stereotypes gives you the fucking right to do it through the reinforced sexualization and objectification of (Asian American) women.
This exaggerated misogyny as a response to mainstream Asian American emasculation is all too familiar. Eddie’s early menu only exemplifies the uncaring (hip hop-caricatured) sexism that has continued to define his public persona. The implicit assertion is that because he is a man of colour, his empowering project of challenging anti-Asian stereotypes justifies his simultaneous gendered mistreatment of others.
I remember writing this post in 2010, and thinking that to speak out against this distressing sexism would be to open myself up to accusations that I am undermining the work of one of my Asian American brothers. I was worried that to criticize Eddie on this point would be to invite hateful backlash. Five years ago, I was less secure in my feminism, and more afraid of expressing a feminist perspective. I know those fears were valid, however, because that is exactly the kind of outcry I now face whenever I draw attention to stories of Asian American sexism. And so, five years ago I tempered my feminist concerns when it came to Eddie Huang, and I gave his misogyny a muted pass.
I was wrong to do that.
How often have we feminist of colour found ourselves (intentionally or unintentionally) turning the other cheek to misogyny in our midst, censored or self-censored by threats of anti-feminist bullying? How often have we been expected to choke down casual sexism emerging from withing our community, and to do so without protest as proof of our sincere racial solidarity?
As a feminist of colour, I often hear the cliched adage: don’t let the perfect be the enemy of the good. Rarely do we contemplate how this incremental approach marginalizes some among us by asking us to put the intersections of our politics on hold. When ABC’s Fresh Off The Boat first aired, I found myself confronted by an episode where a young Eddie Huang objectifies a grown woman, and engages in similar exploitation in a fantasy rap video. An earlier episode had made an offhand (and largely uncontextualized) joke about Grandma Huang’s bound feet. As a female viewer, I was made deeply uncomfortable and disappointed. I wondered why, as an Asian American woman and feminist, the media that was so racially pioneering for my community must also come packaged with such latent examples of casual sexism. Is asking for media that manages not to offend either my race or my gender really a bridge too far?
(Note: I feel FOTB’s misogynist moments this season were dissonant from the show’s strength as a Disney family sitcom, and were instead a byproduct of trying to clumsily infuse Eddie Huang’s personal brand into the show. I sincerely hope that FOTB is renewed next season (update: it was!), and with that renewal that the show can shed the need to include such overt sexism.)
Earlier last month and after a well-publicized break-up with ABC, Eddie Huang went on Real Time with Bill Maher to explain his creative differences with the show.
Ironically, the first few sentences that Eddie Huang utters in this segment are entirely consistent with the thesis of this post. Asian Americans — including Asian American feminists — shouldn’t feel pressure to like or support anything just out of a need to demonstrate racial solidarity. Shit that offends us should be called out.
So, taking Eddie at his word: Eddie Huang desperately needs to be called out right now
In this interview, Eddie makes an off-the-cuff remark comparing the undesirability of Asian American men to Black women. Eddie is talking about the infamous OKCupid dating studies (which incidentally are of limited applicability to any situation that is not OKCupid), but whether from the excitement of being on Maher’s show or excessive comfort with insider language presented in outsider spaces, Eddie’s meaning is largely mangled in his interview leaving it possible that he personally condones the characterization of Black women as “undesirable”.
(No one has pointed out, by the way, that in this same interview, Eddie takes it upon himself to declare himself a “representative” of Asian America, to reinforce the Model Minority Myth, to excuse the slur “Oriental” and to get pretty close do doing the same for the term “Chinaman”. Can we also take a minute to marvel at how totally gross Bill Maher is, as if this is the first time he’s ever talked to a real life Asian?)
Challenged by prominent Black feminists Black Girl Dangerous, KB, Trudy, and Feminista Jones to explain himself, Eddie responded on Twitter — and within 24 hours those tweets took a turn towards the distinctly sexist. Eddie became flagrantly dismissive. He infantilized these women. He became overly familiar. He adopted African American Vernacular English to affect a cavalier “coolness”. He pejoratively recast the conversation as a come-on.
He was just a step away from slapping their asses and telling them not to worry their pretty little heads with “man’s talk”.
@BlackGirlDanger are we dating cause you wildin. lol — Eddie Huang (@MrEddieHuang) April 27, 2015
.@BlackGirlDanger lemme take u out doe. u like sushi and shit? — Eddie Huang (@MrEddieHuang) April 27, 2015
Seriously? Not okay, dude. To say I’m disappointed with the way Eddie handled himself in this exchange would be an understatement.
Eddie Huang is right to highlight the complex interplay between conventional White masculinity and Asian American male sexuality. We need to talk about this more. But, why must an important conversation on the construction of Asian American masculinity be once again marred by the kind of anti-feminist and culturally appropriative behaviour that no self-respecting social justice advocate could ever get behind?
Eddie is totally wrong to use his legitimate concerns about the very real stereotypical emasculation of Asian American men to justify open sexism against (at varying times) Black and Asian women, or his appropriation of Blackness when convenient. Asian American male empowerment simply does not require the perpetuation of anti-Black racism and misogyny. Yesterday, ManForward wrote an open letter to Eddie Huang:
The very institutions and systems that made us as Asian American men undesirable have also taught us as Asian American men that we should not desire black women too. In this racialized system where skin color matters about your place and position of power and privilege, we have learned that the desirable folks are light skinned or better yet white folks; who we can only desire from afar but never can be with. In the context of heterosexism and white patriarchy, white women are framed as the ultimate desired objects but kept away from male/men of color meanwhile white men can exploit and abuse women of color (Native, black, Latino, lesbian, queer, transgender, Asian) unchecked. So, if you were going to speak about the experiences of emasculation of Asian American males, speak to that experience in this context that includes these oppressive systems at operation and do not equate nor link our Asian male experiences to the lived experiences of black women and then dismiss those experiences afterwards. As Asian American men, our intention to be accountable to black women and communities asks us and requires us to follow their leadership. It requires that we understand misogynoir (as Mia [ed note: BlackGirlDangerous] puts it) will show up everyday; as men in our communities we must work to undo this daily. It requires that when we are called out as a misogynoirist, we own it and move on to not do it again. It requires that we hold each other as Asian American men accountable when anti-blackness and sexism shows up. It requires that we disrupt the power and privilege at play when it is happening. The current environment and conditions of systematic state violence that we see towards the black community and women right now demands that we stand closer to the black women and communities now more than we have ever done in history. We also acknowledge that our Asian American communities still have a long way to go to understand what solidarity means with the black women and community. So, as you and we fight for the diversity and inclusion of all Asian American narratives, do not forget that these very narratives are tied to the lives of women and black folks too.
Feminism and racial solidarity cannot be mutually exclusive concepts because our identities are not isolated, they are intersectional. Our lack of privilege in one arena does not delegitimize our obvious privilege in another. Acknowledging male privilege and checking sexist behavior when it arises does not insubstantiate the racism that men of colour simultaneously face.
In fact, it is the opposite. To draw attention to our community’s institutionalized sexism is to issue a greater challenge: that we can move beyond narrow race nationalism, that we can be willing to center Asian American women as readily as we center Asian American men, that we can enact broader social change, that we can be more inclusive in our politics, that we can and should do better. If the goal of the Asian American Movement is to end the shared oppression of all Asian Americans, it must be a vision equally accessible to all Asian Americans regardless of gender, and one that stands in partnership with (not in opposition to) other communities of colour.
How can we claim to be building an Asian American Movement for all Asian Americans when Asian American women — fully half of all Asian Americans — are asked to support behaviour that too often disrespects, marginalizes, stereotypes and alienates us, or our women of colour allies? How can any of us claim to stand on the side of racial justice, when some among us would defend damning appropriation and mistreatment of Black people and culture?
The path to racial justice simply cannot be carved through racialized or gendered violence, and the Movement can no longer give shelter to either anti-Blackness or this brand of hostile misogyny.
Eddie Huang’s behaviour on Twitter last week was just plain wrong, and it undermines everything that the Asian American Movement stands for. Furthermore, his actions echo his earlier perpetration of misogyny against Asian American women in his Xiao Ye menu — and we would do well not to ignore that behaviour either. Although in his interview with Maher, Eddie says he enjoys being our (Asian?) “representative”, more typically Eddie Huang says he doesn’t believe he speaks for anyone. This is fair since he certainly doesn’t speak for me, nor do I speak for him. In 2011, Eddie found my post on him and wrote:
i just do me. its ur job to criticize and i try not to listen too hard.
Here’s the thing, Eddie: this is one of those times when maybe what you really need to do is to stop, to step back, and to listen. Because right now, you “doing you” is you doing it seriously, seriously wrong.
You have lots of important things to say, Eddie, and I earnestly want to hear them — but misogyny simply cannot be one of them.
Read More:Manufacturing sales in Canada tumbled by 3.3 per cent in February, ending three months of consecutive gains, Statistics Canada said Friday.
The drop in sales exceeded the consensus expectation of economists, who had projected a 1.5-per-cent pullback.
Scotiabank said the February drop was the largest monthly decline since January of last year.
Motor vehicles and petroleum and coal products were responsible for over two-thirds of the decrease, Statistics Canada said.
Sales of motor vehicles fell 10.5 per cent in February, following four consecutive gains.
Motor vehicle parts, aerospace product and parts, and machinery also contributed to the February retreat.
"Today's report does support our view that the pop in economic activity in [the first quarter of 2016] will prove temporary and that real GDP growth will settle into a sub-two per cent pace for the remainder of the year," TD economist Diana Petramala said in a commentary.An Israeli court has not only ruled that a number of Palestinian homes in Haifa have to be demolished but also that the home owners must pay 20,000 shekels (just under $6,000) to the authorities to cover the costs. The buildings belong to Palestinian citizens of Israel who refused to be ethnically cleansed from their land when the state was created in 1948.
Most of the owners belong to the long-suffering Hamid family, which has 65 members. The Israeli authorities want to displace the family and replace them with Jewish settlers. According to Ata Hamid, his family have neither the means to pay for the demolition costs nor anywhere else to go. Despite living in a prosperous city, he said, like other “Arab-Israelis” they suffer grave economic circumstances.
The family has called upon all the Palestinians in Haifa, Lod and Ramle to stand up in their support in the rejection of Israel’s discriminatory housing policy. They have asked the municipality in Lod to take appropriate action to freeze the demolition order and protect their homes. Sadly, dozens more Palestinian families and their homes face the same threat.OTTUMWA, Iowa – The motivational speaker had a lot of wisdom to share: How he overcame challenges, found out who he was and learned to accept himself with his good points and bad. And the students seemed to get it. But they also wanted to know how close he and actor Ashton Kutcher are.
“We’re twins … and I consider him my best friend,” said Michael Kutcher, talking to kids Thursday at Ottumwa, Iowa, High School.
Christopher Ashton Kutcher almost grew up without a brother, Mike said. Their mom and her doctor thought she was having a boy. They were surprised when it turned out to be two boys.
Ashton was born first, at 10.5 pounds. Mike referred to his twin as Jabba the Hutt, the slug-like, gigantic “Star Wars” character. A few minutes later, Mike was born. He weighed just 4 pounds and was over-oxygenated.
“The doctor told my parents, ‘You might want to name and baptize him. He may not survive.’ Of course, Jabba the Hutt was fine. I tell people he must have ate everything while we were in the womb.”
When the boys were 3, Mom realized that while Ashton was running around just fine, Mike was not moving the way he should, was lagging behind and just seemed generally “slow.”
Doctors diagnosed him with cerebral palsy.
“For those of you who don’t know what cerebral palsy is, it’s a disability that mostly affects motor function,” Mike said.
His walk is impaired, he said, and so is his speech. He has trouble performing physical tasks with his right side, is 80 percent deaf in his left ear and has had two cataract surgeries.
“My case is considered mild,” he said.
Mike climbed the steps to the stage and walked back and forth during his talk Thursday, and students seemed to understand him just fine. But there are some things he just can’t do well.
When he and his brother were still in elementary school, they were shooting basketball, following each other’s shots. Ashton made a called shot, “Right hand.”
Mike walked away.
“Where are you going?” asked Ashton.
“I said, ‘You know I can’t make that shot. It’s not fair.’ And Chris (Ashton) even at that age said, ‘You can do anything you want. I can’t make that shot for you. Mom’s not here; she can’t do it for you. It’s your challenge. Stop using your disability as a crutch. This is your obstacle.'”
Those words stayed with him for the rest of his life; there are obstacles that are his to overcome or not overcome. He tossed that ball using his disabled right hand. Unfortunately, since they were in a real Iowa town, not in a Hollywood script, Mike missed the shot.
“I don’t think I could make that shot today,” he quipped in answer to an Ottumwa student’s question.
But it didn’t matter. The lesson, from a boy his same age, stuck. He’d try. Sometimes, he’d miss. Other times, he’d succeed.
He remembered his brother’s voice when a cardiologist told his family and him at age 13 that Mike’s heart was going to give out in the next three to four weeks. It could take years to get a heart transplant.
“I realized that was my challenge, my obstacle to overcome.”
He faced his impending death – or life – as bravely as possible. Three weeks later, his heart stopped: cardiac arrest. He didn’t learn until later some of the decisions his parents had to make. The options were to say goodbye and let him go or to try a pump that would extend his life by only 48 hours.
They chose to use the pump. A donor heart arrived 24 hours later. Doctors told him the typical life expectancy of someone with a donor heart is seven years. Michael just passed 20 years with his.
Yet after they cracked his chest open, he had to stop trying to keep up with Ashton, the athlete. He did find a sport, though. He likes golf.
“I decided to stop being Ashton’s brother and start being Michael Kutcher.”
It took him years to figure out who that was. His twin, Ashton Kutcher, had that certain something that allowed him to go to New York and become a model, then a well-known actor.
Michael had different aspects to his character. He had spent so much time trying not to use his cerebral palsy as an excuse that when the mother of a severely disabled girl asked him to speak about growing up with cerebral palsy, he said, “What? I don’t have cerebral palsy!”
But there was that little girl with CP who couldn’t walk, couldn’t eat, couldn’t talk. What she could do was wake Michael up. CP may not rule his life, but it is a part of his life.
These days, in addition to his job doing sales for a company in Cedar Rapids and Los Angeles, he speaks to young people about disability awareness, treating each other with dignity and overcoming obstacles.
“I’m not going to lecture you. I’m not going to tell you what kind of person you should be or how you should talk or how you should act,” he told OHS students when he first walked onto the stage. “I’m just going to tell you about my life.”Looking for news you can trust?
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Is the Tea Party dead? Dave Weigel points out that, unlike 2010, Tea Party challenges to Republican incumbents have gone nowhere this year. Once vulnerable Senate candidates like Orrin Hatch, Richard Lugar, and Olympia Snowe now look pretty safe. But that’s only because, for all practical purposes, they’ve abased themselves so utterly to the Tea Party’s demands:
The Tea Party, the Club for Growth—the whole movement has succeeded in driving Republicans further to the right. Nuking a few moderates in primaries was only part of that—a great story for the horse-race media, but not something that would keep up as the GOP was purified….Republicans seem to have figured this out. It’s increasingly likely that no incumbent Republican will lose a primary to a Tea Partier in 2012. The movement can consolidate its gains. Safe districts and the fear of primaries do more to keep Republicans straight than the occasional wins.
I think this was always the endgame for the Tea Party. Just like every other fluorescence of right-wing activism over the past 50 years, its destiny was to flare up, get incorporated into the Republican Party, and then die out. The big difference this time has been just how complete its incorporation has been. Ultra-conservative flare-ups in the past have been increasingly potent — the John Birch Society was more successful than the Liberty League, the Gingrich-inflected Clinton conspiracy theorists were more successful than the Birchers, and the Tea Party in turn has been more successful than the Gringrichites — which has brought us to the point where there’s really no meaningful distance between the ultras and the Republican Party establishment. The Tea Party really is dying away, I think, but only because their victory has been so total. For the time being, anyway, they control the Republican Party from top to bottom.
But for how long? Good question. Look me up in another decade or so and I’ll let you know.Professional wrestling is an astonishingly profitable type of sports entertainment. Vince McMahon’s organization is a form of theatrical performance art with elaborate storylines, choreographed matches and predetermined outcomes. Hence, often given a gimmick, each scrappers’ future is largely crafted by WWE’s creative team. Famous rasslin’ personality Jim Cornette discussed the importance of a grappler embracing and owning their scripted personality.
“There's only one foolproof lie detector, and that's your face,” said Cornette.
“If YOU don't believe what you're saying on TV, it shows on your face, and nobody else will believe you either. In wrestling, it doesn't matter WHAT you say, the viewers just have to believe you mean it.”
WWE Hall of Famer Edge agreed with Cornette and cited Mark Calaway’s portrayal of The Undertaker as an example of an individual who perfected his character.
"On paper, does The Undertaker [gimmick] sound like something that will go on to be undefeated at WrestleMania for like 22 years, and be the tent pole holding up the company at certain times, and kind of the measuring stick within the [pro] wrestling industry, more or less, the new Andre The Giant?" Edge asked rhetorically.
"The thing is too, I honestly believe if it was on anybody but The Undertaker, it would not have worked. It would've had that shelf life, but because he personified it and he embraced it and he became The Undertaker. You just had to look at him. He had everything down, the movements, he had the entrance, and when he did his entrance, people still when they hear that gong, they stand up. It has become this revered character.”
Some gimmicks require a wrestler to behave like an unhinged lunatic. Obviously, for most wrestling professionals, such conduct is strictly a staged act. However, minus kayfabe, these 15 wrestlers are/were truly insane outside of the squared circle.
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18 ‘MACHO MAN’ RANDY SAVAGE
via youtube.com
The “Macho Man” Randy Savage was a superior performer in the ring. The 6-foot-2, 240-pound Savage, a standout baseball player who was employed by the St. Louis Cardinals, Cincinnati Reds, and Chicago White Sox farm systems, brought unrivaled intensity to the promotion. Alarmingly, much of that unbridled intensity was genuine and his obsession for his real-life spouse, Miss Elizabeth, was worrisome.
“Honestly, Randy was the most jealous man I had ever met, and it created a real problem,” said George “The Animal” Steele.
“Every night it was something different. Randy’s jealousy was driving him crazy. There were times when he would lock her in the dressing room. Randy was always screaming at somebody.”
Savage, who got into a couple of fistfights with Road Warrior Hawk and allegedly bedded an underage Stephanie McMahon, died from cardiovascular disease at the age of 58 in May 2011.
17 CHYNA
via businessinsider.com
The WWE said that Chyna left "a lasting legacy as the most dominant female competitor of all time.” Nicknamed “The Ninth Wonder of the World,” the 5-foot-10, 180-pound Chyna was an industry trailblazer and original member of D-Generation X. Sadly, despite her countless achievements, Chyna was an irreparably damaged person. Chyna battled severe mental illness and couldn’t conquer her addiction to drugs and alcohol. Chyna, a porn star who reportedly once stripped naked and dove into a fish tank in a New York nightclub, died from her dependencies at the age of 46 in April 2016.
“It’s one of the most disheartening illustrations I’ve ever seen of what mental illness and drug abuse can do to a person,” WWE Hall of Fame broadcaster Jim Ross said. “The saddest part is that, at her core, Joanie Laurer was a very loving, sweet person—a gentle soul. She just couldn’t overcome her demons.”
16 ABDULLAH THE BUTCHER
via wikimedia.org
Abdullah the Butcher, an April 2011 WWE Hall of Fame inductee, was a hardcore icon who infamously bladed to create bloodbaths in the squared circle. An unsightly, obese mess of a human being, the 6-foot, 330-pound Butcher allegedly contracted the Hepatitis C virus.
“For decades, Larry Shreve has played the blood-lusting Abdullah the Butcher, a maniac psychotic enough to qualify as a Canadian-born Hitler, another Fuehrer,” said Billy Graham.
“The Butcher, who is Hepatitis C positive, is currently facing allegations of negligence, assault and battery in the Ontario Superior Court of Justice stemming from an unsanitary blade assault in a 2007 professional wrestling match.”
Mick Foley claims that the scars on The Butcher’s forehead are so deep that he playfully hides gambling chips in them.
15 THE IRON SHEIK
via twitter.com
The Iron Sheik was one of professional wrestling’s premier heels throughout the 1980s. The 6-foot, 258-pound Sheik elicited jeers as a proud Iranian who constantly decried the United States. A legitimate badass who oversaw security for Shah Mohammad Reza Pahlavi and his family, the one-time WWF World Heavyweight Champion is now an absolute loon. In fact, The Iron Sheik’s Twitter account provides keen insights into his shaky psyche.
“North Korea you are punk you are jabroni,” tweeted The Sheik, 75, who once ignited a riot at a wrestling show while tripping on mushrooms.
“I can beat the f*** out of you forever because you have a rice crispy d***. Have a good day.”
In addition to detesting Kim Jong-un and his murderous regime, The Sheik also has an intense dislike for Justin Bieber.
“GOODNIGHT @justinbieber F*** YOU TIMES 100000000000,” tweeted The Sheik. “F*** ALL THE #mybeliebers.”
Although The Sheik detests North Korea’s hierarchy and Bieber, he loves watching classic movies.
“Malibu's Most Wanted better movie than the f****** Notebook.”
The muscled Iranian frequently visits The Howard Stern Show to bizarrely rant about a variety of topics.
14 SUNNY
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Sunny was inducted into the WWE Hall of Fame in April 2011 because she’s deemed the promotion’s first Diva. Sunny, who was trained by Kevin Sullivan, Jim Cornette and her late boyfriend, Chris Candido, also worked for ECW, WCW and Ring of Honor. Once an exceedingly ambitious woman who enrolled in a pre-medical program at the University of Tennessee, Sunny was undone by addictions to drugs and alcohol. Sunny’s dependency became scandalous and she had sexual encounters with dozens of wrestlers in exchange for narcotics.
“There’s so many stories I could tell you about how she disrespected Chris (Candido),” said The Sandman.
“We were on the roof of a club in Miami where she was b****** Raven [while] she just had her hand out for pills.”
Sunny has been charged with fraud, burglary, three DUIs, disorderly conduct, violating a protective order, a parole violation and a handful of other offenses since 2012. Sunny is a gloomy soul who can’t pin her problems.
13
12 BRUISER BRODY
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Bruiser Brody was a fearless hardcore grappler who was mainly loathed for his rebellious and uncooperative attitude. An innovative brawler, the 6-foot-8, 285-pound Brody worked stiffly and constantly bickered with promoters and bookers. Brody’s style created dissension and he had a nasty exchange with fellow wrestler José Huertas González during a card in San Juan, Puerto Rico, on July 16, 1988. Following their disastrous match, González followed Brody into the locker room and proceeded to stab him twice in the stomach.
“When Brody was lying on the floor bleeding, the guys were just going over their matches like nothing had happened,” said Tony Atlas.
“Brody laid on the floor for about 45 minutes because it was the beginning of the show and the ambulance couldn’t get through the crowd of people. They couldn’t lift the gurney to get him on the ambulance, so they said, ‘Can any of you guys help?’ Every wrestler in that dressing room – including American wrestlers – turned their back. When [the police] asked what happened, everyone in the dressing room said they didn’t see nothing.”
A 42-yearold Brody succumbed to his wounds and, roughly a year later, González was acquitted of murder.
11 BUZZ SAWYER
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Known as “Mad Dog,” Buzz Sawyer was fond of using his forehead to hammer nails into locker room doors. The 5-foot-11, 240-pound Sawyer was also a drug abuser who once tried to fight a fleet of police officers outside of a bar and stole money from The Undertaker. Despite being in the midst of a solid wrestling career, Sawyer allegedly moonlighted as a heroin dealer for extra income. Sawyer suffered an overdose and died at the age of 32 in February 1992. However, according to Billy Jack Haynes, Sawyer was actually murdered by rival drug cartel members in the Pacific Northwest.
"When Buzz was clean and sober, he was a great guy,'' said Sawyer’s brother, Brett Woyan.
"If you caught him when he was on drugs and stuff, he was a totally different person. I know he was dangerous. I was around him all the time. On the road and at home."
10 DYNAMITE KID
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The Dynamite Kid, born Thomas Billington in Lancashire, England, is a pathetic and miserable person. The Dynamite Kid, who became an industry legend teaming with Davey Boy Smith as The British Bulldogs, is an unabashed racist and bully. Jake “The Snake” Roberts recounted one truly disturbing prank that was pulled by Dynamite.
“But the mean bull**** that some of those guys did, those two guys were the worst,” said Roberts.
“I remember that poor kid in Pennsylvania, man. They were shooting him with air guns and shooting him with steroids and stuff – a mentally retarded kid. The f****** bull***, man.”
Beyond cruel antics, the 5-foot-8, 230-pound Kid also physically assaulted a number of his peers. Most notably, the Dynamite Kid broke Bruce Hart’s jaw with a single punch. The Kid was especially brutish to Jacques Rougeau. Following a verbal spat before a show in Miami Beach, The Kid attacked the 6-foot-1, 245-pound Rougeau. According to Pro Wrestling Stories, “Jacques was minding his own business playing cards in the back. Next thing you know, Dynamite storms in, turns Jacques around and goes off on him. He really beat him up, busting Jacques’ nose wide open.”
9
8 DICK MURDOCH
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Dick Murdoch was a legitimate tough guy and world-class in-ring competitor. On the flipside, the 6-foot-3, 275-pound Murdoch was also a violent psychopath and prominent member of the Ku Klux Klan. Murdoch’s bigotry caused backstage heat with multiple wrestlers of various minority groups. The Rock's father, WWE Hall of Famer Rocky Johnson, recounted a particularly ugly moment that he experienced while tussling with Murdoch.
"Because he [Murdoch] was KKK and didn't like blacks, he kept kicking me hard and punching me," Johnson said.
"I said, 'you hit me one more time, I'm hitting you back.' He hit me, and I knocked him out."
Murdoch suffered a fatal heart attack and passed away at the age of 49 in June 1996.
7 BALLS MAHONEY
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Balls Mahoney was probably clinically insane and he was even considered a misfit in the eccentric world of professional wrestling. The 6-foot-2, 250-pound Balls, born Jonathan Rechner in Spring Lake Heights, New Jersey, was a hardcore pioneer. Balls, a member of the Church of Satan, forged close friendships with the Insane Clown Posse and was almost universally respected by members of the extreme rasslin’ circuit. Still, Balls had an insatiable propensity for violence and he could snap on a whim. In one instance, Balls was facing “Hacksaw” Jim Duggan. Balls and Duggan had practiced their bout and agreed on its details. However, when the bell rang, Duggan refused to let Balls spit an actual fireball at him.
After Duggan purposely botched their first two spots, an infuriated Balls flipped off his foe and vacated the squared circle for the locker room. Balls subsequently retrieved his trusty hunting knife and was prepared to gut Duggan. Concerned co-workers realized the situation’s seriousness and barricaded Balls in a closet until Duggan scurried away from the building. Many workers are convinced that Balls would have killed Duggan that evening if he had an opportunity. Balls suffered a fatal heart attack at the age of 44 on April 12, 2016.
6 HARLEY RACE
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Harley Race is a storied bruiser who beat polio and cancer and survived a horrific car crash. The 6-foot-1, 245-pound Race reportedly possesses fists that resemble cinder blocks. A championship wrestler for multiple promotions, Race once flattened Hulk Hogan in the locker room at the Municipal Auditorium in Kansas City. Unhappy that the WWR was hosting an event in NWA territory, the brief skirmish occurred when Race struck Hogan in the ribs with a blow.
“Harley, I thought the first time I saw you in Kansas City, you’d have a great, big gun,” said Hogan, who was sprawled on the ground and clearly trying to diffuse the situation.
In response to Hogan, Race said, “I don’t have a great, big one.” Race proceeded to brandish, and then aim, a.38-caliber revolver at Hogan. Hogan raced away from the dressing area and rarely discusses the incident.
5 SCOTT STEINER
via wwe.com
Scott Steiner was an elite amateur wrestler at the University of Michigan. Shortly after leaving Ann Arbor, the 6-foot-1, 275-pound Steiner began training with Dr. Jerry Graham Jr. to become a professional wrestler. Steiner, a three-time champion who headlined a slew of pay-per-view specials, debuted in the squared circle in 1986. “The Big Bad Booty Daddy” initially seemed relatively “sane” when he teamed with his older brother, Rick, as The Steiner Brothers. However, fueled by enough synthetic testosterone to maim a stable of racehorses, Steiner’s behavior became increasingly erratic.
Steiner got into a backstage verbal altercation with the now ex-wife of Diamond Dallas Page, Kimberly Page. DDP tried to defend Kimberly’s honor and he confronted Steiner. Steiner proceeded to mercilessly pummel the 6-foot-5, 248 |
available. Hide Caption 1 of 41 Photos: Photos: Missing Mexican students Hide Caption 2 of 41 Photos: Photos: Missing Mexican students Hide Caption 3 of 41 Photos: Photos: Missing Mexican students Hide Caption 4 of 41 Photos: Photos: Missing Mexican students Hide Caption 5 of 41 Photos: Photos: Missing Mexican students Hide Caption 6 of 41 Photos: Photos: Missing Mexican students Hide Caption 7 of 41 Photos: Photos: Missing Mexican students Hide Caption 8 of 41 Photos: Photos: Missing Mexican students Hide Caption 9 of 41 Photos: Photos: Missing Mexican students Hide Caption 10 of 41 Photos: Photos: Missing Mexican students Hide Caption 11 of 41 Photos: Photos: Missing Mexican students Hide Caption 12 of 41 Photos: Photos: Missing Mexican students Hide Caption 13 of 41 Photos: Photos: Missing Mexican students Hide Caption 14 of 41 Photos: Photos: Missing Mexican students Hide Caption 15 of 41 Photos: Photos: Missing Mexican students Hide Caption 16 of 41 Photos: Photos: Missing Mexican students Hide Caption 17 of 41 Photos: Photos: Missing Mexican students Hide Caption 18 of 41 Photos: Photos: Missing Mexican students Hide Caption 19 of 41 Photos: Photos: Missing Mexican students Hide Caption 20 of 41 Photos: Photos: Missing Mexican students Hide Caption 21 of 41 Photos: Photos: Missing Mexican students Hide Caption 22 of 41 Photos: Photos: Missing Mexican students Hide Caption 23 of 41 Photos: Photos: Missing Mexican students Hide Caption 24 of 41 Photos: Photos: Missing Mexican students Hide Caption 25 of 41 Photos: Photos: Missing Mexican students Hide Caption 26 of 41 Photos: Photos: Missing Mexican students Hide Caption 27 of 41 Photos: Photos: Missing Mexican students Hide Caption 28 of 41 Photos: Photos: Missing Mexican students Hide Caption 29 of 41 Photos: Photos: Missing Mexican students Hide Caption 30 of 41 Photos: Photos: Missing Mexican students Hide Caption 31 of 41 Photos: Photos: Missing Mexican students Hide Caption 32 of 41 Photos: Photos: Missing Mexican students Hide Caption 33 of 41 Photos: Photos: Missing Mexican students Hide Caption 34 of 41 Photos: Photos: Missing Mexican students Hide Caption 35 of 41 Photos: Photos: Missing Mexican students Hide Caption 36 of 41 Photos: Photos: Missing Mexican students Hide Caption 37 of 41 Photos: Photos: Missing Mexican students Hide Caption 38 of 41 Photos: Photos: Missing Mexican students Hide Caption 39 of 41 Photos: Photos: Missing Mexican students Hide Caption 40 of 41 Photos: Photos: Missing Mexican students Hide Caption 41 of 41
Mexico's attorney general this week issued arrest warrants for the former mayor of Iguala, the city where the students were kidnapped; that official's wife; and the city's former public safety director. Attorney General Jesus Murillo Karam called the three the "probable masterminds" of the September 26 events in Iguala.
That day, students from a teachers college in nearby Ayotzinapa were on their way to stage a protest in Iguala. When former Mayor Jose Luis Abarca and his wife learned the protest would disrupt an event led by the latter, they gave orders to Public Safety Director Felipe Flores Velasquez to send police forces to prevent the students from protesting.
"The order to confront those people came from the police department's command center, straight from A-5, code name used to identify the Iguala mayor," Murillo said. The attorney general said his office learned the information from interrogations of police officers and gang members detained in the last month and allegedly involved in the incident.
Police blocked the highway leading into the city and shot at the students as they arrived in buses and a van. One student was killed.
Footage from the scene showed a white van left in the middle of the road with its windows blown out and the doors wide open.
Officers took the students away, Murillo said, then handed them to a local criminal gang known as Guerreros Unidos (United Warriors), which not only had infiltrated the police department but was also complicit with Abarca, his wife and the public safety director. All three disappeared the day after the clashes between police and the students.
Members of the Mexican federal police and army have taken over the Iguala Police Department and assumed all security responsibilities.
The students remain missing, and 53 people, including 36 officers and 17 suspected gang members, have been detained.
A Roman Catholic priest and well-known activist who works with migrants and trafficking victims revealed details this week about the kidnappings, saying the students were forced to walk to a remote location and then shot.
"Some who were wounded but still alive, with others who were already dead... were put on top of firewood and set on fire with diesel," the Rev. Alejandro Solalinde said. He said he has given his information to prosecutors.
The case has become a political crisis, with opposition lawmakers asking President Enrique Peña Nieto to dissolve the entire Guerrero state government and take charge. Peña Nieto has said his government will not spare any efforts until the students are found and justice is done.
"Violence, whatever its origin, goes against what we are as a country. Violence will never be a solution or pave the way toward a better future," the President said.
Mexican authorities are offering a reward of nearly $5 million for information leading to the students and solving the case.Kanye West at his runway show for Adidas earlier this year.
Rap megastar Kanye West and German-based sneaker brand Adidas have collaborated on another sneaker, this time on the Yeezy 350 Boost.
The sneakers will be available June 27 and retail for $200.
The Yeezy 350 Boost is a woven low cut version of its wildly popular predecessor, the Yeezy Boost, which mirrors its gray upper with white outsole.
The first Yeezy Boost is currently sold out in retail stores and via the Adidas website. Only 9,000 pairs were produced, with a price tag of $350.
The new silhouette is part of the Yeezy Season 1 collection, which will feature knitwear, bags, outerwear and more.
Adidas confirmed with FN that the information on the rap star’s latest collaboration was leaked online Wednesday.
West teamed up with Adidas after leaving Nike, releasing the Yeezy I and Yeezy II with the Oregon-based brand.
Kanye West wears the original Yeezy Boost at a pre-Grammy brunch earlier this year. CREDIT: Getty Images.
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Rafael Nadal Vs. Novak Djokovic: The Shoe-DownAs Disney fans, we enjoy many a different character, whether they’re good or bad, hand-drawn or computer animated, human or otherwise. But there are certain characters we enjoy because of their overall style and visual appearance—or what we’ll call a character’s “Disney aesthetic.”
So, whether you’re curious to see what type of Disney character fits your ideal style, or if you’re looking for inspiration for that Tumblr blog you’ve always wanted to create, take this quiz and find out what Disney aesthetic you are.
1 Which of the following are you most likely to post on Instagram? A photo of a Jane Austen novel and a cup of coffee A GoPro video you took while skydiving A photo of a wheelbarrow filled with flowers beside a barn A photo of you and your cousins 2 Choose a scent: Freshly cut grass The smell of Disneyland's Main Street Cotton candy Cheeseburgers 3 Choose a quote: "I restore myself when I'm alone." “It’s kind of fun to do the impossible.” “Though she be but little, she is fierce.” “Love is so short, forgetting is so long.” 4 Choose a scene from Cinderella: 5 Which animated Disney classic would you love to see as a live-action film? The Lion King The Little Mermaid Frozen Hercules 6 Choose a word: Alchemy Necktie Wholeheartedly Scintilla 7 What type of colors are most visually appealing to you? Pastels Primary colors Neon colors Cool colors 8 Choose an object from Alice in Wonderland: 1 of 8 Your Disney aesthetic is Earnest Agrarian! You find beauty in the bucolic, and delight in style that is no-fuss and practical. When you’re not outside working on your garden, you can be found enjoying the sunset, sewing patches on your jeans, talking about the weather, or cooking up a new recipe using vegetables you grew. Your favorite Disney characters are Pacha, Hercules’ parents, and Judy Hopps. Share on Facebook Share on Pinterest Share on Twitter Take this quiz again! Your Disney aesthetic is Background Mermaid! You delight in girly touches and anything conventionally pretty, such as lace details, bows, and pastel colors. You dislike anything too loud, whether it’s a color, a print, or a sound. However, you do love many things, such as fairytales, Peter Pan collars, photographs of Parisian architecture, watercolor paintings, and the way light seems to glitter when the sun sets on water. Your favorite Disney characters are King Triton’s daughters (sans Ariel) and the mermaids in Peter Pan. Share on Facebook Share on Pinterest Share on Twitter Take this quiz again! Your Disney aesthetic is Enigmatic Enchantress! Your love style that is sleek and luxurious, with slight gothic influences. You stick to dark shades and love a good dark accessory, such as oversize sunglasses and an all-black wide brim hat. Fascinated by anything mysterious and enchanting, you’re interested in tarot cards, unsolved mysteries, and the crystal ball emoji. Your favorite Disney characters are Maleficent, Ursula, and the Evil Queen. Share on Facebook Share on Pinterest Share on Twitter Take this quiz again! Your Disney aesthetic is Colorful Cat! You find joy in bold colors, large prints, and mesmerizing patterns. Your taste in style is busy, a bit chaotic, but always fun. When you’re not out trying new things, you can be found enjoying a late night concert, taking a pottery class, or playing with your pet cat. Your favorite Disney characters are Simba and Marie from The Aristocats. Share on Facebook Share on Pinterest Share on Twitter Take this quiz again! Your Disney aesthetic is Hundred Acre Minimalist! Your concept of beauty deals with the famous motto that less is more. You prefer clean lines, simple patterns (if any), and anything that doesn’t take away from an entity’s overall design. You love blue skies, leather messenger bags, empty roads in the country, and boat shoes. Your favorite Disney characters are Winnie the Pooh and all of his friends. Share on Facebook Share on Pinterest Share on Twitter Take this quiz again! Your Disney aesthetic is Soft Prince/Princess! You’re a true romantic with a love for anything that has a classic sense of style and coziness to it. You love paper ephemera, Jane Austen novels, chivalry, vintage timepieces, and flowers by the dozen. Your favorite Disney characters are Prince Eric and Belle. Share on Facebook Share on Pinterest Share on Twitter Take this quiz again! Your Disney aesthetic is Disney Dad! You love anything kitschy and unique, as well as a little bit wacky. You have an appreciation for vintage comic books, Hawaiian shirts, puns, gas station postcards, and stress balls. Your favorite Disney characters are Goofy and Riley’s father from Inside Out. Share on Facebook Share on Pinterest Share on Twitter Take this quiz again!
Posted 3 years AgoThis year, the American comic industry's annual Free Comic Book Day promotional event is scheduled for May 7th (not coincidentally a day after the release of Captain America: Civil War). On it, readers can go to local comic shops serviced by Diamond Distributors for samplers of books from a host of publishers. This week, they've been previewing some of their offerings, including Viz's One-Punch Man/My Hero Academia super-hero manga double preview.
ONE PUNCH MAN/MY HERO ACADEMIA FCBD 2016 EDITION
Publisher: VIZ MEDIA LLC
(W) One, Kouhei Horikoshi (A) Yusuke Murata, Kouhei Horikoshi (CA) Kouhei Horikoshi, Yusuke Murata
Nothing about Saitama passes the eyeball test when it comes to superheroes, from his lifeless expression to his bald head to his unimpressive physique. However, this average-looking guy has a not-so-average problem - he just can't seem to find an opponent strong enough to take on! He is the One-Punch Man! Also: What would the world be like if 80% of the population manifested superpowers called "Quirks"? Heroes and villains would be battling it out everywhere! Being a hero would mean learning to use your power, but where would you go to study? The Hero Academy of course! But what would you do if you were one of the 20% percent who were born Quirkless?
Rating: Teen
Some original English books also of note include
SONIC SAMPLER FCBD 2016 EDITION
Publisher: ARCHIE COMIC PUBLICATIONS (W/A) Various (CA) Jamal Peppers, Gary Martin Get the best of both worlds with the Sonic Sampler! Hot on the heels of the all-new epic Sonic comics event, "Panic in the Sky," comes a supersonic sampling of stories for Free Comic Book Day! Join Sonic and friends as they band together to save the world from the evil ambitions of Dr. Eggman in these select stories from Sonic the Hedgehog and Sonic Universe! Plus, get a sneak peek of what's to come with a special "Fast Forward Feature" that you'll have to see to believe!
Rating: All Ages
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Scott Green is editor and reporter for anime and manga at geek entertainment site Ain't It Cool News. Follow him on Twitter at @aicnanime.Indian Supreme Court has given a customized DVD of Ubuntu 10.04 LTS to more than 17,000 courts across the country. All the systems in these courts were running Red Hat Enterprise Linux 5 for last 4-5 years and now it will be replaced by Ubuntu.
Many helpful links and materials are being provided to these courts. An SMS channel has also been setup which will provide helpful Ubuntu tricks and information to these courts.
Excerpt from the circular:
The Ubuntu Linux operating system can be installed by the judicial officer on his own also as the installation process is very easy, intuitive and self-explanatory. In fact, it shall be a welcome change and a desired enablement on the part of the judicial officers if they become self-dependent in this aspect also.
It is only required to be instructed to all the judicial officers that if they are installing the Ubuntu Linux in their laptops by themselves, they should first download and watch the video available on the Supreme Court of India's website. They must then take the backup of their data. Only then, they should proceed with the installation.
One of the PDF file that can be downloaded from website mentions all Ubuntu features:
here. Other helpful links include a video tutorial, installation instructions and details about these 25 features. You can check them out from
Thanks Abhi for the tip, via Ubuntu Forums, via EFYTimesBy Claire Bernish
CBS News first reported a manhunt inside the Central Intelligence Agency in search of the source who provided thousands of top secret documents to WikiLeaks, published in its “Vault 7” — which revealed the clandestine agency’s hacking tools and surveillance practices.
“Sources familiar with the investigation say it is looking for an insider — either a CIA employee or contractor — who had physical access to the material,” CBS reported Wednesday evening. “The agency has not said publicly when the material was taken or how it was stolen.
Much of the material was classified and stored in a highly secure section of the intelligence agency, but sources say hundreds of people would have had access to the material. Investigators are going through those names.
Investigators surmise the source of the massive leak was either an agent of the CIA or a contractor with the agency — someone with physical access — rather than an outside hacker.
In a statement coinciding with the Vault 7 release, WikiLeaks announced,
The archive appears to have been circulated among former US government hackers and contractors in an unauthorized manner, one of whom has provided WikiLeaks with portions of the archive […] In a statement to WikiLeaks the source details policy questions that they say urgently need to be debated in public, including whether the CIA’s hacking capabilities exceed its mandated powers and the problem of public oversight of the agency. The source wishes to initiate a public debate about the security, creation, use, proliferation and democratic control of cyberweapons.
Unnamed sources from inside the U.S. Intelligence Community told Reuters less than 24 hours after WikiLeaks published the first selection of the damning cache of documents the agency had expected their public disclosure since 2016.
Officials from the CIA and FBI quickly reviewed the case and, within one day, initiated a joint investigation of the release — including the internal manhunt in question.
WikiLeaks — itself, fraught by rumors of enemy State collusion and political opportunism — was lambasted by CIA Director Mike Pompeo, who also had choice words for the pro-transparency organization’s founder, Julian Assange, in his first public comments since taking that role:
Download Your First Issue Free! Do You Want to Learn How to Become Financially Independent, Make a Living Without a Traditional Job & Finally Live Free?
Download Your Free Copy of Counter Markets It is time to call out WikiLeaks for what it really is: A non-state hostile intelligence service often abetted by state actors like Russia.
WikiLeaks founder and editor Julian Assange — incidentally deemed a “demon” by Pompeo — responded to the wholly unproven accusation, stating,
In fact, the reason Pompeo is launching this attack is because he understands we are exposing in this series all sorts of illegal actions by the CIA, so he’s trying to get ahead of the publicity curve and create a preemptive defense.
Former CIA Deputy Director Mike Morell claimed within days of the Vault 7 disclosure it had to be an ‘inside job.’
“This data is not shared outside CIA,” Morell said. “It’s only inside CIA. It’s on CIA’s top secret network, which is not connected to any other network. So, this has to be an inside job.”
Investigators continue to pore over the hundreds of names of hundreds of contractors and agents who would have had physical access to the high-security area, urgently seeking the unknown person or persons who could have managed such a devastating theft of information.
Given the nature and scope of WikiLeaks’ trove — estimated of greater impact than spying practices revealed by NSA whistleblower Edward Snowden — whoever was behind the breach is likely to become a transparency and anti-surveillance folk hero.
Thus far, the CIA has not commented on the ongoing probe — nor on the authenticity of documents in the WikiLeaks trove.
Avoiding The Eye - Ships Free Today! Assange, in the same statement released in tandem with Vault 7, noted the content of the cache, The disclosure is also exceptional from a political, legal and forensic perspective. Claire Bernish began writing as an independent, investigative journalist in 2015, with works published and republished around the world. Not one to hold back, Claire’s particular areas of interest include U.S. foreign policy, analysis of international affairs, and everything pertaining to transparency and thwarting censorship. To keep up with the latest uncensored news, follow her on Facebook or Twitter: @Subversive_Pen. This article first appeared here at TheFreeThoughtProject.comThis article is about the episode. For the location, see Great Divide.
"Harsh words won't solve problems; action will."
— Aang trying to settle a feud.
"The Great Divide" is the 11th episode of Book One: Water of Avatar: The Last Airbender and the 11th of the overall series. It debuted on May 20, 2005.
Contents show]
Overview
The gang arrives at the Great Divide, the world's largest canyon. Two Earth Kingdom tribes bicker with each other about how to cross the canyon, having been enemies for a century. Aang helps them cross the canyon together and is able to end the feud by fabricating a story about their ancestors.
Synopsis
Katara and Sokka are arguing over how to set up their campsite, with Aang ending the fight and gloating about his ability to solve problems as the Avatar. Soon after, they travel to the Great Divide, the largest canyon in the entire world. While Katara expresses awe at seeing the yawning chasm before them, Sokka is bored by the sight, viewing it as somewhat lackluster, and expresses his intent to fly over it on Appa. Before they can leave, however, a man runs up to them and warns them not to leave with a guide to cross the canyon because he was there first. The man angrily says to the team that he is holding a spot for the rest of his tribe, the Gan Jin, until they arrive. While waiting, the Zhang tribe arrives, whom the man claims has been an enemy of his tribe for a hundred years. The two tribes' differences are immediately visible: while the Gan Jin tribe appears neat, well-mannered, and clean, dressed in clothes of white fabric, the Zhang tribe seems dirty and primitive, dressed in garments made from animal skins. The earthbending canyon guide subsequently arrives, prompting both tribes to begin arguing over which should be escorted first: the Zhangs claim that some of their members are sick, while the Gan Jins assert that their elderly are weary from their travel. As the two tribes bicker, Katara wonders if Aang is ready to test his role as a mediator. Despite Aang's reservations about his possible success, Katara alerts the tribes of Aang's status as the Avatar, giving him the chance to propose that they all travel together. When the tribes dismiss the suggestion and resume their argument, Aang ends the verbal fight by shouting over the chaos that Appa will carry their sick and elderly while the two tribes cross the canyon together, conditions to which both tribes agree.
The canyon guide warns them not to take any food into the canyon, as food attracts dangerous predators in the canyon. The two tribes, the gang, and the guide begin their descent to the canyon floor. After the guide breaks a rock shelf so that potential Fire Nation soldiers cannot follow them, a canyon crawler assaults them. Aang and his friends fend it off, but not before it attacks the guide, breaking both of his arms and rendering him unable to earthbend. With no other earthbenders in either of the groups, Aang realizes that they are now imprisoned in the canyon. Both tribes begin to argue again and finally decide to split up. As the tribes each blame the other for the attack, Aang furiously orders them to separate and travel in two separate groups. As they divide, Aang, curious as to why the two factions hold such animosity toward each other, asks Katara and Sokka to accompany the Gan Jins and the Zhangs, respectively, and try to discover the reason for their feud.
That night, both sides, unaware of the conversation of the other group, discuss the use of tarps; while the Zhangs feel it unnecessary to use them as rain protection during the dry season, the Gan Jins dutifully hang the tarps over their tents anyway, reasoning you could never be too careful. Their respective opinions cause Katara and Sokka to sympathize with the groups they are accompanying. Also around the same time, both tribes reveal that they brought food into the canyon against the orders of the guide, justifying their actions by stating that they should not go hungry while the other tribe, which they both believe to have brought food with them, eats. Both tribes soon tell their guests their version of the story behind their feud.
The Gan Jins tell Katara of their tribal forefather, an earthbender named Jin Wei, who was tasked with the job of taking the sacred crystal orb from a gate in the east to a gate in the west as part of a redemption ritual. They claim that, as he neared the western gate, Jin Wei was assaulted by a thief, a Zhang named Wei Jin, who stole the orb out of greed. The Zhangs, on the other hand, tell Sokka that their ancestor, Wei Jin, found Jin Wei passed out on the ground near the western gate. Wei Jin stopped to help the man and was told about the redemption ritual and the orb's importance. Rejecting assistance, Jin Wei asked Wei Jin to take the orb back to his tribe, which Wei Jin did. Upon arriving at the Gan Jin's village, however, Jin Wei's tribe arrested him for stealing the orb and imprisoned him for twenty years. Both sides claim that they will never forget the terrible injustice dealt to them by the other.
Aang spends the night with Momo and the guide, away from the tribes. When Aang sadly states that getting the two factions to cooperate is virtually impossible and that the most important issue before them is escaping the canyon, the guide wonders if the two problems are connected.
The next day, the two tribes reunite and reach the end of the canyon. When Aang asks Katara and Sokka if the tribes might work together at all, the siblings begin to argue, both siding with their assigned tribe. The tribes themselves also begin arguing again and when Aang tries to pacify them with his belief that "harsh words won't solve problems, action will". Realizing that the Avatar may be right, the tribal leaders prepare to fight to the death in order to end the feud. Aang, angry, uses airbending to separate them; as the people tumble backward, the food they carried with them is discovered. Not believing what he is seeing, Aang scolds the tribes for disobeying the canyon guide's warning not to bring food, but is quickly distracted by an egg custard tart since he has not eaten in a day. As he speaks, a horde of canyon crawlers, attracted to the abundance of food, approach the refugees. After an initial skirmish with the beasts, Aang realizes that the crawlers want the food more than they want to attack the tribes and convinces the tribes to cooperate; by working together and throwing bags over the crawlers' heads, everyone is able to mount the beasts and, guiding them with food, ride them up the wall and out of the canyon.
Safe and out of danger, the two tribes compliment each other's ability to take on the crawlers but subsequently pick up their feud right where they left off and are on the verge of a physical altercation when Aang, upon hearing the names of the two tribes' ancestors for the first time, suddenly pipes up that he knew the two men personally long ago. He begins to tell everyone that he had met them a hundred years prior, though notes that a lot of confusion rose in regards to the details of the story. The men had not been enemies, but eight-year-old twin brothers, who played a game called "Redemption", clarifying that the sacred orb was the ball they played with and the gates the respective goals. As Jin Wei was running with the ball, he fell, fumbling the ball in the process; Wei Jin recovered it and started running to the other end of the field, though stepped out of bounds and was put in the penalty box for two minutes, not twenty years. He concludes his story by pointing out that while Wei Jin was "kind of a slob" and Jin Wei was "a little stuffy", they respected each other's differences enough to share the same playing field. Convinced by Aang's tale, the tribes make amends and continue their journey to Ba Sing Se, the Earth Kingdom capital, as one tribe, followed by the guide, who expresses his intention to never again return to the Great Divide.
As the tribes depart, Sokka tells Aang how convenient it was that he knew the twins. To Katara and Sokka's shock, however, Aang reveals that the story was a complete fabrication. Still hungry, he asks where the egg custard tart is, as they make their way to Appa in order to continue their journey.
Credits
Directed by: Giancarlo Volpe
Additional voices: Rene Auberjonois Dee Bradley Baker Roberta Farkas Scott Menville Leonard Stone Mae Whitman
Production notes
Transcript
Avatar Extras
Goofs
When the canyon guide gets attacked by the canyon crawler, the canyon crawler picks him up using its leg, but in the next scene it is holding him with its mouth.
Trivia
In the real world, the "Great Divide" most commonly refers to the Atlantic/Pacific continental divide, a mountainous ridge that separates the watersheds that drain into the Atlantic and Pacific oceans. The "Great Divide" of the World of Avatar is the exact opposite—a canyon analogous to the real-world Grand Canyon.
When the canyon guide's arms are broken by a canyon crawler, he states that he can no longer bend., which is significantly different to other earthbending styles seen in later episodes. Toph Beifong, on many occasions, uses only her legs. In addition, the earthbender in the opening sequence is seen performing the art with only his legs.
This episode was unpopular with fans due to its relatively insignificant plot and is the lowest rated episode on IMDb. [1] This fact did not go unnoticed by the creators and in the play in the episode "The Ember Island Players", the characters chose to fly right over the canyon without stopping, highlighting the inconsequential nature of the episode's events. Avatar Extras references it by saying, "This references an episode called 'The Great Divide'", immediately followed by, "That episode was not a fan favorite."
This fact did not go unnoticed by the creators and in the play in the episode "The Ember Island Players", the characters chose to fly right over the canyon without stopping, highlighting the inconsequential nature of the episode's events. references it by saying, "This references an episode called 'The Great Divide'", immediately followed by, "That episode was not a fan favorite." The episode title refers not only to the geographical feature, but also to the great divide that has grown between the two tribes and the literal meaning of Wei Jin's name.
This is the first episode in the series to not be seen again in "Previously on Avatar..." The others are "The Fortuneteller", "The Northern Air Temple", "The Painted Lady", and "The Puppetmaster".
On the old Nick website, the episode was incorrectly titled as "Bitter Work".
This is the only instance in the entire Avatar franchise in which "earth spirits" are referenced.PARK CITY, Utah—As President Barack Obama prepared to be sworn in for his second term as the 44th president of the United States, two courageous journalists premiered a documentary at the annual Sundance Film Festival. “Dirty Wars: The World Is a Battlefield” reaffirms the critical role played by independent journalists like the film’s director, Rick Rowley, and its narrator and central figure, Jeremy Scahill. The increasing pace of U.S. drone strikes, and the Obama administration’s reliance on shadowy special forces to conduct military raids beyond the reach of oversight and accountability, were summarily missed over the inaugural weekend by a U.S. press corps obsessed with first lady Michelle Obama’s new bangs. “Dirty Wars,” along with Scahill’s forthcoming book of the same title, is on target to break that silence... with a bang that matters.
Scahill and Rowley, no strangers to war zones, ventured beyond Kabul, Afghanistan, south to Gardez, in Paktia province, a region dense with armed Taliban and their allies in the Haqqani network, to investigate one of the thousands of night raids that typically go unreported.
Scahill told me: “In Gardez, U.S. special operations forces had intelligence that a Taliban cell was having some sort of a meeting to prepare a suicide bomber. And they raid the house in the middle of the night, and they end up killing five people, including three women, two of whom were pregnant, and... Mohammed Daoud, a senior Afghan police commander who had been trained by the U.S.”
Scahill and Rowley went to the heart of the story, to hear from people who live at the target end of U.S. foreign policy. In Gardez, they interviewed survivors of that violent raid on the night of Feb. 12, 2010. After watching his brother and his wife, his sister and his niece killed by U.S. special forces, Mohammed Sabir was handcuffed on the ground. He watched, helpless, as the U.S. soldiers dug the bullets out of his wife’s corpse with a knife. He and the other surviving men were then flown off by helicopter to another province.
Sabir recounted his ordeal for Rowley’s camera: “My hands and clothes were caked with blood. They didn’t give us water to wash the blood away. The American interrogators had beards and didn’t wear uniforms. They had big muscles and would fly into sudden rages. By the time I got home, all our dead had already been buried. Only my father and my brother were left at home. I didn’t want to live anymore. I wanted to wear a suicide jacket and blow myself up among the Americans. But my brother and my father wouldn’t let me. I wanted a jihad against the Americans."
Before leaving, Scahill and Rowley made copies of videos from the cellphones of survivors. One demonstrated that it was not a Taliban meeting, but a lively celebration of the birth of a child that the raid interrupted. Rowley described another video: “You can hear voices come over it, and they’re American-accented voices speaking about piecing together their version of the night’s killings, getting their story straight. You hear them trying to concoct a story about how this was something other than a massacre.”
The film shows an image captured in Gardez, by photographer Jeremy Kelly, sometime after the massacre. It showed a U.S. admiral named McRaven, surrounded by Afghan soldiers, offering a sheep as a traditional gesture seeking forgiveness for the massacre. The cover-up had failed.
William McRaven headed the Joint Special Operations Command, or JSOC. Following the thread of JSOC, painstakingly probing scarcely reported night raids, traveling from Afghanistan to Yemen to Somalia, Scahill’s reporting, along with Rowley’s incredible camerawork, constructs for the first time a true, comprehensive picture of JSOC and Commander in Chief Obama’s not-so-brave new world.
The Inauguration Day drone strike in Yemen was the fourth in as many days, along with a similar increase in strikes in Pakistan. The Washington Post reported that Obama has a “playbook” that details when drone strikes are authorized, but it reportedly exempts those conducted by the CIA in Afghanistan and Pakistan. On Inauguration Day, Obama officially nominated John Brennan, a strong advocate for the “enhanced interrogation techniques” that many call torture, and architect of the drone program, to head the CIA.
With the film “Dirty Wars,” co-written with David Riker and directed by Rowley, Jeremy Scahill is pulling back the curtain on JSOC, which has lately exploded into the public eye with the torture-endorsing movie “Zero Dark Thirty,” about the killing of Osama bin Laden. When “Dirty Wars” comes to a theater near you, see it. Sadly, it proves the theater of war is everywhere, or, as its subtitle puts it: “The World Is a Battlefield.” As Scahill told me, “You’re going to see a very different reality, and you’re going to see the hellscape that has been built by a decade of covert war.”
Denis Moynihan contributed research to this column.The German ambassador was summoned to a meeting with officials in Ankara after German television broadcast a satirical song about Turkey's President Recep Tayyip Erdogan.
Shown on public broadcaster NDR, the two-minute song entitled Erdowie, Erdowo, Erdogan, features footage of Erdogan and Turkish riot police battling protesters.
Its lyrics criticise recent crackdowns on the free press by the Turkish government. "A journalist that writes something that doesn't suit Erdogan is in jail tomorrow," it says.
Days after the song's broadcast on 17 March, Germany's ambassador to Turkey, Martin Erdmann, was summoned by Turkey's Foreign Ministry to explain "in length" the reason for the broadcast, Spiegel reported.
The spat comes amid attempts by German Chancellor Angela Merkel to reach an agreement with Erdogan in an attempt to ease the flow of refugees and migrants that have travelled to Europe from Turkey.
Prosecutors have opened more than 2,000 cases against those accused of criticising Erdogan since he became president 18 months ago. Those investigated include academics, journalists, a 13-year-old boy and World Cup star Hakan Sukur.Fake Android Minecraft apps scammed million users
Experts at ESET have discovered over 30 scareware uploaded to the Google Play store over nine months masquerading as Minecraft cheats and tip guides.
Do you completely trust mobile applications available on the official app store like Google Play? If your answer is yes, you’re wrong.
ESET security researcher Lukas Stefanko has discovered 30 malicious apps uploaded to the Google Play store over nine months, the bogus apps pretend be Minecraft cheats and tip guides. This kind of attack is very dangerous due to the large audience of the official Google Play, in the specific case Stefanenko confirmed that nearly 2.8 million users have already downloaded malicious Minecraft Android apps. The malicious Minecraft Android apps aren’t trojanized version of a legitimate app, they simply are empty applications that display victims banners to notify them the presence of “high-risk” threat. Users were then directed to remove to remove the threat by activating a premium-rate SMS subscription.
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The data related to the download of the malicious Minecraft Android apps are worrying, since the first upload of one of the scareware on the Google Play store in August 2014, several of them were installed between 100.000 – 500.000 times.
“… several of them were installed between 100,000 and 500,000 times and the total number of installations of all 33 scareware applications lies between 660,000 and 2,800,000.” Stefanko added.>6th grade. Fresh to the middle school. We all are assigned homerooms and this is where I first met Tommy. Now, I only knew a handful of people in my homeroom and tried to talk with them.
>Tommy sits next to me in the row closest to the sinks (my homeroom teacher was a science teacher,so that explains the sinks)
>Talking to my friends and Tommy scoots his chair loudly over next to me and says "IM TOMMY WHATS UP!"
>The entire classroom looks over at him, and I kinda tell him to get lost
>"You guys like Dungeons and Dragons?" he says as he pulls out this |
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